“This email already isn’t using, as far as something of necessity you have need of, so hypotenuse Your enamel on my new email address: …”

/me sighs

“Pageviews per kilowatt-hour (kWh)”

Noted by Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), they keep getting kicked out of colocation sites. I’ve heard this a lot lately, the biggest headache at highly scaled sites is the power consumption of all the server hardware. Perhaps it’s simply a side-effect of the horizontal scaling (scale-out): lots of cheaper machines, rather than some big iron (but the latter is not affordable, and might not be suitable for this kind of job anyway).

So the challenge lies with chip manufactureres (CPU, RAM) and hardware companies: provide high performance with lower power consumption. One can probably simply look at 64-bit CPUs there, with the memory addressing capabilities and relative low cost (AMD Opterons being ahead right now, but Intel is coming out with new stuff), 32-bit for this type of server won’t make much sense any more. Of course this is when talking about new hardware setups.

Re the pageviews, I think Jim said they’re currently at around 120,000 pageviews per kWh.

I’m scribbling this while temporarily stranded in Vancouver,
Washington. The train had electric trouble so the aircon and toilets
didn’t work (and it’s quite a hot day). Now go on train-sceptics,
have your laugh! But I’ve seen similar stuff happen in other
countries, and with airlines also. I’m quite entertained here, I like
watching people do whatever they do, and there’s plenty of that here.


Amtrak has been taking good care of us with lots of cold water, ice, and popsicles… the local fire rescue has come by to check whether everybody (particularly the older people) were doing ok with the heat, and just now someone from a local TV station came by with a camera – of course that’s typical of any town where not much happens (I used to live in Cairns, North Queenland in Australia – similar quietness ;-)


Update… we’ve just been informed that there’s a replacement train on the way, so we’re about to head off! I think it’s just about the time we were originally scheduled to arrive… ohwell ;-)

Pretty much everybody has been a good sport about this adventure, and that’s very nice to see; no people being cranky at the poor local employees or anything like that. It’s also been interesting to see that many people these days carry not only a mobile phone but also a charger… yes, I do that too, it does come in handy sometimes.

Pia Waugh recently wrote an excellent article on economic and social reasons for using FOSS. It’s for Australia, but of course it applies almost everywhere. You may find it useful!

As Pia says, “getting the right information to the right people in the right order to get a right outcome.” or as I generally note, “don’t try geek arguments on non-geeks.” ;-)

You’re probably all aware of my opinion regarding software patents… apart from all the other arguments against, purely looking at “time to market” and effective use of limited resources, it makes no business sense spendingwasting time on software patents. Just be faster.

I heard the following recently, and I think it’s an interesting observation:

An IP lawyer recently remarked that the most money that an engineer can earn is in patent litigation. When we take our best and brightest and put them to work litigating against the rest of the best and brightest, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get passed by countries that actually make things.

The real question may well be: what business are you in? Producing something real, or just creating more work and income for lawyers?

This may even apply to some innovations outside the software realm. Increasingly, time to market is critical – even if your innovation gets copied, by the time your competitor gets to market, you’ve already sold what you can and it’s done. Next!

Never bet the farm on a single magic innovation; the world just doesn’t work that way any more. And no matter how bright you are, there are always other (perhaps even brighter) people out there also. Coming up with something nifty important, but it’s really only a tiny part of what’s needed. Getting it out there fast and in a smart way, that’s the real trick.

To give you a very practical example… I once mentioned as part of a talk “a tarball is not a product”. Now think about Red Hat. They took a huge pile of tarballs, and turned it into a pretty nice product. And with that standardised environment, they were able to sell complementary services.

So, while they didn’t make the original inventions, they sure made a product, got it to market, and they’re very successful. Us geeks can debate the technical details of their offering, but that’s really beside the point ;-) It’s not about being perfect, but about being reasonably workable and on the market. If “perfect” only exist in your head, it’s irrelevant to the world. Get it out there, fast.