The title of this post makes no sense.
FAST is an enterprise search engine. It isn't even remotely like Google. In fact if you RTFA, you'll see it says: "You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects." So this is so different from what Google currently does that Google is more likely to buy it than build it.
It seems to me the only way this technology ever winds up on the road is if the owner of the car signs a waver at the car dealership to hold GM harmless and assume all responsibility for driverless mode accidents.
GM could also lobby the government to make laws specific to these situations. If the government believes that the technology would dramatically reduce the risk of driving, they could well play ball. All sorts of industries have specific laws shielding them from certain kinds of torts.
If it were not for Rails, Ruby would be as popular now as Lua or Tcl. JRuby would not exist. Ruby 1.9 would probably not exist. Rubinus would probably not exist. In other words, Ruby's future would be very dim.
A lot of Python users want to thing its big, but it just isn't. If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.
Perhaps your experience is somewhat limited. Python is in heavy use and/or development at Google, Microsoft, YouTube (now part of Google but they made the choice independently), the Washington Post, NASA, etc.
Is that enough to make it "big"? Well you didn't define "big" so it's hard to say. I think that measured in lines of code, Perl is much bigger than Python. As is COBOL. And FORTRAN. So what? Accumulated lines of code is not a very interesting metric.
Then he should push for more charitable donations rather than higher taxation. Instead, he advocates the latter.
He pushes for more charitable donations by example. He pushes for more taxation by advocating for them. Once again, there is no hypocrisy.
Also note that, while there are many good charities out there, many charities exist solely for the purpose of paying staff a check. Some have as much as a 90% operating cost, giving mere pennies on the dollar donated to the cause they advocate.
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Others run by prominent individuals seem to exist only for promoting a positive image of the individual too. Rich guy who does dubious things to earn money starts charity to give it away. Gets large tax deductions, continues to control where all of his money goes and boosts his public image while he continues to rape society on the side.
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
It's hard working middle class people trying to acquire wealth that are crushed by the jackboot of confiscatory taxation.
Oh, I'm crushed, I'm crushed. I'm actually Canadian so I likely pay higher taxes than you. But I just had a baby and didn't pay a penny at the hospital. Neither did my employer. I'm looking forward to sending my daughter to excellent public schools in a few years. What a CRUSHING BURDEN it is to be middle class in a socialist country. OH THE PAIN!
The thing about guys like Buffet is... while they support higher taxation, they, themselves, donate their monies to charities to manage. They obviously don't trust the government to properly manage their own money but think that everyone else (be it in just the ultra-rich or a wider range of the population) should give their money to the government to manage for them.
There is nothing hypocritical in it. Buffet believes (as our government apparently believes) that it is more effective to give to charity than to government. That's why charitable givings are tax deductible. If Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith or Larry Birkhead wants (wanted) to avoid taxes they could also give money to charities. There is no double standard at all.
There are many people who advocate that their own taxes be raised in order to pay for a social program they believe to be for the greater good, whether it be public education, socialized medicine, intervention in the Balkans, the fight against AIDS in Africa, amelioration of global climate change and so forth. Many super-rich people ask quite explicitly to pay more taxes. Warren Buffet is a good example.
Pretty simple concept, but completely lost on programmers who think the database is the "backing store" for their code (which will likely be replaced or rewritten in few year anyway, especially stuff like PHP, Ruby, etc). No, the database is the foundation of the business. It should be properly designed.
You're generalizing from your specific situation. Often the goal is to sell the company in a few years to another company that will require you to integrate with their databases in any case. In that case both the code and the database are disposable (in the long run, both always are) but time to market is the immutable requirement. Every situation is different. It's even possible in some circumstances that performance is more important than integrity.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net.
Those are not "single points of failure" for the web. They are independent points of failure for many specific sites, just as with email, instant messaging, the television or the telephone.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure.
Who is going to pay to host all of these millions of MySpace and Facebook pages "in the cloud?" What's wrong with a model where each user decides how important their content is and entrusts it to a company that buys the appropriate level of redundancy. Facebook obviously has a ton of redundancy and pays for it with advertising. If you buy a cheap blog host, you probably have a lower level. If you want more, you can upgrade your service to a host with colocation or RAID or whatever meets your needs.
Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
There are probably more unique webservers on the Internet now than any time in the past. Virtual hosting is getting really popular.
The current model is not optimal technically, but it has a solid business model behind it. If we all wanted to put our stuff into one "cloud" we could buy that service from Akamai and their competitors.
One thing the Web DOES need (which fits its current business model nicely) is a way to nominate a failover site for a bit of content. The failover site could be bookmarked or pair linked. But for business reasons, the owner of the content should choose the failover site so they can decide how much reliability they want to pay for.
