The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.
Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons: - Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't. - What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML,... ? - How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?
But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?
So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....
My honest read of the article is: - cloud interoperability is important (as you say -- XML, BLOB, plaintext, whatever interface is agreed on, though there's a longer discussion about the implications of what you choose on adoption) - yet there's a "race to the bottom" of creating a lowest common denominator, looking at very complex things like networking equipment, firewalls and load balancers as mere commodities, when in fact they're pretty complicated. - most of the cloud interoperability discussion is driving for a "high level interface" for developers to access, when what you need is a much more detailed set of metadata to be able to capture the rather more complicated tweaks & configurations.
Interestingly enough, there's already some standards for granular metadata in data centres, like the DMTF's CIM. The problem is that this was more designed to "set state" on storage arrays, switches, and servers, not to be used as "metadata" that is stored and traded around, maybe modified and collaborated on, etc.
It's not about Flash vs. Silverlight so much as this particular streaming technology. They sold the Obama-folks on it early on, and it *happened* to built on Silverlight (MS was an investor in the startup). This technology in my experience has better adaptive compression than the typical Flash streaming (even HD), though I'm not about to claim it will be the only technology that can do this.
In any case, the point is somewhat moot in that a Moonlight-based streaming version seems to be available for LInux and MacPPC users.
Issues of accessibility aside, there is a clear technical reason for this choice: the video quality is astounding for a streaming medium.
The DNC website streamed the 2008 convention with Sliverlight technology from Move Networks in high definition, and, from what I can tell, that's the same technology they will be using for the Inauguration.
This is near-HD quality streaming, with adaptive correction (i.e. no pauses to "buffer"). Startup is nearly instantaneous.
Given that 99% of users are using Windows or Intel Macs, and that they need to stream *live*, I'm not sure what open technology you would have them use that has been proven in practice and has comparable quality. You would be basically insisting that the government fall back to the technological equivalent of AM Radio because they haven't published the specifications of how to build your own FM Radio, even though they're giving out new radios at no charge....
So, I don't view this as a mistake, or a screw-up. I view it as a challenge to FLOSS supporters to build a better (or at least, *competitive*) video streaming solution. The freedom to use crap is not freedom.
This isn't a screw up. They just placed higher priority on streaming quality than on accessibility -- especially given there are many more channels to see the inauguration live (TV, Flash, etc.) than this one.
Did you SEE how high quality the DNC streaming coverage was? It was phenomenally good, a leap ahead of the typical Youtube quality.
Detestable? What evidence do you have that this man *set* RIAA policy, rather than carrying it out?
Last I checked, Copyright is still a cherished law of the land outside of Slashdot, and the RIAA had the right to sue people for infringement.
Now, it was a stubbornly stupid move (step 1, kill your customers, step 2, ???, step 3, profit!), but why would specific attorneys be painted with the brush for enacting the policy?
As an example, David Boies was lauded for defending Napster, representing the DOJ vs. Microsoft on Antitrust, yet was retained by the SCO group in recent years. Does that make him detestable?
What good does FOSS adoption mean if there's no money exchanging hands? If a provider of software can't take a huge profit, then no one (outside of technology enthusiasts) really cares. Having 1m downloads and zero revenue gives you bragging rights and a large bandwidth bill -- you're not going to be driving the economy or paying for your kids' college education on that basis.
RedHat on the other hand, shows you can make a viable, profitable, large business on FOSS -- it is possible. Just not common.
The point is that, if you don't have a business model, you don't have a software industry -- you might have software being supported by other industries, but there still is a very sizeable sector of our economy that just. makes.... software. And wants you to pay for it, and would prefer to prevent you from using it if you don't.
By one (flawed) measure, such software made $450 billion in 2007, though that doesn't measure the whole industry, and it conflates services & hardware revenues at times. So let's go pessimistic, split the difference and say commercial software is around $250 billion in annual global revenue.
Open source revenues were 1.8 billion in 2006, and I would guestimate probably were $2.3 billion in 2007 given IDC's growth projection of 26% compounded.
In other words, open source revenues currently account for around 1% of the software industry's revenues. At a very optimistic growth rate, in 5 years, they'll be somewhere between 3 and 5%, mostly through growing at a faster rate (26% vs. 14%), though it's not clear how the recession will impact either number (you can be guaranteed some FOSS companies will go bankrupt or get bought ; though FOSS demand may increase to lower prices).
