It's probably final proof that I'm not a born sysadmin, but I would far rather sit twiddling my thumbs (actually I'd probably go for a walk) waiting for Google's world-class admins to fix a system problem than be responsible for fixing it myself.
Sounds like we're in the same situation - I've always been slim, but a couple of years ago started putting on fat around my waist.
My solution has been talking a 45 minute walk up and down a local hill each day. Walking is the exercise we're designed for, low impact and can be sociable if you want. I think you need to be pushing yourself though - I take a stop watch to motivate me to try harder each day. My other tip is to do it first thing, before breakfast - you get most of the hard part (going up the hill) over with before you are properly awake.
You also end up with a great start to the day - blood pumping, mind alert, and you've had time to plan your day and chew over problems without disruption. I've got back to a good weight, and seem to be sticking there, so it works.
I disagree - 2008 and will be remembered as the birthday of cloud computing, the same way 1981 is remembered as the birthday of the PC. The PC was easy to use, so all of us could have a computer on our desks. Good clouds will be easy enough to use that web applications will become mainstream.
I think Google's "Run your app here" approach is better than "Here's a copy of your OS". Suddenly a developer can launch a serious web application, without having to worry about scaling, redundancy, or all the work that goes into making a service secure and reliable. It's a bit like c versus python - python reduces the power of c, but makes it an order of magnitude easier to learn and use.
It all comes down to ease. With appengine, it's easy to deploy a web app - you don't need to know how to set up iptables, tripwire, or build custom kernels. You don't need to understand how to replicate databases if your web app becomes popular, and you don't need to figure out LVM if storage becomes an issue. And all this is going to cost ten (probably a hundred or a thousand) times less than if you used your own servers. There are serious limitations, but the benefits far outweigh them in most cases.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and starting to migrate the services my company sells to appengine. I will be able to provide better services for less money, and still have a bigger margin. In six months, people will be saying "Remember when you had to build servers to run web apps?".
Cardboard Man (or Woman)
on
Linux 2.6.26 Out
·
· Score: 2, Funny
++Insightful.
I've lost count of the number of times I've explained some esoteric bug to my wife, and shouted "AHA!" in the middle. The success rate is high, so long as you have a patient partner, and can ignore the glazed look.
It's not ridiculous! He did exactly what you suggested - got out of the pond.
I did too - same position, small number of email accounts took up an inordinate amount of time configuring spam filtering for whatever the next trick the spammers came up with. Then I noticed GMail's spam filtering was far better than any combination of greylisting, baysian filtering and black listing I could come up with, and with no training. Bye bye, pond!
It's the "IT professionals" that still insist on swimming round a more and more polluted pond that are ridiculous.
Both in the patent and performance arenas, people talk about "owning" an idea, or a song, or a movie, and poster above equates this with owning a car. There is a huge difference - if someone takes my car, I am deprived of it, so it really hurts me. If someone takes my idea, I still have the idea, and can exploit it as well as I am able. The only thing I'm deprived of is the opportunity to exclusively exploit it.
I think we need a more nuanced concept of control for IP, rather than this easy equation with ownership.
I get about 1 spam message a week on my Gmail account, despite several wild-carded domains pointing to it. I noticed this a couple of years ago, when I was struggling with greylisting, spam assassin and spambayes. So as a test, I set up a Gmail account for a real-estate agent customer, who has a very problematic message profile (lots of real messages with "mortgage" and "loan"). I set Gmail to forward messages straight on to a second mailbox on my mail server, from where the customer picked up his mail. The results were fantastic - he gets hardly any spam, and hasn't had a single false positive (that he knows about). Plus he's worked out he can access his mail away from his computer. And all this with no training, which customers hate doing.
So if your company can handle the idea of all their emails going through Google, Gmail is a great no-cost solution - you need to set up a Gmail account and two mailboxes for each user, but Google does all the hard stuff, saving you from buying meaty hardware for all that spam number-crunching.
This is really exciting. If you are prepared to lie back in Google's arms - and they are trusted more than most - this gives your humble web app all the advantages of GMail over Outlook/Exchange. And if my online one-dollar slashtrolling service hits Slashdot and a million of you sign up overnight... no problem, Google will handle it, and I'm an overnight millionaire - as opposed to having $10,000 and 990,000 pissed off non-customers, pulling my hair out trying to scale my system after the horse has bolted.
