match

I'd love a more lightweight replacement for Neo4j but I need something that has good cypher support. Options are pretty limited.

Many of these companies are having to choose control and the ability to continue to make profit from their intellectual property vs they're games effectively being free in a historical archive.

Wonder if any of them would be willing to partner with a company or non-profit (such as the IA) if they offered to archive the code and artifacts for safe keeping but not automatically release it unless legally allowed to do so. Some things would probably stay under wraps for a long time, but at least it wouldn't be lost that way.

Yes, perhaps more than some other fields. However don't underestimate the number of decisions which must be made with less than adequate information and sometimes multiple outcomes can be chosen which are supported by available data. Also there are times when someone's experience can help them understand how a stream of data will change over time and they can use that to get ahead of the change rather than being purely reactive.

I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, just proposing that it isn't usually so black and white in our industry.

Yep. This is basically what they do. Source: I was around when they were designing and building Glacier.

Original oss licences were developed in a world where software was distributed and the licenses were developed based on that model. Business models shifting largely to XaaS wasn't accounted for in the original license mindset and this is being taken advantage of the fullest extent my commercial entities (as they would be smart to do). The differences between the original oss philosophy and the realities of software in the current world seems to be causing some stress on the system as envisioned by oss advocates. Will be interesting to see how this develops.

Also because of this many SaaS and IaaS companies do not permit the use of OSS where the license requires them to release their source.

Not sure why this needs fancy branding. This sounds like what any ops organization is supposed to be focused on. I agree that there are plenty of places out there that approach ops poorly, but to me what they outline here doesn't sound like HumanOps it just sounds like the way you are supposed to approach ops in your engineering organization. All of the big name tech places I've worked at have had this attitude. I have interviewed at some other large tech places that do not deal with ops his way and I choose not to work for a company with what I view as a "broken" approach to operations.

Another often practical approach is to change the situation in some way that allows you to solve an easier problem instead. This isn't always possible but can be more often than you might think.

Forgive my ignorance, but what mechanism did they use to not damage their retinas by staring at the sun through a telescope?

It seems the author is conflating centralized/decentralized with distributed/monolithic. Dropbox is obviously a distributed system.

If you read the source code it calls a method called get_all_keys. Please realize, this does NOT get all the keys in the bucket. Passed to it is the maxkeys=0 argument which means no keys are returned and a single list call is made.

Yes, it is still a waste of money, but just make sure you understand that it's not actually listing your entire bucket.

  > Use random strings at the start of your keys.
  > This seems like a strange idea, but one of the implementation details 
  > of S3 is that Amazon use the object key to determine where a file is physically 
  > placed in S3. So files with the same prefix might end up on the same hard disk 
  > for example. By randomising your key prefixes, you end up with a better distribution 
  > of your object files. (Source: S3 Performance Tips & Tricks)

This is great advice, but just a small conceptual correction. The prefix doesn't control where the file contents will be stored it just controls where the index to that file's contents is stored.

I'd also like to point out that it was placed there by local criminals, not the conference attendees. It was however discovered by the attendees and the hotel was notified and the offending ATM was turned over to police.

I would have to say in the majority of cases the answer is still no. Let's face it, when a group of people head out to the bars after conference hours there is plenty of networking going on. People form business relationships and friendships that continue after the conference. A female shouldn't have to choose to tolerate unwanted sexual advances simply to participate in these bonding experiences.

Interesting question, let's try to compare the two events. The 2011 event involved roughly 13% of ebs volumes in the affected zone, including multi-az control plane impact, the 2012 event involved 7% of EC2 instances in the affected zone. These two events are different, since one was a power event and the other a network event, but let's see how they compare in number of impacted volumes. It's not exactly clear how to compare these numbers, but if you assume nearly all EC2 instances (7% were affected, were any EBS servers affected? possibly the same % or none or in between) have at least the boot volume and possible more attached then maybe that's roughly 7-10+% of the volumes in the affected zone. Assuming a respectable growth rate (http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-s...) these events may have been around the same size (I'd be curious to hear other arguments for/against this guess).

