Inkjet ink you can taste is another example of a techie with a stupid food idea and the dummies with money who follow them: “He challenges every preconceived idea we have about food,” says David Mazovick of the design consultancy Deep Labs in Chicago, which is helping the chef commercialise his ideas.
Every idea we have about food? You mean except for those insignificant things like nutrients, right? This reminds me of the dot-com era startup that made smell-o-vision.
Starbucks has introduced a coffee liqueur. Turns out 50% of their customers drink liqueurs…. I admit I’m curious.
From my friend Megan via our friend Jon: USNews.com: Vashon Island is in the top 10 emerging markets for second homes. Luckily the article misspells the place so hopefully they won’t find us.
I’m posting this to help people who have the same problem I did and search for a solution can find it by searching for “Supermicro P8SCI boot problem” instead of wasting days like I did with no info….
We got two new identical servers last week that have the new Supermicro P8SCI motherboard in them. After installing linux on them, they wouldn’t reboot reliably. Roughly 70% of the boots failed — the machine just crashed right after the GRUB loading stage. This was the same on both machines, which made me believe it was a software problem rather than a hardware problem — hardware can be flakey, but two machines failing the same way is unlikely.
After a weekend of trial-and-error trying to figure out if the problem was GRUB or the linux kernel or a hardware problem and doing a lot of internet research, we took it to the vendor on Monday, Silicon Mechanics (who is great!), and after a few hours they discovered that the BIOS console redirection was causing it. Supermicro hadn’t heard about the bug yet — it’s a new motherboard for them and I’m probably one of the few people who use the BIOS’ console redirection. We turned off console redirection and they boot fine.
On the bright side, we had them install IPMI cards in the machines. I’ve never used IPMI, but is supposed to be a better replacement for console redirection (among other things). So maybe some good did come out of all this wasted time.
It is true, it is difficult to get to know people here. Oddly 60% of us are from else where, so it must be someting that happens after you arrive. The article purports our politeness, which can be an empty social grace, or the weather, which makes us “cocoon”, is responsible. I noticed it here first, the trouble actually meeting people, but since then I’ve experienced it all over the country, really. Leave the U.S. if you really want to see outgoing, truly friendly people — well, don’t go to Canada, they are more polite and reserved than Seattlites. Traveling in Cuba, England, Mexico, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Bali…we’ve met many friendly people who introduced themselves to us, wanted to hang out and talk, invited us into their homes… Honestly, I think suburban sprawl, the greater personal space, the lack of urban community planning in the US, less public tranportation, which contribute to our dwindling experience with true hospitality. Perhaps it is more difficult to meet people here than in other cities, but at least we are polite about it.
(The article mentions a charm school here in Seattle and pictures two little girls aged 11 & 9 attending — those things still exist?! Oddly Mrs. Charm School teacher doesn’t teach how to be friendly.)
It’s very encouraging news that the US will give another $600 million for the Tsunami aid because even Wolfowitz realizes that it’s a great PR move: “Above and beyond the humanitarian considerations — which would be compelling enough — we have an enormous interest in seeing this succeed,” Wolfowitz said, noting Indonesia’s status as both an “emerging democracy” and the world’s most populous Muslim country.”
I think the US Govt is finally starting to get it; a successful war on terror is 10% destruction and 90% education. Right now, we’re at 99% destruction and 1% education, but we’re going in the right direction.
We all know that the Microsoft “settlement” (read: bowing to Bush’s fear of angering the wealthy) was essentially nothing. We knew it then and we know it now. But now Colleen Kollar-Kottelly and Microsoft’s lawyer are praising the settlement’s positive effects. Right away, when the guilty part is happy with the settlement, you can be sure the settlement was toothless.
Why do they think it’s effective? Firefox. Firefox is proof that the settlement worked. No level playing-field, no open access to APIs, no dynamic market, none of the things they touted would happen after the settlement. After decades of Microsoft’s abuse of antitrust laws and of harming of consumers, we get a web browser as our prize. And we are to believe that the browser wouldn’t have existed without the settlement. I’m sure there are many people on the Mozilla team who would argue that.
But even if Firefox is the one thing that made the world a wonderful place and all was right in the industry again, here’s the simple version: Microsoft killed Netscape illegally, were convicted of it twice, and as a settlement, we get the browser born from Netscape as proof that all is wonderful. In other words, Microsoft killed someone and their punishment is that they have to allow that person’s child to live. And that child is our proof that justice works.
Is Firefox really a threat to Internet Explorer? Not according to Microsoft. In November of last year, after Firefox 1.0 was released, Microsoft said that Firefox is not a threat to IE. What did the 2002 settlement change in the last four months?
I’ve been looking for a decent word processor to write documentation and it had to do at least HTML output, but preferably XML. I’ve been using Mozilla’s HTML editor, but wanted more of a word-processor. I considered OpenOffice, which does use XML as a file format, but on a Mac it runs within an X11 emulator. I don’t like emulators. Microsoft Word was out even if I could afford it because its XML is crazy proprietary. Then along came Apple’s Pages, which does output in XML, the same open XML as OpenOffice, in fact. So I bought it for a mere $79 and got a presentation software package to boot (imagine the beautiful presentations I can give to the dogs!).
Pages is the most amazing word processor I’ve ever seen… it’s a little slow even on my fairly speedy (dual 1.25GHz G4) PowerMac, but imagine PageMaker with a real word processor. It’s what WYSIWYG was supposed to be. Word is a good word processor, but they should be ashamed that after 15 years they haven’t done much of anything to improve the writing experience (simultaneous spell-check was their only innovation and that was 10 years ago in Word 95).
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