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The media often compare sizes and weights to things people are already familiar with: "an area of four football fields", "as high as four elephants", "the size of Wales", "the weight of four bags of sugar".
This is comparing the weight of the whole planet Earth to pi times a thousandth of the weight of Jupiter.
It's probably accurate (Randall normally checks his facts very carefully) but it's as useless in practice as "add a millionth the weight of a sperm whale of saffron" would be in a recipe!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: It's probably accurate
Close enough for government work - Earth mass / Jupiter mass[^] ≈ 0.00314636, which is reasonably close to π / 1000. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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OriginalGriff wrote: "the size of Wales"
You forgot your 'h' in Whales.
I'm the helpful spelling American and I'm just helping out.
You should really probably indicate which type of Whale too since there are large size differences in whales like Orca and Blue.
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raddevus wrote:
I'm the helpful spelling American and I'm just helping out.
Maybe not so much. Consider the difference between Wales and whales. Hint: one is a plural, the other isn't.
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I'm guessing the joke "How do you get two whales in a car? Over the Severn Bridge!" is a bit of a woosh then?
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Now, how does that joke go? Something like
This American guy returns from a round trip of Great Britain with a badly bruised eye, and tries to explain it to his buddies:
I went to this pub, and tried to approach a couple girls
- Hi! Are you chicks from this part of England?
They snared back at me:
- That'll be Wales, you silly fool!
So I tried again:
- OK, I'm sorry about that. So, are you whales from this part of England?
The next thing I remember is waking up at the local hospital.
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I really love comparisons such as "as heavy as a fifty pound sack of potatoes" or "as long as a ten foot pole".
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As clueless as a first post in QA.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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That reminds me on the stupid look on someone's face when I said "kiloEuro".
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Kiriander wrote: That reminds me on the stupid look on someone's face when I said "kiloEuro".
Really? You get a stupid look?
I am so accustomed to reading about kilodollars (K$), megadollars (M$), kilokroner (KNOK) and megakroner (MNOK - that is for NOrwegian Kroner) that kiloEuro and megaEuro sounds perfectly natural to me.
If you start taking about dekadollars or hektokroner, you might confuse me for a few seconds, though. I know of no application are were the deka- prefix is used regularly. Hekto- has survived in a few professions, e.g. fishermen may talk about hectoliters of fish. In farming and surveying there is a unit of area, 10 by 10 meters, called an are. So ten ares are a deca-are and 100 ares are a hecto-are - but those are contracted to decare and hectare.
On the other side of 1: If you want to confuse a stereo freak or signal processing man, you should consistently use Bel as a unit. A S/N of six Bel is quite reasonable for everyday use, even though modern sound technology can easily provide eight to ten Bel. Lots of engineers may know, at an "intellectual" level, that a dB is a tenth of a Bel, but in everyday work they never think of it; dB is the basic unit.
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Impressive and quite interesting!
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Very cool. 
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It will be very interesting to learn more about the architecture here at Code Project. What say you, Chris?
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I did not read the SO article word by word, I quickly scanned through it. But it seems they are using VMs for everything, with very powerful dual Xeons (10-core) as the Hyper-V host machines. And I would assume that the redis VMs are all high-RAM spec'd
[edit] - I may be wrong. Seems they use physical servers. Now, that makes sense!
modified 17-Feb-16 12:34pm.
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I would think that Chris has a few thousand hamsters turning the wheels... one side benefit is that your hardware is self replicating :P
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Jacquers wrote: one side benefit is that your hardware is self replicating
OTOH, power (food) supply and waste disposal problems are significantly worse. 
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Actually, Chris runs the entire website and database off a single Raspberry Pi 2. 
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Thanks! Suddenly my little Dell XPS feels very inferior! 
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Quote: That was an April fools joke article
I may have realized that, had I taken the trouble to actually read the article and take notice of its date! 
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Well, we all look at pretty pictures of motherboards and SATA cables. Who reads articles anyway?
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Quote: Well, we all look at pretty pictures of motherboards and SATA cables beautiful girls
FTFY
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Well, if you want to get all factual 
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Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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