Good thing that those tight accountability rules prevented the massive credit / derivatives bubble.
Apples and oranges. That was a different game, where the villains were the banks, mortgage companies, Wall Street traders and ratings agencies.
It wasn't the same thing, but there are some important similarities. In both cases the responsible parties misrepresented their real risk exposure and they were then caught with their pants down when the market turned against them. In the case of mortgage brokers there was pretty clearly outright fraud; people lying on their applications at the brokers suggestion, etc. Presumably better "corporate governance" should have prevented that, but it didn't.
As far as the ratings agencies go... yeah... why they're still in business and have suffered no consequences (that i'm aware of) after they so massively failed in their one and only task is a mystery. Perhaps their SarBox violation is lying in claiming in their SEC filings that they actually offer a bond rating service when in fact they're a massive marketing company for bond issuers. Com to thing of it maybe they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Or perhaps for mail and wire fraud for disseminating their ratings across state lines. That's hyperbole of course, but man, they screwed up bad.
That would be different (and i believe such tests already happen a good deal in actual research).
In this art project they're pitting blood cell against blood cell, not blood cell against things that are actually harmful to humans, so success here doesn't prove anything. Also, given that auto-immune disorders are probably currently a bigger health problem for people than infectious disease, figuring out how to moderate white-cell action is arguably more important than finding the most bad ass killer white blood cell.
(and no, i'm not in the seafood industry or even within 1000 miles of the Gulf. Just tired of the un-scientific and anti-scientific scare mongering about the impact of the spill. Yes, it did some damage, and it sucks for the birds, dolphins and turtles that got killed by the oil, but there's just no evidence of wide spread, ecosystem changing disaster here)
This article doesn't pass the smell test for a few reasons.
a) Everything i've heard so far about the dissolved methane has been pretty positive. e.g. http://www.upstreamonline.com/incoming/article240856.ece The current article doesn't make anything but a FUD statement that the methane is "a big deal".
b) Having watched live video feeds (for hundreds of hours (Go CRAW! )) from the well area during the capping process two things don't jive: First of all the area immediately around the well, say within 200m or so didn't have anything living on it. It was just mud. Occasionally (maybe once a day at most ) a fish , squid or shark would swim by, but that's it. No crabs, sea cucumbers, corals or anything else were on the bottom. This is probably because it was all at 5000 ft depth where there's no light and not a whole heck of a lot going on. Second, even around the well there was no actual oil visible.
c) I'm glad they took samples over "2600 square miles". What percentage of the area was impacted ? where ? over such a huge area even if all the oil had sunk straight to the bottom it would be a vanishingly small amount. certainly not enough to "choke off" anything. Also, as noted in point "b" the corals and sea stars etc would have to be some distance away from the well anyway because coral needs sunlight... which doesn't exist 1 mile down.
d) there's no mention of just how many natural oil and gas seeps there are in the GOM. (answer: thousands). Let's wait and see if those samples really show that the oil is from the mc 252 well.
i fully believe that some of the oil ended up on the bottom and that it's caused damage, but on the balance whatever truth there may be in this article is being spun in a misleading and scare-mongering way. The GOM is open for shrimping and the shrimp is testing out fine.
Ok. If you're proposing something that will be as good as Sarbanes-Oxley... you probably need to find a better idea. Sarbox was a knee jerk response to Enron and has done nothing but drive up costs.
Good thing that those tight accountability rules prevented the massive credit / derivatives bubble.
Indeed. Your blood cells are just hanging out patrolling your body and keeping you safe from bad stuff. These people would have you sacrifice them in an arena for no purpose other than entertainment. Even the "winner" blood cells are going to die in the end. I know they're not people, but it still seems like a "mean" thing to do.
(And yes, i know blood cells die all the time etc. but if i were a blood cell, i wouldn't want to go out like this)
You guys are so right. I've heard him a few times on the radio on some NPR show (the web says it's All Things Considered) dispensing supposed ethical advice, but i've been disappointed every time. I expected him to contextualize the question: maybe describe how the law and/or different philosophical, religious , cultural traditions look at the issue and then perhaps give his personal pronouncement. Instead he didn't even necessarily seem to get the root of the questions and dispatched them with like 2 or 3 sentences and a joke. Basically the same thing as what his column seems to do but even shorter because it's on the radio. It was all really disappointing and just didn't deliver. Maybe i'd think differently if I found him funny, but making fun of people who are asking earnest questions doesn't work for me.
