Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good? 307
theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"
Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Insightful)
So, theodp, if you were a developer you would look at this and see a set of interfaces to web services done in a RESTful manner. You would say, "Oh, my users want to use Google storage but they need more of a drag and drop interface." Then you would spend a couple weeks using Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous to make virtual folders or buckets or whatever your application calls them and using the elegance of RoR with the UI of Scriptaculous so the user can move their photos or data from your server to the cloud or vice versa. You could really use anything you want to interact with it but I would bet these two GPL compatible tools would result in the most rapid of web application development.
So three sentences with links to Google besmirching them for being smart will get you on the frontpage of Slashdot these days? Really the substance of the 'story' here is essentially "WTF?! So complicated it must Suck!"
Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API ...
Here's a final hint: API stands for Application Programming Interface is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be developer-friendly. I hope I don't sound like a Google fanboy but this is a nontrivial task and I would defend the API they have produced. The documentation is far more than you would get from a CS PhD. You want me to take notice of your mindless drivel, theodp? Get off your ass, code an interface for this API and then point out how the API and documentation is lacking in a step by step post. That would be helpful and deserve a place in Slashdot's programming section. What you have here is not.
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Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps the OP would enjoy a line of work that involves shovels and dirt.
Yeah, but shovels are too complicated an unintuitive. I mean it would probably take theodp hours to figure out which end he is supposed to hold and which end goes into the dirt.
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree.
Slashdot is so non-technical these days it's a complete fucking joke. Ignorance just spews on anything even remotely related to software development. Please drop "news from nerds" from the slogan. Replace with "lip service for sycophants".
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't slashdot that has become non-nerdy, it's that being a nerd has become "cool", very unlike it was when slashdot started. These days, anybody who knows that you make your computer stop by clicking "start" thinks (s)he's a nerd, even if they couldn't copy a file without a GUI, let alone have ever heard of Linux or BSD or any other non-Microsoft OS (which these days actually have GUIs).
In the old days, a submission like this most likely wouldn't have been posted, but now we have the firehose, where every nerd wannabe can vote a story up. There are still very good, technical stories here (there was one a couple of days ago about mathematics) -- you just have to ignore the ones like this one voted up by the wannabes. That said, I haven't looked at Google's APIs.
God, I never thought I'd see the day when we would be considered cool! Just laugh smugly and enjoy being cool instead of being a wannabe.
That said, sometimes I say stupid things here (probably a lot this week, I've had the flu and it's affected my mental faculties).
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why, to this day, it's so much easier to get a GUI up and running in other OS's other than Windows.
While most other OS's will 'just work' getting Windows to display the GUI can be an involved and frustrating task requiring the modification of .conf files or running command line based configuration tools.
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I agree.
Slashdot is so non-technical these days it's a complete fucking joke. Ignorance just spews on anything even remotely related to software development. Please drop "news from nerds" from the slogan. Replace with "lip service for sycophants".
/agreed
People would rather talk about eCiggerettes than eLectronics these days on slashdot.
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Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Funny)
Coding is hard! Let's go shopping!
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Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Funny)
To the shopmobile!
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Funny)
What? Shopping is way more difficult than coding!
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Funny)
I hope I don't sound like a Google fanboy but this is a nontrivial task and I would defend the API they have produced.
Heck, I had the exact same reaction to this article, and I haven't even looked at the API! My reaction was based solely on the wording theodp's atrocious post.
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I had the same reaction just by seeing who posted it. Check out his other stuff, he really is a clown. Sadly, he's in bed with the editors, so expect more similar shit in future.
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It isn't exactly confusing, all the actions map into standard filesystem interactions.
I think theodp probably has an alias for "ls" called "list_folder".
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Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like a adver-troll by proposing such a silly argument.
It's a straight forward documented restful api. No biggie, written a few myself and it is always a bonus to get some decent usage examples.
I'm not sure you would be classified as a google fanboy for pointing out the obvious.
Looking over the API and the simpler nature of the subject I doubt it would take a few weeks. If you have some code lingering around to manage similar API's you can sling together an app over a weekend.
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One more "looks fine to me" on the pile.
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This guy is a bit of an idiot. There's a ridiculously simple Python wrapper right here [google.com], based on the Boto S3 library, that Google has already built/customized for him if he doesn't feel like writing his own REST wrapper in the language of his choice.
They provide examples there in a few lines of code each for uploading, copying files, reading metadata, deleting files, etc.
That's about as easy as a web-based file system is going to get. Duh.
If he wants to talk directly to the REST API from the language of h
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Yes but you are making the huge assumption that either theodp or kdawson actually know anything about programming. Such a claim is highly suspect.
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In fact it's *exactly* the same API used for its competitor, Amazon S3. If you use boto to access AWS, you'll be right at home using boto to access Google Storage.
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I agree. Apparently the author of the FA has no understanding of the purpose of this service. It is similar to AmazonS3 or EMC Atmos online with a similar interface.
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I'm not getting this either. It don't look too hard for a developer to me. If you are a user, what could be easier? With Gmail you now have drag and drop to attach a file with HTML5 support. There is getting to be developers doing all kinds of cool stuff with the tools provided and they have anything you could want. They change stuff really fast but that's not really a complaint.
I'm still not getting this post at all.
Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" (Score:5, Informative)
Granted, this story is grandstanding. But still, this is what you have to do to copy from the article:
That seems like a lot of steps, and a couple of them seem very strange to me, namely the clone_replace_name.
I agree that complex tasks require complex APIs. I just don't see why this is such a complex task. We're not using SSL, namespaces or storing a gigantic file here, and I don't see any reason why those features should make the process that much harder. If you want to store large data in the cloud, why should it be so much harder than storing data on a regular filesystem? You don't have "namespaces" on the filesystem, just folders and they just work. SSL "just works." Large files are not intrinsically different from small files. There aren't any ACLs in this example. Where's the complexity? Shouldn't simple things be simple?
The answer is because the cloud is ultimately about marketing and selling expensive crap to enterprises that don't need it, so a burdensome API is just another way of making things that should be cheap more expensive. Expensive developers up on their marketing will get to charge 5x as much because it will take them 5x as much work to do simple things. "Everyone wins."
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If it turns out, after the fact, that 90% of your users just want easy access to 10% of it, it isn't exactly impossible to have a trivial_subset library that sits on top, and makes it easy for
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Re:Rule of the 5 Year Old and 7 Year Old (Score:5, Insightful)
As the parent to your post noted: we are talking about an API here. Precisely none of it is user facing.
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ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
This is a very, very important concept. As I said in my other post, this is a good API, a usable API. But so many APIs aren't usable. API usability should ALWAYS be considered when releasing a public library/service.
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Sure. But you shouldn't be able to explain Photoshop or vi to a 5 year old, either.
Sure I can. Photoshop lets you paint on pictures, and Vi is like a piece of paper that you can write on.
With an API the difference is that you should be able to assume that your user will have a common lower bound on their knowledge. If your API deals with multi-threading, to be effective you probably need to assume your user knows the fundamentals of multi-threaded programming. Or, at least that the user has some base level of knowledge in computer science.
Attempting to over-simplify a concept to a ch
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If only they had to be worthy of the moniker to get a job...
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mind reading the Whole thing??
like i said user facing stuff should be at the five year old level
API stuff should be at the level of a 7 year old (with documents)
If everyone was supposed to understand it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If everyone was supposed to understand it... (Score:5, Funny)
The da Vinci Code begs to differ.
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I don't consider that a counter-example. I can't understand anything about that.
Re:If everyone was supposed to understand it... (Score:5, Funny)
The da Vinci Code begs to differ.
I still don't understand why anyone would want to read it. Does that count?
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I've never programmed in da Vinci, but are you saying it only supports integer arithmetic?
No... (Score:2)
The word you are looking for is "able", not "supposed".
Because, letters in the alphabet are "a code" but we don't refer to them as "codes for wording".
So, everyone who is familiar with "the code" used IS supposed to understand it. Regardless if we are talking alphabet, kanji, C++ or Python.
Unless it is poorly coded and/or a mess - which is a part of the reason why the OP questions the current practice.
