If I had a penny for every drunk I’ve seen..
Someone was upset and whining in the Sunday’s Hesari (in letters to the editor) how the guards and cops didn’t do much when she called the emergency center because of a drunken, passed-out guy. She was worried who will take care of all the drunks left outside. Okay, how about themselves for starters? Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t get so drunk that you’ll pass out in any random location.
Right, so anybody who’s been in the… well, country, knows that that doesn’t really work in Finland. But her wish of someone caring for them has a huge problem of scale – if everyone called 112 (the local 911) every time somebody passed out in Finland from drinking too much, we’d need to hire like a thousand new people to the emergency exchange just to answer the calls, let alone haul them somewhere warm.
Google and Search … don’t mix after all?
I’ve been using Google Reader for my RSS needs for some months now and I’m generally very happy with it. What it’s missing, however, is search. And then I ran into an article in the Irish Independent with a quote from Google:
Search is still our core competency and you will see that through whatever products Google unveils in the future.
Ehh? So why not trying to put your money where your mouth is and give Google Reader a search function!?
Update October 2nd, 2007: Google Reader now has a search function. Sweet!
Hey YLE, ever heard of scalable platforms?
We had the parliament election today here in Finland (sidenote: the preliminary results don’t seem too bad. Or, well, let’s just say they could be worse). It seems a couple of people tried to browse through the YLE pages or the news videos therein, as the pages practically came to a screeching halt on Sunday evening. A halt, in this case, is defined by their 512kbps stream not being delivered up to snuff and pages taking forever to load.
It’s not like this was an unforeseen situation. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. So what exactly does it take before YLE figures out how to scale their systems to support the occasional (and very minor, in global standards) flood of users?
