Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

 ALL


  The Death of File Sharing

Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snake...

2,528 0       FILE SHARING DEATH TREND CLOUD


  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps.That said, this is a fairly small step. For comparison, take a look at our public monitoring dashboard here at Sc...

2,799 0       CLOUD TRANSAPENCY 37SIGNALS ANNOUNCEMENT


  How The Web Became Just Another Interface to the Cloud

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.For years, everyone was talking about the convergence of interfaces. The Web, and as a result, the browser, were "clearly" about to take over as the major platforms and cloud computing emerged. Then, in March 2008, Steve Jobs unleashed the iOS followed by the mobile apps revolution. What seems to have happened nex...

3,692 0       WEB REASON CLOUD INTERFACE


  Why We Moved Off The Cloud

Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.Low initial costs. Specifically, you can get a cloud server for less than $20. Even the cheapest dedicated servers (and I wouldn’...

2,250 0       CLOUD COMPUTING CLOUD DISADVANTAGE MIXPANEL GET OFF DRAWBACK


  The Great Tech War Of 2012

From left: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Photos courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images (Jobs); Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (Zuckerberg); Chip East/Reuters (Page); Mario Tama/Getty Images (Bezos).Gilbert Wong, the mayor of Cupertino, California, calls his city council to order. "As you know, Cupertino is very famous for Apple Computer, and we're very honored to have Mr. Steve Jobs come here tonight to give a special presentation," the mayor says. "Mr. Jobs?" And there he is, in his black turtlenec...

1,903 0       APPLE GOOGLE FACEBOOK CLOUD 2012 TECH WAR AMAZON TABLET ANALYSIS


  Lustre file system set for spit 'n' polish

Whamcloud, the startup created in July 2010 to continue development of the open source Lustre supercomputer file system, has secured a $2.1m contract from OpenSFS to spruce it up with new features and functions.Lustre – used on about 60 per cent of the largest supercomputers in the world – is a parallel clustered file system designed for both supporting petabytes of files and giving high-speed access to the data stored on the file system. Lustre was created by Peter Braam when he was a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and was commercialized when he created Clus...

2,864 0       DATABASE SERVER TOP500 CLOUD MANAGEMENT