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Have you ever known someone that just has to tinker with things? You know the guy I am talking about. It is never good enough. There is always one more tweak, hack, or adjustment to be done to get that few extra MHz out of their systems. Well, imagine a room full of the same people. This is what you get when you talk about ASUS' R&D team. ASUS makes some great boards, but to the R&D team it is still not enough.
This team of tinkerers continues to improve on their designs with new BIOS features, new drivers and in some cases, new revisions of products that ASUS already has on the market. It is this mindset that allows ASUS to produce the excellent products that they have. Today we are taking a look at one of these; the ASUS M4A89TD PRO/USB3. This is an AMD 890FX based motherboard that headlines the upper end of their mainstream products.
As the name suggests, the M4A89TD PRO/USB3 does have USB 3.0 on-board along with a host of other features. These features include Turbo Unlocker, Core Unlocker, Turbo Key II, TurboV EVO; all for only $184.99 on NewEgg.com. Will the performance of this board along with the features list equal the price? You know what to do to find out.


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No Registration necessary. Ever want to ask an Independent Baptist a question? Now is your chance, just click the "Ask A Question" button to the right and ask away. Hopefully, one or more Independent Baptist will reply to your question soon. While in Beta, all questions will be hidden until approved.
Best Android Bible App?
Name: | Pilgrim |
Add a little more detail (optional): | Anyone have any thoughts on the best Android App that has a search function? |
4 Comments
Easy to use, strongs reference available, good search.
- The Ohio Patriot likes this
I use Bible KJV published by Liberty University Online. So far I have zero complaints about it. You are able to search words or phrases, and then also certain sections of the Bible if you have an idea of where something is, just not exactly.
I like simplicity so I use Quick Bible. It is simple yet functional. I have not had any problems with the search function as I've always found what I was looking for. Here is a link.
I have been using MySword as well on my Samsung Phone and on my Tablet. Very functional but I may also try the Quick Bible just to see what it is. I wish the MySword was as integrated as ESword or Sword Searcher. I use both for different purposes.

subset: commoncrawl


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There was an interesting talk earlier today at Microsoft Research by Jason Cong of the UCLA Computer Science Department on compiling design specifications in C/C++/SystemC and user constraints into ASIC and FPGA design. The advantage of compiler based approaches include, more productivity working at a higher level, automating verification, allows optimization, and allows rapid experimentation at different frequencies and different optimization goals (performance vs power, for example). As design complexity increases higher level language and optimization have excellent potential. Essentially the same thing is happening in hardware design as happened 30 years ago in operating systems implementation languages. High level implementation languages replace lower level as complexity climbs. For example, the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is a 1B transistor implementation whereas the 386 was 1/1000th of that complexity at 1M.
Also super interesting was the example from a financial institution that is taking a software based stock analysis system where they take the hottest parts of the system and compile these to FPGA implementations. 30x faster at 1/10th the power. Very cool.
Now that AMD supports hyper transport it is possible to implement custom processors with excellent overall system performance. Intel has opened up the FSB and is also expected to offer a non-compatible hyper transport-like implementation in the future.
My rough notes from the talk follow:
· Speaker: Jason Cong, UCLA Computer Science (firstname.lastname@example.com)
· Working on on-chip interconnects & communications
o 3D IC design
o RF-interconnects
§ Note that power restrictions restrict processors to ~5GH
· But, communications lines can scale to 100s of GH
· Dividing communications link into 10 or more "channels" that operate at different frequencies
· This talk focused on ESL SystemC to FPGA compiler
· Why?
o 700,000 lines of RTL for a 10M gate design is too much
o Allows executable specification
o Verification requires executable design
o Accelerated computing or reconfigurable computing also need C/C++ based compilation/synthesis to FPGAs
§ CPUs coupled with FPGA to support common functions at high performance and lower power
· Note that performance limited by communications (getting data to the CPU)
o Long wires that have to be traversed in a single clock are the limiting factor
o This research focuses on supporting multi-cycle communications
· xPilot: Behavior-to-RTL (Register Transfer Level design) synthesis flow
o takes behavior spec in C/SystemC to front-end compiler to SSDM
o SSDM is optimized using standard compiler optimization (loop unrolling, strength reduction, scheduling, etc.)
o SSDM is compiled to:
§ Verilog/VHDL/SystemC
§ FPGAs: Altera, Xilinx
§ ASICs: Magma, Synopsys
o UPS: Uniform Power Specification
o During final compilation optimize for power and shut off compute units that are not being used and shut off those that are being during idle periods (a busy disk controller is frequently waiting for mechanicals and not need to execute instructions)
§ Can't shut FPGAs but can with ASICs
§ The only solution to dynamic power leakage only solution is shut the component of
o Allows faster experimentation than hand coding. You can try different frequencies and different power optimizations (too complex for most humans)
o Scheduling (allocation of operations to compute logic and specific clock cycles) is NP-complete and automated techniques can exceed quality of expert designs
· Example:
o Schedule the behavior to RTL using the following characterization, cycle time, constraints, and objectives:
§ Platform characterization: adder (2ns) & multiplier (5ns)
§ Target cycle time (10ns)
§ Resource constraint: only one multiplier is available
§ Objective: high performance or lower power as examples
· Note as optimizing and reducing component counts, less space is required, which can allow faster clocking
· Investigating compilation for Reconfigurable Accelerated Computing
o Take GCC 3DES implementation and synthesis FPGS RTL description
o Example took 3DES from C level implementation to a FPGA (Xilinx Virtex-5)
· Investment bank is using this tool to compile financial optimizations from S/W implementation to FPGA accelerators (Black-Scholes S/w kernel)
o 30x speed-up over software implementation and 1/10 the power (6 vs 68W)
A related presentation: http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/slides/fpt05_xpilot_final.pdf.
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | email@example.com
H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Last week at Google IO, pricing was announced for Google Application Engine. Actually it was blogged the night before at: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/announcing-open-signups-expected.html.
The prices are close to identical with Amazon AWS although GAE differs substantially from the AWS offerings. The former offers a easy to use Python execution environment whereas Amazon offers the infinitely flexible run-this-virtual-machine model. Clearly the Amazon model costs more to provide so, by that measure, AWS pricing is somewhat better:
Google Application Engine Pricing:
· $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
· $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
· $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
· $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
· From: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/announcing-open-signups-expected.html
Compared with AWS Pricing:
· $0.10 - $0.80 per VM hour (depending upon resources allocated)
· $0.15 per GB-month of storage
· $0.100 - $0.170 per GB outgoing bandwidth
· $0.100 per GB incoming bandwidth
· From: http://www.amazon.com/S3-AWS-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA and http://www.amazon.com/EC2-AWS-Service-Pricing/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=201590011&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA.
There are some important differences that make the pricing comparison somewhat biased in a couple of ways. Two important differences: 1) as mentioned above, Amazon gives an entire virtual machine so EC2 is much more flexible than GAE both in that it can run arbitrary applications in arbitrary languages and that it supports all execution models whereas GAE only supports HTTP request/response. Another key difference is the storage subsystem. In the numbers above, we're comparing the Amazon blob store (S3) with the more structured storage model offered by GAE. The more comparable AWS SimpleDB pricing is considerably higher than the GAE storage pricing. SimpleDB charges $1.50 GB/month in addition to machine usage and network transmission costs. GAE is offering much more affordable semi-structured storage and the GAE storage model actually supports data types rather than having to force everything to character format.
GAE is still free to start with under 5M page views/month and up to ½ GB storage for free. Obviously this helps developers get started without strings and that's a good thing. But, more importantly, it avoids Google from having to go to the expense of billing very small values. In a weird sort of way, I'm more impressed with AWS billing $0.04 on some accounts in that it shows there billing system is incredibly lean. Scaling down billing is hard, hard, hard.
In addition to announcing prices, GAE went from a controlled admission beta to a fully open beta where all comers are welcome. I'm impressed how quickly they have gone from making the service initially available to a full open beta. Impressive.
Also announced last week was a new GAE Memcached API which appears to have been a 20% project of Brad Fitzpatrick (Sriram Krishnan sent my way). And a set of image manipulation APIs supporting image scaling, rotating, etc. will now be part of the GAE API set.
My notes from Google IO:
· http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/RoughNotesFromSelectedSessionsAtGoogleIODay1.aspx
· http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/IO2008RoughNotesFromMarissaMayerDay2KeynoteAtGoogleIO.aspx
· http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/30/IO2008RoughNotesFromSelectedSessionsAtGoogleIODay2.aspx
Yesterday the Tribute to Honor Jim Gray was held at the University of California at Berkeley. We all miss Jim deeply so it really is a tough topic. But it was great to get together with literally 100s of Jim's friends and share stories and talk about some of his accomplishments, his contributions to the field, and his contributions to each of us. Jim is amazing across all three dimensions but what is most remarkable is the profound way he helped others achieve more throughout the industry. We're all better engineers, researchers, and human beings for having been lucky enough to have known and worked with Jim.
