5 ms·
Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business
- doctorpangloss 10y agoWhich of the following is from Walmart's open source software's website, and which is from Silicon Valley? > Revolutionize the way you report bugs on your mobile platform > Deploying paxos algorithms for consensus protocols > Software defined radio for cloud computing > Accelerating product delivery in the digital economy through continuous application lifecycle management > Scalable, fault tolerant, distributed databases with ACID transactions
- abritinthebay 10y agoI mean... Walmart Labs IS part of the valley (ok, Brisbane south of SF, but still), so...
- Fuxy 10y agoAdd blocker naggware... sigh oh well I'm no reading that.
- larrik 10y agoI'm about to the point that I may just start flagging all NYT/Forbes/WSJ articles.
- detaro 10y agogiven that the mods have multiple times said that paywalled articles are ok, don't expect that to do much
- Fuxy 10y agoNothing against paywall articles everybody is allowed to make money however they like I would like the option to filter them out though. If I can prevent them from showing up in my list I'm ok with it.
- detaro 10y agothere is this userscript that marks them, which you probably could change to hide them instead: https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-paywalltag https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-paywalltag
- krapp 10y ago>If I can prevent them from showing up in my list I'm ok with it. Hacker News supports hiding stories now, so you're free to filter as you like.
- Fuxy 10y agoIs there an option to hide pay walled stories because I don't see it. Can you tell me where it is?
- krapp 10y agoThe option to hide paywalled stories is the same as with any other story - if you see a story you want to hide, click the 'hide' link. It's literally no more work than flagging it (which is an abuse of flagging rights), and less work than complaining about it (which is off-topic ranting.)
- Fuxy 10y agoYou do realize that completely defeats the prosperous of what I'm asking for right? A setting that would hide every pay-walled article would avoid me ranting on it because I never see it. On the other hand in your situation I seed the article title get intrigued click on it get pay-walled and then I get pissed off and hide it. The purpose or hiding it is to avoid aggravation not hiding it for the sake of hiding it.
- krapp 10y ago>On the other hand in your situation I seed the article title get intrigued click on it get pay-walled and then I get pissed off and hide it. Yes. Because paywalled articles aren't off topic here (as has already been established by the staff), but rage-posting about them is. I suspect many of the people who do post indignant comments about paywalls are aware an article is paywalled to begin with, as the usual suspect domains and sites are well known. If it happens that you didn't know, now you're aware that Forbes uses paywalls, so it should be easy for you to simply choose to never click on a link from Forbes on Hacker News again. The correct solution is to either hide the article or ignore it - or, indeed, to click on it, see that it's paywalled, and then hide it or ignore it. The topic of this thread is "Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big Business" not "Fuxy is triggered by advertising." If you refuse to engage with the article on any meaningful level, then don't engage with the thread, it's that simple.
- sctb 10y agoThat's an expedient way to lose one's flagging privileges. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant. I suppose, open-sourcing their stuff back then would have benefited the competition more than Wal-Mart. It might still do that today -- but now that it is a giant, they expect the resulting loss in market share to be tiny.
- fweespeech 10y ago> I had thought that having superior IT infrastructure was one of the things that propelled Wal-Mart to success when it was not yet a giant. Tbh, of the two companies I know of that deal with Walmart IT...100% of the people in those two companies think Walmart IT is pretty inept and opaque.
- kminehart 10y agoI live in Bentonville and I can tell you it's a mess. They switch IT contractors every few years because each one agrees to more than it can handle to get the contract. Just recently, like 2012-2013, NCR had it. CompuCom made a killer deal which they couldn't actually afford and cut a lot of corners and provided shitty service because they didn't hire enough competent staff. CompuCom lost the contract to NCR again, so everyone in CompuCom got laid off. Now since Toshiba bought out IBM's "Retail Store Point-of-Sale Solutions Business", they also hired on their own support team, a lot of them were previous CompuCom employees. There's layers and layers and layers of tech support and bureaucracy, it's amazing anything ever gets fixed. Their inhouse service, "Information Service Desk", or "ISD" is full of people here on H1B visas, shoulder to shoulder in a huge building called the "David Glass Technology Center". There are no cubicles, just long rows of tiny tiny desks. It's a damn terrifying sight.
