Our corporate overlords (those who own Congress) won't allow it.
Call me cynical, but I think that our overlords (one of my friends calls these people "the owners", and she has that right) let the House pass this bill to keep people's hopes alive and distracted.
I am basically against large government expenditures, but the cost of our military industrial complex is so much more that what a reasonable medical bill would cost, that I have softened my position and now I do support health care reform.
BTW, we could save a lot of money by trimming our ""defense"" costs but that is not going to happen because a relatively few people make so much profit that any reform there is not going to happen.
Many years ago, I did to J2ME projects for customers. I have played with the iPhone dev tools, but don't really like the platform or the constraints of the AppStore.
The Android plugins for Eclipse really make this a nice "coders platform." I expect to see more web portals to provide customized rich clients (perhaps for free) to make for easier mobile access. ANyway, getting more into the Android platform has been on my short list for a while.
BTW, a little off topic, but the rumors are that Google is going to open an app store for Google Wave plugins. Nice addition to an app store for Android aps.
Copying from my blog (http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/10/i-just-tried-amzons-new-relational.html):
Amazon just released a beta of their Relational Database Service (RDS). You pay by the EC2 instance hour, about the same cost as a plain EC2, but about $0.01/hour more for a small instance, plus some storage costs, and bandwidth costs if you access the database outside of an Amazon availability zone.
RDS MyQL compatible (version 5.1) and is automatically monitored, restarted, and backed up.
Currently, there is no master slave replication, but this is being worked on (RDS beta just started today).
Here are my notes on my first use of RDS:
* Install the RDS command line tools
* rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier marktesting123 --allocated-storage 5 --db-instance-class db.m1.small --engine MySQL5.1 --master-username marktesting123 --master-user-password markpasstesting123
* Wait a few minutes and see if the RDS instance is ready: rds-describe-db-instances
* Open up ports for external access, if required (note, here I am opening up for world wide access just for this test): rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip 0.0.0.0/0
* Use a mysql client to connect: mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u marktesting123 -p
* create database recipes;
* in another bash shell: cat recipes.sql | mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com recipes -u marktesting123 -p
* In the mysql client: use the remote RDS hosted database and be happy:-)
* delete RDS instance (to stop paying for it): rds-delete-db-instance marktestng123 --skip-final-snapshot
When I only had a sandbox account this summer, all I did with Wave was experiment with writing robots.
Now that Wave is out in beta form and I have been able to invite family members, friends, and some of my customers, I am starting to appreciate Wave as an email substitute.
I am also getting some customer feedback that they might want to build systems layered on top of Wave.
I've had a developer's account for a while, and I think that wave is fun. Most fun is writing robots that receive events (which events is a configuration option) when people add text to a wave, join a wave, etc. A robot can then itself modify or add to a wave.
Great point! Also, we had our largest peacetime naval exercises off of Venezuela after they started talking about getting off of the dollar standard.
It pisses me off when I feel that my country takes such a bad approach to promoting our best interests.
China has used long term treaties and financial arrangements to nail down long term access to oil. We, on the other hand, persue a military strategy that simply does not make sense financially. (I am assuming that we are much safer now than during the cold war, so our "defense" is not much an issue.)
Once again, our controllers (i.e., financial elite, corporations) choose strategies that enrich them and hurt people like me, my family, and friends who just want to work, be productive, and not harm other people.
G. W. Bush's actions with "axis of evil" rhetoric and threats forced the moderates in Iran to keep their heads down and empowered the radicals. I now suspect that this may have been done purposely.
Sanctions really are a soft act of war and should be viewed thus. Does Congress have to approve sanctions? If not, they should have this power, not the president.
I voted for both G.W. Bush and Obama, and I am very disappointed by both of them. They both seem to beholden to the defense industry and the all too powerful Israeli lobby, instead of doing what is best for *our* country.
Seriously, what about people (like me!) who work on laptops - who wants to give up that much screen real estate?
Yuck.
