Most magazines wouldn't be ok with an automated process because it wouldn't let them charge extra for some issues.
An automated conversion process has no effect on what can be charged for individual portions of the results, it just streamlines the process of getting material into a form where it can be distributed online, separated by (and, potentially, priced differently by) article, which is even more specific than particular issue.
Now, certainly, Google would probably like to get everything from everyone and pay and charge nothing for it, making money by serving targetted ads alongside the content. But that's not the only could do with the technology, and patenting the technology (even if one assumes that they intend to deploy it at all) doesn't tell you anything about how they plan to deploy it.
Many of you don't get it. Apple "iPad" isn't a general-purpose computer. It's an entertainment device.
Yes, its an inconveniently sized iPod Touch crossed with an ebook reader with an emissive display.
Of course, the people most inclined to purchase expensive new entertainment gadgets already have iPod Touches and/or iPhones and/or e-Ink based readers; the main feature the iPad is that its a bigger display than the iPod, which is probably good for video (especially for multiple viewers) but is it really worth the extra size?
It's an improved "e-reader", not a "netbook".
Well, its a "does more" ereader. Whether having an emissive display makes it an "improved" ereader is somewhat dubious.
It's not a "convergence" device, it's a "divergence" device.
Its a convergence device, in that its trying to combine the functions of various entertainment devices (audio/video functionality of an iPod, but bigger to compete with portable, shareable video players, and better text reading size to compete with dedicated ereaders.)
It's overpriced. The price will drop, of course.
And so will the price of competing devices, and the iPad is likely to remain overpriced.
It will succeed or fail based on what content it can access. If Apple and News Corp. work out a deal, and you can view all News Corp. content on the thing, it will be a big success.
If it was exclusive, then that certainly would be a selling point for the iPad. Whether it would do more to help Apple sell iPads than it would do to limit News Corps. ability to reach customers is debatable.
Of course, since News Corp. is one of the members of the consortium behind the Skiff, one of the readers that the iPad and Apple bookstore will be competing with, I think its unlikely that they'll make an exclusive deal with Apple for all News Corp. content.
Usability isn't magic. Its having the right set of features to provide functions that produce definable benefits in particular applications. If you've got a real usability advantages, you can sell them with the tradition "this feature provides this function which produces this benefit" way, you don't have to wave "magic" around.
You guys bashing don't get it. Your Netbooks will do more.
So, for that matter, will my smartphone (which, as it happens, is an iPhone, but any modern smartphone would be in the same position.) And, either of those things will do the things they do better than the iPad, which is to big to excel at the things that a smartphone is good for, and too feature-limited to excel at the things the netbook is good for.
That's the point. Apple is all about giving you the 50% of functions you need, and polishing the hell out of it.
That's a nice theory, and sometimes Apple hits a home run trying to do limited-functionality-but-polished. But, also, sometimes it makes the Apple Pippin.
My grandmother won't get a netbook. She will get an iPad. She's not encroaching on your geek demographic.
Most of the people I've seen with netbooks aren't geeks.
For you logic types, iPad potential customer base > Netbook targeted customer base.
If anything, an expensive, limited-functionality computing device that is designed to rely on another computer as a primary device has a narrower target market than a less-expensive device that can operate just fine as a primary device.
It will win because it does less.
If doing less (or even doing less, but doing it better) meant you win, the iPad would be killed by e-Ink based dedicated readers, which do less than the iPad and do it better. From its price, size, form factor, and what they highlighted in the demo, I think Apple's hope is exactly the opposite of "It will win because it does less (and does it better)". I think they are hoping to win in the exploding market for digital reader devices by doing more, not winning in against netbooks by doing less.
Until you understand that concept, stay in your sheltered Netbook world. Oh, and update your virus definitions. And defrag your disk. Be sure to reboot today. Oh, update those drivers, too.
All of those functions happen automatically (or, in the case of rebooting, with a reminder that you click on when an update requires it, which is maybe once a week -- and the only time, except when I'm switching to use Linux [hardly something a non-geek user is as likely to need to do], that I reboot my netbook rather than just closing the lid and letting it hibernate), except defragging which is almost never needed.