On the point of the ethicists job being to clarify ideas, i definitely agree, HOWEVER, i have little patience for "experts" who just won't offer an opinion because "it's not their decision to make", etc. That's a cop out. They should lay out the options AND then if they have an opinion they should give it.
Your statement doesn't really address the ethics of the situation, but rather whether it makes good business sense. Your argument against it is that the apparent savings in costs won't materialize because the quality of the product will be worse which will lead to decreased sales, injury to the brand, higher replacement cost etc.
But that dodges the question. Assuming you could get the equivalent productivity (from your business' point of view) for lower cost by offshoring, is it ethical to do so ? Or to flip it around, how much of a premium would you be willing to pay to keep your operations on-shore. 1% ? 5% ? 10%? 100%? That's the real question.
(and my answer is " idon't know". personally i'd be willing to give maybe 20% - 25% of profit to keep things on-shore... 50% would be a lot harder. )
What i don't understand is why the network providers keep pushing mobile video and tethering.
T-mobile is pushing their video chat... Sprint is saying you can upload live video directly to the web etc.
The networks already can't handle the level of data usage they currently get, yet they're pushing these very high bandwidth services. Don't get me wrong, i like that my t-mo G2 with stock firmware can do wifi and USB tethering. But i would also like it if my "4G" phone on the "4G" network got more than 400kbps download rates (in one of their 4G launch cities). If there's any level of adoption of this stuff it'll bring their networks to a halt and not due to any top 5% users.
yeah... haven't whipped out firebug to see what's causing it (mostly because i'm running Chrome right now) but something is definitely taking most of the CPU in this one tab according to Chrome's task manager. I'm guessing/hoping that that's a bug rather than an inherent feature of the new design because as a permanent feature that would be quite lame.
Display on my older Atom netbook though is actually faster than the previous version. (in Google Chrome anyway, haven't tested it in anything else yet.)
Have you ever tried to contact google about anything ever? It's near impossible whether as a user or a webmaster. You can't even send them an email or report a bug. If you buy advertising from them the experience is a little better, but not all that much (based on the experience a previous company had with them. Our monthly spend w/ them was in the mid four figures iirc). That's not huge, but it meant that we'd occasionally get our emails acknowledge even if they never answered why our site would occasionally drop entirely from their index for certain terms and then return to the first results page a few weeks later when there was absolutely no change to the page or our server set-up or anything else and there was no indication of anything different on the Webmaster Tools pages). On two occasions we dropped out of the results entirely for our own site name even though people linking to us were still there. A few weeks later we were back. No explanation or indication of what, if anything had happened.
Basically google does whatever it does and they don't want to hear from you because they know better. Sometimes it does it well (e.g. spam filtering), sometimes it doesn't (e.g. indexing any type of DHTML, allowing for flexibility in search results, dealing with non-RESTful urls etc). Your choice of interaction with google is primarily to use what they offer (which is sometimes excellent) or not to. Same as with other large companies like Facebook and even Comcast, AT&T, T-mobile etc.
The ones that you give money to seem to be a bit more responsive in that they at least will give you someone to talk to but that's about the only difference.
A better question even is why dual boot at all (as a user)? Nowadays what I care most about is the documents and tabs I have open.
I could probably remedy this with some utilities for session saving/restoration... but dual booting is a clunky solution for a user and it's especially unnecessary w/ the rise of virtulisation over the past few years. Want a different OS for some tasks or "just because"? Get another gig of ram and run a VM.
Getting a new/different OS to run on some hardware is cool, but multi-boot for a general purpose box? Forget it.
Heh. I searched for "bruce perens" in the comments just to see if anyone else picked up on this. My first reaction was also "huh ?" especially since the summary doesn't capitalize Open Source and just refers to it as a concept. (note this is nothing against Mr. Perens, who is certainly a beg cheese in Free/free software, just against whoever wrote the summary).
T-mobile's own 4G "launch" phone doesn't distinguish in the interface between the HSPA "3G" and the HSPA+ "4G" as far as i can tell. The user interface used to say "G" "E" "3G" for GPRS, EDGE and HSPA now was just changed to say "G", "E" and "H" as far as i can tell.
