I wonder if the dev. team can give us some updates on how far some things are, cause im
trying to read the dev forum but its way to technical for me atm.
I wonder how close we are to a fully connected testnetwork where the users are running the vaults and not the foundation itself ? And please also explained for not developers. This cause when i explain maidsafe to people they always reffer to vaporware, thats why i called this the vaporware stage not cause i think it is but cause people think it is.
Example @HeyTaiZen on twitter that makes vlogs about coins and actually is not that bad in it.
When i tweeted them about maidsafe they said it’s vaporware and i had to tell them its not and some of the functions. and now i saw they finaly tweeted to maidsafe for a Q&A with maidsafe.
And ofcourse people here will scream cause i used the word vaporware but please visit other forums beside maidsafe forum and find it out yourself.
We dont need exact dates but any direction would be awesome, a week or maybe 2 or 10 weeks
Hi, The developers are very reluctant to give ETA’s because of the backlash of doing so once before. There was a working network up for a couple of weeks where users were running vaults remotely. So the network does work and now they are just fine tuning various things and adding things to make it fully decentralized and autonomous.
Anybody think this is a good explanation in layman terms or am I way off the mark?
No, i’m not part of the dev team. I just wanted to give me understanding of the current state in order to have it verified or debunked. Thanks.
You won’t get actual times from the devs be it 2 to 10 whatever or other sort of timeframe.
The reason is as @upstate said, the dev team got hammered when timeframes slipped. Thats why the road map does not have any.
Best to point people to past achievements and not engage in the “if it cannot do this then its not xyz” because it is talk trying to prove its not going to work. Let those things that have been achieved speak for you. Then tell them what is being worked on without giving a timeframe.
They updated the road map ( https://maidsafe.net/roadmap_dev.html) also at one point but things have changed since then and some people find the Full Road Map(https://maidsafe.net/roadmap.html) a bit cumbersome to follow. If you look here https://maidsafe.net/roadmap_dev.html, you will see Alpha 1 was supposed to have Vaults as part of it but it didn’t. I prefer the Devs putting time into the SAFE Network software itself versus keeping the website up to date. It’s frustrating sitting on the sidelines being unable to assist with such a great project and especially one that’s so important.
This is not like building a house where you have a plan an a bunch of people working on building it. In this case it’s inventing the stuff as well. Think of the logic like routing, farming and more. The devs planned in the beginning to use C++ and Reliable UDP for connections. Well, here we are in Rust with TCP connections. Were these good decisions? Ohw yes, definitely. Could they’ve been plannend on forehand? Absolutely not. One way to get a clue about how far the devs are is looking at the RFCs. What do we need for reliable storage and a secure network??? Data chains, Disjoint Groups and Node Ageing.
At the same time they’re delivering tools for other devs to build Apps and stuff. So we have to wait for these 3 RFCs to be finished, tested and implemented before we see BETA. How long will it take? Disjoint groups in next 2 weeks. The others in next few months. So say hello to 2017 before we see BETA and/or test-Safecoin.
Very true for standard projects. But having been involved in R&D projects myself in the 70’s/80’s any timeframe is designed to be broken. Even though the projects had to justify their right to be funded (big dollars) the funders also knew they were not funding a project that can be detailed down to the nut/bolt as in an airport or bridge but one where things have to be created & new concepts discovered etc. Building things that never have been done before. My uni thesis was the first of many and it was done for < $1000 and yet changed the way we view things (liberality) before and on the web. Yet I had to put a lot of extra time into it.
Point being that research projects cannot really give milestones and when milestone dates have to be given one of four things occur. 1) by pure luck/manipulation they do it, 2) miss it by a lot, 3) cut short the research and develop an inferior product (many dangerous products were because of this) to meet the deadline, 4) Never gets completed (i.e. fails) or workers put in 80-100 hour weeks (paid only 40) trying to do it.
SAFE is doing things that have not been done before and like the original Internet is not keeping to any timeframe. Decades till the web existed on the original Internet and another decade before the public really started to notice it. SAFE is just as cutting edge as the original internet, just higher level protocols.
Then we have history.
MAIDSAFE used to give time frames for progress. Often the “programmers type” of timeframes, wildly optimistic and more inaccurate. Even when they started to be careful the time frames were missed. They were attacked, called many things (still happening). But was it wasted time causing this, nope just when R&D of this sort occurs there are things unknown that needed to be solved/developed. So what should have taken a day can easily become a month. How does one timeframe such things???
Best to continue development, have the goals (roadmap) in sight and oversight that ensures the programmers know they are in effect always behind schedule.
I agree with you. This topic has been talked about a lot over the past years. I’ve noticed that the “maidsafe apologists” always seem to get the last word. Let’s be clear: I’m a supporter of this project. However, I think the management of this project doesn’t meet any standards that I’ve ever been involved with.
Timelines are necessary when you ask a community to provide private capital. Period. If you can’t measure it (timeline) you can’t manage it (the project).
Speaking of managing it:
Any project manager worth his or her salt recognizes that everything revolves around timelines and due dates. If you can’t put those down on paper, then you are not managing anything.
