Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Obama says he's outraged by Rev Wright's comments

I've heard this described variously as Sen. Obama throwing Rev. Wright under the bus, under a train, and off the planet. Regardless, I fear that it may be too little too late. The Clinton machine knows how to twist arms, and if anyone can get the super-delegates to overturn Obama's apparent candidacy, it is them.
Obama says he's outraged by former pastor's comments - Yahoo! News:
"WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Barack Obama angrily denounced his former pastor for 'divisive and destructive' remarks on race, seeking to divorce himself from the incendiary speaker and a fury that threatens to engulf his front-running Democratic presidential campaign.

Obama is trying to tamp down the uproar over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright at a tough time in his campaign.
. . .
"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

His strong words come just six weeks after Obama delivered a sweeping speech on race in which he sharply condemned Wright's remarks but did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member. After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, the former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago made three public appearances in four days to defend himself.

On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.

And perhaps even worse for Obama, Wright suggested that the church congregant secretly concurs.

"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Obama stated flatly that he doesn't share the views of the man who officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and been his pastor for 20 years. The title of Obama's second book, "The Audacity of Hope," came from a Wright sermon.

"What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for," Obama said. "And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people."

Although Obama leads in pledged delegates, no Democrat can win the nomination without the support of the superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who can vote their preference. The Wright furor forces those Democrats to wonder about Obama's electability in November."

An Emerging Standard for Home Media Networks

This standard is something to keep an eye on. If you haven't already upgraded to digital TV, then in a year or so, network connectivity will be one more feature to look for. Of course there are lots of ways to accomplish this today, but standardization usually makes thing easier & cheaper.
Industry leaders join push for home media networks - Yahoo! News:
"FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Chip and electronics makers Intel (INTC.O), Infineon (IFXGn.DE), Texas Instruments (TXN.N) and Panasonic (6752.T) have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring.
. . .
The four leading chip and electronics makers will help market and test a standard to wire together computers, TVs and entertainment systems using electricity, phone and coaxial cable lines that already exist in most homes, they said on Tuesday.

There is already a common wireless standard to link home devices using Wi-Fi. Wired networks often have the advantage of being more stable and having more capacity, and the building blocks for the infrastructure already exist in most homes.

"Powerline is the most ubiquitous technology in the world. You have powerlines to almost every house in the world," Intel's Matt Theall, president of the new HomeGrid Forum (homegridforum.org) said on a conference call.

"There's a huge market potentially for this type of technology. It can be embedded in DVD players, TVs, PCs, speakers -- any home entertainment device."

The four leading members of the HomeGrid Forum (homegridforum.org) said they would work with the International Telecommunications Union to promote, test and contribute to a standard the ITU is already working on, called ITU-T G.hn."

Monday, April 28, 2008

Our History is Important

This is a snippet from a column that covers other interesting stuff - click on the title to read it all.
Declarations - WSJ.com:
. . . "Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.

John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92.

Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country – any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?

Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they're questioning its content, its fullness. Gate 14 has a right to hear this. They'd lean forward to hear.

This is an opportunity, for Mr. Obama needs an Act II. Act II is hard. Act II is where the promise of Act I is deepened, the plot thickens, and all is teed up for resolution and meaning. Mr. Obama's Act I was: I'm Obama. He enters the scene. Act III will be the convention and acceptance speech. After that a whole new drama begins. But for now he needs Act II. He should make his subject America."

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess

Interesting notes from the Wall Street Journal - we can't be sure what exactly is happening to the average global temperature, in part because the variances are so small, and in part because the measurement technology keeps changing:
Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess - WSJ.com:
. . . "The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.

For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.

These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce Department.

The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data.

The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In 2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling the initial overall rate.

Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none.

There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small."

Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age

There is nothing wrong with saving energy & reducing pollution, however, don't assume that you're changing the climate when you do so. Volcanoes put far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than mankind, and our sun has more effect on Earth's temperature than greenhouse gasses.
FOXNews.com - Scientist: Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News:
"Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

'This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,' Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. 'If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.'"

If you're curious, a simple Google search can turn up thousands of arguments on all sides of the issue. We should continue to study our planet and learn how things work, but burning food for fuel probably isn't a good answer to any of our problems.

Send self-destructing IMs

I don't normally type anything that would embarass me if I saw it on the front page someday, but some folks use IM & e-mail in a much different manner.
Send self-destructing IMs : Gina Hughes : Yahoo! Tech:
". . . IMs don't disappear, and for the most part we all have to be careful about what we say over email or IM, especially at work. The good news is there are services out there that allow people to send both self-destructing emails and IMs. I told you about the self-destructing email services before, and Bigstring, one of the companies mentioned in the article, is now also offering a self-destructing instant messaging service.
. . .
Once you sign up for an account, you can send other Bigstring users IMs or pictures that will literally self-destruct right before their eyes. These IMs can not be copied, logged, or screen-printed, and the company says once the message disappears from the screen, it is gone forever. Copies of the message are not saved on any server.

