First is the assumption that talented bankers only come with gigantic price tags. It turns out there are thousands of banks — including pretty much any bank still standing that didn’t get bailed out — that are being run by reasonably competent people who don't make enough in one year to buy a Major League Baseball team.  If you’re managing a bank that's survived the crisis this far, you must be doing something right.

[...]

If you can’t make money borrowing at zero and charging 29.99 percent on a credit card, maybe you’re in the wrong line of business.

— John W. Schoen, for MSNBC, on why the argument that big banks need to pay top dollar to hire and retain "top performers" is fallacious.  Many of the "top performers" retained by the big bucks so far have been part of the problem, and there's little evidence megabank executives pulling down tens of millions of dollars in compensation a year are actually doing their jobs any better than — or even as well as — smaller bankers earning a tenth or a hundredth as much.

You can’t fly Chicago-San Francisco on All Nippon Airlines or JAL.  If you could, the domestic lines would be out of business in three weeks.  The only way they can clip customers for a hundred bucks per guitar is by being a federally mandated monopoly.

— Fred Reed

'Nuff said.

The book touts at the bottom of the page are fun, too...

Despite taking it apart and lubricating every coarse mechanical track, linkage and pivot, I have been completely unable to cure the intermittent (roughly 50% of the time) tray jam on the LiteOn SATA DVD burner databeast gave me the last time he was up here. There is nothing visibly mechanically wrong, and nothing sticks when cycled by hand; nevertheless, at least half the time, when actually connected to a machine, the drive either fails to open, fails to lock closed, or fails to unlock.

Nevertheless, despite it's mechanical problems, its logic is working fine, and I was able to use it to confirm that the MSI6566E P4 board that lwj2 sent to us has not the slightest hesitation about attempting to boot from a SATA device connected to the SiI3124-based PCI SATA controller I bought when I first started trying to do a ground-up OS refresh on babylon5. This only deepens the mystery about why babylon5's ASUS A7V333 AthlonXP board will talk to that controller, and SATA devices connected to it, perfectly happily once it's booted, but utterly refuses to detect any SATA devices at boot time. I even tried installing a 16MB CF card on a PATA adapter with grub on it to boot from a SATA disk, and that didn't work, either. I can only conclude that, as the A7V333 motherboard (introduced in 2002) predates SATA (introduces in 2003), the BIOS contains no SATA support whatsoever, and for some reason none of the subsequent BIOS updates (the most recent, version 1017, dates from July 2006) has ever added any SATA support.

There's one post on the ASUS support forums about inability to get an A7V333 to boot from an add-in PCI SATA card, but it's never received any replies. Further research online finds occasional other posts of the same problem, none of which ends in a successful resolution. This appears to suggest that SATA on the A7V333 is a problem to which there is no known solution.

I guess that means I'm squarely behind the 8-ball on converting babylon5 to SATA¹, unless I also replace the motherboard. And therefore the CPU, and the RAM, and probably the graphics card...

Well, it has been seven years since I last did it. So I suppose that's not so bad.

[1] "Why not just use PATA?" Because PATA is brain-damaged, and because the board only has two PATA channels, and I like to run mirrored boot disks on all of my *nix boxen, which means two disks and an optical drive, which means some two of those three devices are going to have to share a PATA channel. And that's when PATA starts to REALLY suck, because bus contention is going to cut throughput on that channel by a factor of at least two. That's one of the major reasons why SATA was invented.

It's not so much the strip, as the footnote.  Computer voice recognition is so bad that whenever I find myself talking to a robotic voice-recognition menu system, I immediately just start repeating "Just give me a human" until it gives up and forwards me to a human.  If I'm calling one of several potential sources for something, and I hit a voice-recognition menu system, I'll hang up immediately and try the next supplier.

Companies and government agencies deploy computer voice-recognition menu systems because they're convinced it'll save them money and let them reduce the number of humans they're paying.  But at the current state of the art, what it mostly does is lose them customers who are sick and tired of dealing with artifical stupids, and frustrate and enrage the people who don't have a choice about whether to use the AS.

