I don't think there is a good generic recommendation. It depends on your application.
The main thing that I think people need to do is to think beyond the notion of The One True Database and focus more on grouping data and related computation behind clean interfaces. Sometimes behind that interface you use a traditional SQL database, and sometimes you do something else. But so many people build systems where the database is both the internal API and the single integration point, turning a historical accident into a key architectural feature.
As examples of what people are doing once they think outside the SQL box, take a look at Dynamo, Bigtable, or Mnesia. But my point isn't that you should build your system around one of those instead; it's that you should be thinking of any given solution like that as a tool in your toolbox, something that your system might use for now.
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
Partly true, and in that, partly necessary.
A lot of what's going on in what I will reluctantly call the "Web 2.0" world is built around database-centric frameworks. The SQL RDBMS is a strongly centralized approach, and since it was invented in the days of the mainframe, that's not a big surprise. So if you start out with a normal PHP or Rails setup, you've implicitly bought into centralized thinking whether you need it or not.
Sometimes, that centralization is a pretty poor approach, and compute offerings from Amazon and EC2 push people away from that. It's a struggle for some; people who have only built SQL-backed web apps have a strong bias to centralization. It always worries me when I talk with a team that can only talk about "the database" (or "the server" or "the application"); if you grow sufficiently, one of anything isn't enough.
Sometimes, though, centralization is legitimately hard to avoid. A lot of Web 2.0 apps are inherently social, and social graphs are hard to partition. If you are moving to London and want to find people in your social network who live there, that's not an easy problem to distribute, especially if you need things to stay up to the minute and work reliably.
But then again, I also know people eating at McD's... Just because "everyone" does it doesn't make it relevant. Actually, if anything, it makes it irrelevant.
You should get together with that other guy. He thinks it's irrelevant because nobody's using it. You think it's irrelevant because everybody's using it. Together, you could be contemptuous and dismissive of everything!
What fun! It would be a party. Wait, no, it would be more like the opposite of a party. But either way, the rest of us would be better off.
Google understands that sometimes things don't scale as well as you hoped, which is probably the real reason for the eternal beta status of so many google products; they can just close new subscriptions any time. Use the same model when the pressure is on and it will keep the fires burning low while you work on the replacement.
This sounds plausible, but it is often a path to failure.
You can get away with growth limits during an early private beta phase, but turning away interested users when you catch fire with the general public is asking for trouble. Many of them will never come back. My pals at Google tell me that they now see GMail's slow-growth approach as a giant mistake, something that cost them lots of users that they have not so far managed to get back.
If you can make the thing work fast from day one, that's great. But a lot of these sites would never have even existed in the first place if it weren't so easy to get them up and running (if not scalably) in the first place.
That is a false dichotomy. Doing all the scaling work up front is indeed expensive. Being ready to do it in stages just as you need it isn't. You just have to know what you're doing.
How do "major web site" (as in "in any way important or at least interesting") and "Twitter" belong in the same sentence?
They are at position 933 on Alexa's list of the world's most visited websites. I'd guess that means circa 1.5m registered users, 2.5m visitors/month, and 7.5m page views/day. As a comparison, they have about 2-3x the reach of Slashdot.
They may seem less well known to you than that because it's a social networking app that has spread mostly by word of mouth. If your friends use it, you won't be able to escape it; otherwise, it will seem irrelevant.
An important, related issue is the loss of local knowledge.
If you did a web startup ten years ago, you pretty much had to hire a sysadmin. If you had a good one, they would yell at your developers about their retarded, unscalable designs. Having a scary bearded man threaten you with defenestration has its downsides, but it does give you an incentive to consider the impact to operations.
The ever-lower cost of hosting is also a problem. If you tried to just throw $250k of hardware at a scaling issue back then, hopefully some executive would come by and ask some WTF-ish questions. (Unless you were at Boo.com or Webvan, natch.) But now, monthly rental on equivalent computing power is circa $400. Who'd bitch about that? Which allows you to really settle in to a totally unscalable architecture.
By the time you get big enough to really have to worry about scalability more than just turning on caching, you ought to be able to produce enough revenue to reimplement the site. If not, obviously you aren't relevant (or you aren't clever enough.):)
I've heard this theory a lot. With regrettable frequency, it's part of noob entrepreneur business plans. I see three big problems with it.
If a sudden surge in popularity is forcing you to work on scalability, that's exactly the point that you don't want to work on scalability. Finally, people care about your site! So now you want to give them cool new features regularly, so they don't go away again. Plus, they discover (and create) problems that you need to solve with new code.
Scaling is much harder to do when you're behind than when you're ahead. If you're already creaking under load, you run around doing a lot of quick fixes that do nothing for the long term. All of the budget you planned for that rebuild can quickly get eaten up just keeping things from catching on fire.
Per-user margins have been steadily declining for pretty much the life of the web. Decreased hardware and bandwidth costs mask some of that. And the vast growth of the internet audience makes up for the rest. But over time you have needed larger and larger numbers of people to have a viable web business. So you need to serve a lot more people to support a staff than you did early on.
