Even Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers are capitalizing on the black rifle phenomena? We are truly winning. I challenge our opponents to say otherwise. The AR-15 is mainstream now. Even if this is marketed to the Counterstrike Kiddies (is that even current terminology among the kids these days?) we’re still winning.
I am pleased to have gotten a link from Instapundit yesterday, which brought in some traffic to give the new server a bit of a test. We seem to have held up well.
I have circled the load under Instalanche, which did not even really make the server break a sweat. We don’t max out until 400%. Monitoring the number of new incoming TCP connections looks pretty good as well:
Again, not too out of the ordinary. The previous server was a Core2Quad, and this is a Quad-core Xeon. I think the big difference is the fact that I have a lot more RAM, so I’m able to run more apache processes simultaneously, which allows for servicing a larger number of clients. I have also greatly improved caching in the new server. Aside from the hacking attempt, I am pleased with the upgrade. Even better that the upgrade was thanks to salvaged hardware that didn’t cost me anything.
My network graph shows barely a blip. Granted, this was a weekend link, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the new server is robust enough to handle a weekday Glenn link with more room to spare.
Not digging it. Apparently I’m not alone in this. I used to use bloglines, but they were so unreliable, I switched over to Google Reader,which was much better. It seems like every online provider is getting into the business of fixing what ain’t broken.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from Steve Wozniak somewhere, who apparently thought his game was pretty cool and decided to pay for it. The DUsers were absorbed into another student group a number of years ago, and I don’t know what’s happened to them since. I also don’t know what happened to a lot of our vintage archival material.
Once being a Mac user went from being Geek to Chic, a lot of the old user groups died out, and while the Apple community has gained substantially, it has lost something in becoming the “in” thing. I was part of the community when Apple was getting steamrolled by Microsoft, and being an Mac aficionado was something a bit odd, rather than stylish. It is in that spirit I share this with you. It is classic Steve Jobs. Cordial, and at the same time arrogant, but also speaking the brutal truth:
For those of us who were Mac users during the days of John Scully, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio, what could also be charitably referred to as “the dark years,” it’s hard to imagine what Apple will be like, once again, without Steve Jobs at the helm. Does Tim Cook have the minerals? We shall see. Google is a much tougher competitor than Microsoft ever was, and operating systems, at this point, are easily commoditized.
Those of us that have been around the Apple world for a while might remember that before Apple bought NeXT back in 1996, it was also rumored to be flirting with Be Inc, maker of the BeBox, which ran BeOS. Be was lead by Jean-Louis Gassee, who was probably every bit Job’s equal when it came to personality. Gassee was once famously, and humorously quoted as saying:
“For God’s sake, don’t compare us to NeXT. We want to be a better tool for developers, not to be tasteful. We don’t cost $10,000. We have a floppy drive. We do not defecate on developers.”
Of course, Apple ultimately bought NeXT, rather than BeOS, and Steve Jobs proceeded to rearrange the Apple board, and orchestrate his return to the helm. How different of a world it would be today if instead of bringing back Steve Jobs with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, they had bought Be Inc, and with it Jean-Louis Gassee?
I got the play-by-play on the first non-Steve product release. First part of the presentation was how they had caught up to Android. Jobs never would have done that. Trying to edge other products and play “me-too, only better” was what Apple did during the Gil Amelio days, and it didn’t work out too well for them.
The improvements in the camera are welcome, and I think they are going in the right direction with the speech technology. I don’t really give a crap about being able to speak searches, or have a device take dictation, but being able to set and review appointments via voice, or to get updates on weather and traffic via voice would be a great help.
Apple is very proud of Lion. Initially I didn’t think Lion was too bad, but it’s a horrible release. It’s buggy as hell, and Safari is now full of quirks and bugs, whereas it was one of the cleanest browsers out there.
I will probably get an iPhone 4S, but only because I currently still have a 3G (not even the 3GS) with a screen that has streaks of failed pixels all through it. But I worry Apple is headed back down the road to being “me too, only better” while chasing everyone else instead of really innovating.
Perhaps history will repeat itself a bit here. After Apple release the Macintosh (which was truly innovative in the same way iOS was, in that Apple stole/bought the technology from Xerox/Fingerworks), quickly had the technology stolen by competitors (Microsoft/Google), Steve was booted/left for health reasons, leaving Apple to slowly wither as their competitors killed their market share as Apple lost ground in the gadget race.
Only this time it could be worse. Windows 3.0 was a piss poor knockoff of MacOS. Up until Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft arguably had a product that was inferior on nearly every way, and despite the flaws of MacOS at the time, I still largely preferred it to NT 4.0’s user interface. Android is a stellar implementation of the ideas originally pioneered by Fingerworks, and later bought by Apple. Google is also a lot smarter than Microsoft. Apple is going to have to impress people better than they did yesterday if they want to hold on to their market share, which means the iPhone 5 is going to have to introduce something very new.
