Please open source Carakan and Presto - don't let them rot, and us hackers have what to learn with them (and potentially do with them). GPL is fine, and may let you still monetize it.
(And ... it's not like it's giving you any advantage - you've switched away from both)
From this presentation (http://vimeo.com/73934576):
Presto don't go open source in the foreseeable future, cause Opera don't want to lose support contracts for the TV browsers. That's makes sense.
Restricting commercial use would disqualify it from being "open source" according to the OSI's definition [1]. If you changed the text of the GNU GPL, the license proposed by the GGP, you would also no longer be able to call it the GPL since the text of the license itself is copyrighted and not free to edit (to, e.g., prevent fragmentation) [2]. If you did all that the source release could well be a net negative for whatever goodwill the FOSS community has for your company.
What they could do instead is dual-license it under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL 3.0 and a proprietary license betting on companies being reluctant to share their source code. Still, it would hardly be to their advantage at all.
I'm a big fan of Fastmail, and I'm tentatively excited about this announcement.
Missing CardDAV/CalDav sync ability is sorely missing, so it's good to see the developers talking about it.
I'd also like to see (and would pay for) options where the data is located in other countries, away from the United States. It's really symbolic, but also practical: I'd like my data closer to where I live.
Currently I'm fine having that live in owncloud, but should fastmail start supporting it, I may want to sync these data-sets.
Not sure I want to move everything into one place and one place only though. If it was one thing my migration from Google Apps taught me, it was that having too much stuff auto-integrated in one place makes it much harder to have control of your own data.
It severely limits your options to mix and mash best of breed services as you see fit.
How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data at random which would be unacceptable to me. I am using Baikal for CardDav and CalDav which has been very reliable so far, and BitTorrent Sync for Dropbox replacement which is less reliable and has some bad bugs (one of which is it being closed source).
How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data
Good question.
I have mixed impressions of owncloud so far depending on what area of the product you are using.
The good parts: Contact and calendering managament. Just works. Integrates nicely with Android, Thunderbird, etc. Not very good synching back to Google though. I don't really care about that, but now you know.
The not so good parts: I tried running it on my NAS, because that would be the storage-backend for the file-sync service anyway. I quickly discovered that the code is not near efficient enough to be deployed on underpowered devices like this. It needs optimization, or to be put on proper hardware. I chose the latter and redeployed.
On my NAS, with enough data getting synched across clients could take days. So don't even think about putting this on a Raspberry Pi or something silly like that.
The worse: Using owncloud's files-module as a drop-in Dropbox replacement, you will be surprised by how well supported all kinds of platforms are. If you treat it as a Dropbox replacement though, you will encounter issues.
I tried putting my code/project/build-folders under owncloud and hack away, much like I've done with Dropbox. Even with a limited amount of clients, you will quickly encounter at least some bugs. The most annoying thing I encountered was probably getting conflicts when only one of the clients had updated the file.
The client updated the file, called back to owncloud with the changes, and then got a response back that this update cannot be done cleanly.
It then proceeded to the code/build/project files involved in the conflict and rename the local and the "server"-version to $file.conflict345678543 & $file.conflict1234567 or something to that effect. Needless to say that broke my code, my build and needed to be cleaned up.
If you think that sounds annoying, imagine it happening several times during a 30 minute coding session.
So yeah. The owncloud file-service currently suffers and cannot be treated as a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Hopefully it will get there, but outside coding, I haven't experienced anything like that and it seems to chug along just fine. With a high CPU-usage though.
So yeah. There are good, not so good and directly bad things about it. If it fits your use-case is up to you.
Thanks for your detailed reply. It pretty much mirrors things I've heard elsewhere, it seems file sync is one issue in particular which can be slow and prone to errors, it is a shame as an all in one solution would be great.
Funnily enough I have both Baikal and BitTorrent Sync running on a Raspberry Pi (model B/512) and it is handling it surprisingly well, I even use it as a destination backup server for some VPS's and local computers (using duplicity). I just wish the Pi had more RAM as BTSync is a bit of a memory (and CPU) hog when you start to hae a lot of files involved, it is under strain. My compromise has been to tar a lot of folders I rarely access to cut down the number of individual files it needs to track, not ideal. I was thinking of buying one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing I think it is called, which is more powerful but still power effecient enough to be left on 24/7.
