Last I heard, Apple shipped a full development suite, free, with every Mac. It wasn't installed, but it was included in the supplied media. (Since they seem to have stopped providing the media, this may no longer apply.)
It still applies it is a free download. That doesn't change anything regarding the culture and who they want developing apps for the app store.
. These types of companies go bust and disappear in less than a day
No they don't. These types of companies stop offering a service to new clients then slowly shut it down. For example Verizon decided to move away from their public cloud offering they didn't close the company. IBM (Softlayer) had dropped thousands of products in its history.
the company will have let the service degrade so far by then that a single hosting company unplugging a system over non-payment topples the entire infrastructure
No they won't. First off they generally have their own hardware. Secondly they are in multiple data centers. They can't just move away from datacenters with no one noticing. There are people who regularly talk to the colo companies and telco companies.
If Dropbox were to stop paying Amazon, AWS would automatically wipe and reassigns the entire system a short period after they shut down the service.
Baloney. Amazon would take over the migration service. That data is worth far more than the disk space to some customers. It would be an excellent tool for Amazon to migrate customers to AWS. The bond holders would probably approve completely and sell AWS the dropbox name.
ot a single provider I have ever worked with will maintain a system for years on their own dime in wait of a legal decision.
What legal decision? This is a bankruptcy. If the major creditors agree on action in the public interest it goes through in hours. There is nothing to decide. The court gets involved when there are conflicts between creditors. There is no conflict that destroying the data is the worst of all possible worlds as it erodes the value of the company and leaves behind liability.
Pretty much what happened there was what I said. They continued operating for a few weeks. With the usual options for getting data out. Then IBM took control. There was good network connection to HP so HP restored their entire system to a private cloud inside their setup where of course the customer could become an HP customer and get their data. Nirvanix got a loan of $1.1m to fund operations for the liquidation and was able to continue to move data off.
No cloud provider I have ever heard of provides SAN ARRAY based replication from their site to yours.
Sunguard, Terramark, Navisite, Helion... all do replication. I'm hard pressed to think of a single one that wouldn't with possible exceptions like AWS and Azure who provide sophisticated backup from their production clouds to other backup oriented clouds.
and it would surely be cheaper to get your own colo space and do it yourself.
The cost is going to be pretty similar. The cloud vendor is getting colo space for less than you are. OTOH they are making more margin on things like storage. It generally is somewhat cheaper under best case to get your own colo and do it yourself vs. cloud. People buy cloud because they want the management and less risk of getting it wrong.
We got the first AWS bill for the development servers for two customers, and it cost about the same for 2 months at AWS than if we just put it in our own DC (but the dev/architects didn't ask us, they just took a credit card and did it. Needless to say we are moving it in house.
I doubt AWS is 18::1 cheaper unless they did really badly on buying AWS resources. But 4::1 isn't uncommon. Remember though this article is about a petabyte of data. For small customers the price difference on hardware is larger. I wouldn't use your own experience here.
Of course they are interested. That's a standard process of replication. Most of the cloud providers offer all sorts of cross cloud backups and replications. They understand that their customers do business with multiple vendors and better to be one of their vendors then not get the account at all.
Also most of the SAN vendors have systems that virtualize within their product lines. The storage, is as you mentioned highly abstracted.
Bondholders may well prefer.60 cents on the dollar. But John Q Sysadmin doesn't give a rats ass about bondholders, and does care about his pay. Once the money runs out, the people running it will walk, and money can dry up surprisingly quickly if management have buried their heads in the sand.
Well yes. But we are moving from what is likely to happen to what could theoretically happen in a worst case. And even with stupid management someone is going to want those accounts and those assets. A bad shutdown means it all goes to 0.
The administrators will sell off the assets but that can be months after winding up. Even if they find a buyer, your data may not get transferred and available as quickly as you'd like. How would your company do if it had to shut up shop for a week?
We aren't talking about the assets. For liability reasons the physical assets are going to be wiped. I'm talking someone taking over existing accounts or helping them with an orderly liquidation of accounts if there isn't someone taking over.
Of course there are no guarantees. If you need an absolutely guarantee then you need multiple types of backup. Same as local where a backup type can fail. My point is though that what the article is worried about is nonsense. With high probability there is going to be an orderly liquidation.
