Granted, these days most of the people you correspond with are likely to use gmail, so Google is still getting a copy of a lot of your mail. That doesn't detract at all from the satisfaction and enjoyment I get out of running my own systems, of course.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the number of people questioning the desire to be self-hosted, but I am. To hear the tone of this discussion, you'd think that Google invented email and anybody who didn't want to use their offering was somehow a freak who was asking for all sorts of trouble. I've been self-hosted for mail, web, etc, for over a decade, and I can say that it's been almost completely enjoyable. It's interesting and educational, and you've got all sorts of visibility into stuff that Google doesn't expose to you. It's really not very difficult or time-consuming, and as long as your hosting provider is reputable you won't have any issues with blacklisting or reliability. No, it's probably not a great idea to host what should be a stable email server on the end of a residential cable modem connection, but that shouldn't surprise anybody.
For what it's worth, my mail server setup uses Debian's exim4-daemon-heavy package with spamassassin and greylistd. Filtering is accomplished via procmail, and mailboxes are stored in mbox format. At some point I'll likely install an IMAP server, since mobile access via k9 mail is more convenient than running mutt via an ssh client on my phone. I don't run a web mail interface, but it sounds like roundcube is worth a look should I ever care.
Well, they did say that "Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com's global infrastructure through the company's first 5 years". They wouldn't be doing that if it wasn't taking off.
Keep in mind that "cloud computing" is a really vague term that is used to describe all sorts of different technologies and platforms. It's still really immature, in terms of best practices and that sort of thing. There are still a lot of people throwing around the "cloud will solve all our problems" mantra.
At a previous job (in a computer science research lab), the director got all excited about Amazon's cloud stuff. He wanted my team to move everything to AWS, from our email service to our backups of user data. We researched pricing, thought about how it'd change our service model, and wrote up our findings. When we presented the results to him, he simply refused to believe that the AWS solution was actually significantly more expensive than what we had been doing. It was inconceivable to him that there were workloads that didn't see a major cost reduction when moved to the cloud. Eventually saner heads prevailed, and we were able to convince him that we shouldn't move all our stuff to AWS, but it took a lot of effort to overcome the buzzword enthusiasm.
That said, however, I really think there are situations where the AWS model makes a lot of sense. Your application must be able to scale to additional servers easily, transparently, and at least semi-automatically. It must be easy to deploy in multiple datacenters, so you can insulate yourself from outages like the big one that hit Amazon's East Coast region a few months ago. And it must be easy to scale your application down to fewer servers when the workload is lighter. If your usage patterns are spiky enough that you will occasionally need lots of capacity for a short time, but less capacity most of the time, then AWS is a really interesting option.
I haven't thought as much about Google AppEngine or Microsoft Azure, but they'd likely be similar. The big difference between them and AWS is that they essentially abstract away all the scaling stuff. It's a potentially good model, but you need to write your application specifically to target their environment. You need to do that for AWS as well, but the model is somewhat more similar to the traditional server-oriented model.
The point of IPv6 test day is not to test IPv6 connectivity. We know the protocol works. The point is to give the ISPs and site operators experience with running their sites in a dual-stack configuration. Even by accessing these sites via IPv4, you're taking part in this experiment. IPv4 will be around for a long time, and network operators need to know how things are going to go when some of their users are on v6 and others are on v4. Your ISP, even if they shut off end-user v6 access after v6 day, will have gained significant experience.
It's most certainly not a waste of time.
For those of us who spend a lot of time in the shell, screen is quite handy. The MIT AI Lab's ITS system from the 70's had this functionality built in to its equivalent of the TTY driver. You could detach your session from the current terminal, leave it alone in a "headless" sort of state, then reconnect at a later time. You didn't need to plan ahead and make sure that your jobs were started in a screen session, it just always worked. Screen is basically an effort to emulate this functionality in userland for POSIXy systems.
:) Fair enough. IMO, if you really need flash, the 32 bit version is worth running. On a Debian-ish box, you need ia32-libs, but otherwise it's straightforward enough.
Are you sure? I know the release manager and talked to him yesterday about it. While 64 bit linux firefox is built, and is not distributed via the download button on firefox.com, mozilla.com, etc. You'd need to go directly to the ftp site or one of the mirrors to get it.
