New storage classes for Google Cloud Storage - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Coldline-and-a-unified-platform-for-data-storage.html <comment><USER2> I think there is really no doubt that the storage prices itself ( for all types) are pretty amazing. But let's face it: traffic costs are the huge elephant in the room. By charging 12ct and more per GB, the traffic costs easily become your biggest expense, and make the storage price reduction from 2.6 to 2ct per GB almost forgetable.

For me this is in no way acceptable and it seems to be a vicious attempt to sneak in some extra profit without having the customer noticing this upfront. Shure, these harsh words seam like a big exaggeration, but I literally never ever hear or read something about traffic costs in Googles fancy blog posts, and I would make the assumption that only a fraction of the HN community is aware of this fact. 120 bucks for a sloppy TB of traffic is just way too high.

<comment><USER3> This x 1000. Even when you throw your own CDN on top of this, the bandwidth markup is nasty. Neocities would be unsustainable if we used GCS for our hosting.

I'm paying about $0.01/GB right now, and I've seen market rate at half that. And that's not even directly using IP transit providers. You can get a gigabit unmetered for $450-1000/mo which you can shove a theoretical 324TB through every month. The difference in the numbers is so staggering I sometimes wonder if I'm even doing the math right.

Perhaps their bandwidth is better somehow (prove it), but 12-18x better it is probably not, and having truffle shavings added to your IP transit really adds up when you're hauling a lot of traffic. If you're doing something with heavy BW usage and low margins, be careful with stuff like this. It quickly becomes much more expensive than doing it yourself.

I'd love to be wrong here. I'm sitting next to 60 pounds of storage servers I'm setting up for a data center, they're taking up my entire living room. I would love to get out of the data persistence business forever. But at these BW rates, it's never going to happen.

<comment><USER4> You can get gigabit + a full cabinet of colocation from Hurricane Electric for $400/mo so you know: [https://he.net/colocation.html](https://he.net/colocation.html)

I'm sharing it with a few other people and it's great.

<comment><USER3> I've looked at this. Easily the best deal in town. A few notes for people considering it:

\- It's IP transit and a DC from HE, which means it's possibly not BGP peering through other transit providers? If this is true, if HE's network fails, so does your server's internet connection. Typically you want to be multi-homed to ensure redundancy, unless you're doing something like an Anycast CDN and you don't care if it craps out for a few hours.

\- HE is the cheapest transit for reasons. It may not be a big deal for what you're doing, but be aware of the differences [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5348624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5348624)

\- They only provide a 15A circuit (likely only 80% usable) for a 42U rack, which is pretty ridiculous. You'll blow through that pretty quickly if you're using dual Xeon servers. It's cheaper under their pricing to get a second 42U rack than it is to get the proper amount of power needed for a full cabinet.

\- If you're doing Anycast, be aware that HE doesn't provide any BGP communities except blackholing, which could make it hard to tune your network.

(If any of this sounds annoying to deal with and think about, you know exactly why I'd prefer that the cloud providers had better BW costs so I could not have to do this anymore. Again, if the business model works with GCS, congratulations, use it.)

<comment><USER4> > It's IP transit and a DC from HE, which means it's possibly not BGP peering > through other transit providers?

The gigabit transit that comes with the cabinet is HE-only, yep. You can however buy transit and an interconnect from any other carrier in the datacenter (there are quite a few in FMT2 at least).

> They only provide a 15A circuit for a 42U rack, which is pretty ridiculous.

Yeah, it's pretty shitty. I ended up going with Xeon D for the power efficiency. Works pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Summary: Google Cloud Storage is now (significantly) cheaper, faster and more available than Amazon S3.

Also, it supports multi-region whereas S3 does not.

Love the direction Google Cloud is taking <3

<comment><USER6> What about ~~reliability~~ durability of storage (bitrot, not the uptime)? I didn't see any information comparing this, is it practically the same across both?

edit: durability, not reliability.

<comment><USER7> At this point, durability is hard to compare because the published numbers are total fantasies. S3's published durability is 11 9s, which I've complained about in the past because the chance that the human race will be wiped out next year by an asteroid impact is probably not too far from one in a hundred million, which puts a hard cap on durability at around eight nines.

Then ask yourself, "is the chance that someone made a mistake in designing the system which causes catastrophic data loss higher or lower than one in a billion?"

Yes, the number is total fantasy. The only actual meaning of the durability SLA is that if the durability SLA is violated, your cloud provider will give you some service credits. If the data is worth more than some service credits, this is small consolation.

In practice, if you absolutely must compare durability, what you are trying to do is compare the frequency of black swan events, but actually estimating the frequency of those events requires access to proprietary data which you don't have.

Both providers are undoubtedly storing the data in multiple locations on multiple types of storage systems with multiple layers of error coding.

After thinking about this issue earlier, the most likely data loss scenario in my opinion was "I get injured, the company hires someone incompetent who doesn't pay the bill for a year while I'm in the hospital."

<comment><USER8> I've always seen durability from the perspective of Amazon telling me, "Look, we're going to lose your data - here's how quickly you should expect it to rot." Basically, take the number of objects you have, and multiply by: 1xe-7 each year. So, if I have 400 Billion objects, (4e11) - Amazon is going to lose approx 40,000 of them/year, and I should be prepared for that.

With regards to your Asteroid Strike (And other disasters such as Riot, Insurrection, War, Hurricane, Earthquake, etc...) - these are all disclaimed in the agreement you sign with Amazon under a clause known as Force Majeure - which essential means, "Acts of God". The durability clause comes into effect under the normal course of business, not exceptional events. For those types of scenarios, you'll want to have a business continuity plan in place, not a durability formula on your storage service.

<comment><USER7> Your numbers are off... according to Amazon's durability notes, if you have 400 billion objects then Amazon would expect to lose less than 40 per year, not 40,000. And for that level of storage, you're paying Amazon something like a quarter million dollars per year to do storage for you.

My point is that there is no point in taking that kind of durability guarantee into account, because there are much bigger threats to data storage. It's kind of like saying that driving by car is very safe if you don't get into an accident--while technically true, it's not a very useful fact.

<comment><USER9> The exact values may be off, but that is how to think of it. Losing any specific object is less likely than earth ending. But these are providers with many trillion objects. In that case there are a handful of objects that are going missing each year, on average. The durability guarantee allows customers to make an educated decision as to how much they invest in loss prevention.

But lets get back to that 400B object customer who's losing 40. How much does it cost to verify (resilver) all those bits, even annually? Is it even tenable?

<comment><USER7> This response got a bit long.

No, that's absolutely not how to think about it. In short, it's a dangerous simplification and it's not at all representative of how failures work in a system like S3 or Google Cloud Storage. It does make good marketing copy, but if you are an engineer or a program lead you have a certain level of responsibility for understanding why cloud storage does not, in practice, give you eleven 9s of durability per object every year. (At a first approximation, you would _at least_ expect the data loss to follow a Poisson distribution, but…)

Drilling down into the techical guts, S3 and Google Storage do not store separate objects in the lower storage layers, it's too inefficient. So below the S3 / GCS object API, you have stripes of data spread across multiple data centers with error encoding, along with a redundant copy on tape or optical media. Randal Munroe estimated Google data storage at 15 EB ([https://what- if.xkcd.com/63/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/)), so taking that number, let's suppose a stripe size of 100 MB (just picking a number out of the air that seems reasonable) and you get 1.5e11 stripes. Taking Amazon's 11 nines, that gives a loss of 1 stripe every 8 months.

So, all we've done so far is look at how a system would be implemented, and we've already completely destroyed the notion that you would expect 40 of 400B objects to disappear due to bit rot in any particular year. Supposing the objects are 10KB in average size, you might expect most years to lose no objects at all, and if you lose any you might lose 10,000 at the same time—and the entire extent of your recourse is to get a service credit from your cloud provider.

The gotcha is that the system simply isn't that reliable. First of all, engineers at Amazon and Google are constantly pushing new configuration and software updates to their stack. Some of these software updates can result in catastrophic data loss, and some of these errors will not get caught by canaries. "Catastrophic" might mean metadata corruption, it might mean the loss of many stripes all at the same time, but from the cloud provider's perspective they're still meeting SLA for _most_ of their customers so _most_ of their customers are happy. On top of that, you also have to take into account the possibility that a design flaw in the storage media would cause massive data loss across multiple data centers simultaneously, or other nightmare scenarios like that. Given that I've personally experienced data loss due to design flaws in storage media and I only have ever owned twenty hard drives or so in my life, you can imagine that a fleet with millions of hard drives presents some unique reliability and durability problems.

You can pretend that these configuration and programming errors are "unusual events" but the fact is that stripe loss for any reason is already an unusual event, and you might as well include the _most probable_ cause of data loss in your model if you are going to model it at all.

So, what is the SLA? It's part of a contract. It defines when the contract is performed and when it is broken. It's also a piece of marketing and sales leverage. That's all. It's not a realistic or particularly useful description of how a system actually works—so the responsible engineers and program managers at companies which use cloud services are always asking themselves, "What happens if Amazon or Google violates their SLA? Will I lose my job?"