I wrote several books using OpenOffice.org, and I still very much appreciate having it (for free!), but I really prefer the use of Latex - you get to spend almost all of your time thinking about what you want to write, then doing the writing - and not waste time formatting with Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages, etc.
Anyway, the ribbon looks sort-of OK (perhaps) if you work on a huge display, but for hyper-modern nomadic knowledge workers (*) who use laptops, it seems like a really lame idea.
(*) In many years of posting to Slashdot, I don't think I have ever had a comment modded funny - this may be my big chance:-)
Amazon published a white paper about using their AWS platform with HIPAA compient applications: basic idea is to keep data encrypted until it is in memory, and encrypt it again before writing to persistent storage.
For Google Apps, how about using rich clients that decrypt data for viewing/editing, and encrypt it again before storing back on big table, etc.
Perhaps Google themselves would implement this as browser plugins?
The economy is in poor shape now, but will probably get much, much worse in the coming years (see today's poorly performing 5 year treasury bond sales, an indicator that foreign banks and investors don't want to invest in us, even with a higher "tail" interest rates.). What makes our state legislators think that they will have more funds in a few years to buy these properties back?
It is in no one's interest that the US economy crash and burn, and that is why the oil rich countries, and China, Russia, etc. appear to be cooperating on "gently" moving the world to a "basket of currencies" rather than use the dollar as the main international exchange currency - they don't want us to crash and burn and take them with us. A slow and gradual process is the best that we can probably hope for.
How can the USA cooperate? For one thing, how about reducing federal, state, and local expenditures by 25% (OK, I just made up that amount, but it sounds about right).
Painful? You bet. Government workers will have salaries and benefits reduced, as will the general population. Deals with labor unions will be broken. Benefits form the ponzy scheme known as social security will be cut back.
Corruption needs to be nipped. As a starter, how about a tax on financial transactions that do not involve real goods and services: apply a 1% tax to hedge fund investment transactions, etc. Slow down the non-productive use of money.
Bush, Obama, and Congress have already proven themselves to be firmly in the pockets of corporations and their lobbyists - that will not change. Why should people who get to make the rules be fair with the rest of us?
The installation was easy (on OS X) but it does not do much. You can run OpenFire, install Google's open source wave protocol project, and run server + client scripts. The client script lets you create new waves and add other participant IDs.
However, when I try adding my robot that is running on AppEngine as a participant, I get an error on my local server. It looks like I need to re-install everything on a public server so my app on AppEngine can communicate back -- but, I am not sure what the problem is.
Hopefully, if I wait a few days, the community may publish examples of creating local waves and invite robots on AppEngine to participate.
As an end user, you invite "people" to participate in each Wave that you create. New "blips" added to a Wave can have restricted access rights. If you only invite/work with people you know, then hopefully no problems.
It may be a problem that spammers can waste your time inviting you to waves that you are not interested in - I am not sure how this will be handled. I am interested in Wave as a development platform, and I would hope that small work groups can voluntarily work in peace. When I get time, I would be very keen on learning to set up a private Wave server. The developer's support for writing Wave robot extensions is very good, so I am hoping that setting up local private Wave servers will prove to be as easy.
As an end user, you can invite other *humans* to participate in Waves that you create. Waves can contain text and multimedia.
When I write a test robot, I install it on AppEngine (I use the Java version, but the robot support libraries are also available in Python). I can then create a new wave and invite my robot, just as I would invite a human participant.
My test robots watch for new invites or changes to the text in waves, perform some processing on that text, and then add their own 'blips' to the end of the wave.
I have been thinking about the web applications that I have developed in the last 10 years, and thinking in particular about which ones could be implemented on the Wave platform.
I received a Google Wave sandbox account 8 days ago and I have been kicking the tires mostly in developing robot extensions. However, to answer your concerns about being browser based: the Wave team used GWT and the client side user interface is very nice. If you have not done so, watch the demo video.
There a several thousand developers who have sandbox accounts so there are opportunities for shared editing, asking other people to try your test robot extensions, etc.
