There’s an excellent book called How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen. It’s an hilarious account of some of the truely crazy things that many influential figures, such as politicians, believe in. The fundamental aim of the book is not to be funny however, it is to highlight a disturbing modern trend: A rejection of the values of the Age of Enlightenment in favour of those of Postmodernism. Or to put it another way, a rejection of logic, reason and an evidence-based scientific method in favour of evasive, subjective attempts to pretend that every idea is of equal worth. (Great! says the postmodernist. We’re free of the tyranny of absolutism! Shite! says I. Now I can’t tell the good stuff from the bad.)
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Even though there’s no evidence that in 1943 IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, this remark is attributed to him. And a recent CNET News article talks about Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos’ similar view, even though the scale of the computing power in Papadopoulos’ vision is very different from the scale in the original quote. So in his interview, Papadopoulos talks about five or six hyperscale computing centers, such as Google, eBay, etc. To appreciate the scale of computing better, the interviewer even mentions that eBay runs 8,000 or so computers. Wow! That’s a lot, right? At that scale, it’s certain that we’re only going to have 5 hyperscale computers. Ever!
Well… I don’t think so. And I don’t think that we need to wait 60 years to laugh at that statement. Because, there’s a huge industry that is rapidly growing and that is not mentioned in this interview: The gaming/entertainment industry. Let me explain:
I don’t play video games and we definitely don’t develop any in DSI :). Like most of my generation (and worst in the younger generation I guess :)) I happen to have an addictive personality towards video gaming. When I start to play (I love role-playing games) I just forget about anything else and 5 real hours become 20 minutes in the dimension that I’m in. Anyway, you get the picture. However my brother is a hard-core gamer and he’s into Warcraft these days (and believe me, it’s nothing like the first Warcraft I used to play 12 years ago). He’s paying a monthly subscription to play with other users all around the world. Do you know how many of them there are out there? A blog entry published in September 2006 claims that the game hit 7 million users and it is running on more than 9,000 servers. Hmmm… If eBay is impressive with their 8,000 servers, Blizzard is more impressive with their 9,000 servers. That makes the sixth computer already. 
Even though I don’t follow the gaming industry closely, it’s only a matter of time that more and more MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) become like Warcraft. Therefore it’s only a matter of time that the theory of only having 5 hyperscale computers becomes laughable.
- Yagiz Erkan -
Technorati Tags: IBM, Sun Microsystems, Greg Papadopoulos, hyperscale, Warcraft, Blizzard, MMORPG, Warcraft
Something’s been bothering me for a while. According to what I’ve read, lots of folks out there seem to be releasing their Continuous Integration builds. A lot of tools even seem to have this notion built in. For a while now I’ve been assuming that sooner or later we’ll switch to doing things this way, but now that I come round to giving it some proper thought, I’m not convinced it’s the right thing to do. Maybe someone out there will change my mind on this one.
Continue reading ‘Continuous Integration Builds Are Not Good Release Builds’
Technorati Tags: Continuous Integration
