Should I Machine Learn?

Kevin Gallo just announced Bash support on Windows. If you have never had to interact with the Windows Batch language, this might not seem like such a big deal. Surely Batch could not be substantially worse than Bash, right? Bash: a language that was neither designed, nor evolved. An adequate solution to a problem that has since become orders of...

This morning, TechCrunch broke the story that Mesos support is coming to Windows. This story is meant to coincide with Ben Hindman’s MesosCon keynote, in which there will be a real, end-to-end demo showing us scheduling work on a cluster with a mix of Linux and Windows nodes. For the vast majority of the project, I have been the only dedicated...

FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple. A notice on their community site explains that they have pulled download links, and their client libraries now return 404 on GitHub. To database customers, this is a good lesson: assuming FDB did not coordinate with customers ahead of time, this instantly cost at least some FDB customers millions of...

The performance of live site systems — everything from K/V stores to lock servers — is still measured principally in latency and throughput. Server I/O performance still matters here. It is impossible to do well on either of these metrics without a performant I/O subsystem. Oddly, while the last 10 years have seen remarkable improvements in the...

IBM was at the top of the news aggregators a couple days ago as irresponsible rumors spread that it was laying off more than 100,000 people. IBM eventually posted a scathing denial, though not quickly enough to stem the flow of Internet pundits who showed up in droves (at, e.g., Hacker News) to explain just how irrelevant IBM really is. This is a...