Andersen Consulting split from Arthur Andersen (mainly accounting/auditing) years ago. The reason for the rename from Andersen Consulting to Accenture was to completely remove the ambiguity about relations between the two companies. (Incidentally the remaining Arthur Andersen also started up a consulting group!) The people involved with Enron were Arthur Andersen (accounting/auditing) and they did go bust afterwards because no one would do business with them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

I suspect their test methodology isn't very good, in particular the SQLite tests. SQLite performance is largely based on when commits happen as at that point fsync is called at least twice and sometimes more (the database, journals and containing directory need to be consistent). The disk has to rotate to the relevant point and write outstanding data to the platters before returning. This takes a considerable amount of time relative to normal disk writing which is cached and write behind. If you don't use the same partition for testing then the differing amount of sectors per physical track will affect performance. Similarly a drive that lies about data being on the platters will seem to be faster, but is not safe should there be a power failure or similar abrupt stop.

Someone did file a ticket at SQLite but from the comments in there you can see that what Phoronix did is not reproducible.

TomTom already let you fix some errors. And of course the way you find out about errors is at the worst time and if routing in the worst way possible, such as if the unit tries to send you the wrong way up a round, a turn that doesn't exist, a road that is different etc.

I certainly believe that crowdsourced maps will be better just as Wikipedia is better than the paper encyclopedias. However it is going to take a while.

How can an airplane be allowed to carry passengers when the margin to airframe disintegration is so narrow?

There are certification bodies in the US, Europe and many other countries that define what that margin is. The greater the margin the heavier the plane will be, the more fuel it will need and the less load it will be able to carry. So your question really is asking if all these certification bodies are idiots. They are not and are definitely better at it than your armchair speculation. Simple evidence is looking at the rate of crashes and fatalities over time despite the increasing amount of air travel.

How come you don't walk around always wearing a bulletproof vest? Why aren't all your house doors, windows and walls armoured? Because there are costs and benefits and they all have to weighted together to come up with something appropriate.

but to be able to tear the airplane apart in level flight?

It would not tear apart in simple level flight within the normal speed range. It could be torn apart going too fast (ie beyond the certification limits imposed by those national bodies) but even then would not be in level flight but likely dropping. It was a massive thunderstorm with huge air currents they were going through. This is an example of what planes can survive where the plane looped, parts flew off and the wings got permanently bent. This is an example of a certification test for wing strength. FAA regulations require that wings survive 1.5 times (150 percent) of the highest aerodynamic load that the jet could ever be expected to encounter during flight for 3 seconds. That applies to all airliners. The pitot tubes keep being mentioned because they tell you how fast you are going relative to the surrounding air. If they iced over then you don't know and going to slow will result in a stall, going fast increases discomfort and going too fast can result in bits of the plane breaking off.

But to be clear it required abnormal circumstances to break apart. Way beyond anything normally or abnormally encountered. If the circumstances happened with any regularity then you would hear about this kind of accident more often.

If the airplane can send fault messages home, why don't blackbox data streams get sent as well? At least that way there would be some situation info available as opposed to none.

The fault messages are generally intended for maintenance so that when the plane arrives they can be repaired as quickly as possible and the plane turned around. They also help with long term tracking of wear and tear. Current blackbox recorders record a huge amount of data which would be infeasible to transmit, especially when it has to go via satellite such as when over oceans. Plane crashes are very rare (that is why they make the news) and it is even rarer to not find the blackboxes.

In some ways reliance on flight computers is like reliance on spreadsheets or calculators -- if you do not understand what is going on and are not capable of doing it yourself then you cannot tell if the software is correct. Essentially, if the computer says it is so then it is, and you either survive or not.

You overestimate the ability of humans. We are long gone from the days of the lonesome hero sweating it with the control stick. A flying plane is a complex mechanism. You have many control surfaces, air pressures and speeds, centre of gravity, fuel consumption, engine abilities, aerodynamics etc all to take into account. A computer program can do all of that so many times better than a human which includes being both more economical and reacting quicker. The people who make planes are not idiots. Ultimately you have to take the underlying tools you use as is. For example I don't see you insisting on design your own CPU - you just use whatever is in your computer. The airplane manufacturers have user (pilot) interaction teams to try and provide the best interfaces possible. For example the Airbus team decided that the computer could feasibly compute safe flight angles but humans are unlikely to, so a human can pull the stick bar as far as the want but the plane will only obey it as much as is safe. Boeing provide force feedback on their control sticks in the 777 but that information is synthesized (ie fake). They also have modes where the computer hands over more control to the pilot such as when the computer is unsure of the readings it is getting or the calculations do not make sense. (I believe pilots can also manually select these more control to them modes.)

But if you think humans are so much better look at how many managed to kill themselves in the earlier days of aviation, or at the way people "pilot" cars today.

If you genuinely care about this sort of stuff then I'd recommend studying and working for the regulators or design companies and seeing what difference you can make.

Yes it can be good, just as the commercial maps can be. But all it takes is one area you happen to be driving through with less than correct mapping information for you to be guided in an unsuitable way. Those are what all the newspaper stories are derived from.

