Well first, RAID is not a backup. It's just hardware redundancy. If you delete a file or overwrite a specific revision, it's gone. If a file gets corrupted, it can get corrupted on your mirrored drive just as fast.
CDs and DVDs are decent backup media, but better in terms of archives. There's a difference. Archives are probably what you're talking about when you say things are "finished", backups are those "silly" things that we do on a regular basis.
P2P might be fine for popular movies or music, but it doesn't really work for personal stuff or confidential/sensitive business information.
If you don't have any data you care about, then fine, don't back anything up. Some of us have >10 TB of business data, and god forbid, if the server room catches fire and all the servers melt, we'd like to be able to get back all the business-critical data as it was the day before the fire.
JPEG in high quality mode does not really exhibit blocking problem, so it's not like JPEG 2000 is addressing a critical flaw of the JPEG format.
This is more or less what I was getting at when I said, "it's not clear to me... that we really need to bother coming up with much better compression methods for static images." If you use the highest possible quality of JPEG on most photographs, the loss in quality to compression isn't that big. If even that small a loss in quality is a deal-breaker for you, then you should use a lossless format. So the only real reason to worry about coming up with better compression (in my mind) is to be able to shrink file size. However, with ever-increasing bandwidth and storage capabilities, it doesn't seem to me that even the highest quality JPEGs are all that unwieldy.
You're right that there's a greater likelihood that we'll want better video compression, but even there I'm not sure. How much more efficiency can we get (by which I mean, how much smaller can we get the video files for a given video quality)? And at what cost of processing power for encoding/decoding? Given our increasing bandwidth/storage capabilities, I'm not sure how much work it's worth putting into improving that efficiency. Like let's say you can shave another 2% off your filesize, requiring 10% more processing power to decode, and it'll cost a couple million dollars to develop and promote that new encoding. Is that worth it to anyone? Obviously I'm just pulling those numbers out of thin air, but getting people to adopt a new format is very hard when the existing format is sufficient for their needs.
Not only that, but since lots more people have usb devices today than had tape backups 20 years ago, it's more likely that there will be a market in supporting those devices to some degree. If lots of people have USB drives when they move over to the new connector, someone will figure out that it's worth money to produce a USB-to-[new thing] adapter.
And that will probably happen in the short term, but there's still some point at which USB drives won't be readable anymore. It may take 50 years or 1,000, but it'll happen sooner or later. One question is, will anyone really care?
I think your post is very insightful, and I have an additional problem to throw into the mix: sorting through all the crap you've archived, even assuming you can read it all.
I don't know about you, but I've run lots of different backups on lots of different systems, and one of the problems that always comes up is just finding the revision of the file you want. People say, "I want the copy before I made this revision-- I think I did that about a month ago." Check the backups and there are no revisions from a month ago, but there are 20 from the month before. Next thing you know you're checking 20 copies by hand, and none of them are what you're looking for-- and that's even when your backup/archive system is working.
So when devising any kind of archive, I think it's at least worth considering, "How am I going to find what I'm looking for in 20 years?" Imagine yourself in 20 years, and you have every piece of data you've ever generated stored on some kind of media that holds hundreds of terabytes of data. You want to find some spreadsheet you made today (20 years ago). Maybe you don't remember exactly when you made the document-- you think about 15 years ago, but it's actually 20. You can't really remember what the filename was. You can't remember if you made it in Excel or OpenOffice, so you're not even sure what filetype you're looking for. What's going to be your method for finding that file?
I'm not suggesting it's an insoluble problem. It might be that it's not even a problem in 20 years because indexing/searching has become so good that your AI will be able to sort through terabytes in a couple seconds and make some good guesses about what you're looking for, but do you really want to rely on that happening?
I think you're exaggerating the problem a bit. Formats like GIF, JPEG, and ODF will most likely be readable somehow in 30 years. They may not be the format of choice, but we have open source readers for those things, so for as long as lots of people have data in those formats, someone will be maintaining viewers that allow reading them and probably converting them to newer formats. Besides, it's not clear to me that we're going to come up with much better compression methods for static images, or that we really need to bother coming up with much better compression methods for static images, which means it isn't that unlikely we'll still be using JPEG in 30 years. I'm not saying it's a lock or anything, but it's not *that* unlikely.
