And if you do start doubting our mission, keep your mouth shut, because we'll ruin your life no matter who you are (that's why they're going after a retired four star general right now over leaks).
That's also why Obama administration has been so hard on leakers and whistleblowers in general. To serve as a clear message to those who would talk about what's been happening at the NSA: we will punish you. The reason for clamping down so hard is because the scope, both in the amount of surveillance and in the sheer number of people who knew (in the military, government employees, contractors, and private companies NSA is collecting data from) had gotten so out of control.
The questions in my mind are:
How much of a systemic change has this program caused to the federal government already (e.g. clamping down on whistleblowers)?
How often have the capabilities of NSA been used to track down whistleblowers of any kind already (ironically employing what's causing the problem in the first place as part of a "solution")?
Have these capabilities been used to settle political scores already? I'm thinking of Petraeus. Interesting how those dots were connected. Interesting also that by then both Obama and Hillary Clinton had reason to be upset with him.
Anyone ever hear the rumor that the reason why Google pulled out of China was because Chinese hackers had tapped into a feed of all email metadata? I heard it included subject. This news made me immediately think of that rumor.
He has always communicated his own point of view, which I think is fine, even as a reporter. But in the past I feel he has spun yarns and made connections that don't exist for sake of a story and his point of view. That does bug me.
I disagree. I think enough people are willing to pay for a service that makes their lives easier, and developers especially so. GitHub does exactly that, and their pricing is at a good point where it isn't prohibitive for people just starting out.
Unlimited repo's for teams of less than 5 compared to GitHubs pricing model for private repositories is a strong challenge.
Throw in that BitBucket is Atlassian backed and they can afford to subsidise BitBucket to sell their other tools (though I would observe that BitBucket does not do heavy sales tactics at all).
I actually prefer bitbucket to github day to day (I have about a dozen repo's with them) and they have excellent support for mercurial as well.
It's all speculations at that point but if the only reason to go to BitBucket is price then Atlassian is creating a community of poor/cheap people. The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard.
Another thing is that if you're using open source products then they're likely on github. I agree that both platforms have a general feature parity but if you're going to interact with these projects often enough then it's better to stay on a single platform and avoid the context switch. Personally this only is already worth the $50-100 that our company is paying.
You can see that I am biased but something I would also like to point out: on more than one occasion github has prompted me to open-source things. When you reach your repo limit you're faced with a choice that you don't have with unlimited repos. There's a case where you don't want to think about it and just want to keep working as usual but for me space constraint is what keeps my home tidy.
I see your points but I'd note that "it's better to stay on a single platform" is actually perhaps not as good as it appears (all your eggs in one basket - for example when github went down the other weekend a lot of PHP developers where stuck without composer update for example).
The context switch is fairly minimal, underneath it is just git with a pretty web-ui.
The scenario for up-sell is absolutely fine, if you have less than 5 developers it's free, if you have more than that you start to pay based on number of developers, this is both more rational (you are paying for users not number/size of repo's) and easier to quantify.
In my opinion GitHub's cleverest move was making it free for open source repo's thereby building a good community of influential developers around their product from day one, this does give them a significant lead but it's not insurmountable (I'm old enough to remember when the first thing you did when you wanted the source code for an open project was head straight over to sourceforge) particularly as moving most (small) projects from github to bitbucket (or another competitor) is one git push.
The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard.
Perhaps, but it's also likely that consumers are not Atlassian's primary target audience. They make most of their money selling JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo etc to companies and large enterprises.
Getting individual developer's hooked on free access to Bitbucket for personal projects is a great way to get those developers to agitate for using Bitbucket within their company.
If you have an active open source presence then you're already using github a lot of the time, personally I don't like switching tools a lot and I guess a lot of people feel similar. Personal preference aside.
If they'd offer a couple of private repos I'd jump over to GitHub in a heartbeat. I use BitBucket for private stuff, and then port over to GitHub when I want to make the code public.
At work we use BitBucket because of the unlimited private repos, and we've got a fairly good setup built on it. Every office I know either keeps their repo hosted, or uses BitBucket. I've only known one office that uses GitHub, and due to the nature of their work they keep their stuff public.
It's not even up for debate anywhere I work. BitBucket, or a private hosted repo is the only choice to make.
There are no incentives to switch open source projects to BitBucket, but there are incentives to switch to BitBucket small team/personal private projects.
Edit: Also open source projects will not start to pay github, but private projects might grow and will start paying for BitBucket
Since I'm talking about where I prefer to host my projects I think in this case it is about my personal preferences.
Obviously GitHub is the major git hosting solution for open source projects and yes I have a github account and yes I visit the site as much as I do bitbucket but mostly to pull repo's, check issues and read documentation.
When you're talking about private repos for commercial customers, paying is a feature, not a bug. A paid relationship is fundamentally different in that it creates obligations on both parties. When something is free, the person receiving the free service has few rights or remedies.
