macspoofing
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
Who thinks they are easy? Elon Musk? The guy that spews obvious (even to him) bullshit like we're going to Mars in the next 5 years?
I don't even want to read the article. It is obvious that Orbital Data Centers have MASSIVE engineering challenges. They may never be cost-effective.
No it isn't. That is patently untrue. I've had to deal with in-house solutions many times in my careers. Inevitably what happens is the original author leaves the company or just doesn't want to support it and whatever tool they built atrophies and we end up moving to an off-the-shelf product with a lot of pain.
I'm dealing with a homegrown project management tool like that now. Originally built 10-15 years ago - it now has a feature request list a mile long. Finance is annoyed they can't pull the kinds of reports they want, and that it doesn't integrate into our CRM. IT is annoyed it doesn't support SAML and they have to manage backups. The tool is running on whatever the hot stack was at that time - so it is horribly out of date now ... but the original people that wrote it have long since left the company. The engineers don't want to touch it. Product doesn't want engineers to work on it because it takes away from our core business.
There are commercial off-the-shelf tools that provide the same feature-set (+more) and don't tie up my engineers, but now the thing is engrained into workflow and moving off of it is a major project spamming multiple departments (including engineering).
Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.
Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.
As your business needs grow, you can start layering complexity on top. The point is you don't start at 11 with a overly complex architecture.
In your example, if your server crashes, just make sure you have some sort of automatic restart. In practice that may mean a downtime of seconds for your 12 users. Is that more complexity? Sure - but not much. If you need to take your service down for maintenance, you notify your 12 users and schedule it for 2am ... etc.
Later you could create a secondary cluster and stick a load-balancer in-front. You could also add a secondary replicated PostgreSQL instance. So the monolith/postgres architecture can actually take you far as your business grows.
You can get all that with a monolith server and a Postgres backend.
Probably should stop after this line - that was the point of the article. It will work at lower scales. Optimize later when you actually know what to optimize.
You're making two assumptions - both wrong:
1) That this is an unscalable solution - A monolith app server backed by Postgres can take you very very far. You can vertically scale by throwing more hardware at it, and you can horizontally scale, by just duplicating your monolith server behind a load-balancer.
2) That you actually know where your bottlenecks will be when you actually hit your target scale. When (if) you go from 1000 users to 10,000,000 users, you WILL be re-designing and re-architecting your solution regardless what you started with because at that point, you're going to have a different team, different use-cases, and therefore a different business.
No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.
It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.