Google's Data Loss: The Corrolary. Ok - the news that has been making the rounds everywhich way since last night is Gmail's loss of data for 150,000 users.
At a glance, 150,000 seems like a large number, maybe it is. But lets take a look at the bigger reality and more importantly - the ratios, and the null hypothesis. Gmail has over 100 *MILLION* users. Lets round it to an even 100 to keep the math round. So what percentage of 100 million is 150,000? Or said another way (again keeping it 100 million to keep the math easy)... that means everyone is chewing Google's ass for *NOT* losing the data of 99,850,000 people!!! # of people who did NOT lose data: 99,850,000 # of people who did lose data: 150.000 Get the picture? They're acting like Cloud computing has completely failed - when in truth, if there was 0.15% loss of data, then conversely... there was a 99.85% RETENTION of data. And since there are MORE than 100 million users, the percentage lost is actually lower than I'm calculating here.
Gmail Glitch Wipes Out Archives from 150,000 Accounts (So Back Yours Up Already) Cloud Computing: Gmail Meltdown Casts Shadow on the Cloud. A Gmail disruption has resulted in tens of thousands of users losing their stored emails and contact information.
Google says it's working to restore access to those affected. Several notable crashes at Google and other services over the past couple of years may raise questions about the reliability of cloud services in general. Hundreds of thousands of Gmail users woke up Monday to find their emails had vanished and they had lost their contacts. Initial estimates put the number of people affected at between 150,000 and 500,000. Google's support forums are inundated with messages from angry users. The Internet giant indicates on its Apps Status Dashboard that service has been disrupted for Gmail, but that no other Google apps are affected. "We've had some big updates since initial reports," Google spokesperson Jessica Kositz told the E-Commerce Times.
Torpedoing the Global Village Google wouldn't say exactly how many people were affected. No Such Thing as a Free Lunch Size Matters. Google restores Gmail access to one-third of affected users. Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent - PCWorld. Your hard drive may not be as reliable as manufacturers would like you to think.
Recent studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Google suggest that vendor Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) ratings for hard drives are a bit misleading. The Carnegie Mellon study, conducted at several locations, found typical failure rates of 2 to 4 percent and a high of 13 percent, in contrast to the less than 1 percent you'd expect based on vendor MTTF ratings (see chart or click on the thumbnail image below). Google's study pegged the annual failure rate at about 3 percent.
Both studies were based on observations of approximately 100,000 drives, with Google looking at its own farm of consumer-grade disks and Carnegie Mellon examining both consumer-grade drives and the ostensibly more reliable enterprise variety; the latter have beefed-up actuator magnets, more-robust spindle motors, and advanced features such as rotational vibration safeguards.
Discussing the future and blogging. Intro ramble...
First off, PearlTrees (aren't you sick of this topic?) : After trying to plug it into my blog via an IFRAME tag to integrate my mind/sitemap into the blog, I discovered that it was really lacking in scalability or flexibility. The flash based client (that based on the the ability to download your tree is clearly based on RC3) has made me decide to investigate other solutions. While I appreciate the PearlTrees community - I went there because ultimately I wanted a mind/sitemap for my blog.
Ready Boost Concept. The Grande Turing Machine. ChromeOS.