So so wrong. If you think anyone can develop the next Netflix killer by sprinkling some sugar on Amazon AWS, have fun trying.
Really? Seriously? I agree that their recommendation engine is extremely valuable. But the rest of it? Oh so hard to rip content, shove it into S3, and use EC2 instances to serve the content back out to registered users.
This is what we call "race to the bottom". Whomever is willing to take the least amount of profit is going to win.
So you're going to instead fight for the reduction of services the majority prefers to keep (roads, schools, police, fire, social security, medicare, etc?). Don't like the taxes? Get the fuck out.
And your point would be? Lots of oil-rich countries fund social programs and keep taxes low by selling oil to other countries. What do you do when there are no resources to sell to subsidize a populace, and no land to sell to others? You tax your country's internal economy, to fund that infrastructure that runs that economy.
I think it also takes a bit away from Netflix by running on Amazon. You look at Facebook, Google, etc. and you'd never dream about running that stack on Amazon's infrastructure. But Netflix? How special can what they do be if they moved everything into Amazon?
Having your own gear has an air of "We're doing something different, something hard" when you're a huge tech company. Running on Amazon says "We're a commodity, and it's not hard to replicate what we're doing".
First, yes, I'm well aware of how Amazon's AWS infrastructure works. If you're a business, you're making money either via a) labor (hiring people; their output) b) rent (licensing land, IP, computing time, etc).
If you're a business that makes money where the majority of the work is done by your computing equipment (Netflix, etc), the business is mostly that equipment. Sure, you've got licensing. Sure, you've got distribution centers for the physical discs. But if your business is mostly that software, and the hardware side is elastic and fungible, while also being cheap and easily obtainable by anyone, your business is some sprinkles on top of a cake anyone can buy a piece of.
A fairly large component of a business is barrier to entry. Can you compete with Walmart? No, of course not. Enormous capital outlays would be required.
The capital outlay is time to build software systems like Netflix that run on Amazon. You may argue "Who is going to waste their time with that?" Easy. The 4-6 billion people not in the first world (Brazil, Russia, India, China, as well as a lot of eastern Europe) whose time is relatively cheap. You just need a credit card and an AWS account. Low barrier to entry = low business value.
Don't be shocked as not only the cost of online services that anyone can develop drops, but also the available profit margin of said services.
You are free to move to a country that doesn't tax its citizens if you're unhappy about it. I think you'll be hard pressed to find a developed country that doesn't tax it's citizens to provide necessary services.
Excellent point. Netflix has moved almost all of the infrastructure into Amazon AWS. If you want to buy Netflix, I'm assuming they'd hand you the keys to the AWS login and the contracts they have in place with media groups (yes, the distribution centers are a different story, go with it for the example).
What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it? And that infrastructure company sells resources cheap to anyone else in the world? You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Exciting, interesting, and worrisome at the same time. As OP said, short work weeks or civil unrest. May you live in interesting times.
TL;DR Massive, cheap infrastructure-on-demand drags down valuation of businesses that run on it. Win for consumers (hopefully), lose for businesses (not so bad).
True, moving CDN->CDN is fairly easy if APIs are exposed, and since its all HTTP/streaming media. But physical infrastructure? You just can't spin that up overnight.
Is there any concern with being tied to Amazon for your infrastructure? What happens if (just like you guys raising your prices due to vendors, in this case, content providers with their licensing) Amazon bends you over the barrel? True, moving CDN->CDN is fairly easy if APIs are exposes, and since its all HTTP/streaming media. But physical infrastructure? You just can spin that up overnight.
I say this coming from an environment with 17PB of storage and thousands of servers, and where dropping $500K on equipment was like buying a pack of gum.
Left Tampa at 8am on Friday morning, got an epic spot (and took some great pictures with a 500mm lens/tripod from top of rental car) 25 minutes before launch from Port Canaveral cruise ship parking lot. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs.
I don't need permission from a label to upload music I've paid for to a storage locker and to stream it or redownload it where ever I want. First label who says otherwise can suffer the death of a thousand cuts of not getting paid anymore for music.
