Whoever modded you offtopic must really like Google.
Totally agree, the fact that Googlers keep modding that critical-but-correct comment down just shows Googlers are basically cut from the same cloth as Microsofties, sad but true.
As a former Googler, I completely understand the stunning level of hubris and myopia displayed by this doomed product strategy. The only question is, will the folly of trying to foist off neutered, sing-app boxes on the public be corrected in time to save the whole effort from withering pathetically, or will out of touch Google management insist on riding this lead balloon all the way into the ground.
There, fellow Googlers, mod that down, we already know what at least some of you are made of.
Even though.doc format remains an abysmally poor choice for a document produced by a government agency for public distribution, the days when non-Windows users would be inconvenienced by that are long gone.
Often the term bloated is misused meaning the speaker is at a point where he/she personally starts to find a technology confusing to wade through. Different people perceive different "bloat" points, so it's often relative. When it comes down to it, bloat is just software. As long as the pieces are loaded and run efficiently enough that the end-user, sysadmin, etc is happy then bloat is often a moot point and each person only needs to understand their own role and related facets of the software.
You seem to be oblivious to the fact that more bloat means slower development and more bugs, never mind lesser bad effects like longer compile times, longer downloads, more wasted memory, slower execution. Not sure why you're anxious to justify something that is just as bad for the long term health of a software system as obesity is bad for the long term health of a couch potato.
At this point, it looks pretty much the same as a (DEC) Alpha or Itanium roadmap.
Except for one thing: the SPARC circuitry is entirely open source. This has interesting implications, such as the fact that enthusiasts can build these things as FPGAs or even ASICs as fab costs come down to within the reach of clubs and schools. And emerging economies can fab these things by the bazillions without paying royalties. Not to mention big rich countries too.
Sun, if this is the best you can do -- 4 cores, 8 threads, arriving at 45nm just as everyone else is getting to 32nm
Sun's performance as a chip vendor is far better that your performance as a Slashdot troll. According to Sun's roadmap, a 16 core times 8 threads processor (128 threads just to be clear) at 40 nanometers arrives in 2010. That would be four sockets per blade, 48 blades per chassis for a respectable 768 multithreaded processors per chassis. As Sun says, it comes down to the TPC-C numbers. I'm no Sun fanboi, far from it, but I could be convinced by the right performance/heat ratio.
As a developer, I will never release software under the GPL, but I will release software under actually free licenses like BSD or Apache.
Suite yourself, however let me provide just one data point: the two best open source version control systems, Git and Mercurial, are both released under GPL, while the relatively lame Subversion is released under Apache license. Why do you suppose that is?
Not really, it's IT done by not letting anyone over 30 or with any experience into the room. Every single issue they had to learn and fix mentioned in the article is quite literally standard textbook stuff in distributed systems, and has been for over 40 years. The failure model, the huge chunk sized, the single master problems... etc. Nobody who had taken even one decent class would have ever considered the original design viable. They really should just stick to buying their tech pre-made like everything else Google is known for - acquisitions [wikipedia.org]. Other companies are willing to hire experienced people. You know, those old lazy bastards that only work 40 hours a week because they have families, cost way too much to provide health insurance to, but get things done 5x as fast because they have done it before:)
You hit the nail right on the head. The original GFS is pretty lame, as Google folks freely admit (full disclosure: I'm a fomer Googler, but I'm not telling you anything you can't find on ahem Google). The new GFS will also be pretty lame, because as you correctly point out, Larry, Sergey and Eric don't quite get the concept of experienced people who have done it before. All that standard clustering stuff has to be reinvented by Googlers, who frankly, have gotten a little soft over the years, now so used to working. We will see, but I'm predicting that the new GFS will still be a research project two years from now.
Web browsers are proof that it really doesn't take that long to parse CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
Web browsers are proof that CSS, HTML and Javascript based interfaces are really sluggish and memory hungry compared to interfaces coded with native frameworks.
So... Webkit renders html as far as I know. So the proposal seems to be to render the entire Gnome gui by feeding html at it. I hope I'm wrong, because if that is correct then it would be a really goofy way of going about things.
All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
If you're using IE I guess you might be left out in the cold, but IE users will be used to that by now.