(A footnote: You don't need to verify the bits yourself, cloud providers will send you messages when your data is lost. If you want more durability then you go multi-cloud or buy a tape library.)

(Disclosure: I work at a company that provides cloud storage.)

<comment><USER9> Disclosure: I currently work at AWS and have a bit more than passing familiarity with large scale storage systems. I know what erasure encoding is. I know from experience just how wrong things can go.

The passing comment of distribution of errors is important. However the "1 stripe is 100Mb, and objects are 10KB, ergo you'll lose 0 or 10,000 objects" bit is bizarro. I suspect youre letting your personal experience lead to assumptions that may not be true in other implementations.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's definitely not true on all the storage systems I've worked on. Some storage systems will pack a single customer's data into a single stripe and others won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google is making their cloud offering very attractive compared to AWS.

The issue with Glacier is the convoluted retrieval pricing. I understand they want to dissuade people from using it as a primary storage, but the potential for a surprise bill is hard to swallow.

Interesting how they still offer unlimited storage through their consumer Amazon Drive service.

<comment><USER11> The AWS web console is a pain point. I had a particularly frustrating experience once where attempting to restore a Glacier storage class file in S3 silently failed due to permission issues (I had forgotten to assign permissions to the bucket owner in my automated upload script), but the console told me that the file would be "available in 3-5 hours". I wasted days due to this.

Meanwhile other competitors (e.g. Nearline) promise to have your file available within seconds...

<comment><USER12> Yep. Nearline is great. Just so we're clear though: milliseconds ;). There's no latency penalty to get your bytes back, even with Coldline. We do charge a retrieval fee because the pricing is determined by a "promise" that you won't touch the data frequently (roughly once a month for Nearline and once a quarter for Coldline), otherwise you should use our regular flavors.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and am a happy GCS customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Coldline seems to be a perfect solution for personal backups. I used amazon glacier, but got hit with extremely huge bill, when I decided to retrieve my backups, so I'm not going to deal with them anymore, their retrieval pricing is absurd. If there's good UI and scripting solutions for manual and automatic backup into google coldline, I'm in.

<comment><USER14> I highly recommend the "Arq" [1] commercial program for backing stuff up to these kinds of services. They support most of the big names (AWS, Google, Dropbox, etc.) and will probably be supporting the new Google options soon.

It does local encryption before sending your data up to the cloud.

Notably Arq restores _all_ macOS permissions/meta-data, and there is an open- source test kit to show whether such a program does so.

It also works on Windows.

I have no relationship with the company, other than as a happy user.

[1] [https://www.arqbackup.com](https://www.arqbackup.com)

<comment><USER10> Arq sounds almost ideal, except its still intended more for "backup" than "storage". Its more like an Apple Time Machine.

From what I read, you can still offload data from your local machine by choosing to "archive" a directory.

But thats an extra step and I haven't read how it handles conflicting directory that are created in the future after archiving the original.

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting use case. You ought to email them and ask about it!

My goal is just two off-site backups (AWS and Google).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In case it's not widely known, rsync.net maintains 'gsutil' in the environment (along with s3cmd) so you can move data between google cloud services and rsync.net.

      ssh email@example.com gsutil cp mscdex.exe gs://my-bucket

      ssh email@example.com gsutil rsync -d data gs://mybucket/data

Although it should be noted that, circa 2016, the cool kids are all backing up to rsync.net with borg[1][2] (the "holy grail of backup software") which limits the use cases of gsutil with an rsync.net account.

HN Readers discount. Just email and ask.[3]

[1] [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

[2] [https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail- backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

[3] email@example.com

<comment><USER4> I say this most times I see you advertising and I'll say it again: You really need to work on your pricing to be competitive with things like this. Even with the HN discount your service is expensive and even with the Borg/Attic pricing which is cheaper still, your service is 3x more expensive than alternatives like Nearline (aside from bandwidth), which themselves can be used as a backend for Attic (just mount GCS locally).

I really like the look of the service but I can't justify paying over 3x for it.

<comment><USER15> "your service is 3x more expensive than alternatives like Nearline (aside from bandwidth), which themselves can be used as a backend for Attic (just mount GCS locally)."

Well, our storage platform is online and random access so it would be inappropriate to compare it to either nearline or glacier.

The appropriate comparison is to S3 - or in this case, the multi-regional GCS option that this discussion points to.

In that case, our attic/borg pricing is 3 cents as compared to (roughly 3 cents) for s3 and 2 cents for GCS - and that assumes you use no bandwidth. Since we charge nothing for usage/bandwidth, the comparable prices from amazon/google would be slightly higher.

It sounds like a steal to me and every day plenty of people agree enough to commence using our services.

Also, unrelated, you know you can just drive up to an rsync.net location and get your data - even if the Internet is crippled.[1]

[1] [http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html](http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html)

<comment><USER4> > Well, our storage platform is online and random access so it would be > inappropriate to compare it to either nearline or glacier.

That would be true but you stated "circa 2016, the cool kids are all backing up to rsync.net with borg", so comparing your service pricing as a backup product to Nearline is appropriate I believe.

Don't get me wrong, your service definitely has a lot of good applications and the free bandwidth is quite great but for those of us that just want somewhere to park a whole pile of data we aren't going to touch much, Rsync.net is quite expensive.

Also a downside of rsync.net vs. AWS/GCS etc. is that you can't direct users' HTTP requests to rsync.net. That dampens the usefulness of online storage and unlimited bandwidth, since it essentially limits it to servers under our own control. If I could run HTTP off it directly, my feelings would be very very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cold storage looks cheap at first glance, but for the amount of data I have to backup (about 3 TB), I work out the cost to:

(0.7 * / 100) * 3000 = $21 / month * 12 = $252 / yr

For that price, I'm better off just paying $60 / yr for CrashPlan, which is unlimited storage. I'd say that applies to anyone who has a terabyte or more of stuff to back up.

<comment><USER17> Have you tried downloading any significant portion of your backup from CrashPlan? Is so, how was performance?

<comment><USER16> Not a significant portion, no. CrashPlan is only my third layer of backup, the offsite backup. Each of my drives have a clone backup drive (typically just a WD My Passport that makes them easy to transport when I travel), and then a larger external that holds backups of all of them--I usually keep that one in storage and only plug it in once a month or so to sync. CP is the third layer of backup. The most I do in a typical week is use the Android app to grab a few movies or documents from the CP storage to get it onto my phone and tablet.

I should probably "test" doing a recovery from CrashPlan at some point, but I fear that even getting a third of it (1TB) would probably trip some sort of overcharge from my ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google finally is taking a step over the cloud offerings. I was skeptical about them ~1.5 year ago, they where only following the AWS without big innovations.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those that are asking:

\- Multi-regional is what we used to call Standard (highlighting that it's always been awesome and replicated)

\- Regional / DRA collapse into one

\- New offering: Coldline

\- Massive price cut on operations

\- Per-object storage class, plus lifecycle (e.g., automatically go from Nearline to Coldline after 60d)

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and use Nearline at home!).

[Edit: Formatting. I always forget to put two newlines]

</comment><comment><USER19> I had to move to AWS entirely due to lack of GPU instances on google cloud. If someone from GCE is reading this - please add GPU instances.

Yes, I know unrelated, but I like GCS much more than S3, and I can't use it since by "network" effect caused by GPUs eveyrthing have to run on AWS.

<comment><USER12> Please ping me with your project id, and your need (e.g., "I want to run TensorFlow on 8 GPUs per VM, 4 VMs at a time, somewhere in Europe").

Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud (contact info in profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google smart to be aggressive on the storage side of their Cloud business. Once you have the data (assuming it's big data) it naturally makes sense to move the processing of that data into Google Cloud services as well...

</comment><comment><USER21> You can attach buckets to cloud instances natively using the gcloud cli[1] as well. Really useful for static file storage.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/gcs- buckets](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/gcs-buckets)

My only complaint is Google Cloud persistent SSD disk pricing at $0.17 per GB / month. AWS EBS SSD is noticeably lower at $0.12 per GB / month.

</comment><comment><USER22> My hope is that this will spur AWS to lower their storage prices. Competition is great!

</comment><comment><USER23> Multi region support is interesting, but haven't most of GCPs outages affected all of their regions?

<comment><USER24> Checking specifically for GCS at [https://status.cloud.google.com/summary](https://status.cloud.google.com/summary) ...

There are two outages there, one that only affected a few projects and one that affected only service in the central US (we have regions over much of the world).

Anecdotally, from watching and working with other services internally I don't think most of our outages affect all regions. We actually spend a significant amount of engineering effort ensuring that we're as decoupled as possible.

Disclaimer: I'm an Engineering Manager on Google Cloud Storage.

<comment><USER25> Is there some documentation anywhere talks about how Google Cloud (any product) creates isolation between various regions while at the same time exposing a simple "regionless" programming model?

<comment><USER24> Probably the best reference is the SRE book, specifically the chapters on loadbalancing and distributed consensus protocols.

