links for 2009-11-09

profiling is not a bad idea, but i'm not sure it's going to help much in SF, where they pretty much need two or three times their currently available bandwidth

i can't say that i've ever seen anything remotely like this. it defies description, and is unquestionably the strangest thing i've seen in baseball.

yes, weirder than Randy Johnson vaporizing that dove, or the Izzy Alcantara take-out-the-catcher charging strategy.

Dave on the expectations for Ubuntu and what they mean?

"Kudos to Amazon. Having them run a database service won't provide the "high end" sort of usage that keeps the folks who tune databases in business, but there certainly are a lot of users for whom this type of service will work just fine.

At the very least this service will certainly up the ante for others in the MySQL hosting business.

Providing services like RDS and application is the future for cloud companies. It will be interesting to see what they will come up with next.

I'm surprised Memcached hasn't been done as a service yet, but perhaps that is why I have those SASL patches sitting in my inbox. " – likewise

"I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right?…But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!"

""The beauty of releasing the data is it frees us from having to develop the applications ourselves,'' said Chris Dempsey, an assistant secretary in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation. "That's expensive and something that we're not very good at.''"