adamsmith

folks on Outlook 2007 will also find a huge OL performance boost from upgrading to SP2, wherein the fixed about thirty Outlook perf bugs, some of which can be tickled by their addin API's!

  [startups]
  http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
  http://cdixon.org/
  http://news.ycombinator.com

  [business]
  tech: http://techmeme.com

This has been by far and away my #1 complaint for over three years (http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2007/03/complaints-about-visual-stu...). It is a huge deterrent from taking advantage of most of C#'s beauties.

You are absolutely right that you would have to get serious about data integrity. ECC is such a good example.

Getting customers to trust a smaller company's software is definitely a top risk. I wouldn't start this company now, but it might be worth doing in 2015. Watch this space!

It's just that their business model -- charging per GB, instead of per GB of new data that nobody else is storing yet -- leaves them susceptible to arbitrage. I.e. customers can steal the economies of scale if they collaborate.

You know how Starbucks charges $5 for a small and $6 for a large? It's the same thing. If two people want smalls, but collaborate, they can just split a large and save $2 each. It's the same idea, except that arbitrage becomes more realistic when it's electronic.

(I've ignored compression in the whole discussion for simplicity. If AWS wants a business model that isn't arbitragable based on compression they would have to charge based on how compressable your data is. Also, next generation compression algorithms -- another blog post on that later perhaps -- could achieve compression rates that have the same economies of cross-customer scale that data deduplication does, so really it would have to be price based on how compressable your data is __given all of the other data S3 is storing__.)

(EDIT: made starbucks example simpler.)

Working at the abstraction layer of disks is misleading because there are so many other pieces that go into making a service like S3.

Instead I'm proposing an arbitrage that works one layer up -- on top of S3.

> Also, how much would de-duplication help? I mean, how much stuff is stored on s3 that is uncompressed? (or the same compressed file?)

It's a good question. The answer is unclear. Certainly if you're willing to get exotic with redundancy elimination (as opposed to dedup, which is a subset) and large-data-set compression algorithms there just are going to be economies of scale. What's not clear is (a) how large those economies become, or (b) how exotic your algorithms have to be to capture those economies.

> ..I could turn a profit renting uncompressed drive space at $0.05/gigabyte/month..

I wouldn't want to compete with Amazon S3. Data safety and uptime would keep me up at night like a mofo. I just wouldn't want to run that company, though I can imagine folks like MS doing it.

> Costs in the outsourced infrastructure market, as far as I can tell, have always been dominated by marketing.

This is a really interesting question. The landscape is obviously changing with the current batch of cloud infrastructure services.

I do think there are pieces of cloud storage that will not be commoditized, most notably the peace of mind around data safety and uptime. I wouldn't want to use a small cloud storage provider. Thus: (a) they will be able to charge a premium for a long time, and (b) there will be a smallish number of providers, meaning marketing will be less important in the future than having a good product.

(I'm not sure how much the API's and other development tools will be commoditizable. MSFT historically does a great job of embrace & extend when it comes to those parts, though their recent cloud services are too wedded to Windows and .NET.)

(EDIT: added responses to more of your original post.)

This could be a dumb bet. I'm treading on thin ice because I don't have experience with selling hardware. It seems like your biggest disagreement is the sale price needed to be profitable. So let's see -- if you make $40 on each purchase and want to make $4M per year you'd need to sell 100,000 units per year.

That's probably about what Sonos is doing now, six years into the company.

So it's a huge challenge, yes.

(Am I missing anything else?)

On the other hand I'd wager that XP has broader support for any driver or program in existence than any other version of any other OS. That's always nice.

As we're seeing, though, that's going to start changing real soon.

I would have liked to see time domain analysis -- so when a person goes from 'single' to 'in a relationship' does one see a pop in happiness? Is it sustained?

Guy #2 and #3 were definitely critical here. Both were needed, and in the same order. (Guy #3 didn't seem like he was willing to have been guy #2.)

I realize it's just a model and not intended to be entirely accurate. Just seems like a very small piece of the story.

one time during undergrad I was talking with Hal Abelson because there was this big stink about the new research building (Stata center) requiring rfid's to get around. Richard Stallman et al were making a huge ruckus about the privacy implications of not having physical keys.

I mentioned some desired attributes of a protocol to let people in without logging it, and started worrying about the implementation details / feasibility. he said "oh don't worry about implementation. this building has people in it who can implement anything." he had this smirk about him.

so give it some experts and time and they'll figure it out.

Even if that means a new protocol that uses SSL to send the javascript, etc., and we're 15 years away.

Do you think designing a system where the server never sees (or has the opportunity to store) the plaintext password is the way of the future?

(Edit: more emphasis on future, not short term, ambitions.)

For the long term I wonder if it's possible to close this hole by putting certs into DNS and using a single key to sign all of these DNS records. Is this part of the DNSSEC spec? (not at a computer and can't remember for sure if it is called DNSSEC; whatever the name of the next gen DNS is.)

That said states like Iran might be more likely to garner the most passwords through sniffing, which is a passive activity, than hacking the sites that store passwords insecurely.

The curious case was Zynga. They don't have a login form. (!)

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