If google only filed defensive patents, I might agree. But they've got an immense patent portfolio and have used it extensively for purposes far beyond defensive.
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Maybe you have not heard about Microsoft suing andriod makers over such silly patents as the idea of an index, or a graphic that displays while a page is loading. Or the dozens of other equally silly IP extortion scams launched by Microsoft.
I didn't say anything at all in Microsoft's defense.
Google may not be perfect, but Microsoft's IP litigation is in a class by itself.
Again, I'm not making any claims about Microsoft. I'm simply expressing amazement that people still see Google as this benevolent entity that only ever acts in the public's best interest (or at worst, defensively, as you seemed to imply) Google is a publicly traded multi-national corporation that is driven by the need to expand markets and increase revenue. If they did not see monetary value in this "invention", they would not have applied for the patent, offensively, defensively, or otherwise. Their application for this patent was not done out of altruism.
When you get down to it, whatever the motivations, this is a bad patent.
Strange, I've had glow.mozilla.org up for a couple hours now (along with a pile of tabs split across several windows) and it's really impressively lightweight. It's typically around 3-10% of CPU time and its memory footprint is 400 MB (~850 virtual)
Re:Can't switch 'til delicious add-on works
on
Firefox 4 Released!
·
· Score: 1
Yahoo, although they thoroughly mis-managed all sorts of stuff related to delicious, never announced that delicious is getting shut down. They have, however, laid off a bunch of employees from the project and are apparently looking to sell it. While the future is uncertain, there's plenty of reason to expect that delicious will survive, and hopefully thrive, under somebody else's umbrella.
The browser you get from mozilla.com is a 32 bit binary. Try installing the 32 bit flash. It worked well for me on Debian squeeze.
Re:Can't switch 'til delicious add-on works
on
Firefox 4 Released!
·
· Score: 2
The latest rumors are that delicious is being sold, possibly to StumbledUpon. Unfortunately, given the lack of support that delicious gets internally at yahoo and the amount of time it takes for sales like this to happen, I suspect that third-party add-ons will come before anything official. It's unfortunate, because delicious is a really useful service and hard to live without. I've made myself do so with firefox 4, largely due to the uncertainty about its future.
I'm not sure about that. It's pretty apparent to me that the crazies don't have much concern about the condition there car is in once they reach their destination. As long as they get there first! Damage is a secondary consideration.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but man, there are some crazy drivers there! As far as I can tell traffic laws are viewed merely as suggestions, and there's no enforcement at all. For all the crazy driving I witnessed in the time I lived around there, I probably saw no more than 2 or 3 instances of police involvement.
I lived in metro-Boston for a long time (I moved away about a year ago), and my only question about this whole project is, "why?" The Mass DCR (Dept of Conservation & Resources) is legally free of any liability for damage to cars due to road disrepair, and it is clearly evident. Potholes deep enough to cause severe damage are common, and unless the DCR staff goes out of its way to avoid ever driving, there's no way they could be unaware of these. (That's hard to imagine, since the only organization more poorly run in the entire Boston area is the MBTA, operator of the public transit system.) You don't need a GPS to find the potholes, you just get in your car and drive, they'll find you. Just watch out when they do!
I suppose, in fairness, that this article is only referring to Boston proper, not the greater Boston area. Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc. Maybe the roads in Boston will be great because of this, but everybody's car will be so trashed by the time they get there that it won't matter.
Gah. The SF Bay Area is fucked, but this really makes me not miss Boston!
By showing such clear support for the FCC it's equally clear you are far more behind a totalitarian state than myself.
It's funny how you seem to equate regulation with totalitarianism. It was precisely the de-regulation of the broadband market in ~2001 that effectively killed any real competition. I'd argue that without that de-regulation, there would be enough competition among broadband providers that we wouldn't even have to worry about regulated net neutrality. Customers could simply switch to another ISP if they were unhappy with the traffic shaping policies of their current provider. Today, however, with a monopoly (or maybe duopoly -- telco and cable co) controlling the entire broadband market in most of the US, customers have no recourse against traffic-shaping or filtering policies that they find unacceptable.
Furthermore, if his ISP built the network, they damn well do have the right to degrade the services they wish to. They'll ultimately drive customers away, but hey, it's their network.