Now, with a format like ODF, if adoption isn't bigger before something new comes along, you might have a hard time reading that just because of the relative obscurity of the format (which is a problem JPEG doesn't have). In that case, it will probably depend entirely whether enough people have enough valuable information in ODF that some developers somewhere think it's worth writing a viewer.
Yes, ideally emulation would be available for every obsolete platform, and we'd all keep VM images of all our old operating systems. We'd all keep all of our old applications to install on those images, and VM software would always be backwards-compatible meaning that we'd never lose anything. I'd love to know that someone somewhere is working on that, if only for historical preservation. However, for the individual who might have limited resources, it probably won't be necessary. If it ever becomes necessary for that to happen for most people, someone will be able to make a lot of money selling a solution.
In most cases I'd say the best bet is to stick to open formats, keep copies on multiple different media, and continually migrate to new media. So, for example, back everything up to a hard drive and create checksums for every file, and then burn multiple copies to DVD. In 3 years, pull them all out, check all the checksums for corruption, and copy known-good copies (and checksums)to your brand new 5TB hard drive, and burn a couple BluRay discs. In another 5 years, check the checksums again, get known-good copies, and copy them to your 50 TB SSD and burn a couple copies into your super-ultra-cool whatchamakallit.
Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome
This makes some sense to me. Having multiple high-quality web browsers is good for the Internet, and therefore arguably good for Google. It makes some sense for them to support both major open-source engines to some degree.
Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice
StarOffice is just OpenOffice with some extentions. I doubt it takes much to support both, and they sell StarOffice. It's comparable to Redhat supporting Fedora and selling RHEL, or Novel supporting openSUSE while selling SUSE Enterprise Linux.
Just wanted to be clear - its not as though they created a considerably different new system that beats Vista, they have just made improvements upon the Vista codebase.
And as a customer, I'd take that. The problems I had with Vista weren't that it was built on the same old NT kernel, but that after so many years of work, they hadn't made any improvements that I particularly cared about. Improving speed over XP would have been something I would have cared about.
Any opinions out there on SMF? I know some people won't consider it strictly "free" in the GPL sense, but I'm wondering how its reputation compares to phpBB's
Given all the advantages of open source it's hard to understand why it never really got a bigger foothold and now it seems to be little more than that... a foothold that those involved are trying to keep in fear from falling off the mountain altogether.
Is this a purposeful troll? Linux hasn't done all that well on the desktop, but open source in general has been wildly successful. Open source operating systems are widely used on servers. Firefox has become a very popular browser and continues to grow, Safari is the number 3 browser, and lots of people use some kind of open source applications or tools on a daily basis. Even Apple's OS is largely based on an open source project.
And on top of all that, Linux is starting to do well on the desktop. Those little netbooks are becoming popular, and Novell just announced recently that their sales are way up (I assume at least some of that is desktop Linux).
I don't think you're really addressing any important issues here. Apple could open source the iPhone software completely, and even allow people to install software on their own phones freely, without sacrificing the unified user experience. New phones would still come with Apple's default distribution of software, and you'd have to go mucking with internals to get it to break.
For example, when I buy a Mac, Apple is effectively controlling the user experience. I can install whatever applications I like, and even wipe the hard drive entirely and install Linux or Windows. None of that interferes with the experience Apple is able to provide, but it merely provides me the freedom to do what I like with my computer. If I don't want to install another OS then I don't have to. If I don't know how to install the new OS, I'm not going to do it by accident.
There are a couple other reasons why Apple might want to control the iPhone:
Security. Only allowing whitelisted apps makes it much harder for virus/malware writers to spread things.
They may have some kind of a deal with AT&T that forbids it. AT&T may be worried about the health of their network, or perhaps protecting their own revenue stream.
Apple may be concerned that people will be less forgiving of things breaking on their phone than on their computer. The idea may have been a way to allow them to QA applications a little.
Money. By controlling distribution, Apple gets a cut of everyone's profits.
Apple leans toward control-freakishness, and may just be unwilling to relinquish control on new product lines until they figure out what direction they want things to take.