Also, i live in one of the cities that supposedly has this coverage but I still only see speeds usually less than 1 Mbps down though now i get almost 2Mbps upload speed for whatever that's worth. Perhaps i should go around downtown in search of the supposed fast speeds.
Fortunately, 1 Meg is fine for my usage of the phone as i just use it for maps, web browsing and email etc, and the G2 has been a good phone, but the marketing around this stuff is deplorable as usual. (I say as usual because i've been paying for their unlimited data plan for something like 7 years now and the actual capabilities of the phones/network pretty much lag the advertising by one full generation.)
This is good an all, but it doesn't address the biggest issues with Flash:
1) Adobe (and Macromedia before it) give virtually NO control to the end user over how flash objects run. You can't stop them, you can't pause them, you can't unload them, nothing. Technically you can control if they store local shared objects (LSOs) on your machine but the interface for that is terrible. Half the time the pop-up window it prompts with can't even be accessed because of various z-index issues on the page. That is you can't even click the button.
2) It is a CPU hog. Forget the fact that its inherent performance isn't great. The issue is that if you browse the web for any length of time and have multiple tabs open you'll find that your Flash plug-in is taking up all your cpu (or a whole core). Why? because there are all sorts of little flash movies playing in all the pages. Mostly Ads but also paused video players, random web bugs and such. Plus, some of these random are poorly written and have memory leaks. Thus BECAUSE Adobe gives the user no control, you have to just kill the plugin.
Instead of trying to horn in on HTML5 maybe they should fix the fact that Flash is the SPAM of the web. (And yes, Flash itself could be fine... but the business practices they've chose to pursue make it a scourge rather than a blessing).
If you're looking for an actual transactional database w/ constraints and things like that i'm not aware of any significant advantage that MySQL has over Postgres. I haven't really used Postgres since ~4 years ago and at that time it didn't have a good replication solution and you had to "vacuum" your tables via cron or other external process in order to maintain performance. However both of those issues have since been addressed so...
I too was struck by the overall unprofessional tone of the discussion. The language barrier was certainly palpable, but what was up w/ all the "joking" and such. louis_to at least put down some statement of what he (and/or his faction) were demanding, but he didn't really explain how or why this was a conflict of interest.
His statements were a quoted appeal to "gentlemanship" and a statement that he didn't want to "confuse the users". That's fairly weak reasoning. There was, for example, no statement of how the two projects are in competition with each other or any statement about WHAT exactly the users would be confused about.
I'm not saying that there isn't a COI, but no theory of COI was even advanced in the "discussion".
From my reading of this it looks like louis_to and mhu were giving the branchers/non-employees an ultimatum to resign by Tuesday (though no specific "or else" was specified). I assume otherwise they're going to be voted off the island?
(as a purely subjective matter, and perhaps as a result of their making demands without presenting an argument, mhu and louis_to came off as jerks in this exchange.)
I don't think this is really "hate" speech, but what I find most relevant about this story is that it is a warning to anyone hosting w/ Rackspace for anything anywhere near mission critical. Do you really want your hosting company imposing speech codes ?
If Rackspace wants to get into politics, fine, but I'd rather not have to worry about downtime because my ISP doesn't like what my site or what my customer's sites say. This is not unlike the stories of GoDaddy and Paypal locking accounts because of some real or imagined breach of their TOS. If there's a court order or someone's spamming, distributing warez or doing something clearly illegal, then ok, but in this case none of that is true.
Ask them to move along at the end of their contract? Ok, that's reasonable (unless the contract has a clause guaranteeing renewal), but just to take a site off the net... that's not acceptable behavior.
Heh. BP looks to be down about 30% since this started (vs ~9% for the Dow). If i had stock, selling it now would be way too late.
No, i'm not trolling. It's just that everything here is relative. Let's look at a quote from the NYT article: "BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.
Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks."
From these statements and others like it how can one judge whether BP acted "correctly" or not? One can't. What's an acceptable level of risk? How much riskier was the option chosen ? Without at least some framework to evaluate this, it's pure innuendo.
Or, let's look at another: " On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.... When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure — 6,500 pounds per square inch — than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay. It tested at this lower pressure until the explosion.
A review of Minerals Management Service’s data of all B.O.P. tests done in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico for five years shows B.O.P. tests rarely dropped so sharply, and, in general, either continued at the same threshold or were done at increasing levels.