Also announced yesterday was the creation of the Jim Gray Chair at Cal Berkeley. Bill Gates Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, and Mike Stonebraker each donated $250,000 which were matched by a $1,000,000 from the Hewlett Foundation.
Seattle PI coverage: Gathering in Berkeley, Calif., today to honor legendary scientist, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.
The morning, general session agenda:
• Welcome - Shankar Sastry
• Opening Remarks - Joseph Hellerstein
• A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
• The Amateur Search - Michael Olson
• Jim Gray at Berkeley - Michael Harrison
• Knowledge and Wisdom - Pat Helland
• Why Did Jim Gray Win the Turing Award? - Michael Stonebraker
• Jim Gray Chair - Stuart Russell
• 500 Special Relationships: Jim as a Mentor to Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
• Jim Gray: His Contributions to Industry - David Vaskevitch
• A "Gap Bridger" - Richard Rashid
• Thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard - Paula Hawthorn
The afternoon, technical session agenda:
· Welcome - Shankar Sastry
· Opening Remarks - Joseph Hellerstein
· A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
· The Amateur Search - Michael Olson
· Jim Gray at Berkeley - Michael Harrison
· Knowledge and Wisdom - Pat Helland
· Why Did Jim Gray Win the Turing Award? - Michael Stonebraker
· Jim Gray Chair - Stuart Russell
· 500 Special Relationships: Jim as a Mentor to Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
· Jim Gray: His Contributions to Industry - David Vaskevitch
· A "Gap Bridger" - Richard Rashid
· Thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard - Paula Hawthorn
The event was video recorded and streamed via http://webcast.berkeley.edu/.
Update: the video will be at: Tribute to Honor Jim Gray - General Session (thanks to George Spix for sending my way).
Second Update: A good article by John Markoff of the NY Times: A Tribute to Jim Gray: Sometimes Nice Guys Do Finish First.
Google IO notes continued from earlier in the day: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/IO2008RoughNotesFromMarissaMayerDay2KeynoteAtGoogleIO.aspx and yesterday: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/05/29/RoughNotesFromSelectedSessionsAtGoogleIODay1.aspx.
Google Web Toolkit and Client-Server Communications
· Speaker: Miquel Mendez
· GWT client/server communication options:
o Frames
o Form Panel
o XHR: RequestBuilder (be careful don't to start too many—many browsers have limits)
o XML RPC
· XML Encoding/Decoding: com.google.gwt.xml defines XML related classes
· JSON Encoding/Decoding: com.google.gwt.json.JSON defines JSON related classes
· GWT RPC: Generator that generates code and makes use of RequestBuilder
Reusing Google APIs with Google Web Toolkit
· GALGWT: Google API Library for GWT. It's an open source project lead by Miquel (Javascript bindings to GWT).
o It's a collection of easy to use GWT bindings for existing Google JavaScript APIs
o It's a Google code open source project
· Reminder: GWT is a java to Javascript compiler.
· GWT now has a gadget class. Google Gadget creation using GWT by extending the Gadget class and implementing the NeedsXXX intrerfaces.
· Gears support:
o Exposes database, LocalServer, and WorkerPool JS modules
o Provides an offline module that automates the process fo going offline (creates the necessary manifests automatically)
· Google Maps support as well
Engaging User Experiences with Google App Engine
· Speakers: John Skidgel (designer) & & Lindsay Simon (developer).
· Showed a guest book application written using Djanjo Form. It's been modified to run under App Engine (didn't say how).
· App engine development environment makes it easy to work with a designer as it's easy to install and runs well on a Mac.
· Walked through what they called 3D (Design, Develop, & Deploy) and how they handle it.
· Authentication options:
· Do your own
· Use GAE (any authenticated user or you can narrow the population to your domain only – all supported out of the box).
· Don't make auth a gating factor or you will lose users – auth at the last possible moment
· Use the App Engine Datastore for sessions
· Decreasing Latency:
· Create build rules to concatenate and minify (Yahoo! Minifier) CSS and JS
· File fingerprinting
· Set expires headers for a very long time but add a version ID. He showed how to handle the version number on the server side. The recommendation was 10 year expiration with version numbers.
· Recommends "Progressive Enhancement" or "Defensive Enhancement". You should still be able to render without JS. JS should give a better experience but you may not have JS (crappy mobile browsers for example). Another test, shut off CSS and it should still work.
Continued from Yesterday (day 1): Rough notes from Selected Sessions at Google IO Day 1.
Marissa Mayer Keynote: A Glimpse Under the Hood at Google
· Showed iGoogle and talked about how Google Gadgets are a great way to get broad distribution and are a form of advertising.
· Search is number 2 most used application (after email)
· The ordinary and the everyday
· Why is search page so simple?
· Variation of Occam's Razor: "the simple design is probably right"
· Sergey did it and it was because "there was nobody else to do it and he doesn't do HTML"
· Described process of answering a query (700 to 1,000 machines in .16 seconds):
· This time of day we're busy so the query will likely go to one data center and likely get bounced to another (must be a simplification of what really happens – load ballancing)
· Mixer
· Google Web Server
· Ads + Websearch (300 to 400 systems)
· Back to mixer
· Back to Web server
· Back to load balancer
· Split A/B Testing:
· We given a subset of users a different user experience. Web services allow very detailed views and to iterate very quickly and evolve rapidly.
· Example: amount of white space under Google logo on results page?
· This test showed convincingly that less white space rather than more (produces more usage and more revenue)
· Example: yellow or blue as background for paid adds
· Yellow produced both more satisfaction and more revenue.
· "If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will" – Sam Walton
· But you need to test rather than ask since they often don't know.
· Example: would you like 10, 20, or 30 results. Users unanimously wanted 30.
· But 10 did way better in A/B testing (30 was 20% worse) due to lower latency of 10 results
· 30 is about twice the latency of 10 (I would have expected the other overheads to dominate. Suggests there is another solution waiting to be found here).
· Example: Maps was 120k for launch page. We took 30 to 40k out. Got a proportional increase in usage.
· Example: Google Video uploads used to be 1 day to watch while YouTube offered "Watch it now". Much more compelling.
· Urgent can drown out important
· Users go from unskilled to skilled searchers very fast (under 1 month). Consequently it's better to optimize for expert since most are and novices get there fast due to fast feedback loop.
· The lesson is to think longer term at all levels in design.
· Think beyond the current development horizon. 10 years for major products and services.
· Example: Universal search vs vertical search. Users want verticals now but what they really want is universal search. They just want to find the answer they are searching for.
· Goog-411: don't know if we can make money off this but it helps us develop voice recognition. Applications of voice recognition are monetizable so, even if Goog-411 doesn't yield revenue, other applications will.
· International content:
· 50% of the web is English but only aobut 1% of the web is Arabic
· Conclusion: take an Arabic search, translate find relevant pages, then translate the result. Opens up MUCH more content and dramatically improves the results for an Arabic user.
· Larry Paige: "A Healthy Disrespect for the Impossible" opens up many possibilities.
· Showed examples of how search is not generally "solvable" but getting to 90 to 95% has HUGE benefit. Search is a hard and unconstrained problem. Same with health records.
· Recommendation: Be Scrappy & revel in constraints
· Google operates in 140 countries and 110 languages. Described the complexity of pulling out text strings from a web site, sending out to translation, dealing with multiple string versions, etc.
· Betters solution: let the users help with the translated content. If you don't see your language, help us do it. There are now ¼ million users helping with translation from all over the world.
· Interesting little Easter egg: one of the languages on the Google home page is "Bork! Bork! Bork!" – it's the Swedish chef from the Muppets
· Interesting little example: they took 11k Googler's to Indiana Jones last week
· Marissa went through a bunch of examples of taking on the impossible and brainstorming possible solutions and showing that some just exercised their thinking and others produced cool products/solutions. Explained that 20% time is just another way of exercising the brain ("Imagination as a muscle"). And Orkut, Google News, and during one period 50% of their new products, were from 20% time.
· Random note: What you last searched for is the best context signal for the current search.
Rough notes from the sessions I attended at Google IO. The sessions are going to be available in Video so, if you want more detail (or more accuracy :-)), you can check out the videos.