Other than that, the general approach is to minimize global control planes and dependencies in our software stack. In the case of GCS, we do have a single namespace which means we need to look up the locations of data early in the request. Once we know the locations of data we can route the request to the right datacenter to serve it. That global location table is highly replicated and cached, of course.

When outages happen, most are caused by changes to the stack, so we also are careful to roll out code or configuration slowly and carefully, slowly increasing the blast radius after it's been proven safe. For example rolling out new binaries first to a few canary instances in one zone, then to a few instances in many regions, then to a full region, then to the world, all spread over a few days.

Disclaimer: I'm an Engineering Manager on Google Cloud Storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Talking about cold storage, i'd like to Pitch C14 of Online.net (the company behind Scaleway): [https://www.online.net/en/c14](https://www.online.net/en/c14)

0.2ct per Gb.

</comment><comment><USER27> So what happened to "Durable, reduced availability". It does not seem directly mapped into the new system. I guess it roughly maps to "regional"???

<comment><USER28> Yep. Regional is the equivalent of Durable reduced availability.

<comment><USER27> Doesn't look like things got auto migrated.. (whereas for the other cases they did get auto migrated)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone explain to my why I shouldn't be worried about Google becoming a monopoly? I think they make some fantastic products and they have been expanding their reach to hardware, DNS, web hosting, and storage.

<comment><USER20> You don't need to start worrying about them becoming a monopoly until they actually figure out how to properly provide support for their products to the people (eg enterprises) that need it. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am confused. Is multi regional the same as availability zones in s3?

Or do we upload to the European region and it gets replicated to the US automagically?

</comment><comment><USER31> It's difficult to see how AWS and GCE can justify their ridiculous bandwidth charges given how low they buy it in bulk. This is plain profiteering. With cloud bandwidth was supposed to become something one takes for granted not something to fuss over with calculators.

And the whole nickel and diming charges that force users to needlessly seperate their computing needs into storage, compute, memory, bandwidth, reads, writes and what not are actually forcing considerable complexity on users.

This cannot be brushed aside as a good model for cloud when valuable user time is being wasted grappling with needless intricacies that have no reason not be flat.

End users cannot buy bandwidth at low bulk rates and for things like backups may be faced with considerable overcharges on their local connections.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm extremely reluctant to rely on Google services for core infrastructure for anything revenue generating after seeing the shenanigans they've played on pricing with their other services (especially Google Maps, where they initially jacked up the pricing to an absurd level, then backpedaled and made the prices 1/10 what they were initially threatening) and the relatively short migration windows they typically provide.

Besides capricious pricing changes, their support is notoriously bad, even for paid apps for business.

They don't seem to understand business customers needs nearly as well as Microsoft/Amazon, from what I've seen.

Really not who I want running my business's server infrastructure, even if it's completely free.

</comment><comment><USER33> Dear god, the copy on that page is awful. The first paragraph is just vacuous twaddle. Anyone who starts a minor product announcement with the words "Today, we're excited to announce..." deserves their own circle of hell. Most of that first section is redundant preamble and should be rewritten as bullet points.

In fact the whole thing could do with being rewritten in a simple bullet- pointed skimmable form. That way I wouldn't have to come to HN comments to find out what the hell it's all about. Is it too early in the day for a drink?

<comment><USER17> Try some coffee with a light breakfast, then move on to the harder stuff if you still can't cope with "words".

<comment><USER33> A couple of points:

1\. It was 4 in the afternoon here when I posted that - a touch too late for breakfast even if it was a bit early for a drink

2\. I quite like words when they are strung together well ;-)

I still would like to hear someone defend that as a piece of marketing copy. I've re-read it and stand by my earlier diatribe.

<comment><USER17> You've wasted a lot of time on something that is easily ignored. Its time to move on.

<comment><USER33> And I feel better for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Used Data Analysis to Increase our Conversion Rate by 30% - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.coachup.com/used-data-analysis-increase-conversion-rate-30/

<comment><USER2> Good example of data analysis. Creating that initial survey should ease some of the pain on the next iteration.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article, great examples and excellent presentation.</comment>


Why aren't developers interested in Ada? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/break-points/4008214/Why-aren-t-developers-interested-in-Ada- <comment><AUTHOR> For some up-to-date or "still relevant" Ada links, see:

[https://github.com/samuell/awesome-ada](https://github.com/samuell/awesome- ada)

See especially the site devoted to Ada 2012, the latest (stable) language version:

[http://www.ada2012.org](http://www.ada2012.org)</comment>


Why is Ubuntu the best open-source OS? - <AUTHOR> https://codecoda.com/en/blog/entry/why-is-ubuntu-the-best-open-source-os <comment><USER2> Arch and Alpine are the best distros in my opinion, however for most people Manjaro is going to be a much easier introduction to understanding the installation process. Package management is so much easier and you can also use whatever app sandbox technologies you want.</comment>


Juul hit with first wrongful death lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/claudiakoerner/juul-vaping-death-wrongful-death-lawsuit-nicotine <comment><USER2> > Now, his family is convinced the culprit is the Juul that was never far from > his side since he was 15 years old.

15?!?!? His parents are insane for knowingly letting him smoke/vape, they should be charged with neglect! Its illegal for people under the age of 18 to purchase tobacco/nicotine products...

<comment><USER3> I would agree with this other user. Kid was 15!!! Hello parents, you're to blame for this. Take some accountability.

 _sigh_ This is on buzzfeednews.com... It's either made up, not backed up by facts, or just a hit piece to get ratings.

<comment><USER2> I dug into it, it appears to be true...</comment></comment></comment>


Heroku Status: billing issues - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/incidents/854 <comment><USER2> I deleted a couple of apps because of this fright. No follow up message on email, nor in the dashboard. I had to stop and delete these things because it was costing per minute.

It was only from searching online that herou tweeted "sorry about that". I'm hugely disappointed.

<comment><USER3> For future reference I think you can scale an app to 0 without deleting it using heroku ps:scale web=0 worker=0.

I had to remove scheduler from three of my apps too. It's frustrating but it did make me realise how trivial some of them were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was my morning heart attack.

Got an email from Heroku with the ominous subject line: "You have spent money."

The email encouraged me to log into my account and "review the charges."

So I logged in, checked the billing page, and found an invoice with a HUGE bill for what was supposed to be a free instance.

The question is: What's an appropriate way to say, "Sorry for accidentally making you think that you owe us $1,200, causing you to have a total freak- out, wondering where you're going to get that kind of money ... and only finding out that the bill _might_ be erroneous by clicking on a small-print support message on the billing page?"

<comment><USER2> Heroku has said

"Invoices went out today with incorrect numbers. We're terribly sorry about that! We're working on a fix: "

on Twitter only. So if you only saw your email, you are in still in the dark

<comment><USER3> If you tweeted or opened a support ticket they responded some time ago - or at least they did for me. Still an email would have been better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great use case for system-wide messaging within your application.

While they didn't send out an email to users, they could've easily thrown up a banner on logged in pages indicating the current problem.

The initial shock of viewing the email invoice would be subsided when you login to realize they've got your back.

Even better would be to link to the status page for updates.

<comment><USER3> On my billing page there's a banner with a link to the status page for the issue (though it wasn't there when I looked earlier).

"We're experiencing problems with incorrect billing amounts being displayed on invoices"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just got a bill for $1100! Thank god it's a mistake.

<comment><USER7> I got something similar for $1200. Glad I'm not the only one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah they got me it seems.

[https://i.imgur.com/jiGTnnp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/jiGTnnp.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER9> As others said I've also deleted all my apps from heroku. I was really scared, a bill of $700 out of nowhere, are you kidding??? And not even sending an e-mail right after when they've discovered the problem! I got in touch with their support and they took THREE HOURS to answer why I had to pay $700 for dynos I didn't use.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://i.imgur.com/g91mZ7u.png](http://i.imgur.com/g91mZ7u.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had a response on a support ticket as well as a reply on twitter. Seems they're working on it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Same here. $1200

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the 2nd time it's happened to me (1st time occurred 2 years ago) so I was 99% sure it was a mistake. Still threw a support ticket for good measure</comment>


Sovereign – Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own personal cloud - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/blob/master/README.textile <comment><USER2> It's not worth bothering with filesystem encryption on a VPS. Keep in mind that the hypervisor has full, unrestricted and essentially undetectable access to the contents of the virtual machine's RAM, so they can read decrypted data, private keys and cleartext passwords.

If you want even a hint of privacy, you'll have to rent some rackspace and put a tamper-resistant box of your own in there - and stop trusting it the first time it goes down unexpectedly.

<comment><USER3> ... or make sure that your cloud-based resources, whatever they are, only see ciphertext, and access them only through heavily secured machines that you hold locally. Which requires the attacker to compromise your laptop, or phone, or whatever. (Which is almost certainly still possible for an attacker with the resources of a major government that decides you're of sufficient interest, but it raises the bar a bit.)

<comment><USER4> How do you propose bootstrapping the cipher onto a "known compromised" machine in a known compromised environment?

<comment><USER3> Use full end-to-end encryption. The "known compromised" machine doesn't do the encryption or decryption in the first place; that's done at the physically secure (you hope!) endpoints.