The manufacturer of the blowout preventer, Cameron, declined to say what the appropriate testing pressure was for the device. "
It certainly SOUNDS suspicious, but is it relevant? They don't say, and I don't know. This information could be very damning or it could be irrelevant. Without further analysis it's impossible to make a determination. I have yet to see such analysis (in the NYT or anywhere else).
This isn't just philosophical masturbation... in my unexciting career as a software engineer i've been involved in 100s of situations where we had to choose between alternative courses of action where we had to balance cost/time vs features and/or confidence usually w/ less than perfect information about costs and consequences. Much lower stakes in my case, but same general dynamic.
The transcript in the article could be turned into a template that applies to pretty much every project i've been witness to.
Even in your scenario one would have to show that the mechanic was correct and that the brakes failed (if you were in a criminal case at least; in a civil case it seems all bets are off as evidenced by e.g. airlines ALWAYS paying out if there's a crash)
More importantly I'd modify the scenario as follows: Let's say that the driver took his car in for service. The mechanic recommended set of repairs A. The driver instead asked for the cheaper set B. The mechanic did B and the government said that B is ok.
That's a lot closer to what's happened so far w/ this well. It could be the case that doing A would have prevented the accident that B allowed, and one could argue that the driver had undue influence on the mechanic and on the government agency... but now things are a lot less clear.
It's certainly possible that some people at BP acted badly, etc but, based on the information currently available i don't see how one differentiates between "negligence" and "accident".
Seriously. I don't understand all of the hate being thrown at BP. We don't even know what happened yet (and probably will never know). It's possible that some of the decisions they made contributed to the gas explosion, but it's also possible that this would have happened no matter what. Until the last hour before the explosion or so everything was "ok". Not great, but not terrible either.
In addition, BP seems to be doing the right thing in terms of response and clean-up so far. They have already spent close to $1B on response and mitigation/ clean-up without anyone twisting their arm when technically their liability is limited to something like $10M or $75M and there is still no end in sight.
Finally, given the volume of oil that's been spilled, the impact SO FAR has been pretty limited. Only a small amount of wetlands have been affected (36 acres was the number i saw) and ~150 miles of shoreline. The bulk of the oil is in these underwater "plumes", but those have yet to be shown to have any serious impact. (see e.g. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127263477 (note that the phrase "The oxygen levels are crazy low..." is mis-transcribed. If you listen to the audio the prof says "AREN'T" which makes more sense in context)). The long and the short of it is that oil in the deep waters and these oil plumes MAY be bad but they may not be and really we don't know much about them.
So yes, this spill is bad, and it might get worse, but right now it's not the end of the world and BP seems to be behaving quite well so far during the response.
They also don't specify what "80 mph" means. Is that indicated air speed or true ? If the top speed is 80mph true at 20000 that would mean less than 60mph near the ground.
It's just a strange word that people don't normally use yet every such wiki page is prominently labeled and wikified in the introduction. This particular word has bugged me for years. It is pretentious and out of place even though it is correctly used. I don't have a problem w/ the parallel word "acronym" when it is used correctly, but that's because normal people actually USE the word.
(I was similarly rankled recently, but nowhere to the same degree, by an article that described a fictional character as a "gynoid". WTF? It's supposedly the feminine form of "android". Ok... gender warriors... you keep on fighting the good fight...)
The defense in the rebuttal seems pretty strong, though i haven't read the original works or, of course, the unreleased critique discussed in the OP.
It certainly doesn't seem that Friel is acting in good faith here. For example, Lomberg points out that Friel chose to critique the shorter American version of "Cool It" instead of the more heavily footnoted British version ("The full 354 pages version with 59 graphs and about 50% more text" ) even though the British version is apparently MENTIONED in the American version. ( see.http://www.lomborg.com/cool_it/uk-version_354_pages/ )
It's also unfortunate for Friel that he apparently makes some arguments using the now retracted 2035 date for the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers to counter Lomberg's moderate claims that said glaciers will at least last out this century.
Tone wise Friel comes off as shrill and snarky and wheras Lomberg seems cool and collected. As to the claims, at least the tens of such claims rebutted by Lomberg, don't seem to hold up in the least.
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Good thing that those tight accountability rules prevented the massive credit / derivatives bubble.
Apples and oranges. That was a different game, where the villains were the banks, mortgage companies, Wall Street traders and ratings agencies.
