I think it's safe to invoke Betteridge's Law here.
Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary).
The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein.
Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.
It's even older than mainframe vs microcomputers. It'd centralization vs distribution, and its the fundamental question to human life, which is necessarily social and therefore needs organization.
Interestingly, the answer is always "both", just in different ways. AWS could be used as an example argue that technology and society is becoming more centralized, and that it is becoming more distributed. It's all about what your focus is.
> I do feel that the replication/failover story needs a lot of work, but there's been some progress towards getting it in the box. Even digging into any kind of HA strategy is cumbersome to say the least (short of a 5-6 figure support contract)
Eeeh...a simple HA solution can be developed in about a week (I was able to do so on 9.3, and so far, it held it's ground). Also, now with 9.5's pg_rewind you can easily switch back and forth between nodes (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/app-pgrewind.html), simplifying things a great deal. Can't imagine that's 5-6 figures.
I agree that you don't get a Plug&Play-Solution out of the box, but from anecdotal evidence they often don't quite work as advertised anyway (remember 1995? And I'm sure your friendly DBA has some stories to share as well).
How do you feel when someone badly appropriates a word like this and it gets really big, like Uber? :)
I understand why the umlaut gets dropped, but it super bugs me too - especially as it's as easy as dropping an 'e' next to the letter if you don't have an easy way to add an umlaut.
Keeping things slightly off-topic for a moment - I love Swiss German. I lived in Bavaria and speak reasonably fluent German, so I can understand bits of it, but it's mostly incomprehensible to me, but in a delightful way. Its 'sing-song' nature and fun pronunciation are the best.
I also found in Switzerland people were far more willing to tolerate and respond to my German than in Germany (where people tend to switch to English), which I very much appreciated when I was still learning the language.
The problem here is that the naming isn't consistent. Sometimes it's Love and sometime Löve. I never know what to call it, but I think the whole idea of naming a software package with diacritics is just asking for trouble. If they would have transcribed it to Loeve it would at least be obvious what's going on.
This is perhaps exacerbated by my native tongue treating ö not as an o with umlaut, but as a completely different character distinct from o and at another place in the alphabet. To me it's like naming a package Blam but half the time referring to it as Blym instead.
I'll try not to take that as an insult to speakers of Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and any of the other dozen languages which make use of the character.
Doesn't this happen in every language that borrows words? Accent/diacritic marks appear and disappear to suit the speakers/writers of the "guest" language.
Also regarding our US-centric naming conventions wouldn't it be very unconventional to include a non-ASCII character in the name of an imported library or called function?
Yesterday I tried creating a Rails project with the name containing the Lithuanian character ė. In some parts the letter was reproduced correctly, in others it was incorrectly capitalised (it should be Ė - so not complicated - but was still the lowercase version), and in others was silently dropped :D
Low growth causes more income to come from capital, which causes more inequality due to inheritance and the rich getting richer. The solution is a global progressive tax on capital.
After reading the first paragraphs in pg's essay I immediately went CMD + F Piketty and was somehow disappointed that he didn't choose to cite him since that's the crux of C21C. But, glad to see that others on HN resonated with the same ideas.
Generally Piketty is dealing with inequality produced by differences in income from capital, not labour. His reason for focusing on capital income is explained in depth, especially in chapter 7. In short, the distribution of capital ownership is always more concentrated than the distribution of income from labor, so we should be worrying about wealth inequality and inheritance. This is why Piketty proposes a wealth tax, not an income tax of the kind that pg says will 'be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.'
> (...) the "doesn't matter, I'll be dead soon" card.
This mindset is what creates a _lot_ of problems; while some decisions do not matter greatly for oneself, they do for others and/or even more so for future generations.
I think many people grasp this concept in the context of polluted oceans et al., but fail to do so when it comes to the real-world manifestations of 1984 and the like.
You might also check out Syncany if you're interested in client-side encryption or Syncthing if you're looking for something more Bittorrent Sync like.
Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary).
The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein.
Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.