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As unlikely as it is, I hope that Heroku terminates the account of anyone that joins the class action against them.
In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company. Maybe I am misremembering...
Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)
Rap Genius says they aren't involved either, so this is probably a single-person law firm looking to create some buzz for himself. He should threaten to sue Amazon next for all the times they haven't held their end of the bargain. That'll get him a ton of publicity.
In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company. Maybe I am misremembering...
I think the matter is if random distribution is what is documented, no one will raise an eyebrows. I believe the Heroku claimed intelligent routing based on server loads to route traffic to idle servers. That threw people off.
It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Heroku is not perfect, but they give a whole lot more value than they charge for. As unlikely as it is, I hope that Heroku terminates the account of anyone that joins the class action against them.
It would be hard to give worse legal advice than this.
IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…
Fraud is usually a criminal matter.
This is a civil matter. Probably under torts law, especially if there's anything in California/US torts law that resembles Australia's tort of "misleading and deceptive conduct".
Fraud and torts are different. And to forestall the next obvious point: torts and contracts are different.
> I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here.
A refund.
Heroku's selling pitch is linear scalability. Rent 1 dyno, get ~ (1 dyno / Σ dynos) improvement in performance. Rap Genius demonstrated that they were getting exponentially worse increments of added performance per dyno added.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
This is orthogonal to the question of whether Heroku acted in a legal way.
> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
Courts don't worry their heads with strawman hypotheticals.
(IANAL, TINLA)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5237920
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5241686
Really, though, given how much money Heroku charge and how much money Salesforce.com would be able to stump up in a settlement or judgement ... it was inevitable that a fast-moving law firm would jump on this.
It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Heroku is not perfect, but they give a whole lot more value than they charge for. As unlikely as it is, I hope that Heroku terminates the account of anyone that joins the class action against them.
Really? Because it really disgusts me when a company:
* Misrepresents their product (saying it's A when it's actually B)
* Privately acknowledges this misrepresentation under the radar
* Makes large and ridiculous amounts of bank on this misrepresentation (since you have to throw more dynos at the app to mitigate the lag caused by the misrouting.. and Heroku may be many things, but economical it isn't)
* And on that note, provides very expensive monitoring and performance analysis tools that further perpetuate the misrepresentation!
* And then force you to resort to litigation to get some portion of this huge mis-spent investment refunded. (Looking at the suit, this is all that's being asked for)
This is definitely grounds for a suit.
Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)
While I agree this sways me to Heroku's side, I don't think this is their marketing ploy. Rap Genius says they aren't involved either, so this is probably a single-person law firm looking to create some buzz for himself. He should threaten to sue Amazon next for all the times they haven't held their end of the bargain. That'll get him a ton of publicity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long? We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing) EDIT: > Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation…
New Relic isn't Heroku's tool, man. It's like a car dealership selling you a Pioneer stereo.