Disqus - Friends of Eyebee

Re: Facebook Could Eliminate 75% of Its Servers by Changing Their Code

needcaffeine — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:52:01 -0000

agreed Virtualization is not a magic bullet; but as FB uses a clustered system for its webservers & backend servers for the majority of the DB load. Webservers don't tend to be heavy on CPU as much as they are on network & memory load; which is where virtualization can pay off. Plus in all the VM clusters I've worked on each physical box had 6+ network ports. And to a certain degree throwing more memory & cpu at a box doesn't fix it, just delays the big crash.

I don't know how or if FB seperates out their workload by timezones/countries. But theoretically they could put US & Asia VMs on the same box as they'd be under heavier loads at different hours.

And with the current beta system that VMware is testing where physical boxes can be powered down/up as VMs need more juice thus another proposed saving

Re: Heavy vog on Oahu

billso — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:10:40 -0000

It's been fine for the last 4 weeks. We get vog from time to time, and the last brutal batch floated through during October 2009.

Re: billso.com may be down for 2 days

billso — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:50:50 -0000

Ack! I'm sorry I botched your name, David. I've fixed it now.

Re: A quick explanation of copyright law

billso — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:32:03 -0000

Please do! Thanks for the comment.

Re: Bloglines is on life support – are Friendfeed and twitter next?

billso — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:50:17 -0000

Twitter was conceived as an extension of text messaging, but it's become more than that - it's a platform for authentication and processes. Even if microblogging dies off, we'll still have services like Twitter and laconi.ca that developers can use.

Re: Bloglines is on life support – are Friendfeed and twitter next?

billso — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:47:41 -0000

I agree - I've been on Twitter for 17 months and I'm still learning new ways to tweet effectively.

Re: Upgrading to Snow Leopard

billso — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:32:54 -0000

I have a list of my favorite Mac software at http://billso.com/mac/

Re: HawTel to offer naked DSL and faster downloads

billso — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:28:00 -0000

Hawaiian Tel has $20/month plans. I'm paying $50 for 11 mbps.

Re: Coffee

needcaffeine — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:50:21 -0000

They're based in Philadelphia, but they have an office & cafe in NYC. I think in TriBeCa. Can't remember where though.

Re: Twitter and Major League Baseball: A Missed Opportunity

billso — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:47:52 -0000

He's managing the American League in the All-Star Game tonight, so Joe's twitter feed is actually relevant today. :)

Re: Twitter and Major League Baseball: A Missed Opportunity

billso — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:42:48 -0000

MLB is hanging in there. Can't say the same about NASCAR!

Re: FileTwt: Fast File Sharing on Twitter

onlinedesign — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:01:42 -0000

Better than Scribd? I'll definitely have to check it out. Thanks, Bob!

Re: The Barriers to Reaching Your Audience & Customers

onlinedesign — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:24:18 -0000

Well spoken indeed. (I am really glad I found your blog. It's quite inspiring).

Re: The Seven Gates of Hell

czar — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:41:12 -0000

approvw

Re: Sell Your Twitter Name for Cash with Tweexchange

billso — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:25:27 -0000

Agreed - this scheme seems to violate the Twitter TOS.

Re: Facebook Pages Become the Newest Ad Platform

onlinedesign — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:20:35 -0000

Reply to SS: There is nothing wrong with corporate symbols. In fact, some of them actually inspire us to do better in life. If they sponsored a charity page on a Facebook page, that would be super! I would like to see everyone active in social media adopt the "Twitter Twollars" approach and use social media to encourage corporate responsibility. That's all.

This was a super great comment thread and I thank you for the engaging conversation.

[Right now in South Carolina, I have dear friends that have been evacuated from the still raging fires in Myrtle Beach, so I will not be re-joining this thread right now. I will be Devil's Advocate another time].

