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Authentication is a service that is obviously used by other microservices, otherwise it would have no use.

But with microservices coupling is as loose as possible.

Your authentication microservice provides an interface (REST or whatever) independent on the underlying implementation and it does not matter how it implemented. As long has the interface 'contract' is fulfilled you can re-implement it from Java to Rails, or move it from here to there, if you wish and that is completely transparent to all other microservices.


Banks and actual currencies still have a bright future.


As far as I'm concerned, if you give your money to some dude on the internet with ZERO oversight or regulation, you're pretty much guaranteed something like this happening at some point. how is this different than giving cash to your cousin's uncle who promises to give it back "whenever you need it"?


Oh, there’s lots of missing fiat in this case too. Not just crypto.


Value has a bright future. There will always need to be some means of exchanging it. Fiat currencies fit the current system of a bunch of countries defending their territory and needing to collect taxes.


Don't confuse applications and protocols with microservices.

Microservices are services within an application.


There's every chance your MX MTA authenticates people against LDAP, uses LDAP again to figure out where to forward the mail to another system for final account storage, then the MDA stores the message on a clustered file system or an object store, then tells the logging system to log the delivery. The LDAP systems for authentication and for where the user's mail lives might be separate instances.

Then the MUA connects to an IMAP proxy which talks to LDAP to authenticate and to determine where the messages for this user are stored (again, possibly different LDAP instances), then connects to an IMAP backend that retrieves the data from a clustered file system or object store. The IMAP proxy, IMAP backend, and MDA are separate systems. The object store is, likewise, a separate system.

Meanwhile some of your users are using a webmail client as their MUA. That talks to an outbound-only MTA and the IMAP proxy, but it may talk directly to LDAP for authentication rather than authenticating to the mail servers first. It can pull user preferences from LDAP. It pulls their contact book from LDAP. These might be three different LDAP instances. I has a calendar app in the same page in another tab, but that talks instead to a separate CalDav server. The folder pane which updates with the number of unread messages in each folder updates through a different backend process on a different web server from the listing of mail in your current folder, which is a separate web server from the one that just fetched the content of the highlighted message into your preview pane.

Meanwhile. half of these systems actually forward through another MTA which makes no final delivery decision itself but scans for spam scoring. Those messages that make it through the filtering get forwarded to another service which only scans for malware. Then those messages which pass go to the system that forwards the mail for final delivery to the user or to the remote party's mx server.

All of these systems need their timestamps correct, so they all talk to an NTP service running alone on a VM or container that does nothing else.

All of these systems send their logs to a central logging cluster via a defined protocol. The logging servers do nothing else.

Just because your mail server might run qmail, Courier, Amavis, SpamAssassin, procmail, and mutt on one box with local storage and local logging doesn't mean that's how mail is done at scale. It's pretty clear to me how if you think of "email" as the application that it is composed of microservices.


A very long comment that ignores the one it purports to reply to...

Microservices are called that because they reside within an app that itself provides a service. Otherwise, of course you could call everything and anything 'microservice' but then the term would become meaningless.


GMail (or any other email offering) is "an app" from many perspectives.


Yes, it is an app. Not a 'microservice'. That's the point.


An app containing many services handling individual, separated aspects of the overall app, connected by queues and standard protocols. Many pieces interchangeable with others. If you'd hide the fact that it's e-mail and wrapped a bunch of HTTP/gRPC around it you could easily sell the same architecture to people as "a messenger build on microservice principles".


Because we're on track to be 10 billion soon.


Small nitpick, but it's estimated that global population will peak at approx. 8.7 billion before starting to decrease. See: https://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722


That's very optimistic.

"The median estimate for future growth sees the world population reaching 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100" (2017)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...


People typically have fewer kids as their society develops. Average age in the developed world is almost double of places like Africa. There is some evidence that slowing or decline in population is a reasonable expectation.

Also, from Wikipedia:

Low estimates suggest a decline

Moderate estimates suggest a plateau

High estimates suggest constant increase

Time will tell, and estimates suggest that the earth can comfortably support ~10bn

---

I don't think housing prices have much to do with population increase, but more to do with urbanization (as well as increasing wage gaps).

