Translation cost is minuscule compared to the revenue it enables: less than 1% for most companies.

Centralized groups have fastest turnaround-time at 24 days, vs. average of 30 days for other groups.

5 or less FTEs do 60% of the work. A lot of outsourcing.

Word counts are going down, but some is moving to audio/video.

2/3 of projects are using more than 11 languages now!

(My feeling is that we’re going over 10 languages just because last decade we did 10, and now we do a few more languages each year. Only Google has said, “We’re going to support 99% of the users on earth in their native language.”)

Maybe ask the customer what level of quality is important, rather than be driven by company stakeholders.

What is the cost of an FTE in managing translation vendor projects?

Smart managers are using long-term contractors instead of FTEs.

“Cost per word” vs. impact of project. Product documentation is fairly easy to justify, but marketing programs need to be evaluated per product per market.

Instead of metrics on words, languages, projects do cost of content, brochure, etc. Cost to produce, manage, maintain each piece of content including overhead and external costs.

How does finance and accounting categorize and count things? How does that affect how and what you measure?

“measure” or “maysure”?

Thanks to Adobe for hosting the meeting tonite.

It was nice to see URL’s Restaurant again.

There was a demo of Datameer.

After that, two Yahoo! engineers gave a lecture on the Oozie scheduler.

One slide said that Yahoo! is up to 42,000 Hadoop nodes in 25 clusters. Pig is the most popular query method, with about 40% of jobs using Pig.

Spirit is the most profitable US airline per airplane, and typically has 85-90% seat occupancy.

Ryanair and Spirit provide a glimpse into the future, which is very different than the glamorous portrayals of airline travel that Boeing and Airbus illustrate for new airplane models.

Ryanair goes beyond this, and is investigating having passengers stand, eliminating copilots (have stewardesses pinch-hit), and removing window sunshades.

wsj.com: A Stingy Spirit Lifts Airline’s Profit
airfarewatchdog: Airline Fees Chart

gplEDA Tools Catalog
Olimex Tools Catalog
wikipedia: Comparison of EDA Software
SUIGYODO ONLINE

MacPorts PCB port (version 20060822):

$ sudo port install pcb
$ PCB


Non-Free but Affordable Alternatives

ExpressPCB Review (Commercial Editor Free for Customers)
Sunstone PCB123 (Commercial Editor Free for Customers)
Sprint-Layout for Windows (40 euro)

Having flown several times in that exact area, I can say that VFR flight there is very demanding:

• the weather was typical: partly cloudy at that time, likely broken to overcast at 2000′ and 1 mile visibility (Marginal VFR conditions down to IMC, with clouds to the ground in the hills.) With 70% humidity and a small temperature/dewpoint (DP) spread, it’s cloudy 95% of the year over Jakarta. Residents also burn their trash, causing continuous smoke haze.
• Indonesia is a chain of volcanoes, which means “stratogranite” to pilots. There’s several mountains to the south of Jakarta, including Mount Salak. Outclimbing a mountain with 1 mile warning may not be possible and can result in an aerodynamic stall, which some witnesses reported (“the airplane flew over my house and fell out of the sky to one side.”)
• there are some restricted areas near Jakarta, including the National Monument (Monas) and their version of the Pentagon, which can distract pilots momentarily – “We’re not over the Pentagon, are we?”

Mt. Salak on a rare clear day.

Recommendation: a local instructor pilot should be in the airplane cockpit for all demo flights. While local pilots can successfully do contact MVFR flying, visiting pilots can get into trouble.

Scheduled airline routes are quite safe to and from Jakarta, but I doubt if these passengers had any idea of the risk they were assuming in a demo flight.

Congrats to the Indonesian government for organizing at least 3 search parties and quickly finding the crash site.

Indonesia’s Sky Aviation lost many employees, so we’ll see how that affects their company. Sukhoi also lost several employees.

msnbc: Debris spotted in search for Russian jet missing in Indonesia
Russia opens criminal case on Sukhoi accident
wikipedia: Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash
Indonesia finds black box part of crashed Russia jet

I hope Bruce Dickinson has more luck than that …

“Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson – also a commercial airline pilot and entrepreneur – has set up Cardiff Aviation Limited, which will provide specialist services to the airline industry.

