It is becoming more common for fire ants to build nests in pad mounted equipment. Their nesting materials can cause short circuits, the ants can eat away at conductor insulation, and they make equipment maintenance a challenge. from Power System
Happy Birthday to Emmy Noether
March 23. So much for you, Larry Summers, mere economist.
Software comes from the sky and labor is overpaid: NOT!
John Dvorak concludes an otherwise sensible article on the effect of Linux/Office-clone packages combined with netbooks with the following: If Intel can provide users with powerful little systems for $99 and has been pushing prices lower and lower over the
Program structure and threads
Threads were initially used for telephony systems where each request to connect could be given to a new thread to manage. The simplification was, in theory, dramatic. The programmer could just write the code for handling a single line, and
Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay
Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.
AIG and me
The New York Times has an article explaining the business model of the failed insurer AIG that is giving me a new perspective on why I walked out of a bank in New Mexico wondering whether it was worth it
Are threads evil? (updated)
This paper by Prof. Edward Lee explains something of why “threads” are such a painful abstraction. As Prof. Lee notes, threads intrinsically create unspecified program operation (which he calls non-determinism) and resource conflicts which we then attempt to “prune” via
Venture Capital falls off the cliff
Through all the bumps and strains in the broader economy, venture outlays kept up an almost eerily steady pace over the previous 21 months, ranging between $7.3 billion and $8 billion each quarter, from the start of 2007 to the
Mobile device security and President Obama
Obama’s fighting hard to keep his Blackberry President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House. The president has been adamant about continuing to use
Satyam explodes
WSJ: Satyam Computer Services Ltd. Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju Wednesday resigned admitting to falsifying company accounts and inflating revenue and profit figures over several years, sending the company’s shares plunging 78%. In a letter to the company’s board, which was