Eucalyptus Systems raises $5.5M for a hybrid approach to cloud computing » VentureBeat

Eucalyptus Systems raises $5.5M for a hybrid approach to cloud computing » VentureBeat: "Since launching the Eucalyptus platform last year, it has already been downloaded 14,000 times. It’s used by other cloud infrastructure companies such as Benchmark-backed RightScale. And it also provides the underlying technology for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an offering that’s now shipping with every version of the popular Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system.
With the funding from Benchmark (one of the leading cloud computing venture investors), Eucalyptus is now spinning off from an academic, open source project into a commercial business. Competitors include 3tera and Globus Nimbus."

Google plugs PC power into cloud computing | Webware - CNET

Google plugs PC power into cloud computing Webware - CNET: "The company has released experimental but still very much real software that brings in some of the power of the PC, where people often use Web applications. Google Native Client--first released in 2008 but updated with a new version Thursday--is a browser plug-in for securely running computationally intense software downloaded from a Web site. And on Tuesday, Google released O3D, a plug-in that lets Web-based applications tap into a computer's graphics chip, too."

Cassatt Near The End - Forbes.com

Cassatt Near The End - Forbes.com: "For many years, Coleman acted as something of a prophet for cheap computing via the cloud, but he also thought it would mean a sharp drop in pricing with which the big companies would not be able to compete.

'The big guys copied my story,' says Coleman. Cassatt, he adds, was upended by a slowing economy and by customers skittish about closing big orders or changing existing ways.

'What frustrates me is my own naivete,' he says. 'I thought I could give companies something radical that had a proven return on investment, and they would be willing to change all their companies' computer policies and procedures to get that. Right now it's hard to get people to get beyond proof of concept tests or a data center energy analysis.'"

Leonard Cohen | Closing Time lyrics

Leonard Cohen | Closing Time lyrics: "johnny walker wisdom running high"

Words In A Certain Appropriate Mode by Hayden Carruth

Words In A Certain Appropriate Mode by Hayden Carruth: "In the evanescence from a coffee cup
Where the song crumbles in monotone
Neither harmonious nor inharmonious
Where one is neither alone
Nor not alone, where cognition seeps"

The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot: "Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow"

Parallel Lines and Power Chords: A Meditative ABC on Rock & Roll and Poetic Composition - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Parallel Lines and Power Chords: A Meditative ABC on Rock & Roll and Poetic Composition - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More: "'The power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument.' —William Matthews"

InfoQ: VMware Has Launched vSphere, the OS of the Cloud

InfoQ: VMware Has Launched vSphere, the OS of the Cloud: "Sphere can manage the following configuration as one pooled resource:

* 32 physical servers with up to 2048 processor cores
* 1,280 virtual machines
* 32 TB of RAM
* 16 petabytes of storage
* 8,000 network ports"

AMD announces 16-core chips | AMD Message Board Posts

AMD announces 16-core chips | AMD Message Board Posts: "AMD announces 16-core chips"

The Mad Dash to Digitize Medical Records - BusinessWeek

The Mad Dash to Digitize Medical Records - BusinessWeek: "The billions in taxpayer funds—part of the $787 billion economic stimulus—also have energized tech titans General Electric (GE), Intel (INTC), and IBM (IBM), all of which are challenging Cerner and other traditional medical suppliers. Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) aim to put medical records in the hands of patients via the Web. Wal-Mart (WMT) is teaming with computer maker Dell (DELL) and digital vendor eClinicalWorks to sell information technology to doctors through Sam's Club stores"

Whatever Happened to the Top 15 Web Properties of April, 1999? | Technologizer

Whatever Happened to the Top 15 Web Properties of April, 1999? | Technologizer: "So to summarize, four of April 1999’s top Web properties remain in the top fifteen (plus AltaVista, Excite, and GeoCities, which are extant and part of top-10 properties). Four more are in the top 50, or are part of properties that are. Two exist but have fallen out of the top 50. And two (Xoom and Snap) no longer exist. Bottom line: If you were one of the Web’s biggest properties a decade ago, chances are high that you remain in business in some form in 2009…but you probably aren’t still a giant."

