powdermonkey

Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours

Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours
Don MacAskill, CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
his blog: http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb

slides posted there, download them

--> great presenation with hard numbers about how to outsource you data storage, processing and hosting <--

SmugMug
192 terrabytes data stored
140 million pictures
 doubling every year
$.15 per GB w/ replicas
Why use amazon: not a lot of web-scale expertise on Planet Earth
helps focus on the app, not the muck
Guess: ~ would saved $500k per year
actual
- 64 m to 140 mil photos
- disks $40k to 100k per month
- $922k would have been spent
- $230k spent instead
- $629 in cold, hard savings!
nasty taxes: $295k 'saved' in cash flow! bonus!
- and can resell hard disks, recouping sunk costs
labor mot included, because they had to move 100 TB of data onto
S3 sweet spots
- perfect for startups and small companies
- deal for 'store lots, serve little' business of all sizes
- not so great (yet?) for serving lots if you're a medium or large business. Transfer costs high if you can buy bandwidth
Like SmugFS (file storage) previous:
- everyone building same
-pain to screw in servers
Lessons:
- hot and cold model just right, SmugMug hosts 'hot' data roughly 10% stored locally, s3 holds all of it
- 95% reduction in number of disks bought, no local backup and then only 10% stored local
outages:
3 outages, 15-30 mins, 2 core failures
 and one DNS prob. Amazon.com affected
- 2 performance degradations, one our customer noticed, the 2nd they didn't.
 - not a big deal, everything fails, expect it.
SLA, Service and Support
Amazon a little weak with customer support
launching ec2 implementation soon
- image processing
- 500k - 1 mil images a day
- 2 terapixles of processing
- ridiculously parallel

Everything you wanted to know about Radar Networks, Inc.

it's all in the patent application, including the business model:
article about Radar in NYtimes, john markoff:
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense

Based on the patent:
- hosted sematic blogging service with email accounts for distilation of content all for $9.95
- also will be called hotnode.com,

This is Web 3.0 (?) email, blogging?

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

[0007] Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The features and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims. These and other features of the present invention will become more fully apparent from the following description and appended claims, or may be learned by the practice of the invention as set forth herein.

[0008] In one aspect of the invention, a method of processing content created by a user utilizing a semantic, ontology-driven portal on a computer network is described. The semantic portal application provides the user with a content base, such as a semantic form or meta-form, for creating a semantic posting. The semantic portal utilizes a knowledge data structure, such as a taxonomy or ontology, in preparing a semantic posting based on the information provided by the user via the content base. The semantic portal application prepares a preview of a semantic posting for evaluation by the user. The semantic posting is then either modified by the user or accepted and posted by the user for external parties to view.

[0009] In another aspect of the invention, a method of sharing information on a semantic-based network is described. A semantic portal application intercepts an e-mail message via an outgoing mail server or an incoming mail server. It then creates a semantic object from the e-mail message by examining syntax of the e-mail message inline, for example by detecting brackets, colons, and certain keywords indicating data type. The semantic posting is then make viewable by the public.

[0295] In addition to the above, Hotnode does automatic social networking: Building a social network by simply analyzing the recipients on messages, and linking these together into a representation of the social network that they are a result of. This is a secondary viral feature: Belonging to such a network makes it more likely that a member will solicit his or her friends to join the network. Hotnode looks at the user's emails as they come through and builds a social network from them automatically, based on who they correspond with. The user can then search, visualize and communicate using this network. This is totally automatic--there is no need to send or reply to "join my network" messages anymore. Hotnode learns just by seeing who talks to who.

[0298] We are going to start by providing a the most powerful hosted blogging and wiki service on our platform, as well as a portal for our community of users. We provide semantic blogging, Website and Wiki services to individuals, groups, communities and organizations. We are the semantic equivelent of the Wikipedia or Everything2 (which we might consider acquiring or close collaboration with). Users get a basic blog and Wiki for free, without ads. We can also provide them with other semantic objects they can post to their blogs for various types of things. If a user accept ads then they get some additional free features. Users can opt-in to advanced features by subscribing to the Hotnode Pro service ($9.95/month) and paying a la carte fees for other optional additions.

Google crawls into source-code search

Google crawls into source-code search

it's all becomign a commodity: The company on Thursday launched a Web site, Google Code Search, which the company says will let programmers search billions of lines of code for tips on how to write their own software.

sloppy web

sloppy web
def: being able to enter information in a messy way in the internet, assuming that ater you (or a machine) can fix it
- fits well with web2.0 arch

Krugle Update

update of Krugle, search for open source code: Developers can use Google and other search engines to find source code, but it's not easy. A Silicon Valley startup claims to have come up with a better alternative -- a search engine for source code and code-related information.

The tool, known as Krugle, is designed to deliver easy access to source code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, clean, easy-to-use interface, according to the company. Krugle works by crawling, parsing, and indexing code found in open source repositories and code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and Web pages.

It's based on a combination of open-source and proprietary technology, according to the company.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6361290460.html