Cockroaches are some of the most resilient creatures on earth. They can live for 45 minutes without air and over a month without food. Cutting their heads off won't even kill them ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-cockroach-can-live-without-head/ )-at least not immediately. Their bodies can live on for several days without their heads.
At technology giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, engineers have pioneered techniques that help make their websites just as hard to kill. If a server goes on the fritz, a series of servers shut down, or even an entire data center goes dark, these sites are supposed to just keep chugging along. That's vitally important since every second of downtime means lost revenue.
Now, a team of open source developers ( Ex-Googlers ) wants to make it easier for just about any company to build the sort of resilient cloud computing systems that run online empires like Google. They call their project CockroachDB (github source: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach), billing it as a database with some serious staying power. That may sound like an odd name for a piece of software, but co-creator Spencer Kimball-a former Google engineer-says it's only appropriate. "The name is representative of its two most important qualities: survivability, of course, and the ability to spread to the available hardware in an almost autonomous sense."
Related: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/all/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:09AM
The main traits of a computer virus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rts008 on Thursday July 24 2014, @04:32PM
Yeah, that's exactly what my first thought was on RTFS also.
It sounds like the ideal platform to be used as malware delivery and propagation. Wonderful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:10AM
Q: Which license?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:26AM
The article mentioned cockroaches being able to survive 45 minutes without air.
I do not like cockroaches in my house. I trap them in a paper cup, then put them in the toilet. Normally, they will float and crawl right back out, so I put a little squirt of shampoo in the toilet as well to mess up the surface tension in the water.
It takes several seconds of frantic effort by the roach at that point. He does not float. He sinks, swims around for a few seconds, then goes dead silent. I usually leave him be until I use the toilet because I a reticent to waste a couple of gallons of water just to dispatch a roach.
I don't want to step on them as I would just as soon not clean up all the goo.
It sure appears to me they burn up their internal air supply as fast as any of us if they cannot trap their little bubble.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by NewMexicoArt on Thursday July 24 2014, @03:22PM
the summary mistakenly said they can survive 45 minutes without air. the first linked article said they can survive 45 minutes without their head, because they breathe through holes in each body segment. so sinking them should work quickly. thanks for the shampoo idea, it should come in handy. i wonder if this is considered cruel and unusual or if it could be used on larger cockroaches
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:47AM
So this is by super awesome ex-Googlers, right? As in former Googlers? How do we know they are Genuine(tm) ex-Googlers? Are they as awesome as former Googlers?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 24 2014, @01:40PM
It is written in Go, so they must be super genuine.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 25 2014, @08:14AM
Well, an ex-googler is someone who is no longer a googler. Now, according to the rules of the language, a googler is someone who googles. To google means to search the internet using Google's search engine. So a googler is someone who uses Google to do internet searchers, and an ex-googler is someone who no longer uses Google to to do internet searches. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.