langreiter.com plain, simple: 2008-12-20

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2008-12-20

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 5800 days AGO

Ted Dunning: Students learn what they need, not what is assigned

"On the first day, I turned the structure of the class upside-down and assigned the entire final exam. This consisted of a single question in the form of a task (to build a robot that would drive around as fast as possible following a line on the floor). I then passed out soldering irons, computer components and kits of lego parts and told them to get to work. For the record, I had never tried to build such a 'bot myself.

"This tactic resulted, as you would expect, in panic."

Wonderful story.

2008-12-20-botPanic

Olivier Travers: "Google Apps + App Engine + Gears + Chrome + network investments, they're not toying around. There's a deliberate web application strategy at work here with more chances to succeed than Netscape ever had in the 90's."

Prompted by the recent releases of status dashboard, quota monitor, a sneak peek at the upcoming billing system and similarly serious stuff ("[those features] make me think Google must have hired someone who used to work in the mainframe business at IBM").

Speaking of Google App Engine, Ryan Barrett does a great job of competitive monitoring: His Windows Azure write-up (technical details) is certainly one of the most informative per bytes used.

For what it's worth, however, I still like my cloud(y) services as plain vanilla^* as possible. Amazon (especially with EC2, EBS and S3) standardizes at exactly the right (as in: most universally useful) levels of abstraction, whereas both App Engine and (many parts of) Azure seem more akin to (scalability-enforcing, but still) straightjackets.

^* Who'd have thought?

2008-12-20-ns2.0