And where will these customers go once the ISP drives them away? Unfortunately, in most of the US, customers have no more than two broadband providers to choose from (the cable company and the telephone company).
I don't get why there is so much blind faith in bureaucracies and so much blind suspicion of companies. It's entirely backwards, when you think about it.
Because, unfortunately, the major broadband providers in the US are even less accountable to the people than the bureaucracies are. I would love to see that change, but it doesn't look like the broadband market is going to see any sort of competition any time soon.
What about the deal between Obama and the Republicans regarding Bush-era tax cuts and extending unemployment benefits? The unemployment benefits should certainly be counted as an increase in spending. It seems to me that the Republicans are perfectly happy to vote for just about anything at all, as long as there's a tax cut attached to it.
Am I the only one that is none the wiser for that post? What is a 'wave' supposed to be or do? Can someone explain in plain English what the purpose of Google Wave is?
The best answer I've heard to date for this question is "It's something that's supposed to make young people understand the confusion that old people feel when they try to use a computer."
Well, you realize that Google is the default in the upstream (non-ubuntu branded) firefox browser because they contribute 90% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue, right? [1] Clearly, Google sees a lot of value in partnerships like this. I don't think anybody would argue that Yahoo!'s spending power is greater than Google's. So, if Google sees value in something, they have the money to take it. It's not cynical, it's a business reality.
Foursquare hasn't turned down anything, as far as anybody knows. In fact, the Yahoo! buyout is still only rumor. The article is basically representing the opinion of some analyst entrepreneur. Quoting from the article:
Sometimes making a fortune is dumb, writes entrepreneur Charlie O'Donnell—which is why, O'Donnell adds, Foursquare will wisely walk away from a rumored $100 million offer from Yahoo.
Who's Charlie O'Donnell? What's his role in Foursquare? Is he really making statements on their behalf? I doubt it. Quoting from the photo caption later on,
[Photo: Laughing Squid's pic of Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley who, to be fair, may not have turned down anything yet.]
So, wtf? There's no story here, it's just some random dude repeating what some other random dude said would be a wise move.
If, as DeWitt & Stonebreaker claim, MapReduce is a "major step backwards", we ought to be able to skip right past this patent and use whatever the state of the art is... Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, these days most of the people you correspond with are likely to use gmail, so Google is still getting a copy of a lot of your mail. That doesn't detract at all from the satisfaction and enjoyment I get out of running my own systems, of course.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the number of people questioning the desire to be self-hosted, but I am. To hear the tone of this discussion, you'd think that Google invented email and anybody who didn't want to use their offering was somehow a freak who was asking for all sorts of trouble. I've been self-hosted for mail, web, etc, for over a decade, and I can say that it's been almost completely enjoyable. It's interesting and educational, and you've got all sorts of visibility into stuff that Google doesn't expose to you. It's really not very difficult or time-consuming, and as long as your hosting provider is reputable you won't have any issues with blacklisting or reliability. No, it's probably not a great idea to host what should be a stable email server on the end of a residential cable modem connection, but that shouldn't surprise anybody.
For what it's worth, my mail server setup uses Debian's exim4-daemon-heavy package with spamassassin and greylistd. Filtering is accomplished via procmail, and mailboxes are stored in mbox format. At some point I'll likely install an IMAP server, since mobile access via k9 mail is more convenient than running mutt via an ssh client on my phone. I don't run a web mail interface, but it sounds like roundcube is worth a look should I ever care.
Well, they did say that "Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com's global infrastructure through the company's first 5 years". They wouldn't be doing that if it wasn't taking off.
Keep in mind that "cloud computing" is a really vague term that is used to describe all sorts of different technologies and platforms. It's still really immature, in terms of best practices and that sort of thing. There are still a lot of people throwing around the "cloud will solve all our problems" mantra.
At a previous job (in a computer science research lab), the director got all excited about Amazon's cloud stuff. He wanted my team to move everything to AWS, from our email service to our backups of user data. We researched pricing, thought about how it'd change our service model, and wrote up our findings. When we presented the results to him, he simply refused to believe that the AWS solution was actually significantly more expensive than what we had been doing. It was inconceivable to him that there were workloads that didn't see a major cost reduction when moved to the cloud. Eventually saner heads prevailed, and we were able to convince him that we shouldn't move all our stuff to AWS, but it took a lot of effort to overcome the buzzword enthusiasm.
