a friend of mine, whose COMPANY i enjoy, decided to create a COMPANY focused on delivering services to the theatre industry... basically if you have a COMPANY of thespians who need theraputic massage, she will ACCOMPANY them for an hour each.
I, for one, welcome our new search|database|communications|content overlords.
Seriously, this kind of proliferation (of access to information, content, mindshare) only works if the 'do no evil' mantra is adhered to.
I'm not sure if the slashdot community is aware of this, but Google has started being referred to as the "Dark Empire" and the "Evil Empire" in many diverse communities within the business community.
I guess we finally have the real sequence.
1. Develop profoundly useful search engine, base company on "do no evil" 2. Only Hire PhD's 3. Buy/Partner with every Fortune 1000 company 4. Host every netizens content 5. Control the Online Marketing channels 6. Surround the net userbase with usefull tools, finally making good on sun's "the network in the computer" 7. [LOOP 2-7] 8. Profit (and world domination)!
pointy haired bosses will faint at the thought of having to repeat that to _their_ pointy haired bosses.
i actually think debian -is- a product... of a somewhat sophisticated organization trying to do TheRightThing.
fyi, i dont use debian becuase of the tools, per se. i use debian because of the quality process wrapped around it. with all the hubbub around wikipedia, check this out:
i use debian, the good. but my main interest is in debian, the service.
Warcraft from my cold dead fingers
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 1
I have real hobbies (national champion motorcycle roadracer, avid sand volleyballer)
I have a real job (technical executive at successful wireless company)
But I really like Warcraft. I have level 60 world of warcraft characters. On wc3 I play house games, custom games, and every now and then teach other players about DOS attacks when they annoy me.
I've abused my knees and other joints. high school and collegiate wrestling. competitive racquetball. skateboards. snowboards. texas high school football (go maroons!) motor sports of all kinds, with aerobatic crashes. Warcraft 3 is the perfect 10 - 40 minute veg, while your kernel compiles, or your j2ee integration tests run. Back when I worked at a Fortune 100 company it was the PERFECT tool to get thru mind numbing conference calls. You haven't lived until you've been paid to play wc3. World of Warcraft (which, admittedly, I play alot less now that I'm back in a startup) is a teaser to a world yet to come.
Is it my fault I look forward to a world where i can get around -ANYWHERE- by walking out my house, hopping on my motorcycle/personaltransportpod to the neighborhood gryphon portal? And dont get me started about how cool recreating in the holodeck is going to be. Hitting apple-tab (go powermac!) to bring up warcraft and donning the headset is just a neandrethal predecessor to reaching over and jacking in matrix style into tomorrow's recreational sports.
Heck, I may want to live life from 60 onward jacked in 24 hours a day.
So yeah, you can have your warcraft back when you EITHER pry it from my cold dead fingers OR deliver the equipment and surgical plan to tap right into my occipital lobe.
while i'll take up2date over WU anyday, and have had linux doing 90% of server room work since 1997... i will say that its not perfect.
recently --every-- rackspace on linux customer i know, including ourselves, got hit with an up2date deployment bug which totally hosed the distribution (everything from java on down was segfaulting) in the default configuration. whether you label it a redhat or a rackspace problem, its a problem with the technology as its currently implemented. asdly, rackspace actually denied the problem at first.
more fundamentally, tools such as WU and up2date aren't all that useful unless they can keep from hosing your system. i'd be happy if at the very least it put the developers of the code in question (and its dependencies) in closer proximity to my business. ideally my phone would ring not when there IS an update (yawn), but when there is some issue which i should be aware of with the deployment, and even present me with a discussion of my options.
the closest thing i've found to this is the debian system, which i use semi-religiously... i do violate it sometimes when the software i want to use (or rather its development team) is having some friction with the package maintainers. still, the intricate details of the system are available in public information forums and --I-- get to choose how to navigate those waters.
so yeah, in worst-first order:
-- run windows/windows update -- do nothing and pray -- run redhat/up2date -- run debian and just get the emails, update accordingly -- run debian, and deviate from in where necessary, with close proximity to the actual engineers of the tools involved
I have 3 servers at rackspace. they came with redhat enterprise linux 3.0, which i couldn't stand despite being a die hard redhat guy (and stock purchaser) in the redhat7 days.
I wouldn't be surprised if rackspace is actually reporting this as a windows operating system, since the hardware probably came with a windows install originally. But how do you count it, really? 3 Redhat installs, even though all that distro does is run the kernel, ssh, and the vserver userland tools? Or is it 50 instances of debian sarge?