That's 281,474,976,710,656 different unique names that can point to somewhere on the web. Even if each eight-character shrunken name was assigned permanently then it is difficult to see how you could ever run out of names.
Did someone say that running out of names was a likely problem? Why did you even raise that issue?
So in short the answer is that these name shortening services are not going to damage the web - provided the links they provide are permanent
Let me rephrase that: "in short, the straw man problem I raised is not really a problem. There is no problem except perhaps for the real problem." Yes: the permanence of the link IS the issue raised by the summary above. What if these sites go down? What if they change their behaviour? What QOS have the people creating these links contracted for?
Another thing to chew on is what service does Google provide? To me, it's the ultimate URL shrinker. I remember one domain, www.google.com, and then from there I can go to anywhere else through a search-able database of links.
Yes but: if there exists another search engine with the same features and a similar algorithm to Google's, it can be used as a stand-in. But if I build a new URL shortening service and put it on a different domain, it is completely useless for interpreting pre-existing tiny URLs, because it lacks the database mapping hash keys to URLs.
Has Google damaged the web? I think the benefits out-weigh the problems. Search Engine Optimisation firms are damaging the semantics of the web in reaction to the power of the search engine but there can be no doubt that far more sites get exposure because of search engines than without them. On the whole, I'm willing to deal with Google spammers because the quality of the links is still high in-spite of them.
Now we're bringing search engine optimization into it. What's that got to do with the topic at hand???
URL shrinking services are the same. They have benefits and drawbacks. If you're listening to web-radio, it's far easier to give a shrunken URL which your listeners can jot down in a few seconds than spend thirty-seconds on a much larger URL.
Thanks doctor obvious. Yes, URL shrinking services have strengths and weaknesses. Like gasoline. And t-shirts. Let's discuss them instead of going off on tangents about SEO and hash space sizes.
The drawback is that the URL has no semantic meaning. I personally think the semantic meaning is less important than getting the URL out there.
This is a drawback for the user, but has nothing to do with net architecture. Please read the short summary above and discuss the topic at hand!
First: The bug was not in the runtime. It was a simple programming bug.
Second: the bug had nothing to do with parallel processing. It was an object leak due to event handling.
The fastest way to solve it would have been to print out the object graph of the program after it had started running and then again after it had "slowed down". They would have seen a particular class of object had become much more numerous over time. That's you're leaker. Memory leaks ARE often easier to track down empirically rather than by just reading the code over. After all, the bug is that the state of the application is in an unwanted state. So why wouldn't you want to characterize the nature of the unwanted state (not just "memory is gone" but "event listener objects are leaking")?
If Orkut and Yahoo Mash and other also rans want to take on Facebook there is only one way to do it. They must open up and become a virtual social network that is much bigger than Facebook. OpenSocial is not it: OpenSocial is about making life easy for apps developers: not making communication easy for end-users. A status update typed into Orkut or Yahoo or Twitter should be visible to people in all of the other services. Users should be able to invite other users to play authenticated games across network boundaries.
Mr Brin and Mr. Yang. Tear down those walls!
gang related issues, grow ops & drug related crime
It is the criminalization of normal human behaviour (mood altering plant consumption) that funds the gangs. Prosecuting drug buyers and sellers is much more insidious than prosecuting music copiers, because it delivers gangs a ready-made business model.
They said it will take 5 to 10 years. Therefore it will work using technologies that are not invented now. One might as well have said in 1997 that YouTube could not possible work.
I wrote an XML book a decade ago and I don't understand how it is different than documenting any other programming technology. You write chapters on various topics and you cut and paste examples into appropriate places with appropriate prose around them. Word, FrameMaker, TeX, DocBook, DITA: the container documentation technology is not particularly relevant. I mean sure, there are more sophisticated things you can do (auto-testing, auto doc-generation, XML escaped within XML etc.) but you need to tell us what kind of documentation you're trying to produce and why the no-brainer techniques are not sufficient for you.
Yeah, I heard that garbage collection lead to the total failure of a few businesses that were otherwise likely to succeed: like Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia and EBay. Google employs the inventor of Python and Apple added garbage collection to Objective C, so I guess those two companies are headed for the scrap heap as well.
Is the usage pattern of these apps the same as Firefox's? No. But I just thought that your imagination needed a little bit of prodding since you couldn't conceive of an application in which multiple inheritance is an appropriate tool. According to you it shouldn't have been invented at all. By the way: used properly, multiple inheritance is also a nice tool!
