November 2008
12 posts
The Subprime Primer →
The US Financial meltdown as told by stick figures.
Tufte on the iPhone interface →
Google's commitment to sustainable computing →
“As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query.”
Numbers (software engineers) should know →
L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict 5 ns
L2 cache reference 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock 100 ns
Main memory reference 100 ns
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 10,000 ns
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns
Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns
Disk seek 10,000,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from network 10,000,000...
“By the way, a similar analysis indicates that election financing—all the...”
– Presidential Election 2008 FAQ, Peter Norvig’s great analysis of the 2008 US presidential election argues the amount spent on campaigning is a down right good deal. 