Sexy Jihad

This posting has a nice listing of North Korean anti US propaganda posters. Nice style, very kitsch.

Well, to keep a long story short: it doesn’t. While I am not a fan of myspace (pick a reason):

1. it’s an ugly bitch
2. it doesn’t adhere to web standards
3. it’s badly designed technically
4. it has a horrible interface
5. all morons and attention seekers seem to be perpetually drawn to it

I could go on and on, but that isn’t the point of this posting. Baselinemag has written a comprehensive analysis of how myspace actually works and how it has scaled since it’s grown. To me it’s mostly an example of how NOT to design a website:

Booming traffic demands put a constant stress on the social network’s computing infrastructure. Yet, MySpace developers have repeatedly redesigned the Web site software, database and storage systems in an attempt to keep pace with exploding growth - the site now handles almost 40 billion page views a month. Most corporate Web sites will never have to bear more than a small fraction of the traffic MySpace handles, but anyone seeking to reach the mass market online can learn from its experience.

……..

Benedetto candidly admits that 100% reliability is not necessarily his top priority. “That’s one of the benefits of not being a bank, of being a free service,” he says.
In other words, on MySpace the occasional glitch might mean the Web site loses track of someone’s latest profile update, but it doesn’t mean the site has lost track of that person’s money. “That’s one of the keys to the Web site’s performance, knowing that we can accept some loss of data,” Benedetto says. So, MySpace has configured SQL Server to extend the time between the “checkpoints” operations it uses to permanently record updates to disk storage—even at the risk of losing anywhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours of data—because this tweak makes the database run faster.

Similarly, Benedetto’s developers still often go through the whole process of idea, coding, testing and deployment in a matter of hours, he says. That raises the risk of introducing software bugs, but it allows them to introduce new features quickly. And because it’s virtually impossible to do realistic load testing on this scale, the testing that they do perform is typically targeted at a subset of live users on the Web site who become unwitting guinea pigs for a new feature or tweak to the software, he explains.

“We made a lot of mistakes,” Benedetto says. “But in the end, I think we ended up doing more right than we did wrong.”

Econbrowser has generated a cool map & analysis of world wealth distribution by multiplying GDP per capita by the number of people per square kilometer:

A paper by John Gallup, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Mellinger in the International Regional Science Review in 1999 introduced the concept of “GDP density”, calculated by multiplying GDP per capita by the number of people per square kilometer. Basically GDP density is a measure of the total amount of economic activity that takes place at different spots on our globe.

……

Economists often try to explain differences in income across countries by factors such as the capital stock, education level, and institutions defining property rights, all of which the government could influence with appropriate policies. But when you look at pictures like these, you can’t help but be struck that there appear to be other very important and purely physical determinants of GDP. Economic activity clearly is much more intense near oceans, or, if inland, along navigable rivers where transportation by ship is feasible. Temperate climates with adequate rainfall also seem to be extremely important, perhaps for productivity of agriculture as well as for mitigating disease. When you look at just the United States, for example, no one would suggest that the big open stretches in the state of Utah imply that its governor has promoted policies that are hostile to business. Instead, the Utah desert, while one of the most beautiful spots on earth, is an inherently less suitable place for growing food or shipping products in and out. By the same principle, just looking at physical features, you’d predict that Afghanistan– a landlocked, mountainous desert– is destined to be poor, no matter what policies they adopt.

The thing I find fascinating is comparing the above map to satellite pictures of earth at night: