chibea

One main problem that we observed was that big parts of their IAM / auth setup was overloaded / down which led to all kinds of cascading problems. It sounds as if Dynamo was reported to be a root cause, so is IAM dependent on dynamo internally?

Of course, such a large control plane system has all kinds of complex dependency chains. Auth/IAM seems like such a potentially (global) SPOF that you'd like to reduce dependencies to an absolute minimum. On the other hand, it's also the place that needs really good scalability, consistency, etc. so you probably like to use the battle proof DB infrastructure you already have in place. Does that mean you will end up with a complex cyclic dependency that needs complex bootstrapping when it goes down? Or how is that handled?

It's a bit funny that they say "most service operations are succeeding normally now" when, in fact, you cannot yet launch or terminate new EC2 instance, which is basically the defining feature of the cloud...

The max-unused percentage feature is well worth it to 80/20 the prune process and only prune the data which is easiest to prune away (i.e. not try to remove small files big packs but focus on packs which have lots of garbage).

In general, there's an unavoidable trade-off between creating many small packs (harder on metadata throughout the system, inside restic and on the backing store but more efficient to prune) versus creating big packs which are more easy on the metadata but might create big repack cost.

I guess a bit more intelligent repacking could avoid some of that cost by packing stuff together that might be more likely to get pruned together.

Isn't he dismissing culture with his rant? Culture as the currently common way to do and describe things?

He seems to imply that there could be an easier, more straight-forward way to describe things in some more common language. And that while he doesn't give any evidence how the current ways are overly complex.

Of course, there is broken or outdated software, and some things were crap from the start. Of course, there are always concrete things to improve but you won't get anywhere by dismissing all of it and starting anew.

For me, understanding the current state as part of our culture and our humanity and improving gradually on it, has guided me well in the past.

That's implication not equation.

Actually, that the malware contained a root exploit is fixable sooner or later.

The next insight will be, that even if the sandbox had worked, this type of attack still is possible by using the user's trust in the brand of a well-known app to use the permissions granted to it for malicious intents. There's no easy way to avoid that up front automatically.

The downside is that a bunch of processes started from one TTY doesn't get as much CPU as before. It basically shifts the scheduling granularity a level higher from processes to (interactive) sessions. Because that's what the question is: on which level do we want to have a fair scheduling? For a desktop user, processes have little meaning. Sessions, instead, are much more useful because they correspond better to his different tasks, for which he expects that the CPU power is distributed in a fair way.

What's the reasoning for your reproduction of the complete text here? With all possibly valid reasoning in this particular case, there should be high barriers for just copying someone else's text, esp. here given its personal nature.

Often, manual allocation is even slower.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2552

An interesting side note here is that the coming Unity will be based upon compiz, instead of relying on mutter. Canonical apparently hired the lead developer of compiz:

http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/a-bright-new-futur...

"and before long you have a system that demonstrates rare flashes of brilliance but in practice is so unpredictable and opaque you can't use it"

_That_ actually seems to resemble human psychology to some degree ...

Yeah, it seems it does, quite impressive!

I think that's a valid point. For long years mostly the live performance of media was paid for. Then with the manifestation of media as data, the guys who had the machines to record and create copies claimed the stakes and the exclusive rights as a form to create economic value. Time has passed and now we have found out that every data are equal and data can hardly be bounded and the exclusivity of copying has gone away. Perhaps it's time to rethink the claims.

No news, but still worth pointing to...

(e.g. http://blowery.org/2008/04/08/opendns-is-proxying-google/)

I think so, too. If you think about what is making Android devices run so slow, it's almost always some misbehaving background services. Unless there isn't some smarter way controlling the scheduling of foreground applications, there won't be multitasking and fast speed at the same time with a comparable CPU.