Intentionally breaking compatibility with IE would be an excellent way to ensure the project bombs and fades away as a footnote. Another excellent way to ensure failure would be to support _only_ web apps or apps written to Chrome's API. Sorry, but people expect a computer to work like a computer, and that means support a full range of applications, not just web apps. Well so far, what have we got, a blog post and rebranding Linux as Chrome? Remember Java desktop, how's that working for Sun? Advice to Sundar Pichai and friends: if you want the open source community on board, burying the community's own "trademarks" in favor of your own is not a good start. Second bit of advice: if you can't run Openoffice on it, it's a toy. So better start figuring out how to do that, or at least make it easy for the community to do it for you. Third nugget is, be careful who you allow to represent Google to the community
I don't think anyone is talking about propritary codecs here, except for perhaps VP6. VC-1 and H.264 are both international standards, with licensing handled by MPEG-LA. They are patent encumbered, but are not propritary any more than MP3 or ASP are.
As is well know, and as you know, MP3 is proprietary. Surely you know the name Frauenhofer.
You are being disingenuous, but why should I expect anything different from an Microsoft employee? Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
I repeat my observation that you spend a very large amount of time posting FUD about Ogg Theora on slashdot. Who knows where else you spend time promulgating FUD about Ogg Theora?
Since you are a Microsoftie, I know that you will not just do the gentlemanly thing and let the issue lie, after all, your paycheque depends partly on your evangelistic activity, where the word evangelism is a well known Microsoft euphemism for FUD.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
The fact that you know a thing or two about codec technology does not make you any less of a FUDster, quite the contrary. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.
Pretty much everything I've done with Qt tells me KDE should be a much better desktop than Gnome. But the truth is that most of the large desktop distributions use Gnome, Ubuntu is much bigger than Kubuntu and same goes for the others. None of the big three hitters Firefox, OpenOffice or GIMP are KDE applications - ok not all are Gnome apps either but there's not many "killer KDE apps" around. Don't get me wrong, they're all perfectly okay but nothing really rocks the boat.
The think I like least about each of Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP is the user interface, for which I blame GTK. For example, Firefox's application chooser dialog makes me want to slit my wrists.
There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona
Having dealt with Chris personally, I'm fairly comfortable confirming that he is a bit of a loose cannon and not a good friend of open source, even though that is supposed to be his job a Google. Foot in mouth seems to be more or less a permanent state of affairs with him.
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
I for one, am perfectly happy to burn a little extra bandwidth for that, and anyway I not buy your assertion that Ogg cannot close the bandwidth gap over time. After all, you are a Microsoftie with a vested interest in keeping video proprietary.
"Better" is alwasy about context. Try a head-to-head for a scenario of interest to you.
"Better" to me is quite clear: the one that is unencumbered and good enough technically is better. See here for a trustworthy comparison of H.264 vs Theora PSNR, showing Theora running about 2 db behind H.264 currently. Not only is that not enough to bother me, but the other thing you see from the graph is the gap steadily closing. Theora is already good enough for me, versus H.264's huge disadvantage of being heavily legally encumbered, and thus unsuited to use in a web standard.
I will take "good enough" any day over lawyer bait. Sorry, you may be a codec geek but as a Softie you are a geek with an agenda. Cred -1.
I'm actually not an evangelist anymore; I run strategy for Silverlight media technologies.
Color me skeptical about the impartiality of a company named after one of Microsoft's key embrace-extend efforts, particularly when the issue is public access to media via non-proprietary codecs.
Stop misquoting the motto! It's "don't be evil", not "do no evil".
Right, that pretty much fits with the Google ethos now, which goes something like "sure, doing a little evil here and there is ok as long as I myself am not actually evil". It's worth keeping in mind that the gentleman who coined the original left the building some time ago.
An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
It is especially amazing that Google has trouble understanding the importance if this issue. The phrase that comes to mind is "asleep at the wheel".
Thanks for providing us with the objective point of view from Microsoft's evangelism department, Ben. Your support for Chris Dibona's point of view pretty much confirms for me he's flat wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
right now it's mostly a customised linux distro with a maximized browseK
You mean, maximized-and-impossible-to-minimize-or-switch-to-another-app-from. It is not just nerds who think this is stupid.
Whoever modded you offtopic must really like Google.
Totally agree, the fact that Googlers keep modding that critical-but-correct comment down just shows Googlers are basically cut from the same cloth as Microsofties, sad but true.
As a former Googler, I completely understand the stunning level of hubris and myopia displayed by this doomed product strategy. The only question is, will the folly of trying to foist off neutered, sing-app boxes on the public be corrected in time to save the whole effort from withering pathetically, or will out of touch Google management insist on riding this lead balloon all the way into the ground.