And, with a netbook, you don't have to have another computer to plug into to get OS updates.
That's really a poor choice of words coming from the COO about the super sized iPod Apple just cranked out. I'd expect that from marketing, but the COO?
Its the same thing that the CEO has said, and its the same thing their official product announcement said, and its the same thing the current project page said. "Magic", "Revolutionary", etc. -- its all fuzzy hype, and no "feature, functions, benefits".
This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology -- new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous.
That doesn't support the idea that people "don't put as much weight on facts as they do on their own belief about how the world is supposed to work", it instead suggests the much less interesting conclusion that what people subjectively like (rather than what they believe to be true in fact) is based not on facts alone but also on their personal priorities. This, of course, is true by definition, since you can't get to a conclusion about "X is good" without a premise of the same form.
What's odd is that the experiment that actually shows something closer to what is claimed -- conducted by the same group -- by showing that the perception of the existence of scientific consensus on various current issues, as well as the credence given by individuals to claims from particular scientists, is predicted vary strongly by where the subject stands on the "heirarchical individualist" vs. "egalitarian communitarian" scale isn't referenced here instead of this one, which shows nothing like what is claimed.
said nothing about ACID compliance. I specifically mentioned non-relational datastores, and clearly MySQL isn't that.
Um, the reason MySQL with MyISAM doesn't provide ACID guarantees (particularly, its deficiencies with regard to consistency) are related to the ways in which MySQL with MyISAM fails to implement the relational model. Merely using a dialect of SQL as a query language doesn't make a database relational.
Well bully for you having a chance to show off your obscure knowledge of non-relational data stores, I'm sure you must be very proud. But have any of those been targeted at modern enterprise application deployments? Not that I'm aware of.
Your ignorance on the point is noted, but since they have been continuously deployed in large enterprise applications (including "modern" ones), and since they are in many cases the exact same products now being touted as "new" "post-relational" alternatives for modern enterprise applications, the answer is "yes".
There's nothing obscure about them; some of the largest production databases used by the largest institutions (e.g., the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) run on these systems.
Which is why I asked the question "when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS". Answer: there hasn't been.
Well, sure, if you ignore the mainstream, high-perforamnce, non-relational datastores which predate RDBMSs and which RDBMSs never managed to displace for many large-scale, production installations. Which happen, in many cases, to be the exact same systems now hyped as "post-relational" alternatives to RDBMS's.
Rather, the RDBMS has, for decades, been considered the solution that should *replace* the types of systems you describe, because the RDBMS has been largely considered *the* answer for large-scale data management.
It has, by some people. It hasn't, by others -- including the users and vendors of these large-scale production systems -- which is why these systems have continued to be deployed, developed, and now around to be the some of the primary subjects of "NoSQL" hype.
This whole "NoSQL" (god I hate that name) trend, on the other hand, is a move away from relational models to ones that may be more appropriate for the kinds of applications people are building today.
Which, it turns out, are often the current versions of the same systems which have continuously deployed in large production environments since before RDBMSs were even around to compete with.
IOW, web developers are starting to build systems that reach the scale of the large-scale production database systems which RDBMS's never displaced, and are finding that the same systems which RDBMSs never managed to displace are, in fact, often better choices than RDBMSs at that scale, which makes these tried-and-true systems new and shiny to the web development community.
New Age (rather than classical Mayan) superstition aside, the Mayan calendar doesn't end, period (or at least, on any timescale that matters); it has many much longer cycles than the one that ends in 2012 and on which certain New Agers fixated for end-of-world hysteria.
But when was the last time you heard announced a mainstream, high-performance, non-relational data store that was intended to be an alternative to an RDBMS (BTW, I'm intentionally discounting OODBMSes, as I think they and RDBMSes are intended to target largely the same application space)? I know I haven't. People simply rolled their own and moved on. But times are changing and that niche is finally being filled (in part because that niche isn't so niche anymore).
