So in your opinion data centers should be built in the middle of a desert where they need to be cooled heavily all year by a coal plant?
Yahoo gets a subsidy on their power to operate a data center (and create jobs) in Niagara County, because most of the power generated by a huge public work in Niagara County benefits people in larger cities far away who pay more for the electricity. There is a savings on transmission costs, the weather in Niagara County is very favorable to cooling a data center, there is ample space, no history of natural disasters, etc.
They absolutely chose this spot because of the abundance of clean and cheap energy, and even though it was money talking, I applaud Yahoo for letting "green power" buy them instead of plain old "tax breaks".
When I was a freshman in college, an EE professor put a chart up on the projector. It was a fairly consistent chart with one giant spike right in the middle. He explained this was demand on the US power grid over a period of several months, and asked the class what they thought caused the giant spike...most big world events of the 90s were thrown out by the students....and they were all wrong.
The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity was the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict.
You mean this Thinking Machines? http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
I wouldn't exactly call that "success"...he did cool stuff, but his company was one of the biggest failures in tech history...
Not a black and white discussion....
on
You Call This Agile?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the point missed by both articles (Joel's and the one he is commenting on) are that specific examples are bad. The real problem is making a habit of emergencies. When you fly by the seat of your pants and constantly have engineers fixing emergencies, then yes, it has a very negative impact on their productivity. Once in a while, however, is to be expected and is okay.
Really what any organization should do is instill the resources and culture for proper QA and operational support for developers. If calling the original engineer is the _last_ resort, because QA didn't catch a bug and operations can't fix the problem, thats fine. All too many organizations, however, have an engineer getting called first for a problem that probably should have been caught by QA, or that should have been caught by the operations people. Engineers hunting down problems and finding a reproducible case constantly is really what kills productivity. If the culture is "don't worry, if its broken the engineer who made it can take time out of their current projects to fix it", then your organization is broken.
I do. I pay to subscribe to MLB.TV, major league baseball's live online video service. Its the cheapest way for me to watch my favorite team, who is outside the area where I live.
Now, paying for CNN online, when I can easily get it with cable, is a completely different story...not something I would do.
Its not too difficult to get tickets off of Ebay. Yes, you'll pay more than face value, but I managed to find some decent tickets, 3 days before the saturday evening show, for $30 more than face value. Not too bad, and I'd suggest seeing it before Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, and Hank Azaria leave the show.
I thought Tim Curry was great in it too. The Lady of the Lake (Sara Ramirez) was fantastic too. David Hyde Pierce, while fittingly cast in the role of Brave Sir Robin, wasn't as big a part of the show.
He was modded offtopic, because this article was about OS benchmarks, not database benchmarks. The title of TFA is "Using MySQL to benchmark OS performance"...so its seeing which OS mySQL runs best on, not which database is best.
Honestly, when it comes to purchasing very expensive machines, I don't think IT departments should be looking at a journalist's review. They need to be doing the research and testing themselves.
Vendors will bend over backwards to get you to buy their big-ticket items. They will generally give you test machines and allow your engineers to hammer away. Those making the purchasing decisions will talk to their engineers, and value their opinions much higher than those of a magazine.
At least thats how it should work, and that is how it does work in top companies who rely on these machines for their entire business.
Journal publishers are one of the biggest contributors to the exhorbitant cost of higher education. For those unfamiliar with how it works...
1) Someboday (Government in this case) gives a grant to a faculty member for some research 2) Faculty member does the research, writes a paper, then wants to get it published in a prestigious journal. 3) Journal gets the paper, asks other professors in the field to peer review it to make sure its "good research". This is done entirely for free by those peer reviewers. 4) Publisher now owns the copyright, *PRINTS THE STUFF UP AND BINDS IT* (yes, no more work really than the sleaziest $1.99 magazine), and charges thousands of dollars per subscription. 5)University must pay for subscription, which they often can't afford, if even the author wants to read his own paper. Yeah, im sure he has a copy, but his collegues aren't even allowed to read it if the institution doesn't subscribe to that journal.
