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Submission + - Technical Debt and the Ongoing Battle Against It (chrisshort.net)

oaf357 writes: I have been trying to fit a lot of square pegs into round holes lately. Eliminating technical debt with modern day DevOps practices to reduce costs is seldom fun or glamorous but is very often beneficial. Reducing costs should be the mindset of IT and one surefire way to do that is to spend the right amount of time on a task to complete it successfully. Finding that balance is definitely tricky especially when a lot of us are human time division multiplexers now. But, that right combination of good work and adequate time spent is definitely out there.

Submission + - What Does Yahoo's Downfall Teach Us? (chrisshort.net)

oaf357 writes: What does Yahoo's downfall teach us? That you must bring together a great team. The assembled players have to push people to build great features (the content will come, as exemplified by Medium, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.). That team must also do its due diligence in an effort to add value to the company. Now we all get to see how Verizon will deal with Yahoo assuming that deal gets approved, of course.

Comment Re:Double-dipping (Score 3, Informative) 466

Interestingly, as a tier-2/regional operator, these cache devices are hard to get because they fill a certain role. We have worked with Netflix to try and get the caching device, and it just doesn't do any good if you have less than 3-4gbps of pure Netflix traffic. It does not work because the caches have to ... populate the cache! They do this regularly, and the do it overnight -- but it is an absurd amount of data, especially when there are multiple bitrates. I am told that the cache runs > 1.5gbps to populate, almost nightly. So if you don't push significantly more than that, it is not a cost winner.

As a transit provider/local ISP/bandwidth buyer, 3+gbps is a lot of traffic. We found it mildly more attractive to buy a 10gbps wave to a Netflix-available peering point and peer directly with them than to buy 2+gbps of transit from Level3/Cogent/HE, especially factoring in last mile costs.

Also of note, my own traffic engineering testing shows that Netflix *strongly* prefers Hurricane Electric (as of last fall), then Cogent, then Level3.

There is a really horrible hole between 1gbps and 10gbps of consumption that there isn't a good solution for. Netflix knows about it, but it is a very difficult target to hit -- it may be cheaper to buy transit, or it may not be, but hardware isn't the answer. This same situation exists for all CDNs - limelight, edgecast, akamai, L3.

As usual, peering is the answer. Our customers pay us to bring them Netflix ... so we buy a wave and backhaul it hundreds of miles to satisfy them. It'd be ridiculous for me to charge Netflix when my customers are asking for it!

Comment Re:Everyone knows... (Score 1) 229

To this day I still sleep like a baby through the night. Unless, of course, I'm interrupted by the sounds of somebody else stumbling their way to the bathroom.

... or by that nice feeling of wet pajamas rubbing against your skin reminding you that sometimes it's really better to go ...

Comment Re:SEO gaming - no penalty! (Score 2) 220

Or maybe, that JCPenney makes most of its money in its brick-and-mortar stores rather than online?

Or most of their online customers go directly to JCPenney's rather than searching for a source of doodads or widgets?

In the end, google might have done JCPenney's a favor by showing them how little business their SEO games actually brought, and that this is an expense they can well do without...

Comment Re:Same time? (Score 1) 365

Would it matter where the data was heading at the time?

Sure it does. We (supposedly) live in a fair country where everyone has right to due process.

The point is that the user was doing data transmission with her phone when her hands should have been on the wheel.

So she connected to facebook while sitting in her car idling in her driveway waiting for it to "warm up". After a while she put the phone on the passenger's seat (or into her pocket), forgot to disconnect from the network, and drove off. All the while one of the myriads of silly javascripts included in facebook kept on chattering with the facebook server without her knowledge.

Or maybe, she did indeed have a fancy client that was buffering her update while she was sitting in an area with poor reception, and automatically sending the buffered data when reception was better (i.e. seconds before the accident).

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