keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Sinking in too many layers

    Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..] Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system,…

  • Computer architecture, power, and PHP

    The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software. This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera,…

  • VCs bailing on signed term sheets

    Via Trevor Loy (not a bailer) this story We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed.   The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company. The startup’s lead investor pulled out of a $500,000 round. Another entrepreneur raised between $3 and $4 million and thought he was…

  • American corporate management

    ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for…

  • Apple’s Patents possibly covering android

    Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited…

  • Computer Science 101

    CS101 – Introduction to Computing Principles Welcome to CS101 — the essential ideas of computing via little phrases of Javascript code. For interested teachers, here is a demo and discussion of this approach. From Stanford! When I taught CS 101 at the crappy state school, we did some coding in C, some algorithm analysis, some architecture,…

  • Why computers are more and more devices for generating heat from electricity

    Why is it that the hardware interfaces of disk drives 30 years ago were simple and clear and they currently require enormously elaborate drivers? Imagine if one could provide a command consisting of (read/write, diskaddress, buffer_address, count, notification_address) so that the disk drive controller wrote a completion code in the notification_address when done.  Would that…

  • Dutch masters

    Seen on Linux Weekly News. Ext4 maintainer Ted Ts’o has responded with a rare (for the kernel community) admission that technical concerns are not the sole driver of feature-merging decisions: It’s something I do worry about; and I do share your concern. At the same time, the reality is that we are a little like the…

  • Dropbox shows utility of regression tests

    This is an absurdly bad failure.

  • Information technology for medical care

    Really interesting article in The Atlantic about efforts to reform the medical information system. One general observation is that the potential of information systems to permit flexible corporate/government operation are often defeated by corporate culture So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for…