Maybe people are capable of making a distinction between the device and the media? The kindle can read tons of formats, and putting non-drm content on the device is really super easy. One can buy a kindle without ever running in to any sort of DRM issues. Just don't buy the DRM'd content. Sheesh.
"I don't want to talk about PHP's technical merits."
People should talk about this more, because excluding the size of the developer base or pre-existing code, there is almost NEVER a good reason to choose to start a project with PHP. These days anything that PHP was once appropriate for, Python or Groovy or some other lambda based language is a better choice. My preference is Groovy. You get a great functional programming language plus the whole world of Java.
"to the point where a lot of people speculate that the Magento team wants it to be like that, so when your store takes off you are more likely to hire them to speed things up."
Which is hilarious when you look at the "Enterprise" sites that Varien has done to date. They are slow, ugly and often broken. Varien does not do great work. Thats probably why they are partnering with Optaros, but it remains to be seen if those carrion eaters can do any better.
$10,000 a server license. It might be worth it if you need SAP integration, but I don't believe for a second that the "Enterprise" version is written any better then the community. Some people doubt that it even exists, that in reality its probably just community edition + over-priced consulting services.
The problem with Magento is not that it is too complex for a non-technical user. The problem with Magento is that is not properly documented or commented for technical users. Non-technical users that stay within the Magento default store box will have no problems, developers that try to move outside this box will be frustrated, constantly.
Take a look at the code. There are precisely zero comments. Take a look at the documentation, there is almost no official documentation. This makes developing with Magento extremely hard as they employ some convoluted structures for very simple tasks. Eventually one finds that the code is generally of a high standard and that most things can be done without too much effort, but the learning curve is excessive.
I believe that the lack of comments and documentation is part of an intentional strategy by Varien to drive potential users to their closed-source Enterprise solution. The power of the community edition is enticing, but finding knowledgeable developers is nearly impossible and training inhouse staff takes far too long due to the conspicuous absence of documentation and comments.
Finally, I think it is pretty clear that PHP was a very poor choice for such a large framework. The lengths they need to go to implement something that appears to be convention bases and sort of but not quite dependency injected are extreme. PHP's inability to execute code asynchronously is a huge headache and the EAV model is cumbersome to say the least. Performance is seriously wanting.
So yeah, Magento is enticing as hell to non-technical beginners. However ultimately the combination of Varien's refusal to document/comment and their poor technology choices make this a platform that just won't scale. Whats needed to at least partially change that is Magento for Developers*
*There is a Magento for architects, but its already out of date and very short on real details.
Sure you can. I have applications online that scale up and down automatically multiple times a day. Some scaling is scheduled, some is based on load.
Though your terminology is a little wrong. Its not a single "instance", it is N instances. Scaling up and down is based on adding or removing an instance. It can be done automatically right now using things like Scalr, Cloud watch or right scale. Or it can be implemented from scratch pretty easily too.
100x small ec2 instances will cost you a total of $10/hour. Each has 1.7 GB of memory, 1x core and 160 gb of storage. 100x large ec2 instances will cost you a total of $40/hour. Each has 7.5 GB of memory, 2x Cores and 750gb of storage.
I am not sure why people are so confused about what cloud computing means in this context. It is pretty straightforward-
(1) Yes, the underlying technology is "just" a data-center that you could provision through standard channels. (2) Yes, it is "just" a normal MySQL server that you could manage and scale through normal means.
Now take those above functions, and put them behind an API that we can call into from our software. Could you manage the same things directly? Of course! However there are use cases where being able to control these functions through is very desirable.
Now take a bunch of other infrastructure resources and put control of them all behind APIs too. One ends up with a very different thing then traditional hosting. You can't provision 100x servers/databases/hadoop nodes for a single hour or night at a traditional host based on some event your software manages, and then pay less then $100. Sure the underlying tools are the same, and there are many traditional use cases where AWS is actually more expensive. However there are an equal number of situations where the reverse is also true.
As for who owns the data, thats just FUD resulting from an unfortunate overlap in terms with things like Facebook. The AWS TOS and contract is quite clear on who owns the data. Just like any other data center, if you don't secure/encrypt your stuff it is possible for the host to look into it, but this is no more likely in AWS then at Rack Space or Data Pipe.
How much would it cost for you to build that rack with highly reliable hot swappable up to 1TB each (No cap on how many either I dont think) that backup to a file system replicated in about a dozen countries at the click of a button?
Then there is the message bus. Then there is simple db. Then there is the load balancing. Then there is the fact that maybe I don't want the server all year, but only for 5 hours a week, so instead buying hardware I just ask for them on demand...
Building a server versus AWS is a false dichotomy.
I guess I don't consider things like Facebook true cloud computing.
