Been working at Netflix for the last two years. In that time, I've seen costs for "hardware" (in quotes because all that stuff is now at Amazon and CDNs) go through the roof. That's the easiest money to spend, and the only beancounters involved are the ones we work with to try to predict how much we'll spend, not constrain spending.
(Seriously, one of the things I love working at Netflix is the ability of an engineer to launch 1000 instances in the cloud, or, when we were in the DC, buy $100K worth of hardware, without any approval process)
There's no such thing as we "only have room for so much at any given time." And if there was, we'd solve it. It's the sort of problem you want to have, y'know?:)
My whole point was that this actually has nothing to do with Netflix. It wasn't lobbied for by Netflix (to the best of my knowledge). I don't see any chance of Netflix actually asking for enforcement of this law.
Boy howdy, you and I are so entirely on the same page in this regard. There are really two issues there:
1. Having multiple people's tastes poisons Netflix's ability to come up with very good matches for both of them. I know this intimately well -- my wife and I share a profile (it's not a money thing, it's just that we're sharing devices). That means I get to deal with her love for depressing documentaries and she gets to deal with my love for Pixar movies (which she finds to be emotionally manipulative. Don't look at me, look at the lawyer I married);
2. It'd sure be nice if you could sit your kids in front of a Netflix device and not worry about them being recommended Dead Snow because they liked Snow Day;
The first problem is relatively harder to solve; once Netflix solves this in the protocol, the people who build Netflix boxes will need to incorporate these changes into their client. You'll likely first see this in PC and PS3 streaming (because we can update the client whenever we want to), followed by other devices.
The second problem should be easier (though, personally, I fear the inevitable point at which we'll screw up and a non-kids thing leaks into a kid profile accidentally).
And Netflix has said that it's actively working on both of these issues.
As for jobs... I'm really not hot on publishing my work email address on slashdot -- that way lies madness -- but http://jobs.netflix.com/ is your friend.
I work for Netflix (but, obviously, this should not be taken to speak for my employer).
This is something that Netflix thinks about, and it's got about as many safeguards in place to prevent it (starting with the fact you can only have six active devices on your account, followed by the fact that your recommendations get less effective the more you share your account with someone with disparate tastes -- as anyone who shares their account with a spouse will tell you).
As noted in the article, this was pushed by the RIAA types, not Netflix. Netflix had nothing to do with it; it's just that it's being used as the most pervasive example of violation of this law because it's the easiest example.
(My background: I've been doing IT for the last 18 years or so; for the last two years, I've been working at Netflix, one of the highest-visibility cloud consumers out there. Until two weeks ago, I was on the IT side, focusing on the datacenter; about two weeks ago I moved over to Cloud Operations, focusing on the cloud (duh) and monitoring, specifically. The following is my opinion only, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer).
In my opinion, the cloud is the easiest way to launch a new service with reasonable redundancy and growth potential. It's how I would start off any new business. Have there been failures? Sure. But largely, cloud failures have only impacted cloud consumers who engineered their environments in a non-fault-tolerant way, in the mistaken belief that "the cloud never fails." The cloud fails. It fails all the time. But following good design principles (ideally, be in multiple regions; at minimum, be in multiple availability zones; test what happens when an AZ dies an ugly death) will give you better uptime, with better cost, than you would achieve for a reasonable amount of money running your own datacenter systems.
And then, once you've got a significant enough size with a big enough ongoing consumption of cloud resources, you can look at creating your own DC environment.
Two sorts of answers: 1. Anything going through our systems (email or home directories) obviously gets logged with a legal-strength discovery system on top of it; 2. See, the interesting thing is that -- and this is an opinion, mind you, not fact -- if you make it so people get anything they want through the company, they're less inclined to want to use their own equipment for work. It's not a "you can't use your own equipment" rule (we don't really have many rules), but rather (as my first boss here told me) "you shouldn't have to use your own equipment to do work. If you want something for work, we'll just get it." So if you can get exactly the platform you want through the company... it turns out that personal equipment is far less of an issue.
I'd say we're as exposed as other companies our size. We've got about 800 HQ employees; we've got to deal with SoX, investors, and PCI (we're a PCI Level 1 vendor). We're not a 20 person startup:)
Most of the comments before this one are a good example of the attitude of your average IT person toward this whole "personal equipment" thing.
