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Environment: Bad Code is the Planet Killer

Sure, but we all knew it, didn't we? I mean, if our feeble brains could write smarter codes that barely touched the processing powers of the Pcs, we'd have a PDA-Data Center today ;-)

But Alistair Croll has something really neat to say, a quotation (I will say that explicitly, as with this template you don't see the big quotation signs, I'll work on it this weekend):

Modern applications, however, are changing in several important ways:

* One, virtualization lets applications scale across multiple machines. Many companies are consolidating their server infrastructures, and decommissioning hundreds of machines in the process. A 2006 Yankee Group study of 700 firms estimated that 76 percent had already deployed server virtualization in the data center or planned to do so.
* Two, power is the limiting factor for many data centers. A typical Google (GOOG) data center — which puts 10,000 computers into 30,000 square feet — is likely located in a Wet State near a power source. For example, the new Google data center site in The Dalles, Ore., was chosen largely for its proximity to hydroelectric power.
* And three, Software-as-a-Service platforms let us run sophisticated applications on someone else’s infrastructure. Salesforce.com’s (CRM) recently unveiled Force platform is a good example of this, and Amazon’s (AMZN) EC2 and S3 provide lower-level computing on demand.

These three changes mean that bad code matters. Now, with ten instances of my application installed in a data center, I’m using five machines — while Joel only needs one. I’m five times as bad for the planet as Joel. This hits my wallet, too: Amazon’s Elastic Computing service charges 10 cents per processing hour, plus storage and bandwidth costs, for a “typical” server.


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