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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Johnathan Little

Johnathan Little has been walking since he left Oklahoma.

The KPA soldier guarding the door to North Korea

The door behind this KPA soldier exits to North Korea. In addition to needing a stolid face, KPA soldiers must be expert martial artists, according to Wikipedia.

No groceries, Mina, Nevada

Grocery, sundries, ice cream in Mina, Nevada

The paradox of tolerance

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Summarized by the hive mind at Wikipedia.

Claim chowder: cloud storage

Ten years ago Apple was still doing MacWorld Expo keynotes, and that year they introduced Time Capsule.

My response was this: forget Time Capsule, I want a space ship:

So here’s my real question: Why hasn’t Apple figured out how to offer me a storage solution that puts frequently used items on local disk, and less-frequently used items on a network disk? Seamlessly.

Ten years later: cloud storage is definitely the norm. Dropbox is about to IPO. And iCloud is the glue that unifies the Apple experience across all its devices (and which you’re perpetually out of space on, unless you pay).

AWS regions, AZs, and VPCs, NICs, IPs, and performance

Jump to section: Availability zones and regions VPCs Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces Network performance Resources by scope Connectivity by scope Availability zones and regions AWS’ primary cloud is available in 15 regions, each with two to six availability zones, not including separately operated regions (with independent identity) for GovCloud and China. » about 4600 words

AWS' Andy Troutman on component reusability

What we do first is we build very simple foundational building block services … we will build the simplest possible service that you could think of.

The next thing we do is we encourage an open marketplace within Amazon so individual teams can use, optimize, and extend these basic services.

We use our individual [teams] as a test lab to experiment on better ways to do things, and when we find something that seems to be working, we look for ways to [grow it and use it more] broadly.

Then, on the value of open repos:

We want this ecosystem of learning from each other because we are all leveraging each other’s web services. We have these hardened contracts, it’s incredibly high leverage to be able to go and see how someone else used a web service quickly, and rip a piece of their code—steal it—and make use of it for your own purposes.

Andy’s slides are at Slideshare.

Drivers and “standards”

A contact at Intel spoke rather openly that AWS was consuming about 50% of all Intel CPUs. Ignoring what this means for Intel’s business prospects, consider that it means that AWS is effectively the dominant server ~~manufacturer~~designer. And, now that they’re building their own components, they’re the biggest developer of drivers for server hardware. » about 400 words

Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware

One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.

» about 900 words

Continuous disruption

Trains were once seen as icons of freedom. They freed riders from the dust and bumps of horse or stagecoach travel, and dramatically shortened travel times. But that view of trains as agents of freedom changed with the development of the automobile—and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.

This isn’t about transportation policy1, it’s about how previously novel solutions become subject to disruption once they become the baseline against which alternatives are compared. Railroads didn’t realize they were competing against automobiles until it was too late.

Who are you competing against?

This is a revision of something I originally posted ten years ago.

Photo CC NC-ND by Schnitzel_bank.

  1. If you do want to explore the policy side of this, consider this comparison of transit volume, part of the broader question of whether cars take up too much space, and this inquiry into why public transport works better outside the US. ↩︎

Mortmar, California

This was once North Shore, California, but many maps now label it Mortmar.

Looking up at Muir Woods

End of summer at Muir Woods, with a Lomography Spinner 360.

Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada

The Extraterrestrial Highway, just north of Area 51

Street jazz

New Orleans-style jazz on the Embarcadero.