Also, you get 2 accounts with an invite: 'regular' and 'test'.
I received a Wave sandbox invitation 8 days ago and since then I have been spending a lot of time writing test robot extensions, installing them on Java AppEngine, and then inviting my test robots to participate in new waves I create.
Very cool. Very fun. Huge time sink. You know how it goes:-)
I would like a completely local development setup, but I don't know if it is worth the effort right now. Installing new versions of a robot on AppEngine is very quick, as is creating a new Wave in the sandbox - about a 90 second cycle to test code changes. I set my logger for DEBUG, and keep my AppEngin console log viewing page open -- not a bad setup.
DERI has produced some good stuff: I particularly like D2R which is a wrapper providing a SPARQL endpoint around a relational database. Both cool and useful (if you know how to use SPARQL queries).
In the as year, I have been happy using Amazon EC2 (etc.), Google's Java AppEngine, and Heroku for web apps. Way better, if you can, to outsource scalability.
BTW, I use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the examples for my last book. It took me almost 10 hours to get the software (Ruby, Rails, Sesame, Redland, Hadoop, Sphinx, Solr, etc., plus my example programs) set up on an AMI, but this is time well spent because now people who want to casually experiment with this stuff don't need to spend this time (an Amazon EC2 instance costs about 10 cents/hour).
In a similar way, software vendors like Sun, Oracle, etc. are offering test and evaluation AMIs. It is great to be able to try out a new Solaris build, a specific Oracle database, etc. without investing much time. AMIs would also be great for student projects, etc. If you haven't tried EC2, etc. it is worth the time to experiment with it.
You can find this on the web: encrypting data in S3, decrypting in memory right before use. HIPAA medical records privacy requirements are severe, so if the cloud can work for HIPAA, then it should work for government infrastructure.
I have tried it, and wrote a robot and a gadget
on
Google Wave Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The documentation is good, so it is easy to get started. I view Wave as "something for the future" but I think that it is worth 3 or 4 hours a week coding to it. It was a thrill when my robot replied to a wave that I had invited it to join (like a human). For writing robots, I look forward to a local runtime and debugging setup. Overall, I think that Wave looks promising and I am mentally re-evaluating several web application projects that I have done in the last ten years, thinking of how I might re-implement them on Wave.
1. Early Newton owner 2. long time Lisp developer (and I wrote 2 Spring-Verlag Lisp books, back in ancient history) 3. right now, Ruby is my favorite language 4. I am typing this on Ubuntu (installed on my MacBook):-)
As much as I appreciate Eric's contributions to open source (his early writings helped get me interested in writing open source), and our shared interest in shooting guns -grin-, I prefer Bruce Peren's approach (as I wrote about recently http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/02/bruce-pernes-on-gnu-affero-general.html).
I think that a combination of AGPL, a less restrictive license like MIT or Apache 2, and perhaps something like the LGPL cover most needs, and the fewer licenses the better. The point of the article is that GPL is not good for business, raising VC for startups, etc. Perhaps true, but I still believe in the more restrictive (for developers) forced sharing of the AGPL is better for a world where software infrastructure is just about free because a very large number of people and companies supply resources for coding, bug tracking, and documentation.
I would rather do work for customers that involves adding functionality to an already great open source project, and I would prefer that improvements be folded back into infrastructure that everyone can share.
BTW, I disagree with Stallman's and the FSF's take on cloud computing as long as:
1. you have access to the software that you are running 2. you can easily copy your own data 3. you can easily migrate to your own servers or other hosts
I think that both EC2 and App Engine meet these requirements.
Your post is the best idea in this entire thread. I agree. Although I have been using Ruby and Lisp more the last few years, much of my business is based on Java -- basically the whole world wants a stable and well maintained Java platform and a spin off company for Java might make sense, especially if many large stakeholders owned equity.
Slashdot Mirror
Our corporate overlords (those who own Congress) won't allow it.
Call me cynical, but I think that our overlords (one of my friends calls these people "the owners", and she has that right) let the House pass this bill to keep people's hopes alive and distracted.
