A world without the Mac Pro - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2016/11/05/world-without-mac-pro <comment><USER2> _" Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It's a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change."_

When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platform was, I said! And it was!

The platform I switched to in 2005 wasn't Linux. It was OS X.

In 10 years the world has changed and today if you are in most of the "creative" professions, not using a Mac is the exception. You can today make a lot of arguments against desktop linux, yet for the past several years I've run it exclusively on all my main systems (laptops and desktops, work and home).

10 years ago, plenty of Windows users couldn't imagine a world in which Macs were where they are today. I mean _couldn 't imagine_. The way Mac enthusiasts _can 't imagine_ desktop linux today. The parallels aren't exact. They don't need to be. I am neither predicting success or failure. I am simply pointing out that imagination fails and it is a mistake to say _" that will probably never change."_

<comment><USER3> Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.

<comment><USER4> That is subtly incorrect - what they are is "cheap generic x86" (or x64 now), that's why all those SGIs and Suns were dumped, the price/performance of the hardware. Linux just happened to be the x86 Unix around at the time. It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86.

Would anyone have ditched IRIX to run Linux on their MIPS kit? Of course not because it was never about the OS in this space, it was about FLOPS/$.

<comment><USER5> > It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) > Solaris x86.

What exactly did Sun do wrong with their x86 and x86_64 versions of Solaris that you call "so short-sighted"?

<comment><USER4> They were afraid that x86 hardware would eclipse SPARC hardware, so development of Solaris x86 lagged behind "real" Solaris, and the HCL was always very small. They wanted to sell you expensive hardware, not a software license.

What actually happened was that x86 hardware eclipsed SPARC hardware... And organisations that would have been happy to refresh the hardware and keep the same OS and just recompile their apps found that they couldn't, so they jumped to Linux instead... And the rest, along with Sun itself, is history. I was working for a big Sun customer during this transition, we _begged_ them to make Solaris x86 a first-class citizen, and we had a lot of support within Sun too but the SPARC Mafia won the day and with regret, our next big order was (IIRC) with Dell and SUSE...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Arment is way too positive on the Mac Pro's thermal design. Recently I worked on an application where we had about a dozen Mac Pros doing heavy video encoding workloads. Four of these computers started having GPU overheating issues, and turns out that this is a common occurrence on the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple has been quietly replacing units over the years (searching for the specific console error message reveals that it's common among Mac Pro owners).

My theory is that the Mac Pro hasn't seen an update because Apple knows that its current thermal design is a lemon, and they don't really want to sell any more of these because the replacement rate is so high.

<comment><USER7> Can confirm, had a similar set up with six Mac Pros for video processing and compression. We had to replace every single one of them at least once, and some 3 times and still we feel there are heat-based performance issues that Apple hasn't addressed.

Also, I think Apple will have to come out with a new display to go with the Mac Pro.

<comment><USER8> > Also, I think Apple will have to come out with a new display to go with the > Mac Pro.

I must be missing something. If a new Mac Pro ever came out wouldn't it use USB-C and be fine on the new LG displays Apple sells (price dropped by the way)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It's a fantastic server OS but > a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.

Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore.

I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did.

If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. If you are a developer who spends most of your time split between the terminal and the browser, then Linux is not just an acceptable substitute, but can in fact be a superior replacement.

<comment><USER10> How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

<comment><USER11> Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them.

I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.

<comment><USER12> Just curious, is that because of VPN?

<comment><USER11> No nothing I posted about has anything to do with VPN.

The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).

<comment><USER13> The only time I've ever had an issue connecting to a network with Linux was with a specific university network, which (forgive me if I mangle this because I'm not very familiar with networking protocols) used WPA2, PEAP and MSCHAPv2 and required a username and password to authenticate. The only tricky step was you needed to indicate to the network manager to use a certificate at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt

That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly.

Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page.

Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 18.104.22.168 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it.

But for the most part! I have not had any issues with _normal_ "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305)

And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with.

YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and > everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software > ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at > least a decade to catch up — and they won't do everything right.

So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is it doing so much better than Windows that at minimum a decade would be required for it to catch up?

<comment><USER15> * The windows registry vs the OSX defaults system

* Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa

* HiDPI that always works or has good fallbacks

* Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use

* Battery life

* Multidesktop

* POSIX scripting (that one is slowly coming to windows now)

* Can be restored from another computer in a matter of minutes (see also the first point)

* PDF support baked into OS

<comment><USER16> Everything you listed as either incorrect or extremely insignificant. I don't have time to correct you right now but please, you're really reaching on quite a few of those.

Edit: maybe it would help you to level out your perspective by thinking about some reasons why almost every business on the planet runs Windows and not Mac.

<comment><USER17> * Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use

* Multidesktop

* PDF support baked into OS

He's right with these.

I now solely use the touchpad on my MBPr. I cannot see myself ever switching back to a mouse. Having been a mouse user for 16 years!

The ability to do a 3 finger swipe and switch to another virtual desktop in a split second is awesome. Is this possible on Windows? I don't know.

I was working on a Windows 10 machine yesterday and PDFs opened with Edge. Again, I don't know if it's right or not.

<comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure Edge has PDF rendering built into it. It keeps trying to smash the default file association I had for Foxit.

<comment><USER19> Latest Windows insider build have DrawboardPDF app preinstalled. So no more dependence on Edge anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs?

Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has _200 billion_ dollars laying around.

<comment><USER21> Apple has indeed some great chip designs available. But one should not forget that the switch to Intel not only gave Apple nicer CPUs but also made Apple compatible to the rest of the PC world. You can run any x86 application on a Mac via VMware or Parallels. Moving away from Intel would kill this.

<comment><USER22> I've been wondering, is it practically possible to have a dual arch hardware + OS?

The kernel would run on an ARM processor, along with all the supported software. Any x86 binary would be offloaded to the intel cpu. Sharing RAM and even the remaining hardware would be nearly impossible I guess. Not sure though. This way it can be like the integrated / discrete gpu design and switch can be done a lot less painfully.

<comment><USER4> _I 've been wondering, is it practically possible to have a dual arch hardware + OS?_

Yes of course, we were doing it back in the 1980s with hybrid 6502/Z80 systems, the Z80 side running CP/M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > We can't just buy hideous Xeon workstations from Dell and install macOS on > them.

Sure you can. Or rather, you can install the [free] VMWare ESXi hypervisor on said hideous box, and then install macOS on _that_. The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration. Apple _want_ you to only run macOS guests through ESXi if you're on macOS hardware, but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.

Default new USB device attachments to the macOS VM; add a USB Bluetooth dongle; use SR/IOV to feed the VM a dedicated video card, and plug your monitor into that. You'll never even know ESXi is running.

Side benefit: cheap sibling Linux VMs!

<comment><USER11> > The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration.

ON APPLE HARDWARE. If you run MacOS on non-Apple hardware it isn't officially supported at all, effectively piracy, and you need to hack ESXi to make it work at all (ESXi Unlocker, etc).

> but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.

Except the license agreements (both Apple and VMWare), and the fact that ESXi won't do it unless modified.

<comment><USER23> > If you run MacOS on non-Apple hardware it isn't officially supported at all

By "officially supported", what I mean is that Apple supports _VMWare_ in developing drivers for ESXi, so neither new versions of ESXi, nor macOS updates, will suddenly break macOS ESXi guests. You can put the same expectations on the stability of the ESXi hypervisor in running Apple software as you can on Apple hardware in running Apple software. (This contrasts with the Hackintosh driver ecosystem, where every time macOS updates you have to figure your compatibility out all over again.)

Now, the other half of that—the stability of _your hardware_ in running ESXi, etc.—is up to you. Obviously, you can't take your Dell into an Apple Store and expect support.

VMWare _sort of_ does support you, though, insofar as it's the free-tier support (you can get better if you pay for VSphere), and insofar as whatever problem you're facing is a problem _with_ ESXi—or a problem in _your hardware 's_ ESXi compatibility—instead of a problem in how ESXi handles macOS guests. But, as I said above, the latter is _Apple 's_ problem to worry about; such bugs get fixed, to support the people who _are_ virtualizing macOS on Apple hardware.

> the fact that ESXi won't do it unless modified

Not actually true! ESXi won't _create_ a macOS guest without hacks. It's perfectly happy, however, to _import_ a macOS VM created using VMWare Fusion. There's even a quick menu-action to upload VMs directly from Fusion into ESXi.

> Except the license agreements (both Apple and VMWare)

A license agreement doesn't stop you from doing anything. It doesn't have hands to restrain you from typing the commands that will install macOS. You stop _yourself, because_ of a license agreement. Or you don't. Up to you, really. It's not like either Apple or VMWare is going to stop selling you their products, let alone sue you, for what you do with their software on your own computer.

(Now, if you're an employee of a company, then the licence agreement might indeed have "hands" to stop you with: the hands of the lawyers of the company, enforcing the company's agreement with VMware/Apple. This is why [https://macminicolo.net/](https://macminicolo.net/) exists, instead of just being an ESXi farm.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a software developer, I can't say I really care about the Mac Pro.

It's not to say that I don't care about performance, I have a MacBook Pro bought by my work that's about 5 months old and it's great.

But honestly, I run the hell out of this thing and I never really notice a slowdown.

I can have Chrome open with a bunch of tabs (I probably limit it to a dozen before I force myself to start reading/closing them), multiple VM's spun up with vagrant/virtual box, a Windows 10 VM via Parallels, an entire linux software stock via docker-compose, Sublime Text, Slack, SourceTree, PostMan, 4 or 5 terminals, a VPN manager, multiple web servers and not notice any slowdown whatsoever.

If a new MBP came out and offered 32GB of RAM, I'd take the option. But do I really have any reason based on reality that I need more than 16GB of RAM? No.

Would I ever buy a 4K or 5K Mac Pro? Unless I had some sort of big data or scientific computing need, no. And even then, wouldn't I have a cluster somewhere else for that? Probably.

</comment><comment><USER25> _" Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It's a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change."_

Miserable is a strong word. Ubuntu is hardly miserable. Chromebooks are pretty much guaranteed to be able to run Linux without worry, and installing Ubuntu on them shouldn't be much of a hassle.

I personally run Fedora on an XPS 15 and have had very few issues with it, which is crazy since I'm bleeding edge everything by that count (hardware and software).

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm sorry to pop your Apple bubble, but I find Ubuntu much better than macOs.

And RIP Apple hardware, I give you the Hackintosh!

</comment><comment><USER27> This was interesting until he got to the unsubstantiated (maybe he elaborates elsewhere?) partisan jabs at windows, linux and Google.

<comment><USER28> Yup thats typically this guys MO. Him and Grubber make it pretty lame to be a modern Apple fan. They whine about Apple not doing what they want, they whine about people critiquing Apple, and then they make up or spread nonsense about Apples competitors. They are the "Macs can't game" Windows fan boys of the 90s.

I would be surprised if he's ever really given Ubuntu or Fedora a serious chance. I think he thinks Google's Android and Kindle Fire have the same UI. I listened to him once bitch about Windows and it was so obvious he hadn't installed it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some of the Mac people I follow seem to be begging Apple to build a PC-like box:

\- [https://chuqui.com/2016/10/how-apple-could-have-avoided- much...](https://chuqui.com/2016/10/how-apple-could-have-avoided-much-of-the- controversy/)

\- [http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/11/04/2230](http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/11/04/2230)

\- [http://www.libertypages.com/clarktech/?p=751](http://www.libertypages.com/clarktech/?p=751)

<comment><USER30> Hey! Thanks for the link. I don't really want a completely PC-like box (I have a mini, and want to upgrade that), but I do want something that can be expandable somehow.

I'm pretty sure I won't get it (or worse, that I'll have to pay through the nose for it at Mac Pro-grade prices), but I'd really like to get a more modular Mac.

I don't think that Apple will do it, though. Jony "VP of Narration" Ive has a thing about unbroken surfaces, and even though I like Apple's overall aesthetics, I don't think there's any way a modular system fits into the Mac "look".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any particular reason why Apple should sell Macs at all, given they make almost all their money from other products? Besides Xcode, is there any other app (or equivalent) that can't be had on other systems?

<comment><USER32> First of all, Apple is making more money from Macs than iPads. In the last quarter, they had ~$6B in revenue from Macs versus $4.2B from iPads (~$7B same quarter last year). Are you seriously suggesting that Apple should drop that kind of money just because the iPhone had ~$30B instead? (Source: [http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy16datasum.pdf](http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy16datasum.pdf)) They're not going to make macOS a paid OS for sale on other hardware, which means they'd lose $4-6B per quarter, that's $20b revenue a year they can use to improve all products.

They're not going to keep making that much money from iPhone forever, it will decline eventually as competitors keep getting better and better. Google is entering the market with products that finally rivals iPhones and Microsoft/HP/Dell with Surface/Spectre/XPS products that does rival Macbooks.

This is Apple, they want total control of the entire stack and the only way to do this is to do it themselves. macOS will not survive on other hardware with questionable QA. I started hating W10 simply because of its driver issues, automatic brightness stuff that I can't turn off on SP4. Same Win10 on my Macs, it works much better and consistent. There's no way Apple will do this to macOS.

<comment><USER31> Five years down the line Macs will be an even smaller piece of the pie. The way Apple has been neglecting Macs has me concerned of a not too distant dystopia where Apple decides that Macs and macOS are not worth the trouble any more. Sure they will still use macOS internally for development that they can run on older Macs or generic PCs themselves. Swift Playgrounds on the iPad will be the way most developers get to make apps. Larger and more prominent developers like Adobe, Microsoft, big name game publishers etc. get some sort of special treatment, e.g they get to buy iOS "devkits" (2013 Mac Pro preloaded with Xcode or some sort of macOS VM) from Apple for a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you know what you want a workstation for, you probably have enough know how to get a Supermicro barebones system and stuff it with the exact CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSDs, and ANY peripheral you want. More flexibility and cheaper. There are even outfits that will build it for you if you're feeling lazy.

And when Linux breaks, there is a wealth of knowledge on how to fix it. I have found OS X's community to be plagued by the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER34> This article is ridiculous.

> Nobody else can make macOS hardware. If Apple doesn't address someone's > hardware needs, there's no alternative.

So that's a bad thing right, the closed ecosystem?

Oh no wait.

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but [even] if Microsoft > did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up

Talking about which, that decade an entirely unfounded claim. It doesn't even attempt to make arguments, instead waiting for the mac vs windows users flamewar to start. Then to add some fuel, it says linux sucks as well, not backing up that claim either, inviting anyone using a linux-based desktop (and by extent, the rest of the open source desktop community) to add to the flamewar.

And it's all for nothing. The article is telling about how bad it would be not to get another mac pro, using a hundred arguments that come down to "I like OS X software and software that runs on OS X, and the pro hardware is better than the consumer version [duh]". Apple cannot possibly not have thought of this yet.

PS. My memory must be wrong but I thought I remembered a different company boldly (bravely?) experimenting with hardware.

</comment><comment><USER35> A strange fact is that many modern PCIe graphics cards work with MacOS, despite the last extendable Mac Pro being sold years ago. Also, Apple knows exactly what hardware they have sold over the years. They could put a whitelist in their OS to prevent Hackintosh or make it at least a lot harder (almost everything can be patched out of course, but it is funny that you can open "About my Mac" and it happily shows configurations that have nothing to do with a real Mac).

I take this as a hint that they secretly tolerate hackintosh at a small scale. They can't allow it altogether, and anyway it is nothing for most Mac customers (who want the "it just works" experience), but some people in the "pro" segment who need the extra power and don't fear some hacking can be satisfied that way. I'm thinking especially about small iOS or macOS developers, or people who work with audio/video, who need a beefy macOS machine.

</comment><comment><USER36> The problem with this article is that Marco presents a rational argument for the need of a Mac Pro, but Apple is way past rationality in their view of the future; they are engaged in a _holy war_ against _local computing_ , against ports, wired connections, and against being tethered to a desk.

<comment><USER37> What is irrational about this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> While there is no doubt that Apple did neglect the Mac Pro, I am quite hopeful that it gets a significant refresh in the spring. As with so many Mac releases, Apple is limited by the Intel release schedules. That is why the Mac Pro has to wait till spring for a refresh. And that the Mac Pro has not being bumped in smaller features points to me to a rather larger change.

And it would make a lot of sense to go back to a bit more "PC" like design like the predecessor of the current machine. That would mean that Apple has less pressure to update it frequently, it would be sufficient to have updates whenever Intel releases new CPUs, but all the other stuff, especially graphics cards, could be updated independent of Apple releases.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It's a fantastic server OS but > a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.

I disagree! A Linux desktop gets as good as your customization.

For me nothing can replace my setup: Debian + custom Stumpwm window manager

Pro users want flexibility.

<comment><USER39> I think for some people customisation is a pain, especially when you have to workarounds bugs or find some hardware configuration incompatibility.

