On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved with arXiv, “but his sense of management didn’t scale.” For most of the 2000s, arXiv couldn’t hold on to more than a few developers.Continue Reading
The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving stuff through cyberspaceContinue Reading
Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually “graduated” from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simplyContinue Reading
Meta has presented the Waterworth Project, an initiative aimed at building a 50,000-kilometer undersea cable that will provide internet connectivity in five continents. The company seeks to strengthen control over the management of its services and guarantee the necessary infrastructure for the development of its products, especially those based inContinue Reading
