March 2011
6 posts
Fukushima heroes
CNN writes:
The beleaguered crew had to abandon the plant control room Tuesday night because of high radiation levels, Kyodo News reported, citing plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company.
“Their situation is not great,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. “It’s pretty clear that they will be getting very...
Good shepherds
Michael Schuman, reporting for Time on how German managers pulled their companies through the “Great Recession”, writes:
Instead of laying off cherished staff, management deployed idled workers to new assignments. Bernhard Nick, a BASF president, believes the measures taken during the downturn kept the company primed to capitalize on the recovery. “It wasn’t just a...
A tiny glimpse of Gmail's backup infrastructure
This came as a bit of a surprise to me:
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.
I had really not...
Thunderbolt is a brilliant move
I think Intel’s new Thunderbolt protocol/adapter is a truly brilliant move on their part. It’s more than just a new adapter, yet there’s not really a new protocol, in the sense that you don’t get to (nor need to) see much of the protocol.
It sounds like the adapters will be practically invisible in the software layer: we’ll just see PCIe and some display devices....
Luis Villa: Other Ways to Slice Revenue Pies →
Try not to get your eyes locked onto the delicious pie photo, and scroll past it for the insightful stuff…