MetaFilter posts tagged with IT and technology

Two Google searches use as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea

nthdegx — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:39:25 -0800

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches - "Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea."

ARTISTdirect MediaDefender

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:16:35 -0800

Anti-Piracy agents MediaDefender have 700MiB of juicy internal emails leaked on BitTorrent; are in trouble.

India's Outsourcing Problems

PreacherTom — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 04:31:54 -0800

India's Outsourcing Problems One of the most controversial aspects of the global economy has been the newfound freedom of companies from physical location and the subsequent spread of outsourcing jobs. No country had embraced tech outsourcing with the passion of India. Of late, problems there are beginning to rise: engineers start a project, get a few months' experience, and then bolt for greener pastures, bringing a level of attrition that replaces entire staffs within the course of a year. Combine that with salaries in Bangalore that are rising at 12% to 14% per year and it is no surprise that companies are leaving India for a slew of emerging hot spots for IT outsourcing such as the old Soviet Bloc, China, and Vietnam. This comes as companies such as Microsoft continue to laud outsourcing and proudly proclaim that it is here to stay, and it looks as if Ho Chi Minh City will be the next Bangalore.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

daHIFI — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:50:31 -0800

Google's sorcery You use it, I use it some 30-40 times a day, but did you ever wonder exactly how they do it? The numbers are staggering:

# Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed. # Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster. # Over 30 clusters. # 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog. # One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue. # Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster. # An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters. # No complete system failure since February 2000.

Is Google God? (via /.)

New ideas through your headphones

turbodog — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:57:10 -0800

The IT Conversations motto is "New ideas through your headphones" and offers audio interviews with well-known technology personalities. Ever wonder what Craig Newmark's or Bram Cohen's voices sound like?

Personal information being sent abroad

homunculus — Sun, 09 Nov 2003 17:28:52 -0800

We need an "Information Technology Disclosure Act." The Programmer's Guild is pushing for the creation of legislation to require companies which outsource abroad to tell consumers when their sensitive personal information is being sent to companies in other countries. This aspect of outsourcing has gotten little attention, but the SF Chronicle's David Lazarus has reported on it being done by hospitals (like UCSF, which is being threatened over back pay by a transcriber in Pakistan), accountants, banks (BofA), telecom companies (SBC), and perhaps most alarmingly, two of the three major credit-reporting agencies.

sikander — Wed, 11 Jul 2001 20:54:28 -0800

WhatIs - Definitions for thousands of the most current IT-related words. Not everyone knows about this site. It is pretty helpful for a quick lookup for anything computer related.

Steven Den Beste — Mon, 19 Feb 2001 15:18:25 -0800

NSA has lost the techno war. It says. But do we believe them? Or is this merely intended to lull us into complacency?