Apple definitely isn't going to want to open source their entire iPhone OS for the same reasons they don't open source their entire Desktop OS. There's a whole separate list of reasons why they do that, but everything that applies on the desktop applies on the phone too.
My guess is it's some combination of those reasons, though they might not all be factors, and there might be other reasons too.
On the other hand, there would also certainly be benefits to open sourcing their whole OS or at least providing full access to install your own programs on your iPhone. For one thing, you'd increase satisfaction among some customers (myself included-- I own an iPhone). Second, you'd attract more developers, and ultimately 3rd party apps are going to help the iPhone's popularity immensely.
There's a quote that comes to mind: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." (I don't know who said it originally)
Not only do many professionals have little idea about what their unions are up to, many people have little understanding of copyright law, and many people don't know much about Linux.
Also, it's very common for people to have been taught that "nothing is free". I was taught when growing up that "free" things had to be one of the following:
stolen (or otherwise illegal)
cheap quality or broken to the point the owner wants to get rid of it
charity, where the real owner has paid for it and is giving it away
And that's about it. I've run into lots of people who think Linux must be illegal. Some of my friends still don't believe me when I tell them that Linux is not crappy "freeware", that there are no ads or spyware, and that it's good enough that computer professionals choose to use it for serious tasks.
My personal opinion* is that this is a step in the wrong direction. Javascript engines are getting good. Damn good. I'd like to see more R&D poured into these engines and the underlying technologies [whatwg.org] rather than reinventing ActiveX and Java.
I agree with that, except for in my personal opinion (and I know that others will disagree), I'd like to see all of that R&D put to making a an application that runs web apps that's entirely separate from the browser. Go ahead and make a simple cross-platform application development framework, but also please leave me with an plan html+css viewer that doesn't present the security risk from such extensive scripting.
Yes, one of the reasons I'm a fan of Obama is that he has talked for years now about the need to invest in infrastructure, including roads, bridges, etc.-- but also that he recognizes that the Internet is also infrastructure.
Lots of people think that the Internet is either an entertainment service or some kind of a teenage gossiping service, and therefore a luxury instead of a vital piece of infrastructure. However, there are a lot of businesses these days that can't survive without fast Internet access any more than they can survive without roads leading up to their building, water flushing through their toilets, or electricity lighting their offices. It's necessary, and yet another example of how the US has failed in recent decades to develop proper infrastructure.
Not only would nationwide broadband create lots of jobs (at least blue collar and technical jobs), but it also would help our economy in that companies are more likely to locate themselves and invest into areas with good infrastructure.
Pretend your a modern company that shoves gigabytes of data around every day, and you have the choice of putting your offices in a country where 100Mbps internet access is ubiquitous and cheap, or you could locate yourselves where you have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a 10Mbps upload rate, if you can get that at all. What country are you going to move to?
Sorry, but I don't buy that. I mean, yes, you can get very detailed and all, but if you're good at what you do, you should be able to come up with some kind of estimate about how long a given project with set goals will take as well as what materials will be needed. I'm not saying your estimate will be perfect, but that's why it's called an estimate.
Quoting a fixed price for projects is like putting a "kick me" sign on your back. You'll attract cheapskate clients who will chisel you.
I disagree with this. You might argue that I'm a cheapskate, but if I'm going to pay a web developer, I want a real idea of what I'm going to be paying. If you quote me an hourly rate, I'm going to want to know about how many hours the project will take you so that I can calculate a total cost anyway. And I won't be happy if I have to pay more than I expected because you've estimated your time badly.
I think the key to quoting a fixed price for the whole project is to clearly define the project first. Make it very clear what you consider to be part of the project, and what's extra. Make it clear to the customer that if they want anything extra, they'll have to pay for it.
Remember, it's not just about legal obligations, it's about managing expectations. If you deliver what you said you would within the time frame and budget you've quoted, you're more likely to end up with a happy client who will hire you again and recommend you to others.
It may be tempting to give a low quote in the hopes of winning business, but I'd generally rather do business with someone who quotes me $x and charges me $x than someone who leads me to believe a project will cost $0.5x and then charges $0.9x. That may seem strange since $0.9x$x, and you'd think that I'd simply want to pay less, but really it's just that there's some business value in having predictable costs.
