An inspired RFC from Tim Bray of Google: he proposes an additional code in the 400 (client error) series to cover content that cannot legally be made available to the client. Yes, I'm aware than 95%+ of readers have already dozed off, but bear with me.
Which 400-series code does he choose to represent this? 451. I'm not sure what the late Ray Bradbury would have thought of this, but my sneaking suspicion is that it would have tended towards approval.
Danny Boyle wants to open the Olympics by transforming the stadium into the English countryside. I see vast satirical horizons opening. I'm recommend a formation of dancing sheep, a musical chorus of chirping blackbirds and mooing cows, a procession of tractors with farmers growling "Get orf moi laaaaand", and finishing off with a flock of starlings taking a crap all over the Argentine team and their Malvinas badges.
I was intrigued by Apple's announcement that it was moving away from Google Maps to its own mapping solution in iOS6. This is a serious step up for Apple. If you do the math that shows that a basic 256-color map view on a 640x960 screen is 610KB, you're looking at having to provision over half a MB of serving capacity for each map query per second. Look at what Apple high-bandwidth content that Apple serves currently: OS updates (say, 100MB/user/week, but really cacheable) and iTunes streaming and sales (say, 2 songs at 5MB per user per week). I can well imagine Apple Maps tripling their traffic levels, which is significant enough, but the other point is that maps data is very user-sensitive in the way that even iTunes sales are not: a delay of 30s in a 1 minute download of a music track is annoying, but delaying interactive map views by 10s will really bug people trying to find their way around a new city.
I foresee a lot of pain for Apple's data centre team in the first month or two after iOS 6 rolls out, and not a little user annoyance.
Update: (20/6/12) as the esteemed Mr. Worstall has linked this, I shall expand on the detail a little. Yes, if you compress the image (e.g. via PNG) you could easily shrink the bandwidth required to 1/2 or 1/3 of the uncompressed, depending on how "busy" the map image is. However, nothing is for free. If you want to serve compressed images, you either have to pre-compute and compress every image you might possibly want to serve (which can turn out to be a big, big storage problem when you consider different zoom levels and image viewing options) or you have to compress on the fly and hope that you get reasonable cache hits. The former strategy takes stupid amounts of disk (which is slow to read); the latter takes stupid amounts of processing power and therefore reduces the number of users that each server in your datacenter can serve.
Compared to this, serving iTunes tracks is easy because everyone gets the same track data and caching the popular tracks (Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Flanders and Swan) helps you avoid the slow disk reads.
Thank heavens there was €100bn floating around the Eurozone that no-one knew what to do with; good thing that Spain managed to find it and take it to shore up its banks.
Where did they find these funds again?
The Eurogroup said the funds could come from either from the eurozone's temporary rescue fund, the EFSF, or the permanent mechanism, the ESM, which is due to start next month.Mmm. OK. So this is the solvent Eurozone members (I'm looking at you, Germany) bailing out Spanish sovereign debt (held by the Spanish banks) by the back door. Somehow I don't think this is going to go down well in Germany when the taxpayers realise they're in for €1000 per head of a "recapitalisation" into banks backed by Costa del Sol property that's still plunging in value.
I'm with Sir Terry Pratchett on this. A man who would do this to a dog is a man to whom the police should pay attention. One has to wonder, what else is he capable of and what would set him off?
The details are instructive:
At around 3am, he struck the dog around 20 times on the head with a hammer. No explanation was given in court.When even your defence brief is unwilling to touch one of your actions with a ten foot pole, you know you're a pretty repulsive excuse for a human being.
My inner libertarian rebels against keeping this man in jail because of what he might do; however, I fear that it is a near-inevitability that eventually a human is going to be on the wrong end of his temper.
You just couldn't make this up: a book publisher censoring a book about book-burning. The late and great, great Ray Bradbury recalls, in the 1979 Coda to Fahrenheit 451:
Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel [Fahrenheit 451]. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.If Ballantine Books had any integrity, I would hope that they cast the offending editor out of the nearest window. I would hope further that their offices back then were at least on the 30th floor, so that the editor had time to reflect on the irony of his mistake.
I am delighted that Bradbury lived to see an era where the staggeringly rude and yet wonderful Rachel Bloom could record and broadcast to the world an extremely suggestive and sexual video about her and the master of future fiction. (Not safe for work. Really, I'm not kidding. Not in the slightest. Minimum safe viewing age probably about 80 years. Just fantastic. Use headphones.) Nevertheless, censorship hasn't gone away: "damn" is just fine these days, but I fear that militants of other groups are thriving. Hands up who thinks this couldn't happen today:
...the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play — it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!In my dreaming moments, I can see just this scene playing out in a student union meeting somewhere. Then the ghost of Bradbury descends and smites the offending head-up-arse-earnest "progressives", thundering a denounciation that shrivels what remains of their souls...
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn't.
