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The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.
Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University.
First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!
We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.
Christmas is upon us, and like the geeks we are here at Pingdom, we couldn’t help but check out how our fellow geeks worldwide are handling their Christmas decorations. We found some very cool examples where people have put together über-geeky Christmas trees, wreaths and other decorations. And then of course there’s that Christmas tree network monitoring system…
Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here).
For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.
In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):
An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).
Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.
The Apple Mac market share has been reported to be around 8-9 percent and growing, but if this search volume graph from Google is any indication, the Mac market share is nothing compared to its mind share.
We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today.
For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself?
There are lots of vintage ad collections out there, and it’s always a fun to look through them. For your viewing pleasure, we have handpicked nine of the most fun, creative or just plain weird computer ads we have ever seen.
Inside you will find classic ads from Apple, Texas Instruments, IBM, BASF, Honeywell, Maxell and more.
We recently bought a bunch of new servers stacked with RAM and dual quad core CPUs. They will be used for backend processing of Pingdom’s monitoring data and some other tasks. We shipped them out to a data center in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to share some photos of the “event” [...]