I have a strong gut feeling i'm not the only one playing with virtualization (vmware esx/gsx, xen, hell even ms now has some offerings)
The reality is we'll never really know how many linux servers there are. i'm guessing tens of thousands are running --routers and firewalls-- and hundreds of thousands (millions?) dont have a public ip address. on the other side of the fence you have microsoft, touting every license that they sell, even knowing full well that some percentage of them are not in use despite being purchased in some leverage deal.
Not that i really care, since I'm busy building a company around the concept of platform agnosticism and anti-lockin. So long as the innovation market is still fostering development in open source software i could care less how many licenses microsoft is reporting having sold. I dont need to be sold "Linux," what i need to be sold is support.
I'm sure you know this and were just generalizing, but often times in horizontally scaled applications its the needless and dizzyingly large number of tcp/jdbc/etc. handshakes that kill the database host.
persistent database connections (pools) help alot here.
my point was just about how ipv6 just keeps "getting in the way" vs. other technologies which have a real upside i can take advantage of today... or at least in the near future.
Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created.
The thing that surprises me about people discussing the big bang, and time, and god, and prime mover, is that nobody ever seems to assert that speaking about "the moment before the big bang" makes absolutely no sense since its out of context.
I'm obviously no BB expert, but what makes the most sense to me is our physics (and time along with it) was possibly instantiated in concert with the big bang itself.
There are two general cases:
1) God, the prime mover, etc. is subject to the same physics we are since those laws are !LAWS! transcending the BB.
2) God, the prime mover, etc. isn't subject to the same physics we are since (our version of) physics arrived at the same moment--if you will--the rest of our universe did.
so using the notion of time, i.e. the moment before the bb, just means you are asserting what we think of as time exists outside the context of our universe. my guess is that it doesn't.
As I converse with people about this i use the bomb story, asking them to nod along a few assumptions:
a) human beings are not god (omnipotent, etc.) b) human beings are subject to physics c) human beings can create a bomb and set it off
even though we can be the prime movers for the explosion, it doesn't necessarily mean we have godlike powers over it. it just means we were the prime mover for the explosion.
the prime moverer theory doesn't prove to me that there is a god, just that there is a prime mover. and if the universe as we know it cycling in on itself in a constant contraction/explosion/expansion/apex cycle as was recently thought (and disproved, but whatever) then the prime mover for the universe as we know it may be... our universe. in this case nothing put the cycle into motion, its just all that there is.
i'm sure there are other cases where an omnipotent all seeing god isn't the prime mover.
i'm also surprised that the academic notion of god as a philosophical problem always regards her as an all seeing, all knowing being. call me a hubris laden paranoid skeptic, but i think our universe is pretty wonderful. if someday i find out that there IS in fact a god, in the prime mover sense, it may just be some precocious child-god which created a small explosion in its playpen harry potter style and has spent the rest of its life awed at the result... just sitting there mesmerized by the glowing ball hovering overhead.
or, maybe our universe was created by that same precocious god-kid doing the equivalent of bottlerockets in the back yard and couldn't care less about our existence, much less have any ability to exert any influence over the explosion it put in place with an errant firecracker.
anyway, points being:
a) the academic/philosophical god doesn't fit with me at a gut level.
b) the prime mover argument doesn't prove the existence of god as we assert her, just indicates a prime mover, which doesn't necessarily indicate anythign more in the universe than... our universe.
c) since i dont think physics as we know it applies outside our little BB universe, i'm confident human beings will never be able to ascertain the nature of god, or the prime mover, or the BB's boundaries until we can first transcend physics.
d) i hold out hope that the agents in this world, of which i am one, are really just projections from a different context matrix-style, and upon termination of my consciousness i'll find myself in a context with alot more answers.
and, in closing, and not really a point, i keep coming back to an idea as an extension of this thread:
that the whole artificial intelligence issue, isn't the problem we think it is. as ai developers we think what we need is to figure out how to write programs to teach programs how to write programs to gather data and ana
much to the dismay of all my developers, my answer to just about every problem is "you can use an ssh tunnel for that"
when i bought my powerbook 15 months ago, reverse tunnels stopped working, and it took me awhile to figure out why.
normally you'd run something like:
ssh -R 8080:localhost:8080 user@remotedevbox.com
to let a remote server access tomcat running on your laptop.
i suspect OSX routes "localhost" to the ipv6 address by default in this case. the solution was to change the tunnel:
ssh -R 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 user@remotedevbox.com
point being... from the "what have you done for me lately" perspective, ipv6 has been nothing but a headscratcher. and we're supposed to run the internet on it?
