In my time we were the kids in high school that drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, took mini-thins, joined bands (stage fright naturally releases adrenaline increasing concentration), drag raced, played sports, etc. School is hard, speed helps. But to medicalize it rather than maybe just increasing the length of the school day, going slower, improving educational techniques, improving values around education...is a farce of the highest magnitude and one we will pay for some day as a society. Just like the Nazi Germans took tons of methamphetamines and used it to blitzkrieg europe, eventually the high wears off and then you're left with substanitally less than you had before. (The allies took regular amphetamines pretty regularly as well). Look people, do what you have to do to get them a good education, but do whatever you can to keep your kids off speed.

Plus we have other legal stimulants like caffeine and up until recently ephedrine. You can probably plot the end of ephedrine supply against the rise of adderall use and get a perfect X graph. It remains to be seen which is the less harmful drug but I'd say ephedrine is definitely less likely to be abused since it doesn't hit dopamine like amphetamines.

Yeah, but who would do shitty meth when you could have all the dexidrine and adderall you want in pure form? Amphetimines of course have their downsides, but at least they aren't an actual poison like nicotine.

Well, they require a cold-sink to operate. It's the temperature difference (gas laws, etc) that enables them to generate so much electricity. If the conventional wisdom about this is like the conventional wisdom about other electric technologies (e.g. server rooms), it's likely that a reactor could be designed that does not require as much of a cold sink or temperature differential to operate (e.g. air cooling, or converting more heat into power). The issue of course is that even the smallest chain reaction events generate such a huge amount of energy that you have to have the scales we've seen to harness even a percentage. I've always thought some type of sub-critical or even better a semi-critical (pulse modulated) reactor with lower heats and smaller footprints would be the way to go long term. There are a lot of these safe by default reactors that use some of the energy generated to maintain the reaction through an active feedback system rather than passive. So instead of having a giant atom bomb that's kept from exploding with a barrier, you have a non-atom bomb that's made into an atom bomb by a barrier that has to be actively held up. Then you just pulse the barrier to modulate the reaction and achieve whatever power output you want. It won't change needing a cold sink, but it could be a lot smaller since you aren't having as much waste.

I don't know, maybe there's some session management and auth stuff that's slowing it down but I have not noticed it being quick, or even as fast as Apache. I mean, it's been pretty common practice to put apache on the front of tomcat for quite a while and use redirection to serve static content. With a lightweight cache/reverse proxy it's even easier and faster.

Yep, it's mostly used for front-end duties like connection pooling, load balancing, SSL offloading, gzip, that type of thing. If you're running PHP stuff, it's still debatable whether you want to go FCGI or PDM instead of Apache's built-in module. There are ups and downs in both cases and you'll have to see what works best for your site. At my company we use Nginx up front (with server type obfuscated) for SSL offloading and gzip and connection pooling. From there it goes into a varnishd cache on the same server (stored in 100% RAM) which handles the static stuff. Varnishd then forwards remaining requests to an L7 load balancer appliance type thing which then drops requests to each of 10 web "application" servers which are a combination of Apache with mod_php, Tomcat and Jetty Java servers. We've also used Nginx as an IMAP proxy and cache and it works quite well for that.

Apache has a good architecture but it's horrible at handling a lot of simultaneous connections and recycling them (that will change in 2.4 but it's not out yet). Also, if you're using mod_php, over time each Apache process will take the total maximum amount of RAM your php process uses, and many of our PHP applications use 128-256M of RAM or more (data management type stuff). So you can run a server out of RAM if you're trying to maximize connections.

Nginx can handle 10K connections on a little box with very little RAM due to the way it threads stuff. It's basically a copy engine and it's very fast. Varnishd can also handle a lot of connections and can serve up content straight from RAM in less time than apache takes to build a connection. That being said, Apache is reliable, and has I feel better logging at the moment and just more of everything. It's a reference implementation. It's actually fine for most purposes but if you're handling 1000 users simultaneously and they are making 10-20 connections each with various service calls and static downloads, you gotta have something that can pool the conenctions on the front end and handle static content or you're going to spend a lot of money on RAM. And if you're serving up static content with Tomcat, Tomcat is absolutely garbage. I think it has to boot the whole JVM to serve up your one file. If not that bad, it's still awfully slow, and it REALLY benefits from caching up front. BTW, Nginx does caching as well but varnishd seemed more mature and elegant.

