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3 Congressmen Trying To Tie Up SpaceX
HB Gary (393 comments)
I will give credence to these Congressmen's words when I see them come out against HB Gary (or whatever it's called now) in a similar way.
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HB Gary (393 comments)
I will give credence to these Congressmen's words when I see them come out against HB Gary (or whatever it's called now) in a similar way.
This is being blown out of proportion (228 comments)
This is scary but ultimately a decision that needs to be appealed.
I own a small company that works with Drupal. I am a member of the Drupal Foundation and give as generously as possible to their events.
Similar determinations have been made by the IRS before and challenged successfully. It is important that Yorba stands up for themselves on this matter and establish the scientific and educational validity of their claim to 501 c3 status.
There is an important point in the lifecycle of every open source project, where it goes from being a small hobby to something having an ecosystem that must be managed. It's essential that there is a way to provide fiscal support for groups springing up around the management of these projects without creating a tax burden.
The IRS judgement pertains really seems to only include an established software project, and not one that is supported by a small community. I am not sure there is a way for them to make a determination between the two. IANAL, but I am sure this is important in distinguishing the legitimacy of 501c3 claims.
Re:Detroit would be better! (190 comments)
Holla atcha Detroit! Friends of mine are becoming thousandaires buying property by the block. When the turnaround does come, it's going to be driven by tech.
Re:Fat Chance (272 comments)
Never discount the power of nationalism to sway otherwise rational decisions.
There's a good chance SpaceX will benefit from this blockade.
Flexibility is not exclusive to CS (358 comments)
Well, I am an English major who learned programming and started a technology shop I have been running for the last 10 years.
During that time, I have had programmers working for me with CS degrees, but also with degrees in law, economics, theater, criminal justice, business, political science, and other pursuits.
We build websites and CRM systems using open source content management systems. To be honest, the people who have worked out best over the years came to programming from another background. The people that have really thrived have tended to be lawyers, they are able to apply logic on the fly.
Re:It's the Cubs (56 comments)
Well, it says 5 years ago, they would not be a team you would expect. I still say it's the Cubs, and yeah, this is just a guess. But I really can't think who else would have a reason to do it.
When I go down the list, here's the teams that have a front office with a strong, expressed interest in Big Data.
- Athletics
- Red Sox
- Cubs
- Padres (Jed Hoyer legacy)
Here are the clubs that are known to have been investing in advanced metrics previously, in some cases at a limited scale.
- Nationals
- Dodgers
- Rays
- Phillies
- Yankees
- Mets
Out of the teams listed above, the Cubs stand out as the one with the strongest support for big data from the front office, and the biggest gap in terms of what they have now. There was an article about Theo recently that talked about the fact they had someone on payroll who would print emails and web pages out for scouts to read, since they were not reading them online. Five years ago, they are one of the last teams I would expect to use metrics in a meaningful way.
I discount the other teams based on the following factors:
- If it was the Yankees, the price tag would be more like $13 million. They don't spend cheap period.
- If it was the Nationals, Davey Johnson would not be in the front office. He has been vocal about not using advanced stats in game-time decisions.
- If it was the Phillies, the system would be less about game time decisions and more about scouting. Their issues with their scouting system are well-known.
- The Rays are all about efficiency and doing the most with what they have. They don't like to acquire free agents, they are about building from within. They are not going to have a lot of historical data about their players for a system like this to chew on. It would not make sense for them to invest in one.
- I could almost see it being the Dodgers, but the Dodgers have a lot on their hands with new television contracts. I doubt they have the bandwidth for an organizational overhaul on top of that. They are focused on marketing, and this plays a role in how they make decisions.
- The Mets continue to struggle financially, and I am not sure they are entirely solvent. I am sure a capital expenditure like this would be something people would have already heard about through the media. It's possible it's something that would need to be approved by a bankruptcy judge.
The teams I simply discount are as follows. I don't see where big data fits into what they are doing. A $500,000 investment in winning requires some kind of organizational commitment to transforming the club overall, which just doesn't jive with the way these teams spend money. They either have systems that already work, or the markets they operate in allow them to make money without winning. I don't see where the impetus for a big, organizational change comes from with these ones.
- Orioles
- Indians
- Twins
- Mariners
- Angels
- Rangers
- Astros
- Marlins
- Pittsburgh
- Braves
That leaves about 11 teams to think about. If there was a wildcard, I would say it's the Twins, simply because Selig owns them and is aware of what Big Data can do.
Re:It's the Cubs (56 comments)
Yeah, and the Red Sox has Tessie. I don't think they are in the market for a replacement.
It's the Cubs (56 comments)
My best guess is it's the Cubs.
They are looking for minority investors in the club right now, and the cost of ballpark improvements is a smoke screen for taking on the cost of big data. Theo has not been the same without Tessie, and it's not cheap to recreate the analysis that system is capable of performing.
I really wonder what the value of such a system is compared to updating / refining Nate Silver's PECOTA odds to play out hypothetical teams and transactions over a 5 year period. There is so much data available about players at this point, it's almost possible to predict regressions on a macro level.
Re:Very funny. (140 comments)
This reminds me of the time Julia Childs sued Neil Armstrong because he bring back samples of the strain of cheese composing the moon.
Re:Enough (224 comments)
Then who is it about? Who is actually standing up and doing something about this?
The definition of a narcissist is someone who excessively admires his or herself. I don't see how sacrificing one's own career, income, relationships, freedom to travel, reputation, and subjecting himself to ridiculous criticism and smear campaigns is compatible with that definition.
Edward Snowden has made sacrifices on behalf of principles we should all be standing up for. That has little to do with self-love.
We should all take notice (107 comments)
We should all take notice of this but, Lonely Island, you should take special note. It the authorities in this country are not going to punish you for your crimes against good taste, we will find a way to get you to the UAE.
This almost happened to me at a Pizzeria Unos (1010 comments)
This almost happened to me at a Pizzeria Unos in Washington DC in 2003.
I was sitting at a booth and plugged in my charger. The manager came over, starting asking questions about the service, and asked me why I had been there so long. He said he noticed I was stealing electricity from the restaurant and the police had been called, and would not let me get out of the booth.
When the cops came, they took me out to the car in cuffs. They talked with the manager for about 45 minutes. I was released with the promise that I would never return to the restaurant again.
It's strange to think how different things are today, where everyone just does this anytime they are out. But yeah, people have strange outlooks on this sometimes.
Good for him (199 comments)
Without assigning any kind of reason to his shift in attitudes - it's refreshing to see a privacy officer come out like this. I can't think of a reason any CPOs should act differently.
Rockstars tend to be prima donnas (356 comments)
There's no room for rock stars in my tightly organized classical and jazz ensemble.
I let go of 2 rock star developers in May. Their stars were so bright they did not seem to understand what they were actually being asked to do. I helped them on their way to finding challenges suitable for their skills and have been cleaning up after them ever since.
I completely respect people who take the art of application development seriously and do want to attract that kind of talent. What rock star implies to me is something more than a soloist, it's someone with an almost pathological urge to show off his or her talents by solving challenges. A challenge could be a bug, or an infrastructure issue, or something else, but they have to address it the moment they notice it. Feeding this urge is not quite the same thing as participating in a structured process for delivering solutions to technology challenges.
I have had guys with such talent they could build web applications sophisticated enough to be unrecognizable as web sites and completely unusable in terms of core functions. The code does something interesting in the background, but I really don't care because the project is suddenly 300% over budget and there's no end in site. Their project managers don't always know what's going on because these developers don't actually tell anyone what they are going to do - they do what they feel like and you get to live with it.
Case in point: the 'KC Box'. This name comes from a rock star developer some might think at the level of a Van Halen, with the way he promotes his personal brand. He was the lead developer on a website built for a client using an open source content management system. 9 months into the project, 100% whitescreens, user logins had been shut off, you could not enter new content, etc. Literally nothing worked, but he did get some interesting contributions to a css preprocessor out of it.
This is the kind of thing I eventually end up with from rock star developers. It's not like they are building things that are sustainable or that other people can contribute to, they are building things to satisfy some internal need.
What's more valuable to me is people who can learn to see the goals of the group of people they work with, contribute to it, communicate about the areas where they see issues and put processes in place for how to address them. I don't have some meaningless label for them, I just get better results with structured development processes and people who know how to work in teams.
Oh good lord (395 comments)
Is there anything that cannot be justified by appeals over terrorism?
This is just getting ridiculous. I am not used to politicans from the UK making no sense, even Thatcher was usually coherent.
But this... is just plain absurd.
Brilliant (102 comments)
It will go well with my HD TV windshield and the Beats by Dre headphones I wear whenever I drive.
I don't know if this matters, but... (892 comments)
I employ about 20 people.
About 70% of the time, when people quit my company without notice, they are leaving with business. A client talked them into contracting with them directly at a higher rate, or another company made them an offer based on walking with a project.