Now the more interesting issue is what about a cloud provider that doesn't have infrastructure. Say for example backup company X has $500k / mo cloud bill on $700k / mo in revenues during good times. Times have not been good and their revenues have fallen off and they haven't paid their bill in 4 months. To get their data back they need to pay $500kx4 plus 2 months to get it plus 3 months on the new provider (since their credit sucks) plus the transfer costs. Say $4m which would be over 6mo revenues and possibly more profit than they ever made. Now the customer wants to get their data back under that situation from backup company X....
I think it is the niche backup companies that are going to be a problem.
The assets are most valuably deployed in winding down operations i.e. selling people their data back. Particularly remember lots of cloud providers that don't sell dedicated bandwidth charge for data going out but not going in. So for example data into AWS is free but out it is $50-60/p and they might raise that a bit during a surge. That's what the creditors are going to want to do with the assets short-term. So even if the company were broke financing would step in to cover a month of two of colo costs because any cloud is going to be profitable for that month. Plus it saves on lawsuits.
Now of course if company X ignores the "cloud provider Y is shutting down in 60 days" notices and doesn't move their data, thats when things are going to get cute. I can easily imagine management being like "well we don't have budget for all those surcharges on top of your regular cloud fees, I'm sure someone will take over their operations let's not worry about it".
Why would you want it to die? What was the upside of company's having to constantly worry about hardware budgeting when they wanted to do software projects?
You can do the same things just not on the file levels. Most of your clouds are using a SAN for databases. SAN's do backups like you say. You create matching LUNs on both devices and incrementally track changes to blocks between the SANs. You can just ask your cloud provider what SAN they are using and have them configure this sort of setup for you to another provider.
In the case of AWS they provide backup servers directly connected to their production servers so you just backup to AWS. And if you want to move the backup from there to somewhere else it is trivial since it is already organized for backup.
Even if a large cloud provider were to get out of the business they are going to handle things in a responsible way and move their datacenter, hardware and data to someone else. And that's almost certainly true for the smaller players as well. That hardware and data is worth money even if not as much as it cost to buy. The bondholders are going to want $.60 on the dollar rather than $.00 on dollar if they can. But even if we assume that weren't true there are still options. Many of the colo companies which remember sell 30% of their space to the telcos are already using their cross connects for cloud-to-cloud moves the same way they do now for carrier-to-carrier. So for example from Equinix you can go between AWS, Azure and Verizon (Tarramark).
Almost all the small cloud players are renting space and will move data to physical drive or DAS or SAN. If they are growing broke just find out where they host, buy their hardware storage and keep it in the same colo your data is at now as a colo deal.
This is the sort of thing your cloud agent can handle for your company for free. I get that Joe-IT manager isn't plugged in enough to the industry to know whose hosting what where and what interconnects they have but that doesn't mean the data isn't readily available. This article is mainly just ignorant of how the industry works.
Consumer owns the device, the account, the software Company owns the device, the account, the software
To some extent they allow you to mix on mobile. You are trying to have a BYOD situation without business licensing. If you want business licensing then you build your own app store and distribute from there signing licenses with the software companies directly. Apple doesn't get involved at all.
Casual developers are what serious deelopers come from.
That's never been Apple's belief. They have always wanted a professional development community. Moreover I'm not sure that's true. Obviously in school people do casual development but then most people join companies and learn to code professionally.
I can see the argument for allowing some kinds of apps to escape the sandbox, but it should require some hoops be jumped through and it should require specific notification to the user.
That is precisely what they do. You can get applications through that break Apple's rules on the consumer store but they require much more serious auditing and evaluation.
It's rather sad, actually, that the Mac App Store doesn't have anything serious in the $50-$500 range.
They do have applications in those ranges but they sell on the commercial applications stores. Microstrategy (http://www.microstrategy.com) is probably the biggest mobile applications development house in the world and they sell many of their applications for more than $500 / user.
The failure to bugfix both OSX and IoS except for a few bugs in the first few years
Come on. There have been bugfix for both regularly.
The arbitrary dropping of useful capabilities (PPC emulation is the poster child for this)
There is nothing arbitrary about it. IBM acquired Transitive in 2009 and wanted them focused on software. Transitive stopped making the Rosetta application.
My macbook pro... suffering from serious bugs at its current OS... can't be upgraded to the next (not even latest) because they stopped supporting the CPU *and* the OS version
That's kinda odd. How old is your pro and which bugfix did you desperate need?
