O'Reilly Radar

Tim O'Reilly had a great post back in August of 2006 "Round 2: Dial Tone" http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/round_2_dial_tone.html where he said:

New applications often start out requiring operators, but eventually move towards dial-tone. For example, you can look at blogging as the “dial tone” equivalent of creating a web site. For ordinary folks (not most of my readers, but non-technical folks), creating a web site was something that required an operator. You went to a web design shop or an ISP and had them do it for you. The blogging revolution, the wiki revolution, the MySpace revolution, the CyWorld revolution, are really about providing a kind of self-service dial-tone for creating a web presence and community.

Your blog is the dial tone for your website, go too long between posts (and a month seems to be pushing it) and visitors will wonder if you are still there.

Yes. That's partly how I got the Alan Turing apology in 2009. Really helps to get celebrities on board, particularly because it gives the media something to write about.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/how-alan-turing-finally-got-a.html

On August 18, 2009 the petition made the national news with a major
story in The Independent, and at the same time the first celebrity
name appeared on the list of signatures: Richard Dawkins.

With one celebrity name and national press I began to think the
petition might really get noticed. The following night Richard
Dawkins and I appeared on Channel 4 News to talk about the petition (Dawkins was filmed looking regal in his garden; I was filmed in classic programmer clothing: bad shoes, dirty shorts and a crumpled shirt).

It looks like there isn't any kind of user-definable shard/partition key available within the topics - a message within a topic could go to any client subscribing to a channel for that topic? Is that correct?

That's obviously fine for AWS Lambda-style single event processing (maps, filters, sinks), but isn't that going to make multiple event processing (reduces, sorts) really difficult? It rules out using in-process memory or local KV storage for maintaining the necessary state across the aggregation window - you're only left with pounding some remote database, not a great strategy as per http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/why-local-state-is-a-fundamental-primitive-in-stream-processing.html

It's such a ridiculous line. Even putting aside that many laptops and desktops cost over $1000 Intel spends over $10 billion a year on R&D and machines.[0] Add to that the kind of engineering that goes into the physical form of a Thinkpad or a Macbook Air, both of which are far more impressive that a stationary monolith. Then add the kind of engineering that goes into a modern Ubuntu, Windows or Mac OSX. Someone estimated as far back as 2008 that just the Linux kernel alone represents over 1 billion dollars of R&D.[1]

[0]http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/top-10-research-development/

[1]http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/linux-kernel-worth-1bn.html

OReilly:
One of the first times I met Larry Page, long before Google went public, when he was still driving a bright blue VW bug, he was telling me how for Google, the annual energy cost of each processor they put online was greater than the cost of the processor itself. (This may actually have been lifetime energy cost. It's a long time and I don't remember exactly, so I don't want to put words in his mouth.) Energy is one of the key costs for anyone running a large server farm, and keeping that cost under control is a key element of competitive advantage.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/google_energy_strategy.html

So, funny story. I was in YVR waiting for a flight when I decided to get my shoes shined.

The shoe shine had been reading a manga take on the bible. Just a regular guy that in another life could be a computer programmer if the circumstances were different.

He asked me what I do: mobile apps. And he went on and on about how his favourite iPhone app downloaded all of Wikipedia but it didn't work on the latest version of iOS anymore.

That app was Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia app:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/oscon-preview-how-patrick-co.html