Via davefreer and Times Labs, "the graph the record industry doesn't want you to see".

(I've reproduced it here as a GIF because ... well, what in Cthulhu's fever dreams possessed the Times to think it was necessary to use Flash to display a STATIC GRAPH?  The only thing accomplished by using Flash was to make the damned graph take two minutes to load.)

There's actually two graphs.  I've left the second alone because it loaded in only a few seconds for me.  (It still didn't need Flash to display it, though.  The Times' webmaster needs his fingers smacked with a steel ruler.  I live in hopes that HTML5's embedded video/sound features will kill Flash for all non-interactive content.)

The point of the graphs is pretty clear:  The music business as a whole is doing just fine.  The artists are making more money.  The venues are making more money.  The promoters are making more money.  The only part of the industry making less money is the record companies — and there's little, if any, evidence that file sharing is responsible. (As previously reported by the Times, music listeners in the UK who admit to sharing and downloading music via the Internet spend 75% more per year, on average, than listeners who say they don't share or download.)

Found on dump.com:

Intel and AMD just settled their autitrust and patent-licensing disputes.  ...For now.  Hopefully it'll last this time.

Under the new agreement, AMD and Intel have agreed to drop all past patent cross-licensing disputes, enter a new five-year patent cross-licensing pact, and terminate all current antitrust and patent-infringement litigation worldwide.  The agreement also ends Intel's opposition to the GlobalFoundries spin-off, and frees up GlobalFoundries to pursue fab business for non-AMD customers.  Additionally, Intel will pay AMD a $1.25 billion penalty and has agreed to abide by "a set of business practice provisions" that basically amounts to halting its widespread practice of using bribes, kickbacks, and threats of supply restrictions to encourage computer manufacturers to reduce their business with AMD.

This has been along time coming.  Perhaps Intel finally Gets It that playing this kind of dirty pool only hurts their image and leads potential customers to question Intel's ability to compete on the strength of its products alone.

Intel has very good products.  So does AMD.  If Intel and AMD compete fairly on their merits, they will drive a continuing mutual improvement in their products, which can only be good both for them and for everyone else.  We need only look at Microsoft to see how this drive to improve is lacking in a monopoly-dominated market.

(The Detroit auto industry is a different case.  GM, Ford and Chrysler may not have been a single monopolistic company, but in many ways, the way they've designed and built cars for the last half-century, they might as well have been.  The key factor there was not near-monopoly control of the US auto market, though, but more the handing over of final authority on engineering decisions from the engineers who wanted to make the product better, to the accountants who wanted only to shave every last nickel out of it, combined with a lack of incentive to build more efficient engines because US gasoline was so cheap for so long.)

This is a new page for Intel and AMD.  Let's hope they stay with it.

I've been promising (on LJ, at least) a photopost for a while now about the Great Reconstruction.  Well, it kinda went on and on as we found more problems, and the number of photos grew and grew, and ... well, to cut a long story short, instead of making a massive journal photopost, I've put the story on our webserver instead.

You can find the whole saga, to date, here.

"To date"?  Well, yes.  We were hoping to have the floor of the rebuilt hallway re-tiled by now.  But that's another story.  The pages will get one final update when the floor is done.  Trust us.  Would we lie to you?

to see that the District of Columbia received more "stimulus" money, per capita, than any of the fifty states?  In fact, DC got roughly twice the US average per-capita stimulus money, over 40% more than second-place Rhode Island, and 75% more than Michigan, the hardest-hit US state by unemployment rate.

(Michigan's official unemployment is 15.2%; DC's is just over 11% according to the graph, although the article declares it to be 9.9%.)

The chart in that article plots stimulus money per capita against unemployment rate.  As it observes, if stimulus money were parcelled out proportionally to unemployment, most states should cluster along the blue diagonal line on the graph.  In practice, DC is further above that line than any state, by a factor of almost 2:1; and Michigan is more than twice as far below the "equitable" line as DC is above it.

Draw what conclusions you will.