One of the key requirements of this specification is that it preserve all idiosyncracies of the Office file formats so that customers experience no loss of data. It is neither an accident nor a secret plot to keep it bug-for-bug compatible with Office. That is, in fact, the whole point. Whether this is a sound basis for a standard is for you to decide.
Western publishers are self-censoring anything remotely offensive to Muslims. This is just evidence that threats, intimidation and terrorism work.
Americans will go to any lengths to "fight terrorism" by invading countries basically uninvolved in terror, but given the chance to simply stand up and say: "we won't be intimidated by threats" the press folds like a three legged card table.
Grow a pair!
that anyone who thinks that CLI usage is not a feature of Linux think again? This topic is 12 minutes old and three post have already suggested we bury the command line; part of what makes Linux so fast, flexible and customizable is access to virtually every setting from a text editor. This is not something that needs to be changed, instead change your mindset that this is not Windows.
You've set up a false dichotomy. The other guys are saying that every setting should be available from a GUI. They did not say that the settings should be unavailable from the command line. Can we put away the "You're with us or you're against us" mentality? A person could be in favour of BOTH more powerful command lines and text files AND more powerful GUIs. The two are very complimentary. Most of the progress Linux has made over the last decade is because people have put aside those false dichotomies. In fact, this is often true for the technology industry in general...
You cannot use a planet with a completely different atmosphere as "control data". I could pick a random person elsewhere in the world and say that "if that person is gaining weight and you are gaining weight then the source of the weight gain is likely to be the same." Not really, it is much more likely to be a coincidence. Can we let the Mars thing drop? It's totally irrelevant.
I'm curious what you think the sarcasm in your answer contributes. I only mention it because it reminds me of a guy who I knew who didn't realize that his tone of smug superiority only annoyed the people around him without winning friends or influencing people. And it certainly didn't contribute to him getting laid!
Caring about other humans who are not your closest relatives also seems quite strange.
Uh....no....that's basic human nature. If you are walking down the street and see a child get hit by a car: do you stop and call 911 or do you think: "Doesn't have anything to do with me. He's not my relative." The word "strange" means "out of the ordinary" but caring about distant strangers is not "out of the ordinary" at all. Most people give to charities that help strangers. If you would not help the child and have never given money to a foreign-oriented charity then YOU are the strange one.
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The title of this post makes no sense. FAST is an enterprise search engine. It isn't even remotely like Google. In fact if you RTFA, you'll see it says: "You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects." So this is so different from what Google currently does that Google is more likely to buy it than build it.
It seems to me the only way this technology ever winds up on the road is if the owner of the car signs a waver at the car dealership to hold GM harmless and assume all responsibility for driverless mode accidents.
GM could also lobby the government to make laws specific to these situations. If the government believes that the technology would dramatically reduce the risk of driving, they could well play ball. All sorts of industries have specific laws shielding them from certain kinds of torts.
If it were not for Rails, Ruby would be as popular now as Lua or Tcl. JRuby would not exist. Ruby 1.9 would probably not exist. Rubinus would probably not exist. In other words, Ruby's future would be very dim.
A lot of Python users want to thing its big, but it just isn't. If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.
Perhaps your experience is somewhat limited. Python is in heavy use and/or development at Google, Microsoft, YouTube (now part of Google but they made the choice independently), the Washington Post, NASA, etc.
Is that enough to make it "big"? Well you didn't define "big" so it's hard to say. I think that measured in lines of code, Perl is much bigger than Python. As is COBOL. And FORTRAN. So what? Accumulated lines of code is not a very interesting metric.
Then he should push for more charitable donations rather than higher taxation. Instead, he advocates the latter.
He pushes for more charitable donations by example. He pushes for more taxation by advocating for them. Once again, there is no hypocrisy.
Also note that, while there are many good charities out there, many charities exist solely for the purpose of paying staff a check. Some have as much as a 90% operating cost, giving mere pennies on the dollar donated to the cause they advocate.
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Others run by prominent individuals seem to exist only for promoting a positive image of the individual too. Rich guy who does dubious things to earn money starts charity to give it away. Gets large tax deductions, continues to control where all of his money goes and boosts his public image while he continues to rape society on the side.
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
It's hard working middle class people trying to acquire wealth that are crushed by the jackboot of confiscatory taxation.
Oh, I'm crushed, I'm crushed. I'm actually Canadian so I likely pay higher taxes than you. But I just had a baby and didn't pay a penny at the hospital. Neither did my employer. I'm looking forward to sending my daughter to excellent public schools in a few years. What a CRUSHING BURDEN it is to be middle class in a socialist country. OH THE PAIN!
