msiebuhr

$WORK anecdote:

We had a quartet of legacy-ish databases with sharded customer data (had some interconnection, but we sharded in the application-layer, so the database didn't have to move any data internally). It was a bitch to maintain, but it performed OK, by throwing fairly beefy machines at it.

We began a quest to replace the database with MongoDB/HDFS/Riak/CouchBase/Cassandra/whatever. We wrote a script that converted our data to JSON for easier ingestion and began hammering away. Until we discovered that by converting it to JSON (and simplifying some parts of the data-model), our dataset had actually become small enough to fit on a single server in memory (still ~100GB).

So we ditched the cluster-thingie and moved everything to CouchDB. Pricy hardware, but the saved man-hours recouped that within a month or two.

(And in half a year's time, the database will have outgrown whatever hardware we can reasonably throw at it, so then we'll have to start over for real...)

>> "Chinese now consume more Guccis and Bulgaris and Louis Vuittons than the rest of the world combined."

> He wants you to think Chinese consumers have a lot of buying power. They don't. They just happen to like those specific brands. Even Japan spends more than the U.S. on those specific brands, with half the population.

I read somewhere (now forgotten where) that the U.S. is notoriously disinterested in premium/luxury brands.

That is why Apple charges ~170 USD more for the base iPad Air in Denmark than it does in the US (3699 DKR ~= 671 USD; 499 USD in US); some places, people are simply willing to pay more for a premium/luxury product. Same goes for the debate over Adobe product pricing in Australia (it was cheaper to fly to the US, buy Photoshop and fly back, than it was buying it locally).

While I have no idea about how China works in this regard, the US is clearly the outsider when it comes to comparing luxury goods consumption.

Wikipedia has the details + references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Three-point

After re-reading it a few days later, I realize it reads a lot like advertisement.

Some technical stuff wrt. SNI:

We waited a long time for the SNI-support to be widespread enough for us to provide to the customers. Despite we have a lot of users in the 'mom-and-pops' demographic, which typically tend to have older equipment, I'm not aware of widespread complaints about it.

It also turned out that most webservers can't handle being loaded with a few thousand SSL-certificates...

Finally, we were somewhat nervous about the rumored 'SSL/TLS has lots of CPU usage', but it didn't turn out to be an issue AFAIK.

I believe it is possible, if you beg the support enough.

I do know we strongly discourage it though, as it makes some parts of shared hosting hard for us; ex. quickly move your website to another IP in case of a DDoS attack.

One.com uses SNI in order to sell SSL-enabled websites for somewhere around $2.5/month.

Edit: We have around 1.-something million websites, though I don't know how many of those have SSL enabled.

(Disclosure: I happen to work there.)

Both Xbox360 and PS3 use modified POWER-designs.

Edit: Also, it's notable that both Xbox One and PS4 switched to use x64.