It's a free market and people are supposed to do what makes them happy and all, but shady is shady. I check people's references before making them an offer and never hire people who have left a job without notice. I don't take on projects people bring with them unless they have been away from their former employer for a long, long time. I am not making assumptions about someone's reasons for quitting without notice - in fact, I usually give people a chance to explain themselves, and I would be open to hearing reasonable explanations.
The thing is they never do. I hear a lot of grousing about how work was part of their last job, he / she "just couldn't take" some aspect about it any more, or how there was this bull and it had horns and those horns needed to be seized. But no one has ever pointed to legitimate factors such as an abusive workplace, not being paid on time, not receiving fair / just compensation, or the like.
(Well, to be honest, that's not true. There was one time that someone left a job in protest after management refused to put in assistive devices to help with his handicap. I could understand this. But he was not being honest about his experience and lost out on that factor.)
I don't know if I am the only employer who is like this, but I suspect there are more people who do things this way than you might expect. Seriously, I just want to know when I invest in training people up, having them travel the world with me, setting them up as a thought leader, listen endlessly to their stories about kids and dogs and things they want to buy and their colds and everything else, they are going to at least have the courtesy not to vanish on their way out.
HAHAHAHAHAHA (107 comments)
OMG that's so funny. Porn filters blocking great literature.
What would the bard say?
"With this bit I damn thee..."
"She censored well but not wisely"
"O, reason not the need!"
"Art made tongue-tied by authority." (had to look this one up)
Let's call this the Acquia tax (364 comments)
I think I know the origin of this tax bill and what it is intended for.
Acquia - http://www.acquia.com/ - is a large firm that specializes in Drupal. A lot of the work they do is around setting up, configuring and maintaining Drupal websites.
While they don't produce the majority of the code that is in Drupal, they do provide a lot of services around it to consumers and other businesses. This is really a tax on VARs and other people who implement Drupal using their services.
I am sure there are a lot of other companies that operate in a similar space. While I don't like it, I can see the potential revenues to be drawn in through such a tax.
Re:Jeff Moss works for the feds (250 comments)
I think Jeff is a sincere fellow who seeks to have a nice conference and avoid issues that could be tough on either the Fed side or the Hacker community side.
I don't take his request as retaliation over government policies, and mroe as recognition that the community coming out to DefCon is very different from the one that will be attending BlackHat.
The point of the conference, regardless of anything anyone wants to say, is to have fun. My take is that he is trying to preserve that spirit for the conference.
So, getting to know what holding companies are. There is a big Wikipedia entry about them, but I am giving up on Wikipedia in favor of rumor and innuendo. Going to go on the definition my friend Mickey gave me, which is corporations formed for the express purpose of building prisons, zookeeping and technical instruction on the art of grappling. Having access to lions, convicts and Hulk Hogan types may be useful...
The past few weeks have had me jumpy, I don't like the idea of doing work without a realistic expectation of payment. The only answer to this ASP idea is to continue collecting information about the real potential and make a decision based on the best facts available. It's a risk to do it, it's a risk not to do it, and the best thing I can do it look at it right now and resist letting other people push me into a questionable decision.
I called everyone I know who has successfully run a business last week and asked for advice. Some of them didn't understand what I was talking about and didn't want to talk. Some of them were tied up with other things and just weren't going to have time. Some of them were interested in helping me over the hump and we lined up meetings. Spent time with some people today, meeting with a couple more tomorrow, then going a non-linear route over the weekendand talking with the family.
The first thing was to talk about market research. Spoke with a PR guy who has a background in marketing technology. It is never a good idea to jump into a new vertical market without knowning a thing or two about what you plan to do when you land. Fortunately, the research bug hit over the weekend and I was able to put together a lot of information about our 'target market'. I had been collecting bits and pieces over the last 6 months and was able to put together some fairly articulate comments about what I was planning to do. The person I spoke with told me I had an over optimistic view of events and more than likely this was a bad idea to begin with. He explained a little bit about identifying markets, how NAICS codes don't really mean anything, and how getting 10,000 people to adopt a new piece of technology was going to require an investment of resources. Offered to put me in touch with some contacts who have done some of this themselves. Also offered me a couple reports on effectiveness of online advertising rate adjusted for blog traffic based on some kind of correlative something something, allegedly this disproved the idea you can just put something out there on Google and break even. Probability says you can't in 99.99% of cases no matter what keywords you choose.
It is good to get knocked down sometimes, lets you know where you need to fortify. I was expecting to be asked questions above my pay grade and walk away feeling low, but knew I was better off for scrutinizing it all. It was a bit humbling seeing how the pros do it. Reminder to myself: never underestimate the power of the DOC's Web sites, they are awesome tools.
The second meeting was more interesting, we talked about founding a holding company to control risk within my primary organization. That way, if the ASP idea does go belly up, the holding company can absorb the losses without causing my main consulting company to run into challenges. This made a lot of sense but sounded complicated. The Houlden Caufield part of me kicked in and wondered what good was it anyways if I had to take money from one to fund the other (something has to give), and may have sent the wrong signals. Made a good point that building products is not the same as delivering services and most products brought to market leave the stage shortly.
So, all jokes about the name aside, a holding company is kind of like an umbrella shielding numerous businesses from the storms raging outside. I was planning on reorganizing my company as an s-corp but now may create second company to hold ASP stuff and holding company to rule them all.
So, you say ASP to a Web developer, they say 'Huh, you mean Microsoft?' Now, I deal exclusively with open source developers (except for the occassional Flash and Java guy) and there is a basic unfamiliarity with the term and the concept amongst many people in this area. It's not like I talk to thousands of developers or conduct any research on this, but the basic conversations I have with people always start this way.
I'm not trying to find a new way to phrase things here, only to point out that not everyone is an ASP developer. My company is starting a new line of business where we are going to be deploying 'ASP services'. When I say ASP services, what I mean is hosted applications built on top of existing FOSS products. In some cases, we are going to be deploying versions of these products with value added features we put in ourselves to make them 'better'. In some cases, we are going to be using them to deploy applications we build on on this platform to deliver specific solutions for various markets.
As a someone who has been a victim of good ideas in the past, I am entering into this with eyes wide open and looking at all the things that could happen. To start with, the company has become transparent about our plans with the greatest resource we have - our people. I made the entire development team aware of what we are looking to do and explained all good ideas are welcome. I have been speaking to SMEs with experience in the area, and found some good people locally who could fit the bill. There is a lot of enthusiasm around this push, and some developers have told me privately they would be willing to forgo extra salary to put in extra time.
All the people stuff is encouraging, but no substitute for proper business planning. I keep meaning to read that book on how to run your own successful ASP service from a manager's perspective but can't seem to find a copy (recommendations are welcome). In lieu of some plan someone else has already done, I am actually writing a business plan to guide our efforts. We are starting with a single application with the intention of using the lessons learned as a blueprint for what to do with the next one. We know that we are not going to get everything right the first time around, but we are going to learn enough to guide us as this service expands.
First off, we have performed ample amounts of market research, which has broken down into several categories of inquiry: attracting customers, understanding the competition, and pricing our products / services. As this is development on an open source platform, our market research has included supporting the community and evaluations of other companies attempting to use this platform in similar contexts. Our customers will be SOHO businesses and small agencies with a need for... uh... maybe that's too much detail. But we know there are about 700,000 potential customers domestically, more than that internationally, and getting just a small share of that sector will make this a huge success.
Our competitors are a collection of other ASP services with varying strengths and weaknesses. There are a lot of competitors in this market, at least 20 of them, and there are some big divisions in what people find useful about each one. Concerns generally break down into 2 camps and we are looking to provide enough features to avoid being classified in one or the other. This should serve to distingush the service and give us a place of special mention for people talking about the market.
In terms of pricing, we know the pricing policies of our competitors and think maybe kinda sorta we can do it cheaper. We are in a position where we don't need to make a huge profit off this to be successful and our plans are to price in line with the market and offer incentives to customers who sign up early that would put us below our nearest competitiors.
In terms of the community, there is an active community of 1000s of developers working with this platform. Our strategy is to provide the community with patches for specific issues related to scalability, new modules we have developed in house, and reports about our server infrastructure that will serve as guides for other shops looking to go this route. This should win us some points with the powers that be and generally evoke feelings of respect from the people who's hard work makes this all possible. Should the service actually make any money, we will start making strategic donations at that time.
Secondly, I am looking at the costs to deploy the service. This breaks down into 3 categories: development, scaling, and support. Development is the cost to build the version of the application you are hosting. To my great astonishment, off the shelf FOSS products don't always scale to meet the needs of thousands and thousands of concurrent users. We have had to scrutinize the platform in 100 different ways already just to figure out if this is possible, and we are satisfied we understand the challenges of deploying the core platform and have strategies in place for how to scale it. Beyond just the platform, there is the application being built on top of it. In a Web 2.0 world, everything has to be usable and include enough AJAX to make people go wow. We have worked through the issues surrounding functionality and interface design and gotten it to that 80/20 place. There is a good amount of development to be done, and much of it is going to be just centered on usability concerns.
