Layer 42 review

Layer42 Networks  3080 Raymond ST Santa Clara, CA 95054 

this is a truly evil company.  we've been their customers for one year and we found the following facts:

- there is no onsite support. they claim there is, but there is not. for example, not a single emergency ticket was ever responded. we had to drive to facility to restart equipment

- facility has frequent power failures. once they didn't even answer the phones when it happened.

- and the worst: all contracts are auto renewed, and require 60 -day notice prior to expiration. there is *only* a year option for any service. don't phase out contracts: we had cabinets  and 50mbit/s bandwidth from august, then we bought much more bandwidth in december. since they do *only*anual contracts, cabinets were expiring in next august and bandwidth four months later. in order to leave, we're now faced either to waste money for 4 months of bandwidth or 8 months of cabinets. no, they explicitly won't let us buy any of these monthly. 

yes, it sucks.

Releaselog | RLSLOG.net » Real punishment: Russian Viagra spammer murdered

Releaselog | RLSLOG.net » Real punishment: Russian Viagra spammer murdered

More free music, this time its Oasis, Jamiroquai, The Charlatans and Madness - Download Squad

More free music, this time its Oasis, Jamiroquai, The Charlatans and Madness - Download Squad

OhGizmo! » Archive » World’s Largest Outdoor Swimming Pool

OhGizmo! » Archive » World’s Largest Outdoor Swimming Pool

Amazon EC2 instances have hidden command

This was my first experience with Amazon EC2. 100 instances doing WWW / 50M http hits per day.


And then we discovered this hidden command:

shitdown -h now!


And it worked.

Now we are at Layer42. It feels right.

The day when geeks will take over The Stick

Why Hit Forge based models could rule the near future


This is Hit Forge and more is here



Business is easy

It took me 15 years, as a developer, to realize that.


Writing software is about turning machines into your private slaves - that's exciting, empowers you - but is only on-screen.

Much more fun is coding business, which is nothing more but using laws of physics and your coding skills - to make people hand you over their money, in a politically correct fashion.


This, in turn:
- buys you life (money=time).
- makes others respect you.
- buys you a big house.
- porsche.
- gets you hot girlfriend, for many it could have been life-goal (let's not brag about woman who didn't like money).
- or gives your children opportunity to choose the best education (those who experienced paternal instincts know what I'm talking about).


* welcome to ego heaven



Worth mentioning, there is much less competition in the field than in pure coding one. Businessmen have generally worse skills in synchronizing events, thinking out possibilities and noticing details. I think of developers who debug, master action/reaction, synchronize processes in milliseconds, have great sense what it means confronting the physics of the Nature ...and more...



What matters is reaction of the market and quick & flexible turns to take the best advantage of it

Nobody can for sure predict market reaction, but what is left are skills to notice details and up-create a big picture out of it. Generalize where possible. Fill out the missing numbers. Early notice trend to failure.

Guess who can do it better?


But yet most of the geeks never step into this zone.


(with exceptions of Commodore, Apple, Microsoft while uprising, Google, Digg - wherever coders were/have been truly in charge)

There is a mantra, created by businessmen which reads: building companies is hard, leave it to us.



Business people are important

Nothing if black and white. The laws of Nature will tell you this the next morning.

Layer of business people is important, very important. They are connectors. They can talk to people.

As an experienced coder, I know the feeling of "wasting my time" dealing with politicians, dishonest people and anything else that doesn't-react-as-instructed.

Coders know how nature feels. And The Market, as part of it. But not the micro-universe of human behavior.


Capital is unavoidable, as well. I heard people objecting the importance of it because now we have Amazon Web Services, Imageshack, cheap hosting, open source...

They're right, but there is more to it.



An example

Say you are a bare handed builder. Experienced. On a party you overhear an idea which could be hit. You should always steal good ideas. Tech parties are full of them.

As a coder who can build complete product - it's easy, give it few thousands lines, get yourself a server on Rackshack and start flying. Then you spend some more time to get first users, do A/B testing, see how market reacts by analyzing logs, using your debugging skills. Don't know how to get first users? Buy them, it's cheap.

Use this knowledge and your coding skills to figure out which micro actions should be taken to lead users into desired reaction.

Two possible outcomes:

- it simply doesn't work. You can try again, or kill it.

- market bit it: now it's time for rent-a-business people

They will unload the "boring" tasks off you by getting more people into the team, inject money for technical stuff (for example salaries, so you don't need to give up more shares). In other words, help thing expand in the fastest possible way and help you magnify your best: understanding why it worked.

Otherwise, you're subject to fast-following, burnouts, getting hell bored doing things you might not like, like dealing with support.

But if you call professional help in, you could also move along and build more companies.

Without money you can't reach those who need salary. This, alone, can lead you into making bad partnerships which can later destroy the company.


In other words, let business do what it does best: do the talking.



If you still think the Silicon Valley is famous because of coders - you are wrong.

It's because of its risk-tolerant capital holders and business culture.

Put these capital-adventurers in the middle of Atlantic Ocean, you'll get the Silicon Valley there.



Builders are everywhere, we just need access to the business layer and freedom to fail.

The God, revisited

I, for sure, don't believe in God and think that religion is often dangerous for teaching us that non-understanding is a plus, the Church works in a mafia-model by combusting our fears... - but

After reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I started revisiting the whole idea, from the standpoint of how-brains-interconnect: the God being an imaginary point where you instruct you brain to connect to and believe unconditionally everything the point propagates to you, that being actually a compiled opinion from the child nodes.

Voila.

That makes, or could make, our entire brain acting as one cell, allowing us to create super brain by connecting all child nodes (believers, in God's case) to super-hub, "the God" itself.

Q: Does the God exist?
A: Yes, as long as there are at least two people believing in it!

The Bible is written in a very clever way: If you understand it's a bullshit, you are ready to move onto next level. No need for anybody to evaluate your brain's readiness.

God is just one model suitable to be instructed to our brain. There are various other models: Sport teams, nationalities, labeled groups. Also Digg, Myspace. Basically, anything you can make yourself feeling "connected to".


my thinking process is still evolving but this CNN article may be of interest.

Learning from spammers

I just visited site from a spam email and... I think there is lots of things we can learn from spammers about design: clean, direct, colorful, pretty