This is a tragedy of a product being developed for an audience of zero.
All of these problems have acceptable, established, and time-tested solutions using Node.js itself, without the crippling caveat of lock-in to a new and unproven platform. And yes, despite the copy trying to distract from this fact, this is very much a case of lock-in, because built-in multithreading is not a Node thing. None of the mountain of Node code out there works on that expectation. Furthermore, JX seems to have its own proprietary packaging solution, SQL database, memory store, monitoring, and more. This isn't a point in its favor; it's just more lock-in.
These new features might be great and well-implemented, but if I'm going to benefit from them, I'm leaving Node.js behind and trusting that JX will be supported as well as Node itself is. I have no faith that will be the case. It's (perhaps unfortunately) and self-fulfilling prophecy: I doubt I'm alone in my thinking, and that feeds back into lack of a community coming together to support this fork.
My advice to the developers (who are clearly talented if they can put together something like this) is to refocus your energies on building stuff with (and on top of) Node.js instead of forking it.
Am I correct in assuming this means I can (eventually) use PFS without any dependency on Docker? In particular, I'm interested in knowing whether I can expect to be able to run PFS contained within an arbitrary unprivileged container and use my preferred orchestration around it. Or, is it the goal of PFS to take over the orchestration plane, or require CoreOS's? Or, something else?
> I think the easiest way would be just letting people pass an arbitrary endpoint to be used in an M/R job.
I'm not seeing what this has to do with Docker, other than the planned future ability to run M/R jobs inside Docker containers. That's an interesting idea, but I don't think enforcing Docker has any advantages; if you have a clean and simple API like REST or even plain pipes, you open yourself up to a whole new world of composability without needing something relatively heavyweight like Docker.
Additionally, you seem to be leaning on CoreOS at the moment. That seems a dangerous dependency considering the CoreOS/Docker relationship.
I'm actually surprised virtualized page-zeroing isn't a memory controller feature at this point. With all of the things modern CPUs do or you, it seems crazy that everyone is running CPU threads that waste time and voltage to pump a zero page queue.
I agree with you that it's troubling that a new model for monetizing free work isn't coalescing -- in art, open source, writing, and more. I've personally felt the sting of all of these.
However, I don't blame the downloaders or the Pirate Bays. People want what they want, and Pirate Bay managed to provide that to people: a download index for the price of an ad or a drive-by download. I congratulate them on their success.
I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable, even if it maybe was yesterday. Perhaps this means that the local band will have to pack away their guitars while the one-hit wonder Gangnam Styles rake in the bucks, but nobody is being screwed here.
What society wants from entertainment has evolved, and holding onto a static definition of what constitutes "art", "quality", or "enriching one's life" while ignoring what real people are clearly demanding from their entertainment is, I think, pretentious.
I don't think the internet is destroying anything or screwing anyone. It's just closing gaps and optimizing every industry towards exactly what people want; if that's thrown-together garbage delivered for free at the cost of promotions shoved into your eyeballs, then don't blame the internet, or Pirate Bay. Blame people for consuming crap and blindly selling their souls to ads.
Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists.
Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work.
I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for.
I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer.
Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.
In an internet-ubiquitous world, the idea of restricting the flow of data -- any data -- is basically a magical fantasy of those who understand neither the technology nor its sociology. The Pirate Bay will be back in a day or two tops.
I wonder how much longer people will keep trying to put the information genie back in the bottle?
But I'm not going to grumble about it because I don't see this as a startup. In a social kickstartered world this stuff is the new breed of entertainment.
And the way you evaluate successful entertainment is buzz, not creating "business value" or whatever metric you deem more real.
His argument, if you read his work, isn't based solely on the increasing speed of computers.
His idea is that progress is exponential in all of the requisite areas. That includes algorithms, hardware, biology, neuroscience, and more.
> Siri, etc, are nothing more than text parsers that give a canned set of responses
We say the same about everything once we can do it with computers, because progress doesn't come magically. It's incremental. Yet much of what we have already is what used to be "science fiction" and, before that, "magic". I'm sure when AIs are passing the Turing test, we won't think any more of computers, but less of the Turing test.
This isn't an argument against Kurzweil's predictions, it's just moving the goalposts as you say. If strong AI comes, we'll move them all the way there and maybe even a bit past.
I disagree that we'll know it when we see it though. I think we'll deny it until we die and the new generation grows up in a world in which computers have rights.
> I'm not saying it won't happen, but it will require a type of conceptual breakthrough that we simply haven't had yet.
Finally, Kurzweil's arguments do not require a breakthrough as a premise. Kurzweil's idea is to scan the brain at the neuronal level, then brute-force its simulation at the biochemical level. It's straightforward extrapolation.
You could propose that we will come across some roadblock in our exponential progress towards that goal, but in the absence of one, the null hypothesis is that progress will continue as it has. Then indeed, the singularity is nigh.
Unfortunately, while government can mostly wrap its head around science though consultation with academia, the state of the art of software is so ethereal and moves so fast that I imagine seeking funding for software will be even more of a farce than it is in the sciences.
Great idea in theory, but as you fear I think this would quickly be bastardized into more private military-industrial complex funding.
I would expect a tax-funded OpenSSL to be developed mostly in secret, in cooperation with the NSA, to be extremely expensive to develop/maintain, and to most definitely have backdoors.
All of these problems have acceptable, established, and time-tested solutions using Node.js itself, without the crippling caveat of lock-in to a new and unproven platform. And yes, despite the copy trying to distract from this fact, this is very much a case of lock-in, because built-in multithreading is not a Node thing. None of the mountain of Node code out there works on that expectation. Furthermore, JX seems to have its own proprietary packaging solution, SQL database, memory store, monitoring, and more. This isn't a point in its favor; it's just more lock-in.
These new features might be great and well-implemented, but if I'm going to benefit from them, I'm leaving Node.js behind and trusting that JX will be supported as well as Node itself is. I have no faith that will be the case. It's (perhaps unfortunately) and self-fulfilling prophecy: I doubt I'm alone in my thinking, and that feeds back into lack of a community coming together to support this fork.
My advice to the developers (who are clearly talented if they can put together something like this) is to refocus your energies on building stuff with (and on top of) Node.js instead of forking it.
Source: some hard-learned lessons