Comments on: Dancing on Magnolia’s Grave: Fuck the Cloud II

By: gwern

gwern — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 01:00:21 +0000

Fake Rake: that’s not true. Magnolia could *easily* have screwed itself over while using Amazon S3 for everything. Amazon S3, so far as I am aware, does not keep incremental revisions of each and every file you upload or modify; to do so would represent a massive increase in cost, especially for heavily modified files.

All Magnolia has to do is accidentally delete its files on S3, or write junk over them – and it’s gone.

This is the same reason that ‘rsync’ is insufficient as backup: oops, you just rsynced a bad version of some folder? Hope you had history – oh wait!

By: pabstsmear

pabstsmear — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:09:35 +0000

I have been nauseated by the capitalist(spend your money on nonsense), idea that is cloud computing. Whats really interesting about the term is how it is now being overused to encompass everything that was previously called the Internet. I understand that to some people it sounds like your saving money if you need less local resources, but I think thats malarkey. What it really sounds like to me, is that these companies want more control over their closed source software. so if they barricade the software behind their secured access point, it becomes much more difficult to debug it and find/write exploit code… Also making it almost impossible to crack without hacking the box, which will most likely be diligently administrated… Meaning now, not only can they charge you to access a program(which they could only do one time if it were on your box), but they can charge you per click. Sure this saves you the trouble of having all those wasted features taking up space on your box locally, but for the slight convenience of saving you, very minimal space(which its not really doing because you still need a pretty heavy duty client side program to connect to these features). Also lets say they said you clicked 400 times, but you think you only clicked 389 times, who mediates that dispute? Sounds like more corporate holding action so they can screw you out of money for software you probably could get free if you would run a linux distro. This is all before you even touch the ideas corresponding to the actual feasibility of migrating to the cloud. Issues like bandwith. They talk all this shit about how great their high-speed bandwith is GOING to be. As things are, try filling out an online application to work retail, or even in a number of other feilds… you fill out 200 pages of personal questions, “if you caught your mother stealing you publically cut her hands off to show your loyalty to the company… strongly agree…” Then after laboriously beleaguering yourself with this nonsense… Your brain dead… apparantly so is your computer, because you hit submit and somewhere between your access point and their server your packet gets dropped, maybe because the bandwith was too high, maybe your tcp connection timed out. maybe, there was an nop sled before the payload and it got confused for a malicious packet… maybe a million things… Lets say 500,000 people need to access the same application simultaneously… Is it possible that there could be an issue with packets getting dropped by access points?

They don’t care, all they see is a way to make more money off the same shit, and as said here before, if you buy in your a sucker.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:51:17 +0000

Holy shit. That video. Fail just fail hard. You didn’t test your fucking backups??? WTF were you doing in this business in the first place?

1TB MySQL DB??? Yea, get a fucking real DBA. Nao.

By: Backing up delicious bookmarks via curl and the command line - zendo ireland

Backing up delicious bookmarks via curl and the command line - zendo ireland — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:45:04 +0000

[...] (OK, not really.) [...]

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:23:30 +0000

My point is that the term “cloud” is so meaningless that even services like Magnolia are considered to be part of “cloud computing”, even though it’s a technologically feeble amateur blowing scripts onto a messed-up infrastructure. In all these cases, I am trying to stop people from wholeheartedly endorsing something based on the pleasant clean graphics and the simple sign-up screen.

I see the term “cloud” used so much, I think the use of it is now a signifying danger sign. I appreciate that an amount of more subtle observation will determine the actual danger, but the trend is towards less observation, not more.