"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
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
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
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
Ok, not just me seeing that. Nice job Kevin.
- Andrew Smith
Oh my. It's official, I'm old. Eeeeeniwayyyy... Glad to know it wasn't my mind going when I rolled over the logo.
- Andy Kruger
This has to be FriendFeed's best logo yet!
- Nicholas James
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 Chen
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
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
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
I can't believe it has been that long!
- Gary Stiehr
@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
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
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
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
"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'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
That's pretty darn cool. Hope it's not an April fools joke.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Alex Scoble
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?
No not really :) Other users can find you and contact you.
- Svartling
that's pretty much it. damn u discovered the secret.
- Jay Martinez
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
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
Friend Connect has a long way to go before it's remotely useful.
- Matt Soreco
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
"The source added: "Jen was fuming. There he was, telling her he didn't have time for her and yet his page was filled with Twitter updates. "Every few hours, sometimes minutes, he'd update with some stupid line. And in her mind, she was like 'He has time for all this Twittering, but he can't send me a text, an email, make a call?'."" Never been a fan of Jennifer Aniston. But I would have given her props if she'd done the break-up via @reply.
- Ana
from Bookmarklet
I wasn't convinced about this whole Twitter being mainstream business, but now that the tabloids are using it as a breakup device I'm sold! In two year's time: Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart split due to Ford hiding all of Flockhart's feeds in FriendFeed. You heard it here first.
- Mark Trapp
But why didn't she just follow him? Then he'd be sending her texts all the time. It's just more efficient that way.
- Kevin Fox
Hanging with Jen. Not really enjoying myself
- Private Sanjeev
"#oscars Jen is avoiding Brad. I'm avoiding Jen, it's fun."
- anna sauce
Surely this is a planned conspiracy. Both must be holding Twitter shares and doing this to drive traffic there. :)
- Mike Reynolds
It's like she didn't even try to take part in his hobbies or get involved in his life! ;) </devils advocate>
- alphaxion
Good point Mike, thought of it after the first reactions. I was telling someone that if Hollywood get there, then a new generation of tabloids will drain that type of stuff. Being Twitter spies and finding out about those accounts and their development. Hell, it could even be press releases: After investigation, all we could get is a simple "Fck Off, I'm sad" post since 8:54 pm on Monday. Replies and hashtags were flowing since ;p
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
Looks to me like *he* broke up with *her.*
- Mitch Wagner
I used to think she did a great job of acting like the weepy mess of a girlfriend that can't seem to make a relationship last. Now I realize it isn't acting.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
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.
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
I could have done without the final moral lesson but was otherwise satisfied.
- Kevin D. White
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
It was about as good as any series ending I've ever seen, probably the best SciFi for sure. I'm sure I'm not the only who bites his check bloody when someone says "All Good Things"
- Matthew DeVries
Only 2 things bummed me out, that they didn't flat out say that Starbuck was the daughter of a Seven, and that they never unboxed the Twos.
- Matthew DeVries
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
But Mark - Kara and Hera? Come on. Starbuck was Seven's daughter, that's just a given.
- Matthew DeVries
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 Haas
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.
- Jon, the Chilled Beartato
Has there ever been a good ending to a sci-fi/fantasy series? Nerds cannot be pleased.
- Matthew DeVries
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'm still waiting for someone to cite a more perfect SciFi/Fantasy ending. There's never been one. So just respect it for not being flat out terrible like ALL of the other SciFi endings have been. Voyager was the closest to not terrible, and it was still pretty terrible.
- Matthew DeVries
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
Schwab is canceling and reissuing my Visa card. Good, I guess, but is there any reason whatsoever to believe that measures are being taken to prevent this from happen again with another vendor?
- DeWitt Clinton
They are just now doing that? That breach was weeks ago. And no, there's no reason to believe that they are taking steps to prevent this from happening. Then again you aren't on the hook for any fraud either. They are.
- Alex Scoble
That's what I thought, too, Alex. I have few complaints about Schwab though, I suspect that Heartland is only now getting around to disclosing the full extent of the cards impacted.
- DeWitt Clinton
@Chris, okay, that would be far, far worse. I almost hate to ask, but did that happen to you?
- DeWitt Clinton
Aww man, I'm really sorry to hear that. And I know there's no happy ending to the story, like jail time or worse for the perpetrators.
- DeWitt Clinton
The happy ending to the story is that Chris didn't have to pay for the fraud, directly.
- Alex Scoble
Small claims suits only make sense if you really want revenge, or if you value your time very low. Like mowing your own lawn.
- DeWitt Clinton
A well-written letter informing a company of your intention to sue takes little time and will often get a company that knows it will lose to settle. The company has no idea if you like changing your own oil or not, though it helps if you happen to be an attorney and put the letter on your own letterhead (as my father used to do).
- Kevin Fox
The argument against mowing your own lawn / changing your own oil never made sense to me until I heard someone ask the hypothetical question, "would you mow *my* lawn for $10/hr?" Then I got it.
- DeWitt Clinton
Chris, "unless that's something you enjoy doing" Was that a typo or a level of enlightenment I have yet to reach?