It wasn't the same thing, but there are some important similarities. In both cases the responsible parties misrepresented their real risk exposure and they were then caught with their pants down when the market turned against them. In the case of mortgage brokers there was pretty clearly outright fraud; people lying on their applications at the brokers suggestion, etc. Presumably better "corporate governance" should have prevented that, but it didn't.
As far as the ratings agencies go... yeah... why they're still in business and have suffered no consequences (that i'm aware of) after they so massively failed in their one and only task is a mystery. Perhaps their SarBox violation is lying in claiming in their SEC filings that they actually offer a bond rating service when in fact they're a massive marketing company for bond issuers. Com to thing of it maybe they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Or perhaps for mail and wire fraud for disseminating their ratings across state lines. That's hyperbole of course, but man, they screwed up bad.
That would be different (and i believe such tests already happen a good deal in actual research).
In this art project they're pitting blood cell against blood cell, not blood cell against things that are actually harmful to humans, so success here doesn't prove anything. Also, given that auto-immune disorders are probably currently a bigger health problem for people than infectious disease, figuring out how to moderate white-cell action is arguably more important than finding the most bad ass killer white blood cell.
Had also meant to include this link, but couldn't find it at the time: http://www.louisianaseafoodnews.com/2011/02/11/gulf-shrimp-safe-enough-for-1575-per-day-diet/
(and no, i'm not in the seafood industry or even within 1000 miles of the Gulf. Just tired of the un-scientific and anti-scientific scare mongering about the impact of the spill. Yes, it did some damage, and it sucks for the birds, dolphins and turtles that got killed by the oil, but there's just no evidence of wide spread, ecosystem changing disaster here)
This article doesn't pass the smell test for a few reasons.
a) Everything i've heard so far about the dissolved methane has been pretty positive. e.g. http://www.upstreamonline.com/incoming/article240856.ece
The current article doesn't make anything but a FUD statement that the methane is "a big deal".
b) Having watched live video feeds (for hundreds of hours (Go CRAW! )) from the well area during the capping process two things don't jive: First of all the area immediately around the well, say within 200m or so didn't have anything living on it. It was just mud. Occasionally (maybe once a day at most ) a fish , squid or shark would swim by, but that's it. No crabs, sea cucumbers, corals or anything else were on the bottom. This is probably because it was all at 5000 ft depth where there's no light and not a whole heck of a lot going on. Second, even around the well there was no actual oil visible.
c) I'm glad they took samples over "2600 square miles". What percentage of the area was impacted ? where ? over such a huge area even if all the oil had sunk straight to the bottom it would be a vanishingly small amount. certainly not enough to "choke off" anything. Also, as noted in point "b" the corals and sea stars etc would have to be some distance away from the well anyway because coral needs sunlight... which doesn't exist 1 mile down.
d) there's no mention of just how many natural oil and gas seeps there are in the GOM. (answer: thousands). Let's wait and see if those samples really show that the oil is from the mc 252 well.
i fully believe that some of the oil ended up on the bottom and that it's caused damage, but on the balance whatever truth there may be in this article is being spun in a misleading and scare-mongering way. The GOM is open for shrimping and the shrimp is testing out fine.
Ok. If you're proposing something that will be as good as Sarbanes-Oxley... you probably need to find a better idea. Sarbox was a knee jerk response to Enron and has done nothing but drive up costs.
Good thing that those tight accountability rules prevented the massive credit / derivatives bubble.
Indeed. Your blood cells are just hanging out patrolling your body and keeping you safe from bad stuff. These people would have you sacrifice them in an arena for no purpose other than entertainment. Even the "winner" blood cells are going to die in the end. I know they're not people, but it still seems like a "mean" thing to do.
(And yes, i know blood cells die all the time etc. but if i were a blood cell, i wouldn't want to go out like this)
You guys are so right. I've heard him a few times on the radio on some NPR show (the web says it's All Things Considered) dispensing supposed ethical advice, but i've been disappointed every time. I expected him to contextualize the question: maybe describe how the law and/or different philosophical, religious , cultural traditions look at the issue and then perhaps give his personal pronouncement. Instead he didn't even necessarily seem to get the root of the questions and dispatched them with like 2 or 3 sentences and a joke. Basically the same thing as what his column seems to do but even shorter because it's on the radio. It was all really disappointing and just didn't deliver. Maybe i'd think differently if I found him funny, but making fun of people who are asking earnest questions doesn't work for me.