In the development and staging environments it was great. As other posters mentioned you could get from zero to something usable in less than 30 minutes. Everything was as you would expect.
However... in the -production- environment, with 10's of millions of ldap objects connected to SprintPCS's provisioning systems which were making 1,000+ ldap writes --a minute-- the SunOne system absolutely blew chunks.
LDAP architects will ask what the hell we were doing with the entire database in one ldap instance rather than partition the dataset, and they'd be right, but we were acting under Sun's direction since at the time we had one of (if not) the largest LDAPs in the world.
LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.
That being said...
-- Multimaster replication would never ever work. Most of the time the entire SprintPCS userbase was hanging off one master and less than 4 replication slaves. For several months the entire messaging system was wedged into a single point of failure nightmare. (to be fair, this wasn't all slapd's fault and had 1/2 of the root cause in Sprint Datacenter practices which produced predictable results)
-- Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis. We actually automated the process of detecting its death and restoring from last night's backup. If you were a SprintPCS customer and your calendar ever seemed screwy now you know why. Of course further reflection suggested opensourcing it is probably the only thing that could help at this point because...
-- We used to get hotfix builds from Sun which were missing entire sections of the binaries. Whoever was managing the code would forget to use the same compilation flags for hotfixes as original code so we would receive webmail frontend builds which couldn't talk to imap backends, or calendar backends which wouldn't accept connections from calendar front ends.
-- SOL if you wanted to run more than 4G of memory in slapd.
Dont consider this post a rant, just let any CIO's/etc. reading this know that this opensource release will probably work great for you if you dont load it heavily (unlike exchange 5x, which would grenade just sitting there)
On the other hand, if you want to push the performance envelope, pretty much expect it to take alot of time and cause a bunch of headaches -in production-. Get help from people who have pushed the performance of the tools you are considering running.
The only thing that you might actually have to export manually would be contacts and schedules. Both can be dumped to XML IIRC. I've helped people export data from a variety of phones, and these things are very open compared to others it has to be said.
can you comment on which (non winXX based) phones you've helped export contact/schedules from which didn't involve running an export using desktop software which may have come with the phone?
have you considered developing over-the-air synchronization tools given the claimed openness of PIM data?
from what i understand there's quite a market there but getting programmatic access to PIM data from code running on the handset is somewhat cumbersome in non-(RIM|BREW) environments, especially from certain phone manufacturers.
as far as i'm concerned, sun's pam configuration and flexible login setup only applies to solaris 9 and above. after trying to come up with a sitewide md5 solution i found solaris 8 to be terribly difficult to work with. dont get me started on their broken ldap libraries.
several datacenters i work with independently only offer solaris 8 so "why aren't you using the latest sun distro's" falls on my deaf ears. the huge body of vendor supplied software which calls for solaris 8 just makes it worse.
nis implementations that pass these crypt values around the network just makes keeping them inaccessible to users a nightmare.
crypt-for-passwords is one of those "standard unix" methodologies that needs to have already died a horrible death. the original title of this topic was hopefully appropriate.
if you refer to my other posts on this thread, you'll note that i'm specifically advocating control of the service be put directly in the hands of the engineers/developers very much like the debian system so most of your tongue-in-cheek comments are non-starters.
i'm almost certain that if altavista had been turned over to an organization which functioned alot like the debian group, that the simple epiphany of link-ranking would still have come about. probably sooner.
given that i spend alot of time evaluating startup ideas/projects and that my wife is a principal in a venture firm, i'm knee deep in the primordial ooze that provides creative, risk-taking people the freedom to innovate. i dont see how separating the "business of selling prioritized billboard space" and the "implementation of this novel way to maintain www search databases" is really limiting to anyone. assuming the US Gov does thru some miracle decide to buy google, setup an organization to run and maintain the site (and do whatever with the "sell adspace" part) i dont see how anyone's freedom to innovate has been impacted.
what i do see is the original entrepeneurs and current shareholders get compensated for their investment, the "ad space" business might continue, and the underlying service gets protected from market forces.
if in 5 years we decide google is irrelevant even for the multitudes who are still finding the internet then we shut it down. i doubt that will be the case, however.