One of the most recent, well-known major successes before the recent "NoSQL" movement, in terms of a product that sacrificed ACID for performance as an alternative to databases providing ACID guarantees, was MySQL. (And, insofar as scalabality in the database size dimension is an aspect of performance, I guess the WWW itself could count.) I can't think of a time in history where there wasn't a tension between offerings with maximum performance in particular dimensions and offerings with the strongest integrity guarantees.
Aside from that, many of the "new alternatives" are non-relational, high-performance systems that are updated versions of non-relational, high-performance systems that have been around in large-scale production deployments and have continued to be maintained since before relational databases were widespread -- some even before the Codd's paper laying out the relational model was published in 1970. E.g., InterSystems Cache is a development of MUMPS, which has been continuously in use in large production installations since the late 1960s; a number of other of the recently--and amusingly--labelled "post-relational" databases are the products of decades of revisions -- with continuous production deployments -- from the similar MultiValue database included as part of the PICK operating system, also from the late 1960s.
Since these hard numerous, large-scale, production deployments, I wouldn't exactly call them "niche". They may not have overlapped with the experience of most web developers, so they may seem new from that perspective.
If you don't really need a database to run your 'website', then who cares if you use flat files or an in memory hashmap for all your data needs?
There is a difference between needing a structured storage mechanism (database) and needing a database that implements the relational model and provides ACID guarantees. Further, many non-relational databases provide specific, weaker forms of ACID guarantees that are better than (say) naive flat file storage would, while providing better scalability in certain applications than existing RDBMS products.
There's certainly a lot of work going on on providing better scalability for relational databases providing ACID guarantees, too, and as that progresses (because strong ACID guarantees do have value), RDBMS's may be better in some of the roles that "NoSQL" products are good for now. There are challenges to scalability with ACID guarantees, and maybe even some hard barriers, so at best its going to be easier to build scalable products with weaker guarantees in the near future. And real apps need real solutions now, not solutions that might materialize years down the line.
Is there really a huge issue with rdbms speeds?
Yes, in certain applications with certain workloads there is. Otherwise people would just use existing products.
To some extent it looks like they weren't litigious pricks as much as having gotten very bad legal advice and then not backed out when they should have.
Or, their litigious pricks who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions, and our now blaming their lawyers.
I think the real problem is not that you are forced to follow the rules to be on the apple store. Is that if, as a developer, you want to develop for the iPhone, you HAVE to use the apple store.
Or the web. Given the functional restrictions (no multitasking, etc.) on local apps, and how much of the device functionality is exposed to web apps, and Apple's increasing trend of arbitrary and after the fact administrative restrictions on App Store apps, I wouldn't be surprised if more and more developers stopped making native apps for iPhone in favor of iPhone-targetted web apps.
This can't be said enough. Falcon 9 Flight 1 is in no way a single point failure for the administration's budget proposal.
Well, it rationally shouldn't be, but, politics being politics, if enough people believe it is, and then it does fail, it will be, whether or not there is any sense to it.
Which may be part of the motivation for it being painted as such.
Does Twitter really have loads which are more difficult to manage than, say, the BBC, CNN, Google, or Wikipedia?
(1) In some measures , probably; (2) When Google or Wikipedia makes announcements about technology (whether its a "change" or not) they use in their backend, that's usually often a front-page story on Slashdot, too. The BBC and CNN don't, AFAIK, tend to make big public announcements about back-end technology.
I would have thought serving up a fairly straightforward page, a stylesheet, a background image and the tweets or twits or whatever they're called can't be that difficult compared to, say, Facebook.
Processing the tweets is the big scale issue at Twitter, AFAIK, and while Facebook does something similar with its status updates, ISTR that the scale at Twitter is bigger. But its not really a big issue either way, as when Facebook talks about their technology backend, that also gets attention from Slashdot.
I think their point is not everything needs an RDBMS, whereas before it was the 'go to' method of storing data.