However, on a practical level, how do you handle periodic processes? Any well-designed web app needs cron jobs, to delete stale data, for instance. As it stands, I need to keep one server to have cron run wget commands against AppEngine. Google's terms seem to count out any other way to launch processes. Presumably Google will extend the system to allow this when we have to pay for processing.
People's capacity for unceasing amazement never ceases to am... oh wait. Where's the "Retract Comment" button? Slashdot's lame user interface never ceases to.... Darn! Done it again! My stupidity never cease... ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
For an idea of an equitable price, I'd suggest looking at Canonical's costs in distributing Ubuntu. We all get it for free, but Mark Shuttleworth has pumped several millions into it. Now divide those millions by the number of users. Unfortunately I don't have reliable figures for either of those numbers, but I'd hazard a guess that it would come out at under $10 per user, reducing all the time as Ubuntu gets more popular.
Now imagine MS dropping the price of Windows to $10, opening the source to reduce their development costs and open the door to innovation. They'd still make money, they wouldn't have to worry about piracy, they'd suddenly be up there with Google as geek gods, and Linux would become a historical curiosity.
Bill Gates became fabulously wealthy because he persuaded the world that you should pay several hundred dollars for every copy of a piece of software. The world is waking up to the fact that software production is not your typical business, and FOSS is providing a concrete example of a more equitable economic model.
In the Microsoft model, customers get off-the-shelf solutions (tough if their business doesn't work the way MS software does), MS get most of the proceeds, and local support people pick up the crumbs.
In the FOSS model, customers can afford to pay for more custom development, local development and support people get most of the proceeds, and the original developer picks up the crumbs.
As a local development and support person, guess which model I prefer?
So if this succeeds, can we expect people to start suing the Ministry of Transport because the proceeds of (real!) crime are traversing their road network unimpeded?
Agree about ray tracing, but crypto is very relevant. If you aren't using javascript md5 in your login page, then your password is wizzing around the internet in plain text - not a good idea.
"Dressing kids like sluts", yup, right with you, "fault of the parents", some truth in that... "smack the shit out of em"??? BZZZZZZZZT, mod this loser down.
Hitting kids is of the same order of bad as having sex with them. It's also stupid - you're teaching them to get what they want through violence. So what do you do when they grow bigger than you - or get a knife?
Hitting kids is also totally unnecessary. I've two boys that have never been hit, and they are the best-behaved kids I know. Not good enough for you? I've also run a scout group of 18 adolescent boys for five years without ever having laid a finger on one of them. Here's a clue - it's all about respect, and you have to give it before you get it. And that's not respect you get from beating a kid - it's fear.
Since I moved to Gmail, I get about one piece of spam a week, and have had one false positive that I've noticed. It's so good I've started piping my user's email through it - redirect from my server, then get Gmail to redirect back to a spamfree account that the customer picks up. This was after months of trying spam assassin, bayesian filters and greylisting, and Gmail did better than all of them.
I know, I'm a fanboy, but it's because they do a good job. How have others found the efficacy of Gmail's spam filtering?
My point is that for the great majority of users, the safety of their data (whether from malware, hardware issues or privacy) is likely to be higher if they store it on an online service than on their own hard drive. I agree with you that Gmail/Google Apps is not the pinnacle of privacy, but I'm questioning how often network sniffing http packets actually happens, compared to bot/keylogger instances (hence even greater loss of privacy) on a PC.
I'd imagine the bots win, but even if they are roughly as prevalent as sniffing, you've still got to make up for the all the other advantages of online data/application storage - convenience, reliability, hardware independance... All in all, I stand by the use of online apps by mine and me.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as she hadn't passed on her genes, she's got a good chance in the Darwin awards.
... the Puu?
Nah, that's a sh*t name.
...what he really meant was that there wasn't enough hokey.
He must have hit Slashdot on a good day.
It's probably final proof that I'm not a born sysadmin, but I would far rather sit twiddling my thumbs (actually I'd probably go for a walk) waiting for Google's world-class admins to fix a system problem than be responsible for fixing it myself.
You wouldn't happen to be from Alabama, perchance?