Twitter is a good example of all of these problems. They surely started out saying they would worry about scaling later. Then later came, and they had other things to do: new features, dealing with abusers, setting up a customer support infrastructure. Their quick scaling fixes kept their heads barely above water, but they didn't do much for the long term. And they are still in the "grow big, grow fast" stage, so they don't have any revenue and would rather wait a while longer to deal with that.
Sites like Twitter are popping up precisely because the bar is very low to get your idea out on the 'net and compete. Sure, the cost in dollars and person hours is much higher to refactor for stability later, but would Twitter have even come into existence if that was a requirement from the start? Would its founders have considered it a worthwhile risk?
That's a common after-the-fact excuse for not thinking at all about performance, but I've concluded that it's mostly bullshit.
Sure, if you consider these questions up front and know what you're doing, it's completely possible to defer most of the work until things start to pick up. That's a very legitimate business decision, and if you get a big surprise in your growth curve, it's possible to get crushed. But with a little load testing, responsible development practices, and a little forethought, you've got a very good chance of avoiding a disaster. And none of that needs to be a big barrier to just getting something out.
On the other hand, if you just don't think about those questions at all, building things willy nilly with no preparation for refactoring and growth down the road, then that's just idiotic. You are in effect betting that you will fail, in that your site will work only if it doesn't get popular. And with something like Twitter, where the network effect is king and you could only make money with a shitload of traffic, massive growth is the only way to succeed.
From what I can tell, Twitter is firmly in that second camp. They've been going for nearly two years, and they've been shaky for most of it. One black eye from a sudden surge is acceptable, and for some is even a badge of honor. But more than a year of load-based suckage, to the point where you are an international joke, is a sign of plain incompetence. Although it hasn't killed Twitter, it has killed other businesses, and Twitter is not out of the woods yet.
When it gets higher taxes it passes the costs on to the consumer.
Maybe, maybe not. If they do, then the consumer will change their behavior. As we are seeing right now with the price of oil.
It don't work for cigarettes either, governments keep raising that sin tax on cigarettes to try and get people to quit smoking so they can be healthier and not die of cancer, but smokers still buy cigarettes even if the price of cigarettes has gone insanely high.
You are utterly wrong. Wrong to the point of negligence. Could you look something up now and then before you run your mouth?
I went to Google and typed in cigarette tax smoking rate study. In about 3 seconds, I found an easy-to-read newspaper article about a study that shows that cigarette taxes are very effective in reducing smoking. Carbon taxes would be similarly effective, but cap-and-trade systems seem to be an adequate substitute.
That makes about as much sense as a church selling sin credits to stop people from sinning.
In the modern world, we call them sin taxes. E.g., the punitive tax on cigarettes to get people to stop smoking. They work quite well. One alternative to a cap-and-trade system is a carbon tax.
Did you know that the whole cap and trade system of carbon credits was invented by Enron?
Do you have the slightest bit of proof of that? As far as I can tell it goes back to a couple of Harvard economists, Roberts and Spence, in a mid-70s paper.
It seems to violate the law of thermodynamics in that CO2 molecules are destroyed somehow, and proves itself to be very unscientific.
I suspect you of trolling, as I'm not sure anybody could really be that retarded. But just in case:
Most carbon credits come from emitting less. Say you've got an industrial plant with a big furnace, one that emits X CO2 per year. Then you improve energy efficiency, so you're now emitting X/2 CO2. You can just be happy with your contribution to terraforming earth. Or you can sell your emissions reduction to somebody else who has a harder time reducing their CO2 emissions. They will have bought a carbon credit.
Another approach is sequestration, where you take the CO2 and get rid of it. Some of this does involve destroying CO2 molecules, which is perfectly scientific. Destroying mass is pretty hard, and destroying atoms isn't easy, either. But destroying molecules is so easy that I'm doing it right now. For sequestration, one might destroy CO2 while creating calcium carbonate.
If you want to be less publicly idiotic in the future, try Wikipedia before posting:
It's a pretty standard web shopping cart system, where you buy spells. Not that you can perform, mind you. You're paying for them to do hoodoo. No proof or anything, but they do guarantee their work.
My favorite part is that they link out to a review site, ratethecaster.com, an independent site that says how good they are. Which just happens to be on the same IP.
The correct response to that question is, "why WOULD you design it without MySQL or some other database engines?"
That's not the correct answer, but it's a reasonable question.
SQL databases are great for a certain range of problems. They're obviously terrible for other sorts. And there's a fair bit of middle ground where the right choice depends on conditions. If you don't understand other options, you can't possibly know when those other options are the right ones.
FYI I'm not the only person who thinks this. One of the fathers of the modern database, Michael Stonebraker, recently said this:
"We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a 'one size fits all' solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of âoefrom scratchâ specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow's requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday's needs." -- From the paper The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite).
Of course, sometimes you don't care that your system excels at anything. There are plenty of average problems out there, and as long as that's all you want to work on, only knowing how to design for SQL databases can be perfectly fine.
There's definitely work out there for people who are one trick ponies, but generally not on the projects where I help with the hiring.
A random person (to me you are anyway) on the Internet says to trust their authority.