I'd say, for most sites, it's probably worth it to auto-scale first, and then page the human.
That sounds reasonable enough to me. Sometimes you just have to analyze, "Given the risk of [event A] happening and the money I stand to lose if it does, and given the cost of doing what it takes to prevent [event A] from happening, is it worth investing in a system to prevent [event A] from happening?" And often you can't outright prevent Event A from happening, but you're just trying to make it more unlikely, or reduce the costs associated with that risk.
So I think the question is, how much is "proper" capacity planning going to cost me, and how does that compare with the risks associated with scaling. So on the one hand, capacity planning might mean that having an expert in capacity on your staff, paying their salary to do that and paying the costs of implementing their recommendations, and losing money whenever they make a mistake and plan for the wrong capacity. On the other hand, you have the risks of auto-scaling, including the risk that the auto-scaling won't work or that it will scale to meet the needs of illegitimate traffic.
So my question would be, what's the balance there for your specific application, and what can you do to either lower costs in the first case or lower risks in the second? So in terms of auto-scaling, I'd want to know whether anything can be done in the cloud to detect DDoS attacks and prevent that from driving up costs. I'd probably like to have something like your idea, where there would be various triggers of "if capacity exceeds A in time frame B, someone gets emailed/paged and is given the opportunity to override." I might even want to set a high upper-limit that says, "If capacity exceeds X in time frame Y, the service scales back or shuts down for timeframe Z." Stuff like that.
I'm no expert in web services and auto-scaling, but the issues being brought up just seem like implementation issues that need to be figured out.
The scaling logic is in your software. The cloud service shouldn't know best.
In my mind that would depend to some degree-- whichever was a better solution given your needs. If the scaling logic of the cloud was much better than I could come up with without significant investment, and I weren't in a position to make a significant investment on that logic... well...
Yeah, it seems like is argument really comes down to a couple points:
Auto-scaling isn't fast enough- Apparently EC2 doesn't react quickly enough. To me, this seems to be a technical question as to whether auto-scaling can be designed to be reactive enough to be practical, and not necessarily an insurmountable problem with the concept of auto-scaling.
Auto-scaling might incur unexpected costs- The basic idea here is that, if you're paying a certain amount per measurement of capacity and it scales automatically, then your costs scale automatically too. This seems more like a contractual issue with your "cloud" service provider than an insurmountable problem with the concept of auto-scaling.
So if someone offered a service where auto-scaling was fast, and there was some kind of limits on what you could be charged under what sorts of situations, would he still have a problem with auto-scaling? I was expecting something a little more absolute, like "there's a definite trade-off between security and accessibility", but it seems like he's saying something more like, "Right now there's no service that is offering auto-scaling services that are good enough."
I don't agree. Acid tests certainly aren't the end-all be-all that some assume they are, but they're useful. They're benchmarks for browser developers for measuring whether their browser is adhering to standards. They are not the only benchmarks, but when everyone is passing Acid2 and Acid3, then someone can come up with Acid4 (or some other different benchmark) to deal with some of the remaining issues.
From a web developer perspective, you're right, IE is still a bigger problem, and relative to IE, Acid2 rendering bugs seem minor. However, I still think it's good that Opera/Firefox/Safari are making such progress. Sooner or later, MS is either going to catch up or fall behind.
A) The idea that Windows only gets compromised because of its large market share isn't firmly founded. Even if you think it's true, it's far from being widely accepted.
B) Even if OSX becomes just as frequently compromised as Windows, it still doesn't make sense to buy an Antivirus program now. Most AV packages rely on databases of known-viruses, and aren't very effective against new/unknown viruses. Therefore, even if you have AV software for your Mac, they won't detect any threats until after they're known. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to bother to install anything until after there are known threats for OSX, and there aren't any yet.
So mostly, installing AV software on OSX will just use up resources and *maybe* help to protect Windows machines you're trading files with.
Also, I don't know about you, but I evaluate AV software before I buy it for what's most efficient and effective at the time when I buy it. Until there are real threats against OSX, there's no way to measure how effective it is at protecting you from those threats, so there's nothing to recommend one package over another except for what uses the least resources. And do you know what uses the least resources? Having no AV software installed.