however, i dont have a great answer for you. as long as the u.s. has amongts the best engineers, datacenters, entrepeneurial environments, etc. it seems like a natural place for it to be.
havnen't given it much thought since frankly i see it as a non-issue. do you really care where the servers are that are serving your queries? caching servers aside, its one of the thigs that should be abstracted away from you.
i have to admit, if google were a british company, my first thought would have been "why not have the british govt buy them?"
the US Gov might not be interested in maintaining internationalized service, but the engineers that the site will get run/managed/modified by certainly would.
note that i'm emphasizing the separation of google the company (marketing, brokering, etc.) from google the search engine service/algorithm.
well, some people are in the business of making roads. the govt ends up choosing some companies to make the national highways. and in other cases employs the entire crews to make the national highways. is that fair to other companies that might be in the road business? i dont know.
i do think some things are just that important. like the emergence of our global network brain even in its infancy. thats what i think google is.
in germany i think they have a "national" television station which competes with a "private" television station for viewers. at least in '94 when i learned about this from one of the executives on the national station it wasn't such a bad thing.
frankly, i'm not so concerned with whats "fair" to companies anyway. these are the same entities which abuse their employees, consumers, and in some cases the public at large just to turn a larger profit.
heck, if google went off the "search engine market" such that it didn't sell anything to anyone that would be fine by me, but then funding for the datacneters, hardware, people, etc. would have to come from somewhere. of course linux is free.:)
i have to admit i lack even a basic understanding of economics.
however i have extensive expertise running high profile sites serving tens of millions of daily impressions and i can tell you there are many forces that tend to make big systems resist change.
is that what you mean by fat and lazy? not implementing a "wouldn't it be cool if" feature?
or do you mean with budgeting and managing the P&L's?
in my minds eye i see a set of engineers/phd's formed by committee to oversee management of the service. smart people tend toward interesting problems. i dont see those people allowing google to become something the general consumer would be abused by.
hell, they would all use the service themselves and would be just as motivated as i am or some other posters here when they claim that they would be really bummed if google went away, or got crappy.
i know in my own work i dont need the pressures of competition to make good decisions for the systems i design/implement/maintain. i do that just because i'm a geek. i'm pretty sure there are hordes of us out there.
sure. if they find my searches for kernel log messages and goat sex interesting then great.
i see too many people sending their credit cards via email, and have seen too many instances of social engineering to think that the entire notion of privacy is just a thin veneer we interested liberals lay across our daily lives.
the reality is that privacy as we knew it pre-internet just doesn't exist anymore.
at first i thought maybe they just need to license google. but then i got to thinking about it and realized that they would need to have their own dataset, their own crawlers, just using the same algorithms.
i'm not so interested in seeing google continue as a company. i think some organization, for the purposes of this topic the US Gov, then basically shut down the business side of it and just run the service. the old deja stuff, new crawls, and at that point it would become a separate entity from google the business. if the engineers that run it decicde that there's a better way to do it, then they can develop it in parallel with google the company, if it still exists after the magic deal i'm proposing.
i wouldn't be averse to the company continuing to exist, where it just sold the right most 20% of the real estate similar to paid rankings today. my main focus, however, is that the service be implemented by engineers, free from market forces.
i hold up debian as an example. they are a self governing organization doing quality work and worked on by thousands of people. i imagine a vaguely similar structure for running the new google.
the benefits are obvious. people are learning about the internet every day. as technology becomes more advanced it becomes less accessible. i want google to be aroudn for 10 years at least in its current implementation so that new internet users can marvel at whats possible before advancing to the next system that replaces google.
i'm a star trek fan, i know we are moving to a world where computers are just "with us" and we will be able to talk to them withotu keyboards or dragon, but we're not there yet. google is just an important step along the way that i dont want to get disrupted just because it stops being profitable for some reason or another.
Slashdot Mirror
It could still be right, if they have 1000 -reseller/partnership/b2b- customers.
Not that I RTFA, of course.
ha! nice broken tautology you and the parent have going.
2 89633
parent: (paraphrase) all uses of the word 'company' deal with (for-profit) business
me: identify several uses that dont
you: (paraphrase) none of your identified uses of the word 'company' deal with business
anyway, if you are distracted by what the parent -meant-, to the exclusion of what was said, check this out:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171571&cid=14
a friend of mine, whose COMPANY i enjoy, decided to create a COMPANY focused on delivering services to the theatre industry... basically if you have a COMPANY of thespians who need theraputic massage, she will ACCOMPANY them for an hour each.