Encouraging economic news from Latin America, where President Kirchner of Argentina is giving up her last US dollar account. It turns out that, in a nation of 9% official inflation and 25% actual inflation, people are unaccountably keen to hold dollars rather than pesos. How strange.
Dear Cristina is only too pleased to explain her reasoning for the switch:
"I've just had one fixed term account in dollars for some time," President Fernandez said on Wednesday.Yes, I'd imagine you could get a great 8%-10% interest rate on a peso account; I can't imagine that dollar accounts pay any interest, given the demand for them and bureaucracy-induced cost of operation:
"And I've decided to put it in pesos, it's more profitable to have it in pesos."
People wanting to buy dollars have to give their national identity and tax number, which must then be approved by the national tax agency (AFIP) before the transaction can go ahead. [...] Argentines wanting to travel abroad must prove their money was obtained legally and tell the tax agency when and where they are going, and why.And yet, Cristina, people are clamouring for dollars. Why might that be, do you think?
A 2009 article from paulgraham.com is doing the rounds this week, identifying why meetings annoy a substantial subset of their participants. The 30 second summary is that most meetings are organised by people who spend a lot of time in meetings and hence are used to doing non-meeting work in small blocks (context switching fairly quickly). Participants, notably people who make things or write software, are used to and most productive in an environment where they have long uninterrupted time to focus on getting things done. Putting a meeting in the middle of that block of time causes a disproportionate loss of productivity (a 1 hour meeting in the middle of a 4 hour morning more or less trashes the entire morning's productivity).
The remedy recommended, which I'd heartily endorse, is for the "maker" people to set aside "office hours" for meetings, one or two chunks of time in the week when they are fully available for meetings and hence won't be planning any deep-dive productivity session. Scheduling meetings outside those times should only be done rarely and for a really good reason.
I have encountered many types of meeting, organisers and participants in my time, and the article rings very true. Doing any interesting software development or testing requires a good 30-60 minutes to get really engaged, focused and productive. An interruption after that time provokes the same kind of reaction as waking a sleeping baby - serious grump and sociopathic behaviour.
I would go further, though, and encourage meeting organisers to think hard about who they invite to meetings. Too often I've seen half or more of the meeting participants figuratively asleep in their chairs - they don't see any value in listening to one or two prima donnas drone on, but daren't refuse to attend. Personally I'd require the organiser to shoulder the burden of proving the value of attendance: unless you can make a good case why each attendee needs to be physically in the meeting (instead of reading the meeting notes), they should be at best an optional invite.
Just to show there's no favoritism, if the organisers adopt this model then it's incumbent on the attendees to prepare themselves; they should read the agenda and prep notes (circulated at least a day before the meeting) and come ready to offer specific opinions and solutions, rather than try to catch up as the meeting occurs.
According to Miss Manners, if a meeting organiser refuses to provide a meaningful agenda but insists you come, you are quite within your social rights to spend the entire meeting breaking wind loudly. (Admittedly I skim-read her book, but I'm sure I picked up the essentials.)
Charles Ferguson (why no hyperlink to the name? does he have commercial interests or connections that the Guardian may be ashamed of promoting?) writes in the Grauniad on the Madoff Ponzi scam and why he thinks major banks should be prosecuted for staying schtumm.
I particularly treasured:
But suppose a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, UBS or JPMorgan Chase had called the SEC and said: "You really need to take a close look at Bernard Madoff. He must be working a scam."Just suppose the bank had made such a call. Can you imagine the opprobrium, court cases and financial damages had they been wrong? (or unable to prove themselves correct, which is much the same thing in a libel trial). And what benefit would accrue to them for such whistleblowing? Staying quiet and refusing to deal with Madoff was the least worst option for them.
But not a single bank that had suspicions about Madoff made such a call. Instead, they assumed he was probably a crook, but either just left him alone or were happy to make money from him.
Instead, Charles, let's talk about the complete dysfunction of Mary Schapiro's SEC that allowed Madoff to operate for over a decade despite widespread misgivings in the financial industry. What the heck was the SEC doing? How did it totally fail to detect Madoff's too-good-to-be-true results and draw the obvious conclusion? It isn't as if this was a tiny fund in Podunk, NY beneath the SEC's radar. Madoff ran a huge hedge fund. What was the SEC doing when it was "regulating" this fund where investors lost $50bn?
Charles Ferguson, blinkered moron that he is, completely misses the actual culpable idiots in the SEC in his pursuit of the "big banks". Charles: the big banks were merely responding rationally in the environment that civil litigators and the SEC created. Whose fault is that?
'We're stable': Cash-strapped Spain's finance minister says nation is back on track despite claims it asked IMF for massive €300BILLION bailoutWhen reading this, I couldn't help but think of the Rules of EMS:
64. Asystole is a very stable rhythmand perhaps while we're here should modify:
63. Less than 8, intubate (GCS score).to
63a. If the Finance Minister lies, recapitalize.