Except, of course, that it never was the "go to" method of storing data. There was no point in history where RDBMS's were anywhere close to the exclusive method of persisting data. Non-relational document-oriented storage has pretty much always dominated in the era in which relational databases existed, whether it was proprietary binary document formats, fairly direct text-based document formats, or highly structures (XML, etc.) text-based document formats.
Why is it that whenever twitter makes any random change to some part of its infrastructure that we need a front page story about it?
Because in some areas Twitter is at an extreme of scale, so what they are doing to deal with that extreme of scale (even if it isn't necessarily always the ideal choice) is usually interesting since, if you are looking for things that have been done in production to deal with the kind of scaling they experience, there aren't a lot of other data points to find.
It's fascinating how after initially being a posterboy for the post-Java revolution Twitter is gradually moving their architecture to the JVM piece by piece.
I think its fascinating, too -- but probably in a very different way than you do. You seem to think that it is a repudiation of some mythical "post-Java revolution", when in many ways I think it is a validation of exactly the approach that was common to pushing Ruby, Python, and similar languages as more agile alternatives to Java. The appeal of tools noted for their suitability for rapid development of software that works and is maintainable, even if it isn't going to set any kind of performance records, is that it supports getting new functionality (and, thus, often new businesses) of the ground, and supports the kind of rapid change that is often necessary when a product is first exposed to a mass market, gets used in new and unexpected (by the developers) ways, etc., and that the right time to optimize performance is often once the concept is validated, and trying to do too much of that too early means you lose agility in introduction and early development of the product.
Shifting, component by component, to more "enterprisey" solutions as a service/product matures is entirely consistent with that understanding.
(where as if you talk to most of the ruby / python crowd they would rather stick toothpicks in their eyes than endorse a solution that involves java).
I don't think that's particularly true. Sure, some of the people in the any language community are going to be partisans for that language exclusively, but the Ruby community (which I'm more familiar with than the Python community) seems particularly friendly to Java as a platform, and to Ruby being used in the role of a "glue" language instead of an exclusive language.
In the case of the Ruby community, I think that the appearance of anti-Java sentiment there stems largely from the the early days of Rails, where lots of people were pushing Rails by extolling (often in a rather hyperbolic manner) its virtues as compared to enterprise-oriented, XML-configuration-heavy, Java frameworks.
Nobody wants the nuclear power plant in their back yard because it is: "NUCULAR!!!" The power has to come from somewhere. Yet everyone will happily accept that coal-powered plant in their front yard which actually emits more radiation (through trace amounts in the coal) than a nuclear plant does.
[citation needed]
Seriously, have you ever seen the public outcry over siting new non-nuclear power plants? No one wants them near them -- especially coal power plants -- either. Wind turbines are too ugly. Hydroelectric dams destroy too much land. Anything that burns fossil fuels raises issues with airborne pollution, especially coal or oil fired plants.
NIMBYism isn't restricted nuclear power plants.
The only difference with nuclear power plants is that energy companies don't want to build them -- unless the public indemnifies the operator against any liability. Why? Because not only does the public not like them, the operators and insurers don't feel they are safe enough, either, which is why they aren't willing to build them if they are financially on the line in the event of an accident.
Sadly, "Learning Python" has grown from a book less than 400 pages, to one over 1200. It used to be that people would buy "Learning Python" if they wanted a reasonable sized learning book, and the big 1200 page "Programming Python" if they were truly crazy. Now "Programming Python" is over 1600 pages, and "Learning Python" is over 900.
While 1216 pages is both "over 1200" pages and "over 900" pages, its kind of odd to refer to it as the former in one sentence and the latter in the next.
Anyway, as it happens, getting the most into the public domain the fastest is basically exactly the best way to promote the progress of science. Consider a utopia of knowledge: Everyone who can create works, and is willing to create works, does so.
Sure, if you presume perfect altruism on the part of creators, getting everything immediately into the public domain is obviously ideal. When you start dealing with trying to get the best practical results in promoting progress in the real world, when the creators are real people, that's when you get into the balancing act between incentive to create and freedom to use. The Constitution permits exclusive rights because its designed to deal with the real world and real creators, not a utopia with perfectly altruistic creators.
