I'd guess it's that downtime is easier than non-downtime, and it's a free service. It's not like anybody can say they're not getting what they paid for.
Yeah, but sometimes engineers blow off something that really is neat and exciting because of their silly, unscientific, emotional views about the way things should work.
Rails has its share of issues -- deployment is way complex, performance sucks, and the community can be rabid in the same unscientific, emotional ways -- but buggy and unstable? Come now, that's disingenuous.
When Twitter opened it was handling 11,000 requests per second and doing it well. Twitter has gone from nothing to sensational in a very small amount of time. If you hit the ground running that quickly, your growing pains will be evident regardless of what framework or language choice you're using.
The summary makes it sound kinda squishy, though Wal-Mart was pretty clear:
Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows didn't attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores, a spokeswoman said Monday. "This really wasn't what our customers were looking for," said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien.
The "repeatedly sold out" link is a little misleading, too. It isn't exactly a solid list of endorsements -- well, it seems a lot of people bought it and then promptly returned to the website to bitch it didn't come with Windows. In short: it flopped.
I do have to wonder -- and this will certainly invite some livid replies -- solid engineering is great, but I always seem to get the sense that solid marketing and solid sales practices aren't valued in the same way by the F/OSS community, and if it doesn't fail to gain them any ground, it might actually hurt them, as well. I mean, that stuff doesn't have value because people like wasting money. Packaging and naming and charm and all of that has value. WTF is a gOS?
Your iPhone comes with a complicated list of rules about what you can and can't do with it. You can't install unapproved third-party applications on it. You can't unlock it and use it with the cellphone carrier of your choice.
As Gruber noted, that's not really that complicated. It doesn't count as complicated if you can explain it in two sentences.
It's why all gaming-console manufacturers make sure that their game cartridges don't work on any other console...
I think we need another word for this than "lock-in", because a lot of the examples he cites are lock-in but mostly in the sense that Nintendo probably doesn't want to be an international standards body for video game formats. The word might be "cost". If Nintendo worries about Nintendo's problems, then they're easier to solve than trying to solve everyone's problems. Why? It's lower cost. Costs less time, less money, it's less risky. And in defense of some of those entities, firm standards rarely result in innovation. Having an ISO for hand-held game controllers might result in an easy way to write code for controllers with six buttons and vibration, but having standards for game controllers doesn't result in the Wiimote. Not worrying abut six-button vibrating controllers does.
Schneier's half-right, but he's also saying that lock-in is always a conscious factor and not just, yanno, the cost of the thing. I'm locked into my current metropolitan area by the cost of moving, but it's not city hall's problem.
As for conscious lock-in, if you don't want a phone with lock-in, you're free to get one. Enjoy paying twice as much for calls and having a per-call fee. Lock-in costs less than stuff without lock-in because it reduces risk. It's a valuable tool and one that, despite the Slashdot crowd's feeling, most consumers have little problem with as a way to get goods more cheaply.
Just an alternative opinion. I hated Blair Witch, but I thought Cloverfield was the scariest movie I've seen in a long time. The scariest movie I've seen in a long time, if your local theater supports the dB level the movie really requires.
I saw it as a welcome departure from the Bay/Bruckheimer formula with too-wide, sweeping, omniscient shots where everything's in view, all the time -- the movie didn't focus on the unlikely high-school hero, wasn't concerned with the monster's presence, the pinnacle of the movie wasn't about some magic weapon that would defeat it. It was hopeless and gritty and pretty frightening if you were close to 9/11. CGI was used sparingly, relative to a lot of films these days.
I'm just ragging on you unnecessarily here -- but was Alexa following POSTed form actions or something? This is why there's a completely different verb for the alteration or deletion of a URI object (POST) vs reading one (GET). (And shame on somebody for sticking usernames and passwords in GET variables, if that was the case.)/nitpick
+10. As of right now, every other post is not about what this person has done -- spending nearly six months orbiting the earth -- but the fact that we shouldn't be filtering on sex. I'm not sure what they're claiming -- it's not like she gets higher pay or a new car for spending more time in space. She didn't get a certificate to hang. She just gets to spend (wait for it)..more time in space. It's just a statement of fact, so I'm not sure why every Slashdotter is suddenly concerned about equity when they've never been before.
Keep in mind, if the space station was a more accurate sampling of reality, we'd have a roughly equal number of women and men on board. Of course, that assumes you would have equal numbers of men and women in the armed forces, as scientists, and in other 'prereqs' for NASA. But we don't -- that's why this kind of thing is special, that's all.