Vic Gundotra Keynote:
· 2 hour session walking through entire conference material mostly with demos: Open Social, Google Web Toolkit, Android, Gears,
· 8 Main Conference Tracks with multiple concurrent sessions in each:
o AJAX & Javascript
o APIs & Tools
o Maps & Geo
o Mobile
o Social
o Code Labs
o Tech Talks
o Fireside Chat
· All recorded and will be available publically.
OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web
· How do we socialize objects online without creating yet another social network (there are already at least 100)?
· API for controlled exchange of Friends, Profiles, and Activities (the update stream)
· Recommends Hal Varian's (Google Chief Economist) "Information Rules"
o OpenSoicial is an implementation of Chapter 8
· Association of Google, MySpace, and Yahoo!
o http://opensocial.org
· More than 275M users of OpenSocial
· How to build an OpenSocial application?
o JavaScript Version 0.7 now and REST services coming soon
o Three groupings of the API
§ People & friends
§ Activities
§ Persistence
o Programming model is async. Send a request and set a callback function that gets called on completion.
o Update of activity field: postActivity(text) – also supports setting priority
o Example server side REST services:
§ /people/{guid}/@all: collection of all people connected to the user
§ /peple/{guid}/@friends: friends
· Main sell is to allow small sites to gain critical mass when friction of yet another login system and initial lack of users would have blocked. Make it easier on users.
· Showed a map of the world showing that different social networks have won in different geographies all over the world.
o E.g. LiveJournal (Rusia), Orkut (Brazil)
· OpenSocial gets you to all their users so plan to localize your application (OpenSocial is designed to support localication)
· OpenSocial Terms:
o Container: the site (Hi5, MySpace, etc.)
o Owner: author/owner of the page
o Viewer: person viewing the page
· Apache Shindig is an open source implementation with a goal of allowing new sites to host open social applications in well under an hour.
· Shindig is an Apache Incubator project: http://incubator.apache.org/shindig
· Summary: make the web more social, current version is 0.7, and 0.8 includes REST.
· OpenSocial has 11 sessions in addition to this one at Google IO.
Google App Engine
· This session packed. Others quite lightly filled.
· Google App Engine does one thing well
o App engine handles HTTP requests, nothing else
o Resources are scaling automatically
o Highly scalable store based on BigTable
· An application is a directory with everything underneath it
· Single file app.yaml in app root directory
o Defines app metadata
o Maps URL patterns in regex to request handlers
o Seperates static files from program fiels
· Dev Server (SDK) emulates deployment environment
· Request Handlers:
o Python script invoked as though it were a CGI script
o Environment variables give request parameters
o Write response to stdout
· Runtime is Python only but the fact that it is specified in app.yaml suggests that more will eventually be added.
· Showed Django support and how to use GAE with Django
o Showed a minimal main.py
§ Import os from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util, ….
o Also showed minimal settings.py
· Note: Existing Django apps will NOT port easily to GAE.
Google Docs + Gears == Google Docs Offline
· Google Docs Offline Architecture:
o Document editor
o Spreadsheet editor
o Presentation editor
o Authentication
o Docs Home (doclist)
· Overall, no big breakthroughs. It's just Docs offline but its work well done.
· Challenges to disconnected operation:
o Upgrade is a challenge: Now that code is being installed remotely, the server needs to support old code at least until the new code is pushed out and installed.
· Possible solutions for static resources: fail to upgrade, sticky sessions, resource database, or serve the old version.
· Solution implemented: resource database with a per-server cache
o Rolling upgrade for HTML: hard code the offlineVersion and request it specifically – it will fail during rolling server upgrades but the speaker argued that it wasn't worth the cost to avoid this failure.
o Security: Decided to not do auth remotely and rely on O/S facilities (if you have access to the data at the O/S level, you get access). But they do provide support for multiple users since most power users have multiple personas (work and home at least). Multi-user support is via putting the email address of the user in a cookie. They have an loggedin and a loggedout manifest. The loggedout manifest redirects to a dialog to chose one of your existing accounts. This either sets the loggedout cookie to an appropriate email address or fails. (loggedin cookie doesn't have an email address – it has the google security context).
· Recommendations:
o Need to provide debugging tools (online can look at server logs – need something for online)
o Rollout initially a small number
o Support disabling offline experience for a user
Under the Covers of the App Engine Datastore
· Speaker: Ryan Barrett: App engine Data Store Lead
· Bigtable in one slide:
o Scalable structured store
o Types on each value
o Single row transactions
o Two types of scans: 1) prefix (physically contiguous), 2) range scan (also physically contiguous)
· The entities table:
o Primary GAE table
o Stores all entities in all apps
o Generic and schemaless
o Row name is entity key
o Only column is serialized entity
· Entity key is based on parent entities (root to child, to child, etc.)
o Note: Can't change a primary key but can delete and create a new entity with new key
· Queries and indexes:
· GQL: Google Query Language
o A tiny subset of SQL. Most clauses restricted. Added the Ancestor clause.
· Big table only supports scan. No sorting and no filtering.
o Because they have no knowledge of the app or data shape, they convert all queries to scans since that is all BigTable can do.
o Indexes:
§ Kind Index (kind, key) where kind is child, grandparent, parent, …
§ Single-property index (kind, name, value key) : Serves queries on a single property. (there are two indexes: ascending and descending)
§ Composite index: defined by the user in index.yaml (generated by the dev environment if you run queries over all needed composite types).
o All index comparisons are lexicographic
o They support index intersection. Multiple equals filters and an equals filter and an ancestor restriction for example (just do index anding).
· Indexes space consumption is not charged for since they don't want to make people go to considerable pain to avoid using, for example, composite indexes. Ryan went on to explain that this is what he "wants" but it is not a committed decision.
· If a query can't be satisfied with a range scan, they query will be failed (need index exception).
· Transaction model: all writes are transactional
o All writes are written to journal with timestamp
o No locking – they use optimistic concurrency control.
o Each entity has a last committed time. All reads access last committed time. All writes check to ensure last committed hasn't changed. The committed timestamp is only updated after the full value is written out and the log entry is written. The log entry is a big table row and each row supports atomic writes. He didn't provide enough detail to fully debug/understand the commit protocol implementation.
o You define entity groups (defined by the root entity – all descendents are in the same entity group. Only the root has the timestamp.
o He did say that all writes to a entity group are serialized so make the entity groups small.
Working with Google App Engine Models:
· Speaker: Rafe Kaplan
· Other object relational mapping systems:
o ActiveRecord
o Django
o Hibernate
· Does not map to an RDBMS
· No pre-existing schema
· No joins, No Aggs, & no functions
· Showed how to model relationships
Wednesday Yahoo announced they have a built a petascale, distributed relational database. In Yahoo Claims Record With Petabyte Database, the details are thin but they built on the PostgreSQL relational database system. In Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world's biggest, busiest, the system is described as an over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day. Waqar Hasan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo! Data group, describes the system as updated in real time and live – essentially a real time data warehouse where changes go in as they are made and queries always run against the most current data. I strongly suspect they are bulk parsing logs and the data is being pushed into the system in large bulk units but, even near real time at this update rate, is impressive.
The original work was done at a Seattle startup called Mahat Technologies acquired by Yahoo! in November 2005.
The approach appears to be similar to what we did with IBM DB2 Parallel Edition. 13 years ago we had it running on a cluster of 512 RS/6000s at the Maui Super Computer Center and 256 nodes at the Cornel Theory Center. It's a shared nothing design which means that each server in the cluster have independent disk and don't share memory. The upside of this approach is it scales incredibly well. It looks like Yahoo! has done something similar using PostgreSQL as the base technology. Each node in the cluster runs a full copy of the storage engine. The query execution engine is replaced with one modified to run over a cluster and use a communications fabric to interconnect the nodes in the cluster. The parallel query plans are run over the entire cluster with the plan nodes interconnected by the communication fabric. The PostgreSQL client, communications protocol and server side components with some big exceptions run mostly unchanged. The query optimizer is either replaced completely with a cluster parallel aware implementation that models the data layout and cluster topology in making optimization decisions. Or the original, non-cluster parallel optimizer is used and the resultant single node plans are then optimized for the cluster in a post optimization phase. The former will yield provably better plans but it's also more complex. I'm fearful of complexity around optimizers and, as a consequence, I actually prefer the slightly less optimal, post-optimization phase. Many other problems have to be addressed including having the cluster metadata available on each node to support SQL query compilation but what I've sketched here covers the major points required to get such a design running.