On the point of the ethicists job being to clarify ideas, i definitely agree, HOWEVER, i have little patience for "experts" who just won't offer an opinion because "it's not their decision to make", etc. That's a cop out. They should lay out the options AND then if they have an opinion they should give it.
Your statement doesn't really address the ethics of the situation, but rather whether it makes good business sense. Your argument against it is that the apparent savings in costs won't materialize because the quality of the product will be worse which will lead to decreased sales, injury to the brand, higher replacement cost etc.
But that dodges the question. Assuming you could get the equivalent productivity (from your business' point of view) for lower cost by offshoring, is it ethical to do so ? Or to flip it around, how much of a premium would you be willing to pay to keep your operations on-shore. 1% ? 5% ? 10%? 100%? That's the real question.
(and my answer is " idon't know". personally i'd be willing to give maybe 20% - 25% of profit to keep things on-shore... 50% would be a lot harder. )
What i don't understand is why the network providers keep pushing mobile video and tethering.
T-mobile is pushing their video chat... Sprint is saying you can upload live video directly to the web etc.
The networks already can't handle the level of data usage they currently get, yet they're pushing these very high bandwidth services. Don't get me wrong, i like that my t-mo G2 with stock firmware can do wifi and USB tethering. But i would also like it if my "4G" phone on the "4G" network got more than 400kbps download rates (in one of their 4G launch cities). If there's any level of adoption of this stuff it'll bring their networks to a halt and not due to any top 5% users.
yeah... haven't whipped out firebug to see what's causing it (mostly because i'm running Chrome right now) but something is definitely taking most of the CPU in this one tab according to Chrome's task manager. I'm guessing/hoping that that's a bug rather than an inherent feature of the new design because as a permanent feature that would be quite lame.
Display on my older Atom netbook though is actually faster than the previous version. (in Google Chrome anyway, haven't tested it in anything else yet.)
Have you ever tried to contact google about anything ever? It's near impossible whether as a user or a webmaster. You can't even send them an email or report a bug. If you buy advertising from them the experience is a little better, but not all that much (based on the experience a previous company had with them. Our monthly spend w/ them was in the mid four figures iirc). That's not huge, but it meant that we'd occasionally get our emails acknowledge even if they never answered why our site would occasionally drop entirely from their index for certain terms and then return to the first results page a few weeks later when there was absolutely no change to the page or our server set-up or anything else and there was no indication of anything different on the Webmaster Tools pages). On two occasions we dropped out of the results entirely for our own site name even though people linking to us were still there. A few weeks later we were back. No explanation or indication of what, if anything had happened.
Basically google does whatever it does and they don't want to hear from you because they know better. Sometimes it does it well (e.g. spam filtering), sometimes it doesn't (e.g. indexing any type of DHTML, allowing for flexibility in search results, dealing with non-RESTful urls etc). Your choice of interaction with google is primarily to use what they offer (which is sometimes excellent) or not to. Same as with other large companies like Facebook and even Comcast, AT&T, T-mobile etc.
The ones that you give money to seem to be a bit more responsive in that they at least will give you someone to talk to but that's about the only difference.
A better question even is why dual boot at all (as a user)? Nowadays what I care most about is the documents and tabs I have open.
I could probably remedy this with some utilities for session saving/restoration... but dual booting is a clunky solution for a user and it's especially unnecessary w/ the rise of virtulisation over the past few years. Want a different OS for some tasks or "just because"? Get another gig of ram and run a VM.
Getting a new/different OS to run on some hardware is cool, but multi-boot for a general purpose box? Forget it.
Heh. I searched for "bruce perens" in the comments just to see if anyone else picked up on this. My first reaction was also "huh ?" especially since the summary doesn't capitalize Open Source and just refers to it as a concept. (note this is nothing against Mr. Perens, who is certainly a beg cheese in Free/free software, just against whoever wrote the summary).
T-mobile's own 4G "launch" phone doesn't distinguish in the interface between the HSPA "3G" and the HSPA+ "4G" as far as i can tell. The user interface used to say "G" "E" "3G" for GPRS, EDGE and HSPA now was just changed to say "G", "E" and "H" as far as i can tell.
Also, i live in one of the cities that supposedly has this coverage but I still only see speeds usually less than 1 Mbps down though now i get almost 2Mbps upload speed for whatever that's worth. Perhaps i should go around downtown in search of the supposed fast speeds.