But the costs of development, in this case, are not limited to the actual expense of building the application. My company has a core consulting service that also does a lot of business. Right now, we have close to $500k in work in the pipeline, and we get about 4 requests for more work each week. Having developers build the ASP application means we are going to have to scale back on the consulting work, and the question is how much do we scale back. We also have to hire people to work on the ASP, and we have to hire people who really are SMEs in production processes. It's a matter of finding the balance between payroll and infrastructure versus intentionally forgoing work to get there. The company has never taken any debt and we have worked hard to pay off occassional investments by principles (well, everyone except me). The idea of not being able to directly bill a client for each hour worked is new for us, and overcoming this mentality makes drawing this line a little more complicated. Basically, we want to stay far enough substinence levels we can make sure there is something left over at the end of the month, and avoid doing so much we have to hire too many new people to get there.
The second component of cost is scaling. Developers hear this and think servers!' Businessy types hear this and think 'FTEs!'. If I had to come up with a definition for this word in this context, it would be providing sufficient resources to ensure the proper operation of the hosted service and meet the demands of the market. We think we are going to have to hire 2 full time support people at the time the product launches, a marketing person who can actually talk to potential clients and get us some press, and a second product manager (one for UI, the other one for new additions).
There will need to be more servers added as time goes on and additional development, and these are parts of the cost of scaling. We are going to have special server installs running the applications and are currently evaluating the costs of doing it through a partner or building everything out ourselves. We have a choice of co-location providers who are willing to charge semi-reasonable fees.
The next thing is marketing. To make a product successful, people have to know about it. We plan on going commando on google ads and blogs to start, including a private beta to a number of bloggers in this area. We figure they are going to find it boring, which is why we have worked in some clever bits into the application that poke a bit of humor at other players in the market. There is an outdoors sports theme to the whole concept of the application that we are going to play off of to give it some class.
The product is going to have a bunch of distinguishing features that set it apart from the other systems. Hard to talk about what they are, but there's 4 of them.
Anyways, lots of work just planning it that I am not getting paid for. Biggest stressor about it all is doing the math around scalability, hard to predict and few case examples to work off of.
I was thinking about using Slashdot's journal as a central place for all my blogging. There's another post in here about trying to get everything I write together in one place. The trouble is, feeds of my journals get imported into other systems without line breaks. Everything gets compressed into one gigantic paragraph and makes it hard to read.
I am using Facebook for aggregation. *sigh* Gonna have to figure something else out...
I was searching through the Grand Haggerty library today, looking to settle a question about a work by Voltaire. A friend and I were discussing politics and got stuck on the question of the origins of the word Candidate and whether or not it is related to the word Candide (which I believe is French, and which I was told means 'optimism'). Which, of course, brought to mind the story about the auto-de-fey and how it was just about the most horrible torture people have ever cooked up. Having not heard of it before, this person questioned whether or not such a thing was possible. It was, I said, and it was detailed in Candide. But then I was told I was full of it because, look, there is no article on an auto-de-fey in the Wikipedia entry for Execution methods!
So this got me all ready to stand on my high horse, unwilling to be contradicted by a social encyclopedia over something I feel has a special significance in the realm of academics and thought. Way back when, I took an introduction to philosophy class with a particularly grim professor. This guy was all about the hemlock and looked like he was waiting for someone to pass the cup. On the course syllabus, it listed everything we had to read, when the papers were due, and all the gruesome things that happened to the authors of various works or their characters. Pythagoreas and the field of grass, Socrates and the final happy hour, Nietzsche and his madness, terrible things happened to all these great minds over the years. On the one hand, I guess professors need a way to make the material come to life, and nothing captures peoples attention like the end. On the other, I had the impression this professor was saying something about the relationship between society and violence, and that, one way or another, we find a way to ferret out the smartest and the greatest and destroy them once and for all (Social Darwinism as a Law of Averages).
Anyways, in this class, we did spend time talking about the most horrible fates that befell these great minds and the irony that came along with it. Pythagoreas, with his ideas about transsubstantiation, was killed by a mob when he refused to run over a field of grass because he supposed the individual blades may be reincarnations of former friends. Plato, with his ideal of what a citizen of a state should be, drank his hemlock rather than save his own neck. Nietzsche, with his, um, 'enlightened' views of feminism, by all accounts contracted some hideous disease through his sexual relations that preyed upon his mind and ate away at his soul. There were others, but their stories were not so rich in irony. And don't get me started on the pre-socratics here, I am aware of the role violence played in early Greek society and still think of Anaximander as the real life counterpart to the Christian conception of Satan.
Candide, the protagonist from Voltaire's novel of the same name, had it the worst. This auto-le-fey thing was really bad news. You were hung, stripped of your skin, drown, burned alive, and more, all in front of a big crowd and in an effort to make you confess. It's the sort of thing that can only happen in societies with a highly evolved concept of multiple sins and the need for a method of cleansing each before sending someone to eternal justice. I imagine it took centuries to perfect this particular form of torture and the work of many scholars of the day to really perfect the method of purging the taint on the way to one's maker. From what I hear, this was considered the Cadillac of execution methods. The electric chair is positively burnt out by comparison and this method made the guillotine look like a cheese slicer for it's lack of pagentry.
What's interesting here is that the auto-le-fey, conceptually, was all about cleaning someone's soul, stripping away their sins and sending them to a better place. It is the justification for it that is important, because no one really wanted to live in a world where arbitrary violence is handed out and the state is made to look like a bunch of butchers. This changed over the years. At some point, captial punishment itself was divorced from it's roots as a purification method for the benefit of individual and all pretence about mercy and sanctity was dropped in favor of a purely humanistic version of slaughter for the benefit of society at large. The idea became one of keeping the streets safe from human predators and capital punishment has since been idealized as the ultimate deterrent against specific crimes.
Although we did not go into the ethics or morality of any specific cases, there was a clear subtext here tracing the relevance of execution methods to the particular forms of society in which these people lived. It became the source of my own objections to captial punishment in that, when viewed on a grand scale, societies are always doing terrible things to their brightest minds, it's really just the excuses we come up with for why that change. To call a state sponsored killing justified in any sense is simply a way large numbers of people abandon reason all together, a kind of block party of the passions where someone is going to get left with the entire mess.
For these reasons, I can't believe the auto-le-fey has been forgotten, especially if Candidate and Candide are really related etymologically. What does this mean for our own society and the ways we treat our own best and brightest? Look at what happens to people running for high office. They are ridiculed, judged on sound bytes, opposition groups devote massive amounts of money to investigating and incriminating them, pompous talk show hosts set them up as straw men, people sometimes burn them in effigy, we set up whisper campaigns with jokes about things we tag them with that may or may not be their fault, basically people end up running the gauntlet every time they want to represent the masses. While I thourough vetting of someone's background is certainly in order, there are times when people cross the line and actually damage the lives of private citizens to score political points and use the process as a form of violence. By destroying someone else, another world view can work it's way into existance, and people can only go on with their daily lives once this question about prevalence has been settled.
I remain optimistic that I shall never stand too far out from the crowd, or become a target for this thing that societies do.
So, yeah, I write a lot of things in a lot of places. I've got travel journals up on 43 places, Slashdot comments all over the place, various mailing lists I am active on, letters to the editors of the big 5 newspapers, articles that have appears in various technical journals, a couple blogs no one ever reads, plus the stuff I put up on my company's blog.
People get a good sense of all the things I have to say about a topic depending on where they read it, but never really get a sense of all the things that interest me. I have been thinking about a blog aggregator for a while, just to capture all the stuff I have been writing. Gonna try putting it all together in my Facebook account for now and see how that works.
Er... actually, all I can get in there is one feed at a time. I think I may just start putting things into Slashdot going forward. Or maybe get everything in a different blog aggregator and pull feeds from there. I don't know what to do.
Understanding the big picture of the political scene is very difficult. Many sources are charging the Democratic party is out of touch with core American values and cannot connect with the average voter. High level statements like this can often not be evaluated with any clarity, and attempts to answer the question seem to end up with answers specific to the questioner.
In these days after the election, I am taking stock of this charge and wondering what this values gap really consists of. Many of my clients, colleagues and friends are GOP operatives, many others are Democratic. While I do not normally characterize either side except to say what are simply the facts about who they are, I have begun to notice differences in each side's standards for accepting what is 'real'.
By 'real', I mean those ideas which identify with our common beliefs about the world. On the one hand, some people seem driven to find emperically valid, factual truths and use those to develop their conceptual understanding of the world. There are other people who set the bar a little lower on the valid side and seem more driven to go with what their gut says about things.
If this is the gulf people are talking about, and that perceptual issues about the nature of things are driving the American political experience, I cannot help but wonder why. If 'grit' and 'guts' are the substitute for reasoned political discourse people expect the Democrats to accept, I argue this is a Catch 22 that will only lead to mob rule. If there is no threshold for what can be considered 'truth', if our concept of the real is governed by whomever is in power, our understanding of the ends of our democracy are at the whim of whoever can govern popular belief.
Below is a reprint of an email I received from Media Matters for America. Interesting read.