The publishers make all the money here, and really don't do much work at all. Plus, for whatever reason, most big publishers are Dutch, so they are making huge amounts of money off of US government-funded research.
What makes it even more broken is really the tenure system in American universities. Its basically a matter of keeping your job if you are an associate professor trying to get tenure. If you can't give a nice list of the journals that you have been published in, you are not going to get tenure.
Really, the tenure system is the root of the problem. However, by requiring free access, the government can go a long way in breaking this cycle, as the focus for giving tenure may move more towards quality of work and away from quality of journals that you get published in.
While that article is interesting and all, the author is pretty quick to say how Amazon didn't embrace the semantic web.
Amazon is the best (most useful) application of the theory and technology behind the semantic web that you will find anywhere right now. Granted, I don't *know* exactly how they are doing what they do, and its not a "public" interface in the way that the semantic web is envisioned, but it is a large scale implementation of knowledge management principles.
Did you ever notice that whenever you look at a book (or anything really) on Amazon, it gives you suggestions for similar books, suggestions for books that other people looked at who also bought that book, suggestions for books on topics that you have previously bought books for, etc? The semantic web is at heart a directed graph. Amazon is at heart a directed graph, too. Their graph grows every day with new knowledge based on the actions of people shopping on Amazon, and new conjectures about the relationships between products can be made by simply walking that graph, and computing the transitive closures of the statements (ie John likes the things that Mary likes, and Mary likes Jane's taste in music, so John may like the music that Jane bought).
This technology has incredible power, the ability for a machine to draw conclusions like that. Do I think that it will work the way that article thinks it will? No, not if the masses are left in charge of the metadata. It works very well for Amazon because they can control the quality of the metadata, so erroneous conjectures are not made on bad information. I don't think Google is by any means _not_ paying attention to the semantic web, but I think that Amazon is already there and has been for quite some time.
Don't say that to real semantic web junkies...RDF is most decidedly not XML. There is a format for serializing RDF called RDF/XML, and that is indeed a common way of passing RDF around, however RDF really is a number of statements, each with a subject, predicate, and object (like a sentence).
XML is more of a key, value type of thing, and as such, without a priori knowledge of the meaning of the key, a computer can't reason about what the value means.
Well, genetic algorithms are optimization algorithms. Any problem that is non-deterministic, as long as it can be defined with a "genotype", can probably be optimized with a genetic algorithm.
One thing they get used for in academia is designing robots. Its very hard to teach a robot to do something like walking, and the optimal solution depends on so many factors that its hard for humans to hard-code the behavior. But set up the proper simulated environment on a computer, and have a genetic algorithm whose fitness function depends on the robots walking across a room, and you'll see some pretty amazing things...
I remember when I was in middle school or around there, the guy who was flying these at the time gave us a talk about them (not the same guy they talk about in that article). It was some rediculous 6 or 7 figure cost of fuel for the ~30 second flights they can take with those...while cool, probably the biggest waste of money I can imagine.
Well, think about it this way...its about 300 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad. M1 Abrams tanks get about 0.6 miles to the gallon. So, that means a single tank needed about 500 gallons of gas to get to Baghdad. Cost @ $40/gallon: $20,000. (Yes im not figuring in the fact that it is consuming gas, but the return trip should account for the difference) If a hydrogen tank got 3 times the gas mileage, the cost of getting it to Baghdad would be $6,667. A fine savings by my standards, but multiply that by the number of tanks going in there (say 500, im not sure the exact number), and $10 million in fuel costs drops to $3.3 million. Or maybe they could use 3 times the number of tanks. When it comes down to it, the more Dubya plays with his tanks, the more money could be saved by converting them to hydrogen.
Well, a "fission-reactor ion-drive" is really not that outlandish at all -- though there isn't much reason for the fission reactor when there is plenty of light energy floating around in our solar system to power the ion drive. Deep Space 1 uses an ion drive...more info here
And I don't know why you want a quantum computer on your mission to mars....doesn't seem like you'll really need to be factoring large numbers out there. Plus, I can watch videos from space on my Linux desktop.
Then that is where I lose you...true AI? A power company who doesn't charge you through the nose? These things that will never happen...
At Cornell they don't use C#. I think there is a new class about C#, but in every real CS class that includes programming, its either Java, or a language more suited to the subject of that class.
The core "programming" classes, 100 and 211/2 are in Java. 312, functional programming, when I took it was SML, but I'm not sure if it still is...regardless there is no MS functional language. Operating systems was in C, networking was in C and Java, security was in Java (our professor from that class was even a MS consultant...fancy that), and most other courses that involve programming have been in Java.
In fact, when I started at Cornell, they said they teach in Java...i was like ugh, oh no, where did my c++ go? But now I realize...Java is great as a teaching languge. You can develop on any platform, which is key when some labs are windows, some are BSD, some are Solaris, and your home computer is Linux. Its also easy to build on....say in a data structures course they make you implement a hash table. You can do that in Java, but then in some later class when you need to use a hashtable, Java has it built in so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
There is very good reason for Cornell to be using Java, and I don't think that they are willing to let Microsoft buy away their flexibility.
Actually this caused a big controversy at my school, as they decided to air condition the campus using the cool water from the bottom of the very deep Cayuga Lake. But people were upset that the lake would rise a degree or so in temperature, thus disrupting many micro-ecologies. Read about it here: http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/july02/tech.html And the opposition here: http://www.cldf.org/news/nyt_990327.html
I am going to graduate in a couple of months, and I just went through all of what you are going through now.
For the summer after freshman year, there aren't too many people who are going to be interested in you -- face it, you still probably have no experience. This is where contacts are really important: find anybody you know well enough to ask if they have any opportunities. I managed to get an internship in the IT department of my dad's company. This paid, but not very much...but it didn't matter, thats all I could get that would give me good work experience.
So, the next year I finally had something reasonable to put on my resume, so I applied for a few part-time IT jobs on campus. As a little aside, every company that uses computers at all needs IT people, so don't think you can only work for tech companies...I never have. Anyway, back to campus jobs--I got a job as a sophomore writing web applications for the business school at my university.
Our coop program starts sophomore year, so I applied to all the jobs for that, and had a bunch of interviews. This was in early 2001, possibly the worst part of the crash. When our co-op offers came in, our career services office put up a list of which companies are no longer hiring....all the ones I wanted to get. I got a couple of offers, but none I was really interested in, so I decided to forget co-op and see if I could get an internship.
As time went on, I couldn't really find an internship that I wanted, but then I started to realize that I already had a job (the web development one) where I had gained the respect and responsibility that you will never get from a summer internship. So I stuck with it, and got lots of experience doing real projects in industry, rather than getting people coffee and shredding paper.
So, I stuck with that job (and I still have it, and will until I graduate). Fast forward to senior year, and the job hunt for real jobs...ugh. There isn't much this year. However, I had real experience I could talk about...not just standard menial intern work at some huge company. And it paid off: I got a job offer from the first (and only) company that I interviewed with, because I had real projects that I was able to talk about.
So I guess the moral of the story is...don't worry about it if you don't get a Microsoft internship, or any other big tech company. Get a job where you actually can make a difference and get experience; when you interview, people care about what you did, not who you did it for. There are tons of opportunities in IT if you know how to look for them.
Slashdot Mirror
They have these in my city: http://z.about.com/d/alternativefuels/1/0/a/P/-/-/Portland_Charging_Station.jpg
Sure there aren't many yet, but there also aren't any all-electric mass produced cars on the market. Give it time...
So in your opinion data centers should be built in the middle of a desert where they need to be cooled heavily all year by a coal plant?