In any case, given these numbers, would you really bet on FOSS as a better *business* model? Certainly it's got nowhere to go but up, so it's growing. And yes, free/cheap is a good selling point. But it has a long, long way to go before you honestly can say it's going to draw investors, talented employees, etc., that all want to make a lot of money for their futures.
Motivations are mixed; owners aren't always looking for a company to enrich them. The Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit entity, for example, is owned by The Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit.
Motivations further don't explain the function & purpose of a company, which is ultimately to create and keep a customer, increasing the wealth capacity of the economy in the process.
All the semantic web gives you is the ability to layer a logical design over data. It's like a database design, except it's "open world", meaning there can be many different designs, it's up to the agent to pick the one it trusts, and it can't really make assumptions based on what it doesn't know.
The only inferences made are those that have been imagined by some human designer. And they might be very wrong , if the designer was wrong.
The "kinds" of inferences available are also pretty limited, like hierarchy or transitivity, or set membership. Useful, yes, but stepping stones...
Speaking as a long time architect, who used to work for BEA, the "3-tier architecture" was a hold-over from limitations of 1990's-era database servers that required an external OLTP monitor like Tuxedo. It hasn't been necessary for many, many, years, but got promoted by "clever" folks that build application servers and persistence frameworks.
Persistence frameworks can be useful -- but they lull developers into a false sense of security that they don't need to know how the database works. You need to REALLY REALLY know what you're doing when you're building a large scale application on a persistence framework, the same way you would if you were building it with stored procedures. Most Java applications "get away" with using these frameworks because they create a completely proprietary data model that's tied to their object model, and never designed to be reused by multiple applications. Naturally there's a maintenance bottleneck with schema changes there, but that's what stored procedures and views are for.
So, instead, we now have enterprise service buses and Web services to take the place of what a good shared database used to do.
The only reason stored procs, triggers, and advanced database features are considered 'outdated' or 'hard to maintain' are because a) they're not taught in Java class, b) developers are too lazy to learn them.
I've seen 50 KLOC Java systems that could have been replaced with maybe 1600 lines of PL/SQL. I know cases where 5-10K LOC PL/SQL systems were re-written by multi-year J2EE efforts, and the resulting system was much harder to maintain and consumed a heck of a lot more resources.
I'm not saying databases are the 'best' way to do things (Oracle certainly costs a lot of dough), but the reason technology trends wind up in certain directions aren't necessarily due to facts or progress, it's more to do with vendor politics mixed with ignorance.
Magnusson-Moss just involves restrictions on WARRANTIES , i.e. opting-out of a service tie-in, or using an alternative source, cannot void a warranty.
Just take a look at enterprise software products (e.g. Oracle's database, Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's anything) which have been sold this way since the 1970's:
- Usually they are sold by a license fee and then a 21%-of-license fee support/maintenance contract annually, with the first year being mandatory.
- If you cancel your support contract after the first year, then the vendor has the right to terminate your support for *all* products you own by that vendor, and if you renew it, you have to renew it for *all* products, and pay retroactive fees with a penalty for the time you weren't in support.
Both of these entitle you to product upgrades & support resources (ie. email, phone, bug fixes and maybe a support-representative on site if you're big enough). But they don't void your warranty if you cancel it (a lot of enterprise software is under customized warranty -- long-term or even perpetual, depending on negotiations).
Look, I don't agree with Apple's current behaviour here, but as you suggest, there's a big difference in "user experience" between a phone and a PC/Mac.
The phone has certain core features that *must* work, such as taking phone calls, messages, browsing, etc. This is arguably why the SDK is locked down to the degree it is (i.e no background processing). It ensures the stability of the phone in the presence of 3rd party code.
The App Store rejections are consistent with this mindset: Apple has decided that rather than confuse people with choice in the areas of core functionality (Mail, Phone, Browsing, etc.), that users must become locked into Apple's experience. Fewer choices, simpler experience.
Becoming a monopoly is a _good_ problem to have in our market system - then it just becomes about managing the government.
Was Microsoft _punished_ for being a monopoly? They have a consent decree, sure, but they're still growing revenue, and weren't split up.
Furthermore, monopolies are always transitory. They generally don't last in effective marketplaces. Microsoft arguably succeeded and lasted due to the record levels of hubris/stupidity in its competitors during the 1980's (during which time it wasn't really a monopolist, just trying to become one).