The sad thing is I really like the OS, and I'd be happy to develop for it if they made development accessible and quit leaving trails of unfixed bugs behind them.
Your points about have little to do with development.
Total sales are way up. In 2011 there was a lack of good quality general purpose applications. Today those exist. So unless you can do something really spectacular your app doesn't serve the common interest and shouldn't be funded. However in 2014 there is still a huge lack of applications targeting verticals. That's what developers should be focusing on.
I think we are seeing fresh starts. We've seen a shift away from desktop applications towards web as a common framework, that's become remarkably more useful. And now we are seeing moves towards mobility. Both web and mobility have forced a genuine separation between view systems and business logic that in the desktop world was a goal often not met. Then with the rise of devops architectures are becoming even more factory component where the parts are interchangeable and thus design mistakes can be corrected.
In terms of the languages themselves as fewer of the languages outside view languages need to be performance front ends, nor need to have a broad audience they've been able to specialize into particular domains. So if anything I see the opposite.
The author if this article is a Scala guy. Scala is architected the key compromise of free intermixing of imperative and functional code so that programmers don't have to cross the conceptual barrier switching to functional. Which means that it effectively introduces programmers to functional concepts at the line level but not the program design level. It is really an imperative language with lots of functional data manipulation structures you don't see the full power of functional. It is hard to think of a language which more directly followed in C++'s footsteps of bolting object-orientation onto C, then Scala which bolted functional onto a Java type language.
Debian abstracts the particular distributions. Ubuntu doesn't abstract Debian. And supporting the 3rd party distributions like Ubuntu has been Debian's primary mission for about 17 years. One can argue about whether Ubuntu is more important or not, but no question in the aggregate they see the distribution support as more important than direct support. They are happy to have people using Debian as a distribution, but if Debian the distribution ceased to exist and Debian just became a service arm for downstream distributions that wouldn't be a total loss for them.
Linus' point there was that the API should be stable for Linux but he was not going to support stability in the ABI. It was a revolt against stability per Sun, Microsoft... who worked hard to make sure binaries were stable. It was the exact opposite.
Now two errors on top of that. Things in UserSpace break other stuff in UserSpace. Like upgrading GCC versions.
Second in general Systemd doesn't break UserSpace applications. Init doesn't support advanced functionality. So for most applications the distribution simply removes or ignores the init file and creates a systemd entry. For those that do invoke advanced functionality it might require a bit more work, but they are the ones getting the features from systemd and enjoying its good points.
The sheer size of the distribution can be inconvenient: it is really unreasonable to distribute 70 CD-ROMs to install a complete version on a standard PC This is why Debian is increasingly considered as a “meta-distribution”, from which one extracts more specific distributions intended for a particular public: From Debian handbook: http://debian-handbook.info/br...
The family of Linuxes in general is not a highly stable OS. Some are more stable than others but none are terribly stable. They are mostly less stable than the commercial Unixes which are mostly less stable than other server OSes.
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It still applies it is a free download. That doesn't change anything regarding the culture and who they want developing apps for the app store.
No they don't. These types of companies stop offering a service to new clients then slowly shut it down. For example Verizon decided to move away from their public cloud offering they didn't close the company. IBM (Softlayer) had dropped thousands of products in its history.
No they won't. First off they generally have their own hardware. Secondly they are in multiple data centers. They can't just move away from datacenters with no one noticing. There are people who regularly talk to the colo companies and telco companies.
Baloney. Amazon would take over the migration service. That data is worth far more than the disk space to some customers. It would be an excellent tool for Amazon to migrate customers to AWS. The bond holders would probably approve completely and sell AWS the dropbox name.
What legal decision? This is a bankruptcy. If the major creditors agree on action in the public interest it goes through in hours. There is nothing to decide. The court gets involved when there are conflicts between creditors. There is no conflict that destroying the data is the worst of all possible worlds as it erodes the value of the company and leaves behind liability.
Pretty much what happened there was what I said. They continued operating for a few weeks. With the usual options for getting data out. Then IBM took control. There was good network connection to HP so HP restored their entire system to a private cloud inside their setup where of course the customer could become an HP customer and get their data. Nirvanix got a loan of $1.1m to fund operations for the liquidation and was able to continue to move data off.