Well Google has an advantage in that they are large and respected. If they open up VP8 and say "Here's the docs to implement hardware decoding, we'll be supporting this standard well in to the future," companies might be interested in it.
They'll be more interested in it if Google goes beyond just doing that and also pays for someone to make a hardware decoder for it (but doesn't demand exclusivity on it), and includes it alongside hardware H.264 decoding in, say, the "Nexus Two" phone, or a Google-branded ChromeOS netbook or something like that.
Why doesn't Congress act and moot these proceedings?
Because that would involve taking responsibility for a result that is going to anger lots of people (whatever form it takes) when someone else (the courts) is already on the hook for it.
Simple, you have a yearly registration and nominal fee (say $1 per work).
I think that, at a minimum, you need a reasonable (say 7-10 years) "free" period. (In order to encourage deposit, and thus discourage the loss of works, I'd consider having a strong deposit -- of a copy of the work in the form protected -- requirement, which if not complied with within (say) 1 year would result in the work losing protection, but I wouldn't associate payment with that.)
I also personally prefer that once you require paying a fee, you make it a fixed-percentage tax on the declared value of the work, with a minimum but no maximum, and allow a work to be bought into the public domain by any interested party (or combination of parties) for the declared value.
Since even most commercially viable works make the vast majority of the money they earn for their copyright holder in the first few years they exist, this would have little impact on the incentives to create new works. It would also allow creators the choice to keep works under their exclusive control -- if they were willing to pay enough to do so (and thereby compensate the public for the special privilege they would be asking to have extended to them.) And the purchase-into-the-public-domain option would prevent copyright holders from undervaluing works, but also assure that they were fairly -- at the value they themselves set on the work -- compensated for any work taken into the public domain early (short of whatever maximum limit is set on the duration of even paid copyrights.)
The fastest way to get as much into the Public Domain as soon as possible is to abandon copyright
That's only clearly true in very short run as a one time event; GP seems to think that the purpose of copyright is to encourage the greatest long-term rate of new material entering the public domain (which, clearly, given the trend of extensions so that nothing ever enters the public domain, isn't the purpose behind present copyright policy, and also isn't the express Constitutional purpose of copyright in the US, though it might be argued as a desirable mechanism of acheiving the Constitutional purpose.)
Slashdot Mirror
An automated conversion process has no effect on what can be charged for individual portions of the results, it just streamlines the process of getting material into a form where it can be distributed online, separated by (and, potentially, priced differently by) article, which is even more specific than particular issue.
Now, certainly, Google would probably like to get everything from everyone and pay and charge nothing for it, making money by serving targetted ads alongside the content. But that's not the only could do with the technology, and patenting the technology (even if one assumes that they intend to deploy it at all) doesn't tell you anything about how they plan to deploy it.
It does, if it wants to compete with the iPod Touch, which has the ideal size for the interface style and application limits imposed on it.
Yes, its an inconveniently sized iPod Touch crossed with an ebook reader with an emissive display.
Of course, the people most inclined to purchase expensive new entertainment gadgets already have iPod Touches and/or iPhones and/or e-Ink based readers; the main feature the iPad is that its a bigger display than the iPod, which is probably good for video (especially for multiple viewers) but is it really worth the extra size?
Well, its a "does more" ereader. Whether having an emissive display makes it an "improved" ereader is somewhat dubious.
Its a convergence device, in that its trying to combine the functions of various entertainment devices (audio/video functionality of an iPod, but bigger to compete with portable, shareable video players, and better text reading size to compete with dedicated ereaders.)
And so will the price of competing devices, and the iPad is likely to remain overpriced.
If it was exclusive, then that certainly would be a selling point for the iPad. Whether it would do more to help Apple sell iPads than it would do to limit News Corps. ability to reach customers is debatable.
Of course, since News Corp. is one of the members of the consortium behind the Skiff, one of the readers that the iPad and Apple bookstore will be competing with, I think its unlikely that they'll make an exclusive deal with Apple for all News Corp. content.