Features on this IM client are very minimal. You can choose how long you want your message to be displayed on the screen, you can set your online status, and you can turn off sounds. It's web-based, which means you don't have to install anything on your computer, but you can download a plug-in to your AIM account."

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

The border fence works

This confirms the common sense of most people living border states. Make it difficult to cross the border at one point, and illegal traffic will be reduced - at least at that point. Our governor believes that if we erect a fence, illegals will erect ladders - so far this isn't happening.
Where U.S.-Mexico border fence is tall, border crossings fall | csmonitor.com:
"The triple-and double-layered fence here in Yuma is the kind of barrier that US lawmakers – and most Americans – imagined when the Secure Fence Act was enacted in 2006.

The law instructed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to secure about one-third of the 1,950-mile border between US and Mexico with 700 miles of double-layered fencing – and additionally through cameras, motion sensors, and other types of barriers – by the end of the year to stem illegal immigration.

Bankrolled by a separate $1.2 billion homeland security bill, the Secure Fence Act would, President Bush said in 2006, 'make our borders more secure.' By most recent estimates, nearly half a million unauthorized immigrants cross the border each year.

On the ground, though, things have turned out differently.

The DHS scaled back its ambitions early on, trimming its end-of-2008 target down to 300 miles of vehicle barrier and 370 miles of pedestrian barrier.

As of February, 302 miles of barrier have been constructed mostly on federal land in Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and slightly over half of this has been built under the new law.
. . .
Only a fraction of the new barriers resemble anything like the images of formidable fencing – the Berlin Wall or the bleak monolith that divides Israel and the West Bank – envisioned by the initial proposal. Most of the new fencing is not a double wall, but a combination of regular vehicle blocks and pedestrian barriers that range from metal mesh and chain link to traditional picket fences.
. . .
In Yuma, at least, the fence seems to be preventing illegal border-crossings.

Bernacke, the patrol agent, says that since the triple fence was finished in October, there has been a 72 percent decline in illegal migrant apprehensions in the 120-mile swath of the US-Mexican border known as the Yuma sector. Eight hundred people used to be apprehended trying to cross the border here every day. Now, agents catch 50 people or fewer daily.

The 1.5-mile strip of triple fencing that cuts through suburban San Luis is the most impenetrable, says Bernacke.

That's because the three walls are separated here by a 75-yard "no man's land" – a flat, sandy corridor punctuated by pole-topped lighting, cameras, radio systems, and radar units, where unauthorized migrants can be chased down by border agents.

The triple-layer fencing begins at the San Luis port of entry, one of a handful of formal checkpoints where cars and trucks from Mexico line up, waiting for the US border patrol to inspect them for illegal contraband or migrants before they cross over. One-and-a-half miles east of San Luis, the triple fencing gives way to double fencing for about five miles, after which come another 39 miles of so-called "primary fencing" – a combination of steel mesh and steel panels fitted over bollards, or small metal and cement pillars, that stick up from the ground.

"Back in 2005 when President Bush came here, newspapers were writing that Yuma was the most dangerous place to live – and he came in and said, 'I am going to fix this' and he did," says Yuma Mayor Larry Nelson.

Conversations with residents and business owners in this town suggest the fence is not such a hot-button issue. But, violent drug smugglers aside, neither has the flow of illegal immigrants been a big issue, observers say.

That's partly because the migrants are headed through to Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the Midwest.

Still, most residents support the idea of a barrier, says Terry Ross, editor of The Sun, a daily newspaper in Yuma, but also feel that "the wall is a temporary measure that won't solve the problem [of foreign workers] in the long run."

Border security has been beefed up considerably during President Bush's tenure, reflecting heightened security and immigration concerns. The budget for border security has more than doubled in this time, as has the number of border patrol agents, which is anticipated to top out at 18,000 agents by the end of this year.

But as with 1994's Operation Gatekeeper – when the Border Patrol's San Diego sector beefed up fencing, agents, and technology to keep out border-crossers from Mexico only to find they entered the country elsewhere – critics say Yuma's apparent success does not necessarily translate into a permanent solution.

Strengthening border security in Yuma may be diverting illegal immigration to rural and desert areas.

"For the Yuma sector, the numbers are telling us that the wall has had a dramatic effect," says Ken Rosevear, president of the Yuma Chamber of Commerce. "But we all know that once you shut down a pipeline in one area it merely diverts the traffic to somewhere else."

In this case, the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation and Saguaro National Monument to the east are seeing a rise in foot traffic, he says."

Not securing our borders just invites criminals and terrorists to come here and commit mayhem.

