I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don’t know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc… There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.
Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE—but that was not the fault of my software).
To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: “I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.” It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.
It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.
...so you should have almost no confidence in your implementation, or accept that you’re dealing with an orders-of-mangnitude easier version of the problem than Google is.
I understood the point to be the latter. Like, the usual rule of thumb is that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the value, and Drahflow is claiming that in this instance 0.0068% of the effort produced 80% of the value. (Assuming that Google Wave was developed by a hundred-person team).
Wave was certainly not developed by a hundred-person team. That article says that the “enabling technologies” behind Wave, including GWT and Google’s XMPP fork, comprise a hundred-person team, which I could maybe believe between three or four of Google’s key infrastructure projects at the time.
I think in Wave’s case, as an innovative technology that had no clear predecessor, most of the two years is probably design, not development. Wave missed its mark, so none of that design is really re-usable.
I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don’t know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc… There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.
Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE—but that was not the fault of my software).
To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: “I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.” It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.
...so you should have almost no confidence in your implementation, or accept that you’re dealing with an orders-of-mangnitude easier version of the problem than Google is.
I understood the point to be the latter. Like, the usual rule of thumb is that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the value, and Drahflow is claiming that in this instance 0.0068% of the effort produced 80% of the value. (Assuming that Google Wave was developed by a hundred-person team).
Wave was certainly not developed by a hundred-person team. That article says that the “enabling technologies” behind Wave, including GWT and Google’s XMPP fork, comprise a hundred-person team, which I could maybe believe between three or four of Google’s key infrastructure projects at the time.
I think in Wave’s case, as an innovative technology that had no clear predecessor, most of the two years is probably design, not development. Wave missed its mark, so none of that design is really re-usable.