There’s a very good reason for this. Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honour. Knowing how to play chess will get your head kicked off. Reading a book with no pictures in it will cause there to be no friend requests on your Facebook page. Little Britain is funny because people vomit a lot. Monty Python is not because they delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean muse.

Last week I wrote about observations of "Big blind spots" I've noticed that IT Operations — and vendors — suffer from. My opinion is that these blind spots are largely due to marketing hype around the more glitzier products and technologies – to the demise of data center operations. They still may not recognize where the biggest unsolved problems still lie.

I’ve always wanted a concise and beautiful schema language for JSON. This desire stems from a real world need that I’ve hit repeatedly. Given in-memory data that has been hydrated from a stream of JSON, of questionable quality, validation is required. Currently I’m constantly performing JSON validation in an ad-hoc manner, that is laboriously writing boiler plate code validating that an input JSON document is of the form that I expect.

An excellent paper was just released that puts hard data behind this point and shows conclusively that ECC is absolutely needed. In DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large Scale Field Study, Bianca Schroeder, Eduardo Pinheiro, and Wolf-Dietrich Weber show conclusively that you really do need ECC memory in server applications. Wolf was also an author of the excellent Power Provisioning in a Warehouse-Sized Computer that I mentioned in my blog post Slides From Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research where the authors described a technique to over-sub subscribe data center power.

It is a library that allows the parameter names of non-private methods and constructors to be accessed at runtime. Normally this information is dropped by the compiler. In effect, methods like 'doSometing(mypkg.Person toMe)' currently look like 'doSomething(mypkg.Person ???)' to people using Java's reflection to inspect methods.

To date parameter name access has not been very useful to Java application developers, but with the advent of advanced scripting languages and web action frameworks for the JVM it is of increasing importance to be able to leverage a method's parameter names. Scripting languages like Groovy & JRuby, web action frameworks like Waffle and VRaptor (that verge on the tranparent) and the compelling Grails. SOAP and REST designs could also benefit.

Standards already? Not sure that's a good thing.

Alas the cargo cults will continue in their failure to understand the points Jeff makes…

Bandwidth-conscious broadcasters have a new way to distribute their live video streams. A group of Uruguay-based P2P researchers recently released the first English-language version of their open-source P2P streaming application, GoalBit. The application, which is based on a BitTorrent-like architecture, aims to compete with P2P streaming services like PPLive and PPStream by giving anyone looking to distribute their own live video programming a way to do so.

Tax, tax and tax is the reason. Government's must become better at managing existing funds and using them effectively rather than rely on increasing taxes.

As I review performance trends, I am struck by a consistent theme across many technologies: bandwidth improves much more quickly than latency. Here, I list a half-dozen performance milestones to document this observation, many reasons why it happens, a few ways to cope with it, a rule of thumb to quantify it, plus an example of how to design systems differently based on this observation.

- Maybe someday the computing industry will actually pay some attention and make genuine progress on this instead of obsessing over bandwidth.