“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
[Now, more than ever in my lifetime.]
news
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.
[Hmmm. I like some of the aspects of this… still digging’ into the details.]
Information wants to be expensive
Information wants to be expensive:
The full quote, from Stewart Brand, actually goes like this:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
It’s interesting how the “information wants to be expensive” part of that axiom is largely forgotten these days, isn’t it?
[Always. Excellent point.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
Ubuntu TV (a/k/a the new BeIA?)
Ubuntu TV (a/k/a the new BeIA?):
Just because everybody is talking about something as the Next Big Thing doesn’t mean it actually is. You need to pay attention to whether the Big Thing needs infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet, understand that not everyone can press a button and become huge seemingly overnight, and be realistic about how many players the market space can actually support.
Source: Coyote Tracks
Undetectable Technology
After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.
[Nice theory. It works for me because I’ve always loved “undetectable technology”. I want my technology to disappear into the use of the item as much as possible.]
Source: The Technium
What not to do: Learning leadership from Congress
Learning leadership from Congress:
When planning your career, avoid these pitfalls, behaviors evidenced by many elected officials:
- In all things, look for money first. Listen to people with money, respond to people with money, justify your actions around money. Worth noting that 47% of those in Congress (House and Senate) are millionaires–an even greater percentage than those that are lawyers.
- Embrace the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Aspire to run systems you don’t understand.
- Compromise over the important issues, but dig in and fight forever over trivia.
- Along those lines: focus obsessively on the short run. Even though you are virtually assured of re-election, define the long term as “before the next election.”
- Take months off from your day job (with pay) to actively campaign for a better job.
- Blame the system, the other side and your predecessors for the fact that you are not taking brave, independent action.
- Avoid developing independent thought and analysis. Focus on parroting the work of lobbyists and the party line.
- When given the choice between being on television or doing hard work, pick television.
- When a difficult problem shows up, duck.
- Try mightily to outlast passionate resistance by quietly ignoring it and waiting for it to go away.
[Good one, Seth!]
Source: Seth’s Blog
Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet
Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet:
Terrific piece by Kirby Ferguson — explains clearly and succinctly why the proposed PIPA legislation will not only fail to achieve its intended purpose, but will outright harm the entire Internet.
[Clcik on the link, if you don’t already understand why this legislation is so broken.]
Source: Daring Fireball
App Store Economics
David Barnard:
Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.
[Oh my that would be awful.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Did Apple skip a generation of video pros?
Why the video pros are moving away from Apple:
Everyone we spoke to agreed that Apple would have a much better standing among professional users if the company would just acknowledge them a little more and act like their concerns are being listened to. “Apple needs to be a little more open with third parties about how they plan to improve FCP over time. They need to enable those third parties to feel that when FCP improves, they can make more money selling their products,” Alper said.
[It’s easy to understand the argument being made. “We were loyal to Apple, now Apple should be loyal to us.” But it’s clear to me that this isn’t true. When the product worked for them, they used it. If it is not going to work for them, they’re going to switch. That’s not loyalty, but it makes business sense. I wonder if Apple didn’t decide to “skip” a generation here. Current folks with big suites of hardware and software are, despite their desire for new gear, are probably fine for a while longer. We’ll wait out this generation in order to push this in a direction we think is right, and see what makes sense from a hardware point of view down the road.]
Scarcity
Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model:
I am sure there was a time when scarcity was a good business model for the film industry. And I am sure that many of the leaders of the film industry came of age during that time. I understand their muscle memory in terms of the scarcity business model. But restricting access to content is a bad business model in the age of a global network that costs practically nothing to distribute on.
I’ve argued this point many times with film executives. They insist that they need their windows. They argue they need to manage access to their films to extract every last dollar from the market. That just doesn’t make sense to me. If they went direct to their customers, offered their films at a reasonable price (say $5/view net to them), and if they made their films available day one everywhere in the world, I can’t see how they wouldn’t make more money.
[For some things it is, but for others it simply the nature of how things are produced. The decisions come when demand exceeds current production. Can you maintain the essence of your product if you remove yourself from each step of production? If so, do you wish to? If your item becomes less scarce does it lose something? But I agree about the film business. It’s nuts.]
Source: A VC
turnings :: daniel berlinger 