Conservative criticism of "liberal bias" in "big media" rings hollow
Since President George W. Bush's November 2 reelection, several conservative columnists have accused "big media" of liberal bias, claiming that news outlets actively campaigned against Bush throughout the pre-election period. Nationally syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell, Weekly Standard staff writer Stephen F. Hayes, Wall Street Journal contributing editor Peggy Noonan, and conservative columnist and author Mona Charen have all chastised media outlets for providing election coverage that favored Senator John Kerry -- but their criticism is at odds with substantial evidence showing a conservative bias in election coverage.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Media Matters for America documented countless examples of media coverage -- in both conservative and "mainstream" outlets -- that benefited Bush and/or hurt Kerry, including:
MMFA's recent examples of anti-Kerry campaign coverage: "Top Ten Reasons why Media Mattered in the 2004 Presidential Race"
MMFA's analysis of how flawed coverage affected the election: "Top Ten media failings in 2004"
In his November 7 "Commentary" column in The Washington Times, Sowell wrote:
The election demonstrates mainstream media have lost their power to control what the public will and will not know. Without alternative media like talk radio, Fox News and the Internet, the public would have heard only pro-Kerry spin disguised as news.
In the November 15 edition of The Weekly Standard, Hayes criticized the media for conducting "fact checks," apparently arguing that checking the veracity of candidates' statements is a bad practice:
For some 16 months, then, journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of political debate to elucidate the many misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies of the Bush administration and its campaign affiliates. Sometimes these "fact-check" pieces were labeled "news analysis." More often, they were splashed on the front page as straight news or presented on the evening news.
The nonpartisan Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk website, however, has frequently noted its belief that such fact checks aren't common enough.
In her November 5 nationally syndicated column, Charen wrote:
[Philanthropist] George Soros, [author and documentarian] Michael Moore, [advocacy group] moveon.org, [actress] Whoopi Goldberg, [actor] Ben Affleck and a few other plutocrats spent a reported $200 million attempting to defeat George W. Bush. They had the energetic assistance of The New York Times, ABC, NBC, NPR, CNN and particularly CBS. They retain (for how much longer is open to question) the power to shape the national debate.
In a November 4 Wall Street Journal opinion editorial piece, Noonan wrote:
But I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down.
MMFA previously noted Noonan's attempt to deny the truth of an October 25 New York Times report that hundreds of tons of high-powered explosives went missing in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Numerous reports set out clear evidence that large quantities of the high-grade explosives HMX and RDX were present at the Al Qaqaa military installation when American troops arrived at the site in early April 2003 and were looted shortly thereafter.
I am part owner of an ASP and have a day job consulting. One of the most frustrating parts of this situation is handling problems with the small business during the day, I have to wait until after 6pm to look at them. Gives me a sick feeling in my stomach when I go home to know the first 3 hours are going to be spent doing QA / bug fixes.
Growing the business is turning into a monumental effort and each new client we add brings a fresh set of problems to work out. Funny, frustrating, USER problems. Today I get an email and a phone call from a new client I didn't even know we have, and he is having a problem trying to upload a CSV file into the database. He has a file that was created on a Mac, saved under OpenOffice on Linux then put back into a CSV file under Excel on Windows. I have no clue what the carriage return codes are for this after travelling so far so fast. Salesforce.com must have had it the same way.
Just driving through traffic is getting to be a pain. I always scan for shortcuts these days and become frazzled when cars get backed up. I am always thinking about how much time I lose to red lights now, never used to be this way in my 20's. My head starts to hurt and my stomach starts to turn when the car stops making forward progress, and road accidents mess me up even more. Listening to the radio is aggravating, the commercials have somehow become more annoying recently and I can't listen to them for very long.
When the anxiety gets to me, I visualize pleasant things in my mind's eye. My list of pleasant things is shrinking, however, as I outgrow some of the things I used to love. I feel out of place when going to see live music these days, I am usually about 5 years older than the rest of the audience. Sometimes it's just teenagers, so I don't do that as much anymore. The batting cage is almost inaccessible to me since I hurt my shoulder last year. Been a while since I broke up with my girlfriend, I find myself thinking about her more often and wishing things had been different. Still like programming, but I never have time for personal projects anymore.
Books are still a favorite pasttime, for the 5 minutes or so each week I get to read. Started in on a new book last week, can't even remember the name now. Was an encyclopedia of horror film characters and cliches, very interesting but definitely not in line with my other stuff. Still read 2600 and Dr. Dobbs, but mostly on airplanes now and mostly on my way to DC. Everyone once in a while someone recognizes 2600 and either stares at me funny or throws me some gang sign to tell me they are a hacker. Would just like to read sometime, and maybe hack a hotel entertainment system.
I hardly ever drink anymore, and constantly wish I had time for a beer. I have a refrigerator full of Heineken and Guinness, I buy some every time I go to the grocery store. I think I lost the bottle opener, it hasn't been there the last few times I thought I might enjoy a cool one.
Everyone tells me I am doing a wonderful job, I think I have finally learned how to offend no one and be successful managing projects. My partners think it is amazing I am able to keep up with the demands of the company and the consulting work. Our business grows with each passing day, and soon we will be hiring more developers. Bothers me things keep happening the way they do.
I am getting sick of comment moderation. Not that the system itself is flawed, it's almost ideal. It's the people doing the moderating that bug me, they do not improve the quality of the posts one iota.
Case in point: I made a joke in a discussion about Dungeons and Dragons. Got modded way, way down because the moderators lack a sense of humor / are too impulsive to meaningfully read sigs. In a discussion about Half Life 2, I posted a complete lie about how to crack the game. Gets modded Interesting +42.
Went to my first political rally event yesterday after 5 years living in the District of Columbia. It was a meet and greet for Wesley Clark's campaign, I was shocked by how grass roots things are right now.
I received an email about 10 AM requesting some help down at the Capitol dropping of letters and Clark bars to congressional offices. Went down to check it out, met with one of his campaign managers. Naturally, the talk turned to tech - I asked him if he needed any volunteers to help organize Web intiatives. He points to this kid and explains how well equipped they already are. This kid got a whole email campaign set up and ready this morning (!).
Anyways, within 20 minutes I was given a stack of letters and told to go hand them out in the Cannon House Office Building. Left with a group of 3 other people, none of whom had ever met before, and we started handing stuff out, shaking hands in congressional offices, and feeding hungry staffers candy bars (BTW, there is no exaggeration around the legendary hunger of congressional staffers, even the republicans were gobbling up these Clark bars. One person offered to talk to her representative about a statement on P2P if we gave her one).
When I say grass roots, I mean this is people going out to set up a movement by themselves with nothing to get them started. While I knew what this meant, there is a difference between knowing about it and seeing the process up close. To think there are people who do this day-in-day-out for no money, this idea makes me appreciate the work these people do.
I was just thinking how great it would be to develop software to support these kinds of movements. This would be a great open-source deal. Something that lets you track and manage mailing lists, does some project planning, and keeps contact lists.
This is a test of my online journal system at Slashdot. I have a lot to write about, mostly non-technical in the common sense, but sharable nonetheless.
* The things I need to write down: *
The vicious cost waterfalls of Six Flags
The joys of Vermont and the family farm
Bringing my daughter to work with me this summer
My parents breaking up
My Dad's family coming back together
Katie growing from a 4 to a 6
The bunk bed
Katie starting soccer practice.
Being asked to coach soccer.
Law School and how important the SAT was
Trying to get some education! I miss academics
Java. Cold Fusion. PHP. Postgres. SAPDB. 3DSMax. Other means of wasting free time.
Being laid off from Lockheed Martin.
Being *ahem* laid off from other places...
The good job where I can be late and not lynched.
Free Diet Sodas.
The voice on that cartoon I saw last night with the siamese twins - I know that voice from another cartoon but can't remember - OH WAIT KATIE'S FAVORITE TIME SQUAD!!!
The Redskins and Shane Matthews going 327 yards on opening day
The Orioles losing 10 in a row after finally reaching


text:
This question is about distribution in excess of basis - tax impact on individual:
I am a partner in a LLC partnership run business. Every year, our accountant files 1065 K-1 for each partner. We had refinanced our business so our mortgage went up but we were able to obtain the refinance amount in our bank account.
My capital basis as of Dec 31 2009 was $0. I took a distribution check on my name from the partnership on Dec 25, 2009.
My accountant is saying that the distribution amount will be reported on Schedule K-1, line 1 (as ordinary income) AND also on Line 14, box a - it will be subject to the self employment tax.
Question 1 - Is this correct tax treatment ? I thought I would only pay regular tax, not the additional Self-Employment tax.
Question 2 - The accountant has not yet finalized/filed the K-1. Can I return the amount back to the partnership this year, BEFORE the accountant files the K-1, thus negating the tax consequence?
Question 3 - I have heard of 1031 exchange. Could I have (or in future) have the distribution sent directly to a 1031 type investment ? (E.G. I have heard of Oil/Gas Master Limited Partnerships, REIT, Health REIT, etc.) Would that allow me to DEFER the capital gains tax ?
