Thursday, May 31, 2012
Amity Shales - Just Say No (why does she have a job? Really?)
Shes got an article up on Bloomberg where she basically sez. "If your workplace discriminates, its basically being 'creative' and 'promoting growth'"
Check out these gems
Hmmmm? Maybe, given a choice between
Maybe? Just maybe?
Theres more, much more in the article, but its making me throw up in my mouth.
Come to think of it, avoid the troll-bait. Don't read the article.
(Though, I still wonder, why is Bloomberg posting troll-bait?)
Amity Shlaes - Just Say No...
Check out these gems
Over the years, creative rebels have often behaved poorly in their creative workplaces. Do most of us approve? Hardly. Nobody likes, say, the way the great creator of Apple Inc. (AAPL),Steve Jobs, treated many colleagues.Riiight. So if Apple instituted a policy saying "Front-office jobs to be done only by the Swedish Bikini Team", thats OK right? They're just being "creative rebels"?
Her action may reduce the very kind of access she enjoyed for those who followed her. Setting Kleiner Perkins aside, consider the rest of the sector. Human-resources specialists aren’t idiots. They see how much Pao, still merely alleging, is costing a firm such as Kleiner Perkins: time, image and distraction from its main work, finding value. Other businesses will work harder to avoid a litigious hireOr, and I'm going out on a limb here, They might actually decide to not allow workplace harassment?
Hmmmm? Maybe, given a choice between
- Hiring a Certified Genius from MIT who doesn't like his/her co-workers watching pr0n in the office, and
- Hiring a super-model to walk around looking good
Maybe? Just maybe?
Theres more, much more in the article, but its making me throw up in my mouth.
Come to think of it, avoid the troll-bait. Don't read the article.
(Though, I still wonder, why is Bloomberg posting troll-bait?)
Amity Shlaes - Just Say No...
Women will dominate the workforce in the coming years...
The point behind the title isn't So what?, but more of a Why do I say that?
And the answer is - because thats what the data are showing.
Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic summarizes a couple of annual reports releases by the National Center for Education Statistics to come up with the following chart
The key points from the above?
And the answer is - because thats what the data are showing.
Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic summarizes a couple of annual reports releases by the National Center for Education Statistics to come up with the following chart
- Starting 1995, more women have graduated w/ Bachelor's degrees than men. Or, to cast this slightly differently, this has been going on for the last 17 years (and counting)
- The trend lines have been dominated by women since 1975, i.e., At best, the increase in the percentage of men getting degrees is the same as for women (and its usually worse!)
Not caring about the NHL...
Which team that I am not interested in am I more interested in?
I don't particularly follow the #NHL.
Given that, I really don't follow the Los Angeles Kings.
The New Jersey Devils? meh city
Which basically leaves me with a conundrum - when I'm in a business setting, and people are going on about The Great Game Last Night, WTF am I supposed to do?
I guess I could just read the sports section of the paper, and pretend, but that still leaves me with the choice of a team.
I suspect the best
solution is to emulate a buddy of mine and conflate the NHL and the NFL -
say, did you see that great touchdown last night?
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
High Performance SQL @ Google
There is a paper out by Google on how they migrated from MySQL to F1 for AdSense.
Its fascinating reading on its own, but its got some key take-aways for scaling and reliability. I'd recommend going and reading it, but these two are worth emphasizing
Scaling
Eliminate the R in ORM. In short, instead of building out a nice layer (hibernate, whatever) between your DB and your code, go the other way, and deliberately expose the workings of your DB to your application developers.
This actually makes tremendous sense - in many ways the advent of NoSQL has been due to people specifically picking data stores that map to their application requirements. Need a key-value store? Use Riak. Need a document store wht guaranteed writes? Use CouchDB. Hiding the specifics of your data store behind an ORM layer is - increasingly - becoming irrelevant, and Google quite probably just made it official.
Fault-Tolerance
Use 5 replicas.
5? Why 5? Why not 3?