Sounds like we're in the same situation - I've always been slim, but a couple of years ago started putting on fat around my waist.
My solution has been talking a 45 minute walk up and down a local hill each day. Walking is the exercise we're designed for, low impact and can be sociable if you want. I think you need to be pushing yourself though - I take a stop watch to motivate me to try harder each day. My other tip is to do it first thing, before breakfast - you get most of the hard part (going up the hill) over with before you are properly awake.
You also end up with a great start to the day - blood pumping, mind alert, and you've had time to plan your day and chew over problems without disruption. I've got back to a good weight, and seem to be sticking there, so it works.
I disagree - 2008 and will be remembered as the birthday of cloud computing, the same way 1981 is remembered as the birthday of the PC. The PC was easy to use, so all of us could have a computer on our desks. Good clouds will be easy enough to use that web applications will become mainstream.
I think Google's "Run your app here" approach is better than "Here's a copy of your OS". Suddenly a developer can launch a serious web application, without having to worry about scaling, redundancy, or all the work that goes into making a service secure and reliable. It's a bit like c versus python - python reduces the power of c, but makes it an order of magnitude easier to learn and use.
It all comes down to ease. With appengine, it's easy to deploy a web app - you don't need to know how to set up iptables, tripwire, or build custom kernels. You don't need to understand how to replicate databases if your web app becomes popular, and you don't need to figure out LVM if storage becomes an issue. And all this is going to cost ten (probably a hundred or a thousand) times less than if you used your own servers. There are serious limitations, but the benefits far outweigh them in most cases.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and starting to migrate the services my company sells to appengine. I will be able to provide better services for less money, and still have a bigger margin. In six months, people will be saying "Remember when you had to build servers to run web apps?".
++Insightful.
I've lost count of the number of times I've explained some esoteric bug to my wife, and shouted "AHA!" in the middle. The success rate is high, so long as you have a patient partner, and can ignore the glazed look.
The good people of San Francisco already have GWB's legacy organised - they're proposing to name their new sewerage plant after him.
http://presidentialmemorial.wordpress.com/
If you are an SF resident, do your duty, and sign up.
It's not ridiculous! He did exactly what you suggested - got out of the pond.
I did too - same position, small number of email accounts took up an inordinate amount of time configuring spam filtering for whatever the next trick the spammers came up with. Then I noticed GMail's spam filtering was far better than any combination of greylisting, baysian filtering and black listing I could come up with, and with no training. Bye bye, pond!
It's the "IT professionals" that still insist on swimming round a more and more polluted pond that are ridiculous.
Both in the patent and performance arenas, people talk about "owning" an idea, or a song, or a movie, and poster above equates this with owning a car. There is a huge difference - if someone takes my car, I am deprived of it, so it really hurts me. If someone takes my idea, I still have the idea, and can exploit it as well as I am able. The only thing I'm deprived of is the opportunity to exclusively exploit it.
I think we need a more nuanced concept of control for IP, rather than this easy equation with ownership.
I get about 1 spam message a week on my Gmail account, despite several wild-carded domains pointing to it. I noticed this a couple of years ago, when I was struggling with greylisting, spam assassin and spambayes. So as a test, I set up a Gmail account for a real-estate agent customer, who has a very problematic message profile (lots of real messages with "mortgage" and "loan"). I set Gmail to forward messages straight on to a second mailbox on my mail server, from where the customer picked up his mail. The results were fantastic - he gets hardly any spam, and hasn't had a single false positive (that he knows about). Plus he's worked out he can access his mail away from his computer. And all this with no training, which customers hate doing.
So if your company can handle the idea of all their emails going through Google, Gmail is a great no-cost solution - you need to set up a Gmail account and two mailboxes for each user, but Google does all the hard stuff, saving you from buying meaty hardware for all that spam number-crunching.
Actually the effects were terrible - I remember a review snidely saying that "the sets must have cost several pounds".
Not that we cared - any sci-fi was lapped up without complaint.
This is really exciting. If you are prepared to lie back in Google's arms - and they are trusted more than most - this gives your humble web app all the advantages of GMail over Outlook/Exchange. And if my online one-dollar slashtrolling service hits Slashdot and a million of you sign up overnight... no problem, Google will handle it, and I'm an overnight millionaire - as opposed to having $10,000 and 990,000 pissed off non-customers, pulling my hair out trying to scale my system after the horse has bolted.
