Author Archive
Yet another argument in favor of Degraded Operations Mode (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/01/22/DegradedOperationsMode.aspx) emerged last week. All of Amazon AWS (S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queuing Service, EC2, etc.) down for several hours last week: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/02/15/DowntimeAmazonS3SimpleDBSQS.aspx. The outage was reportedly due to a authentication storm: http://www.highscalability.com/s3-failed-because-authentication-overload (Mike Neil sent this my way). Remember, you’ll never have the capacity for the…
I recently was in a meeting with several physicians. One of them reported a result I have always suspected, but at a magnitude I never would have guessed. The core observation was that that 80% of medical diagnoses were incorrect. The other doctors in the room confirmed this number to be roughly consistent with their…
If you run a big service and claim to have never had down time you either 1) have close to zero customers or 2) are lying. It’s almost that simple. There is considerable concern that Amazons AWS service was down for several hours: · http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/amazons_s3_util.php · http://gigaom.com/2008/02/15/amazon-s3-service-goes-down/ · http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-error Thanks to Jeff Currier and Soumitra…
Google has published an interesting study of Mobile Search trends (sent my way by Tren Griffin). In this study the authors looked at over 1M queries submitted to Google Mobile web search over the course of a one month period. They found that the average search query was 2.56 words. (This is surprisingly similar to…
I upgraded my Samsung SGH-i607 to Windows Mobile 6 earlier today. I had held off upgrading until today having been told that Internet Connection Sharing doesn’t work on the AT&T Windows Mobile 6 build. Actually, it’s even a bit of a hassle to make it work on Win Mobile 5 but it can be done…
I was down at Amazon last week speaking at their Internal Developers conference. It was a fun trip in that I got to catch up with a bunch of old friends – a great many of which seemed to be working on S3 these days. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services. Essentially best…
A few months back I was in a debate about the value of shared code segments between virtual machines. In my view there is no question that shared code across VMs has some value but code is small compared to data so the impact will be visible but not fundamental. What follows is an inventory…
Yesterday, Intel and Micron announced a generational step forward in NAND Flash Write I/O performance. From the Intel Press release: The new high speed NAND can reach speeds up to 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) for reading data and 100 MB/s for writing data, achieved by leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four-plane…
I saw a video earlier today titled “Great Ideas are a Dime a Dozen” and I just loved it. Unfortunately it’s a Microsoft internal-only video so I can’t post it here but I can point to some related talks and videos. The speaker was Bill Buxton of Microsoft research. I fell in love with this…
Earlier today Microsoft, held an internal tribute to Jim Gray, celebrating his contributions to the industry and to each of us personally. It’s been just over a year since Jim last sailed out of San Francisco Harbor in Tenacious. He’s been missing since. Speakers at the tribute to Jim included Rich Rashid, Butler Lampson, Peter…
Founders at work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141) is a series of 32 interview with founders of well-known startups. Some have become very successful as independent companies such as Apple where Steve Wozniak was interviewed, Adobe Systems where Charles Geschke was interviewed, and Research in Motion where Mike Lazaridis was interviewed. Others were major successes through acquisition, including Mitch…
Exactly one year ago, Jim Gray guided his sailboat Tenacious out of San Francisco’s Gashouse Cove Marina into the Bay. He sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and continued towards the Faralon Islands, some 27 miles off the California coast line. Until that morning, I chatted with Jim via email or phone several days a…
If you are interested in boating, the Seattle Boat Show opened yesterday. Jennifer and I will be presenting on the red stage at 4:15 on Saturday February 2nd. Our presentation will be some of our favorite anchorages and cruising areas selected from Cruising the Secret Coast: Unexplored Anchorages on British Columbia’s Inside Passage which just…
A couple of weeks back I attended the Berkeley RAD Lab Retreat. At this retreat, the RAD Lab grad students present their projects and, as is typical of Berkeley retreats, the talks we’re quite good. It was held up at Lake Tahoe which was great for the skiers but also made for an interesting drive…
Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker posted an article worth reading yesterday titled: MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards (Thanks to Kevin Merrit and Sriram Krishnan for sending this one my way). Their general argument is that MapReduce isn’t better than current generation RDBMS which is certainly true in many dimensions and it isn’t a new invention…
The article below is a restricted version of what I view to be the next big thing. If I was doing a start-up today, it would be data analysis and optimization as a service. The ability to run real time optimization over an understandable programming platform for a multi-thousand node cluster is very valuable to…
