Hey, it's HighScalability time:

The oldest known fossil of a flowering plant. 130 million years old. What digital will last so long?

• 32.6: Ashley Madison password cracks per hour; 1 million: cores in the Human Brain Project's silicon brain; 54,000: tennis balls used at Wimbledon; 4 kB: size of first web page; 1.2 million: million messages per second Apache Samza performance on a single node; 27%: higher conversion for sites loading one second faster; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @adrianco: Apple first read about Mesos on http://highscalability.com  and for a year have run Siri on the worlds biggest cluster 
  • @Besvinick: Interesting recurring sentiment from recent grads: We lived most of our college lives on Snapchat—now we don't have any "tangible" memories.
  • Robin Hobb: For most moments of our lives, we have forgotten almost all of the world around us, except for what currently claims our interest.
  • @Carnage4Life: I'd like to thank all the Amazon employees who cried at their desks to make this possible 🙏👍 🚚🍷🍸🍹🍺 
  • Jim Handy: The single most interesting thing I learned at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit was that 3D NAND doesn’t have a natural limit, after which some other memory type will need to be adopted.
  • @mccv: them: is that written down? me: we communicate in the viking tradition. Let me tell you the saga of that system.
  • The Handmade Manifesto: that amazing speed we'd been granted was wasted, by us, in a death by a thousand abstraction layers
  • Peter Thiel: For us to really have a greater productivity gains as a society, we have to do things more in the world of atoms and not just the world of bits.
  • @lxpollitt: Verizon announced today as paying customer of @Mesosphere DCOS. Cool on stage demo with 22k cores: 50k containers in 100s - @flo #MesosCon
  • Matthew Brunwasser: Technology has transformed this 21st-century version of a refugee crisis, not least by making it easier for millions more people to move.
  • @rsingel: Stephen Hawking says to never give up hope if caught in a black hole. He has never evidently used a mobile browser.
  • @lxpollitt: Siri has been running on Mesos for exactly one year today. “Mesos scales” - Apple #MesosCon
  • @Jimminy: "The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there. — Gordon Bell
  • @mathiasverraes: There are only two hard problems in distributed systems:  2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery
  • Horace Dediu: If I were Tim Cook I would not have the goal of tripling revenue over the next decade...The objective of the company is not to triple revenues, the objective of the company is to make great products...That's the goal. End of story. You don't talk about money. You talk about product. Money comes from product not the other way around...The purpose of the firm is to delight the customer. 
  • @t_blom: “The hardest thing about MVP — you decide what’s Minimum, the customer decides what's Viable” — @davidjbland 
  • @adrianco: #mesoscon @pbailis reading list. 
  • @kelseyhightower: Based on my twitter stream, it seems the theme coming out of #mesoscon is the major benefits of increasing resource utilization at scale.
  • lorenzhs: We need new algorithms that - require communication volume and latency significantly sublinear in the local input size (ideally polylogarithmic) - don't depend on randomly distributed input data (most older work does)
  • @clstokes: #MesosCon @pbailis on coordination-free systems - "Scalable systems can just shut up and comfortably share silence."
  • frankmcsherry: if you want to do any big data computation, please sort your records. Stop talking sass about how Hadoop sorts things it doesn't need to, read some papers, run some tests, and then sort your damned data. Or at least run faster than me when I sort your data for you.
  • @RFFlores: There's always lock-in. You have to choose where. My latest blog is about this.
  • Jared Diamond: People in the first world are terrified by the wrong things. The real danger isn’t terrorism, serial killers or sharks, which kill a very, very small percentage of people annually. The real risks are those things that we do daily that carry a low risk but that eventually catch up with you – driving, taking stairs, using step ladders.


• Something tells me we can expect this list to get much larger as the future fumbles forward. T-Rex large. The 20 Most Infamous Cyberattacks of the 21st Century (Part I).


• Getting to Datacenter Zero. Catchy buzzword from @swardley around Netflix sloughing off the last of its non AWS datacenter operations. Netflix shuts down its last data centre, but it still runs a big IT operation. Finally, all of Netflix IT will run in the public cloud. We'll likely hit Datacenter Zero long before we hit Inbox Zero.


• She's so humble! Q: Alexa, what do you think of M, Facebook's new Human-Powered assistant? A: I don't have preferences or desires. 


• Have you ever wanted to know how WiFi in a plane works? Have you ever wondered why it's so expensive? Have you ever wondered why it's just a tad slow? Then Why Gogo's Infuriatingly Expensive, Slow Internet Still Owns the Skies is your story. In my mind I thought the system would use a satellite. It doesn't! There's a vast air-to-ground system. The plane talks to 225 towers spread across the US. Newer systems do use a satellite. It's expensive because with a first mover advantage Gogo was able to lock in long term contracts and achieve a near monopoly. There are competitors, but switching costs are high. And with only 40,000 planes in the world making more money requires raising prices on relatively price insensitive business users. There's a sophisticated dynamic pricing scheme aimed at keeping traffic within capacity limits while maximizing profits. It's slow because the signal is shared by everyone on the plane and the hardware on 2/3rds of the planes tops out at 3Mbps. Yet it's still hard to deny: “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy.” 

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