consistency nosql March 23, 2013 at 03:10 PM ← Older Newer → There are many letters in distributed systems, and they're not fungible. It seems that newcomers to distributed systems are often confused by the various definitions of the C-word. I want to go over them to draw a distinction that is often…

Bill Curtsinger/National Geographic Stock A diver exploring a gap in the ice of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica The first dive to a depth of a thousand feet was made in 1962 by Hannes Keller, an ebullient twenty-eight-year-old Swiss mathematician who wore half-rimmed glasses and drank a bottle of…

Clues to the UK’s woes lurk in its own backyard, writes Tim Harford ‘Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary . . . said the number of EU migrants claiming benefits in Britain had reached a “crisis” and confirmed the government was “looking at what we can do” to limit new arrivals’ access…

bitly’s stack isn’t fancy. We use a combination of languages and tools that interact well with eachother and promote philosophies such as explicitness, simplicity, and robustness. Most of ourservices are Python with many core components in C (of which some are open sourced under simplehttp ). We…

3D Thursday is a feature about CNC Machining, 3D Printing, 3D Scanning, and 3D design that appears in MAKE every Thursday. This miniature, high-precision assembly started with a CAD model and not much more. It cost about $10 to make it at home – with no 3D printer required. In the past couple of…

Technological change has swept through broadcasting as surely as it has through music and newspapers What does Strictly Come Dancing have in common with Mad Men? Not a lot, you might think – and before hearing Joshua Gans speak recently at a seminar on broadcasting, I would have agreed with you. I…

Des Traynor did a great interview with Ryan Singer , Product Manager at 37signals . I’m a huge fan of Ryan’s, and I agree with most of what he says in the interview. But there’s one part I’d like to challenge a bit. Answering the question “Did you ever consider techniques like personas or user…

Sumant Kumar photographed in Darveshpura, Bihar, India. Photograph: Chiara Goia for Observer Food Monthly S umant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five…

These ‘men without bowels’ are more likely to be the prompt discoverers of bad news than the inventors of it No economist could remain unmoved by the brouhaha that has engulfed Herbalife, the nutritional supplements company. The sponsors of football teams such as Barcelona and LA Galaxy, it sells…

As I write these words, I am already contemplating my New Year’s resolutions, and my attempts to use the toolkit of behavioural economics grow ever more intricate. This year the enemy is “loss aversion”, a phenomenon identified by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel laureate) and the late…

Sam Calagione at Dogfish breweries. “I’m frustrated that one beer has been hammered down people’s throats,” he says. Credit Photographs By Martin Schoeller Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have…

Nicole Cooke during a training session near Box Hill in Surrey for the women's Olympic road race last year. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images Introduction Thank you all for coming here today to be with me and hear what I am going to say. I am here to announce my retirement and in one sense that…

Teacher Chloe Combi joins a group of young people whose only refuge at night is a London bus A forlorn group of teenagers huddle under the grey October sky. It is 4pm in London and the light is just beginning to fade. The group are well dressed - Nike, Adidas, Sean Paul - and they mutter to each…

Buy Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 by Jeffrey Jackson Palgrave, 262 pp, £20.00, January 2010, ISBN 978 0 230 61706 3 Paris Inondé 1910 Galerie des Bibliothèques, Paris, until 28 March 2010 On 21 January 1910 in the coal-mining community of Lorroy, 80 km…

A decade ago I read an article about two men setting out to break the outright world speed sailing record – then just over 45 knots. They were proposing to build a radical new kind of sailing boat. There were pictures; a remote controlled scale model, clearly sailing at high speed. Wow. My inner…

Emeril Lagasse made an appearance on Treme on Sunday. I watched a clip of his scene a few days ago and have been thinking about it on and off ever since. In the scene written by Anthony Bourdain , Emeril takes a fellow chef to the building that used to house Uglesich’s, a small-but-beloved New…

KHARGAH, Afghanistan— Long before the Government called on the rebels recently to join in a cease-fire, the war in Afghanistan always paused on Friday mornings in the hills outside this village just beyond the Kabul city limits. The weekly truce was arranged informally by the Government and the…

A chief executive had a dilemma. After working in a fast-growing company as COO, he accepted an offer from venture capitalists to start his own company. Within five years he had built a new enterprise generating revenues over $300 million and profit margins so high that his company had compiled a…

A decade ago, I embarked on a new hobby — one that many more people have taken up in the meantime . I became a beekeeper. At the same time, I became a bee observer. Like Sherlock Holmes (in His Last Bow ), I spent many pensive nights and laborious days watching the little working gangs. What I…