My drive is in writing code, and being able to look at other code that has what I want, plain and simple. In that sense, the GPL made it easy to do those two things: all technology is driven by convenience. PHP isn't popular because of its "enterprise-class frameworks", it's popular because it's easy to grab code from elsewhere, easy to write code in. Windows is easy because it comes with your computer. The GPL made it easy to be open-source.
In the past few years it seems everyone has become a zealot for something in computing, not because they're a visionary, but because they're a bully. And to be honest? I don't really give a fuck. I don't plan on using licenses for the advancement of some idealogue's great Cause, and I don't plan on consulting a lawyer just to write code and see if I'm Compliant.
So in the past few years I've released stuff as BSD/MIT/etc. (Gasps.) Do I care that people can use my code and not contribute back to the "community"? Not really. For one, I haven't found that to be the case. But secondly, it's just easier. It's easy to use code and to release code. No Visions, no Causes, no lawyers, no Compliance and papers-please-style-development. Just some guy on the internet putting his code up for use.
Report as soon as possible no matter who it embarrasses.
Oh, please. Responsible disclosure isn't about who it embarasses; this isn't high school. It's about lost data and compromised systems of real people and real companies.
What you're preaching is a form of Econ 101 -- if we incentivize security patching via reputation, you'll have more people fixing their holes. Maybe, but regardless, I think you'll just have more people changing the definition of what constitutes a vulnerability.
I have to respectfully disagree with the critique of Elebits' gameplay. I found it fun and incredibly challenging -- there are time limits, limits on breakability of objects (don't smash too many plates) as well as limits on making too much noise (dB). On some levels these limits were fun, on others, they were annoying. While the graphical polish could have been better, it was a refreshing game that didn't once harp on the same old genre formulas. I appreciate the smooth gameplay and consistent framerates in most levels as opposed to focusing on graphical prowess.
Those that are observant/patient enough to explore into the levels a little more will realize that there are hundreds of little, unrevealed puzzles. For example, find a basketball in the drawer and put it through a hoop in the next room, and Elebits pop out. The same of putting books in order on the shelf, or finding a disc to put in a CD-ROM drive. The time limits are probably the most challenging/frustrating aspect of the game -- these are relatively massive levels with tons to do and explore, so it sucks when your time runs out at the expense of finding enough Elebits to turn on various appliances and tools that allow you to solve puzzles and turn on further appliances and tools. I truly envy those that have scored high enough to unlock Eternal Mode on a good number of their levels.
The control method (drag the wiimote to the edge of the screen to rotate) sounds a lot like the same Red Steel catastrophe, but it was more responsive and easier. Unlike other games (like COD3), you have smoother, more gradient speeds of rotation as your wiimote approaches the edge. Controlling your character is incredibly simple and fun -- I'd play more FPSs on the Wii if they were all like this.
My one beef with the entirely gameplay aspect was the Capture Gun power-up method. In Elebits, you have both regular elebits that increase your wattage (turning on appliances and such), and special elebits that power up your Capture Gun to lift heavier objects and thus find more Elebits in general. Unforuntately, they chose to make the gun reset to its lowest power at the beginning of each level, so if you want to get into the more challenging puzzles, you're doing it in the last two minutes of the level because you have to power up your gun the same way every time. I think I would have liked having fewer powerup elebits in conjunction with the "leveling" method a little bit more, so I could go back and use the newfound power to discover secrets in older levels I had already played. As it is now, I'm forced to unlock Eternal mode for a level if I want to power up my gun with few restrictions. I suppose the level they have now is more challenging, but I think another system might have been more fun and had more replay value.
I honestly fail to see to how this reasoning has much logical or historical basis. I mean that sincerely, not just to push back at you.
For 100 years in the United States we had more-or-less open hiring practices after the abolition of slavery -- no anti-discrimination law -- and none of this went very well. Perhaps in a due time, but the thing about discrimination is that it allows bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of the people they discriminate against. In other words, take a marginalized group, refuse them education on a discrimintaory basis, and you end up with a marginalized class who doesn't qualify for a job. Deny them a job, and you deny them their next job to someone with more experience. It keeps going. You're allowed to have your biases, but if you're not allowed to push them on me as a job applicant.
Permit them to choose freely, however, and the fallacies of this reasoning will soon be exposed by their less discriminatory competitors.