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a set of rules as to how you're supposed to write things
So are English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Navajo, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic... and how many people can write in more than a couple of those? How many Americans can write in more than one of them? For that matter, how many Americans can write correctly, legibly, and coherently in their own native language?
My point is, it takes some work to learn a new language (or code). Not everyone can do it, and not everyone wants to.
Huh? (Score:2)
Soooo, like, some software is hard to use?
Maybe it's the pills I'm on, maybe it's the lack of caffeine, but could someone maybe explain the point of this article to me?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
We didn't have a Google story for over two hours, so we had to post what was available.
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So the half-hourly Apple story was already done? ;)
It's just not for regular users (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news: the space shuttle UI is too complicated for regular car drivers! duh.
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever happened to simple interfaces, like:
"Would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War? [YES|NO]"
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it will take days to compile and years to run but it will work
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Whatever happened to simple interfaces, like:
"Would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War? [YES|NO]"
Today, only president's suitcases have such a simple interface. Everyone else is supposed to find their way in Vista's redesigned Control Panel.
That API looks fine to me (Score:3, Interesting)
The only nonintuitive thing is the name "bucket", which might be better called "zone" or "filesystem". Other than that, it looks like it provides just about what I'd expect of a high-level filesystem representation.
Sheesh, just think about what the complaints would be if they provided something closer to VFS-type mappings so people ended up commonly rewriting half of FUSE to get their data where they like.
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The only nonintuitive thing is the name "bucket"
That's what kdawson said when he read the api spec. Or was it fuck-it?
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I think it was suck-it!
Of course, that's what he says for *every* story he posts.
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Re:That API looks fine to me (Score:4, Informative)
It might be better to call it "bucket", if one of your biggest target audiences was, say, developers already using and familiar with Amazon S3, a popular existing service in the same space that calls the same thing a "bucket" rather than a "zone" or "filesystem".
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I agree. In fact, this looks very similar to the Amazon API which I think is fairly straight forward.
It's not similar to the Amazon S3 API... It IS the Amazon S3 API.
The article submitter is simply (ahem) uninformed.
API's user friendly? (Score:2)
Since when does an API need to be user friendly? I found Google's documentation much more user friendly and straightforward than say Microsoft's .NET documentation on File I/O. It's not an end-user product. Just skimming over the contents of the linked sites, it seems very easy to use even if you're not an advanced programmer. If you don't understand what's on those websites after some thorough reading, please hand in your geek card.
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What exactly is hard to use or cryptic about a RESTful API? If such a thing strains your brain too much you probably are in the wrong line of work. I'd recommend you get a job flipping burgers but even that may be way more than your intellectually capable of.
APIs are not written for end-users. (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't to discredit the idea of ease of use or good design - god knows Google graphs requires way more hoops than it should (compare, say, Visifire).
I think it's easy to look at the developer's guide and just flee in terror, but honestly if that's your reaction, Google storage API is probably not the droid you're looking for. If you need simple file sharing that a typical user can appreciate without having to read a manual, Dropbox may be more appropriate; Google Storage API is written with developers in mind.. I'm a big fan of some of Google's APIs, Dropbox, and Google Docs for sure.
News Flash! (Score:2)
Something not understood by Slashdotter! Film at 11.
Meanwhile, slashdot editors too dumb for own good (Score:5, Insightful)
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You could just set your filter for "mere mortal" appropriately and you won't see these things anymore.
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Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot??
One word: kdawson.
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It isn't their design (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It isn't their design (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. This is from the docs:
Interoperability
Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
Basiacally, google is essentially building on what has become an industry standard for cloud storage.
This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.
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This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.
Both. The submitter is an idiot, and kdawson is a troll.
uh? Maybe I'm missing something..... (Score:2)
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Yes you are. This is not a "storage system to be used as a filesystem" it's an implementation of the Amazon S3 interface that provides remote, redundant key/value storage (where the value in this case is a bucket of bytes). There's nothing to stop you implementing a file system on top of it; but the API provided by Google is at a lower level than that. Which is a good thing as a standard file system is not necessarily the best way to use this kind of storage.
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Are you one of those types (Score:5, Funny)
who flood developer-boards with questions that typically look like
" Sir Sir please help sir I have project due sir I need full workking code by tomorrow sir" ??
If so, you would expect everything to be point and click, I guess.
API is not a UI (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:API is not a UI (Score:5, Funny)
Do you think anyone who would conflate API with UI will know what conflate means?
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The “user” of an API is an application programmer. The “user” of a UI in general is your grandmother.
Both of them have to be of just the right complexity... neither unnecessarily complex, nor overly simplistic. If the interface is unnecessarily complex, it will be harder to use; if it is overly simple, it may not be usable at all.
Both of them have to be usable, but an application programmer’s idea of “usable” will be very different from your grandmother’s. Equ
Yes. Next question. (Score:2)
Seriously, Google has a number of products with extremely simple, user friendly interfaces. Their search engine, you know, the reason that they are who they are, the reason that anyone knows about them, is a prime example. Type in what you want, it finds what you need. No special syntax needed, no complex logical operations to try and get results, just key in terms or phrases and you get good results.
What kind of question is that?
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Haven't we been doing this since the early 90s?
Hotbot
...
yahoo
askjeeves
altavista
It's because you have more control no your searches ('filetype:jpg',...) with relevant results and hat made google what it is, is "unintrusive and related advertizing". It used to be about the "most flashy", "most blinky", "largest", "impossible to click away" and what have you.
(Before popupbl
Ob. Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.
-- Ward Cunningham
DroidDraw (Score:2)
The mere existence of DroidDraw would indicate "no".
Explaining American Football to Chinese (Score:3, Interesting)
Things become much more complicated then first impression when you try to really explain something. For example I went to a football game with a group of Chinese grad students and they asked me how a team can score points. I thought to myself this is easy, and began to explain the rules.
1. Touchdowns are worth 7 points... err they are worth 6 points technically
2. After a touchdown the scoring team can decide to kick the ball through the uprights for 1 point
Or
3. The scoring team can decide to run another regular play and if they enter the end-zone again on that 1 play they get 2 points.
4. Fields goals are 3 points and are scored when the team on offense can kick the ball through the uprights.
5. The defense can score points if they can tackle an offensive player in the end-zone while they are holding the football. The defensive team then gets 2 points and gets the ball kicked to them on the following play instead of the normal system where the scoring team kicks the ball to the other team.
6. If the defense can steal the ball and run into the end-zone they are facing then it is a touchdown and rule 2 and 3 apply.
By the end of this discussion they were more confused then when we started. So when you say how hard can it be to explain how to store a file questions like.
1. How to delete?
2. How to rename?
3. How to create folders or other organizational structures?
4. How to move items between organizational structures?
5. How to copy an item already in storage?
6. How to download multiple files?
7. Can security be set or changed?
8. Oh yeah and how to I upload a file in the first place?
The more precision you apply to a discussion the more complicated they tend to get. Just like a touchdown is 7 points is easier to understand, upload a file is easy too.
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In a word... (Score:2)
No.
After skimming the file-copying code... (Score:3, Interesting)
After skimming the file-copying code, I agree with the people who say it's not complicated. I'm not a Python programmer either. The example functions they gave look like good starting points for wrappers that would provide the higher level, "get, send, delete" sort of functionality the poster wants. The only thing that confuses me is why you have to have "config = boto.config" when the config variable isn't used in the rest of the code. To me, it looks like you're only interested in the side effects of retrieving the configuration and not the result. Couldn't you just "boto.config()" or something at program startup? Of course that's probably more of a Python question from somebody who is ony passably familiar with the language. It's nothing complicated about the API.
Article Tag (Score:5, Insightful)
The tag on the article "submittertoostupid" pretty much says it all here folks.
Re:Article Tag (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about being too difficult. It's about being way too overcomplicated.
