08.30.04
Men at work
Men at work
An oxymoron I know: but while passing some construction works today I was struck by one particular sign amongst the usual safety and warning notices. It said “No Urinating on Site”.
08.26.04
US State and Venezuela
US State and Venezuela
The dissembling continues.
“QUESTION: Yes. There still seems to be quite a bit of confusion over the final position of the United States regarding the referendum results. Are you still going to issue any kind of a written statement?
MR. ERELI: As I said on Thursday, I am not going to commit to what form a statement might take, whether it be written or otherwise. I think we have been very forthcoming in public statements on Venezuela. The latest is that the OAS and Carter Center have conducted an audit of the election results. In our view, the results of that audit are consistent with the results announced by the National Electoral Council on August 16th and we understand that the Electoral Council will certify the final results on August 25th.
We commend the important contribution of the OAS and Carter Center to the referendum process and we again congratulate the people of Venezuela for their peaceful civic participation in this process and their demonstrated commitment to democracy.
QUESTION: Adam, that statement seems to kind of leave it open. You say you result — that you evaluate the views that were consistent with CNE. You don’t say that you agree with those views entirely, do you?
MR. ERELI: I’ll leave it where I — I’ll leave it where I — with what I said.”
08.23.04
JK Galbraith and hope
JK Galbraith and hope
Thank God. James K. Galbraith sees hope for November in Salon. I had the great honour of meeting the Da at a debate in TCD’s Phil (where I served as Hon. Registrar.. !). Most imposing and distinguished man, but he wouldn’t spill the beans on whether or not FDR knew the Japs were coming to Pearl Harbour (as all the conspiracy theorists suspect he did thus forcing the US into the war when the citizens were quite happy to let the Nazis take over altho the way they go on you’d think they were competing with each other to get over the Atlantic and save us all). Anyway, JK the 1st was at a famous mystery meeting just before PH at which it was suspected the option of allowing the Japs attack was discussed. He’s very tall.
Not sure what to make of the IPO story. As story after story appeared in the press casting doubt upon the wisdom of the dutch auction, I paid them little or no heed. The VC’s had been very mean to the boys in the early days and now the founders, in control of one of the most eagerly anticipated IPO’s in years, were having their revenge. Throw it open to masses and screw the VC’s. But the money men weren’t going to roll over too easy. As well as clearly spinning Google negatively to the press, they refused to co-operate with the auction. Merrill Lynch simply pulled out and as they have the largest retail network that clearly effected interest. With the papers full of negative stories, others were cautious. Finally, their own VC’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequioa Capital simply pulled out of the IPO claiming they felt that Larry and Sergei had made such a balls of the auction that they could get a better price for their shares on the open market. Of course, by withdrawing the millions of shares that they owned from the IPO, their prophecy was immediately self-fullfilling and contrary to Google’s hopes, the shares went from $85 to $100 on opening day, thus allowing buyers to flip the shares on day one and make a big profit and at the same time confounding all the negative spin.
This NYT article has some of the juicy detail. But it can’t help quoting mystery investors like this:
“To at least some, the company is finally being priced at a value that more accurately reflects its true value. “The real story of what happened here is the deal is finally being priced where the bankers would have put it had they been in charge of this deal from the beginning,” said one investment banker, who owns a small slice of Google through his stake in one of the venture capital funds that was an early Google investor.”.
When actually this is BS since the $85 didn’t reflect the true value – $100 was the true value – the price the Kleiner wanted, predicted it would get, and then did get on the day.
So big deal, the guys tried to get one over on the establishment: it didn’t work but they’re still disgustingly rich and even if they destroy the company now, it won’t make much difference. Finally I could not see what the big fuss about the Playboy article was since it seemed totally harmless to me.
I was happy with my dismissive analysis until I read Karlin Lillington’s highly critical piece in the IT on Friday in which she references a previous very well researched article. (sub reqd)
I’ll reprint some here due to the bloody subs: From the May article
“But as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, people still don’t know some pretty basic things about the company, like how many people use its search engine daily, how many searches it performs, how much server power this requires, and how it performs them.
Oh, sure, the company regularly has stated some figures around some of these areas. But a fascinating article tucked away recently in the MIT Technology Review suggests that the company either can’t do its mathematical sums, or is telling a few porkies. The article reports a presentation given by Dr Martin Farach-Colton, professor of computer science at Rutgers University in the US. During the talk, he shows a slide with some of the figures that Google does release:
150 million queries/day, 1,000 queries/sec (peak), 10,000+ servers, More than four tera-ops/sec at daily peak, Index: 3 billion Web pages, 4 billion total documents,
4+ petabytes disk storage.
As Mr Simson Garfinkel, the article’s author, states: “Let’s see: ‘Four tera-ops/sec’ means 4,000 billion operations per second; a top-of-the-line server can do perhaps two billion operations per second, so that translates to perhaps 2,000 servers – not 10,000. Four petabytes is 4×1015 bytes of storage; spread that over 10,000 servers and you’d have 400 gigabytes per server, which again seems wrong, since Farach-Colton had previously said that Google puts two 80-gigabyte hard drives into each server.
“And then there is that issue of 150 million queries per day. If the system is handling a peak load of 1,000 queries per second, that translates to a peak rate of 86.4 million queries per day – or perhaps 40 million queries per day if you assume that the system spends only half its time at peak capacity. No matter how you crank the math, Google’s statistics are not self-consistent.”
