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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#171

Post by simonw »

dexen wrote: post #25
benologist wrote: post #3

No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…

It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers. It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms. From linked article: > Silico…

"It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out."

That's the number one benefit of an open source stack: it's possible to know the stack inside out. If it's closed source, there's an eventual point at which you're dealing with a black box.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#172

Post by nikcub »

rms wrote: post #163
nikcub wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

The web is only 200TB? That seems wrong by orders of magnitude to me. Maybe you mean Google's publicly indexed web?

well yes, indexed web - otherwise it would be all the data everywhere bar a few nuclear facilities.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#173

Post by ianhawes »

flyt wrote: post #123
chollida1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast this with Facebook, Google et al-- where every process (from corporate IT to production operations to HR and recruiting) is designed with needs of the engineering organization in mind: Completely agree. > Want ssh access to production? No problem. This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to the production server.

If you can't trust engineers to work in production, then you can't trust their code. Extensive logging, auditing, and granular access control are also critical to making this work in a large engineering org.

I don't think it's a matter of trust but rather mitigating your exposure to hackers.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#174

Post by DaRKoN_ »

simonw wrote: post #171
dexen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers. It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms. From linked article: > Silico…

"It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out." That's the number one benefit of an open source stack: it's possible to know the stack inside out. If it's closed source, there's an eventual point at which you're dealing with a black box.

There is nothing black box about the MS stack. The .net bcl might be closed source but you can still step into and read the source. It's available under the MS-RSL license. Which allows you:

"use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software"

See: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#175

Post by rorrr »

ssharp wrote: post #38
gcr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown PHP-to-C compiler https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/ and Cassandra, their own custom database system http://cassandra.apache.org/ If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.

Are there any websites that face similar load problems to Facebook's that are addressing it with an unmodified stack?

I'm pretty sure Facebook's bottleneck is the database, not the framework.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#176

Post by teyc »

Myspace was killed by backwards compatibility.

One key aspect of Myspace is how customizable it is. As any programmer can tell you, this limits the ways features can be rolled out.

For example, you want to have a new layout? Too bad. It will break the users customization.

You want to add a new button? Too bad. There is not a coherent place where you can add it.

You want ajax? How will that break users layouts?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#177

Post by nikcub »

simonw wrote: post #166
nikcub wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

I think you're grossly underestimating the size of the Web. Flickr alone were storing 15TB of new photos a month back in 2006: http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/a-picture-a-day-flickrs-stora...

sorry I just re-read my post, should have been past tense, i have been up for too long.

It would be interesting to get more recent figures and compare again, because I do know that the investment banks hoard a lot of data.

In terms of just documents, they would easily store more than the web

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#178

Post by famousactress »

nikcub wrote: post #159
nikcub wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no what I am saying is that it is unusual for them to get themselves in a situation where they have to suddenly code out of a hole at 'startup pace' (whatever that means) startups don't have a monopoly on working hard or working fast, and it is arrogant to generalize about both .NET and enterprise developers in that way since we are all in one way or anther standing on the shoulders of earlier enterprise work (where…

ahh sorry, I misread your tone - might be because I have been up for so long (working at startup pace ;))

No apology needed! Tone's tough, and I'm particularly sloppy in conveying it carefully :)

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#179

Post by mkramlich »

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

> largely

critical word there: largely. he wasn't saying all. he was making a generalization comparing large groups. individual cases may vary.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#180

Post by ms_throwaway »

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

There is so much garbage in those comments. The lack of staging servers was probably from 6 years ago and we use TFS, git and SVN.
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