Yahoo gets a subsidy on their power to operate a data center (and create jobs) in Niagara County, because most of the power generated by a huge public work in Niagara County benefits people in larger cities far away who pay more for the electricity. There is a savings on transmission costs, the weather in Niagara County is very favorable to cooling a data center, there is ample space, no history of natural disasters, etc.
They absolutely chose this spot because of the abundance of clean and cheap energy, and even though it was money talking, I applaud Yahoo for letting "green power" buy them instead of plain old "tax breaks".
When I was a freshman in college, an EE professor put a chart up on the projector. It was a fairly consistent chart with one giant spike right in the middle. He explained this was demand on the US power grid over a period of several months, and asked the class what they thought caused the giant spike...most big world events of the 90s were thrown out by the students....and they were all wrong.
The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity was the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict.
You mean this Thinking Machines? http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
I wouldn't exactly call that "success"...he did cool stuff, but his company was one of the biggest failures in tech history...
I think the point missed by both articles (Joel's and the one he is commenting on) are that specific examples are bad. The real problem is making a habit of emergencies. When you fly by the seat of your pants and constantly have engineers fixing emergencies, then yes, it has a very negative impact on their productivity. Once in a while, however, is to be expected and is okay.
Really what any organization should do is instill the resources and culture for proper QA and operational support for developers. If calling the original engineer is the _last_ resort, because QA didn't catch a bug and operations can't fix the problem, thats fine. All too many organizations, however, have an engineer getting called first for a problem that probably should have been caught by QA, or that should have been caught by the operations people. Engineers hunting down problems and finding a reproducible case constantly is really what kills productivity. If the culture is "don't worry, if its broken the engineer who made it can take time out of their current projects to fix it", then your organization is broken.
"It recognizes names given it by users, Mitsubishi says."
I'm going to call mine "Rosie".
Every Friday in the summer is Hawaiian shirt day at my office, a very large number of engineers here are wearing them right now.
I do. I pay to subscribe to MLB.TV, major league baseball's live online video service. Its the cheapest way for me to watch my favorite team, who is outside the area where I live.
Now, paying for CNN online, when I can easily get it with cable, is a completely different story...not something I would do.
Its not too difficult to get tickets off of Ebay. Yes, you'll pay more than face value, but I managed to find some decent tickets, 3 days before the saturday evening show, for $30 more than face value. Not too bad, and I'd suggest seeing it before Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, and Hank Azaria leave the show.
I thought Tim Curry was great in it too. The Lady of the Lake (Sara Ramirez) was fantastic too. David Hyde Pierce, while fittingly cast in the role of Brave Sir Robin, wasn't as big a part of the show.
He was modded offtopic, because this article was about OS benchmarks, not database benchmarks. The title of TFA is "Using MySQL to benchmark OS performance"...so its seeing which OS mySQL runs best on, not which database is best.
Honestly, when it comes to purchasing very expensive machines, I don't think IT departments should be looking at a journalist's review. They need to be doing the research and testing themselves.
Vendors will bend over backwards to get you to buy their big-ticket items. They will generally give you test machines and allow your engineers to hammer away. Those making the purchasing decisions will talk to their engineers, and value their opinions much higher than those of a magazine.
At least thats how it should work, and that is how it does work in top companies who rely on these machines for their entire business.
Journal publishers are one of the biggest contributors to the exhorbitant cost of higher education. For those unfamiliar with how it works...
1) Someboday (Government in this case) gives a grant to a faculty member for some research
2) Faculty member does the research, writes a paper, then wants to get it published in a prestigious journal.
3) Journal gets the paper, asks other professors in the field to peer review it to make sure its "good research". This is done entirely for free by those peer reviewers.
4) Publisher now owns the copyright, *PRINTS THE STUFF UP AND BINDS IT* (yes, no more work really than the sleaziest $1.99 magazine), and charges thousands of dollars per subscription.
