Yeah, what was the grandparent talking about? The price of AAPL shot up after the iTunes Music Store and 3G iPod were released. It kept going until within the last year.
I'm sure they need more than that. Google representatives often say (when talking about cheap commodity hardware), "With 1000 machines, you can expect one to fail everyday." Therefore, if they have 450,000 machines, you can expect about 450 to fail a day. Not only that, but they are probably adding machines like crazy and replacing old machines as they become cost-inefficient (the numbers I've heard say they keep computers for 2-3 years). I think it would take more than two guys to do all that. I'm sure they have a huge ratio of computers to sysadmins, but they still need a bunch of folks to replace the dead machines and add new ones. I imagine their servers are easy to manage on the software side, however.
Here are some good papers about Google's technologies: Sawzall (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce) MapReduce (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.) GFS (Google's File System) Google's Cluster (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.) BigTable (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)
And here are some videos: The Google Linux Cluster. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things. Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny). Perspectives on the Information Industry. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt. BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).
Whoa, those are a lot smaller than mine. I wonder if QT blew them up when they were saved and transcoded. Oh well, I have a couple people downloading from me, so I'll keep it going for a while.
I have them in.mov format, but I've been spending the whole time since you posted this looking for an open tracker. Do you know any that I can use that I don't have to register for?
Thanks for the link. I downloaded and saved both movies. Then, I used Quicktime's Play All Movies to watch both at once and to have them be perfectly synchronized. It is interesting to see what happens in the different views at the same time. I feel like I'm the mission commander;)
"You've had 10 billion dollars for 30 years and NOW you decide to put the excess to good use?!?!?! Where the hell were you last year?"
Amassing that wealth. I'd rather someone who is excellent at creating wealth give it away at the end of their life when it is of no use to them, instead of doing it in their prime. By waiting, they can amass even more wealth to give away when they die. If they are super rich, they are probably good at creating wealth, and therefore will create wealth faster than the rest of society.
No problem, I'm just happy to get the more accurate information out there:). I made the page in a few hours the other day (with some feedback from a friend) and I had no idea how many articles this would spawn. My friend at Google IMed me today and said his coworkers were talking about it:).
Additionally, Google is allowed to crawl more of my site than MSN or Yahoo. However, based on the search terms used, I don't think this made that big of a difference (the majority of visitors from all these companies came looking for my BigTable article, which ranks highly in the big three search engines).
This is a moot point, because The Inquirer should have done their job and mentioned Philipp Lenssen's blog post where he uses a much larger sample set and gets similar results.
My original sample was very small (maybe 20,000 hits in total, with only some of them being from the companies in question). However, Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped took a much larger sample and got similar results.
Of course, when you get your news from the fourth tier of information (one not particularly known for respectability in the first place), you are more likely to get some misinformation. In this case: my website->Google Blogoscoped (where more content was added)->Tech Web->The Inquirer.
Andrew
PS: This has gotten way more coverage than I ever imagined. First it was dugg and now slashdotted... wow.
I like Apple's products, but I don't have the impression that they are ethical. They may good products and I like their business practices a little more than Microsoft's, but I don't buy them because they are socially responsible. Apple advertises itself as hip and cool, but not really environmental friendly or socially responsible (just look at the commercials). Sure, they have an environmental statement on their website, but so does Dell.
However, each service (Maps, Reader, Base, etc.) runs its own BigTable cluster, so it might be a little difficult to share information between services.
Musicmobs does something similar. I'm not sure about now, but before you were able to export your whole iTunes library (or just one playlist) to XML and upload it to Musicmobs to get recommendations.
I think they got rid of the direct upload feature because it was extremely slow (the iTunes XML file is huge, but can be highly compressed) and they now have a client - Mobster - which will upload your stats. I'm not sure if Mobster allows you to upload just one playlist in place of your library. You can upload a playlist for all to see, but it doesn't (yet) give you recommendations on the playlist. It might be worth checking out, though.
While 24 fps is pretty low, it does give it that film look. I hope films don't lose their style as we move to new and different technologies.
I remember a discussion (I'm pretty sure it was on/. ) about how viewers expect different events to have certain looks. TV, live TV, and movies all have their distinct looks, and if one of those has the style of another, then the viewer thinks it looks wrong.
Actually, I bet CS majors are more likely to buy this. I bet the CS major at my school has one of the highest percentages of Mac users of all majors (behind DXARTS and probably some other art/design majors). Also, I'm not sure the suggestion that CS majors game more than others holds much water anymore... especially with the popularity of WoW.
Okay, so it's not just me. I saw that on the page and did a double take. I really don't like the look of glossy screens. I've been seeing more and more on Windows laptops and I've always thought, "God, I'm glad my laptop isn't like that." I prefer the matte and I hope Apple isn't moving away from that.
Wow, that is quiet a post. It is very well written and takes apart all of the grandparents flawed arguments. If only I had mod points now. How long did it take to write all that?
Honestly. Why can't the computer in Warcraft III figure out it needs to chop down some trees in order to reach me (for the few maps that isolate players in forests)?
Also, most AI doesn't deal with running out of money/credits/gold very well. For example, in Warcraft, I like to have a big stock pile of gold when all the mines are depleted, so I can keep building units as necessary. The computer always seems to use whatever gold they have, so as soon as the mines collapse, they are stuck with whatever units they have left. If you can kill their current forces (which shouldn't be too hard if you have lots of money), then winning the game is easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what was the grandparent talking about? The price of AAPL shot up after the iTunes Music Store and 3G iPod were released. It kept going until within the last year.
I'm sure they need more than that. Google representatives often say (when talking about cheap commodity hardware), "With 1000 machines, you can expect one to fail everyday." Therefore, if they have 450,000 machines, you can expect about 450 to fail a day. Not only that, but they are probably adding machines like crazy and replacing old machines as they become cost-inefficient (the numbers I've heard say they keep computers for 2-3 years). I think it would take more than two guys to do all that. I'm sure they have a huge ratio of computers to sysadmins, but they still need a bunch of folks to replace the dead machines and add new ones. I imagine their servers are easy to manage on the software side, however.
Here are some good papers about Google's technologies:
Sawzall (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce)
MapReduce (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.)
GFS (Google's File System)
Google's Cluster (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)
BigTable (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)
And here are some videos:
The Google Linux Cluster. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things.
Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny).
Perspectives on the Information Industry. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt.
BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).
Andrew
Whoa, those are a lot smaller than mine. I wonder if QT blew them up when they were saved and transcoded. Oh well, I have a couple people downloading from me, so I'll keep it going for a while.
Here are the links to the two SRB cameras (hopefully this works):
.torrent.
right_aft_srb_camera.mov.torrent
right_forward_srb_camera.mov.torrent
There is something wrong with my MIME types, so save the file as and, if necessary, rename to
I have them in .mov format, but I've been spending the whole time since you posted this looking for an open tracker. Do you know any that I can use that I don't have to register for?
Thanks for the link. I downloaded and saved both movies. Then, I used Quicktime's Play All Movies to watch both at once and to have them be perfectly synchronized. It is interesting to see what happens in the different views at the same time. I feel like I'm the mission commander ;)
"You've had 10 billion dollars for 30 years and NOW you decide to put the excess to good use?!?!?! Where the hell were you last year?"
Amassing that wealth. I'd rather someone who is excellent at creating wealth give it away at the end of their life when it is of no use to them, instead of doing it in their prime. By waiting, they can amass even more wealth to give away when they die. If they are super rich, they are probably good at creating wealth, and therefore will create wealth faster than the rest of society.
Andrew
No problem, I'm just happy to get the more accurate information out there :). I made the page in a few hours the other day (with some feedback from a friend) and I had no idea how many articles this would spawn. My friend at Google IMed me today and said his coworkers were talking about it :).
I doubt the spiders would execute javascript (necessary for Google Analytics) and actually act like a user.