Because, as Google puts it, with 3 replicas, all it takes is one data-center outage + one machine crash for you to be SOL, but with 5 replicas, you're pushing the black-swan way, waaaaay down the line.
And that, boys and girls, is what you need to worry about when you are working at Google-scale. (Come to think of it, its also what we worry about at our scale, which, while not Google Scale, is still quite scale-y, and has 5 replicas...)
Anyhow the paper --->
Abstract
Its fascinating reading on its own, but its got some key take-aways for scaling and reliability. I'd recommend going and reading it, but these two are worth emphasizing
Scaling
This actually makes tremendous sense - in many ways the advent of NoSQL has been due to people specifically picking data stores that map to their application requirements. Need a key-value store? Use Riak. Need a document store wht guaranteed writes? Use CouchDB. Hiding the specifics of your data store behind an ORM layer is - increasingly - becoming irrelevant, and Google quite probably just made it official.
Fault-Tolerance
5? Why 5? Why not 3?
Because, as Google puts it, with 3 replicas, all it takes is one data-center outage + one machine crash for you to be SOL, but with 5 replicas, you're pushing the black-swan way, waaaaay down the line.
And that, boys and girls, is what you need to worry about when you are working at Google-scale. (Come to think of it, its also what we worry about at our scale, which, while not Google Scale, is still quite scale-y, and has 5 replicas...)
Anyhow the paper --->
Abstract
Many of the services that are critical to Google’s ad business have historically been backed by MySQL. We have recently migrated several of these services to F1, a new RDBMS developed at Google. F1 implements rich relational database features, including a strictly enforced schema, a powerful parallel SQL query engine, general transactions, change tracking and notification, and indexing, and is built on top of a highly distributed storage system that scales on standard hardware in Google data centers. The store is dynamically sharded, supports transactionally-consistent replication across data centers, and is able to handle data center outages without data loss.
The strong consistency properties of F1 and its storage system come at the cost of higher write latencies compared to MySQL. Having successfully migrated a rich customerfacing application suite at the heart of Google’s ad business to F1, with no downtime, we will describe how we restructured schema and applications to largely hide this increased latency from external users. The distributed nature of F1 also allows it to scale easily and to support significantly higher throughput for batch workloads than a traditional RDBMS.With F1, we have built a novel hybrid system that combines the scalability, fault tolerance, transparent sharding, and cost benefits so far available only in “NoSQL” systems with the usability, familiarity, and transactional guarantees expected from an RDBMS.
Les Misérables - The movie (please, *please* be good...)
And the soundtrack! Brilliance - I must have listened to it - oh - an infinity of times. Slightly obsessive about it? Quite possibly, but the music is sheer genius, and I still get chills down my spine when I hear the opening chords. On my own, Do you hear the people sing, I dreamed a dream, One day more, and on, and on, every song is brilliant.
So why this sudden burst of nostalgia for Les Mis?
'cos the Trailer for the latest movie version is out, and it looks staggering, quite probably one of the first movies in a long time that I'm actually interested in. Ye gods, I cant' wait...
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Why the FDIC exists
Most people have one of three perspectives on the FDIC- U.N. sponsored gummint agency, that makes black helicopters for use by the Trilateral Commission
- Something to do with medicine approval?
- Something to do with regulating banks?
As it turns out, there is actually a perfectly valid reason for the existence of the FDIC - and it has to do with Banks, and Nash Equilibrium.
To put it simply, a Nash Equilibrium is the equivalent of a self-reinforcing law, i.e., one that nobody has an incentive to break, despite the absence of a police force, because you end up worse off breaking it than if you don't.
Or ask XKCD puts it
"What on earth does the above have to do with the banks?"
I'm glad you asked.
Being a bank, what it does is takes in short-term deposits from people (you, I, Alice down the street, etc.), and lends it out as long-term loans to local businesses.
The above is key, and is worth elaborating on. Short-term deposits are things like your paycheck. It gets deposited on the 1st of the month, and you take it out in small chunks during the month to pay rent, get groceries, etc. Long-term loans are things like construction loans to local businesses, which might get paid back only over a ten year span, as compared to my short-term deposit.
