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Eran Sandler › Likes
YC-Funded RethinkDB: A MySQL Storage Engine Built From The Ground Up For Solid State Drives - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Krishna Gade, Sean Kelly, hajar and 22 other people liked this
"RethinkDB is a new startup that’s looking to capitalize on this problem by building a storage engine for mySQL databases that’s fully optimized for SSD drives, bringing with it large speed boosts and a number of features sure to catch the eye of many developers. The company, which is part of the latest batch of Y Combinator-funded startups, is in fairly early stages (it started developing the product only two months ago), but it’s already making some substantial headway in the features it can offer. Among these are live schema changes, which allow developers to make significant modifications to their database structure without having to go through complex sync and backup procedures. It also offers lock-free concurrency, which means users will be able to read from the database even while other users are writing to it. And it’s an append-only database, which means developers can quickly recover in the event of a system failure."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
http://www.rethinkdb.com/
- Paul Buchheit
They need to get with the FusionIO guys
- Jesse Stay
Using an Android phone as a bar code scanner: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog... Done in 6 lines of Python code!
Tracy, Sumit Chachra, Gordon Saunders and 33 other people liked this
Wow, the Android Scripting Environment sounds really cool. Now I want an Android again. Can someone over there send me a G2? :)
- Paul Buchheit
Actually, if you could send over a box of 6 or 7 G2s to the FriendFeed offices, that'd be great.
- Kevin Fox
And one to me! Even though I already have a G1.
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
sweet dude. Is the ASE available for download in the market or where can i start using python on my android? anyone??
- Chris Jackson
As long as the camera quality is high enough res to actually *read* the bar code...rubber, meet road :)
- Jamie Beckland
it's not in the market yet, afaik, it's open sourced on google code though: http://code.google.com/p...
- coffee
The books.google.com Library looks pretty cool - this poses the question, do I now need to subscribe to LibraryThing, or just use Google Books Library? Hmm, choices choices
- Colin Charles
from twhirl
I just got my new Android - I am VERY excited!
- Ric Johnson
That's cool! I'm really looking forward to get a G2 phone.
- Peter Hoffmann
After putting in some time using NESoid today to play my favorite classic Nintendo games I couldn't possibly be more in love with my Android phone.
- Alex
“The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.” - Atle Selberg, winner of the 1950 Fields Medal
Lisa zahara Hopkins, K.D., Andy Tinkham and 77 other people liked this
I wonder how sure he was of that.
- Simon
Wasn't he talking of religion in general, and belief in supernatural in particular? Myself, I am partial to the concept of religion as a self-replicating and very nearly ineradicable thought virus (with some exceptions).
- ianf ⌘
ianf -- secularists and atheists are fully capable of holding fixed ideas that are as absurd and destructive as those held by religionists. Marxists, Marxist-Lenininsts, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. murdered in the neighborhood of 100 million people in the 20th century in the pursuit of utopian fantasies. (See The Black Book of Communism.)
- Sean McBride
I have no idea what he was talking about -- it's not important to me. I just liked the quote. I think it applies to everything, including religion, atheism, politics, technology, finance, etc.
- Paul Buchheit
I have a fixed idea that friendfeed rocks. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Sean - did you see me write that, so you needed to set me straight (again)? Besides, had I elected to engage in this discussion, I'd have pointed out from the start, that your "godless" examples of Communism (and Fascism, I presume) can just as easily be described as new religions. Complete with their own belief dogmas, foundation myths, theology, cathecisms (="A FAQ of religious...
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- ianf ⌘
ianf -- these Marxist movements were all explicitly anti-religious, and in many cases targeted religions for destruction (and religionists for death). To describe them as "religious" in any conventional or meaningful sense is to play word games. They were militantly dogmatic in their secularism and anti-religionism, in their fixed anti-religious ideas.
- Sean McBride
It seems clear to me that "religious" has two (related) meanings. It's common to describe a technical debate (such as one involving programming languages) as being "religious", but without literally meaning that it's the same as an Christianity or something.
- Paul Buchheit
Usually it means that the discussion is over non-falsifiable statements or matters of opinion that won't lead to anything useful.
- Bruce Lewis
really good context of the quote can be found here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26... Selberg was talking about fellow mathematician Louis de Branges, who had a reputation for being consistently wrong. In 1985 de Branges announced he had proved the Bieberbach Conjecture, and nobody paid any attention to it because it was from de Branges. Only, in this case, de Branges happened to be correct. :-)
- Karim
i'm not sure if Selberg was saying that de Branges was often wrong because he was seduced by the attractiveness of his own "fixed ideas" -- proofs that de Branges felt were correct when they weren't -- or whether it was a comment on the mathematical community rejecting de Branges' ideas outright because of *their* "fixed idea" that he was a nutcase. :-) either way, the lesson would seem to be, "Don't be so sure of yourself."
- Karim
oh and +1 Simon
- Karim
Hear, hear (Sean ;-))
- ianf ⌘
Isn't that the truth
- RAPatton
Life is a constant work in-progress!