The result is a modified version of PostgreSQL runs on each node. A client can connect to any of the nodes in the cluster (or a policy restricted subset). A query flows from the client to the server it chose to connect with. The SQL compiler on that node compiles and optimizes the query on that single node (no parallelism). The query optimizer is either cluster-aware or uses a post-optimization cluster-aware component. The resultant query plan when ready for execution is divided up into sub-plans (plan fragments) that run on each node connected over the communication fabric. Some execution engines initiate top-down and some bottom up. I don't recall what PostgreSQL uses but bottom-up is easier in this case. However, either can be made to work. The plan fragments are distributed to the appropriate nodes in the cluster. Each runs on local data and pipes results to other nodes which run plan fragments and forward the results yet again toward the root of the plan. The root of the plan runs on the node that started the compilation and the final results end up there to be returned to the client.
It's a nice approach and as evidenced by Yahoo's experience it scales, scales, scales. I also like the approach in that most tools and applications can continue to work with little change. Most clusters of this design have some restrictions such unique ID generation is either not supported or slow as is referential integrity. Nonetheless, a large class of software can be run without change.
If you are interested in digging deeper into Relational Database technology and how the major commercial systems are written, see Architecture of a Database System.
Yahoo has a long history of contributing to Open Source and they are the largest contributor to the Apache Hadoop project. It'll be interesting to see if Yahoo! Data ends up open source or held as an internal only asset.
Kevin Merritt pointed me to the Yahoo! Data work.
Search drives the online commerce world by bringing sellers and buyers together. As a seller, you most important task is getting your site to rank high organically and to have your advertisements placed most prominently and most frequently to user interested in buying and only to users interested in your product. A buyer chooses a search engine on the basis of more reliably getting them to what they are looking for. And, with commercial queries, getting them to the "best" seller where best is a fairly complex and hard to define term in this context. Happy buyers keep using the search engine and paying the sellers. Sellers who manage their organic and paid placements correctly sell lots of product. Successful search engines make considerable profit. That's just the way the ecosystem has evolved – it's the broadly used search engine that has all the influence and so they end up with considerable profit.
What if the rules changed? What if some of the search engine profit was returned to users? Could this change the ecosystem and could it be a good thing? Let's watch because Microsoft is about to announce a "cash back service" later today according to Search Engine Land. In this posting, Playing with Live Cashback, the blog author demonstrates using the Live Cashback system and concludes that it won't have much impact. I'm less certain. I suspect that respecting users and returning some value to them will change this market in positive way. It'll be fun to watch over the next 4 to 6 weeks and see how the search ecosystem evolves.
There is no question that cloud computing is going to a big part of the future of server-side systems. What I find interesting is the speed with which this is happening. Look at recent network traffic growth rates from AWS:
From: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/05/lots-of-bits.html
AWS is now consuming considerably more bandwidth than Amazon's global web sites. Phenomenal growth and impressive absolute size.
Continuing to look at growth, I saw a chart a few weeks back on the Amazon Web Services Blog that illustrates the value of a pay-as-you-go and pay-as-your-grow service. This chart shows the number of EC2 servers in use by Animoto over a couple of week period. Note the explosion in EC2 server usage in the three day period from 4/15 through 4/18 and imagine trying to do capacity planning for Animoto. They went from roughly 50 servers to needing more than 3,500 in three days. Imagine having to predict growth and get servers racked, stacked and online in time to meet the growth. Nearly impossible.
From: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/animoto---scali.html (Emre Kiciman sent it my way).
When you next hear "why web services?", think of this chart.
Another point I hear frequently around web services is, "sure, they are used by start-ups but REAL enterprises would never use them due to security and data privacy reasons." Again, utter bunk but it's a frequently repeated quip. I led the Exchange Hosted Services team and we provided hosted email anti-malware and archiving. The service was originally targeting small and medium sized businesses and many from those categories did use it. But, what was interesting was the number of name-brand, world-wide enterprises that recognized the cost and quality advantages of using hosting services. Valuable internal enterprise resources are best saved for tasks that add value to the business.
Perhaps the large enterprises will use hosted email services but what about low level services such as EC2 and S3? Again, it's the same story. If the value is there, companies of all sizes will use it. From the Amazon 4th quarters earnings call, TechCrunch reports (Who Are The Biggest Users of Amazon Web Services? It's Not Startups):
So who are using these services? A high-ranking Amazon executive told me there are 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing. Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.
Big companies are jumping in as well.
Google recently entered the cloud computing market with Google Application Engine. They are only a couple months in beta and report they have allowed in 60,000 developers in that short period of time. The amazing thing is the apparent size of the back log. The forums are full of people complaining that they can't yet get on (Sriram Krishnan sent my way).
Wired recently published "Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today".
It's unusual for a new model to grow so fast and it's close to unprecedented to see so much early growth in the enterprise. However, when the potential savings are this large, big things can happen.
I've been involved with high scale systems software projects, mostly database engines, for the last 20 years and I've watched the transition from low level and proprietary languages to C. Then C to C++. Recently I've been thinking a bit about what's next.
Back in the very early 90's when I was Lead Architect on IBM DB2, I was dead against C++ usage in the Storage Engine and wouldn't allow exceptions to be used anywhere in the system. At the time, the quality of C++ compilers was variable with some being real compilers that were actually fairly well done (I lead the IBM RS/6000 C++ team in the late 80s) while others were Cfront-based and pretty weak. At the time no compiler, including the one I worked on, did a good job implementing exceptions. Times change. SQL Server, for example, is 100% C++ and it makes excellent use of exception to clean up resources on failure.
The productivity benefits of new programming languages and tools eventually wins out. When they get broad use, implementations improve reducing the performance tax and, eventually, even very performance sensitive system software make the transition.
I got interested in Java in the mid-90's and more recently I've been using C# quite a bit partly due to where I work and partly because I actually find the language and surrounding tools impressively good. JITed languages typically don't perform as well as statically compiled languages but the advantages completely swamp the minor performance costs. And, as managed language (Java, C#, etc.) implementations improve, the performance tax continues to fall. There is no question in my mind that managed languages will end up being broadly used in even the most performance critical software systems such as database engines.
Recently, I've gotten interested in Erlang as an systems software implementation language. By most measures, it looks to be an unlikely choice for high scale system software in that its interpreted, has a functional subset at its core, and uses message passing rather than shared memory and locks. Basically, it's just about the opposite of everything you would find in a modern commercial database kernel. So what makes it interesting? The short answer is all the things that make it an unlikely choice also make it interesting. Servers are becoming increasingly unbalanced with CPU speeds continuing to outpace memory and network bandwidth. More and more operations are going to be memory and network bound rather than CPU if they aren't already. Trading some CPU resources to get a more robust implementation that is easier to understand and maintain is a good choice. In addition, CPU speed increases are now coming more from multiple cores than from frequency scaling a single core. Consequently a language that produces an abundance of parallelism is a an asset rather than a problem. Finally, large systems software projects like database management systems, operating systems, web servers, IM servers, email systems, etc. are incredibly large and complex. The Erlang model of spawning many lightweight threads that communicate via message passing is going to be less efficient than the more common shared memory and locks solution but it's much easier to get correct. Erlang also encourages a "fail fast" programming model. I've long argued that this is the only way to get high scale systems software correct (Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services).
Certainly Erlang brings a tax as have other new languages that we have adopted over the years. But, it also bring some of what we need badly right now. For example, the fail fast programming model is the right one and, when combined with synchronous state redundancy, is how most high-scale systems should be written. Erlang also encourages the production of a very large number of threads which can be a good thing on very high core count servers. Message passing rather than shared memory with locks and fail fast with operation restart significantly increases the probability of the software system working correctly through unexpected events.
From my perspective, the syntax of Erlang is less than beautiful but all the advantages above make up for most of that.
The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime is a .Net runtime that implements some of the features I mention above for languages like C#. George Chrysanthakopoulos, Microsoft CCR Architect, reports that MySpace is using it: MySpace.com using the CCR (Sriram Krishnan pointed me to this one).
It appears that Erlang usage is ramping up fairly quickly right now. Naturally, since it was developed there, Erlang is used by many Ericsson projects including the AXD301 ATM Switch and the AXE line of switches. The AXD series includes over 850k lines of Erlang. However, outside of Ericsson some very interesting examples are emerging. Amazon's SimpleDB is written is Erlang (Amazon SimpleDB is built on Erlang and What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB). The recently released (quietly) Facebook Chat application uses Erlang as well (Dare Obasanjo sent that one my way). CouchDB is written Erlang as well (CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS). Some more Erlang applications from the Erlang FAQ:
Is it time for a new server-side implementation language?