Now lastly, you can just go out and buy an F5 BigIP and it does all this stuff on specialized hardware (Ok, special board, intel chip) and it's out of the box. But even the little ones are $20K which is a lot of software dev hours and/or web server/database/storage hardware. Would be nice and fun to have but if you can't spend the money on hardware (and training!) the nginx/varnishd frontend is pretty much the best setup in my book at the moment. A little complex but once it's set up you just let it run. I made an internal nginx cache for all our internal sites, including some Java apps (e.g. Jira) and with requests going through the cache everything just flies. If you use sharepoint on IIS, you would be prettty stupid to not try a cache server up front, it's amazing. If nginx fixed mod_rewrite stuff to be the same as apache, it would probably be possible to make it into an application server, and we're going to get a test environment set up with php-fpm and see how it fares. We'll see how managable it is though.

No one's made the Steve Jobs Borg Icon for Apple yet.. just give it time for this glorious torch passing. Meanwhile Gates gives another $2B away this year to eradicate malaria worldwide and saves 200M lives.

By faaaar and away the 9.0 Japanese earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was the most important story of the year. I'm not in Japan but Japan, the 3rd largest economy, was Stunned by it. We are still seeing economic and emotional effects. Not to mention just being sick for all those people who had to move or were hurt. And the fact that the land is now closed off for decades. I don't know how you can put Steve Jobs in the same category. Sure, he did a lot at Apple... I think it's weird to worship the guy though, especially when he was a well-known dick and basically his legacy trying to put an end to general purpose computing. I don't think it'll happen but they definitely tried. Ritchie is definitely far more worthy of worship, being the humble person he was. But when 100+ million people are affected by a natural disaster and then a big man-made disaster, that pretty much takes the cake over any single person dying, no matter where they were in the tree of the economy.

Anyway, there were hundreds of stories on Slashdot about Fukushima, so many that I had to turn my back on them after a while because the situation was so depressing. I think we can start looking back at it now though for some closure. As far as I know it's still pretty fucked there, and yet Kim Kardashian marraige/divorce is the main story of the year on the pop news sites. Oh to be that uninformed and ignorant. I wish I could go back to before Fukushima and become blind and deaf for 9 months so I never had to hear about it..

Primaries are just polls. They are useful to the parties to determine the public tone of the upcoming election. Most likely the national GOP already knows who they are going to run, and they are using the primaries as a way to find the relevant messages they will focus on in 2012. This new system here is of course endorsed by many prominent politicians. This is because such a system, controlled by the powers that be, would enable more complete and more real time polling. Polling serves the purpose of determining not only what people think of individuals but it actually closes the loop on a complex quality control process. If a candidate can know how different sections of the electorate react to each thing they say, they can hone that message to reach the most people. If people think that logging in and "voting" in this system will somehow allow them to have influence, they will do it. However, time and time again you see the politicians' ACTS are very different than their SPEECH. A real revolution in democracy would be a version control system for the U.S. Code so we can see every debate and comment on each piece of code and generate summary reports of the changes in the code and how it relates to the "politics", that is the sampling and influence of public opinion. Of course they will find ways to ruin that too so they can make money and get power (spamming it or something) but at least it's a technical step in the right direction that will maybe open the doors to more of the younger generation to really get involved in making laws in this country. Because that's what this is all about--what are the laws and why.

$2.75 earnings per share and a 3.1% dividend yield on 23 billion in net income, I think they're doing fine. They are a money machine, they aren't hipsters. Why invest all the time and money in huge new projects and technology when you have stuff making tons of money and more importantly profit. MSFT isn't even in the same class as Apple or whatever people are comparing them to nowadays (Apple, I'm guessing). Geeze, look at IBM, same story. No one balls out IBM for having tons of patents and no real products.