When would you go with NoSQL, and when would you go with RDMS – this might help
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/madgreek/nosql-vs-rdbms-apples-and-oranges-37713
Elevator Pitch
Get your point across in 30-120secs .
I had to do this the other day and it could have worked!!!
Better still Harvard as the tools to help you do this.
Sage of Omaha Annual Letter 2010
Warren Buffett’s Shareholder letter for 2010
A history of finance since the 1970s is best summed up by his insightful letters.
Apple – Innovators or Extrapolators of Design
So Apple are in a quandary – the designer, Jonathan Ive, of most of the products which has redefined the gadget landscape for the last 10 years wants to perhaps to call time.
Apple have no doubt redefined the look and feel of technology but dig deeper and I discover that they have INMHO just hashed the innovations of a one Dieter Rams and modernised it for todays market. Perhaps that is what design is all about – take something add to it and rebrand it. What do you think?
I do think though that these principles of design are true in any medium:
This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:
Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us to understand a product. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is durable. Good design is consequent to the last detail. Good design is concerned with the environment. Good design is as little design as possible.
However, design aside lets talk about what Apple are good at, marketing. Here is the IPAD broken down and why it will beat the competition.
The three areas in which Sacconaghi believes Apple builds its price advantage, he said, are component sourcing; its own base of retail stores, through which Sacconaghi believes about one-third of all iPads are sold without other retail partners taking their cut; and the fact that Apple designs its own chips for the iPad, while rivals must buy their chips from designers such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Qualcomm (QCOM).
Comparing the iPad to the iPhone, Sacconaghi argued that Apple has effectively created a “pricing umbrella” on the popular smartphone, with margins estimated to be in the 50%-to-60% range.
This allowed competing devices running on Google’s (GOOG) Android platform to undercut the iPhone on price and build market share quickly. Some third-party reports estimate that Android as a platform now has a greater share of the smartphone market than Apple.
“It is unclear if Apple’s ostensible change in pricing policy on the iPad vs. iPhone was shaped by Android’s success in the smartphone market, but we do believe that aggressive penetration pricing makes sense in an increasing returns/platform-based market such as tablets,” Sacconaghi wrote.
Don’t buy until you see the whites of their eyes
Same useful articles on PEG evaluation and picking winners for the future
Building reliable always on systems
I never knew there was a concept for building systems that were up 99% of the time (even that is not good enough).
So here is Nine-9s
And a practical example of it is the Amazon Dynamo Storage Mechanism
FB+GS=OS – Internet Bubble (part deux)?
Here we go again, remember the internet bubble of the 1990s and its spectacular pop…. well it looks like a few are taking the first blow of the next one – we had the credit housing bubble of 2000-2010 – so is 2010-2020 going to be the internet bubble part deux?
Goldman and Facebook
Goldman Pitch
Goldman get out clause
LinkedIn and the rest..
What Facebook can learn from Google IPO
So whose next, twitter?
BTW for the record I am not the only one who thinks this.
Update: 10Jan2011
This is how it all began TheFacebook.com T+5days, an interesting quote from Mr.Z:
“I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address,” he said. “At one point I thought about making the website so that you could upload a resume too, and for a fee companies could search for Harvard job applicants. But I don’t want to touch that. It would make everything more serious and less fun.”
Well it surely is still fun, lets see how long that lasts once it is out in the public landscape.
And here is a useful graphic – something for all those herds on the street.
Update: 12Jan2011
Coming soon to an inbox near you – me@fb.com
“At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer.”
Finance Books of the Year – 2010
Drowning In Oil: BP & The Reckless Pursuit Of Profit
‘Dealings’ – The Work Of A Wall Street Legend
All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Bought and Paid For – The Unholy Alliance Between Obama & Wall St
Banktown – The Rise and Struggles of Charlotte’s Big Banks
King Of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman & Blackstone
The Last of the Imperious Rich – Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008
‘Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street’s Bluff’
‘The Rise and Fall Of Bear Stearns’
Goldman Sachs – ‘When Money Was In Fashion’
13 Bankers – The Wall Street Takeover & The Next Financial Meltdown
Graph of the Year
A good article to sum up the last few years of financial rollrecoaster as explained by Gavyn Davies
Scalable Design Patterns
Good article about patterns to use when designing scalable systems on infoq
A good link in that article is stuff written by Ricky Ho
http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/10/bigtable-model-with-cassandra-and-hbase.html
http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/10/scalable-system-design-patterns.html
Did you not get the memo?
Ray Ozzie – ex-Microsoft executive suggested how they should stay at the top about 5 years ago (2005) – how the technology world has changed since then.
The Internet Services Disruption
Dawn of a New Day
Memos like these change companies forever but takes an individual to plant the first seed.
How does all that data get stored on Google? Ans:BigTable
This is how google store all that data – its how things just work
Shazam – How do they do that?
You have heard of Shazam - in a nutshell – takes a short sample of music, and identifies the song against a massive, growing music catalogue and notifies you what the details of that music is – impressive.
I was intrigued as to how this technology works and this post explains it beautifully – thanks to Bryan Jacobs
Oracle vs Google – aka The Future of Java
Its all kicking off – Oracle and Google are at logger heads of a langauge and what has been done to it.
Two great articles that helpto trace the history as to why we are where we are:
http://blog.headius.com/2010/08/my-thoughts-on-oracle-v-google.html
http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/power_corrupts_absolute_power_corrupts
Well as Harry Hill says there is only way to settle this… fight!
Windows Memory and Pushing the Limits
One of the best series of articles I have read on windows memory and invaluable reference to solve those out of memory issues.
Must have tools for the windows development professional
This link by Scott is one of the best and comprehensive lists for tools required for developers on windows – check it out.
“Trust no one, except the profiler” – LINQ on SQL does not perform as expected
In some cases LINQ can do things that you don’t expect – here is an article that explains the situation.
The main emphasis from Scott Hanselman is:
When you are working with something that is IQueryable; that is, the source is IQueryable, you need to make sure you are actually usually the operators for an IQueruable, otherwise you might fall back onto an undesirable result, as in this database case with IEnumerable. You don’t want to return more data from the database to a caller than is absolutely necessary.
