4 ms·

Reading his laundry-list of paper cuts, it looks like many of them (around 50%?) relate to one particular issue: synchronisation. It keeps coming up, time and a

by cstross 14y ago

Reading his laundry-list of paper cuts, it looks like many of them (around 50%?) relate to one particular issue: synchronisation. It keeps coming up, time and again, from his email woes (seriously, folks, didn't we solve this one back in 1980?) through to the borked address books, contact lists, and photo streams. Sync software usually takes a conservative approach to deleting or merging records, and leaves duplicates lying around rather than risking deletion of vital user data. This is a good thing. What's bad is that the tools for housekeeping -- merging and deleting duplicates -- are generally rubbish. (I have the same problem with my phone's address book: masses of duplicates due to sync processes that conserve stuff. And trying to get rid of them using the tools provided turns out to be a tedious pain in the neck, requiring multiple mouse-clicks or focus changes per record.) Further down the list we get into identity management issues. Nobody seems to have a really good handle on how we manage identity across multiple machines, much less how we manage esoteric stuff like family relations for delegating access to photos or music purchases or whatever.

mathattack 14y ago
I noticed the same. We don't have a precise underlying model without real unique identities for everyone. That's the rub - people want multiple identities, and don't always want to share their real one. Add to that multiple software systems, and it's messy. The tradeoff is a more reliable "less messy" world, but much less innovation. This doesn't mean that software requires less QA or design, just that it's a trade-off of two different modes of operating.
zdw 14y ago
I'm going to take an even harder line: Sync is a fundamentally broken. The only solution is to switch to technologies where merging data is a primary core feature. Thus why I use text files and git to manage the vast majority of my data. The sooner people realize that sync isn't fixable (or a good idea in many cases), the sooner real solutions appear.
- white_devil 14y ago
  Sync is a fundamentally broken. Yep. It's weird that everything is built around just one button that says "Sync", when there are two different directions involved. Either you want to save the state of whatever device you're currently using, or you want to revert it to the state stored in the cloud. Export <--> Import, pretty much.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    well, 'export but give me anything new that's not in conflict', or 'import but don't overwrite anything in conflict'... 'sync' somewhat makes sense, but two sync options labelled easy to understand would go a long way to clearing this up, but... would likely introduce other issues as well. 'sync' works fine, except for when it doesn't. :/
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Even git isn't perfect. I spend plenty of time in a three windowed merge tool figuring out which piece of code should go where when we have merge conflicts. The solution would have to be to store everything in ascii formats (probably taking a hit in terms of filesize and performance) and get everyone to understand the ascii representation each of these data formats and how to merge them effectively. The alternative would be to build a diff tool for every binary based format out there. The simplest solution would simply be to implement locking on everything and have one authoritative copy. So you can have your data on any device you want and share it with as many others as you want but only one person/device can have write access at any given time and can only have that once they have updated to the latest version of that rescource.
- nradov 14y ago
  Synchronization in IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has worked quite well for 20+ years, so obviously sync is not fundamentally broken. More likely we've just failed to learn from history.
  - elviejo 14y ago
    That is why I like CouchDB. The original developer worked on the synchronization mechanism in Lotus Notes and used it in CouchDB.
andrewf 14y ago
The same thing jumped out at me. Probably because of the months I spent in 2004, staring at the combined desktop + Palm OS databases helpful customers had emailed in, wondering how things had gotten to their present state. We controlled the code and data 100% on both sides and I still never got it working really well.
Splines 14y ago
Contact software is, IMO, trying to do too much these days. I have a business contact on my iPhone that has a contact photo of one of my relatives. I certainly didn't set it this way, but I have no idea how this happened. Is it something that my iPhone did? Is it something that happened at Google (it's a Google contact)? Is it something that my Windows 8 contacts app did (syncs to Google contacts)? I don't know, and even if I did, I don't know if I'd be able to fix it. Frustrating. We sandbox our applications, and the success of the iPhone shows that this is something users want. Why can't we sandbox the other parts of our computers? Sure, I could "delink" everything and maintain it all myself, but I wish it wasn't so "all or nothing".

by cstross 14y ago

mathattack 14y ago

I noticed the same. We don't have a precise underlying model without real unique identities for everyone. That's the rub - people want multiple identities, and don't always want to share their real one. Add to that multiple software systems, and it's messy. The tradeoff is a more reliable "less messy" world, but much less innovation. This doesn't mean that software requires less QA or design, just that it's a trade-off of two different modes of operating.

zdw 14y ago

I'm going to take an even harder line: Sync is a fundamentally broken. The only solution is to switch to technologies where merging data is a primary core feature. Thus why I use text files and git to manage the vast majority of my data. The sooner people realize that sync isn't fixable (or a good idea in many cases), the sooner real solutions appear.

white_devil 14y ago
Sync is a fundamentally broken. Yep. It's weird that everything is built around just one button that says "Sync", when there are two different directions involved. Either you want to save the state of whatever device you're currently using, or you want to revert it to the state stored in the cloud. Export <--> Import, pretty much.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  well, 'export but give me anything new that's not in conflict', or 'import but don't overwrite anything in conflict'... 'sync' somewhat makes sense, but two sync options labelled easy to understand would go a long way to clearing this up, but... would likely introduce other issues as well. 'sync' works fine, except for when it doesn't. :/
jiggy2011 14y ago
Even git isn't perfect. I spend plenty of time in a three windowed merge tool figuring out which piece of code should go where when we have merge conflicts. The solution would have to be to store everything in ascii formats (probably taking a hit in terms of filesize and performance) and get everyone to understand the ascii representation each of these data formats and how to merge them effectively. The alternative would be to build a diff tool for every binary based format out there. The simplest solution would simply be to implement locking on everything and have one authoritative copy. So you can have your data on any device you want and share it with as many others as you want but only one person/device can have write access at any given time and can only have that once they have updated to the latest version of that rescource.
nradov 14y ago
Synchronization in IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has worked quite well for 20+ years, so obviously sync is not fundamentally broken. More likely we've just failed to learn from history.
- elviejo 14y ago
  That is why I like CouchDB. The original developer worked on the synchronization mechanism in Lotus Notes and used it in CouchDB.

andrewf 14y ago

The same thing jumped out at me. Probably because of the months I spent in 2004, staring at the combined desktop + Palm OS databases helpful customers had emailed in, wondering how things had gotten to their present state. We controlled the code and data 100% on both sides and I still never got it working really well.

Splines 14y ago

Contact software is, IMO, trying to do too much these days. I have a business contact on my iPhone that has a contact photo of one of my relatives. I certainly didn't set it this way, but I have no idea how this happened. Is it something that my iPhone did? Is it something that happened at Google (it's a Google contact)? Is it something that my Windows 8 contacts app did (syncs to Google contacts)? I don't know, and even if I did, I don't know if I'd be able to fix it. Frustrating. We sandbox our applications, and the success of the iPhone shows that this is something users want. Why can't we sandbox the other parts of our computers? Sure, I could "delink" everything and maintain it all myself, but I wish it wasn't so "all or nothing".