That said, however, I really think there are situations where the AWS model makes a lot of sense. Your application must be able to scale to additional servers easily, transparently, and at least semi-automatically. It must be easy to deploy in multiple datacenters, so you can insulate yourself from outages like the big one that hit Amazon's East Coast region a few months ago. And it must be easy to scale your application down to fewer servers when the workload is lighter. If your usage patterns are spiky enough that you will occasionally need lots of capacity for a short time, but less capacity most of the time, then AWS is a really interesting option.
I haven't thought as much about Google AppEngine or Microsoft Azure, but they'd likely be similar. The big difference between them and AWS is that they essentially abstract away all the scaling stuff. It's a potentially good model, but you need to write your application specifically to target their environment. You need to do that for AWS as well, but the model is somewhat more similar to the traditional server-oriented model.
The point of IPv6 test day is not to test IPv6 connectivity. We know the protocol works. The point is to give the ISPs and site operators experience with running their sites in a dual-stack configuration. Even by accessing these sites via IPv4, you're taking part in this experiment. IPv4 will be around for a long time, and network operators need to know how things are going to go when some of their users are on v6 and others are on v4. Your ISP, even if they shut off end-user v6 access after v6 day, will have gained significant experience.
It's most certainly not a waste of time.
For those of us who spend a lot of time in the shell, screen is quite handy. The MIT AI Lab's ITS system from the 70's had this functionality built in to its equivalent of the TTY driver. You could detach your session from the current terminal, leave it alone in a "headless" sort of state, then reconnect at a later time. You didn't need to plan ahead and make sure that your jobs were started in a screen session, it just always worked. Screen is basically an effort to emulate this functionality in userland for POSIXy systems.
:) Fair enough. IMO, if you really need flash, the 32 bit version is worth running. On a Debian-ish box, you need ia32-libs, but otherwise it's straightforward enough.
Are you sure? I know the release manager and talked to him yesterday about it. While 64 bit linux firefox is built, and is not distributed via the download button on firefox.com, mozilla.com, etc. You'd need to go directly to the ftp site or one of the mirrors to get it.
If google only filed defensive patents, I might agree. But they've got an immense patent portfolio and have used it extensively for purposes far beyond defensive.
And my claim is that it doesn't excuse the creation of yet another bad patent. Defensive bad patents are still bad patents.
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Maybe you have not heard about Microsoft suing andriod makers over such silly patents as the idea of an index, or a graphic that displays while a page is loading. Or the dozens of other equally silly IP extortion scams launched by Microsoft.
I didn't say anything at all in Microsoft's defense.
Google may not be perfect, but Microsoft's IP litigation is in a class by itself.
Again, I'm not making any claims about Microsoft. I'm simply expressing amazement that people still see Google as this benevolent entity that only ever acts in the public's best interest (or at worst, defensively, as you seemed to imply) Google is a publicly traded multi-national corporation that is driven by the need to expand markets and increase revenue. If they did not see monetary value in this "invention", they would not have applied for the patent, offensively, defensively, or otherwise. Their application for this patent was not done out of altruism.
When you get down to it, whatever the motivations, this is a bad patent.
If Google did not patent this, Microsoft would have; then Microsoft would have sued Google over it's use.
People still have this delusion that Google is not evil. Amazing.
Strange, I've had glow.mozilla.org up for a couple hours now (along with a pile of tabs split across several windows) and it's really impressively lightweight. It's typically around 3-10% of CPU time and its memory footprint is 400 MB (~850 virtual)
Yahoo, although they thoroughly mis-managed all sorts of stuff related to delicious, never announced that delicious is getting shut down. They have, however, laid off a bunch of employees from the project and are apparently looking to sell it. While the future is uncertain, there's plenty of reason to expect that delicious will survive, and hopefully thrive, under somebody else's umbrella.
The browser you get from mozilla.com is a 32 bit binary. Try installing the 32 bit flash. It worked well for me on Debian squeeze.