Also, for some reason that I don't fully understand, OSX seems to be a good platform right now for small applications. I remember in the 90s there were tons and tons of little Windows shareware apps all over the place, and all of those dwindled down to a handful of actually good/useful applications. Right now, OSX seems to be in a shareware/freeware/FOSS boom.
I myself have a handful of $50 applications on my Mac that I've bought and that are pretty good. I never buy those sorts of little applications for Windows anymore (it seems like everything I install is either FOSS or several hundreds of dollars), but there really are a some worthwhile little apps for OSX.
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Well first, RAID is not a backup. It's just hardware redundancy. If you delete a file or overwrite a specific revision, it's gone. If a file gets corrupted, it can get corrupted on your mirrored drive just as fast.
CDs and DVDs are decent backup media, but better in terms of archives. There's a difference. Archives are probably what you're talking about when you say things are "finished", backups are those "silly" things that we do on a regular basis.
P2P might be fine for popular movies or music, but it doesn't really work for personal stuff or confidential/sensitive business information.
If you don't have any data you care about, then fine, don't back anything up. Some of us have >10 TB of business data, and god forbid, if the server room catches fire and all the servers melt, we'd like to be able to get back all the business-critical data as it was the day before the fire.
JPEG in high quality mode does not really exhibit blocking problem, so it's not like JPEG 2000 is addressing a critical flaw of the JPEG format.
This is more or less what I was getting at when I said, "it's not clear to me... that we really need to bother coming up with much better compression methods for static images." If you use the highest possible quality of JPEG on most photographs, the loss in quality to compression isn't that big. If even that small a loss in quality is a deal-breaker for you, then you should use a lossless format. So the only real reason to worry about coming up with better compression (in my mind) is to be able to shrink file size. However, with ever-increasing bandwidth and storage capabilities, it doesn't seem to me that even the highest quality JPEGs are all that unwieldy.
You're right that there's a greater likelihood that we'll want better video compression, but even there I'm not sure. How much more efficiency can we get (by which I mean, how much smaller can we get the video files for a given video quality)? And at what cost of processing power for encoding/decoding? Given our increasing bandwidth/storage capabilities, I'm not sure how much work it's worth putting into improving that efficiency. Like let's say you can shave another 2% off your filesize, requiring 10% more processing power to decode, and it'll cost a couple million dollars to develop and promote that new encoding. Is that worth it to anyone? Obviously I'm just pulling those numbers out of thin air, but getting people to adopt a new format is very hard when the existing format is sufficient for their needs.
Not only that, but since lots more people have usb devices today than had tape backups 20 years ago, it's more likely that there will be a market in supporting those devices to some degree. If lots of people have USB drives when they move over to the new connector, someone will figure out that it's worth money to produce a USB-to-[new thing] adapter.
And that will probably happen in the short term, but there's still some point at which USB drives won't be readable anymore. It may take 50 years or 1,000, but it'll happen sooner or later. One question is, will anyone really care?
I think your post is very insightful, and I have an additional problem to throw into the mix: sorting through all the crap you've archived, even assuming you can read it all.
I don't know about you, but I've run lots of different backups on lots of different systems, and one of the problems that always comes up is just finding the revision of the file you want. People say, "I want the copy before I made this revision-- I think I did that about a month ago." Check the backups and there are no revisions from a month ago, but there are 20 from the month before. Next thing you know you're checking 20 copies by hand, and none of them are what you're looking for-- and that's even when your backup/archive system is working.
So when devising any kind of archive, I think it's at least worth considering, "How am I going to find what I'm looking for in 20 years?" Imagine yourself in 20 years, and you have every piece of data you've ever generated stored on some kind of media that holds hundreds of terabytes of data. You want to find some spreadsheet you made today (20 years ago). Maybe you don't remember exactly when you made the document-- you think about 15 years ago, but it's actually 20. You can't really remember what the filename was. You can't remember if you made it in Excel or OpenOffice, so you're not even sure what filetype you're looking for. What's going to be your method for finding that file?
I'm not suggesting it's an insoluble problem. It might be that it's not even a problem in 20 years because indexing/searching has become so good that your AI will be able to sort through terabytes in a couple seconds and make some good guesses about what you're looking for, but do you really want to rely on that happening?