I gave you the numbers I used. You want to check the numbers, go ahead. You've got better numbers, go ahead. Or if you want to admit that you're basing your claims for compensation on no facts at all, that's fine too.
Most other customers are getting the exact same value you are: none yet
No, they get extra value that I don't.
Most other customers aren't using it. I don't have hard numbers here, but the low selection, the high system and network requirements for using it compared with just using DVDs, and the experience of my friends in trying to get people to watch movies on computers suggest that this is a minor, minor sideshow for now.
You think you've got something to bitch about? The vast majority of their customer base has much better video and audio on whatever they've hooked their DVD players to, and no good way to put their computers in the mix. Netflix has just told all of them to go pay $100 if they want the on-line option on their TV. And you know what? Nobody minds. They're excited about the step forward.
You'll keep waiting because they won't do it unless you provide a business case for them. Sucking it up and taking whatever they dish out will not do jack.
Am I advocating that? No. I'm going to wait until a plausible business case for them even exists. Because right now, it doesn't.
I expect to receive the same value that others who pay the same amount get. I expect customer service, and if I don't get it, I take my business elsewhere. That's how capitalism works.
Not really.
Capitalism mainly works by people looking at what they pay and what they get and deciding if it's a good deal for them. Vendors then compete for that business, pushing them toward delivering maximum value at minimum prices.
You pitching a fit because a few Windows users are getting something extra is envy. It's a foolish envy, because it's not like anybody is stopping you from installing Windows or getting a Roku box, which cost about the same, and which all of those people paid for. And it's a pointless envy because nobody else is offering a better deal on DVDs plus online video for Linux or Mac users anyhow.
You started off this thread by claiming that Netflix were stupid and failed. When it was explained to you why their choice was in fact reasonable for now and part of a plausible plan for success, this became about what you personally wanted because you were envious. Now you're down to saying you'd like somebody to give you a quarter to make you feel better about something that everybody else is already ok with.
Either live up to your rhetoric and actually take your business elsewhere, or quit your bitching. Failing that, do your pointless bitching elsewhere, to people who actually care to hear it.
I don't want them to kill the video downloads. Where did you get that absurd idea?
I never said you did. I'm just saying that the maximum reasonable compensation is the amount extra they're allegedly charging you for a service you're not using. Which we can get at by imagining what would change if they shut it down entirely.
when you have done so, or have concrete data to back up your position here, this is entirely unbacked specuation.
I have friends who built one, so I know whereof I speak.
Bandwidth costs are your biggest issue. Expect circa $10k per gigabit line when you're buying a few. Netflix can probably get it for less, but I'll run with the numbers I have.
Assuming 1% of customers use the feature regularly and average 3 movies a month (which is probably high for now) and assuming they watch them all in a 6-hour window during just 10 days of the month (to account for peak times; again, a high estimate) that's a peak of 4250 movies simultaneously, so let's say you'll need 7 1-gigabit circuits, for a cost of $0.84 million per year. A couple of cabinets will cost you circa $5k per month, and you'll need a couple of ops guys to keep this running, so figure a total of $1.2m per year in direct OPEX. Another $800k per year should more than cover any operational expenditures that the rest of Netflix takes care of.
The position remains: to keep me a happy customer, I should get the same value as the other customers or get some compensation back. I really don't see why you're fighting me on this.
If you're saying this is your own personal and irrational desire that you'd like to indulge, that's fine. Godspeed. I was under the impression you thought your position made some sort of sense.
It doesn't. Most other customers are getting the exact same value you are: none yet. And even if they were to refund every penny that you might conceivably be paying toward the service it would be a tiny fraction of what you want in compensation. Compensation for a service that you're not using only because you use a platform that, when you picked it, you knew would exclude you from all sorts of stuff that other people get.
And wait, I did the per-customer math wrong. $2m a year over 8m customers is $0.25 per customer per year, or about 2 cents a month. If they refund you everything, that's what you'd get. And that's not even accounting for the postage and handling savings from people who substitute on-line viewing for mailing DVDs back and forth.
Wanting them to give you compensation is like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and demanding a discount because you keep kosher and won't eat the shrimp. You're still getting all the movies you want, and you're not getting the downloads only because of a choice you made.
I run only Linux, so I can't get the downloads either. I look forward to when I can. But I don't want them thinking all Linux users act like they're entitled to everything, regardless of how possible it is or what the real costs are.
I'd argue that it's more akin to only letting you use the drive-thru if you own a Ford car instead of your Prius, because Pepsi requires it.
And if that happened, McDonald's still wouldn't give you anything.
So they should be perfectly happy to give us $2/mo back.
Not at all. They are taking what would be profit and putting it back into R&D, so that in five years when the online movie business actually matters, they have a solid offering. Which is exactly what their investors want them to be doing.
If you compare plan prices with other services, they're all about the same. If Netflix closed down their video service tomorrow, they wouldn't drop their prices. They're the market leader; they don't have to. They'd just put the money into a different sort of R&D.