<comment><USER4> By cloud resource, did you mean storage? In which case, sure. But if you meant to do work "in the cloud" on the cipher text's content, the under-bad-actor- control machine _is_ one of the "ends".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area _I had been a paying Google Apps customer for personal and corporate use since the service was in beta. Until several weeks ago, that is. I was about to set up another Google Apps account for a new project when I stopped to consider what I would be funding with my USD $50 per user per year_

This is exactly how I feel about Google Apps. I used to recommend it to customers, now I hesitate to recommend it, even though the alternatives aren't as easy or fully-featured without a lot more work. Thanks to the author for setting this lot up, I'll definitely be looking at it, and possibly using a few of the pieces.

Ansible is great though; even if you're not setting up your own private cloud it's worth taking a look at for deployment. AnsibleWorks really should set up an extensive library of playbooks like this, each isolated so that they can easily be mixed and matched. Their examples were a bit limited and specific last time I looked.

Does anyone have any tales of using Dovecot (good or bad), as I'm considering installing it?

<comment><USER5> I ran a Postfix/Dovecot setup for years and they were both fast, reliable, lightweight, and very flexible. The #dovecot and #postfix channels on Freenode are also tremendously helpful if you are in a pickle. (Full disclosure, I don't run my own mail server anymore except for a few virtual aliases; a good webmail client was the weak link in the chain and Fastmail provides a reliable service with a phenomenal web client at a fair price).

<comment><USER6> roundcube is a very good webmail client nowadays

<comment><USER5> I was using Roudcube, but it was not powerful enough for my needs. The greatest strength of the Fastmail UI are all of the built-in keybindings. There's one for almost every action, indeed, I find it friendlier than the best desktop clients I've used, let alone ones like Gmail or Roudcube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Intrusion prevention via fail2ban and rootkit detection via rkhunter.

Semantics, semantics, but rkhunter is intrusion detection, not prevention. I don't know what rkhunter would do to stop an intrusion, and fail2ban stopping a brute-force on your SSH login is hardly the likely intrusion vector for a server running this many services.

These tools still require a huge amount of systems administration work before it really counts as a "personal cloud". rkhunter looks for some basic rootkits but will not really protect you from emerging threats, other than to tell you you have a file integrity mismatch on a common file such as /usr/bin/login.

Since this is installing everything, it seems wise to add better host-based intrusion detection/file integrity checking across all services and configurations, via AIDE[1] or Samhain[2], which you could do with this type of automated setup. Both can then use the local MTA to alert you directly to your mail client if something is compromised, plus you gain the security of your configuration files for these services not having been tampered with.

What about running unattended-upgrades[3] for security patches to things like Apache et al? Given the adversaries expected here, I assume that we aren't worried about false packages, etc. as a risk.

[1] [http://aide.sourceforge.net/](http://aide.sourceforge.net/)

[2] [http://la-samhna.de/samhain/](http://la-samhna.de/samhain/)

[3] [https://launchpad.net/unattended- upgrades](https://launchpad.net/unattended-upgrades)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was surprised to read that this configuration uses DSPAM rather than SpamAssassin. Can anyone here compare these two, or point to a recent comparison?

</comment><comment><USER9> Docker seems like it could be a nice alternative to Ansible here. I'd love to see something as easy to use as an "app store" for "personal cloud" servers. One click to install servers for email, contacts, calendar, dropbox, backups, etc.

<comment><USER10> I am working on something like what you are suggesting. I currently have only the email container done(Postix/Dovecot) and working on a small cmdline tool that will take care of bootstrapping the containers by asking a few simple questions. The point is to make the whole setup as frictionless as possible, by providing a sensible set of standards and only asking for the bare minimum configuration parameters. In the future I plan to expand the tool with a web interface so you can install and uninstall applications from a central repository or a git repository.

I will publish what I have soon, just need to build a few more applications containers(think rss reader, owncloud, git repo).

It seems like a useful thing to have and I am curious if there is a demand for such a tool.

<comment><USER11> For installation, are you planning on using one of the existing project like DockerUI[1] or Shipyard[2]?

1: [https://github.com/crosbymichael/dockerui](https://github.com/crosbymichael/dockerui) 2: [https://github.com/ehazlett/shipyard](https://github.com/ehazlett/shipyard)

<comment><USER10> The project is based on Docker. The nice part about it is that its really convenient to interact with the Docker daemon via its http api, with a minimum amount of work. Although all the underlying tech that Docker is built upon was widely known, the useability of Docker is the thing that sets it apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the use of Dovecot, but I got tired of resource consumption with OwnCloud, despite it being a very, very cool project (and Android not speaking CardDav or CalDav natively, sigh; the ONE thing that makes me like iOS).

In any event, I have been looking into Cyrus IMAP because a) it used by Fastmail, they even host their forked version of the code [0] and b) there is a alpha-beta feature right now for a CardDAV and CalDav server baked in. [1]

Maybe I can try and work on my own sovereign-like setup with this.

[0] [https://github.com/brong/cyrus- imapd/tree/fastmail](https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail)

[1] [http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Latest_Upda...](http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Latest_Updates)

</comment><comment><USER13> Addition of XMPP messaging via eJabberd would be welcomed. Also, potentially use Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV as an option...

<comment><USER8> For XMPP I highly recommend Prosody ([http://prosody.im/](http://prosody.im/))

<comment><USER14> I second this.

Every couple of weeks, ejabberd will attempt to eat all of the RAMs. Scheduling restarts was easier than trying to figure out why that was happening.

Since switching to prosody, we've seen much better stability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any new and modern open source HTML5 webmail clients available?

It's been several years since I last set up self-hosted email. At the time Roundcube was the best out there, but it wasn't in the same league as Gmail.

<comment><USER16> It's the full stack instead of just the web client, but Zimbra has a very full featured (and closest I've found to gmail) ajax interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a bit confused as to why postgrey is being used (it's circa postfix 2.1.x) when postfix's "postscreen" is now built-in and just as good.

<comment><USER18> As a side note, the postscreen(8) man page [1] says that "this service was introduced with Postfix version 2.8.". Also RHEL 6 comes with postfix-2.6.6-2.2.el6_1.i686.

[1] [http://www.postfix.org/postscreen.8.html](http://www.postfix.org/postscreen.8.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be great if someone could set this up as an AMI for idiot proof setup on AWS.

<comment><USER20> Spin up an instance using Debian then run the script.

Done.

<comment><USER21> I think the issue is all the strings that must be grepped for and replaced in the scripts prior to installation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Instead of going through all this hassle with private clouds just to avoid using a service like Dropbox, I have some shell scripts that use rsync and curl to grab almost everything I want to back up from my hard drive and the internet (rss subscriptions, bookmarks), and generate a tar.7z.gpg file. The 7z archive is AES256 encrypted as well.

I feel relatively safe that I could drop this file anywhere I want and it would be useless to anybody without access to my brain or keystrokes, so I just put it in unsecure cloud storage. If I'm wrong about that, then I'm screwed, because all of my finances and identity would be full compromised. Each backup is pretty small since it's mostly text files and a few binaries and images. I have a minimal amount of media files so I don't bother to back up larger things that are mostly replaceable.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it could be of more coolness if named "Hegemon", which is more connected to "Ansible"...

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been wanting to do this, hadn't gotten around to detailing all the pieces I'd need to put together, and also I've been wanting to check out ansible. Thanks for this writeup!

</comment><comment><USER16> the problem I seem to run into when into when hosting my own email these days is that my IP (currently with ovh) keeps getting marked by sbls because of some other bad citizen in the same block. I've been looking at sendgrid and authsmtp as potential ways to avoid this, but would love to hear what others are doing... those of you who hosts... how do you prevent from getting black listed?

</comment><comment><USER25> Thank you. Not only a good real world example of server provisioning with Ansible, something I've been meaning to try, but a pretty well chosen set of services to install and configure. I'm already using Postfix and Dovecot over SSL but will surely learn from the rest of the setup.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is it to me or I need to somehow compute the hash of the password used for email? [1]

[1] [https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/blob/master/roles/mailserv...](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/blob/master/roles/mailserver/vars/main.yml#L15)

</comment><comment><USER26> I refuse to use reaper technology run my cloud.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been thinking about setting something like this up in Switzerland or someplace. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER28> I don't see a reason to buy overseas hosting. So long as your body is still in the US, the NSA could get your data if they really wanted to.

But the real goal here is not to stop a targeted government attack. It's to avoid cost-effective, bulk surveillance. For that, a server in your basement is quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Very nice!</comment>


A Case for Strongly Typed HTML Templating Languages - <AUTHOR> http://geoffhill.org/article/typed-html-templating-languages/

<comment><USER2> FTA:

> Is this full type checking overkill?

Yes.

> But considering the huge number of websites and web applications written > every year, and the massive difficulties we consider with browser testing > and compatibility, it sure would be nice if web developers no longer had to > consider whether their HTML was valid or not, and instead have more time to > focus on the things that really matter.