A question re: BTSync/RPi - I've got around 40-50 gigs synced up between my x86-64 computers (might be on the order of fifty thousand plus files) and the maximum memory it occupies is around 60-70 megs. It idles at 42MB. Since you already have the set up that I am looking into, I think you're the right person to ask, can the RPi handle that much? If not, what are the signs of it slowing down? If it helps, my hypothetical RPi would be connected via wires instead of USB-Wifi dongle.
Looking at it, I have about 10k files and it is only using about 12% memory, perhaps not as bad as I thought. 50k should be absolutely fine I would think. Here is the output of top showing btsync at idle:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 11.9 12.4 610:05.84 btsync
I have noticed that the CPU takes a beating during any sync operations, tends to grab 100%. I limit the CPU for the btsync process to 60% max and also overclocked the Pi up one level (after installing a heatsink kit). Here it is during typical filesync operations:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 63.8 12.4 612:51.33 btsync
To limit the cpu I use cpulimit and put this in my /etc/rc.local
This is more interesting for what it means for Opera than for what it means to Fastmail. First they abandon their browser engine, now a top-notch webmail offering. What do Opera even offer these days that you can't get elsewhere? What 'long term vision' is Rob speaking of?
Unless Opera are building themselves their own little Firefox OS kind of thing they're pretty much fucked moving forward. On the desktop their move to webkit successfully destroyed every reason to use Opera and doesn't measure up against rivals, and they've been netscaped out of mobile.
The Myopera forums are rife with users complaining about missing features in the Opera 15+. Any unique features which distinguished Opera have been axed and most solutions seem to point towards using browser addons to accomplish what was previously in-built. They might have gained a few users, but it appears the majority of the current userbase will be sticking with Opera 12 for the time being.
Yes, but from what I understand their plan is to bring back most of the features in the future (I remember them mentioning specifically bookmarks, opera link and tab thumbnails), until then: Opera 12.
On the other side Chrome based Opera is also starting to look pretty good in it's own rights: it's fast and snappy, mouse gestures are there if I'm not mistaken, page stack (or whatever the name is) is cool. If I would to choose between Chrome and Opera 16 now I would go with the latter (also because Chrome really pushes too much Google on the user).
I heard that they ditched the fit-to-width feature (ctrl-F11), do you know if this is true?
It's one of those features other browsers simply do not have (Opera has a couple more but this one's pretty unique) that I really do use several times a day, and I'm not "upgrading" until I know they won't take that away.
Not that it matters too much, features or not, I'm thinking to switch to Firefox because these are times no longer to be using closed-source software.
Fit-to-width did all kinds of magic at a layout engine level — it's not that simple to just reimplement on top of a new engine. And then there's the question as to whether Google would let an implementation would ever get upstreamed to Blink.
I think you're generally correct about users not caring about the rendering engine for the most part. I wouldn't care at all that they ditched Presto if it meant they retained all the previous features and user interface they had before transitioning. However, I am worried that is unlikely to happen.
Looking at the course Blink based Opera has taken thus far, it doesn't look like they're focusing on keeping current users happy (any new user base is going to be an uphill climb). It's still new, but as a consistent Opera user for almost a decade, I'm very skeptical of them keeping all the previous customization as well as avoiding "Chromisms" in the UI.
I still use Opera 12 because of the lack of features in the new version. My biggest pet peevs: Ctrl+Tab behavior (Opera default was 'previous tab' now it's 'next tab') and no thumbnails tabs on the left, and they removed the email client.
Yeah, I dislike both of those changes as well. I have a pretty long list of things Opera needs to add to versions beyond 12 before I will update to their Blink version. Until then, I'm still using 12 as well.
I agree the rendering engine isn't important, but when they threw out Presto they also threw out most of the features and innovations they created and turned Opera into a sort of half-assed Chrome.
So you are suggesting them to maintain two different codebases during the transition rather than focus all their efforts to the new version to make the transition as short as possible?
