Interesting Snippets from 2012-10-31

• Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually | Wired Design | Wired.com

  Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.

• Fastly.com - Amazon S3 Traffic Overview

  The graph below represents real-time response latency for Amazon S3 as seen by Fastly's Ashburn, VA edge server. Each column represents a histogram ranging from 0 to 4 seconds. Darker colors represent more traffic in a particular latency range and lighter colors represent less traffic.

[/snippets] permanent link