From what I recall they did anywhere between 10 and 18 takes in the studio. And sure they pro-tool'd the hell out of it (as most professionals do these days).
Also, the album doesn't suck. It's got some very good tracks on it.
I don't care who endorses the AGPL; by the FSF's own definitions, it is not Free Software. Get pissed off and mod me down all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the AGPL is a EULA in that it governs the behavior of people who merely run the software, even if they do not distribute it (by any reasonable definition of the word "distribute" that has been in common usage during the history of computing).
You apparently don't understand the definition.
The section you quoted from the Affero GPL does not deny Freedom 1. You are still free to study the program. You are still free to adapt it to your needs. With the AGPL, modifiers AND hosts must also preserve the freedom for others to do so, even if that is a burden.
A burden is not a denial of freedom, it is rather the requirement of enabling freedom. In other words, it is an assumed responsibility.
The GPL family has always been focused on user-freedoms over author-freedoms, and in the case of AGPL, hosting-freedom. As soon as one chooses to modify the code, or in the case of AGPL3, HOST the code, they're burdened by certain behaviours. This is a utilitarian calculation to maximize societal freedom at the expense of individual liberty. You may not agree with it, but it fits the definition of free software.
Note that I'm not a fan of the AGPL either, but I definitely think that it's free software -- it's the purest sense of the FSF's social agenda. But the FSF also recognizes that many would find the AGPL too burdensome, hence why it's not the only license they offer.
I have an iPhone 3G with the 20 MB international data roaming plan. I had travelled to Switzerland in June, and Canada in July, and reached around 55 MB of usage by the time I was in Canada. AT&T called me while I was in Canada, offered to back-date an upgrade to their 50 MB plan so that I wouldn't have to pay as much. I'm also able to downgrade to the cheaper plan (after any existing data charges have posted to my bill) without penalty.
So, yes, I know AT&T can suck, as do many carriers, especially when they "forget" to remind you to get a reasonable data plan and charge you ridiculous $$$$... but in this case there is a sign they are learning.
I don't think the author really understands what TBL's original vision was, except in the narrowest of contexts. The idea of code on demand was certainly described as part of REST.
The problem with JavaScript standardization arguably comes down to vendor politics (as do most standards efforts). We're in a wave of proprietary "innovations" being pushed, like MS Silverlight, Adobe AIR, Sun JavaFX, etc. It's not in these gorilla's interests to commoditize a richer browser experience before they try to take over a portion of the web on their own.
I listen to Sirius and there are several metal stations...
- Octane (plays NuMetal-ish stuff) - Hair Nation (80s hair bands) - Buzzsaw (ac/dc, ozzy, rush, metallica etc) - Hard Attack (which you say plays death metal, but I've seen everything from metalcore to classic judas priest & sabbath).
That's pretty good representation.
One thing missing, I think, is a good IDM or Electronica station. Area 33 on Sirius is Trance, but there's not much IDM....
The NY Times converted 4 terabytes / 11 million TIFF based images & articles from their archives in 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances. And continue to do it to this day. Cost? A couple hundred dollars.
Disclaimer, I'm the chief architect of a cloud vendor.
I'd say the cloud buzz started when Google's Eric Schmidt started saying that they were in the "cloud computing business" circa 2006, and with the release of Nick Carr's "The Big Switch" book in January 2008.
Here's the question: "Why is my enterprise IT so expensive, not innovative, and hard to use and my online services so affordable, innovative, and easy to use?"
The answer could be one of three things: 1. maybe the online vendors do things differently and better in some ways, let's learn from them and change IT 2. online vendors use commodity hardware in clusters, so we all should move to that too 3. maybe online vendors know more about IT than we do, let them do the dirty work. 4 they're not, go back to sleep
So, there's a few ways to look at "cloud": - A new way to do IT management & provisioning on demand and at scale, regardless of who hosts it (e.g. Puppet + Virtualization + a Web API) - A large cluster of computers instead of a few large computers (e.g. Hadoop) - Outsourced infrastructure with an API for manipulating it and a "retail channel" to pay for it with credit cards (e.g. Google App Engine, Amazon EC2) - It's a fog. Nothing to see here, move along.
Now, my opinion:
Is a cloud always a cluster? Often, yes, but not always. Sometimes it might be several independent clusters working together (e.g. database vs. web vs. integration). Sometimes one large box makes sense (e.g. for certain database apps).
