The End of Theory

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Board opens way for new top-level domains

Board opens way for new top-level domains - Network World: "Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday's vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today -- over 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains -- france.ebay instead of ebay.fr, for instance"

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Agents, who pay about $650 a month to have realestate.com.au connect them with home buyers, are furious and baffled as to how such a seemingly basic error at a high-tech internet company could go unnoticed for so long.

The delays meant many leads were lost and agents complained of damage to their reputations caused by the significant delays in following up queries."

RAM Footprint

A program's RAM footprint can be critical to its success. A program that uses too much memory can force the operating system to rely on virtual memory. Because virtual memory is many times slower than physical RAM, relying on virtual memory can result in slow performance and a poor user experience. While developing your system, be aware of your target deployment environment and consider how much RAM will be available on machines running your software.

Lazy Bastards: How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

In which we prove that a college education can make some people dumber

Summary of Findings: Global Warming: A Divide on Causes and Solutions:



"There also are striking educational differences in partisans' views of global warming. Among Republicans, higher education is linked to greater skepticism about global warming -- fully 43% of Republicans with a college degree say that there is no evidence of global warming, compared with 24% of Republicans with less education."

Another symptom of the Republican War on Science.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Bezos goes on to note that Amazon's retailing operation is "a low gross margin business" compared to software and technology businesses, which "tend to have very high margins." The relatively low profitability of the retailing business gave Amazon the incentive to create a highly efficient, highly automated computing system, which in turn could become the foundation for a set of cloud computing services that could be sold at low enough prices to attract a large clientele. It also made a low-margin utility business attractive to the firm in a way that it isn't for a lot of large tech companies who are averse to making big capital investments in new, low-margin businesses.

"On the surface, superficially, [cloud computing] appears to be very different [from our retailing business]," Bezos sums up. "But the fact is we've been running a web-scale application for a long time, and we needed to build this set of infrastructure web services just to be able to manage our own internal house."

This is the great advantage that, at this early stage in the evolution of the utility computing industry, is held by companies like Amazon and Google. Building an efficient cloud-computing infrastructure does not represent an added expense for them; it's a prerequisite to the success of their existing business.

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.:
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page."

Google spotlights data center inner workings

Google spotlights data center inner workings | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation."

Capacity Planning for Web Operations

Capacity Planning for Web Operations: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 — Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, April 22 - 25, 2008, San Francisco, CA: "Capacity planning for growth is not a new concept in web operations, but planning for the explosive and unpredictable types of growth that social applications experience is a whole new ballgame.

This talk will take a look at new and different approaches to capacity planning, and how we do it at Flickr. John Allspaw will cover real-world challenges and lessons learned"

Planning for growth

Planning for growth: "This paper presents a methodology for IT professionals to use to determine whether their Web site can satisfy future demands and to evaluate potential workload and infrastructure changes."

Zipf Distribution

Zipf Distribution of Website Popularity: "Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution." It appears to apply within a site and across sites. It also applies to outgoing page requests from a network and it applies to links.

"Zipf's law, an empirical law formulated using statistics, refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions."