Learn & Tell

For the graphs below, I was most curious about PHP, MySQL, Java, and ASP.NET.

Found this graph of O’Reilly book sales:

And then did this search for job trends:

Java, as suspected, is clearly the winner in both categories. What I thought was interesting was that, in terms of book sales, PHP sales are more steady than Java books and are currently about half of what Java sales are. But if you look at job trends, Java is dominantly and consistently approximately four times as more prevalent. So based on these fairly off-the-cuff metrics, I would guess that there’s people out there learning PHP for their own purposes, their own startups (ie. digg is PHP), etc.

Make of it what you will. I like the numbers.

Two interesting and related articles I recently read that got me thinking about massive redundancy, power consumption, and the move toward less power-needy CPUs. The move toward more efficient CPUs means less focus on clock rate, which is a fundamental shift in the way we’ve looked at R&D for CPUs historically.

Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes
Source: Wired’s article on cloudware

And I’m sure this won’t seem like much in the near future. There’s a 1-terabyte hard drive coming out soon or possibly its already out and I’m behind the times yet again.

That’s one exciting thing about this field of technology: constant, 24 hour, ceaseless innovation and evolution. Just 20 years ago I had a Commodore 64. It was called a 64 because it had 64K of RAM. For a refresher course, after Kilobytes comes Megabytes, then Gigabytes (my MacBook hard drive now is 80GB), then Terabytes, then Petabytes (Google houses approximately 200 petabytes), then Exabytes. And I don’t even know (right now) what is after that, but I’m sure we’ll be there sooner than we think. So much information.

What delights me about so much information, so much data, is the chance to analyze the data for trends never before realized in the history of mankind. From the mundane (what time do most people watch videos of dogs skateboarding) to the more business-oriented intelligence (how many times does a person look at a product before they buy), this stuff is interestng. And, to get a bit more lofty, perhaps it reveals that as a global community, human beings aren’t all that different from one another. Same lumps of flesh with different nooks and crannies and variances, but basically the same computers in our skulls…

And this other article is about the dangers of data corruption. What would happen if Google lost its massive redundancy and lost all of that information? Sure, the web could be scoured again, sure this information is hidden elsewhere. But what about a massive power failure and critical hard drive corruption and, what the founder of CouchSurfing.com describes as “the perfect storm” of irretrievable data loss. Here is his letter of regret about how two negligent System Administrators managed to bring down a business with 90,000 registered users overnight:

TechCrunch DeadPool: Couchsurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down

Imagine if the web went down, even for a day. How would you look up a phone number? Find driving directions? Buy a new book? Read the news? I guess you’d have to go take a walk and tend to your garden.

Its fun to read about people who had a good idea and the passion to see it through. Here’s an article in BusinessWeek about the founder of digg.com and how he got where he is today:
Valley Boys

Mmm, more data. Take a look at this article, The State of the Blogosphere from David Sifry of Technorati.

There’s some very interesting graphs and charts to peruse. Especially interesting to me were these two:

This indicates that English is the dominant blogging language on the web, but that Japanese is a close second.

And this next one indicates that English speakers perhaps blog while at work, while Japanese are more likely to do so before or after work. Of course, this statement doesn’t take into account the likely large number of students who are blogging.

Read the article for more interesting data crunching.

The fact that ebay is not allowing meebome on its listings sounds a LOT like what they did against PayPal way back when. And PayPal fought long and hard and users liked PayPal better than the ebay payment system. Eventually, ebay just bought PayPal. But since ebay already owns Skype, and Skype is so well-established, do you think that ebay may also buy meebome? Maybe only if the meebome user base grows substantially to be a real competitor with Skype… The technology is reproducible…

• Link: eBay rejects Meebome, saying it is against policy

Oil company BP released their Q2 2006 earnings today. Amazing amounts of money:

[BP] posted a net profit of $7.3 billion for the three months to June 30, up from $5.6 billion a year earlier.

Here’s some math for ya:

• In one quarter, there are 2,184 hrs (3 months * 4.33 wks per month * 7 days per week * 24 hrs per day)
• So, with a profit of $7,350,000,000, that means that BP was making a profit of $3,365,384.62 per hour

$3.37 million per hour profit! Not too shabby.