Sunday, September 12, 2004

Popularity doesn't scale I could have quoted from any of a numbers of posters about the RSS non-scaling non-controversy, but Dare offers a round-up of the bleating masses The RSS Sky is Falling...Again.This is becoming a broken record. Every couple of months some web site that hasn't properly prepared for the amount of bandwidth consumed by having a popular RSS feed loudly complains and the usual suspects complain that RSS is broken. [Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life] Sure, RSS doesn't scale. It doesn't not scale either. All of the problems with scaling have thus far been shown to depend on nothing particular to RSS. Scoble attemps to show RSS not scaling a) generating a gedankenexperiment where hits on the RSS are a fixed factor greater than HTML hits, and b) by quoting figures that the bandwidth consumed by RSS requests (for what site I'm not sure) per month is growing at a much faster rate that bandwidth for HTML. The former shows exact parity in scaling between RSS and HTML, while the latter fails to factor in the relative popularity of RSS versus HTML readers. If new traffic for RSS is N times new traffic for HTML, but new requestors of RSS are 10 times new requestors for HTML , this is also parity in scaling between RSS and HTML. There are attempts to blame the automated nature of  RSS requests, but HTML can be and is requested by machine as well. Either way, requests at regular intervals may affect the absolute value of the traffic but bear no relation to the scaling of the traffic growth. Certainly Amdahl's law would tell you that if RSS is a significatly larger portion of  your traffic that it may be worth while applying some RSS specific fixes. However, the discussion is not really about a scaling problem in the sense that the proposed solutions do not affect scaling. If requests are still growing exponentially, reducing response size may delay the point at which you hit any particular traffic level but it cannot prevent it. This is independant of  what the response is, and also independant of the absolute size of the response. 10:42:15 AM     Categories: Pushing rectangles... Radio

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radaR's LiveJournal   8/30/2004 Geek gamers rejoice. Finally, a hot chick they can score with. Video game vampire to go topless in October Playboy Ernest Miller sez, "Videogame character BloodRayne (a red-headed 'Dhampir' who hunts supernatural baddies for the 'Brimstone Society') will be topless in October's Playboy. According to her creators, 'This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint.'" Link (Thanks, Ernest!) [Boing Boing] By radar@poboxes.com. Keeping America Safe from wireless internet. AKMA gets hassled by the man: So Weirdly Wrong: And I walked back to the studio, dumbfounded that someone just rousted me for picking an open wireless signal in public — indeed (as it turns out) for using a laptop within a wireless signal’s range of the library. Weird. We should all be glad that the local contstabulary are able to invent federal laws at a moments notice to save us from the scourge of freely available internet access. However, those godless commie librarians seem to have gotten off scott free. By radar@poboxes.com. Keeping America Safe from Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy's name is similar to an alias of some "evil doer". Proof that this list only catches the innocent is left as an exercise for the reader. If Senators are allowed to roam freely about the country, then the terrorists have already won! Reuters. Kennedy -- one of the most recognizable figures in American politics -- told a Senate committee hearing on Thursday he had been blocked several times from boarding commercial airline flights because his name was on a "no-fly" list intended to exclude potential terrorists. [John Robb's Weblog] By radar@poboxes.com. Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you. Yet again, I find I have underestimated just how deep into pathetic geekdom I am when confronted by others of the species. We're pointed that this damning refelction by Joey de Villa, an actual example of the cool geek that the rest of us pretend that we could possibly be but really can't. I don't know how I ended up looking at a page in Everything2 (imagine a less academic Wikipedia written by LiveJournalers), but someone has come up with a geek lament treatment of the Clarke Axiom: Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you. [The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog] By radar@poboxes.com. fun Fun FUN. Whee... isn't working late fun? Someone bring be some dinner, okay? By radar@poboxes.com.