IMO this is akin to how scientists developed thermodynamics to comprehend steam engines. Except now, AI could be on the forefront of forming conjectures and explanatory theories!
Hilarious that they still label it as a country variant, as if the variant carries a genetic “country” code that determines the origin. Plain stupidity.
[Edit] To elaborate since there is so much negativity to my original comment. There is no absolute proof that the variant originated in South Africa, so calling it by a country’s name is an insult to human intelligence. We refer to the virus as the Coronavirus and not the Chinese virus. Why should the variant be any different? (This variant being actually called 501.V2)
Why humor them? Their "Plain stupidity" comment without offering anything resembling reason shows they will not respond to reason. Don't encourage the Twitterification of Hacker News.
Use the evolutionary lineage nomenclature. If people can memorize street addresses and telephone numbers they can learn to identify viruses by some other pattern.
The other problem with naming a variant after a country or state is what happens when the locale identifies a subsequent variant?
The citationable things come later because a student decided to write a paper for their race studies class, which is just as meta as us just telling you what our experience is.
These things aren't science, but maybe someone can articulate it better for you.
If I am refer to "British variant", no person is thinking I am racist against Englishmen. If I am refer to "Chinese virus", every person is thinking I am racist against Chinamen. But it is not "Asian coronavirus", that would be having more credible potential for racism. Persons who are using term in racist way are symptom, not problem: even while we are seeing use of alternate terms in all places, there still has been in past year increasing of hate crime against Asian. Neither terming has problem, British nor Chinese. It is a simple easy. Common man is not having any desire for to remember scientific names for any thing. And in last point, some persons are say that it create stigma against China: this is feature, not bug. China is deserving much fault for her failings in this manner.
agree, do all the downmodders here find it interesting that "the Spanish Flu" originated in Kansas? The variants have alphanumeric names such as B.1.1.7.
In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).
The thing is Google Maps is not a monopoly. There are plenty of other map providers, so a price increase is not anti competitive, because you can switch to other providers.
There's not a single usable competitor to street view considering the coverage and quality. They got that imagery using money from non-maps revenue, while keeping Maps pricing artificially low for years, with the the practical effect of making sure that no one else could compete with them. So you can't switch street view providers if it's integrated into your product, and now you get to suck up an insane price increase. Which makes it in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act here in the United States and I'm sure the EU has even stricter rules on monopolies.
If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps?
I don't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.
That's exactly what I was suggesting: If you are stuck in a low margin business and see that a provider such as google is screwing up your margins, you should really try to work on another idea which has higher margins.
Working on a low margin business is a choice! You can always ditch it and try to find something with higher margins (= higher value created for users).
Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year.
Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.
No I did not miss it. Also I'm based in a neighboring country to Poland. The salary you mentioned won't get you a software developer anywhere in the EU.
I am only pointing out that entrepreneurs need to rethink their business models if they are hit by this price increase, as this is a very strong indication they are not working on a healthy, high-margin business.
A 20-30x increase in costs being a problem for your business isn't indicative of being in an unhealthy low-margin business per se, quite the opposite. If you were operating in a 95% profit margin industry, which is an insanely generous hypothetical, increasing the 5% cost component by 20-30x would destroy you overnight.
This is what happened to OP, and they were able to switch to haf a dozen competitors at a fraction of the price with almost equivalent service offerings for their use-case. The notion they have a fundamentally unworkable business model doesn't apply here.
If you're a consumer business with low margins but very high scale, this is a killer. Before, you could be providing value to a lot of people at a low price point (or free/ad supported). This makes ad-supported much, much harder.
Name one billion dollar business that is a success today when 80% of its product is an API call to an externally owned service?
I get the frustration and pain with this, but let's be honest, if your business was totally reliant on Google Maps it probably wasn't a great business to begin with. Way too many eggs in a basket you don't own.
I know 1st world companies with millions of dollars in revenue who quickly switched away from Google Maps, at some expense, to alternate map providers after Google hiked up its prices for Premium customers a few years ago.
There where so many "why should we pay/develop X, Google does it for free" conversations at one of my previous employers who competes in the mapping space with Google.
Good question. From a game theoretic perspective, agents (players) are assumed to be self-interested in a non-cooperative setting if I recall. Maybe someone can comment on this a bit further.
We've got so many beta requests, we can't process them fast enough. So, just refer as many people as you can, and we'll bump you up somewhere in the "waiting list". Ingenious. ;-)
Interfaces with the addition of default methods, in contrast to abstract classes, provide the inheritance of behaviour (but not state) from multiple sources.
In the current form, yes HaLVM requires Xen, therefore Xen on ARM support would be required too.
Xen on ARM [1] support is ongoing and from what I can tell, the repository [2] is flagged as unstable therefore certainly still requiring work.
[Edit] RaspberryPi has an ARMv6 CPU. The Xen site reads: "The Xen ARM Project, led by Samsung, is responsible for the direct port of the Xen hypervisor to the ARM processor. So far the focus of the project has been to use Xen Paravirtualization (PV) for a range of processors (ARM v5 - v7).".
This means that it should cover ARMv6 of course. As for the status, I have no idea.