As a first-order approximation, Zelda's Bank keeps 10% of all the short-term deposits as cash, and lends out the remaining 90%. This 10% suffices to cover any sudden up-tick in people needing money (emergency surgery, trip to see your parents in India, that darling Prada purse you simply must have, etc.). But, by definition, 10% of the short-term deposits are only 10% of the short-term deposits, and not 100% - this is important, as you'll see in just a moment.
One Monday morning, John is getting his morning-coffee at Starbucks, when he thinks he overhears someone say that Zelda Bank's construction loans were not properly vetted, and are going bad. Being a fiscally prudent guy, he promptly heads over to Zelda Bank to get his money out, but also being a nice guy, he calls up a couple of his friends, and tells them to do the same. His friends call their friends, and the next thing you know, the entire town is headed over to the bank to get their money out.
Enter the FDIC. At the core of it, the FDIC sez. "We, the Gummint, will guarantee that the first $250,000 of your money in the bank will get paid back, even if the bank goes kaput".
And that simple act changes the dynamics completely.
John hears the rumor, blah blah blah, but instead of blasting over to the bank, John sez. "meh, there will probably be a bunch of people over at the bank clamouring for their money, I'll just take a nap instead, and head over next week when the chaos has died down". His friends will all probably do exactly the same thing, resulting in virtually nobody blasting over to the bank. In short, the Nash Equilibrium here is for there to not be a Bank Run!
This remarkably obvious (in retrospect!) take on Bank Runs was actually formalized in 1983 by Douglas Diamond Phillip Dybvig in a seminal paper and is now immortalized as the Diamond-Dybvig model.
And that my friends, is why the FDIC exists, and why Bank Runs don't really happen anymore. Or if they do, why they tend to be really, really short-lived! Exhibit A is the Northern Rock bank run which continued till the British Government guaranteed the deposits FDIC style, at which point the Run vanished...
Monday, May 28, 2012
The solution to the EuroCrisis! Its simple!
It came to me as an epiphany!
It is brilliant, sheer brilliance I tell you!
Huh?
What?
Oh, right, its the solution to the EuroCrisis, the chaos going on in Europe / Greece / Spain / Italy / etc.
Its really simple - what they need is a central banking authority that can print Euros!
See, you print up a bunch of Euros, and that deals with the short-term balance of payments issue, banking issues, solvency issues, etc., and you agree on a long-term fiscal compact to prevent chaos from occurring again.
But in the short term, all you need is a central bank that can print Euros.
Huh?
What?
There is already something called the ECB?
Really?
Dammit....
Biometric Security - basically "Security Theater"
Biometric identification systems are all the rage - heck, they've been the rage for years now. The problem, of course, is what biometric signs to use for identification.
Fingerprints?
D.H. Kaye showed in 2003 that the statistical evidence showing that fingerprints are unique is not at all conclusive
As HackLaw puts it
It gets worse
Mind you, juries tend to like "scientific" evidence, and they might say "the fingerprints matched", but the automatic rebuttal is to point out that any number of people's prints might have matched!
Handprint Scanning
Its exactly the same as Fingerprints above. The value is in that if you can pre-restrict the set of people who are having their handprints scanned, then handprints are - quite possibly - a very good way of discriminating amongst people.
Think - you claim to be Bob, not Alice, and the handprint matches Bob's handprint, as does your ID, so you're good.
As compared to - I have no idea who you are, but your handprint matches Charlie's so you must be Charlie.
Iris Scans
Turns out this is even worse! From a forthcoming paper by a few folks at Notre Dame, we have the news that Retinal Scans actually change over time.
The bottom line? Retinal scans are not dispositive, and if they are not updated frequently, are pretty much useless for both uniqueness (think "Fingerprints" above) and discrimination (think "Handprint scanning" above)
So yeah, the next time you see any kind of biometric identification going on (and in particular, being used for uniqueness or discrimination), think Security Theater, and keep on trucking....