InfoQ: Axum, Microsoft’s Approach to Parallelism

InfoQ: Axum, Microsoft’s Approach to Parallelism: "Axum, previously known as Maestro, is a Microsoft incubation language project meant to provide a parallel programming model for .NET through isolation, actors and message passing. The language borrows many concepts from Erlang but with a C#-like syntax"

Shambhala Sun - Leonard Cohen: "The Other Side of Waiting"

Shambhala Sun - Leonard Cohen: "The Other Side of Waiting": "Well, my feeling is that democracy is the religion of the West, perhaps the greatest religion the West has produced, because it affirms other religions. Most religions have a lot of trouble affirming other religions. A great religion affirms other religions, and a great culture affirms other cultures.
Democracy is a faith and an ideal, and I think it is the greatest expression of our western experience. It can be set against anything that any other area of the world has presented, either religion or mysticism or anything else. This notion that there is this fraternity of men and women is a very, very high idea."

Emerald: Article Request - Weight discrimination and the glass ceiling effect among top US CEOs

Emerald: Article Request - Weight discrimination and the glass ceiling effect among top US CEOs

Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether overweight and obese individuals are underrepresented among top female and male US executives and whether there is evidence of greater discrimination against overweight and obese female executives than male executives. Design/methodology/approach – Estimates of the frequencies of overweight and obese male Fortune 100 CEOs and female Fortune 1000 CEOs were obtained using publicly available photographs and raters with demonstrated expertise in evaluating body weight. These “experts” then estimated whether the pictured CEOs were normal weight, overweight or obese. Findings – Based upon our expert raters’ judgments, it is estimated that between 5 and 22 per cent of US top female CEOs are overweight and approximately 5 per cent are obese. Compared to the general US population, overweight and obese women are significantly underrepresented in among top female CEOs. Among top male CEOs, it is estimated that between 45 and 61 per cent are overweight and approximately 5 per cent are obese. Compared to the general population overweight men are overrepresented among top CEOs, whereas obese men are underrepresented. This demonstrates that weight discrimination occurs at the highest levels of career advancement and that the threshold for weight discrimination is lower for women than for men. Practical implications – Weight discrimination appears to add to the glass ceiling effect for women, and may serve as a glass ceiling for obese men. Originality/value – This paper uses field data, as opposed to laboratory data, to demonstrate that discrimination against the overweight and obese extends to the highest levels of employment.
Keywords:
Discrimination in employment, Gender, Glass ceilings, Obesity, United States of America
Article Type:
Research paper
Article URL:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/02610150910937916
Top
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited Copyright info Site Policies

Software Magazine - Innovation Alive and Well

Software Magazine - Innovation Alive and Well: "The top three companies in the ranking - IBM, Microsoft and EDS - remain the same as last year. IBM, atop the list for many years, is by far the largest employer, with 426,969 employees at the end of 2007, the ranking year. Hewlett-Packard is second with 172,000, followed closely by Accenture, with 170,000."

Andy Grove: The U.S. must create an electric car industry - Apr. 17, 2009

Andy Grove: The U.S. must create an electric car industry - Apr. 17, 2009: "The power and efficiency of the internal-combustion engine were at the core of the development of the automobile. In a similar vein, batteries will be a competitive advantage for the auto-makers of the future."

IBM puts Oracle to the sword with EnterpriseDB | The Open Road - CNET News

IBM puts Oracle to the sword with EnterpriseDB The Open Road - CNET News: "The bigger news, however, may be IBM's partnership with EnterpriseDB, the commercial backer of the open-source PostgreSQL database, to embed EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server technology into IBM's DB2 9.7 database product. EnterpriseDB's technology basically allows applications written for the Oracle database to run on EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL...and now IBM's DB2."

IBM makes push into virtualization security with Phantom

IBM makes push into virtualization security with Phantom: "In a project code named Phantom, IBM researchers are developing new security technologies to protect the hypervisor and monitor communications between virtual environments. IBM is a member of VMware's VMSafe program, and like many security firms, it plans to use VMware APIs to tap into the hypervisor and produce products designed to harden it.
Big Blue highlighted its virtualization security strategy at RSA Conference 2008 in San Francisco. Virtualization security was a hot topic at the annual security conference with security pros packing conference panel discussions and educational sessions on ways to deal with patching issues, communications monitoring, and network security—many of the same issues that trouble security pros in physical environments."