My point is I *want* to run it as a non-profit organization, similar to Wikipedia. I take in enough money to pay for servers, developers, etc. and keep prices as low as possible, since I have no shareholders demanding their pound of flesh.
This (the hoarding of patents, not just software, but large swaths of patent "property") is disgustingly similar to lords owning the land, and the serfs paying rent to farm it. I believe in copyright and software patents for your average citizen to enrich themselves due to their innovation and ingeunity, but I don't believe large corporations should be able to hold us hostage with patent portfolios.
Patents should be like stock, with multiple classes. You're the original inventor who registeredt he patent? Class A patent. Longer duration, more protections. You're a business who owns the patent? Class B patent. Shorter duration, less protections. You're a "patent portfolio" company? Class C patent. Shortest duration, fewest protections.
This is not perfect, but please tweak it. Maybe we'll get something more sane than what we already have.
I run a (substantially) profitable hosting operation with several million dollars in the bank (business accounts, I don't pay myself more than my co-workers/employees).
So, I can run a profitable operation, the question is, are there enough people willing to purchase domain services from a non-profit?
Expect torrent/gray area DNS to move towards things like distributed hash tables, most likely signed asymmetric keys. Torrent clients and sites are already using DHT for magnet links and finding other clients. It's not rocket science to keep moving down the OSI stack.
Several months ago, I thought about opening a coop model registrar, in the same vein as ARIN or other non-profit resource management organizations, but didn't think there'd be enough demand (IT people would dig it, but not your average joe, who is going to use GoDaddy). How difficult is it to start a registrar?
Slashdot Mirror
You can smooth the output with flywheels or capacitors on land.
So so wrong. If you think anyone can develop the next Netflix killer by sprinkling some sugar on Amazon AWS, have fun trying.
Really? Seriously? I agree that their recommendation engine is extremely valuable. But the rest of it? Oh so hard to rip content, shove it into S3, and use EC2 instances to serve the content back out to registered users.
This is what we call "race to the bottom". Whomever is willing to take the least amount of profit is going to win.
WiMax from water towers, silos, etc.
So you're going to instead fight for the reduction of services the majority prefers to keep (roads, schools, police, fire, social security, medicare, etc?). Don't like the taxes? Get the fuck out.
And your point would be? Lots of oil-rich countries fund social programs and keep taxes low by selling oil to other countries. What do you do when there are no resources to sell to subsidize a populace, and no land to sell to others? You tax your country's internal economy, to fund that infrastructure that runs that economy.
Can you provide an example of a functioning country with a libertarian government?
I think it also takes a bit away from Netflix by running on Amazon. You look at Facebook, Google, etc. and you'd never dream about running that stack on Amazon's infrastructure. But Netflix? How special can what they do be if they moved everything into Amazon?
Having your own gear has an air of "We're doing something different, something hard" when you're a huge tech company. Running on Amazon says "We're a commodity, and it's not hard to replicate what we're doing".
First, yes, I'm well aware of how Amazon's AWS infrastructure works. If you're a business, you're making money either via a) labor (hiring people; their output) b) rent (licensing land, IP, computing time, etc).
If you're a business that makes money where the majority of the work is done by your computing equipment (Netflix, etc), the business is mostly that equipment. Sure, you've got licensing. Sure, you've got distribution centers for the physical discs. But if your business is mostly that software, and the hardware side is elastic and fungible, while also being cheap and easily obtainable by anyone, your business is some sprinkles on top of a cake anyone can buy a piece of.
A fairly large component of a business is barrier to entry. Can you compete with Walmart? No, of course not. Enormous capital outlays would be required.
The capital outlay is time to build software systems like Netflix that run on Amazon. You may argue "Who is going to waste their time with that?" Easy. The 4-6 billion people not in the first world (Brazil, Russia, India, China, as well as a lot of eastern Europe) whose time is relatively cheap. You just need a credit card and an AWS account. Low barrier to entry = low business value.
