Tag: google

Apollo 11

Those guys didn’t move around very much at all

2009-07-14: Remembering Apollo 11

40 years ago, 3 human beings – with the help of many 1000s of others – left our planet on a successful journey to our Moon, setting foot on another world for the first time. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. aboard. The entire trip lasted only 8 days, the time spent on the surface was less than 1 day, the entire time spent walking on the moon, a mere 2.5 hours – but they were surely historic hours. Scientific experiments were deployed (at least 1 still in use today), samples were collected, and photographs were taken to document the entire journey. Collected here are 40 images from that journey 40 years ago, when, in the words of astronaut Buzz Aldrin: “In this 1 moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind”.


2009-07-24: Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages

May the high courage and the technical genius which made this achievement possible be so used in the future that mankind will live in a universe in which peace, self expression, and the chance of a dangerous adventure are available to all.

2019-06-14: The Biggest Nonmilitary Effort in History

The Apollo computers had a total of 73kb of memory. If you get an email with the morning headlines from your local newspaper, it takes up more space than 73kb. … They hired seamstresses. … Every wire had to be right. Because if you got it wrong, the computer program didn’t work. Even on John Glenn’s famous orbital flight — the first US orbital flight — the computers in mission control stopped working for 3 minutes out of 4 hours. Well, that’s only 3 minutes out of 4 hours, but that was the most important computer in the world during that 4 hours and they couldn’t keep it going during the entire orbital mission of John Glenn.

2019-07-19: Margaret Hamilton tribute

With the anniversary of that moon landing approaching, Google set out to shine a light on Margaret’s influence on Apollo, and on the field of software engineering itself. The tribute was created by positioning over 107K mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 3.6-km2 portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.

Working At Google

# 10: The amazingly fantastic food and impressive digs.
# 9: “Micro Efficiencies”.
# 8: A company that truly cares.
# 7: Brain expansion opportunities.
# 6: The sheer amount of brilliant Google employees.
# 5: Empowerment (The big small company).
# 4: The scale of your impact.
# 3: Doing Good: Green & .org
# 2: It’s a happening place. The energy, the vibe, the passion.
# 1: The brand.

not a bad summary. i concur (mostly)

Socal Wildfires

On Tuesday, we saw a huge increase in traffic on Google Maps. The traffic spike was so large that our servers thought they were being DoS attacked. It turned out that the additional traffic was due to 100Ks of people constantly refreshing maps about the terrible wildfires in Southern California. Several news outlets and individuals had used the My Maps feature to create maps that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations. (For those of you who haven’t been reading US news, these wildfires scorched 2K km2 of land and caused 1M people to be evacuated from their homes)

the wildfires, behind the scenes

Social Graph API

Google’s announcement today of the Social Graph API is a major step in the development of what I’ve called “the Internet Operating System.” In a nutshell, what the Social Graph API does is to lower the barrier to re-use of information that people publish about themselves on the web. It’s the next step towards the vision that Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon outlined in Thoughts on the Social Graph.

i have had a FOAF profile since 2003. now it is finally useful for something.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web – linking. Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The 2 standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know. Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

bradfitz++

Dataviz Google Gadgets

Google probably intends to use this technology to visualize custom data. One of the interfaces that will allow you create your own Trendalyzer visualizations is an iGoogle gadget which creates a Flash multi dimensional chart. Another gadget creates an interactive table that supports filtering and grouping, the simple table gadget lets you perform queries, while the heat map gadget “displays a map with color intensities that match given values”. There are also gadgets for pie charts, column charts, bar charts, area charts, image lines, scatter charts, organizational charts, time series.

what is the story here? these would be quite useful if documented properly

MapReduce commentary

It is exciting to see a much larger community engaged in the design and implementation of scalable query processing techniques. We, however, assert that they should not overlook the lessons of more than 40 years of database technology — in particular the many advantages that a data model, physical and logical data independence, and a declarative query language, such as SQL, bring to the design, implementation, and maintenance of application programs. Moreover, computer science communities tend to be insular and do not read the literature of other communities. We would encourage the wider community to examine the parallel DBMS literature of the last 25 years. Last, before MapReduce can measure up to modern DBMSs, there is a large collection of unmet features and required tools that must be added.

We fully understand that database systems are not without their problems. The database community recognizes that database systems are too “hard” to use and is working to solve this problem. The database community can also learn something valuable from the excellent fault-tolerance that MapReduce provides its applications. Finally we note that some database researchers are beginning to explore using the MapReduce framework as the basis for building scalable database systems.

wherein mr. stonebraker disses mapreduce