O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 12 November 2009 - CRM on Rails, Data Mining on Hadoop, Disappointing Keynotes, The Teapot Effect

By Nat Torkington
November 12, 2009

Bixo -- An open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Vendor Relationship Management workshop

By Andy Oram
October 15, 2009

Nobody knows you as well as you do. Or do they? Let's run a test. Do you know what percentage of your food bill went to processed products? Or what type of coupons (store coupons, newspaper coupons, etc.) is most likely to get you to switch brands? I bet someone out there knows.This kind of data mining is the modern companion to Customer Relations Management, which is the science of understanding customers and trying to get repeat business. CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies with the vendor. A Vendor Relationship Management workshop at Harvard looked at what it would take to leave control with the customers.

Environment Variables: On Surplus, Scarcity, Fear & Greed

By Mark Sigal
August 19, 2009

I am big believer that markets gravitate between FEAR and GREED, and that industries are driven by core assumptions about the SCARCITY or SURPLUS of enabling resources. Think about the stock market in terms of the former (it's heavily outlook driven), and the evolution of computing, as afforded by the latter (i.e., the commoditization of processing, storage and bandwidth).

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 13, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Freemium Services and the Economics of Social Networking

By George Reese
July 6, 2009

Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

Bonus lessons from AIG: crisis management just sets up the next crisis

By Andy Oram
March 26, 2009

The flap over 165 million dollars in bonuses at a company taking federal bail-out money provides an opportunity to rethink how we handle crises. Start by trusting your staff to set long-term priorities accurately. Ask staff to analyze problems for root causes. Also, ask the people most affected by the problem what they need to fix it.

The Weakness of Commodity Server to Cloud Server Cost Comparisons

By George Reese
March 20, 2009

Though the conventional wisdom on the Internet is that the economic benefits of cloud computing fail for applications with steady usage needs, the reality is that the commodity-server to cloud-server comparisons on which this wisdom is based are flawed. The reality is that the cloud often provides compelling economic benefits even when you have an application with consistent resource demands.

Blame the Credit Card Franchise: Criminals on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

By Nitesh Dhanjani
March 11, 2009

Amazon EC2 is an extraordinarily powerful infrastructure available to anyone with a stolen credit card. Even if someone is able to use the EC2 platform for a few hours with a stolen credit card, he or she will be able to initiate a vicious cycle that may become impossible to halt.

XBRL Becomes Mandatory - This Should Be Interesting

By Kurt Cagle
February 8, 2009

The announcement came quietly, a briefly worded memo from the SEC in December that as of the the third fiscal quarter of 2009 (starting in June), companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earnings using the Extensible Business Markup Language, or XBRL. Other companies would be required to follow suit according to whether they use GAAP (which have a one year grace period) or IFRP (starting 2011).

Analysis 2009: The Financial Crisis Hits IT Hard

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

The recession that started in January 2008 looks to be four phased. The first phase, The housing collapse, actually started in August 2007. The financial meltdown hit in September 2008, and likely will continue through to March 2009 or...

Analysis 2009: Some thoughts for a New Era

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

This particular look forward is definitely longer than what I have written in years past, and for those of you who have managed to wade through the admittedly voluminous text I both admire your fortitude. This has been a hard...

Sustainability, Boxing Day, and Open Source Software

By Kurt Cagle
December 28, 2008

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

Throwing Money at Problems: More Thoughts on Bailouts

By Kurt Cagle
December 15, 2008

Government absolutely must play a role in dealing with companies that are too big to fail ... it must prevent them from reaching that point. Until that happens, real reform in business will be slow and problematic.

Expanding The O'Reilly Forums

By Kurt Cagle
December 13, 2008

Forums have become an integral part of many communities over the years - as a webmaster on a number of different social sites, I found that the sites tended to live or die on the strength of their forums more than on any other component of the site. They provide a way for people to express their feelings, to communicate with one another, to explore deep concepts (and silly ones) and to learn, and as such they often form the vibrant backbone of communities regardless of the subject matter expressed.

Bailouts, Burnouts and Non-Linear Innovation

By Kurt Cagle
December 10, 2008

Think fractally, think non-linear, and help those of your linear friends, neighbors and political representatives who can't conceive that tomorrow will not be like today to understand that linear thinking is a dangerous, deceptive illusion.

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

By Nitesh Dhanjani
November 10, 2008

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

The desktop 3D printer

By Mike Loukides
October 30, 2008

Yesterday, Andrew Sheppard pointed me at a desktop 3D printer for under $5000. That brought back some memories... In the early 80s, I worked for Imagen, the company that made the first laser printer that sold for under $20,000, the first laser printer that sold for under $10,000, and the first laser printer that sold for under $7,000. We didn't...

Short Gas Supplies Lead to Short Tempers, Long Lines and Telecommutes

By Kurt Cagle
October 1, 2008

While Hurricane Ike has long since faded into the ether, its effects on the economy continue to mount. One of the more significant (and unexpected) - Ike hit a number of oil refineries and gas distribution centers hard enough to know them offline for the last couple of weeks.

Black Monday, 2008

By Kurt Cagle
September 29, 2008

At one point, the stock market fall was so rapid that several financial sites web service update servers were overwhelmed and crashed as people refreshed their browsers second by second to watch the carnage. At the end of the day, the damage was significant - the Dow down 672 points (6.2%), the S&P down 94 points (7.8%) and the NASDAQ down a staggering 200 points (more than 9.1%). In Canada, the TSX closed down 750 points, and it's likely that the selloff in Asia and Europe will be just as brutal.

Paulson Plan Will Prove Devastating to IT

By Kurt Cagle
September 24, 2008

On the 20th of September, Henry Paulson submitted an architectural plan to Congress to provide a foundation for keeping Wall Street functional and prevent the credit markets from seizing up, a task which he has been engaged in pretty much non-stop for at least the last year (since the markets started to crack in August 2007). This architectural plan, one that would involve potentially trillions of dollars and affect the lives of tens of millions of people, was not 1000 pages of detailed analysis, not even a hundred pages of recommendations and "to be filled in with details later". It was 2 1/2 pages long.

Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer's Guide

By Kurt Cagle
September 17, 2008

O'Reilly's focus has long been on programming issues (or programmer issues) and that focus remains very much in place. However, it is worth understanding how the grief playing out on Wall Street will have a very significant impact upon the IT industry within the next four to six months, even despite the fact that up until now the contagion seems largely to have remained contained in the financial sector.

Time to Stop "Blaming the SysAdmin" or "Geekonomics"

By Anton Chuvakin
June 13, 2008

This rant/post comes due to my finishing the book "Geekonomics"(book site) - my earlier impressions here and here. The way the book ends, BTW, just kicks you in the balls, hard (look up what Mr Petrov did on Sept 26,...

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