Not saying there's anything wrong with people enjoying tinkering with their setup, but I guess the advantage OSX offers you is most of that is taken care of you on the desktop, you just install your apps on top

<comment><USER40> It is a misconception that mainstay Linux distributions have any sort of hardware or software incompatibility (aside from Mac- or Windows-only targeted software). That said, you are correct that people use OSX because it's literally 0 set up and configuration.

<comment><USER41> There's a lot of incompabilities on new hardware. Usually Linux kernel needs about 6 months to catch up with latest Intel or NVidia products. Also, try to use an iPhone with Linux computer - it is a nightmare. I have Windows installed in VirtualBox vm solely for iTunes's sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think this is the first article on HN that touches on the real problem with the Mac lineup. It's not that the notebook aren't powerful enough (they're notebooks, not desktop replacements) it's that there isn't a viable Mac backend to do the heavy lifting.

They discontinued the rackable servers, yet require developers to do software testing and compiling on MacOS. On what? Racks of macbooks and imac mini apparently.

What backend are we supposed to render on? A single, 3 year old Mac pro?

I get wanting to only sell in highly profitable segments, but maybe they should give developers a little sugar

</comment><comment><USER43> Stop begging to get crumbs from Apple. They are big company run by adults. They've been exploiting our desire to get their computers for a long time.

They make some really nice computers, but the whole point is that there are others. I really miss times when I would assemble my own computer. Obviously you can't do this with laptops, but I still miss freedom it gave me.

I am exploring how to get my work done on something else, for start on desktop, some nice linux machine for start.

I tried several times in the past, but without us actually using linux, there will never be real need to fix issues that it has.

</comment><comment><USER44> _3\. "Hackintoshes" aren't good enough. ↩_

Is this really true? Yes, there are currently support issues, but this would seem to be _because_ Apple exclusively makes its own hardware and doesn't legally permit running their OS on anything else. Might macOS thrive if it was retargeted to (or at least officially permitted use of) high-end 3rd-party hardware? Microsoft doesn't make their own high-end workstations, and Windows seems to be doing just fine.

<comment><USER29> Marco does iOS development, and there are a number of features that simply won't run on a Hackintosh. Anything involving crypto is dicey, and stuff that relies on (for instance) having an official serial number (like iMessage) will also fail.

But that is irrelevant for a lot other use cases.

<comment><USER45> >and stuff that relies on (for instance) having an official serial number (like iMessage) will also fail.

Which is not true. I have gotten my iMessage to work without having to clone a serial number.

<comment><USER30> I'm curious about that, since iMessage and iTunes Match have been a constant source of trouble to one of my colleagues. He also mentions that the device is flagged as "Untrusted" in Find My Mac...

<comment><USER45> The idea is to generate a valid serial number (in form) that is not used by someone else. Not sure if things have changed, though, but I used this last year and it worked. It still shows up on my account as an iMac 2013.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/2wohwn/getting_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/2wohwn/getting_imessage_working_on_10102_generating/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not sure what the author point was. He told us that chips aren't getting faster, so the only way to add speed was to add cores, then he told us that we can get 22 cores from a Mac Pro. As far as I know no other desktop can deliver 22 cores, so what is he griping about? Is he upset that Apple hasn't released a Pro with 48 cores?

<comment><USER47> You can only get maximum 6 cores from a Mac Pro currently. He is saying that the modern processors they should be using have 22 cores.

<comment><USER36> You can custom order a 12 core Mac Pro from the Apple Store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and > everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software > ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at > least a decade to catch up — and they won't do everything right.

A whole decade to catch up? I use Windows and macOS on daily basis for web development and various other tasks. I find macOS inferior to Windows in many ways. For example, window management on macOS is terrible and the transitions are nothing but annoying (personal preference) . Can't cut and paste with keyboard, can't lock your screen with keyboard, finder, itunes, and the task manager are all garbage. There are many other examples. That's not to say there aren't many things that are better than Windows or other operating systems, but the statement above is exaggerated.

<comment><USER49> > Can't cut and paste with keyboard, can't lock your screen with keyboard...

Uh, are you using some weird KVM or something? There are keyboard shortcuts for both of those.

<comment><USER50> I assume he's talking about files in Finder, where you can't just CMD+x, CMD+v like you'd expect (though I think there is some kind of CMD+SOMETHING+V shortcut that will move a file after copying it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> For every 'pro', how many people buy a Macbook/MBP for the logo and use it as a glorified Facebook/occasional assignment machine. It's an easier audience to keep happy and probably more profitable.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is the 2013 Mac Pro the best performing Apple-supported Mac computer? Or are there older full ATX Mac Pros with dual CPUs or something that would outperform them?

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if it's possible to offload the stuff that requires a heavy CPU load to the cloud. Spot instances on aws are really cheap per hour.

</comment><comment><USER54> If I were "Pro" relying on OS X, I would build good PC compatible with macOS and just install hackintosh. Much better experience.

</comment><comment><USER55> I personally don't really care how nerdy criticism sounds like to me. MacBook Pro still the best developer laptop I have ever use. Even, you just keep a closed MBP on everywhere in your house, it looks so like a piece of fine art rather than an electronic device to stand out.

<comment><USER55> Really, say what product I personally like get down vote?</comment></comment>


LinkedIn, HiQ spat presents big questions for freedom, innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/LinkedIn-HiQ-spat-presents-big-questions-for-11274133.php <comment><USER2> As someone who once oversaw the operation of a web crawler I can tell you its pretty simple, if it is "Okay" then the robots.txt file will tell you its allowed. If you look at the LinkedIn robots.txt ([https://linkedin.com/robots.txt](https://linkedin.com/robots.txt)) you will see it is carefully groomed to allow various search engines look through specific sections of their web site, the rest are disallowed.

Pretty much all of the case law comes down as there is a perfectly valid copyright on the 'collection' of a web site regardless of ownership of particular pieces, and the robots.txt is a well known and well understood mechanism for informing 'authorization'

There is a "value" to LinkedIn to letting Google and other search engines crawl them, you get to see pages in your search results pointed at LinkedIn, so LinkedIn lets them crawl their pages.

At the end of the day this is _exactly_ a question of value. Microsoft knows that the collection of information in LinkedIn is valuable for a number of uses, if you want to pay them some of that value to get access to it, fine, if not then don't use it.

Here is one possible outcome; Microsoft will tell them what it will cost to use their info, HiQ will probably not be able to meet it because they've built their existing pricing structure around "free" access, and then as they are going down the drain Microsoft will buy their assets and technology and LinkedIn will get this new service you can buy from them to help you find and retain people.

<comment><USER3> From what I've been told, if the data is factual, such as current employment information, then it doesn't fall under copyright.

Interpretation of that factual data would fall under copyright though.

<comment><USER2> Kind of, kind of not. It is true that the language of Copyright law calls out 'facts' as something that is not being protected by copyright, _how_ you get the facts has a large bearing on whether or not you can reproduce them.

There is a _lot_ of case law around this stuff as you might imagine. I certainly haven't followed all of it but my interest in information economics has lead me to read fairly extensively about it. And I'm not a lawyer, and especially not a Copyright lawyer so it is entirely possible that everything I have come to know is pure bollocks, consider yourself so warned :-).

Generally in reading about these things there are 'facts' and 'how you got access to them' that come out. There are lots of cases where the "collection" of facts has been upheld to be protected. So for example the "Machinists Handbook" is a collection of facts about machining and the handbook is protected by copyright, even though the specific dimensions of various thread pitches are just 'facts'. Perhaps more interesting has been cases involving national sports leagues against companies and fans who do things like "live tweet" a sports event. They have argued successfully that by buying a ticket to the event you have agreed to the terms of that admission which expressly prohibits you from reproducing those facts in any form. So while it may be a "fact" the Buster Posey just struck out, if you learned of that fact by sitting in AT&T park at a game you can't legally "tweet" it without violating your agreement with Major League Baseball that you agreed to when you bought the ticket.

It has similarly been held (look at a lot of CraigsList vs a bunch of people) that automating access to a web site through scraping is an access that you have to be explicitly allowed. That allowance comes in the terms of service of the web site and is expressed by the robots.txt file (and the available terms of service contracts on the site).

What it boils down to is that the collection of facts in a web site ARE protected by Copyright. Further, in exchange for granting you access to the information, the Copyright owner CAN put restrictions on how you may further use the facts you discover there. If you wish to use the information in a way the Copyright owner objects too, you must get the 'facts' through some other source and not the Copyright owner's collection.