Take AWS for example. Getting data out could not be simpler. Have a EC2 instance? Snapshot it, or snapshot an attached EBS and drop the data on to S3. Download it to your hearts content. Have data in SimpleDB? Its a DB, designed for querying, that outputs XML...
The real problem is that "Cloud Computing" has become a big tent that is coming to include a lot of things it shouldn't. I don't see why facebooks API is included in it. Webservices != Cloud necessarily.
I am fairly certain that one can be PCI compliant so long as you never store or relay unencrypted card information on your systems. This means that most ecommerce solutions can be put on EC2 without violating compliance, simply by relaying the encrypted card information from the client to the PCI compliant facility/credit card gateway.
Unless you actually need to view/store the CC information, I don't think EC2 and PCI level 1 compliance will be an issue.
We should all feel compelled to download content from any entity directly associated with the thieves that pushed through copyright extension act. It is a moral imperative to make them suffer as much as possible until they undo the harm they have caused (ie, billions in reparations to the commons) or go out of business. "Artists" have no business complaining as long as they are in league with the relevant publishers. Burn them down.
The artists I am talking about have contributed to theft of billions of dollars of value from the commons. I think artists should be paid, and deserve a limited monopoly on the sale of their work. Its just the ones under discussion in this portion of the thread are thieves and have forfeited that right as far as I am concerned.
I would never copy or distribute someone's work without their permission, assuming they aren't part of the effort to steal from the commons in the first place. Sadly this is almost all writers and artists. Its civil disobedience aimed at changing the behavior of the original transgressors. If the artists want us to respect their copyrights, then they should start by respecting the commons and the general rights of society. Until then every bit of downloaded and distributed media is just value repatriated to the commons.
"I bet 90% of the content you steal and distribute is less than a year or so old, and as such would STILL BE PROTECTED UNDER LAW."
You are missing the point. This doesn't matter to me. I don't care about the content I am downloading. What I care about is causing harm to the companies, guilds, unions and individuals that have stolen and are working to steal from the commons. I don't care if the content would be protected otherwise, I don't care if the content is good or bad or if I will ever consume it. All I want to do is cause harm to the thieving bastards behind the Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, etc. With a lot of luck we can put them out of business. With a little luck they will go so far over the top with restrictive legislation, that it will all become impossible to enforce and meaningless.
On a sidenote- I happily buy content from artists that are unaffiliated with any of the organizations.
Of the content I download, an extraordinarily small fraction of it is ever imported in to my media library. Most of it I download simple so that I am then in turn able to help other people obtain it for free. I download and distribute because I want to cause harm to companies and individuals that stole from the commons. I have zero interest in most of what they produce and will never personally watch/listen/read the vast majority that I download.
As I am coming from a highly cynical POV that has decided civil disobedience is the best path to defending the commons, I can easily understand your own cynicism and difficulty in believing that "piracy" is ever anything other then selfishly motivated. However I assure you that one can in fact be both a cynic and an idealist.
Actually if an "artist" is a member of a guild or union that pushes legislation the end result of which is to steal from the commons, then I make sure that I not only don't pay for it, but I will help other people take it without paying as well.
Until the Copyright Term Extension Act is rescinded, I consider all media produced by "artists" affiliated with the companies/guilds/unions that bought the law, to be free. Furthermore the act of refusing to pay for their work while actively distributing it to others for free is not only ethical, but an important bit of civil disobedience. Those who pay for works created by said artists are in fact the real transgressors.
It really is unfortunate that so many people end up buying these works simply for the sake of convenience.
I would say that the systems of beuaracracy and control that enabled each respectively are not substantively different. The abstraction of responsibility, hiding individual choices in a collective, etc. I did not compare the consequences, only the methods of institutional control.
Didn't we discredit the "I was just doing my job" defense in the 1940s? These people make real the unethical policies of their employers. They are fair game. If they are sufficiently abused over the phone, maybe they will quit. If enough of them quit, then maybe their employers will be forced to reconsider their policies. Really the problem is that we aren't all acting like intolerable assholes whenever we are confronted by CS reps intent on wasting our time and implementing the nonsensical abusive policies of their employers. If we all did this then the CS reps would quit or file civil suits against their employers for creating a hostile work environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what Freud would say about such "extreme caving"?
"This is no cave."
The parent is the most informed commentor on how banking functions. Mod up.
credit card transactions
There are. PCI Compliance. http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php
Maybe it was my age when I saw it, but to me I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me
Good grief, this is like saying Cheeze Whiz is what defines cheese for you. I'm sorry for you.
Above should be modded troll not insightful.
Maybe people are capable of making a distinction between the device and the media? The kindle can read tons of formats, and putting non-drm content on the device is really super easy. One can buy a kindle without ever running in to any sort of DRM issues. Just don't buy the DRM'd content. Sheesh.