All the stories about watery doom are almost nothing to do with the GPS and entirely due to the maps. The GPS can only give as good instructions as the underlying map data. Map data on highways is usually fine as they don't change much, many people use them and the information is easy to incorporate. Smaller roads change more often, there are lots more of them, and the company making the maps is less likely to keep completely up to date with them. Nowhere do I see how you intend to deal with maps.

You missed the point. It is not unique to the US that calling a cell phone costs more than calling a landline. It is just that in the rest of the world they use dedicated area codes for cell phones and charge the caller. The US doesn't have a way of knowing a number is cellular and charge the recipient. This page gives you an idea of the disparities between landline and cellular rates and just how many countries have a difference. Notice how calls to cellular phones are often 10 times that of to landlines.

Being charged to receive cell calls makes sense. In other countries such as the UK calling a cell phone costs the caller more than calling a landline. How do you know which you called? Cell phones have their own area code. In the US there are no area codes for cell phones so there is no way for a caller to know. Conceptually the call goes to the regular area code and then has to be transmitted by radio to your phone and the latter bit is why you are charged for incoming and outgoing calls. Of course it doesn't work like that under the hood any more but it used to in the begining. Either way someone is paying extra for the cell phone call cost.

Some countries don't have this system but they aren't comparable to the US. All of the UK, NI and various islands fit in 2/3 of California. Germany is the same size as Montana. The scale is very different.

SMS receiving used to be free. The reason for the charges is because of a corrupt market. The carriers have a cartel. They fought very hard against number portability. There are two different radio systems, and even the one used by the rest of the world (GSM) is on different frequencies. Phones are sold cheap but lock you into a two year contract and you are unlikely to be able to use a phone between carriers even if it is unlocked. All this minimizes the ability of consumers to change carriers. The cartel players also by some miraculous coincidence charge exactly the same for SMS. Whenever one raises the price, they all do.

A secondary issue is that voice is charged too cheaply since that is what the headline number looked at by consumers is. Consequently the carriers make up for it by nickel and diming on every single other thing they can, including SMS.

The Tango Project does just that. At the simplest level they have a standard set of icons which any application developer can use - the icons are public domain.

The result will be two versions of software. One will be priced the same as today, with a detailed license agreement with you ultimately giving up those rights and a second version that sells for a million dollars a copy with those rights.

Not to mention someone has to build Skynet.

You are mistaken. The backwards compatibility in fact goes all the way back to DOS 1.0 (before subdirectories and file handles). As evidence the original 1981 Visicalc executable still runs under XP!

Taking the taxes away and refunding them in April is only because of how idiotically taxes are done the US. In Britain they take away exactly the correct amount on each paycheck since the tax code is simple enough for the majority of people - you have income from your job and some interest income. You don't even have to do a tax return until you hit the higher tax brackets, or you have special stuff going on (eg being a landlord, owning a farm etc).

I was shocked on first working in the US and being asked by the HR department how much tax they should take out of my paycheck. Apparently "the right amount" isn't a valid answer.

Also the purchase may travel through several other states. And what happens when I am physically in Alabama (while travelling), order an item to be sent to Montana, use a company credit card based in Delaware and have a home address in California with the item shipped from Colorado manufactured by a company in Ohio, via a website located in Washington.

I'd much rather see sales taxes abolished since they complicate retail and hurt the poorest people the most (they have to spend most of their income to live and hence proportionally pay way more sales tax).

To use a car analogy, a mainframe is like a big rig truck. Sure your Toyota can go faster, but a big rig will do far better at getting 40 tons of timber from one location to another. (Ever try to move 40 tons of lumber using a Ferrari?)

In terms of hardware, there are a lot more processors in a mainframe. Each I/O channel (and there will be a lot of them) typically has its own separate processor customized for getting results without bothering the main general purpose processors. On your nearest Linux box do some networking and disk access while watching the output from vmstat 1 and looking at the in(terrupt) column. Each interrupt (except a few used for task switching time slices) is I/O devices causing the main processor to have to pay attention to them instead of getting work done. The mainframe I/O processors can do high level work such as looking for database records that match certain criteria. There will also be separate processors for networking, encryption etc.

Mainframes are managed differently. If you bought a several hundred thousand dollar big rig truck, you wouldn't leave it sitting in your driveway for weeks on end. You'd be finding as much work for it do as possible. The same applies to mainframes. The goal is to use them - get the cpu and I/O usage close to 100% since any less means you are wasting capacity. Contrast with desktops and Unix/Windows servers where beyond occasional spikes you would get nervous of high cpu and I/O consumption and buy more hardware to spread the load.

Because downtime would be expensive (remember you are trying to use 100% capacity of the mainframe so if it is down that is work going undone) the whole system has significantly more fault tolerance built in. This ranges from the software, including the ability to upgrade the operating system without a reboot, to the hardware where components and systems are duplicated, sometimes even having physically separated systems (up to a few miles) with high speed optical interconnects running in lockstep. They also have backwards compatibility that would make Intel seem an amateur.