I hadn't ever watched one of these talent shows
But I'm watching Britain's Got Talent and Simon Cowell is the only judge on the panel who has any taste.
But I'm watching Britain's Got Talent and Simon Cowell is the only judge on the panel who has any taste.
OK, listen, seriously. Watch that. Then you should go to Hulu and watch the show. This show will make you smile. It also might be the single best way to spend an hour on the internet today.
This is my personal opinion. It does not reflect the opinions of my employer.
The programmers out there can probably sympathize with me, but anyone who writes for a living will probably be able to relate. It's a frustrating thing when the idea you're trying to express is taking many more words than it seems should be necessary to describe what you originally thought was a simple idea.
Right now I'm working on a set of classes that I thought I would be able to do quickly and simply, but whose code just keeps on balooning. I've written 400 lines so far today on top of 400 that already existed, and I'll probably need 600 more to get the job done.
Most of the ballot measures on yesterday's special election failed. That means there will be more budget cuts this year. I not completely happy about this. On the one hand, some say you have to starve the monster to tame it. On the other hand I do still want kids to get educations.
I think a couple of things are coming out of this that are pretty disgusting. For one thing, I heard a Democrat on Forum today interpreting this result as the people saying, "We're fine with you raising taxes and spending. But just don't ask us about it because we are busy." How deep in the sand does your head have to be to believe that this is what the results meant?
It's clear to me that Californians are saying, "We are tired of being the most heavily taxed citizens in the country yet having one of the lowest dollar per child ratios in our public schools." (To pick just one example of a thing that a Californian might be pissed about.) Me, I am sick of giving nearly 8% of my income to California -- on top of the chunk of my federal income taxes that get pumped back into the state -- to get indistinguishable service levels from those I enjoyed in St. Louis, Atlanta, or Orlando.
And am I going to vote to do away with the 2/3s requirement on passing a budget or raising taxes? Hell no. Do I read like the type of person who wants to give the majority party free license to take from me whatever they think they need?
I don't put this all on the legislature. The voters are the ones who elected our officials, and it is their wishes that they transitively represent. You need look no further than last year's election to see why. Consider, for example, the Train. I have a lot of friends who voted for the train, one of whom needles me with it occasionally. "I'm really looking forward to that train," things like that. It's well intended, but it still pisses me off. This vote and other decisions like it fritter away money that could rather be spent on things that are actually important. The collective motivation seems to be that trains are shiny, so we ought to have more of them. That kind of logic does not pass muster with me.
The final measure on the ballot is another such example. Who cares if the legislature gets pay raises during a recession? The impact is so small that it just doesn't matter. Yet this measure was the one that captured the imagination of the Californian voter.
Is it any wonder that, with decades of decisions just like the train piling up, we are where we are now? And should anyone be surprised with the highest tax rates in the country corporations are increasingly choosing not to locate in California, which can at least in part explain our nation-leading unemployment rate? Should I now be terrified that the government has to figure out how to make do with a little less (OK, let's be fair, a lot less)? I am less fearful and more anticipatory to see exactly what happens as a result of this belt tightening.
Here's a comparison of several other websites that also host thumbnails, once again blown up to twice the original size. Some thoughts:
1. It's true that the other sites do have some artifacting, but Netflix is by far the worst. Google is second worst, Live is second best, and Paint.Net comes in first. (It'd better since it's twice has heavy as the other three.)
2. How much would it cost Netflix to upgrade to better thumbnails?
Let's be really liberal and assume that Netflix gets 100 qps of pageviews and shows 30 thumbnails per page, and that to get decent quality thumbnails it'd have to double the weight of each image. Let's talk about that in terms of storage and in terms of bandwidth.
Storage:
I don't know how many movies Netflix has. I see some numbers on the internet claiming they have 65,000, so let's round up to 200,000. 200,000 * 20 kb (again, rounding up on the required size of the image) = 4 GB of thumbnails. You can store that ten times on a single hard drive. So we know that disk space is no constraint.
Let's say you want to serve it really really fast. This still fits in memory on a single server several times, so if you're going for triple redundancy we're still not even getting close to $2,000 incremental capex. You slap a little bit of memcache in front of that to serve your hot spots (or just replicate the images you intend to serve most often across all three of your ram databases, memcache is easier though) and you are DONE with storage.
Bandwidth:
I can't be bothered to calculate this. The amount they spend on pumping movies to their users must be so vastly much more than the thumbnail serving bandwidth that it boggles the mind.
Summing it up, it's hard to imagine the total outlay for improved thumbnail serving on their site would cost more than $10,000 (known to his friends as "a drop in the bucket"). So are my calculations wrong? Or is this an instance of penny wise and pound foolish? Or has nobody at Netflix noticed how ugly their thumbnails are? Not working there it's impossible for me to tell, but I really do wish someone would fix it.
On the right is Netflix's movie cover thumbnail. On the left is an ideal rendering of almost the same image. I blew both up by 200% after shrinking the left to Netflix thumbnail size. The mess you see on the right side comes from Netflix's horrible JPEG compression.
OK, the language of my first attempt at this was a little strong. But seriously, guys. Looking at this makes me want to not watch movies on your site. If somebody from blockbuster came over here and told me that they don't cut corners on their thumbnails and additionally charge the same as you, I'd probably switch to their service. It doesn't (can't, at your qps rate) cost that much to serve thumbnails. It's something that's worth getting right.
http://www.railsenvy.com/2009/5/11/rubystein-ruby-meets-wolfenstein
