Pingdom Royal

My mother introduced me to Google back in the day. She and several of her friends agreed that it was amazing because it was fast, simple, and got out of your way. And back then, that's exactly what it was: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/05/googles-first-website-from-10-year… At the time, their main competitors were already expanding into other markets, and Google was refreshing for doing one thing and doing it well, compared to its competition. It didn't clutter, it didn't try to distract with other services that they offered. It simply gave you the results you queried as a plain list of links, and got out of your way so you could browse those links at your leisure.

There's Lynx--the text web-browser. [1] Someone wrote up their experience using Lynx on the web around 2012. [2] Conclusion: "Not all the sites are usable with Lynx, but many of them offer at least basic functionality using the text-only web browser." As long as there's HTML output, a more humane web browser could allow better customization of the information; it could infer the usual human organizational methods; lists, metrics, groupings, buttons, etc, and present it with your favorite background color, font size, line-length, image size, videos, etc, based on the hierarchical structure. The other camp is web apps, which is a different use case. [1] http://lynx.invisible-island.net/ [2] http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/25/using-web-browser-lynx-visit-top-w…

5.2% of the worlds top 10,000 websites use it, as of July 11, 2012: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/07/11/how-popular-is-varnish/ So the question is- if it is so great, why only 5.2%? I'm not being sarcastic. This is a totally serious question.

The concept of "Privacy" means to me that the average user is aware of how their profile, their content, etc is going to be used by the host. There's a difference between the perception of your feed being public, and Twitter selling your feed data to a corporation to utilize for targeting, advertising, reselling to employment agencies in the future long after your stupid teenage profile is deleted, whatever. When a solid 10% of the users are kids (and a much much larger percentage is entirely clueless) it's worth questioning and the people that do know what's actually going on have a responsibility to ask questions. That's my best attempt to get fired up about privacy on twitter, you forced my hand - oh won't you please think of the children? Ref twitter age - http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users…

Thanks for bringing this to the light. I'm sorry to say that Firefox has become more about the marketing and less about the code - they're too worried about looking good in the benchmarks and raising their mass-market appeal than about true good code and user experience. From JS benchmarks to SSL certificates (http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=339) to false advertising of FF3's memory consumption (http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-hog/) - it's all going downhill.

We covered software-induced disasters in my CS courses. This isn’t standard, which explains a lot about our profession. My two favorite examples were: The Therac-25 — it’s just frontend GUI code. Why test it? What could go wrong? The Siberian gas pipeline explosion of ‘82 — not technically an accident, but it shows the problem with testing untrustworthy code to correctness. It was also the biggest non-nuclear man-made explosion, at least at the time. The Russians had stolen some pipeline schematics from US companies. The theft was discovered before they stole the control software. Instead of stopping the software from being stolen, US intelligence modified it so an integer would overflow after a year (or two) of operation. The Russian economy would be ruined if the pipeline wasn’t operational in less time than it would take the bug to trigger, so it wouldn’t show up in testing. When it triggered, it slammed a bunch of valves shut, causing multiple parts of the network to explode at the same time. The US military’s seismologists detected it, and thought the Russians had detonated a new type of nuclear weapon. The military was going to escalate until the intelligence service told them they were responsible for the blast. Here’s a decent list of other incidents: https://royal.pingdom.com/10-historical-software-bugs-with-extreme-con…

> Number of users? That's not even sure As far as I can tell, Slack has an order of magnitude more users. They were at 8m DAU back in May: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/slack-hits-8-million-daily-active-us… IRC was in long-term decline even before Slack: https://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/ So my best guess is that Slack has at least an order of magnitude more users. But users is not exactly the metric I'm thinking of. It's when people say, "We need some way for us to communicate," Slack is the popular option. Even though I'd rather not use it, I'm in 8 right now. If you look through this thread, you'll find plenty of people concerned about how prominent it is in the open-source world, IRC's home ground. > IRC runs everywhere and does not need a fat browser or a RAM-and-CPU hungry application to enable "chat". I get this in theory. But RAM and CPU power are fantastically cheap. Conserving them to get a worse user experience is optimizing for the wrong thing. > but Slack sucks in many ways Sure. There are no perfect things. But Slack doesn't have to be perfect. It just had to be better than the competition. And for most people it manifestly is.