The thing about guys like Buffet is... while they support higher taxation, they, themselves, donate their monies to charities to manage. They obviously don't trust the government to properly manage their own money but think that everyone else (be it in just the ultra-rich or a wider range of the population) should give their money to the government to manage for them.
There is nothing hypocritical in it. Buffet believes (as our government apparently believes) that it is more effective to give to charity than to government. That's why charitable givings are tax deductible. If Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith or Larry Birkhead wants (wanted) to avoid taxes they could also give money to charities. There is no double standard at all.
One supports the law that benefits oneself.
There are many people who advocate that their own taxes be raised in order to pay for a social program they believe to be for the greater good, whether it be public education, socialized medicine, intervention in the Balkans, the fight against AIDS in Africa, amelioration of global climate change and so forth. Many super-rich people ask quite explicitly to pay more taxes. Warren Buffet is a good example.
Pretty simple concept, but completely lost on programmers who think the database is the "backing store" for their code (which will likely be replaced or rewritten in few year anyway, especially stuff like PHP, Ruby, etc). No, the database is the foundation of the business. It should be properly designed.
You're generalizing from your specific situation. Often the goal is to sell the company in a few years to another company that will require you to integrate with their databases in any case. In that case both the code and the database are disposable (in the long run, both always are) but time to market is the immutable requirement. Every situation is different. It's even possible in some circumstances that performance is more important than integrity.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net.
Those are not "single points of failure" for the web. They are independent points of failure for many specific sites, just as with email, instant messaging, the television or the telephone.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure.
Who is going to pay to host all of these millions of MySpace and Facebook pages "in the cloud?" What's wrong with a model where each user decides how important their content is and entrusts it to a company that buys the appropriate level of redundancy. Facebook obviously has a ton of redundancy and pays for it with advertising. If you buy a cheap blog host, you probably have a lower level. If you want more, you can upgrade your service to a host with colocation or RAID or whatever meets your needs.
Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
There are probably more unique webservers on the Internet now than any time in the past. Virtual hosting is getting really popular.
The current model is not optimal technically, but it has a solid business model behind it. If we all wanted to put our stuff into one "cloud" we could buy that service from Akamai and their competitors.
One thing the Web DOES need (which fits its current business model nicely) is a way to nominate a failover site for a bit of content. The failover site could be bookmarked or pair linked. But for business reasons, the owner of the content should choose the failover site so they can decide how much reliability they want to pay for.
That's 281,474,976,710,656 different unique names that can point to somewhere on the web. Even if each eight-character shrunken name was assigned permanently then it is difficult to see how you could ever run out of names.
Did someone say that running out of names was a likely problem? Why did you even raise that issue?
So in short the answer is that these name shortening services are not going to damage the web - provided the links they provide are permanent
Let me rephrase that: "in short, the straw man problem I raised is not really a problem. There is no problem except perhaps for the real problem." Yes: the permanence of the link IS the issue raised by the summary above. What if these sites go down? What if they change their behaviour? What QOS have the people creating these links contracted for?Another thing to chew on is what service does Google provide? To me, it's the ultimate URL shrinker. I remember one domain, www.google.com, and then from there I can go to anywhere else through a search-able database of links.
Yes but: if there exists another search engine with the same features and a similar algorithm to Google's, it can be used as a stand-in. But if I build a new URL shortening service and put it on a different domain, it is completely useless for interpreting pre-existing tiny URLs, because it lacks the database mapping hash keys to URLs.Has Google damaged the web? I think the benefits out-weigh the problems. Search Engine Optimisation firms are damaging the semantics of the web in reaction to the power of the search engine but there can be no doubt that far more sites get exposure because of search engines than without them. On the whole, I'm willing to deal with Google spammers because the quality of the links is still high in-spite of them.
Now we're bringing search engine optimization into it. What's that got to do with the topic at hand???
URL shrinking services are the same. They have benefits and drawbacks. If you're listening to web-radio, it's far easier to give a shrunken URL which your listeners can jot down in a few seconds than spend thirty-seconds on a much larger URL.
Thanks doctor obvious. Yes, URL shrinking services have strengths and weaknesses. Like gasoline. And t-shirts. Let's discuss them instead of going off on tangents about SEO and hash space sizes.
The drawback is that the URL has no semantic meaning. I personally think the semantic meaning is less important than getting the URL out there.
This is a drawback for the user, but has nothing to do with net architecture. Please read the short summary above and discuss the topic at hand!
