Some posts I liked to read this week
Amazon SimpleDB thoughts Ryan Barrett write a nice introduction about Amazon Simple DB web service offering. Talks about it's usage, it's pricing and tuplespace inspiration.
Thrudb - faster, cheaper than SimpleDB an open source alternative to Amazon Simple DB, seems nice and powerful, but it also seems to something to cater to a different audience. The interesting thing about amazon simple DB, it's that is a model that works as a service. We simple pay as we go. We don't have to care about infrastructure issues (or expenditures) and when needed the processing power is just there to respond to unanticipated spikes or unusual usage.
How effective is the wisdom of crowds as a security mechanism? Tyler Moore discusses the effectiveness of crowd sourcing in the security area. He explains how a small sample is somewhat uneffective addressing this problem, and worse if you a have a small user base it is very easy to subvert the results and inject into the collective wisdom false informative (something that can be very dangerous in such an area as security).
Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language? James Hague, asks the million dollar question, actually the 100 million dollar question, would you risk this kind of money using a less mainstream languare?
Why I don’t give fixed price. Software developer story. Andrey Khavryuchenko talks about how fixed pricing sucks and why he refuses to work that way.
Desiging Software is the same as Predicting the Future Damon Poole talks about the always fun task of predicting the future of software estimation.
Insects and Entropy I'm sure this story has a moral i'm not sure exactly what it is. But I found it entertaining, and it brings back the memories of pulling all nighters in college while writing heuristics for a game in the Artificial intelligence course. I remember a similar story with a colleague spending countless hours writing an heuristics he fondly nicknamed"powerfull", which after several hours of processing lost against a random heuristic. :-)