links for 2010-01-12

more on the power of data, and what Google can tell us about ourselves

interesting release by the Flightcaster guys

tells an interesting story

a peak inside Weta's datacenter

very late with this, but a nice piece from William Vambenepe on how the cloud can obscure proprietary software costs

interesting comments from a Microsoft Technical Fellow

this would be a real boon, given our familial history

data on VC mentions from ITDatabase

"As most of you know, we moved reddit to EC2 back in May of 2009. Our experience there has been excellent so far. Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon's constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started."

"All of these factors contributed to developers stepping up and taking ownership of the process of developing software. These days, you see lone developers implementing a somewhat formal process for building software. Ten years ago, it was tough to find programmers who wrote unit test. Now there are a lot of programmers out there writing unit tests even when people aren’t looking. Programmers are taking ownership of the full life cycle of software development like never before as well. Take a look at some of the more recent writing on continuous deployment — it covers everything from requirements to maintenance to monitoring of running applications. More work done in public, public discussion of that work, and the introduction of new best practices have defined the trend of the decade — developers owning the processes under which they work."

"Holding the product version and support level constant across an on-premise license and Amazon EC2 instance, the price premium of Windows vs. RHEL, if X% for on-premise, will be less than X% on the Amazon cloud.  Said differently, the license cost differential between proprietary and open source products narrows in the cloud."

good to see the alma mater keeping up with the times

i'd go if i was around

thoughts on open source fundraising

i'm late with this, but it's interesting to see Cassandra building out connectors

Twittered this a while back, but deserves a link here as well. evidence based decision making is going to be far more common, soon, than it is today.

count me as unsurprised

"While the barriers to use something like Hadoop have fundamentally dropped there are only a handful of experts that can make your Hadoop cluster perform well. What’s needed is a new suite of services and tools that can analyze your cluster and automatically optimize your performance. Hadoop Timelines, while rudimentary, is the beginning of an exciting new business niche, Hadoop Performance Optimization (HPO)."

i'm not leaving, but it's an interesting thought exercise

"As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.

Great companies do this well."

some very interesting lessons in here.

no, i'm not a "prepper." but i do think some self-sufficiency and preparation is probably a good idea.

nothing surprising in here, except that it's interesting in that if Forrester is recommending this it means that the recommendations are no longer bleeding edge, but early to late majority

don't agree with all of it, but worth the read

the calculation certainly qualifies as an estimation, but still, the numbers are interesting

a loss for Novell, no doubt, but i'm happy for Nat. very much looking forward to seeing what he does next.