The latest rumors are that delicious is being sold, possibly to StumbledUpon. Unfortunately, given the lack of support that delicious gets internally at yahoo and the amount of time it takes for sales like this to happen, I suspect that third-party add-ons will come before anything official. It's unfortunate, because delicious is a really useful service and hard to live without. I've made myself do so with firefox 4, largely due to the uncertainty about its future.
I'm not sure about that. It's pretty apparent to me that the crazies don't have much concern about the condition there car is in once they reach their destination. As long as they get there first! Damage is a secondary consideration.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but man, there are some crazy drivers there! As far as I can tell traffic laws are viewed merely as suggestions, and there's no enforcement at all. For all the crazy driving I witnessed in the time I lived around there, I probably saw no more than 2 or 3 instances of police involvement.
I lived in metro-Boston for a long time (I moved away about a year ago), and my only question about this whole project is, "why?" The Mass DCR (Dept of Conservation & Resources) is legally free of any liability for damage to cars due to road disrepair, and it is clearly evident. Potholes deep enough to cause severe damage are common, and unless the DCR staff goes out of its way to avoid ever driving, there's no way they could be unaware of these. (That's hard to imagine, since the only organization more poorly run in the entire Boston area is the MBTA, operator of the public transit system.) You don't need a GPS to find the potholes, you just get in your car and drive, they'll find you. Just watch out when they do!
I suppose, in fairness, that this article is only referring to Boston proper, not the greater Boston area. Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc. Maybe the roads in Boston will be great because of this, but everybody's car will be so trashed by the time they get there that it won't matter.
Gah. The SF Bay Area is fucked, but this really makes me not miss Boston!
By showing such clear support for the FCC it's equally clear you are far more behind a totalitarian state than myself.
It's funny how you seem to equate regulation with totalitarianism. It was precisely the de-regulation of the broadband market in ~2001 that effectively killed any real competition. I'd argue that without that de-regulation, there would be enough competition among broadband providers that we wouldn't even have to worry about regulated net neutrality. Customers could simply switch to another ISP if they were unhappy with the traffic shaping policies of their current provider. Today, however, with a monopoly (or maybe duopoly -- telco and cable co) controlling the entire broadband market in most of the US, customers have no recourse against traffic-shaping or filtering policies that they find unacceptable.
Furthermore, if his ISP built the network, they damn well do have the right to degrade the services they wish to. They'll ultimately drive customers away, but hey, it's their network.
And where will these customers go once the ISP drives them away? Unfortunately, in most of the US, customers have no more than two broadband providers to choose from (the cable company and the telephone company).
I don't get why there is so much blind faith in bureaucracies and so much blind suspicion of companies. It's entirely backwards, when you think about it.
Because, unfortunately, the major broadband providers in the US are even less accountable to the people than the bureaucracies are. I would love to see that change, but it doesn't look like the broadband market is going to see any sort of competition any time soon.
What about the deal between Obama and the Republicans regarding Bush-era tax cuts and extending unemployment benefits? The unemployment benefits should certainly be counted as an increase in spending. It seems to me that the Republicans are perfectly happy to vote for just about anything at all, as long as there's a tax cut attached to it.
It looks like there may be room for just a little hope: What's next for delicious? from the delicious blog.
Am I the only one that is none the wiser for that post? What is a 'wave' supposed to be or do? Can someone explain in plain English what the purpose of Google Wave is?
The best answer I've heard to date for this question is "It's something that's supposed to make young people understand the confusion that old people feel when they try to use a computer."
Well, you realize that Google is the default in the upstream (non-ubuntu branded) firefox browser because they contribute 90% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue, right? [1] Clearly, Google sees a lot of value in partnerships like this. I don't think anybody would argue that Yahoo!'s spending power is greater than Google's. So, if Google sees value in something, they have the money to take it. It's not cynical, it's a business reality.
noah
1. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9120866/Google_deal_produces_88_of_Mozilla_s_revenue (Yeah, it's somewhat dated. Please feel free to dig up something newer.)
Who's Charlie O'Donnell? What's his role in Foursquare? Is he really making statements on their behalf? I doubt it. Quoting from the photo caption later on,
So, wtf? There's no story here, it's just some random dude repeating what some other random dude said would be a wise move.
If, as DeWitt & Stonebreaker claim, MapReduce is a "major step backwards", we ought to be able to skip right past this patent and use whatever the state of the art is... Right?