….But why? Garfinkel argues that it is to Google’s benefit to hide such details that would enable other search contenders to try and benchmark themselves against Google’s achievements. And it means the company always seems to perform at astonishing levels of efficiency and speed given the hardware. My, what algorithms they must have!”
and from Friday on the Playboy interview
“In the interview, the founders state that Google has about 1,000 employees. The correction, however, notes the figure is actually now 2,292 employees. Where did almost 1,300 more employees come from, and how could they not know this key, basic figure?
The company also issued this bizarre statement: “The article states that more than 65 million people use our search engine each day. We believe that this number represents monthly, not daily, domestic visitors data as compiled by a third-party research organisation.” Huh?
What do they mean, they “believe” this number represents monthly, not daily, figures? Surely they know? The difference is nearly two BILLION users in a monthly period.”
Karlin’s point is that as a private company they can tell whatever fibs they want, but once they’re public they have to come clean. Hmmm. Not good or evil. Were they thwarted by evil or just immature to begin with?
Bill Clinton “My Life”
Bill Clinton “My Life”
A colourful man, a controversial presidency, a huge list of enemies, what a sex-life, what a marriage. I practically salivated opening this book. I’m half-way through and what a bore. It’s a simple diary of what happened on each day. He says something nice about everyone. Reagan, Bush Sr., Bob Dole, journalists who allowed themselves to be used by the VRC. No one escapes his reconciliation. Does he describe George Stephanopolous’s practical breakdown? Give us a taste of Hillary’s rage or heartbreak? But the worse thing is that while I would forgive his discretion in relation to his opinions of the living and the details of his whorish sex life, why does he then feel it necessary to bang on about God all the time? Every few pages he and Hil are off to church, praying, reading the bible; instead of hearing about Monica on her knees, he’s never off them. As far as I am concerned one’s relationship with one’s maker should share a privacy level with picking one’s nose and toileting activities. Looks like I’ll have to cast around for a book with the real dirt. Suggestions welcome.
08.20.04
US State Dept more weasly than ever
US State Dept more weasly than ever
As today’s NYT followed up on my observations 
on the State Dept.’s hilarious reluctance to endorse the Venezuelan election, I see they attempt a transparent re-spinning of the true position. Check out today’s daily briefing (you’ll have to scroll to just more than halfway down). Unfortunately the journalists are never identified so we don’t know who the plant is…altho even he/she has to resort to the allegations of the fraud being committed by the electronic machines rather than the counters. I also love Ereli’s comments about the necessity to meet ‘international standards’. Presumably that doesn’t include the US……
08.19.04
McGreevy Fall-out
McGreevy Fall-out
Bestofbothworlds has been following the fate of ex-Gov. of NJ McGreevy, however my favourite observation concerns a possible addition to the world of slang. What a pity the circumstances to use this will be so limited. Especially in Ireland. The wives would stick it out here.
On a similar theme Arianna Huffington offers some but disappointingly coy commentary on the situation. Perhaps P O’ Neill would offer a suggestion for marrying someone even when you already suspect their gay?
Venezuela vs US on Fair Voting
Venezuela vs US on Fair Voting
The US State Dept. really has a nerve qualifying the Venezuelan vote. Check out this NYT link on all the outrageous flaws in their own election system. Forget about hanging chads. How about sending International Observers to endorse the Presidential election?
Religion and schools
Religion and schools
Tom’s comment appears attractive but I think ignores the problem that Ireland’s educational (and indeed medical) history is not easily disentangled from religion. For a variety of reasons the education of the masses in Ireland was left to the religious. While the Jesuits had their fancy Belvederes and Gonzagas, the hoi polloi were left to the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy (or Presentation, Loretto etc). For all their faults, it did leave the people educated and in a position to fill the ranks of the civil and public service or ship out to the US and UK in search of employment. So even if O’Malley wanted to dump the religious (which he probably had no interest in doing) he couldn’t have considered it, because how would the state replace the school buildings and personnel which the religious orders had provided?
If there was no prospect of separating church and state in the schools then it seemed logical that the only fair system was to support all religions in the schools and given the fact that the ‘minority’ religion would clearly not be in a position to adequately fund its own schools, then providing the capitation grants as well as the teachers’ salaries was a fair system to protect the Prods. (And given the havoc Ne Temere was playing with the left-footers, this was a necessity). (Altho’ their access to contraception and suspiciously small families didn’t help them either and that was their own making – or non-making). (WW1 didn’t help either but neither the Church nor the State can hardly be blamed for that). But I digress.
The point is that now, a lot of the fee-paying COI schools have more Catholic students than Protestants. So why should they get the extra money? The Prods can get their money, but for Prods, not for the aspirant West Brit Catholics.
One further comment and this relates to the criticism of the State’s deal with the religious orders regarding compensation for abuse in the reformatory schools. The Orders are contributing something like €127m cash and some property to a fund which will compensate those who were abused in various homes and schools as children. This will leave the state with a massive shortfall as the claims could well run into several multiples of that figure. The State has been severely criticised for letting the Orders off the hook. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that these children (orphans, mild delinquents, poor children etc) were the State’s responsibility. They were happy to shunt their ‘care’ on to the religious thus saving the State money and resources. There are many documented cases of their being informed, not perhaps of sexual abuse, but certainly of neglect, malnutrition and physical abuse taking place in some of these institutions. They chose not to intervene. This negligence means that they are liable to pay the compensation. Of course, the humble tax payer will end up paying (since we are the State), however I’ve no problem with that either since it was as a society that we (or previous generations) stood by and allowed it to happen.