People are flocking to existing cities, and the more center you are the higher prices are.

This pushes people to the outskirts, which become more urbanized, which spreads urbanization through the same cycle.


Increased urbanisation is at best marginal in Western countries. This is not what is driving prices.

But top places like London now attract from a global pool of billions.

People need to realise that a world with 10 billion does not look like a world with 2 billion.

Lastly, the planet has trouble with us now... It's terrorism to suggest that 10 billion is just fine.


>Lastly, the planet has trouble with us now... It's terrorism to suggest that 10 billion is just fine.

Calling it terrorism is a bit absurd.

It's totally possible (and even likely within our lifetimes), but that doesn't mean that there aren't huge logistical issues to overcome for it to be comfortable.

One of the main problems is that the world population is so widely distributed. We can already feed and house everyone, we already have more resources than what would be required... they're just not distributed appropriately (some due to hoarding, some due to supply chain barriers, political borders, etc).


Considering the current environmental issues this is not absurd at all.


"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."


It is because I didn't say it was "just fine" I said "can" as in "is possible" — which is objectively true.

...and even if I did say it was "just fine" it wouldn't be tantamount to terrorism because I was pointing out something that is very likely inevitable.

I'm not invoking 3 billion people by assuming one day they will exist.


Please, describe to me how pointing out the inevitability of population increase is terrorism.

You don't need to weaponize "sorry" — just don't say it.

It doesn't make sense to jump to ad hominem attacks because someone's calling you out on a statement that seems completely irrelevant.


It is intellectual terrorism. I am sorry but sometimes things must be called out even if the feelings of thin-skinned people are hurt.

It is only 'inevitable' because no-one has cared about it and, worse because some try to downplay the issue.

I did not accuse you personally, but you also did not say that it was inevitable, you spread the opinion that it was fine.

Those who claim that it is all good are pushing us to the abyss.

Edit: Downvoting the inconvenient truth won't make it go away.


I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but you're being outwardly shitty when you have no reason to be. You're just throwing the word terrorism around disingenuously to get a rise out of people.


It was not disingenuous. You complain too much while avoiding the point.


Your only point is that the suggestion of the earth supporting 10bn people is akin to terrorism (which you later amended to "intellectual terrorism"), which I'd argue is objectively disingenuous... and completely pointless.

This conversation has reached the point of unproductive a while ago.

I'm sure you'll try to bait me back into it, because you fit that MO, but you're on your own.


That’s the global pop, not the UK’s.

The UKs pop should dropping, if not for immigration which the UK can control if they wanted too (being an island surrounded by rough seas and rich neighbors).


And because a much larger percentage of those people want to live in big cities compared to 50 years ago.


In developed countries things haven't changed that much.

If you look at London (since that's essentially the article), population has actually only reached back to its 1950 level.

But attractive cities can now pull people and investment from a global pool of billions of people and thus the market does its thing and prices move accordingly.


It's definitely a thing in the US. 64% of the population lived in urban areas in 1950 compared to 81% in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...


Be careful of that though. Urban is very broadly defined by the census. I live in a 7,000 person town 40 miles outside of a major city. Myself and 2 neighbors are collectively on 75 acres and are adjacent to conservation land. This area is considered urban.


It was 74% in 1970 (50 years ago). It is not a massive change.

The massive change in urbanisation is happening in developing countries. In developed countries it happened earlier and is not really a thing anymore.


I haven’t seen recent details but as of a few years ago, there was an uptick in college educated young people moving to a handful of mostly coastal dense urban cores but the overall urbanization trend in the US was rather limited.


> Even if four people's names are on a mortgage, if one or more stop paying, the mortgage lender has the right to demand full repayments from whoever they can reach, he explains.

This is called "joint and several liability" and is the legal position for many agreements when a party is made of several people (at least in the UK).

For example, people sharing a flat/house as renters will have the same liability unless they have separate tenancies. This is extremely common but surprisingly many people have no clue about it and think that they are fine paying "their share" of the rent.


Part of the reason for this is that the lender really needs everyone whose name is on the title deeds to sign the mortgage deed and also wants to ensure that none of them are able to claim an equitable interest to prevent a foreclosure. A simple joint mortgage is a relatively quick way and reliable way to ensure this.