Are these buzz words to rent software? Perhaps. Much enterprise software is sold and bound to physical CPU's for $10,000 to $60,000 each. That doesn't really work well when you're virtualizing stuff and growing & shrinking it regularly.
Will everyone want to outsource? Hell, no. It can be a shell game. Security is a problem (though I'll note, we do store money in a bank, not under our bed in a mattress, these days, so our computing may make some sense). Privacy is even more of a problem.
Having said that, is it not cool that you can programmatically create a small army of Linux nodes for 10 cents an hour each via Amazon EC2? Won't it be cool to be able to broaden this idea (i.e. being able to manage large numbers of services & apps on there via an API or command line or even GUI?)
Is this proprietary? In a way, yes, in a way no. Amazon EC2 is proprietary, but there already is the open source Eucalyptus project that emulates it to be able to use the EC2 API to provision Xen containers on Rocks Clusters. There are EC2 API libraries that are mostly open source. Then there's Puppet -- a couple of years old and is a great GPL project for infrastructure automation (i.e the new CFEngine) which fits into what the cloud is trying to do. Zenoss is a few years old and is a great management platform that some cloud vendors hook into. Elastra is working to open source tools for its ECML and EDML languages to build a cloud package / design / platform ecosystem.
Are online services cheaper and easier to use than the enterprise? In some cases, certainly. Some internal IT departments require a $10k+ tax on top of server purchases to cover IT installation and provisioning costs, and then take 2 weeks to 2 months to bring the server online. Using an API to bring up a server up , auto-configured as part of a MySQL cluster, in under 30 seconds, is quite a relief.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason something like Facebook works is that they can design a database schema to facilitate a complete experience that just kind of... works.... Across mini-feeds, status walls, applications, etc.
Doing that in a way that's completely decentralized requires standardization on interfaces and data that would be hard to do for a couple of reasons: ... ?
- Agreeing on the architecture; how many "really" RESTful interfaces are out there? Netflix has a great one, but Flickr doesn't.
- What's the syntax? JSON, XML, YAML,
- How about a data model? Will people want to go beyond syntax into being able to do queries like what SPARQL gives you?
But beyond the technological hurdles, there's the business angle. Social media isn't exactly rolling in revenue, it's rolling in VC funding at best. Why interoperate when can try to claim a monopoly position? Or aim to be the defacto standard?
So, in the end, I woudn't say we're moving backwards ... we're just progressing through the usual stages of how standards and openness has evolved online. We start with well-funded walled gardens (CompuServe, Prodigy, your local BBS, etc.) , people eventually get fed up and build out interoperable bridges that cross them (e.g. FIDOnet and NNTP in the old days of bulletin boards). Now we have to do the same for the web....
My honest read of the article is:
- cloud interoperability is important (as you say -- XML, BLOB, plaintext, whatever interface is agreed on, though there's a longer discussion about the implications of what you choose on adoption)
- yet there's a "race to the bottom" of creating a lowest common denominator, looking at very complex things like networking equipment, firewalls and load balancers as mere commodities, when in fact they're pretty complicated.
- most of the cloud interoperability discussion is driving for a "high level interface" for developers to access, when what you need is a much more detailed set of metadata to be able to capture the rather more complicated tweaks & configurations.
Interestingly enough, there's already some standards for granular metadata in data centres, like the DMTF's CIM. The problem is that this was more designed to "set state" on storage arrays, switches, and servers, not to be used as "metadata" that is stored and traded around, maybe modified and collaborated on, etc.
It's not about Flash vs. Silverlight so much as this particular streaming technology. They sold the Obama-folks on it early on, and it *happened* to built on Silverlight (MS was an investor in the startup). This technology in my experience has better adaptive compression than the typical Flash streaming (even HD), though I'm not about to claim it will be the only technology that can do this.
In any case, the point is somewhat moot in that a Moonlight-based streaming version seems to be available for LInux and MacPPC users.
SImply put, the FOSS technology sucks. If it was better (video quality / usability, for starters), then people would be inclined to use it.
Issues of accessibility aside, there is a clear technical reason for this choice: the video quality is astounding for a streaming medium.
The DNC website streamed the 2008 convention with Sliverlight technology from Move Networks in high definition, and, from what I can tell, that's the same technology they will be using for the Inauguration.
This is near-HD quality streaming, with adaptive correction (i.e. no pauses to "buffer"). Startup is nearly instantaneous.