I'd appreciate any tax related help and the specific IRS publication that explains this, or any other tax website.
asked 26 Mar '10, 00:14
TaxQueries ♦♦
(1) There really isn't enough information. A distribution in excess of basis would generally be a capital gain. However, guaranteed payments (generally based on services rendered, not on partnership income) are ordinary income and subject to SE tax.
(2) You could ask your accountant whether part of the payment could be a loan to you. To be a valid loan, there would have to be a signed loan agreement and you would have to pay the partnership back a reasonable rate of interest.
(3) A 1031 exchange involves qualifying business or investment property. Partnership interests are specifically excluded from qualifying for a like-kind exchange.
answered 28 Apr '10, 13:21
Dont Trust your accountant! Question everything.... you are the one who has to deal with the consequences of signing or being apart of the tax decisions made. If you find yourself questioning your accountant a lot and not capable then hire a new one.
answered 11 May '11, 19:09
Viagra OnlineJust watch the questions that ask too much, dump out the extra info not needed and relax.
answered 24 Jun '11, 17:28
pepe cadena 3

subset: commoncrawl


text:
NCIS Star Pauley Perrette Issues Hair Dye Health Warning After Severe Allergic Reaction
NCIS actress Pauley Perrette is warning fans about the dangers of hair dye after suffering a severe allergic reaction to her trademark ink-black color.
Girl's Hair Gets Caught In Handheld Fan Distributed By CPS
Shortly after the fans were distributed at Smyser Elementary School, a 6-year-old's hair got caught in her fan and her teacher had to cut it out.
Barber: Blagojevich's Hair To Turn Gray In Prison
Rod Blagojevich's barber says the former Illinois governor's famously thick, dark hair is dyed and will turn gray within the first months of his prison term.
Can Lasers Zap Baldness? One Woman Thinks So
Dr. Anita Buckler lost her hair when she was treated for a brain tumor, but something amazing happened with a space-age treatment: Her hair grew back.
New Broadway In Chicago
From new plays to old favorites, here is some of the best Broadway theater in Chicago.


text:
The Wall Lyrics - Bruce Springsteen
Cigarettes and a bottle of beer
This poem I wrote for you
This black stone and these hard tears
Are all I've got left now of you
I remember you in your Marine uniform laughing
Laughing that you're shipping out probably
I read Robert McNamara says he's sorry
You and your boots and black t-shirt
Ah Billy you looked so bad
Ya, you and your rock and roll band
Was the best thing this shit town ever had
Now the man who put you here
He feeds his family in rich dining halls
And apology and forgiveness have no place here at all
At the wall
I'm sorry I missed you last year
I couldn't find no one to drive me
If your eyes could cut through that black stone
Tell me would they recognize me?
For the living, time must be served
Life goes on
Cigarettes and a bottle of beer
Skin on black stone
High School pictures, paper flowers
Ribbon, red as the blood
Ya, as the blood you spilled
In the Central Highlands mud
Now the limousines rush down Pennsylvania Boulevard
As the rain falls
And apology and forgiveness have no place here at all
Click here to submit the Corrections of The Wall Lyrics
Please Click Here to Print The Wall Lyrics
Thanks to Michael / email@example.com for submitting The Wall Lyrics.
The following area is only for review, if you want to submit the lyrics or the corrections of the lyrics, please click the link at the end of The Wall Lyrics.


text: I'm on their mailing list and as it happens, went there on Wednesday. Nope. Did have some excellent deals on small waffle irons though, I got one that does a waffle in the shape of a [very short, round] bouquet of roses. I want to serve these to a Queen's tea with rose syrup some time. Selene Samia al-Kaslaania wrote: > If you live near the store Tuesday Morning, give them a call. They had > pieces of these last month. > > Samia > > Johnna Holloway wrote: >> They have several lines of pots and pans. >> http://www.ruffoniusa.com/products.cfm


text:
Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) Sci-Fi Movie Review
Sci-Fi movies Review
Catch a wave of "terrific adventure" and "non-stop action" (CBS-TV) in this fun and fantastically entertaining smash-hit! "Invisible Woman: Sue Storm and "Mr. Fantastic" Dr. Reed Richards are about to be married when a mysterious alien… the Silver Surfer… crashes the proceedings and heralds Earth's impending destruction. With time running out, the Fantastic Four reluctantly teams up with the nefarious Dr. Doom in a thrilling effort to save our planet!
Synopsis:The Fantastic Four learn that they aren't the only super-powered beings in the universe when they square off against the powerful Silver Surfer and the planet-eating Galactus.
About Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
Year: 2007
Starring: Doug Jones, Kenneth Welsh, Laurence Fishburne, Jessica Alba, Crystal Lowe, Moneca Delain, Kevin McNulty, Michael Chiklis, Zach Grenier, Suzanne Ristic, Andre Braugher, Brian Posehn, Chris Evans, Benjamin Ayres, Andy Stahl, Ioan Gruffudd, Valerie Tian, Julian McMahon, Kerry Washington, Gonzalo Menendez, Beau Garrett, Dawn Chubai, Chris Gailus, Debbie Timuss, Chris Calleri, Vanessa Lachey, Alicia Thorgrimsson, Jeanna Haddow, Ali Costigan, Patricia Harras
Runtime: 92 minutes
Director: Tim Story
Reviewer: Florita A.
MPAA Rating: PG
Score: 4 / 5 starsPublished: April 22, 2009, 6:49 pm
Avg. Rating: 2.5/5 stars from 6 users. Reviews: 6.Genre: Thriller, Sci-Fi, Action, Fantasy
MPAA Rating: PG
Help Us Rate These Movies and TV Shows
You May Also Like…


text:
Spring Branch, TX, USA < change city >
Reception Sites (277)
Photographers (70)
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See All Vendors >
Serenity Cove Lodge
14585 Weir Creek Rd.
Willis, TX 77318, U.S.A.
Ceremony & Reception, Hotels/Accommodation...
Lakeside Lodge on Lake Conroe surrounded by 5 acres of natural wildlife setting in a grove of beautiful pecan trees. Perfect s...
WestLake Club
570 WestLake Park Blvd
Houston, TX 77079, United States
Reception Sites, Ceremony S...
4 ratings, 4 reviews, 16 weddings
Jennifer O'Keefe is wonderful! The Westlake is a hidden gem in Houston! I definit...
Omni Hotel
4 Riverway
Houston, TX, United States
Hotels/Accommodations, Rece...
4 ratings, 2 reviews, 59 weddings
Our out of town guests stayed at the hotel for the weekend. Their every need was...
The Houston Museum Of Na...
1 Hermann Cir Dr
Houston, TX 77030, US
Attractions/Entertainment, ...
3 ratings, 2 reviews, 64 weddings
Nancy at the museum made the whole process so easy. It was a great location in t...
St. Michael Catholic Church
1801 Sage Rd
Houston, TX 77056, US
Ceremony Sites
2 ratings, 2 reviews, 17 weddings
St. Michael's Church did an excellent job! Everything was organized and went jus...
The Bell Tower On 34th
901 West 34th Street
Houston, TX, United States
Reception Sites, Attraction...
2 ratings, 2 reviews, 17 weddings
The Bell Tower was amazing. It was beauiful and the staff was wonderful to work w...
The Houstonian Hotel, Cl...
111 North Post Oak Lane
Houston, TX, United States
Ceremony Sites, Reception S...
2 ratings, 2 reviews, 11 weddings
The Houstonian was soooo luxurious and wonderful. They made us feel like a King a...
Omni Houston Westside Hotel
13210 Katy Fwy
Houston, TX, United States
Hotels/Accommodations, Rece...
1 rating, 2 reviews, 31 weddings
We didn't have any guests that stayed here but they were helpful with the room bl...
Pine Forest Country Club
18003 Clay Road
Houston, Texas 77084, United Stated
Reception Sites, Ceremony &...
3 ratings, 0 reviews, 19 weddings
2021 Binz Street
Houston, TX, United States
Reception Sites, Ceremony S...
2 ratings, 1 review, 17 weddings
Not one complaint we could think of with the Parador. Overall all a top notch fa...


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Carolina Beach Condo Rental Photos and Description
2 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom, sleeps 7
Get the Dates You Want in 2014. BOOK NOW FOR 2014! This is an Oceanfront Condo Complex with Ocean/Beach/Pool view! This newly renovated condo is at Sandpebbles, a highly desirable ocean front complex. This condo is centrally located in Carolina Beach. Newly Renovated - BRAND NEW KITCHEN (GRANITE COUNTER TOPS), New Laminate Flooring, New Master/Guest Bath Rooms, New Fold-out Queen Couch - Both the private balcony (covered) and master bedroom have breath-taking views of the beautiful ocean, private beach, and one of the two oceanfront pools just below. There are 2 outdoor showers positioned on two beach walk-ways, private to the Condo Complex. Enjoy watching dolphins swim in the surf and wake up to the sunrise over the ocean. The beach stretches for miles, great for a long walk or jog.