- Kris
@Kris: are we sure of that? Like a fixed idea? </resist>
- Bill Anderson
from twhirl
unless your fixed idea is that we should legalize marijuana, in which case then it's cool.
- Thomas Hawk
Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores « random($foo) - http://randomfoo.net/2009...
Eran Sandler liked this
this confirms my take on the state of the art, Tokoyo Cabinet is reliable network enabled bdb, great foundation to roll your own, everything else is fluffy.
- kellan
Happy 10th anniversary to the Matrix! See http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009... and Kevin's awesome logo: http://friendfeed.com/static...
anna sauce, Jayavasanthan J, Ricardo Vidal and 168 other people liked this
so, you guys are agents... 8-|
- xekc
WFT? It's been 10 years? Wow.
- Arda Çetin
Definitely my favorite logo ever!
- Shannon Jiménez
very nice. i think you could add a bubble explaining the reference to Matrix with a mouse over
- Ouriel Ohayon
may have been 10 years to you :o
- chaz2b
great!
- K.D.
and people still ask me why I LOVE friendfeed, sign...
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
想不到都10年了，好快
- Kunshou（困兽）
Ok, not just me seeing that. Nice job Kevin.
- Andrew Smith
Wow! That is neat! I LOVE creative people! :-)
- Pat Graham Block
A very cool logo! Keep up the creative work!
- Sanne Buurma
Very cool logo you guys! :) Like Nicholas said, best and most creative one yet!
- vijay
How about change the color of entire background next time?
- Ray(http://sangu.me)
Gosh - ten years have passe me by - no one told me where to run . . .
- Chris Loft
Chris: those are Japanese characters, but yeah, I thought the original matrix logo had numbers, but might be wrong.
- Robert Scoble
@slayerboy - agree totally / "Show that you have no respect for those that built you, and you'll wonder why you were just a fad." lots of proof of that...
- Ben Watson
from twhirl
sorry - twhirl jumping around got my think in the wrong drink ... oops
- Ben Watson
from twhirl
This is so sweet!
- Brandon Titus
Kevin, this logo rocks!! hahaha - love it!! "Take the Red Pill" !! OK :)
- Susan Beebe
Very nice, you should do something for the 30th anniversary of 'Alien', too.
- Michael R. Bernstein
Great logo!
- Jorg Jansen
rick sanchez approves!
- Cee Bee
Great Stuff!
- Sidharth Shah
The film used a combination of hiragana, numbers, Latin characters and some reversed characters. I opted to just go with hiragana for a specific reason... (Matrix screenshot here: http://thefuturebuzz.com/pics...)
- Kevin Fox
So AWESOME.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
I was very pleasantly surprised to see this. Awesome job, FF!
- nadim
geez has it been ten years?
- Justin Long
My 9-year old son has been asking to watch this with me and I really need to make the time for us to do that. This is one of my favorite movies of all time (and he is one of my favorite persons)
- Alan Cheslow
What a great movie. Always think about it when I get deja vu :)! Love the logo.
- Ruth Helfinstein
@Gary, I know! I was in high school when the first one came out.
- Brandon Mendelson
The coolest and I would have missed it if Jeremiah Owyang never made a post about the Best of Day content (I found it in the BoD), which included a filter from FFing Enigma (aka Tina) and finally brought this post to my attention. The lengths I will go to for good content!
- Michael Fidler
ha! thats great... cool stuff
- Peter Efland
How come FF has a way to show additional comments, but no way to hide them again?
Eran Sandler, Maggie and Robert Felty liked this
Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web - http://www.mnot.net/blog...
Anthony Citrano, Matt Cutts, Peter Stuifzand and 2 other people liked this
I just commented on Mark's post about rel="alternate" type="text/html".
- DeWitt Clinton
I like your idea DeWitt. Let the crawlers decide what "short" means to them and pick whatever alternate URL they like
- Benjamin Golub
Thanks. I'd also support rel="shorturl" or whatever, but honestly rel="alternate" seems to be sufficient without needing to create yet-another rel value.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, the question is whether or not there are other uses for rel="alternate" type="text/html" out there that may cause some confusion (any chance you'll run a map-reduce job like you did on XFN? :-) ).
- Eran Sandler
Good point, Eran. I'll take a look. I can't think of any uses off the top of my head (alternate has been used for feeds, mostly), but I can run a MR and get real data.
- DeWitt Clinton
Added another comment that if rel="self" makes its way from Atom into HTML5 than that is preferable even over rel="alternate".
- DeWitt Clinton
.
- Philipp Lenssen
I'm just throwing an idea to the air here, but what about other URL types like images. Suppose I post a link to a resource that is not a page. Should it be entitled to get a short URL from the provider of that link? If so, we can't use rel="alternate" since we don't have an HTML page. This will require a different mode of discovery. Maybe something like an HTTP header (or we can ride the XRDS/whatever it is called now train)
- Eran Sandler
Right, the idea would be to use the draft Link Relations and HTTP Header Linking spec (http://www.mnot.net/drafts...). In fact, since I can't imagine aggregators actually *parsing* the HTML for <link> tags, getting the headers in a HEAD request is just about the only way they'd ever be discovered.
