Dustin Sallings › Likes

And look at the boarders on that pad - dude cut them back a bit :-) - Dan owns Comicsforge.com

So very AWESOME! - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

If something similar to the iPod Touch were this big and had all of the Nook functions, I would be all over that. - JA Castillo

Can this or the Kindle be rotated and read horizontally? - JA Castillo

@JA The Kindle 2 can't be rotated and I would say the Nook can't either otherwise they'd list it as a "feature" as Amazon does with the DX. - ronin

Thank you, Cristo. - JA Castillo

thanks for sharing - testbeta

thanks for sharing... its nice.... - Said MURAT

hmmm -- so I am violating my own principle of not commenting until I've listened/read content, but my gut reaction to the quote is "nonsense". Similar arguments were made against wide-spread literacy a few centuries ago b/c we'd stop having to memorizing everything. I don't see where "perfect" digital memory eliminates human capacity for change -- instead, it introduces a new emphasis on what the human brain does most brilliantly: forge connections amongst data points. - Mickey Schafer

Having now read the transcript, I will amend the "wide spread literacy" part of my earlier comment b/c it has no relevance; but I keep the final point. It's hard for me to get past the conflation of human memory with computer/digital storage, a metaphor that reduces understanding of each medium, although there are some interesting points made in the interview. - Mickey Schafer

I'm refreshed by the distinction that was drawn between human memory and computer storage. Intentionality seems to be a theme that is woven throughout this interview, and it is a trait that many social web users sorely lack. I don't think it's Facebook's job to impose a philosophy of memory on its users, but the medium is bent toward ubiquitous storage rather than selective saving. - Joel Zehring

What? I thought Android is open source - Rodfather

that's what I thought too..... - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

Yes, I read the FAQ ... but I have a fairly pragmatic approach to RESTfulness myself. At the very least, I'd love to see publish and subscribe happen at different endpoints. The discovery seems mostly important for the subscriber because the publisher is already going to know what hub they want to publish to. - Jeff Lindsay

In fact, the rel can be something like "subscribe" as opposed to "hub" ... the former seems to provide much more affordance. - Jeff Lindsay

Your point about discovery makes sense and it's true now, but in the future we may have other verbs beyond just publish and subscribe. People have asked for ways of doing introspection to get the Hub's capabilities as well, which could share the same endpoint. - Brett Slatkin

They could also go on different endpoints. ;) - Jeff Lindsay

This is so NOT a "fail" (1) the kid's learning the scientific method (2) the kid is applying it to something he or she finds interesting (3) it's more creative than yet another baking soda volcano - Ken Sheppardson

I'm not a fan of blowing up living things, but this did seem scientifically sound. - Dustin Sallings

Or at least tell them to go away when they say, "So I'm going to reinvent it from scratch!" Some things end up complicated because the problem is harder than you think. - Dustin Sallings

I tell people the same thing when they ask why OAuth is complicated - because security is *hard* - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

but, but, but - Chris Heath

oh - Chris Heath

Hey, I get as frustrated by XMPP as the next guy, particularly the deployability and maintainability of the available servers... but that just means there's room for improvement. - Ken Sheppardson

Well Google Wave is not widely adopted as well. I mean just try to compare number of HTTP implementations (a thousand? thousands?) to Google Wave implementations (one? the one from Google?). I won't dis XMPP though. It has already earned its place for other applications. Google Wave could grow as well, but I don't have high expectations of it. - Meryn Stol

I'm actually not sure with what we should compare Google Wave... Google's version is a kind of framework talking a certain protocol (wave protocol). Should we compare it to all web frameworks out there then? But Google's version is only hosted at one place. Should we compare it to *one* instance of a web app framework? How many Rails sites are there alone? - Meryn Stol

Or you could point them to AppEngine where they can use XMPP with minimal setup and somebody else worries about keeping the servers running. - Adewale Oshineye

XMPP on GAE is very limited -- it wouldn't work for most of my interesting apps. - Dustin Sallings

What are the limits and what interesting apps do they prevent you from building? - Adewale Oshineye

Put me down for two. - Jason Shellen

45 drives per unit and many units means they must be constantly replacing failed hard drives - just due to the sheer quantity of them in use - Jacob Old

It wasn't entirely clear to me from the blog post what you have to do to replace a drive. Looks like at minimum you have to remove the unit from the rack, and I don't see any drawer guides or similar to assist with that. And do they have to take the unit offline to replace a single drive? - Jason Wehmhoener

Geez. Back in 1998, Microsoft was bragging about their 1 TB cloud... :-) Millions of $ then I think. - Mitchell Tsai

One happy Backblaze customer checking in. - Russellreno

sounds neat - now what to do with 67 TB of storage... - Matt Ellsworth

Seriously Matt! Lots and Lots and Lots of video? HD video! - Rick Cogley

So, they store their data "securely" in Palo Alto? That makes me scared. - Jonas S Karlsson

Quoted from blog- "Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure." They have indicated an amazing amount of cost savings. - Wins Fern

Petabyte schmetabyte. - Rick Cogley

Mitchell: I don't think 1TB was "millions of dollars" in 1998. - Steve de Mena

Nice idea. Pity that it only supports a HTTPS interface, not surprising at that cost though (the software that runs the filesystems on the NetApp and other devices isn't exactly cheap to write). Anyone see if they quoted transfer speeds? I'm wondering what impact the four SATA cards each with SATA multipliers on them has when it comes to access speeds. - Russ

Steve: according to http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625... disk cost ~$0.08 / mb in 1998, which comes out to >$800,000 for 1 TB or just over a million bucks in todays dollars. so maybe not millions, but a million! - Karl Rosaen

Russ: It runs Debian. If you were rolling your own (and they don't sell these units), you could turn on NFS or some other protocol (CIFS, iSCSI). They only use HTTP because it's cloud storage. NFS license is a major expense on NetApp, but all the major Linux distributions can act as NFS servers, CIFS servers, and probably iSCSI targets. - Andy Dustman

Andy: I know that you could do that on them but it leaves the problem of what to do with the storage. You could merge the 3 volumes into an LVM VG but the performance could become an issue with any load on it. It seems I wasn't the only one to question the performance, while the views of a Sun engineer aren't exactly unbiased it does highlight some of the downsides: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archive... - Russ

Russ, great find, thanks. - Jason Wehmhoener

Fascinating article; but more questions: "In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive." -- so what happens when a drive fails; how much redundancy is there? What happens when a meteorite destroys the whole building; is there off site backup too? (I know this *is* the off-site backup, but still...) I wonder how much data flows in and out over time. Maybe I should just read their website. - Rob Fisher

Rob: they mention using 15 drive RAID6 volumes that can lose up to 2 drives before failure - Mike Chelen

The worst part about this cluster design is the fact that I couldn’t shut up about it for the first couple days after finding out about it. It was the solution I proposed to every problem. There were complaints. - A Mitchell

IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency. - Pandu ● IT Optimizer from fftogo