Zawinski’s law states:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
I wonder if there’s a corollary that applies to imperialism.
Every empire attempts to expand until it can occupy Afghanistan. Those empires which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Brough Turner says the congestion problems on AT&T’s network may be the result of misconfigured routers:
Recently I was talking with a friend whose company continuously operates (and monitors) multiple 3G data links on the Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Sprint PCS networks. His data shows periods when the round trip time for http requests goes over 8 seconds, on the AT&T Wireless network only! I don’t have a copy of his data that I can examine in detail, but when combined with David Reeds report, it certainly appears AT&T Wireless has configuration problems. If you read on you’ll see this may not be the result of gross stupidity, but someone at AT&T Wireless should be a little embarrassed.
The argument he makes is really interesting. The limiting factor for AT&T’s network is over the air capacity. TCP stacks handle congestion by throttling back their traffic when they detect packet loss. If AT&T’s network that backs up the over the air network does not induce sufficient packet loss, then devices will not handle congestion properly and further oversaturate the network, thus eroding the network’s capacity to degrade gracefully. I have no idea if this is the case, but it certainly seems possible.
Don’t miss the comments on the post, they’re really interesting as well.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an example of steganography from the Revolutionary War. Here’s a more recent, cruder example, courtesy of the governor of California.
John Resig says Google Groups is dead:
There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile.
The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.
Sad considering how well Gmail does at keeping spam under control.
The brilliant John Scalzi offers his opinion on why the White House is publicly feuding with Fox News, but I don’t think he’s got it quite right. Here’s what he says:
Which makes it a low-risk ideological foil for the White House. Follow: The White House says Fox News is not a real news organization and is the propaganda arm of the GOP, Fox News throws a very public shit fit about it, which gives it higher ratings and an impetus to skew even more to the right in its presentation, and go out of its way to criticize Obama even further. Meanwhile the noise is all covered by multiple other news outlets, which in aggregate reach a much larger audience, which show Fox News anchors and personalities in the middle of ideological conniptions, confirming to the general population the proposition that, indeed, Fox News is more interested in politics than news, and reinforcing the impression that Fox News and the GOP are reading off the same page. Which makes the GOP look unreasonable in an era in which its popularity isn’t, shall we say, spectacular to begin with. To what end? Well, you might have heard there’s a health care debate going on.
I do think this is why the White House picked a fight with Rush Limbaugh earlier in the year, but I think there’s something else going on. Fox News’ purpose is to produce propaganda that reinforces the views of its audience. Lately they have taken to not only selectively reporting news to suit their agenda, but also creating news. They have gone all in on the tea party spectacle, for example. They worked with “protesters” who disrupted the August town halls and gave them massive exposure. Then something started happening — a lot of other media outlets started asking whether they were out of touch with the “angry White American” movement and needed to give it more attention. All of the media outlets started giving a disproportionate amount of attention to the town hall idiocy, even though there were town halls going on all over the country that didn’t include hecklers.
So I think what the White House wants is to remind everyone, especially everyone else in the press, that the crap Fox News flings is not real news. They don’t need to cover stories just because Fox News is covering them, and certainly they don’t need to cover stories that Fox News is ginning up. That’s the reason behind the White House is calling Fox News out — they can afford for Fox News to be what it is, but they don’t want the New York Times or CNN to factor the priorities of Fox News into their own editorial judgement.
Amazon.com’s cloud computing service now offers MySQL 5.1 directly:
Amazon RDS provides a MySQL 5.1 relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks for customers. The service takes much of the hassle out of setting up and managing relational databases, such as backups and code patching, freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business
Amazon RDS provides the full capabilities of a MySQL Database, which means that libraries, applications and tools that have been designed for use with MySQL can be used without modification. This makes it very simple for customers to start using Amazon RDS. As with all AWS services Amazon RDS is a scalable resource; its storage, processing power and memory usage can be adjusted on demand and the customer only pays for those resources that have been used.
First they came for your systems administrator, now they’re coming for your DBA. Here are instructions for setting it up.
Wonder how long it’ll be before they enable you to use their database as a replication target for an existing database somewhere else?
Australian reporter Paul McGeogh has been covering the war in Afghanistan since its outset. Last week he gave a talk on the state of things in Afghanistan in Australia, using General McChrystal’s report on the state of things in Afghanistan as a hook for predicting what awaits us in the future. It’s a must-read.
Here’s his preview:
That is what makes the 60-page assessment of the conflict by US General Stanley McChrystal a damning document, more because of who he is than what he actually has to say.
The handling of the crisis by the US-led coalition has its many critics. But seeing so many of its shortcomings articulated with all the authority of a top American general makes startling reading. Since the report was leaked in Washington last month, the debate has been narrow, focusing on the question of sending more troops than on what amounts to his condemnation of the conduct of the venture.
The detail is excruciating.
McGeogh’s outlook is pessimistic, but not without good cause. I think at this point it would be impossible for the US to make the kind of commitment necessary to achieve a positive outcome in Afghanistan. So what should we do? It’s looking like it’s “muddle through” or “cut our losses” and muddling through (and pretending we’re building toward success) looks like the popular choice.
Personal Democracy Forum has a case study on the White House’s switch to Drupal from a proprietary content management system.
Update: Via Tim O’Reilly we learn that the full stack is Drupal, Apache, MySQL, and Red Hat Linux. They’re using Apache Solr for search.
Tom Schaller writes about the fact that government subsidy of the US Postal Service is pure corporate welfare, favored by big business and Republicans.
© 2024 rc3.org
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Enjoy your misconceptions
I have a fair amount of discussions about politics with friends and family, and generally I’m happy to have them. But as of today, I’m done debunking people’s specious claims about President Obama or Democrats, usually regurgitated from the Drudge Report, talk radio, or Fox News.
If people want to believe that President Obama asked the families of military dead if he could do a photo op with the casket of their relative, or that Anita Dunn publicly admitted that Mao is her hero, or that Obama is trying to set up government panels that will decide which old people have to die when they get sick, I’m not going to try to correct them any more. Clearly people believe those things because that’s the world that makes sense to them. And who am I to correct them?
It’s a losing battle, it wears me out, and for every ridiculous rumor I debunk, there are ten more behind it waiting to take its place. So if people want to wallow in propaganda that caters to their absurd preconceived notions, they officially have my blessing.
That feels better.