- DeWitt Clinton
Not to mention a HEAD request is MUCH more efficient for both sides (processing and bandwidth). The hax0r in me thinks the header is a good idea (quick and dirty scripts, easy almost one liner code in most languages). The "generic designer" in me thinks it might be a better idea to delegate this whole URL shortening to be a service that utilizes the evolving discovery standards.
- Eran Sandler
Microsoft Can Clone Twitter?! - http://www.developerzen.com/2009...
Jemm and Eran Sandler liked this
It's ALWAYS about the community and has always been the case for everything in the tech industry.
- Eran Sandler
Well they did manage to do it with Messenger (vs. ICQ\AOL\etc.). Hard to say if thats because they bundled it with Windows or just bcz the others didn't keep up with the market...
- Eran Kampf
Software pirate sends spam email: "I'll get you software for cheap!" So a guy asks for Ubuntu. Just read: http://bit.ly/2MNVXI
Eran Sandler, Patrick Jordan and DeWitt Clinton liked this
Announcing Amazon Elastic MapReduce - http://developer.amazonwebserv...
Winston Teo, John Lam, 9000 and 44 other people liked this
"Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit."
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
I'm smilin and nodding and secretly going 'huh?' although I get the principle
- Phill Price
"Develop your data processing application authored in your choice of Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++." (from http://aws.amazon.com/elastic...).
- fshamsi
I'm betting the App Engine version will be worth waiting even longer for.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Nice to see this principle being used more widely in the industry. Not all problems fit well into a map-reduce structure, but when they do, it's incredibly useful to be able to point a thousand machines them without a second thought.
- Joel Webber
For some of those problems, like finance, bioinformatics, and n-body simulations, you get substantial benefit from using something like OpenCL/CUDA/Brook on GPUs. The GPUs are insanely faster at doing things like running Smith Waterman or HMMR compared to x86 cores. Seems like someone needs to build a map-reduce cloud service on top of NVidia Tesla servers. Hmm, didn't Google already buy PeakStream? :)
- Ray Cromwell
wow, cool infrastructure with some serious scalability options
- Susan Beebe
@Ray - a little off topic, but I've often thought that the vector processing capabilities in GPUs would make them a good match for doing recommenders on the client
- Nick Lothian
Google uncloaks once-secret server | CNET News - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...
Nick Mutton, Rob Boek, Craig Deakin and 62 other people liked this
"Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts. [...] It may sound geeky, but a number of attendees--the kind of folks who run data centers packed with thousands of servers for a living--were surprised not only by Google's built-in battery approach, but by the fact that the company has kept it secret for years."
- Simon
from Bookmarklet
Hmm, I was in a Google data center two years ago (not one of their big ones) and it didn't have individual power supplies and didn't have machines in shipping containers. Seems to me that the shipping container would impede heat transfer and would add unnecessary expense. I'm sure they dont use them everywhere.
- Robert Scoble
Has CNet been "Scobled"? Site's pretty much toast.
- Kenton
Hey Robert, Sun has been doing the shipping containers. Check out http://www.sun.com/product...
- Paul Wade
That's pretty darn cool. Hope it's not an April fools joke.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Alex: I wonder. The servers I saw inside Google had Seagate drives. These are Hitachis. But I know that Google refreshes all its machines quite often. This looks real and makes sense.
- Robert Scoble
Paul: I know Sun was doing the shipping container thing, but that only makes sense when you need one small data center on premises, or something like that. Building a whole warehouse/data center like that doesn't make any sense.
- Robert Scoble
Plus I know they don't just use one brand of drives.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Google has lots of data centers all over the place, though, and I could see Google using a shipping container in some weird location. Just not in its big datacenter up in Oregon.
- Robert Scoble
Scoble, MSFT has data centers that are silos for containers. Makes a lot of sense if you think of having to swap in and out huge numbers of machines every 18-24 months.
- Aaron deMello
Aaron: wild. I'd love to visit one of those huge data centers and see how they do airflow management.
- Robert Scoble
By the way, CNET is down right now (all of CNET, not just the one this article points to).
- Robert Scoble
Yeah, I wonder if it's more efficient in the long run to have separate air and power handling for each container. Probably makes it a lot quicker to build up large server farms. Just connect the modules and download the software.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
The shipping container thing could make sense if they were stuffed into a shelving system - open the one end to allow for cooling, plug the whole box full of boxes in, and go. There was one company that was doing prefab hotels in this kind of fashion. build shell, and stuff pre-fab rooms in the slots. Do the datacenter the same way.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Yeah, CNET is having problems but it seems to be intermittent.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Like giant Drobos :-)
- Tim Ostler
The most interesting thing to me is the shipping container concept. That's the future model of efficiency. Portable data centers that you can drop anywhere you need 'em.