I think you're exaggerating the problem a bit. Formats like GIF, JPEG, and ODF will most likely be readable somehow in 30 years. They may not be the format of choice, but we have open source readers for those things, so for as long as lots of people have data in those formats, someone will be maintaining viewers that allow reading them and probably converting them to newer formats. Besides, it's not clear to me that we're going to come up with much better compression methods for static images, or that we really need to bother coming up with much better compression methods for static images, which means it isn't that unlikely we'll still be using JPEG in 30 years. I'm not saying it's a lock or anything, but it's not *that* unlikely.
Now, with a format like ODF, if adoption isn't bigger before something new comes along, you might have a hard time reading that just because of the relative obscurity of the format (which is a problem JPEG doesn't have). In that case, it will probably depend entirely whether enough people have enough valuable information in ODF that some developers somewhere think it's worth writing a viewer.
Yes, ideally emulation would be available for every obsolete platform, and we'd all keep VM images of all our old operating systems. We'd all keep all of our old applications to install on those images, and VM software would always be backwards-compatible meaning that we'd never lose anything. I'd love to know that someone somewhere is working on that, if only for historical preservation. However, for the individual who might have limited resources, it probably won't be necessary. If it ever becomes necessary for that to happen for most people, someone will be able to make a lot of money selling a solution.
In most cases I'd say the best bet is to stick to open formats, keep copies on multiple different media, and continually migrate to new media. So, for example, back everything up to a hard drive and create checksums for every file, and then burn multiple copies to DVD. In 3 years, pull them all out, check all the checksums for corruption, and copy known-good copies (and checksums)to your brand new 5TB hard drive, and burn a couple BluRay discs. In another 5 years, check the checksums again, get known-good copies, and copy them to your 50 TB SSD and burn a couple copies into your super-ultra-cool whatchamakallit.
Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome
This makes some sense to me. Having multiple high-quality web browsers is good for the Internet, and therefore arguably good for Google. It makes some sense for them to support both major open-source engines to some degree.
Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice
StarOffice is just OpenOffice with some extentions. I doubt it takes much to support both, and they sell StarOffice. It's comparable to Redhat supporting Fedora and selling RHEL, or Novel supporting openSUSE while selling SUSE Enterprise Linux.
Just wanted to be clear - its not as though they created a considerably different new system that beats Vista, they have just made improvements upon the Vista codebase.
And as a customer, I'd take that. The problems I had with Vista weren't that it was built on the same old NT kernel, but that after so many years of work, they hadn't made any improvements that I particularly cared about. Improving speed over XP would have been something I would have cared about.
Now if they would only get rid of "activation".
Any opinions out there on SMF? I know some people won't consider it strictly "free" in the GPL sense, but I'm wondering how its reputation compares to phpBB's
WITH open source, Apple will find itself in the same position as today's IBM.
You mean Apple will start making lots of money from business services and high-end servers?
Given all the advantages of open source it's hard to understand why it never really got a bigger foothold and now it seems to be little more than that... a foothold that those involved are trying to keep in fear from falling off the mountain altogether.
Is this a purposeful troll? Linux hasn't done all that well on the desktop, but open source in general has been wildly successful. Open source operating systems are widely used on servers. Firefox has become a very popular browser and continues to grow, Safari is the number 3 browser, and lots of people use some kind of open source applications or tools on a daily basis. Even Apple's OS is largely based on an open source project.
And on top of all that, Linux is starting to do well on the desktop. Those little netbooks are becoming popular, and Novell just announced recently that their sales are way up (I assume at least some of that is desktop Linux).
I don't think you're really addressing any important issues here. Apple could open source the iPhone software completely, and even allow people to install software on their own phones freely, without sacrificing the unified user experience. New phones would still come with Apple's default distribution of software, and you'd have to go mucking with internals to get it to break.
For example, when I buy a Mac, Apple is effectively controlling the user experience. I can install whatever applications I like, and even wipe the hard drive entirely and install Linux or Windows. None of that interferes with the experience Apple is able to provide, but it merely provides me the freedom to do what I like with my computer. If I don't want to install another OS then I don't have to. If I don't know how to install the new OS, I'm not going to do it by accident.