Yet another argument in favor of Degraded Operations Mode (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/01/22/DegradedOperationsMode.aspx) emerged last week. All of Amazon AWS (S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queuing Service, EC2, etc.) down for several hours last week: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2008/02/15/DowntimeAmazonS3SimpleDBSQS.aspx. The outage was reportedly due to a authentication storm: http://www.highscalability.com/s3-failed-because-authentication-overload (Mike Neil sent this my way). Remember, you’ll never have the capacity for the…
I recently was in a meeting with several physicians. One of them reported a result I have always suspected, but at a magnitude I never would have guessed. The core observation was that that 80% of medical diagnoses were incorrect. The other doctors in the room confirmed this number to be roughly consistent with their…
If you run a big service and claim to have never had down time you either 1) have close to zero customers or 2) are lying. It’s almost that simple. There is considerable concern that Amazons AWS service was down for several hours: · http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/amazons_s3_util.php · http://gigaom.com/2008/02/15/amazon-s3-service-goes-down/ · http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-error Thanks to Jeff Currier and Soumitra…
Google has published an interesting study of Mobile Search trends (sent my way by Tren Griffin). In this study the authors looked at over 1M queries submitted to Google Mobile web search over the course of a one month period. They found that the average search query was 2.56 words. (This is surprisingly similar to…
I upgraded my Samsung SGH-i607 to Windows Mobile 6 earlier today. I had held off upgrading until today having been told that Internet Connection Sharing doesn’t work on the AT&T Windows Mobile 6 build. Actually, it’s even a bit of a hassle to make it work on Win Mobile 5 but it can be done…
I was down at Amazon last week speaking at their Internal Developers conference. It was a fun trip in that I got to catch up with a bunch of old friends – a great many of which seemed to be working on S3 these days. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services. Essentially best…
A few months back I was in a debate about the value of shared code segments between virtual machines. In my view there is no question that shared code across VMs has some value but code is small compared to data so the impact will be visible but not fundamental. What follows is an inventory…
Yesterday, Intel and Micron announced a generational step forward in NAND Flash Write I/O performance. From the Intel Press release: The new high speed NAND can reach speeds up to 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) for reading data and 100 MB/s for writing data, achieved by leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four-plane…
I saw a video earlier today titled “Great Ideas are a Dime a Dozen” and I just loved it. Unfortunately it’s a Microsoft internal-only video so I can’t post it here but I can point to some related talks and videos. The speaker was Bill Buxton of Microsoft research. I fell in love with this…
Earlier today Microsoft, held an internal tribute to Jim Gray, celebrating his contributions to the industry and to each of us personally. It’s been just over a year since Jim last sailed out of San Francisco Harbor in Tenacious. He’s been missing since. Speakers at the tribute to Jim included Rich Rashid, Butler Lampson, Peter…
Founders at work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141) is a series of 32 interview with founders of well-known startups. Some have become very successful as independent companies such as Apple where Steve Wozniak was interviewed, Adobe Systems where Charles Geschke was interviewed, and Research in Motion where Mike Lazaridis was interviewed. Others were major successes through acquisition, including Mitch…
Exactly one year ago, Jim Gray guided his sailboat Tenacious out of San Francisco’s Gashouse Cove Marina into the Bay. He sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and continued towards the Faralon Islands, some 27 miles off the California coast line. Until that morning, I chatted with Jim via email or phone several days a…
If you are interested in boating, the Seattle Boat Show opened yesterday. Jennifer and I will be presenting on the red stage at 4:15 on Saturday February 2nd. Our presentation will be some of our favorite anchorages and cruising areas selected from Cruising the Secret Coast: Unexplored Anchorages on British Columbia’s Inside Passage which just…
A couple of weeks back I attended the Berkeley RAD Lab Retreat. At this retreat, the RAD Lab grad students present their projects and, as is typical of Berkeley retreats, the talks we’re quite good. It was held up at Lake Tahoe which was great for the skiers but also made for an interesting drive…
Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker posted an article worth reading yesterday titled: MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards (Thanks to Kevin Merrit and Sriram Krishnan for sending this one my way). Their general argument is that MapReduce isn’t better than current generation RDBMS which is certainly true in many dimensions and it isn’t a new invention…
The article below is a restricted version of what I view to be the next big thing. If I was doing a start-up today, it would be data analysis and optimization as a service. The ability to run real time optimization over an understandable programming platform for a multi-thousand node cluster is very valuable to…