If you compare the recovery time (ballpark, feel free to break down the timelines in your copious amounts of free time):

2011:

  12:47AM, Apr 21 - Event started, API impaired across all availability zones 

  12:00PM, Apr 21 - API recovered in non-affected zones
                        "Customers also experienced elevated error rates until Noon 
                         PDT on April 21st when attempting to launch new EBS-backed 
                         EC2 instances in Availability Zones other than the affected 
                         zone."

  12:30PM, Apr 22 - Nearly all volumes in affected zone restored
                        "all but about 2.2% of the volumes in the affected
                         Availability Zone were restored by 12:30PM PDT on 
                         April 22nd"

  18:15PM, Apr 23 - API restored for affected zone
                        "At 6:15 PM PDT on April 23rd, API access to EBS resources 
                         was restored in the affected Availability Zone."

2012:

  20:04, July 2 - Some number of racks lose power due to drained UPSs

  21:10, July 2 - API restore
                        "8:04pm PDT to 9:10pm PDT, customers were not able to launch
                         new EC2 instances, create EBS volumes, or attach volumes in
                         any Availability Zone in the US-East-1 Region. At 9:10pm PDT,
                         control plane functionality was restored for the Region."

  02:45, July 3 - Vast majority of volumes restored to customers
                        "By 2:45am PDT, 90% of outstanding volumes had been turned
                         over to customers."

http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/ http://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/

Yes I'm painting with broad strokes here, and feel free to argue the details (we always do). But I do think this at least shows some improvement to answer the previous poster's question.

[edits to try to fix the formatting, fixed mis-paste]

I actually agree with you. This is why I never make a hiring decision based on a single trivia question, but I do ask trivia questions that are all over the map on a topic in order to find something the candidate is good at. Honestly, if you can answer any of my trivia questions in a deep and meaningful way that demonstrates insight into the topic then I'm satisfied.

This is why I never make a judgment based on the answer of a single trivia-like question. I will jump all over the map and ask about as many different aspects of a topic as I can, hoping to map out where the depth of knowledge is for a candidate. If I am getting mostly blank stares I then give them the opportunity to decide what to tell me about the subject, in case they can surprise me. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time candidates are unable to convince me that they have deep knowledge on a subject. I want to find qualified people as much as these people would like to be considered qualified. But sometimes I feel like I throw a bunch of stuff at the candidate and NOTHING sticks.

I am beginning to believe that the majority of people who consider themselves experts or experienced are really just novice or intermediate and don't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Then apparently we're the only company that has crazy number of openings and I personally talk to people every week that aren't what we're looking for.

I agree with you that these companies are probably turning away qualified developers. However at my current job it is the prevailing feeling, and I mostly agree, that it's better to turn away a few qualified candidates in order to prevent a mis-hire.

"All of the rest is pretty much a waste of time at least until after that key item is settled."

Yes, but unfortunately settling this item is not as simple asking "Can you do the job?". Oddly enough all the candidates say "Yes".

I often think about a quote that I cannot recall the source for, but the gist was, "A technology doesn't change the world until it becomes boring." Meaning that technological paradigms don't alter the way humans interact until they become weaved into our common culture to the point where we no longer think about them. I believe this is starting to happen with much of the internet technology that has been maturing for the last 20 years. What once was limitless and magical is now commonplace and banal, yet the sands have shifted beneath our feet so much in the last 20 years and we don't even realize it.

I agree. The app works well enough but the main reason I want to use it is for comment support.

That's a little dismissive. Perhaps we're just talking about different levels of scale.

It largely depends up the nature of your web service. If you are running a user-interactive site theb i may buy it. However if you are offering a high-tps, high-throughput web service I assure you the costs of switching 100% of your users to SSL is not negligable and has a real impact on the customer experience.

Damn, that's a lot of GETs if you're just doing backup. What's up with that?

Yes and no. Correct me if I'm wrong but tipping over into the text tier doesn't change the price of the previous data, only the data that's in the next tier.