Comment Scott Kurtz has it... (Score 1) 374
... Does anyone know his BMI? He's a big lad (not as big as he used to be, but still large), and isn't swine flu meant to be more dangerous if your BMI is over 40?
Comment You gotta love the IT Crowd (Score 3, Funny) 380
Moss: Subject: Fire. Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
[deletes text, starts again] Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss.
[sigh of relief]
Comment Re:I'm confused (Score 2, Informative) 247
"with one nearly (because the crew got really, really lucky) catastrophic accident"
Actually, Apollo 1 went on fire on the launch pad, killing all three astronauts on board, so that makes one-and-a-half catastrophic accidents
Submission + - Dell Limerick to Close (ticktocktots.ie)
goodEvans writes: "Dell's manufacturing plant in Limerick, Ireland is to close with the loss of 1900 jobs (with potentially another 6000 in related industries). Production is being transferred to Poland. 1100 jobs will remain in Limerick as R&D. Dell has been in the area since 1990 and is Ireland's largest exporter, and second largest company."
eBay Makes Huge Gains In Parallel Efficiency 47
CurtMonash writes "Parallel Efficiency is a simple metric that divides the actual work your parallel CPUs do by the sum of their total capacity. If you can get your parallel efficiency up, it's like getting free servers, free floor space, and some free power as well. eBay reports that it amazed even itself by increasing overall PE from 50% to 80% in about 6 months — across tens of thousands of servers. The secret sauce was data warehouse-based analytics. I.e., eBay instrumented its own network to do minute-by-minute status checks, then crunched the resulting data to find bottlenecks that needed removing. Obviously, savings are in the many millions of dollars. eBay has been offering some glimpses into its analytic efforts this year, and the PE savings are one of the most concrete examples they're offering to validate all this analytic cleverness."