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Robert, each of the large vendors has their own solution to airflow management. Take a look at what Rackable and Verari are doing, quite interesting. Verari's are actually portable and designed to work outdoors.
- Aaron deMello
With these sorts of cooling requirements you'd think they'd bury the shipping containers 20 feet underground or in old coal mines or something.
- Andrew Leyden
The one thing I can tell you is that no Google employee will go near commenting on something like this. It is made *very* clear that anything touching datacenters is super-uber confidential.
- Joe Beda
I think it's a very smart design on Google's part. Years ago, when I worked in the Sprint's Central Offices the telecom battery backups were hideously large and only used when the diesel generators failed. Matter of fact, I think many of those beer keg size batteries were decades old.
- Donna Payne
This "secret server" was revealed in 2006 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive...). I personally looked at the power cable coming out the back of the power supply, being routed back *in* the case, *under* the mobo and out through the front, and had a Luke Skywalker reaction: "What a piece of junk!" Which I suppose is the cue for Han Solo to walk out of the...
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- Karim
my favorite quote from that 2006 article: " he said that in his first week working [at Google] they flew anyone who wanted to go, to denver to go skiing.... during the work week too ahaha" soooo it's like "super-efficient data centers, scrimping and saving every penny OMG DID SOMEONE SAY SKIING? FIRE UP THE PARTY PLANE!!!" :-D
- Karim
Ok, so how many of you are now trying to build one of these at home? That would be a good MAKE episode.
- Andrew Leyden
I bet all those $15 batteries would be a maintenance nightmare in a typical datacenter.
- Gabe
The article has been updated with additional photos and details: "Google's PUE [Power Usage Effectiveness] scores are enviably low, but the company is working to lower them further. [...] "[From] early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query," Hoelzle said. "We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.""
- Simon
What does it mean to "join" a website with Google Friend Connect? After joining, the main difference seems to be the lack of a "Join" button. Is there any other benefit?
İbrahim Uzun [ j ], Laura Norvig, Régis Gaidot and 49 other people liked this
yeah I'd like to know as well... I do have Friend Connect on my blog, but I'm hoping there's a future value that's not apparent yet.
- Nathan Chase
No not really :) Other users can find you and contact you.
- Svartling
the subtle undeclared goal is to contact the other follower behind the scene and to ask for a mutual friendship, funny thing google have to make explicit the symmetrical friendship. and before to close my comment, you can make a comment using GFC too :)
- abdellah
Yahoo's MyBlogLog seems to have a much better "join/sign in" widget - and for that matter, the FriendFeed Friends widget at FFavatars.com is much better that Googles Friend Connect too.
- Chris Loft
it is not just a widget, the un-confessed goal is to build a social network based of google profile and Google Friend Connect. that all, but they haven't made more effort on the profile part of the stuff.
- abdellah
Apart from getting one step closer towards Google-mediated/provided single sign-on, maybe the idea is/was to attract the "earliest" adopters before additional features are introduced for a greater benefit... Such features could be OpenSocial integration, article digests, comment digests, having your GFC social graph accessible from GMail, maybe even Google Reader, etc. Am I making any sense? :-)
- Nenad Nikolic
from twhirl
I think gfc is a good tool to set up communities on websites, what do you expect else?
- Alp
Nikolic I thing that you are on the right way, even the implementation of GFC (JS-RPC) suggest such orientation. I want to name all this hourahoura "MetaSocial" google want may be I am wrong to be a kind of meta social platform. or I am a fool.
- abdellah
If a site is using the Google Friend Connect API, you can often leave comments with your Google, Yahoo, or AIM account very easily.
- Matt Cutts
I have a video demo with Kevin Marks of Google, which shows you some of what Google's FriendConnect does: http://blip.tv/file/1920841
- Robert Scoble
Robert, your video doesn't seem to explain the benefit of joining a site. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you can do on a site if you have an OpenID account, but why do you need to join it to take advantage of any of it? If Google Friend Connect is supposed to be this truly open and portable social network, having to "join" sites seems to be counterproductive towards that goal.
- Mark Trapp
Also, I'd love to see the killer app for Google Friend Connect. The widgets out there seem to all be pretty lame: shoutboxes are so 2001. What do I get from GFC that someone would drool over?
- Mark Trapp
I've been wondering the same - it seems to be MyBlogLog widget without anything else
- andy brudtkuhl
I think it will depend whether it gets developed/expanded to really compete with the functionality of Facebook Connect, or if it gets sidelined like so many non-core Google projects/acquisitions for a long time (Feedburner anyone?).
- Badger Gravling
Clearly, it means that Skynet is growing....
- Mike Shields
The feed of the site appears in Google Reader under "Blogs i'm following"
- Lode Nachtergaele
@lode - was wondering where that came from
- andy brudtkuhl
Pretty sure it does the same thing as MyBlogLog -- after you join, when you visit, the owner of the site can see that you "visited." Maybe everyone else can see it too.