How is that a negative example?
Sunguard, Terramark, Navisite, Helion... all do replication. I'm hard pressed to think of a single one that wouldn't with possible exceptions like AWS and Azure who provide sophisticated backup from their production clouds to other backup oriented clouds.
The cost is going to be pretty similar. The cloud vendor is getting colo space for less than you are. OTOH they are making more margin on things like storage. It generally is somewhat cheaper under best case to get your own colo and do it yourself vs. cloud. People buy cloud because they want the management and less risk of getting it wrong.
I doubt AWS is 18::1 cheaper unless they did really badly on buying AWS resources. But 4::1 isn't uncommon. Remember though this article is about a petabyte of data. For small customers the price difference on hardware is larger. I wouldn't use your own experience here.
Of course they are interested. That's a standard process of replication. Most of the cloud providers offer all sorts of cross cloud backups and replications. They understand that their customers do business with multiple vendors and better to be one of their vendors then not get the account at all.
Also most of the SAN vendors have systems that virtualize within their product lines. The storage, is as you mentioned highly abstracted.
Well yes. But we are moving from what is likely to happen to what could theoretically happen in a worst case. And even with stupid management someone is going to want those accounts and those assets. A bad shutdown means it all goes to 0.
We aren't talking about the assets. For liability reasons the physical assets are going to be wiped. I'm talking someone taking over existing accounts or helping them with an orderly liquidation of accounts if there isn't someone taking over.
Of course there are no guarantees. If you need an absolutely guarantee then you need multiple types of backup. Same as local where a backup type can fail. My point is though that what the article is worried about is nonsense. With high probability there is going to be an orderly liquidation.
Now the more interesting issue is what about a cloud provider that doesn't have infrastructure. Say for example backup company X has $500k / mo cloud bill on $700k / mo in revenues during good times. Times have not been good and their revenues have fallen off and they haven't paid their bill in 4 months. To get their data back they need to pay $500kx4 plus 2 months to get it plus 3 months on the new provider (since their credit sucks) plus the transfer costs. Say $4m which would be over 6mo revenues and possibly more profit than they ever made. Now the customer wants to get their data back under that situation from backup company X....
I think it is the niche backup companies that are going to be a problem.
The assets are most valuably deployed in winding down operations i.e. selling people their data back. Particularly remember lots of cloud providers that don't sell dedicated bandwidth charge for data going out but not going in. So for example data into AWS is free but out it is $50-60/p and they might raise that a bit during a surge. That's what the creditors are going to want to do with the assets short-term. So even if the company were broke financing would step in to cover a month of two of colo costs because any cloud is going to be profitable for that month. Plus it saves on lawsuits.
Now of course if company X ignores the "cloud provider Y is shutting down in 60 days" notices and doesn't move their data, thats when things are going to get cute. I can easily imagine management being like "well we don't have budget for all those surcharges on top of your regular cloud fees, I'm sure someone will take over their operations let's not worry about it".
Why would you want it to die? What was the upside of company's having to constantly worry about hardware budgeting when they wanted to do software projects?
You can do the same things just not on the file levels. Most of your clouds are using a SAN for databases. SAN's do backups like you say. You create matching LUNs on both devices and incrementally track changes to blocks between the SANs. You can just ask your cloud provider what SAN they are using and have them configure this sort of setup for you to another provider.
In the case of AWS they provide backup servers directly connected to their production servers so you just backup to AWS. And if you want to move the backup from there to somewhere else it is trivial since it is already organized for backup.
Even if a large cloud provider were to get out of the business they are going to handle things in a responsible way and move their datacenter, hardware and data to someone else. And that's almost certainly true for the smaller players as well. That hardware and data is worth money even if not as much as it cost to buy. The bondholders are going to want $.60 on the dollar rather than $.00 on dollar if they can. But even if we assume that weren't true there are still options. Many of the colo companies which remember sell 30% of their space to the telcos are already using their cross connects for cloud-to-cloud moves the same way they do now for carrier-to-carrier. So for example from Equinix you can go between AWS, Azure and Verizon (Tarramark).
Almost all the small cloud players are renting space and will move data to physical drive or DAS or SAN. If they are growing broke just find out where they host, buy their hardware storage and keep it in the same colo your data is at now as a colo deal.
