Who the heck says someone's point is "shit, doubleshit, and bullshit" when sitting on a panel at a conference?

Thinking about it, this might explain their attitude towards users...

Unofficial Solution: Remove iTunes.

The affiliate industry is rife with this, too. Ringtones, etc are essentially financed by reverse billing fraud (the "sign up for our free trial and you'll be billed $9.99 a month without being able to cancel"), and with the way CPC advertising works this tends to crowd out all other advertisers because if you're a fraud you have staggeringly higher LTV than legitimate businesses, meaning you can afford to outbid them.

It isn't just affiliates, either: many shareware developers have inadvertently caused their customers damage when their payment processor tacks on high-margin low-value items as a rider to transactions. I covered this on my blog here:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/09/regsoft-scam/

In addition to the outright fraud discussed in that example, many payment processors will do things like offer customers $10 for "download recovery" service, where they promise to keep your download on file for a year so you can get it again. This obviously costs them essentially nothing. That isn't zero value (I suppose, theoretically, the shareware developer could go out of business and stop offering downloads), but it mostly takes advantage of unsophisticated customers who THINK they are buying "Get my software back if my computer melts" and are unaware that almost all shareware authors will do that for free.

(Wow, I'm finding myself agreeing with Arrington.)

Dynamo is still in use, but as with all technologies that have to operate at Amazon's scale, the systems evolve rapidly. The storage systems in use now no longer look like the ones from 5 years ago when Dynamo was developed.

The Dynamo SOSP paper had two goals: 1) show how systems are a composition of techniques and how all of these need to work together build a production system 2) given that it was based on a variety of research results it was intended to give feedback to the academic community about the difficulties of moving from research results to production, and what matters in real-life vs production.

The paper was never intended to be a complete blueprint for easy design of follow-up systems.There just isn't enough room in an academic paper to do justice to that. If it was going to have any role in that the best we could hope for was as a collection of points you would have to think hard about and make decisions about when you were going to design your own storage engine.

That doesn't means I agree with the conclusions of the analysis, on the contrary, I think they are seriously flawed as well (as with everything else that is not absolutely perfect :-)). But I can understand that when people look for the dynamo paper to be a blueprint that solves all their storage needs and provides a perfect available service under all failure scenarios (and solves world peace), that they may be left with a few questions afterwards.

I always thought that the real contribution of the paper was that it made you think hard about the trade-offs you are faced with when you have to design high-available, ultra-scalable systems that are cost-effective and provide guaranteed performance. 5 years later we know a lot more but this stuff is still hard, and we still need to balance rigorous principles with production magic to make it work. But you do need to fully understand the principles before you can make the production trade offs.

Caveat: some of these remarks were tongue-in-cheek fun; I leave it to the reader which ones :-)

especially if that someone is Arrington, who you know is going to make it a personal quest to destroy you.

In addition, Buffet likes consumer monopolies -- brands people recognize with a product or service. GEICO and Dairy Queen, Orange Julius, The Pampered Chef -- all recognizable brands and ones people don't associate with BH. This is a good thing. To make Berkshire Hathaway the center of attention dilutes a consumer monopoly.

When holding companies take it on as a strategy, it's a flash in the pan. Yum! Brands' (KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver's) Kentucky Derby sponsorship is a great example.

I'm not going to Pizza Hut to be Yum!'s patron. I'm going there for pizza and I don't like Domino's.

Likewise, I'm not going to Dairy Queen because I like Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire Hathaway has no business building a consumer brand. And yet Berkshire's consumer brand is Warren Buffet.

Totally with Arrington on this one. OfferPal CEO came across as a complete jerk. Arrington's response was surprisingly chill and levelheaded.

I have a pet peeve, it's people thinking that my situation is the same as theirs, and giving me advice that is wrong for me.

I get around 2400 spam a day. I've tried three different spam filters recommended to me by people I trust and who generally know about these things, and they get about 97% to 98% accuracy. Worse, they produce false positives. With 50 spam per day, plus having to trawl through the spam bin to look for the false positives, I decided to write my own.

My spam filter is highly tuned to my traffic and I get about 10 spam through per day. More, there are about 2 false positives per month, although that's very hard to quantify.

The problem with putting up a form is that people want a reply, and yet they can't type their own email address properly. About half the emails I get through my various forms have subtle and not-so-subtle misspellings of the return address, and it can cost me hours to track them down.

No, obfuscated email addresses is still my best tool in this situation.

I love how Arrington refers to Slide as the "good guys." You know an ecosystem is unbearably slimy when you have the spammers fighting the scammers for the title of "good guy."

Facebook Platform is such a joke. Sad, too, when you know what the original vision looked like.