Me, I work at a different company, where we decided to treat employees like responsible adults. We make sure people know how to secure their equipment and, if they want (and usually they do), we do it for them. If they want supported equipment, they choose between a wide selection of equipment choices (desktop/laptop, pc/mac/linux); if they want to be responsible for their own equipment, they can go and buy (and then expense) whatever equipment they want. I'm using an HTC Thunderbolt that I went to Verizon to purchase, then expensed, and then told the company to take over the contract (I could have simply expensed the contract on a monthly basis, but I'm lazy).
It's seemed to work pretty well for us, with no noticeable virus outbreaks. It supports that whole "our employees are our biggest asset" stuff that most companies just spout but never believe. In fact, it really comes down to that point -- IT people (much like HR people, BTW) mostly consider employees threat vectors, rather than colleagues. Here? It's the other way. And it seems to work pretty well.
Actually, you've got some good ideas, but once they're implemented, you no longer need GNU/Linux.
My life's been far better since I rebuilt my parents' computer with Windows 7 and then made it so they were not admins/power users, so they couldn't install anything.
Actually, while Israel has a long and storied tradition of killing enemy leaders, when it comes to TRIALS there's only ever been one death sentence imposed in Israel -- Adolf Eichmann. Israel does not have the death penalty.
I'm thankfully not smart enough to qualify, but I've worked with both Heretics and Jerks. One of the really nice things I love about my current workplace is their clear and very explicit "no brilliant jerks" policy. "For us, the cost to effective teamwork is too high."
The only time I've ever interviewed someone, walked out of the interview absolutely sure we had to hire them, and been wrong was when we hired one of the three smartest guys I've ever worked with -- who proved to be entirely ineffective in getting anything done because "we have to change everything because you're all a bunch of idiots!"
I don't know if there are; but I do know my wife (an attorney) absolutely refuses to watch movies featuring scenes with attorneys because the inaccuracies drive her up the wall.
AIX. It's a bit shocking. It's actually even more amusing -- when I joined Netflix, the production web servers were running Linux on Power.
That was a historical, vestigial thing, and while I can talk smack about the people who made those decisions originally, I can't actually speak to their reasoning originally.
I will say that our platform of choice now is Linux on x86. Thank God.
Just a quick note -- Netflix does have a Corporate Headquarters. I know. I work there. It's very nice. And the salaries are well-known to be noticeably above-average. It's a kick-ass place to work.
I'm not spilling any corporate secrets when I note that analysts have acknowledged for a while that the lower Netflix drives its subscription plans, the harder it will be to compete with it. We started with a, what, $15.95 plan, I think? (I was a subscriber back in 2002). The lowest plan which offers unlimited streaming is $8.99/month now. Pretty sure you'll never see it go up.
These things work beautifully. They're comfortable for wear (I typically put one on even if I'm not going to make a phone call), pair nicely with both the wired telephone and my iPhone, have great sound quality while talking to tech support, etc. Can't recommend enough.
What about En-Bloc clips for the M1 Garand? Holds a bunch of cartridges (and seriously, you can't be all pedantic about clip vs magazine and then get the cartridge/bullet thing wrong:) ), slides into the gun. Thoughts?
I've seen it defined (IMHO better) thus:
Clips hold rounds, but typically at least a part of each round protrudes from the clip; Magazines encase rounds.
(I work at Netflix, on the IT side. I mean, duh, I read slashdot).
The groups working on device support have nothing to do with the groups working on more content; the latter is largely a business effort anyway, whereas the former is SOME business efforts, and lots of technical efforts.
And my impression is that the top two priorities are:
1. We give you a Blackberry or an iPhone (you pick) 2. We pay for the plan 3. You use it responsibly 4. You figure out what "responsibly" means. 5. There is no Rule 5
Just to be pedantic, the box rental stores CAN get it from the same place you and I do these days, but probably don't -- because they get vastly better pricing by striking up deals with movie studios.
But the basic point -- that you can go ahead and rent movies you buy as a consumer -- is absolutely true. Want to compete with Netflix? Go and clean out a Best Buy and start renting to your friends. The IRS may be interested in you, but the MPAA can't touch you.
Slashdot Mirror
Been working at Netflix for the last two years. In that time, I've seen costs for "hardware" (in quotes because all that stuff is now at Amazon and CDNs) go through the roof. That's the easiest money to spend, and the only beancounters involved are the ones we work with to try to predict how much we'll spend, not constrain spending.
(Seriously, one of the things I love working at Netflix is the ability of an engineer to launch 1000 instances in the cloud, or, when we were in the DC, buy $100K worth of hardware, without any approval process)
I work at Netflix (CloudOps, not marketing).