I am basically against large government expenditures, but the cost of our military industrial complex is so much more that what a reasonable medical bill would cost, that I have softened my position and now I do support health care reform.
BTW, we could save a lot of money by trimming our ""defense"" costs but that is not going to happen because a relatively few people make so much profit that any reform there is not going to happen.
Many years ago, I did to J2ME projects for customers. I have played with the iPhone dev tools, but don't really like the platform or the constraints of the AppStore.
The Android plugins for Eclipse really make this a nice "coders platform." I expect to see more web portals to provide customized rich clients (perhaps for free) to make for easier mobile access. ANyway, getting more into the Android platform has been on my short list for a while.
BTW, a little off topic, but the rumors are that Google is going to open an app store for Google Wave plugins. Nice addition to an app store for Android aps.
I wouldn't be surprised if PostgreSQL support will be forthcoming.
BTW, I spent 2 hours experimenting with RDS - I'll probably start using it when it is out of beta.
Copying from my blog (http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/10/i-just-tried-amzons-new-relational.html):
Amazon just released a beta of their Relational Database Service (RDS). You pay by the EC2 instance hour, about the same cost as a plain EC2, but about $0.01/hour more for a small instance, plus some storage costs, and bandwidth costs if you access the database outside of an Amazon availability zone.
RDS MyQL compatible (version 5.1) and is automatically monitored, restarted, and backed up.
Currently, there is no master slave replication, but this is being worked on (RDS beta just started today).
Here are my notes on my first use of RDS:
* Install the RDS command line tools :-)
* rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier marktesting123 --allocated-storage 5 --db-instance-class db.m1.small --engine MySQL5.1 --master-username marktesting123 --master-user-password markpasstesting123
* Wait a few minutes and see if the RDS instance is ready: rds-describe-db-instances
* Open up ports for external access, if required (note, here I am opening up for world wide access just for this test): rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip 0.0.0.0/0
* Use a mysql client to connect: mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u marktesting123 -p
* create database recipes;
* in another bash shell: cat recipes.sql | mysql -h marktesting123.cyvbi77nio5f.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com recipes -u marktesting123 -p
* In the mysql client: use the remote RDS hosted database and be happy
* delete RDS instance (to stop paying for it): rds-delete-db-instance marktestng123 --skip-final-snapshot
Any mysql client libraries should work fine.
When I only had a sandbox account this summer, all I did with Wave was experiment with writing robots.
Now that Wave is out in beta form and I have been able to invite family members, friends, and some of my customers, I am starting to appreciate Wave as an email substitute.
I am also getting some customer feedback that they might want to build systems layered on top of Wave.
I've had a developer's account for a while, and I think that wave is fun. Most fun is writing robots that receive events (which events is a configuration option) when people add text to a wave, join a wave, etc. A robot can then itself modify or add to a wave.
If I had mods points, I would mod you up.
Great point! Also, we had our largest peacetime naval exercises off of Venezuela after they started talking about getting off of the dollar standard.
It pisses me off when I feel that my country takes such a bad approach to promoting our best interests.
China has used long term treaties and financial arrangements to nail down long term access to oil. We, on the other hand, persue a military strategy that simply does not make sense financially. (I am assuming that we are much safer now than during the cold war, so our "defense" is not much an issue.)
Once again, our controllers (i.e., financial elite, corporations) choose strategies that enrich them and hurt people like me, my family, and friends who just want to work, be productive, and not harm other people.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up.
G. W. Bush's actions with "axis of evil" rhetoric and threats forced the moderates in Iran to keep their heads down and empowered the radicals. I now suspect that this may have been done purposely.
Sanctions really are a soft act of war and should be viewed thus. Does Congress have to approve sanctions? If not, they should have this power, not the president.
I voted for both G.W. Bush and Obama, and I am very disappointed by both of them. They both seem to beholden to the defense industry and the all too powerful Israeli lobby, instead of doing what is best for *our* country.
Seriously, what about people (like me!) who work on laptops - who wants to give up that much screen real estate?
