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Jon Parise › Likes
The Secret Behind The Real-Time Web - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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inarli, ffctvhd1, JoeCamel and 237 other people liked this
Ross and Dan made this video to illustrate the advanced technology we use behind the scenes at FriendFeed. (Ross and Dan, you are amazing - I can't believe how awesome this thing turned out)
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
How very creative. This is very fluid and cool.
- Louis Gray
OK, not exactly what I was expecting, but very cool.
- Kevin Arth
Anyone have the video somewhere other than Youtube? it's banned here in Turkey and I can't wait until we get home (next month) to watch it!!
- Chris Myles
Bret, this video should be titled: A Love Song for FriendFeed ! Great vid (and music) !
- Ahsan Ali
This is awesome!
- Christopher Chung
with a community like this - you just can't roll-it into f.b.. keep the dream alive!
- michael sean wright
:O
- Josh Haley
Amazing, thanks for that!
- dkb
According to Ross, they used about 1030 individual pictures in the final version. Stop motion is a lot of work :)
- Bret Taylor
Sure, sure--give away all the secrets. (Are those Lego dudes union?)
- Kathy Fitch
very creative. wonder how long it took to do that stop-action?
- berchman
Ross's best work so far ! great job Ross
- goutham
Major props to Ross and Dan. FriendFeed lives on
- Shane
That's priceless. Great job, guys.
- John Craft
This is superb. I just showed it to my 5 year old son who enjoys Lego and has already taken some great photos, including one or two of his toys. So now he has the seed of the idea that, in time, he could take multiple stills and put them together to make moving pictures. Thank you very much for posting it and giving me and him that opportunity. Maybe, he might use FriendFeed one day too!
- John W Lewis
Great project!
- Anne Bouey
AWESOME!
- Kevin Fox
I think they need to make a full stop-motion version of the Matrix in legos. Now THAT would be awesome. I wonder what bullet-time looks like in LEGO?
- Bret Taylor
i'd pay to see the stop animation lego matrix, but not the sequels
- patrick
"Equipment Generously Provided By Casey Muller" - hahaha!! THIS IS AWESOMESAUCE!!! I love the creative energy and vibe in this video... LOTS of work went into that one! Thanks guys!! :)
- Susan Beebe
Genius, how much time did that all take?
- Wayne Hornsey
Chris Myles: if you want ot - DM me an address and I'll mail you a copy.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
That is so awesome
- Glenn Slaven
happy-making!
- Felicia Yue
I am more proud than ever for being a FriendFeeder :)
- Arvind
Wow!!!!!
- Mona Nomura
Excellent!!
- Kol Tregaskes
That's great!
- Devon Govett
Cool! The friendfeed's manufactury
- Benedetto Vacca
неплохо, неплохо! Продолжение будет?
- atner
Lots of handshaking I see :)
- Nicholas Kreidberg
hahaha very nice stop motion and music!
- Alex Huinchucleffy
BUMP
- Roberto Bonini
FULL OF WIN
- Jac Falcon
Now who will be the first to buy a carrier, Apple or Google? Sprint market cap is just over $10B (up 8.75% today).
urdumania1, Mark Essel, Venkat Raghavan and 55 other people liked this
We can only hope one of them will. Even better: The ATT / T-Mobile merger is denied. Apple buys one of them, Google buys the other. The mobile carrier market needs some serious disruption.
- Tinfoil 2.0
None of them. If anything, Microsoft will become a soft carrier, followed quickly by Apple, then Google. Here are some thoughts I had on that a few months ago: http://fury.com/2011...
- Kevin Fox
bretin arkadası benimde arkadasım sayılır..hey adamım nasılsın?
- Özlem(angiocat)
Someone please. That's where we need real disruption.
- Todd Hoff
Realistically, no carrier has first-class coverage everywhere, and neither Apple or Google would tie their own product image to a single carrier's coverage area (again). Everyone's learned by watching the love/hate relationship users have with Apple and AT&T the past four years. No way they hobble themselves to a single physical infrastructure.
- Kevin Fox
Buying a carrier doesn't mean that they couldn't still sell phones on the other carriers and more than buying Motorola precludes them from putting Android on Samsung devices.
- Paul Buchheit
Would SprintApple still sell Android and Windows phones?
- Kevin Fox
Carriers are so much about commoditized physical infrastructure that I'd have to believe Apple is looking for a way to make them obsolete, rather than buying one for themselves.
- Kevin Fox
Amazon? -- Since they're already using Sprint for the Kindle. Might also make for some interesting Twilio-style additions to AWS
- Ken Sheppardson
Amazon no longer uses Sprint for the Kindle. It uses AT&T. It was the only way to get global coverage.
- Piaw Na
Aha. Got it. Meaning the newer K3 (and K2?) use AT&T? Y'know given the differing radio/network technologies, I wonder if anybody'd want Sprint, with all the inherent coverage limitations.
- Ken Sheppardson
If Amazon would build a pneumatic tube delivery service underneath everyone's homes and businesses (to replace FedEx/UPS/OnTrac), they could also put Wi-Max or LTE in their tubes, so that the Internet would actually be a series of tubes.
- Amit Patel
Tubes have been replaced with solar powered automated driving delivery vehicles. Not quite as romantic, or com friendly, but it uses the existing road system.
- Todd Hoff
I don't think Apple wants any part of a deal to buy plumbing. If they can cover that plumbing in gold plate and sell it as an experience, then maybe. Microsoft, on the other hand, has plenty of cash and doesn't mind being a plumber.
- Eric
Trucks? Tubes? Pfft... Autonomous solar-powered drones that dock at giant floating fulfillment center airships are the way to go. Get around the whole state-by-state tax problem once and for all. Just float over them.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ooh, delivery by airdrop. I like it.
- Amit Patel
Plus you tie this in with an app on your Android device and you'd get a little alert that says "You're package is available for delivery... please step outside"... BAM
- Ken Sheppardson
Airspace tax zones would be sure to follow :-) And I think the economics of lifting goods into the air will have to wait for zero-point energy devices.
- Todd Hoff
Lifting goods is cheap on the space pulley. You put a chunk of asteroid on one side and you put a container of goods on the other side. Make sure the asteroid is heavier, and it will go down as the goods go up. You extract the precious metals out of the asteroid and use that money to fund development of your delivery spacecraft, which is orbiting the Earth at supersonic speeds, picking up goods from the space pulley and releasing them at just the right time to hit Ken on the head.
- Amit Patel
I figure eventually they'll just have fab plants on the moon. Solar power turns moon rocks into whatever you need, and the end products get railgunned out of the moon's gravity well and fall straight to your home with a guided descent with last-minute parachute braking. The fun part is that your Amazon Prime cutoff time will be dependent on the moon's relative position to you, so it...
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- Kevin Fox
Since this conversation looks to be officially derailed, I vote for some form of Wonka-Vision to be the distribution method of choice for Amazon prime...
- Ross Miller
That or skyhooks.
- Kevin Fox
Until I parsed "Sprint" I was sure you are talking about the actual warship, you know, Invincible class carrier is now supposedly on closed auction in UK :)
- Michael Bravo
Well, yeah, I guess that ties in with the Amazon sub-thread nicely. They probably are the most likely to be the first to buy a carrier, e.g. http://bit.ly/g55NKr
- Ken Sheppardson
Although as far as sub-threads go, this'd probably be more appropriate: http://bit.ly/rjNj0i
- Ken Sheppardson
The first thought that came into my head was "Aircraft Carrier" to use as a Datacenter...
- Stuart Woodward
The Cloud OS - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010...
testbeta, Philipp Lenssen, Shakeel Mahate and 35 other people liked this
(removed minor issue)
- DGentry
Fixed. Thanks.
- Paul Buchheit
Maybe service OS might fit better? Services are being composed together. Cloud OS already has the notion of running a cloud inside a datacenter or across datacenters. Though that's just a nit, I agree with the larger points.
- Todd Hoff
Great post, Paul. There's a slight aesthetic issue with having different UI for apps and browser tabs. The typical window managers couldn't accommodate heavy web browsing. Chromium breaks down with too many tabs (although side tabs could change this. There's also an extension for searching open tabs.) And the stock Android experience for app and browser window switching is less than ideal. Heh, I should take a crack at this since I'm so opinionated.
- Vezquex
from Android
After reading your blog, I thought of a great slogan. "The network is the computer." I'm pretty sure that one hasn't been taken yet :)
- Rob Hoeting
Yeah, Sun was right about the big picture, but couldn't translate that into products worth buying.
- Paul Buchheit
We used a heck a lot of Sun's diskless workstations. Worked nicely, even with the anemic networking of the time. Just too early on the whole portable device thing.
- Todd Hoff
"Once Android has all the benefits of ChromeOS, the most obvious difference will be that ChromeOS lacks the thousands of native apps which are popular on Android. Android apps are closer to web apps than Windows apps in terms of security and manageability, so eliminating them doesn't seem like much of an advantage for ChromeOS." Nicely put. Here's to hoping that Android makes web apps as powerful and integrated as possible so the only reason to go native is for things like video uploading and games.
- Karl Rosaen
Might help to think of devices as memes -- Chrome OS as part of the cloud OS meme cannot die but only help evolution. Having a cloud OS as a mere theoretical concept versus actually playing around with one is the difference between reading a book on color theory versus actually sinking your paint brush into oil colors and putting them down on the canvas. As a web developer playing...
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- Philipp Lenssen
You may be right Philipp. It could serve its purpose even if it never finds commercial success on its own.
- Paul Buchheit
Bryan O'Sullivan :: Dual bitbucket / github citizenship via Mercurial - http://www.serpentine.com/blog...
Jon Parise and AJ Batac :) liked this
"[A]lthough bitbucket is pretty good [and free now for <= 5 users], github is currently far slicker, and has a much larger community of potential collaborators. I’ve hosted most of my code on bitbucket for quite a while. Until this morning, I had a somewhat awkward way to mirror code to github. I just automated the problem away... [code]" #hg
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet
see also, Create a Git Mirror by Steve Losh, http://hgtip.com/tips...
- Adriano
Here an additional resource for Git. 'Pro Git' by Scott Chacon, http://progit.org/book/
- Dan Kartono
"DVR screws up the description for The Daily Show, but it's still eerily accurate"
Jon Parise, Casey Muller, Kemal Hadimli and 21 other people liked this
"This uplifting and intriguing drama depicts the life of a group of intellectuals, who risk their lives by protecting the national security and military secrets."
- April Buchheit
There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage -- if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge :)
WoH: Minding her Steves, BRҰANSAҰS, Jeff (Team マクダジ ) and 227 other people liked this
What is transforming... FriendFeed, or the idea of FriendFeed?
- Christopher Galtenberg
Thanks for the update, Paul!
- Anne Bouey
THANK YOU!
- tehKenny
Fabulous News :)
- Susan Beebe
Noticed the "leaked" Facebook UI screenshots and the groups blog post today, and both seem FriendFeed inspired: nice to see Facebook trying to bring the stuff we like about FriendFeed to a larger audience.
- Mark Trapp
To Robert Scoble: I told you so ;-)
- Jesse Stay
Mark - got link?
- Susan Beebe
Thanks Paul :)
- Ashish
Devil is in the details: "couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" == Facebook projects with FriendFeed-like elements == no work on FriendFeed itself.
- EricaJoy
Paul, FriendFeed rocks as Gmail does ;)
- Orlando Pozo
Thanks for the update, the more you communicate, the less we have to speculate.
- Peter Hoffmann
The fact that these improvements are coming to Facebook and not friendfeed will not sway those who like friendfeed but dislike Facebook.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Thank you Paul for bringing "FriendFeed goodness to the larger world" -- THAT sounds awesome!!
- Susan Beebe
integration with facebook?
- Rocco Galluzzo
@Alex Scoble: That's true
- Jorge Escobar
I hope out of the chrysalis emerges an infested Kerrigan. That'd be awesome http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki...
- Ivan Kirigin
Thanks Mark, much appreciated... I'll check those out
- Susan Beebe
+1 Ivan :)
- Benjamin Golub
But we knew this was the deal the moment the full details of the purchase of friendfeed by Facebook became public.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Yeah, I don't give a crap about Facebook. I want to know about FriendFeed.
- Rochelle
sadly, no one with any power seems to care about FF anymore.
- Joe The Sausage
And there's your answer, Rochelle. friendwho? friendwhat now? Oh, you mean Facebook! (No I mean friendfeed) friendwho? (rinse, lather, repeat)
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
there are some ui differences (and i tend to prefer friendfeed in those cases) but i have friended quite a few FF people in FB and the experience is remarkably similar in many ways.
- Jason Wehmhoener
yep
- Jason Wehmhoener
Thanks for the transparency on the Friendfeed "ghost town" matter Paul. Much appreciated.
- Alex Knight
Thanks Paul... bring the special sauce to Facebook: http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife...
- Andrew
I like the "chrysalis stage" analogy - sounds cool.... goes an looks for FF goodness butterfly!
- Susan Beebe
Good to know that FriendFeed still has some fight left; hope that translates into a viable and sustainable platform/utility for the masses (though I quite enjoy the close-knit, uber-geek community that it's become).
- Christian
I don't like the chrysalis analogy. The butterfly emerges from the chrysalis and buggers off leaving the shell. Of course, it might then also get eaten by a bird. Tweet, tweet.
- Mark H
Mark LOL nice, ... haha
- Susan Beebe
Note that he didn't say that FriendFeed.com was going away, only that they're diverted to bringing it to a much larger audience
- Jesse Stay
The problem is Scoble (Robert) and MG both just sent half of FriendFeed away so most of those that would benefit from this announcement won't even see it.
- Jesse Stay
Yeah, Paul's statement won't help friendfeed. This will just either give people more reason to go to Facebook or find another service entirely.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
What Alex and Rochelle said. This sounds like a "we're bringing FF to Facebook" announcement, and I don't give a damn about Facebook. I want to know what's happening HERE. And Cristo, both, but more the interface. I care about the friends I've made here, and I'm connected with many of them now on Facebook as well, but I prefer to interact with them here, because I like it better.
- Jandy
Travis, he didn't say that - you read that, but he didn't say that. I'm willing to bet FriendFeed.com will not go away.
- Jesse Stay
Travis, there are better ways of getting the FF team to comment
- Jesse Stay
:( I quite liked the caterpillar.
