Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Where does IBM's Watson or Google Translate fit? (SciencePorn)

• 40Tb/s: Bandwidth for Windows 10 launch; 4.04B: Facebook Q2 revenue; 37M: Americans who don't use the web;
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @BoredElonMusk: We would have already discovered Earth 6.0 if NASA got the same budget as the DOD.
  • David Blight~ Something I've always believed as a historian and more and more it seems true to me is what really moves history, or brings about change in rather sudden and almost always unpredictable ways, is events. 
  • Quentyn Kennemer: Tom Brady replaces Android with iPhone, gets suspended 4 games
  • @BenedictEvans: Apple Maps has ~300m users to iOS GMaps 100m, of 4-500m iPhones. Spotify has 20m paying & 70m free users. And then there’s YouTube
  • Ben: Some scale problems should go unsolved. No. Most scale problems should go unsolved.
  • @mikedicarlo: 3.5 million Redis ops per/sec across our cluster. Wondering how that compares with other production deployments out there. 
  • @Carnage4Life: $1 billion valuation for a caller ID app with $800K in revenues? Unicorn valuations are officially meaningless 


• Is shooting a trespasser filming a video of your potentially intimate moments considered a crime? Kentucky man shoots down drone hovering over his backyard. 


• Death through premature scaling. Larry Berman determined this was the cause of death of RewardMe, his once scrappy startup. In the next turn of the wheel the dharma is:  Be a 1-man growth team;  Get customers online as oppose to through a long sales cycle; Don’t hold inventory; Focus on product and support. The new enlightenment: Don’t scale until you’re ready for it. Cash is king, and you need to extend your runway as long as possible until you’ve found product market fit. 


• What about scaling for the rest of us? That's the topic addressed in Scaling Ruby Apps to 1000 Requests per Minute - A Beginner's Guide. A very good resource. It goes into explaining the path of request through Heroku. Dispels some myths like scaling up makes a system faster. Explains queue time. And other good stuff. 


• Not quite as sexy as Zero Point energy, but 3D Xpoint memory sounds pretty cool: Intel and Micron have unveiled what appears to be the holy grail of memory. Called 3D XPoint (pronounced "cross point"), this is an entirely new type of non-volatile memory, with roughly 1,000 times the performance and 1,000 times the endurance of conventional NAND flash, while also being 10 times denser than conventional DRAM.


• So what is 3D XPoint Memory really? Here's a great analysis at DailyTech by Jason Mick. More than analysis, it's a detective story. Jason puts together clues from history and recently filed patents to deduce that this new wonder RAM is most likely to be PRAM or Phase-change Memory, that stores data "in the form of a phase change to a tiny atomic-level structure." Jason thinks "any usage scenarios, it may be possible to run exclusively off PRAM." Forgetting just got even harder.


• Damn. I may die after all. The Brain vs Deep Learning Part I: Computational Complexity — Or Why the Singularity Is Nowhere Near: My model shows that it can be estimated that the brain operates at least 10x^21 operations per second. With current rates of growth in computational power we could achieve supercomputers with brain-like capabilities by the year 2037, but estimates after the year 2080 seem more realistic.


• It has always struck me that telcos who desperately want to get in to the cloud business, where they are just an also ran, control some of the most desired potential colo space in the world: cell towers. Turn those towers into location aware clouds and we can really get some revolutionary edge computing going on. Transiting traffic back to a centralized cloud is such a waste. Could 'Supercomputing at the Edge' provide a scalable platform for new mobile services?

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