Once our borders are secure, we need a guest worker program that verifies who an immigrant is, where they're going to be, and where they are working. In return, we get improved security, and the immigrants will probably get better wages, benefits, and the ability to contact police without fear of deportation.

Emphasis added.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

IBM Returns to Water-cooling

I remember watching the installation of our first water-cooled mainframe at a bank in the late 70s (I was an operator keeping our other mainframes running during the project). I was initially skeptical (unconfined water is bad for electronics), but the performance of that box made a lot of converts. Water cooling went out of fashion as chips got smaller and dissipated less power per MIP Recently folks have started water cooling multiple components (CPU, graphics chip, memory, etc) in desktop PCs. It is interesting to see water cooling emerge as a green technology.
PC World - Business Center: IBM Updates High-end Servers, Returns to Water-cooling:
"IBM announced its most powerful Unix server to date Tuesday, an update to the System p5 595 that will be based on a new Power6 processor running at up to 5 GHz.

IBM also unveiled an update to its System p5 575 supercomputer that has a more efficient, water-based system to cool the processors. IBM hasn't used water-cooling in its servers since 1995, but it expects to use it increasingly as customers wrestle with a shortage of power to their datacenters.

The new systems, which will be discussed in detail at an IBM event in San Francisco Tuesday, continue a rebranding of IBM's servers that started last week. IBM said then that it was merging its System i and System p server lines into a single Power Systems family that can run IBM's AIX flavor of Unix, Linux or its i5/OS, now called i.

The new high-end machine, called the Power 595, is due for wide availability on May 6. Along with the faster processor it uses a new "point to point" interconnect technology to increase system bandwidth and get the most out of a system's processors, cache memory and main memory. It gives an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1.3 terabytes per second, IBM said.

The Power 595 supports up to 4 terabytes of memory, or twice that of the System p 595. The extra memory is good for handling very large databases, heavy transaction loads or consolidating servers. The system can run up to 254 virtualized partitions using IBM's PowerVM virtualization software.
. . .
The Power 575 supercomputer uses a new Hydro-Cluster design developed at IBM's research lab in Zurich. It uses a network of copper pipes that sit just above the processors and carry cold water to them and warm water away.

Water cooling is more efficient than air cooling -- 4,000 times more efficient, according to IBM -- and allowed the company to cram 448 4.7GHz Power6 processor cores in a Power 575 rack. That density would have been impossible using air cooling because customers don't have enough power in their datacenters to run the air conditioning units they would need, Handy said.

Joe Clabby [cq], president of Clabby Analytics in Yarmouth, Maine, said that at one time the hassle of setting up a water-cooled system outweighed the benefits. But rising energy costs mean it now makes economic sense to use water, because the cost of cooling air is becoming too great.

Handy said it's not so much a question of economics as the fact that customers simply can't get any more power into their datacenters. "It's not just that customers are going to save energy, it's that they are out of energy. They've hit a ceiling."
. . .
The end goal is to reuse the hot water piped out of the computers in building heating systems, creating a "zero emissions datacenter." The researchers in Zurich are working now on how to pipe the water inside the chips, instead of over the top of them, making the cooling system more efficient, IBM said."

Using waste heat to warm buildings is more useful in Zurich than Phoenix. The Colorado School of Mines had a huge old computer in the early 70s that provided quite a lot of building heat when it was in use - it was not water cooled.

Monday, April 7, 2008

"poor Americans" a threat to European businesses

Hemingway haunt gives discounts to "poor Americans" - Yahoo! News:
""Harry's Bar of Venice, in an effort to make the American victims of subprime loans happier, has decided to give them a special 20 percent discount on all items of the menu during the short term of their recovery.'

When the euro was introduced as the continent's common currency in 2002, a dollar bought about 1.10 euros. Today it gets about 64 euro cents, making prices seem astronomically high for most Americans.

'Since the start of January, we noticed a drop in (American) customers of between five and 10 percent and now that we are in April its looks really frightening,' Arrigo Cipriani, 76, Harry's owner, told Reuters by phone from Venice on Monday.

ENIT, Italy's national tourism board, said in a report this month that the 'strong devaluation of the dollar compared to the European currency and signs of a recession are currently the greatest obstacle to American tourism toward Europe.'"
Enough said ...

Friday, April 4, 2008

In a global market Absolut makes a poor local choice

People living in this area have heard of reconquista a little too often already - this isn't helpful.
La Plaza : Los Angeles Times : Mexico reconquers California? Absolut drinks to that!:
"Mexico reconquers California? Absolut drinks to that!
The latest advertising campaign in Mexico from Swedish vodka maker Absolut promises to push all the right buttons south of the U.S. border, but it could ruffle a few feathers in El Norte.

The billboard and press campaign, created by advertising agency Teran\TBWA and now running in Mexico, is a colorful map depicting what the Americas might look like in an 'Absolut' -- i.e., perfect -- world.

The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California.
Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories"