We Are Expensive and Expendable

Mar 19 2008
Written by Jake. Also tagged under general. 3 comments.

Rich and I were bemoaning the current state of the economy yesterday, and eventually, the conversation turned to outsourcing, not jobs, but storage, computing power, databases, applications, etc. You know, cloud computing.
Remember after the Bubble burst in 2001 how people were in a tizzy, some rightfully so, about the exodus of tech jobs overseas? That [...]

MacWorld Brings Twitter to its Knees

Jan 15 2008
Written by Jake. Also tagged under general. 4 comments.

So much for scaling. Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld today brought Twitter to its virtual knees. The little guy’s web app is only just beginning to recover, while Twitter clients seem to be confused still about the number of requests I’ve made, meaning the Twitter API is borked too.
For those who care about Twitter, is [...]

Amazon SimpleDB and the Lazyweb

Jan 11 2008
Written by Jake. Also tagged under general. 6 comments.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Amazon released the latest offering in their AWS suite last month, SimpleDB. I tagged this and subsequent analysis posts for later consumption, and I’m just now getting back to it; a post from Web Worker Daily yesterday on LongJump and their new Database-as-a-Service offering jolted my memory.
I [...]

Bigger Big Brother, Part 2

Jun 15 2007
Written by Jake. Also tagged under Uncategorized. 2 comments.

Thanks to Eddie and Steve for weighing in on the discussion I started yesterday.
I think fundamentally, we disagree about who has more damaging information. I say Amazon does. Eddie and Steve say Google. My argument is that purchase history (even without exposing credit cards) can be more damaging than search/email/feed reading/documents. [...]

Who’s the Bigger Big Brother, Amazon or Google?

Jun 14 2007
Written by Jake. Also tagged under Uncategorized. 6 comments.

I’m a paranoid guy, always have been.
Last week’s report by Privacy International that slammed Google as “hostile to privacy” got me thinking about Amazon vs. Google, which knows more about me and how I feel about them. I happened to be downloading Smokin’ Aces (any good?) to my Tivo from Amazon Unbox, so I [...]