timf

I don't see how it isn't based on time. They use GPS and atomic clocks to establish the time, establish an uncertainty window, and in Spanner's case will have transactions wait out that uncertainty to guarantee an ordering (globally).

Agree, and the timestamp comparisons you can make when the windows do not overlap are the basis of the ordering guarantees (across machines, even globally).

Could be an alias, I have a limited set of aliases for each type of system. But I keep a repository of hundreds of personal shell scripts and it fit better there.

Since I'm bouncing between OSX and Linux a lot, I have a shell script with the same name on each that boils down to:

  if [ `uname` == "Darwin" ]; then
    pbcopy
  else
    xsel --clipboard
  fi

I want to make a FOSS reader that we can run on our own machines. It would poll on demand and be really good at archiving sites/posts. A combination of feed reader and scraping/archiving from residential IPs (at a low rate) where it will almost always be successful.

I want to pair that with an (opt-in) service for syncing feed subscriptions and handing off a stream of things worth archiving (it's often not urgent that this happens, you just want to make sure it happens soon so the content is not lost in a few years). That service could be a very low cost monthly subscription thing plus a FOSS option that you could run on a cheap VPS, etc.

24/7 services are also essential for generating notifications when something in a filter is spotted, being able to have an email gateway, doing things like POSTing items to other sites automatically, etc.

Making that "full" service FOSS is not in the near term plans, though. This is a distributed system that has run 100s of millions of jobs already, has a very specific security and monitoring setup, uses a number of queues and databases, etc. From my past experience, it's really hard to support people with on-premises distributed systems software like this (FOSS or not). I couldn't do this part alone (bootstrapping and can't afford to hire anyone yet).