kmod

Interesting article, but I find the author's use of statistics to be quite bizarre...

[quote] Approximately 68% of URL shortening services were Stage 1 Compliant.

Approximately 56% of URL shortening services were exclusively Stage 2 Compliant. [/quote]

It seems from his numbers that he just meant to not include the word "exclusively", even though it was italicized. Also, I'm not sure what prompted the venn diagram with three sections "A", "B", and "A and B". Most of the regions (such as "A"-and-"A and B"-not-"B") are empty, for good reason.

Zipcar does the same thing: only numbers and letters. Also, try putting '<' or '>' in your password -- they'll complain about how you're putting HTML tags in your password.

Now why would they worry about that?

I don't understand how you make the jump from "I want to support this company" to "everyone should be forced to support this company". If you want to support them, there are ways you can do it currently, so if you really want to support them than you would have done it already. Are you saying that you want them to be supported, but you want other people to shoulder the cost?

I think charging or not for their services is definitely the NYTimes's prerogative. That doesn't mean that it's a good choice. Personally, I think it's a bad choice, because they're going to alienate some of their most loyal readers. I, too, wish that the neswpapers could find a sustainable way to remain profitable, but I don't think this is it. But if there is no sustainable way, I guess that means that newspapers actually aren't as valuable to us as we like to think, because otherwise we'd be willing to pay for it.

This is like saying that we should get rid of TCP because all we use is HTTP. Which, if it even made sense, would be a pretty bad idea.

What exactly is this guy arguing for? How is the OS supposed to "make higher-level APIs like these"? It seems like he hasn't completely thought through his suggestion: he's saying that we should move the filesystem into the OS and then hide it. Ok that's probably fine if you're not doing anything serious and all you need are ints and dicts. But what about a database? The only way the OS can provide a database abstraction is by taking over database functionality from applications.

And I'm pretty sure that exactly not what we want, and why the original designers decided to go with flat byte streams rather than structured data on disk. Yes, maybe you don't work at the level of abstraction of files and bit streams. But someone has to! The author is suggesting making that impossible except inside the OS...?

I think instead of "Death to Filesystems", the author should have made the claim that we should produce and standardize an abstraction level above the FS, and then everyone should start using it (which is a valid and very justifiable suggestion). As is, this post has come off as unreasoned.

It's a systematic problem: often one wants to reward some good behavior X, but X is very hard to measure so one finds some measure Y that is highly correlated to X, and then measure Y. The problem is that once people know that it is Y that is being rewarded, they seek to do Y as cheaply as possible. And if "seeking to do Y as easily as possible" does not involve doing X, then the system breaks.

So in this example, X is producing high-quality content, and Y is getting a lot of links to you. Other examples include X,Y = (knowing the material, getting correct answers on the test) and (needing money, spending money).

This has a well-known analog in economic circles known as the "Lucas Critique" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique

Right, I'm not saying that AT&T isn't responsible or that people don't have good cause to be dissatisfied with them. All I'm trying to say is that it's possible that the root technical cause of the bad service issues isn't in AT&T's network, but in bad behavior from iPhones that manifests itself when you have a large concentration of them in one area.

I think people need to stop jumping to conclusions. Maybe the "problem with the network" is that "there are too many iPhones on the network." This deals with every actual piece of evidence that people are putting forward to try to refute the original article. Is it really so hard to believe that Apple could put out a piece of hardware that does not behave nicely to others?

I'm not saying that the nytimes article is right, but just that people who say it's wrong are wrong.

As an analogy, you can take the routers that were stupidly configured to use stratum 1 NTP servers. These misbehaving devices placed too much strain on the NTP "network" because they used it inappropriately. But it was only the NTP servers that a lot of these routers were configured for that were having problems. Yet no one would claim that it's the NTP network's fault for the issues.

"The way I look at it is if all these services were free, EC2 would win based upon features. So, the question is, does cost matter?"

I think this is the important part of the debate. Many people don't use these features, but with EC2 you are paying for them regardless. For example, you pay for the ability to pay by the hour (in terms of increased costs), even if you never plan on doing so. Yes, reserved instances can help, but they don't fully cover the cost difference.

So it really does come down to what features you need. If you do use all the features, I'd imagine that EC2 is a great deal, because everyone else is subsidizing your use of them. If you don't want any of the features, well, then you're subsidizing everyone else.

I think the "cost shouldn't matter" argument isn't relevant. If cost doesn't matter, it is hard to make a case for EC2 vs spending the money to develop your own infrastructure + hiring lots of people + vastly overprovisioning your own datacenters.

Random speculation: Google put this feature in Wave to get some early feedback before including it as the default scrollbar behavior in Chrome OS.

I will most likely be verifiably wrong about this soon, but it would make sense given Google's strategy of testing things out in small batches before making it default. Why the comment about "mobile devices and netbooks"? Why Wave? They could just as well put these scrollbars in Gmail or any other Google product. It doesn't make sense to me, except if they want people to try it out and work out the kinks before putting it in Chrome OS where 1) the primary target is "mobile devices and netbooks" and 2) they can much more easily make that the default scrollbar behavior.