Posts

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. ...

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.

Stephen O’Grady explains why he is in favor of EU approval of the Oracle-Sun merger. He argues that Oracle and MySQL are not really competitors, but there’s too much to it to summarize. It’s an interesting argument, but I think he underestimates the degree to which MySQL competes with Oracle at the low end of the market.

Tim Bray worries: It’s like this: MySQL just isn’t a very big business, by any measure. And it represents the sort of Open-Source entanglement that essentially every major technology player now has one or more of. So, my worry is: If, in a merger or acquisition, partial control over a financially-insignificant Open-Source project can now be expected to result in many months of anti-trust review, that’s going to have a massive negative effect on the viability of M&A transactions all over the technology landscape. ...

RMS and some other open source advocates are urging the EC to prevent Oracle from taking over MySQL. Here’s why the GPL is inadequate to preserve MySQL, in their estimation: Defenders of the Oracle acquisition of its competitor naively say Oracle cannot harm MySQL, because a free version of the software is available to anyone under GNU GPL version 2.0, and if Oracle is not a good host for the GPL version of the code, future development will be taken up by other businesses and individual programmers, who could freely and easily “fork” the GPL’d code into a new platform. This defense fails for the reasons that follow. ...

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains how Shazam works. If you’ve never seen Shazam, check it out, you’ll be amazed. Its incarnation as an iPhone app is its most famous – I had no idea it started out as a dial-in service. Shazam fingerprints songs and then compares the fingerprints of submitted samples to their database. The service fingerprints “important” notes in a song, not sequences of notes. I wonder how long note sequences would need to be to constitute a unique fingerprint? It’s probably less than you think. ...

Crooked Timber on contrarianism, as exemplified by the new book Superfreakonomics: To sum up my current view: “contrarianism” is mostly contrary to reality, the “conventional wisdom” is probably wiser than the typical unconventional alternative, and “politically incorrect” views are almost always incorrect in every way: literally, scientifically and morally. I’m not sure, but I think that this makes John Quiggin a conservative by temperament.

Cooks Illustrated editor Chris Kimball believes that recipes developed by professionals in a test kitchen will always beat recipes developed collaboratively by enthusiasts and has issued a challenge to prove it. The folks at food52 have accepted the challenge. This should be fun. I can’t wait until they make the movie version.

Here’s your quote of the day, courtesy of Tyler Cowen: Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.