- Nick Lothian
I think it's the opposite, the butterfly is becoming this crawling caterpillar :)
- Jorge Escobar
What I do see is more Facebook integrated into the FriendFeed environment - I think that's a good thing
- Jesse Stay
The critical difference between Facebook and FriendFeed is the social model. With Facebook as it is today, you need to be mutual friends to see each others content. There is a "fan page" model but it is oriented toward "publishing/celebrity" rather than information sharing. FriendFeed has an asymmetric model like Twitter, where you can easily discover someone's content without any "friend" gesture whatsoever, and you can follow without friending. This makes the converation more discoverable, and useful..
- Adina Levin
If the integration is bringing public/asymmetric to Facebook, then it will be very useful indeed. If the integration is to add FriendFeed-style service integration into the symmetric/private Facebook model, it will be much less useful - it's more of the same - I'll be able to more easily share updates from youtube or last.fm or delicious to my friend network, but be unable to discover new people and infomation.
- Adina Levin
@Jesse - I can't see any sign that they are working on FriendFeed at all. All the indications are that the FF team is now working on Facebook, and only Facebook. That's great for Facebook, and I'm sure they will do wonderful work there. But don't delude yourself that FriendFeed is going to get anything more than critical fixes, and maybe the occasional thing done in someone's spare time.
- Nick Lothian
Butterflies look totally different than caterpillars and they also fly away
- Melanie Reed
Crickets chirping... is this site alive?? :)
- Christopher Galtenberg
+100 Adina. The things I like best about FriendFeed (easy content/people discovery, FoaF, asymmetrical following and being followed) are completely opposite to Facebook's core model. That's why as much as people keep talking about Facebook adding FF-like features, I don't see the REAL FF core features making it over, because the mindset is different.
- Jandy
I don't see this announcement as anything new, or as reassuring. We knew from the time of the acquisition that there would be would be some movement of FF capabilities into FB. The real question is whether this means absorption of FF into FB or attracting the FB user base into FF. The comment about "bring[ing] FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" still leaves that question open.
- John (bird whisperer)
+1 everything Alex Scoble has said. Friendwhat? What's a feed? Who uses RSS anymore? We've got PubSubWTFOMGBBQ now!
- Mr. Gunn
Agree with Jandy on +100 Adina.
- Amy℠
Also, I agree with Jandy and Adina's comments.
- John (bird whisperer)
Nick, Paul just said they're working on other projects right now. That still doesn't mean FriendFeed is going away. I'm not deluding myself at all. I'm telling everyone else they're deluding themselves by assuming it's going away. All the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed, and Paul just tried to give us comfort not to worry. For some reason we all don't want to believe him. It's actually kind of amusing.
- Jesse Stay
I wonder what the powers that be mean by "FriendFeedy goodness"? Is it understood what WE like about it vs. FB?
- Amy℠
Paul - Wishing you all the best as you tend your new butterfly garden :) I'll be here to enjoy them!
- Susan Beebe
This is not the news that Friendfeed fans were looking for.
- Vezquex
The issue isn't belief that they are going to do something. The question is what they are going to do, and whether that will continue the core value of FriendFeed, which is not just information aggregation but discoverability.
- Adina Levin
I know more about the "Last Days" and heaven than I know about what's going to happen to FriendFeed as we have come to know it than was given in your rather cryptic answer, Paul. :) And while that may not be a fair comparison (God actually gave details and signs), there is something definitely not forthcoming about your response. A person usually withholds details that affect another...
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- Melanie Reed
Hopefully this helps to quiet all of the "friendfeed is dying" talk. Because this thread proves ff is alive and well.
- Garin Kilpatrick
@Jesse - I read it differently to you. To me, Paul is saying "We are taking what we were working towards on FriendFeed, and trying to bring that goodness to a bigger audience". No one is claiming they are going to shut down FF.
- Nick Lothian
@Jesse - Want to make a bet on the number of new features added to FF before the end of the year?
- Nick Lothian
Cristo, to deliver some straightforward talk is not about giving away company details. If you have a product that is original and stands on its own, you don't need to refer to it as a "butterfly". Many companies even promote something new and upcoming especially to their loyal user base. It gives a signal. A proper one. It tells your users and future users enough so that they can make an informed decision about what they want to do instead of keeping them on tenderhooks
- Melanie Reed
"the chrysalis stage in most butterflies is one in which there is little movement" (via wikipedia) So if you follow that metaphor then eventually FriendFeed will go through a metamorphosis -- that means it's not dead... really how hard can it be to get what he's saying?
- Chris Heath
Its pretty hard :) The burning question is if they are putting FF goodness in to the walled gardens that are Facebook or are they bringing FF openness to FB too. I think the people here want the open forums that are FF not the closed ones that are FB. If FB is going hybrid with both walled gardens and open forums that would be OK too. People on FF want open forums... like Twitter and FF... without the crude interface that is Twitter and without the uncertainty that is FF now.
- Ed Millard
Facebook is gonna have to rip off much of the privacy to maximize their product in the real-time web world. I am going to assume FF goodness is going to be applied to FB :) *crosses fingers*
- Susan Beebe
Just a thought... why does "longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world" JUST mean facebook.com? What I get from this is that they are working on a range of things, maybe bringing the FriendFeed sauce to a range of sites, powered by the Facebook back end. Who knows what that means. A FriendFeed service powered by FacebookConnect? Also to......
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- Johnny
LMFAO. Johnny++
- Rah-PM 2012
FB needs to leave the privacy for the walled garden and the inner circle. Their current user base likes that. They just need a second feed that is an open forum and you can talk there without it bleeding in to your inner circle feed.
- Ed Millard
Yes, but blocking doesn't work so well since you can just use Chrome's Incognito mode to get around it.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Translation: if you haven't switche to Facebook yet, you better do it now so you can get a good vanity URL.
- David Chartier
from iPhone
I don't know what all the fuss is about. But could we have the long answer too, please?
- Laura Norvig
Although I'm interested, FB != FF. I don't see how the two mix in a way that makes me feel otherwise. Mixing audiences is not a good thing for me (with a few exceptions) and I know others share the same thought.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
Paul, will FF be here in 1 year, 5 years?
- Robert Higgins
Thanks for the update Paul..
- Chris Myles
Cristo I am funking nobody, I would like Paul to quantify his post. Simple. Will FF be here in 1 year? Will FF be here in 5 years?
- Robert Higgins
IMO friendfeed shoud attract more general audience... Facebook and twitter are having more general users. Most of the FF users are tech bloggers or those who needs aggregation services... I dont know it's just my feeling or not . but this is my impression on FF. but it's great service.. the features are too good... but we will roam were we meet our friends... thats most of the people are into twitter and FB.
- Sarath
Ohhhh a perrrttty butterfly, I'm moist with anticipation.
- The Real sofarsoShawn
Glad to hear it, Paul.
- WoH: Minding her Steves
Cristo: i almost made the same observation an hour or two ago when i first read through this posting and its comments. I was skimming and kept seeing alex, alex, alex... and thinking to myself... where's Robert!?!