IMHO they did the correct choice, every new version Opera will difference itself more and more of Chromium. You can continue to use Opera 12.16 until they take the decision to pull the trigger to completely kill 12.16 auto-updating it...
Remember the transition from Firefox 3.6 to the current Firefox, they didn't kill 3.6 until they reached version 12.
I used to use Opera because of it's privacy features. Being able to have different configuration of javascript, cookies, referals, content blocking and so on. Now with Opera 16 all these features are gone.
How do you increase you're competitive abilities by removing everything that made you unique when you're already the underdog? :S
An increasing proportion of Opera's (growing) revenue comes from advertising (they bought a few agencies recently) and their share price continues to climb. I don't think they have many problems moving forward, it's just less visible than their traditional consumer-facing domain.
Not sure what you mean. Just FYI : at least on Android phones, among FF, Chrome, Opera (and the default browser), Opera's text flow is the best by far. You can zoom in and read any article on any site, and it does just the right thing. There is honestly an element of fear when you use Firefox for the same thing: it's absolutely unpredictable what it will do when you zoom in. I can sympathize with the developers since the re-layout of a page, figuring out whether the user wants to zoom in on the text or the image, etc; may be quite difficult. Opera Mobile has seemingly perfected this over years and years.
Yes, this is just one example. To OP, if he has bothered to check this deep into replies, does Safari do text reflow upon zooming in? Should I attach screenshots to explain?
I hope not. I've just switched (long-term, I hope) to Opera out of complete disgust with Google and a lingering disgust with Firefox. It's nice to have choices.
Developing an in-house browser engine is rather expensive. It's a moving target with constant pressure to better rivals. There's a need to patch an infinite number of websites, which don't care that you exist.
I can understand why they switched and focused on value added features.
Possibly. They were uncannily quick in adopting Blink. The series of events seemed to be Opera->WebKit, Google->Blink, Opera->Blink... so perhaps they want to get cosy with Google? Although, I can't see what G would want with them.
I think it's also known that, sometime around IE7, Microsoft tried to acquire them. Microsoft have long since made their bed though... unless they want a better mobile browser.
Either way, it'd make total sense for Opera to ditch their email operation if they were looking to be acquired by a business with an established email product already. Especially when many Fastmail customers are there because of their particular niche in service.
Perhaps it's the new Blackberry group? Dark horse! :P
Two clarifications:
- Opera never switched to Webkit. Opera had switched to Chromium, which initially used Webkit. So, it's no surprise that Opera adopted Blink.
- Opera has publicly commented it was aware of Google's plans for Blink, and that information was a factor in the decision to switch to the Chromium engine.
I can't speak for Opera but if you take a look at their latest browser in iOS (only available for the iPad) it will give you some hope in the direction Opera is going. The browser, "Coast" as they call it is a pretty nifty, well crafted and thought out browser.
My guess is they're trying going for a niche product and are focusing on what's important to them rather than try to get their feet wet in every market.
I remember reading that one of the big money makers is Opera Mini. All the content viewed by that browser comes through proxies run by Opera. This means a HUGE amount of data that Opera can monetize on.
During the Opera tenure, FastMail moved to new, larger premises in Melbourne and took on quite a few new staff. They did a lot of work on the My Opera Mail web client, which will hopefully be folded back into the main FM product.
They also built-out data centre capacity, including facilities in Iceland.
So all around I think FM benefited greatly from the three years under Opera, though I'm not convinced the reverse is true.
> the USA just did a bad job hiding the fact that you had none.
Er, no - the USA are the main ones wholesale intercepting everyone's shit - I'm not a US citizen and I don't like it in principle. I did have a pretty good expectation of privacy until they started doing that, because no-one else has the resources to do a similar whole-take surveillance effort.
Anyway, I signed up for Fastmail because I thought it was foreign to the USA (though later found out the servers are hosted in NYC - doh).
But seriously, I'd love to see an end to the "oh well" attitude. The stance I do take is "you're spying on and profiling me? Fuck you I'm leaving". And that helps me sleep at night, for better or worse.
