Yeah, I've read that article, although actually the article that really explained MapReduce for me was the article linked to from here: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1669
The thing is, though, I don't by and large need help on the higher-level, academic side of things. Things like higher-order functions or the lambda calculus I'm pretty much OK on. I'm not ready for a computer science research position, but I know more about that than is really needed for where I am and for where I want to be.
My problem is more the little practical bits: knowing, for example, that a disk seek takes on the order of 10**(-2) seconds, and that therefore a solution that ends up involving 10**10 disk seeks just isn't going to work. Knowing how network traffic behaves, and what things are going to cause just awful congestion. Knowing that you can expect hash collisions once you have a number of items that's approximately a square root of the number of hash buckets. Most importantly, knowing that you know all of these concerns and knowing to check for them as you're coming up with a design.
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Date: 2006-08-26 11:47 am (UTC)The thing is, though, I don't by and large need help on the higher-level, academic side of things. Things like higher-order functions or the lambda calculus I'm pretty much OK on. I'm not ready for a computer science research position, but I know more about that than is really needed for where I am and for where I want to be.
My problem is more the little practical bits: knowing, for example, that a disk seek takes on the order of 10**(-2) seconds, and that therefore a solution that ends up involving 10**10 disk seeks just isn't going to work. Knowing how network traffic behaves, and what things are going to cause just awful congestion. Knowing that you can expect hash collisions once you have a number of items that's approximately a square root of the number of hash buckets. Most importantly, knowing that you know all of these concerns and knowing to check for them as you're coming up with a design.