Given that 99% of users are using Windows or Intel Macs, and that they need to stream *live*, I'm not sure what open technology you would have them use that has been proven in practice and has comparable quality. You would be basically insisting that the government fall back to the technological equivalent of AM Radio because they haven't published the specifications of how to build your own FM Radio, even though they're giving out new radios at no charge....
So, I don't view this as a mistake, or a screw-up. I view it as a challenge to FLOSS supporters to build a better (or at least, *competitive*) video streaming solution. The freedom to use crap is not freedom.
This isn't a screw up. They just placed higher priority on streaming quality than on accessibility -- especially given there are many more channels to see the inauguration live (TV, Flash, etc.) than this one.
Did you SEE how high quality the DNC streaming coverage was? It was phenomenally good, a leap ahead of the typical Youtube quality.
All right, I believe you.
Yes, I admit my fix fails at grammar. Sorry, where's the edit post feature!? Yar
Detestable? What evidence do you have that this man *set* RIAA policy, rather than carrying it out?
Last I checked, Copyright is still a cherished law of the land outside of Slashdot, and the RIAA had the right to sue people for infringement.
Now, it was a stubbornly stupid move (step 1, kill your customers, step 2, ???, step 3, profit!), but why would specific attorneys be painted with the brush for enacting the policy?
As an example, David Boies was lauded for defending Napster, representing the DOJ vs. Microsoft on Antitrust, yet was retained by the SCO group in recent years. Does that make him detestable?
Fixed.
What good does FOSS adoption mean if there's no money exchanging hands? If a provider of software can't take a huge profit, then no one (outside of technology enthusiasts) really cares. Having 1m downloads and zero revenue gives you bragging rights and a large bandwidth bill -- you're not going to be driving the economy or paying for your kids' college education on that basis.
RedHat on the other hand, shows you can make a viable, profitable, large business on FOSS -- it is possible. Just not common.
The point is that, if you don't have a business model, you don't have a software industry -- you might have software being supported by other industries, but there still is a very sizeable sector of our economy that just. makes.... software. And wants you to pay for it, and would prefer to prevent you from using it if you don't.
By one (flawed) measure, such software made $450 billion in 2007, though that doesn't measure the whole industry, and it conflates services & hardware revenues at times. So let's go pessimistic, split the difference and say commercial software is around $250 billion in annual global revenue.
Open source revenues were 1.8 billion in 2006, and I would guestimate probably were $2.3 billion in 2007 given IDC's growth projection of 26% compounded.
In other words, open source revenues currently account for around 1% of the software industry's revenues. At a very optimistic growth rate, in 5 years, they'll be somewhere between 3 and 5%, mostly through growing at a faster rate (26% vs. 14%), though it's not clear how the recession will impact either number (you can be guaranteed some FOSS companies will go bankrupt or get bought ; though FOSS demand may increase to lower prices).
In any case, given these numbers, would you really bet on FOSS as a better *business* model? Certainly it's got nowhere to go but up, so it's growing. And yes, free/cheap is a good selling point. But it has a long, long way to go before you honestly can say it's going to draw investors, talented employees, etc., that all want to make a lot of money for their futures.
Motivations are mixed; owners aren't always looking for a company to enrich them. The Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit entity, for example, is owned by The Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit.
Motivations further don't explain the function & purpose of a company, which is ultimately to create and keep a customer, increasing the wealth capacity of the economy in the process.
All the semantic web gives you is the ability to layer a logical design over data. It's like a database design, except it's "open world", meaning there can be many different designs, it's up to the agent to pick the one it trusts, and it can't really make assumptions based on what it doesn't know.
The only inferences made are those that have been imagined by some human designer. And they might be very wrong , if the designer was wrong.
The "kinds" of inferences available are also pretty limited, like hierarchy or transitivity, or set membership. Useful, yes, but stepping stones...
Speaking as a long time architect, who used to work for BEA, the "3-tier architecture" was a hold-over from limitations of 1990's-era database servers that required an external OLTP monitor like Tuxedo. It hasn't been necessary for many, many, years, but got promoted by "clever" folks that build application servers and persistence frameworks.
