Facebooks Insatiable Hunger for Hardware
Facebook’s Insatiable Hunger for Hardware
Facebook these days is doing everything in its power to imitate Google, recruiting the search giant’s sales people, poaching its senior executives and — most importantly — using infrastructure as a competitive advantage. Like Google, Facebook has figured out that the right web infrastructure is the difference between user delight and dismay. And like Google, Facebook is finding out that it isn’t cheap.
I’ve been trying to get a handle on Facebook’s infrastructure for some time, but so far have been unable to get the company to open up. The last time I reached out to them, back in January, I was hearing that they had between 1,200 and 1,500 servers, along with storage and switches from EMC Corp. and Force 10 Networks respectively. As it turns out, those server numbers weren’t even close to the total servers used by them.
The company is running around 10,000 servers, according to Data Center Knowledge, citing comments made by Facebook VP of technology, Jeff Rothschild, at a recent MySQL user conference. (See video of the panel.) Of the 10,000 servers, 1,800 are from MySQL and around 805 of them are memcached servers. In order to house its sprawling infrastructure, Facebook has leased data center space from DuPont Fabros in Ashburn, Va., and Digital Realty Trust in Santa Clara, Calif., DCK reports.
Missing Dot Kills Two People
A Cellphone’s Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail
The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)
The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)
Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.
Porn filmed in Japanese McDonalds? I’m rubbin it!
Porn filmed in Japanese McDonald’s? I’m rubbin’ it!
McDonald’s customers suspected something amiss when one guy pulled out his whopper. They knew for sure when he began partaking of fur burger. The upshot was four people trying to make an adult movie in a fast food outlet ended up getting arrested, says Friday.
“They probably did something that stupid because they wanted to cut production costs,” the associate says.
“Putting the actress’s wages aside, 10 years ago most cheap adult movies had a budget of about 1 million yen, but now that figure is more likely to be 500,000 yen or, in really bad cases, only around 300,000 yen. If you’ve only got 300,000 yen to work with, there’ll be no room to book a studio or hotel room once you’ve rented the filming equipment and paid the guys’ wages. So that’s probably why they filmed in the fast food restaurant.”
You Walk Wrong
Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll around the city, worrying about the economy, or the environment, or your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling around the city.
Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.
Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.
The new face of hunger
Global food shortages have taken everyone by surprise. What is to be done?
“World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period,” says Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. To prove it, food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting “We’re hungry” forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt’s president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment. “It’s an explosive situation and threatens political stability,” worries Jean-Louis Billon, president of Côte d’Ivoire’s chamber of commerce.
Pigs force rethink on human history
Pigs force rethink on human history
The largest ever study into the ancestry of the humble domestic pig has unearthed a new evolutionary theory behind one of our most common farmyard animals.
Scientists from the University of Oxford’s Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre and the University of Durham have traced DNA from wild boar and domestic pigs revealing five brand new regions of domestication and a fascinating insight into early farming practices.
The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, is published in today’s edition of Science magazine (11 March) and reports that, in addition to new centres of domestication, and contrary to popular belief, European domestic pigs derive from wild boar native to Europe and not from wild boar indigenous to the Near East.
Eating Local Has Little Effect on Warming, Study Says
“Eating Local” Has Little Effect on Warming, Study Says
Being a “locavore” and eating foods grown near where you live may not help the environment as much as you might think, according a new study.
When it comes to global warming, focusing simply on where food comes from will make only a small difference, the study’s authors say.
On average, food racks up about 1,000 food miles (or 1,650 “food kilometers”) traveling from farms to processing or packaging plants before reaching Americans’ dinner plates, the study estimates.
Why Are So Many Fighting For Food?
Why Are So Many Fighting For Food?
Food prices are rising around the world. In an interview with ABC News, Gregory Barrow, senior public affairs officer at the World Food Program (WFP), said that “the WFP has identified a number of countries that have been badly affected, and we have identified a type of country that’s most likely to suffer from rising food prices.”
“”The kind of country to be worst-affected is a country which depends on importing its food to meet its people’s needs, it is likely to have witnessed dramatic inflation recently, and where individuals typically spend a significant portion of their income, i.e. 50 percent or more, on food.”
HAITI
The poorest country in the Americas, Haiti has seen some of the worst food-related riots in recent months, with protestors taking to the streets, burning tires and looting shops. As the vast majority of Haiti’s population struggles to get by on less than $2 a day, the rising prices of staple food items like rice and beans have left many Haitians angry with the government for not reducing taxes on foodstuffs.
Running Out of Planet to Exploit
Running Out of Planet to Exploit
Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.
In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”
Last week, oil hit $117.
Confessions of a Bionic Man
My life has changed even more than most: I have information technology inside my body. I’m deaf, having had rubella (German measles) before I was born. Fortunately, the damage wasn’t complete, so I was able to get by with hearing aids until 2001. Then my “good” ear abruptly quit working, for reasons that are still unknown. My hearing aids couldn’t help me anymore, just as glasses can’t help a blind person.
Now I have a cochlear implant in each ear. At first glance, they look like behind-the-ear hearing aids — but the technology is totally different. They digitize sound and broadcast the data through quarter-size radio transmitters. The transmitters are stuck to my head, behind my ears, using magnets…
My implants don’t aid my hearing. They create my hearing.