Usability isn't magic. Its having the right set of features to provide functions that produce definable benefits in particular applications. If you've got a real usability advantages, you can sell them with the tradition "this feature provides this function which produces this benefit" way, you don't have to wave "magic" around.
So, for that matter, will my smartphone (which, as it happens, is an iPhone, but any modern smartphone would be in the same position.) And, either of those things will do the things they do better than the iPad, which is to big to excel at the things that a smartphone is good for, and too feature-limited to excel at the things the netbook is good for.
That's a nice theory, and sometimes Apple hits a home run trying to do limited-functionality-but-polished. But, also, sometimes it makes the Apple Pippin.
Most of the people I've seen with netbooks aren't geeks.
If anything, an expensive, limited-functionality computing device that is designed to rely on another computer as a primary device has a narrower target market than a less-expensive device that can operate just fine as a primary device.
If doing less (or even doing less, but doing it better) meant you win, the iPad would be killed by e-Ink based dedicated readers, which do less than the iPad and do it better. From its price, size, form factor, and what they highlighted in the demo, I think Apple's hope is exactly the opposite of "It will win because it does less (and does it better)". I think they are hoping to win in the exploding market for digital reader devices by doing more, not winning in against netbooks by doing less.
All of those functions happen automatically (or, in the case of rebooting, with a reminder that you click on when an update requires it, which is maybe once a week -- and the only time, except when I'm switching to use Linux [hardly something a non-geek user is as likely to need to do], that I reboot my netbook rather than just closing the lid and letting it hibernate), except defragging which is almost never needed.
And, with a netbook, you don't have to have another computer to plug into to get OS updates.
Its the same thing that the CEO has said, and its the same thing their official product announcement said, and its the same thing the current project page said. "Magic", "Revolutionary", etc. -- its all fuzzy hype, and no "feature, functions, benefits".
And that's a bad sign for a new product.
That doesn't support the idea that people "don't put as much weight on facts as they do on their own belief about how the world is supposed to work", it instead suggests the much less interesting conclusion that what people subjectively like (rather than what they believe to be true in fact) is based not on facts alone but also on their personal priorities. This, of course, is true by definition, since you can't get to a conclusion about "X is good" without a premise of the same form.
What's odd is that the experiment that actually shows something closer to what is claimed -- conducted by the same group -- by showing that the perception of the existence of scientific consensus on various current issues, as well as the credence given by individuals to claims from particular scientists, is predicted vary strongly by where the subject stands on the "heirarchical individualist" vs. "egalitarian communitarian" scale isn't referenced here instead of this one, which shows nothing like what is claimed.
Um, the reason MySQL with MyISAM doesn't provide ACID guarantees (particularly, its deficiencies with regard to consistency) are related to the ways in which MySQL with MyISAM fails to implement the relational model. Merely using a dialect of SQL as a query language doesn't make a database relational.
Your ignorance on the point is noted, but since they have been continuously deployed in large enterprise applications (including "modern" ones), and since they are in many cases the exact same products now being touted as "new" "post-relational" alternatives for modern enterprise applications, the answer is "yes".
There's nothing obscure about them; some of the largest production databases used by the largest institutions (e.g., the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) run on these systems.
Well, sure, if you ignore the mainstream, high-perforamnce, non-relational datastores which predate RDBMSs and which RDBMSs never managed to displace for many large-scale, production installations. Which happen, in many cases, to be the exact same systems now hyped as "post-relational" alternatives to RDBMS's.
It has, by some people. It hasn't, by others -- including the users and vendors of these large-scale production systems -- which is why these systems have continued to be deployed, developed, and now around to be the some of the primary subjects of "NoSQL" hype.
Which, it turns out, are often the current versions of the same systems which have continuously deployed in large production environments since before RDBMSs were even around to compete with.
IOW, web developers are starting to build systems that reach the scale of the large-scale production database systems which RDBMS's never displaced, and are finding that the same systems which RDBMSs never managed to displace are, in fact, often better choices than RDBMSs at that scale, which makes these tried-and-true systems new and shiny to the web development community.
