You're free to view the older revisions of this gist, but much of this content has been rewritten and will appear on the [Basho blog] (http://basho.com/blog) in the very near future.
Update: First part of the series is now at http://basho.com/understanding-riaks-configurable-behaviors-part-1/
Extended it a bit to talk about why
R=1
is interesting forbasic_quorum
as an illustration for the performance rationale.