Ok, if you go to the first post of this thread, you can see some pictures.
You can see them even when my computer is turned off - magical!


Why on earth would I buy an overpriced black box and create a single point of failure!? That's crazy. If I needed to go down the path of a centralised database, I'd use something built from the ground up to be scalable and redundant.

That's even assuming such a route is necessary - I haven't sat down and worked out specifics of what would be required, but I do think it's something that could potentially be avoidable.

As I said, the earlier £5k/£10k came from some very very rough estimates of what might be involved, simply as a theoretical example of an amount I personally would be happy to "throw away" on costs, if it would allow a real alternative to Facebook (even one only used by the people I directly care about / am connected to).

I wasn't saying "I'm going to create a billion user service for almost nothing", but I also don't agree you need to fling gold bars at HP and IBM and friends in order to run a successful service.


Your general approach here seems to be not thinking fully and/or jumping to incorrect conclusions, based on a non-existent scenario, and I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm not in the mood to keep trying to explain stuff either. :/

Right, here is the summary:



I'm saying it's not possible and that I can spend your budget 20 fold on a small, mediocre system.

As for pictures, they have to go somewhere. It's not really a Facebook alternative if you leave out that whole bit.



Yeah, I'm not going to get into SAN's. I showed you a cheap one (Which can do multi-location by the way). You need expensive ones :)

Don't forget Farmville, Mafia Wars, all those quiz apps and word games and zombies and pirates and flowers and whatever else it is that massed humanity occupy themselves with on Facebook...

Mind you, I would fully support those being left out.

I'm hungry. Can you make me a sandwich?

Nope. :'-(

Would you like me to maybe arrange for a pizza to be delivered instead? What pizza would you like?

I have a milkshake.

You can eat pizza with your milkshake. Best o' both worlds. :)

 

Now, what sort of milkshake are you having?

I'm not now.

Does it bring all the boys to the yard?

Oh.

 

:-S

 

Why not?

I don't know where the yard is, so I'm unable to determine if all the boys were brought there.

I had a limited quantity and was not reluctant to consume it.

I fear Peter's milkshake would send the boys away from the yard. It could be quite useful under certain circumstances.

:'D

haha good point!

It could be decentralised and would actually be more secure if it was. I don't think Pete's wrong about this. Freenet did it (it failed, because it required a critical mass of users before it was usable (and never got them), but the tech was sound, I think a lot of it got rolled into what is now TOR).

Stuff is moving that way anyway. I mean all this 'cloud' stuff is virtualised on-demand servers with resources allocated on the fly. That's a step towards complete decentralisation.

There's a legal angle too. In the US people are starting to make home cloud servers - i.e. something very much like a NAS but with webmail, photo sharing etc. etc. - all the social stuff built in to the server. The reason for this is that if the authorities want access to all your online stuff they can get it pretty easily. If they want something from your home it's a lot tougher - they need more warrants and they need more justification.

As that kinda thing starts to become more common (and I think it will, eventually) decentralising gets a lot easier.

And as Pete says, all you'd need then is a chain of central hubs/database servers which glue all this together. You wouldn't even strictly /need/ that. It'd just be a good way to start it off.

I'm not sure Dan's trying to argue against that, more that he's got a fairly good idea of how much hardware costs and that Pete's rough budget isn't anywhere near enough. I'm inclined to agree with him.

And Pete's point is: What hardware? This idea could potentially be run on no-centralised-hardware which, last time I checked, cost no pounds. Anything you add is just to grease the wheels a little.