There, fellow Googlers, mod that down, we already know what at least some of you are made of.
Even though .doc format remains an abysmally poor choice for a document produced by a government agency for public distribution, the days when non-Windows users would be inconvenienced by that are long gone.
In short, non-composting KDE4 is designed to look like garbage.
I'm using KDE 4 without compositing right now and it looks fine.
The problem is the fact that IPv6 was built in an incredibly fucking stupid way.
Those responsible should be hanging their heads in shame. Instead they seem to be living on another planet.
Often the term bloated is misused meaning the speaker is at a point where he/she personally starts to find a technology confusing to wade through. Different people perceive different "bloat" points, so it's often relative. When it comes down to it, bloat is just software. As long as the pieces are loaded and run efficiently enough that the end-user, sysadmin, etc is happy then bloat is often a moot point and each person only needs to understand their own role and related facets of the software.
You seem to be oblivious to the fact that more bloat means slower development and more bugs, never mind lesser bad effects like longer compile times, longer downloads, more wasted memory, slower execution. Not sure why you're anxious to justify something that is just as bad for the long term health of a software system as obesity is bad for the long term health of a couch potato.
We work as a team.
What?
At this point, it looks pretty much the same as a (DEC) Alpha or Itanium roadmap.
Except for one thing: the SPARC circuitry is entirely open source. This has interesting implications, such as the fact that enthusiasts can build these things as FPGAs or even ASICs as fab costs come down to within the reach of clubs and schools. And emerging economies can fab these things by the bazillions without paying royalties. Not to mention big rich countries too.
Sun, if this is the best you can do -- 4 cores, 8 threads, arriving at 45nm just as everyone else is getting to 32nm
Sun's performance as a chip vendor is far better that your performance as a Slashdot troll. According to Sun's roadmap, a 16 core times 8 threads processor (128 threads just to be clear) at 40 nanometers arrives in 2010. That would be four sockets per blade, 48 blades per chassis for a respectable 768 multithreaded processors per chassis. As Sun says, it comes down to the TPC-C numbers. I'm no Sun fanboi, far from it, but I could be convinced by the right performance/heat ratio.
As a developer, I will never release software under the GPL, but I will release software under actually free licenses like BSD or Apache.
Suite yourself, however let me provide just one data point: the two best open source version control systems, Git and Mercurial, are both released under GPL, while the relatively lame Subversion is released under Apache license. Why do you suppose that is?
Not really, it's IT done by not letting anyone over 30 or with any experience into the room. Every single issue they had to learn and fix mentioned in the article is quite literally standard textbook stuff in distributed systems, and has been for over 40 years. The failure model, the huge chunk sized, the single master problems... etc. Nobody who had taken even one decent class would have ever considered the original design viable. They really should just stick to buying their tech pre-made like everything else Google is known for - acquisitions [wikipedia.org]. Other companies are willing to hire experienced people. You know, those old lazy bastards that only work 40 hours a week because they have families, cost way too much to provide health insurance to, but get things done 5x as fast because they have done it before :)
You hit the nail right on the head. The original GFS is pretty lame, as Google folks freely admit (full disclosure: I'm a fomer Googler, but I'm not telling you anything you can't find on ahem Google). The new GFS will also be pretty lame, because as you correctly point out, Larry, Sergey and Eric don't quite get the concept of experienced people who have done it before. All that standard clustering stuff has to be reinvented by Googlers, who frankly, have gotten a little soft over the years, now so used to working. We will see, but I'm predicting that the new GFS will still be a research project two years from now.
Web browsers are proof that it really doesn't take that long to parse CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
Web browsers are proof that CSS, HTML and Javascript based interfaces are really sluggish and memory hungry compared to interfaces coded with native frameworks.
So... Webkit renders html as far as I know. So the proposal seems to be to render the entire Gnome gui by feeding html at it. I hope I'm wrong, because if that is correct then it would be a really goofy way of going about things.
All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
If you're using IE I guess you might be left out in the cold, but IE users will be used to that by now.
