Hoax Piratebay.org Closure Again?

Slyck.com is reporting that the officials have seized ThePiratebay.org’s servers on Wednesday. The site quotes TPB’s ‘spokesman’ as saying that all the servers have been taken away. Which is a bit strange since the domain still answers to the five IPs it used to answer to earlier.

Of course, it could be a front end load balancer/switch (which again would not advertise dead backend IPs?) or an LVS cluster (which I don’t think they were using), but for all purposes, seized servers don’t leave behind IP addresses dangling in mid air. Sounds very much like another hoax to me.

Update: It is not a hoax, the MPAA has put out an official press release confirming the raid.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, piratebay, piracy, hoaxes

Shock, replicated

One of the greatest WTF moments I have had in recent times in relation to technology was the time when I discovered that Postgresql did not have decent replication built into it. Transactions and ACID compliance are good things to have, but any self-respecting RDBMS solution that calls itself enterprise-ready should also have native replication capabilities.

From what I have seen, for us (using the 8.x branch of Postgresql), the available options are the commercially available Command Prompt’s replication solution, Slony I, PGCluster and a whole host of middleware applications available only if you are using JDBC.

Of the lot, Command Prompt has not bothered to get back to me with a quote for their product (very few companies actually reply to such queries, weird) and from what I had seen mentioned somewhere it costs somewhere in the region of USD1000.

Slony I looks pretty okay and it has been around for a while too, but it does not support schema replication, leaving you high and dry unless you are lucky enough to work somewhere the database schema does not change for the duration of your employment. Moreover, it does not have multimaster capabilities.

PGcluster seems to have most of what we want in a single solution — clustering, load balancing and failover.

Technorati Tags: postgresql, RDBMS, replication, clustering, JDBC

AJAX bad for publishers? Don’t think so

The Internet Stock Blog today takes a look at the Myspace issues, from the News Corp point of view and jumps in to the debate on page view inflation and the effects of AJAX on inventory available for ad sales teams. The link trail from the post leads to previous posts by Mike Davidson and Jason Calcanis on the subject.

While Mike argues that Myspace can actually benefit from better user experience, even if it results in reduced pageviews, Jason throws the baby, the bathwater and the entire bath house by saying that AJAX is flat out bad for publishers.

I disagree with that contention. You can very comfortably serve ads in AJAX-heavy websites. Of course, you should not fill up all page transformations and triggers with ads. It is possible to do it sensibly, if you create ad areas in your AJAX interfaces and define when they can change or when they can be counted as an impression.

For instance, a new email being read is technically a page refresh. I don’t understand what stops publishers from inserting an ad there, unless there is some imagined standard that you can’t have advertisements on AJAX pages.

Fire up that fox!

“All machines in the office should have Firefox and Flash installed with no bandwidth caps on them.” When your CEO says something like that to the systems guys, you understand even better why you love to work in the company, even if it is primarily a television-based firm.

Some things are never equal (unchanged)

The Internet Stock Blog on Comparing the Big Three: Google, eBay and Yahoo

All else being equal, we are bullish on companies with accelerating revenue growth (or at least modest deceleration off of a high base), expanding margins, and high rates of free cash flow generation.

Some seven years after having heard the same “all else being equal” rider in any assumptions that are made about economic/financial models during my graduation years, it still gives me that odd ‘er?’ feeling in my mind to hear it all over again. The thing about human (and market) conditions is that all else is never equal, nor do they remain unchanged over time. I can’t believe that we still stick to the same canard even in this age and time.