Even if they did drop their prices, killing the video downloads probably wouldn't get you much. I could put together a similar offering for under couple million a year in operating expenses, (including staff time but excluding the studio revenue share). That's like $0.20 per month per Netflix customer. And probably less given that they already have a substantial internet presence, so they wouldn't have to hire as many people as I would. It could even be that the people actually watching online are renting fewer DVDs, so Netflix might already be turning a profit on their online offering. Meaning that killing it would get you bupkis.
'd be paying a hefty sum to use a feature that they let their other customers can use for free, and that's a ridiculous thing to require your customers to do IMHO.
Yes! I don't have a car, and so can't use drive-through windows. That's unfair! I demand that McDonald's charge me less for my in-store orders. Or give me a car.
Seriously, all of the people using the movie downloads are people with relatively modern home computers, broadband connections, up-to-date copies of Windows, decent screens, and a comfortable setup for watching movies on their computer. My guess is that less than 5% of Netflix users have ever watched a full movie on line, and circa 1% watch more movies on line than they do via DVD.
You could claim that Neflix is also screwing all those other people. Or you could treat it like it is: an experiment that is so early on that they don't even know how to charge for it properly, so they're just giving it to some customers for free to see how the market develops.
Until then, you might consider being content with getting exactly the service you signed up at the price you were happy to pay before. If you get upset every time you see a Windows user getting something that you don't as a Mac or Linux user, you're going to have a stroke long before Netflix talks the studios around on this.
But they won't provide "instant watching" to Mac and Linux users (5-10% of the global userbase, let alone the tech-savvy Netflix base), rather they'll charge the same price for fewer features?
I don't know the details for Netflix, but I've heard the scoop from other negotiations for video rights. Netflix probably had no choice in this. The studios are incredibly suspicious of digital content because they are afraid it will lead to more piracy. They are also incredibly retarded technically. My guess is that the Windows DRM stuff is a non-negotiable studio mandate.
Netflix sees the downloadable stuff as the heart of their long-term future; mailing DVDs will eventually be as quaint as eight-track tapes. They'd be fools to jeopardize their studio relationships right now over 5% of their current user base. I'm sure that they think (as I do) that the studios will eventually come around on this, just like the big music publishers are starting to. There's no long-term win in upsetting them now, and a lot of risk.
Regardless, with the Roku box coming out, you can watch things that way. I'm going to get one and some cheap Firewire TV capture device so I can watch movies on my home Linux computer.
Oh, if only there were a "+1, Sadly Hilarious" moderation.
No shit. The "it's all in the database" is the modern equivalent of 80-column mind.
Not that databases aren't neat, but there are a lot of people out there calling themselves programmers that couldn't build squat without an SQL interpreter involved. One of my favorite interview questions is, "Ok, now how would you design that without MySQL?" People make the funniest faces.
low-branch alkanes that averages around 6 to 7 carbon atoms per molecule [...] lot of catalytic cracking processes are quite happy to spew out branched hydrocarbons
Holy crap! That is the single most informative post I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Please do the world a favor and find some place in Wikipedia for that explanation.
Actually, their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value.
And that error is one that I feel like so many businesses make. Some yutz with an MBA and no real understanding of the business cuts anything that doesn't pay off in the short term, because that's the easy way to good quarterly numbers. At least for long enough for them to get promoted and/or for their options to vest. Sadly, those cuts include the kind of long-term investments that got the company to where they are.
I've never been able to think of a decent way to fix this. Anybody got an idea?
I think it's odd/funny/sad/hilarious that we make a big deal when "companies listen to their customers". Isn't that what they are supposed to be doing?
In my view, there are two kinds of service companies.
One is the friendly, generally small service that provides the service because they like doing it, and aims to make a reasonably living at it. Think a friendly neighborhood restaurant or a great family doctor. They love thoughtful, involved customers because they get their best feedback from them.
The other kind is a machine for extracting money from people. Any service given is the minimum necessary. They are not there because they like their work and want to serve you; they are there to take your money. They want a bunch of pliant sheeple as customers; if you are an active consumer, you are a problem to be suppressed or eliminated. For this, think of cellphone companies, large corporate gyms, and large banks.
There is no choice. We *must* drive to work, we must take our kids to the doctor, we must go to the grocery store, etc.
Hear that rushing sound? It's me crying you a river.
There is plenty of choice.
A lot of Americans have chosen to commute long distances. To buy houses in suburbs where driving is the only option. To drive large vehicles. They've supported more highways, less transit, and zoning that favors cars over walking and biking.
At the national level, they have chosen to support a full-on war against a major oil-producing nation. And they've chosen to accompany it with a lot of imperialist, anti-Islamic rhetoric that sure isn't going to win many friends in the world's oil-producing nations. And let's not forget choosing to support subsidies and tax breaks on oil and oil-intensive lifestyles.
There has been plenty of choice. What people aren't liking is the consequences of their choices.
There is no 'market economy' in oil. Period.
That's flatly wrong. Read The Economist. Last week they had a 14-page section on the future of the energy sector. OPEC nations, as well as many others, have been adding supply. All sorts of previously uneconomic oil sources will be tapped because the new price makes it uneconomical. It's just that demand in Asia has grown a lot faster than supply.
The current peak also has a lot to do with the crash after the previous one. For a long time, oil was cheap, so nobody invested in exploration or development of new oilfields. It takes many years to bring new supply sources on line. If we haven't hit peak oil, look for prices to be absurdly low again circa 2015, hopefully modulo a $2/gal carbon tax.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there is a good generic recommendation. It depends on your application.
The main thing that I think people need to do is to think beyond the notion of The One True Database and focus more on grouping data and related computation behind clean interfaces. Sometimes behind that interface you use a traditional SQL database, and sometimes you do something else. But so many people build systems where the database is both the internal API and the single integration point, turning a historical accident into a key architectural feature.
As examples of what people are doing once they think outside the SQL box, take a look at Dynamo, Bigtable, or Mnesia. But my point isn't that you should build your system around one of those instead; it's that you should be thinking of any given solution like that as a tool in your toolbox, something that your system might use for now.
Speak for yourself. I'm running Web 2.3 beta 5, and it's nice to have a numeric metric that proves how much I'm ahead of the rest of you chumps.
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
Partly true, and in that, partly necessary.
A lot of what's going on in what I will reluctantly call the "Web 2.0" world is built around database-centric frameworks. The SQL RDBMS is a strongly centralized approach, and since it was invented in the days of the mainframe, that's not a big surprise. So if you start out with a normal PHP or Rails setup, you've implicitly bought into centralized thinking whether you need it or not.
Sometimes, that centralization is a pretty poor approach, and compute offerings from Amazon and EC2 push people away from that. It's a struggle for some; people who have only built SQL-backed web apps have a strong bias to centralization. It always worries me when I talk with a team that can only talk about "the database" (or "the server" or "the application"); if you grow sufficiently, one of anything isn't enough.
Sometimes, though, centralization is legitimately hard to avoid. A lot of Web 2.0 apps are inherently social, and social graphs are hard to partition. If you are moving to London and want to find people in your social network who live there, that's not an easy problem to distribute, especially if you need things to stay up to the minute and work reliably.
But then again, I also know people eating at McD's... Just because "everyone" does it doesn't make it relevant. Actually, if anything, it makes it irrelevant.
You should get together with that other guy. He thinks it's irrelevant because nobody's using it. You think it's irrelevant because everybody's using it. Together, you could be contemptuous and dismissive of everything!
What fun! It would be a party. Wait, no, it would be more like the opposite of a party. But either way, the rest of us would be better off.
Google understands that sometimes things don't scale as well as you hoped, which is probably the real reason for the eternal beta status of so many google products; they can just close new subscriptions any time. Use the same model when the pressure is on and it will keep the fires burning low while you work on the replacement.
This sounds plausible, but it is often a path to failure.
You can get away with growth limits during an early private beta phase, but turning away interested users when you catch fire with the general public is asking for trouble. Many of them will never come back. My pals at Google tell me that they now see GMail's slow-growth approach as a giant mistake, something that cost them lots of users that they have not so far managed to get back.
If you can make the thing work fast from day one, that's great. But a lot of these sites would never have even existed in the first place if it weren't so easy to get them up and running (if not scalably) in the first place.
That is a false dichotomy. Doing all the scaling work up front is indeed expensive. Being ready to do it in stages just as you need it isn't. You just have to know what you're doing.
How do "major web site" (as in "in any way important or at least interesting") and "Twitter" belong in the same sentence?
They are at position 933 on Alexa's list of the world's most visited websites. I'd guess that means circa 1.5m registered users, 2.5m visitors/month, and 7.5m page views/day. As a comparison, they have about 2-3x the reach of Slashdot.
They may seem less well known to you than that because it's a social networking app that has spread mostly by word of mouth. If your friends use it, you won't be able to escape it; otherwise, it will seem irrelevant.
An important, related issue is the loss of local knowledge.
If you did a web startup ten years ago, you pretty much had to hire a sysadmin. If you had a good one, they would yell at your developers about their retarded, unscalable designs. Having a scary bearded man threaten you with defenestration has its downsides, but it does give you an incentive to consider the impact to operations.
The ever-lower cost of hosting is also a problem. If you tried to just throw $250k of hardware at a scaling issue back then, hopefully some executive would come by and ask some WTF-ish questions. (Unless you were at Boo.com or Webvan, natch.) But now, monthly rental on equivalent computing power is circa $400. Who'd bitch about that? Which allows you to really settle in to a totally unscalable architecture.
By the time you get big enough to really have to worry about scalability more than just turning on caching, you ought to be able to produce enough revenue to reimplement the site. If not, obviously you aren't relevant (or you aren't clever enough.) :)
I've heard this theory a lot. With regrettable frequency, it's part of noob entrepreneur business plans. I see three big problems with it.
Twitter is a good example of all of these problems. They surely started out saying they would worry about scaling later. Then later came, and they had other things to do: new features, dealing with abusers, setting up a customer support infrastructure. Their quick scaling fixes kept their heads barely above water, but they didn't do much for the long term. And they are still in the "grow big, grow fast" stage, so they don't have any revenue and would rather wait a while longer to deal with that.
Sites like Twitter are popping up precisely because the bar is very low to get your idea out on the 'net and compete. Sure, the cost in dollars and person hours is much higher to refactor for stability later, but would Twitter have even come into existence if that was a requirement from the start? Would its founders have considered it a worthwhile risk?