D.H. Kaye showed in 2003 that the statistical evidence showing that fingerprints are unique is not at all conclusive
As HackLaw puts it
But, it turns out that there is no publicly available database of this evidence (really!)No court has ever challenged the expert-ness of an expert witness who purported to be an expert on fingerprints.Why not?To be an expert in something, there has to be a body of knowledge for you to know about.Where is the body of knowledge about fingerprints? They swirl around, we know that much right?
It gets worse
Fingerprint evidence is difficult to deal with in trial because the examiner offers his or her "opinion" as if it were indisputable fact. In truth, the examiner identifies a number of points of comparison and then, if similar to the known sample (for example, from our client), declares that the prints "match." He or she may use fewer than 7 points of comparison in many jurisdictions and still declare the "match.Which, when you really get down to it, is what reviews around the world have pretty much determined viz., that fingerprints are a good test, but are not (not!) a provably exact test, which basically means that you can't have the CSI investigator say "His fingerprint was on the gun! I have a match! He done it!".
Mind you, juries tend to like "scientific" evidence, and they might say "the fingerprints matched", but the automatic rebuttal is to point out that any number of people's prints might have matched!
Handprint Scanning
Think - you claim to be Bob, not Alice, and the handprint matches Bob's handprint, as does your ID, so you're good.
As compared to - I have no idea who you are, but your handprint matches Charlie's so you must be Charlie.
Iris Scans
The study used commercial iris-matching software to compare 20,000 images of 644 irises, using iris pictures that were taken anywhere from one month to three years apart.When the researchers compared the photos that were taken one month apart, they found few instances of the system failing to match two irises from the same person. As the length of time between the photos increased, however, the rate of false mismatches increased: when iris photos taken three years apart were compared, the false non-match rate was 153 percent higher than for photos taken a month apart. In practical terms, this still means that only about 2.5 iris scans in 2 million will be incorrectly matched after three years. As time goes by, however, the effect will be compounded, co-author Kevin Bowyer says, potentially locking some people out of systems or letting other fool security checkpoints. This means that at the very least, images should be updated every few years, and future pattern recognition systems may need to account for changing irises as well as different lighting conditions and other factors.
The bottom line? Retinal scans are not dispositive, and if they are not updated frequently, are pretty much useless for both uniqueness (think "Fingerprints" above) and discrimination (think "Handprint scanning" above)
So yeah, the next time you see any kind of biometric identification going on (and in particular, being used for uniqueness or discrimination), think Security Theater, and keep on trucking....
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Eurovision - the Road House of Singing Competitions
Seriously, for sheer camp spectacle, can it be topped?
Exhibit A - Pasha Parfeny - pretty much speaks for itself :-)
Exhibit A - Pasha Parfeny - pretty much speaks for itself :-)
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Travel Supplies - "Sexy Skin Lotion" edition
The point here is that in this day and age you can pretty much buy anything you need at the destination if you really need it, and the only allowance you need to make is that you can survive if you show up on a Sunday - when all the shops happen to be closed.
But even that is changing!
Germany - which has some of the toughest Sunday trading laws around - recently ruled that "condoms, porn DVDs and sexy skin lotion" are acceptable for sale on Sundays since they are (get this!) "legitimate travel supplies"!
"This is the decision of the court … since the above articles can be considered 'travel supplies,' regardless of their content,"Mind you, this decision explicitly said that sex toys were not legitimate travel supplies, but "sexy skin lotion" was.
Thats pretty entertaining to begin with, but as Local World reports the kicker is that
Three administrative judges visited Erotic World ahead of the court hearing to inspect the shop's goods, carefully assessing whether each item might come in handy on a long journey.As I've said before, I don't even bother reading The Onion anymore, reality is pretty damn good enough :-)
Condoms were considered useful enough, but the judges ruled that the old favourite sex game "Erotic Ludo" should still be taboo on the day God has designated the day of rest.
BigData - Tornado Tracks edition
Theres a ridiculously cool map out from IDV Solutions titled 56 years of tornado tracks, by F-Scale.