There are a couple other reasons why Apple might want to control the iPhone:
My guess is it's some combination of those reasons, though they might not all be factors, and there might be other reasons too.
On the other hand, there would also certainly be benefits to open sourcing their whole OS or at least providing full access to install your own programs on your iPhone. For one thing, you'd increase satisfaction among some customers (myself included-- I own an iPhone). Second, you'd attract more developers, and ultimately 3rd party apps are going to help the iPhone's popularity immensely.
There's a quote that comes to mind: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." (I don't know who said it originally)
Not only do many professionals have little idea about what their unions are up to, many people have little understanding of copyright law, and many people don't know much about Linux.
Also, it's very common for people to have been taught that "nothing is free". I was taught when growing up that "free" things had to be one of the following:
And that's about it. I've run into lots of people who think Linux must be illegal. Some of my friends still don't believe me when I tell them that Linux is not crappy "freeware", that there are no ads or spyware, and that it's good enough that computer professionals choose to use it for serious tasks.
My personal opinion* is that this is a step in the wrong direction. Javascript engines are getting good. Damn good. I'd like to see more R&D poured into these engines and the underlying technologies [whatwg.org] rather than reinventing ActiveX and Java.
I agree with that, except for in my personal opinion (and I know that others will disagree), I'd like to see all of that R&D put to making a an application that runs web apps that's entirely separate from the browser. Go ahead and make a simple cross-platform application development framework, but also please leave me with an plan html+css viewer that doesn't present the security risk from such extensive scripting.
Maybe I'm alone in wanting that, though.
Yes, one of the reasons I'm a fan of Obama is that he has talked for years now about the need to invest in infrastructure, including roads, bridges, etc.-- but also that he recognizes that the Internet is also infrastructure.
Lots of people think that the Internet is either an entertainment service or some kind of a teenage gossiping service, and therefore a luxury instead of a vital piece of infrastructure. However, there are a lot of businesses these days that can't survive without fast Internet access any more than they can survive without roads leading up to their building, water flushing through their toilets, or electricity lighting their offices. It's necessary, and yet another example of how the US has failed in recent decades to develop proper infrastructure.
Not only would nationwide broadband create lots of jobs (at least blue collar and technical jobs), but it also would help our economy in that companies are more likely to locate themselves and invest into areas with good infrastructure.
Pretend your a modern company that shoves gigabytes of data around every day, and you have the choice of putting your offices in a country where 100Mbps internet access is ubiquitous and cheap, or you could locate yourselves where you have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a 10Mbps upload rate, if you can get that at all. What country are you going to move to?
It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.
I wonder if one of those two girls is going to be genetically a male. Either way, let's just hope they can't find 1 cup.
Sorry, but I don't buy that. I mean, yes, you can get very detailed and all, but if you're good at what you do, you should be able to come up with some kind of estimate about how long a given project with set goals will take as well as what materials will be needed. I'm not saying your estimate will be perfect, but that's why it's called an estimate.
Yes, I understood that, and I was agreeing.
Quoting a fixed price for projects is like putting a "kick me" sign on your back. You'll attract cheapskate clients who will chisel you.
I disagree with this. You might argue that I'm a cheapskate, but if I'm going to pay a web developer, I want a real idea of what I'm going to be paying. If you quote me an hourly rate, I'm going to want to know about how many hours the project will take you so that I can calculate a total cost anyway. And I won't be happy if I have to pay more than I expected because you've estimated your time badly.
I think the key to quoting a fixed price for the whole project is to clearly define the project first. Make it very clear what you consider to be part of the project, and what's extra. Make it clear to the customer that if they want anything extra, they'll have to pay for it.
Remember, it's not just about legal obligations, it's about managing expectations. If you deliver what you said you would within the time frame and budget you've quoted, you're more likely to end up with a happy client who will hire you again and recommend you to others.
It may be tempting to give a low quote in the hopes of winning business, but I'd generally rather do business with someone who quotes me $x and charges me $x than someone who leads me to believe a project will cost $0.5x and then charges $0.9x. That may seem strange since $0.9x$x, and you'd think that I'd simply want to pay less, but really it's just that there's some business value in having predictable costs.