It's not an "oh well" attitude. In fact, I'm advocating that if you actually want your data private and secure, you shouldn't be hosting on someone else's computer at all! You shouldn't be practicing security through good-will (good will assurances by a party that they aren't snooping).
I send most of emails through gmail because I don't care if the NSA reads them. For my cross-border drug deals, I use carrier pigeons with encrypted handwritten messages.
Indeed. However, I've used Royal Mail (postal service in UK) all my life without thinking that I needed to worry about what I said - I always found that very liberating, looking back. Even postcards I assumed wouldn't be read by anyone, and certainly not photographed and archived permanently against my name. Given that IP traffic is replacing the postal service, to not have this assumption any longer is painful on several levels.
> You shouldn't be practicing security through good-will
Fair enough. That said, the need to defend myself against a well equipped foreign government is just not a job I'm up to on my own. I'd prefer it if the government demonstrated goodwill, which would seem to be their job.
> However, I've used Royal Mail (postal service in UK) all my life without thinking that I needed to worry about what I said
This is true for the United States Postal Service as well. I've always thought it'd be interesting to look at what historically brought about the strong privacy expectations to postal mail when it's technically so easy to intercept.
The whole situation arose because the government wasn't supposed to invade privacy, but it did anyways. So if policy is changed we'd just be back where we were before.
> * Do you really believe these efforts are not being taken by every major world covert agency?*
No. Targeted surveillance is the job of every major world covert agency. Mass-surveillance of one's own population is an ambition of totalitarian societies and governments only. It's not necessary for secret services of the world to do their job or to do it well.
Tell me what "other major world covert agency" has these:
- Gigantic data centres like the one in Utah
- Practically all Internet data flowing through their territories
- The large majority of all cloud storage user's data, and largest social network, in the world, with the added unchecked ability for this major covert agency to request query all this data
- Strong influence in the world's crypto-standards
- Control over the world's two largest closed-source Operating Systems and the proven ability to place backdoors therein (the latter only for Windows, dunno if they got iOS too, but why wouldn't they)
There's quite a few more areas in which the US definitely has an exclusive and unique ability to track and intercept the entire world's Internet data that other "major world covert agencies" most definitely do not possess.
Now put some names to it, the others are? China and Russia? I think it was pretty bloody obvious that nobody was suggesting to all start using cloud storage in those territories instead. But even then, it IS strictly better to have your data surveilled in part by China, Russia and the US, than to have all of it surveilled by a single entity, the US. Because you know it won't be shared between them, and that is a tiny bit of privacy gained. So that's already where your silly defence of your beloved Orwellian government falls apart.
Of course, there's other places still.
Take the Netherlands, definitely another bad choice, but at least none of these "major covert agencies" have a direct line into our data. Our own secret service (AIVD) can be rather cosy with the NSA, and they definitely perform surveillance on a level of intrusiveness that equals and exceeds that of the NSA, but not on a level of SCALE and that is, when it comes to data and privacy, what can make all the difference. When the NSA comes knocking on the door of a Dutch Internet hosting provider (this happened), they will refuse or tell them to contact the police or something. We have no "gag orders", "secret laws", "plea bargaining" or similar Kafkaesque nightmare fuel like the US, so if the police forces a company to hand over data to the US without an extremely good reason, heads will roll. Like everywhere, there is a lack of accountability in NL, but this much I trust. You guys wouldn't need gag orders if no one would give a shit, after all.
So, a tiny but heavily surveilled country like NL is already two steps better for hosting data than the US. And then there's even better places. I don't know, I've heard people mention Switzerland? What about some places in East Europe with not too much oversight? Either way, just fragmenting all that data instead of keeping all of it right in the hole of the beast, is going to make it a lot harder to develop a terribly powerful singular system such as XKeyScore.
Then, there's of course the tiny little slight caused by the fact that hardly anyone in the US gave a damn about the whole world's Internet data being intercepted and analyzed by the NSA, but only started to complain when it turned out that included them, too. Not just that, but even right here on HN some people have the audacity to argue that it's fine (expected, even) to do this to the world, as long as there are legal checks and rules before the same is applied to US citizens. Doesn't sit very well with me, that. Is already a great reason to grab my data and take it some place else, and tell all my friends in the world to do the same.
