When you deal with cold storage you have to look at things from a node level, not in global storage size. If your basic unit is a 50GB device instead of a 4TB device, this means that each request you make to recall data has a much smaller footprint.

Let's say that each stored account takes up 1GB of space. That's 50 accounts per BD drive, and 4000 accounts per hard disk. This means that when some dude comes out of jail and tries to access the photo his mom posted on his Facebook wall in 2010, there are 3999 accounts that are pulled out of their coma with it for no reason. On a BD that's only 49.

As long as you partition stuff properly it's unlikely that a single request will span multiple BD drives. You may have to deal with clusters of BD disks and this requires a bit of tuning, but even with the best indexing system in the world you can't power up only part of a hard disk. So BD is a clear winner here, especially if to that footprint issue you add the fact that spinners die quickly when you keep playing with the on/off switch.

Bytes are bytes when you live in a software world. But physical factors and limitations come into play when you deal with storage, and that's why most people with a software background can see WTF where there is instead good engineering.

So they blew millions on a lousy website instead of forcing their citizen to use the lousy website on which the federal government blew millions. I'm sure the Oregon people are happy to have paid twice for the same garbage.

Meanwhile Oracle's stock is up almost 1/3 this year. At least some people made money with this healthcare thing.

Especially if they are held hostage like Nokia in India.

What you describe is called a MAID and over the years it has proven quite unreliable. Hard disks are sensitive creatures and don't age well when being powered-on/powered-off randomly, and because of the nature of cold storage it is difficult to achieve a right balance of redundancy and power savings.

Also I would advise you to be careful when you label something as "phenomenally stupid" otherwise in instances like this one it may make you look like you are "phenomenally uninformed".

I'm not sure which is the most depressing:

1) the gas station with an attached convenience store where the clerk is behind bullet-proof glass and when you want to buy something in the store you have to turn the barcode of the item towards the barcode reader yourself to ring up the sale before sliding money in the reinforced drawer

2) the ones where they lock doors at night so you have to stand outside and ask the clerk to go fetch whatever you want to buy and he puts them in the drawer after you have paid

The saddest thing is that I'm pretty sure those measures are not there to protect the clerk per se as much as to minimize liability for the company in case a robbery goes wrong.

Even when there is intense competition the service is usually bad, because then the companies are stuck in a price war (like the one in the cloud involving Amazon, Google and Microsoft) so resources are scarce for great customer service. And once a winner emerges from a price war, the service remains poor because the company can get away with it.

This is not specific to the tech industry. A long time ago people were greeted by a small army of sharp-looking attendants at the gas station who made sure to check the oil, clean the windows and check the tires. Nowadays you are lucky to get the attention of a nonchalant clerk facebooking behind a 4 inch bullet-proof window when the pump does not accept your credit card directly or when you don't get a working code for the automated carwash.

I agree that pictures and diagrams suck on a Kindle, but the highlighting is fantastic, I've been using it a lot since I found out that in my Kindle library online I can access all the text I have highlighted, ever. In the past I used to stop reading whenever I would find something interesting that inspired me to do some googling, or when I would learn about some other book mentioned by the author. Now I simply highlight stuff and I look it up later. A lot more convenient.

Also it's possible to lookup a word or sentence in wikipedia without leaving the page, there is a small pop-up window for that. Hugely convenient. Same thing with the built-in dictionary; that's what I used to brush up my Spanish since it's possible to have 1 default dictionary per language.

And finally there is the Audible sync thing. I can listen to an audiobook while driving, and when I get home I can pick up where I left reading on my Kindle, the audio and ebooks are synchronized. I have to buy both but there is a big discount. It's not ideal for deeply technical books, but it works well for other kinds of non-fiction like business books or biographies. And it is awesome for fiction.

I would not go back to reading paper books or ebooks on a tablet. For a while I had access to O'Reilly Safari and while they have a large selection of technical books it is pretty subpar as far as e-reading goes, I hated it.

I don't know what is your "hosted Azure solution" that costs tens of thousands per month (I think your IT guy is ripping you off), but if you were to switch to Office365, for $4 per user per month you could have 25GB mailboxes on servers that you don't have to maintain or patch or backup, without having to stop using your own Active Directory (if you want you can use a managed domain instead). Or for $8 per user per month you would have that plus SharePoint, Lync and the online version of MS-Office, which is at least as good as any non-online version of existing FOSS office suites.