Yuck.
I wrote several books using OpenOffice.org, and I still very much appreciate having it (for free!), but I really prefer the use of Latex - you get to spend almost all of your time thinking about what you want to write, then doing the writing - and not waste time formatting with Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages, etc.
Anyway, the ribbon looks sort-of OK (perhaps) if you work on a huge display, but for hyper-modern nomadic knowledge workers (*) who use laptops, it seems like a really lame idea.
(*) In many years of posting to Slashdot, I don't think I have ever had a comment modded funny - this may be my big chance :-)
Amazon published a white paper about using their AWS platform with HIPAA compient applications: basic idea is to keep data encrypted until it is in memory, and encrypt it again before writing to persistent storage.
For Google Apps, how about using rich clients that decrypt data for viewing/editing, and encrypt it again before storing back on big table, etc.
Perhaps Google themselves would implement this as browser plugins?
The economy is in poor shape now, but will probably get much, much worse in the coming years (see today's poorly performing 5 year treasury bond sales, an indicator that foreign banks and investors don't want to invest in us, even with a higher "tail" interest rates.). What makes our state legislators think that they will have more funds in a few years to buy these properties back?
It is in no one's interest that the US economy crash and burn, and that is why the oil rich countries, and China, Russia, etc. appear to be cooperating on "gently" moving the world to a "basket of currencies" rather than use the dollar as the main international exchange currency - they don't want us to crash and burn and take them with us. A slow and gradual process is the best that we can probably hope for.
How can the USA cooperate? For one thing, how about reducing federal, state, and local expenditures by 25% (OK, I just made up that amount, but it sounds about right).
Painful? You bet. Government workers will have salaries and benefits reduced, as will the general population. Deals with labor unions will be broken. Benefits form the ponzy scheme known as social security will be cut back.
Corruption needs to be nipped. As a starter, how about a tax on financial transactions that do not involve real goods and services: apply a 1% tax to hedge fund investment transactions, etc. Slow down the non-productive use of money.
Bush, Obama, and Congress have already proven themselves to be firmly in the pockets of corporations and their lobbyists - that will not change. Why should people who get to make the rules be fair with the rest of us?
The installation was easy (on OS X) but it does not do much. You can run OpenFire, install Google's open source wave protocol project, and run server + client scripts. The client script lets you create new waves and add other participant IDs.
However, when I try adding my robot that is running on AppEngine as a participant, I get an error on my local server. It looks like I need to re-install everything on a public server so my app on AppEngine can communicate back -- but, I am not sure what the problem is.
Hopefully, if I wait a few days, the community may publish examples of creating local waves and invite robots on AppEngine to participate.
As an end user, you invite "people" to participate in each Wave that you create. New "blips" added to a Wave can have restricted access rights. If you only invite/work with people you know, then hopefully no problems.
It may be a problem that spammers can waste your time inviting you to waves that you are not interested in - I am not sure how this will be handled. I am interested in Wave as a development platform, and I would hope that small work groups can voluntarily work in peace. When I get time, I would be very keen on learning to set up a private Wave server. The developer's support for writing Wave robot extensions is very good, so I am hoping that setting up local private Wave servers will prove to be as easy.
As an end user, you can invite other *humans* to participate in Waves that you create. Waves can contain text and multimedia.
When I write a test robot, I install it on AppEngine (I use the Java version, but the robot support libraries are also available in Python). I can then create a new wave and invite my robot, just as I would invite a human participant.
My test robots watch for new invites or changes to the text in waves, perform some processing on that text, and then add their own 'blips' to the end of the wave.
I have been thinking about the web applications that I have developed in the last 10 years, and thinking in particular about which ones could be implemented on the Wave platform.
I received a Google Wave sandbox account 8 days ago and I have been kicking the tires mostly in developing robot extensions. However, to answer your concerns about being browser based: the Wave team used GWT and the client side user interface is very nice. If you have not done so, watch the demo video.