And yes, getting it out of Google's cache of the pages does not count. See the Craiglist vs 3Taps ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.)) dispute to get a feel for how the court views things. The simplest interpretation I can make from those events was that Google's caching pages counts as fair use (it makes results faster) but people taking the page from Google's cache is either a CFAA or Copyright violation and thus disallowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting to think about how this differs from Craigslist going after scrapers. Linkedin is objecting on the basis of DMCA (copyrights) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (alleging unlawful access of their public website).

>Nate Cardozo, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said copyright law doesn't apply to this case because information from LinkedIn profiles, like when someone worked at a particular company, are facts, not creative works like music or films.

I wonder if copyright applied to Craigslist posts or if the fact that a house is for rent is just a fact.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a fine line between limiting the free speech of these personal information aggregators and violating the privacy of people. Right now, there seems to be a lawless and limitless environment for the aggregators. They freely present people's physical address history, phone numbers, relatives, date of birth, etc. to the open web.

I hope some reasonable restraints will be put in place. Something like aggregated address history can only be displayed on official government websites with rate limits.

</comment><comment> shawn-butler Seems identical to podmappr/3taps v Craigslist which ended up in a settlement of something like a million USD to Craigslist.

The CFAA is such a horribly written statute. It needs to be completely rethought.

</comment><comment><USER6> On phone and not sure of how to format a quote. Can anyone explain how this from their terms of services affects copyright claims. It appears that they do not own the content on user profiles and shouldn't be able to sue based on it:

> You own all of the content, feedback, and personal information you provide > to us, but you also grant us a non-exclusive license to it.

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had the very unfortunate pleasure of being neighbors with HiQ when we shared a coworking space in downtown SF. They were aggressively selling and marketing HR software that alerted employers when their employees updated their LinkedIn profiles, indicating an intent to quit.

I've got no problem with the business, and LinkedIn's suit is probably an overreach, but by God were the HiQ people annoying. I remember the CEO pretend boxing with their salesmen to get them amped up (in our rather open, shared office). Quintessential white good ol boys club mentality.</comment>


10 Years of Atari/Atari Games VaxMail - <AUTHOR> http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/

<comment><USER2> This archive has been a personal reminder to watch what I say in all digital communication. Even if I think that my post is "internal only" or "private", it can still end up online.

I say this because one of these files has an email that my dad wrote nearly 30 years ago. I'm willing to bet that my dad had no idea that the email he was writing would be read by his son, who would be slightly embarrassed at the fact he was writing in ALL CAPS, and wishing that his dad had used a little more tact in what he was saying.

(The email I'm referring to is in "vax84.txt" search for "THE FUTURE AT ATARI")

<comment><USER3> Are you just now discovering this stuff? Because I read all these emails on Jed's website, way back in 2001 or so.

(side note: this page has his last name as Margolis, when it is really Margolin)

<comment><USER2> I've known about this archive for quite a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It completely amazes me how nothing has changed. The only difference from Today's email is that those vax mails were usually longer, more polite, and full of nostalgia.

Take baby announcements emails for example. They're identical word for word as today's. I always thought people recently got better at writing those. But no, the pattern was established back then and, shockingly, we haven't changed the way we're making babies, or changed standards in describing a healthy birth.

Back then, and still today, you could guess the person's personality by his/her emails.

Also, back then, they were trying to improve productivity as a constant struggle, just as we do today. Interestingly, nothing has improved much in that field. It's still a rat race. Everybody recognizes the loss of productivity in large businesses, and there seems to be no real fix.

<comment><USER5> > more polite

I know you are correct in 99.9% of all situations as email used to be taken more professionally. ...but I did find this little gem in there, it made me laugh and reminded me on how so little has changed in software/process/delivery over the last thirty years.

    		From:	KIM::LOGG            1-FEB-1984 09:54
    		To:	@SYS$MAIL:JUNK
    		Subj:	More on FXL letter (or the second biweekly Jeff Boscole letter)
    		...
    		The only reason I was given why the cart was to be released within
    		a week of the meeting was to have ONE week worth of sales for the first
    		quarter.  WHAT A SHITTY, GOD DAMNED, FUCKING CSDKFHAS FHLAVFHJ EXCUSE!!!!
    		What ever happened to quality which the name ATARI is supposed to represent?
    		Where was VCS management??  I would hope that someone would stand up and
    		say "THE GAME IS NOT READY.  WE WILL RELEASE IT WHEN IT IS DONE!!"  Who
    		are they trying to make look good?

</comment></comment><comment> T-hawk Yes, there are some gems in here, nestled among the chaff of new VAX commands and building operational schedules. I found this bit amazing, from vax84:

      This brings up one of many problems with games of skill that
      include monetary payoffs ... As an example, consider a
      multi-player space war type game where you win money by eliminating other
      players and receiving what they have won so far.  The house percentage
      could be falling into the sun.  What do you suppose would happen out in
      the parking lot if you overheard the guy in the next console scream "I just
      got a ship worth $10,000!" and you had just been about to return that
      much to your home base before some turkey blew you out of the sky...

Rusty foresaw EVE Online twenty years ahead of time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely fascinating, I found the collapse emails really telling, this is a long one: <http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/vax84.txt>

    		From:	KIM::FRANUSIC       23-MAR-1984 15:02
    		To:	@SYS$MAIL:JUNK
    		Subj:	THE FUTURE AT ATARI

    		LATELY THERE'S BEEN SOME CONFUSION OVER THE "ORGANIZATIONAL
    		ADJUSTMENTS" THAT WE'VE BEEN EXPERIENCING HERE AT ATARI.
    		LET'S PUT IT ALL INTO PERSPECTIVE ...

    		AT THE END OF 1983, ATARI ANNOUNCED LOSSES OF OVER 500 MILLION
    		DOLLARS.  THERE WAS SOME TALK THAT THESE LOSSES WERE ACTUALLY
    		CARRIED ON THE BOOKS OVER SEVERAL PRECEDING QUARTERS, AND THAT
    		MR. MORGAN WAS SIMPLY GIVEN A FRESH START.  THE FACT REMAINS
    		THAT ATARI HAS BEEN, AND STILL IS, LOSING AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF
    		MONEY, ENOUGH TO MAKE ANY COCAINE IMPORTER'S HEAD SPIN.

    		THE HOME COMPUTER MARKET HAS FALLEN FLAT ON IT'S FACE.
    		PEOPLE FINALLY REALIZED THAT THEY DIDN'T NEED A HOME COMPUTER
    		FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT PLAYING GAMES.  MOST OF THE PERCIEVED NEED
    		FOR A HOME COMPUTER COULD ONLY BE ATTRIBUTED TO MARKETING HYPE.

I edited out the rest... was taking up too much space on the hacker board

</comment><comment><USER6> I love their early version of crontab.

          Find out what is todays date, ala 830717 (1983, 7'th month, 17'th day)
        as well as what day of the week it is (Sunday) and the standard three letter
        abbreviation (coincidently the first three letters of the long name) (Sun in this case).  The proper spelling for Wed is WEDNESDAY, by the way.

          Look for each of the following and do the appropriate thing (execute
        the command file or type the text file):

          'weekday'.com	! as in "SUNDAY"
          'weekday'.day	! SUNDAY.DAY will be typed
          'dow'.com	! SUN.COM will be executed
          'dow'.day	! SUN.DAY will be typed
          'date'.com	! 830717.com, remember?
          'date'.day	! this gets typed
          daily.com	! every day (7 days a week, not 5)
          daily.day	! this one too

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, lots of memories there (1984-ish, anyway).

You'll notice a bunch of people leaving after July 84, which is when the Tramiels took over. Coin-op remained with Warner. About a week into the split, there was an email sent out with the subject "Look! Two companies joined by a single computer network!" which caused the Tramiel Atari to be dropped from the net within a couple of hours.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to see that those missives show really good grammar, spelling and formatting for the most part, differently from today's standards where orthography has somehow become optional. Even for educated people in this field.

</comment><comment><USER9> Was I wrong to expect Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's name to be in there somewhere?

<comment><USER10> Jobs and Wozniak were full time at Apple 6 or 7 years before these emails. Seems like a long shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Didn't click on any of the links. It's creepy to read other people's emails

<comment><USER7> This looks a dump of some internal mailing lists. I didn't see any "private" email. You'll see that a bunch of phone numbers and addresses had been scrubbed, too.

I'd agree that it's probably more creepy if you never worked there.