Persistence frameworks can be useful -- but they lull developers into a false sense of security that they don't need to know how the database works. You need to REALLY REALLY know what you're doing when you're building a large scale application on a persistence framework, the same way you would if you were building it with stored procedures. Most Java applications "get away" with using these frameworks because they create a completely proprietary data model that's tied to their object model, and never designed to be reused by multiple applications. Naturally there's a maintenance bottleneck with schema changes there, but that's what stored procedures and views are for.
So, instead, we now have enterprise service buses and Web services to take the place of what a good shared database used to do.
The only reason stored procs, triggers, and advanced database features are considered 'outdated' or 'hard to maintain' are because a) they're not taught in Java class, b) developers are too lazy to learn them.
I've seen 50 KLOC Java systems that could have been replaced with maybe 1600 lines of PL/SQL. I know cases where 5-10K LOC PL/SQL systems were re-written by multi-year J2EE efforts, and the resulting system was much harder to maintain and consumed a heck of a lot more resources.
I'm not saying databases are the 'best' way to do things (Oracle certainly costs a lot of dough), but the reason technology trends wind up in certain directions aren't necessarily due to facts or progress, it's more to do with vendor politics mixed with ignorance.
Product & Service tie-ins are not illegal.
Magnusson-Moss just involves restrictions on WARRANTIES , i.e. opting-out of a service tie-in, or using an alternative source, cannot void a warranty.
Just take a look at enterprise software products (e.g. Oracle's database, Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's anything) which have been sold this way since the 1970's:
- Usually they are sold by a license fee and then a 21%-of-license fee support/maintenance contract annually, with the first year being mandatory.
- If you cancel your support contract after the first year, then the vendor has the right to terminate your support for *all* products you own by that vendor, and if you renew it, you have to renew it for *all* products, and pay retroactive fees with a penalty for the time you weren't in support.
Both of these entitle you to product upgrades & support resources (ie. email, phone, bug fixes and maybe a support-representative on site if you're big enough). But they don't void your warranty if you cancel it (a lot of enterprise software is under customized warranty -- long-term or even perpetual, depending on negotiations).
Google's Eric Schmidt has stated that they want most consumer (and some business) computing to move to ad-supported revenue.
Look, I don't agree with Apple's current behaviour here, but as you suggest, there's a big difference in "user experience" between a phone and a PC/Mac.
The phone has certain core features that *must* work, such as taking phone calls, messages, browsing, etc. This is arguably why the SDK is locked down to the degree it is (i.e no background processing). It ensures the stability of the phone in the presence of 3rd party code.
The App Store rejections are consistent with this mindset: Apple has decided that rather than confuse people with choice in the areas of core functionality (Mail, Phone, Browsing, etc.), that users must become locked into Apple's experience. Fewer choices, simpler experience.
Becoming a monopoly is a _good_ problem to have in our market system - then it just becomes about managing the government.
Was Microsoft _punished_ for being a monopoly? They have a consent decree, sure, but they're still growing revenue, and weren't split up.
Furthermore, monopolies are always transitory. They generally don't last in effective marketplaces. Microsoft arguably succeeded and lasted due to the record levels of hubris/stupidity in its competitors during the 1980's (during which time it wasn't really a monopolist, just trying to become one).
From what I recall they did anywhere between 10 and 18 takes in the studio. And sure they pro-tool'd the hell out of it (as most professionals do these days).
Also, the album doesn't suck. It's got some very good tracks on it.
You apparently don't understand the definition.
The section you quoted from the Affero GPL does not deny Freedom 1. You are still free to study the program. You are still free to adapt it to your needs. With the AGPL, modifiers AND hosts must also preserve the freedom for others to do so, even if that is a burden.
A burden is not a denial of freedom, it is rather the requirement of enabling freedom. In other words, it is an assumed responsibility.
The GPL family has always been focused on user-freedoms over author-freedoms, and in the case of AGPL, hosting-freedom. As soon as one chooses to modify the code, or in the case of AGPL3, HOST the code, they're burdened by certain behaviours. This is a utilitarian calculation to maximize societal freedom at the expense of individual liberty. You may not agree with it, but it fits the definition of free software.
Note that I'm not a fan of the AGPL either, but I definitely think that it's free software -- it's the purest sense of the FSF's social agenda. But the FSF also recognizes that many would find the AGPL too burdensome, hence why it's not the only license they offer.