As a web developer I can tell you that generating valid HTML is trivial. Even when working with large, multipart systems like Drupal and Wordpress, the developers and plugin writers do a phenomenal job of creating a single, unified DOM. This is remarkable: thousands of individuals can contribute to a project that outputs a single page of perfectly valid HTML and corresponding CSS/JavaScript assets. (This code is not always optimized, but it is valid).

Generating valid HTML is a solved problem - even in complex systems. Creating a new templating engine doesn't add any value.

The time and aggravation that occurs in web development is as follows: even if I create a perfectly valid & consistent HTML/CSS/JavaScript web page it will not be rendered the same across web browsers. Let me repeat that: _as a web developer even if I honor the contract outlined in a specification there is no guarantee that the same contract will be implemented in a consistent fashion across browsers._

</comment><comment><USER3> Templates that are valid HTML are the right answer, unlike most templates which are string based because historically most server side templates have been string based (which I personally detest). No need for yet another template language!

An example is <http://batmanjs.org/> , and maybe most XML based templates too.

I ended up writing my own pure HTML templates (templates implemented using cloning - super simple and fast), with declarative definitions written in JavaScript. Declarative definitions and events are linked to HTML nodes by data-nodename attributes within the template.</comment>


Yahoo Research: Microsearch (*Not the recently announced Searchmonkey platform*) - <AUTHOR> http://www.yr-bcn.es/demos/microsearch/ <comment><USER2> cool</comment>


Net income, salaries deducted? - <AUTHOR>

amazon.com(according to wikipedia) Revenue 	▲ US$14.84 billion (2007) Net income 	▲ US$476 million (2007)
net income means EVERYTHING deducted right?
so salaries are paid? <comment><USER2> Yes, why?</comment>


The end of smartphone innovation - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/22/the-end-of-smartphone-innovation <comment><USER3> > I increasingly think that augmented reality is the next fundamental platform > shift.

I read these articles and everyone seems to be operating from the assumption that a fundamental platform shift is inevitable and coming within the next few years.

Is it really unthinkable that smart phones that you carry around in your pocket are the dominant platform for the next 50+ years?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't rule it out, but no computing hardware platform has ever been dominant for 50 years before so there are reasons to believe we're not about to get started with that kind of cycle now.

Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones. Maybe we have reached the end (for 50 years at least), but I think the safer bet is that the next big technology 30 years from now will be something that surprises us, not something we already have or could easily predict having wide adoption.

<comment><USER5> >*I wouldn't rule it out, but no computing hardware platform has ever been dominant for 50 years before so there are reasons to believe we're not about to get started with that kind of cycle now.

"Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones" \-- yes, so we had like 5 generations of computing hardware platforms. And we began with so premature and begging for improvement technologies (when they started in the 50s) and so large form factors that we had Moore's law going on for decades until a few years past.

Now we've reaching physical limits in CPU shrinking, and we have components so small (e.g. Apple Watch) than if they were any smaller you couldn't handle their buttons, or fit a camera lens, or speakers, or a large enough screen in there.

My point is, just because something has been going on for 5 generations of form factors, it's nowhere near enough evidence to be meaningful statistically or otherwise to deduce it will go on forever.

A turkey is fed every day by the farmer for months on end. But after 300+ observations that make it think feeding is never ending and inevitable there comes thanksgiving.

<comment><USER6> > if they were any smaller you couldn't handle their buttons

Voice-interfaced intelligent agents like Siri/Alexa/etc will continue to evolve.

Given a sufficiently advanced AI, buttons won't be needed for most computing tasks - any more than stirrups and a bridle were needed to drive the first automobiles.

<comment><USER7> I don't like talking to my devices, specially because most of the time I'm around other people and I don't want to share what I'm doing with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Throughout history most technological improvements could not be predicted ahead of time. In 2005 few people thought mobile phones would change much at all. In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world. In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later. I assume whatever will happen next will be a surprise to most people, although in hindsight you might have noticed what was coming.

<comment><USER9> > In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and > everyone that would change the world a few years later.

This this may be in danger of going into pedantic territory, I don't feel this is true at all. The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.

In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point.

I still remember a day in 1994 when I played Chess over the Internet with someone in South Africa - thinking that holy crap, the world we had been dreaming and talking about for 10 years finally was coming true.

<comment><USER10> "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."

It's almost guaranteed that _somewhere_ out there, the next big thing is incubating amongst a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next best thing. It's just that most of humanity thinks they're crazy geeks.

That's what it was like with the Internet. I got on it in 1994 and couldn't convince anyone else it was worth paying attention to. By 1995, gifted & talented enrichment programs were starting to suggest all their students check it out. By 1996, I could convince my parents to pay for it. By 1998 a bunch of our family friends were putting their life savings into dot-coms.

<comment><USER11> So let's make a list of all of the things that have a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next big thing. I can only think of two things:

* Bitcoin

* Self driving vehicles

<comment><USER10> Smart home. Virtual reality. Drones. Smartwatches (yes, some people still really like theirs). Rust. AI. IPFS. Federated wikis.

Probably others too. The scale that we're talking about is ~1000s of people, not millions. This doesn't even register in the news media - hell, HN probably has close to a few thousand people online _at any given time_ , and there are 1000s of forums like Hacker News on the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about the opposite of innovation? A new generation of dumb phones that reminds you who's the real boss in life. My ideal one would be:

\- it's small, maybe 3"

\- it's super light

\- still feels substantial when you do hold it though

\- has basic functions (call, text, alarm) but with updated modern interface

\- max 3 apps if you reaally can't get away without them (e.g. whatsapp)

\- sophisticated non-intrusive tech embedded (e.g. Track if lost phone, able to take dictation)

\- fiercely anti-snoop

\- super robust, will be fine even if thrown over cliff, chewed by toddler, stamped on et cetra

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER13> A friend and I were thinking the same about 3 years ago and set out to make an e-paper "smarter" dumb phone. Turns out it's really hard to build a good dumb phone in 2017, especially given the phasing out of 2G.

We landed on the same idea of a less distracting phone, 4" screen, 4G support, and more privacy than existing smart phones.

You can check it out here if you'd like. Curious to hear what you think. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/siempo/the-phone-for- hu...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/siempo/the-phone-for-humans)

<comment><USER14> Full screen, non-tactile keyboard is a non-starter IMO.

<comment><USER15> Which tactile keyboard phone are you currently using, if you don't mind sharing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anybody remember Lawnmower Man? VR and AR have been the next big thing for most of my lifetime now and I'm a child of the 60s. In fact, didn't Google Glass already prove ordinary people don't want computers strapped to their faces? I think it will be a niche, like smart watches. It will be a nice little business, like the Watch is for Apple.

<comment><USER17> No Google Glass sucked for other reasons. The voice interface didn't work very well, the screen was in an awkward position, there we no socially acceptable reason to wear them, they cost $3k and their most compelling feature over a smartphone was hands-free first person video recording.

Compare that to something like Snap's Spectacles which basically took Glass's best use - hands free first person video recording - but use a sensible button-based interface, cost $130 and are sunglasses which are totally socially acceptable.

I think people are also more willing to wear crazy things on their heads when the _do_ actually offer something new and innovative, e.g. the Vive or Hololens. Nobody is saying "OMG nobody is going to wear the Hololens in public; you'll look like a total arse". They're saying "Woah Hololens actually does good AR for the first time ever."

<comment><USER18> Google Glass sucked as a consumer product, it works fine as a business product.

<comment><USER19> Google glass also sucked as a business product.

<comment><USER18> No its doing ok actually. In factories

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 running LineageOS. It has a replacable battery and I have replacements (and have replaced it once so far). I will be keeping it until it breaks, because it's more than fast enough to do everything I demand from my phone and I have no reason to spend hundreds of dollars to buy the latest and greatest in planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER21> My mother (in her late 60s) has my S5 and she complains it is too slow; does Lineage make a difference?

<comment><USER20> The stock ROM is full of garbage. This is true of any phone. For a while I kept an image of my phone with the stock ROM in case I needed to restore it, which I had stripped down of most of the crap by rooting it and removing a bunch of stuff. There are well over 200 unnecessary packages installed that include spyware, bloatware, adware, and uselessware. The only explanation I have is planned obsolecense. LineageOS is as fast for me today as it was when I first installed it (back when it was still CM).

<comment><USER21> Okido. Will that exactly that then. I thought Samsung would be Ok and did not want to risk my mother having to do anything tech :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there even a reason to buy a new smartphone nowadays? They get a bit flatter, get bigger screens, but overall we reached the point where their progress kinda flatlined. They have everything an average user could want since early 10s.

<comment><USER23> I bought iPhone 4S few years ago, and now with new iOS it's very slow, so I'm going to buy new smartphone soon. It has some hardware problems, but new software really killed it. Same story with iPad 3.

I hope that current smartphone generation will be able to sustain longer, I don't like buying new things every 2-3 years.

<comment><USER24> The 4s will be 6 years old this year, and iOS 10 dropped support for it in 2016. The iPhone 5 will likely not be compatible with iOS 11 when it arrives in September.

I think 5 years is a pretty good run, and it seems like the standard now.

If you bought your 4s 2 years ago, that's on you. If you're buying your phones used, then it's in your best interest to not buy a phone that's already 3 years old.