That's a common after-the-fact excuse for not thinking at all about performance, but I've concluded that it's mostly bullshit.
Sure, if you consider these questions up front and know what you're doing, it's completely possible to defer most of the work until things start to pick up. That's a very legitimate business decision, and if you get a big surprise in your growth curve, it's possible to get crushed. But with a little load testing, responsible development practices, and a little forethought, you've got a very good chance of avoiding a disaster. And none of that needs to be a big barrier to just getting something out.
On the other hand, if you just don't think about those questions at all, building things willy nilly with no preparation for refactoring and growth down the road, then that's just idiotic. You are in effect betting that you will fail, in that your site will work only if it doesn't get popular. And with something like Twitter, where the network effect is king and you could only make money with a shitload of traffic, massive growth is the only way to succeed.
From what I can tell, Twitter is firmly in that second camp. They've been going for nearly two years, and they've been shaky for most of it. One black eye from a sudden surge is acceptable, and for some is even a badge of honor. But more than a year of load-based suckage, to the point where you are an international joke, is a sign of plain incompetence. Although it hasn't killed Twitter, it has killed other businesses, and Twitter is not out of the woods yet.
When it gets higher taxes it passes the costs on to the consumer.
Maybe, maybe not. If they do, then the consumer will change their behavior. As we are seeing right now with the price of oil.
It don't work for cigarettes either, governments keep raising that sin tax on cigarettes to try and get people to quit smoking so they can be healthier and not die of cancer, but smokers still buy cigarettes even if the price of cigarettes has gone insanely high.
You are utterly wrong. Wrong to the point of negligence. Could you look something up now and then before you run your mouth?
I went to Google and typed in cigarette tax smoking rate study. In about 3 seconds, I found an easy-to-read newspaper article about a study that shows that cigarette taxes are very effective in reducing smoking. Carbon taxes would be similarly effective, but cap-and-trade systems seem to be an adequate substitute.
That makes about as much sense as a church selling sin credits to stop people from sinning.
In the modern world, we call them sin taxes. E.g., the punitive tax on cigarettes to get people to stop smoking. They work quite well. One alternative to a cap-and-trade system is a carbon tax.
Did you know that the whole cap and trade system of carbon credits was invented by Enron?
Do you have the slightest bit of proof of that? As far as I can tell it goes back to a couple of Harvard economists, Roberts and Spence, in a mid-70s paper.
They said that the sign was not misleading saying that a DVD player was 'digital' and the VCR was the 'video recorder' part.
Ha! That's fabulous. In that case, all VCRs are digital: they all have digital clocks right on the front!
It seems to violate the law of thermodynamics in that CO2 molecules are destroyed somehow, and proves itself to be very unscientific.
I suspect you of trolling, as I'm not sure anybody could really be that retarded. But just in case:
Most carbon credits come from emitting less. Say you've got an industrial plant with a big furnace, one that emits X CO2 per year. Then you improve energy efficiency, so you're now emitting X/2 CO2. You can just be happy with your contribution to terraforming earth. Or you can sell your emissions reduction to somebody else who has a harder time reducing their CO2 emissions. They will have bought a carbon credit.
Another approach is sequestration, where you take the CO2 and get rid of it. Some of this does involve destroying CO2 molecules, which is perfectly scientific. Destroying mass is pretty hard, and destroying atoms isn't easy, either. But destroying molecules is so easy that I'm doing it right now. For sequestration, one might destroy CO2 while creating calcium carbonate.
If you want to be less publicly idiotic in the future, try Wikipedia before posting:
This is my most recent favorite: http://www.fastspells.com/
It's a pretty standard web shopping cart system, where you buy spells. Not that you can perform, mind you. You're paying for them to do hoodoo. No proof or anything, but they do guarantee their work.
My favorite part is that they link out to a review site, ratethecaster.com, an independent site that says how good they are. Which just happens to be on the same IP.
BEST SCAM EVAR!!!
The correct response to that question is, "why WOULD you design it without MySQL or some other database engines?"
That's not the correct answer, but it's a reasonable question.
SQL databases are great for a certain range of problems. They're obviously terrible for other sorts. And there's a fair bit of middle ground where the right choice depends on conditions. If you don't understand other options, you can't possibly know when those other options are the right ones.
FYI I'm not the only person who thinks this. One of the fathers of the modern database, Michael Stonebraker, recently said this:
"We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a 'one size fits all' solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of âoefrom scratchâ specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow's requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday's needs." -- From the paper The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite).
Of course, sometimes you don't care that your system excels at anything. There are plenty of average problems out there, and as long as that's all you want to work on, only knowing how to design for SQL databases can be perfectly fine.
There's definitely work out there for people who are one trick ponies, but generally not on the projects where I help with the hiring.
A random person (to me you are anyway) on the Internet says to trust their authority.
I gave you the numbers I used. You want to check the numbers, go ahead. You've got better numbers, go ahead. Or if you want to admit that you're basing your claims for compensation on no facts at all, that's fine too.
Most other customers are getting the exact same value you are: none yet
No, they get extra value that I don't.