- Dave Winer
It's mybloglog but less ugly. :) But site owners can also add more features, like a kind of guestbook for the blog and such. At some later time, it might also help to understand which people are subscribed to which blogs, like Toluu set out to do ( http://www.toluu.com/ )
- Meryn Stol
Here's an example of the GFC api: http://yoast.com/wordpre... It's a WordPress plugin that lets anyone leave a comment on your blog with Google, Yahoo, OpenID, or AIM account. I'm planning to install it after I upgrade my WordPress.
- Matt Cutts
You get to be in "a list". That's about it, for now. It does give the owner of that app the ability to do something with your credentials though if they want to. Haven't seen anyone do anything with this yet, though.
- Jesse Stay
GFC under OpenSocial treats the 'OWNER' as the Site, and the OWNER's Friends, as those who have 'Joined' the site, IIRC. That is, people writing gadgets, or other integrations on the site, may now query the Owner's Friends to get this list. Presumably, you can also (now or in future) log activities and send notifications to people who have 'join'ed. I would think of 'Join' as 'Authorize this site to see my profile data'. But I could be wrong.
- Ray Cromwell
Ray explained it well: join means expose my profile and friends to that site. After you joined the site can use vanilla OpenSocial API calls to get the list of friends (who also joined that site), profile information, and post to activity stream of the user. The Friend Connect JS API has additional calls to let you login and invite friends. More details and an example of the wordpress plugin at http://wordpress.chanezon.com/....
- Patrick Chanezon
You can see who else there is already a friend of yours. more depends what other gadgets or code is installed. Joining means the comment+review gadgets on the site will be associated with your profile; you can allow activities to be sent to other sites (wouldn't that be nice for friendfeed).
- Kevin Marks
If you want a general explanation of what is going on behind the scenes in Freind Connect, have a read of http://bit.ly/OSqa
- Kevin Marks
Not at the TheMarker COM.vention... some people talk, some people work ;)
Eran Sandler liked this
Not at the COM.vention either :-)
- Eran Sandler
Am I the only one dissatisfied by the BSG conclusion? They basically answered a lot of questions with "God did it", and then the characters choose to terminate their civilization, culture, knowledge and technology, entering into a 150,000 year dark-age.
Jeremy Hylton, Sean McBride, anna sauce and 36 other people liked this
They left us with their "best part", which is apparently the 8's mitochondrial dna.
- Paul Buchheit
No, you are not. I was waiting for a grand finale where everything will be explained in some surprising, mind-blowing way. Everything *was* explained, but the explanation was, lacking a better word, lame.
- Tudor Bosman
I thought the last part, where they brow beat the whole future time-traveling head angels teaching us an after-school special lesson, was lame. In retrospect, the rest of the ending was probably the only appropriate way to end everything: throughout the series, the running theme is mankind got too proud with its technology and built cylons; the cylons rebelled, and even the best laid...
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- Mark Trapp
The one thing they could've done was stretch out the catharsis over more than 20 minutes: I feel like the entire second half of season four was at least a full season's worth of plot condensed after they wasted so much time on nowhere plots in season three. I think they could've explained a little more about the divine plan, but that was probably a victim of the condensed plot line as well. Hopefully The Plan, the TV movie coming out later in the year, expands on the divinity story.
- Mark Trapp
I had no problem dumping most of the high tech because it would make them easier to find in case there are any stragglers were looking for them, was failing and wasn't all that useful. New Caprica looked more like something from Charles Dickens than the Garden of Eden.
- RAPatton
Most tech oriented people I talked to loved that they finally "won" the war with Cavil, heroically, but hated that they chose to be erased from history and live terrible, brutish, short lives without modern medicine or anything. Most people were hoping that they would land on Earth and find it was the genesis of Kobol, a destroyed (non-radioactive earth), like Planet of the Apes, and they would live off in the future in our memories rather than being dead 150,000 years ago.
- Ray Cromwell
One option RDM could have taken with the 'past earth' version would be to make them Atlantians, having build the city of Atlantis and vanished for some reason. But Colonials with children giving up *everything* and living like primitive man? I don't see it, no matter how bad the Cylon war/Cycle was. Some humans would have voted to go live with the Centurions in the base ship or tag along with them I bet. Hell, I would have voted to set a ship down somewhere and live out of it.
- Ray Cromwell
It was incredibly weak.. all this god did it stuff.. your all seeing angels.. Starbuck was an angel.. blah blah blah... really did a disservice to the characters.
- Dave Senior
from twhirl
I was hoping the angels would turn out to be some hyper-advanced AIs from Kobol that had gone to war and started the original exodus, and had been spreading a viral meme through generations of robot DNA manifested as visions, angels, All Along The Watchtower, etc. It wouldn't explain the clairvoyance of how to arrange both fleets to arrive just in time for the super-nova. Or that the singularity+FTL would turn into a time travel device(weak, yes) but allow for Baltar to be the author of Pythian prophecies
- Ray Cromwell
I also thought it was very naive of Apollo to blame war on technology. Humans have been warring for a long time. Technology has just changed what it looks like. The same goes for pedophiles. They used to hang out at the school playground. Now they can hang out in the internet instead. I did like the foreshadowing of things happening again, as the hybrid said.
