IT Knowledge Exchange

Some great information on the innards of this lock can be found at http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/security-corner/physical-sec…

Agreed that Joel has a great office. But you can't move your whole office with you when you need to collaborate closely with other people. In building some of the V2 houses we figured out that having a door (that you tend to leave open all the time) directly behind you wasn't a great thing. The new ones have the door offset to one side so there's no "over my shoulder" feeling and it feels more private. To get light we have three much larger windows now, an opening at each end on the roof line and two skylights in each. You can read about our design session with door placement here: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/software-quality/rapid-proto…

Description of noisy neighbor problem #6 lacks some depth. AWS noisy neighbors problem is very often misunderstood. CPU steal time under linux does NOT mean that somebody is stealing your CPU. It simply means that you wanted to use CPU and hypervisor has given it to another instance. This may happen because you have exceeded your quota or scheduling algorithm selected another pending instance at this very moment and it would give CPU back to you a bit later. In the end in both cases your instance gets fair share. Great detailed explanations of steal time: https://support.cloud.engineyard.com/entries/22806937-Explanation-of-S… and: http://www.stackdriver.com/understanding-cpu-steal-experiment/. The latter article is mentioned by OP but seems to be not fully read/understood. Why does killing and restarting instance help? It likely moves instance to different hardware node with less active neighbors. When your neighbor is not active your instance can use CPU idle cycles of your neighbor! You sort of become the noisy one. Still hypervisor would prevent it once neighbor starts to fully utilize his CPU quota and you are back to square one. Amazon does not oversubscribe CPU according to their CTO: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/amazon-does-… Amazon specifically states that t1.micro instances do not guarantee CPU performance: "Micro instances are a very low-cost instance option, providing a small amount of CPU resources.…

What does running on Amazon mean (in 2006)? Remember, the company is officially Amazon.com, Inc., i.e. the ecommerce site turning tens of billions in revenue. Here's an excerpt from the Businessweek cover story[1] a few weeks after EC2's launch: > Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that. Weeks later Bezos discussed the $2 billion investment in Amazon.com's infrastructure [2]. In effectively the same breath he mentioned 200,000 developers signed up for AWS. This is deliberately deceptive. Bezos linked AWS with Amazon.com's infrastructure, when the two are totally separate. Signs point towards EC2 coming about through the intransigence of a couple people [3], not through a deliberate effort by top brass to rent out Amazon.com's infrastructure. Implicating the main site was a tactic to inspire confidence and provoke experimentation. It's unclear whether EC2 would have found the same success had Amazon not papered over the inchoate AWS architecture by invoking the Amazon brand. I love AWS. Their blog is the only corporate blog I subscribe to, because everything they post is so friggin' cool. Sentences like these... > If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the…

Well the article itself says... "As I blogged last week, Microsoft is seeking ways to boost sales of its Azure platform. One way the company is hoping to do this is by tightening up its developer story around Azure." While Azure was largely blamed for Ray Ozzie's departure (http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch-blog/ray-ozzie-leav… You can look at the anemic selection of Azure Books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&fiel… (By comparison look at WPF books a technology most people believe will disappear into Silverlight in coming years: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&fiel… I'd also point to the number of views on the average Azure article on DotNetKicks: http://dotnetkicks.com/azure But to be honest I mostly based it on my own experience. I know many .Net developers and all of them have chosen to ignore the benefits of Azure and go with the more difficult task of implementing on EC2. Note I'm not saying Azure isn't a good choice. I'd even argue it's a better choice in many ways than services like EC2 (Scaling alone makes it worthwhile for .Net developers). I'm simply saying it hasn't been a success for Microsoft thus far.

They had something like this, but now outsource it to iron mountain: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/yo…

Do they? The article specifically says otherwise and links to this: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netapp-no-ssds-… It also mentions that the 3D NAND process dramatically improves matters over previous tech. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's weird that you don't acknowledge that the article addresses your point.

VMware has been demoing what sounds like almost identical technology for a while now: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch-blog/like-supermanc… It creates a virtual machine that's hardware encrypted on the device, and actually runs them as two separate phones. Similar full-on or pseudo-virtualized environments have been used on the iPhone, iPad, and other devices to various degrees of success over the years, but I think it is a slight hyperbole to say "this could change the way people use smartphones, entirely".

That's not how AWS works at all. Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here: http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computi… And the history is well presented here: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/amazons-earl… The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.

> EC2 only came about because Amazon run their servers on it, and they had so much spare capacity, so they sell it. False. http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/2010/06/17/a…