The perfect storm is coming, Wall Street CEOs have been dumping their own stock holdings at unheard of ratios, they know what is going to be happening.

Citation please. When I tried googling for evidence it appears to be a recurring story over the past few years.

Internally, the user-facing side of Facebook is in PHP. But the front end machines don't talk directly to the databases. They use an RPC system to talk to other machines that do the "business logic" parts of the system. Building a Facebook reply page may involve a hundred machines. There's heavy caching all over the system, of course, so the databases aren't hit for most read requests.

The RPC system isn't HTML, JSON, or SOAP. It's a binary system that doesn't require text parsing. Otherwise, RPC would be the bottleneck.

Um, if a single reply page involves a hundred machines, I don't think the RPC mechanism is the root cause of their problem.

There was a similar article yesterday.

Changes in major air currents year over year (things like El Nino, for instance) can change the length of the day by close to a millisecond: hundreds of times more than this little earthquake.

Or when a couple of little buildings get knocked over by planes.

If not, you need to *first* load it on one mode of transport (typically some kind of car) -then- drive to the nearest "station" where the goods are repackaged, then near the destination, repeat.

This is pretty much what happens with the postal service. Large lorries are used for the large distances, depot to depot, and small vans take the parcels from depot to final destination. All we are suggesting is replacing the depot to depot part.

I've often wondered why we don't create a national infrastructure of underground pipes for the transportation of the reasonably small stuff that constitutes the majority of cargo. No wind resistance, no eyesore. Googled and found this brochure for it!

When I think to my childhood I actually remember large parts of it, especially extremely good or bad events. This is independent of whether pictures exist from that event. Where pictures exist, they tend to colour my memory, and in many cases change it (events which I KNOW weren't fully positive, but the single picture from the event shows something enjoyable happening and everyone smiling). Pictures LIE, and they change how you remember. Taking them also changes how you experience life. Live a little.

Yeah man. My Mum died recently, my Dad died a long time ago. I have hardly any photos of us as a family when I was a kid. No video at all. And my memory has always been poor. I would love to see more old photos of when we were kids.

Never mind PCs, how about adding some support for small living rooms? Here in the UK a lot of us just don't have the space required, something I wish I'd researched before buying it.

Hey, even Apple don't bother testing their iPhone alarm software so good luck convincing your owner!

Kids have the science gene first, that causes the emotional response to such films. Science is about thinking about how stuff works, it doesn't need any external catalysts to kick it off. (Preaching to the converted here I know bit hey).

Mind you, hoping the cricket highlights tomorrow morning will inspire my little boy :)

Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus. One then has to take the limit to infinity of the resulting series, which may or may not be doable for a high school kid (not sure how hard the limit is; I'm too lazy to solve / look up the series)

Or you could just look up the answer on Wikipedia. Which is probably what the creators did when they were trying to come up with an alternative way of writing Pi.

BTW how did they find the factorials for such a big number?

Almost all application software is effectively single threaded: either there is an explicit single execution path or the app has attempted threading but the threads depend on a core path that is single threaded.

That's quite a bizarre claim. I've looked at hundreds of Java dumps from hundreds of different customers and the vast majority are doing multithreading on a massive scale with no issues. If there is contention it's usually pretty obvious from the dump.

I can only assume that your company's software is quite poorly designed from a threading perspective.

Yep. For those that haven't tried it without the patch, a multithreaded kernel compile will typically peg a modern multicore CPU at 100% and will even give you drunken mouse syndrome. Just being able to scroll around a browser window while doing a lengthy make -j64 is impressive. Being able to watch 1080p video smoothly is ... astounding.

For an OS that has been around for nearly 20 years and has had thousands of very bright programmers poring over it, it's quite astounding that only now has someone finally figured out how to let gui-related activity have top priority.

Wait until he puts his robot hydraulic foot on an IED.