Microsoft Announces Food Search Cooperation With Cuil

Redmond, WA - Microsoft (MSFT) today announced a cooperation with Google killer Cuil Inc. The next major release of Microsoft's search engine, Bing 2012, will incorporate the special Cuil Theory developed by Cuil, along with recipe search technology by Google killer Powerset, which Microsoft acquired earlier in a $100 million deal.

In an interview with the press, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters that Cuil Theory will further enhance Bing's standing as a so-called decision engine, especially when it comes to food-related decisions. "Others do nonfood searches quite OK, but the next big thing is food decisions," Mr. Ballmer said. "There is no better way to decide for, say, a grilled-meat restaurant, than Cuil's prized technology."



Mr. Ballmer declined to give any new information about .EAT, Microsoft's rumored major entry into the food decision market, but predicted that ".EAT will be bigger than Java" in an obvious blow to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. He also told the press that this will be an opportunity to sell some of the tablet computers stacked in Washington warehouses. "What's better for food decisions than a table—t," Mr. Ballmer jokingly asked the reporters. "Get it, you dumb _____?"

Analysts were cautious, however. While both Cuil and Powerset were "quite effective" as Google killers, they weren't as successful as Wolfram|Alpha and other newcomers to the scene, a Silicon Valley analyst noted. "Hunting and killing Google will remain a favorite pastime of startup companies for some time. There's still more than enough Google to go around. Happy hunting!"

Apple News for 20090811

ap.pl URL Shortening Store

Unlike other shortening schemes where URLs are quickly shortened via a web input page, Apple’s scheme will first require “URL developers” to submit their URLs for approval. ...

URLs can be rejected for any reason, based on the understanding of a 400-page specification document by Gordy, the one intern who will be reviewing all URLs.

iPhone development in decline, analysts say

What I don't get about Wave: Shared State

State. Big issue. Wave is teh shared state. Shared state = anti-scale.

Some of the most successful collaborative processes in the world, music, the blogosphere, and Linux, are completely shared-nothing.

• When Bob Dylan changes an old folk song, his changes don't somehow magically rewrite existing prints of the song in textbooks. Instead, Bob commits his changes to the world through his albums and concerts, and if interesting, the changes will be included in the canon by Bob's social network.
• Bloggers don't edit each others' posts. They write their ideas on their own blog, and through various orthogonal flows, these ideas do or don't end up in interesting places, and feed back to their authors.
  
• When somebody develops a patch for the Linux kernel, he doesn't go ahead and edit Linus' code repository. The patch is sent to the LKML for discussion, and eventually included by Linus or other upstream people (or not).

In all of these hugely successful cases we have 2 properties:

1. Every participant has his own state, completely separate from others' states.

2. Changes to somebody else's state go through an orthogonal, social channel, that enforces authority.

Google Wave has neither of these properties. In Wave, all participants edit the same state, and authority to change something is not a social, but an administrative property (i.e. if you're in the ACL you can do it, without community moderation).

(Rohit Khare, whose writings are among the most inspiring in all of the intarwebs, has identified latency and agency as the two fundamental forces in internetworking. IMO, Wave takes a worst-of-class approach to dealing with both of these forces: Wave's user experience depends on low latency, and Wave's model of agency is simply boring, as shown in this post.)

What I don't get about Wave: General Architecture

What happens when you take the one dumbest data format in existence, extend it (I won't even go into that), stuff it into a centralized server, and let people manipulate it concurrently, using a TECO-ish differential editing protocol?

Answer: Google Wave.

Of course to make that work you have to look into CSCW which hasn't produced any interesting results in 40 years, and adopt silly bean-counting technology (ha!) like Operational Transformation. Only so that text-editing works in your system.

Joel doesn't understand that stuff. Heck, not even Manuel does.

Wave

“Ecks Emm Ell – In Ze Claud!!”