It is, as you would expect, 56 years of tornado tracks overlayed on a map of the U.S.
And boy oh boy, is it ever a doozy - check out the hard stop as you move west...
Small version below, but click to embiggen...
It is, as you would expect, 56 years of tornado tracks overlayed on a map of the U.S.
And boy oh boy, is it ever a doozy - check out the hard stop as you move west...
Small version below, but click to embiggen...
Underwater homes - "Yikes!" edition
Zillow brings you an interactive map of the U.S. showing you all the underwater homes.
And yes, its as frightening to me as it is to you...
(Click to go the actual site)
And yes, its as frightening to me as it is to you...
(Click to go the actual site)
Friday, May 25, 2012
Water usage (or why the Indian Monsoon is important)
Check out the latest Scientific American - its got a great article on water usage by country, and what it is used for.
For my money though, the fascinating part is that
For my money though, the fascinating part is that
A vast amount of water is used to produce the food and products that nations consume. Large population is the greatest factor, but inefficient agriculture or dependence on water-intensive cuisine can exacerbate demand; meat consumption accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. water footprint.Given the sheer amount of water that India uses (and exports!), the importance of the monsoons makes sense - around 80% of India's water comes from the Monsoon, as does a huge chunk of its energy. Its pretty harsh - this is a ton of water and its all dependant on one - finicky - annual event. As the Economist puts it
Yet the drought underlines a grim truth. India’s extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing. Increasingly frequent droughts may be a sign of this—if, as some think, climate change is to blame. It will accentuate India’s problems, with the monsoon rains, which supply over 50% of much of India’s annual precipitation in just 15 days, predicted to become even more contracted and unpredictable. At the same time, the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers promises to deprive the great rivers of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, of their summertime source. This threatens a triple whammy: of longer dry seasons, in which these rivers do not flow, and more violent wet seasons. That would mean more bad news for flood-prone eastern India, including Bihar, where over 3m were displaced last year when the Kosi river burst a crumbling embankment.Ominous...
Star Wars - Just The Force
Star Wars edited to leave behind only the characters saying The Force.
(Yes, of course, the original Star Wars...)
(Yes, of course, the original Star Wars...)
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
So you want to climb Everest? Take a number...
Its like waiting to get into an overcrowded club.
In Chicago.
In Winter.
The following video brought to you by Outside Online...
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Adventures in Autocorrect
Which makes phrases like
I'll see you later this morningsomewhat fraught, especially when sent to the wrong person (Sorry Tammy!)...
Seriously Mr. Google, "sex" is not, *Not* a valid replacement for "see"!!!
Monday, May 21, 2012
Which Avenger has the most appearances?
As you might expect, Jer Thorp has the answer at blog.blprnt.com
Captain America, thats who... (click to - massively - embiggen)
Interestingly enough, Iron Man isn't all that far behind...
Captain America, thats who... (click to - massively - embiggen)
Interestingly enough, Iron Man isn't all that far behind...
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Charlie Trotter's redux. Or, "You can't go home again"
I remember the first time we went - when we got married, our friends (major shout-out to Mirabell, Tom, Ed and Sarah!) bought us dinner there, and, it was awesome. Awesome not just because of the "Newly married" glow, but awesome in that timeless decadent sense of a brilliant haute cuisine experience.
But this time, this time, Charlie pulled a full-on George Lucas on us last night. In one shot, he not only managed to clobber stuff that I held dear, he managed to retroactively rewrite my memory so that they were never cool in the first place!
Seriously, the rip-off-ness was awesome, Awesome I tell you!
We walk in, and the hostess says, and I quote, "Do you have a last name?"
Huh?
Somewhat puzzled, but perfectly willing to play along, I responded appropriately, and a short while later we were seated. Table of four - The Fabulous Nicole, Paula, Jill, and myself, ready for The Experience.