This assumes that everybody had a fair chance to begin with, and it often feels like many Libertarians have to tack this one on to make it clear that discrimination is bad. Discrimination, statistically speaking, creates a loop where the majority tends to reward the majority based on a bias against a minority, and it almost never begins nor ends in a fair market. Again, we had a solid period of time where the fallacies of this reasoning were not exposed, in fact, they merely reinforced existing discrimination. It took a damn-near revolution in the way people thought.
Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?
Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good (or bad) idea.
Personally, I don't like the idea of my entire digital "memoirs" being elsewhere where anything can happen to them. Now, it's not a rational fear -- Google has a datacenter, and I'm tapping this out on a five-year-old Athlon T-bird (newer HDs, however). But if something goes wrong here, I have full control. I know the routines for extracting data off of a dead drive. They've spent money to ensure that the likelihood of failure is much, much lower than my old little desktop, but if something goes wrong there, I have no control. Again, not a rational fear -- they're much more skilled than I am at recovering my data. But they're also not going to stay up until 3am just for old e-mails to my family from when I was a freshman in college.
I think one of the things I dislike about Web 2.0 most of all is the fact that all my data is elsewhere. There's a lot to be said for ownership and control. I have no problem with distributed applications, but I want my crucial data no more than 100 feet away.
Hi there, people reading this article ten years in the future.
If Openserving was a giant success, then I am all for it. The commoditization of culture and expression is the future, and I should be noted as before my time. Find me in the present, give me gifts. We'll go do expression stuff together or something. You can cry into my neuroblog and listen to emo with me.
If Openserving was a huge flameout that eventually meant the end of the company for yanno, giving away things that take resources for free, then I am rightly skeptical and predict this as a stupid move that will waste lots of money and time. Find me in the present and we'll go to a brick-and-mortar store where you can purchase me a neuroblog. I don't know what that is yet, but it sounds exciting.
Let's do away with the files/folders/desktop/dialogs metaphor and system. It's served us well, but I'd really like to see a groundbreaking way to work with my data. One with an abstracted view system that could, as an example, bridge desktop and network applications, or let me perform actions via the mouse or via speech, or gestures, etc., without having to put any more work into the controller code.::from back of room:: X11!
Slashdot Mirror
Giles Bowkett has written on this here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/twitters-scaling-problems.html
I'd guess it's that downtime is easier than non-downtime, and it's a free service. It's not like anybody can say they're not getting what they paid for.
Yeah, but sometimes engineers blow off something that really is neat and exciting because of their silly, unscientific, emotional views about the way things should work.
Rails has its share of issues -- deployment is way complex, performance sucks, and the community can be rabid in the same unscientific, emotional ways -- but buggy and unstable? Come now, that's disingenuous.
When Twitter opened it was handling 11,000 requests per second and doing it well. Twitter has gone from nothing to sensational in a very small amount of time. If you hit the ground running that quickly, your growing pains will be evident regardless of what framework or language choice you're using.
The "repeatedly sold out" link is a little misleading, too. It isn't exactly a solid list of endorsements -- well, it seems a lot of people bought it and then promptly returned to the website to bitch it didn't come with Windows. In short: it flopped.
I do have to wonder -- and this will certainly invite some livid replies -- solid engineering is great, but I always seem to get the sense that solid marketing and solid sales practices aren't valued in the same way by the F/OSS community, and if it doesn't fail to gain them any ground, it might actually hurt them, as well. I mean, that stuff doesn't have value because people like wasting money. Packaging and naming and charm and all of that has value. WTF is a gOS?
This is very, very important. You can do long and lasting damage by quitting antidepressant medication cold turkey.
As Gruber noted, that's not really that complicated. It doesn't count as complicated if you can explain it in two sentences.
I think we need another word for this than "lock-in", because a lot of the examples he cites are lock-in but mostly in the sense that Nintendo probably doesn't want to be an international standards body for video game formats. The word might be "cost". If Nintendo worries about Nintendo's problems, then they're easier to solve than trying to solve everyone's problems. Why? It's lower cost. Costs less time, less money, it's less risky. And in defense of some of those entities, firm standards rarely result in innovation. Having an ISO for hand-held game controllers might result in an easy way to write code for controllers with six buttons and vibration, but having standards for game controllers doesn't result in the Wiimote. Not worrying abut six-button vibrating controllers does.