5)University must pay for subscription, which they often can't afford, if even the author wants to read his own paper. Yeah, im sure he has a copy, but his collegues aren't even allowed to read it if the institution doesn't subscribe to that journal.
The publishers make all the money here, and really don't do much work at all. Plus, for whatever reason, most big publishers are Dutch, so they are making huge amounts of money off of US government-funded research.
What makes it even more broken is really the tenure system in American universities. Its basically a matter of keeping your job if you are an associate professor trying to get tenure. If you can't give a nice list of the journals that you have been published in, you are not going to get tenure.
Really, the tenure system is the root of the problem. However, by requiring free access, the government can go a long way in breaking this cycle, as the focus for giving tenure may move more towards quality of work and away from quality of journals that you get published in.
While that article is interesting and all, the author is pretty quick to say how Amazon didn't embrace the semantic web.
Amazon is the best (most useful) application of the theory and technology behind the semantic web that you will find anywhere right now. Granted, I don't *know* exactly how they are doing what they do, and its not a "public" interface in the way that the semantic web is envisioned, but it is a large scale implementation of knowledge management principles.
Did you ever notice that whenever you look at a book (or anything really) on Amazon, it gives you suggestions for similar books, suggestions for books that other people looked at who also bought that book, suggestions for books on topics that you have previously bought books for, etc? The semantic web is at heart a directed graph. Amazon is at heart a directed graph, too. Their graph grows every day with new knowledge based on the actions of people shopping on Amazon, and new conjectures about the relationships between products can be made by simply walking that graph, and computing the transitive closures of the statements (ie John likes the things that Mary likes, and Mary likes Jane's taste in music, so John may like the music that Jane bought).
This technology has incredible power, the ability for a machine to draw conclusions like that. Do I think that it will work the way that article thinks it will? No, not if the masses are left in charge of the metadata. It works very well for Amazon because they can control the quality of the metadata, so erroneous conjectures are not made on bad information. I don't think Google is by any means _not_ paying attention to the semantic web, but I think that Amazon is already there and has been for quite some time.
Don't say that to real semantic web junkies...RDF is most decidedly not XML. There is a format for serializing RDF called RDF/XML, and that is indeed a common way of passing RDF around, however RDF really is a number of statements, each with a subject, predicate, and object (like a sentence).
XML is more of a key, value type of thing, and as such, without a priori knowledge of the meaning of the key, a computer can't reason about what the value means.
Well, genetic algorithms are optimization algorithms. Any problem that is non-deterministic, as long as it can be defined with a "genotype", can probably be optimized with a genetic algorithm.
One thing they get used for in academia is designing robots. Its very hard to teach a robot to do something like walking, and the optimal solution depends on so many factors that its hard for humans to hard-code the behavior. But set up the proper simulated environment on a computer, and have a genetic algorithm whose fitness function depends on the robots walking across a room, and you'll see some pretty amazing things...
I remember when I was in middle school or around there, the guy who was flying these at the time gave us a talk about them (not the same guy they talk about in that article). It was some rediculous 6 or 7 figure cost of fuel for the ~30 second flights they can take with those...while cool, probably the biggest waste of money I can imagine.
The reason for the increase today is because they named a new CFO yesterday. Look for it to continue its downward trend next week.
Well, think about it this way...its about 300 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad. M1 Abrams tanks get about 0.6 miles to the gallon. So, that means a single tank needed about 500 gallons of gas to get to Baghdad. Cost @ $40/gallon: $20,000. (Yes im not figuring in the fact that it is consuming gas, but the return trip should account for the difference) If a hydrogen tank got 3 times the gas mileage, the cost of getting it to Baghdad would be $6,667. A fine savings by my standards, but multiply that by the number of tanks going in there (say 500, im not sure the exact number), and $10 million in fuel costs drops to $3.3 million. Or maybe they could use 3 times the number of tanks. When it comes down to it, the more Dubya plays with his tanks, the more money could be saved by converting them to hydrogen.
