Entries Tagged 'The Geek Factor' ↓

Much is said of TED, the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference — there are those who think it a brilliant gathering of thinkers with ideas that can change the world, and others who think it’s a bunch of rich liberal windbags trying to assuage their rich liberal guilt while forming an exclusive club to get into their ivory tower.

I can understand the sentiments of the latter, but I lean more towards the former.  I’ve come to believe that by understanding fundamentally what problems we’re trying to solve, we’re making their solutions far more likely.  And I’m ready to try to understand the world to be able to figure out my part in solving its problems.

Hans Rosling is part of what makes TED — and the way TED has sought to distribute its talks — part of getting to the root of problems and their solutions.

I encourage you to watch this video and consider how you might be a part of making happen what he talks about.  Consider letting go of your ideology and how that would influence the way that you interact with the world, and think about what can happen if you instead decide to solve a problem, and let the problem dictate its solution.

Perspective on how perspective has an impact on our world, doubly so.
I hope that you enjoy this video on perspectives on time.

 I came across this post on twitter’s blog.  Really?  Your all-time record tweets per second is 3283, and your systems are consistently over capacity?

I got the failwhale page several times in the past week.  Seems to me to be pretty #fail that you can’t handle that relatively small of a load.  This is the age of the internet, of cloud, of decoupling and taking advantage of radically different architecture concepts to scale beyond what traditional big iron could ever hope for.

That’s a patently absurdly low rate of small messages per second to handle, particularly when the medium allows for eventual consistency.  Shame on you guys.  You have enough cash, go get some guy who used to run systems for financial firms.  Then get him drunk, and put him up in front of a whiteboard after getting him used to the idea that this data isn’t as important as trades, he doesn’t have to worry about milliseconds before a message that pops in somewhere pops out somewhere else.

Azul Systems is releasing a virtual appliance version of their JVM as part of their Zing Elastic Software Platform, so you don’t even have to buy a hardware Vega-based appliance.  Maybe you should look into it.