I, for one, welcome our new search|database|communications|content overlords.
Seriously, this kind of proliferation (of access to information, content, mindshare) only works if the 'do no evil' mantra is adhered to.
I'm not sure if the slashdot community is aware of this, but Google has started being referred to as the "Dark Empire" and the "Evil Empire" in many diverse communities within the business community.
I guess we finally have the real sequence.
1. Develop profoundly useful search engine, base company on "do no evil"
2. Only Hire PhD's
3. Buy/Partner with every Fortune 1000 company
4. Host every netizens content
5. Control the Online Marketing channels
6. Surround the net userbase with usefull tools, finally making good on sun's "the network in the computer"
7. [LOOP 2-7]
8. Profit (and world domination)!
shush you.
pointy haired bosses will faint at the thought of having to repeat that to _their_ pointy haired bosses.
i actually think debian -is- a product... of a somewhat sophisticated organization trying to do TheRightThing.
fyi, i dont use debian becuase of the tools, per se. i use debian because of the quality process wrapped around it. with all the hubbub around wikipedia, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(business)
i use debian, the good. but my main interest is in debian, the service.
I have real hobbies (national champion motorcycle roadracer, avid sand volleyballer)
I have a real job (technical executive at successful wireless company)
But I really like Warcraft. I have level 60 world of warcraft characters. On wc3 I play house games, custom games, and every now and then teach other players about DOS attacks when they annoy me.
I've abused my knees and other joints. high school and collegiate wrestling. competitive racquetball. skateboards. snowboards. texas high school football (go maroons!) motor sports of all kinds, with aerobatic crashes. Warcraft 3 is the perfect 10 - 40 minute veg, while your kernel compiles, or your j2ee integration tests run. Back when I worked at a Fortune 100 company it was the PERFECT tool to get thru mind numbing conference calls. You haven't lived until you've been paid to play wc3. World of Warcraft (which, admittedly, I play alot less now that I'm back in a startup) is a teaser to a world yet to come.
Is it my fault I look forward to a world where i can get around -ANYWHERE- by walking out my house, hopping on my motorcycle/personaltransportpod to the neighborhood gryphon portal? And dont get me started about how cool recreating in the holodeck is going to be. Hitting apple-tab (go powermac!) to bring up warcraft and donning the headset is just a neandrethal predecessor to reaching over and jacking in matrix style into tomorrow's recreational sports.
Heck, I may want to live life from 60 onward jacked in 24 hours a day.
So yeah, you can have your warcraft back when you EITHER pry it from my cold dead fingers OR deliver the equipment and surgical plan to tap right into my occipital lobe.
while i'll take up2date over WU anyday, and have had linux doing 90% of server room work since 1997... i will say that its not perfect.
recently --every-- rackspace on linux customer i know, including ourselves, got hit with an up2date deployment bug which totally hosed the distribution (everything from java on down was segfaulting) in the default configuration. whether you label it a redhat or a rackspace problem, its a problem with the technology as its currently implemented. asdly, rackspace actually denied the problem at first.
more fundamentally, tools such as WU and up2date aren't all that useful unless they can keep from hosing your system. i'd be happy if at the very least it put the developers of the code in question (and its dependencies) in closer proximity to my business. ideally my phone would ring not when there IS an update (yawn), but when there is some issue which i should be aware of with the deployment, and even present me with a discussion of my options.
the closest thing i've found to this is the debian system, which i use semi-religiously... i do violate it sometimes when the software i want to use (or rather its development team) is having some friction with the package maintainers. still, the intricate details of the system are available in public information forums and --I-- get to choose how to navigate those waters.
so yeah, in worst-first order:
-- run windows/windows update
-- do nothing and pray
-- run redhat/up2date
-- run debian and just get the emails, update accordingly
-- run debian, and deviate from in where necessary, with close proximity to the actual engineers of the tools involved
I have 3 servers at rackspace. they came with redhat enterprise linux 3.0, which i couldn't stand despite being a die hard redhat guy (and stock purchaser) in the redhat7 days.
Each of those boxes runs http://www.linux-vserver.org/, which then spawns of 50 or so instances of debian sarge distributions to run our cluster (tomcat, apache, postgres, http://www.xcnetwork.com/, and others).
I wouldn't be surprised if rackspace is actually reporting this as a windows operating system, since the hardware probably came with a windows install originally. But how do you count it, really? 3 Redhat installs, even though all that distro does is run the kernel, ssh, and the vserver userland tools? Or is it 50 instances of debian sarge?
