Updated: 2012-03-28 22:57:16
Tuesday’s (4/3) Berkman Center for Internet & Society Lunch about The Growth and Decay of Shared Knowledge with Berkman Fellow Dennis Tenen should focus on information issues near and dear to our hearts. Knowledge grows, but it also contracts as outmoded facts and theories are replaced with new ones. This talk will discuss our intuitions [...]
Updated: 2012-03-27 20:46:03
My last post about DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra didn’t go so well. As follow-up, I chatted for two hours with Rick Branson and Billy Bosworth of DataStax. Hopefully I can do better this time around. For starters, let me say there are three kinds of data management nodes in DataStax Enterprise: Vanilla Cassandra. Cassandra plus [...]
Updated: 2012-03-26 12:42:52
I’ve been talking a fair bit with Cory Isaacson, CEO of my client CodeFutures, which makes dbShards. Business notes include: 7 production users, plus an 8th imminent. 12-14 signed contracts beyond that. ~160 servers in production. One customer who has almost 15 terabytes of data (in the cloud). Still <10 people, pretty much all engineers. [...]
Updated: 2012-03-26 10:03:33
ClearStory Data launched, with nice coverage in the New York Times, Computerworld, and elsewhere. But from my standpoint, there were some serious problems: (Bad.) I was planning to cover the launch as well, in a split exclusive, but that plan was changed, costing me considerable wasted work. (Worse.) I wasn’t told of the change as [...]
Updated: 2012-03-23 14:13:13
What do you think about employers asking for login credentials for social media sites during interviews? What about potential employers asking to connect, so they can view your connections and make employment decisions based on what you show your friends online and who they are? Would you allow an employer to view your account? Would [...]
Updated: 2012-03-21 08:20:45
Edit: Multiple errors in the post below have been corrected in a follow-on post about DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra. My client DataStax is announcing DataStax Enterprise 2.0. The big point of the release is that there’s a bunch of stuff integrated together, including at least: Cassandra — the NoSQL DBMS, which DataStax sometimes calls “DataStax [...]
Updated: 2012-03-21 07:42:38
Various reporters have asked me about Oracle’s third quarter 2012 earnings conference call. Specific Q&A includes: What did Oracle do to have its earnings beat Wall Street’s estimates? Have a bad second quarter and then set Wall Street’s expectations too low for Q3. This isn’t about strong results; it’s about modest expectations. Can Oracle be [...]
Updated: 2012-03-20 03:06:01
Through a LinkedIn librarians group, I noticed this analysis of US Census data to learn about American librarians and the profession. The count of librarians captured my attention: 636 in 1880, 307,273 in 1990, and 212,742 in 2009. The decline over twenty years is striking. Many of us know about people who have lost jobs, [...]
Updated: 2012-03-19 10:06:52
I have a bunch of backlogged post subjects in or around short-request processing, based on ongoing conversations with my clients at Akiban, Cloudant, Code Futures (dbShards), DataStax (Cassandra) and others. Let’s start with Akiban. When I posted about Akiban two years ago, it was reasonable to say: Akiban is in the short-request DBMS business. MySQL [...]
Updated: 2012-03-14 23:46:43
Greetings The Massachusetts Library System is holding a Special Libraries Roundtable on Monday, March 19, 2012 at the National Fire Prevention Association in Quincy MA 10:30 am -12:30 p.m. “Join special library colleagues for a discussion of common concerns. The agenda is yours! Submit your discussion items in advance or bring them along. MLS Executive [...]
Updated: 2012-03-14 16:57:57
Because the 10th Archivist of the United States, director of the National Archives and Records Administration, David Ferriero, is from North Beverly, Massachusetts, The Boston Globe profiled him and his work.
Updated: 2012-03-08 17:21:12
When I arrived at this MIT Center for Civic Media’s lunch about mapping supply chains, Leonardo Bonanni was explaining how it took him a very long time to develop the map etched in his computer case showing all the places his computer’s components supposedly originated. It wasn’t the etching that took so long. Discovering where [...]