This condo has an ocean/beach/pool view directly straight out from inside the Master Bedroom (Most of the other condos in this Beach Front Complex - you have to go out to the deck and look left or right). The condo has a fully equipped kitchen, two roomy bedrooms, 2 full baths, living/dining room and a washer/dryer for your convenience. Unit is freshly painted, has new carpeting, new bedding, and is equipped for simple housekeeping. For your entertainment, the condo has two TVs with DVD and VHS . Covered parking for 2 vehicles located under the building. Sand Pebbles Complex is unique as it is Ocean Front with two ocean front pools, well maintained, under building parking and centrally located to Carolina Beach and Kure Beach.
Within walking distance you'll find plenty: boardwalk and arcade, ice cream shop, the best seafood restaurants around,a park and small lake with paddle boats and walking trails, tiki hut on the beach (you can listen to live bands), convenience store, beach shops, bike rentals, and much more. Just across the street from the condo, there are two amazing restaurants (Uncle Vinnie's & The Cove).Visit the North Carolina Aquarium located at the south end of the island, USS North Carolina Battleship or take a short ferry ride to Southport for the day. Historic Wilmington is only 20 minutes away. If you love the surf, sand, and long walks on the beach, this luxurious vacation condo is the place for you. Book early - this unit goes quickly!
The town of about 5,600 friendly residents has a quaint vintage feel sure to transport you back to your childhood days at the beach. Yet it provides every modern convenience you could hope for and you'll be welcomed as one of their own!
In addition to miles of wide, clean, beautiful beaches, Carolina Beach offers a variety of beach homes, cottages and condos.
Carolina Beach restaurants range from five-star to very good family restaurants. You'll love the vintage decor and prices of local restaurants dating back to our early days. Of course, no trip to Carolina Beach is complete without a visit to the Boardwalk. Grab a famous Britt's donut and coffee, head for the boardwalk and watch the day come alive. Click here for more info on area activities in Carolina Beach
Anglers, the fishing is great! Fish on the beach, from the pier, catch a head boat, charter a boat, or launch your own at a public launch.
There are many parks, dog parks, trails and bike paths. The Carolina Beach
- Suitability:
- Long-term Renters Welcome
- Minimum Age Limit for Renters
- children welcome
- non smoking only
- pets not allowed
- wheelchair inaccessible
About The Owner
We enjoy the beach -
The Owner purchased this condo in 2007
Why The Owner chose Carolina Beach
Carolina Beach has some of the best beaches in North Carolina!
Guestbook comments from the owner
FIVE STAR *****: The ocean water was beautiful. We rented bikes from the local vendor, just up the street. We rode the bikes to the aquarium. It was worth the bike ride as the aquarium was amazing. Having the use of the 2-pools was fantastic as an alternative to the ocean sometimes. Brit's doughnuts is a must! (Fresh hot donuts made before your eyes). Nice restaurant named Gribby's - Amazing Food. You can't miss Squigley's Ice Cream - Best ice cream anywhere. All in All an amazing vacation - Excellent Condo - Great location.


text:
YHA Australia
Bookings & travel news
Hi there,
Melbourne Central YHA
562 Flinders St
Melbourne 3000
Phone: (+613) 9621 2523
Fax: (+613) 9614 7891
Manager: Bronwyn Adams
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Reception Hours:
24 Hours
Arrival Time:
Check in from 1pm, Check out is before 10am.
1 kilometre to Southern Cross Station and Skybus Terminal.
1 kilometre to Southern Cross Station.
Nearest Airport:
28 kilometres to Melbourne Airport. The Skybus operates 24 hours from Southern Cross Station and picks up at the hostel.
Take the lift or stairs up to reception on level one.
Melbourne Tourist Map and Walking Directions
If Melbourne Central YHA is full, consider Melbourne Metro YHA Hostel.
Pefect place for a great holiday.
Apoorv A. (November 2014)
TAMARA P. (November 2014)
Great location!
Araceli V. (November 2014)
We had a rooftop room and it had poor ventilation and smelled strongly of mould. But the location was pretty good and the staff were wonderful and very helpful. We met really nice travellers and staff. The cafe next door was recommended but it didn't...
Penelope T. (November 2014)
My stay was very comfortable and the staff very helpful.
Janice A. (November 2014)
i love how comfortable the whole hostel is. the kitchen, well equipped and clean.
Jodie W. (November 2014)
Staff were very friendly and helpful and welcoming, and the whole vibe in the building was just great. The room I had was nice and clean and the bed was comfy. Plus the location was just fabulous, with a tram stop right outside the door.
Melissa E. (November 2014)
I think its expensive overall.$5 / Hour for Wi Fi is ridiculous and there is no storage for luggage unless you pay.
BRIAN W. (November 2014)
Good place to be, good place to work from. Easy to find and easy to get to.
Rooms are good, the beds are good, the extra facilities (the roof garden, the TV room and the balcony area) are good.
Be there, do it.
Paul M. (November 2014)
Melbourne Central YHA is a trendy hostel located in the heart of Melbourne City!
Please note that this hostel is currently undergoing renovations to enhance your experience
at this iconic property. The hostel is running as normal and communal areas are
not affected but guests may experience some noise during daytime hours.
Stay in the centre of the action and explore vibrant Melbourne with Melbourne Central YHA. Our hostel is ideally located only minutes walk from Melbourne's main attractions including Southern Cross Station, Crown Casino, Yarra River, Federation Square and Melbourne's hidden laneways filled with famous street art, cafes and unique bars.
Now with a terrific ground floor communal area opened in late 2014, our YHA offers modern facilities as well as an amazing rooftop complete with BBQ for you to enjoy the city views and meet new friends. On the ground floor you'll find our 24 hour reception, tour desk, lounge, brand new self catering kitchen and TV room. Upstairs, choose from a range of multi-share and private rooms, all with lift access.
Our friendly hostel never closes with 24 hour reception and our staff are always ready to answer your questions, give you local advice on the best spots to go in Melbourne and help you make the most of your trip.
Book a room at Melbourne Central YHA and experience it for yourself.
Melbourne Central YHA is in the perfect location to explore the city! The hostel is only a short walk to Melbourne's main attractions including Federation Square, ACMI, Yarra River, Bourke St Mall, Eureka Skydeck, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Docklands, Crown Casino, Etihad Stadium, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Aquarium and so much more.
The free City Circle Tram and the $5 Melbourne Tourist Shuttle stops directly out the front of the hostel and will take you to iconic Melbourne sites such as the MCG, the Shrine of Remembrance and Rod Laver Arena.
Catch a tram to bohemian St Kilda and walk along the beachside esplanade or head over to Fitzroy and see the eclectic cafes, bars and boutiques.
Melbourne's events calendar is jam packed with fun throughout the year. Events include AFL,Australian Open Tennis, Formula 1 Grand Prix, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne Cup and Spring Fashion Week as well as many music festivals.
Melbourne is a great place to go out with lots of unique hidden restaurants, bars, pubs and nightclubs for every taste with many close to the hostel! Check out our list of top places.
Melbourne Central YHA is just 50 metres from the nearest food store.
Melbourne History
Good common area facilities on ground floor. Rooms ive stayed in decent size. Very close to trams southern cross station casino sky bus to from airport coach terminal and regional/ interstate trains. Woolworths Coles and IGA supermarkets close by and walking distance to spencer street outlet for shopping. Fast food lots of near by. Bottleshops too within walking distance. Bunyip tours next door
10% off any tour. Use the promotional code YHA when booking online.
Ph: 0433 223 557
10% discount.
Ph: 03 9348 9892
Melbourne Metro YHA
Apollo Bay Eco YHA
Grampians Eco YHA
YHA Travel licences: 2TA002629 (NSW), LTA148 (NT), 3433524 (QLD), TTA32 (SA), TA-0033055


text:
Microsoft 'Catapults' geriatric Moore's Law from CERTAIN DEATH
Microsoft has found a way to massively increase the compute capabilities of its data centers, despite the fact that Moore's Law is wheezing towards its inevitable demise. In a paper to be presented this week at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), titled A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large- …
Interesting stuff
FPGAs do offer interesting ways to extend the power of computers, especially for SIMD type situations (and there are loads of these). I will see if our library has that paper available.
I thought Moore's law was not so much an assertion as an observation. I gather he observed a trend in the data so far, and suggested the exponential growth might go on for a while yet. I do not think he envisaged it to last as long as it has.
I do tire of people who still suggest Moore's Law will come to the rescue of their pathetically slow algorithms. I always like to point out that even if Moore's Law continues unabated, the amount of data their quadratic, cubic, or even exponential complexity algorithms algorithms can handle will not grow in the same way. Instead, the amount of data will grow by the square or cube root of two for each doubling, and in the exponential case you can add one data item per doubling of speed.
The end of Moore's Law might put an end to this form of sloppy thinking
Re: Interesting stuff
>>FPGAs do offer interesting ways to extend the power of computers, especially for SIMD type situations
I'd say kind of the opposite. FPGAs excel when there's not an efficient way to express a function with typical computer instructions, regardless of how much data is being processed. If anything it would be MI?D instead of SIMD... "Multiple Instruction, __ Data".
