Top Stories: April 9-13, 2012

Carsharing boosts city governments, why complex systems fail, and what web ops teams could do with big data.

Here’s a look at the top stories published across O’Reilly sites this week.

Carsharing saves U.S. city governments millions in operating costs
Carsharing initiatives in a number of U.S. cities are part of a broader trend that suggests the ways we work, play and learn are changing.

Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification
Simple systems scale effectively, while complex systems struggle to overcome the multiplicative effect of potential failure points. This shows us why the most reliable and scalable clouds are those made up of fewer, simpler parts.

Operations, machine learning and premature babies
Machine learning and access to huge amounts of data allowed IBM to make an important discovery about premature infants. If web operations teams could capture everything — network data, environmental data, I/O subsystem data, etc. — what would they find out?

State of the Computer Book Market 2011
In his annual report, Mike Hendrickson analyzes tech book sales and industry data: Part 1, Overall Market; Part 2, The Categories; Part 3, The Publishers; Part 4, The Languages; Part 5, Wrap-Up and Digital.

Never, ever “out of print”
In a recent interview, attorney Dana Newman tackled issues surrounding publishing rights in the digital landscape. She said changes in the current model are needed to keep things equitable for both publishers and authors.


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Photo of servers: Google Production Server, v1 by Pargon, on Flickr

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