Renewal
I’m very fond of our beech hedge, which provides a dense screen for the house every summer (not to mention a home for lots of birds). But then in the winter it withers, and its impossible to believe it will ever be green or dense again. So I watch it anxiously at this time of year. And miraculously, green leaves begin to appear, and I relax. Silly, really. But that’s how it is.
Job hunting?
Ben Hammersley thinks this is the best job application ever. I’m inclined to agree.
Why Disney will continue to lobby for indefinite copyright extension
“Publicly, Disney’s people are protective of the mouse’s reputation and point to the sheer amount of money they still rake in off goods that bear his likeness. Here’s Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney’s consumer products division: ‘In my world, a character that generates $4.5 billion a year in retail revenue and is at least four times larger than any other character in the world except Winnie the Pooh doesn’t need refurbishing.’ According to Mooney, Mickey has ’98 percent unaided awareness for children 3 to 11 worldwide’, and has started to appear again as a real favorite among girls 8 to 12 and, surprisingly, boys 13 to 17. ” [Source: Henry Jenkins.]
On reflection…
Ashe Street, Tralee, seen in the window of a white van.
Why write?
Joseph Epstein’s just published a lovely essay on this puzzle in Commentary. It takes the form of a review of a book on the neurophysiology of writing (a science which, let it be said, underwhelms him). It begins:
“I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy — once you have these in place, you are set to go.
But why bother writing at all? What would motivate anyone to take up what often turns out to be a life fraught with many obstacles and few palpable rewards? This vexing question has received a number of usually unsatisfactory answers. They include the notions that serious writers are divinely inspired; that they have a preternatural love of aesthetic order; that they are in relentless pursuit of the truth (as they understand it); and, on the somewhat less complimentary side, that they are ego-driven and therefore attention-craving beyond all reckoning…”
En passant, much the same is said of Bloggers…
Ford repudiates SportsKa ad
A few weeks ago, I wrote in my Observer column about the viral video ad for the sports version of the Ford Ka which apparently shows a cat being decapitated by the car’s sun-roof. I wondered whether Ford would like the idea of having its family-friendly image dented by association with this grisly little stunt.
Well, according to USA Today, the company was not amused. “We find this unauthorized ad totally unacceptable and reprehensible and deplore the fact that it has been unofficially issued,” Ford spokesman Oscar Suris said.
Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide issued a statement saying it also didn’t sanction the commercial, which was leaked onto the Internet on April 1.
“Both companies find this unofficial advertisement totally unacceptable and reprehensible,” the statement said. “The action in the video clip was totally computer generated, and we would like to assure you that no animal was harmed in its making.”
Phew! So that’s all right then: moggies of the world unite; you have nothing to fear from the Ford Ka!
Google founder in drag
Charming archive photo of Google co-founder Sergey Brin in drag at a Stanford student party. Nice to know that even embryonic billionaires did daft things in their youth.
So how good is Google Mail?
Not great, is Jack Schofield’s verdict. This is a very clear, critical evaluation. He concludes:
“To sum up, Gmail flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which offers two ways to handle email: a slow but simple web-based system, accessible from anywhere, and a faster, more powerful approach based on downloading mail to a PC. At the moment, Gmail comes somewhere between the two. But it is not as simple as a web-based mail service should be, and is not as powerful as a PC-based one can be. If the compromise works for you, it’s a brilliant innovation. If it doesn’t, it could be a terrible mistake.”
Thanks, Jack. I won’t be using it. Could this be the first thing Google got wrong?
Google numbers — why don’t they add up?
Fascinating article by Simpson Garfinkel about Google’s secretiveness. Here’s a quote:
“Farach-Colton was giving a public lecture about his two-year sabbatical working at Google. The number that he was disparaging was in the middle of his PowerPoint slide:
150 million queries/day
The next slide had a few more numbers:
1,000 queries/sec (peak) 10,000+ servers More than 4 tera-ops/sec at daily peak Index: 3 billion Web pages 4 billion total docs 4+ petabytes disk storage
A few people in the audience started to giggle: the Google figures didn’t add up.
I started running the numbers myself. Let’s see: “4 tera-ops/sec” means 4,000 billion operations per second; a top-of-the-line server can do perhaps two billion operations per second, so that translates to perhaps 2,000 servers — not 10,000. Four petabytes is 4×1015 bytes of storage; spread that over 10,000 servers and you’d have 400 gigabytes per server, which again seems wrong, since Farach-Colton had previously said that Google puts two 80-gigabyte hard drives into each server.
And then there is that issue of 150 million queries per day. If the system is handling a peak load of 1,000 queries per second, that translates to a peak rate of 86.4 million queries per day — or perhaps 40 million queries per day if you assume that the system spends only half its time at peak capacity. No matter how you crank the math, Google’s statistics are not self-consistent.
“These numbers are all crazily low,” Farach-Colton continued. “Google always reports much, much lower numbers than are true.”
Whenever somebody from Google puts together a new presentation, he explained, the PR department vets the talk and hacks down the numbers. Originally, he said, the slide with the numbers said that 1,000 queries/sec was the “minimum” rate, not the peak. “We have 10,000-plus servers. That’s plus a lot.”
Just as Google’s search engine comes back instantly and seemingly effortlessly with a response to any query that you throw it, hiding the true difficulty of the task from users, the company also wants its competitors kept in the dark about the difficulty of the problem. After all, if Google publicized how many pages it has indexed and how many computers it has in its data centers around the world, search competitors like Yahoo!, Teoma, and Mooter would know how much capital they had to raise in order to have a hope of displacing the king at the top of the hill.
Google has at times had a hard time keeping its story straight. When vice president of engineering Urs Hoelzle gave a talk about Google’s Linux clusters at the University of Washington in November of 2002, he repeated that figure of 1,000 queries per second — but he said that the measure was made at 2:00 a.m. on December 25, 2001. His point, obvious to everybody in the room, is that even by November 2002, Google was doing a lot more than 1,000 queries per second — just how many more, though, was anybody’s guess.
The facts may be seeping out. Last Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported that Google had crossed the 100,000-server mark. If true, that means Google is operating perhaps the largest grid of computers on the planet. “The simple fact that they can build and operate data centers of that size is astounding,” says Peter Christy, co-founder of the NetsEdge Research Group, a market research and strategy firm in Silicon Valley. Christy, who has worked in the industry for more than 30 years, is astounded by the scale of Google’s systems and the company’s competence in operating them. “I don’t think that there is anyone close.”
It’s this ability to build and operate incredibly dense clusters that is as much as anything else the secret of Google’s success. And the reason, explains Marissa Mayer, the company’s director of consumer Web products, has to do with the way that Google started at Stanford…”.
Accidental customisation
I am an Apple Mac user for a whole range of reasons too tedious to go into here. I like the user interface, for one thing. And I really value the stability one gets from running on a Unix-based system. But there is one thing about the Mac that has always bugged me — Apple’s insistence on a one-button mouse. Not sure of the origins of this, but it seems to have been dogma from the days of the original Lisa design. This evening, though, I couldn’t find my Apple mouse and plugged in to my PowerBook’s USB port a PC optical mouse that happened to be lying around — and guess what! — the right button works just fine, and enables me to all the stuff I used to have to do Ctrl-click for with my Apple rodent. The scroll wheel works fine too. Eureka!