Andrew
Additionally, Google is allowed to crawl more of my site than MSN or Yahoo. However, based on the search terms used, I don't think this made that big of a difference (the majority of visitors from all these companies came looking for my BigTable article, which ranks highly in the big three search engines).
This is a moot point, because The Inquirer should have done their job and mentioned Philipp Lenssen's blog post where he uses a much larger sample set and gets similar results.
Well, I think the fault lies with both the poster for linking to The Inquirer and The Inquirer for not providing good linkage.
My original sample was very small (maybe 20,000 hits in total, with only some of them being from the companies in question). However, Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped took a much larger sample and got similar results.
Of course, when you get your news from the fourth tier of information (one not particularly known for respectability in the first place), you are more likely to get some misinformation. In this case: my website->Google Blogoscoped (where more content was added)->Tech Web->The Inquirer.
Andrew
PS: This has gotten way more coverage than I ever imagined. First it was dugg and now slashdotted... wow.
I like Apple's products, but I don't have the impression that they are ethical. They may good products and I like their business practices a little more than Microsoft's, but I don't buy them because they are socially responsible. Apple advertises itself as hip and cool, but not really environmental friendly or socially responsible (just look at the commercials). Sure, they have an environmental statement on their website, but so does Dell.
Google probably keeps all the data created via its services in a form similar to the Semantic Web -- just a proprietary version of it.
I believe Google stores most of its data in BigTable, their homegrown database system. BigTable seems to be built on the philosophy of the Semantic Web.
However, each service (Maps, Reader, Base, etc.) runs its own BigTable cluster, so it might be a little difficult to share information between services.
I don't sit in traffic, I ride my bicycle. It helped last night when I zipped past everyone in downtown gridlock.
I enjoyed Philipp Lenssen's parody of Captain Copyright over at Google Blogoscoped.
Musicmobs does something similar. I'm not sure about now, but before you were able to export your whole iTunes library (or just one playlist) to XML and upload it to Musicmobs to get recommendations.
I think they got rid of the direct upload feature because it was extremely slow (the iTunes XML file is huge, but can be highly compressed) and they now have a client - Mobster - which will upload your stats. I'm not sure if Mobster allows you to upload just one playlist in place of your library. You can upload a playlist for all to see, but it doesn't (yet) give you recommendations on the playlist. It might be worth checking out, though.
Andrew
While 24 fps is pretty low, it does give it that film look. I hope films don't lose their style as we move to new and different technologies.
/. ) about how viewers expect different events to have certain looks. TV, live TV, and movies all have their distinct looks, and if one of those has the style of another, then the viewer thinks it looks wrong.
I remember a discussion (I'm pretty sure it was on
I believe it is only an option on the MBP. From what I can tell, it comes default on the regular MacBook.
but 90% of college students aren't CS majors
Actually, I bet CS majors are more likely to buy this. I bet the CS major at my school has one of the highest percentages of Mac users of all majors (behind DXARTS and probably some other art/design majors). Also, I'm not sure the suggestion that CS majors game more than others holds much water anymore... especially with the popularity of WoW.
Okay, so it's not just me. I saw that on the page and did a double take. I really don't like the look of glossy screens. I've been seeing more and more on Windows laptops and I've always thought, "God, I'm glad my laptop isn't like that." I prefer the matte and I hope Apple isn't moving away from that.
Wow, that is quiet a post. It is very well written and takes apart all of the grandparents flawed arguments. If only I had mod points now. How long did it take to write all that?
Honestly. Why can't the computer in Warcraft III figure out it needs to chop down some trees in order to reach me (for the few maps that isolate players in forests)?
Also, most AI doesn't deal with running out of money/credits/gold very well. For example, in Warcraft, I like to have a big stock pile of gold when all the mines are depleted, so I can keep building units as necessary. The computer always seems to use whatever gold they have, so as soon as the mines collapse, they are stuck with whatever units they have left. If you can kill their current forces (which shouldn't be too hard if you have lots of money), then winning the game is easy.
Hahaha.
That was my thought when I just watched them. To his credit, I almost didn't recognize him.