However, on a practical level, how do you handle periodic processes? Any well-designed web app needs cron jobs, to delete stale data, for instance. As it stands, I need to keep one server to have cron run wget commands against AppEngine. Google's terms seem to count out any other way to launch processes. Presumably Google will extend the system to allow this when we have to pay for processing.
People's capacity for unceasing amazement never ceases to am... oh wait. Where's the "Retract Comment" button? Slashdot's lame user interface never ceases to.... Darn! Done it again! My stupidity never cease... ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
For an idea of an equitable price, I'd suggest looking at Canonical's costs in distributing Ubuntu. We all get it for free, but Mark Shuttleworth has pumped several millions into it. Now divide those millions by the number of users. Unfortunately I don't have reliable figures for either of those numbers, but I'd hazard a guess that it would come out at under $10 per user, reducing all the time as Ubuntu gets more popular.
Now imagine MS dropping the price of Windows to $10, opening the source to reduce their development costs and open the door to innovation. They'd still make money, they wouldn't have to worry about piracy, they'd suddenly be up there with Google as geek gods, and Linux would become a historical curiosity.
Bill Gates became fabulously wealthy because he persuaded the world that you should pay several hundred dollars for every copy of a piece of software. The world is waking up to the fact that software production is not your typical business, and FOSS is providing a concrete example of a more equitable economic model.
In the Microsoft model, customers get off-the-shelf solutions (tough if their business doesn't work the way MS software does), MS get most of the proceeds, and local support people pick up the crumbs.
In the FOSS model, customers can afford to pay for more custom development, local development and support people get most of the proceeds, and the original developer picks up the crumbs.
As a local development and support person, guess which model I prefer?
So if this succeeds, can we expect people to start suing the Ministry of Transport because the proceeds of (real!) crime are traversing their road network unimpeded?
Agree about ray tracing, but crypto is very relevant. If you aren't using javascript md5 in your login page, then your password is wizzing around the internet in plain text - not a good idea.
Go and Google "the tragedy of the commons", then tell me society has no interests.
"Dressing kids like sluts", yup, right with you, "fault of the parents", some truth in that... "smack the shit out of em" ??? BZZZZZZZZT, mod this loser down.
Hitting kids is of the same order of bad as having sex with them. It's also stupid - you're teaching them to get what they want through violence. So what do you do when they grow bigger than you - or get a knife?
Hitting kids is also totally unnecessary. I've two boys that have never been hit, and they are the best-behaved kids I know. Not good enough for you? I've also run a scout group of 18 adolescent boys for five years without ever having laid a finger on one of them. Here's a clue - it's all about respect, and you have to give it before you get it. And that's not respect you get from beating a kid - it's fear.
I was intrigued about what the actual algorithm used by the starlings was, but the referenced article didn't elucidate. Eventually I found a link to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/01/29/scistarling129.xml hidden at the bottom - it has a little more detail. Enjoy!
So you are arguing that the network stack (one of the most heavily used and hopefully highly optimised parts of the OS) should be written in Ruby?
No offence, but I'm glad you didn't write the OS I'm using...
Since I moved to Gmail, I get about one piece of spam a week, and have had one false positive that I've noticed. It's so good I've started piping my user's email through it - redirect from my server, then get Gmail to redirect back to a spamfree account that the customer picks up. This was after months of trying spam assassin, bayesian filters and greylisting, and Gmail did better than all of them.
I know, I'm a fanboy, but it's because they do a good job. How have others found the efficacy of Gmail's spam filtering?
My point is that for the great majority of users, the safety of their data (whether from malware, hardware issues or privacy) is likely to be higher if they store it on an online service than on their own hard drive. I agree with you that Gmail/Google Apps is not the pinnacle of privacy, but I'm questioning how often network sniffing http packets actually happens, compared to bot/keylogger instances (hence even greater loss of privacy) on a PC.
I'd imagine the bots win, but even if they are roughly as prevalent as sniffing, you've still got to make up for the all the other advantages of online data/application storage - convenience, reliability, hardware independance... All in all, I stand by the use of online apps by mine and me.