oker - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Apps Engine gets SQL (blogspot.com)

Submitted by oker on Thursday October 06, 2011 @04:59PM

oker writes: Google has finally added SQL to its cloud platform offering — Apps Engine. So far developers had to use Datastore service which not only provides a vendor lock-in threat but also is not supported by most of existing software and libraries. The SQL service should definitely improve Apps Engine adoption. It is currently in limited preview mode.

Submission + - Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by oker on Friday September 30, 2011 @04:42AM

oker writes: From the article: "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (...) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. (...) we predicted the interests and Social Security numbers of some of the participants (...) the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data 'accretion.' ". Do we really enter "Minority Report"-like world?

Comment Re:rsync? (Score 1) 251

by oker on Tuesday September 13, 2011 @10:07AM (#37386770) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Network Backup Solution Out of the Box?

Here is one of such trivial scripts: http://okrasz-techblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/backing-up-with-rsync.html

Submission + - New prices for Google Apps Engine (blogspot.com)

Submitted by oker on Thursday September 01, 2011 @03:44AM

oker writes: Yesterday Google has announced Apps Engine to enter production mode shortly as a fully supported product. Unfortunately it also means new pricing model, which is less appealing since free quotas has been lowered and you need to pay at least $9 per month if you go for paid version.

Submission + - Why Google needs Firefox (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Thursday August 11, 2011 @02:56PM

MrSeb writes: "Almost the entirety of Mozilla's income — 97% of $104 million — arrives in the form of royalties from the Firefox search box, and the lion's share (86%, $85 million) of those royalties are paid by the default search engine: Google. In November 2011, however, Mozilla's contract with Google will expire. Will Google renew it? A better question to ask, though, is whether Mozilla wants Google as its primary search engine."

Submission + - Germany: Facebook's Facial Recognition is illegal (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @02:13PM

fysdt writes: "Although we think it's generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook's auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That's right—Facebook in its current state is now illegal. Deep Scheiße, Zuckerberg.

The German government—which possesses perhaps the world's most adamant privacy laws as a result of postwar abuse—considers The Book's facial recognition a violation of "the right to anonymity," The Atlantic reports."

Submission + - Was .NET all a mistake? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @11:19AM

mikejuk writes: The recent unsettling behavior at Microsoft concerning .NET makes it a good time to re-evaluate what the technology is all about. It may have been good technology but with the systems guys building Windows prefering to stick with C++ the outcome was inevitable. Because they failed to support its way of doing things .NET has always been a second class Windows citizen unable to make direct use of the Windows APIs — especially the latest. .NET started out as Microsoft's best challenge to Java but now you have to ask what has the excursion into managed code brought the Microsoft programmer and indeed what good has it done Microsoft? From where we are now it begins to look very much like an unnecessary forced detour and Windows programmers are going to be living with the mess for years to come.

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