Social Media, Advertising, and Performance

I make computers fast.

These guys make social networks need more compute power!:

http://www.addthis.com/
http://freedns.afraid.org/

They are my heros.  :-)  Why be afraid?

-Todd

Does Google Pay for Non-security Fixes?

I have one for them.  It is a bug in Gmail running on Chrome running on Linux running on Intel.

If the bug causes me to lose money, which one will be liable?

-Todd

Reminder section:


- Send marketing idea (Q-drive for wikipedia) to the marketing guy at Q.

- Eventual consistency and GoDaddy.com.

- BLOG: Context Switching, Amdahl's Law, and How the Internet Made me More Efficient

- Brandon: A true crowd-sourcing idea.

- A new card game: I have to keep them all until I find a way to help them [make money].

- Why GoDaddy.com needs a computer engineer.

- Companies are entitified.  Entitify me.  Apply to be elected as word of the year!  That would look great on a resume!

COTS, Engineering, Politics, and Teachers

COTS:  Commodity, off-the-shelf (parts).

Engineers know what that means because they build things.  Scientists don't learn that until they start working for a company, unless they are involved in manufacturing (I'll guess).

Because engineers have not distinguished themselves from everyone else they (we?) have become a commodity.

Companies hire them (us?) and don't feel comfortable telling them (us?) everything we need to know to do our jobs.

When engineers started jumping between companies in Silicon Valley, they lost the trust of the companies for which they work.

Most of what you see above, I learned from teachers.

-Todd

p.s. The "politics" is built-in.  Read the above again.

The U.S. Presidential Debate According to Freud

Looking at the second Presidential debate at a higher level, the election is already decided.

If you watch it again and look at all of the slips, the people involved in the debate already think Romney is going to be elected.

The only question that remains is whether that is because they have been told that will happen or if they think that will happen.

-Todd

Knowledge is Power

From this BLOG post about storage capacity:

What else do you do with unlimited [computing] power?

The only thing needed to make the most powerful computer this guy is NOT complaining we have too much of is networking.

Doing a quick search for "Turing Test Networking" revealed this and digging a little led to this and then to this.

It continues to get more interesting the farther I go.

It Alan Turing the ghost in Princeton's machine?

The Bush Brothers are Pretty Smart

From here:

Currently, however, helium reserves in the U.S., which supplies 75% of world's annual demand for 6.2 billion cubic feet, are at an all-time low. Under current conditions, the largest U.S. reserve will only last another five to six years unless additional supplies are brought on line.

Interesting fact to tell your kids:

While helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, here on earth, most of it bleeds right through the atmosphere and into space.

From Wikipedia:

By 2007, the federal government was reported as auctioning off the Amarillo Helium Plant. The National Helium Reserve itself was reported as, "(S)lowly being drawn down and sold to private industry."^[4]

Of course, in order to figure out how smart they are, I'd have to find out who owns what, but I assume even the dumbest people don't miss a golden goose when it walks across their desk.  :-)

Engineering our Economy

Wow!  What a nice interface.

I'm watching a PBS-like talk about economics which was probably triggered by the U.S. Presidential debate earlier today.

I don't even know what side is which as far as the economists go.  I do know that if the very rich take too many of the world's resources, some people will hurt for it.  If not now, later when we start to run out of something.

Everybody seems to agree there are two absolutes:  death and taxes.

The solution:

Tie the tax rate to our willingness to invest.  If the tax rate is too high, people won't risk their money to pursue new things.  If it is too low, we end up with a big deficit and we can't pay for what we think is important, whether that is defense, education, vice, or health care.

Engineers call this a negative feedback system.  It is stable if the amount of feedback is tuned appropriately.  Here are the two sides of the control: (Stable-feedback rate regulation is a more palatable name.)

• If the income-equality gap is growing too large, tax more for free/assisted benefits for all.
• If high-income people are not willing to invest, lower taxes.

The obvious question here is, why have we not done this?  Answer: The feedback loop is several years in length, so we have not had a chance to experiment with this.  If we go back to a flat-tax system and set taxes at a point where our budget is balanced, we can see where we need to go from there.

Our current system is chaotic.  We need to rein in the chaos...but not too much.

-Todd