Nima on Products

Comparing Maps: Google, Bing and Yahoo

Google's is perfectly organized and functional, devoid of embellishment. Microsoft Bing's is beautiful and overdesigned, with a subtle palette of lavender and teal. Yahoo's looks like someone vomited a spaghetti dinner in Carrot Top's hair.

via www.boingboing.net

Mediocrity was never so much fun

via www.youtube.com

Not to jump the shark, but damned this sounds EXACTLY like all the other "me oo" clouds out there.

Ferrari motorcycle concept

via image.hotbikeweb.com

Ferrari motorcycle concept

via image.hotbikeweb.com

A Data Center Fit For A James Bond Villain?

via www.youtube.com

While I agree that it's a cool facility, putting a DC in a nuclear bunker is no more safe than keeping your data on a memory stick. Security in a DC is at the data level. The next layer is has more to do with safeguarding the physical location against accidental incidents, attacks or natural disasters. For that, my money's on the Switch NAP (http://www.switchnap.com/) in Las Vegas. Middle of the country, a super fat pipe, multi-redundant systems, plentiful power and in the most stable geo/weather zone.

obsolete

via imgur.com

The beauty of wooden steering wheels

 

 

via www.imakenews.com

Some thoughts on TV remote controls - easy vs complicated

After reading the TechCrunch article on GoogleTV, I went to check out the Sony remote control for the new box. Then I got to thinking... this is TV. I'm watching TV. Which remote control do I really want? For comparison: The Sony

... or the Roku:

 

For my viewing pleasure, easier is better. Much much better. Plus the small human already knows how to use the Roku remote, so it wins the "are you smarter than a 5 year old" test.

Joyent partner Jolicloud launching in UK soon (according to Techcrunch)

As we reported earlier today, Cloud OS startup Jolicloud has confirmed the “Jolibook” Netbook is coming this month, although we don’t know the price. Well, we may not know the price, but strolling round the Monaco Media Forum today I button-holed founder Tariq Krim, and got him to reveal where the Jolibook will appear first: the UK.

via techcrunch.com

Gadget ownership in 2010 - once again the cell phone wins!

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

A good presentation on why Netflix is moving to the cloud

Netflix in the Cloud

View more presentations from Adrian Cockcroft.

How GM "Lied" About The Electric Car?

via jalopnik.com

MongoDB, FourSquare and the Sharding problem

There is a great writeup about the problems at FourSquare this week and their MongoDB instance here:

http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/528a94f287e9d77e?pli=1

If you're so inclined, it's a great story about how  1) running a database only in RAM can be catastrophic and 2)  how sharding on a NO-SQL database totally obviates the whole value of NO-SQL. I'm curious to learn more, but I thought the idea of NO-SQL was that given enough nodal distribution, you could in fact have very good performance writing/reading/deleting directly to disk while using memory only has a temporary buffer. And FourSquares problems started with only 120GB of data! 

The last report I saw, FourSquare was processing about 1,000,000 checkins per day. Assume a pareto distribution, and that comes out to 60 check-ins per second.  Fot the sake of argument, let's assume 1000 check-ins per second.  Watching Joyent's webinar with Basho on NoSQL performance (http://www.joyent.com/resources/webinars/) they got 10,000 transactions per second to a live DB with only 8 nodes (16,000 TPS with 14 nodes). Comparing the MongoDB story to the Riak story, it makes me wonder whether FourSquare had a NoSQL failure (I think not) or just a bad DB design issue (probably!). The question I would ask at the end of the day is, while yes MongoDB is very fast, it is as bullet proof as it needs to be? Maybe we should reconsider the wisdom of putting everything into a few BIG boxes and instead distribute it over a wide area of smaller boxes with more resource overhead to spike/burst when needed.

More proficient people should weigh in on this debate, but I'm curious what other folks think about this.

 

TRON bike suits only $995

via gizmodo.com

they probably don't have kevlar pads and any real protections, but ooooh I wants one.

Did @foursquare go down yesterday because of a MongoDB failure?

Someone please confirm the story. Just trying to find out what happened?

Come join Joyent at Game Dev Conference in Austin - October 5-8

The case for Application Virtualization

Joyent tackles this problem by virtualizing the layer between the hypervisor and the application. Just as virtualization separated the hardware assets from the OS and app, Joyent’s “SmartOS” frees applications from hypervisors and dedicated OSes. Thus, each application running on one of the ported platforms is just another process that gets managed by the SmartOS.

Using Joyent’s SmartOS architecture, international advertising firm AKQA has launched and successfully monetized a number of viral marketing campaigns, including a social-shopping campaign for the Gap and a match-planning app created for Visa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

via itmanagement.earthweb.com

Hadoop is Great, but.....