I've spent a big part of my life working on structured storage engines, first in DB2 and later in SQL Server. And yet, even though I fully understand the value of fully schematized data, I love full text search and view it as a vital access method for all content wherever it's stored. There are two drivers of this opinion: 1) I believe, as an industry, we're about ¼ of the way into a transition from primarily navigational access patterns to personal data to ones based upon full text search, and 2) getting agreement on broad, standardizing schema across diverse user and application populations is very difficult.
On the first point, for most content on the web, full text search is the only practical way to find it. Navigational access is available but it's just not practical for most content. There is simply too much data and there is no agreement on schema so more structured searches are usually not possible. Basically structured search is often not supported and navigational access doesn't scale to large bodies of information. Full text search is often the only alternative and it's the norm when looking for something on the web.
Let's look at email. Small amounts of email can be managed by placing each piece of email you chose to store in a specific folder so it can be found later navigationally. This works fine but only if we keep only a small portion of the email we get. If we never bothered to throw out email or other documents that we come across, the time required to folderize would be enormous and unaffordable. Folderization just doesn't scale. When you start to store large amount of email or just stop (wasting time) aggressively deleting email, then the only practical way to find most content is full text search. As soon as 5 to 10GB of un-folderized and un-categorized personal content is accumulated, it's the web scenario all over again: search is the only practical alternative. I understand that this scenario is not supported or encouraged by IT or legal organizations at most companies but that is the way I chose to work. There is no technical stumbling block to providing unbounded corporate email stores and the financial ones really don't stand up to scrutiny. Ironically most expensive, corporate email systems offer only tiny storage quotas while most free, consumer-based services are effectively unbounded. Eventually all companies will wake up to the fact that knowledge workers work more efficiently with all available data. And, when that happens, even corporate email stores will grow beyond the point of practical folderization.
The second issue was the difficulty of standardizing schema across many different stores and many different applications. The entire industry has wanted to do this over the past couple of decades and many projects have attempted to make progress. If they were widely successful, it would be wonderful but they haven't been. If we had standardized schema, we would have quick and accurate access to all data across all participating applications. But it's very hard to get all content owners to cooperate or even care. Search engines attempt to get to the same goal but they chose a more practical approach: they use full text search and just chip away at the problem. They work hard on ranking. They infer structure in the content where possible and exploit it where it's found. Where structure can't be found, at least there is full text search with reasonably good ranking to full back upon.
Strong or dominant search engine providers have considerable influence over content owners and weak forms of schema standardization becomes more practical. For example, a dominate search engine provider can offer content owners opportunities to get better search results for their web site if they supply a web site map (standard schema showing all web pages in site). This is already happening and web administrators are participating because it brings them value. A web sites ranking in the important search engine providers is very vital and a chance to lift your ranking even slightly is worth a fortune. Folks will work really hard where they have something to gain. So, if adopting common schema can improve ranking, there is significant chance something positive actually could happen.
The combination of providing full text search over all content and then motivating content providers to participate in full or partial schema standardization coupled with the search engine inferring schema where it's not feels like a practical approach to richer search. I love full text search and view it as the under-pinning to finding all information structured or not. The most common queries will include both structured and non-structured components but the common element will be that full schema standardization isn't required nor is it required that a user understand schema to be able to find what they need. Over time, I think we will see incremental participation in standardized schemas but this will happen slowly. Full text search with good ranking and relevance assisted by whatever schema can be found or inferred in the data will be the under-pinning to finding most content over the near term.
Some time back I got a question on what I look for when hiring a Program Manager from the leader of a 5 to 10 person startup. I make no promise that what I look for is typical of what others look for – it almost certainly is not. However, when I'm leading an engineering team and interviewing for a Program Manager role, these are the attribute I look for. My response to the original query is below:
The good news is that you're the CEO not me. But, were our roles reversed, I would be asking you why you think you need PM at this point? A PM is responsible for making things work across groups and teams. Essentially they are the grease that helps make a big company be able to ship products that work together and get them delivered through a complicated web of dependencies. Does a single product startup in the pre-beta phase actually need PM? Given my choice, I would always go with more great developer at this phase of the companies life and have the developers have more design ownership, spend more time with customers, etc. I love the "many hats" model and it's one of the advantages of a start-up. With a bunch of smart engineers wearing as many hats as needed, you can go with less overhead and fewer fixed roles, and operate more efficiently. The PM role is super important but it's not the first role I would staff in a early-stage startup.
But, you were asking for what I look for in a PM rather than advice on whether you should look to fill the role at this point in the company's life. I don't believe in non-technical PMs, so what I look for in PM is similar to what I look for in a developer. I'm slightly more willing to put up with somewhat rusty code in a PM, but that's not a huge difference. With a developer, I'm more willing to put up with certain types of minor skill deficits in certain areas if they are excellent at writing code. For example, a talented developer that isn't comfortable public speaking, or may only be barely comfortable in group meetings, can be fine. I'll never do anything to screw up team chemistry or bring in a prima donna but, with an excellent developer, I'm more willing to look at greatness around systems building and be OK with some other skills simply not being there as long as their absence doesn't screw-up the team chemistry overall. With a PM, those skills need to be there and it just won't work without them.
It's mandatory that PMs not get "stuck in the weeds". They need to be able to look at the big picture and yet, at the same time, understand the details, even if they aren't necessarily writing the code that implements the details. A PM is one of the folks on the team responsible for the product hanging together and having conceptual integrity. They are one of the folks responsible for staying realistic and not letting the project scope grow and release dates slip. They are one of the team members that need to think customer first, to really know who the product is targeting, to keep the project focused on that target, and to get the product shipped
So, in summary: what I look for in a PM is similar to what I look for in a developer (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/2007/11/26/InterviewingWithInsightAtMicrosoft.aspx) but I'll tolerate their coding possibly being a bit rusty. I expect they will have development experience. I'm pretty strongly against hiring a PM straight out of university -- a PM needs experience in a direct engineering role first to gain the experience to be effective in the PM role. I'll expect PMs to put the customer first and understand how a project comes together, keep it focused on the right customer set, not let feature creep set in, and to have the skill, knowledge, and experience to know when a schedule is based upon reality and when it's more of a dream. Essentially I have all the expectations of a PM that I have of a senior developer, except that I need them to have a broad view of how the project comes together as a whole, in addition to knowing many of the details. They must be more customer focused, have a deeper view of the overall project schedules and how the project will come together, be a good communicator, perhaps a less sharp coder, but have excellent design skills. Finally, they must be good at getting a team making decisions, moving on to the next problem, and feeling good about it.
I forget what brought it up but sometime back Sriram Krishnan forwarded me this article on Mike Burrows and his work through Dec, Microsoft, and Google (The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley). I enjoyed the read. Mike has done a lot over the years but perhaps his best known works of recent years are Alta Vista at DEC and Chubby at Google.
I first met Mike when he was at Microsoft Research. He and Ted Wobber (also from Digital) came up to Redmond to visit. Back then I led the SQL Server relational engine development team which included the full text search index support. I was convinced then, and still am today, that relational database engines do a good job of managing structured data but a poor job of the other 90 to 95% of the data in the world that is less structured. It just seems nuts to me that customers industry-wide are spending well over $10B a year on relational database management systems and yet only being able to effectively use these systems to manage a tiny fraction of their data. As an increasing fraction of the structured data in the world is already stored in relational database managements systems, industry growth will come from helping customers manage their less structured data.
To be fair, most RDMBS (including SQL Server) do support full text indexing but what I'm after is deep support for full text where the index is a standard access method rather than a separate indexing engine on the side and, more importantly, full statistics are tracked on the full text corpus allowing the optimizer to make high quality decisions on join orders and techniques that include full text indices.
If you haven't read Mike's original Chubby paper, do that: http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html. Another paper is at: http://labs.google.com/papers/paxos_made_live.html. Chubby is an interesting combination of name server, lease manager, and mini-distributed file system. It's not the combination of functionality that I would have thought to bring together in a single system but it's heavily used and well regarded at Google. Unquestionably a success.
The years of Moore's law growth without regard to power consumption are now over. On the data center side, power isn't close to the largest cost of running a large service but it is one of the largest controllable costs and it has been in the press frequently of late. On the client side, battery power is the limiting factor.
It is worth understanding what devices consume the most power since most laptops provide some form of user control. Most systems allow LCD backlight dimming, the CPU power consumption can be lowered (a combination of factors including reducing clock speed and voltage), wireless radios can be switched off, and disks activity can be curtailed or eliminated. Where does the power go?
The data below was measured by Mahesri and Vardhan with an Thinkpad R40 as the system under test:
LCD Backlight
Wireless (802.11)
Data from: http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/classes/project_report_cs497yyz.pdf.