So just stop, stop making excuses for the US or the NSA, and start acting like a citizen of the world.
This is the Internet, this is the 21st century, just grow up beyond "but they're doing it toooooo!", and who are you?
This sounds more like ability rather than choice. It seems odd to demonize the U.S. because practically all Internet data flows through their territories.
> So just stop, stop making excuses for the US or the NSA
I'm not making excuses, and of course it's a Bad Thing. But don't pretend that avoiding one actor is really a solution, any more than rebooting your computer is going to solve deeper issues.
If I remember correctly, fastmail representatives have (here on HN) promised that they were planning a move from US-based datacenters to European datacenters, if not completely, offering it as an option for people who wanted it.
I'd love to get this confirmed, and some news on when I can expect to have my account hosted in Europe.
I suppose an argument might be made in favour of Germany -- but I'd be surprised if they don't have a similar infrastructure in place for wire-tapping as we know know is in place in the US. UK and France is out. Russia is an open spyocracy of sorts. Iceland?
I'm currently looking into setting up a VPS in Iceland or Germany and running my own mail server from it, moving away from Fastmail. It saddens me as I both dislike managing my own mail server and really like Fastmail, but having my email routed through the US is no longer feasible.
So far I've looked into 1984hosting.com and orangewebsite.com, both pricey compared to what I'm used to but I guess that is the price of better privacy. There is a cheaper one called icelandvps.com but they are owned by a UK parent company so I am little unclear about what that means for Iceland law, privacy etc. It may be cheaper to go to a German host, I am not yet decided.
Austrian company but they offer hosting in Iceland.
I once tried Malaysia. Bad idead, lot's of spam from Malaysia. Lost 50% of my Email due to blacklisting...
Since the .fm tld is for the Federated States of Micronesia, I was sort of hoping for hosting on some tropical island in the South Pacific, but even then the Fastmail operators would more than likely acquiesce to any US spying "requests."
Unfortunately, there are increasingly few nations which will refuse US et al spying "requests."
I think they could really get an edge over other email providers if they went all out as a pro-privacy/non-US email alternative. They would need to exit the US though to take such a claim seriously, which is unlikely.
Brazil? haha. Iceland or Germany for sure. Finland, Eastern Europe, maybe?
Simply out of USA/UK jurisdiction would be good, as they're now demonstrably the worst in the West (at least it would certainly seem so based on recent news trends). So, anywhere else.
Portugal just opened the largest EU datacenter. Connectivity infrastructure is really good in the country (heh, international debt had to go somewhere...). The government couldn't care less about snooping, although they are US-friendly to a fault. However, court approval is required for snooping and courts are slow moving and processes are open: Service providers may inform the customer about the snooping order and may withhold data if the customer challenges the court order.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a paid customer, I'm loving the service (support too), and this is the only thing keeping me from telling people how great FastMail is.
Not impressed with Fastmail - I tried their free offer, wasn't impressed, and didn't sign up for the paid service. I've since had over 100 (yup) emails telling me of my "OVERDUE PAYMENT" (the caps are theirs), and they ignore correspondence requesting that they stop. Marketing via harrassment - interesting tactic, and incredibly bad form, IMHO.
(I work for FastMail) Many apologies about this. It was due to an unexpected interaction with our billing system when we added the free trial functionality. We never intended to spam or harass people who decided FastMail wasn't for them. We fixed this about a month ago and overhauled the wording in our notices as well to make them friendlier and easier to understand.
To nmjenkins, thanks for the reply and apology - please do not take this as a personal shot: I appreciate that issues occur with automated systems - but ignoring emails of complaint sent to addresses advertised on your website suggests that a different issue is in play. Not one of my emails was replied to, and the lasting impression is that - as I do not wish to become a customer - there was no point in responding at all to my complaint. Your reply above is appreciated, however - thank you.