There's no such thing as we "only have room for so much at any given time." And if there was, we'd solve it. It's the sort of problem you want to have, y'know? :)
Dude.
My whole point was that this actually has nothing to do with Netflix. It wasn't lobbied for by Netflix (to the best of my knowledge). I don't see any chance of Netflix actually asking for enforcement of this law.
Boy howdy, you and I are so entirely on the same page in this regard. There are really two issues there:
1. Having multiple people's tastes poisons Netflix's ability to come up with very good matches for both of them. I know this intimately well -- my wife and I share a profile (it's not a money thing, it's just that we're sharing devices). That means I get to deal with her love for depressing documentaries and she gets to deal with my love for Pixar movies (which she finds to be emotionally manipulative. Don't look at me, look at the lawyer I married);
2. It'd sure be nice if you could sit your kids in front of a Netflix device and not worry about them being recommended Dead Snow because they liked Snow Day;
The first problem is relatively harder to solve; once Netflix solves this in the protocol, the people who build Netflix boxes will need to incorporate these changes into their client. You'll likely first see this in PC and PS3 streaming (because we can update the client whenever we want to), followed by other devices.
The second problem should be easier (though, personally, I fear the inevitable point at which we'll screw up and a non-kids thing leaks into a kid profile accidentally).
And Netflix has said that it's actively working on both of these issues.
As for jobs ... I'm really not hot on publishing my work email address on slashdot -- that way lies madness -- but http://jobs.netflix.com/ is your friend.
Best,
-CF
Said it above -- this isn't for Netflix. It's just that NFLX is being used as an example of people violating this new law.
I work for Netflix (but, obviously, this should not be taken to speak for my employer).
This is something that Netflix thinks about, and it's got about as many safeguards in place to prevent it (starting with the fact you can only have six active devices on your account, followed by the fact that your recommendations get less effective the more you share your account with someone with disparate tastes -- as anyone who shares their account with a spouse will tell you).
As noted in the article, this was pushed by the RIAA types, not Netflix. Netflix had nothing to do with it; it's just that it's being used as the most pervasive example of violation of this law because it's the easiest example.
(My background: I've been doing IT for the last 18 years or so; for the last two years, I've been working at Netflix, one of the highest-visibility cloud consumers out there. Until two weeks ago, I was on the IT side, focusing on the datacenter; about two weeks ago I moved over to Cloud Operations, focusing on the cloud (duh) and monitoring, specifically. The following is my opinion only, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer).
In my opinion, the cloud is the easiest way to launch a new service with reasonable redundancy and growth potential. It's how I would start off any new business. Have there been failures? Sure. But largely, cloud failures have only impacted cloud consumers who engineered their environments in a non-fault-tolerant way, in the mistaken belief that "the cloud never fails." The cloud fails. It fails all the time. But following good design principles (ideally, be in multiple regions; at minimum, be in multiple availability zones; test what happens when an AZ dies an ugly death) will give you better uptime, with better cost, than you would achieve for a reasonable amount of money running your own datacenter systems.
And then, once you've got a significant enough size with a big enough ongoing consumption of cloud resources, you can look at creating your own DC environment.
Two sorts of answers: ... it turns out that personal equipment is far less of an issue.
1. Anything going through our systems (email or home directories) obviously gets logged with a legal-strength discovery system on top of it;
2. See, the interesting thing is that -- and this is an opinion, mind you, not fact -- if you make it so people get anything they want through the company, they're less inclined to want to use their own equipment for work. It's not a "you can't use your own equipment" rule (we don't really have many rules), but rather (as my first boss here told me) "you shouldn't have to use your own equipment to do work. If you want something for work, we'll just get it." So if you can get exactly the platform you want through the company
I'd say we're as exposed as other companies our size. We've got about 800 HQ employees; we've got to deal with SoX, investors, and PCI (we're a PCI Level 1 vendor). We're not a 20 person startup :)
Most of the comments before this one are a good example of the attitude of your average IT person toward this whole "personal equipment" thing.
Me, I work at a different company, where we decided to treat employees like responsible adults. We make sure people know how to secure their equipment and, if they want (and usually they do), we do it for them. If they want supported equipment, they choose between a wide selection of equipment choices (desktop/laptop, pc/mac/linux); if they want to be responsible for their own equipment, they can go and buy (and then expense) whatever equipment they want. I'm using an HTC Thunderbolt that I went to Verizon to purchase, then expensed, and then told the company to take over the contract (I could have simply expensed the contract on a monthly basis, but I'm lazy).