The dominant consumer by a significant factor is the CPU. This power consumption is, of course, very load dependent particularly in multi-core systems where the spread between minimum and maximum power dissipation is even higher. The second largest consumer is the LCD backlight, which isn't surprising. Two LCD-related findings that I did find surprising: 1) the LCD without backlight is a very light consumer of power, and 2) there is a perceptible difference in power consumption between mostly black and mostly white backgrounds. The hard disk drive power consumption was notably less than I expected with only 2.8W dissipated during active reading.
I wrote up more detail in: ClientSidePower6_External.doc (130 KB).
My rough notes from the Web 2.0 Keynote by Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh:
· Yahoo! is making three big bets:
1. Be the starting point for all consumers
2. Be the must buy for advertisers
3. Provide an Open Platform
· Focus of today's talk is on the later, open platform.
· Yahoo! broad set of assets are well known
· We lead in 7 areas including: Mail, My Front Page and Messenger (the full list was provided nor how Yahoo! was computed to "lead" in these area)
· 350M unique users/month and 500M users overall
· 20B page views/month
· 250M users minutes per month
· 10B user relationships across properties and this is the real asset
· Yahoo! has been open since 2003
· 25+ APIs
· 200K App IDs (hints at the large number of developers)
· #2 API in the world with Flikr
· 1B UI files/served/week
· Y!OS: (Yahoo! Open Strategy)
· Announcing today they are open all assets at Yahoo! to developers
· Planning to make all experiences at Yahoo "social"
· Provide an open developer platform with hooks for third parties to make experiences more social
· Built into application platform:
· Security: give users control of their data. Where they want to share what with who.
· Application gallery. A common way to <JRH>
· Unify profiles across all of Yahoo (this will take a while) and provide access to developers the social graph and the notification engine. Open up developer access to produce events and the platform includes the ranking engine to show users the most relevant events based upon their context (including social graph).
· Making Yahoo! more social:
· Not creating another social network
· Making all of yahoo "social"
· "social" isn't a destination but rather a dimension of a user experience
· "social" drives relevance, community, and virality
· Showed some examples:
· Email client showing messages most relevant on the basis of social network
· Same basic idea for a "My Yahoo!" page
· When?
· Search Monkey is the first step
· Later this year they will deliver Y!OS and provide more uniform and consistent developer access
· Making Yahoo! more social will take longer with property by property steps being taken over next few years
· Summary:
1. Rewiring Yahoo! from the ground up
2. Open Yahoo! to developers like never before
3. Making Yahoo! more social across Yahoo! properties and to third party developers
The 12 min presentation is at: Ari Balogh Web 2.0 Expo Keynote.
Flash SSDs in laptops have generated considerable excitement over the last year and are in use at both extremes of the laptop market. At the very low end, where only very small storage amounts can be funded, NAND Flash is below the below the disk price floor. Mechanical disks with all their complexity are very difficult to manufacture for less than $30 each. What this means is that for very small storage quantities, NAND Flash storage can actually be cheaper than mechanical disk drives even though the price per GB for Flash is larger. That's why the One Laptop Per Child project uses NAND flash for persistent storage. At the high end of the market, NAND flash considerably more expensive than disk but, for the premium price, offers much higher performance, more resilience to shock and high G handling, and longer battery life.
Recently there have been many reports of high-end SSD laptop performance problems. Digging deeper, this is driven by two factors: 1) gen 1 SSDS produce very good read performance but aren't particularly good on random write workloads, and 2) performance degradation over time. The first factor can be seen clearly in this performance study using SQLIO: http://blogs.mssqltips.com/blogs/chadboyd/archive/2008/03/16/ssd-and-sql-sqlio-performance.aspx. The poor random write performance issue is very solvable using better Flash wear leveling algorithms, reserving more space (more on this later), and capacitor backed DRAM staging areas. In fact STEC ZeusIOPS is producing great performance numbers today, Fusion IO is reporting great numbers, and many others are coming. The first problem, that of poor random write performance, can be solved and these solutions will migrate down to the commodity drives.
The second problem, the performance degradation issue, is more interesting. There have been many reports of laptop dissatisfaction and very high return rates: Returns, technical problems high with flash-based notebooks. Dell has refuted these claims Dell: Flash notebooks are working fine but there are lingering anecdotal complaints of degrading performance. I've heard it enough myself that I decided to dig deeper. I chatted off the record with an industry insider on why SSDs appear to degrade over time. Here's what I learned (released with their permission):
On a pristine NAND SSD made of quality silicon to ensure write amplification remaining at 1 [jrh: write amplification refers to the additional writes that are caused by a single write due to wear leveling and the Flash erase block sizes being considerably larger than the write page size – the goal is to get this as close to 1 as possible where 1 is no write amplification], given a not-so-primitive controller and reasonable over-provisioning (greater than 25%), a sparsely used volume (less than half full at any time) will not start showing perceptible degraded performance for a long time (perhaps as long as 5 years, the projected warranty period to be given to these SSD products).
If any of the above conditions is changed, the write amplification will quickly degrade ranging from 2 to 5, or even higher. That contributes to the early start of perceptible degraded write performance. That is, on a fairly full SSD you'd start having perceptible write performance problems more quickly, and so on.
Inexpensive (cheap?) SSD made of low-quality silicon will likely to have more read errors. Error correction techniques will still guarantee correct information being returned on reads. However, each time a read error is detected, the whole "block" of data will have to be relocated elsewhere on the device. A not-so-well designed controller firmware will worsen the read delay, due to poorly implemented algorithms and ill-conceived space layout that take longer to search for available space for the relocated data, away from the read error area.
If the read-error-data-relocation happens to collide with the negative conditions that plague the write performance above, you'd start seeing overall degraded performance very quickly.
Chkdsk may have contributed to the forced relocation of the data away from where read errors occurred, hence improving the SSD performance (for a while) until the above collisions happen. Perhaps the same when Defrag is used.
In short, performance degradation over time is unavoidable with SSD devices. It's a matter of how soon it kicks in and how bad it gets; and it varies across designs.
We expect the enterprise class SSD devices to be as much as 100% over-provisioned (e.g., a 64GB SSD actually holds 128GB of flash silicon).
Summary: there are two factors in play. The first is that SSD write random performance is not great on low end parts so ensure you understand the random write I/O specification before spending on an SSD. The second one is more insidious in that, in this failure mode, the performance just degrade slowly over time. The best way to avoid this phenomena is to 2x over-provision. If you buy N bytes of SSD, don't use more than ½N and consider either chkdsk or copying the data off, bulk erasing, and sequentially copying back on . We know over-provisioning is effective. The later techniques are unproven but seem likely to work. I'll report supporting performance studies or vendor reports when either surface.
It's not often I come across three interesting notes in the same day but here's another. Earlier today the Jim Gray Systems Lab was announced and it will be lead by long time database pioneer David DeWitt. This is great to see for a large variety of reasons. First of all it's wonderful to see the contribution of Jim Gray to the entire industry recognized in the naming of this new lab. Very appropriate. Second I'm really looking forward to working more closely with DeWitt. This is going to be fun.
This is "earned" in that Madison has been contributing great database developers to the industry for what seems like forever – I've probably worked with more Madison graduates over the years than any other single school. It's good to see a systems focused research lab opened up there.
It's also good to see this project come together. I was involved in earlier discussions on this project some years back and, although we didn't find a way to make it happen then, I really liked the idea. I'm glad others were successful in doing the hard work to get this project to reality.
· University of Wisconsin at Madison News: http://www.news.wisc.edu/15097
· DeWitt Interview (from above): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/apr08/04-23DeWitt.mspx
· Server and Tools Business News Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/stbnewsbytes/archive/2008/04/23/an-addition-to-the-sql-server-team.aspx
· Information Week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2PMY2VDAXNZHSQSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=207401497
Earlier today, Amazon AWS announced a reduction in egress charges. The new charges:
· $0.100 per GB - data transfer in
· $0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
· $0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
· $0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
· $0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Compared with the old:
· $0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
· $0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
· $0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Most networking contracts charge symmetrically for ingress and egress – you pay the max of the two -- so the ingress cost to Amazon is effectively zero.
Note that it's a non-linear reduction favoring higher volume users. TechCrunch reported a couple of days back that the Amazon AWS customer base has rapidly swung from a nearly pure start-up community to more of a mix of startups and very large enterprises with the enterprise customers now bringing the largest workloads (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/who-are-the-biggest-users-of-amazon-web-services-its-not-startups/). Not really all that surprising – I expected this to happen and talked about it in the Next Big Thing. What is surprising to me is the speed with which the transformation is taking place. I was predicting workload mix shift to happen at AWS 3 to 5 years from now. Things are moving quickly in the services world.