Schneier's half-right, but he's also saying that lock-in is always a conscious factor and not just, yanno, the cost of the thing. I'm locked into my current metropolitan area by the cost of moving, but it's not city hall's problem.
As for conscious lock-in, if you don't want a phone with lock-in, you're free to get one. Enjoy paying twice as much for calls and having a per-call fee. Lock-in costs less than stuff without lock-in because it reduces risk. It's a valuable tool and one that, despite the Slashdot crowd's feeling, most consumers have little problem with as a way to get goods more cheaply.
Just an alternative opinion. I hated Blair Witch, but I thought Cloverfield was the scariest movie I've seen in a long time. The scariest movie I've seen in a long time, if your local theater supports the dB level the movie really requires.
I saw it as a welcome departure from the Bay/Bruckheimer formula with too-wide, sweeping, omniscient shots where everything's in view, all the time -- the movie didn't focus on the unlikely high-school hero, wasn't concerned with the monster's presence, the pinnacle of the movie wasn't about some magic weapon that would defeat it. It was hopeless and gritty and pretty frightening if you were close to 9/11. CGI was used sparingly, relative to a lot of films these days.
I honestly don't see the point. Statistically, what industry is using the OLPC over Windows, Mac, or just plain Linux?
But how much powerful is it than supercomputers in 2011? :)
I remember when it was called a jail.
You should probably consider upgrading from a 486.
I'm just ragging on you unnecessarily here -- but was Alexa following POSTed form actions or something? This is why there's a completely different verb for the alteration or deletion of a URI object (POST) vs reading one (GET). (And shame on somebody for sticking usernames and passwords in GET variables, if that was the case.) /nitpick
+10. As of right now, every other post is not about what this person has done -- spending nearly six months orbiting the earth -- but the fact that we shouldn't be filtering on sex. I'm not sure what they're claiming -- it's not like she gets higher pay or a new car for spending more time in space. She didn't get a certificate to hang. She just gets to spend (wait for it) ..more time in space. It's just a statement of fact, so I'm not sure why every Slashdotter is suddenly concerned about equity when they've never been before.
Keep in mind, if the space station was a more accurate sampling of reality, we'd have a roughly equal number of women and men on board. Of course, that assumes you would have equal numbers of men and women in the armed forces, as scientists, and in other 'prereqs' for NASA. But we don't -- that's why this kind of thing is special, that's all.
YOU ARE IN DANGER
Yeah, it does alienate me.
My drive is in writing code, and being able to look at other code that has what I want, plain and simple. In that sense, the GPL made it easy to do those two things: all technology is driven by convenience. PHP isn't popular because of its "enterprise-class frameworks", it's popular because it's easy to grab code from elsewhere, easy to write code in. Windows is easy because it comes with your computer. The GPL made it easy to be open-source.
In the past few years it seems everyone has become a zealot for something in computing, not because they're a visionary, but because they're a bully. And to be honest? I don't really give a fuck. I don't plan on using licenses for the advancement of some idealogue's great Cause, and I don't plan on consulting a lawyer just to write code and see if I'm Compliant.
So in the past few years I've released stuff as BSD/MIT/etc. (Gasps.) Do I care that people can use my code and not contribute back to the "community"? Not really. For one, I haven't found that to be the case. But secondly, it's just easier. It's easy to use code and to release code. No Visions, no Causes, no lawyers, no Compliance and papers-please-style-development. Just some guy on the internet putting his code up for use.
Oh, please. Responsible disclosure isn't about who it embarasses; this isn't high school. It's about lost data and compromised systems of real people and real companies.
What you're preaching is a form of Econ 101 -- if we incentivize security patching via reputation, you'll have more people fixing their holes. Maybe, but regardless, I think you'll just have more people changing the definition of what constitutes a vulnerability.
You mean, tooth is stronger than fission.
I have to respectfully disagree with the critique of Elebits' gameplay. I found it fun and incredibly challenging -- there are time limits, limits on breakability of objects (don't smash too many plates) as well as limits on making too much noise (dB). On some levels these limits were fun, on others, they were annoying. While the graphical polish could have been better, it was a refreshing game that didn't once harp on the same old genre formulas. I appreciate the smooth gameplay and consistent framerates in most levels as opposed to focusing on graphical prowess.