- Robert Felty
I was disappointed that no one pointed out how much is sucks to live without technology. I also thought it was interesting that a couple of the main characters wanted to be hermits in the end. I was happy that they finally let Roslin die.
- Clare Dibble
Claire, there was a dialogue with Romo Lampkin, where he showed surprise that the entire fleet was so willing to forgo "creature comforts," to which someone replied that he underestimated the amount people would sacrifice for a "clean slate."
- Mark Trapp
That crew of screw-ups as the first intelligent life on Earth -- explains a lot. And Baltar and 6 as the 'angels' walking with us to this day. Sorry, but the juxtaposition of Adama throwing up on himself and Tigh and Ellen getting further shitfaced in a strip club, with the scenes of beautiful pristine Earth, was maybe about the lousiest ending that could have been thought up. Ronald Moore's creation was pretty ugly, top to bottom.
- Christopher Galtenberg
But we were left with one lingering question: where will the cylons find fashionable duds now?
- Christopher Galtenberg
I haven't written my final review or figured out what it will say, but part of the reason I found it satisfying is that to me BSG is a collection of characters, and the ending for each made sense, and gave me closure. I like this way of ending, as opposed to the Sopranos which I found unsettling and lacking resolution.
- Dave Winer
We're all descendants of a half-Korean cylon mitochondrial Eve. :p
- Josh Haley
Yep, loved it! They found their paradise and didn't want to spoil it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all the pain and suffering a simple life would be very attractive.
- Rob Fahrni
I guess I don't believe in the Luddite fantasy of paradise, that if only we destroyed all our knowledge and technology, then things would be ok. I doubt that ignorance is the way forward.
- Paul Buchheit
I think things would have been horrible. Think of the Europeans arriving in the New World. How many of the initial waves died? How many of the immigrants and natives succumbed to disease. The Colonials would not have been immune to Earth 2 diseases, nor the primitive natives of theirs. How did Adama build his dream cabin with no steel tools? Did he make a Stone Axe? Look at how city dwellers failed when back-to-nature Communists marched them into the fields to be farmers.
- Ray Cromwell
Paul -- maybe we'd feel differently if we were the last survivors of a civilization that had destroyed itself -- with technology.
- Dave Winer
Paul, I'll drink to that, but I wonder how they could've resolved the ongoing theme of "our technology screwed us" in a way that wouldn't involve a rejection of technological progress. Consider that in the first war, they managed to defend against the Cylons by removing networked computers from their defenses, and the only reason Galactica survived the holocaust was because it was the luddite battlestar of the fleet.
- Mark Trapp
Matthew: Kara being the daughter of Daniel/Seven was never in the cards. RDM went on an interview tour basically saying "my bad, we didn't mean Daniel to be anything more than a minor character in the Cavil backstory. Don't pin your hopes to him."
- Mark Trapp
Dave, I considered that, and of course there's no way to know how we'd feel after being through all that. I think the fact that the show's ending bothers me so much is perhaps an argument that it was a "good" ending :)
- Paul Buchheit
You know one guy would've been smelting out iron barrels and making potassium nitrate the first time he had to go bow or spear hunting. Maybe he was one of the ones who landed in China.
- Rob H.
You can have a clean slate without obliterating all the lessons you've learned up to that point. It just seems wasteful and naive to think the "clean slate" wouldn't dream of electric sheep at some point down the road. But, hey, it is BSG after all. RDM did the best that could be done in that context.
- Scott Greiff
On Xenoevolutionary scale, what are the odds that a biologically similar culture will develop far far away with all the historical biological impressions that Earth has? And I'm not even taking Drake's equation into this whole thing (which would throw the odds far far far far away)
- Eran Sandler
Once saving grace is that the Centurions who left at the end on the baseship presumably have a historical record, and can return in a future BSG Movie, Galactica 2080, to warn Japan about creating humanoid female fashion robots, and to rescue a band of super-powered scout kids..... :) I am still depressed that a culture that invented FTL, immortality through resurrection/consciousness uploads, and AI, destroyed itself multiple times, forgot its history multiple times, and essentially gave up.
- Ray Cromwell
I think we're forgetting something in all this: the show had a proper ending. Maybe it's not the ending we didn't want or like, but it ended. How many of our favorite shows have we seen that were cancelled out from under us, with no way to proper finish the story or with some lame attempt to tie off the myriad loose ends? I'm just glad that Moore and his bunch got to tell their story completely. Was it the one I wanted? Not really, but it finished. And that's not nothing.
- Steven Perez
Oh, and I think that it was the only proper ending that could be had: break the endless cycle of pain and death and find a new way, even if it meant giving up the things that made them "advanced". Then again, after all these years of hype, what possible ending would have satisfied the majority of viewers?