Among the key results:

• Sixty-eight percent of deployments begin as skunkworks projects, with 86 percent advancing to active development or production environments within a year.
• The top three reasons for using Hadoop are data mining for business intelligence (19 percent), lowering the cost of data analysis (15 percent) and performing log analysis (13 percent), although uses like ETL (11 percent), scientific research (10 percent) and better utilizing unstructured data (9 percent) aren’t far behind. The longer organizations use Hadoop, the more valuable they find it and the more uses they find for it.
• The number of Hadoop developers looks to rise by between 50 and 60 percent within the next year.
• Java is the dominant language (86 percent), with Pig and Hive sharing the No. 2 spot at 44 percent each (multiple responses were allowed).
• The steep learning curve (44 percent) and hiring qualified people (34 percent) top the list of general challenges, while debugging Hadoop jobs (63 percent) and monitoring Hadoop jobs (47 percent) top the list of programming challenges. Seventy percent of respondents feel that these challenges will have a major-to-moderate effect on growing or expediting their Hadoop deployments.

via cloud.gigaom.com

Interesting survey - I really wonder how many businesses are really ready to abandon traditional BI tools and start using the power of cloud computing to really dig into their data sets instead of relying on traditional dashboard that don't give second and third order insights.

Mercedes SLS AMG as a rollercoaster ride

via www.youtube.com

Watch the last 30 seconds!

The definition of beauty: Aston Martin DBS

via www.youtube.com

Are RIM's New Tools Enough To Spur Developers? -- InformationWeek

One of the problems faced by RIM is a deficit in the number of applications available in BlackBerry App World. RIM has tried to pitch the "quality over quantity" angle, but that's a tough sell when the competition has 10 to 25 times the number of apps.

via www.informationweek.com

Since I'm still a blackberry user, I would like to see more apps on the Blackberry store.

Is solution for developers to use programs like PhoneGap to write-one-publish-to-all-mobile-platforms or for RIM to really think about their true value proposition?

www.thenetawards.com Innovation of the Year should be node.js

via www.flickr.com

App Engine FAIL - 503 Over Quota

via www.flickr.com

So glad we don't get these "Over Quota" messages when running on Joyent

Is NOKIA in trouble?

via www.flickr.com

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-income-for-apple-nokia-motorola-rim-2010-9#

Apple revenue by segment

via static.businessinsider.com

Intel Capital Invests in Joyent

Joyent: Joyent, the Californian provider of cloud computing solutions, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Series A investor Intel Capital, with additional support from existing investor Greycroft Partners and new investor Liberty Global. This brings Joyent’s total funding to over $23 million. Joyent had previously raised $7 million from Intel in November of 2009. Joyent actually builds the technologies that power cloud computing nfrastructure, and uses those technologies to enable multiple third-party public, private and hybrid clouds. Intel Capital’s investment will enable Joyent to expand international operations and invest in open-source Node.JS and other technologies in the company’s core PaaS cloud offering

via techcrunch.com

Kudos to Devin Poolman @ Metricly

via gigaom.com

everyone wants to kill the semantic web. why?

via www.flickr.com

Node.js now powers services on webOS

Today we announce that node is part of webOS 2.0:

The popular Node.js runtime environment is built into webOS 2.0, which means that you can now develop not just webOS apps but also services in JavaScript. The active Node ecosystem is on hand to provide community support and a rapidly growing library of modules that you can use in your webOS services.

Besides powering the new Synergy APIs, JavaScript services strengthen webOS’s support for background processing and add new capabilities—like low-level networking, file system access, and binary data processing—to the web technology stack.

via almaer.com

Lego Volvo?

via s3.amazonaws.com

The Untold Story of the Search Business Model

Earlier this month, Paul Graham wrote a terrific article, “What Happened to Yahoo,” blaming Yahoo’s demise on two factors. First, “easy money” from banner ads led Yahoo to ignore search in the late ‘90s. Second, ambivalence about being a technology company meant Yahoo hired sub-par engineers and didn’t empower them to innovate. While I agree with Graham’s points, there’s a broader story to be told.

via techcrunch.com

AWESOME article by my cousin Ali Partovi. A MUST READ for anyone in the internet space.

Cloud Computing Plain and Simple

via www.youtube.com

What Happened to Yahoo, by Paul Graham

read the full story here: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

via www.paulgraham.com

Google abandons Wave?

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects

via googleblog.blogspot.com

Webapp in reception area running on Joyent (http://twitter.com/tony4d)

via yfrog.com

Concrete Espresso Machine

For the ultimate "industrial" look.

via gizmodo.com

Great product packaging

via gizmodo.com

Bryan Cantrill to join Joyent

On the wire here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/joyent-names-bryan-cantrill-vice-president-of-engineering-99486149.html

Joyent offers hosting for all SVASE members

Social Gaming Graphs 2010 - USA

via www.gamesindustry.com