Most other customers aren't using it. I don't have hard numbers here, but the low selection, the high system and network requirements for using it compared with just using DVDs, and the experience of my friends in trying to get people to watch movies on computers suggest that this is a minor, minor sideshow for now.
You think you've got something to bitch about? The vast majority of their customer base has much better video and audio on whatever they've hooked their DVD players to, and no good way to put their computers in the mix. Netflix has just told all of them to go pay $100 if they want the on-line option on their TV. And you know what? Nobody minds. They're excited about the step forward.
You'll keep waiting because they won't do it unless you provide a business case for them. Sucking it up and taking whatever they dish out will not do jack.
Am I advocating that? No. I'm going to wait until a plausible business case for them even exists. Because right now, it doesn't.
I expect to receive the same value that others who pay the same amount get. I expect customer service, and if I don't get it, I take my business elsewhere. That's how capitalism works.
Not really.
Capitalism mainly works by people looking at what they pay and what they get and deciding if it's a good deal for them. Vendors then compete for that business, pushing them toward delivering maximum value at minimum prices.
You pitching a fit because a few Windows users are getting something extra is envy. It's a foolish envy, because it's not like anybody is stopping you from installing Windows or getting a Roku box, which cost about the same, and which all of those people paid for. And it's a pointless envy because nobody else is offering a better deal on DVDs plus online video for Linux or Mac users anyhow.
You started off this thread by claiming that Netflix were stupid and failed. When it was explained to you why their choice was in fact reasonable for now and part of a plausible plan for success, this became about what you personally wanted because you were envious. Now you're down to saying you'd like somebody to give you a quarter to make you feel better about something that everybody else is already ok with.
Either live up to your rhetoric and actually take your business elsewhere, or quit your bitching. Failing that, do your pointless bitching elsewhere, to people who actually care to hear it.
I don't want them to kill the video downloads. Where did you get that absurd idea?
I never said you did. I'm just saying that the maximum reasonable compensation is the amount extra they're allegedly charging you for a service you're not using. Which we can get at by imagining what would change if they shut it down entirely.
when you have done so, or have concrete data to back up your position here, this is entirely unbacked specuation.
I have friends who built one, so I know whereof I speak.
Bandwidth costs are your biggest issue. Expect circa $10k per gigabit line when you're buying a few. Netflix can probably get it for less, but I'll run with the numbers I have.
Assuming 1% of customers use the feature regularly and average 3 movies a month (which is probably high for now) and assuming they watch them all in a 6-hour window during just 10 days of the month (to account for peak times; again, a high estimate) that's a peak of 4250 movies simultaneously, so let's say you'll need 7 1-gigabit circuits, for a cost of $0.84 million per year. A couple of cabinets will cost you circa $5k per month, and you'll need a couple of ops guys to keep this running, so figure a total of $1.2m per year in direct OPEX. Another $800k per year should more than cover any operational expenditures that the rest of Netflix takes care of.
The position remains: to keep me a happy customer, I should get the same value as the other customers or get some compensation back. I really don't see why you're fighting me on this.
If you're saying this is your own personal and irrational desire that you'd like to indulge, that's fine. Godspeed. I was under the impression you thought your position made some sort of sense.
It doesn't. Most other customers are getting the exact same value you are: none yet. And even if they were to refund every penny that you might conceivably be paying toward the service it would be a tiny fraction of what you want in compensation. Compensation for a service that you're not using only because you use a platform that, when you picked it, you knew would exclude you from all sorts of stuff that other people get.
And wait, I did the per-customer math wrong. $2m a year over 8m customers is $0.25 per customer per year, or about 2 cents a month. If they refund you everything, that's what you'd get. And that's not even accounting for the postage and handling savings from people who substitute on-line viewing for mailing DVDs back and forth.
Wanting them to give you compensation is like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and demanding a discount because you keep kosher and won't eat the shrimp. You're still getting all the movies you want, and you're not getting the downloads only because of a choice you made.
I run only Linux, so I can't get the downloads either. I look forward to when I can. But I don't want them thinking all Linux users act like they're entitled to everything, regardless of how possible it is or what the real costs are.
I'd argue that it's more akin to only letting you use the drive-thru if you own a Ford car instead of your Prius, because Pepsi requires it.
And if that happened, McDonald's still wouldn't give you anything.
So they should be perfectly happy to give us $2/mo back.
Not at all. They are taking what would be profit and putting it back into R&D, so that in five years when the online movie business actually matters, they have a solid offering. Which is exactly what their investors want them to be doing.
If you compare plan prices with other services, they're all about the same. If Netflix closed down their video service tomorrow, they wouldn't drop their prices. They're the market leader; they don't have to. They'd just put the money into a different sort of R&D.
Even if they did drop their prices, killing the video downloads probably wouldn't get you much. I could put together a similar offering for under couple million a year in operating expenses, (including staff time but excluding the studio revenue share). That's like $0.20 per month per Netflix customer. And probably less given that they already have a substantial internet presence, so they wouldn't have to hire as many people as I would. It could even be that the people actually watching online are renting fewer DVDs, so Netflix might already be turning a profit on their online offering. Meaning that killing it would get you bupkis.