VMware Enables Users to Easily Test-Drive Cloud Computing through the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) and VMware vCloud™ Service Provider Free Trials - VMware

VMware Enables Users to Easily Test-Drive Cloud Computing through the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) and VMware vCloud™ Service Provider Free Trials - VMware: "“IBM is helping companies of all sizes address the challenge of managing huge volumes of data by helping them implement an Information Agenda to quickly transform data into a strategic asset, and, in turn, unlock its full value to make smarter business decisions,' said Boris Bialek, program director for IBM Data Management. “VMware's virtual appliance model simplifies this approach by delivering InfoSphere Warehouse, DB2 and Informix database software ready to work in cloud environments, and making it easier than ever for new clients to put this powerful software to work for their businesses.'"

VMware Virtualization Package Has Lots to Offer, But Will It Sell?

VMware Virtualization Package Has Lots to Offer, But Will It Sell?: "VMware has captured the marketing zeitgeist by labeling its suite “the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud.” Private clouds are, in fact, being adopted ahead of public clouds, and VMWare is right that it will only be successful if it enables mainstream commercial workloads to be run in these clouds without requiring modifications. The company claims that “for hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures.” While VMware is by far the best-positioned vendor to enable these, and is building that stack from the bottom up, I would have liked to see more detail on what that top-to-bottom private cloud stack would look like."

Got memcached? Gear6's new distributed caching appliance - Ars Technica

Got memcached? Gear6's new distributed caching appliance - Ars Technica: "Database-driven websites increasingly depend on distributed caching to deliver adequate performance. This is particularly true in the social networking space where scalability is everything. One solution that has emerged as a de facto standard is memcached, a versatile distributed memory caching system that is developed under the open source BSD license.
Gear6 announced on Monday the launch of its new Web Cache product, a hardware appliance that is built around memcached"

Thanks for the memory

Thanks for the memory

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz Tries to Reassure His Troops in Email - Digits - WSJ

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz Tries to Reassure His Troops in Email - Digits - WSJ: "“Sun was a religion to many of us,” said Edward Zander"

The True Cost of Amazon's New Kindle - BusinessWeek

The True Cost of Amazon's New Kindle - BusinessWeek: "A teardown analysis of the Kindle 2 by market research firm iSuppli estimates the cost to build the device at $185.49, or about 52% of its retail price of $359."

Best Albums of All Time #2

Best 10 albums of all time -- What I think are defining albums in rock

#1 Bob Dylan -- The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Folk at its best; Is it rock? No. But still great and still #1!

#2 Bob Dylan -- Blonde on Blonde
Rock used a vehicle for personal expression. Free form lyrics don't get better..

#3 Bob Dylan -- Blood on the Tracks
Dylan's most personal album

#4 Beatles -- Sgt. Pepper
The first true "album" concept -- a brilliant studio recording

#5 The Doors -- The Doors (67)
Timeless

#6 Led Zeppelin -- Led Zeppelin IV (1971)
Stairway to heaven -- need I say more?

#7 The Rolling Stones -- Exile on Main Street (1971)
The Greatest Rock & Roll band in the world -- their pinnacle album.., they blend blues, soul, gospel, early r&r into the new form.

#8 Black Sabbath -- Paranoid (71)
Heavy Metal defined; Amazing: yet another 1971 release

#9 Ramones -- The Ramones
Set the context for all punk

#10 Bob Marley - Legend
Set the reggae standard in the world

And top 5 for Jazz

# Charlie Parker -- Ken Burns Jazz Volume
# Dave Brubeck -- Time Out (1959)
# John Coltraine -- A Love Supreme (64)
# Mahavishnu Orchestra With John McLaughlin-- Birds of Fire (72)
# Rahsaan Roland Kirk -- Bright Moments (73)

Top Albums of All Time (defined by their personal impact on me, in historical order)

Think of 15-20 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They drag you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

Here are mine:

1. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969)
The first album I really listened & listened & listened to. It only occasionally came off on my parent's stereo (to put on Sgt. Pepper). I somehow wore this album out on the B side (Here Comes the Sun & the McCartney song symphony), but Come Together on the A side is still my favorite song.

2. The Rolling Stones - Beggars Banquet (68)
This album kicks off the Stone’s string of best of rock and roll thru to 1971's Exile on Main Street. An amazing string.. Hard rock, yet blues background. I spent hours learning the words on this one -- Sympathy for the Devil, etc.

3. Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick (1972)
A brilliant follow-up to Aqualung; At the time -- this was high school for me remember -- I thought these "concepts" albums were the future of music -- it is a symphony in the rock form.