<comment><USER12> I would feel a bit misled if most of the internal mailing lists I've been on were ever made public. I suppose it depends on the size, though. I've been on research-group mailing lists of ~10 people, and that would _really_ feel like a breach of confidence, to release to the world at large emails that were intended for a relatively small circle of colleagues. On the other hand, if someone made a 200-person mailing list's archives public, then I would probably not be as annoyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> so fricking awesome</comment>


Ask HN: AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know why the AdWords traffic estimator tool shows a large number of monthly searches for some keywords but 0 estimated daily clicks (regardless of the value entered for Max CPC $)?
As an example, I entered the keyword "alerts" with a $100 Max CPC, and received the following estimates: 823,000 global monthly searches, 450,000 local monthly searches, and 0 estimated daily clicks.
I also tried the keyword "personal search," which shows 22,000 global monthly searches, 12,100 local monthly searches, and estimated daily clicks of 19. <comment><USER2> The keyword alerts is too vague. I think the estimated daily clicks is based on the CPC and the competitors you'll have to face if you choose to bid on that keyword.

Because personal search is more specific, you might actually get up to 19 clicks per day based on the estimates that google gives you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Adwords keywords traffic estimator tool does not report acqurate results for cliks. Add the keywords to an adwords campaign to get more acqurate results on CPC and estimated clicks.

</comment><comment><USER4> "64"</comment>


Information Architecture in Two Really Easy Steps - <AUTHOR> http://www.factore.ca/on-the-floor/46-information-architecture-in-two-really-easy-steps

<comment><USER2> One thing I should point out here: "information architecture" refers to what information goes on what page (a design concept). It doesn't refer to anything such as database schemas or any other programming concepts.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting - typically I've only come across the term 'information architecture' as it relates to design.

That being said, it's not surprising considering how much leeway for interpretation 'information architecture' has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This could be subtitled "IA for really simple sites"</comment>


LoRaWAN distance world record broken twice: 766km using 25mW power - <AUTHOR> https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/article/lorawan-distance-world-record <comment><USER2> LoRa looks like a really cool technology, but I'm always a little bit hesitant about advocating adopting a proprietary protocol, and LoRaWAN is very much proprietary.

<comment><USER3> LoRa is.. But LoRaWAN is an open standard, governed by LoRa Alliance.

<comment><USER4> So, in the article, I saw the picture of a 'base station'...where can I find more info about the towers (locations, hardware)?

Does a single company own/control all the towers?

<comment><AUTHOR> These base stations (we call them gateways) are owned and operated by individuals, communities or companies. The gateways demodulate transmissions and forward them to The Things Network's public community network.

There are currently over 8000 of these gateways worldwide (see also the map on [https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map)).

<comment><USER5> What is the incentive for a hobbyist to set up and maintain a gateway, given that the protocol is not open?

<comment><USER6> Most probably don't want to have a say in the protocol specifications, they just want to use the protocol and spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's far enough to send email[1]. It's incredible the kind of distances that they've been able to demonstrate with LoRa, even with the low data rates it means that wireless sensors it monitoring can be done with small batteries and solar charging almost indefinitely. Weather stations and farms are perfect for this kind of thing.

[1] [https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

<comment><USER8> As far as I can tell the only reason such an insane result was possible is because the transmission was in clear air. Using LoRa in a city you'd be happy to get 10 km.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, transmissions that have line of sight can go extremely far, mostly limited by the curvature of the Earth, which is why these records are typically broken using helium balloons. There have also been several interesting ground-to-ground records [1] [2]

The distances are of course much lower if there are obstacles (like concrete buildings) between the transmitter and receiver.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adhWIo-7gr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adhWIo-7gr4) [2]: [https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/article/atmospheric- duct](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/article/atmospheric-duct)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a Kickstarter attempt to use LoRaWAN from a satellite. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ambasat/ambasat-1-an- ed...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ambasat/ambasat-1-an-educational- space-satellite-kit)

<comment><USER10> Inmarsat offer a commercial service [https://www.inmarsat.com/press- release/inmarsat-actility-del...](https://www.inmarsat.com/press- release/inmarsat-actility-deliver-worlds-first-global-lorawan-iot-network- empowering-business-applications/) and Hiber have their own Hiberband protocol but provide LoraWAN gateways you can use to uplink an area [https://hiber.global/](https://hiber.global/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there good alternatives in this space that don't have super expensive base stations?

Could you use a general purpose sdr like an HackRF as a base station?

<comment><USER12> The cheapest 8-channel LoRaWAN gateways can be found for 69$ ([https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/thethingsindo...](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/thethingsindoor/)). Prices have come down significantly. Outdoor gateways with IP67 rating can be found for about 400$.

Alternatively two LoRa radios can just talk point-to-point between each other.

<comment><USER11> I thought the prices was licensing related

"Alternatively two LoRa radios can just talk point-to-point between each other"

Is this a new development? Last I checked this wasn't possible.

Can I connect up little $6 dollar ESP LoRa modules to talk to each other?

The comments here suggest it's not possible: [https://www.cnx- software.com/2017/10/13/this-ttgo-board-comb...](https://www.cnx- software.com/2017/10/13/this-ttgo-board-combines-esp32-lora-radio-and-oled- display-for-just-10/)

<comment><USER13> Connecting two Lora modules ad hoc has always been possible. The catch is you won't be part of the LoraWan network.

<comment><USER14> I would say boycott LoraWan.

You are only feeding Semtech, the Microsoft of Lora, which has the patents on basic information encoding/decoding.

The only gateways you can have which listen on multiple channels are damn expensive.

<comment><USER15> Gateways are about 200$ fully assembled, it's not _that_ expensive. (Source: I built a gateway with 8 channels)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What frequencies are these using? Also what is the speed? I assume its low frequency and pretty slow.

<comment><USER17> LoRa can be as low a 4 bytes per second IIRC. Yes, bytes per second. I'm not sure where it tops out. 10's of byres per second maybe?

<comment><USER15> 250 bits/s with a maximum payload of 59 bits is the lowest limit on LoRa.

<comment><USER17> Wow! Way faster than I remembered! It was a while back. I spent some time trying to design a payload for a slow application with connectivity challenges once upon a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're also wondering what are the SF7, SF9, SF11 and unused SF12, I just found [0]

[0] - [https://docs.exploratory.engineering/lora/dr_sf](https://docs.exploratory.engineering/lora/dr_sf)

</comment><comment><USER18> How will this scale with lots of active transmitters? Are the doing some kind of distributed SIMO?

<comment><USER19> It doesn't/didn't, unless they have relaxed some rules or opened more frequencies for experimentation. Last time I checked LoRa guidelines required each node to stay quiet most of the time for very good reasons, that is, one could transmit only for a short time (iirc just a few minutes per day). More than enough for remote sensors/alerts etc but hardly usable for any other purpose beyond research. Still impressive results though! Let's hope its success will push for opening of more bands so that traffic rules can be relaxed a bit, but I'm not expecting free (as in unregulated) public availability anytime soon: that would be a mess.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Things Network's public community network indeed has guidelines to ensure fair access for the entire community.

If you deploy a private LoRaWAN network with your own gateways and your own servers, you only need to comply with the limits imposed by local regulators for the (unlicensed) spectrum you're using. In Europe's 868MHz ISM band, transmitters are limited by a 1% duty cycle. In the US's 915MHz band, transmissions are limited to a 400ms dwell time. Other regions have similar limits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any open alternatives to LoRa? I would like to setup a network that would cover a 20km radius even if it is only 1kb/s

<comment><USER21> I don't know how open it is, but there is Wi-Sun to try out. They have a statement on open-ness: [https://www.wi-sun.org/wp-content/uploads/Wi-SUN- Alliance-Po...](https://www.wi-sun.org/wp-content/uploads/Wi-SUN-Alliance- Policy-on-Open-Source-Implementations-1V0.pdf).

Ti's long range 15.4 implementation is not open but is much cheaper than LoRa, you just need two $20 Launchpad boards, one as a basestation and one as your client.

You could also just use the LaunchPad's packet radio api to implement your own simple protocol, you just need to remember to keep to the limitations imposed by the authorities (duty cycle, wait time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What sort of bit rate are they getting with this? And to what extent is it directional?

<comment><USER10> SF10BW125 and SF11BW125 so 980-440 bits per second

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Note that 'm' in this title is 'miles'. Not a great idea to use this format and abbreviations for alternate measurement systems.

<comment><USER24> Yet another reason the metric system is superior.

<comment><USER25> I agree that metric is better but this is ridiculous. Miles should be abbreviated mi.