We sit around for around five minutes, until nattily dressed Dude A shows up, and shows us the menu and wine list, and us being simple folks, we just said "Bring It On, and Do The Wine Pairing please", a choice to the tune of $400/head, but what the heck, its The Experience, isn't it?
Mind you, we did tell him to skip on Rabbit and Apricots/Plums/Peaches/Any_Stone_Fruit 'cos of allergies (remember this bit)
Then we sit back, relax, and wait for experience to start.
20 (!) minutes later, we're still waiting, with empty glasses.
I catch Dude A's eyes, he gives a bit of a perceptible start, vanishes, and shortly thereafter, our first course - an amuse bouche of some kind - shows up along with a glass of bubbly.
Its an amuse bouche, which means that its gone in about one bite, which is a bit of a problem since we're zombie-starved at this point, but whatever, surely there is more food coming, right? We'll just wait for the next course, because the first 20 minute delay was just them gearing up for The Experience, right? Right?
Dude A had absolutely vanished at this point, and based on everything thus far, I suspect was standing by the door behind the kitchen smoking a doobie. Which, come to think of it, would have been ok by me if he had just shared a bit, since it would have made the interminable wait somewhat more bearable. Then again, maybe not, since I would then have had the munchies, and remember there was no food on the table, certainly no fritos, and no edible flowers either.
So yeah, we corner Dude B, and do the "Hey, dude, we're still here, y'know? Perhaps some water might be nice? Or some wine? Maybe some bread to go with that butter over there? Or, and we're going out on a limb here, maybe some more food?" bit.
This does produce an "I apologize" from Dude B - the only one of the evening - who gets us our next course, and who we then proceed to never see again, (The mystery of the vanishing Dudes at Charlie Trotter's. Discuss) but that doesn't hold a candle to the bread that showed up shortly thereafter.
Rock hard, crack your tooth, usable as a hammer, stale bread, which, quite possibly was way more than a day old.
Stale beyond all possibly depths of staleness, stale.
So stale, you mama <something insulting here>
The staleosity, was at the level where, I swear, it had to be the bread equivalent of the waiter spitting in our drink.
Me, I was reduced to helpless laughter, to the point I almost peed my pants. Seeing as how that would be somewhat uncool, I decided to go to the restroom instead, which was pretty much OK, except that I come back to find that Dude C had showed up with the main course, dropped it off at the table, explained the foam this, emulsion that, beet and parsnip something else to the rest of the folks at the table, and had taken off, leaving them to do the honors for me.
Y'know, they don't even do that at the fish-shack around the corner from us?
Dude, I don't care how bloody exclusive your "Charlie Trotter Estate Bottled Bubbly" is, or how old the Assyrtiko vineyard on Santorini is, it is not premier-cru Bordeaux, and there is no, repeat no reason to do "One Sip And Vanish With The Bottle" pours. When your wine pour lasts one sip, you are harshing my buzz something fierce.
End digression
About this point as best as I can tell, Dude D, and Dude E took over (Dude C vanished too. I was really expecting Soylent Green to be one of the courses) and based on the service, I think Charlie pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel, or quite possibly just forced a couple of DePaul students to wait-tables at gunpoint. Highlights from my memory include such joyful items as
- Breadcrumbs left on the table, presumably for us to snack on.
- Napkins that vanished if one went to the restroom, never to reappear (the napkin, though perhaps us not reappearing may have been a good idea)
- The ever present lack of water.
- Mysteriously appearing bread (which was quite good this time), but only offered to some of the people at the table.
- Three successive desert courses, silently left at the table, with no explanation or context (and in my case, There Was No Spoon)
Apricots?
Hmmm? Remember the "No Rabbit and Apricots/Plums/Peaches/Any_Stone_Fruit 'cos of allergies" bit from earlier?
Apparently, for old Charlie, the "Any food allergies and issues" bit up-front was the equivalent of tapping gloves before a boxing match, a meaningless gesture after which he tries his level best to lay you out.
I mean, seriously gone, never to be seen again, along with Dudes B through E.
I am pretty much ready to go Soylent Green is Trotter's waiters, Its Waiters!, except, miraculously, Dude A shows up, and takes our cards.
Perhaps he missed the Soylent Sweep 'cos he was smoking that doobie, but hey, whatever, I'll take it.
Another agonizing 10 minute wait later (what were they doing with the cards? Seriously? I should probably go check the usage on the cards...), we escape, but even then only after wandering down some random concrete tunnel (Dude A apparently got converted to green wafers at this point), hastily backing up, finding our way out, and being accosted after we leave by a random host guy who plaintively sez. "Don't you want to see the kitchen?"
I mean, what was that supposed to be, a bribe? All I could think of was
"No dude! We don't want to see the fucking kitchen! We just got taken for $400 fucking dollars per head, and are not really Feeling The Love. You didn't even use Lube! A "Kitchen Tour" is not really going to make anything better, and given our experience thus far, you might either brain us with a copper pan, or worse, mistakenly lock us up in the wine cellar, where our pickled corpses will be discovered a few years hence."But, just wanting to leave at this point, we left.
So yeah, Charlie Trotter, I hope that you have some reasonable explanation for the monstrous cock-up that this evening was - assuming that it was a screw-up. Sadly, it looks like the Yelp reviews were accurate (a first in my experience).
Sigh.
At $40/head.
As compared to $400.
The irony is so thick, you can cut it with a knife...
Saturday, May 19, 2012
The $17,000 Oil Drip Pan - "Protecting us from Terrorists"
Being a helicopter, and one for the DoD at that, you'd expect stuff to be expensive. And that it costs $17,000, well, its possible right?
I mean, we're not talking about something like the Plews Lubrimatic ($9.80), or Cox ($4.56).
These are military drip pans, and are quite probably gold-plated or something.
So yeah, $17,000, I'd buy that.
Except, it turns out that there are peoples selling equivalent drip-pans to the DoD for $2,500
I bet its not super-complex. Its a f**king drip-pan. Made of metal.Bob Skillen [...] designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.“It’s not a supercomplex part,” said Mr. Skillen, an aerospace engineer who used to work for the Navy
So what d'you think makes this one special? Lets ask Phoenix Products shall we?
Tom Wilson, who owns Phoenix Products, defended his company’s pans as better constructed and more durable than others on the market. Asked what made them so costly, he declined to discuss specifics, saying that disclosure of the company’s custom design could help competitors or even aid America’s enemies.Get that?
We can't find out, because if they make it public, we'll aid America's enemies!
I can just see it - Terrorists attacking our freedoms with Oil Pans! The Humanity! The Humanity!
Seriously, I don't even bother reading The Onion anymore - the regular news is funny enough...
Friday, May 18, 2012
Revolution in Showers - Whose Shower WIll Reign Supreme?
Because Shower Technology has been stagnant far too long...
Theres the Loop
Theres the Loop
And The ArcThe shower’s contours have drawn inspiration from the motions of waves. Designed by Diego Granese, the Loop re-defines outdoor shower systems. And the best part is, it can be parked anywhere on your property, at the backyard or within the four walls. So while the Loop may not be the only outdoor shower system to try your hands at this summer, it is certainly one worth considering.
The alluring Arc-shaped shower can switch from normal shower mode to an energy-saving mode for less water and electricity consumption. The concept will use a 500W domestic water pump to maintain a constant water circulation and recycle warm shower water. The control panel has access to all the functions with a touch interface. So far, so good, unless you are fine with bathing in your leftover shower water. The Arc shower features a luxury design and anyways for that huge a shower you need to have a spacious bathroom or plush outdoors. But it’s just a concept.And of course, The Horizontal Shower
For the first time, HORIZONTAL SHOWER permits showering using the AMBIANCE TUNING TECHNIQUE while reclining. The application combines six WATER BARS recessed into a broad shower field above a reclining space, along with an eTOOL as the main operating element. Just as with VERTICAL SHOWER, with HORIZONTAL SHOWER the user can also choose from among a variety of pre-programmed choreographies, offering a range of settings for water temperature, intensity and quantity. The user can decide from among BALANCING, ENERGIZING or DE-STRESSING effects.
