Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (along with other big tech companies) all produce a lot of academic research that documents the architectures and protocols that they use, along with their performance. These companies innovate, and the material from their research often makes it into these "textbooks ... describing the techniques".
>As someone who came from a working class background, college has enabled me to move up multiple socio-economic classes.
I'm really happy someone brought this up. Where I went to school, the average student just ended up working in their parents/relatives' car wash, nail salon, or sandwich store, those that didn't fall into the grips of drugs and gangs. Even into high school, a few of us didn't even have an internet connection. Though I used to code a lot as a kid, I never thought of coding as something of inherent value because I never saw anyone around me go into a job that involves coding or even math/science as a skill. Forget working at a startup as a teenager! To me, the folks at Google and Apple (Facebook didn't really exist yet) wore white labcoats and tweaked giant machines and took notes on their notebooks. I was just a kid who could visualize math and physics better than his peers.
It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that I might end up working for a company like that or making a difference in the world of technology. And it's college I thank for giving me the self-confidence and technical ability to work in the world of tech.
College isn't useful for social mobility? Bullshit.
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but I think Sync has a long way to go before it becomes a textbook case for BitTorrent advocates to point to productive usage. I think that supporting anonymous, distributed protocols like BitTorrent should be our prerogative as proponents of a free society.
The El Camino Real BRT proposal seems really interesting but VTA has such a terrible track record of implementing transit options that I'm skeptical when and if it will ever proceed.
I hope, perhaps naively, that the positive focus this article gets on HackerNews seeds if not the beginning of change but at least the awareness of just how terrible Silicon Valley transit is.
I'm native to the Bay Area but am studying my Masters in Computer Science outside of California and come back every so often to interview, visit friends, and help out my family. Both of my parents work so I don't have access to their cars. I've never had a car (only driven my parents cars on weekends in high school) and because I'll be finishing up my education soon I haven't felt the need to buy one of my own. For reference, I live with my parents currently in the San Jose / Morgan Hill beyond the commonly serviced Caltrains zones (but still in their extra commute-serviced zones).
Visiting friends, attending interviews, or just taking in the sights somewhere is something I've gotten used to doing on public transit since I've never had a car. The VTA is awful. Most of their schedules use timepoints rather than actual stops for scheduling (is this the case to allow busses slack time in between timepoints?), even on the Light Rail which is not as traffic sensitive as the bus. My nearby Light Rail station isn't even listed on the the schedules for most of the VTA schedules.
Google Maps is just awful at planning trips using VTA. It takes a definite know-how of how the system works to use it effectively. In contrast to what other posts have discussed, using Caltrains to get to San Francisco makes the trip from San Jose to San Francisco relatively painless; I take a 30 minute bus to a Caltrains stop and take a train directly into San Francisco. The main San Jose transit hub (and the best serviced Caltrains stop in the area), the San Jose Diridon, is inaccessible on my Light Rail route, the Blue Line (or the 901). To reach Diridon I can either take a bus from another nearby transit station or take the Blue Line North to the SJ Convention Center, transfer to the Green line, and then go South. Using the Light Rail exclusively is a death sentence however. Using the Light Rail to move from my Light Rail station to Mountain View takes 2 hours. Making the detour at the Convention Center to switch Lines and then using Caltrains is still faster.
Trying to visit Santana Row is awful. I take the Light Rail to a stop from where I can take a bus (the 323) which takes me to Santana Row, all in all a 15-20 minute drive from my home under normal conditions. To visit a friend in Union City I have to take the Light Rail then transfer to a bus (the 181), then transfer to BART Fremont and ride BART to BART Union City. We live, ostensibly, 25 min. away in normal traffic, but actually live 3-4 transfers of public transit away. Awful.
Safety is another huge issue on the VTA but a smaller issue on BART and mostly nonexistent on Caltrains. I rarely feel safe enough to take out my expensive smartphone on VTA. If I can get onto the Caltrains quickly the increase in fare is worth the safety I have to now use my electronics. BART is a mixed bag, but is definitely safe enough.
That said, VTA is cheap. An 8 hour Light Rail pass is $4, and a single bus ride is $2. I can take a single bus to downtown Palo Alto and back and spend $4 on the round trip. I can ride into downtown San Jose and pay $2 - $4 depending on how long I stay, pay nothing for parking, and not have to worry about my car at all. A trip into San Francisco is expensive ($22 round trip, $18 for two Caltrains trips, and $4 for two VTA bus rides), but is still cheaper than gas and parking isn't an issue.
I really wish the various local governments in the Valley took charge of things and created a safe, unified transit system. The Clipper Card has gone a long way in making it much more painless to endure the many transfers needed to get from my home to any location of interest. It's hard though. The suburbs of the Bay Area is very much dominated by cars.
Joel on Software's "Software Inventory"[1] gets a 0.22 rating. I'm a big fan of Joel on Software and am curious as to how this model evaluates "bullshit".
From my understanding of ARM architecture, ARM cores cannot process heavy data loads in a power-efficient manner, making TDP under heavy server conditions prohibitively high. Am I right about this? I've never tried making an ARM server of my own.
Well I'm not referring to reading/writing from a data store, but actually processing the data in registers and such. Arithmetic operations and that sort of thing.
High-density ARM servers are not ideal for every application. However, there are plenty of applications where you don't need massive amounts of computational grunt in each CPU, such as web serving, hadoop, mail and DNS servers, etc. Also, the density and lower power/cooling requirements can often offset the lack of performance. Each slab has a 260W PSU. The whole system can't pull more than 260W, ever. Some Intel CPUs need 200W just on their own.
Tesla vs. Edison, the age old fight of the Manager vs. the Engineer.
As much as Edison seems to be vilified by The Oatmeal, I can't help but think that many of the things Edison did were in the context of the times pretty commonplace. That said, Tesla really is an unsung genius.
I just finished reading "In the Plex", about Google, where the author pretty frequently refers to Sergey and Larry consciously making decisions early on not to get "Tesla'd". Seems that Tesla's legacy of being an unsung genius (presumably for not taking commercial credit for your efforts) had some lasting impact after all.
