Thanks, very nervous I'm gonna be completely out of my depth. This opportunity has only come about via a combination of slight nepotism and a manager who seems a bit mentally ill and took a massive liking to me for no reason. I'm trying to furiously teach myself basic computer shiz before my training starts (if my training starts, not a done deal yet I should say).

When in doubt buy the devs Whiskey.

I think it depends on how much control and customization you want. If you want your data in a database and control over everything, you could write a dynamic web app using a language of your choice (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) and have a db handling the data. Then you could write a script that would upload a csv file to your db.

If you want something much easier, Wordpress apparently has a csv importer plugin. I have not used it though.

Sounds like a bad place to work at lol

oood.py or something similar might be interesting for you, would require converting excel to open office calc but that's easy. Actually iirc oood can handle the conversion.

If you are ever feeling down about it, just watch this and replace "Sony" with "Open Source Project:"
NSFW

... and fill in the rest of the blanks yourself.

I've found myself in a quandary: I'm stuck, yet I am afraid to search "Where do I put my POM in Maven."

And then I figured I may not need Maven at all...

Recently I got annoyed with the plugin that I was using for handling AJAX file uploads so I started looking for a new one. I wanted one that:

-Uses XHR uploads in compatible browsers with a fallback to the hidden iframe method for IE/old browsers
-Is lightweight and not bloated with useless features
-Doesn't require external dependencies
-Doesn't use Flash
-Easily customizable
-Can handle JSON and javascript returned from the server

After a couple hours of searching I gave up and decided to write it myself. It occurred to me that this might be helpful to someone else, so I put it on GitHub:

http://github.com/sdturner02/Simple-Ajax-Uploader

If you need a very flexible, easy to use ajax uploader, check it out.

Google have launched their cloud computing platform

http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

anyone use asana?

just found it recently and it takes such a giant dump all over basecamp that i can't even access my basecamp account because it is so buried in an avalanche of poo and i realize now this is a very good thing.

fyi guys.

so how does this work? let's say i want to run some java simulations on it -- is that possible?

Will they be inserting personalized ads into the output based on the data you're crunching?

+1

What are you doing?

I am assuming its going to be similar to an AWS setup. You just spin up server instances and run whatever you want on them.

We have just started using it at work, so far I like it.

so is it just a straight competitor to AWS? or are the cpus much more powerful or something?

I believe its a straight competitor... but I could be wrong.

g_m,

let's put it this way: if you think amazon has a lot of servers, imagine how many google has.

Huh, I kind of thought Amazon would have more, but I guess Google probably does have more. I don't think it would be by a ridiculous margin though.

Huh? Google catalogs huge swaths of the internet, and a significant percent of actual internet bandwidth is coming from Google's servers. 6% and increasing in 2010, actually: http://ddos.arbornetworks.com/2010/1...raffic-record/ .

Amazon catalogs a bunch of products and runs a website. They also have a cloud computing service. That's nowhere near as computation-intensive as what Google does.

Lol, that's a hell of a sentence to just throw in there. AWS is a huge portion of "The Cloud".

I'd be surprised if Google was even 2x bigger than Amazon.

Looks like it's hard to get numbers. Guesses for Google seem to put them between the 1-2 million mark now (hell of a range...). Amazon seems to have about .5 million for EC2 and I'd guess a hundred thousand or two more for other things.

Edit: Yeah, yeah - these numbers are super rough and based off of about 10 minutes of searching. But probably good enough for a LC thread of 2+2.

I can't prove it because both companies keep that info secret (according to my Googling), but I'd be amazed if Google weren't much bigger than twice Amazon. AWS is obviously very computationally intensive per user, but it's only got on the order of millions of users (had 330k people signed up in June 2007), so maybe on the order of hundreds of thousands of active users.

Google has billions of active users, and it provides a ton of different products to them. Plus, Google attempts to map the entire internet--That's an insanely ambitious task that is incredibly computationally intensive.

Edit: (Posted before I saw your latest post) What unit is that in? I would think we should be measuring in flops or hertz here.

I'm just talking about physical machines. Anything more than that gets pretty crazy and with the number of assumptions have to make, probably isn't reasonable.

I don't disagree with your analysis of Google, but I think you're totally underestimating the size of AWS. Here's a good article on AWS: http://blog.deepfield.net/2012/04/18...amazons-cloud/

Edit: One thing in favour of Google is that AWS is much more North American focused than I had originally realized.

Edit2: Actually physical hardware probably isn't that bad. They both use commodity machines (I believe) so I bet there isn't a huge difference in specs.

shabby,

i don't know that many details (and am not supposed to discuss the details i do know) due to NDA but: google has a ****load of computers. seriously, you and i have no idea. and they've been at this game a lot longer than amazon has -- see noah's point about their respective businesses and how sheer computing power factors into those businesses.

tc, are you saying you don't think the numbers above are approximately right?

i honestly have no idea about the numbers themselves, but my WAG is that google = 4x amazon is a conservative estimate of google's size.

And yet you still can't copy from an Excell spreadsheet to gmail without it getting ****ed up...