- Steven Perez
Thanks for heads up but we don't all live in USA... Season Finale is scheduled here in three months...
- Boubacar Balde
from twhirl
For a series to have an official ending here in the US is kind of a big deal. I kind of wish more shows would wrap up, considering they ran out of ideas awhile back.
- Jonathan Hardesty
I gave it an 8 out of 10. The crew was under a lot of pressure to wrap things up, and for the most part did their best to tie it all together. Did they cop out on some questions? Absolutely (Starbuck anyone?). So there were some ways I was disappointed, but I thought it was better than the last couple of episodes had been trending (horribly IMO).
- David Wynn
The best way I can rationalize the loose ends / mysticism - is that it serves as a counterpoint to the technology - it indicates that the universe that they live in is still much more complex than they (or we) understand - and that although the cylon/human battle seems monumental, it's insignificant in relation to the as yet still unknown. I think that's where allegory with today is most clear. The only thing that weakened it for me was the in-your-face Baltar/Caprica in 2009 silliness.
- Robin Barooah
...although that actually looked as though it was tacked on afterwards - my guess would be studio fears that the emotional/spiritual ending would be lost on some people so they wanted a simplified ending as well.
- Robin Barooah
Saw the title of this thread before watching the finale so decided to let RDM be God and trust HIS divine plan and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.
- Nicola Quinn
A much much better conclusion would have been something like what Asimov did to merge and end both the Foundation and the Robots series.
- Mario Nogueira Ramos
I wish this was available on Netflix streaming. I'm afraid to admit I haven't seen any of them. I'd rather stream it than get the DVDs though.
- Jesse Stay
I agree the Luddite conclusion is annoying. But lately I'm thinking it's not so much "either or." A happy convergence is occurring between the POV that "it takes a village to raise a child" (ie, we'd all be better off in those simpler times) and the increased value that comes from less anonymity online. Instead of lurking and seedy chat rooms, the participation and responsibility is way up. In a way, we're recreating the village. It's a little bit tech, and a little bit Luddite.
- Edward Zwart
Edward: It's a little bit country, and a little bit rock and roll?
- Mark Trapp
Really? Maybe the most vile and self-centered character consistently and throughout the whole series, Baltar, finally decides to something else before himself and he his the hero. All is better: a simple moment to erase the the selling out of the human race. Isn't the message that you should do as you will for as long as you can, and just when you are pretty sure you are about to die, say you're sorry and you'll never do it again. Ouch!
- Chris Rose
from twhirl
Ooo! I just thought of the perfect ending for BSG--they should have called me-- right during the biggest battle, the alarms are sounding and we fade to, insert character here, wakes up and, insert clever-thought-provoking visual here and fade to black, roll credits. I'd like to thank the Acad.....
- Chris Rose
from twhirl
Having wasted many hours following the plot-churn that was the third series I'm glad I wasn't able to see the fourth. Judging from most of the comments here it wouldn't have been a good investment. Why is it all these space operas, from Star Wars to BSG, have to get religious? But then maybe I'm demonstrating why we Brits always get cast as the villains in US series -- something to do with our tendency towards jaded detachment..!
- Tim Ostler
I too was dissatisfied. Sorry, but post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi is a difficult genre and they just didn't deliver. History repeats itself, maybe it will mutate this time around? Gee, I haven't heard that stuff 100 times before. The religious stuff was preachy and overkill. The anti-technology stuff was ridiculous (remember a few episodes ago when toothpaste was a big deal). They resolved everything but the resolution was bunk.
- AJ Kohn
Overall, I liked it, but there was too much "God did it" hand-waviness for it to be completely enjoyable. If there was hinting at some of them becoming Atlantis, at least that would have addressed the "everyone would NOT choose to give up all their technology" issue. A SciFi series that had a much better conclusion than this was Babylon 5. The end of Season 4 of that show (the *real* ending to the main story) was fantastic. Season 5 was alright, but felt more like an epilogue than anything.
- Chieze Okoye
I thought the war scenes were great. I kind of half-heartedly liked the re-enactment of the "opera house," the really long death scene was lame. Glad Olmos got the final scene. Well, despite the odd angels-on-earth-still-in-90s-fashions (though they're 150K years old..?)
- anna sauce
... and I'm also glad that an American TV series decided to end. Starbucks disappearing was dumb. In general, wish they'd done more flashbacks/character substantiation in the weird 3rd/4th seasons that were so slow and melodramatic.
- anna sauce
You are not the only dissatisfied one. I didn't care for it the first time I watched it, let it sit for a day and watched it again, only to find marginal improvement. Not quite as bad an exit as the Sopranos, but certainly not as smart as MASH. 5 stars out of 10 to what was an otherwise extraordinary series.