I'd say, for most sites, it's probably worth it to auto-scale first, and then page the human.
That sounds reasonable enough to me. Sometimes you just have to analyze, "Given the risk of [event A] happening and the money I stand to lose if it does, and given the cost of doing what it takes to prevent [event A] from happening, is it worth investing in a system to prevent [event A] from happening?" And often you can't outright prevent Event A from happening, but you're just trying to make it more unlikely, or reduce the costs associated with that risk.
So I think the question is, how much is "proper" capacity planning going to cost me, and how does that compare with the risks associated with scaling. So on the one hand, capacity planning might mean that having an expert in capacity on your staff, paying their salary to do that and paying the costs of implementing their recommendations, and losing money whenever they make a mistake and plan for the wrong capacity. On the other hand, you have the risks of auto-scaling, including the risk that the auto-scaling won't work or that it will scale to meet the needs of illegitimate traffic.
So my question would be, what's the balance there for your specific application, and what can you do to either lower costs in the first case or lower risks in the second? So in terms of auto-scaling, I'd want to know whether anything can be done in the cloud to detect DDoS attacks and prevent that from driving up costs. I'd probably like to have something like your idea, where there would be various triggers of "if capacity exceeds A in time frame B, someone gets emailed/paged and is given the opportunity to override." I might even want to set a high upper-limit that says, "If capacity exceeds X in time frame Y, the service scales back or shuts down for timeframe Z." Stuff like that.
I'm no expert in web services and auto-scaling, but the issues being brought up just seem like implementation issues that need to be figured out.
The scaling logic is in your software. The cloud service shouldn't know best.
In my mind that would depend to some degree-- whichever was a better solution given your needs. If the scaling logic of the cloud was much better than I could come up with without significant investment, and I weren't in a position to make a significant investment on that logic... well...
Yeah, it seems like is argument really comes down to a couple points:
So if someone offered a service where auto-scaling was fast, and there was some kind of limits on what you could be charged under what sorts of situations, would he still have a problem with auto-scaling? I was expecting something a little more absolute, like "there's a definite trade-off between security and accessibility", but it seems like he's saying something more like, "Right now there's no service that is offering auto-scaling services that are good enough."
I don't agree. Acid tests certainly aren't the end-all be-all that some assume they are, but they're useful. They're benchmarks for browser developers for measuring whether their browser is adhering to standards. They are not the only benchmarks, but when everyone is passing Acid2 and Acid3, then someone can come up with Acid4 (or some other different benchmark) to deal with some of the remaining issues.
From a web developer perspective, you're right, IE is still a bigger problem, and relative to IE, Acid2 rendering bugs seem minor. However, I still think it's good that Opera/Firefox/Safari are making such progress. Sooner or later, MS is either going to catch up or fall behind.
A) The idea that Windows only gets compromised because of its large market share isn't firmly founded. Even if you think it's true, it's far from being widely accepted.
B) Even if OSX becomes just as frequently compromised as Windows, it still doesn't make sense to buy an Antivirus program now. Most AV packages rely on databases of known-viruses, and aren't very effective against new/unknown viruses. Therefore, even if you have AV software for your Mac, they won't detect any threats until after they're known. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to bother to install anything until after there are known threats for OSX, and there aren't any yet.
So mostly, installing AV software on OSX will just use up resources and *maybe* help to protect Windows machines you're trading files with.
Also, I don't know about you, but I evaluate AV software before I buy it for what's most efficient and effective at the time when I buy it. Until there are real threats against OSX, there's no way to measure how effective it is at protecting you from those threats, so there's nothing to recommend one package over another except for what uses the least resources. And do you know what uses the least resources? Having no AV software installed.
Also, for some reason that I don't fully understand, OSX seems to be a good platform right now for small applications. I remember in the 90s there were tons and tons of little Windows shareware apps all over the place, and all of those dwindled down to a handful of actually good/useful applications. Right now, OSX seems to be in a shareware/freeware/FOSS boom.
I myself have a handful of $50 applications on my Mac that I've bought and that are pretty good. I never buy those sorts of little applications for Windows anymore (it seems like everything I install is either FOSS or several hundreds of dollars), but there really are a some worthwhile little apps for OSX.