> I've since had over 100 (yup) emails telling me of my "OVERDUE PAYMENT" (the caps are theirs),
Oh god, yes. This was annoying as hell. I actually liked their service but at the end of the month I didn't think I was using email enough to justify paying 40 bucks a year, so I decided to keep using the one I got for free when I got a domain. But even if I was going to buy, I wouldn't have just because of this harrassment. Here's a screenshot from my inbox: http://i.imgur.com/meNhlAr.png (there are some more that couldn't fit into the screenshot)
That's absolutely crazy. I'm a paying Fastmail customer, and that really puts me off. I'm "trialing" them for 6 months at the moment with a personal domain before I decide whether I want to permanently switch to them, and so far had been very impressed... but that makes me think twice. I hope they're paying attention to this!
While it's a relief that I'm not alone in this, it raises a concern that this policy of bludegoning people to sign up via email DOES appear to be a company policy. Plus, they refuse to even acknowledge emails on the subject.
I cannot recommend them less. Shabby treatment of potential customers.
I've been a Fastmail user for years, ever since I realized that their web UI was compatible with my Windows Mobile Phone. (pre iPhone era)
Here we are now, and the rest of the net has caught up to mobile access, mostly. Though my initial reasons for using Fastmail have become moot points, I'll continue to use my Fastmail accounts with fond memories and hope for improved resistance to governments' exceeding their mandates.
I wonder what "strategic changes" they did at Opera? So far they have shut down all their interesting projects (like Opera Unite), their browser has been highly customizable (the UI, not even needing addons) which was abandoned completely in Opera 15. Now they have some half-assed Chrome clone for Desktop, Coast browser which is also nowhere near final, Opera Mobile (not mini) is getting more and more generic like all other mobile browsers...
I love Fastmail and have been a paid user for many years now, but I hate the new AJAXy interface, in particular the infinite scroll as currently implemented. Slow, annoying, and makes it difficult to reach old emails.
Fastmail has one of the few interfaces that gets infinite scrolling /right/. The outer mailbox div has overflow-y: auto; and the inner div is the combined height of every message in that folder -- my inbox has 11381 messages, and the height is 364192px. When the scrollbar is moved, JS automatically determines which messages to load. Messages themselves are tiny AJAX requests that take less than 100ms each.
This is from the perspective of using Chrome on high end hardware, but I couldn't ask for a better web interface.
That said, they aren't joking about needing a new mobile interface: the current one is usable, but definitely lacks the same polish as the desktop version.
I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.
I used to love gmail's webclient. When I moved to fastmail, I thought I'd miss that a lot. As it turns out, I started using thunderbird and K9 mail on my phone for reading e-mail and I never check my email from any browser at all. I feel now more comfortable with a dedicated email/calendar client - plus the enigmail extension - and it pushes me towards a good habit of never logging in into untrusted computers. I mean, I can't possibly be sure my own computer/cellphone are safe, let alone the other people's.
Yeah, the new interface is missing a few essential things the classic interface has, so I keep the box checked too. Hope it doesn't get phased out- would be mad without the classic interface.
You can do that with Chrome, Firefox and Safari as well - check out my project tmpbrowser, which is a simple app that creates temporary throwaway browser sessions:
I use it at work because it ignores the system policy against downloading exe files. I hate trying to download an installer and having Chrome tell me (after the fact) that the system blocked the file. Opera doesn't care and saves the file just fine.
I'm looking forward to better mobile support. Currently I can't sync contacts at all because the only Android LDAP contacts app seems not to be purchasable.
the most annoying thing about fastmail is their high cost for storage. their new web-based client is top-notch performance-wise. a lot better than gmail.
Is FastMail a joke? I get more storage for free at dropbox and sugarsync. What exactly is this service bringing to the table? It feels like a 1998 business model to me...
I don't require GBs of mail storage because my mail is automatically deleted before its 180 days old. Mail that's older than 180 days can be accessed by USG employees without a warrant.
FastMail provides me with mail accounts for $10/year[2] that provide enough storage for 180 days and include required features like custom domain names, domain aliases, email aliases, etc.
Please open source Carakan and Presto - don't let them rot, and us hackers have what to learn with them (and potentially do with them). GPL is fine, and may let you still monetize it.
(And ... it's not like it's giving you any advantage - you've switched away from both)