Even with the big plan at $8 that's a $11,200 cost per month for your 1400 users; how you managed to setup an Azure solution that costs tens of thousands of dollars is beyond me, and how you expect to save money by replacing Exchange is also puzzling.

But just for fun let's crunch the numbers in your Azure scenario:
1) 3 Azure servers, plus storage, SQL Azure and bandwidth, that's $1000 per month (or $0.71 per user)
2) Windows Server + Exchange Server licenses: over a 3-year span (typical accounting), that's more or less $150 per month (or $0.10 per user)

This leaves $10,000 per month to pay for IT people, which is not a lot because they get sick, take vacations, etc, so you need at least 3. I'm sure that kind of team can deliver the kind of SLA included with Office 365, which has huge datacenters and a small army of sysadmins.

Show those numbers to your boss and explain to him how switching to Postfix or the free edition of Zimbra (that has no search, calendar or contacts) could save tens of thousands of dollars. I'm sure he will promote you to CIO on the spot. Or if he knows how to count he will see what is the expensive line item in his IT budget and he will outsource it.

At my company (125 users) a while ago we moved to OpenOffice to save money. Users were not happy and started to call it "BrokenOffice". Only people who needed to exchange documents with outside clients were allowed to use MS-Office, and this created a lot of tension between the haves and have-nots. Bootleg versions started to appear, etc.

The company has since switched to the Office.com deal (annual $100/user for 5 floating licenses), so each employee can install MS-Office on various computers in their family in addition to their workstation without requiring assistance from IT (plus they get more OneDrive space). With the recent version it's possible to "share" the licenses, so employees can authorize their kids who are in college and let them install the applications themselves.

Employees see that as a perk, and helpdesk is less busy with "BrokenOffice" problems (real or perceived), so everyone is happy. It's more than pennies but it's not that expensive either.

It's the same with electronics. A long time ago I was advising people to avoid HP or Dell laptops. Now I'd rather have a Latitude or Pavilion than a f*ing Lenovo.

No they support Linux virtual machines. It's not the same as cloud services.

On Azure one can deploy virtual machines (Windows or Linux) but also cloud services, which are basically dedicated on-the-fly instances of Windows Server on which one's web services are deployed. Cloud services are similar to managed VPS; you can remote desktop in the instance, but the patching and maintenance is built-in in the image. You don't rent a VM, you rent resources, and the instance is mostly stateless.

In addition to VM and cloud services, Azure also offers web sites, which are similar to traditional hosting. They support most web technologies (asp.net, php, python, node) and you can choose between shared or dedicated instances. What I found convenient is that you can use all those technologies within the same website, so if your app is mostly node but you need a specific web service that is written in PHP you can have both.

That's different from AWS, where only VM are available.

I have two Linux VM on my Azure account. There is a CentOS image available. It works ok but I know for a fact that they sometimes reboot without warning (I installed one and was lazy in configuring Apache, it was not registered in the startup services, and a few weeks later I noticed that Apache was not running). Never had that problem on AWS, but Azure is cheaper and easier to use. I pay about $15 per VM per month for the smallest instance.

I would be curious to see how Azure is impacting Windows Server market share. They made it very easy to automatically deploy instances for those cloud services, and most people run multiple instance for load balancing.

I don't know the exact number but from what I've read Azure is gaining about 1,000 customers per day. That's a lot of Windows Servers.

AWS was first in that business but their console/dashboard is just too clunky, this scares a lot of people away. No wonder that Microsoft is making shitloads of money while Amazon is almost to the point where they will ask employees to sell their blood in order to finance the price war in the cloud.

You know what is hilarious, it's that with mobile development all the old limits are coming back. The other day I was reading the story behind vi and the fact that using short one-letter commands was a decision linked to a slow 300-baud network link, and I couldn't help but think about minified javascript...

I have no experience with wearable computers (watches, glasses, etc.) but it must be even worse on those devices.

Bullshit. Please post a list of hosting providers that offer only PHP4.

Because here is what 30 seconds of googling show:

Bluehost: PHP 5.4
WebhostingPad: PHP 5.4
Hostgator: PHP 5.4

The old crap in the linked article applies mostly to PHP4 or PHP3. Yet PHP5 has been initially released more than 10 years ago.

Find some other dead horse to beat please, this is getting boring.

Could you care to explain how a language is "architecturally cleaner" for web applications when it does not have native web-related features? Unless you consider that piling up frameworks is a better architecture because it brings more moving parts in the picture. Hopefully you are not an architect.