This is the sort of thing your cloud agent can handle for your company for free. I get that Joe-IT manager isn't plugged in enough to the industry to know whose hosting what where and what interconnects they have but that doesn't mean the data isn't readily available. This article is mainly just ignorant of how the industry works.
Apple has two models:
Consumer owns the device, the account, the software
Company owns the device, the account, the software
To some extent they allow you to mix on mobile. You are trying to have a BYOD situation without business licensing. If you want business licensing then you build your own app store and distribute from there signing licenses with the software companies directly. Apple doesn't get involved at all.
That's why Apple has brought in IBM. IBM is supporting Apple in the enterprise.
That's never been Apple's belief. They have always wanted a professional development community. Moreover I'm not sure that's true. Obviously in school people do casual development but then most people join companies and learn to code professionally.
That is precisely what they do. You can get applications through that break Apple's rules on the consumer store but they require much more serious auditing and evaluation.
They do have applications in those ranges but they sell on the commercial applications stores. Microstrategy (http://www.microstrategy.com) is probably the biggest mobile applications development house in the world and they sell many of their applications for more than $500 / user.
Come on. There have been bugfix for both regularly.
There is nothing arbitrary about it. IBM acquired Transitive in 2009 and wanted them focused on software. Transitive stopped making the Rosetta application.
That's kinda odd. How old is your pro and which bugfix did you desperate need?
Your points about have little to do with development.
Total sales are way up. In 2011 there was a lack of good quality general purpose applications. Today those exist. So unless you can do something really spectacular your app doesn't serve the common interest and shouldn't be funded. However in 2014 there is still a huge lack of applications targeting verticals. That's what developers should be focusing on.
We don't have a farmland shortage. We do have a need for vast amounts of cheap power.
I think we are seeing fresh starts. We've seen a shift away from desktop applications towards web as a common framework, that's become remarkably more useful. And now we are seeing moves towards mobility. Both web and mobility have forced a genuine separation between view systems and business logic that in the desktop world was a goal often not met. Then with the rise of devops architectures are becoming even more factory component where the parts are interchangeable and thus design mistakes can be corrected.
In terms of the languages themselves as fewer of the languages outside view languages need to be performance front ends, nor need to have a broad audience they've been able to specialize into particular domains. So if anything I see the opposite.
The author if this article is a Scala guy. Scala is architected the key compromise of free intermixing of imperative and functional code so that programmers don't have to cross the conceptual barrier switching to functional. Which means that it effectively introduces programmers to functional concepts at the line level but not the program design level. It is really an imperative language with lots of functional data manipulation structures you don't see the full power of functional. It is hard to think of a language which more directly followed in C++'s footsteps of bolting object-orientation onto C, then Scala which bolted functional onto a Java type language.
Debian abstracts the particular distributions. Ubuntu doesn't abstract Debian. And supporting the 3rd party distributions like Ubuntu has been Debian's primary mission for about 17 years. One can argue about whether Ubuntu is more important or not, but no question in the aggregate they see the distribution support as more important than direct support. They are happy to have people using Debian as a distribution, but if Debian the distribution ceased to exist and Debian just became a service arm for downstream distributions that wouldn't be a total loss for them.
Linus' point there was that the API should be stable for Linux but he was not going to support stability in the ABI. It was a revolt against stability per Sun, Microsoft... who worked hard to make sure binaries were stable. It was the exact opposite.
Now two errors on top of that. Things in UserSpace break other stuff in UserSpace. Like upgrading GCC versions.
Second in general Systemd doesn't break UserSpace applications. Init doesn't support advanced functionality. So for most applications the distribution simply removes or ignores the init file and creates a systemd entry. For those that do invoke advanced functionality it might require a bit more work, but they are the ones getting the features from systemd and enjoying its good points.
The sheer size of the distribution can be inconvenient: it is really unreasonable to distribute 70 CD-ROMs to install a complete version on a standard PC This is why Debian is increasingly considered as a “meta-distribution”, from which one extracts more specific distributions intended for a particular public: From Debian handbook: http://debian-handbook.info/br...
The family of Linuxes in general is not a highly stable OS. Some are more stable than others but none are terribly stable. They are mostly less stable than the commercial Unixes which are mostly less stable than other server OSes.
Gnome 3 is stable and including Gnome is not going to make Debian unstable.