When you release something that, on day one, already has 'dated' graphics, you don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest graphics cards or poly-counts or anything of the sort. Its just about the game. Like Legos there are countless others, The Game of Life (Milton Bradley, not Conway) has been around since the 1800's. The beauty of this is that you've never completely saturated since kids are coming of age every day and growing into the game.
I honestly don't recall seeing much, if any, evangelism to the extremes of "hey you don't need a relational database anymore" as it relates to Cassandra. Talks I've seen have generally focused on using it as a tool to fit a specific niche/do something that the existing RDBMS wasn't optimal for.
About the talks, yeah. There is no one talking about how we replaced our rdbms (except where they were using the rdbms as kv or something similar like reddit), because it isn't possible.
While not cheap, these likely weren't an extravagant expenditure (probably a few hundred thousand each).
This seems like part of the noise of a company trying many different things and cutting their losses when it makes sense. The only real difference is that we don't see many of these other projects because they can fit in a building
From the article, new the barges would have been $4 mil apiece. Even if they got them for a song, that would still put each north of one million, and that's before you buy 64 containers gut them, weld them together and install windows.
Not saying this was a big loss for Google, but it wasn't "a few hundred thousand."
Net Neutrality issues aside (even though they scare me), it bothers me that they'd produce this in English as only 16% of the population speaks English.[0] A tiny percentage of Zambians claim English as their first language, what about the rest of the people who either don't have access to schools (where English is taught[1]) or don't have the level of comprehension required to navigate.
I would venture a guess that by filtering the numbers of English speakers by those who own mobile phones you'd jack up the percentage of English speakers, still.. this feels like it was designed more as a play to drive new users to sites than to genuinely get good information into the hands of those who need it.
Of course, I can't actually find the app anywhere, so if it were to come out that the app actually includes Bemba or Nyanja localizations.. I'd be taking a different tone. (FWIW, Facebook doesn't appear to support either [2])
Did that really happen? My iTunes library lived primarily on a Windows box until 2 years ago and the only weirdness I can think of was Apple breaking some of Microsoft's windowing conventions.
To be fair, the MS Office experience on OS X is about the same: pretty normal with some things slightly off.
if itunes and quicktime was never slow on your windows box, then i can say with certainty that you changed computers at least every year and always to expensive models.
Republic, Lost[0] is a really good read on this (even if it is by Lessig himself). He lays out how he would see the process working, I believe at the Presidential level. The basic idea is running on a platform that promises change as well as a commitment to step down once said change is accomplished. With the amount of money already wrapped up in politics (especially between two large parties), it strikes me as a tough sales pitch for either party's old guard.
To your point about there not being enough money in politics: I'd agree with you if money existed in a vacuum for its own sake. The question should arguably be is there enough/too much purchasable influence in politics.
Beyond carrying weapons or higher-that-prosumer-quality video equipment, they are not all that different. UAS go from the sized aircraft one would typically think of as "military drone" to the small hand-launched aircraft used by people on the ground [0]. Using a submarine<->boat analog I'd argue with as the overall physics and operating principles of the two are hugely different.
The problem was traditionally the link between the northbridge (which connects connects the CPU and RAM) and the southbridge (handles peripheral connections like SATA, PCI, PCI-E, etc) components of the motherboard. Intel has now changed their architecture in the last 4 or 5 years to be a single Platform Controller Hub where the CPU provides the functionality previously found in the northbridge chip.
In this particular case, a "faster motherboard" might have helped with pushing updates to the GPU faster, though my guess is that graphics memory becomes the concern with double the resolution (which in turn needs to have updates pushed by the CPU, so it could help anyway)
In modern Intel processors (especially in portable devices), the GPU is integrated on the CPU die, so pushing updates doesn't count (unless you count pulling data from main memory to provide to the GPU).