You are sampling outside of Microsoft's market. For eg. * Instead of GitHub they use Codeplex [0] * Instead of web servers they sell network servers, a much larger market. Windows still holds 73% of this market, and growing. It is worth $20B a year and is much larger than the web server market [1] * Outlook is still the most popular mail client in the world (27%) * Office is Office, one of the most profitable business units in the world * 550M PC's are sold each year and 85% of them run Windows * Still 39% of the browser market [3] * There are Microsoft clients in the Fortune 100-500 that store more data than the entire public internet (taken as being 5 petabytes - most investment banks store data in petabyte scale) * Visual Studio is not only the most popular IDE, but also the highest selling and grossing [4] Your data points are based on open source and web servers, which are only a tiny fraction of the total computing and networking market. It is the remainder of that market where Microsoft dominates. I don't think they are even going to pretend to attempt to infiltrate that market, they have a much larger market to defend. I don't work within the Microsoft ecosystem any longer, but I did for over a decade. I agree with OP that Azure will win, all of my Microsoft development and admin friends are raving about it and moving their clients/organizations onto it. [0] http://codeplex.org [1]…

There's nothing trivial about it. Following a book while being taught at a University over a semester is vastly different from what the OP is talking about. For example, he is talking about writing his own PCIe, SATA and USB drivers as well as, well, everything. He is not talking about starting with MINIX and a well-digested book that guides you through the process. In fact, your suggestion is exactly on point: The OP should pick-up Tannenbaum's book and take a year to implement everything in the book. Why a year? He is a web developer and, I presume, working. It will take more than time to learn what he does not know in order to even do the work. So, let's say a year. I would suspect that after doing that his view of what he proposed might just be radically different. For example, wait until he figures out that he has to write drivers for chip-to-chip interfaces such as SPI and I2C. Or that implementing a full USB stack will also require supporting the very legacy interfaces he wants to avoid. Or that writing low-level code to configure and boot devices such as DRAM memory controllers and graphics chips might just be a little tougher than he thought. There's a reason why Linux has had tens of thousands of contributors and millions of lines of code: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/ ...and that's just the kernel.

I'm a former Googler who managed the deployment of their content distribution network. Outside of the codebase challenges that nostrademons articulated very well, Google has to deal with various big company concerns including shipping and logistics, human resources, legal issues in the many countries it operates in, hardware development, datacenter management, etc. To do this they have many talented people across disciplines. I was constantly looking for people to join our team while still maintaining the high level of ability and innate Googliness that Google looks for in an employee. In many measurements Google is still understaffed. Check out Royal Pingdoms profit per employee. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/05/17/apple-staff-profit-per-head/. The difference between 2008 to 2010 is incredible and factors in growth in employees. Google still needs to hire... not for world domination but to maintain and improve the services that we love.

Agreed. Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%. You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements. Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probably-knows-wh… and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income. It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters. Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time) Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice:…

The load time of the Google Analytics script differs quite a lot depending on the time of day. https://royal.pingdom.com/google-analytics-script-loads-97-slower-at-p…

> ...a frequently-larger web app Got any stats for that? I was quickly able to find [0] and [1] which state that web page sizes are 1.5mb (median), 2mb (mean) and the average is about 3mb. [0] https://royal.pingdom.com/webpages-are-getting-larger-every-year-and-h… [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/

> even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. I’m guessing: 1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before 2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them 3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that. Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred solution to moving very very large amounts of data even in 2020. Your own employer still ships large datasets that way too. Here’s a link from 2007: https://royal.pingdom.com/fedex-still-faster-than-the-internet/ But from contacts I know inside Google, it’s still done regularly.