Live Mesh has been under development for a couple of years now. Now it's hear in "technology preview" form. I think the first public mention was probably back in March of last year in a blog entry by Mary Jo Foley that mentioned Windows Live Core (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=349). Last night Amit Mital, General Manager of Windows Live Core, did a blog entry that coves Live Mesh in more detail that previously seen: http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/04/22/279.aspx.
UPDATE: The report above attributing first mention of Windows Live Core to Mary Jo Foley was incorrect. The sleuths at LiveSide appear to have reported this one first: http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/03/25/windows-live-core.aspx.
Live Mesh is a platform that supports synchronizing data across devices, a platform for deploying and managing apps that run on multiple devices, supports screen remoting making all your devices and applications available from anywhere, and it strikes an interesting balance exploiting both cloud services supported features and unique device capabilities. The initial device support is Windows only but Mac and other device clients are coming as well.
Screen shots are up on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/product/windows-live-mesh.
Ray Ozzie did a 36 min Channel 9 interview with Jon Udell: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=399578.
Abolade Gbadegesin, Live Mesh Architect, did a video on Live Mesh Architecture that is worth checking out: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=399577.
Demo video: http://www.on10.net/blogs/nic/Hands-on-with-Live-Mesh/.
Here's a statistic I love, Facebook is running 1,800 MySQL Servers with only 2 DBAs. Impressive. I love seeing services show how far you can go towards admin-free operation. 2:1,800 is respectable and for database servers it downright impressive. This data from a short but interesting report at: http://www.paragon-cs.com/wordpress/?p=144.
The Facebook fleet has grown fairly dramatically of late. For example, Facebook is the largest Memcached installation and the most recent reports I had come across have 200 Memcached servers at facebook. At the Scaling MySQL panel, they report 805 Memcached servers.
1,800 MySQL Servers, insulated by 805 Memcached servers, and driven by 10,000 web servers. Smells like success.
Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for pointing me to this one.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of current or past employers.


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In "Faith like a River," a Tapestry of Faith program
The best religionists are broad instead of bigoted, and they are open and compassionate and kind. In a town and in the world they build bridges more than walls or fences or moats.
—Dana McLean Greeley
Does your congregation already have a connection to one of the global Unitarian Universalist communities explored in this workshop? If so, find out more about the relationship and how you can become a part of it. Or, choose one of the Unitarian Universalist communities from Activity 3, or one of the international organizations from Alternate Activity 1, and investigate it. Is this an organization that you could individually support with your time, talent, or treasure or encourage your congregation to support?
Read about then-UUA president William Sinkford's 2008 pilgrimage to Africa, visiting some of Unitarian Universalist communities there. You can find photos, videos, and written reflections from the pilgrimage group on line.
For more information contact web @ uua.org.
This work is made possible by the generosity of individual donors and congregations. Please consider making a donation today.
Last updated on Wednesday, October 26, 2011.
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Tom Karst, National EditorThe headline could have been the title of a Marvel comic: "FDA's Team Tomato Fights Contamination."
Well not quite, perhaps. But Team Tomato does represent what passes for superheroes at the U.S. food safety regulatory agency.
The FDA's surprisingly jaunty article about such a sober topic actually contains quite a bit of insight into tomato safety research. Calling a fresh tomato "more than just a tasty addition to a sandwich or salad," the article said FDA scientists view the tomato as an "enigma."
"Enigma" seems another comic book-worthy term, perhaps prompting a vision of an elusive and stealthy villain. Yes, but the villain is salmonella, not the round red fruit of the vine.
Subsequent paragraphs in the article speak of the "mystery of the tomato" (its vulnerability to contamination by salmonella) and Team Tomato's efforts to reducing contamination early in tomato production.
The FDA's account noted that from 1973 to 2010, there were 15 multistate outbreaks of illnesses attributed to salmonella contamination of raw tomatoes, with 12 of these outbreaks taking place since 2000. Those outbreaks resulted in nearly 2,000 confirmed illnesses and three deaths, with East Coast states hardest hit.
The meat of the article speaks about research by FDA microbiologist Rebecca Bell, lead researcher on the tomato team. Bell said the work on an experimental farm at Virginia Tech's Agriculture and Research Extension Center has yielded promising results.
Collecting more than a thousand bacteria in the soil and water in search of a natural enemy of salmonella, Bell said researchers found one.
The name of the exalted bacterium is paenibacillus — the anti-salmonella bug could just as easily command respect as a comic book hero in its own right.
Bell said FDA will be working with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop an organic treatment containing paenibacillus that would kill salmonella and other harmful organisms.
The article talks about the efforts of Team Tomato to share their research with industry leaders, with an eye on developing "more effective and targeted agricultural practices that will improve the safety of fresh tomatoes."
The story notes that research into quality of water is a key factor in controlling salmonella, suggesting the importance of using clean water to irrigate at planting or when applying pesticides.


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Shift Your Habit
Today's giveaway is a copy of Shift Your Habit. The book has ideas of little changes to make to both save money and save the environment. Some of the areas covered in the book are home & garden, food & drink, kids, pets, work, electronics & entertainment and transportation & travel. There are some of the ideas on the Shift Your Habit website.
Check back each day thru Sunday, February 26 for more giveaways.
To enter the drawing leave a comment with your email thru midnight today. I will contact the winner to get their mailing address.
One Response to "Shift Your Habit"
09:12, 24.02.2012
This looks like a really interesting book! I checked out the website and there are some great and easy ideas that any family could incorporate into daily lives. I would love to read more of the ideas!


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Series | Countries | Live Scores | Fixtures | Results | News |
Photos | Video & Audio | Blogs | Statistics | Archive | Shop | Mobile |
Feb 14, 2012
South Africa rethink 'no sin' - Petersen
News: Alviro Petersen, South Africa's Test opening batsman, has defended his decision to turn his back on Glamorgan and has said it is "no sin" to want to play for South Africa.
Nov 13, 2009
Craig Kieswetter reiterates England desire
News: Craig Kieswetter, the Somerset wicketkeeper-batsman, has reiterated his commitment to qualifying for England after Graeme Smith said he wanted to bring him back to his native South Africa
Jun 11, 2008
Glamorgan's Kolpak-free future?
Opinion: Ivo Tennant looks at the Kolpak question, one that Glamorgan in particular is seeking to answer
Jun 7, 2008
News: If there's a clash in loyalty when the Champions League takes place, it has been agreed that IPL players will represent the domestic teams of their home countries
Jun 6, 2008
Vaughan joins in as Kolpak debate rages
News: The row over the number of Kolpak players in English cricket rumbles on
Jun 2, 2008
Giles slams 'serious' Kolpak situation
News: Ashley Giles has slammed counties who increasingly lean on Kolpak signings to boost their squads
May 30, 2008
News: The ECB is close to securing a concession from the European Union which could enable it to place restrictions on the number of Kolpak players
May 21, 2008
Christopher Martin-Jenkins: Leicestershire's avowed strategy is to build a core group of senior overseas pros as mentors for young English talent
May 21, 2008
Andre Adams joins Notts as Kolpak player
News: Andre Adams, the former New Zealand allrounder, has signed a two-year deal with Nottinghamshire as a Kolpak player
May 20, 2008
Derbyshire secure Hinds on Kolpak deal
News: Derbyshire have successfully signed Wavell Hinds as a Kolpak player after taking advantage of the ECB's weakening position towards trying to refuse registration
May 7, 2008
Christopher Martin-Jenkins: The idea of foreign players in county cricket is not intrinsically bad, but surely there have to be limits to the influx
May 7, 2008
Leicestershire push young England players
News: With a number of counties under attack for packing their sides with Kolpak players, David Smith, the Leicestershire chairman, has hit back
Apr 26, 2008
Langeveldt joins Derbyshire in Kolpak deal
News: Derbyshire have signed Charl Langeveldt, the South African fast bowler, on a two-year Kolpak contract
Apr 10, 2008
Gillespie, Bond and Marshall cleared for season
News: Shane Bond, Jason Gillespie and Hamish Marshall are among a raft of overseas players who been given clearance by the ECB to play in county cricket this season, ending weeks of speculation over whether they would be permitted to join after playing in the u
Apr 9, 2008
ECB faces legal action over player ban
News: It is reported that as many as eight players are ready to resort to legal action against the ECB
Apr 8, 2008
Derbyshire sign Telo on a Kolpak
News: Twenty-two year old South African batsman Dominic Telo has signed a two-year Kolpak contract with Derbyshire
Mar 10, 2008
Derbyshire prepare to lose Hinds
News: Derbyshire are bracing themselves for the loss of Wavell Hinds after he took his place in the latest Indian Cricket League event.
