Yahoo builds two petabyte PostgreSQL database
James Hamilton writes about Yahoo's "over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day".
It apparently is built on top of a modified version of PostgreSQL and runs on about 1k machines. In his post, James speculates on the details of the internals. Very interesting.
Adding a Y axis would immediately draw up hundreds of blog posts and academic papers citing it as a "benchmark", making various claims and hypotheticals about Facebook's infrastructure. Since we don't have access to the exact metric or method of measurement, the exact magnitude is arguably meaningless.
Also, since this has potential for FUD and Facebook-bashing, it's in their interest to not publish raw numbers.
No context in particular :) Just an observation of how the "inertial scrolling" people are raving about on the new iDevices has a history deeply rooted in Mac folklore (Andy Hertzfeld was part of the original Mac team).
Also note mention of hysteresis and Floyd-Steinberg Dithering which are worth reading up on.