I remember something like this from several years ago...seems like it has actually turned into a company: http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/
Well, a "fission-reactor ion-drive" is really not that outlandish at all -- though there isn't much reason for the fission reactor when there is plenty of light energy floating around in our solar system to power the ion drive. Deep Space 1 uses an ion drive...more info here
And I don't know why you want a quantum computer on your mission to mars....doesn't seem like you'll really need to be factoring large numbers out there. Plus, I can watch videos from space on my Linux desktop.
Then that is where I lose you...true AI? A power company who doesn't charge you through the nose? These things that will never happen...
Its a good strategy selling cheap hardware, and than charging huge amounts in the stuff needed to make the hardware function. Should this be illegal?
Last I heard, the Xbox wasn't doing too well.
At Cornell they don't use C#. I think there is a new class about C#, but in every real CS class that includes programming, its either Java, or a language more suited to the subject of that class.
The core "programming" classes, 100 and 211/2 are in Java. 312, functional programming, when I took it was SML, but I'm not sure if it still is...regardless there is no MS functional language. Operating systems was in C, networking was in C and Java, security was in Java (our professor from that class was even a MS consultant...fancy that), and most other courses that involve programming have been in Java.
In fact, when I started at Cornell, they said they teach in Java...i was like ugh, oh no, where did my c++ go? But now I realize...Java is great as a teaching languge. You can develop on any platform, which is key when some labs are windows, some are BSD, some are Solaris, and your home computer is Linux. Its also easy to build on....say in a data structures course they make you implement a hash table. You can do that in Java, but then in some later class when you need to use a hashtable, Java has it built in so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
There is very good reason for Cornell to be using Java, and I don't think that they are willing to let Microsoft buy away their flexibility.
Actually this caused a big controversy at my school, as they decided to air condition the campus using the cool water from the bottom of the very deep Cayuga Lake. But people were upset that the lake would rise a degree or so in temperature, thus disrupting many micro-ecologies. Read about it here: http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/july02/tech.html
And the opposition here: http://www.cldf.org/news/nyt_990327.html
I am going to graduate in a couple of months, and I just went through all of what you are going through now.
For the summer after freshman year, there aren't too many people who are going to be interested in you -- face it, you still probably have no experience. This is where contacts are really important: find anybody you know well enough to ask if they have any opportunities. I managed to get an internship in the IT department of my dad's company. This paid, but not very much...but it didn't matter, thats all I could get that would give me good work experience.
So, the next year I finally had something reasonable to put on my resume, so I applied for a few part-time IT jobs on campus. As a little aside, every company that uses computers at all needs IT people, so don't think you can only work for tech companies...I never have. Anyway, back to campus jobs--I got a job as a sophomore writing web applications for the business school at my university.
Our coop program starts sophomore year, so I applied to all the jobs for that, and had a bunch of interviews. This was in early 2001, possibly the worst part of the crash. When our co-op offers came in, our career services office put up a list of which companies are no longer hiring....all the ones I wanted to get. I got a couple of offers, but none I was really interested in, so I decided to forget co-op and see if I could get an internship.
As time went on, I couldn't really find an internship that I wanted, but then I started to realize that I already had a job (the web development one) where I had gained the respect and responsibility that you will never get from a summer internship. So I stuck with it, and got lots of experience doing real projects in industry, rather than getting people coffee and shredding paper.
So, I stuck with that job (and I still have it, and will until I graduate). Fast forward to senior year, and the job hunt for real jobs...ugh. There isn't much this year. However, I had real experience I could talk about...not just standard menial intern work at some huge company. And it paid off: I got a job offer from the first (and only) company that I interviewed with, because I had real projects that I was able to talk about.
So I guess the moral of the story is...don't worry about it if you don't get a Microsoft internship, or any other big tech company. Get a job where you actually can make a difference and get experience; when you interview, people care about what you did, not who you did it for. There are tons of opportunities in IT if you know how to look for them.