- Chris Heath
Great news. Thanks! friendfeed team. :D
- Friendfeed's Francisco
@Sarath - I have a lot more in common with the people I've met here on FriendFeed than FB or Twitter. Twitter is too hard to search, and FB (and Twitter to a good extent) is driven by the people you know in RL (and unfortunately I don't have nearly as much in common in RL with my family, co-workers and acquaintences as I do with people scattered all over the world who I have met on FF)....
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- Lindsay
I think that in his cryptic statement he means, and a lot of people here agree with me, that more Facebook's going to get more FriendFeedy. Which doesn't mean that FF still isn't dead or doomed. After all, he works for Facebook now. FriendFeed=open forum, Facebook=walled garden, totally opposite master metaphors; but I don't think Zuckerberg gets it, and FF belongs to Zuckerberg now. So this is really about FB; FF's still in limbo. Still, some FF people friended me at FB, and I put them in a special list.
- Dennis Jernberg
@FF-team keep on rocking :). BTW I also think it's really cool you guys open-sourced tornado.
- alfred westerveld
+1 what alfred said, and good to hear words like "longer-term" & "beautiful" coming straight from The Walrus - keep that vision strong. Hope all goes well for FF team doing some good re-inventing the Octopus Garden of FB - seems you've got your work cut out for you there! It would be so nice if any way to keep a "simple & pure" form of FriendFeed alive (maintained and developed - more open source?) for us to enjoy, but no worries .... you've simultaneously raised the bar and paved the way for the rest!
- Dan Freeman
Good luck with the development Paul! Hopefully Zuck has some positive insight.
- Garin Kilpatrick
I like butterflies.
- Harold Cabezas
Paul: If someone offered me a bag of money to do what you guys did, I would have done exactly the same (probably a lot faster too). However, it would be nice if you spent an hour answering some of the questions here. It might also give people like me a little more faith, in what used to be your primary project; Friendfeed. You made the best platform on the planet - why not use it to let us know what the heck's going on?
- Jim Connolly
I'm assuming that Facebook wants to keep their roadmap quiet. I respect that but leaving you community in the dark for a brand that the applications stand for community building is rather ironic.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
SUPER!! I don't Blame ya 1 Darn bit fer Dumpin' FacePOOP Paul!! ;PPP Wait FacePOOP is the Maggot Stage!! ;))
- Billy Warhol
If I can still have all my friends that I have here on friendfeed and share things with them the exact same way, I don't care what "www" address I have to type in to get it. I just hope i don't have to give up any of FF's awesome features! Thanks for the update Paul!
- David Cook
The problem is I don't know whether to wrote an app on your API or not because i'm not sure whether it will all be dropped in the "transformation". Imagine speding late nights and weekends coding something up only for it to be dropped suddenly. Need a decent long term picture. Looking at Cliqset.
- Steven Livingstone-Pérez
Good point Steven - and one of the reasons many of us are spending so little time developing our networks here.
- Jim Connolly
waiting....
- ffcode
ffcode: Good luck with that ;-)
- Jim Connolly
So the changes are at Facebook not FriendFeed, Paul?
- Kol Tregaskes
And good luck to all of your team
- Özkan Altuner
from iPhone
This is a truly disappointing/concerning post and I think it would have been much better to hold comment until something more tangible could be discussed. Thanks for adding to the confusion/drama Paul.
- Nicholas Kreidberg
yemezler
- MobilAdam
I do care about what happens next, but this is the best news of the day nonetheless ! thanks for giving us updates at last ! and I do hope FF will awaken again ! such a great tool, but letdown since the announcement of the buyback by FB
- laetSgo
will I see this post in my "best of week" email from FF?
- Kirill Bolgarov
If Facebook is going to get fixed, please remember that it needs fixing politically, not just technically. It needs to give people the option to open their data to Google - for instance. A walled garden where the walls are fixed in place sucks.
- Tim Tyler
@Paul, or perhaps an Alien will erupt forth from its stomach? (kidding, kidding!)
- j1m
bump!
- Jesse Stay
Why? edit: so... 18 months later i'm still wondering what exactly this post was all about
- Chris Heath
San Francisco restaurants with Michelin stars - http://www.michelinguide.com/us...
Jon Parise, Anne Bouey, Bret Taylor and 2 other people liked this
I've been to seven of these. I can't tell the difference between the one-, two-, and three- star ones, or even vs some restaurants not mentioned.
- niniane
from Bookmarklet
I've learned that Michelin stars don't correspond to my idea of good food. I was very surprised to find that I agreed with almost every recommendation in "Hungry for Paris": http://piaw.blogspot.com/2008...
- Piaw Na
I can't recommend Zombieland highly enough. It just made me so happy.
Rachel Lea Fox, Vezquex, Jon Parise and 16 other people liked this
I think watching Zombieland on Blu-ray and then immediately starting up a team game of Left 4 Dead 2 once both are released will be a perfect evening.
- Kevin Fox
Zombieland was enjoyable, but there were some parts that could have been cut out.
- Shevonne
Zombieland= The greatest win of the year. Awesome movie
- ‘-.-’ Tutivillus Grift
They filmed part of it right around the corner from my house: http://friendfeed.com/jgw...
- Joel Webber
No, the proper order would be: Ghostbusters, Shaun of the Dead, *then* Zombieland and Left 4 Dead 2. (edited!)
- Neal Krummell
Neal: Shhhh! Actually, I'd advocate Shaun of the Dead, then Zombieland, then L4D2.
- Kevin Fox
Can't wait to check it out
- Kai
Alan Grayson: "If the President has a BLT tomorrow, the Republicans will try to ban bacon." - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Daniel Rowley, Steve Cleary, Louis Gray and 8 other people liked this
Most TVs come with good remotes but then we're still forced to use the shitty ones that come with cable boxes.
Kol Tregaskes, Eric Geller, Ashish and 16 other people liked this
A good option exists: replace the cable box with a TiVo, which has a very good remote.
- Scott Ludwig
from iPhone
TiVo is the only solution ever.
- Louis Gray
Louis, Imma happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but Logitech Harmony has the best remote ever - ever!
- Jesse Stay
I use the a Logitech Harmony remote which works great - especially given the fact that you can program all the settings via their app on my Mac.
- Mike Bracco
Mike, I love my Harmony - watch Woot - you can often find a pretty good deal on them there
- Jesse Stay
used to have a tivo, that did have a good remote, but tivo is yet another box, i want less boxes. always hear good things about harmony remotes but i really just dont see why tv makers spend time making these pretty nice remotes only to be cut out of the picture by cable box makers, who, by the way, have some of the worst tastes ever when it comes to UI/UX design.
- MG Siegler
Jesse: cool thanks. Although I love my Harmony it's just b/c it's not as bad as all the other solutions. The UI still feels really kludgy - The ideal solution would be to just have an iPhone app .......which would also require component makers to build bluetooth and/or wifi into their boxes.
- Mike Bracco
Mike, that's coming. I know of several in the works, and a few in early stages right now. I'd like to see Logitech build an app that does it though.
- Jesse Stay
My satellite box's remote isn't that bad, it's the U.I. that's lacking - they still don't have a widescreen EPG and instead strech the regular 4:3 EPG
- Bryce Roney
Jesse - cool, I'm sure it's coming. I think long term the ideal solution are for these components to have no interface on the physical box themselves. They should all be controlled on an iPhone or another device using an app. I think in 5 years the thought of having knobs on components will seem old school...at least I hope so! :)
- Mike Bracco
I have a Harmony and a TiVo - because cable boxes and non-universal remotes suck
- Ankush Narula
Controlling from your Iphone would be great but I would not pass mine around, controlling with the Apple tablet would be awesome because it would pretty much stay in my living room most of the time. But my Harmony 900 will have to do for now.