The risk if they don't look after their security properly is that the lender ends up owning (say) a 1/3rd joint share in a property which they are not permitted to sell without permission from the other 2 owners and on which they are not entitled to any rent and can't evict the defaulting borrower. There are cases where this has been the result of a defective mortgage arrangement. Understandably, that's not something lenders really want to risk.

It is possible for property to be owned with only one name on the deeds and one name signing the mortgage deed by establishing a trust.

If you want the lender to consider multiple incomes on that basis then you'd need guarantors and you then run into the problem that this probably needs specialist human legal input so it is suddenly not a mass market product.

It's also worth noting that under joint and several liability, the tenants would usually have the right to then sue one another for the relevant shares if the lender went after one of them for the whole amount.


This campaign, which is taking place in several countries, has to be one of the most idiotic I've seen recently.

Stay in school, study hard, make a difference.

You won't achieve anything by hurting yourself and your parents who pay for your education.


> Additionally, campaigners want the curriculum reformed to address climate change as an educational priority, alongside a request to include youth voices in policy-making and lower the voting age to 16.

This is one way to make a difference. And a few days won't really hurt them in any meaningful way.


Children in some countries still have no access to education, and here some people are in awe that children skip school for nothing.

This is a bad joke.

If they want to be taken seriously they should protest outside school hours, that'd show their grit and motivation, instead of wasting the good fortune they have to be in school in the first place.


Those other children are irrelevant here. It's a "finish your dinner, the are children starving in Africa" type non sequitur.

If they went outside of school hours, they could be easily ignored. Now we're taking about them, because they did something more.


Well, a policeman on the beat or patrolling in a car is surveillance.

Based on that surveillance does work.

The question is rather at what level surveillance does not meaningfully reduce crime anymore but becomes a (political) control tool.


I still differentiate between public and private spaces.

I do believe surveillance and the threat of surveillance does heavily undermine public trust in a society and its institutions and that this can be easily deduced by reasoning. Good thing trust is not an issue in 2019...

Ever wondered why so many constitutions around the world forbid surveillance?

I believe the studies about people becoming dumber...


In my country I'm more afraid of police than of thugs, tbh


As is the case for all software, unit tests should be well designed.

If a unit test fails when the code under test hasn't functionally changed then it means that your unit tests are flaky.


I think that the issue is that microservices _require_ good practices and discipline.

These are attributes that 80% of projects and teams lack so when they decide to jump onto the microservices bandwagon the shit hits the fan pretty quickly.


Bopomofo has nothing to do with Taiwan, specifically.

It's a system introduced by the Republic of China, and tha continues to be used in the Republic of China (only Taiwan left these days).

That's because the mainland switched to Pinyin in the 50s.

That being said, Taiwan has now also officially switched to Pinyin so use may increase.

Edit:

Another interesting, and old, system to write Mandarin using the Arabic alphabet: Xiao'erjing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing

Edit 2:

Bopomofo is in the same line as Hiragana/Katakana/Korean system: It simplifies and make things phonetic but still creates a brand new characters set inspired by Chinese characters.

With Pinyin, to me the main development was to integrate that there was already an ubiquitous alphabet in existence, the latin alphabet, that could be used and save the trouble of yet another writing system.

A bit like what happened in Vietnam (though obviously that's because a Frenchman came up with the system).


For what it's worth, there is also a Sinitic language fairly close to Mandarin that's written in Cyrillic characters, Dungan (which, incidentally, sort of refutes the notion that one can only write Chinese languages with Chinese characters).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4578


As a resident here, I know for a fact that Taiwan did not replace bopomofo with pinyin.

You see bopomofu is to denote pronunciation not to romanticize characters. If you are talking about how location/street names are spelled, some form of pinyin (literally means spelling) had always been used for romanticization.


Bopomofo is still taught in taiwan and zhuyin is still used for typing. The only thing changed is signs now use pinyin....


It's a start...


Well they don't change the signs in Tainan or Taipei, only exists in 1 or 2 county's.

Hopefully they don't switch to pinyin, and I especially hope they don't switch to Simplified.


It had always been some form of romanticization for street names. Pronunciation has always been bopomofo.


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