Designs, Lessons, and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems (Slideshare) — in the words of Matt Webb, through whom I found it, There’s a lovely collection of numbers from Jeff Dean at Google, about how long common computer processor and network operations take. […] What makes this more human is this comparison, which reveals a little bit about computer time: your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast.. (via Matt Webb)
Amazon Selling More Kindle Books Than Paperbacks (New Scientist) — Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. (via Brad DeLong)
The AOL Way — the leaked business plan for AOL’s content farms. I was fascinated by how big companies plan, but this is yet more sausage best made unseen. Most sausagey for me was Slide 33 showing the fantasy: a story suggested by high searches and advertising possibilities, with heavily “SEO optimized” text. (via Chris Heathcote on Delicious)