- Johann Diaz
from Nambu
I'm still waiting for the remote that will stand the heavy beating of a 1 to 4 year olds for more than a month or two.
- Amit Morson
Apple Tv uses both the normal remote (which is pretty good) and the Remote App for iPhone or iPod Touch (which is freaking amazing)
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
I've had a logitech Harmony - sorry but didnt work with my very standard sony TV, or with my arcam home cinema. Were listed in the booklet but didnt work as described. Logitech support suggested actually it only worked in the more expensive models, i should buy these... Expensive paperweight - and the last logitech product I bought.
- Iphigenie
Years ago I had an HP iPaq 2210 with a powerful IR LED perfectly capable of functioning as a remote. And in fact, one of the provided app in it was a remote control app, with a database of over 400 devices that it support directly. And one can train it to record the IR signals of unsupported remotes. Miss it a lot :-(
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer
from fftogo
Rhotic and non-rhotic accents - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
Simon, andrei_c, Aaron Schaub and 12 other people liked this
"English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: A rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɨk/) speaker pronounces the letter R in hard and water. A non-rhotic speaker does not pronounce it in hard, and may not in water, or may only pronounce it in water if the following word begins with a vowel."
- Amit Patel
from Bookmarklet
Useful for me in London! Thanks.
- Clay B.
A Scottish accent is also rhotic.
- Paul Grav
I use the R loads more than most people, meaning I get called posh a lot. I'm not, I just pronounce my words properly. I speak the Queens English don't you know.
- Toby Graham
Toby: Really? R in the rhotic sense? The Queen's English (Received Pronunciation) is non-rhotic. In England I think it's usually the case that the more someone pronounces the _written_ letter R, the less posh they sound. For example, the rural and farming West Country accents tend to be full of pronounced Rs, whereas the typical posh English way of saying the written letter R in...
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- Simon
YouTube - Cappuccino X Tornado - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Evgeny Tataurov, Hugo Romano, Devon Govett and 8 other people liked this
i want to start company to disorganize world's info & make it universally unaccessible & useless. just to keep google busy
Michael Leggett, Bronson Harrington, Carlo Maglinao and 37 other people liked this
I think we have a new nemesis. :)
- Matt Cutts
from iPhone
Does your proposed company have a motto?
- Tim Tyler
This is the wittiest comment I read here on Friendfeed - ever.
- Space Cowboy
Apparently, the company has already been started. I had several replies saying that governments in general seem to make things disorganized and unaccessible :)
- dannysullivan
Suggestions for the name of the company: Spammers
- Shakeel Mahate
Hilarious Danny!
- Greg Bogdan
How about Elsevier?
- Ruchira S. Datta
ARGs generate new information but intentionally make it obscure and difficult to access.
- Chris Bentzel
faster cPython :: Unladen Swallow . [Collin Winter, 5 Sep 2009] - http://vimeo.com/6461983
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arnaldostream, Hari, Peter Hoffmann and 2 other people liked this
from PyCon Argentina: "an optimization branch of cPython, intended to be fully compatible and significantly faster. GOALS: 1. produce a version of python at least 5x faster than cPython. 2. python application performance should be stable. 3. maintain source-level compatibility with cPython applications. 4. maintain source-level compatibility with cPython extension modules. 5. we do not want to maintain a python implementation forever; we view our work as a branch, not a fork." http://code.google.com/p... \\ enjoyable video -- almost a stand-up comedy routine based on the dynamic features of Python ;-)
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet
Even if Unladen Swallow never meets its goal of merging completely into CPython, I have to give big credit for the positive side effects of the project, mentioned at the end of the talk. CPython has already apparently incorporated many changes from their Q1 release, and as a result of needing to debug US, they contributed patches allowing the GNU Debugger (GDB) to hook into LLVM. Wonderful.
- Chris Lasher
Overheard: Bing uses Hadoop..cool!
- Hari
Should Facebook Remove Subject Lines from Messages? - http://mashable.com/2009...
Jason A. Samfield, Laura Norvig, Giovanni Piller Cottrer and 65 other people liked this
I tried to remove the subject in Gmail, but people revolted. I really like that FriendFeed (and Twitter) don't have a subject -- it's just a message.
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
How do you know on FriendFeed?
- Paul Buchheit
I think email would be better if they removed the body instead of the subject.
- Jim Norris
well, I can guess what's spam on gmail by the subject line. Since I never got spam on facebook's inbox... that could take things right to the point.
- Caio
Friendfeed removes the body from most messages, so you have to do the 'write a comment on your own message' trick to put it in
- Kevin Marks
That's a good point Kevin, a lot of people treat the first comment by the author as the subject line.
- Eric Florenzano
Which makes the feed API annoying for longform stuff
- Kevin Marks
People are using "pseudo tagging" on FF with the [something] syntax just to provide the "context" for their message. So, yeah, title is here to stay (where used).
- Claudio Cicali
I tend to delete emails with no subject lines without reading them, since it's usually just one of my friends or family forwarding me some crap (Note: I have filters to remove Re: and Fwd: and similar additions to subject lines). So in that sense, subject lines are necessary if you want me to read what you have to say. I would extend this same concept to the Facebook Inbox as well:...
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- Otto
Hmm.. On a related note, I should just setup an auto-responder for no-subject-line emails. Tell people "no subject, no delivery", and also warn them not to send me their forward spam. Might work.
- Otto
summarize, FTW!
- Claudio Cicali
+1 for Otto's comment.
- Curdy G
Twitter has just the subject line, no body. ;)
- Amit Patel
It's the other way around Amit, which is why Twitter is better than Atom/RSS (RSS has titles, Twitter is just short messages). See http://friendfeed.com/paul... for an example.
- Paul Buchheit
"Twitter is better than Atom/RSS"?!? - splutters!
- Tim Tyler
it is very useless btw you also have to change the share box to old way.. It is very difficukt when you want to share a message to another user not to your profile
- Atif UNALDI
Instead of no subject, i often send email with no body, or the same in both. only use body when I need long form.
- David Stratton
Twitter and ff exclude the long-form use case. For email, subject lines should at least be an option. I don't use fb enough to comment on their messaging.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
No subject does totally work. Sometimes I really stuck trying to fill Subj form. Just have no idea how to summarize words like ”How d'ya do”. What's the subject here? No fkcng subj needed, for real.
- Кто это тут у нас
Bruce, the solution is to simply make the "subject" a part of the body, so that there is a smooth transition.
- Paul Buchheit
If there's one general problem I have with Gmail, it's the institutional attitude that they know what's best for the user. e.g. "You don't need to be able to sort by columns." I'm thankful they didn't let you dump the subject, Paul.
- Ken Sheppardson
How do you get users to do that? People don't naturally start long-form messages with concise summaries. Not that a subject line nails this problem, but at least you can prompt the user if it's blank.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
People don't write concise summaries anyway Bruce :). Ken, sorting by something other than date in nonsensical in a conversational context.
