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adamt | 5 years ago | on: If high street shopping was like online shopping [video]

Agree completely.

The biggest threat I see to this though is Apple Pay (for mobile web). When sites integrate with this properly, it enables them to match the Amazon experience. No need to register or enter any details, just one fingerprint, and all done.

adamt | 6 years ago | on: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

It's a lot smaller than you think these days with all the effort that has gone into it.

Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.

Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain

[1] Definition of PUE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness

[2] Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

adamt | 6 years ago | on: Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2019 Results [pdf]

There's many factors at play here, but note that the majority of Internet subscriber growth is in developing countries.

As the spending power of the average Internet user decreases, then CPC/CPM naturally falls with it.

adamt | 7 years ago | on: Tell HN: Amazon now owns 3.0.0.0/8

3/8 or 3.0.0.0/8 means the IP address range from 3.0.0.0 to 3.255.255.255 - this is 2^24 or 16.7M IP addresses.

Why does Amazon want it? - Amazon has a lot of customers who want EC2/ELB instances with their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource.

Why did GE have it? When the IPv4 address space was formed, various big US companies managed to get the initial IP address allocations. You can see more on these allocations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Why so many upvotes? It's relatively rare to see what is 1/255th of the IPv4 address space sold.

adamt | 7 years ago | on: IBM acquires Red Hat

It's not entirely true that in Europe that software patents don't exist.

From: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html "The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions". "

There's 20,000 hits for a Google patent search for patents assigned to SAP (https://patents.google.com/?assignee=SAP+SE+)

adamt | 9 years ago | on: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

This misses the fact that much of that UK figure is FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet). E.g. I live in the rural UK and have a 'Cable' line that is 200Mbps down/12Mbps up.

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

adamt | 9 years ago | on: ARM founder says Softbank deal is 'sad day' for UK tech

If you look at the value of ARM's $-denominated ADRs

  http://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=662445
This is basically a measure ARM's value in $. You will see any value in the fall the pound was more than offset by a rise in ARM's share price at the time. As ARM's revenue is largely $ denominated and it has significant proportion of its costs in UK people (£) then the fall in the pound led to a bigger rise in its share price as the markets expected bigger profits.

adamt | 9 years ago | on: Serverless Architectures

The phrase that Amazon used when launching lambda was 'deploy code not servers'. To me this sums up what 'serverless' means. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about servers in any way.

With AWS Lambda/API Gateway (and arguably with Google App Engine before it) you take away the toil of having to:

  * Manage/deploy servers
  * Monitor/maintain/upgrade servers
  * Figuring out tools to deploy your app to your server
  * Scaling an app globally.
  * Coping with outages in a data-centre/availability
  * Worry about load-balancing & scaling infrastructure
So obviously there are still servers there, but they are largely invisible to the developer.

I think this is more than just a marketing gimmick. It is part of a big change in application architectures.

At one end as a small developer of of web/mobile app this can considerably reduce the amount of code/maintenance you need.

At the opposite end of the spectrum the likes of Google (Borg) and Facebook (Tupperware) have developed their own in-house solutions where by servers are largely abstracted out as an entity that developers need to worry about.

Managed docker services (e.g. Google Container Platform, Docker Cloud) are another approach of achieving a largely 'serverless' goal.

(edits for formatting)

adamt | 9 years ago | on: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

From: http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/about-eurostar/press-office/pr...

"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."

2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.

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