Those that are observant/patient enough to explore into the levels a little more will realize that there are hundreds of little, unrevealed puzzles. For example, find a basketball in the drawer and put it through a hoop in the next room, and Elebits pop out. The same of putting books in order on the shelf, or finding a disc to put in a CD-ROM drive. The time limits are probably the most challenging/frustrating aspect of the game -- these are relatively massive levels with tons to do and explore, so it sucks when your time runs out at the expense of finding enough Elebits to turn on various appliances and tools that allow you to solve puzzles and turn on further appliances and tools. I truly envy those that have scored high enough to unlock Eternal Mode on a good number of their levels.
The control method (drag the wiimote to the edge of the screen to rotate) sounds a lot like the same Red Steel catastrophe, but it was more responsive and easier. Unlike other games (like COD3), you have smoother, more gradient speeds of rotation as your wiimote approaches the edge. Controlling your character is incredibly simple and fun -- I'd play more FPSs on the Wii if they were all like this.
My one beef with the entirely gameplay aspect was the Capture Gun power-up method. In Elebits, you have both regular elebits that increase your wattage (turning on appliances and such), and special elebits that power up your Capture Gun to lift heavier objects and thus find more Elebits in general. Unforuntately, they chose to make the gun reset to its lowest power at the beginning of each level, so if you want to get into the more challenging puzzles, you're doing it in the last two minutes of the level because you have to power up your gun the same way every time. I think I would have liked having fewer powerup elebits in conjunction with the "leveling" method a little bit more, so I could go back and use the newfound power to discover secrets in older levels I had already played. As it is now, I'm forced to unlock Eternal mode for a level if I want to power up my gun with few restrictions. I suppose the level they have now is more challenging, but I think another system might have been more fun and had more replay value.
4/5.
For 100 years in the United States we had more-or-less open hiring practices after the abolition of slavery -- no anti-discrimination law -- and none of this went very well. Perhaps in a due time, but the thing about discrimination is that it allows bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of the people they discriminate against. In other words, take a marginalized group, refuse them education on a discrimintaory basis, and you end up with a marginalized class who doesn't qualify for a job. Deny them a job, and you deny them their next job to someone with more experience. It keeps going. You're allowed to have your biases, but if you're not allowed to push them on me as a job applicant.
This assumes that everybody had a fair chance to begin with, and it often feels like many Libertarians have to tack this one on to make it clear that discrimination is bad. Discrimination, statistically speaking, creates a loop where the majority tends to reward the majority based on a bias against a minority, and it almost never begins nor ends in a fair market. Again, we had a solid period of time where the fallacies of this reasoning were not exposed, in fact, they merely reinforced existing discrimination. It took a damn-near revolution in the way people thought.
Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good (or bad) idea.
Personally, I don't like the idea of my entire digital "memoirs" being elsewhere where anything can happen to them. Now, it's not a rational fear -- Google has a datacenter, and I'm tapping this out on a five-year-old Athlon T-bird (newer HDs, however). But if something goes wrong here, I have full control. I know the routines for extracting data off of a dead drive. They've spent money to ensure that the likelihood of failure is much, much lower than my old little desktop, but if something goes wrong there, I have no control. Again, not a rational fear -- they're much more skilled than I am at recovering my data. But they're also not going to stay up until 3am just for old e-mails to my family from when I was a freshman in college.
I think one of the things I dislike about Web 2.0 most of all is the fact that all my data is elsewhere. There's a lot to be said for ownership and control. I have no problem with distributed applications, but I want my crucial data no more than 100 feet away.
Hi there, people reading this article ten years in the future.
If Openserving was a giant success, then I am all for it. The commoditization of culture and expression is the future, and I should be noted as before my time. Find me in the present, give me gifts. We'll go do expression stuff together or something. You can cry into my neuroblog and listen to emo with me.
If Openserving was a huge flameout that eventually meant the end of the company for yanno, giving away things that take resources for free, then I am rightly skeptical and predict this as a stupid move that will waste lots of money and time. Find me in the present and we'll go to a brick-and-mortar store where you can purchase me a neuroblog. I don't know what that is yet, but it sounds exciting.
Let's do away with the files/folders/desktop/dialogs metaphor and system. It's served us well, but I'd really like to see a groundbreaking way to work with my data. One with an abstracted view system that could, as an example, bridge desktop and network applications, or let me perform actions via the mouse or via speech, or gestures, etc., without having to put any more work into the controller code. ::from back of room:: X11!
:)
Shut up already!
Visicalc for the IBM PC
When the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook is outlawed, only outlaws will have the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.