New Age (rather than classical Mayan) superstition aside, the Mayan calendar doesn't end, period (or at least, on any timescale that matters); it has many much longer cycles than the one that ends in 2012 and on which certain New Agers fixated for end-of-world hysteria.
One of the most recent, well-known major successes before the recent "NoSQL" movement, in terms of a product that sacrificed ACID for performance as an alternative to databases providing ACID guarantees, was MySQL. (And, insofar as scalabality in the database size dimension is an aspect of performance, I guess the WWW itself could count.) I can't think of a time in history where there wasn't a tension between offerings with maximum performance in particular dimensions and offerings with the strongest integrity guarantees.
Aside from that, many of the "new alternatives" are non-relational, high-performance systems that are updated versions of non-relational, high-performance systems that have been around in large-scale production deployments and have continued to be maintained since before relational databases were widespread -- some even before the Codd's paper laying out the relational model was published in 1970. E.g., InterSystems Cache is a development of MUMPS, which has been continuously in use in large production installations since the late 1960s; a number of other of the recently--and amusingly--labelled "post-relational" databases are the products of decades of revisions -- with continuous production deployments -- from the similar MultiValue database included as part of the PICK operating system, also from the late 1960s.
Since these hard numerous, large-scale, production deployments, I wouldn't exactly call them "niche". They may not have overlapped with the experience of most web developers, so they may seem new from that perspective.
There is a difference between needing a structured storage mechanism (database) and needing a database that implements the relational model and provides ACID guarantees. Further, many non-relational databases provide specific, weaker forms of ACID guarantees that are better than (say) naive flat file storage would, while providing better scalability in certain applications than existing RDBMS products.
There's certainly a lot of work going on on providing better scalability for relational databases providing ACID guarantees, too, and as that progresses (because strong ACID guarantees do have value), RDBMS's may be better in some of the roles that "NoSQL" products are good for now. There are challenges to scalability with ACID guarantees, and maybe even some hard barriers, so at best its going to be easier to build scalable products with weaker guarantees in the near future. And real apps need real solutions now, not solutions that might materialize years down the line.
Yes, in certain applications with certain workloads there is. Otherwise people would just use existing products.
Or, their litigious pricks who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions, and our now blaming their lawyers.
Or the web. Given the functional restrictions (no multitasking, etc.) on local apps, and how much of the device functionality is exposed to web apps, and Apple's increasing trend of arbitrary and after the fact administrative restrictions on App Store apps, I wouldn't be surprised if more and more developers stopped making native apps for iPhone in favor of iPhone-targetted web apps.
Well, it rationally shouldn't be, but, politics being politics, if enough people believe it is, and then it does fail, it will be, whether or not there is any sense to it.
Which may be part of the motivation for it being painted as such.
(1) In some measures , probably;
(2) When Google or Wikipedia makes announcements about technology (whether its a "change" or not) they use in their backend, that's usually often a front-page story on Slashdot, too. The BBC and CNN don't, AFAIK, tend to make big public announcements about back-end technology.
Processing the tweets is the big scale issue at Twitter, AFAIK, and while Facebook does something similar with its status updates, ISTR that the scale at Twitter is bigger. But its not really a big issue either way, as when Facebook talks about their technology backend, that also gets attention from Slashdot.
Because in some areas Twitter is at an extreme of scale, so what they are doing to deal with that extreme of scale (even if it isn't necessarily always the ideal choice) is usually interesting since, if you are looking for things that have been done in production to deal with the kind of scaling they experience, there aren't a lot of other data points to find.
I think its fascinating, too -- but probably in a very different way than you do. You seem to think that it is a repudiation of some mythical "post-Java revolution", when in many ways I think it is a validation of exactly the approach that was common to pushing Ruby, Python, and similar languages as more agile alternatives to Java. The appeal of tools noted for their suitability for rapid development of software that works and is maintainable, even if it isn't going to set any kind of performance records, is that it supports getting new functionality (and, thus, often new businesses) of the ground, and supports the kind of rapid change that is often necessary when a product is first exposed to a mass market, gets used in new and unexpected (by the developers) ways, etc., and that the right time to optimize performance is often once the concept is validated, and trying to do too much of that too early means you lose agility in introduction and early development of the product.
