danohu

I was also surprised by this. I thought networking was an area where dedicated hardware had an obvious advantage, because you need to do simple, well-specified things very fast.

It will be interesting to see how these improvements trickle down.

At the moment, a few providers have the scale and skills to run datacenters much more efficiently. But I'm guessing that within a few years there will be some generic datacenter-in-a-container available, with efficiency not much inferior to the big four.

At that point, we go back to the hosting market of 15 years ago. Everybody can offer a datacenter without deep technical knowledge, and sell compute cycles on an open cloud market.

It's like all the tiny hosting providers, except that it requires more capital. So it becomes financialised -- if you can get cheap power, low temperatures and good connectivity, and borrow a few million dollars cheaply, then you're in business. But margins collapse precisely because nobody can do it.

In the end, once we get over the transition period of this move to cloud everything, datacenters end up like utilities

They will be once the EU signs CETA next month.

Their annual revenue is about $6 per user [1]. The problem isn't absolute failure to monetize, it's massive costs. If you thought you could run twitter without their ~4000 employees, you might have a chance of pulling some cash out of there.

The problem is, it's hard to simultaneously clamp down on costs and push for growth. In SV, anything other than growth is an admission of failure. If you aren't flinging money into R&D, everyone will assume it's the start of a downward spiral.

[That, and you can't buy twitter without outbidding all the True Believers]

[1] http://www.viewproxy.com/twitter/2016/2/annualreport2015.pdf

The Google approach would be great, if they just separated it from the Google brand.

Like, when Unilever launch a new detergent, they give it a totally separate brand. If it fails, they drop it quietly, and if it succeeds they can roll it out worldwide.

I wish Google would do the same. Launch this as 'allo', with the fact that it's from alphabet buried in the small print. Once it's been doing well for a couple of years, they can think about pulling it into the Google brand and pushing it to every user in the world.

Entirely logical in political terms. When under pressure to "Do Something!", cook up a solution which sounds big but has minimal real impact

Even as a percentage of GDP, US military spending is maybe 20th-highest in the world[0]. The countries spending more tend to be some combination of:

- at war, or civil war (ukraine, south sudan, iraq)

- with historical conflict with larger neighbours, and reaso to worry about it breaking out again (Pakistan, Israel)

- sitting on enough oil that GDP gets distorted anyway (saudi arabia, Azerbaijan

So yes, US military spending is way out of proportion to the rest of the world.

[0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...

Theoretically, this shouldn't affect rental prices.

Demand is dictated by the number/wealth/desperation of people wanting to rent in NY. Supply is more-or-less constant (except for new-build, which is excluded from this).

So this doesn't affect rental prices, just moves money from the landlord's pocket into the city government. Sounds like a good idea to me.

It's very unusual to have such a complete change of board membership, isn't it? I'm all for new blood, but I'd worry at the near-total loss of continuity.

I merged the whole thing into a single PDF:

http://ohuiginn.net/docs/chilcot/chilcot_report.pdf

6417 pages -- enjoy!

Try the half-bakery: http://www.halfbakery.com/