Month: August 2007

Yahoo using Google?

ang said he would be busy making a long-term strategic plan, which would include major changes if need be. “There will be no sacred cows and we need to move quickly”. No sacred cows, indeed. According to rumors circulating around the company, Yang and other executives at Yahoo are even considering something as massive as offloading some of its search monetization business to rival Google. I have suggested this option here in this column many times. Such a move, even if done in part, could instantly add a whole lot of dollars to its bottom line, drastically cut tech costs and remove the focus on its constantly losing fight with Google as a tech leader.

the old use google to monetize better

Powerset growth models

This helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2. Assumptions about the size and refresh frequency of the index can be changed. Since the model is forward looking, it also makes assumptions about future server power and cost reductions from Moore’s Law.

they would have better spent their time on some actual product

Scene Completion

The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large.

KML 3 Core

The KML Core module includes the minimal subset of KML that would be expected for any implementation. Currently the elements of KML that would exist in Core include:

kml, Document, atom, Folder, Placemark, Link (and NetworkLink?), ScreenOverlay, TimeStamp, Geometry (see below) This list was derived from the current KML 2.1 tags and signifies the general concepts we’re hoping to have in KML Core – allow a user to express location, time, and possibly link to another KML document or service. In addition, providing the current Atom support allows for attribution and other interesting things for linking to HTML and GeoRSS.

arguably, the part that web sites ought to implement

KML 3 Metadata

While KML is a lightweight geospatial interchange format, it shouldn’t restrict users from referencing more formal data formats as necessary. In fact, it would be straight-forward to publish a simple KML file referencing all of your more complex geodata and then let users choose which data they want to investigate.

KML 3 Styling

CSS offers a lot of very intriguing features that would benefit KML. The simple effect would be separating styling from the geometry. In KML 2.1, any Feature (abstract element for other KML elements) can have an id. Subsequently, KML3 could add a class attribute, like in HTML, that could loosely be used to give some categorization of the Feature (road, highway, animal, newt). Then, the CSS could reference these id, class, or even use selectors to apply styling to elements.

the css ideas are largely unimplementable in a well-performing manner in 3d. you can tell that the people in that discussion have a web background.