- Paul Buchheit
Facebook having a proprietary system that mostly competes with email, but is mostly incompatible with it is kind-of feeble.
- Tim Tyler
Paul: Perhaps, but people aren't always operating in a "conversational context" when they're dealing with email. For something as flexible as email, or messaging systems of any sort, I find it annoying when the system tries to dictate what my workflow and thought processes should look like.
- Ken Sheppardson
Maybe it's a dying use case, but subjects are really great for automated messages that are guaranteed to have a useful subject line. I can scroll through server notices, security advisories, and so on quickly and download the full message if I need to know more. The fact that you can download just the subject line (or rather, the email header) before downloading the entire email is still pretty useful to me.
- Mark Trapp
Ken, I'm referring to the UI. For example, sorting by sender doesn't make sense when there are multiple senders, as is the case in a conversational ui. The ui was designed to solve use-cases, not fill feature checkboxes.
- Paul Buchheit
Also, Gmail wasn't meant to cover all possible use cases. I think it's better to have a product that's very good for many people than mediocre for all people. It has open interfaces (such as IMAP) so that it's easy to use other clients.
- Paul Buchheit
I agree 100% with Ken. I almost always sort my e-mails by date, then subject (in Evolution, I can actually group them by thread, which is really nice). If I just kept all of my e-mails sorted strictly by date and none of them had subjects, I would have no idea which ones were related to each other. It's completely counter-intuitive to remove the subject line from an e-mail. Further,...
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- Curdy G
It's not meant to cover all use cases, but it's meant to be interoperable, right? If email originating from Gmail is not supplying subject lines (because they're hidden/downplayed/discouraged), but everything else relies on subject lines (like IMAP clients) to weed through the email list, the spirit of interoperability seems to be violated.
- Mark Trapp
I get that, Paul (re use cases vs features) and was just about to mention that I'm thankful for IMAP support, so I can use Thunderbird, Outlook, etc for those instances where my workflow calls for sorting by size; sorting a set of messages with well-formed subjects by subject; using sorting as a quick, visual proxy for search, etc.
- Ken Sheppardson
Mark, I didn't say that it wouldn't supply a subject line :)
- Paul Buchheit
What would it be? The first n bytes of the message? I guess that could work.
- Mark Trapp
i rarely use the subject line in my email
- andy brudtkuhl
yes
- Christopher Harris
it doesnt mean it is the best way if you use something in a way for a long time. i think no subject for emails is a good approach if you really think on it. it is the change scares us.
- Eren Emre Kanal
from iPhone
People who send me emails without a subject rarely have anything to say that I want to read. If you're too lazy to write a subject, then I'm too lazy to read your ramblings.
- Otto
The business world relies on subject messages for threading and sorting, and I anticipate will do so for some time. I would keep it.
- Louis Gray
Doesn't anybody ever take any business communications classes/training any more? Email without subjects lines is like a meeting without an agenda. Oh, and get off my lawn. Humbug.
- Ken Sheppardson
a direct message? no subject line. an email-like message? subject line for sure.
- Vicarbott
This is why ultimately we may need to abandon email. It's broken in many ways, but difficult to change.
- Paul Buchheit
If by "broken" you mean "people don't take the time to learn how to use it effectively", I agree. ;-)
- Ken Sheppardson
For something meant to be so essential to communication, it shouldn't take time to use effectively: it should be a natural extension of what we do. If we're relying on everyone to use it correctly, that's not very efficient.
- Mark Trapp
ya i dont no why anybody wood half to lern how to do stuff it shuld all be natural
- Ken Sheppardson
Is it the norm to expect everyone to be bilingual? Why not expect electronic communication media to be an extension of the one form of communication that we all spend years to master? Why is it necessary to have to spend another large tract of time to learn another form of communication?
- Mark Trapp
Paul, do you think Google Wave will solve this problem? It doesn't have a subject line and it's much more different than email.
- Eren Emre Kanal
Eren, I don't know what will happen with Wave. It's a very interesting concept, but I suspect that it still needs a lot of refinement.
- Paul Buchheit
Now I'm curious what the subject-free gmail would have looked like, especially messages to/from other email systems.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
It's less different than you would imagine Bruce. The biggest change is in the composer. Gmail already kind of merges subject with body in the inbox. Unfortunately I didn't figure out the right ui until sometime after wanting to remove the subject. If I had thought of it sooner, we might have been able to do it.
- Paul Buchheit
At least I (mostly) got rid of it on reply though :)
- Paul Buchheit
Writing concisely, knowing what a paragraph is/should be, understanding what a "topic sentence" is, and being able to summarize a document in a single sentence aren't skills that are unique to email. Blog posts, reports, books, magazine articles all have subjects... except we call them "titles". Seems like the people I work with all use email in a ways that's fundamentally different than some of you. I don't really get where the idea that subjects are superfluous is coming from.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, when I call up a friend or family member, I don't start the call with "This phone call will be about the weather. Hey Dad, how's it going?" Conversations are not written prose, and the premise being put out is that emails are extensions of conversations.
- Mark Trapp
That's a great example Mark. Subjects are very formal.
- Paul Buchheit
As is most business communication.
- Ken Sheppardson
Email is formal, chat isn't...
- Johnny
Mark: I notice that most if not all the entries on http://marktrapp.com/blog have subjects/titles. Why?
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, because they're prose, not conversations.
- Mark Trapp
Paul - the fact that you say you "mostly got rid of it on reply" is exactly why subjects are so necessary. How else do we keep those conversations inline when dealing with other e-mail clients? Not all e-mail clients are able to thread conversations the way Gmail and Evolution do. With most of them, we have to rely on being able to sort/group by subject in order to keep related conversations together. As long as that functionality is broken, the concept of a subject has to stay in place.
- Curdy G
Curtiss, I'm not talking about removing the RFC822 header, I'm talking about changing the ui so that people don't have to waste time thinking about subjects.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, I have to disagree with eliminating email. It's VERY useful for me in the way that I use it and for the people with whom I correspond. Of course, I don't have Wave yet so I may be eating my words soon.
- Vicarbott
OK, I'm out. Y'all can continue to imagine this sort of topicless/subjectless world where email's just about "conversations"... good luck with that.
- Ken Sheppardson
But, somewhere that subject still needs to originate. Especially when we are talking about formal business communication, all of our messages (assuming you are using a snippet from the beginning of the message as the subject) would have a subject of "Greetings, _____" or "Dear ________" which would be completely counter-intuitive.
- Curdy G
Imagine a typewriter.
- Paul Buchheit
In the old days, when letters didn't have subjects, there was no easy way to automatically file them together or find one you were looking for. I would hate to go back to that.
- Gabe
Imagine, if you will a typewriter NOOOOOOO!!!! I'm so glad computers came along! I had a temp job working on a selectric, on a 3-carbon forms. It was a nightmare.
- anna sauce
I just figured out how to filter my gmail for no subjects. Took a while, but subject:"no subject" will do the trick. Looking through those, they're almost all crap. I'm going to give them their own label for a while, see how they look. If they continue to suck, I'll set up a canned response to tell the sender to stick a subject on there before sending it.
- Otto
What would be a great innovation is if an email program let you assign a subject to email conversations that the original sender wasn't polite enough to write for you.
- Gabe
+1 for Gabe.
