Hey, it's HighScalability time:

The one is many. Lichen composed of possibly 400 distinct species.

• Quotable Quotes:
  • The Master Switch: Selling radio sets—the old revenue model—was a good if limited business, for ultimately few households would need more than one radio every few years. But advertising revenues could expand indefinitely—or so it seemed then.
  • Larry Page: It’s pretty difficult to solve big problems in four years. I think it’s probably pretty easy to do it in 20 years. I think our whole system is setup in a way that makes it difficult for leaders of really big companies.


• The Master Switch: The inventors we remember are significant not so much as inventors, but as founders of “disruptive” industries, ones that shake up the technological status quo. Through circumstance or luck, they are exactly at the right distance both to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it.


• You thought you were clever and safe? Reality doesn't like that. The fallacy of distributed transactions: In other words, as far as the queue is concerned, the transaction committed, and the message is gone. As far as the database is concerned, that transaction was rolled back, and never happened. Of course, the chance that something like that can happen in one of your systems? Probably one in a million.


• How do you make Cassandra 50% faster? You add batching of replies. You fix your thread pools. And you get rid of unecessary endcoding and decoding phases like with Thrift. Of course now the bottleneck has moved and the process starts again.


• Everyday Algorithms: Elevator Allocation. Though I'm pretty sure my contextualized and personalized elevator scheduling goes something like: for him, slow as possible. And they and the crosswalk lights must be in cahoots, because I get the same fine service.


• Simon Wardley: Anyhow, this is what I don't get. Micro services has become a big thing - good. So, why do we have to continuously create 'new' terms to describe what is already happening? < Why have new songs when they use all the same words? What changes is the context. A new binding requires a new word. It's like a linguistic method of versioning. 10 years ago all the words around that eras version of microservices would be different, so we need a new word now to reflect a new world.


• Programmers really want the database to work as a queue. It just never works in the end. But if you are Antirez and are a programmer and have your own database then you can make that happen. Queues and databases. 


• Another case of breaking one thing in to two parts and then arguing which part is more important. In reference to the debate over Linus' quote on data structures: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." < Good and evil. Light and dark. Mind and Body. Starsky and Hutch. They are defined in terms of each other and make no sense without each other. They are a single system. 


• New russian 8-core CPU. It may not be the fastest CPU, but it won't break in the field and hardly ever jams when covered in mud or sand.

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