Fortunately, 1 Meg is fine for my usage of the phone as i just use it for maps, web browsing and email etc, and the G2 has been a good phone, but the marketing around this stuff is deplorable as usual. (I say as usual because i've been paying for their unlimited data plan for something like 7 years now and the actual capabilities of the phones/network pretty much lag the advertising by one full generation.)
This is good an all, but it doesn't address the biggest issues with Flash:
1) Adobe (and Macromedia before it) give virtually NO control to the end user over how flash objects run. You can't stop them, you can't pause them, you can't unload them, nothing. Technically you can control if they store local shared objects (LSOs) on your machine but the interface for that is terrible. Half the time the pop-up window it prompts with can't even be accessed because of various z-index issues on the page. That is you can't even click the button.
2) It is a CPU hog. Forget the fact that its inherent performance isn't great. The issue is that if you browse the web for any length of time and have multiple tabs open you'll find that your Flash plug-in is taking up all your cpu (or a whole core). Why? because there are all sorts of little flash movies playing in all the pages. Mostly Ads but also paused video players, random web bugs and such. Plus, some of these random are poorly written and have memory leaks. Thus BECAUSE Adobe gives the user no control, you have to just kill the plugin.
Instead of trying to horn in on HTML5 maybe they should fix the fact that Flash is the SPAM of the web. (And yes, Flash itself could be fine... but the business practices they've chose to pursue make it a scourge rather than a blessing).
There's no real reason not to.
If you're looking for an actual transactional database w/ constraints and things like that i'm not aware of any significant advantage that MySQL has over Postgres. I haven't really used Postgres since ~4 years ago and at that time it didn't have a good replication solution and you had to "vacuum" your tables via cron or other external process in order to maintain performance. However both of those issues have since been addressed so ...
I too was struck by the overall unprofessional tone of the discussion. The language barrier was certainly palpable, but what was up w/ all the "joking" and such. louis_to at least put down some statement of what he (and/or his faction) were demanding, but he didn't really explain how or why this was a conflict of interest.
His statements were a quoted appeal to "gentlemanship" and a statement that he didn't want to "confuse the users". That's fairly weak reasoning. There was, for example, no statement of how the two projects are in competition with each other or any statement about WHAT exactly the users would be confused about.
I'm not saying that there isn't a COI, but no theory of COI was even advanced in the "discussion".
From my reading of this it looks like louis_to and mhu were giving the branchers/non-employees an ultimatum to resign by Tuesday (though no specific "or else" was specified). I assume otherwise they're going to be voted off the island?
(as a purely subjective matter, and perhaps as a result of their making demands without presenting an argument, mhu and louis_to came off as jerks in this exchange.)
I don't think this is really "hate" speech, but what I find most relevant about this story is that it is a warning to anyone hosting w/ Rackspace for anything anywhere near mission critical. Do you really want your hosting company imposing speech codes ?
If Rackspace wants to get into politics, fine, but I'd rather not have to worry about downtime because my ISP doesn't like what my site or what my customer's sites say. This is not unlike the stories of GoDaddy and Paypal locking accounts because of some real or imagined breach of their TOS. If there's a court order or someone's spamming, distributing warez or doing something clearly illegal, then ok, but in this case none of that is true.
Ask them to move along at the end of their contract? Ok, that's reasonable (unless the contract has a clause guaranteeing renewal), but just to take a site off the net... that's not acceptable behavior.
This isn't funny. It's sad. That it's true is even sadder.
Heh. BP looks to be down about 30% since this started (vs ~9% for the Dow). If i had stock, selling it now would be way too late.
No, i'm not trolling. It's just that everything here is relative. Let's look at a quote from the NYT article:
"BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.
Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks."
From these statements and others like it how can one judge whether BP acted "correctly" or not? One can't. What's an acceptable level of risk? How much riskier was the option chosen ? Without at least some framework to evaluate this, it's pure innuendo.
Or, let's look at another: ...
"
On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.
When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure — 6,500 pounds per square inch — than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay. It tested at this lower pressure until the explosion.
A review of Minerals Management Service’s data of all B.O.P. tests done in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico for five years shows B.O.P. tests rarely dropped so sharply, and, in general, either continued at the same threshold or were done at increasing levels.
The manufacturer of the blowout preventer, Cameron, declined to say what the appropriate testing pressure was for the device.