- Cole Jolley
Anna - you wanted more flashbacks? I thought that the last several episodes were too slow. Most of the revelations about the final five etc. had already been revealed, so the flashbacks didn't really explain that much. I thought that one of the great parts of the series was how suspenseful it was. That was lacking in my opinion in the last several episodes (except the finale).
- Robert Felty
I think I would've just let it pass as a reasonably neutral, non-sucky finish if not for the flash-forward at the end. I found that totally inconsistent, it took me out of the story completely, and sorta left a bad taste in my mouth RE the whole series.
- Ken Sheppardson
I for one am glad for the sucky flash forward, thereby justifying my not having spent any time at all on this
- Steve Gillmor
Finally saw this (it showed up on Hulu yesterday) and it really wasn't half as bad as I was expecting from these comments. :-D I didn't think it was particularly depressing that they walked away from technology. Maybe the depressing part was that the technology didn't change them: that *despite* the fantastically advanced technology developed over millenia, humanity's idea of a "good time" still revolved around politics, illicit sexual encounters, and getting drunk and puking on yourself.
- Karim
Maybe the correct analogy is not to Luddites -- who hated technology because they saw it as stealing their jobs -- but more to the Amish, who wish for peace and nonviolence. ;-)
- Karim
Computing Research Policy Blog: Computer Science Majors Increase at Most Significant Rate Since Dot Com Boom - http://www.cra.org/govaffa...
Lynn, Eran Sandler, Atul Arora and 2 other people liked this
Enrollment in Undergraduate Computer Science is up for the first time since 2001. I guess kids don't want to be Lawyers or Wall Street traders anymore and are trying CS.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Sad that it's so difficult to find talented engineers even in a recession. :/
- Michael
Would you rather be a Cassandra or blissfully ignorant? Reminder: Cassandra could see the future, but no one listened to her.
Kol Tregaskes, Jennifer Dittrich, Jérôme and 3 other people liked this
I'd be Cassie. In today's world you can affect change without requiring people's belief.
- Kevin Fox
If *no one* listened then I'd go with blissfully ignorant. I'd go insane knowing the future but having no one listen or believe.
- AJ Kohn
Weird - no one listened to Cassandra, but people listen to Jim Cramer
- Chris Lamprecht
Cassandra. I like feeling tortured.
- Robert Felty
Cassandra - it'd help my poker immensely. Its even better that no one would listen to me. "But I'm going to flop a boat!" "sure you are..." (flops boat) "whoa!"
- Ken Gidley
Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 | Webdesigner Depot - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009...
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Tomasz Ojrzanowski, Moses Kpetigo, Eran Sandler and 19 other people liked this
Interesting, but what strikes me the most is how similar most of these are. To my untrained eye, there seem to be only about 3 or 4 non-incremental changes: Mac OS 1, IRIX, Windows 95, and OS X.
- Alex Power
Ah, Amiga Workbench, I hardly knew thee. One mistake is that the multi-screen multi-resolution stuff was there since AmigaOS 1.0. He also missed GEOS on the C64/C128, and GEM on Atari ST and CP/M, plus BeOS. Anyway, WSHell and ARexx scripting on Amiga was da-bomb!
- Ray Cromwell
Also from Jeremy Zawodny: Why working at Craigslist is "a job that matters." Nice. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog...
Eran Sandler, David Recordon, Tyson Key and bcultral liked this
Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - http://radar.oreilly.com/2009...
romanzolotarev, Bill Romanos, David Recordon and 9 other people liked this
A screen shot of the new #AWS management console: simple steps to launch EC2 AMI's http://twitpic.com/10z14 (https://console.aws.amazon.com)
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Michiel Sikkes, Eran Sandler and David Recordon liked this
@bpapa Claiming that FBConnect is going to be bigger than OpenID is like saying AOL is going to be bigger than email. Universe > planet.
Tyson Key, Matthias Pfefferle, Eran Sandler and Hassan Ibraheem liked this
Would you rather Google than think? -- Newsday.com - http://www.newsday.com/news...
Eran Sandler liked this
The study found that the ease and familiarity with computers, often associated with younger users, is culturally pervasive. So is intolerance for anything less than an immediate answer to research questions. Adolescents, they discovered, do not feel any more of a need to be constantly connected to the Web than do seniors. And there is no evidence that persons 15 and younger are any less patient in waiting for pages to load and files to dump. This suggests that the mostly negative effects we associate with Internet research - and young people alone - are in fact becoming universal and likely permanent. The term Google Generation is appealing because it confines the problem to a certain population. But if the phenomenon is widespread, then there's a great urgency to raise key questions for the society that until now have been the concern mostly of educators.
- Yaniv Golan
"Google employees received an Android phone as a holiday gift" http://news.cnet.com/8301-10... I wish MS devs were forced to use WinMobile...
Eran Sandler liked this
If MS Devs were forced to use WinMobile or got it as a Christmas gift they would all resign or just randomly fall out of building when the phone will randomly pick up phone calls or just reboot.
- Eran Sandler
Convential logic vs Religious logic - http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/d82b3db...
Eran Sandler liked this
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