I have a strong gut feeling i'm not the only one playing with virtualization (vmware esx/gsx, xen, hell even ms now has some offerings)
The reality is we'll never really know how many linux servers there are. i'm guessing tens of thousands are running --routers and firewalls-- and hundreds of thousands (millions?) dont have a public ip address. on the other side of the fence you have microsoft, touting every license that they sell, even knowing full well that some percentage of them are not in use despite being purchased in some leverage deal.
Not that i really care, since I'm busy building a company around the concept of platform agnosticism and anti-lockin. So long as the innovation market is still fostering development in open source software i could care less how many licenses microsoft is reporting having sold. I dont need to be sold "Linux," what i need to be sold is support.
but damn is it funny, every time i watch it.
m l
http://www.starterupsteve.com/swf/switchlinux3.ht
especially funny, in the context of this topic
I'm sure you know this and were just generalizing, but often times in horizontally scaled applications its the needless and dizzyingly large number of tcp/jdbc/etc. handshakes that kill the database host.
e ction_pooling_with_connectorj.html
persistent database connections (pools) help alot here.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/conn
i know you were just kidding, but i wasn't.
check the last few paragraphs of this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151032&cid=12
absolutely.
my point was just about how ipv6 just keeps "getting in the way" vs. other technologies which have a real upside i can take advantage of today... or at least in the near future.
Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created.
The thing that surprises me about people discussing the big bang, and time, and god, and prime mover, is that nobody ever seems to assert that speaking about "the moment before the big bang" makes absolutely no sense since its out of context.
I'm obviously no BB expert, but what makes the most sense to me is our physics (and time along with it) was possibly instantiated in concert with the big bang itself.
There are two general cases:
1) God, the prime mover, etc. is subject to the same physics we are since those laws are !LAWS! transcending the BB.
2) God, the prime mover, etc. isn't subject to the same physics we are since (our version of) physics arrived at the same moment--if you will--the rest of our universe did.
so using the notion of time, i.e. the moment before the bb, just means you are asserting what we think of as time exists outside the context of our universe. my guess is that it doesn't.
As I converse with people about this i use the bomb story, asking them to nod along a few assumptions:
a) human beings are not god (omnipotent, etc.)
b) human beings are subject to physics
c) human beings can create a bomb and set it off
even though we can be the prime movers for the explosion, it doesn't necessarily mean we have godlike powers over it. it just means we were the prime mover for the explosion.
the prime moverer theory doesn't prove to me that there is a god, just that there is a prime mover. and if the universe as we know it cycling in on itself in a constant contraction/explosion/expansion/apex cycle as was recently thought (and disproved, but whatever) then the prime mover for the universe as we know it may be... our universe. in this case nothing put the cycle into motion, its just all that there is.
i'm sure there are other cases where an omnipotent all seeing god isn't the prime mover.
i'm also surprised that the academic notion of god as a philosophical problem always regards her as an all seeing, all knowing being. call me a hubris laden paranoid skeptic, but i think our universe is pretty wonderful. if someday i find out that there IS in fact a god, in the prime mover sense, it may just be some precocious child-god which created a small explosion in its playpen harry potter style and has spent the rest of its life awed at the result... just sitting there mesmerized by the glowing ball hovering overhead.
or, maybe our universe was created by that same precocious god-kid doing the equivalent of bottlerockets in the back yard and couldn't care less about our existence, much less have any ability to exert any influence over the explosion it put in place with an errant firecracker.
anyway, points being:
a) the academic/philosophical god doesn't fit with me at a gut level.
b) the prime mover argument doesn't prove the existence of god as we assert her, just indicates a prime mover, which doesn't necessarily indicate anythign more in the universe than... our universe.
c) since i dont think physics as we know it applies outside our little BB universe, i'm confident human beings will never be able to ascertain the nature of god, or the prime mover, or the BB's boundaries until we can first transcend physics.
d) i hold out hope that the agents in this world, of which i am one, are really just projections from a different context matrix-style, and upon termination of my consciousness i'll find myself in a context with alot more answers.
and, in closing, and not really a point, i keep coming back to an idea as an extension of this thread:
that the whole artificial intelligence issue, isn't the problem we think it is. as ai developers we think what we need is to figure out how to write programs to teach programs how to write programs to gather data and ana
much to the dismay of all my developers, my answer to just about every problem is "you can use an ssh tunnel for that"
when i bought my powerbook 15 months ago, reverse tunnels stopped working, and it took me awhile to figure out why.
normally you'd run something like:
ssh -R 8080:localhost:8080 user@remotedevbox.com
to let a remote server access tomcat running on your laptop.
i suspect OSX routes "localhost" to the ipv6 address by default in this case. the solution was to change the tunnel:
ssh -R 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 user@remotedevbox.com
point being... from the "what have you done for me lately" perspective, ipv6 has been nothing but a headscratcher. and we're supposed to run the internet on it?