BitBucket killed any inclination in me to pay github a penny. And I will stick with them when my team grows because everything is there anyway and the pricing is better. Github tools are really not there to justify the huge sticker price.
You're forgetting about corporate accounts. They pay through the nose for something no other tool does right now (at least not as well). Nothing else I've used in the corporate space works as well as Github, especially for code reviews. It's also more expensive than anything else, too. The only problem we saw was it didn't handle large repos very well. And by large, I mean 20+gb. Don't look at me like that, storing every asset in a large 3d game in github made sense at the time!
I suppose if you're writing a Triple-A video game or real-time/firmware? (neither of which are "server")
Outside of those cases, Rob Pike has given some discussion on interior pointers and how it's possible to limit the amount of garbage generated:
http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_14.
(along with the usual techniques, like object pools, used with good success in JavaScript and Android games).
This is incorrect. I've written a bunch of ARM firmware in Go and I've seen server applications that use custom allocators for allocation sensitive code.
"Ultimately, though, it sounds like you want a language which has no garbage collection, and Go is not that language. Language constructs will allocate memory in ways that are not immediately obvious, so there is no reasonable way for a Go program to completely manage its own memory."
Of course you can write memory pools and free lists—you can write them in any language—but, like other languages, the GC will still trace them during mark time and there is no safety provided by the language if you return an object to the pool that's still in use, or leak objects by forgetting to reuse them, and so on.
The fact is that programming in Go, for all practical purposes, requires using a garbage collector.
When you manually allocate memory you are naturally responsible for the lifecycle of that memory. In Go you allocate such memory outside the GC to avoid tracing.
The issue, as Ian pointed out, is that it's hard to pinpoint when GC allocations occur. Language constructs allocate in ways that are not immediately obvious.
Do you write kernels? No? Then shut the fuck up with your GC FUD. Lisp somehow managed to get past that and become the golden child of HN; will it take 50 years and pg's blessing before people stop whining about this in every Go thread?
That is why it fails as a replacement for C like it was originally marketed to be. But fits nicely as a replacement for python. People can start getting concurrency, limited type safety, and reasonable performance without having to really learn anything. The switch from python to go is pretty much trivial.
Greenplum's mean-spiritedness makes this more a review of himself than the book, which is too bad because he manages a few golden nuggets here and there among all the brown ones.
I know next to nothing about the music industry - as do most people here I suspect. Your comment is unhelpful here without expanding on what about it was lazy reporting.
The first comment on that article brings up a good point, that it was because the song was becoming so famous and popular on Youtube/iTunes that radio stations were forced to play it, it wasn't that this reality was arranged by some key players who're the ultimate deciders on what ends up getting radio airplay and what not:
For those of us deeply established in Seattle hiphop music; we know this post is not "the real story". In fact, it is completely unfactual and more than misleading. Macklemore is an independent artist who, along with Ryan Lewis, earned the Number 1 spot, first on iTunes and then confirmed on Billboard. Radio had no choice but to add the Thrift Shop single - or face being confirmed as an out dated form of music discovery. Major music Industry is no longer the sole means of entry into the fold.
I find it amazing how large format Media tries to explain away how an upstart dared to do this while turning down Diddy, Jay Z and Interscope offers along the way.
Macklemore has worked very hard for years to achieve this feat, and he should be celebrated. Any analysis at this point should be from a place of admiration and not denegration, as the title of this post attempts to do.
The comments of the NPR article suggest that the reporting is misleading at best, wrong at worst, and isn't news (the facts were reported months ago).
Edit: to expand on the comments in the NPR piece- Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn't sign with a label to get distribution, they stayed independent despite hiring ADA (a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group) to get them distribution.
Anyone who reads the article should easily see why it was lazy. The article is titled "The Real Story of How Mackelmore Got to Number 1". Maybe I'm spoiled by the New Yorker, Atlantic, Slate, Vice, etc..., but when I see something billed as the "real story" I expect more than a half dozen paragraphs. The only "story" in this report is one sentence saying that they hired Warner Music to get more radio play. There are no further details and that seems extremely lazy to me.
What I'm most curious about is whether the reporting was just bad, or intentionally so. After all, npr, while an upstanding organization, is still "traditional media".
That's also why Obama administration has been so hard on leakers and whistleblowers in general. To serve as a clear message to those who would talk about what's been happening at the NSA: we will punish you. The reason for clamping down so hard is because the scope, both in the amount of surveillance and in the sheer number of people who knew (in the military, government employees, contractors, and private companies NSA is collecting data from) had gotten so out of control.
The questions in my mind are:
How much of a systemic change has this program caused to the federal government already (e.g. clamping down on whistleblowers)?
How often have the capabilities of NSA been used to track down whistleblowers of any kind already (ironically employing what's causing the problem in the first place as part of a "solution")?
Have these capabilities been used to settle political scores already? I'm thinking of Petraeus. Interesting how those dots were connected. Interesting also that by then both Obama and Hillary Clinton had reason to be upset with him.