Posts with keyword: engineering

4 entries

Pricing Bulk Cold Storage and Real Engineering

Mon Jan 5 08:26:00 2009

Image by penguincakes via Flickr James Hamilton has put together an analysis of the cost of bulk cold storage. That is, the cost of storing data, including the fully burdened cost of power in a data center, without the associated transport fees. The answer: $0.80/GB/year. Wow--that's cheap. And of course it's getting cheaper. When James did a similar analysis using numbers from two years ago, the cost was $2.50/GB/year. One thought I had as I looked at James' analysis is that we don't teach enough people to do these kinds of calculations. Not that there's anything particularly difficult about
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Infrastructure Automation Increases Operational Efficiency

Sat Dec 27 15:59:00 2008

Last week Jeff Atwood wrote a piece about why throwing hardware at a problem makes sense in some situations. He's careful to avoid the trap of thinking that throwing hardware at a poorly designed program will do more than buy you a little time, but makes a good point: Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you're provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to. From Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are ExpensiveReferenced Sat Dec 27 2008 15:42:36 GMT-0700 (MST) Riffing on that, Gordon Weakliem makes a related and somewhat
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Good Succeeds by Creating Useful Products

Mon Nov 24 07:06:00 2008

An old friend from Excite@Home, Jeff Huber was quoted in the NY Times on Google's product marketing strategy and the issue of data privacy: "We do have a philosophy that our products should speak for themselves. We tend not to make a lot of noise," said Jeff Huber, senior vice president for engineering at Google. As always with Google, the price point is appealing: zero, if you don't count the amount of personal data that I am trading for all that utility. With Google, it is always simple, and any engineer will tell you that simple
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Google's Golden Rules for Effective Technical Teams

Wed Dec 7 21:12:00 2005

Hey! It's Google Day at Technometria. Not really, but this was still interesting. Google's Eric Schmidt and UC Berkeley's Hal Varian list ten "golden rules" that Google tries to follow: Hire by committee. Cater to their every need. Pack them in. Make coordination easy. Eat your own dog food. Encourage creativity. Strive to reach consensus. Don't be evil. Data drive decisions. Communicate effectively. The goal is to be a good place for knowledge workers. They start by talking about Drucker: At google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers."
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