The gist of it seems to be that its a set of data models that make handling concurrency control and conflict resolution easier in the context of a single blob of data being edited by multiple users simultaneously (similar to Google/Apache Wave)
Is anyone aware if Racer uses OT to sync the model as a whole (OT on a tree structure), or if it is used on a per-leaf basis to merge operations on values? Firebase seems to have solved this issue (with their Firepad project) by using their tree/json sync engine to transmit the OT operation primitives.
OT is done at the document level. Documents are JSON objects of arbitrary complexity. Any mutation of the JSON object can be composed against any other mutation of the JSON object.
Firepad doesn't actually do OT of JSON. In Firepad, a string OT algorithm is used to merge text edits, and the metadata describing rich text is separately managed as span objects, which get modified in accordance with text changes.
Firebase provides conflict resolution of JSON structures using their Transaction primitive, which allows them to create a Software Transactional Memory used to update the journal that powers the text OT in Firepad. ShareJS inside of Derby uses a similar approach to allow multiple servers to access the journal, but it is done in Redis with Lua scripting.
The COD part is somewhat cultural. Very few people in India will trust a credit card based system that requires you to hand over your credit card number online and accept delivery at some point in the future. Cash usage in general is disproportionately higher than other forms. I think direct payments from bank accounts is next. Cards rank a distant third.
It is also the case that Debit Cards are insanely popular in India, a lot more than Credit Cards. Secondly, Online Banking (banks exposing merchant APIs) is also very popular for internet purchases as it removes the middleman.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any documentation for these services. It is possible that the APIs are published only for the merchants who are authorized to use them, payment gateways like CCAvenue and TPSL being some of them.
Banks/credit card companies have their payment APIs[0] open to parties they deal with (usually) payment gateways(now don't ask me for public methods and web service URIs) ->> payment gateway firms[1] deal with the banks and have access to those APIs ->> merchants/sellers[1] deal with payment gateways ->> customer checks out on seller/merchant's website ->> is redirected to (usually) payment gateway's portal where basic card/account credentials[2] are entered ->> is redirected bank/card's secure authentication page[3] ->> user enters login/password ->> is redirected back to seller/merchant's page with success/fail message.
[0] You might have to get in touch with some bank and/or payment gateway.
[1] When the seller is big, sometimes, they are themselves the payment gateways. Some PG examples are Citrus, Billdesk, SBI,CCAvenue(the shittiest) etc.
[2] Here in India the basic credentials include card number, exp date, name, CVV. In the USA these same basic details are more than enough for final purchase - sometimes even minus the cvv.
[3] Usually Mastercard's NetSafe or Verified By Visa etc.
Its not just cultural, but financial, unless you consider tax evasion a part of culture. A lot of Indians don't want to spend via credit cards because the money is 'black', i.e. unaccounted for. This is a big reason for COD, esp. among the business class.
I suspect a lot of us are very uncomfortable with that claim. I think the moonshot and the kernel are both independently amazing feats that don't need to be compared against one another for validation.
I don't know anything about Loom, but perhaps the first step to building a HIPAA compliant image store is to simply build an image store? Perhaps Loom's roadmap or eventual plan is to build an image store for a very specific business purpose? Perhaps its more than just cat pictures?
I don't know either way, but I sure wouldn't assume its designed for the exclusive purpose of "helping hipsters heap hi-res headshots of healthy hobos" (nice alliteration btw).
I disagree. We don't know what Yahoo wants to do with Tumblr. All we have are rumors, a WSJ report and tons of idle speculation. Without knowing what the intended end game is, I don't see how we can call the acquisition a "success" or "failure", much less the CEO's. I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".
Google is no genius with large acquisitions either. Motorola and Blogger come to mind immediately, but there are others too.
I think we can all agree that Yahoo has been mismanaged at least until recently. I just don't think a CEO's performance is a boolean value that depends on an undefined "any sign of failure" on a large acquisition with a 1 year time frame.
Google is a genius at acquisitions IMO. To qualify as a genius you don't need a 100% of acquisitions to work out. You do need a few to work out tremendously. Google has those. Meanwhile, what's the last yahoo acquisition that didn't turn into disappointment soon after the acquisition? We can go back 15 years and be hard-pressed to find one. On the other hand there are plenty of disaster acquisitions including broadcast.com, geocities, bluelithium etc.
Anyone got a nice spreadsheet of who has acquired what, with the fate of the acquired unit and people? How long did they stick around? That seems like the minimum - maybe there are clever ways to add information to it.
>Meanwhile, what's the last yahoo acquisition that didn't turn into disappointment soon after the acquisition?
One could argue that that the last acquisition that worked out was the acquisition of Stamped. Something tells me they were behind the new Yahoo! Weather iPhone app which is stellar.
