What does scalability actually means?

I was on the train to Portsmouth, and listening-reading the book “In the Plex”. In the Part 2 of the book, Chapter 2 if I recall correctly, the author is talking about Google and the Ocean project, what is later on going to be know as Google Books. The part that got me thinking is when Page, Brin and Mayer are trying to work out how actually they can scan the physical books, in a scalable manner. To the Googlers, hiring a lot of human beings and a lot of scanner didn’t look like a scalable solution at all! So they decided to work on their own scanner, using the hardware building expertise that years of Google Data Center made them acquire. ...

August 31, 2011 Â· 5 min Â· 877 words

Prime Numbers Generator

I believe I don’t have to describe what primes are, what are their properties and what not. This post is more a tribute to geek-ness of 2 friends-and-colleagues (@lucabox) that have fun thinking of algorithms to solve stupid (or less stupid), and always useless problems ;-) . Optimus Prime :-P - yeah yeah, a stupid joke Briefing This code is based on the assumption that we want to generate very very large primes, so it uses unsigned long long to store the values, instead of classical unsigned int. Live with that. ...

January 23, 2010 Â· 4 min Â· 760 words

333.33

It’s not another jigsaw, but you will never imagine how incredibly this number popped out O_o . Free to wonder in the comments! ;)

July 3, 2008 Â· 1 min Â· 24 words