Disqus - Latest Comments for baint

Re: Apple might switch focus back to LCD due to soft iPhone X sales

Tony Bain — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 18:35:57 -0000

I think the issue is more that the iPhone X has a smaller screen than the 8 plus. Have missed the bigger screen since moving to the X, think when the new one with the bigger screen hits it will dominate the sales.

Re: Telstra and Netgear launch first gigabit 4G LTE mobile router

Tony Bain — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 22:43:20 -0000

Agree except transfer is in Gbps not GBs, so max transfer would be 125MBs so you would get 4 minutes of usage on the larger plans! :) Assume new plans must be coming?

Re: SQL Server Version Usage - Real World Data

Tony Bain — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:33:15 -0000

SQL Server 6.5 was pretty good too ;)

Re: SQL Server to discontinue support for OLE-DB

Tony Bain — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:38:58 -0000

Thanks Hal, a good explanation - I have highlighted this in our twitter feed also.

Re: What Scales Best?

Tony Bain — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:41:14 -0000

In theory yes. But commonly the way it turns out, people tend to favor one tool which can do most jobs pretty well rather than a large selection of tools which do individual jobs well.

It is hard to be an expert in everything and often an expert in an adequate tool will produce a better and quicker result than a novice in a specialist tool.

Re: Realtime Data Pipelines

Tony Bain — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:41:45 -0000

Thanks Victoria. Yes this area of interest is building and I have heard of several initiatives around Hadoop. HStreaming is one that comes to mind.

Re: Realtime Data Pipelines

Tony Bain — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:39:41 -0000

Hi Ken, Stream and Time Series analysis is obvious for tick and sensor data, But what is becoming clear is almost all applications and almost all data analysis can be engineered around the concept of data use being a constant flow rather than a series of push and pulls from a persisted store.

Persistence is useful for recovery, but otherwise data is originating from somewhere and is heading for consumption somewhere else - either raw or part of newly derived data.

Re: Data ownership, social science, and Twitter’s folly

Tony Bain — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 01:16:24 -0000

Drew, please update when you learn more from Twitter. This was surprising and it will be interesting to see what was in violation of what. Finding the right balance between sharing data freely and protecting information assets is always tricky, it will be interesting seeing how this is resolved.

Re: The real-time web, a/k/a Wall Street 2.0

Tony Bain — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:43:04 -0000

Thanks Roger for this post. And I agree that Wall Street has certainly paved the way, I think this is changing and I am not sure if this will be to the same extent in the future though. In fact I think we are starting a period of payback, where Wall Street will benefit from the industry wide advancements being made across the board in big data.

The volume of data on Wall Street used to make my mind boggle, now not so much. The scale of data can sometimes appear somewhat minor compared with big data challenges that exist within some Web properties. Different universes I agree, but purely looking at the world from a data perspective high levels of commonality exists.

Hopefully the flow back of these more general innovations into Wall Street leads to an era when all data and associated analysis is available without effort in real time. And I think Wall Street will enjoy the break from pushing the technical envelope to achieve it.

Re: Experience

Tony Bain — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 12:58:50 -0000

Lol

Re: Domain focus in venture investing

Tony Bain — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:09:34 -0000

I have spent lots of time helping entrepreneurs boil down their ideas in clear and effective terms that can be described to a wide audience. I think this is very important. If you can’t clearly define what you do and how you do it, at a high level, without resorting to in-depth technical discussion I believe this shows that you are possibly pitching too early. In my experience the most well thought out ideas can be explained very simply, even if the underlying technology is very complex. Those who resort to explaining the complexity of their technology laced with domain specific jargon up front tend to be less mature in their own understanding of their ideas.

I don’t think an audience having domain expertise should let you off from this. The detailed discussions can follow later, but when pitching you should always aim to capture the interest of as many people as possible with a simple, clear and compelling discussion of the problems you are addressing and how you uniquely solving it. Even those with domain knowledge will engage more if you give them a simple “ah-ha” hook up front.

This of course varies by what stage you're at. I think this is less important for an angel round when you may quite openly be at the point of trying to understand a cool new technology.

