This would be a very interesting and timely movie, since we're approaching a cycle when conglomerates are, once again, consolidating into ever-bigger entities. (think AT&T trying to buy T-mobile as a small example).
I would also recommend Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" that discusses media monopolies in the U.S. in historical perspective, from the telegraph and early telephone on to movie studios and on to the Internet nowadays. As the book explains, the Internet itself in its current open form is a historical aberration, similar to the multitude of choice in the early days of radio which was short-lived, to be soon replaced by monopolies under the government's helping hand. In fact, many technological inventions would not even have been possible when they happened (and some were delayed by decades) because of large monopolies. The origination of the Internet itself, the book explains, is a direct result of the splitting of AT&T in 1984, which allowed, for example the standard modem jack to exist (jacks and equipment were proprietary before that), and which disallowed AT&T from getting in the Internet business as an ISP.
It seems that these lessons have begun to be, once again, forgotten by our modern generation. The solution to all this would be that the government properly fulfills its role of ensuring free market access and prevention of monopolies. It would also entail what's termed a "separations principle", the creation of distance between each of the major layers in the information economy.
Tim Wu's book is excellent and was one of the many books that have influenced me in the writing of this doc. He's on our list of future interviewees.
His explanation of the "Separations Principle" is essential reading for any one that wants to protect the integrity of the Internet as we know it.
Have you read Evgeny Morozov's book, "The Net Delusion"...?
Interesting book -- He looks at the future of the Internet and of democratic government from an interesting perspective. His central premise is that totalitarian governments in the 21st century will look increasingly more like Huxley's, "Brave New World" than Orwell's "1984"...
"The origination of the Internet itself, the book explains, is a direct result of the splitting of AT&T in 1984, which allowed, for example the standard modem jack to exist (jacks and equipment were proprietary before that)"
The earliest modems didn't use phone jacks at all:
Why just Flash though? I thought Flash was on its way out. Other than that, interesting move. Looks like there is increased interest these days toward live streaming.(Youtube live was announced recently as well)
Flash Media Server means Adobe software running on the server, so users would either need to arrange the license themselves and pay for a server (e.g. using EC2) or have a specific service offered by Amazon (what they've just announced).
Anyone who wants to serve content without flash doesn't need Flash Media Server, so they can do it without needing this service.
I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques.
To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.
That is exactly what I needed in my life...another social network! I had a feeling something was missing and now it's obvious that it's the lack of enough online 'social networks'..
Oddly enough, I am still looking for one that will work for me. I bet there are others out there who fill the same.
I do wish that companies did not try and recreate myspace, facebook, etc. I would rather them build the next thing and allow the internet to catch up to the concept.
Internet identity is getting more important. The average user is now just getting a whiff of the value in having a your own web footprint and what that entails.
I want to see a social site with a mullet...business in the front, party in the back.
Short summary of the article. The outage was caused by the introduction of new requirements by LSE for end-of-day price reporting. The data vendors were the ones who had the responsibility to adhere to these new rules, by making changes to their systems. Unfortunately, the "big bang" approach to the switch-over proved fatal.
From the article:
“I am astonished they did not run the systems in parallel,” said a source at one of the major data vendors. “At least for a few weeks or months as necessary.”
The LSE argues that it gave plenty of proper testing and preparation time, and that the vendors should have been ready. It has been working with them to resolve the issues.
> “I am astonished they did not run the systems in parallel,” said a source at one of the major data vendors. “At least for a few weeks or months as necessary.”
I worked at a wall street trading firm for some years in the past. Our group was primarily working on replacing older mainframe applications. After the normal back and forth with development and QA, they would be run in parallel with the systems they were replacing for a minimum of 3 months. Development was not allowed to install, monitor, "fix" or otherwise touch them during that time. We either got a "go" or "no go" periodically, and we had to fix whatever the issues were or they never saw the light of day.
Why am I reminded of Douglas Adams? "All the planning charts have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now..."
I haven't followed the story that well, and only skim read this article, but there was a four-ish hour outage in the morning last week. I think the LSE came up OK for about half an hour but then went down (although it might not have come up at all; I can't remember). It seems unlikely that that was caused by data vendors not reporting end of day close prices correctly.
I have more modest needs- I would like to know a few practical reasons why I would choose to invest time in learning it vs one of the other non-mainstream & mainstream languages out there.
That being said, I understand there's always value in learning something new.
Ocaml is simple, expressive and fast. While it suffers in terms of libaries and community support it makes a good systems language and is fantastic for expressing complex algorithms and data structures.
Ocaml prepares you for Fsharp - a first class language of the .NET framework. Full IDE support, cross-platform, very liberal licensing, and more or less on the cutting-edge from a MS languages point of view. Ocaml is also used in the finance domain a bit.
Conversely, OCaml allows you the pleasure of a ML-style language without being shackled to .NET.
It is a very, very nice language to work with. Its performance when compiled is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Basically, short of any intensive bit twiddling, I'd take OCaml over C. You get the speed of of native code with the expressivity, type safety and memory management features of a higher level language. It is easier to write solid apps with, since it's harder to screw things up in OCaml.
I am a developer, and in the past I used to be a proponent of "agility". These days if I am interviewing for a job and I hear that the company is using "Agile practices", I generally try to avoid it like the plague.
I believe there are 3 main factors for software projects to succeed: one is the technology and the skill level of the tech team; the second, very important, are the business requirements (are we building the right thing, and with the right priorities?); the third is the level of communication between team members.
Now "Agility" (Scrum/etc) really addresses only the 3rd point.
And herein lies the dogmatism that others have mentioned -- a lot of these companies who do "Agile" usually do so because they have serious problems, and they think "Agile" is a magic bullet that will solve them. This is extremely wrong and dangerous - if your problems are caused by crappy technology or (very often) by the fact that you don't understand what you're trying to build, then throwing scrum meetings at developers will alienate them even further.
What I also see in these companies that are so adamant about Scrum/etc, is management who doesn't understand technology. Therefore they use the "Agile" weapon as one of their only ways to give them a sense that they are in "control" of the situation. They neglect the other parts because they don't understand them.
I had quite a scare. I was searching for this fairly popular repo and when I saw it was gone, I was afraid the author took to the hills like _why. I then thought maybe I've done something wrong when I saw that all my history and repos were completely gone. Finally, twitter revealed they are having problems.
I would also recommend Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" that discusses media monopolies in the U.S. in historical perspective, from the telegraph and early telephone on to movie studios and on to the Internet nowadays. As the book explains, the Internet itself in its current open form is a historical aberration, similar to the multitude of choice in the early days of radio which was short-lived, to be soon replaced by monopolies under the government's helping hand. In fact, many technological inventions would not even have been possible when they happened (and some were delayed by decades) because of large monopolies. The origination of the Internet itself, the book explains, is a direct result of the splitting of AT&T in 1984, which allowed, for example the standard modem jack to exist (jacks and equipment were proprietary before that), and which disallowed AT&T from getting in the Internet business as an ISP. It seems that these lessons have begun to be, once again, forgotten by our modern generation. The solution to all this would be that the government properly fulfills its role of ensuring free market access and prevention of monopolies. It would also entail what's termed a "separations principle", the creation of distance between each of the major layers in the information economy.