> Juggling which banks are open and closed has been traditionally a CPU's memory controller job. But communicating this information over a many-cm long PCB trace incurs latency. So it makes more sense to put this logic as close to the RAM as possible (speed of light, capacitance, inductance, etc. etc. slow down the signal).
The problem with this is that putting 'complex control logic' on the DIMM inevitably brings up the cost of a component which has a shorter lifespan than the CPU. In many applications, the RAM DIMMs are almost a 'consumable resource', in the sense that they are expected to be regularly replaced as heavy read/write cycles lead to their deterioration and eventual demise.
I understand where you're coming from as I've worked both in and outside of SV (Amazon isn't in SV but shares the culture). Though it may look like they're asking for a lot, it has to do with the demanding nature of the jobs they're working.
To answer your question about being woke up in the middle of the night, there is no such thing as a "shift". Most of us are expected to work at the very least 60 hour work weeks (no additional pay, everyone is salaried), with many jobs beings 'always on', extending our work into nights and weekends with take home laptops. A typical (though not universal) day at Amazon is like follows:
- Wake up and open laptop to check emails and get some work in.
- Shower, eat, etc. before going into work.
- Work until around 7-8pm.
- Come home and eat, then open up laptop to work (maybe with the tv on in the background) up until going to bed.
Waking hours are pretty much consumed by work, and on weekends a lot of people will do a couple hours here and there and between other things, to stay current with issues.
If people in SV look like they're asking for a lot or getting upset over petty things, it's because of the sheer soul sucking amount of work that's being imposed on them. Small conveniences like a catered cafe makes the difference in helping them work through it.
That culture sounds depressing. Not all companies (in and out of SV) work like that. The good thing is that you likely have a skill in high demand and can find a company with a better work culture. There are definitely many that value work/life balance and still pay well.
It's definitely not an ideal life, but seems to be increasingly the norm among individual contributor positions at the big guys (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc). What's more is that on paper, these same companies espouse 'work-life' balance, while those who try to leave there laptops at work after hours end up on probation like the individual in this article.
What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?
When you say "check emails", can you describe the typical task that would be assigned to employee?
I ask because it all seems very vague as to what the employees actually do. Are they all software engineers? Customer service? Which ones are overworked?
I specifically kept it vague for reasons of anonymity, as these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past, and also due to the fact that what I described was work habits of people I talk to across different engineering roles (software, hardware, infrastructure) in the company I work for.
You can work less than 60 hours, but it will show in your output, as deadlines are aggressive and set tops down.
Examples of the kind of thing someone is answering emails in the early morning for is bugs discovered in your code, a regression that's failing, or something found that's blocking another coworkers' progress (since they were working late into the night as well).
> What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?
It's not so much the type of work, but other factors like volume, availability and perceived engagement. Even if you were capable of getting done in 20 hours what takes 60 hours for someone else you'd be expected to be available to help the team or respond to issues. Often times, in these types of environments you'll be expected to reply to issues quickly, respond to managers/leads if there's a question and these will arise at any moment within those 60 work hours, because even though you finished "your tasks" the team is still working to finish theirs and you're expected to be around "adding value".
As regards to the "checks emails", the task can literally be anything: a question regarding code, a response to an inquiry, a prompt for a decision on some topic, or a request for information that's needed ASAP. I've seen organizations that track the time taken to get a reply to these emails and they keep track in Excel sheets the average response time from individuals and their number of responses.
For example, I've also seen people get reported to management for taking a nap during their lunch break, even though they had finished their assigned task. The details of the tasks become irrelevant in those types of toxic environments.
Can you elaborate on what impact they had? The vikings reaching North America early is pretty neat, but doesn't seem to have changed the course of history much. Their colonies West of Greenland were pretty much failures, as they were systematically unable to compete with natives for resources. They were eventually pushed back east by skirmishes with the Thule and harsh, underprovisioned winters.
There were many stories about islands or land to the west.
Saint Brendan’s Isle would have been on many maps in Columbus's time, with Irish legends about it. Some of the other phantom islands from that era include Hy-Brasil, the Isle of Mam, Royllo, Satanazes, and Antillia.
> under the Spanish flag of Ferdinand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus set out on his historic journey to Asia, citing the island as the perfect halfway house by the authority of Paul Toscanelli.[45] Columbus had supposedly gained charts and descriptions from a Spanish navigator, who had "sojourned... and died also" at Columbus's home in Madeira, after having made landfall on Antillia.[46]
I am not saying that there could not have been influence from the Norse sagas, only that other (incorrect) geographical descriptions appear to have had a stronger and more documented influence on his decision.
That's fascinating, thanks for the link. Just to provide a little more support for the admittedly weaker argument I made earlier: the knowledge of the lands discovered by the Norse was extensively recorded by Catholic priests, and their works were read for centuries in Europe.
and Christopher Columbus, as a literate Catholic, could conveivably have had access to this knowledge. The Catholic Church may very well have had an interest in these lands as potential places to spread its faith to. The Church even had a bishop in the Norse colonies in Finland.
But yes, clearly the legends you mention were much more prominent in the public consciousness of the time.
Very little impact on the present that I can think of (beyond Greenland's relationship to Denmark)
But the Greenland colony was inhabited by a few thousand people and lasted a few hundred years. Further more, the events around it are recorded in sagas that have survived to this day. Likewise the impact on the presumably hundreds of lives that we involved in the North American landings.
Anything that affects thousands of lives for hundreds of years is a big deal.
Please no. That's exactly the type of suggestion I would expect to see a startup looking to do things "differently" to get attention, without bringing any really value to the overall system.
Bear in mind encoding data into the block chain is a pretty stupid thing to do, practically speaking. No mainstream Bitcoin software/wallets have a file extraction feature, so you end up needing to download a special app designed to download that specific file. At which point, you may as well have just downloaded the file as well. Absence of the special file-downloader-file is proof that you are not willingly engaged in illegal conduct of any kind.
The article is pretty shallow in the sense that it just casually glosses over a few key characteristics that make the server/datacenter space an interesting battlefield for the current round of architecture wars.
It will be an interesting next couple of years. Intel didn't sit on their hands with this one, like they did with the mobile market. They saw the potential for ARM SoCs, using a large number of smaller/lighter cores to take market share in things like simple web servers or hosting static data. Their response was their Atom based "Centerton" which is cannibalizing their own Xeon line.
As for more CPU performance intensive tasks, ARM has yet to prove itself in the performance/watt arena, especially in the 64-bit realm of server features, like error correcting code or RAS. Most sys admins building infrastructure like to play things safe, since they have to live with their decisions for years.
It seems like ARMs biggest advantage will be price, and the SoC business model of custom tailoring silicon for a customer's needs.
The problem with this is that putting 'complex control logic' on the DIMM inevitably brings up the cost of a component which has a shorter lifespan than the CPU. In many applications, the RAM DIMMs are almost a 'consumable resource', in the sense that they are expected to be regularly replaced as heavy read/write cycles lead to their deterioration and eventual demise.