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I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

catonmat.net

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Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#71

Post by vijaydev »

andreyf wrote: post #66
vijaydev wrote: post #64

Nice idea! Congrats for the venture! A small feedback about the site. The email signup UI is the coolest I have seen. However, I would like the string "you@example.com" to be retained when I click in the text box and then click outside. Currently, it disappears when out of focus after clicking inside the text box once.

That's called placeholder test: http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html

Thanks for pointing out the right term. However, the site does not use HTML5 placeholder and instead rely on plain JS to do the trick. What I wished for was a behavior like in the demo here: http://diveintohtml5.org/examples/input-placeholder.html

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#73

Post by pkrumins »

johkra wrote: post #38
tomstuart wrote: post #36

Brilliant. I'm so disappointed you didn't open the XP VM inside XP's Chrome!

That's exactly what I was wondering after he opened the terminal inside XP: What happens when you open a VM inside a VM?

I have recorded the video, it's pretty awesome. Uploading to youtube in a minute!

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#74

Post by trainwreckin »

blueberry wrote: post #54

Based on the confusion that others and I had, I suggest changing your name and dropping VM from it. It really doesn't convey what you are trying to accomplish. When I first heard it, I thought you were making a VM together with an OS with an eccentric stack allocation algorithm or sth.

Personally I think that the chaps should focus on making the product even better instead of branding - the name can obviously change later when they decide to push for market release and by then they probably would be clever enough to seek the wisdom of someone to help them there.

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#76

Post by rapind »

". You can easily rent 10 virtual machines with Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems and test your software."

Linux I can see. Windows and especially OSX though, won't that create licensing issues and a special deal with MS / Apple to provide those VMs?

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#77

Post by mleonhard »

When I read your headline, I was excited to think that someone was building a VM service that was tailored to hosting webapps. I wish there was a service with a UI & API for configuring sites and starting up VMs to serve different areas of the site. For example, I could set up mysite.com on this service and then have requests for mysite.com/blog proxied to a VM running WordPress on PHP/MySQL. Requests for mysite.com/manage would be proxied to CherryPy stack running on another VM. Other requests for mysite.com/* would be served out of an S3 bucket. And of course the hosting service would do logging, monitoring, automatic error recovery, automatic scaling, backups, etc.

You two are doing something different with StackVM, and it looks cool. I currently use FreeNX on EC2 and the NoMachine Windows client. Here are a couple of feature suggestions:

1. StackVM would be much more useful to me if the windows could pop out of the browser. I don't want to use a remote-desktop client that is confined to a browser window.

2. For real productivity, cut & paste must work between StackVM windows and other native apps.

3. Get James or someone with a lighter accent to do the demo video voiceovers.

4. Make it easy to deploy test environments, execute integration tests, and capture the results. For testing webapps, make it work with Selenium and keep videos of tests that fail. I would pay for this if it was sufficiently developed.

I'm looking forward to the private demo. Good luck, you two! :)

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#78

Post by bretthoerner »

runT1ME wrote: post #70
bretthoerner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping in mind that he can't make use of any competitors' (or even friendly open source contributors') patches because they will be licensed under the AGPLv3 and not under his copyright. I guess they could sign the copyright over to him, but I don't see another way around that. (IANAL)

Don't a lot of Open Source companies make you sign copyright over? Or is that not the case. How did MySql handle this since they were dual licensed?

You only have to sign it over if you want it in the official distribution, which I suppose most normal contributors do.

But if someone (competitor or not) forks and adds SuperAwesomeFeature (without signing the copyright over), pkrumins can't pull that into his and license it commercially. It'd have to only exist in his AGPLv3 version, which sounds like hell.

Re: I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

#80

Post by pkrumins »

johkra wrote: post #38
tomstuart wrote: post #36

Brilliant. I'm so disappointed you didn't open the XP VM inside XP's Chrome!

That's exactly what I was wondering after he opened the terminal inside XP: What happens when you open a VM inside a VM?

It's live! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y

Also posted it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536011

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