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Facebook shares some secrets on making MySQL scale — Cloud Computing News
When you’re storing every transaction for 800 million users and handling more than 60 million queries per second, your database environment had better be something special. Many readers might see these numbers and think NoSQL, but Facebook held a Tech Talk on Monday night explaining how it built a MySQL environment capable of handling everything the company needs in terms of scale, performance and availability. Over the summer, I reported on Michael Stonebraker’s stance that Facebook is trapped in a MySQL “fate worse than death” because of its reliance on an outdated database paired with a complex sharding and caching strategy (read the comments and this follow-up post for a bevy of opinions on the validity of Stonebraker’s stance on SQL). Facebook declined an official comment at the time, but last night’s night talk proved to me that Stonebraker (and I) might have been wrong. Keeping up with performance
Motherboard is a celebration of the diversity and eclecticism of the culture that surrounds technology. Rather than squinting at technology through the lens of gizmos and gadgetry, Motherboard explores the ways it influences and affects music, art, design, film, gaming, sports, issues surrounding the environment, and everything else we find important. So consider the floor open for group participation. It's simple: Get involved in an existing discussion, post your own related videos, write posts, comment, anything… you're now part of the Motherboard.
The End of Time... and Back | Motherboard
Less is the New More: Making the Most of Small Spaces : TreeHugger
Good Design For Living in Small Apartments As people migrate to smaller spaces, good design helps a lot. This is something they figured out in Europe long ago, that if you don't have a lot of horizontal room you can go vertical. Tumidei in Italy makes some of the nicest stuff, like this unit with lots of storage under the bed. This one looks a bit clinical, but has two single beds plus a pull-out double bed in between. When you read in the New York Times that professional couples with children are moving into small one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan and sleeping in closets, perhaps this stuff could be useful. None of this stuff is cheap, nor, as far as I can tell is it available in North America, but there are ideas here that demonstrate how people can share a space and still get a little privacy, a good place to work and a lot of storage in a very small envelope.
Video: Perhaps the Best HD View of Earth from Space Ever - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
I see a lot of footage of the Earth from space, and let's be honest, it's all pretty good. Our planet is beautiful from above and as cameras have improved, the views we get of the Earth from orbit get better, too. This particular video, though, is the best that I've seen.
Drawing on World Issues: These Make You Think
Known in some circles as the most amazing man in the universe, he once saved an entire family of muskrats from a sinking, fire engulfed steamboat while recovering from two broken arms relating to a botched no-chute wingsuit landing in North Korea. When not impressing people with his humbling humility, he can be found freelance writing, finding shiny objects on the internet, enjoying the company of much-appreciated friends and living out his nomadic nature. He is also Managing Editor of Visual News. Connect with him through Twitter or StumbleUpon .
Sergey Larenkov is a talented Russian photographer that took some old WWII pictures and combined them with perspective-matching photos that were taken nowadays. This simple technique brings awesome results by creating original time portals that help us to see the World War II from the different angle. Here you’ll see some absolutely legendary photos that are contextually mixed up with the present days captured in one single composition. At first it looks like WWII ghosts appeared at the streets of St.
Frightening Proximity of the Past WWII Photo Collages by Sergey Larenkov | Smashing Photography
Carl Sagan quotes
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. people The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices.
Kensho
It’s said that Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. He hypothesized that your answer to that question would determine your destiny. Surely death is the greatest threat that we all face.
That’s the astonishing claim of East German researchers who recently weighed more than 200 terminally ill patients just before, and immediately after, their deaths. In each case the weight loss was exactly the same–1/3,000th of an ounce. “The inescapable conclusion is that we have now confirmed the existence of the human soul and determined its weight,” Dr. Becker Mertens of Dresden said in a letter printed in the German science journal Horizon . “The challenge before us now is to figure out exactly what the soul is composed of”, he continued.
Weighing The Human Soul | Noetic Sciences - Noetic Science
The 50 Things Every Graphic Design Student Should Know - Jamie Wieck - Design, Illustration & Creative Thinking
My name is Jamie Wieck and I decided to write #The50 Things Every Creative Should Know ( #the50 ) when I realised I was not the first, nor the last student to fear the leap between art college and the creative industry. Inspired by my own, and my friend’s (sometimes rocky) experiences within the creative industry, #the50 addresses the most common concerns held by graduating creatives and aims to bridge the gap between art college and the professional world.