Don't be shocked as not only the cost of online services that anyone can develop drops, but also the available profit margin of said services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis
You are free to move to a country that doesn't tax its citizens if you're unhappy about it. I think you'll be hard pressed to find a developed country that doesn't tax it's citizens to provide necessary services.
Excellent point. Netflix has moved almost all of the infrastructure into Amazon AWS. If you want to buy Netflix, I'm assuming they'd hand you the keys to the AWS login and the contracts they have in place with media groups (yes, the distribution centers are a different story, go with it for the example).
What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it? And that infrastructure company sells resources cheap to anyone else in the world? You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Exciting, interesting, and worrisome at the same time. As OP said, short work weeks or civil unrest. May you live in interesting times.
TL;DR Massive, cheap infrastructure-on-demand drags down valuation of businesses that run on it. Win for consumers (hopefully), lose for businesses (not so bad).
Holy shit. Why wouldn't you just go with Openstack, KVM, or Xen at those prices?
Basically, this will drive people to use The Pirate Bay for disc-based movies and NetFlix for streaming.
Fixed that for you.
True, moving CDN->CDN is fairly easy if APIs are exposed, and since its all HTTP/streaming media. But physical infrastructure? You just can't spin that up overnight.
Corrections made. Sorry, long day.
Is there any concern with being tied to Amazon for your infrastructure? What happens if (just like you guys raising your prices due to vendors, in this case, content providers with their licensing) Amazon bends you over the barrel? True, moving CDN->CDN is fairly easy if APIs are exposes, and since its all HTTP/streaming media. But physical infrastructure? You just can spin that up overnight.
I say this coming from an environment with 17PB of storage and thousands of servers, and where dropping $500K on equipment was like buying a pack of gum.
Left Tampa at 8am on Friday morning, got an epic spot (and took some great pictures with a 500mm lens/tripod from top of rental car) 25 minutes before launch from Port Canaveral cruise ship parking lot. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
I'm in Tampa sleeping for the night, and making my way to Titusville around 6-8am. Meetup?
That's what I assumed. You're looking at a Wal-Mart model, with an extremely slim margin per domain purchased.
there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs.
I don't need permission from a label to upload music I've paid for to a storage locker and to stream it or redownload it where ever I want. First label who says otherwise can suffer the death of a thousand cuts of not getting paid anymore for music.
My point is I *want* to run it as a non-profit organization, similar to Wikipedia. I take in enough money to pay for servers, developers, etc. and keep prices as low as possible, since I have no shareholders demanding their pound of flesh.
This (the hoarding of patents, not just software, but large swaths of patent "property") is disgustingly similar to lords owning the land, and the serfs paying rent to farm it. I believe in copyright and software patents for your average citizen to enrich themselves due to their innovation and ingeunity, but I don't believe large corporations should be able to hold us hostage with patent portfolios.
Patents should be like stock, with multiple classes. You're the original inventor who registeredt he patent? Class A patent. Longer duration, more protections.
You're a business who owns the patent? Class B patent. Shorter duration, less protections.
You're a "patent portfolio" company? Class C patent. Shortest duration, fewest protections.
This is not perfect, but please tweak it. Maybe we'll get something more sane than what we already have.
I run a (substantially) profitable hosting operation with several million dollars in the bank (business accounts, I don't pay myself more than my co-workers/employees).
So, I can run a profitable operation, the question is, are there enough people willing to purchase domain services from a non-profit?
Expect torrent/gray area DNS to move towards things like distributed hash tables, most likely signed asymmetric keys. Torrent clients and sites are already using DHT for magnet links and finding other clients. It's not rocket science to keep moving down the OSI stack.
Several months ago, I thought about opening a coop model registrar, in the same vein as ARIN or other non-profit resource management organizations, but didn't think there'd be enough demand (IT people would dig it, but not your average joe, who is going to use GoDaddy). How difficult is it to start a registrar?
The US can deliver lethal force remotely more effectively than any other country can deliver their foot soldiers to our soil.
Disagree? Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks, and that's just the unmanned variety. Rule the air and you rule (most) of the ground.
Why the shuttle has wings at all:
http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/scot.html