4. The Doors -- The Doors (67)
I'm sure I heard Light My Fire before, but I didn't know this album until I went to college & someone in our dorm wing played the whole thing for me. Then I knew the Doors were special. Luckily, LA Woman was released about then too (1971), making this a big one-two punch.

5. Pink Floyd -- Dark Side of the Moon (73)
What can I say, I was stoned and I missed it!

6. Talking Heads -- More Songs About Buildings and Food (78)
The start of the punk years.. After this one, any new Talking Heads album always stayed a long time on my play list.

7. Elvis Costello: Armed Forces (79)
The 2nd coming of Elvis, in punk form. I listened to this one thru most of my computer science degree work.

8. Paul Simon: Graceland (86)
Fascinating fusion of African rhythms into Simon's music.

9. R.E.M.: Out of Time (91)
The alt-rock pinnacle of melody & harmony Any song titled "Losing my Religion" is ok in my book; what the song is supposed to really say, I have no idea.

10. Eric Clapton -- From the Cradle (94)
For me, the ultimate modern blues album. Clapton takes a bunch of the old songs and plays them to modern perfection.

11. Gipsy Kings: Gipsy Kings (95)
Latin focus-- I couldn't get enough of this sound! Jesse Cook et. al. followed.

12. Santana -- Supernatural (1999)
Perfect ends to the 20th century! Santana’s backing counterpoint of guitar note ecstasy works on this rich mix of songs.

13. Bob Dylan --- Love & Theft (2001)
Rediscovery of the master’s brilliance in a new century, though the trend started with Time Out of Mind(97); Made me go back and buy all his old albums in CD. One of the best moves I ever made.

14. Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (98)
15. Old 97s: Too Far to Care (97)
These two together represent my discovery of Alt-Country. I love these two.

16. John Hammond Jr.: Wicked Grin (2001)
John Hammond, known for his blues covers, here covers Tom Waits songs. And his voice pulls from them even more than Tom's does.

17. Nora Jones: Come Away with Me (2002)
Her phrasing on the songs is unique & her voice.

18. Cracker: Countrysides (2003)
Another alt-country classic -- I couldn't get if off the CD changer; And if you know me, you will know I had to play “Ain't Going to Suck Itself” to *everybody*.

19. Cowboy Junkies: Early 21th Century Blues (2005)
I love these covers, from tradition to Dylan to Springsteen to Lennon to U2. Political? Maybe. But the CJs mood harkens back to early Velvet Underground

20. Jenny Lewis: Rabbit Fur Coat (2006)
Brilliant words and beautiful voice.


Honorable Mentions: I wasn’t able to fit all the albums that I listened to a lot into a short list. Here are some others:

1. Firesign Theater: How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all (1968)
It stayed off the list because its comedy. But we listen to it enough to memorize all the words. See the entry above for Dark Side of the Moon to understand why I can’t remember any of these routines now.

2. Stevie Ray Vaughan: Texas Flood (83)
My favorite blues guitar player. I still listen to all these songs. It didn't make the list because I listened more to Clapton's From the Cradle when it first came out.

3. U2: Joshua tree (87)
I loved the song Sunday Bloody Sunday from the earlier War album, but this album really cemented U2 as a great rock band

4. Green Day-- Dookie (94)
Throw away Nirvana, this is the way post punk grunge should sound

5. The White Stripes: The White Stripes (99)
The stripped down sound. Elephant may be technically a better album, but this was my first introduction to the White Stripes, and with covers of Dylan and Robert Johnson and a unique St. James Infirmary.

6. Sublime: Sublime (96)
Didn’t really qualify for the list because I didn't listen to the whole album full on, over a single time period. But I love the punk/reaggea sound, the humor (or is that anger), the sampling, etc. and songs keep coming back up as my favorites.

7. Marley remixed: Chant Down Babylon (99)
The re-sampled Marley with rap works. Somehow. The only “rap” album I like.

8. Buddy Guy: Sweet Tea (2001)
Buddy Guy with the hard driving blues -- with an all most White Stripes-ey studio sound.

9. John Hiatt: The Tiki Bar is Open (2001)
Focus on the singer / songwriter. All Hiatt tunes should be studied for how to write and play and sing songs.

10. Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2009)
What I have on right now. I can't stop listening. Not sure why yet.

Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores « random($foo)

Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores « random($foo): "Specifically, a production environment handling at least 100M items with an accelerating growth curve, very low latency retrievals, and the ability to handle 100s of inserts/s w/ variable-sized data (avg 1K, but up in many cases well beyond) … on EC2 hardware. The previous system had been using S3 (since SDB is limited to 1K values) - err, the lesson there, BTW is don’t do that."

Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web: I just tried the Java version of Google App Engine

Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web: I just tried the Java version of Google App Engine: "Using EC2 seems closer to the metal in the sense that you need to design an architecture that deals with failing server resources. My first impression is that App Engine abstracts away handling failures at the application level - a benefit, but with a loss of flexibility."

Couches in Browsers at Toolness

Couches in Browsers at Toolness: "urthermore, CouchDB’s MapReduce paradigm also naturally takes advantage of multiple processor cores—something that is increasingly common in today’s computing devices.

To explore the possibility, I decided to spend some time prototyping a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB, which I’ve dubbed BrowserCouch. It’s intended to work across all browsers, gracefully upgrading its functionality when support for features like Web Workers and DOM Storage are detected."

IBM May No Longer Be Interested In Buying Sun Microsystems - Tech Check with Jim Goldman - CNBC.com

IBM May No Longer Be Interested In Buying Sun Microsystems - Tech Check with Jim Goldman - CNBC.com: "Regulators have apparently advised IBM that if it were to pursue a deal with Sun, the review could last as long as 9 months, and force the company to open its books and its business practices to investigators. 'That's attention that IBM wouldn't want at any price,' said one source. Another told me it would essentially be a financial 'proctology exam,' that just wouldn't be worth it."

04-08-2009 - Nehalem and Memory Configurations - The Dell TechCenter

04-08-2009 - Nehalem and Memory Configurations - The Dell TechCenter: "The Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) based systems bring a whole new level of memory bandwidth to the HPC party. But the new architecture brings with it some options that allow you to trade memory price, memory performance, and memory capacity. I want to spend a little bit of time reviewing various memory configuration options and their impact on memory bandwidth"

Intel's Stress Test - Forbes.com

Intel's Stress Test - Forbes.com: "If you're in the microprocessor business right now, you have two problems: the rotten economy and Intel. That means if you're Intel, you have only one problem, and the boys in Santa Clara are planning on making the most of it."

Cisco shells out $105m for Tidal • The Register

Cisco shells out $105m for Tidal • The Register: "Cisco Systems has forked over $105m in cash and retention incentives to acquire Tidal Software, a privately held maker of job scheduling, application performance management, and IT process automation tools known collectively as Intersperse."

BM Seer -- compiler comment

BM Seer: "Sun can make a difference. Congrats to those on the Sun Studio Compiler team. They beats Intel's own compiler on this Intel chip by 20%, due to the optimization technologies found in the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler."

My Own Private Cloud-aho - The Goals - Joe Mocker's Weblog

My Own Private Cloud-aho - The Goals - Joe Mocker's Weblog: "I'd like to share what I have done with xVM Xen, in hopes that it may be useful for others who wish do do the same. But before I get into the details, let me describe some of the goals that we hope to achieve with this new virtual environment"

Deflating The Cloud - Forbes.com

Deflating The Cloud - Forbes.com: "The results: When renting rather than owning its cores, he found that the financial firm would be paying more for all but a few Linux applications. In fact, when adding up the total information technology resources actually used by the financial services company and multiplying the figure by the cost of those resources in Amazon's cloud, Forrest found that the financial services company would be shelling out nearly 150% more in a cloud computing model."

benchmarks-sigmod09.pdf (application/pdf Object)

benchmarks-sigmod09.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Lessons In Survival | Print Article | Newsweek.com

Lessons In Survival | Print Article | Newsweek.com: "Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially 'stress hardy' or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline."

GE Puts 'Private' Cloud Computing To The Test -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek

GE Puts 'Private' Cloud Computing To The Test -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek: "He's now looking to handle GE's ever-expanding number of virtual machines by managing servers as a pool of resources rather than discrete units"

Woody Harrelson claims he mistook photographer for zombie - CNN.com

Woody Harrelson claims he mistook photographer for zombie - CNN.com: "'I wrapped a movie called 'Zombieland,' in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character,' Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

'With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie,' he said."