He hopes it will create around 1,000 jobs. The business will be based at St Athan Enterprise Zone in the Vale of Glamorgan, where it has taken 132,000 square feet of hangar space. The first clients will be announced next month.”

Heavy (metal) weight rival to West aviation

(Likely Microsoft sought an alliance with Nook because the success of the iPad and Fire made them unattainable.)

The Nook color devices have great hardware, software and retail distribution in California.

Nook managers … here’s a tip. Talk to Microsoft about porting some games to the Nook, including Minesweeper and Solitaire. Tablets ship with way too few games for average users.

Microsoft plugging $300 million into Nook
Barnes & Noble’s Nook Unit Is Worth More Than Its Parent Company
Barnes & Noble Nook Color 7″ Tablet BNRV200 Review
Microsoft’s dumpster-diver partner strategy is rubbish

If munin-run looks like this:

$ munin-run --debug apache_volume
[...]
volume80.value U

and the apache error_log looks like this:

[warn] (101)Network is unreachable: connect to listener on [::]:80

Consider:

• disabling IPv6 on your server
• or add Allow from ::1 for /server-status
• ExtendedStatus On is required.

There were about 40 live attendees and 40-48 viewers online. I watched some of the events online.

The moderator kept the focus on technology instead of products, a challenge with the number of product vendors. Vendors can get so catty.

13:30 – Panel 1: Tier vs. Cache

Solid State – Simply a big cache or a real storage tier?

“Solid state disks blur the boundary between cache and storage, with a foot in both camps. Can solid state drives really be treated as a new tier of storage or simply as a way to add more performance enhancing cache to existing arrays? This panel will discuss whether data should permanently reside on solid state media or whether the optimum and most cost effective solution is to simply use SSD to hold the working set of data in the array.”

What’s the best solid-state storage array architecture?

“The 20+ year old array architectures that are served up, day-in day-out, by the traditional vendors are struggling to cope with todays I/O demands. How they will cope with tomorrow’s is anyone’s guess. Looking to plug the hole and steal their business is an increasing crop of solid-state array vendors. Yet they’re all going about it entirely differently. This panel will get to the bottom of how to design great SSD arrays and why they’re architected like that.”

The Future of Solid State Storage

“Today we use flash and SSDs everywhere from notebooks to PCIe cards in servers and enterprise arrays. In this session our panel will consider the future of solid state storage systems and answer some interesting questions. Will SSDs kill spinning disk? Do 2.5” SAS or SATA disks have a place in the data center of the future? What does the next generation of flash bring to the market? What about PCM, Memristors and other new SSD technologies?”

Regarding APIs, the issue of lack of a standard came up. Everybody supports a linux block driver interface, but there is no agreement on APIs, similar to the GPU scientific computing market. Maybe see what the Open Source community comes up with, for example the MySQL community and its custom storage engines.

Other comments and notes:

• VMware DRS tiers storage devices, maybe you can manage SSD that way
• caching affects latency
• people want predictable, low latency
• although SAN increases latency, SAN users have decided that manageability is more important than latency

“Robin [Harris] has said that is the most exciting decade in storage. That means a lot coming from somebody as old as Robin.”

The live streaming went well, with excellent video and clear audio.

Jonathan Ellis is project chair for Apache Cassandra and co-founder of DataStax.

“Apache Cassandra 1.1 includes several significant new features, like live traffic sampling, row level isolation, and full support for CQL. If you haven’t looked at Cassandra in a while, or are just now starting to check it out, this is a great opportunity to find out where it is now, and where it’s going.”

Jonathan emoting.



Jonathan tweeting.

Datastax provided swag, wings, mini rolls, salsa, cookies and soda.

Thanks to Apple for hosting the event tonite.

DataStax Dev Blog