Filet is for people who don't like steak.
Dry-aged Porter House ftw.
Lots of reasons, but start with these:
No namespacing.
No Asynchronous execution.
Non-standard date formats
Dangerous stuff like "Global"
Without Zend-acceleration its incredibly slow.
"I don't want to talk about PHP's technical merits."
People should talk about this more, because excluding the size of the developer base or pre-existing code, there is almost NEVER a good reason to choose to start a project with PHP. These days anything that PHP was once appropriate for, Python or Groovy or some other lambda based language is a better choice. My preference is Groovy. You get a great functional programming language plus the whole world of Java.
"to the point where a lot of people speculate that the Magento team wants it to be like that, so when your store takes off you are more likely to hire them to speed things up."
Which is hilarious when you look at the "Enterprise" sites that Varien has done to date. They are slow, ugly and often broken. Varien does not do great work. Thats probably why they are partnering with Optaros, but it remains to be seen if those carrion eaters can do any better.
$10,000 a server license. It might be worth it if you need SAP integration, but I don't believe for a second that the "Enterprise" version is written any better then the community. Some people doubt that it even exists, that in reality its probably just community edition + over-priced consulting services.
The problem with Magento is not that it is too complex for a non-technical user. The problem with Magento is that is not properly documented or commented for technical users. Non-technical users that stay within the Magento default store box will have no problems, developers that try to move outside this box will be frustrated, constantly.
Take a look at the code. There are precisely zero comments. Take a look at the documentation, there is almost no official documentation. This makes developing with Magento extremely hard as they employ some convoluted structures for very simple tasks. Eventually one finds that the code is generally of a high standard and that most things can be done without too much effort, but the learning curve is excessive.
I believe that the lack of comments and documentation is part of an intentional strategy by Varien to drive potential users to their closed-source Enterprise solution. The power of the community edition is enticing, but finding knowledgeable developers is nearly impossible and training inhouse staff takes far too long due to the conspicuous absence of documentation and comments.
Finally, I think it is pretty clear that PHP was a very poor choice for such a large framework. The lengths they need to go to implement something that appears to be convention bases and sort of but not quite dependency injected are extreme. PHP's inability to execute code asynchronously is a huge headache and the EAV model is cumbersome to say the least. Performance is seriously wanting.
So yeah, Magento is enticing as hell to non-technical beginners. However ultimately the combination of Varien's refusal to document/comment and their poor technology choices make this a platform that just won't scale. Whats needed to at least partially change that is Magento for Developers*
*There is a Magento for architects, but its already out of date and very short on real details.
In small amounts (ie, sushi sized portions) Escolar usually has no effect. Its quite delicious.
My problem is that White Tuna is often but not always escolar, but it can be a couple of other white fish which aren't nearly as delicious.
Sure you can. I have applications online that scale up and down automatically multiple times a day. Some scaling is scheduled, some is based on load.
Though your terminology is a little wrong. Its not a single "instance", it is N instances. Scaling up and down is based on adding or removing an instance. It can be done automatically right now using things like Scalr, Cloud watch or right scale. Or it can be implemented from scratch pretty easily too.
100x small ec2 instances will cost you a total of $10/hour. Each has 1.7 GB of memory, 1x core and 160 gb of storage.
100x large ec2 instances will cost you a total of $40/hour. Each has 7.5 GB of memory, 2x Cores and 750gb of storage.
I am not sure why people are so confused about what cloud computing means in this context. It is pretty straightforward-
(1) Yes, the underlying technology is "just" a data-center that you could provision through standard channels.
(2) Yes, it is "just" a normal MySQL server that you could manage and scale through normal means.
Now take those above functions, and put them behind an API that we can call into from our software. Could you manage the same things directly? Of course! However there are use cases where being able to control these functions through is very desirable.
Now take a bunch of other infrastructure resources and put control of them all behind APIs too. One ends up with a very different thing then traditional hosting. You can't provision 100x servers/databases/hadoop nodes for a single hour or night at a traditional host based on some event your software manages, and then pay less then $100. Sure the underlying tools are the same, and there are many traditional use cases where AWS is actually more expensive. However there are an equal number of situations where the reverse is also true.
As for who owns the data, thats just FUD resulting from an unfortunate overlap in terms with things like Facebook. The AWS TOS and contract is quite clear on who owns the data. Just like any other data center, if you don't secure/encrypt your stuff it is possible for the host to look into it, but this is no more likely in AWS then at Rack Space or Data Pipe.
How is S3 not read/write?
EC2 is only a slice of their cloud though.
