On the nature of the right to privacy

 November 28, 2023

In the last month, Meta has started to give their European users a choice between an account for their services paid in data or one paid in Euros. Today, noyb has filed a GDPR complaint against Meta over this behavior. Noyb has very good points to sustain their filing, but I don’t want to delve too much into those since those are very well explained in their press release. I think there is a deeper problem that they quickly touch but do not address directly, which is the interpretation of the kind of right that privacy is.

Principles of Big Data: Preparing, Sharing, and Analyzing Complex Information by Jules J Berman (Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann)

 May 14, 2013

As you probably know, I usually do not comment the books layout, being more focused on the contents of a book instead of it’s layout.

This time I will start this review speaking about the layout of this book since it’s REALLY peculiar. The Introduction is written in a two-columns layout, very similar to the Science magazine layout. The book itself is written in a single column layout, still with a “Science like” look. What shocked me a little bit about this is the sense of old scientific document that this book has. This is true until you read the first few pages. As soon as you do it, the sense of old scientific document disappears quickly.

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White (O'Reilly Media)

 April 23, 2013

Hadoop is today a industry-standard software for the Big Data and this book it’s the industry-standard book for Hadoop. his book is able to bring you from no knowledge about Hadoop and the Big Data to a full knowledge of Hadoop and it’s usage.

The book is split in 16 chapters and 3 appendix for a total of 628 pages of contents. This make ~33 pages for chapter so it’s easy to read and to find what you need. This is very important since - even if it’s possible - it’s rare that this kind of book is read cover-to-cover.

Strata Conference New York + Hadoop World 2012: Complete Video Compilation by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

 December 28, 2012

When I’ve been selected to review, I was shocked by the amount of material that is hidden in this product.

This is more than 100 hours of videos of the Strata and Hadoop World conference.

The material is divided in three sections: Keynotes (14 videos), Tutorials (64 videos) and Sessions (81 videos).

The Keynotes are really short video (7~15 minutes each) that tend to be some sort of advertise of the companies that are sponsors (I guess) of the event. This is nice, but I would not waste time on these, if a person has really small amount of time.