Congratulations to Kamal. He successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Performance tuning of MapReduce programs,” this week.
Author Archives: Vince
Bad luck
Robert A. Heinlein once wrote:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck.’
You don’t own that car
A modern car only runs because of the software. GM has copyright on the software. They contend that the owner of the car only has a license to make use of the software. If they or some they hire (like an independent mechanic) tinkers with the software it is breaking the law. This doesn’t look good. The courts agree with GM, it will raise the cost of cars and reduce choice. Read more here.
College debt and salaries
Scott Adams sums up the higher-ed bubble in three panels. (Go to the source.)
CLOUD 2015
Congratulations to Kamal. He had two papers accepted to CLOUD 2015. “Dynamically controlling node-level parallelism in Hadoop” describes an online mechanism that adapts the node-level parallelism to improve performance up to 28% over best practices. The second paper “Evaluation of MapReduce in a large cluster” discussion our experiences with Pivot’s Analytic Workbench, a 500+ node Hadoop cluster.
The acceptance rate at CLOUD 2015 was 14%, which is 2% for two papers (OK-that isn’t quite how it works).