Lewisham

That said, as the article focuses on Gap, I think their problems are far more pronounced than just malls or online. The Gap and Baby Gap store in Santa Cruz are almost always completely empty, and that seems to be the case for most places. I get the feeling Target is just dominating them, selling the same clothes cheaper.

The interest of a Simple checking account is no more than the interest on any other banks checking account, so I don't think they're doing it at all. Checking accounts usually accrue some tiny amount of interest.

It ended up that customer service ended up being pushed as the differentiator (the interface I can get with Mint), but I've had great customer service experiences with both Ally and Charles Schwab. And I get all those previous features I wanted, plus things like ATM refunds. So Simple ended up being a feature-bare product in comparison.

I think their customer growth tailing off was a direct correlation to their feature launch velocity tailing off, and I attribute that to the legal stuff around banking being really hard, rather than any slacking on their part. Hopefully the purchase will allow them to leverage more existing agreements to get more features up and running.

Latency is the same as if you were running MySQL on any other platform AFAIK. If the database is cold, yes, the DB is spun down. An incoming connection will cause the DB to spin up, and in most languages the common MySQL connector will block until it's ready, so it doesn't require special coding around. Databases almost always come up in a matter of seconds.

I know that Google as a whole has a rep for support which isn't great. However, I also know that Cloud is trying really hard to show that isn't the case with Cloud products (as is the company as a whole, my personal experience with support phone lines at Google Play, for example, have been really good). We have Stack Overflow (which we as devs check in on to see if there are problems we can help with e.g. [1]), we have support packages which have real live human beings on the other end [2].

I know everyone here in my dev team is 110% behind support being great, but it's one of those things where we'll be judged by execution rather than words (as it should be).

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21774738/google-cloud-sql... [2] https://cloud.google.com/support/

The goal of Cloud is to provide the building blocks so people can make great products. The quickest way to making good stuff is to use the same tools that everyone is already familiar with, and I think that's why Cloud SQL exists. If you want more "touch" on the database for more power, there's Cloud Datastore [1]. But we support companies like Costco on Cloud SQL, so it's good for a lot of folks.

https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-datastore/

This is a bit confusing, I'll file a bug to get it cleaned up. Thanks for the spot.

We offer two different ways of working with Cloud SQL: synchronous and asynchronous writes. With the synchronous writes, you'll get an OK back when you update the database, which lets you know that the write completed successfully and is replicated. If something bad happens, you'll get an exception back and can keep the data in memory until the database is live and accepting connections again.

A faster method is asynchronous, which performs the writes every second or so, so you're not waiting for replication to complete. If something dies during that second, you could lose data during that period and not know it.

Does this help?

Disclaimer: I'm a developer on Cloud SQL.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer on Cloud SQL.

Disclaimer: I'm a dev on Cloud SQL.

Saying that he somehow has a problem because that's what he wants in life is pretty judgmental. Do I want to work that way? No. Do you? No. Does it mean he has a "problem" because that's what he wants? No.

Why don't you try using Google and looking it up before angrily speculating?

The Enforcer system is what the use at Penny Arcade Expo. It's a volunteer system to help run the event, and in return you get to attend things when you're not on the roster. It's no different to all sorts of roles, be it grad students being a student volunteer to attend a conference (and if you want to talk about underpaid, grad student is where it's at) or teenagers picking up trash after the Glastonbury Music Festival.

No-one is being pressganged into being an Enforcer, it sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me.

The ladder is about the ping pong league they run, and he's joking that it's not a benefit because he's not winning. He decided he preferred to get a lower salary for a job he enjoyed more. He said he can wear four hats because "The reality is that one highly motivated, highly skilled person can handle all of this. You do not need to be constantly working IT, or constantly managing servers or writing code. There’s a lot there, yes. This is a job that will keep one person fairly busy. Two people might find themselves spending a lot of time on /r/aww."

So either you're really reading a lot between the lines to see what you want to see, or you didn't read it.

Personally I do feel that G+ has done a good job at communicating to users the privacy they do and don't have, as the ACLs were baked in at the beginning. I think users have had the possibility to be confused when data is being used outside the http://plus.google.com domain, like Shared Endorsements and the YouTube comments, as this opens up the worry ACLs are being violated. I think there's more work that can be done to communicate that this hasn't happened, such as putting the "Shared (publicly|privately)" on YouTube comments so you can see why those are there.

To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on G+.

It's P2P so that you have clear endpoints, so repressive regimes can't ascertain whether it's a VPN or not. It's also helpful in that you might well trust a friend in another country over a VPN company.

I'll go with Silvercar next time I'm in LA for a couple of days and need a car, just to avoid the obnoxiousness.

For an endorsement to appear to a user in search, that user has to have access to your review in the first place. Data that was once private is not being leaked publicly.

Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee.

It's also being pushed to Google.com as a banner, if I understand correctly.

DISCLAIMER: I'm a Google employee, but I am not involved with any of these products.

So I don't think he's not "very informed." He's the normal player base. I don't even bother setting up NAT anymore and it works fine, even though I know I should go through the rigmarole of doing it.