<comment><USER23> 4S became less usable with iOS 7 and that's 2 years. It started to lag. With iOS 9 it's almost unusable and that's 4 years. I bought my phone new, just after iPhone 5 was released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a Nexus 5 from 2013 or whenever it was they released it, still going strong.

I don't see that much innovation in newer phones to warrant an upgrade, at least in the sense of spending hundreds of pounds on what amounts to be a slightly faster processor and the promise of Android O.

The only thing I can think of that might force my hand, outside of the phone breaking, is the security updates (Google no longer supports the Nexus 5 - <USER2> it will be stuck on Android 6 indefinitely)

<comment><USER26> I have a Nexus 4 and functionality wise it's all I need but the random reboots and UI glitches are getting really annoying. Like that time I was on hold for 30 minutes and the phone decided a random reboot was needed.

<comment><USER27> My Nexus 4 is is still doing well, except for the battery I had to replace once already. The trick was to install cyanogenmod, remove all Gapps, and get all software from F-Droid. I use the KISS launcher, have no social networks that run in the background (except for WhatsApp), and so on. All in all it's a pleasant experience, even though there might be an occasional bug from time to time.

If it weren't for the battery, I would have no reason to replace the phone, ever.

<comment><USER28> If we're comparing, my Galaxy Nexus is still serving my needs just fine, with all original parts, still running stock Android 4.3. It does all the phone stuff, plus Maps, car-share apps, games, Chrome, wifi tethering, music, etc. Chrome's a bit sluggish, though.

Maybe Lineage would speed up Maps/Chrome. Hmn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The more I think about it, the more I think the word "innovation" obscures thinking. If you boil it down, "innovation" just means "change in a novel manner". That doesn't mean _good_ change, just unexpected change. It's easy to say "apple isn't innovating anymore", but what else does a smart phone need?

</comment><comment><USER30> I still think smart phones that dock and become full PC work stations would be great.

<comment><USER31> I don't really see the point.

Sharing data/settings already works great with the cloud.

You still get the same bulk as carrying around PC+phone.

The only reason is that maybe it's a bit cheaper because you use the same CPU for both, but the drawbacks (not being able to use both at the same time, slower proc for the PC) don't make it worth.

<comment><USER32> It's already possible to carry ~256 GB to 1 TB data on a device, MicroSD format. With a storage array (a battery of MicroSD cards), multiple TB.

Local wired (or Bluetooth) data transmission will beat the Cloud on performance, not rely on third party security, and be immune from interruptions.

I see strong potential for movement away from the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think we should give credit where credit is due - Apple has "solved" three form factors:

\- the laptop

\- the tower workstation

\- the smartphone

Maybe we should use something other than laptops ... maybe there is an as-yet- unforeseen device that our computing work should shift to. Until such time, we use laptops, and apple solved the laptop with the macbook air. There's nowhere to go from here but spec improvements. That's why they are desperately adding weirdo things like the touchbar - the form factor has been solved.

Same with tower workstations. You're not going to beat the cheesegrater mac pro. All you can do is bump the specs. This is a _good thing_ \- they _solved_ that form factor. Unfortunately Apple has other priorities than churning out low volume, non-sexy updates to an under-the-desk device.

Finally, the smartphone: Apple solved that form factor with the iphone. Everything since then is really just an iphone with different sizes and different little details. They are all just monolithic touchscreen slabs. Maybe there is some new form factor waiting to be discovered, but that's a new product category - that would be real innovation and would be a jump just like the jump from dumbphones to smartphones. But for now, what we have are smartphones and they are all really just iphones - because the problem has been solved.

<comment><USER34> Wow, you have a different view of "solved" than I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is endless innovation desirable?

I have an iPhone 6s. I like it. I'd like to see longer battery life and higher storage capacity in future models, but otherwise it's a good phone.

I don't want it thinner - in fact, I'd be happy if they added some heft so I didn't need a case, without one it feels like it is about to fall out of my hand. (This might allow for a removable battery, which would also be useful)

I don't want a dumbphone - I like having access to all my music and podcasts. And I like being able to do secure texts and calls with Signal. Privacy advocates seem to fetishize burners and feature phones, but a "dumb" Nokia blasts out everything in the clear.

<comment><USER36> Thinner, lighter phones are easier to hold and get used more. Thin phones won because anyone who wants more grip or battery can always add a case.

Thicker, bigger battery phones fail because no case can make them lighter. They only address a niche while thin addresses everyone's needs.

And sealed batteries won because they can fit more capacity. Few people prefer carrying (and charging) two 8 hour batteries to a 10 hour sealed battery.

<comment><USER37> > _Few people prefer carrying (and charging) two 8 hour batteries to a 10 hour > sealed battery._

I carry around a small USB battery pack these days (multiple if I'm travelling). I find the concept of external batteries better — the recharging process is seamless as compared to having to shut off the phone to switch batteries.

<comment><USER38> I can swap batteries and be back online in less than a minute. That's far more seamless than having a bulky external battery plugged in to a fragile, awkward USB connector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> When the patents of the piston engine ended, the combustion engine saw tremendous innovation. So as long as the monopoly is in place, only the military will get hand held computers, and everyone else will get toys. IP is fraud.

<comment><USER40> >IP is fraud.

I wouldn't go that far. IP is a carrot for development. Imagine if you spend a decade and $100K developing an idea, and just when it started taking off, Oracle or somebody copied it and took the entire market. That can and does still happen, but at least you have legal recourse with IP laws.

It was originally a way to foster innovation for a maximum of 28 years, then the works would enter the public domain to be improved upon. Over the years, the copyright duration has become ridiculously long, negating the social benefits of it's existence.

The fundamental concept is sound, it's when it's perverted to help the wolves rather than the sheep that it stinks.

<comment><USER41> Even the phrase "intellectual property" is highly tendentious. It implies property right where there are none. What you get from the patent office is a temporary government granted monopoly.

Often, as with, for example, spectrum, the people holding the license tend to view the object, and not the government granted license, as their perpetual property.

<comment><USER42> Depends upon how you look at it. I find the idea of property rights a bit funny because every physical thing you can own exists because in the past someone murdered the fuck out of people to own what it's made from.

In that regard, intellectual property is the only property not built on human suffering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not unreasonable to think about 10, 20 or even 30 years with mostly incremental improvements and no ground-breaking changes in both smartphones and smartwatches. I list some examples below. Several of them are already under development, and some are already available but just not cheap yet.

\- Batteries that can be fully charged in 5 minutes;

\- Autonomy to go for a month without a charge, achieved by the combinations of new technologies in batteries, screens, chips and better software;

\- Scratch and shock resistant screens that can be equally visible on daylight and at night, maybe by working like and colored e-reader screen when there's enough ambient light available, thus making reading more comfortable;

\- Some kind of battery charging technology that improves over the awful usb connections that we have nowadays, whose cable connectors don't last much;

\- Better cameras that rival today's DSLR. There are some experiences going on using several small combined cheap sensors in a single smartphone to achieve results in the DSLR range;

\- Cheap and fast disk storage over say, 10 TB, as fast as RAM;

\- Cheap and fast data connection at any location of the planet. Like streaming HD netflix in your tent in the middle of a blizzard in Antartida;

\- High quality, small, wireless earphones whose batteries last for a week without recharging;

\- Simpler, faster and more efficient development plataforms;

... And I'm sure you can add a few more. Each of these are changes that separately would not be considered exactly ground-breaking, but all of them together could bring mobile computing to a whole new level.

<comment><USER43> when I think about smartphone innovation I generally think about all the level of automation that could be done with for example tasker for android, if only smartphones could pull sensors data and substantially eliminate overheating, we could have a seamless experience with very little interaction needed, probably not even touch inputs. Smartphones today are sleeping most of the time, they are not dumb, but very much lazy. The benchmarks war has done a ton of harm...look! this device hits 200k on this benchmark, too bad battery dies after 3hours if you keep that up, btw you might also feel an uncomfortable heat in your hands...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Samsung says they're going to introduce a foldable smartphone with the display wrapped around the outside.[1] This provides a small display for routine use and a 7" display when desired.

[1] [http://bgr.com/2017/01/11/samsung-foldable-smartphones- relea...](http://bgr.com/2017/01/11/samsung-foldable-smartphones-release- date/)

</comment><comment><USER45> The smartphone is a concept, a portable computer with Internet connectivity and a touch screen as a primary mode of interaction. I don't think we should limit our thinking to it's actual form. The key bit is the portable, connected computer. How we interact with it and the form of the actual device is hopefully going to evolve.

</comment><comment><USER46> A phone with volume buttons that actually and intuitively worked--in practice, not just in theory--would be innovative.

A phone that incorporated debouncing on its touch screen would be innovative.

A phone that didn't require high manual dexterity in order to avoid tapping the wrong thing would be innovative.

<comment><USER47> Innovative, maybe technically yes. But in reality, these are not really game changers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Seems direct connection and solar charging are the next major innovations.

So like no internet to talk to a friend through a phone from phone to phone(if you can call them a phone at that point).