Given prolific use of CDNs and the abundance of cheap bandwidth, saving the transfer of some images isn't as much as a concern as it may have been once upon a non-cloud point in time. However, if 40-50% of your visitors bounce because your page takes 5s to load[0][1] due to your longform photo essay hammering the user's 4G connection with a bunch of images they won't even see 5 minutes into scrolling down, this is a real concern. Lazy loading shines in these moments. 0. https://royal.pingdom.com/page-load-time-really-affect-bounce-rate/ 1. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/rail#ux

Your objection is probably to the usage of the word "often" which is... debatable. It's probably also unrealistic. Otherwise yes, nobody ever built a DC underwater [0] or in the icy mountains [1] or underground [2]. [0] https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-da… [1] https://greenmountain.no/ [2] https://royal.pingdom.com/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-f…

> Now your site and your monitoring is down. Much better to outsource to people who obsess over doing this right and making sure they are properly redundant. You make valid points about redundancy and levels of reliability but keep in mind that even Pingdom can go down: http://royal.pingdom.com/2016/10/24/ddos-attack-affects-pingdom

Also pionen in Stockholm: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-dat…

Wikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-languages-… ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia. More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.

99% is rediculous. Thats 7 hours per month. with the amount of money they have raised, achieving 99% uptime should not be even close to a stretch for them. http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/24/a-handy-uptime-and-downtime-conver…

GitS was very straightforward and understandable while introducing lot's of new concepts to many people. That's harder than you might think. IMO, it suffers from the Seinfeld effect where you can't watch it in context, because you have seen so many derivative things. PS: Even 2001 was late as it was released in 1995 when only around 40 million people world wide had been on the internet. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/03/31/internet-1995/

IRC usage stats are really bad. Steady decline from 1 million users in 2003 to 400k in 2012. In a time where we're talking about communication apps with hundreds of millions of users, not even having a million is pretty telling to me. http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/

Some older posts/polls made on HN provide some interesting demographic facts, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332 Look also at http://hnstats.appspot.com . There are many various HN statistics on different blogs out there, I personally liked this one 3y old http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics…

I don't know artsy.net, it's probably image heavy. But an average webpage size of over 1.5MB is not acceptable onmobile, imo: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ Also: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-… It's far more then it should be. Graphics can be size optimized, SVG or jpg. A JS framework doesn't need to be 100k where most webpages are probably only using a small subset of functionality. And i also don't want to download a gazillion other JS files for web tracking and such things. Ever download on a high latency connection hurts.

Network latency is going to a significant factor for musicians jamming together. I could see it for musicians living in the same city or maybe a few hundred miles from each other. If they're on different continents, the speed of light will become a limiting factor: http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/06/01/theoretical-vs-real-world-speed-li… It comes to about 1/10th of a second for people on the opposite side of the globe under ideal network latency. Okay for conversation, but could be a problem for musicians playing together. Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of interesting uses for this technology if they can get it to work as promised.

I'm pretty sure her source is this series of Forrester studies commissioned by Akamai in 2006 and 2009 [1,2,3]. Note they focused on online shoppers though. Also, subjectively, if anything it feels to me as if pages load much slower than in the mid-2000s --especially with all this new "Web 3.0" crap. But that's just me... [1] http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html [2] http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/09/17/internet-users-expect-websites-to-… [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-users-flee-…

Remember the internet back when ads were just something you ran across on cheesy low-quality (or porn) sites? http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web-in-1996-1997/ http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the-last-15-years… http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/time-10-big-websites-looked-15-years/

Full article with more demographics http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics…

Most redditors are actually college-aged,[0] with the majority being between 25 and 44.[1] [0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/reddit-demograph… [1]: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics…

623 websites as of Dec 1993. Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/04/how-we-got-from-1-to-162-million-w…