Twitter Stream with updates from Japan

[Anela]

Uh... its only going to be 12 am PST in 10 minutes...

lol sorry, saw 2am EST, not PST.. and the change to DST got me even more confuzzeled......*.*

[annewandering]

DISCLAIMER: I am not a seismologist, meteorologist, or even a statistician. I am, however, a spreadsheet wrangler by vocation; given a set of data, I'll pivot it.

Anyway -- a lot of people have been wondering whether the amount of earthquakes Japan has been getting is normal for this time of year or not. After doing some digging, I managed to find the right link on the USGS website for downloading raw data. I pulled earthquakes of all magnitudes from 2000 to 2011, lattitude 45 to 30 & longitude 130 to 155. That should include most, if not all, of Japan. Here's a link to the Data Set Search Query results - not sure if that will still work or not.

Did a quick pivot on it to get a count of earthquakes occurring in March. While it's not at all unusual for them to get earthquakes between 3.5 and 5.0 this time of year, the number of quakes they are getting (due to aftershocks) is much, MUCH greater than normal.


Count of Japanese Earthquakes in March, 2000 - 2011 by Althea Valara, on Flickr

Hey good information. I was wondering that. On my google gadget it was showing 5+ point earthquakes every hour for days after the 9.0 one hit. Now its down to maybe three or four during the day light hours. They do seem to be slowing down and dropping down into the four and five catagory more often instead of the five and six catagories as before.

[Tingle]

That's great news. At least it's finally dying down.

[Ilax]

Good info Altheav, should have made a new thread about it, almost missed that information.

Thanks you for those 2 link.

[Deadlyscorpion]

lol kinda sideways on topic but someone said they ought to be using cloud, which i am not quite sure what that is, and when i look at the bottom left side of the screen what do i see? tags for this thread none view tag cloud. sounds like SE is on the ball more than that poster thought anyway.

Cloud is basically Virtual services. It would mean that instead of running the servers from Japan only you could put the information on a virtual server which can be run from anywhere in the world. For example. Let's say that it takes 30 servers to run FFXI, they would hire someone like Amazon.com, which runs tons of Cloud services, and Amazon would provide the same hardware that SE has for running FFXi on a virtual machine. What that allows SE to do is to run their services from anywhere in the world, and should one virtual server go down, the information is spread around the cloud, so another server in a different location would still have the information, so it's always live.

Sony is already working on this for the Playstation 3, where your save files will be saved on a Cloud, so no matter which PS3 you're playing on, as long as you log in with your account, your save file will be accessible. This is way more complicated in terms of MMO, but you could essentially have an in-house Cloud network between all the POL offices around the world, and should anything happen at one particular location, all the data would still be available from any of the other locations.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Cloud is basically Virtual services. It would mean that instead of running the servers from Japan only you could put the information on a virtual server which can be run from anywhere in the world. For example. Let's say that it takes 30 servers to run FFXI, they would hire someone like Amazon.com, which runs tons of Cloud services, and Amazon would provide the same hardware that SE has for running FFXi on a virtual machine. What that allows SE to do is to run their services from anywhere in the world, and should one virtual server go down, the information is spread around the cloud, so another server in a different location would still have the information, so it's always live.

Sony is already working on this for the Playstation 3, where your save files will be saved on a Cloud, so no matter which PS3 you're playing on, as long as you log in with your account, your save file will be accessible. This is way more complicated in terms of MMO, but you could essentially have an in-house Cloud network between all the POL offices around the world, and should anything happen at one particular location, all the data would still be available from any of the other locations.

Which is all wonderful. I don't understand people's anti-cloud propoganda.

[RAIST]

Interesting proposition. I always got the impression Cloud computing was used in large part for applications of considerably smaller scale though. At least, that's how it is generally marketed to the public: everyone taps into office applications online instead of installing 100 copies in your office--everyone just uses the "cloud" apps online.

Each "world" is already distributed across seperate servers as is (zones are split across different IP's, could be VM's or physically on different hardware). It could take considerable effort to get it all uploaded. With so many pieces already making up each server's Vanadiel world as is, putting that into a cloud array could result in a LOT of data floating around out there. If it were just one gameworld is one thing, but 24 production sets (soon going to 16) could be a vicious undertaking.

It surely would be an interesting experiment though. Might be something for them to explore with their test server set first.

[annewandering]

If I were SE I might use this for things that didnt really matter. No way would I put the game servers in or on anything that wasnt sitting right in front of me where I can control who has access.

[NightDagger]

I can't see Cloud having any purpose for SE. I do not think a site like Amazon or anyone would allow them to use up all that space & effectively using their bandwidth up. Now even though they had to shutdown their servers & it has made a lot of us to question why they have never had a backup plan for such an incident.

I can not see something of this magnitude happening for a really long time. So if SE were to just take their chances & not change anything (by not having back up server or anything) they would save a lot more money in the long run if this were to happen in say 10 years (god I hope not for Japan's sake not the game)

[RAIST]

Yeah... it kind of reminds me of the big debate over disk-to-disk backups vs. tape backups. 500/TB or 1500/TB cost analysis would scare the hell out of the bean counters. But, then you showed them how easy it was to screw up a tape...then they jumped on board with the disks. But, I doubt the cost gap is that close with the massive operations they are dealing with at SE.

I looked at that infineta system last week during the debates over this issue. The techs were talking about replacing hardware at costs up to 400k a pop for some setups just to reduce that latency on synchronization. Probly better for them to just nix access for a couple weeks and eat the losses in subscription fees then forking out 250k+ a pop X who knows how many sets to get low-latency redundancy going.