<comment><USER26> "This" being the HN submission. @moderators - can you #fix? The linked article uses the word miles.

<comment><USER27> Can the mods fix? They won't fix several other submissions which I've pointed out were misleading, so...

Easy proof the mods aren't neutral by any means. Recorded and added to the 3.2GB file of shame they've got on them (and that's the smallest one. I've got stuff from MicroSoft, RedHat, and Debian groups that would make the mods puke trying to figure out how to word the headline without causing a civil war. Too bad they'll never get it with their current behavior.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And still my 4g and WiFi won't work that well

<comment><USER29> You probably get more than 100 bits per second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow!!! Lorawans future is bright</comment>


Reverse Network Effects: Why our large social networks may soon implode - <AUTHOR> http://platformed.info/reverse-network-effects-why-scale-may-be-the-biggest-threat-facing-todays-social-networks/

<comment><AUTHOR> Money Quote:

One would expect that the bigger the network, the more value users derive from it.

However, as networks scale, the value for users may drop for several reasons:

Connection: New users joining the online community may lower the quality of interactions and increase noise/spam through unsolicited connection requests.

Content: The network may fail to manage the abundance of content created on it and may fail to scale the curation of content created and the personalization of the content served to users.

Clout: The network may get inadvertently biased towards early users and promote them over users who join later.</comment>


A watcher for contributors to various projects: GraphQL with GitHub Actions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/contributors <comment><AUTHOR> The repository is self-updated: [https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/contributors/blob/master/....](https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/contributors/blob/master/.github/workflows/update- contributors.yml#L7)

<comment><USER2> Wow, really cool. I feel like using Github like this could really take off. Free storage and compute and scheduling. I'm definitely going to keep this in mind for any future fun projects--it seems like a scraper is an obvious use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For anyone interested in trying this, you need to set the ENV var `CONTRIBUTORS_TOKEN` with your github API token, then create a README.md with the following sections:

       ### [{project}](https://github.com/{owner}/{project}/)

       <!-- contributors-{project} starts -->
       contirbutors will be auto-populated here
       <!-- contributors-{project} ends -->

with the {owner} and {project} replaced, then after running authors.py the README will get auto-populated.

Very very cool.</comment>


Update on InfluxDB Clustering, High Availability and Monetization - <AUTHOR> https://influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clustering-high-availability-and-monetization/ <comment><USER3> I've advocated for and implemented several InfluxDB installations in production over the last year+, and one of the considerations was always that non-alpha (prod-ready) clustering was always promised in the 'next version' that was just around the corner.

Several months ago it seemed clear that the team was overly optimistic, and it's just disappointing to see that now the clustering will be available only in a paid (minimum $400!) option or on their hosted service.

I understand the business considerations here, but it feels like a bait n' switch for all the people who evaluated/used InfluxDB in single-node operation as a temporary measure while giving the team ample time to work out the clustering kinks.

Lesson learned I guess... but dang what an expensive lesson.

<comment><USER4> I agree, I've invested a bit of time building a monitoring stack with influx, and one of the main reasons I chose it was development velocity vs some of the competition. And from a while back, clustering was supposed to be a top-level issue, coming just around the corner. At this point I'm going to have to bite the bullet and go with a more cumbersome but mature solution, like opentsdb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes me think: an open-source project can be better off if it's _not_ controlled by any one company. While in Prometheus ([http://prometheus.io](http://prometheus.io)), we might still take a while before we have a clustered remote long-term storage, we'd never _prevent_ it because the project is independent of any company and we'd want the open- source project to be as good as it can be.

Also, there were some tentative thoughts about using InfluxDB as the main long-term storage backend for Prometheus, but that has become pretty much uninteresting now that clustering support (needed for LTS and durability) is basically cancelled for the open-source version.

Still, I guess I can understand that when you're a company, you need to focus on making money.

<comment><USER6> This is concerning to me, not because I use InfluxDB, but because my company is also a "pure play" OSS vendor. So it's always concerning to see a company fail to achieve success with the pure-play model, and wind up having to go "open core".

 _Also, there were some tentative thoughts about using InfluxDB as the main long-term storage backend for Prometheus, but that has become pretty much uninteresting now that clustering support (needed for LTS and durability) is basically cancelled for the open-source version._

True, but consider this: Given that InfluxDB (core) is Open Source, there's nothing to stop somebody else from coming along and building a version with clustering support. Whether that will happen or not is, of course, an open question.

<comment><USER7> _There 's nothing to stop somebody else from coming along and building a version with clustering support. Whether that will happen or not is, of course, an open question._

Clustering is really really hard. My personal experience with that class of problem is that it took 3 years to get it production ready, and that was for a simpler problem than what needs to be solved here.

The chances of a 3rd party implementing this given that InfluxData plan to have a commercial version seem very low. I'd expect that most companies who want to stay open source will treat this as a standard database that needs client-side sharding and HA (which is the recommend approach - <USER2> [https://influxdata.com/high-availability/](https://influxdata.com/high- availability/)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in what the pricing will be like at various scales, on Twitter the CEO (Paul Dix) indicated $400 month will be the basic offering for limited cores.

I guess time will tell, but a bigger deal than the money to me is will the clustering actually work well? Clustered databases is an extremely difficult problem. Seen it get better in the years in things like MsSQL, but even with that sort of resources it took a long time (years) for the newer availability model to become stable.

At Stack Overflow we are still using OpenTSBD behind Bosun. But HBase sucks to manage if you don't have any other reason to be using the technology. So I see a lot of users interested in using InfluxDB as the backend (and some do, Bosun can talk to it) because it is easier to get started. But if you know you will have to scale up eventually, all the options right now are not appealing in TSDB land :-/ So if some $$ really does get a good TSDB that scales and reasonable to manage then great, but I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER8> We're committed to making the clustering a world class product. You're right, it'll take time. However, we'll get there. We'll put the same focused effort and testing into it over the coming months and years that we put into the TSM storage engine, which is working remarkably well at significant loads.

In the meantime, the stuff we have going into the open source is going to make the standalone server (and thus anyone using open source options for HA or clustering) even more performant, stable, and scalable.

<comment><USER5> _...anyone using open source options for HA or clustering..._

What open-source option for clustering would this be if the main InfluxDB open-source version won't have clustering anymore? A fork or something built on top of multiple standalone servers somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think maybe the other HA options, such as using a relay or sharding as stated in [https://influxdata.com/high- availability/](https://influxdata.com/high-availability/)

<comment><USER5> That sounds plausible, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york This basically kills Influxdb for me. We're evaluating influxdb in stand-alone mode to collect limited metrics (grafana) with a view to eventually moving more and more data to Influxdb once clustering became available. $399 per month is ridiculous. Clustering is table stakes.

Lesson learnt: _before_ deploying a new OSS, check if they have a _credible_ plan to support the project. Otherwise skip.

<comment><USER9> I mean, honestly, $400/mo is table stakes too, if you're actually using a clustered database in production for anything serious.

I think HN in general is being a bit too cynical here. This is an OSS company trying to find a sustainable way to survive. There are going to be some tricky tradeoffs. "They should just charge $20/mo for us small guys!" is not a reasonable course of action.

Regardless of whether this particular pricing plan works out or not, I think it's a good idea for programmers to support other programmers trying to make money on OSS. We are all not served very well by the general attitude of "I heard about this technology last year, it should be $0 now".

<comment> noir-york How much do you pay per month for: Apache, Nginx, Varnish, Redis, memcached, compilers, interpreters, Nodejs, Cassandra, Linux, Postgresql?

We used to pay for this stuff - remember Sun? Things change.

I suspect what happened with InfluxData is that being venture funded, they see that the funding environment has changed and are racing towards revenue/cash- flow positive. And clustering as a premium feature is, apparently, the answer.

If clustering had been pegged as a premium feature _up front_ then neither I, nor I suspect would anyone else, have a problem. But it wasn't, hence the sour taste.

<comment><USER10> Yea, but even free software maintainers need money from somewhere. Especially if you want $software to continue improving.

It's fantastic that free software has increased so much in market share. I just wish that more companies would recognize that that only works if they actually pay for development of some projects in some way. That can be directly employing maintainers, contributing patches, sponsoring feature development.

Since that often doesn't suffice you sometimes end up with companies trying to make ends mean with "open-core" type models; even if they'd otherwise prefer not to go down that road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugh, we are a startup, we invested in influxdb on faith that it would "get there", developed around it, and now we can't afford what they want to charge for the scalable version.

