All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 19, 2007
The emotions about reading books in digital form and the Amazon Kindle are running high, already before the device was released. For me there are two features that sold me on the device: the networked content push and the content interaction. I have had many pda's, phones and tablets over the years that I setup to automatically pull in feeds such I could read them on the bus or plane.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 28, 2007
Let me first tell you the why and then I will explain the what. By using classes in Javascript, you will notice a couple immediate benefits: Custom classes make your code more reusable. If many of your applications use a similar functionality, you can define a class to help and facilitate that functionality. Now you can just use your new class in multiple projects to provide the common functionality.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
The Agile Manager
NOVEMBER 25, 2007
Bernoulli’s Theorem holds that the potential power that can be produced by a turbine or rotor is equal to the cube of the velocity with which the turbine rotates, expressed simply as Power = Velocity 3. A basic concept of wind energy systems, it is increasingly relevant in commercial building architecture: specifically, if wind velocity can be increased through building design, the potential power that a building can derive from wind energy is considerably greater.
All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 15, 2007
On May 31 2008 a tribute will be held at UC Berkeley to honor Jim Gray, who went missing during a solo sailing trip in January of this year. Although Jim is listed as missing, and will be until 2011, a Tribute be held to honor him before too much time has passed.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 17, 2007
A popular request has been to make more of the Amazon product data available as easy widgets for reuse on blogging, social network and associates websites. You can now find a nice collection of different widgets at [link] Some of these were already available for associates, but there are some really nice new ones.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 18, 2007
Today at noon Swami made the transition to Dr. Swaminathan Sivasubramanian at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In most European countries the doctoral defense (promotie in Dutch) goes with a lot of protocol and pomp & circumstance. A very specific dress code, with two secundants who need to be able to take over in case you faint during the defense.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 11, 2007
As Mike Olsen just wrote on the Tenacious Search weblog, today was the first day that action could be taken on the boats found in the satellite and ER-2 streams. Bad weather has kept any aerial search parties on the ground until now. This morning two planes were dispatched to locations derived from images coordinates combined with drift models.
Technology Performance Pulse brings together the best content for technology performance professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 4, 2007
It is now 3 PM on Sunday afternoon and the group of volunteers in thethe search for Jim Gray has worked their way through almost 100,000 assignments since Friday 5 PM. Since then we have seen over 6000 individual workers completing anywhere from 1 to almost a 1000 assignments. And there are still more to go.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 3, 2007
We have now added the data captured by the NASA ER-2 plane yesterday over the ocean area outside of San Francisco. We were very fortunate that this flight was scheduled for yesterday and that the NASA folks were interested in having it capture these images. We have been able to split them just like yesterday’s satellite images and create HITs (Human Interface Tasks) from them.
All Things Distributed
JANUARY 29, 2007
My long time friend and mentor Jim Gray took his sail boat out for a trip to the Farallon Island yesterday and has not been heard from since. The coast guard has been searching since last night. Jim is an extremely experienced sailor with more than 40 years experience. This is very worrisome.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 2, 2007
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability.
All Things Distributed
JULY 11, 2007
I was putting together a short panel presentation on the role of a Chief Technology Officer in corporate innovation and I once again realized that there is quite a bit of confusion around the role of the CTO. The first thing that always comes up when you want to discuss the role of a CTO is that there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 19, 2007
I wrote a first version of this posting on consistency models in December 2007, but I was never happy with it as it was written in haste and the topic is important enough to receive a more thorough treatment. ACM Queue asked me to revise it for use in their magazine and I took the opportunity to improve the article.
All Things Distributed
JULY 19, 2007
When I was building one of my first teams at Amazon, one that had to work on some really advanced distributed systems technology I put up a job description on this weblog. I was certainly pleased with the responses. Last year at a conference I heard from some of my former academic colleagues that they were using this description to educate their students abput where they were lacking in knowledge or experience.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 6, 2007
Today we had a wonderful day with the finalists of the 900 contestants in the AWS Startup Challenge, all seven proved themselves worthy of winning the ultimate price. The finalists were: Brainscape Commerce360 Justin.tv Milemeter Ooyala WeoGeo Go to the startup challenge vote page to see videos of each of these companies and to see the voting results.
All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 5, 2007
I am about to go on stage at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin where we will announce the ability for Amazon S3 customers to store their objects in Amazon’s European storage cloud. This has been a frequently requested feature by our European customers for various reasons, better latency control being the most important one.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 23, 2007
If we would just forget about discriminatory traffic management (e.g. based on deep packet inspection) life on the network would be pretty simple, even under overload conditions. A lot has been written about this already but Wes really nails it in his summary.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 9, 2007
The 2007 Nobel prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for independently discovering Giant Magnetoresistance in 1988. Their work had a tremendous impact on the computer industry as it revolutionized the way we could store and retrieve information on hard disks. It was the first major application of nanotechnology and allowed hard disks to shrink from the size of a large washing machine to the device that fits in an mp3 player.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 6, 2007
The Institutional Yes is a Harvard Business Review interview with Jeff Bezos about the way strategies are developed at Amazon. I have written before about how the relentless customer focus translates into driving architecture and design using the “working backwards” approach. The interview with Jeff gives you more insight on the impact of customer focus on overall strategy and how it drives a culture of experimentation.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 3, 2007
There is a lot of positive feedback about the Dynamo paper but I noticed that something I wrote in introducing the paper is being misunderstood. This was my fault, I wrote it too strongly. What I meant by internal-only is that Dynamo is not directly exposed externally. However, Dynamo and similar Amazon technologies are used to power parts of our Amazon Web Services, such as S3.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 1, 2007
My old friend Steve Vinoski is back online. Steve was with Iona for many, many years, working as the main architect on many of their Middleware technologies. Steve left Iona this spring to work for a start-up in the Boston area. But Steve became really famous for this drawing, which he used to express his opinion about my keynote at Middleware 2004.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 30, 2007
As a follow-up to the keynote I gave at the Next Generation Datacenter Conference the folks at Network World organized an online chat, to happen for an hour tomorrow (October 1) from 11-12 PST. I have never done something like this before so it will be fun to see how good my typing skills are, but at least I get to sneak out of a very long meeting for an hour.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 29, 2007
I just finished reading the Wired interview with Ridley Scott about Blade Runner, the ultimate film noir. The movie is certainly one of my favorites and I own several editions of it. Of course I now also want this “final cut version”, hoping that it would be available in HD.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 28, 2007
In the recent years Mike Stonebraker has been advocating that the current commercial databases have become one-size-fits-all tools that are so general and heavy-weight that they do not excel in any particular area. Mike has written some papers on this topic of comparing general databases with specialized storage engines in areas of data-warehousing, text search, stream processing and scientific processing.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 10, 2007
Since Saturday morning you can help search for Steve Fossett through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Click here to get to the start page and then press the "Work on HITs" button to start reviewing satellite images. As with the search for Jim Gray, this is only possible because of the collaboration of several organizations.
All Things Distributed
JULY 23, 2007
The august edition of Wired has a long article on the disappearance of Jim Gray, earlier this year. Steve Silberman worked diligently on this article and interviewed many people including Donna Carnes, Jim’s wife. I like the article because it focuses more on Jim as the technologist, friend and mentor than on the technicalities of the search after his disappearance.
All Things Distributed
JULY 10, 2007
I omitted the Dynamo reference from the previous collection, but now that the SOSP program is live: Guiseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swami Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels, “Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store”, to appear in the Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Stevenson, WA, October 2007.
All Things Distributed
JULY 6, 2007
I recently gave a few talks in which I gave some reading advice to the audience and I promised to follow-up with posting the links here. The first article is the interview of Michael Stonebraker by Margo Seltzer in the May/June edition of ACM Queue (unfortunately the article is online yet, but this link seems to work thanks to Peter O’Kelly).
All Things Distributed
APRIL 29, 2007
Tori Amos - American Doll Posse – Each of the 5 persona on the album have their personal blogs, more details at the wikipedia page for the album (May 1). Groove Armada - Soundboy Rock – Unpredictable (May 10 US release).
All Things Distributed
APRIL 16, 2007
Congrats to Scott Berkun for sending his "Myths of Innovation"book to the printer. Scott has collected an excellent set of recommendations for his book; among others JSB, Guy and me. It is well deserved; I read a beta version of the book and I was impressed.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 14, 2007
Today in the opening session of FAST there are two papers on the studies of hard disk reliability. Both these papers present very interesting results that blow away some of the common assumptions in failure modelling of systems. Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson from CMU in their paper Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 12, 2007
I have had the luxury of almost 4 months with any real conferences. Don’t get me wrong it is not that I do not enjoy the public speaking side of my job; it is just that I experience it always as rather disruptive. It is great to focus for a while and get things done.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 2, 2007
Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.
All Things Distributed
JANUARY 4, 2007
Each year I try to immerse myself in a particular technology, either as a user or as a developer. This technology has preferably nothing to do with my day-job, or at least not directly. For the past year this was Second life. Today I sold all the SL real-estate that I acquired in the past year and parked my avatar permanently in The Blarney Stone Irish Bar in Dublin.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 9, 2007
Midnight in Seattle. Amazon Hackday 2007 in progress.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 24, 2007
The beta of the long awaited DRM free Amazon music store is ready for use. Go download!
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 9, 2007
Sadness. Marc Orchant, the ulimate optimist, is no longer with us.
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
78 
Let's personalize your content