Kaya

I wouldn't say it's ridiculous, given that:

- It may not possible to produce an LTE iPhone 5 for either Verizon or AT&T right how (or for any other country), as the LTE chipsets are not ready and LTE deployments are limited. However, it may be possible in six to nine months.

- WiMAX chipsets may be more mature than LTE, and Sprint's LTE deployment may be widespread, making it possible to produce such a phone for Sprint.

- Sprint has promised to buy 7.5 million iPhones a year, which is a whopping 31% of US iPhone sales

- The depth of the Sprint commitment effectively means there is no room for Android on that carrier.

So, if Apple's choices are:

a) Produce non-LTE phone for AT&T and Verizon, only to obsolete it six months later in order to compete with LTE phones running Android.

b) Give Sprint temporary six to nine month "exclusivity" to a phone that they could not produce for anyone else anyway in return for 30% more U.S. sales and killing Android on Sprint

... then it's plausible for them to choose b.

I'm a bit pessimistic; if the hardware is old and rushed, why would the software or overall experience be any better?

I suspect Lab126 is cooking up something much better--but, unfortunately, it's not yet ready for prime time.

tl;dr: company denigrates a new technology which could disrupt their business

In their quest to copy Apple, of course this feature is only implemented after it appears in OS X Lion. It's as if the developers lack self-confidence or imagination, or both.

How many of these "missing workers" are simply mothers, homemakers, and students? The article does not mention these classes.

How do you handle the case where file X uses file Y, and you commit file Y? You could run the test for X when Y is committed in case Y broke X.

The author claims unequivocally that global warming is a hoax. Submitted as evidence is a page which one-sidedly discusses troubling, suspicious, and unseemly behavior by some climate scientists. That is bad, but not proof of a hoax--not by a long shot. Such a strong claim supported by such a weak source makes it appear (at least to the skeptical) that the author may not be equally skeptical of all sources or points of view. Confirmation bias is a known bug in the wetware which makes it hard to be truly objective about anything, try as we might.

Had the author made a weaker claim I'd have read the rest of the article with much less skepticism!

Jinx can help verify mutex implementations themselves, although the example code that ships with the product is a little more advanced (lock-free stack). Some of the underlying technology is described here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/corensic/whitepapers/DeterministicSh... and here: http://www.corensic.com/WhyYouNeedJinx/CorensicHasaUniqueTec.... Because it's a hypervisor, it can aid in verifying synchronization primitives that are a mix of userspace and kernel code.

This project looks great. VirtualBox runs on Solaris, an OS which supports writable snapshots and deduplication in the ZFS filesystem. Is there support for filesystem snapshots in Vagrant? It would be nice to spawn a new virtual machine from an existing on-disk snapshot.

Unfortunately the article does not mention the standard deviation of the distribution of mathematical ability after controlling for other factors. As mentioned here: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm, Larry Summers got in a lot of trouble at Harvard for making this assertion:

"It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined."

Is that assertion backed up by evidence? And, if true, is making this distinction useful in informing public policy and shaping our culture? In a fight between naturalistic and moral fallacies, which wins?

As someone who used a setup like this (Perfect Chair + Ergoquest reclining workstation) at work for several years, allow me to share my experience:

One's head and neck are pushed slightly more forward than normal and don't have their normal degrees of freedom; this causes some stiffness over time.

One can sometimes "flip up" one's elbows to rest on the armrests, as when reading, or resting. Over time, this tends to "bang" them against the armrests, which can really hurt the ulnar nerve, which is unprotected on the "backside" (upper portion) of the elbow.

If the chair has a fixed angle at the knees, you'll need to get up from time to time and walk around--or at least, I did. The fixed angle prevents the lower back from moving around much and doesn't allow one to "stretch" out.

It's tough to keyboard comfortably in a reclining chair. One ends up disproportionally compensating for poor ergonomics with one's chest muscles. In addition, your shoulders tend to roll forward. Either of these can cause thoracic outlet syndrome over time, which is like carpal tunnel syndrome, only it affects your entire arm.

It is for these reasons that I switched to a standing desk, where my body can move the way it was designed to. Keyboarding is still an issue, but if you buy a split keyboard Datahand you can mount each half near your hips and keep your shoulders back.

www.isilon.com makes the best clustered filesystem around. It's not open source, however.

For a comparison with PetraVM's Jinx, see: http://petravm.com/blog/2009/11/comparing-cuzz-and-jinx/

For the past decade I have been using (faux) leather bound, grid ruled scientific notebooks, first from BookFactory (http://www.bookfactory.com/) and then from Scientific Notebook Company (http://snco.com/).

These lab books are designed to document work for patent purposes, but I find that they are great for all manner of design and implementation writing.

Unlike the cheap shit you find almost anywhere else, the bindings are incredibly durable, and you can lay them flat, like a spiral notebook. You can paste printouts directly into some of the larger versions. The quality of the paper is very high. For a small fee, you can have your name embossed on the cover in gold leaf.

There's really nothing new under the sun, but success has as much to do with timing and luck than with skill and perseverance. When I was 17 I founded soc.college.admissions for a related purpose. For those of you who don't remember USENET, think of it as the poor man's web. Mostly text only, and uncontrollable, it was eventually overrun by spammers and eclipsed by the Web. And does anyone remember sixdegrees.com in 1998? It was the first LinkedIn/Facebook site to see major publicity. The not-yet-ready public was horrified at the privacy implications, and it died.