Also if Apple or google get into the solar game by putting a super high efficiency panel on the phone that might change the world. They work at such large scales that it's likely drive the overall cost of solar panels through the floor so solar cars solar fridges solar tiles solar showers idk solar anything similar to what they did with quadrocopters.

Those would likely be the two main points of world changing ground breaking innovation I'd see. Idk how they'd achieve either of those things on the technical side but they have enough money to find out.

<comment><USER38> You can already buy solar charger cases but I doubt a mainstream manufacturer would ever integrate solar cells directly into a smartphone. That would add cost, weight, and bulk for a feature few consumers want. A solar panel doesn't work in your pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I don't know. I don't see any big innovation coming next. Just because we don't see one doesn't mean we have to force one of the creative things that aren't market ready yet to be that next innovation. When the iphone hit it hit big time. Everybody knew immediately that this will be a game changer. AR, VR are just like that. The only thing that really let's me "wow" is AI and all its applications we haven't considered yet like autonomous cars. But this may happen next year or in five years or maybe even just in 20 years. And on the road there something else might happen that is totally unexpected to most of us.

</comment><comment><USER50> one word - fuchsia.

[https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/)

<comment><USER51> Knowing Google, Fuchsia was probably started as a mean to kill yet another product.

<comment><USER52> You're getting downvoted but your vocalization has some merit. I looked at the link and decided not to bother reading it since it'll probably get closed down in a few years, so what's the point?

<comment><USER51> People seem eager to forget, given that Google Talk was discontinued not even a week ago.

<comment><USER52> The real nail in the coffin for me was when they killed Google Reader for no good reason. What a shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It doesn't mean there isn't any improvement. Phone cameras are getting so incredible now that you really don't need to carry a P&S and with things like HDR+, OIS, 4k video you'll get better results.

People have been saying that smartphones replaced cameras for years, but now they are not just a replacement but actually better.

There has still been innovation with dual cameras, finger print sensors, laser focus, better LED flash, USB type C and monthly Android security patches will probably encourage people to upgrade after they reach EoL for a device.

<comment><USER24> My $200 Canon P&S that I bought in 2013 still takes better low-light pics than my iPhone 7.

Phones are good enough, sure. But top of the line phones still can't do low- light very well.

<comment><USER54> Bit better in low light, but can you edit your RAW pics on it? How about editing 4K video? Of course I'm being facetious, but top of the line smartphones are pretty great cameras generally speaking. Man I wish I could have changed the crappy OS in the P&S cameras I used to use, and now I can pick the camera/video shooting app I prefer. Plus edit & upload pics from the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Snapchat could become the most successful entrant in AR. Especially after the launch of the first version of Spectacles. They already have an audience that likes to make, see and share new things. You could consider them as a niche company in media and hardware sectors. Other companies are clearly focused on produce one solution to everything before know how people will like to use, for what purpose. They are the only company that is pursuing produce something Cool that people will like to use on streets.

</comment><comment><USER56> I agree that the time of smartphone innovation is gone, and I'd argue it's been gone since years, but still breathing the last breaths.

On the other hand, I do not think AI is the next big thing. It is a good candidate to be so, but there should exist much better guesses we can make. You should have a product, not simply a way of doing something or a technology. You need to sell a product, so pure AI won't do anything.

But even if it doesn't do much by itself, it should play a big role in the coming S curve (as the article names it.)

Good article!

<comment><USER57> Well, multitouch was not a product. You need a technology and then products that successfully build upon it. Exactly what's not happening with VR for consumers (but applications in the b2b sector are much more interesting I gotta say)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This article is naive to the HUGE patent library Apple will be capitalizing on for iPhone 8, which will be a device to see. I've heard to called as ambitious as the original iPhone.

To the comments on platform shift, might you call it a paradigm shift? If so, Thomas Kuhn, the man who popularized that phrase in his book "On the Nature of Scientific Revolutions" argues that individuals within a revolution would likely not be aware of such a fact.

</comment><comment><USER59> Smartphone Innovations is far from over it is just harder.

Upcoming innovations:

1.)Superior camera: Incredible Low Light sensitivity, Incredible compensation / correction for camera shake, will be better than any current implementation.

2.)AR support: example: [http://www.waverlylabs.com/](http://www.waverlylabs.com/) This earpiece will work with a smartphone app.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm going to jump on the AR train when implants become mainstream. Glass and those watches seem silly to me as a normal consumer. The professional applications I've seen recently look quite useful so I'm very positive about future development in this sector.

</comment><comment><USER61> Funny that he should put a Magic Leap video in his article. I thought the consensus is that this is actually really fake, as opposed to the iPhone. The mechanical turk of the 18th century was also fake, but that didn't mean mechanical chess players were the next big thing.

<comment><USER62> Evans has seen / played around with the Magic Leap tech, and he is pretty certain it's the real deal.

<comment><USER36> The effect may be a real deal, but is the box still the size of a refrigerator?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> There will be no end, until everything gets into the smartphone, in my opinion. Tablets are in decadence, and laptops will fall dramatically once convenient operating system support for external screen appear (e.g. a la Windows 10) on Android and iOS.

<comment><USER64> Smartphone screens are just too small for certain tasks.

<comment><USER63> Sure. That's the point of using external screens (e.g. dumb "docking stations", converting any phone into a laptop).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> >Apple and Google won (Google only outside China, of course)

Could someone explain this? My understanding was few in China used an iPhone and Android is extremely popular? Is that now out of date given Apple's recent pushes into the Chinese market?

<comment><USER66> iPhones are actually pretty popular in China, broadly comparable to their market share elsewhere (I don't have numbers). But while Android dominates, it's not "Google" Android. The phones don't ship the GMS app suite and don't integrate with the Google services stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I think we'll just keep removing features and raising the price :/

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't think this is true. Phones are still getting bigger and thinner while battery life only decreases slightly. This game can be played indefinitely.

<comment><USER69> I don't believe it's possible to slightly decrease battery life indefinitely.

Also, there is a limit to thinness. Maybe the rest of the phone could be hidden in an alternate universe and the only thing that protrudes in to our realm is the direct visual cortex stimulator.

We'll see.

<comment><USER57> *we'll feel

Ftfy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> PCs took a lot longer to stop innovating, but they were (and still are for desktops) an open platform.

</comment><comment><USER32> Think Hegelian.

The smartphone gave us pocket comms and information. Unfortunately, with the Jevons paradox and Gresham's Law impacting on our fundamentally limited attention -- _rivality is the counterpoint of virality_ \-- we're in a world in which distractions, distortions, impositions, agency, and privacy are up for grabs.

Contra several assertions within this thread, we've seen information systems and regimes which have lasted far beyond 50 years: speech and language themselves, early writing systems, clay tablets, papayrus, block printing, moveable type, increased literacy, ever cheaper and faster publishing methods, voice, image, moving image, and broadcast. More recently networks with some degree of peer-to-peer _and_ mass comms integrated.

There have been advances and regressions. When Gutenberg first pulled the lever on his press in Europe, there were 30,000 books on the continent. Not 30,000 _titles_ , but 30,000 _books_ , total. There were 50 million by the end of the century, nearly a billion by 1800. Reproduction rates went from about 120 impressions an hour, to over one million with the steam-powered rotary presses of the late 19th century and early 20th, which promoted populist wars in Cuba, the Philippines, and the muddy trenches of Normandy.

Liberalisation in the 19th century lead to a fundamentalist backlash amongst early 20th century religious groups, particularly in the United States, the descendents of which are still active in creationist, young-earth, and global- warming denialist cults.

Mobile devices of today strike me as akin to patent-medicine and radium-water peddlers of an earlier age. We're waking up to the fact that these technologies have _both_ positive _and_ negative elements. The boosters, ben- evans amongst them, keep preaching more and faster, shades of the jetpack, flying car, meal-in-a-pill, and plastic-prefab-house fantasies of the 1930s through 1960s.

Instead, we realised that not all marketing claims are justified, that pollution presents real hazards, that there's something to be said for modestly-traditional housing and clothing styles (the 1990s grunge fad looked little like _Lost in Space_ or _Space 1999_ ).

We're discovering that our social networks and bubble-filtered news meshes poorly with liberal democracy, or carefully-cultivated brand-consciousness, in the case of YouTube. Spam and phone solicitations crowd out what few moments of uninterrupted time we can find -- the technorati now revel in _not_ being connected, rather than jacking in to their email every five minutes. A practice which was freakish in 1999, naff today.

Among the largest disruptions of the 1990s was a small local events-and-items listing which was passed about via email. Turns out that it accomplished, at far less cost, and price, what newspaper classifieds did at the time.

Whilst Moore's Law appears to be winding down in terms of chip density and capacity, the _cost_ component of it isn't, and we still have the fact that computing costs are falling by roughly an order of magnitude each decade. This means that what Google accomplished in the 1990s, Facebook could achieve at roughly 1/10 the cost, and today's Emerging Threats will be able to achieve at 1/10 the cost of Facebook, 1/100th that of Google.

