Heard of Yandex?
From TimesOnline, a good reminder to not forget that we do live in a USA bubble sometimes, and don't pay enough attention to the rest of the world:
"A little over two decades later, Arkady Volozh is the chief executive and one of the founders of Yandex, Russia’s most popular internet search engine, a company now valued at £2.5 billion. Widely described as Russia’s answer to Google, Yandex was launched only eight years ago but is now visited by 8m people a day. More impressive still, Yandex and Volozh are credited with humbling Google, by denting its global domination." (from "Russians dent Google's world domination")
Hmm, let me try the query that tripped up Cuil:
Whoops. The site is all Russian. But interestingly I typed in the query in english and I seem to have gotten fairly good results. Certainly better than I got from Cuil. And the oddest phenomenon is now when I write that search in google, it takes me to my own post on that very topic.
Can you spell "echo chamber?"
5 things to keep in mind when relying on S3 and similar SAAS services
On a project I worked on recently, I asked myself whether I should make one or more of Amazon's awesome web services (AWS - Awesome Web Services) a mission critical part of the infrastructure of the product. I wrote yesterday about the considerations that go into deciding to rely on services like Amazon's web services as key infrastructure components.
Of the five I mentioned, these two considerations were especially confusing to me:
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What is the comparable reliability?
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If the whole scheme doesn't work out, how hard is it to switch?
On the one hand , the reliability of running a bunch of servers in a data center is fairly well understood, as well as the contingency plans to deal with hardware and software failures.
On the other hand(using S3, the storage service as an example,) the expected reliability is more or less unknown - although preliminary data is highly positive - and S3 is the only service of it's kind, so that there is a certain unavoidable amount of lock in.
I expressed that as the rhetorical question,
" Do I really want to entrust a business critical function to another company - if they decide to shut me off, my business is dead in the water."
Sounds ominous , doesn't it?
But wait , I entrust running my servers to a hosting service, don't I? If they shut me off I am kind of dead in the water too, aren't I? What's the difference?
Relying on your hosting provider for ping & power has a different risk
profile than relying on a SAAS provider for disk & cpu in the cloud
Here's why I say that:
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There are many many hosting providers (ISPs) to providing ping & power. It's a vibrant and competitive space.
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We understand them well. We understand their services, their pricing, their terms of service.
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They generally rely mostly on a well known and understood set of technologies, interfaces, software and hardware.
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It is feasible to switch from one to another.
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It is also feasible (and many do) to have parallel relationships with two totally different hosting services so if one shuts down, crashes, goes out of business, or whatever, you can seamlessly switch to the other.
Originally posted on Feb 19, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
Mac OS X Virus?
Take a look at that very weird looking Mac menu. I didn't (knowingly) do anything to get it and yet every time I launch a new application it's menus are corrupted that way. All of its menus, and with fancy animated graphics. Anyone know what's going on? I just told someone today that Mac's NEVER have viruses!
Democrat vs. Democratic
I wonder about this.
Why is it considered a slur to use Democrat as an adjective? For example, "The Democrat plan is to …" vs. "The Democratic plan is to…"
Oddly enough, do my ear or my mind, Democrat does sound harsh and evil, but I can't put my finger on why.
Just wondering…
Sign up for Jason Calcanis email list!
Jason Calcanis has stopped blogging and instead is doing an email only mailing list (yes, how 1999 of him.) I had heard about it but recently got me a copy of his most recent missive.
Interesting, opinionated, practical and easy to read. I recommend it!
I've never met Jason but I've been in his presence as he forcefully (and humorously) debated this or that luminary. Feisty guy, experienced and articulate. Most recently he founded Mahalo.com, which was well covered when it first launched but now I don't hear that much about it.
[GEEK] Note to self: Ruby has no ++ operator
I don't know why it don't.
I don't know why the error message doesn't just say: "Hey dope, Ruby has no ++ operator"
Originally posted on Apr 13, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
Mysteries of printing Mac OS X Address Book labels
Apple always, or almost always, thinks through the user interface carefully and includes all kinds of deft and elegant touches that delight and amaze users.
Not always though. Sometimes there's a crazy quilt of magic and cleverness that is totally baffling.
Originally posted on Feb 15, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
Harper’s on torture
Came across this interesting article. You may agree or not, but it's definitely interesting:
"So now the process can be fully diagrammed, and the cast of characters is stunning. The torture system involves the operations division of the CIA on the implementation side. They rely heavily on contractors, it seems, in torturing people. And a special role is apparently played by a couple of psychologists. (from Harper's Magazine)
p.s. Happy Valentine's Day 🙂
Originally posted on Feb 14, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
[GEEKY] Can your current reader/aggregator do this?
