

80legs Web-Scale Apps Competition - jdrock
http://www.challengepost.com/challenge/80legs-web-scale-apps-competition

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vicaya
Instead of a thinly veiled advertisement, how about some information on the
capability of the hardware: histograms of RAM size, hard drives, CPU units
(equivalents of some known CPU) and network speed/latency for these "50,000"
machines?

Without a reasonable description of hardware, any ideas would be just hand
waving.

~~~
dotBen
The problem is that 80legs works to a trojan/malware type model - the runtime
is installed as a background service on apps like Digsby.

It's fair to say that many people who are using these apps don't know that
their machine is being given tasks to work on in the background.

Aside from the unknown bandwidth/cpu/throughput unknowns IMHO there is an
ethical question of using this software. From what I can see there is no opt-
out other than not to install the software the runtime is bundled with. And
that assumes you even know it's being installed.

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jdrock
Actually all Digsby users are told up-front during the install process about
Plura. And you can easily turn off Plura from Digsby.

~~~
dotBen
Hmmmm. I would respectfully disagree.

I'm somewhat conflicted as I have interests in a rival product in the twitter
app space but IMHO it's not clear to your "average Joe" user what is going on.
Further more, from my own experience, once you tell someone who's using an app
that has Plura running what it is doing, people tend to be quite concerned and
certainly not wanting to have it on their system.

JDRock: I also believe you work with/for 80legs but can't see any disclosure
in your posts.

Not wanting to be a d*ck but if you are going to say that it's obvious and
easy to turn off (and de-karma me for my comment) I think you should state
whether that's from a NPOV or whether you're actually involved in the product.

~~~
jdrock
I think it's fairly obvious from my posts that I work for 80legs.

If you try out the latest Digsby installation, you'll see that they've changed
the install process. So while I suppose I am biased, it's also a fairly
objective thing to observe. Lifehacker even posted a follow-up article
applauding Digsby for the change, if I remember correctly.

What I've seen is that if people are told about Plura up-front and have the
option to turn it off from the get-go, they have no qualms about it. Digsby
didn't do an awesome job about this initially, but they've corrected it.

Also, I wasn't the only that d-ked you.

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jlees
I'd love to enter this if it wasn't just Java. I understand _why_ , but it's
still an unfortunate hurdle!

~~~
elcron
Where does it say java? Afaik you can use any language that compiles to the
jvm so languages that compile to it (e.g clojure) are fine. Not as much
choice, but better than just java.

~~~
jdrock
We're exploring the use of other languages that work in the JVM, but for now
it's just Java.

The problem with other languages is that they all make use of reflection to
get themselves working, which Plura's security sandbox does not allow. If
anyone knows a way around this, please share!