"
It certainly SOUNDS suspicious, but is it relevant? They don't say, and I don't know. This information could be very damning or it could be irrelevant. Without further analysis it's impossible to make a determination. I have yet to see such analysis (in the NYT or anywhere else).
This isn't just philosophical masturbation... in my unexciting career as a software engineer i've been involved in 100s of situations where we had to choose between alternative courses of action where we had to balance cost/time vs features and/or confidence usually w/ less than perfect information about costs and consequences. Much lower stakes in my case, but same general dynamic.
The transcript in the article could be turned into a template that applies to pretty much every project i've been witness to.
Even in your scenario one would have to show that the mechanic was correct and that the brakes failed (if you were in a criminal case at least; in a civil case it seems all bets are off as evidenced by e.g. airlines ALWAYS paying out if there's a crash)
More importantly I'd modify the scenario as follows: Let's say that the driver took his car in for service. The mechanic recommended set of repairs A. The driver instead asked for the cheaper set B. The mechanic did B and the government said that B is ok.
That's a lot closer to what's happened so far w/ this well. It could be the case that doing A would have prevented the accident that B allowed, and one could argue that the driver had undue influence on the mechanic and on the government agency... but now things are a lot less clear.
It's certainly possible that some people at BP acted badly, etc but, based on the information currently available i don't see how one differentiates between "negligence" and "accident".
Seriously. I don't understand all of the hate being thrown at BP. We don't even know what happened yet (and probably will never know). It's possible that some of the decisions they made contributed to the gas explosion, but it's also possible that this would have happened no matter what. Until the last hour before the explosion or so everything was "ok". Not great, but not terrible either.
In addition, BP seems to be doing the right thing in terms of response and clean-up so far. They have already spent close to $1B on response and mitigation/ clean-up without anyone twisting their arm when technically their liability is limited to something like $10M or $75M and there is still no end in sight.
Finally, given the volume of oil that's been spilled, the impact SO FAR has been pretty limited. Only a small amount of wetlands have been affected (36 acres was the number i saw) and ~150 miles of shoreline. The bulk of the oil is in these underwater "plumes", but those have yet to be shown to have any serious impact. (see e.g. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127263477 (note that the phrase "The oxygen levels are crazy low..." is mis-transcribed. If you listen to the audio the prof says "AREN'T" which makes more sense in context)). The long and the short of it is that oil in the deep waters and these oil plumes MAY be bad but they may not be and really we don't know much about them.
So yes, this spill is bad, and it might get worse, but right now it's not the end of the world and BP seems to be behaving quite well so far during the response.
They also don't specify what "80 mph" means. Is that indicated air speed or true ? If the top speed is 80mph true at 20000 that would mean less than 60mph near the ground.
More importantly if you consider that 80mph = 70 kts so this thing would do well to stay away from the jetstream if it wants to stay in one place, even at full power
http://www.wunderground.com/Aviation_Maps/Winds_Aloft/FL200-24.html#a_topad
It's just a strange word that people don't normally use yet every such wiki page is prominently labeled and wikified in the introduction. This particular word has bugged me for years. It is pretentious and out of place even though it is correctly used. I don't have a problem w/ the parallel word "acronym" when it is used correctly, but that's because normal people actually USE the word.
(I was similarly rankled recently, but nowhere to the same degree, by an article that described a fictional character as a "gynoid". WTF? It's supposedly the feminine form of "android". Ok... gender warriors... you keep on fighting the good fight...)
The defense in the rebuttal seems pretty strong, though i haven't read the original works or, of course, the unreleased critique discussed in the OP.
It certainly doesn't seem that Friel is acting in good faith here. For example, Lomberg points out that Friel chose to critique the shorter American version of "Cool It" instead of the more heavily footnoted British version ("The full 354 pages version with 59 graphs and about 50% more text" ) even though the British version is apparently MENTIONED in the American version. ( see .http://www.lomborg.com/cool_it/uk-version_354_pages/ )
It's also unfortunate for Friel that he apparently makes some arguments using the now retracted 2035 date for the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers to counter Lomberg's moderate claims that said glaciers will at least last out this century.
Tone wise Friel comes off as shrill and snarky and wheras Lomberg seems cool and collected. As to the claims, at least the tens of such claims rebutted by Lomberg, don't seem to hold up in the least.