Author Archives: Stanford

Why I am a Google Fanboy….

Here is a breakdown of what happened yesterday (1/24/14) with Google.

The issue has been resolved, and we’re now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn’t happen again. If you’re interested in the technical explanation for what occurred and how it was fixed, read on.

At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored.

via Googleblog

 

Wikipedia for our new overlords !

European scientists from six institutes and two universities have developed an online platform where robots can learn new skills from each other worldwide — a kind of “Wikipedia for robots.”

The objective is to help develop robots better at helping elders with caring and household tasks.

“The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task”, says René van de Molengraft, TU/e researcher and RoboEarth project leader.

“RoboEarth simply lets robots learn new tasks and situations from each other. All their knowledge and experience are shared worldwide on a central, online database.”

via KurzweilAI.net

 

Why Officemax in St. Thomas is on it’s way to closing shop…..

I bought some new monitors over the weekend from Officemax and for my configuration I needed a 10ft DVI extension cable.  So I returned to Officemax and almost keeled over when I saw that they had it for $82 !!!

Then I went online and found that they sell it on their website for $65.  Just out of curiosity I checked Amazon and they have it for $20 !!!

Officemax in the VI ….  What the hell ?!

Notes :

Belkin DVI Replacement Cable, 10 ft.