Archive For January 31, 2008
Earlier today Microsoft, held an internal tribute to Jim Gray, celebrating his contributions to the industry and to each of us personally. It’s been just over a year since Jim last sailed out of San Francisco Harbor in Tenacious. He’s been missing since. Speakers at the tribute to Jim included Rich Rashid, Butler Lampson, Peter…
Founders at work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141) is a series of 32 interview with founders of well-known startups. Some have become very successful as independent companies such as Apple where Steve Wozniak was interviewed, Adobe Systems where Charles Geschke was interviewed, and Research in Motion where Mike Lazaridis was interviewed. Others were major successes through acquisition, including Mitch…
Exactly one year ago, Jim Gray guided his sailboat Tenacious out of San Francisco’s Gashouse Cove Marina into the Bay. He sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and continued towards the Faralon Islands, some 27 miles off the California coast line. Until that morning, I chatted with Jim via email or phone several days a…
If you are interested in boating, the Seattle Boat Show opened yesterday. Jennifer and I will be presenting on the red stage at 4:15 on Saturday February 2nd. Our presentation will be some of our favorite anchorages and cruising areas selected from Cruising the Secret Coast: Unexplored Anchorages on British Columbia’s Inside Passage which just…
A couple of weeks back I attended the Berkeley RAD Lab Retreat. At this retreat, the RAD Lab grad students present their projects and, as is typical of Berkeley retreats, the talks we’re quite good. It was held up at Lake Tahoe which was great for the skiers but also made for an interesting drive…
Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker posted an article worth reading yesterday titled: MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards (Thanks to Kevin Merrit and Sriram Krishnan for sending this one my way). Their general argument is that MapReduce isn’t better than current generation RDBMS which is certainly true in many dimensions and it isn’t a new invention…
The article below is a restricted version of what I view to be the next big thing. If I was doing a start-up today, it would be data analysis and optimization as a service. The ability to run real time optimization over an understandable programming platform for a multi-thousand node cluster is very valuable to…
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media spoke at Microsoft Research earlier today. It was a great, wide-ranging talk pounding through 103 slides roaming from social networking, through sensor and ambient computing, to Web2.0. Four themes for the talk: · Thoughts on social networking · Sensors and Ambient Computing · Web 2.0 and Wall Street · Open…
Many massively multi-player games have substantial parts of the game played and scored locally. The only way to get a sufficiently responsive gaming experience is to have the high speed game to player interactions local. Offloading some of the interactions from the server to the client is also an important way to reduce costs since…
It’s finally done! Back in August of 2006 Joe Hellerstein asked me to join him and Mike Stonebraker in producing an article for Foundations and Trends in Database Systems. The project ended up being bigger than I originally understood, and the review process always takes longer than any of us expect. The goal for the…
FusionIO has released specs and pricing data on their new NAND flash SSD: http://www.fusionio.com/products.html (Lintao Zhang of msft Research sent it my way). 100,000 IOPS, 700 MB/s sustained read, and 600 MB/s sustained write. Impressive numbers but let’s dig deeper. In what follows, I compare the specs of the FusionIO part with a “typical” SATA…