Not sure how this story is breaking and unexpected. This is exactly the type and style of program that was expected right after 9/11. It's totally the NSA's playground and the co-operation and/or backdooring of major, communication-funneling corporations would be assured. How is this shocking? It has little to do with political winds and everything to do with the spawn of the military-industrial complex... the military-infocomm complex.
CIA != NSA and I'd be pessimistic on the CIA funding projects for the NSA. They aren't the same org and they have reasons to not be, so they aren't all chummy.
This reminded me of how ham-handed we should expect the media handling of all this will be and how many windmills will be put up for people to teeter at while the real story and grander plan continues to roll past and evolve.
Wish he spent more time on meaningful work instead of retorting inflammatory web postings.
He could have done two things in far shorter time.
1) Debunked the original article
2) Used the space to evangelize to others (while echoing the original article's author's views).
Too many words for HN over any private wedding. If I wanted ceremony, I'd be writing STL.
Sorry folks. We should have been well beyond the point of detached thought experiments about this. Change the power structures or change the power structures. They've gone too far in so many ways. Change from within, change from outside, or stay home and get what you deserve?
Yeah, but those are just questions on paper! They after me lucky charms!
When you sign a legal form, especially tied to a business, you might want to consider the ramifications of how you complete the form. You probably should legal up prospectively if it deals with money and currencies.
This is not surprising for MtGox. Their platform, communications, and, now, essential business acumen all perform at the same unprofessional level. I guess it's back to trading cards then, eh?
Pay bands. Loss of the love/age discrimination. Hours/screw your stress.
Sorry... we don't understand what you do enough to warrant paying you 2x-3x what we pay the grads and we pay grads more than other starters. Pay the programmer more than execs or non-tech with big degrees?
There are also a bunch of folks that ride out the tech that they rode in on when they started. PHP? Classic ASP? COBOL? If you don't love to learn and adapt in both tech and culture, you won't know what the cool kids know nor will you fit well with their group to tell stories about pointers and punch cards.
At 40, those kids of yours are just getting better and better and you might be feeling guilty about missing out on parts of those first years. You might have also done the math on how much of your surplus value you, as developer, are pouring into the sales guys' gas guzzler... You are there when something fails. You are there cashing the checks that the sales people write beyond scope, budget, and/or time. You see that gals' work-life balance compared to yours and say, f-it.
Also, as the guy notes... StackOverflow is a self-selecting group. Which of these highly-paid, older programmers are trying to build up virtual street cred or answering surveys?
So you want:
- unlimited storage for a large collection of images
- additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video
- minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI
- to do me the favor of profit at $5/mo
I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video.
Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB, let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop videos.
A potential market (evolving and growing because of the ubiquity of cameras and video cameras) has stated what it wants. A company that can deliver solutions to this market can scale with the the market. The OP's point is that no one (specifically Apple in his situation) seems to be really excelling in this space because of a pre-smart phone and pre-'video cameras everywhere' view of the world.
What you so condescendingly refer to as an 'entitlement attitude' is frustration with the widespread and accelerating ability to create content but the lack of ways to manage and organize it. Full stop.
HN startupers always talk about changing the world; instead of CRUDing more status updates, selling more ads or selling cheese graters online you could aim higher and solve the problems that the changing digital world is asking for. You could even use Node.js to do it!
S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those 9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half that price like imgur.
I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing.
Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video.
When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem.
This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.
I really don't throw in video like it's nothing. What I intended to highlight was that for 99% of users, the perception of what they get should be unlimited even if there are fair-use policies.
I don't expect that a $5/user/month model is going to support Chase Jarvis' needs. However I do imagine that at $5/user/month 90% of users will actually be very profitable for Apple as they'll use way less than the available amount.
The fair-use limits can therefore be relatively high as they're subsidised by the majority of people who don't use that much.
My point about wanting "unlimited video" was not that I expected to store my entire film collection on there - only that as a 90-95 percentile user I want to be able to do the stuff I do every day without worrying about low limits. I don't mind if there's fair-use limit I just want to be sure that I can do a "fair" amount before hitting it.
All of this is also putting to one side the fact that this is a 20 year investment for Apple. Data costs don't seem to fall inline with Moore's law but they still fall crazy fast. It was only 10 years ago we didn't have S3. Even now if the RAW files were stored on an Amazon Glacier equivalent ($0.01/Gb/month) while screen-quality versions were stored in a hot cache you could provide high dataplans with much lower costs than putting things in tier 1 S3.
If my canonical store of my images is going to be on a cloud service, I sure as hell want all those 9's for durability. It doesn't matter how cheap a service is, if it permanently loses precious memories.
This is true, but storage is dropping and don't forget Amazon makes a profit on those prices so the cost is cheaper. It would potentially be a loss leader - generally people still don't take much video compared to photos.
Edit: Sorry for flippancy. I sense the challenge of the over-complete demo. Eventually, the design requires interfacing with developers who are then skewered for not getting it done as fast as the drag and drop mock-up.
It's probably not horribly worse than taking on an HTML5 template from your favorite template garden along with a laundry list of breaking customizations... I find it pretty quick to take the static images and build out without the baggage of more opinionated style work already "complete"
I want to respectfully disparage your statement. Doubling zero is zero. Doubling a small amount is likely still a small amount. They need to sell somewhere like 10k units to make this effort worth repeating, let alone a profit model. That means they better get working on getting this in the hands of 150k pirates.
7% of freeloaders is no small or easy task and compare time and energy trying to convert the sinful vs. pandering to the pious. Stop trying to fix culture or people and make a good product that makes life better and/or easier for paying customers.
This thread would be a fine place to enumerate the devs and studios that had success converting pirates to payers. That's a short list.
Given their platform, you would think progressive crippling of game play hits the correct balance of try before you buy and allowing for player investment to the point where they could be nudged in. Or, why not sell in-game DRM for $8?
I respect your argument and approach. "Stop trying to fix culture or people" I think our culture and people generally frown upon stealing given the ramifications it has for all of us if it becomes rampant. So I'm not trying to fix these folks - just point out that the ease with which these goods can be stolen creates this outcome where it gets too much of a free pass.
James Bamford