AWSome Atlanta (Cloud Computing User's Group) March Meetup - AWSome Atlanta (Cloud Computing User's Group) (Atlanta, GA) - Meetup.com
Topic: Technology
10:39 am EST, Feb 21, 2009
Agenda:
7:00 Hadoop
Don Brown of TwitPay and Divvs will be giving a presentation on Hadoop and Map Reduce. For those of you who missed Don's presentation at Cloud Camp Atlanta, this is a great presentation. We are planning video taping the presentation this time so that we can show the world that not only does Atlanta have cloud, we also got "Hadoop".
Hadoop is interesting not only if you want a Java map/reduce system but... because most of the public domain discussion on map/reduce is about Hadoop, and it applies to other systems.
Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett on Insurance Economics and 2004 Results
Topic: Business
9:44 pm EST, Feb 19, 2009
The Power of Float The source of our insurance funds is "float," which is money that doesn't belong to us but that we temporarily hold. Most of our float arises because (1) premiums are paid upfront though the service we provide - insurance protection - is delivered over a period that usually covers a year and; (2) loss events that occur today do not always result in our immediately paying claims, because it sometimes takes many years for losses to be reported (asbestos losses would be an example), negotiated and settled. The $20 million of float that came with our 1967 purchase (National Indemnity- NICO) has now increased - both by way of internal growth and acquisitions - to $46.1 billion.
Float is wonderful - if it doesn't come at a high price. Its cost is determined by underwriting results, meaning how the expenses and losses we will ultimately pay compare with the premiums we have received. When an underwriting profit is achieved - as has been the case at Berkshire in about half of the 38 years we have been in the insurance business - float is better than free. In such years, we are actually paid for holding other people's money. For most insurers, however, life has been far more difficult: In aggregate, the property-casualty industry almost invariably operates at an underwriting loss. When that loss is large, float becomes expensive, sometimes devastatingly so.
Insurers have generally earned poor returns for a simple reason: They sell a commodity-like product. Policy forms are standard, and the product is available from many suppliers, some of whom are mutual companies ("owned" by policyholders rather than stockholders) with profit goals that are limited.
To identify and invest, both time and capital, in unique opportunities presented by young companies navigating the chasm between Early Stage and Institutional funding
Early stage investment group I'd never heard of, in Atlanta.
Anyway, the take away from all this for venture capital firms is that we’re not really complaining. I mean, technically that’s all I’ve been doing, but I also want you to know that we are definitely honored to be in a position to have VCs that want our attention. We know that’s a rare position to be in and we don’t take it lightly. Which is why we’re actually rooting for you. For that hero associate out there to get a hold of us and maybe knock our socks off with a little insight or even just some good ol’ fashioned genuine enthusiasm. For good reasons, we don’t want our time wasted. And we really do want you to accomplish your goals, which is to be remembered. You don’t have to be our biggest fan. We don’t expect that at this point, but we do think that if you’re asking us to consider handing over a percentage of our soul (a soul that we’ve cultivated with our own blood, sweat and tears) in the hopes of capitalizing on our now apparent successful trajectory, then we’d hope that you’ll at least do us the honor of reading our words and learning our craft.
Ubuntu EC2 - Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2 - Alestic.com
Topic: Technology
2:06 pm EST, Feb 19, 2009
Philosophy
The server AMIs are base installs built with the minimal Ubuntu or Debian system. No assumption is made about your intended purpose or desired software choices. Given that this is Ubuntu/Debian, it is generally trivial to turn a base install into a web, database, or email server, complete LAMP system, or just about any other application.
The desktop AMIs are provided as experimental systems. It takes over an hour to install the Ubuntu desktop on EC2, so I figured it would be nice to give folks a chance to try one out without this wait.
One of the most commonly discussed, requested, and suggested development projects that comes from the RipIt user-base is a program to manage the hundreds of thousands of movies you have ripped so far. We've actually been thinking about it since before RipIt was released!
Turns out, we needed a solution as much as you do. We purchase and test hundreds of DVDs from around the globe. After six months of selling RipIt, we have quite a collection of rips - so much so that we recently set up a 15 terabyte storage solution for them all!
About 5 months ago, we set about developing such a solution. After countless hours of sweating the details, we're happy to introduce Multiplex - the easiest and most beautiful way we could think of to manage our DVD collections.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
Topic: Current Events
8:11 pm EST, Feb 17, 2009
My father’s experiences were broadly shared throughout the country. Although times were perhaps worst in the declining rural areas of the Dust Bowl, every region suffered, and the residents of small towns and big cities alike breathed in the same uncertainty and distress. The Great Depression was a national crisis—and in many ways a nationalizing event. The entire country, it seemed, tuned in to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
The current economic crisis is unlikely to result in the same kind of shared experience. To be sure, the economic contraction is causing pain just about everywhere. In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Investor Services published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.
Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly - A hand picked TV channel
Topic: Current Events
5:34 pm EST, Feb 17, 2009
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
...
But if there is one problem with the shallow and the fickle, its that they are shallow and fickle, they won’t put down deep roots and they won’t remain loyal to Dubai. The people who appear in People magazine need to be told what is cool by Wallpaper magazine who in turn will discover something after the hipsters have moved on. The problem is that Dubai was never hipster-cool and is no longer Wallpaper-cool. This realization will have the same impact as suburbanite bachelorette party in a Wallpaper-cool nightclub. It will spread like the sighting of a floating turd in a public pool, flushing people to the exits with silent panic, unacknowledged for fear of embarrassment.
As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?