How much would it cost for you to build that rack with highly reliable hot swappable up to 1TB each (No cap on how many either I dont think) that backup to a file system replicated in about a dozen countries at the click of a button?
Then there is the message bus.
Then there is simple db.
Then there is the load balancing.
Then there is the fact that maybe I don't want the server all year, but only for 5 hours a week, so instead buying hardware I just ask for them on demand...
Building a server versus AWS is a false dichotomy.
I guess I don't consider things like Facebook true cloud computing.
Take AWS for example. Getting data out could not be simpler.
Have a EC2 instance? Snapshot it, or snapshot an attached EBS and drop the data on to S3. Download it to your hearts content.
Have data in SimpleDB? Its a DB, designed for querying, that outputs XML...
The real problem is that "Cloud Computing" has become a big tent that is coming to include a lot of things it shouldn't. I don't see why facebooks API is included in it. Webservices != Cloud necessarily.
I am fairly certain that one can be PCI compliant so long as you never store or relay unencrypted card information on your systems. This means that most ecommerce solutions can be put on EC2 without violating compliance, simply by relaying the encrypted card information from the client to the PCI compliant facility/credit card gateway.
Unless you actually need to view/store the CC information, I don't think EC2 and PCI level 1 compliance will be an issue.
We should all feel compelled to download content from any entity directly associated with the thieves that pushed through copyright extension act. It is a moral imperative to make them suffer as much as possible until they undo the harm they have caused (ie, billions in reparations to the commons) or go out of business. "Artists" have no business complaining as long as they are in league with the relevant publishers. Burn them down.
Thats it?
I really would have hoped for better.
The artists I am talking about have contributed to theft of billions of dollars of value from the commons. I think artists should be paid, and deserve a limited monopoly on the sale of their work. Its just the ones under discussion in this portion of the thread are thieves and have forfeited that right as far as I am concerned.
I would never copy or distribute someone's work without their permission, assuming they aren't part of the effort to steal from the commons in the first place. Sadly this is almost all writers and artists. Its civil disobedience aimed at changing the behavior of the original transgressors. If the artists want us to respect their copyrights, then they should start by respecting the commons and the general rights of society. Until then every bit of downloaded and distributed media is just value repatriated to the commons.
"I bet 90% of the content you steal and distribute is less than a year or so old, and as such would STILL BE PROTECTED UNDER LAW."
You are missing the point. This doesn't matter to me. I don't care about the content I am downloading. What I care about is causing harm to the companies, guilds, unions and individuals that have stolen and are working to steal from the commons. I don't care if the content would be protected otherwise, I don't care if the content is good or bad or if I will ever consume it. All I want to do is cause harm to the thieving bastards behind the Copyright Extension Act, DMCA, etc. With a lot of luck we can put them out of business. With a little luck they will go so far over the top with restrictive legislation, that it will all become impossible to enforce and meaningless.
On a sidenote- I happily buy content from artists that are unaffiliated with any of the organizations.
Of the content I download, an extraordinarily small fraction of it is ever imported in to my media library. Most of it I download simple so that I am then in turn able to help other people obtain it for free. I download and distribute because I want to cause harm to companies and individuals that stole from the commons. I have zero interest in most of what they produce and will never personally watch/listen/read the vast majority that I download.
As I am coming from a highly cynical POV that has decided civil disobedience is the best path to defending the commons, I can easily understand your own cynicism and difficulty in believing that "piracy" is ever anything other then selfishly motivated. However I assure you that one can in fact be both a cynic and an idealist.
Actually if an "artist" is a member of a guild or union that pushes legislation the end result of which is to steal from the commons, then I make sure that I not only don't pay for it, but I will help other people take it without paying as well.
Until the Copyright Term Extension Act is rescinded, I consider all media produced by "artists" affiliated with the companies/guilds/unions that bought the law, to be free. Furthermore the act of refusing to pay for their work while actively distributing it to others for free is not only ethical, but an important bit of civil disobedience. Those who pay for works created by said artists are in fact the real transgressors.
It really is unfortunate that so many people end up buying these works simply for the sake of convenience.
I would say that the systems of beuaracracy and control that enabled each respectively are not substantively different. The abstraction of responsibility, hiding individual choices in a collective, etc. I did not compare the consequences, only the methods of institutional control.
Didn't we discredit the "I was just doing my job" defense in the 1940s? These people make real the unethical policies of their employers. They are fair game. If they are sufficiently abused over the phone, maybe they will quit. If enough of them quit, then maybe their employers will be forced to reconsider their policies. Really the problem is that we aren't all acting like intolerable assholes whenever we are confronted by CS reps intent on wasting our time and implementing the nonsensical abusive policies of their employers. If we all did this then the CS reps would quit or file civil suits against their employers for creating a hostile work environment.