Shifting, component by component, to more "enterprisey" solutions as a service/product matures is entirely consistent with that understanding.
I don't think that's particularly true. Sure, some of the people in the any language community are going to be partisans for that language exclusively, but the Ruby community (which I'm more familiar with than the Python community) seems particularly friendly to Java as a platform, and to Ruby being used in the role of a "glue" language instead of an exclusive language.
In the case of the Ruby community, I think that the appearance of anti-Java sentiment there stems largely from the the early days of Rails, where lots of people were pushing Rails by extolling (often in a rather hyperbolic manner) its virtues as compared to enterprise-oriented, XML-configuration-heavy, Java frameworks.
[citation needed]
Seriously, have you ever seen the public outcry over siting new non-nuclear power plants? No one wants them near them -- especially coal power plants -- either. Wind turbines are too ugly. Hydroelectric dams destroy too much land. Anything that burns fossil fuels raises issues with airborne pollution, especially coal or oil fired plants.
NIMBYism isn't restricted nuclear power plants.
The only difference with nuclear power plants is that energy companies don't want to build them -- unless the public indemnifies the operator against any liability. Why? Because not only does the public not like them, the operators and insurers don't feel they are safe enough, either, which is why they aren't willing to build them if they are financially on the line in the event of an accident.
While 1216 pages is both "over 1200" pages and "over 900" pages, its kind of odd to refer to it as the former in one sentence and the latter in the next.
Sure, if you presume perfect altruism on the part of creators, getting everything immediately into the public domain is obviously ideal. When you start dealing with trying to get the best practical results in promoting progress in the real world, when the creators are real people, that's when you get into the balancing act between incentive to create and freedom to use. The Constitution permits exclusive rights because its designed to deal with the real world and real creators, not a utopia with perfectly altruistic creators.
They'll be more interested in it if Google goes beyond just doing that and also pays for someone to make a hardware decoder for it (but doesn't demand exclusivity on it), and includes it alongside hardware H.264 decoding in, say, the "Nexus Two" phone, or a Google-branded ChromeOS netbook or something like that.
Because that would involve taking responsibility for a result that is going to anger lots of people (whatever form it takes) when someone else (the courts) is already on the hook for it.
I think that, at a minimum, you need a reasonable (say 7-10 years) "free" period. (In order to encourage deposit, and thus discourage the loss of works, I'd consider having a strong deposit -- of a copy of the work in the form protected -- requirement, which if not complied with within (say) 1 year would result in the work losing protection, but I wouldn't associate payment with that.)
I also personally prefer that once you require paying a fee, you make it a fixed-percentage tax on the declared value of the work, with a minimum but no maximum, and allow a work to be bought into the public domain by any interested party (or combination of parties) for the declared value.
Since even most commercially viable works make the vast majority of the money they earn for their copyright holder in the first few years they exist, this would have little impact on the incentives to create new works. It would also allow creators the choice to keep works under their exclusive control -- if they were willing to pay enough to do so (and thereby compensate the public for the special privilege they would be asking to have extended to them.) And the purchase-into-the-public-domain option would prevent copyright holders from undervaluing works, but also assure that they were fairly -- at the value they themselves set on the work -- compensated for any work taken into the public domain early (short of whatever maximum limit is set on the duration of even paid copyrights.)
That's only clearly true in very short run as a one time event; GP seems to think that the purpose of copyright is to encourage the greatest long-term rate of new material entering the public domain (which, clearly, given the trend of extensions so that nothing ever enters the public domain, isn't the purpose behind present copyright policy, and also isn't the express Constitutional purpose of copyright in the US, though it might be argued as a desirable mechanism of acheiving the Constitutional purpose.)