First: The bug was not in the runtime. It was a simple programming bug. Second: the bug had nothing to do with parallel processing. It was an object leak due to event handling. The fastest way to solve it would have been to print out the object graph of the program after it had started running and then again after it had "slowed down". They would have seen a particular class of object had become much more numerous over time. That's you're leaker. Memory leaks ARE often easier to track down empirically rather than by just reading the code over. After all, the bug is that the state of the application is in an unwanted state. So why wouldn't you want to characterize the nature of the unwanted state (not just "memory is gone" but "event listener objects are leaking")?
If Orkut and Yahoo Mash and other also rans want to take on Facebook there is only one way to do it. They must open up and become a virtual social network that is much bigger than Facebook. OpenSocial is not it: OpenSocial is about making life easy for apps developers: not making communication easy for end-users. A status update typed into Orkut or Yahoo or Twitter should be visible to people in all of the other services. Users should be able to invite other users to play authenticated games across network boundaries. Mr Brin and Mr. Yang. Tear down those walls!
gang related issues, grow ops & drug related crime
It is the criminalization of normal human behaviour (mood altering plant consumption) that funds the gangs. Prosecuting drug buyers and sellers is much more insidious than prosecuting music copiers, because it delivers gangs a ready-made business model.
In what sense are computers "syntactical" and the human brain "semantic"?
I just don't see how it can work
They said it will take 5 to 10 years. Therefore it will work using technologies that are not invented now. One might as well have said in 1997 that YouTube could not possible work.
No upgrades. No support.
I wrote an XML book a decade ago and I don't understand how it is different than documenting any other programming technology. You write chapters on various topics and you cut and paste examples into appropriate places with appropriate prose around them. Word, FrameMaker, TeX, DocBook, DITA: the container documentation technology is not particularly relevant. I mean sure, there are more sophisticated things you can do (auto-testing, auto doc-generation, XML escaped within XML etc.) but you need to tell us what kind of documentation you're trying to produce and why the no-brainer techniques are not sufficient for you.
Yeah, I heard that garbage collection lead to the total failure of a few businesses that were otherwise likely to succeed: like Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia and EBay. Google employs the inventor of Python and Apple added garbage collection to Objective C, so I guess those two companies are headed for the scrap heap as well. Is the usage pattern of these apps the same as Firefox's? No. But I just thought that your imagination needed a little bit of prodding since you couldn't conceive of an application in which multiple inheritance is an appropriate tool. According to you it shouldn't have been invented at all. By the way: used properly, multiple inheritance is also a nice tool!
One of the key requirements of this specification is that it preserve all idiosyncracies of the Office file formats so that customers experience no loss of data. It is neither an accident nor a secret plot to keep it bug-for-bug compatible with Office. That is, in fact, the whole point. Whether this is a sound basis for a standard is for you to decide.
Western publishers are self-censoring anything remotely offensive to Muslims. This is just evidence that threats, intimidation and terrorism work. Americans will go to any lengths to "fight terrorism" by invading countries basically uninvolved in terror, but given the chance to simply stand up and say: "we won't be intimidated by threats" the press folds like a three legged card table. Grow a pair!
that anyone who thinks that CLI usage is not a feature of Linux think again? This topic is 12 minutes old and three post have already suggested we bury the command line; part of what makes Linux so fast, flexible and customizable is access to virtually every setting from a text editor. This is not something that needs to be changed, instead change your mindset that this is not Windows.
You've set up a false dichotomy. The other guys are saying that every setting should be available from a GUI. They did not say that the settings should be unavailable from the command line. Can we put away the "You're with us or you're against us" mentality? A person could be in favour of BOTH more powerful command lines and text files AND more powerful GUIs. The two are very complimentary. Most of the progress Linux has made over the last decade is because people have put aside those false dichotomies. In fact, this is often true for the technology industry in general...
You cannot use a planet with a completely different atmosphere as "control data". I could pick a random person elsewhere in the world and say that "if that person is gaining weight and you are gaining weight then the source of the weight gain is likely to be the same." Not really, it is much more likely to be a coincidence. Can we let the Mars thing drop? It's totally irrelevant.
I'm curious what you think the sarcasm in your answer contributes. I only mention it because it reminds me of a guy who I knew who didn't realize that his tone of smug superiority only annoyed the people around him without winning friends or influencing people. And it certainly didn't contribute to him getting laid!
Caring about other humans who are not your closest relatives also seems quite strange.
Uh....no....that's basic human nature. If you are walking down the street and see a child get hit by a car: do you stop and call 911 or do you think: "Doesn't have anything to do with me. He's not my relative." The word "strange" means "out of the ordinary" but caring about distant strangers is not "out of the ordinary" at all. Most people give to charities that help strangers. If you would not help the child and have never given money to a foreign-oriented charity then YOU are the strange one.