Phasor Burn

Aha, I found a detailed description of how my buckling spring keyboards produce that wonderful tactile and audible feedback.

Here’s an animated image that shows how it works.

Looks like Kristopher Tate took a short vacation to recharge his batteries. Upon return a couple of days ago he gave an update on the status of Zooomr Mark III, where the blame for the delay was laid squarely at an unnamed 3rd party storage provider.

They had some in house storage infrastructure previously but wanted to outsource that function to someone that purported to have the ability to massively scale for them. Apparently it didn’t work out. Now, I wonder if that was Amazon S3, since Thomas Hawk did mention that Zooomer used Amazon EC2 and S3 . . .

Now I am willing to assume that S3 was too slow for them, but also based on Thomas Hawk’s posting I’m wondering if they are simply using this as a smoke-cover excuse to distance themselves from Amazon because of a blog-frenzy kerfuffle overAmazon’s efforts to protect it’s Alexa proprietary data and possibly it’s trademarks etc.

Whatever the reason behind the delay of Zooomr Mark III may be, I hope that they eventually arrive at their destination intact. I am intrigued by some of the new features slated for that release, especially their taking on the micro stock photography space.

Edit: April 15
There is an article on The Register today about Amazon’s S3 service and their lack of SLA’s :

A barrier to adoption of Amazon’s web services is the absence of any SLA (Service Level Agreement), making some businesses reluctant to entrust data or critical services to Amazon. “They are absolutely correct,” says Vogels, with disarming frankness. “You have to understand that this is a nascent business. So we have to figure out on our side how to give these guarantees. It doesn’t make sense to guarantee things, and then not be able to meet those guarantees. It is better to explain to people that there are no guarantees at the moment, except high level statements that it is fast and reliable, instead of lying to them.”

That said, has anyone lost data? Have there been outages? “We’ve lost nobody’s data. We’ve had a few performance blips that didn’t affect everyone,” Vogels tells me. “We try to avoid that with Amazon.com also, where any outage has significant financial impact. We try to deploy the same techniques around S3 and EC2.”

Emphasis on the first sentance was added by me.

So what they are saying is they aren’t ready for commercial prime time. OK, fine. It’s still ok to experiment with your latest and greatest Web 2.0 startup that has a ‘beta’ (or alpha) moniker attached to it’s logo though. Who knows, you might get lucky and able to take a competitive advantage before the bigger, slower, more established companies in your space can.

Too bad it didn’t work out on the first try for Zooomr, but they had to try it. They’d have been fools to not see this as potentially huge advantage for them. I’ll bet that they will revisit the Amazon S3 service every few months over the next while to see if it has improved or changed enough to make sense for another stab at using it.

Edit April 23, 2007 :

Although . . . I do see that SmugMug is using S3 just fine thankyou. Hmmm.

Not everything’s perfect. For instance, the speed of delivery for data stored on S3 can be slow, because S3 lacks edge caching features standard to true content-delivery networks.

To get around that, SmugMug uses a tiered structure in which 90% of its data is stored on S3, and the most popularly accessed 10% remains with SmugMug. That way, S3 mostly serves as a type of archive or backup site, with almost all requests served up faster by SmugMug’s own servers.

Read entire article at ComputerWorld

Fred Freaks Out Again. Shred of truth to everything he usually writes about means that I really don’t want to be flying after theper-seat spy-on-passenger camera and microphone gets installed.

I don’t think for a second that some or all of the western airlines will fail to implement this. It’s just too stupid of an idea for it to fail.

The Brits are already monitored by cameras all over the place already and they’ll probably just accept this. The yanks are so paranoid hiding under their beds etc that they’ll probably buy into it as well, and everyone else will follow the leader.

Sigh.

Tim O’Reilly means well but has really missed the mark with this one.

A Blogger’s Code of Conduct is not needed. There are plenty of existing mechanisms in place to keep trolls at bay. This problem has existed since the early days of USENET, the early BBS’s, etc etc etc. Why it’s a surprise to anyone that it’s appeared in blogs is beyond me.

Here’s a blow-by-blow response. There’s many others, since this lit up the blogospheroid quite well today.

It’s rather simple. Ignore the trolls. Only the sysop, list admin, blog owner, should make policy as to what is and is not allowed and whether they want to publicize rules (a bad idea) or just let their actions and their good users’s actions speak for themselves.

There’s technological ways of accomplishing the ignore bit, but ignoring is what is at the heart.

If you don’t feed the trolls, they go away.

As an example, Citadel BBS software had a feature that the sysop could flag a user as a ‘twit’. The user wouldn’t even know they had been flagged as such, and would still be allowed to post new messages or comments on existing ones. The twit would eventually give up and go away after a period of time with no responses by the rest of the user populace. The secret sauce was that the twitted user would see all of their postings and comments in the proper context etc but the regular user populace would never ever see those words at all. All they knew was the phone line was perhaps a bit more busy from some unknown user that was on a bit earlier.

I’ll admit that it is a bit harder to do this with blogs since any joe can put up their own blog and say things about you, trackback to your site, etc. Blog software can have, or will have shortly, filters to let you keep these trackbacks from showing up where your regular readers would see them. The problem is that the unwanted spewage is actually hosted on joe’s blog and is still readily findable via search engines and the like. Gee, like any web page since the ealry 90’s has been. Not a big hairy deal imho.

Aside from the ‘ignore the trolls’ you still have the law to fall back on. Libel, slander, etc are still enforceable and we all know how lawsuit happy the americans can be… it’ll work itself out in their clogged court system.

Anyhoo.