16 March 2010
Distributed processing is great…until it isn’t. Similarly, distributing tasks among independent nodes allows us to scale up easily and to achieve greater reliability. However, these goals are often in conflict. The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the harder it is to maintain consistency between them, and the more critical it is that you get the networking element of the problem right. Strange emergent properties of the system may surprise you, and it seems to be a law that the consumption of drink scales O(log n) with the number of cooks.: from this nice piece by occasional FT pub-fancying commenter Alex the Yorkshire Ranter, likening cookery to computing and vice versa. (The ingredients can be found in the comments thread at this post on Unfogged, but the final salad of all the gags is smart as as it’s funny.)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 1 Comment
The first round in Group C left pop-soccer heavyweights England disappointed by a loss and in need of a good result in round 2. Conversely, Algeria won their opening game and are looking to press on to qualification. It’s an unexpectedly big match and the managers will have been thinking carefully about tactics. Won’t they?
Voting for this match ends at midnight on 22 March more »
Tim in FT • 13 Comments
15 March 2010
There’s no way around it: this is one of the classic David vs Gol-iath clashes which make these opening rounds such fun. Surely with the resources and tradition of the United States of America ranged against them, there is no hope for even the pluckiest Slovenian side? But this is world pop football, no easy games, anything can happen on the day with a sprinkling of cup stardust. Let’s wait and see.
Voting for this match ends at midnight on 21 March more »
Tim in FT • 12 Comments
12 March 2010
ok i ett this yesterday: had been swimmin w/dr vick near victoria park, and she was keen to check out the weird village-y bit of victoria park road — it comes across like dulwich village except without a not-as-good-as-it-thinks-it-is minor public school — ftb having tea and cake, and we found a bakery/caff called “loafing” (hoho DYS), and yes, it was the best SR i ever had = a fancy cuisine echo of the foodstuff recollected here!
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • No Comments
More action now from the group of draws, Group B. Greece ranked as outsiders ahead of the tournament, while Nigeria were hotly tipped in some quarters to go somewhere near All The Way. But the table doesn’t lie and they go into this game all square. Defeat may leave either team contemplating an early exit and no-one wants to go home too soon to their national equivalent of Del Amitri.
Voting for this match ends at midnight on 18 March more »
Tim in FT • 12 Comments
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER you love. You can interpret how strong an attachment you want “love” to be, of course.
The list of albums is from Acclaimed Music, a kind of ‘metacanon’ which lists the top 3000 albums.
To make it more interesting, answer these questions in the comments box:
1. What’s the WORST record on this list?
2. Which of the records you ticked did you love first?
3. Which of them did you start to love most recently?
Poll below the cut. more »
Tom in FT • 168 Comments
11 March 2010
The first round of games in Group B finished all square – draws all round. It’s a position to conjure with, as fancied outfits try to recover from the disappointments of points dropped, while outsiders find their confidence boosted by points unexpectedly gained. Anything could happen from here, but failure at this stage could be fatal for any of the four teams.
Voting for this match ends at midnight on 15 March more »
Tim in FT • 21 Comments
9 March 2010
Well this is going to be a titanic struggle, if either France or Mexico lose this one they’re on the first flight to face the brickbats (and possibly bricks) of the fans back home. Tom and Alex will both be hoping it’s not their head the press are calling for…
Voting for this match ends at midnight on 15 March.
more »
CarsmileSteve in FT • 23 Comments
8 March 2010
#590, 9th May 1987, video
Listening to this song you realise that at some point the idea that a rock record should sound like a bunch of people in the same place playing the same music at the same time was completely abandoned by record producers. Not in the name of experimentation, or expanding a record’s sound, but I guess just because that kind of verisimilitude didn’t seem relevant any more. In its way this even seems a more radical shift than genres like dub reggae or techno which were clearly studio constructs from the off.
This is a long way of saying that there’s something quite off about a song like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” more »
Tom in FT / Popular • 108 Comments
Hello there, due to Tom’s ridiculously busy life and burgeoning media profile (you’ve all read Shiny Shiny, right?), Tim and I will be taking over putting the PWC tracks up for the next few weeks.
We start the second round of matches with a scrap for group supremacy between South Africa and Uruguay. A win for either team here would almost guarantee them a place in the last sixteen, so Isabel and Jim will no doubt have been sweating over their seleção…
This match will end at midnight on March 14th* – for now, get voting.
*oops, gave you 8 days originally, will close on sunday night now more »
CarsmileSteve in FT • 21 Comments
« Older
Distributed processing is great…until it isn’t. Similarly, distributing tasks among independent nodes allows us to scale up easily and to achieve greater reliability. However, these goals are often in conflict. The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the harder it is to maintain consistency between them, and the more critical it is that you get the networking element of the problem right. Strange emergent properties of the system may surprise you, and it seems to be a law that the consumption of drink scales O(log n) with the number of cooks.: from this nice piece by occasional FT pub-fancying commenter Alex the Yorkshire Ranter, likening cookery to computing and vice versa. (The ingredients can be found in the comments thread at this post on Unfogged, but the final salad of all the gags is smart as as it’s funny.)