- Curdy G
repeating how the ui might play out: snippet of body becomes the subject for a long form email, or short form email message is completely scannable in the message list.
- karl dotter
I agree with Kevin. I know I'm late to this thread but to answer Paul's "How do you know on FriendFeed?", the original post in FriendFeed/Facebook is in a lot of ways like a subject. It generates an overall topic that makes replies the body. When dealing with large conversation flows such as FF/FB, this tells the reader whether it is worth reading beyond. In many ways Twitter is the...
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- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
To add on, FriendFeed/FB Walls are in a lot of ways equivalent to being the flat file view of a message board's group of discussions/topics. Without subjects, it's just a bunch of unstructured data.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
There's the expectation of the subject field to be there - it's a hard habit to break now - and it does give a bit of context and scanability to mail clients. But the process of labeling up mail could be migrated into place - 'mail tags', so to speak. Which could work for both sender and receiver and could make mail archives more like a folksonomy - and thus offer more integration with other web services.
- zeroinfluencer
I second that David, i was thinking along the lines. I would rather see the subject line being replaced with tags. Just keywords, no summary. Less thinking needed to summarize the message into one sentence, thus more productive and even useful for e. g. semantic purposes.
- Tibor Holoda
Hey - getting back on topic (we all got derailed there for quite a while) - I see no reason that Facebook really needs subjects on their messages. Since the messages are basically only used inside of the proprietary Facebook platform, which already threads the messages anyway, there's no real need for the subject.
- Curdy G
For what it's worth, Wave takes the first couple lines and makes it a pseudo subject, from what I can tell... It made it bold in the body of the wave (is it called a body?) and then added a dash in the inbox. Check out this example: http://img.skitch.com/2009100... all i did was type "Hi Louis!" as the first line of my wave and it did the rest
- Frankie Warren
Nope, don't need subject line. Instead, use labels (tags) to filter content (folders / views)
- Susan Beebe
For Facebook messages, the subject line isn't important; context doesn't need to be set. For "business" messages (Gmail/Outlook), it's more important, because the subject line is (usually) used as the first method of filtering/prioritising.
- Andrew Terry
+1 Andrew.
- Curdy G
yup, subjects with small updates is clumsy and noting but extra line that is not needed at all
- testbeta
Yes.
- Meryn Stol
Yeah! Why do we always need to be formal?? Huh!? Is It social networking thingy or office networking thing? Lol! Good question, they should remove this. :)
- Mohammad Abdurraafay
from iPhone
The whole argument is pointless because in FB the subject is optional.
- Jason Williams
from iPhone
Wow, so much complaining. For subject haters, is it really that much of a problem to leave the box blank?
- Rebecca Sun
Furthermore, if you're writing just to say "hi" or whatever, put it on the wall! (Unless you're trying to keep your relationship a secret)
- Rebecca Sun
Python Project Howto — Python Project Howto - http://infinitemonkeycorps.net/docs...
Mike Chelen, Nikhil Kadadi, Adriano and 2 other people liked this
"You have a pile of Python code. You think, “this could be useful to someone else.” You want to release it as an open-source project. You’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you release a high-quality Python project. The file layout below illustrates the correspondence between the components of a good Python project and the files you create. I’ll be using my googlemaps module as a running example."
- Peter Hoffmann
from Bookmarklet
I didn't know until just now that the 'space tourist' who launched today is Guy Laliberte, 95% owner of Cirque du Soleil. Nifty.
Jon Parise, Paul Buchheit, Dan Hsiao and 3 other people liked this
He is apparently going to be taking part in a show promoting the arts while up there. He has also taken clown noses with him.
- Kenton
Did I mentioned I built two apps on this trip? Hacking in the theater before shows I made (but haven't deployed) storable.org and notify.io
Jon Parise liked this
PyPy Status Blog: First results of the JIT - http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2009...
Private Sanjeev, Lode Nachtergaele, Kenyth and 8 other people liked this
"# 8.18 seconds with CPython 2.5.2; # 2.61 seconds with pypy-c-jit (3x faster than CPython); # 1.04 seconds if you ignore the time spent making assembler (8x faster than CPython); # 1.59 seconds on Psyco, for reference (5x faster that CPython)."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
I wonder if unladen_swallow is to the point of being able to benchmark like this.
- DGentry
McKinsey did a study for AT&T in the 80's about cell phones. Prediction: 1M units in US by 2000. Actual: 109M. Forcasting is hard.
Adam Kazwell, marko, romanzolotarev and 28 other people liked this
A couple of things spring to mind 1) Moores law wasn't common knowledge back then. 2) People's desire to get laid means they will use any means of communication at their disposal.
- James Robertson
Reminds me of Thomas Watson's (IBM) forecast that there was demand for 5 computers (mainframes) in the world.
- Larry Hawes
They forgot multiplication ;)
- Ashish
A million people then is about as much as 109 million is today. It's all in the exchange rates...
- Mike Lewis
You can get teensy toy r/c helicopters for $20 now, right?
- Andrew C (✓)
LOL @ Mike Lewis
- Oblomov
Thanks for the laugh, Mike
- MiniMage, enterRUPPted
A practical scalable distributed B-tree - http://www.hpl.hp.com/techrep...
Jimminy, CoG of FF, alfred westerveld, Nagender Parimi and 72 other people liked this
"Moreover, our algorithm is conceptually simple: we use transactions to manipulate B-tree nodes so that clients need not use complicated concurrency and locking protocols used in prior work. To execute these transactions quickly, we rely on three techniques: (1) We use optimistic concurrency control, so that B-tree nodes are not locked during transaction execution, only during commit. This well-known technique works well because B-trees have little contention on update. (2) We replicate inner nodes at clients. These replicas are lazy, and hence lightweight, and they are very helpful to re- duce client-server communication while traversing the B-tree. (3) We replicate version numbers of inner nodes across servers, so that clients can validate their transactions efficiently, without creating bottlenecks at the root node and other upper levels in the tree."
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, I think many of us are going to trust your opinion on this white paper. All Greek to me.
- Jon-Paul Bussoli
All I understand is that it is in my best interests to cheer for the way you access B-tree nodes in order to continue to enjoy friendfeed reliably. Go friendfeed algorithm go!
- Jon-Paul Bussoli
What, no comparison to BigTable?
- ⓞnor
@nor It's really not the same thing, unless somehow you're using a distributed B-tree on hash collision, however, if you're getting that many collisions, then the hash algorithm is probably wrong or your key width is too small. Then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about.
- Eric Florenzano
Curious as to what problem Paul is looking at... My default data toolkit these days would probably include sqlite for in-memory data, sharded bdb's for btrees that are too big for memory, and hbase/hypertable for a distributed store. I wonder where this fits in...
- DeWitt Clinton
Ok this is a really *nerdy* post! :*)
- Susan Beebe
DeWitt, I just thought that it looked like an interesting paper. As for the several solutions you mention, I don't know that any of them have distributed transactions (maybe bdb, but that doesn't really work).
- Paul Buchheit
B-Trees and Prof. Bayer http://wwwbayer.informatik.tu-... - would be interesting to know what he'd say, unfortunately he's retired a few years ago. Used to be fairly approachable in all matters B-Tree.
- Mustafa K. Isik
@DeWitt - no room for a traditional SQL based database except as an in memory database?