I don't mean to imply that Yahoo is more successful than Google at acquisitions (We know that isn't the case). I just don't think Google is a good benchmark for acquisitions. I think they as good or as bad as Yahoo.
I think Yahoo's problem with acquisitions has been that they are moderately successful initially and then drift away over time. ViaWeb, GeoCities, Musicmatch Jukebox, Konfabulator, delicious and Ludicorp (of Flickr fame) come to mind. Other than Flickr, none of the others are still around, but they weren't disappointments soon after acquisition either.
Konfabulator is still (unfortunately) somewhat still around in the form of Yahoo Widgets for Connected TVs, a platform I have had the misfortune of working with in the past. But I suspect this too will soon be dead as any interest that still exists in this area has already shifted to Google TV.
Motorola stands out as a clunker. It is very expensive, even for Google. It is a distraction for management. It is a threat to Google's culture. It fails to be a stick to beat patent trolls. It has all the problems of an underperforming mobile OEM, while breeding doubt among Google's important partners. And all these criticisms were leveled by many people before Google bought Motorola. Some things really are plain to see.
So far, Meyer is doing what needs to be done to turn Yahoo into a first tier competitor. Who knows if she will succeed, but it's good to see them try.
When Google bought Motorola, the reasoning I read was all about patents. They still have those patents, and it might have been a good acquisition no matter the state of Motorola the company...
To know that Motorola was a poor acquisition, you'd need to know what would have happened if Google hadn't done it. Defensive/preventative decisions are sometimes undervalued.
That's essentially saying that one needs to know alternate history, which is obviously impossible. So, any mention of 'undervalued' can be counterbalanced with 'overvalued' absent facts.
Google is just getting started with Motorola so it's too soon to tell and I'm pretty sure that Blogger has been a huge success (through adsense) and many successful blogs uses it. It went down though since Facebook and Twitter for obvious reasons but the same thing happened to most blogging platforms.
I'm sorry, but in the 12 months since the acquisition was announced, MOT has lost pretty much every court case it's been in, had patents invalidated, has been passed over by google for 4 (might be even more?) flagship 'nexus' products, and hasn't built/shipped/teased a single thing newsworthy.
You can't seriously be arguing that this has gone well?
> MOT has lost pretty much every court case it's been in
I think for Google to be assuming an aggressive position in the courts is just posturing. Can you imagine the reaction if Google did really go all at it, and there was a result of an injunction against sale of all iPhones? No, of course Google/MOT would not go for something like that, that makes no sense. As it stands though, MOT's patent portfolio is pretty damn good. They're in a good position for it. It was something they needed and now they have it.
Motorola is a hardware company. it takes much longer to fix a hardware company. Do you think it took 12 months for Steve Jobs to fix Apple when he came back? Come on.
For a random $30mil acquisition (hypothetically), there's a lot of gray area where it's hard to judge whether the overall benefit to the parent company is net positive or net negative. For a $1 bil acquisition, it's a lot easier to judge and the stakes are a lot higher.
I also don't agree that "a sign of progress" is "making it succeed in the long run".
What? How can success ever not be a sign of progress? I know Silicon Valley likes to celebrate and learn from failure, but there ought to be a limit somewhere.
I really like Safari's Reader and that feature alone keeps me on Safari. Readability and other similar plugins on Chrome are nice, but I don't find them as well done as Reader.
Perhaps "planning" is a term closer to what I'm attempting to convey. The reality is that even if you think long-term, it requires money to execute those plans.
A point often neglected in such comparisons (regardless of the actual conclusion), is that paper towels are useful for more than just drying hands. What if I'm at a restaurant and I wish to wipe my trousers because I spilt a sauce on them? Or what if I just walked in from a walk and I want to wash and wipe my face? Or what if I just ate something oily and I wish to wipe that away (oil doesn't evaporate noticeably and will stick around until wiped away).
I don't quite think autotools were invented to replace Makefiles. Autoconf and friends _configure_ the build environment by discovering locations of dependencies, feature sets, available compilers and build tools and other build conditions. This information is then used to generate the appropriate Makefile.
Makefiles solve a different problem; which is of local build dependencies, looking for changes, packaging and suchlike.
CMake, as it happens, was written because Autotools were particularly ineffecient at the configuration problem. Make happens to be very efficient.
Agreed. One of my worst productivity killers at work is the "hey, could you do this little thing? I know it'll only take you two minutes" type of request.
It might only take two minutes to do, but it's also just botched a nice hour long flow with the context switch.
The gist of it seems to be that its a set of data models that make handling concurrency control and conflict resolution easier in the context of a single blob of data being edited by multiple users simultaneously (similar to Google/Apache Wave)