Check out the latest summary of amazing feats by BlogBridge. I don't want to be too cheeky, but there are some pretty cool things that you get from BlogBridge (for free) that you can't get anywhere else.
BlogBridge is definitely a serious tool which is why I bit my tongue and marked this post 'geeky' but really it's also, as you know, my labor of love, so I can't resist showing it off. Hope you take a moment to try it!
Originally posted on Sep 25, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
Blind to Bargains – Jeremy Wagstaff
Here is a full article written by Jeremy Wagstaff…
Blind to Bargains
If We Won't Pay for Software,
People Won't Write It
April 20, 2007Computers would be nothing without programs to run on them, so why do we spend so much time drooling over our hardware -- physical bits and pieces -- and so little over the software that makes the bits and pieces do what we want them to? And why are we so stingy about paying for software?
These thoughts were running through my mind the other day as I read the exchanges on a mailing list devoted to a piece of software I follow closely (a thought organizer called PersonalBrain, which I'll be taking a closer look at in a forthcoming column). When its creator, California-based Harlan Hugh, unveiled the pricing structure of the latest version of the program, there was a collective intake of breath among users. One, a doctoral student from Florida, exclaimed: "I stopped breathing for few seconds when I read the price."
It's true, the jump in price might sound heart-stoppingly steep -- to more than three times the cost of the previous version. But we're not talking massive amounts of money here -- $250, in fact, which nowadays wouldn't get you much more than dinner for two in a posh restaurant. And the people balking at shelling out are the same ones who are passionate enough about the software to spend their spare time reading and contributing to a mailing list entirely devoted to it.
The problem is that we users haven't yet come to terms with what software really is. We understand hardware -- wires, chips, silicon, more wires -- and can see it and touch it. It isn't hard to attach a value to that. But software is, well, soft. It's intangible. And we are still struggling to grasp the fact that hardware is a commodity, and software isn't. Which leaves software and the people who make it in a constant struggle to both produce something and find a way of making money from it.
Take Singaporean Joe Goh, for example. Mr. Goh produces a small tool called FunkeeStory (funkeemonk.com/funkeestory) that does one thing for one select group of people: backs up SMS text messages from a Treo smart phone to a Mac. He's been at it full-time for a year now, and is making between one and three sales a day. He's just about eking out a living, he says, as long as he keeps costs low. He still regrets an early decision: cutting the price from $24.95 to $19.95 in the panic of a quiet first week after launching last year. Even so, he still gets emails saying his tool is too expensive. "That's when it hit me," he says. "No matter [at what level] I price my software, there will always be people out there complaining."
All the free software out there puts further pressure on prices. No one today, for example, is going to pay for a browser, because you can get good ones free. Part of the blame lies with Microsoft, which has long given away its Internet Explorer. But the Open Source movement -- where volunteers contribute to writing software that is then usually made available to users gratis -- has also contributed with its Firefox browser.
It isn't as if people aren't making money out of software: Microsoft still charges an arm and a leg for its Office Suite: between $250 and $350 in the mid-1990s, against $150 to $680 now. Others have switched to different pricing models. McAfee VirusScan, for example, was a very popular antivirus program in the mid-'90s, selling for a one-time price of $65. Now people cough up the same price every year for a subscription.
The rise of Web-based applications that sit in your browser is also supporting the idea that software should, at least for simple tasks, be free. Google offers basic word processing and spreadsheet applications online at no charge, while other companies, like developer 37 Signals with its collaboration tool Highrise (www.highrisehq.com), offer free basic versions of Web-based programs and charge for advanced features like storage or sharing.
I have no quarrel with this kind of innovation. And the more stuff that's available without shelling out a lot of cash, the better for us as users. But I suspect that, too, it reinforces a growing perception that software is an entitlement, something we just grab out of the refrigerator when we need it. It isn't: It's the lifeblood that flows through the veins of our devices. We need to recognize that what we get out of our machines is nearly all due to software, and the brains that created and that maintain it require food to keep doing so. Sure, the likes of Microsoft probably don't need every one of us to shell out $600 for Office. But the real innovators have always been small artisanal developers, beavering away in obscurity and hoping to make a living. If we keep thinking that software is something that should be free, then, in the words of Singapore-based software developer Bernard Teo, we may find that there aren't many of those people around: "If a developer is not careful, he may find that it's simply not worth his time building and supporting his product, if consumers continue to expect low, low prices without limit."
Next time you balk at paying $30 for a program, think about how little that really is.
Originally posted on Apr 29, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.