Can’t come up with dates? See #1 above. It a vicious cycle. Lack of dates does nothing but cause doubt, accusations of vaporware, and general discontent among all participants.
Here’s my helpful hint: Put some dates out there. And whatever you do: Under-promise and over-deliver.
By maidsafe apologists you mean people that have another opinion than you?
It seems that even though they didn’t supply any timelines the private capital is still coming their way, so there goes your whole argument.
I guess you haven’t noticed any of the progress? Seems to me they are managing things just fine. Will you eat these words when there’s a launch within the next year? I’ve had projects at work where all they did was push a deadline one month further again, and again. All it does is frustrate everyone involved and put pressure on the people working on the project. The result is that people burn out because of the unreasonable pressure that is put on them.
There’s no discontent here and I think a lot of other participants don’t care either. The ones that do are free to move on to other things, sell their MAID, not buy equity.
Naming dates and not making them causes way more doubt and would definitely fuel accusations of vaporware.
Aren’t they doing that by not naming any dates? They don’t promise anything so by default they can only over-deliver.
@FollowTheCycles what is the origin of your knowledge or experience in these pronouncements?
Have you read and understood the explanations of why what you say here is applicable in many projects, and the reasons why there are exceptions where the approach you advocate does not work?
Have you ever managed a software project, and if so, in what context - regular product cycle, bespoke solution for client, delivery of novel solutions using tools you have to be build for the attempt, or blue sky research? Oh, and how did it go?
I’m not a MaidSafe apologist, I find your simplistic characterisation of people who disagree with you on this issue rather silly. What I am, is someone with an long career in development of one-off research like projects for clients with business problems (where cost, budget and time were critical - but not possible to estimate reliably), as well traditional software products with relatively well understood parameters (where estimated were possible, but still very difficult because: doing difficult things is very hard to estimate), among other things.
If this was building a standard website, your points would be valid, but it patently is nothing like that.
I’ve also listened to the arguments on both sides of this issue, and I support MaidSafe’s approach for reasons which I’ve explained many times, and which nobody has been able to show are mistaken.
You are very right if this was a regular “let’s build a parking lot” project. Same for construction workers that build a piece of road somewhere with a strict project manager above them. But these kinds of projects have been done for decades, and even they still have delays. This is completely new technology. Not very different from Elon Musk being late on both his cars and rockets. Or Steve Jobs disliking the the first internal version of the Iphone and delaying the project. The big difference is, Apple didn’t gave us a notice something was coming, so we didn’t feel any delays, but there where. This project is very open and getting weekly dev-updates is amazing. Imagine Tesla giving weekly dev-updates…
I don´t go all along with @FollowTheCycles but there is some truth in the complaint that criticism is often deflected, frequently in an unfriendly manner and sometimes ad hominem (I personally find “MaidSafe apologists” ad hominem by itself, but as far as I see it was written in quotation marks that have been removed in the reaction - maybe not the best move to propagate a hard-headed debate). At one hand people appear to be expecting a very close release, on the other hand they discard requests for a roadmap with the argument that project SAFE is digging in the dark. Which one is it?
To me the whole rebuttal of the request for timeline doesn´t make any sense: even if SAFE was “rocket science”, do you seriously believe that rocket scientists don´t have timelines? There is ANY serious project I know that doesn´t work with timelines and you can bet that Musk and Jobs had timelines even when it comes to flying to Mars. Every PhD student works with timelines, even though you never know if you can match them when you do your research. I said it and will repeat it over again: timelines are not there to predict the future - they are used to communicate the process of development and allow others to get an idea of how you are working internally. They are not at all about the final date, but about the logic of the process.
I really appreciate the weekly updates, but they have anything to do with roadmaps. You cannot argue how cool it would be if Tesla have weekly updates - you know very well, that these companies work silently for the same reason, they don´t use GitHub.
In the end all comes down to the question whether this is research and experimental or close to release. If it´s experimental I wouldn´t expect anything substantial in the next 5 years. If it´s close to release it should be easy to define all steps to the final one. In both cases you can have a roadmap, even though it will look very differently and have a different level of accuracy.
I personally doubt that there is an elaborated roadmap, because it is MaidSafe philosophy to be open and transparent. I believe we are at a highly experimental state and I don´t expect a release of a stable product in this year and neither in the next year. I´d love to be proven wrong, but that was my feeling one year ago and it is my feeling right now. It is certainly an unsettling feeling and I guess the own uncertainity is the main reason why people sometimes react so harsh.
P.S.: Sorry if the comment sounds like a rant. I have any problems with waiting for the SAFE release, in fact you can look up my former comments on estimation sand you´ll see that I´ve always been rather conservative with regard to expectations people on the forum had and even said in 2015 that I wouldn´t have a problem with a release in 2017 - what I have a problem with is the discrepant rhethoric.
If the dev team is not willing to do time lines, then… What is the list of things that still need to be done. And out of that list of things to be done, what has been figured out and just needs to be coded and what still needs to be figured out.
Edit: I’m asking specifically about decentralized vaults.
