Month: December 2008

A Modest Proposal

rabitt proposed

Served via Facebook

A legal move believed to be a world first has opened the way for New Zealanders to be served legal documents through their Facebook sites. Canberra lawyer Mark McCormack expects other courts will follow his lead after he used the internet to find a couple who had defaulted on a loan and serve them with a default judgment.

ha. “LALawyer25 served you legal documents. Add Comment – Share”

Sugar Tax

The justification for taxing sugar sodas is that being fat imposes a negative externality.

Engineering @ Facebook

fb eng blog

Adages

You know you’re a workaholic when… … you find yourself thinking “Thank god it’s Friday. Now I can really get some work done.”

Saxon Performance

In this paper I have presented 10 characteristics of the Saxon XQuery implementation that contribute to its performance, and for most of these, I have attempted to quantify the size of that contribution for some selected queries. Few of these mechanisms are unique to Saxon; what makes Saxon distinctive is the deployment of a balanced portfolio of techniques to deliver efficient query execution over a variety of user workloads, coupled with a determination to place other qualities of the product (standards conformance, reliability, usability) ahead of raw performance. In a crowded marketplace with over 50 XQuery implementations competing for user attention, I believe it is this balanced approach that has led many users to make Saxon their preferred choice.

memcached scaling

we have been able to scale memcached to handle 200k UDP requests/s with an avg latency of 173us. This is from 50k UDP requests/s using the stock version of Linux and memcached.

SwissCom Fail

Le Web, which paid €100k to Swisscom to ensure lightning fast Internet, had no Internet connectivity. Nothing for the audience, nothing for the stage, nothing in the press room.

completely incompetent. good thing we ddn’t pick them as investors.

Mother of All Demos

But 40 years on, Engelbart’s core vision has vanished. NLS has devolved into Twitter.

[Added 2021-04-13] Here’s a moving

by Ted Nelson.

Madoff marketing

Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm’s hallmark”