Google is killing Google Reader. Announced it Wednesday, buried in a blog post. Hacker News has been on fire for three days. I use Reader every morning; it’s how I read every one of the blogs that taught me to code. The lesson everyone keeps repeating: if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer. I’m signing up for Feedly like everyone else and feeling weird about depending on free things.
Meanwhile, SimCity launched with always-online DRM and the servers immediately melted. People paid $60 for a loading screen. EA’s response was to disable game features to reduce server load. As a person who now gets paged when servers melt, I have complicated sympathy.
Champions League knockout rounds are in full swing this week. Our office sweepstakes has a ₹100 buy-in and I picked my winner based on which club has the best data analytics team. This is a terrible strategy and I will defend it.
TIL: capacity planning is a job. Like, an actual discipline. SimCity didn’t fail because of bad code, it failed because nobody planned for launch day. Noted.