It also means that the cost horizon is shifting, from _making_ and _obtaining_ compute devices, to _managing_ and _organising_ them. If you're interested in getting a log of conditions over the life of a package shipment, you can slap a $5 SOC unit in the packaging and have it phone home when it finds WiFi (or 4GL) at its destination. In ten years, that will be a $0.50 SOC, in twenty, $0.05.

We're likely to have tens or hundreds of billions of such devices, all around us. Which at such price-points, won't be worth the time to property engineer, secure, harden, or patch.

Collectively, these will have a considerable amount of processing power.

And though most of these devices won't be tied in to physical systems, that compute power might be put to use finding those that are and ... persuading them in various ways. Lights. Heating systems. Automated vacuums. Industrial control machinery. Drones. Self-driving vehicles.

Food for thought.</comment>


The Librem 5 has been "shipping" for a month–but not to backers - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/the-librem-5-has-been-shipping-for-a-month-but-not-to-backers/ <comment><USER2> This was posted 2 days ago on their site:

We want to give everyone a super quick update on shipping of the current batch of Librem 5 smartphones.

There's a delay. But, never fear, it's only a delay of just a couple days.

[https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-update- delay-o...](https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-update-delay-of- just-a-few-days/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like manufacturing struggles. Hope they work their way through them and are able to deliver.

<comment><AUTHOR> Their manufacturing struggles seem like a smaller problem than their communications struggles, at least to me.

If they'd just come out in September and said "hey, this is turning out to be a lot harder than we'd anticipated, we're going to miss our Q3 2019 ship date", I honestly don't think most supporters would have had a problem with it. Hardware is hard, they're trying to do something novel, these things happen. But they _didn 't_ say that, they instead cooked up a whole schedule of half-baked "iterative batches" just so they could say they really were shipping _something_ in Q3 -- which only set them up to faceplant when they weren't able to meet the deadlines for those either.

I have been an admirer of Purism for a long time, and I was excited to see them make this move into the smartphone space. But my enthusiasm has been gradually whittled down over time by their consistently poor communications around the project. They're constantly coming across as too clever by half, when clarity and transparency would have served them much better. The quickest way to have people lose faith in you is to treat them like you don't deserve it.</comment></comment>


The Centennial Light, a bulb that's reportedly been burning for 113 years - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-mysterious-case-of-the-113-year-old-light-bulb/ <comment><USER2> This article is terrible, priceonomics I'm ashamed of you.

> raises questions as to whether it is a miracle of physics, or a sign that > new bulbs are weaker. Its longevity still remains a mystery.

It's not mystery at all. All you have to do to make a bulb last forever is derate it. The lower the temperature the longer it lasts, (and the less efficient it is).

At the dull red glow this one is emitting it'll last forever.

> Instead, they began to collectively engage in planned obsolescence. To > achieve this the companies agreed to limit the life expectancy of light > bulbs at 1,000 hours

I expected better from priceonomics than to repeat urban legends.

You can trade off long life and high efficiency. All that agreement did was decide that 1000 hours was a good trade off point, and standardize the luminous efficiency of incandescent bulbs so all incandescent bulbs of a specified wattage will be approximately the same brightness.

You can read about it here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_output_and_lifetime) \- it even mentions this very bulb.

Note that lifetime goes by the power of 16!!! so it's very easy to derate a bulb and make it last forever.

<comment><USER3> Just a note that a site moderator has responded to this reply in their comments:

"First of all, we understand the correlation between low output and longevity, and acknowledge that the Centennial Light produces a very low output. Even so, out of hundreds of thousands of low wattage bulbs produced from 1880-1910, it's the only bulb of its kind that has burned for 113-years. Just a handful of bulbs on Earth are older than 60. We think that qualifies as mysterious on some level -- even when scientifically dissected.

Secondly, I appreciate you clarifying the complexity of the Phoebus cartel's actions (admittedly, it's a bigger picture than what we presented) -- but there exists compelling evidence that the cartel exercised planned obsolescence (we understand planned obsolescence to be when the "lifespan of a product is rendered artificially short by design"). Pre-1900, bulbs had lifespans of 1,200-2,500 hours; the cartel set bulbs at 1,000 hours -- even when GE (a member of the cartel) had access to modern tungsten filament technology that could've increased the output of bulbs without so aggressively compromising lifespan. While, as you said, the cartel's motivation was to standardize the haphazard market, the byproduct of this was an overly- assertive cap on longevity."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many possible reasons.

A crude bulb with a thick filament will last longer, as the current per unit area goes down. A thicker filament would of course drastically increase the life.

And reduce the voltage by 10%, an incandescent bulb will last 10x longer. With Tungsten the usual failure mode is excited evaporated material cooling and ending up on the cool bulb wall, this is the "blackening" you see on the bottoms of bulbs.

Tungsten is a pretty amazing material, but will wear down over time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Related reading about planned obsolescence:

[http://www.hugtherhino.com/2013/04/planned-obsolescence- dark...](http://www.hugtherhino.com/2013/04/planned-obsolescence-dark-history- of.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the Centennial Light actually superior to the classic light bulb?

The article states that the filament is 8 times thicker -- using 64 times more material -- and only runs at 4 Watts. So to match the standard 100 Watt bulb, you'd need 25 Centennial Lights, for a total of 1600 times more material.

Meanwhile, it's burned for 113 years, about 990 times the standard bulb's 1000 hour lifespan. 990 times better using 1600 times more material; should I be impressed?

<comment><USER7> >should I be impressed?

Not really. Run a 100 watt lightbulb dimmed down to the brightness of a 1 watt bulb and it will also likely run for 100 years.

<comment><USER8> Especially if you don't switch it on and off ... they've got that bulb on a UPS now so that it doesn't experience cooling/heating cycles which are what kill (or at least finally kill) most incandescent bulbs.

As an aside, it's my experience that what kills most LED bulbs is transients that fry their control circuits. Has anyone else noticed this?

<comment><USER9> What tends to kill incandescents is the non-uniform thinning of the tungsten wire due to tungsten evaporating, which causes the thinner parts to heat up more, combined with tungsten's positive temperature coefficient, which causes a current rush on power-up when the filament is cold, which causes the weak spots to heat up particularly rapidly and potentially higher that they would if the surrounding wire was hot and thus had higher resistance (a cold tungsten filament has about 1/15th the resistance compared to when it's glowing hot).

Transients certainly are one problem for LEDs if the power filtering is bad, another is (lack of) cooling - while LEDs produce much less heat, they also need to stay much, much cooler: A tungsten filament is fine at 2400 °C, an LED die should not get much hotter than 100 °C, preferably less than that, and most fixtures are not particularly good at getting rid of heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> See also, the Oxford Electric Bell:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell)

</comment><comment><USER11> The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

</comment><comment><USER12> You mean Byron the bulb? [http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of- byron-bulb.h...](http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of-byron- bulb.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The light bulb conspiracy is a movie about the subject of planned obsolescence.

</comment><comment><USER14> "They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To" Wrong. The explanation why the bulb still holds is very simple. By turning it off and on again, the tungsten contracts and expands. That is why light bulbs break after a certain amount of time. If you keep the bulb lit or turned off, it won't break. In this case, the bulb was lit with the exception of very few power outages.

Also mentioned in the article: "Katz also adds that the bulb's age could be, in part, contributed to the fact that it hasn't been turned off and on a whole lot -- a process which is more exhausting on a bulb than letting it run continuously (the filament needs to reheat itself, much like a car's engine)."

<comment><USER15> Not so much; it's operating far under the level of light it could put out and at atrocious efficiency. As said in the article: "Modern bulbs, she explains, use thinner tungsten filaments that put out more light (40 to 200 watts) burn hotter, and are therefore taxed more rigorously than older bulbs like the Shelby"

With semiconductors, the rule of thumb is an increase of 10 Kelvin halves the lifetime of the part. Considering this bulb is running several hundred Kelvin below modern bulbs, it isn't surprising it lasts. Run a modern 60W lightbulb at 30Vac and it'll last just as long too, but put out so little light as to be near useless (like this bulb).

<comment><USER16> If you're at all interested in this topic, I can't recommend highly enough a little book by Tony Kordyban, _Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong_. (The sequel, _More Hot Air_ , is good too). The author makes the case, in Chapter 30, that those numbers, which came from MIL-HDBK-217, were pulled out of somebody's hat at a time when semiconductor reliability rates were changing rapidly due to process improvements, and probably don't have much validity any more. When actual reliability rates were compared to prediction and measured temperatures, there was no correlation.

These books are great.

Refs:

[1] Tony Kordyban. _Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks_. New York: ASME Press, 1998. ISBN 0-7918-0074-1

[2] ---. _More Hot Air_. New York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2005. ISBN 0-7918-0223-X</comment></comment></comment>


Analysis of Google Chromium C++ compilation times - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/big-project-build-times-chromium/ <comment><USER2> Best would be to not have huge projects in the first place, because even if your forward declare everything and essentially get rid of the bloat caused by the headers, you still are spending tens of seconds on the linking step even if you changed a single character in a string somewhere.

You can then have 0 link time by having dynamic librairies everywhere. You'll even probably be able to hot-reload some of them.</comment>