- Kevin Fox
If you already sent letters then I entirely agree. Best to let it go. (Or find someone to file a class-action) ;-)
- Kevin Fox
Marijke pointed out that my comment about mowing one's own lawn could easily be misconstrued. The point I was attempting to make (poorly, apparently), is that depending on how one evaluates the value of personal time (e.g., as an opportunity cost), even things that superficially make sense to do-it-yourself may not strictly be economically sound. As Chris observed, there are plenty of non-economic factors at work that change that balance. If I had a lawn, I'd probably mow it myself. : )
- DeWitt Clinton
Special offer for FriendFeeders only: I'm nearing the 0.9 release of the java-twitter library. This version is a complete (and massive) rewrite of the original, and I'd love it if people here wouldn't mind taking an early look.
- DeWitt Clinton
I'd love to get this running under GWT if possible. The we'd need to write a new http manager, but that shouldn't be too hard.
- DeWitt Clinton
The problem is, the protocol buffer compiler that generates Java source code picks up all kinds of anti-GWT dependencies, like java.lang.reflect. IMHO, the protobuf compiler should create simple POJOs and move all of the other auxillary stuff to upper level classes instead of using inner classes for everything.
- Ray Cromwell
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
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
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
The reason I ask is that most of those protocols and formats don't use much of the extras that XML is required for (schemas, namespaces, attributes, data escaping, etc). Simple key/value/dict/array/string/number structures would be sufficient in all those cases. If you could take a do-over, would you?
- DeWitt Clinton
"On the other hand, gratuitous syntactic diversity is not a feature. I remember in the early days of XML, Tim Bray used to start his pitch for XML by showing a whole bunch of widely different Linux config file formats. It was quite compelling: the lack of consistency was obviously confusing and pointless. Now I don't think anybody would suggest that XML is the right format for...
more...
- Shakeel Mahate
The above quote is from James Clark http://blog.jclark.com/2008... where he is discussing MGrammar from Microsoft. But it is asking the same question as you are.
- Shakeel Mahate
Great question! And if you look at how I use XML, you know the answer is yes. I have no love for XML, I thought it was over engineered, and too much was promised for it, but everyone wanted to do it, and that convinced me. The important thing is the consensus. One way to do things. And the second guy to come along has the power to make the standard, and in XML I was one of the "second guys" (the first wave were the guys at Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, etc).
- Dave Winer
So, by accepting the invitation to design my own formats as long as I used XML, I thought everyone would be happy. Turned out not to be so, they wanted to control things all the way up to the top of the stack, the arguments never stopped. That's what I like about JSON, it has a low-techness to it, no fuss, no pretension. That's how I viewed XML.
- Dave Winer
But... Look at what we were able to do with XML. One of the proudest moments for me was when Eric Raymond discovered XML-RPC and said it had the same philosophy as Unix. I grew up on Unix as Unix was growing up, and that's the highest compliment, I could write a book on why Unix does so much yet is so empty and open. That's what I hope for everything I do.
- Dave Winer
Great response, Dave. Thanks for answering!
- DeWitt Clinton
I never minded XML, till I inherited the responsibility of hosting a chatroom and had to use the server software & bot scripts from the previous host. That was when I came across this inappropriate use for XML...as the scripting language for the bot. You have no idea how much I wanted to tear my hair out while sorting through those scripts. Just for a taste of what I had to deal with, here is one of the shorter scripts. This is a Mastermind game: http://pastebin.ca/1353820
- April Russo (app103)
That is a great answer, and exactly what I was getting at in my comment on the other post. The attribute vs contents split in XML means you always need marshal/unmarshal overhead to get it into a native structure. With JSON you don't.
- Kevin Marks
Great thread. Thanks for sharing, Dave et al
- kortina
Kevin, are you saying that Javascript doesn't turn the text representation of JSON into binary data before programs operate on it? If true, that's remarkable. BTW, when we wrote our XML parser for Frontier, in C, the typical machine ran at 200 MHz and had about (guessing) 100MB of memory. Obviously today's machines are much bigger and faster, yet people *still* raise the encoding and decoding perf issues as if they matter in 2009, I don't see any evidence that they do.
- Dave Winer
The issue today is installed base of code and data. If I could have talked to the guys designing the data model for JavaScript I would have really strenuously argued for XML, rather than fracture the base. But what's done is done. Let's hope it doesn't happen *again* but it will of course, always does. I also found it ironic that Bray used an example of different config files, yet when he reinvented RSS, he didn't even reuse its names. So we have items and whatever Atom calls items. (I forget.)
- Dave Winer
Since people aren't shouting me down (yet, thankfully) anotherdesign error in Atom is the link element. It's yet another reinvention of XML inside an XML format! (I know OPML looks like that too, but that was in 2000, and that format makes sense when you view it from inside the app whose file format it is, an outliner with attributes.) Why not make every element in Atom an instance of <link>? What was the design rationale for that?
- Dave Winer
When I use xml I feel i'm on an old calculator typing (1 + 1)/(2 + 4) =. Much better to use rpn: 1 enter 1 + 2 enter 4 + /. Now applying this to "xml" your namespace definitions supply you with your operators. Add xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" to your page and <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point> becomes 45.256 -71.92 point.
- mal
re "Why not make every element in Atom an instance of <link>?", that would more or less be RDF. And we all know where that leads! :)
- Dan Brickley
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
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