UPDATE: Speaking of the early Windows NT reminds me, nothing is really all that new, even in technology. It’s kind of like guns in that regard. Microsoft produced NT by snatching away all the top operating system developers from Digital Equipment Corporation. Because of that, it’s long been believed that Windows NT (now just called Windows) still retains an awful lot of VMS-like constructs, and that its internals are very similar to VMS. MacOS is really just a candied up version of NeXTStep, that was developed by all the same people who were brought in when Apple bought NeXT. And even NeXT was just a mach microkernel with parts of BSD Unix grafted on.
As someone who spends about 14 hours a day in front of a keyboard on a good day, workstation ergonomics is something I’ve done a good bit of experimentation with. Clayton Cramer seems to have been having some wrist problems, but believes that the Microsoft Natural line of keyboards helps a lot. I used a Microsoft Natural 4000 for a few years to help with wrist issues, and it is indeed good, and one of the better split keyboards out there.
But I’ve discovered through trying various techniques that key travel distance has more of an effect on how hard a keyboard beats up your hands, wrists, and arms as using a split keyboard does. After several years of using the Apple “chiclet” keyboards, I find them to be quite easy on the hands and wrists, despite the fact that they aren’t split. This is doubly true if you add a beanbag wrist rest to the equation. I think this is because the travel distance on the chiclet keys are so short, and as such doesn’t require as much work and movement from the fingers to depress the keys. When I go back to a regular PC keyboard, or even the Natural Keyboard, I can feel my fingers having to work a lot of harder to type. One other thing I like about the chiclet keyboard is that it’s easy to keep clean, preventing it from looking gross and crusty after a couple of years.
To go with any keyboard setup, you also need a good chair. I have been using one of these Aeron chairs for seven years. They are expensive, and infamously associated with failed .com companies (which is where my previous employer got them from at pennies on the dollar), but after using this chair, I will sit on no other. They are comfortable and rugged. At the end of our company, I got to take mine home, plus a broken one I intend to fix and take to my next job. The main drawback to the Aeron chair is that they don’t do well on plush carpet, so a chair mat is a must. Though from the pictures, it looks like they may have fixed the carpet problem in later models.
Bucks right has pretty good coverage over the latest outrage. Seems they are spinning off their DVD business like it was an infected appendix. I was willing to live with the price hike, but destroying the value of the service is enough to make me think about dropping it.
“Our work is different from the research that led to the breakthroughs in Neanderthal genetics,” he explained. “We couldn’t look directly for ancient DNA that is 40,000 years old and make a direct comparison.”
To get past this hindrance, Hammer’s team followed a computational and statistical approach.
“Instead, we looked at DNA from modern humans belonging to African populations and searched for unusual regions in the genome.”
Because nobody knows the DNA sequences of those now extinct archaic forms, Hammer’s team first had to figure out what features of modern DNA might represent fragments that were brought in from archaic forms.
“What we do know is that the sequences of those forms, even the Neanderthals, are not that different from modern humans,” he said. “They have certain characteristics that make them different from modern DNA.”
The researchers used simulations to predict what ancient DNA sequences would look like had they survived within the DNA of our own cells.
“You could say we simulated interbreeding and exchange of genetic material in silico,” Hammer said. “We can simulate a model of hybridization between anatomically modern humans and some archaic form. In that sense, we simulate history so that we can see what we would expect the pattern to look like if it did occur.”
It’s an interesting theory, but any time someone tries to tell me they can successfully model complex systems with a computer program, I get very very skeptical. From my previous job, I know the difficulties in doing this with protein-ligand interactions, which we have a lot of experience modeling in-silico, and even that’s daunting. We’re also, still, not that remarkably good at it.
I would imagine to model something like this, you’d have to make a rather large number of assumptions. Since we also do not have African proto-human DNA, in contrast to what’s available for Neanderthals, I don’t see any way you could invalidate this model. One way I can think of is to see if it can successfully tag DNA sequences from known inter-species hybrids, where we do have the DNA for both parent species available. If it can do that, I might have some faith in it. I’d want to see it work on more than just Neanderthal cross-breeding with modern humans.
I should note, that the theory sounds plausible, and the evidence that it happened with Neanderthals is pretty strong, but my bullshit alarm goes off when computer models are employed to model complex systems with a lot of unknowns.
Over at the Firearms Blog, they show a motherboard by Gigabyte that will help your inner techno-geek channel your inner gun geek. I don’t think it’s deniable that the design elements of this motherboard are related to the AR-15 aesthetics.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from