Let's look at the code.
config = boto.config
okay here. We need config.
bucket_name = "dogs"
remote dir. So they made a half-assed directories system. Can't be nested, data can't be outside them. Piss-poor but let's say "okay" here.
name = "poodle.jpg"
dir_name = "pets"
so far so good.
src_uri = boto.storage_uri(bucket_name + "/" + name, "gs")
dst_uri = boto.storage_uri(dir_name, "file")
seems logical if slightly redundant. So we need some objects instead of plaintext names...
dst_key_name = dst_uri.object_name + os.sep + src_uri.object_name ...wtf... oh, we are trying to create a local filename... that's some convoluted way to do it.
new_dst_uri = dst_uri.clone_replace_name(dst_key_name)
err... so our local disk file needs to be placed at... "pets/dogs/poodle.jpg". Now that's some way to get there!
dst_key = new_dst_uri.new_key()
oh, that was just the NAME of the new key... so we need the actual "key"... again, what for?
src_key = src_uri.get_key()
again, if we have the URI object, why do we need some "key" object? Isn't the dedicated URI object good enough?
tmp = tempfile.TemporaryFile() ...can't we read directly from a file instead of creating temporary one? So the "uri" of a file is not good enough, the "key" of a file is not good enough, we need a "tempfile" object extra?
src_key.get_file(tmp)
tmp.seek(0)
dst_key.set_contents_from_file(tmp)
I recommend a reading about a hammer factory factory factory [joelonsoftware.com]. This one doesn't overdo factories, just abstraction layers. I can spot four: filename (string), URI, key, file handle within the key. WHO needs that???
a well known quote comes to mind... (Score:2, Insightful)
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
- Brian Kernighan
It seems Googler's may be smart enough for their own good, but not smart enough to debug the cloud
Nice low-level API. Missing high-level API. (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks like a nice low-level API for doing really interesting and complicated things. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a high-level API to deal with what will be by far the most common use cases. Sure, it's not so difficult to implement an upload_file(filepointer, uri) function with this, but given the huge proportion of developers using this library that are going to need exactly this sort of function, do we really need all of them reinventing the wheel?
Powerful and complex functionality is good, but the most common use cases got that way for a reason. Specifically accounting for them, even if only through a set of basic frontend functions, brings major productivity boosts to the programmers that use your library. It is a thing worth doing, and it sounds like the Google folks neglected to do that in this case.
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http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-methods.html#putobject [google.com]
Content goes in the HTTP request body.
This is not rocket science. If you can't wrap your head around REST, wait for someone to come up with a RPC-style API.
-1 Offtopic (Score:2)
When it counts... (Score:2)
Last time I checked, the Google search page was pretty straightforward. For more complicated systems, get set up on Google Voice. I'm so used to phone-tree hell that I was pretty stunned with how quick and painless that was. They are happy to put user experience as a primary concern when they're trying to acquire users. For a storage API, frankly having granddad want to try it out might not be in their interests.
As a mad, sweaty, bald man once screamed on stage (Score:2, Funny)
Or in other words: (Score:4, Funny)
Are you just simply way too “dumb”* for the 21st-fuckin-century?
I know I’m (sadly) a minority here. And I know that I will probably get modded to into oblivion. But except from the stupid overengineering... come on!
How about for a change actually learning something, when it is useful for you?
* I’m not even really saying that people are too dumb. It’s just that most people grew up in a culture, where it made more sense, to complain and feel entitled, to getting spoon-fed, than to understand it themselves. Where intelligent people get hate, and dumb people get special treatment (e.g. it not being allowed to point out that fact about their mental performance).
So naturally, they choose the more efficient way.
But the thing is, that we all are very much capable of grasping those complex concepts that we always say we were too dumb for. It’s just an excuse. And the more it is used, the more mental growth we miss. So after some time, we really have a hard time using our brains. Just like with a muscle. Just like we all are born with the ability to some day run for hours, every day, in the heat.
So, no, they are not too smart. We’re just used to being lazy as hell.