Re: Interesting stuff
Maybe SIMD is not the best turn of phrase. As I see it, FPGAs could work well if the processing steps are fairly predetermined. I do not see FPGAs working on the data-driven processing order required for my kind of image and volume filtering work, but then I haven't got much experience with FPGAs, so maybe I am wrong
A troupe of boffins?
Sounds rather undignified, we need a better collective noun than "troupe".
Re: A troupe of boffins?
A Toupée of boffins?
Re: A troupe of boffins?
A school of boffins? A pod of boffins?
Re: A troupe of boffins?
Surely a shed of boffins...
Re: A troupe of boffins?
I am personally a fan of a pod of boffins, since we apparently work in pods where I am.
Re: A troupe of boffins?
Undignified? But some of the best boffinry comes from monkeying around ...
Re: A troupe of boffins?
"Undignified? But some of the best boffinry comes from monkeying around ..."
An indignity of boffins. There you go then.
Re: Indignity of boffins
Nah. If we're talking monkeys, it has to be a flange.
Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
There's an old Rule of Thumb that is deadly-wrong. "Allow 50% of the capacity for growth."
FAIL. Stupid stupid stupid.
The very next generation of requirements will require about 10x the processing capabilities. So your 50% spare capacity barely makes it through the maintenance cycles.
Lie: "It's reprogrammable so you won't be buying another one for decades."
Fact: They go obsolete as fast as the old way of doing business (CPUs). Faster in fact, because nobody can be bothered to reprogram them.
Decision makers beware.
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
Absolutely true. Reprogramming FPGAs is a bottleneck to many. A software platform which could ease that pain would help, but I trust that might be as difficult as compilers which "automatically" recognize how to parallellise code. I have seen examples of the latter which handled quite a few situations admirably, but feed them e.g. a queue based algorithm and they are stuck. Many challenging problem require real originality.
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
A software platform which could ease that pain would help, but I trust that might be as difficult as compilers which "automatically" recognize how to parallellise code
Kinda sorta...
A big part of the problem of FPGA development is that you're not just programming someone else's core, you're actually doing hardware layout. That means that, beyond getting your design algorithmically correct, you also need to layout the design such that it conforms to timing constraints. This is not trivial as you approach the capability of the device.
The way this seems to be done is to perform multiple layouts (in parallel if possible), and then to compare each to see which fits the constraints properly. Altera's tool for this is called Design Space Explorer (DSE), Xilinx's is called SmartXPlorer.
I've spent much of the last 3 years implementing & maintaining a Grid Engine cluster specifically to run this sort of tool. It's entirely possible to do, but the complexity of pushing out a new FPGA design should not be underestimated. There's *lots*[1] of compute time burnt in each iteration...
[1] Especially as the Linux port of some of these tools seems not to be as effective as it might be. Now I'm out of contract on that job, I might have to talk to the vendors to see if I can't get their tools running a little quicker :-)
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
"A software platform which could ease that pain would help"
I take it you're aware of neither Handel C at one end, and National Instruments Labview software-through-pictures meets FPGA (http://www.ni.com/fpga/) at the other end? And other variants on the theme?
Previous incarnations of Handel C were associated with Oxford University Computing Lab, and Embedded Solutions Limited (later Celoxica).
Attempts to market the Handel C product to engineering and scientific markets seem to have been relatively disappointing; last time I looked they were aiming at the City instead, specifically at High Frequency Trading, where pockets are deep and every nanosecond counts. But that didn't seem to work all that well either, and the remains of the company and technology were bought in 2009 by Mentor Graphics, the eCAD company turned mini-conglomerate.
Afaict both products work technically, but the solution space where they are relevant is not very big (even in comparison with the solution space where graphics card computing is relevant).
That said, where are all these FPGAs going to get all their data from? If it doesn't fit in on-FPGA memory, then surely main memory speed (bandwidth? latency?) is the bottleneck, as it often is. FPGAs don't really change anything much in that respect, surely?
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
" That means that, beyond getting your design algorithmically correct, you also need to layout the design such that it conforms to timing constraints. "
Not exactly...
You don't do the layout yourself. The tools do that. You just provide the timing constraints and it is the job of the tool to do the floor planning.
Of course you need to write the HDL code in a way that timing **can** be met.
For example, instead of having complex blocks of logic that take a long time to crunch you instead chop these up into lots of small steps and use pipelining.
might become
Step 1:
Step 2
Now each bite of processing is smaller and can therefore be processed within a clock cycle.
Something like a multiply and accumulate might end up taking many (6-10) pipeline steps, but at least it is FAST.
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
You don't do the layout yourself. The tools do that. You just provide the timing constraints and it is the job of the tool to do the floor planning.
If you read the rest of my post, you'll see I talk about the tools.
But floorplanning - you tend to do that yourself for non-trivial designs, as it makes a huge difference both to the execution time of the tool and to the probability of any run actually meeting timing constraints.
SmartXPlorer and DSE still take a shitload of time to run...
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
Doesnt that suggest that the future of CPU's is in Software Defined Computation?
ie Future iteration of FGPA's or similar that can load new CPU models on the fly whenever a non-trivial set of operations are detected.
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
ie Future iteration of FGPA's or similar that can load new CPU models on the fly whenever a non-trivial set of operations are detected.
Already happening...
Re: Here's a Lesson Learned (from SDR) for anyone going down this road...
Unfortunately, loading the FPGA is slow.
Synchronization among FPGAs is slow.
Saving context will be slow...
The network described looks the same as the old Cray T3. And that beast took several seconds just to get ready to start the job. Granted, once setup it was quite fast. But job setup time took forever - as did shutdown times. A single checkpoint could take 15 minutes if all the processors were used by one job.
And this doesn't look any different.
Slow evolution?
SRAM style FPGAs have been slow to achieve their potential. Back in 1986 most programmers only understood how to handle data by serial processing on a cpu. A need to do processing in real-time would always end up as "need a faster cpu" - rather than offload some data handling tasks to FPGAs. Hardware designers mostly used FPGAs for quick prototyping of hardware logic - or to allow logic maintenance updates.
In general the idea of reconfiguring the FPGA on the fly as part of the application was often ignored. I suspect that CGI companies have been doing work like this for many years.
Re: Slow evolution?
I thought the British micro scene in the 80's had a fetish for ULA's (rather than ASIC's) which were essentially a basic write-once FPGA.
Re: Slow evolution?
ULA's (rather than ASIC's) which were essentially a basic write-once FPGA.
No, you're thinking of PLDs.
ULAs were logic blocks with the function defined by the metal layer; this allowed near-ASICs to be generated comparatively cheaply and with low lead time.
PLDs are EPROM/EEPROM-configured, and are significantly smaller than FPGAs (and generally have much less granularity in function).
Re: Slow evolution?
ULA's were write once, but there's another important distinction, they were mask programmable.
Digital custom chips fall into two high level categories: field programmable and mask programmable.
Mask programmable, the non-recurring engineering costs on there are much higher, the interconnect of the logic gates/transistors is done at manufacturing time.
In field programmable chips the chips are mass produced and all the way through to packaging the die into the lead frame and final test. All the chips coming off the production line are the same.
Customisation of the chip and putting the circuit design into the chip is undertaken by the customer (and not the chip manufacturer).
Re: Slow evolution?
ULA's WERE ASICS. ASICS - application specific integrated circuits - were/are mask programmable, which is precisely what ULA's were.
Re: Slow evolution?
ULA's WERE ASICS. ASICS - application specific integrated circuits - were/are mask programmable, which is precisely what ULA's were.
The term "ASIC" covers far more than just mask-programmable parts; full-ASIC development would determine the silicon layout underneath the metal layers, and that means a shedload more NRE.
ULAs had a common silicon layout, with just the metal layer being application-specific. That's why I described them as "near-ASIC".
Re: Slow evolution?
I was working with ASICs - mask programmable mostly - in the 1990's. The design of the device was undertaken by the customer and a netlist of the logic circuit sent to the ASIC vendor, which then carried out pre-layout validation checks, design rule checks, pre layout simulation, floor planning, place and route, and then post-layout simulations. The end result of this process was a database which was sent onto the fab. plant which simply created the final few metalisation masks.
The difference between those ASICs in the 1990's and the ULA's such as the Ferranti ULA used in the BBC microcomputer was that they didn't have the design tools and CAD software in the days of the ULA. Design and verification of the mask patterns was done by printing out huge print outs, and visually inspecting them.
From a manufacturing perspective, I believe the ULA and mask programmable ASICs were the same.
Re: Slow evolution?
I was working with ASICs - mask programmable mostly - in the 1990's.
I was working with ASICs - full-custom mostly - in the 1990's.