Mar 10, 2008
Leicestershire defend Kolpak signings
News: Leicestershire have defended their use of Kolpak players and insist they won't mean that young English cricketers will be kept out of the first team
Jan 23, 2008
Leicestershire chairman attacks county inequality
News: The chairman of Leicestershire, Neil Davidson, has hit out at the financial inequality affecting the future of English county cricket after compiling a damning report which highlights the massive divide within the game
Nov 29, 2007
Lancashire sign du Plessis for 2008
News: Lancashire have signed 23-year-old South African batsman Francois du Plessis on a six-month contract from April 2008


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Ten things to do for $10 this weekend, July 13-15, 2012
Since you're probably spending every extra dollar on the air- conditioning bill this month, it's hard to find money for fun stuff. Help is at hand, with this week's list of ten events you can participate in for under $10: art shows, meeting a punk legend, eating a pancake breakfast. So turn off the air-conditioning, get out of the house, and enjoy summer in Colorado. For a full roster of events, see the online Westword calendar.
See Also:
- Marczyk Fine Foods hosts a Burger Night benefit for wildlife relief
- Artist Chat closes out two installations at Ice Cube this weekend
- Q&A: Natasha Leggero on Playboy radio and horrifying pop culture
Eleven-Year Retrospective at Space Gallery (Friday, free)
There have been many, many artists who've displayed their work at Space Gallery over its eleven-year run, and they'll come together tonight at a benefit for the prolific art gallery. Every artist who's displayed work in the gallery was invited to create a twelve-by-twelve-inch panel of art to show and auction off tonight, and sixty responded. Come see the different styles that Space has hosted over the years, and bid on the pieces to raise money for the gallery's move to a new space.
Colorado Irish Festival at Clement Park (Friday-Sunday, free before 6 p.m. today)
Culture straight from the Emerald Isle will land in Denver for this festival, which celebrates all things Irish. If you make it before 6 p.m. tonight, all of the pipe dancing, music and tournaments of Irish hurling are free! After 6 p.m., tickets start at $10, but that's a small price for what promises to be a lively extravaganza filled with vendors, art and Irish culture.
Artist Chat at Ice Cube Gallery (Saturday, free)
Pick the brains of artists Jane McMahan and Regina V. Benson, who'll discuss the making of their installations Absence and Wading in, both closing this weekend. Not only is this your last chance to see some great work, but the official Artist Chat is also a way to get inside the artists's minds, to learn how they carried out their particular visions.
Night Drive at Beauty Bar (Saturday, free)
There can never be too many dance parties in this town. Beauty Bar's new offering, Night Drive, will be a great place to let your hair down tonight. On decks will be James Miles of Double//Shadow and Snake Rattle Rattle Snake and Shannon von Kelly of Neon Nights, so it's sure to be a great, sweaty night full of people shaking it all out.
Alice Bag at Wax Trax Records (Saturday, free)
Today offers a rare opportunity to see feminist punk activist Alice Bag in person. And not only can you experience the work of a legend, you can do so for free! Bag is known for her prolific music career as well as her autobiography Violence Girl, which she'll read from and sign at today's record-store show. With any luck, she may even play some music. Don't miss it.
Location Info
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Holman Christian Standard (CSB) | New International Version (NIV) |
5 Then [people from] Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the vicinity of the Jordan were flocking to him, | 5 People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. |
Holman Christian Standard Bible ® Copyright © 2003, 2002, 2000, 1999 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. (Holman Christian Standard Bible Online) | Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online) |


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Skin Care
Skin Care
Stella & Dot Introduces Skin-Care
Jessica Herrin, founder and chief executive officer of the company, will soon focus her attention above the neck.
— Jan 16, 2015
Prestige Skin Care Drivers
Big and small facial skin-care segments are on the rise, according to the NPD Group
— Jan 15, 2015
Who Will Partner on Burberry Skin Care?
The company has big dreams for its beauty and it's continuing to audition potential skin care partners.
— Jan 15, 2015
Neutrogena Transports Innovation From Asia to the U.S. Market
The launch of the Hydro Boost range marks the first time that the brand has brought over technology from Asia Pacific to the U.S. marketplace.
— Dec 23, 2014
Simple Skincare Makes a Case for Hydration
Predominantly, it's prestige skin care brands that are testing the market with water-based products, but now the mass sector is hopping on the H20 bandwagon.
— Dec 23, 2014
Estée Lauder Purchases Glamglow
This is the fourth brand Lauder's snapped up since October.
— Dec 19, 2014
Shen Beauty Expands its Brooklyn Footprint
Shen Beauty has opened its second shop, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
— Dec 3, 2014
Christie Brinkley to Launch Skin Care
The line will launch on HSN and hsn.com in early March, then will roll out into Kohl's 1,163 doors later that month.
— Nov 21, 2014
Patients Consult Dermatologists via New App
Klara, an app developed by German company Goderma that allows consumers to access a dermatologist via their mobile phone.
— Nov 20, 2014
Skincare Lab Launches Exfoliator
Los Angeles-based Skin Research Laboratories is introducing a skin polish, neuRadiance, $79, to the market Saturday.
— Oct 31, 2014
Estée Lauder Buys Rodin Olio Lusso
The acquisition marks the second deal this month for Lauder — the ink is effectively still drying on its agreement to buy indie fragrance brand Le Labo.
— Oct 31, 2014


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Use your computer to investigate anyone worldwide! - Not just bankruptcies, but all types of public and court records. You are given detailed, step-by-step instructions for conducting even the toughest and most complicated online investigations.
Visit the authorized retailer's own web site for COMPLETE INFO
Wyoming Counties Birth Certificate, Death Record, Marriage License .Wyoming County Vital Records Offices. Information for Wyoming:. Marriage & divorce records. genealogical resources; USGenWeb Archives Niobrara County.
Wyoming Birth Certificate, Death Record, Marriage license and .Index to Wyoming County Vital Records Offices. Marriage & divorce records. Clerk in the county where the divorce was granted or the license was issued..


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Return to Conservation Biology Research on Insects
Lane, C.P. 1992. The status of the karner blue butterfly (Lycaeides melissa samuelis: Lycaenidae) and its associated plant resources in Minnesota 1991. Final report submitted to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 39 pp.
In Minnesota, the state threatened Karner blue butterfly, Lycaeides melissa samuelis, is currently found in only one area in the southeastern portion of the state. A study was initiated to estimated population sizes and the distribution of the butterfly. Populations were found to be very low, with only 75 total individuals sighted. Since food resources are believed to be one of the limiting factors for Karner blue survival, the distribution and abundance of common lupine (Lupinus perennis), the sole larval food source, was also studied. The sites containing the butterfly did not vary significantly in their lupine cover, and the one site where Karner blues were not found had the significantly greatest lupine cover. Butterflies were found to be associated with areas with less than 5% canopy cover. This may be due to increased quantity or quality of the food resource in these areas.


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Security and Scalability
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- Confidential data, such as usernames and passwords, secured through an encrypted connection (using VeriSign 128 bit encryption).
- Users may employ our 'Secure Connection' feature; applying the VeriSign 128 bit encryption to the survey and the data it collects.
- Key Survey is an official licensee of the distinguished TRUSTe Privacy Seal Program and certified by the EU Safe Harbor Privacy Program, with endorsement to securely host consumer data from any country.
With Key Survey, you'll never have to worry about your platform being able to grow as your needs expand. Your subscription can grow as your business grows, so it is always ready to meet the demand - at your pace.
From single user to unlimited Enterprise, WorldAPP can meet any user count and throughput - thousands, or even millions of respondents. Whether you're running Key Survey internally or on our hosted servers, there is virtually no limit to how many users, how many surveys, or how many respondents you can handle.
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Although the current Mini continues the "made in England" tradition of the original BMC model, increased demand for the current car -- along with forthcoming new models -- may mean some productioncould occur within Germany.
BMW -- Mini's corporate parent -- has already confirmed that the Roadster and Coupe models shown as concepts at the 2009 Frankfurt motor show will become production models in the next few years. Coupled with a crossover set to launch in 2011, the new models will deplete the current assembly plant in Oxford, England, of any extra capacity.
Rather than tax the already busy plant (it's built more than 1 million Minis since 2001), BMW will likely shift some production to a facility in Regensburg, Germany. The location is approximately an hour north of BMW's world headquarters and Munich, and currently builds 1- and 3-series cars. In addition to the extra production volume, building Minis in Germany will also help BMW offset currency fluctuations, becauseEngland has yet to adopt the Euro as a standard currency.
Source: The Independant