If anything, it's too simple (Score:4, Informative)
After reading through the API, if anything, it's too simple. You can't copy a bucket without reading it from Google's servers and writing it back, which is far slower than a copy carried out within their high-speed network. The "list" capability isn't well documented. The security model is about as dumb as the UNIX/Linux one; it doesn't have capabilities or anything like that. Bucket transactions are themselves atomic, but there are no user-specified atomic transactions. You can't, for example, rename "current" to "old" and "new" to "current" as an atomic transaction. (That's a normal operation in SQL, and a useful one when you've constructed a new copy of a mostly-static table and want to make it live.) Nor do buckets have version management. There's no way to read replication status; although bucket data is supposedly replicated, when does this happen? Right after uploading a bucket, or some time later?
Oh, delicious irony. (Score:4, Insightful)
theodp in this post [slashdot.org] quotes from a book entitled "The Dumbing-Down of Programming."
Not content with infantilizing the end user, the purveyors of point-and-click seem determined to infantilize the programmer as well.
Judging by this story submission, it turns out he's for it.
How quaint (Score:3, Interesting)
It may seem a bit hilarious, apparently this kind of crap (like having bucket names conform to DNS) happens when you want to use web services as your OS. Not too hard if you just implement this once.
This bit is just silly, good for giggles but are they serious about requiring zone editing to expose a database table? Nooooo....
I didn't quite catch how you copy data to other domains, since it looks like you use a gs:// prefix to reach google storage but you say gs://cats and it is still in your account not at google's root server.. kind of annoying though maybe there's a way around it?
I think the 1024 byte limit is totally bogus, that's pretty short if it has to hold the URI path through your virtually nested buckets. Although I've seen Windows flake out at 255 character paths.. That and the bit about a "flat hierarchy", which is an oxymoron, and how you can't nest buckets but you can do so "virtually" by putting slashes in your bucket names, as if it isn't just a normal URI, they're just joshing you, a little bit of fun y'know. "Bare metal" indeed, more like stripping the metaphor down to bare CGI.
It is funny you have to allocate your own temporary file as a buffer for uploading a file, though of course that's what happens in Perl CGI. Which then makes you wonder why you cannot set a max upload data size for your app.. Of course the GSUtil command line tool looks pretty simple.
Otherwise, Animats' post is to right to the point. It isn't really that great. Kind of a bare minimum is more like it. And they stick with REST... so you should hope for a nearby library to exist that will save you not have to start implementing wierd HTTP verbs.. you have to really want this as implementing it seems as much fun as pulling teeth slowly.
Abusing Google Storage for phishing? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if Google Storage can be abused as a way to host phishing pages?
There's a phishing page [phishtank.com] that's been on Google Sites since February. Google is good about kicking off most phishing pages, but this one is different. Here's the phishing page as a web page. [google.com] The actual hostile page (which is a bogus login page for Stickam) is on the "Click here to download your attachment". The actual url is http://2699962600425641406-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/stickamcomlogindo/login.html?attachauth=ANoY7cpc6fembideFQyYULstnVDU-XMkgwzNLFkUv77Suh8bUq_LGrFRQ-RtLkw6pEPJb5Vk0XW4JMbOVQtqT_R6CjNCh5N2r29quoFkE5Cq1XQXUFhuegVtr4kQUMN9T3dT3yO1q-FthiahDl45UqMmFfD6gKSYwQP4bsgVoM-N5cQN0hHRvDZskuvmTdy0lqnQqUhmKFYP&attredirects=0. That's probably a page in Google Storage.
This raises the question of whether Google should be running hostile-code checks on publicly-accessible Google Storage pages.
AOL? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Simple Interface from Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and paper mills are consumers of raw pine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all the rough edges need to be filed off it first.
Re: (Score:2)
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I tend to think of your taxonomy in terms of design outcomes:
4. Sufficiently engineered
3. Over-engineered
2. Under-engineered
1. Doesn't work or works on accident.
That is to say, average developers tend to nail the common case, but lack the experience or knowledge to spot the corner cases. Your "above average" developer wants to demonstrate his knowledge by optimizing for as many corner cases as possible at the expense of simplicity in the common case. The well-above average developer can balance the common
Re: (Score:2)
Your comment reminded me of this story:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Complicators-Gloves.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
A mighty fine story about overcomplication :)
Re: (Score:2)
Can we uninvite them now?