- Nick Lothian
we had designed and implemented distributed tree control, but transactions were considered "too much" for near-real-time, and they were already in protocol... the rest you know as xGSN boxes in GPRS/3G/HSDPA - dynamic routing for mobile packet networks. I'd left team in 2003...
- A. T.
@paul - I'll readily admit to being out of my depth, but it depends on what the definition of "distribution transaction" is. With bdb a combination of local transactions and guaranteed consistent replication you can approximate a distributed transaction at the cost of speed. See http://www.oracle.com/technol... and http://www.oracle.com/technol.... But those won't work across bdb shards.
- DeWitt Clinton
@paul - A table-based distributed store can do this via a lock on entity groups, where entity groups are defined by relationship formed by instances of similar models that belong to the same parent-based ancestry chain. This is how App Engine transactions work -- see http://code.google.com/appengi... and http://code.google.com/appengi.... Ping ryan for some background there. Not sure if hbase or hypertable support this via their api.
- DeWitt Clinton
@nlothian - I dunno. Offline maybe?
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt: have you ever successfully used BDB with millions of newly written entries and transaction support turned on? We kept getting transaction logs with millions of entries that were never consumed, so restarts would take hours as it replayed the logs. Configuring BDB to work for large databases is insanely esoteric to say the least, and it may be impossible to get it to work acceptably in some cases.
- Bret Taylor
@bret -- no, definitely not with large databases. We used bdb's heavily at my last company, though. Aggressive sharding is the key if you want to support either transactions or replication, which matches intuition about how it is implemented.
- DeWitt Clinton
But your comment about millions of entries makes me wonder about which data is getting written to which place. I suspect a lot of problems like this end up with the bulk of the data being written transactionless + replicated to a table-based store (or a transactionless bdb), and only a small subset of the data gets transaction support. So multiple datastores. But you guys know this better than I do, so why am I rambling? : )
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, you can also look into all the trouble that Gaia had with bdb - I simply wouldn't trust any fancy bdb functionality.
- Paul Buchheit
Also, AppEngine transactions are limited to a single "entity group", which I assume means a single BigTable tablet. Essentially, they solved distributed transactions by not having them -- all transactions must be local to a single tablet. From the docs: "Every entity belongs to an entity group, a set of one or more entities that can be manipulated in a single transaction. Entity group relationships tell App Engine to store several entities in the same part of the distributed network."
- Paul Buchheit
@paul - yup, that's the trade-off. Entity groups ensure locality, locality makes transactions fast(er). Same old lever problem -- speed of consistency vs. scope of the transactions.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, there's nothing wrong with having local transactions -- I'm just pointing out that they aren't distributed transactions.
- Paul Buchheit
Point taken. I got way off-topic regarding your original post anyway.
- DeWitt Clinton
The design seems reasonable. The only part that is under-specified is the way they switch from a master node to a slave. I'm curious why they don't use transactions to maintain replicas but instead rely on some unspecified master/slave replication scheme.
- Private Sanjeev
Dropbox Reaches 2 Million Users; Continues to Grow - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Matthew Gifford, Jon Parise, Paul Buchheit and April Buchheit liked this
Furthest Point From McDonald's | Dagoosh! - http://blog.dagoosh.com/post...
Jason A. Samfield, Tanath, paniaguai and 64 other people liked this
"the furthest point you can get away from a McDonald's in the contiguous US is in South Dakota, where you can be 107 miles away from the wonderment that is the McGriddle."
- Benjamin Golub
from Bookmarklet
Mmmmm, McGriddle...
- Brian Chang
This is pathetic. I have three within 5 miles of my house.
- Will Sloan
I think I have 2 within 5 miles. One is within walking distance and the other is the next city over. I'm sure there are others I've managed to ignore, since I don't eat there.
- Anika
I think McDonald's on Manhattan island are like Starbucks there - you can see the next one from the front entrance of the one you're at.
- Brian Chang
I remember once reading that McD's objective was that no American be more than 10 minutes away from an outlet.
- Piaw Na
just thinking of McD's makes me want to puke... (sorry about the implied image there)
- Harold
Alright. Now do this with Starbucks.
- Louis Gray
Just a sec ... ok ... got sunglass on now ... proceed with Starbucks version ...
- Tom Horn
That is so cool.
- Brian Johns
According to aggdata.com, there's 12,275 McD's, but only 10,995 Starbucks. The clear winner in number of shops is Subway sandwiches, with a whopping 22,944 locations. If you consider all types of businesses instead of just foodservice, FedEx wins with 52,065 locations.
- Otto
How are there that many Subways, yet we just got one within 3 miles of me earlier this year.
- Anika
That's only in the USA, mind you, although Subway will soon pass McD's at most locations worldwide: http://www.yumsugar.com/5162960
- Otto
Twitter / Kevin Rose: I ask one thing of you, cl ... - http://twitter.com/kevinro...
Jon Parise liked this
So creepy.
- Corey Johnson
Switching browsers is a big deal for many people (change is bad), but installing the latest Flash plugin so that you can play games, watch videos, etc is normal. This is why the "Chrome Frame" plugin is a great idea. Now they need to add some "must have" features to HTML5.
Michael Leggett, Vishwajith, Rodrigo Jaroszewski and 60 other people liked this
Absolutely... I hope they'll offer it in .cab form as well so it'll be a simple click-to-deploy solution.
- Matt M (inactive)
A brilliant strategy... MSFT left with just the frame.
- τorƍue
Next up: Chrome OS inside of Windows.
- τorƍue
one of my predictions was right! (it should also totally go into Google Toolbar) http://www.satine.org/archive...
- Charles Ying
This is fantastic news for developers and really opens up the potential to innovate.
- Daniel Shaw
Chrome 3 still has drawbacks..no roboform support and xmarks support. Also, flash does not work on a number of sits. Firefox kept freezing(ver 3.0013 to 3.53) so I tried Flock and it uses all my old extensions and is fast.
- earl wallace
from twhirl
Chrome frame will just tick people off: "you need a plugin to view this site" ... and then you just show them what is basically just a plain old website?
- Joel Bennett
I like digg's strategy of displaying a warning of possible funkyness to users visiting the site with IE6. Wouldn't [click here to remove funkyness] do the trick for most people?
- no name
It looks like Wave refused to be slowed down by older browsers and requires the use of Chrome-frame for any interaction with the app: http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009...
- no name
"and then you just show them what is basically just a plain old website" No, using it for plain old websites would be annoying, but there are uses -- like Canvas animations -- to which there is no good plugin-less alternative. So then it becomes the choice between different plugins. (Of course Flash is more widely distributed at the moment, but some developers may prefer Canvas + JavaScript.)
- Philipp Lenssen
Are there any good uses for Canvas animations? Or any really good uses for Canvas at all? I'm at a loss for situations where SVG wouldn't be better.
- Gabe
my flash will not update!
- Lizajane
Facebook Lite loads incredibly fast and it only uses one image. http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc...
Amarnath Prabhakar, Lizunlong, Glen Rhea and 14 other people liked this
Traps & Pitfalls of Agile Software Development - A Non-Contrarian View - http://www.artima.com/weblogs...
Jon Parise liked this
nice overview of the common areas agile developers sometimes fall down in.
- Scot Mcphee
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