In the development and staging environments it was great. As other posters mentioned you could get from zero to something usable in less than 30 minutes. Everything was as you would expect.
However... in the -production- environment, with 10's of millions of ldap objects connected to SprintPCS's provisioning systems which were making 1,000+ ldap writes --a minute-- the SunOne system absolutely blew chunks.
LDAP architects will ask what the hell we were doing with the entire database in one ldap instance rather than partition the dataset, and they'd be right, but we were acting under Sun's direction since at the time we had one of (if not) the largest LDAPs in the world.
LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.
That being said...
-- Multimaster replication would never ever work. Most of the time the entire SprintPCS userbase was hanging off one master and less than 4 replication slaves. For several months the entire messaging system was wedged into a single point of failure nightmare. (to be fair, this wasn't all slapd's fault and had 1/2 of the root cause in Sprint Datacenter practices which produced predictable results)
-- Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis. We actually automated the process of detecting its death and restoring from last night's backup. If you were a SprintPCS customer and your calendar ever seemed screwy now you know why. Of course further reflection suggested opensourcing it is probably the only thing that could help at this point because...
-- We used to get hotfix builds from Sun which were missing entire sections of the binaries. Whoever was managing the code would forget to use the same compilation flags for hotfixes as original code so we would receive webmail frontend builds which couldn't talk to imap backends, or calendar backends which wouldn't accept connections from calendar front ends.
-- SOL if you wanted to run more than 4G of memory in slapd.
Dont consider this post a rant, just let any CIO's/etc. reading this know that this opensource release will probably work great for you if you dont load it heavily (unlike exchange 5x, which would grenade just sitting there)
On the other hand, if you want to push the performance envelope, pretty much expect it to take alot of time and cause a bunch of headaches -in production-. Get help from people who have pushed the performance of the tools you are considering running.
Weird mood tonight.
The only thing that you might actually have to export manually would be contacts and schedules. Both can be dumped to XML IIRC. I've helped people export data from a variety of phones, and these things are very open compared to others it has to be said.
can you comment on which (non winXX based) phones you've helped export contact/schedules from which didn't involve running an export using desktop software which may have come with the phone?
have you considered developing over-the-air synchronization tools given the claimed openness of PIM data?
from what i understand there's quite a market there but getting programmatic access to PIM data from code running on the handset is somewhat cumbersome in non-(RIM|BREW) environments, especially from certain phone manufacturers.
as far as i'm concerned, sun's pam configuration and flexible login setup only applies to solaris 9 and above. after trying to come up with a sitewide md5 solution i found solaris 8 to be terribly difficult to work with. dont get me started on their broken ldap libraries.
several datacenters i work with independently only offer solaris 8 so "why aren't you using the latest sun distro's" falls on my deaf ears. the huge body of vendor supplied software which calls for solaris 8 just makes it worse.
nis implementations that pass these crypt values around the network just makes keeping them inaccessible to users a nightmare.
crypt-for-passwords is one of those "standard unix" methodologies that needs to have already died a horrible death. the original title of this topic was hopefully appropriate.
makes sense.
i dont really know of any ethically/technically successful candidate organizations. i welcome their introduction to this forum.
if you refer to my other posts on this thread, you'll note that i'm specifically advocating control of the service be put directly in the hands of the engineers/developers very much like the debian system so most of your tongue-in-cheek comments are non-starters.
i'm almost certain that if altavista had been turned over to an organization which functioned alot like the debian group, that the simple epiphany of link-ranking would still have come about. probably sooner.
given that i spend alot of time evaluating startup ideas/projects and that my wife is a principal in a venture firm, i'm knee deep in the primordial ooze that provides creative, risk-taking people the freedom to innovate. i dont see how separating the "business of selling prioritized billboard space" and the "implementation of this novel way to maintain www search databases" is really limiting to anyone. assuming the US Gov does thru some miracle decide to buy google, setup an organization to run and maintain the site (and do whatever with the "sell adspace" part) i dont see how anyone's freedom to innovate has been impacted.