There a several thousand developers who have sandbox accounts so there are opportunities for shared editing, asking other people to try your test robot extensions, etc.
Also, you get 2 accounts with an invite: 'regular' and 'test'.
I received a Wave sandbox invitation 8 days ago and since then I have been spending a lot of time writing test robot extensions, installing them on Java AppEngine, and then inviting my test robots to participate in new waves I create.
Very cool. Very fun. Huge time sink. You know how it goes :-)
I would like a completely local development setup, but I don't know if it is worth the effort right now. Installing new versions of a robot on AppEngine is very quick, as is creating a new Wave in the sandbox - about a 90 second cycle to test code changes. I set my logger for DEBUG, and keep my AppEngin console log viewing page open -- not a bad setup.
DERI has produced some good stuff: I particularly like D2R which is a wrapper providing a SPARQL endpoint around a relational database. Both cool and useful (if you know how to use SPARQL queries).
In the as year, I have been happy using Amazon EC2 (etc.), Google's Java AppEngine, and Heroku for web apps. Way better, if you can, to outsource scalability.
BTW, I use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the examples for my last book. It took me almost 10 hours to get the software (Ruby, Rails, Sesame, Redland, Hadoop, Sphinx, Solr, etc., plus my example programs) set up on an AMI, but this is time well spent because now people who want to casually experiment with this stuff don't need to spend this time (an Amazon EC2 instance costs about 10 cents/hour).
In a similar way, software vendors like Sun, Oracle, etc. are offering test and evaluation AMIs. It is great to be able to try out a new Solaris build, a specific Oracle database, etc. without investing much time. AMIs would also be great for student projects, etc. If you haven't tried EC2, etc. it is worth the time to experiment with it.
You can find this on the web: encrypting data in S3, decrypting in memory right before use. HIPAA medical records privacy requirements are severe, so if the cloud can work for HIPAA, then it should work for government infrastructure.
The documentation is good, so it is easy to get started. I view Wave as "something for the future" but I think that it is worth 3 or 4 hours a week coding to it. It was a thrill when my robot replied to a wave that I had invited it to join (like a human). For writing robots, I look forward to a local runtime and debugging setup. Overall, I think that Wave looks promising and I am mentally re-evaluating several web application projects that I have done in the last ten years, thinking of how I might re-implement them on Wave.
I think that your post makes the most sense, so far (I have a few more comments still to read :-)
Besides, if/when Microsoft starts to run out of their large pile of cash (LPOC), they might get even more aggressive.
1. Early Newton owner :-)
2. long time Lisp developer (and I wrote 2 Spring-Verlag Lisp books, back in ancient history)
3. right now, Ruby is my favorite language
4. I am typing this on Ubuntu (installed on my MacBook)
As much as I appreciate Eric's contributions to open source (his early writings helped get me interested in writing open source), and our shared interest in shooting guns -grin-, I prefer Bruce Peren's approach (as I wrote about recently http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/02/bruce-pernes-on-gnu-affero-general.html).
I think that a combination of AGPL, a less restrictive license like MIT or Apache 2, and perhaps something like the LGPL cover most needs, and the fewer licenses the better. The point of the article is that GPL is not good for business, raising VC for startups, etc. Perhaps true, but I still believe in the more restrictive (for developers) forced sharing of the AGPL is better for a world where software infrastructure is just about free because a very large number of people and companies supply resources for coding, bug tracking, and documentation.
I would rather do work for customers that involves adding functionality to an already great open source project, and I would prefer that improvements be folded back into infrastructure that everyone can share.
BTW, I disagree with Stallman's and the FSF's take on cloud computing as long as:
1. you have access to the software that you are running
2. you can easily copy your own data
3. you can easily migrate to your own servers or other hosts
I think that both EC2 and App Engine meet these requirements.
Your post is the best idea in this entire thread. I agree. Although I have been using Ruby and Lisp more the last few years, much of my business is based on Java -- basically the whole world wants a stable and well maintained Java platform and a spin off company for Java might make sense, especially if many large stakeholders owned equity.