So far of the building blocks for computer systems we have covered processors and memory. We have seen that processors have become massively faster and that memory has become massively cheaper. Today we will learn about storage and find that it has become massively bigger. Throughout this discussion we will use a somewhat eclectic reference point: the length of that great American novel “Moby Dick” which clocks in at 1,203,686 bytes (counted off the text version on DailyLit where you can read...

Last night I managed to fix my ReadyNAS NV+ with a replacement PSU purchased from PC Warehouse (bypassing customer support but shelling out a bit over $100). I updated the forums with the relevant links and am happy to once again have a running RAID array for backup at home. More importantly though, this incident made it amply clear that in addition to my local backup I absolutely need a cloud backup as well. Would love to get recommendations on what to use. Ideally, I would like a single pro...

Just as I was bout to start this post, I saw Marco’s Entry “On Database Joins” where he quotes a tweet by @codinghorror on joins being super expensive and explains how Tumblr avoids them. Tech folks at our portfolio companies have probably all heard me say that “joins are evil” because they will make it really difficult for your service or site to scale past a certain level. Of course, once you start to program without joins, you pretty quickly demote your database engine to perform object (o...

So far of the building blocks for computer systems we have covered processors and memory. We have seen that processors have become massively faster and that memory has become massively cheaper. Today we will learn about storage and find that it has become massively bigger. Throughout this discussion we will use a somewhat eclectic reference point: the length of that great American novel “Moby Dick” which clocks in at 1,203,686 bytes (counted off the text version on DailyLit where you can read...

Last night I managed to fix my ReadyNAS NV+ with a replacement PSU purchased from PC Warehouse (bypassing customer support but shelling out a bit over $100). I updated the forums with the relevant links and am happy to once again have a running RAID array for backup at home. More importantly though, this incident made it amply clear that in addition to my local backup I absolutely need a cloud backup as well. Would love to get recommendations on what to use. Ideally, I would like a single pro...

Just as I was bout to start this post, I saw Marco’s Entry “On Database Joins” where he quotes a tweet by @codinghorror on joins being super expensive and explains how Tumblr avoids them. Tech folks at our portfolio companies have probably all heard me say that “joins are evil” because they will make it really difficult for your service or site to scale past a certain level. Of course, once you start to program without joins, you pretty quickly demote your database engine to perform object (o...