- earlz 10y agoI have a CS friend who just recently got hired for walmart (not sure on terminology, but he does some analytics stuff). Your account sounds pretty accurate to what he described, but add in a dollop of basically every technology that's ever existed and was ever popular at any point. He's been there a short time and already had to look into systems running on cobol, hadoop, oracle database, SQL Server, MySQL, Firebase, C, C++... Pretty much they hire contractors to implement any new project, and then hire H1-Bs to maintain it afterwards. He said his job is mostly managing H1-Bs, rather than actually writing code.
- deepuj 10y ago> "The poster child for open source is Linux, a software operating system that holds roughly 25-30% of the server market share" That doesn't sound right? I'd assume it is way higher.
- learc83 10y agoI thought the same thing. A quick google search shows a pretty large variation in reported statistics depending on what's being sampled. W3Techs checks the top 10 million sites on the internet and they report something close to 1/3 Windows, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 unknown Unix. My guess is that a fairly large chunk of unknown Unix is Linux. W3Cook checks the top 1 million sites, and they report 2% Windows and 98% Unix.
- Zigurd 10y agoAnd some of those servers on the public internet are only nominally public. Their names might be in the DNS database, but they're really an "extranet," that can only be used by authenticated users. These numbers will become even harder to pin down as Microsoft converts the Windows Server business to the Azure cloud.
- superuser2 10y agoThat's websites. Basically every brick-and-mortar business with more than a couple of computers has a Windows Sever domain controller and Exchange server in a closet somewhere. It does not generally host the website.
- marcosdumay 10y agoI don't know how many make it to the top 10e6, but parked domains are mostly Windows.
- tonmoy 10y ago> The poster child for open source is Linux, a software operating system that holds roughly 25-30% of the server market share against formidable competitors like Microsoft I would sure like to see some citation on that claim, to me it feels like it could be much higher!
- jawilson2 10y agoI'm assuming they differentiate linux from, e.g., BSD or other Unixes?
- smitherfield 10y agoIt's probably just a 10 years+ out-of-date figure. Although there probably are a lot more systems running legacy Windows outside of the tech industry and also outside the US.
- superuser2 10y agoWarning: anecdata. Nearly every traditional small/medium business with Windows machines has an onsite domain controller and Exchange server. Any store with computer cash registers probably has a Windows server in the back that they're talking to. Ditto for card access control systems, parking garage gates, some elevators, some HVAC systems. Every doctor's office, chain retail store, car dealership, and cube farm is likely serviced by at least one Windows server (and also likely a Cisco PBX running IOS). Linux is dominant for web backends in tech companies, and has some penetration among large non-tech enterprises for Java apps, but there is really a staggering amount of Windows out there in the non-tech world, and Linux is not the default server platforms often as you'd think. (Plus enterprises may be less hip to virtualization, and run larger server counts for similar workloads). Rust belt cities have vibrant Windows Server consulting/service ecosystems that spend a few service hours a month on a given small business. Those companies have maybe one or two techs who did a little bit of Linux once.
- tracker1 10y agoThere's also a surprising number of C#/.Net application deployments for internal usage and Windows is the default deployment strategy for most of them. Even well outside the rustbelt. Phoenix, for example, often has more .Net than Java dev going on.
- walmartianthrow 10y agoMisleading content about One Ops. > Why give away something that you created yourself that gives your company an advantage? One Ops was an acquisition. They didn't create it. It's incredibly bad. But don't take my word for it, check out the nightmare of an entire platform built on chef cookbooks on GitHub. My biggest complaint isn't even code quality. It just doesn't work. Almost every single action fails and requires manual intervention. Walmart has ideas that look good on paper, and horrible execution. I'm sure that the idea of a "cloud agnostic tool for building auto scaling self healing clusters" sounded great. In practice it seems to offer about 10% of open stack features. When it works.
- DanielDent 10y agoTo be fair, OpenStack doesn't exactly have a reputation of "just working". It's really more a framework for building infrastructure. That's why there are entire consultancies and OS distributions to help people successfully deploy OpenStack.