Greatest Facebook related headline ever: "Company Sells Stock"
From Dealbreaker. Not The Onion. Who knew they had it in them?
Speaking of news, have you seen the latest from Pew Research? It turns out that Americans really, really don't care about the shit-fest going down in Europe.
Check it out, pretty much everything polls higher than "European economies", including Yet Another Plan Bomb Plot (who cares? really?).
I mean, its not like the world is going to go into a depression or anything, right?
Sigh. We are so turning into a nation of navel-gazers
Check it out, pretty much everything polls higher than "European economies", including Yet Another Plan Bomb Plot (who cares? really?).
I mean, its not like the world is going to go into a depression or anything, right?
Sigh. We are so turning into a nation of navel-gazers
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Vacuuming a Corgi
Because you asked for it.
On YouTube, video below --->
We live in great times I tell you, in great times...
Oh, there is also Vacuuming a Cat...
Vacuuming a cat...
As the title sez. - Vacuuming a cat.
On YouTube
In all its glory - video below --->
We live in great times I tell you. In great times...
Oh, if you really want it, there is also Vacuuming a Corgi...
Payware - and the BigData Ecosystem
- ... can SAP make it as easy to experiment with SAP HANA as it is to download and use open source?
- ... will developers buy into SAP’s efforts at being open and making SAP HANA easy to use?
- (If it is) Priced too high or with onerous terms, SAP HANA won’t make sense to startups.
This isn't because of some philosophical Stallman-like Software should be free mindset. Au contraire, it is because, people can now, truly, focus on what they want to do with the data , instead of how they manage the data.
What this meant was that you had to bake in your data storage and persistence licensing costs into the equations right from the beginning. And these costs could be substantially different depending on what you bought, and when you bought it (buying 5000 seats up front is invariably far cheaper than buying it 1000 at a time).
As a consequence, you had to think long and hard about how you would store your data, how the data would grow, what the associated costs would be, etc., as part and parcel of the problem that you were trying to solve!
Think about that for a moment.
You have a problem, and you come up with a solution to that problem. Somewhere, as part of the solution, you have to store and/or manipulate data. Yes, this might be a significant part of the solution, but it is still part of the solution.
The moment you start worrying about licensing fees and costs, you have now made it part of the problem space!
And therein lies the rub. What NoSQL brought to the table is the concept of solution-oriented stores
They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes (document, column-oriented, key-value, etc.) and each of these has a different sweet-spot. I tend to think of them as solution-oriented data stores, i.e., each DB is tuned towards a specific solution domain. Oh yes, they are certainly moving towards each other - Riak has secondary indexes, CouchDB's bigcouch variant shards and scales brilliantly, etc. but that is evolution for you.
Of course you can use these (somewhat, and very loosely) interchange-ably, but ye gods, wouldn't that be a dumb thing to do. As a simple exercise, imagine the entertainment associated with swapping out CouchDB with Berkeley DB. (And, in case you are wondering, I was actually asked to help in this recently because "They both are DBs right? Whats the difference?")
Of course, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you, but that isn't the point. What we're trying to do here is come up with the best solution to the problem, and, in our current ecosystem, there are plenty of ways of accomplishing that without paying huge license fees.
Do understand, I am not minimizing the benefits of SAP HANA, IBM Netezza, etc. They are all remarkably good and useful pieces of software, and if you have the money to splurge, go for it - as long as it is the correct fit for what you are trying to do (but that goes without saying, right?)
The bottom line here is that a huge - and instinctive - barrier to entry for most startups is going to be the "Why should I sell my soul to SAP / Oracle / IBM / whoever" attitude. This is especially true for startups, for startups not backed by VCs invested in the SAP / Oracle / IBM ecosystem :-)
Back to SAP HANA - what do I think of it? Its great, and as I mentioned earlier, if you have the money, and can afford it, and most of all you need it, go for it...