Maybe we can avoid clustering with some workaround, (sharding) but I feel tricked.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry that you feel tricked. I hope that one of the open source options handles your use case if commercial software doesn't work for you.

However, we think that the community will be better off if we can continue to contribute to the open source InfluxDB. We want to invest heavily in open and closed source software. Ultimately the open source community will benefit from an open InfluxDB

<comment><USER11> A pricing model that scaled with usage and was more inexpensive at the low-end would, in my opinion, better serve your company and customers. That way you pull more people into the product and increase the overall size of the pie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People will find increasingly clever ways to work around the lack of clustering, as they always did. This could mean only the top-tier users will be paying, which must be a very small portion of the pie.

Even though this announcement is sold as something that will empower InfluxData to add even more cool features to the open source version, I'm actually worried that it won't be around as an open source product for very long. Let me explain.

InfluxDB is a very fine product but I don't think it has all the momentum it needs to keep going in the long term yet. That means it's still building that critical mass of supporters in an open source ecosystem. With this announcement, InfluxData is eroding the trust that small to medium-sized users had in it so the momentum slows down. If InfluxDB was a no-brainer for anyone starting a time-series project, it is not anymore. All the other alternatives need to be carefully analyzed and, even if InfluxDB is chosen, there is that voice in the back of your head saying you'll be in trouble if you exceed a single node's capacity. Eventually people will jump to the next TSDB solution that offers clustering as soon as it becomes avaiable. Then where are all those paying customers going? It'll then be easier and cheaper for InfluxDB to become a proprietary software company.

While there are some comparisons being made to what Nginx does with its Nginx Plus offering, I think it's the opposite situation. IIRC, since the early days, Nginx has offered a paid product with more features. And recently they have started to add those features to the open source version, so people got happier. InfluxDB has always promised clustering (it was a major selling point, go watch any presentation about it from 2 years ago), shipped the code (even if it's half-working as of now) and now announced it's removing the functionality. Suddenly any InfluxDB node you have (even if it's running just fine without clustering) looks like a lemon.

It's all such bad PR. And it's 2016, haven't hundreds of OSS companies been through this already? Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really don't see a point to worry about. So as of 0.12 the OSS product will change; however a new product will come out to bring in replication. Somehow they will produce a private binary that will do the same thing

Single node usage is great for most people; sure it can be useful to cluster and you have that option.

If there's limitations it's open source; those can be removed. Then people would likely use the fork that doesn't have that limitation.

I don't see evil here. Just trying to work on their product

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone is saying anything about it being evil, and it may even make sense for InfluxData the company. But for users, not having clustering (for scalability, long-term storage, and durability) will limit the value of the open-source version a lot in the long-term. As for the viability of a fork, see the other comments around that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "less than ½ of a percent are running active clusters." because it doesn't work. They have been TheatricDB to me for a long time, this is just another nail in the coffin.

</comment><comment><USER15> We use blueflood developed by Rackspace at Square which uses cassandra , coupled with a query layer called MQE ([https://github.com/square/metrics](https://github.com/square/metrics)). While it's actively developed, I definitely recommend taking a look if you are interested in highly scalable metrics system with decent strategy for rollups. (100k+ metrics/sec).

<comment><USER8> The reason we think InfluxDB is compelling as a standalone server is that you can get 300k metrics/sec on a single server. The scale is there for many use cases in the current release

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm pretty damn angry right now, but I'm sure that in a few days I'll get over it.

I run the tech side of a decent sized startup right now. Having joined ~4 years into the venture, one of my immediate concerns was the lack of visibility into how our system works. Keeping tabs on the performance of several hundred ETL pipelines is not super easy. I decided to double down on InfluxDB, changing the road-map of my infrastructure team.

Then, InfluxData introduced the TICK stack. I can get monitoring and alerting as well? Let's double down again!

I bought hardware, set up a cluster (painful), we filed bug reports, learned what sorts of queries not to run, and we were in good shape. I purchased tickets for a training session and a flight (out of pocket; we don't have travel budget). And then I saw the blog post last night.

All along, I knew that the promise of all of this great technology for free was too good to be true. There was always a little voice in my head asking me about how they actually made money -- I knew that a paid offering + professional services was not sustainable.

I'm angry, but we'll be fine. We're going to break apart our cluster and shard. We've already got code written to do a backup/restore that actually works (slowly) from one cluster to another. If we hit the point where sharding doesn't work, then it'll also probably be financially viable to pay the $399/month (on top of server costs). I'll still go to the training, but I'm not sure what I'll get out of it. The reason why I was going to the training was the section on "Cluster Administration".

The only thing that I'm raw about is the lack of apology. You have to make money, and you had to do a bait-and-switch as a result. I totally understand, but the tone of that blog post was too defensive and unapologetic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully this isn't too "pitch"-y, but: if you're looking for a database that's good at time series, will always be open source, and does support scale-out and HA, you might be interested in Apache Kudu (incubating).

Feel free to drop by our Slack ([http://getkudu- slack.herokuapp.com](http://getkudu-slack.herokuapp.com) ) if you have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the decision. Standalone InfluxDB can be scaled up just fine to meet most usecases, and it's better to have the long-term project sustainability that a hosted/enterprise offering can bring to the standalone offering.

InfluxDB 0.9 still had plenty of bugs, and I'd rather see a high-quality standalone server than any not-quite-there-yet clustered version.

<comment><USER19> Agreed I would have like to have seen these bugs ironed out before the whole splashy rebranding to Influx Data or whatever they are calling themselves now and their business pivot to a "data platform." I think the timing is unfortunate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > ... "customers eventually drop support as their infrastructures mature and > they look to reduce operating costs"

This is part of the game called software. In some worlds this is actually the goal; that the software works so well and is so reliable that your customers eventually don't all need to keep paying you.

So you find new customers and add new, never advertised before features and enterprise clients with SLA support contracts, etc.

It's very understandable that it's hard to monetize, but giving people the impression clustering was going to be included long term and taking it away is not going to score you points.

Furthermore you want to get all the folks doing a startup on a budget hearing a story that works for them. Most ( especially new or young ) cofounder programmer types rarely plan to not need clustering, even if the reality is most won't need or use it. Saying this is for the big kids only is a turn off at this point in the influx story.

Wish you the best of luck

</comment><comment><USER21> I understand the need for businesses to make money, but I do not understand how a business can understand OSS and implement the OSS core-only model. If your product has demand, at some point, an OSS project will arise to displace you.

Are there many winners with this model to name. Maybe NGINX, MongoDB?

<comment><USER22> _I do not understand how a business can understand OSS and implement the OSS core-only model_

Whenever you see "open core," you should read it as "VCs said we need to do this to keep them happy."

VCs love the _idea_ of how you can give _part_ of something away for free then lock people in to auto-renewing subscription contracts for the whole banana (with fees increasing 7% to 17% every year for ongoing "maintenance"). Many VCs still actively recoil at the thought of giving away _everything_ for free then just hoping the best will happen.

Nginx is a weird example because I'm not sure how well they are doing or who would buy "nginx pro" instead of haproxy+nginx or haproxy+varnish+nginx some other combination of already existing stuff.

MongoDB is an interesting example because they went with the "provide open software, but with really serious, game-stopping flaws, then force people to pay for support because nothing works" route. That's almost literally bait- and-switch (bait-and-support?). But, that hasn't ended up so well for them. From a recent WSJ article: _Fidelity has cut its valuation of MongoDB in eight of the nine quarters since Fidelity made its investment in December 2013, valuing the shares 58% below what it paid._

<comment><USER19> Isn't this what Elasticsearch is doing now? Security is deliberately left out of the offering unless you purchase a very expensive support contract that give you access to Shield? I'm not sure I would call them a winner, its unclear how well they are doing. I think they are mostly running on VC money at the moment. I agree "Open Core" should be regarded with some suspicion.

Do you have a link to the MongoDB WSJ article? They are pretty terrible, even with a support contract bugs have a way of not being resolved or addressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Axibase Time Series Database is free for pseudo-cluster installations and ships with SQL and visualization included [0].

We also have a fully functional Grafana driver in case the customer prefers it over programmable visualization that we ship.

By programmable visualization I mean a way of building dashboards using toml- flavored configuration [1] and templating language, as opposed to manual design.

[0] [https://axibase.com/products/axibase-time-series- database/](https://axibase.com/products/axibase-time-series-database/) [1] [https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/2ef08f32](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/2ef08f32)

</comment><comment><USER24> Druid ([http://druid.io/druid-powered.html](http://druid.io/druid- powered.html)) is another option for similar workloads. Druid is a community- led open source data store used by many technology companies at very large scale. Comes with multiple visualization/open source applications, SQL interfaces, Grafana extensions, and a community to help with issues.