'd be paying a hefty sum to use a feature that they let their other customers can use for free, and that's a ridiculous thing to require your customers to do IMHO.
Yes! I don't have a car, and so can't use drive-through windows. That's unfair! I demand that McDonald's charge me less for my in-store orders. Or give me a car.
Seriously, all of the people using the movie downloads are people with relatively modern home computers, broadband connections, up-to-date copies of Windows, decent screens, and a comfortable setup for watching movies on their computer. My guess is that less than 5% of Netflix users have ever watched a full movie on line, and circa 1% watch more movies on line than they do via DVD.
You could claim that Neflix is also screwing all those other people. Or you could treat it like it is: an experiment that is so early on that they don't even know how to charge for it properly, so they're just giving it to some customers for free to see how the market develops.
Until then, you might consider being content with getting exactly the service you signed up at the price you were happy to pay before. If you get upset every time you see a Windows user getting something that you don't as a Mac or Linux user, you're going to have a stroke long before Netflix talks the studios around on this.
But they won't provide "instant watching" to Mac and Linux users (5-10% of the global userbase, let alone the tech-savvy Netflix base), rather they'll charge the same price for fewer features?
I don't know the details for Netflix, but I've heard the scoop from other negotiations for video rights. Netflix probably had no choice in this. The studios are incredibly suspicious of digital content because they are afraid it will lead to more piracy. They are also incredibly retarded technically. My guess is that the Windows DRM stuff is a non-negotiable studio mandate.
Netflix sees the downloadable stuff as the heart of their long-term future; mailing DVDs will eventually be as quaint as eight-track tapes. They'd be fools to jeopardize their studio relationships right now over 5% of their current user base. I'm sure that they think (as I do) that the studios will eventually come around on this, just like the big music publishers are starting to. There's no long-term win in upsetting them now, and a lot of risk.
Regardless, with the Roku box coming out, you can watch things that way. I'm going to get one and some cheap Firewire TV capture device so I can watch movies on my home Linux computer.
Oh, if only there were a "+1, Sadly Hilarious" moderation.
No shit. The "it's all in the database" is the modern equivalent of 80-column mind.
Not that databases aren't neat, but there are a lot of people out there calling themselves programmers that couldn't build squat without an SQL interpreter involved. One of my favorite interview questions is, "Ok, now how would you design that without MySQL?" People make the funniest faces.
low-branch alkanes that averages around 6 to 7 carbon atoms per molecule [...] lot of catalytic cracking processes are quite happy to spew out branched hydrocarbons
Holy crap! That is the single most informative post I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Please do the world a favor and find some place in Wikipedia for that explanation.
Actually, their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value.
And that error is one that I feel like so many businesses make. Some yutz with an MBA and no real understanding of the business cuts anything that doesn't pay off in the short term, because that's the easy way to good quarterly numbers. At least for long enough for them to get promoted and/or for their options to vest. Sadly, those cuts include the kind of long-term investments that got the company to where they are.
I've never been able to think of a decent way to fix this. Anybody got an idea?
I think it's odd/funny/sad/hilarious that we make a big deal when "companies listen to their customers". Isn't that what they are supposed to be doing?
In my view, there are two kinds of service companies.
One is the friendly, generally small service that provides the service because they like doing it, and aims to make a reasonably living at it. Think a friendly neighborhood restaurant or a great family doctor. They love thoughtful, involved customers because they get their best feedback from them.
The other kind is a machine for extracting money from people. Any service given is the minimum necessary. They are not there because they like their work and want to serve you; they are there to take your money. They want a bunch of pliant sheeple as customers; if you are an active consumer, you are a problem to be suppressed or eliminated. For this, think of cellphone companies, large corporate gyms, and large banks.
There is no choice. We *must* drive to work, we must take our kids to the doctor, we must go to the grocery store, etc.
Hear that rushing sound? It's me crying you a river.
There is plenty of choice.
A lot of Americans have chosen to commute long distances. To buy houses in suburbs where driving is the only option. To drive large vehicles. They've supported more highways, less transit, and zoning that favors cars over walking and biking.
At the national level, they have chosen to support a full-on war against a major oil-producing nation. And they've chosen to accompany it with a lot of imperialist, anti-Islamic rhetoric that sure isn't going to win many friends in the world's oil-producing nations. And let's not forget choosing to support subsidies and tax breaks on oil and oil-intensive lifestyles.
There has been plenty of choice. What people aren't liking is the consequences of their choices.
There is no 'market economy' in oil. Period.
That's flatly wrong. Read The Economist. Last week they had a 14-page section on the future of the energy sector. OPEC nations, as well as many others, have been adding supply. All sorts of previously uneconomic oil sources will be tapped because the new price makes it uneconomical. It's just that demand in Asia has grown a lot faster than supply.
The current peak also has a lot to do with the crash after the previous one. For a long time, oil was cheap, so nobody invested in exploration or development of new oilfields. It takes many years to bring new supply sources on line. If we haven't hit peak oil, look for prices to be absurdly low again circa 2015, hopefully modulo a $2/gal carbon tax.