Rational Survivability

Rational Survivability: "What we’ll also see is that even though we’re not supposed to care what our Cloud providers’ infrastructure is powered by and how, we absolutely will in the long term and the vendors know it. This is where people start to freak about how standards and consolidation will kill innovation in the space but it’s also where the realities of running a business come crashing down on early adopters. Large enterprises will move to providers who can demonstrate that their services are solid by way of co-branding with the reputation of the providers of infrastructure coupled with the compliance to “standards.”"

Hello, Dally: Nvidia Scientist Breaks Silence, Criticizes Intel - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Hello, Dally: Nvidia Scientist Breaks Silence, Criticizes Intel - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Dally considered working at Intel but decided against going somewhere with what he calls a “denial architecture.”
“Intel just didn’t seem like a place where I could effect very much change,” he said. “It’s so large and bureaucratic.”"

Reiss: Science lessons should tackle Easter Bunny - News of the News

Reiss: Science lessons should tackle Easter Bunny - News of the News: "The Easter Bunny should be discussed in school science lessons rather than dismissed, says Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society and of infiltration at the Discovery Institute.

The Creation of Dawkins“If pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about the Easter Bunny, such ideas should be explored,” he said. “Easterbunnyism, Fatherchristmasism or the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement are best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. This is more valuable than simply banging on about ‘reality.’ Reality-based thinking is vastly overrated and certainly won’t prepare children for a career in the City or in government.”"

MediaPost Publications Why YouTube Won't Last 04/09/2009

MediaPost Publications Why YouTube Won't Last 04/09/2009: "According to Credit Suisse, YouTube's 2009 revenues will be about $240 million against operating costs of roughly $711 million"

The Electrofriend: Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB compared

The Electrofriend: Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB compared: "responses are JSON"

Performance » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

Performance » Yahoo! User Interface Blog: "Because DOM interactions are generally slow, leveraging Ajax to reduce the number of DOM operations, Douglas argues, is often the most important optmization you can make."

Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests » Yahoo! User Interface Blog: "optimizing web page performance"

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » Object-Oriented Database Management Systems Succeeded

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » Object-Oriented Database Management Systems Succeeded: "ObjectStore does totally bona fide ACID transactions. He’s also incorrect about high performance: ObjectStore performed far better than RDBMS’s or ORDBMS’s in ObjectStore’s target markets. And he’s also incorrect about reliability: plenty of products were based on ObjectStore and were quite reliable. And our users did not especially want SQL. As for “scalability”, that can mean a lot of things, but with no specific claim and no data whatsoever, it’s not a very convincing criticism. ObjectStore can handle databases that are quite large"

Top 10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype — ryanpark.org

Top 10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype — ryanpark.org: "Relational databases are scalable, even with massive data sets.

The world’s largest companies all use giant relational databases, and they’ve been able to make this work. The world’s largest websites use relational databases, and they’ve also been able to scale successfully"

High performance single-threaded access to SimpleDB

High performance single-threaded access to SimpleDB: "until it reached SimpleDB's limit at about 1300 requests per second"

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB: "In the response message for each request, Amazon SimpleDB returns a field called Box Usage. Box Usage is the measure of machine resources consumed by each request. It does not include bandwidth or storage. Box usage is reported as the portion of a machine hour used to complete a particular request. The cost of an individual request is Box Usage (expressed in hours) * $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine hour. The cost of all your requests is the sum of Box Usage (expressed in hours) * $0.14.

For example, if over the course of a month, the sum of the Box Usage for your requests uses the equivalent of one 1.7 GHz Xeon processor for 9 hours, your charge will be:

9 hours * $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine hour = $1.26."

Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage

Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage: "Billing for usage of a database server which is shared between many customers is hard. You can't just measure the size of databases, since a heavily used 1 GB database is far more resource-intensive than a lightly used 100 GB database; you can't just count queries, since some queries require far more CPU time -- or disk accesses -- than others; and you can't even time how long queries take, since modern databases can handle several queries in parallel, overlapping one query's CPU time with another query's disk time. When Amazon launched their SimpleDB service, it looked like they had found a solution in BoxUsage:"

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : BoxUsage Response Element ...

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : BoxUsage Response Element ...: "The unit for BoxUsage is CPU Hours. This thread has quite a bit of discussion about it:"

Op-Ed Contributor - How the Internet Got Its Rules - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - How the Internet Got Its Rules - NYTimes.com: "we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.”"

Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight | Digital Media - CNET News

Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight | Digital Media - CNET News: "MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player"

Structure of Multidimensional Patterns - Google Book Search

Structure of Multidimensional Patterns - Google Book Search: "Structure of Multidimensional Patterns
By Stephen Phillip Smith
Published by Michigan State University. Dept. of Computer Science, 1982
278 pages"

William Windom His last speech. Annual banquet of the New York Board of trade and transportation By New York (N.Y.). Board of Trade

William Windom His last speech. Annual banquet of the New York Board of trade and transportation By New York (N.Y.). Board of Trade: "principle echoing men of the nation The sentiments he expressed came from his heart They were words of golden eloquence emanating from a sound mind and an honest heart giving the concentrated ideas of the study of a lifetime so instructive so patriotic How eloquently he spoke of the country he loved so much Can any of us ever forget it When Mr Windom had finished his effort and had"

Real-Time Rendering » Blog Archive » Connections: Larrabee, Michael Abrash, Intel, Dr. Dobb’s and me

Real-Time Rendering » Blog Archive » Connections: Larrabee, Michael Abrash, Intel, Dr. Dobb’s and me: "There has been a spate of Larrabee information during the last two weeks"

assertTrue( ): What Sun means to IBM

assertTrue( ): What Sun means to IBM: "Three things, I think. First, a customer list to sell into (for servers, storage, cloud services). That's the obvious one.

The second thing IBM gets by buying Sun (something I don't see many people talking about) is that nobody else gets to buy Sun. Certain IBM competitors who really do stand to benefit from a Sun purchase (e.g., Cisco) are denied easy entry into some of IBM's markets, if Big Blue takes Sun out.

A third thing IBM gets is 7000 patents. Not all of those patents are still active, and around 1600 were donated to open source a few years ago. But it's still a sizable portfolio. And we do know that IBM likes patents an awful lot."

Google App Engine Blog: A Brand New Language on Google App Engine!

Google App Engine Blog: A Brand New Language on Google App Engine!: "select a new runtime language for App Engine. Today we're excited to officially announce support for FORTRAN 77!"

Engineering @ Facebook's Notes | Facebook

Engineering @ Facebook's Notes | Facebook

XHProf is capable of reporting function-level call counts and inclusive/exclusive metrics such as elapsed time, CPU time and memory usage. A function's profile can be broken down by callers or callees. XHProf has a simple HTML based user interface. The browser based UI for viewing profiler results makes it easy to view results or to share results with peers. XHProf supports the ability to compare two runs (a.k.a. "diff" reports) or aggregate data from multiple runs. Diff and aggregate reports, much like single run reports, offer "flat" as well as "hierarchical" views of the profile. [Note: Although implemented for PHP, the methodology used by XHProf is also well suited for other dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby.]

'Richard Dawkins says Pope is 'stupid'' by Telegraph - RichardDawkins.net

'Richard Dawkins says Pope is 'stupid'' by Telegraph - RichardDawkins.net: "I did not say the Pope is 'stupid, ignorant or dim' – I hope I would never say anything so repetitive. My exact words were 'stupid, ignorant or wicked.'"

369 - Best Beer Map of America « Strange Maps

369 - Best Beer Map of America « Strange Maps: "The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:

1. Colorado - 64.4
2. Oregon - 42.5
3. Wisconsin - 38.6
4. Washington - 16.2
5. Missouri - 15
6. Pennsylvania - 13.5
7. Massachusetts - 12.6
8. California - 12.8
9. Texas - 5.6
10. New York - 5.1"

On Faith Panelists Blog: Religions Rooted In Delusions - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

On Faith Panelists Blog: Religions Rooted In Delusions - On Faith at washingtonpost.com: "I do not believe that there is one bit of difference between any religious conviction based on belief in the supernatural and a delusion"

New Humanist Blog: Pot, kettle?

New Humanist Blog: Pot, kettle?: "'A Catholic who puts his or her trust in reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition, the no man's land that is neither faith nor science. Superstition corrupts one's worship of God by turning one's religious feeling and practice in a false direction.'"

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon EC3 TrueCloud? Confirmed by Bezos

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon EC3 TrueCloud? Confirmed by Bezos: "'What's the difference between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EC3 TrueCloud? It's one louder,' explained Bezos, echoing a line from his current Amazon Wishlist favourite, 'This Is Spinal Tap'.

'I can confirm that EC3 TrueCloud is not mere vaporware. As of today, Amazon is the first company to use real clouds to store our users data - the sky really is the limit for TrueCloud users.'"