Useful for your macbook pro.

The iPad is a couch consumption device. I use it for reading email, quick email replies, reading facebook, surfing the web, and as an e-reader. I don’t find it good for creating content out side of the most basic snark-attacks on someone’s wall.

The iPhone for me, before it started sucking wind, was what the Read it Later people say it was – a downtime device. Something to due while waiting in line, stuck in traffic, or during a boring meeting.

When I want to do real content creation, I do it on my Mac. Nothing beats a full-sized keyboard, a 27″ monitor, multiple windows open, etc.

That is why I don’t expect Apple to do away with their MacOSX product line. iOS is great for consumption. OSX is great for creation. Sure some guy claims he edited a movie on his iPad. That means it can be done, not that that is the way it should be done.

“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars”. – Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5

Mac 101: Whats happening when your Mac is starting up?.

Interesting tid-bit on how to DOS Google if you’re so inclined.

Some of the search queries can cause huge IO. One example Jeff gave is “circle of life” as one phase enclosed in double quotation marks. It could incur 30GB I/O before. As I just searched on Google, the phrase is now a song name. I bet it’s now in Google’s cache server.

When there are so many servers to manage, something unique happened. Jeff mentioned an interesting phenomenon called “query of death.” If a query can causes a server to crash, then it can crash all other servers because the software stack is the same. To avoid large scale of crashes, they used canary request which is first sent to one machine. If it’s good, then send it to the rest of machines; otherwise reject the request after failing several times. It of course adds a little delay but far better than large scale system crash. Of course, you need to log down the query and found out why it crashed software as a process of continuous improvement. Jeff didn’t mention this, but I bet Google did that.

via DoubleCloud » What Lessons You Can Learn from Google on Building Infrastructure.

So, I wonder what the I/O load is on google if I did a search on:

“Ubuntu Private Cloud Prince William Engagement” or “MySQL Replication Senator McConnell Earmark ban”
Pick any two other totally different subject and combine them into a single query.

Netflix streaming consumes 20pct of download throughput during weekday primetime hours

via How Google TV Could Hand Netflix The Entire Streaming Universe | paidContent.

Voice-routing call fingerprint system fights ‘vishing’ • The Register.

Campus rivalry aside, Fleming makes the case that the money could be best spent elsewhere. More funding for K-12 Math and Science, expanding the Georgia Technical College System, or expanding the instructional facilities at Georgia Tech, would cost a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars it would cost to create an engineering program from scratch in Athens.

In addition, unless UGA planned to drastically lower its admission standards, it wouldn’t be admitting a whole lot more Georgia High School graduates than GaTech already does.

At a time when the Georgia budget is stretched so thin, is it really worth spending millions of dollars to boost the prestige of a University President?

Finally, he takes aim at the You-Must-Have-A-College-Degree-To-Succeed myth, and makes the case for more technical education:

If you’re 18 years old and have no idea what you want to do with your life… major in engineering! I don’t really care what branch of engineering. The interesting stuff happens at the edges, anyhow (merging electrical engineering with biomedical engineering leads to implantable heart monitors, etc.). But, engineering remains rigorous, engineering remains grounded in reality, and you can’t gobbledygook your way to an engineering degree. If you get the design wrong, or flub the calculations, the bridge will fall down, and not all the neo-Marxist deconstructionist twaddle in the world will change that.

Engineering will kick your butt, but you will learn something… and you’ll learn how to learn. (Something that cannot be said for the earnest young undergraduate who can regurgitate the entire works of Jacques Derrida, but whom I wouldn’t hire as night watchman in a cement factory.) And that will set you up for a lifetime of fulfilling and successful work, whether you choose to continue in engineering, or switch to medicine, or law, or farming, or building electric guitars.