The next world's biggest scientific computer will be yielding 500 teraflops and consume 3 MW of power. Which comes out at approximate 6KW per TFlop. Which is much worse than the IBM BlueGene (if they delivered the performance envisioned). We need a Moore's law for power per operation but it seams we're going nowhere as far as power use is concerned.
Seagate is set to start shipping 1TB disks. For those keeping score, that's about 3 times the disk space in the first public edition of Google. Note: I'm pretty sure the bandwidth to the disk is not keeping up - disks like this new 1TB disk get their relevance from large files not lots of files.
(Bonus: The 1998 Salon story where I first heard of Google)
(Bonus II: Carrying one of these home from the office would provide a sneakernet bandwidth of approx 4 Gbit/s)
The father of Expat and Relax NG now has a blog where he talks a lot about XML and JSON.
The Mono team pulled a 21-day 12-16 hour-per-day hackathon to implement Silverlight for Linux that they have dubbed Moonlight. 21 days with a group of good hackers doing double shifts and working on the weekends. Just counting hours, each contributor will have put in about as much work as a regular 9-5 employee does in two months. We're assuming the entire team is composed of clever people - only clever hackers care to work so much. And lets assume there's a handful of people working on it (seems reasonable from the task list). So about a years worth of quality development delivered in 3 weeks by a small committed team with no external constraints and full concentration.
Sounds about right to me. Miguel de Icazas war story blog post is a great read.
One has to guess extra antennas were involved - and no forests or other natural antennae in the way - but the lowly and standard Linksys WRT54 router was recently used in an experiment able to transmit WiFi over a 382 km distance.
It took me > 2 hours to remember this from machine A to new machine B just recently so here goes:
Ruby on Windows ships (many versions, any way) with a broken readline used in irb and rails console sessions. The upshot of the broken readline is that the characters { [ ] } and | are not available - which makes it kind of hard to use blocks...
The trick is this:
In your .irbrc file in c:\Documents and Settings\Your Name (make one if it isnt there) put the single line
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = false
and your console sessions should become more satisfying
[
UPDATE: Hmm - through the unbelivable idiocy of the ruby distro on windows, ruby actually does NOT read this .irbrc on its own, and I haven't found a solid default interpretation of ~ or HOME or HOMEPATH elsewhere on win32 ruby either
You have to
set IRBRC=c:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\.irbrc
No, placing it with the ruby interpreter itself doesn't help either
]
Excellent: VMWare actually has a free tool to convert physical OS instances to virtualized OS instances. This is the kind of thing you always thought should just work in an ideal world - but tends not to in the real world. Anybody have any experience on how well this actually works? It seems to.
Facebook's memcached cluster has over 3TB of ram on 200 boxes. Obviously if you did a full memory count for Google's entire cluster you would reach enormous numbers, but still - as single installations of addressable ram goes 3TB is a big number.
The protocol version of the statement the web should be a public place is "HTTP is and should remain a stateless protocol". There are software reasons to make it so - and IMO digital freedom suggests its a good idea as well.