The design of the device was undertaken by the customer and a netlist of the logic circuit sent to the ASIC vendor, which then carried out pre-layout validation checks, design rule checks, pre layout simulation, floor planning, place and route, and then post-layout simulations
So you're doing floorplanning & place/route. That's way more than just configuring the metal layer. That's floorplanning the layout of the silicon beneath that metal layer. Which is exactly what I said...
Take a look at Wikipedia's entry on full-custom ASIC. Feel free to do some more searching if you don't find that sufficiently authoritative.
From a manufacturing perspective, I believe the ULA and mask programmable ASICs were the same.
Nothing like it. ULAs were only customised when the metal layer was applied - long after the dice were sawn. Full-custom ASIC is a custom piece of silicon from start to finish.
Re: Slow evolution?
ASICs offered lower NRE than full custom/semi custom technologies.
The NRE cost of the development effort into designing the ASIC device by the vendor was distributed across all the dies made, across all customers that used that particular ASIC.
When we talk about NRE, we are generally talking about the NRE to the customer that has created the design to be put on to the ASIC, it's important to distinguish the customer's NRE - the charge they pay to the ASIC vendor for the validation, layout and production of samples of the ASIC, and the developmental costs of the particular ASIC technology family which is incurred by the ASIC vendor.
As far as the customer is concerned, they don't care about the development costs of the technology incurred by the vendor, that cost is distributed across all chips that are made and manifests itself in both the NRE charge for ASIC validation and individual price per chip the customer pays.
The point about ASICS is that the die, unmetallised, was already fabbed, and made in their thousands,
Re: Slow evolution?
>So you're doing floorplanning & place/route. That's way more than just configuring the metal layer.
No, this isn't right. With a semi-custom mask programmable ASIC, this isn't what is happening
When you floor plan such an ASIC, you're laying down instructions to the place and route tools to constrain the placement of logic gates.
The end result is purely that the creation of metalisation masks to do the final interconnect.
My credentials;
1) Spent two years at university studying full custom, semic custom IC design.
2) Made an interated cicuit chip in the lab, using photolithography
3) Spent 5 years as an ASIC validation engineer, laying out chips, pre and post layout logic simulations, automatic test pattern generation of one of the world's leading ASIC venors.
Re: Slow evolution?
Might have made a typing error. With full custom you are right, lower level masks of the difusion regions need to be produced, but this is not true for semi-custom.
Thanks for the reference to Wiki, I don't need to check. I know what my job was, did it for 5 years, I *am* the authority on it.
I had to hand route a 30,000 logic gate Gallium Arsenide device at 97% utilisation, when the routing software couldn't hack it.
Re: Slow evolution?
With full custom you are right, lower level masks of the difusion regions need to be produced, but this is not true for semi-custom
I wasn't talking about semi-custom...
Re: Slow evolution?
There were two competing implementations of the FPGA concept circa 1985.
Altera had an FPGA user gate configuration process that was a one-off process. You burned the logic configuration by (IIRC) fusible links - and it was then non-volatile.
Xilinx had SRAM technology to control the way the FPGA gates were configured. The chip could be dynamically loaded off a serial eprom - or via a serial line on a I/O port of a cpu. The FPGA could be dynamically reloaded for different configurations. One of their examples was reloading a comms FPGA between send and receive. The gate count was quite low - in the order of a couple of thousand gates.
My 1986 IBM PC ISA bus prototype board was wire-wrapped by hand. It used two Xilinx FPGAs and some quite expensive 15nsec SRAM. The rest of the board was filled with chips for bus and external interfaces. The FPGA logic was first configured to enable the SRAM to be loaded with customised data via the cpu.
Then the FPGAs were reloaded with their operational logic. This download bit stream was customised for each run by on-the-fly merging of pre-built bits of several different FPGA configuration files. The result was able to generate a very large number of preset bit patterns for various counters etc.
It clocked at 100ns and worked first time using only a home-made 0/1 TTL logic probe to test the wiring. The professional hardware engineers were duly impressed with Xilinx FPGA capabilities.
Re: Slow evolution?
Having done such work (and absolutely killer wire-wraps), you have my total respect. And that's the reason that the next, obvious, step is programming everything. (I'm surprised that some wag hasn't trotted out Software-Defined Hardware, unless I missed seeing it somewhere.) Rearranging connects, and therefore function, will work for a time to conceal the sloppiness of the of developers (yeah, right, the "art of computer programming") but for a time. Hopefully, by then, you'll be able to rearrange atoms (using nanotech) or living computing nodes, as required.
[I've been doing every damn IT thang, hardware/software/network/systems, since 1975 and have zero respect for "practitioners" in software today. BTW, software defined biologicals should totally frighten anyone as they'll give "bug" a whole completely new manifestation!]
Ah we are back,
First found in BYTE Magazine in the early 90's to speed up the prime sieve. I can't remember the company that produced the FPGA ... probably dead by now.
The next step will come from ...
Analysing bloatware.
And instead of tailoring chips to run it, tailoring the software not to need it.
Bye bye X-windows. You served us reasonably well..
Re: The next step will come from ...
Right, because the X server is the obvious bottleneck on a massively parallel backend system. Not.
As for bloatware , yes you have a point there. First of all perhaps its time to dump a lot of inefficient scripting languages and VMs whether running Java style languages (unless the JIT execution can really be proven to be faster than precompiled binaries for the task) or entire OSes, and go back to to-the-metal style coding at using C/C++ and research even more improvements to compilers.
Following that strip down the OS itself - far to many server OSes run with code they don't need that while it doesn't do anything still occasionally is pointlessly spun up and queried (eg drivers) or just has to be passed through (eg firewalls). This is the case for Windows and Linux.
Then reduce the number of daisy chained API libraries and rewrite important code in a single library with minimal code jumping and hence paging required.
Once all that is done then we can start worrying about hardware.
Isn't this pretty much what Netezza does?
Disclaimer: I work for Big Blue although it's a genuine question, not rhetorical
Big Out of order Core + Little In order Core + unified io (arm BIG.little)
Intel phy
Nvidia cuda (kepler or whatever it is called now)
god knows what's google up to
and now MS fpga sauce
They all look quite similar to me.
Took long enough to get to the point
The only interesting part of the article is WHAT Microsoft has programmed its FPGAs to do... nothing else is new. We have had FPGAs for decades. Putting FPGAs in a server farm is a brain-dead logical step that's hardly worth mentioning as long as you have found a use for said FPGAs. All this stuff about Moore's law and whatever is pointless word padding.
Since feature detection is mentioned, I assume these FPGAs are assisting with image searches. That's nice, but I doubt that image searches take up that much of Microsoft's cloud compute power. Thus the benefits of this approach are limited. Not to say they shouldn't do it, but, certainly not the extension of Moore's law that the article promised.
Microsoft research...
Re-cutting the edge that has been mown by others for decades.
FPGAs have been used for data processing applications for ages. They are particularly valuable for doing things like video processing.
Pipelining means hundreds, or even thousands, of steps can be executed in parallel. I'm currently working on a project where we're applying a long sequence of manipulations to video pixels passing through at 150M pixels per second. As each pixel is having, say, 100 transformations applied, that's 15 Gpixel transformations happening per second. Far, far faster than anything that you can do on a CPU.
Similar things can be done with networking, search, ...
What was the MS marketing spiel several years ago.
Do Moore with less...
"parallel programming is devilishly difficult"
But FPGA programming is easy?
Haven't we been here before, 30 years ago? Anyone remember Occam? Go back to the late 70s for Hoare's seminal paper on Communicating Sequential Processes, into Inmos and the Transputer in the early 80s. So many times has the performance of the computer seemed to reach a plateau only to suddenly take off again. Is it a bluff this time? or, are we really going to have to re-write operating systems and applications to be genuinely parallel, scalable, resilient, portable and usable?
Personally, I'm really looking forward to a massively parallel future of software defined silicon :D
Re: Transputer?
Haven't we been here before, 30 years ago?
I'm glad I'm not the only one saw the Transputer link in that slide :-)
Anyone remember Occam?
The trouble with Occam is that many people really couldn't get their heads around it. Although it helps with implementing parallel designs, it doesn't do all the work for you - and some of the Occam floating around the world is, shall we say, "less than optimal".
I don't have exact figures, but it was generally accepted within ST that more Transputers were sold after the name was dropped and 3 of the links were cut off - at that point, it became the ST20, and that forms the core of a significant number of STB designs throughout the world. You've probably got one in your living room.
One of the big thongs that affected T4/ST20 popularity was the existence of the C compiler. People were much happier programming in C. If you run "strings" against the binary, you'll see that it's a C-to-Occam translator lying on top of the Occam compiler :-)
Are you telling me Bing is running on more than one core!?
I known, I know, I'm just trouble making but oh it's fun.
Re: Wait!
Not at all, I would cite this as a portent of Bing as the 'fastest search engine that nobody uses'. But then most of the most elementary arguments in this thread leave me with a pained look, so a cheap jibe is all I could manage.
this will work great
until someone goofs up the layout of the FPGAs and they start pumping hundreds of gigs of garbage into the CPUs.
So they added a SPARC chip in effect. Hmm.
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When pigs fly...
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