what i do see is the original entrepeneurs and current shareholders get compensated for their investment, the "ad space" business might continue, and the underlying service gets protected from market forces.
if in 5 years we decide google is irrelevant even for the multitudes who are still finding the internet then we shut it down. i doubt that will be the case, however.
thoughts?
i certainly appreciate your perspective/concern.
however, i dont have a great answer for you. as long as the u.s. has amongts the best engineers, datacenters, entrepeneurial environments, etc. it seems like a natural place for it to be.
havnen't given it much thought since frankly i see it as a non-issue. do you really care where the servers are that are serving your queries? caching servers aside, its one of the thigs that should be abstracted away from you.
i have to admit, if google were a british company, my first thought would have been "why not have the british govt buy them?"
heh.
i hate perl.
i love python.
but i hear you. if i could work out the funding requirements, i'd just start an "opengoogle" implementation and we'd be off in sourceforge fashion.
the US Gov might not be interested in maintaining internationalized service, but the engineers that the site will get run/managed/modified by certainly would.
:)
note that i'm emphasizing the separation of google the company (marketing, brokering, etc.) from google the search engine service/algorithm.
well, some people are in the business of making roads. the govt ends up choosing some companies to make the national highways. and in other cases employs the entire crews to make the national highways. is that fair to other companies that might be in the road business? i dont know.
i do think some things are just that important. like the emergence of our global network brain even in its infancy. thats what i think google is.
in germany i think they have a "national" television station which competes with a "private" television station for viewers. at least in '94 when i learned about this from one of the executives on the national station it wasn't such a bad thing.
frankly, i'm not so concerned with whats "fair" to companies anyway. these are the same entities which abuse their employees, consumers, and in some cases the public at large just to turn a larger profit.
heck, if google went off the "search engine market" such that it didn't sell anything to anyone that would be fine by me, but then funding for the datacneters, hardware, people, etc. would have to come from somewhere. of course linux is free.
that is certainly the dogma of this past century.
i have to admit i lack even a basic understanding of economics.
however i have extensive expertise running high profile sites serving tens of millions of daily impressions and i can tell you there are many forces that tend to make big systems resist change.
is that what you mean by fat and lazy? not implementing a "wouldn't it be cool if" feature?
or do you mean with budgeting and managing the P&L's?
in my minds eye i see a set of engineers/phd's formed by committee to oversee management of the service. smart people tend toward interesting problems. i dont see those people allowing google to become something the general consumer would be abused by.
hell, they would all use the service themselves and would be just as motivated as i am or some other posters here when they claim that they would be really bummed if google went away, or got crappy.
i know in my own work i dont need the pressures of competition to make good decisions for the systems i design/implement/maintain. i do that just because i'm a geek. i'm pretty sure there are hordes of us out there.
sure. if they find my searches for kernel log messages and goat sex interesting then great.
i see too many people sending their credit cards via email, and have seen too many instances of social engineering to think that the entire notion of privacy is just a thin veneer we interested liberals lay across our daily lives.
the reality is that privacy as we knew it pre-internet just doesn't exist anymore.
i've given this a little thought.
at first i thought maybe they just need to license google. but then i got to thinking about it and realized that they would need to have their own dataset, their own crawlers, just using the same algorithms.
i'm not so interested in seeing google continue as a company. i think some organization, for the purposes of this topic the US Gov, then basically shut down the business side of it and just run the service. the old deja stuff, new crawls, and at that point it would become a separate entity from google the business. if the engineers that run it decicde that there's a better way to do it, then they can develop it in parallel with google the company, if it still exists after the magic deal i'm proposing.
i wouldn't be averse to the company continuing to exist, where it just sold the right most 20% of the real estate similar to paid rankings today. my main focus, however, is that the service be implemented by engineers, free from market forces.
i hold up debian as an example. they are a self governing organization doing quality work and worked on by thousands of people. i imagine a vaguely similar structure for running the new google.
the benefits are obvious. people are learning about the internet every day. as technology becomes more advanced it becomes less accessible. i want google to be aroudn for 10 years at least in its current implementation so that new internet users can marvel at whats possible before advancing to the next system that replaces google.
i'm a star trek fan, i know we are moving to a world where computers are just "with us" and we will be able to talk to them withotu keyboards or dragon, but we're not there yet. google is just an important step along the way that i dont want to get disrupted just because it stops being profitable for some reason or another.