It's seemed to work pretty well for us, with no noticeable virus outbreaks. It supports that whole "our employees are our biggest asset" stuff that most companies just spout but never believe. In fact, it really comes down to that point -- IT people (much like HR people, BTW) mostly consider employees threat vectors, rather than colleagues. Here? It's the other way. And it seems to work pretty well.
Actually, you've got some good ideas, but once they're implemented, you no longer need GNU/Linux.
My life's been far better since I rebuilt my parents' computer with Windows 7 and then made it so they were not admins/power users, so they couldn't install anything.
Actually, while Israel has a long and storied tradition of killing enemy leaders, when it comes to TRIALS there's only ever been one death sentence imposed in Israel -- Adolf Eichmann. Israel does not have the death penalty.
I'm thankfully not smart enough to qualify, but I've worked with both Heretics and Jerks. One of the really nice things I love about my current workplace is their clear and very explicit "no brilliant jerks" policy. "For us, the cost to effective teamwork is too high."
The only time I've ever interviewed someone, walked out of the interview absolutely sure we had to hire them, and been wrong was when we hired one of the three smartest guys I've ever worked with -- who proved to be entirely ineffective in getting anything done because "we have to change everything because you're all a bunch of idiots!"
I don't know if there are; but I do know my wife (an attorney) absolutely refuses to watch movies featuring scenes with attorneys because the inaccuracies drive her up the wall.
AIX. It's a bit shocking. It's actually even more amusing -- when I joined Netflix, the production web servers were running Linux on Power.
That was a historical, vestigial thing, and while I can talk smack about the people who made those decisions originally, I can't actually speak to their reasoning originally.
I will say that our platform of choice now is Linux on x86. Thank God.
Actually, most of their (our) open-source stuff is basically in the Amazon cloud these days.
(I work at Netflix. In IT)
Just a quick note -- Netflix does have a Corporate Headquarters. I know. I work there. It's very nice. And the salaries are well-known to be noticeably above-average. It's a kick-ass place to work.
I'm not spilling any corporate secrets when I note that analysts have acknowledged for a while that the lower Netflix drives its subscription plans, the harder it will be to compete with it. We started with a, what, $15.95 plan, I think? (I was a subscriber back in 2002). The lowest plan which offers unlimited streaming is $8.99/month now. Pretty sure you'll never see it go up.
We've got two datacenters and I've spent ... well, way too much time in both of them. At some point, our network team discovered the Peltor bluetooth headsets -- see http://www.peltor.com/peltor.com/comm_detail.cfm?prod_family=BlueTooth%20Headsets&ind_prod_num=MT53H7AWS2001 -- and stocked up on about 3-4 headsets per datacenter.
These things work beautifully. They're comfortable for wear (I typically put one on even if I'm not going to make a phone call), pair nicely with both the wired telephone and my iPhone, have great sound quality while talking to tech support, etc. Can't recommend enough.
What about En-Bloc clips for the M1 Garand? Holds a bunch of cartridges (and seriously, you can't be all pedantic about clip vs magazine and then get the cartridge/bullet thing wrong :) ), slides into the gun. Thoughts?
I've seen it defined (IMHO better) thus:
Clips hold rounds, but typically at least a part of each round protrudes from the clip;
Magazines encase rounds.
Technically, unless you're in the group of people getting the first batch of discs, it's not even supported then :)
They can do both, you know.
(I work at Netflix, on the IT side. I mean, duh, I read slashdot).
The groups working on device support have nothing to do with the groups working on more content; the latter is largely a business effort anyway, whereas the former is SOME business efforts, and lots of technical efforts.
And my impression is that the top two priorities are:
1. More content;
2. More devices.
The rule where I work (Netflix) is simple:
1. We give you a Blackberry or an iPhone (you pick)
2. We pay for the plan
3. You use it responsibly
4. You figure out what "responsibly" means.
5. There is no Rule 5
I tried the Netflix PS3 streaming disc on my Samsung BD player -- no love. I don't think it'll work on every BD player.
Exclusive for game consoles, I suspect.
Just to be pedantic, the box rental stores CAN get it from the same place you and I do these days, but probably don't -- because they get vastly better pricing by striking up deals with movie studios.
But the basic point -- that you can go ahead and rent movies you buy as a consumer -- is absolutely true. Want to compete with Netflix? Go and clean out a Best Buy and start renting to your friends. The IRS may be interested in you, but the MPAA can't touch you.