The New Mac Pro
I keep finding myself thinking about this new Mac Pro. It’s not that I’m lusting after speed of the memory, SSD, CPU, or GPUs for what I do. The more I think about this new Mac Pro the more I find myself wanting to write software for it. To me it’s become the most interesting piece of new hardware since the original iPad.
There’s only one CPU socket and it bets heavily on the bus and GPU performance.
One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell.
I keep finding myself thinking up applications for all that compute power and dreaming up what kind of software I could write to take advantage of it.
I don't know of any other consumer computing devices with a GPU dedicated to computation. It will be very interesting to see how app developers are able to take advantage of this. I suspect, in time, the Mac Pro will blow away more traditional architectures for tasks like video and audio editing as well as 3D rendering/CAD.
Opinion: Microsoft and Sony will eventually revert their game ownership policies, what matters is how
Microsoft fumbled the messaging, and its reversal on policy is the company taking a timeout to regroup on the sidelines. Many commentators were quick to begrudge the company for excising the few positive points of the original policy: the ability to share games with up to 10 family members; the freedom to maintain a game library in the cloud; and the ability to trade digital games, an option unavailable in any other digital marketplace.
The same goes for Sony, whose consumer camaraderie is merely the positioning of public opinion. If Polygon ran a blind items section, you'd have seen a post about a certain first-party executive overheard on the day of his console announcement making sweeping changes to business strategy.
A good article that provides a lot of insight into the situation. Two things jump out at me:
- Microsoft changed their policy for both disk and downloaded games. Why not treat them differently and give traditional users what they want from physical media while allowing digital sharing and trading for downloads? It seems they could have found a middle ground here.
- Apparently the decisions regarding DRM policy came down to the wire. This is believable in retrospect when considering how confused and unrefined Microsoft's communications were. Then the reversal, also a quick decision. With over 7 years to plan for the One, I would have thought this stuff was sent in stone a long time ago. All Sony had to do at E3 was not change and thing and they walked away looking like the good guys. I wonder what would have happened if Sony's E3 press conference was first...
Scaling Pinterest
When you push something to the limit all technologies fail in their own special way. This lead them to evaluate tool choices with a preference for tools that are: mature; really good and simple; well known and liked; well supported; consistently good performers; failure free as possible; free. Using these criteria they selected: MySQL, Solr, Memcache, and Redis. Cassandra and Mongo were dropped.
This point is related to what I found to be the most interesting topic: sharding vs. clustering. Pinterest heavily favors sharding and I think they make a few good arguments to support their case.
You can watch a video of the talk on InfoQ.
Principles of Software Engineering
Software engineering is a constant battle against uncertainty – uncertainty about your specs, uncertainty about your implementation, uncertainty about your dependencies, and uncertainty about your inputs.
I'd add to this that software engineering is helping users to find success in the face of all this uncertainty. I think this his true whether you are writing a UI or a library meant for other programmers.