Intentionally breaking compatibility with IE would be an excellent way to ensure the project bombs and fades away as a footnote. Another excellent way to ensure failure would be to support _only_ web apps or apps written to Chrome's API. Sorry, but people expect a computer to work like a computer, and that means support a full range of applications, not just web apps. Well so far, what have we got, a blog post and rebranding Linux as Chrome? Remember Java desktop, how's that working for Sun? Advice to Sundar Pichai and friends: if you want the open source community on board, burying the community's own "trademarks" in favor of your own is not a good start. Second bit of advice: if you can't run Openoffice on it, it's a toy. So better start figuring out how to do that, or at least make it easy for the community to do it for you. Third nugget is, be careful who you allow to represent Google to the community
I don't think anyone is talking about propritary codecs here, except for perhaps VP6. VC-1 and H.264 are both international standards, with licensing handled by MPEG-LA. They are patent encumbered, but are not propritary any more than MP3 or ASP are.
As is well know, and as you know, MP3 is proprietary. Surely you know the name Frauenhofer.
You are being disingenuous, but why should I expect anything different from an Microsoft employee? Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
I repeat my observation that you spend a very large amount of time posting FUD about Ogg Theora on slashdot. Who knows where else you spend time promulgating FUD about Ogg Theora?
Since you are a Microsoftie, I know that you will not just do the gentlemanly thing and let the issue lie, after all, your paycheque depends partly on your evangelistic activity, where the word evangelism is a well known Microsoft euphemism for FUD.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
The fact that you know a thing or two about codec technology does not make you any less of a FUDster, quite the contrary. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.
Pretty much everything I've done with Qt tells me KDE should be a much better desktop than Gnome. But the truth is that most of the large desktop distributions use Gnome, Ubuntu is much bigger than Kubuntu and same goes for the others. None of the big three hitters Firefox, OpenOffice or GIMP are KDE applications - ok not all are Gnome apps either but there's not many "killer KDE apps" around. Don't get me wrong, they're all perfectly okay but nothing really rocks the boat.
The think I like least about each of Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP is the user interface, for which I blame GTK. For example, Firefox's application chooser dialog makes me want to slit my wrists.
If they're afraid of downtime, this would certainly be a terrible place for Linux HPC, which would be down an awful lot more than the occasional day.
Care to support that assertion? Until then my working assumption is that you have allowed your nether orifice to hold forth on your behalf.
That was no troll. Support your assertion, or stop talking out your ass.
If they're afraid of downtime, this would certainly be a terrible place for Linux HPC, which would be down an awful lot more than the occasional day.
Care to support that assertion? Until then my working assumption is that you have allowed your nether orifice to hold forth on your behalf.
There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona
Having dealt with Chris personally, I'm fairly comfortable confirming that he is a bit of a loose cannon and not a good friend of open source, even though that is supposed to be his job a Google. Foot in mouth seems to be more or less a permanent state of affairs with him.
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
I for one, am perfectly happy to burn a little extra bandwidth for that, and anyway I not buy your assertion that Ogg cannot close the bandwidth gap over time. After all, you are a Microsoftie with a vested interest in keeping video proprietary.
"Better" is alwasy about context. Try a head-to-head for a scenario of interest to you.
"Better" to me is quite clear: the one that is unencumbered and good enough technically is better. See here for a trustworthy comparison of H.264 vs Theora PSNR, showing Theora running about 2 db behind H.264 currently. Not only is that not enough to bother me, but the other thing you see from the graph is the gap steadily closing. Theora is already good enough for me, versus H.264's huge disadvantage of being heavily legally encumbered, and thus unsuited to use in a web standard.
I will take "good enough" any day over lawyer bait. Sorry, you may be a codec geek but as a Softie you are a geek with an agenda. Cred -1.
I'm actually not an evangelist anymore; I run strategy for Silverlight media technologies.
Color me skeptical about the impartiality of a company named after one of Microsoft's key embrace-extend efforts, particularly when the issue is public access to media via non-proprietary codecs.
Stop misquoting the motto! It's "don't be evil", not "do no evil".
Right, that pretty much fits with the Google ethos now, which goes something like "sure, doing a little evil here and there is ok as long as I myself am not actually evil". It's worth keeping in mind that the gentleman who coined the original left the building some time ago.
An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
It is especially amazing that Google has trouble understanding the importance if this issue. The phrase that comes to mind is "asleep at the wheel".
Thanks for providing us with the objective point of view from Microsoft's evangelism department, Ben. Your support for Chris Dibona's point of view pretty much confirms for me he's flat wrong.
only?! inst 3db about 50%? huge lag behind.
No, it's about 29%
(1 - (1 / 1.41)) * 100