"I am still not sure if Google App Engine works on top of the real BigTable which is a column-base storage (that would explain the support for queries) or it is just a KV storage built on top of BigTable. Anyway, my point was related to alternative data storages and not to RDBMS where we have SQL."
- Alex Popescu
The aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual design space of non-relational databases as compared to traditional relational databases.
- Alex Popescu
"What can I say... I'm really interested in these systems :-). And I'm still trying to figure out where they fit in the overall picture."
- Alex Popescu
"Excellent catch! While I can probably understand the frustration of someone being laid off, I do find such posts to be detrimental to their own future more than to their ex-employer. Or maybe it as an oath Google asked for :)"
- Alex Popescu
DrawIt is a vector editing application with support for bitmap-like image filters. Vector editing as well as the filters are completely non-destructive which means that a vector layer can still be edited even after a stack of filters has been applied.
- Alex Popescu
"Fred, seeing you, a busy person, blogging every day is both encouraging and challenging. I have a lot to learn from you. Thanks. The thing that attracts me to this blog is the wide range of subjects you are covering. You speak about your experience and share advise, you help your companies, you inspire other companies and last, but not least you have the guts to pick up any subject that interests you. This blog feels like it's you as a person in this world. And that's simply great."
- Alex Popescu
"Just another crazy thought against FCC regulation. If FCC imposes these rules, ISPs may consider dropping altogether their R investments in flood protection. In the case of a cyberattack (hey it happened quite recently in Lithuania, Estonia, etc.), US might be caught bare naked. And I'm really afraid to imagine what that'll look and feel like"
- Alex Popescu
"Even in a perfect world, this problem would remain thorny :-). Let me exemplify it through a couple of different arguments: 1. Why would I have to suffer from all that illicit/illegal traffic? The reason here is that all the illegal traffic has an impact on the internet and that's influencing the lifes of others. Plus there are already other level 7 services doing it (think Google and spam) 2. The moment we start judging in absolute terms (illicit traffic), that very same principles would ask us to include other things in our absolute rankings: is YouTube generated traffic better or worse than linux distributions available through torrents? Is a YouTube video better or worse than a Hulu video? etc. Fortunately, we are living in an imperfect world... and that makes things even more complex."
- Alex Popescu
"I must confess that it took me a bit (and a visit to the site) to better understand what this service is about, so my understanding might be wrong: it's a Yahoo!/Google Finance with a social twist. Anyways, my comment was more related to the blog post than to the service itself, so back to the topic. "Yahoo!/Google are ticker driven." I think an important consequence of this "ticker driven" is that it makes these services (close to) real-time services. "LinkedIn and CrunchBase are company and people centric services." I do think that both LinkedIn and Crunchbase are still far from being real services, both being human edited with almost no real-time aspect. And I'd speculate that the value would be in having these transformed in real (close to) real time services. Imagine Crunchbase being able to present you with real time data about the company: latest news, latest press coverage. Add to that news related to the market/product/resources and competitors. Combine that with ticker..."
- Alex Popescu