Re: Facebook Pages Become the Newest Ad Platform

onlinedesign — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:57:45 -0000

Tyler, I agree with you. too. My concern is that us Facebook users are already suffering from “Facebook Application Fatigue” - the Apps were not originally created to be monetized. FB was created as a social media outlet for communication, not as a major advertising outlet or search portal. We are watching a FB evolution.

The fact of the matter is, Facebook is not user-service interaction, like how Google is, but it’s all user-user interaction with the service acting as a communication link. When a user lists his or her music or film preferences on Facebook, it is for the express purpose of communication those interests to his or her peers, not so random people on the Internet can look them up and say “Oh hey, I like State Farm, too!”

There is a great article from 2 years addressing these very concerns at:
http://www.marketing-ninja.com August 12th, 2007

I was simply agreeing with Chris about the monetization of FB Apps being a significant wave of the future - big $$$. (Even so, don't you just get a little bit sick of seeing a large corporate symbol stuck on everything you do, see, or read? Just sayin...)

Re: Luci the lemon tree

billso — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:28:44 -0000

Use the floss! FLOSS!

Re: The Seven Gates of Hell

czar — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:36:12 -0000

aoorive

Re: Bonuses

needcaffeine — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:38:21 -0000

1) don't pay them peanuts. Pay them a good salary & don't put a limit on when bonus stock can be sold.
2) agreed
3) but wouldn't that cash be better spent, building up the company? Most executives already write off most of their entertainment & travel expenses anyhow. Plus if an executive is relying on a bonus, and the economy tanks or a competitor takes all your business, what's to keep the executive from jumping ship?

Re: Can Amazon Run The Table On Cloud Services?

needcaffeine — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:29:09 -0000

yes, it is paranoid. Depends what you're building, MySpace & Facebook are making money by adverts only, at least till recently. If you're going to be selling a service/product, and not just providing an open platform you want to insure limited if any outages.

look at pownce, a great service (free & paid)- it went offline for several days, and lost (what seemed like) 70% of it's user base.

My primary concern would be to insure you have daily backups of your data at your office location or some other provider service(not the same company providing the cloud). Look at Ma.gnolia, or Twitter, when they're mysql DBs corrupted & they lost all their data &/or site/service.

Re: Can Amazon Run The Table On Cloud Services?

needcaffeine — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:03:26 -0000

Clouds - no matter what you name it, it's just a bunch of VM servers clustered together w/ shared storage & fat pipes between datacenters.

I'm not wholly sure how Amazon locates a VM server that you create. Is it located close to your location, or where low latency is?

My concern is with overload at a particular location. Let's say multiple startups have their VMs located in LA, as well as some large media organizations & Apple. So while at SXSWi or similar, there's a real buzz for 60% of these startups, Apple releases another fanboy object, & OJ escapes jail. So now there's massive load of internet traffic & I/O traffic at this DC in LA.

Well all the startups & Apple have informed Amazon that there may be increased load....but no one expected the OJ thing.

Has Amazon or other sufficiently provided enough bandwidth & I/O capabilities at that site to handle the load...or will VMs be moved to other DCs which could mean inaccessibility for some VMs during the transition and/or increased latency issues for the end user trying to find out about your product...if a customer gets any sort of error accessing your website; they're less likely to return.

Re: Can Amazon Run The Table On Cloud Services?

needcaffeine — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:17:34 -0000

I'm just thinking about if there was some event, where a bunch of startups thought they'd get a lot more hits after such; I'd just be concerned if all the startups had their servers in a single cloud location.

Re: Can Amazon Run The Table On Cloud Services?

needcaffeine — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:01:02 -0000

agreed for elasticity it is the best option...at the moment. Though I wonder if IBM or such will get into this business? The hope is that Amazon is over expanding their services to handle the needs. To handle a load, such as if multiple vendors wanted to 10x their capacity at a single cloud location; would Amazon be able to handle?

Re: Hawaii’s move to digital TV surprises some residents

billso — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:33:21 -0000

Thanks, Ryan. See my edits in my article.