Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

4th of July may never be the same. China creates stunning non-polluting drone swarm firework displays. Each drone is rated with a game mechanic and gets special privileges based on performance (just kidding). (TicToc)

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• $40 million: Netflix monthly spend on cloud services; 5%: retention increase can increase profits 25%; 50+%: Facebook's IPv6 traffic from the U.S, for mobile it’s over 75 percent; 1 billion: monthly Facebook, err, Instagram users; 409 million: websites use NGINX; 847 Tbps: global average IP traffic in 2021; 200 million: Netflix subscribers by 2020; $30bn: market for artificial-intelligence chips by 2022;

• Quotable Quotes:

  • @evacide: Just yelled “Encryption of data in transit is not the same as encryption of data at rest!” at a journalist on the car radio before slamming it off. I am a hit at parties.

  • Drako: I deal with the security industry, where more than 90% of the security cameras are manufactured in China. The chips in those cameras used to be made in a lots of different places. They’ve since migrated to China, and a lot of the government customers I engage with are unwilling in any way, shape, or form to deploy those cameras. They have a huge problem sourcing cameras that are not based on those chips. There is a lot of concern about the Trojans in chips and Trojans near the chips. It’s the first situation I’ve encountered where the customer is honestly concerned about this.

  • Memory Guy: But there are even more compelling reasons for certain applications to convert from today’s leading technologies (like NAND flash, DRAM, NOR flash, SRAM, and EEPROM) to one of these new technologies, and that is the fact that the newer technologies all provide considerable energy savings in computing environments...Something consistent about all of them is that they are nonvolatile, so they don’t need to be refreshed like DRAM, they use faster and lower-energy write mechanisms than either NAND or NOR flash, and their memory cells can be shrunk smaller than current memory technologies’ scaling limits, which means that they should eventually be priced lower than today’s memory chips.

  • Charlie Demerjian: what does Intel have planned for their server roadmap? Why is it causing such consternation among OEMs, ODMs, and major customers? For the same reason the 14/10nm messaging is causing consternation among investors, but the server side is in much worse shape. How bad is it? Three major roadmap updates in 29 days with serious spec changes, and it got worse from there.

  • Xtracerx: for me the biggest value to serverless functions is how nicely they tie in to the ecosystem of a cloud provider. using them to respond to storage events on s3 or database events or auth events is super easy and powerful.

  • Daniel Lemire: So Roaring bitmaps can be thousands of times faster than a native JavaScript Set. they can can be two orders of magnitude faster than FastBitSet.js. That Roaring bitmaps could beat FastBitSet.js is impressive: I wrote FastBitSet.js and it is fast!

  • Bryan William Jones: Cool. "But it turns out that the Orbiters' photos were actually super-high-rez, shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground stations using... lossless analog image-compression technology."

  • Bcrescimanno: I worked at Netflix when OpenConnect was introduced and I don't remember anyone internally thinking it was unnecessary (though, even at the time, the company was large enough that you didn't know everyone). Quite contrary, this was the era of the 250GB / month cap from Comcast and we could observe clearly that they were throttling Netflix traffic. OpenConnect, the ability to deploy the CDN directly into the internal network of these ISPs served multiple purposes--not the least of which was to expose the fact that they were holding Netflix for ransom. So, to say that was the executive foreseeing things is a bit of revisionist history. It doesn't lessen the impact or importance of OpenConnect; but, it grew out of a very real impasse with a very large ISP. Ultimately, Netflix did end up paying Comcast in 2014 and, surprise surprise, the throttling stopped.

  • Eitally: there are a few critical differences between GCP and AWS or Azure. Setting aside the network quality & performance, which is objectively superior with Google, outside of GCE almost every other GCP product is offered as a managed service. Beyond that, there are several -- like Spanner -- that don't exist anywhere else. I fully appreciate a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, but there are plenty of situations where allying with a vendor that offers a superior product/service for your specific business need is absolutely the correct decision.

  • There are more quotes, more everything. Get them while they're hot.

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