</comment><comment><USER25> it appears that paul dix deleted his answer in this stackoverflow question [http://web.archive.org/web/20150416175827/http://stackoverfl...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150416175827/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25540722/how- to-make-a-choice-between-opentsdb-and-influxdb-or-other-tsds)

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems like there are 2 OSS models other there: 1) community supported; 2) company led.

Most of the "community supported" projects that I have used are libraries. Since shifting from developer to the devops team, nearly everything that I rely on is "company led": saltstack, docker, grafana, influxdb, ELK, ngnix, sensu, rabbitmq, etc.

That being said, we are now re-evaluating the use of influxdb.

</comment><comment><USER27> An interesting way to monetize software could be to have people pay to access official docker images.

You want to pull the latest images an unlimited number of times ? Sure, it is just XXX$/month

Nothing will stop people to build open source containers of the same product, but those won't be "official" and there won't be any update guarantees...

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if clustering will be available in the cloud service?

We use a single server on Influx's cloud service for some internal metrics and it has been running without any interruptions for >6mo.

<comment><USER8> It will be available in the cloud service in the next few months. But if you want to continue running single server that's ok too

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hello, I was directed here through the mentioning of blueflood. I hope it is ok to share some product information. Please let me know if there is a more appropriate way to do it. My only goal is to offer solution to solve the pain we run into frequently ourselves.

Rackspace Metrics (the product team behind blueflood) is currently doing many times more than 300 metrics per second. Our goal of this year is to reach to a new scale from where we are at, driven from the needs of big internal adoption this year. So blueflood project would be live and kicking.

Here is the most recent update on Rackspace Metrics product. All the functional work are through blueflood: [http://bit.ly/rax-metrics- mvp](http://bit.ly/rax-metrics-mvp)

Also, there is a hidden gem in monitoring unknown for most of the startups. My other product, Rackspace Monitoring, is a SaaS product designed to assist Rackspace business instead of making big bucks. If you have a Rackspace cloud account, which requires minimum $50 service charge, you will be able to use Rackspace Monitoring for free. You can use it to monitor any other servers you host anywhere. This means that if your monitoring budget is already above $50 (all cost considered), you really should look into Rackspace Monitoring.

To learn about Rackspace Monitoring, please go here: [https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/monitoring/](https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/monitoring/)

Please also feel free to reach out to me. We are located at the same location of Rackspace Startup Program in San Francisco. We talk to startups all the time and always enjoy the learning.</comment>


Microsoft GraphView: Use SQL Server or Azure SQL to efficiently manage graphs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/GraphView <comment><USER2> I'm hoping I'm missing something important, or that there's a reason the documentation isn't more clear, especially if this is coming from Microsoft.

        "efficiently manage graphs" != "efficiently traverse graphs"

It's very very easy to store a graph in a database. It's very very hard to efficiently walk an arbitrary path between nodes using SQL.

Browsing the user manual, I don't see any examples of graph walks. There are some glorified joins, but there's no real explanation of why a graph database is better suited for the queries show (quite the opposite I feel -- it's harder to read the non-standard SQL!).

<comment><USER3> Seems like its more geared towards matching relatively small template-based subgraph patterns rather than doing arbitrary walks efficiently. From page 9 of the user manual:

> Below is an example query matching a triangle over the employee-client > graph:

        SELECT En1.Name, En2.Name, Cn.Name
        FROM EmployeeNode AS En1, EmployeeNode AS En2, ClientNode AS Cn
        MATCH En1-[Colleagues AS Cg]->En2-[Clients AS C1]->Cn,
              En1-[Clients AS C2]->Cn
        WHERE En1.Name = 'Jane Doe' AND C1.credit > 1000

<comment><USER2> Clearer and more standard SQL Join:

        SELECT En1.Name, En2.Name, Cn.Name
          FROM EmployeeNode AS En1, EmployeeNode AS En2, ClientNode AS Cn,
               Colleagues AS Cg, ClientOf AS C1, ClientOf AS C2
         WHERE En1.Name = 'Jane Doe' AND C1.credit > 1000
           AND En1.ID=Cg.ID1 AND En2.ID=Cg.ID2
           AND En1.ID=C1.EnID AND En2.ID=C2.EnID
           AND C1.CnID=C2.CnID

Really all the "MATCH" gets you is cleaner many-to-many join. But is that tradeoff worth the DLL dependency and burden to bringing on new developers?

<comment><USER4> [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/259290/GraphView%20User%2...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/259290/GraphView%20User%20Manual.pdf):

      CREATE TABLE EmployeeNode
      (
        [ColumnRole:"NodeId"]
        WorkId varchar(32),
        [ColumnRole:"Property"]
        Name varchar(32),
        [ColumnRole:"Edge", Reference:"EmployeeNode"]
        Colleagues VARBINARY,
        [ColumnRole:"Edge", Reference:"ClientNode", Attributes: {credit:"int", note:"string"}]
        Clients VARBINARY
      )

=> they also appear to replace "many rows each with key and a single referenced value" by "row for each unique key with packed values for that key" (possibly with multiple rows for a key if the packed data doesn't fit in a VARBINARY(MAX))

So, the database structure looks a bit like an inverse index. That could speed up some queries.

I have been playing with something similar in pure T-SQL, using a cross apply over a table-valued function to get from this packed format back to the normalized table, but wasn't impressed with its performance. Using CLR was next on my list, but I haven't come around it because I don't have high hopes that it will perform, but I may try this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how this will compare with TitanDB?

[http://thinkaurelius.github.io/titan/](http://thinkaurelius.github.io/titan/)</comment>


Medicinal Applications of Fullerenes - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2676811/ <comment><USER2> I'm not a chemist or a medical researcher but I found this overview article quite fascinating. Buckyballs to the rescue!</comment>


The Role of Higher Education in Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/21/the-role-of-higher-education-in-entrepreneurship/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone have any idea what this is saying? All I get out of it is that The Princeton Review's list and the U.S. News and World Report's list of entrepreneurial schools were totally different and apparently the author has no idea why.</comment>


Free unlimited private repos from Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/version-control-vs <comment><USER2> Wow, I feel like the new Microsoft has been on a roll lately.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty amazing. I'd love to have lots of tiny private repos for small projects.

<comment><USER4> bitbucket is free for tiny private repos...

<comment><USER5> Specifically, 2GB. So not for huge repos, but great for personal projects.

<comment><USER6> GitLab CEO here, GitLab.com has free unlimited private repos up to 10GB with unlimited collaborators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> good god

Cue the whinging in 2 years when people discover free means someone is paying, just not you, whereas you will be paying with something, just not cash. Apparently we never ever learn.

<comment><USER8> I doubt that will happen here. By doing this, Microsoft is really pushing their tools and hence pushing developers to start thinking about Windows as a platform to develop for first. Not just, Apple and Android.

<comment><USER7> Yes, microsoft has a (frankly delusional) goal here. And if they don't meet that goal, or corporate priorities change, or the executive cheerleader for this idea moves onward and upward, free offers may materially change. As counterexamples, consider sourceforge, or any of the entrants in our incredible journey [http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

<comment><USER3> Excellent points - you changed my thinking =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it "free", or "free if you subscribe to a $20/mo basic VS online account"?

<comment><USER10> It's free free. You don't even have to worry about paying for storage. The first five Visual Studio Online basic users in an account are free. You can then add unlimited stakeholders for free, unlimited MSDN subscribers for free, or add-on monthly users with a contract-free license.

-Ed Blankenship from the VSO team

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have they added support for Git over SSH yet? That's something I felt was sorely lacking in VS Ultimate last time I used it.

</comment><comment><USER12> "pls stop using github"

<comment><USER13> Microsoft is using github themselves. [https://github.com/Microsoft](https://github.com/Microsoft)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think they mean this instead "Hey doodz, give us your source code and we'll steal^wproductise^whost it for you!".

</comment><comment><USER15> Great product, besides the great overall offering it's a nice alternative to bitbucket when you need free private repos.

</comment><comment><USER16> git, ci, scrum tools & load testing for $20/month... that's superb.

</comment><comment><USER17> was kinda rooting for gitlab. this will be interesting

<comment><USER6> Thanks for rooting for us. We're not worried. We make our money with on- premises installations of GitLab Enterprise Edition. And the Microsoft tools have a hard time with a good user interface for pull/merge requests and forks.</comment></comment>