Re: When Portfolio Companies Work Together

Tony Bain — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:22:39 -0000

I think this is the link (there may be another, sorry if it is not the one being discussed) http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/528a94f287e9d77e?pli=1

From my interpretation after reading the posts from both sides it sounds whoever managed Foursquare’s implementation didn’t proactively manage and prevent a shard outgrowing RAM. Neither side seems to be debating this, or that once this happened the shard underperformed and took forever to sort the problem out. For this type of issue I am sure who was at “fault” could continue to be debated all day. Publically at least they have kept things pretty amicable.

Foursquare did fingerpoint MongoDB a little by naming them in their post mortem which wasn’t great for MongoDB at the time (I saw scoffs from RDBMS vendor staff and others on NoSQL’s reliability in response to this). Especially occurring a few weeks after some media publications attributing Diggs issues partly to their use of Cassandra. So I am glad 10gen had the right of reply.

More broadly speaking I think your approach is right, but I also think that any form of common collective (no matter how loose) creates a bit of a family mentality. My experience, meetings with your “sister” companies tend to be more frank, open and less formal. But it hurts you more when your family chooses your biggest competitor over you.

Re: MongoDB 30,000 downloads a month?

Tony Bain — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:56:06 -0000

Thanks I did see this come out after I wrote this post. Good to see clarification.
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Re: Pure readies launch of portable Internet radios in US

Tony Bain — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:22:49 -0000

I have the Pure Evoke Flow and it is great. I just plugged it it and it worked without issue over wireless LAN. 15,000 stations, all the ones I was hoping to find were listed. For something which could have very easily been limited as a technies toy they have done a great job of making it a "consumer ready" device.

Re: Ingres Vectorwise smokes it!

Tony Bain — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:37:32 -0000

Not as far as I am aware.
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Re: Should MongoDB Use SQL as a Query Language?

Tony Bain — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:59:28 -0000

(do I have to write LOL above for people to know I am speaking tongue-in-cheek?)

Re: Should MongoDB Use SQL as a Query Language?

Tony Bain — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:57:21 -0000

Well you could support SQL.... then joins and while you are at it ACID.... ;)

Re: Some Initial Thoughts on Oracle Exadata V2

Tony Bain — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:10:33 -0000

Hey I don't mind posting! Happy for you to post some detail about why you feel XtremeData is doing better than Exadata (but slogans with links won't impress the audience here I think).

Re: Some Initial Thoughts on Oracle Exadata V2

Tony Bain — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:49:36 -0000

Hi John, I appreciate you're proud of your product but your comments are bordering on spam. I have deleted the other one, you might want to rethink this marketing strategy.

Re: http://www.bainnotes.com/post/370269845

Tony Bain — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:21:46 -0000

I can't think of many running NEC in the data center, so not sure how well this will work out for them.

Re: Why We Need An Independent Invention Defense

Tony Bain — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:24:43 -0000

LOL, I'll keep that in mind.

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Re: Why We Need An Independent Invention Defense

Tony Bain — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:12:32 -0000

I tend to agree. But holding a patent, or at least filing for a patent, is commonly used in our industry to help determine if something is really innovative or not. I don’t recall when I have spoken to a VC about any technology without the patent question coming up at some point. Having a software patent is valuable or perhaps not having one can be costly. Maybe this is starting to change.

Re: Is Cassandra winning the NoSQL race?

Tony Bain — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:04:25 -0000

I am being told that there isn’t a race and that many of the NoSQL solutions are suited for different requirements. I agree and perhaps I didn’t mean to be as contentious as the title indicated. However, I have been involved with software development for over 20 years and I know that people also select tools based on what they familiar with, and what others (often the companies they aspire to be) are using. So in that context that I was referring to the "race" - the shakedown period while a few good technologies become defacto standards.

Re: Analytics at Twitter

Tony Bain — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:18:15 -0000

Hi mate. This is talking about the amount of code required to write the query in PIG compared with the amount of code required if you wrote the map reduce routines directly yourself. They have found in PIG it is about 5% of the volume of code compared with the native map reduce code.

Underneath PIG is of course generating all this map reduce code for you but as a developer working in the higher level language you are working with a much smaller and much simpler code base.

Re: Imagine a 3500 Page Book…

Tony Bain — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:24:14 -0000

Hey I have been logging GUID’s into a table 24x7 for the last 3 years. Laugh you might, but you’ll come with your check book open like all the rest when the world runs out.