* Posts by jmith

3 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2016

Hey, YouTube: Pay your 'workers' properly and get with the times

jmith

Google is aware of what they are doing

When Google increased the video length of youtube they did so with the intent of a bigger strategy in mind. They realized that people would start uploading pirated videos to their service. Google sat and watched this develop and thousands upon thousands of full lengths films were uploaded. Google added functionality such as play lists and other features to make it much easier for people to find this pirated content.

Of course now Google wants to monetize all of the pirated content on their service. They started getting more aggressive with the ads and introduced their "Youtube red" service to make the ads go away.

Google is fully aware they are providing pirated content but their excuse is "we did not upload these". While they did not upload the content they are providing the framework and the incentive for people to do this. Google pays these pirates a cut of the ad revenue.

If the copyright owners want to be paid for their pirated works perhaps they should go after Google. The copyright violaters themselves are getting the smallest part of the cut from the revenue. Google is making most of the money from this illegal content. Only in America can someone steal content upload it to the internet and have a major corporation that should know better profit from it.

DevOps isn't just about the new: It's about cleaning up the old, too

jmith

New Shiny Phenomenon

There's a huge problem in the software industry. I call it the "New Shiny Phenomenon". Developers that are absolutely brainwashed that software needs a continuous life cycle. The reality is if software is functional and the users aren't complaining you should leave it alone and devote your time to something else. Just because it's old does not mean it's bad.

A good example of this is systemd. For decades systemv init worked perfectly fine and all of a sudden it was decided that this underpinning of Linux was legacy and needed to be replaced. A huge amount of wasted effort was put into place to replace a system that worked fine before. Effort that could have been spent making something else.

This really comes from developers that lack ideas and vision. Instead of setting their sights on new uncharted territory they play the power trip game and rewrite perfectly good software and attempt to grab political power in the process.

These developers are destructive and self serving and contribute nothing to the end user. Exactly what ground breaking problem did Lennart Poettering solve by reinventing the wheel?

StorPool CEO: 'We do not need another storage product'

jmith

Misson Critcal Data

Here's the problem that this guy is not thinking about. Misson Critical data.

Most large corporations are only going to consider highly redundant hardware devices for their storage for quite some time. They don't want commodity hardware to fail and cause issues. While you can add additional hardware to protect against this you pay a performance impact for writing that data multiple times on multiple systems.

There's another problem with his line of thought. While a lot of startups are annoyed by storage arrays it's business as usual for big corporations. They have tons of storage admins that keep these systems running without failures. The startups are going to be big consumers of the "commodity hardware storage" concept. Just a slight problem. Some of them don't have a lot of money. The ones that do have lots of money and have a thriving infrastructure that you would love your storage product in aren't the types to "buy stuff". They tend to create their own. Amazon, Google and Facebook all operate on commodity hardware. They bought the hardware but they did not buy someone's "magic sauce" to make it work.

The type of data changes the appropriateness of the storage greatly. Would you put a lot of easily replaceable data on the most expensive EMC arrays? Nope. Would you put banking data on a PC with some drives inside and trust all that account data not to be lost? Nope!

While I agree that the storage industry leaves a bit to be desired it's not completely outdated like this guy thinks. You can certainly make commodity hardware suit your needs if you have the time and knowledge like the big internet firms. You just have to decide on your own if you think this guy's somewhat ripped off from others software is worth the cost or if it's snake oil.