Cloud Computing, Wine Walk, Pride Parade and Micro Macro Economics

• Here are some really unrelated insights from my two weeks business travel in the states.
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• 1. The dollar is so weak that a haircut in New York, 45^th street, 5^th Avenue Is just $11. In Tel Aviv’s old north it is $18. In Nes Ziona it is $12.
• 2. The real cost of hair cut in New York is $13. One dollar extra because the Israeli barber assumed I was a stupid German tourist .He said to his friend, in Hebrew – “You can take $12 from this guy”. Another dollar was for a tip strongly demanded, although the whole thing tookless than five minutes…
• 3. For $15 you can eat the best ceviche in the world in Fresca, new Peruvian restaurant in the trendy Fillmore street , San Francisco. That does not even buy one a breakfast at Nir Zuk’s Noa bistro in Jaffa.
• 4. Cloud computing is the new buzz. A year and half ago it was an early rumor. Now I was in three separate conferences in one week and all tried to focus around it – Structures08, velocity08, Gartner Israel.
• 5. Internet Explorer 8 is going to have 6 concurrent HTTP requests for each host. Hurray. This simple change can speed up the entire Internet by 20%. In 2010 they might even support HTTP pipelining. And we thought computes would have Artificial intelligence by 2010.
• 6. Everyone knows TCP is broken for the modern web, everyone knows how to fix it. No one is working on HTTP over UDP and CDN’s are still making a fortune.
• 7. The San Mateo Wine Walk is a really nice event. Where else would you get 10 glasses of wine for $30 ? and where else can you see college kids performing “Born to Be Wild” and 60 year old White, Mexican and Afro American ladies in shorts shouting at them and dancing ?
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• 8. Steve Souders, Yahoo’s former chief Performance Officer now works for Google. Quite Symbolic. And he is a very nice person as well.
• 9. 50% of the overall cost of running a data center is actually the cost of building it. Turns out that the physical and power infrastructure is very expensive.
• 10. There were 10 firemen marching in San Francisco 2008 pride parade. There were about 40 chefs. 70% of Linux kernel contributors are working for commercial firms.
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Tags: Cloud Computing, elastic computing, HTTP, Micro, Web Performance