I have an iPhone 3G with the 20 MB international data roaming plan. I had travelled to Switzerland in June, and Canada in July, and reached around 55 MB of usage by the time I was in Canada. AT&T called me while I was in Canada, offered to back-date an upgrade to their 50 MB plan so that I wouldn't have to pay as much. I'm also able to downgrade to the cheaper plan (after any existing data charges have posted to my bill) without penalty.
So, yes, I know AT&T can suck, as do many carriers, especially when they "forget" to remind you to get a reasonable data plan and charge you ridiculous $$$$... but in this case there is a sign they are learning.
I don't think the author really understands what TBL's original vision was, except in the narrowest of contexts. The idea of code on demand was certainly described as part of REST.
The problem with JavaScript standardization arguably comes down to vendor politics (as do most standards efforts). We're in a wave of proprietary "innovations" being pushed, like MS Silverlight, Adobe AIR, Sun JavaFX, etc. It's not in these gorilla's interests to commoditize a richer browser experience before they try to take over a portion of the web on their own.
I listen to Sirius and there are several metal stations...
- Octane (plays NuMetal-ish stuff)
- Hair Nation (80s hair bands)
- Buzzsaw (ac/dc, ozzy, rush, metallica etc)
- Hard Attack (which you say plays death metal, but I've seen everything from metalcore to classic judas priest & sabbath).
That's pretty good representation.
One thing missing, I think, is a good IDM or Electronica station. Area 33 on Sirius is Trance, but there's not much IDM....
The NY Times converted 4 terabytes / 11 million TIFF based images & articles from their archives in 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances. And continue to do it to this day. Cost? A couple hundred dollars.
Disclaimer, I'm the chief architect of a cloud vendor.
I'd say the cloud buzz started when Google's Eric Schmidt started saying that they were in the "cloud computing business" circa 2006, and with the release of Nick Carr's "The Big Switch" book in January 2008.
Here's the question: "Why is my enterprise IT so expensive, not innovative, and hard to use and my online services so affordable, innovative, and easy to use?"
The answer could be one of three things:
1. maybe the online vendors do things differently and better in some ways, let's learn from them and change IT
2. online vendors use commodity hardware in clusters, so we all should move to that too
3. maybe online vendors know more about IT than we do, let them do the dirty work.
4 they're not, go back to sleep
So, there's a few ways to look at "cloud":
- A new way to do IT management & provisioning on demand and at scale, regardless of who hosts it (e.g. Puppet + Virtualization + a Web API)
- A large cluster of computers instead of a few large computers (e.g. Hadoop)
- Outsourced infrastructure with an API for manipulating it and a "retail channel" to pay for it with credit cards (e.g. Google App Engine, Amazon EC2)
- It's a fog. Nothing to see here, move along.
Now, my opinion:
Is a cloud always a cluster? Often, yes, but not always. Sometimes it might be several independent clusters working together (e.g. database vs. web vs. integration). Sometimes one large box makes sense (e.g. for certain database apps).
Are these buzz words to rent software? Perhaps. Much enterprise software is sold and bound to physical CPU's for $10,000 to $60,000 each. That doesn't really work well when you're virtualizing stuff and growing & shrinking it regularly.
Will everyone want to outsource? Hell, no. It can be a shell game. Security is a problem (though I'll note, we do store money in a bank, not under our bed in a mattress, these days, so our computing may make some sense). Privacy is even more of a problem.
Having said that, is it not cool that you can programmatically create a small army of Linux nodes for 10 cents an hour each via Amazon EC2? Won't it be cool to be able to broaden this idea (i.e. being able to manage large numbers of services & apps on there via an API or command line or even GUI?)
Is this proprietary? In a way, yes, in a way no. Amazon EC2 is proprietary, but there already is the open source Eucalyptus project that emulates it to be able to use the EC2 API to provision Xen containers on Rocks Clusters. There are EC2 API libraries that are mostly open source. Then there's Puppet -- a couple of years old and is a great GPL project for infrastructure automation (i.e the new CFEngine) which fits into what the cloud is trying to do. Zenoss is a few years old and is a great management platform that some cloud vendors hook into. Elastra is working to open source tools for its ECML and EDML languages to build a cloud package / design / platform ecosystem.
Are online services cheaper and easier to use than the enterprise? In some cases, certainly. Some internal IT departments require a $10k+ tax on top of server purchases to cover IT installation and provisioning costs, and then take 2 weeks to 2 months to bring the server online. Using an API to bring up a server up , auto-configured as part of a MySQL cluster, in under 30 seconds, is quite a relief.