The WSJ has a new opinion column by Peggy Noonan, and it's worth reading.

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter.  We should be dancing in the streets.  No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers.  Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment.  The tide will recede.  The boats aren't rising, they're bobbing, and will settle.  No one believes the bad time is over.  No one thinks we're entering a new age of abundance.  No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008.  Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either.  Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts.  The experts missed the crash.  They'll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

Noonan talks about two main issues in this column.  The first is that more and more people are tired of being told the same old "Jam tomorrow" promises, and just don't believe them any more.  In increasing numbers, the American people are realizing that there's no reason why what failed yesterday and the day before should work if tried again, unchanged, tomorrow.  People don't believe that Congress or the White House will fix the problem. They don't believe that the government knows how.  And they're right, because the government is too mired in business-as-usual to think outside the box.  No matter what promises are made in their campaigns, once they get ensconced inside the Beltway, it's the same old same old.

Noonan's other issue is another thing that an increasing number of Americans have caught on to, and that Congress hasn't.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative.  They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on.  They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened.  They don't even notice.

And that's the real problem.  Capitol Hill is totally out of touch with America; and, as a general rule, Capitol Hill neither knows, nor cares.

Many of us have been saying for a long time that Hollywood and the music industry aren't so much barking up the wrong tree about piracy, as barking at a lamp-post under the myopic delusion that it's a tree.  Baen Books found years ago that when you give people freebies to pique their interest, you sell more books.  Now the UK Daily mail reports on a study by British think-tank Demos, which finds that people who admit to downloading music via file-sharing services spend 75% more per year buying music CDs than those who claim they don't.

The survey also revealed nearly two thirds of file sharers said new and cheaper music services would encourage them to stop accessing illegal services.  It found that by lowering the price of music available online to 45p per track - compared to between 59p and 99p on iTunes - providers could expect to double interest in legal sales.

Eight-three [sic] per cent of people downloading music illegally said they buy more music as a result, while 42 per cent said they did so to 'try before you buy'.

Naturally, the UK government doesn't get it.  Neither does the music industry, yet.  But reports elsewhere (sorry, I don't have the links right now) suggest that the Hollywood movie industry is starting to figure out that the market has changed, and they need to embrace that change and adapt to it instead of trying to resist it and deny that anything has changed, the way the music business is doing.  Like it or not, though, the music business cannot put the genie back in the bottle.  Small bands everywhere have learned that they don't need the record companies, and many of them have learned that the record companies will cheat them any way they can.  But the record companies haven't learned yet that if they continue to view both music makers and music buyers as captive resources with nowhere else to go, who can therefore be exploited indefinitely, they're doomed.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- The Obama administration says it will continue its predecessor's policy of using state secrets authority to block disclosures about warrantless eavesdropping.

OK, so ... anyone out there still believe in Obama enough to try to spin this?

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankson told CNN Holder's move represented a continuation of Bush's policies and stands in sharp contrast to the promises of greater government transparency and accountability Obama made during his presidential campaign.

"It turns out that 'change we can believe in' hasn't really resulted in any change at all when it comes to government secrecy," he told the broadcaster.

But at least the Bush administration didn't make any empty boasts about being "the most open administration in history".

Republican.  Democrat.  It makes no damned difference.  Both are rotten to the core, united by their love of power.  There is no "lesser evil" on Capitol Hill.  There is only the same evil wearing two different faces.  They play different favorites; but they both play favorites.  They take different special interests' money; but they're both owned body and soul by special interests.  They go after different Constitutional and civil rights first; but they both attack and undermine Constitutional and civil rights. They sometimes tell the voters different lies; but they are both cut from the same pack of habitual liars.  Only when both parties' followers learn that, will there be any chance of changing it.

This article by Bill Gurley talks about how Google has disrupted the turn-by-turn navigation market by offering turn-by-turn map data "less than free" with every Android OS copy, now that Google Maps is based entirely on Google's own mapping data.  Not only do they not charge for the map data, but if you use it and their mapping API, they give you ad revenue splits.  This announcement from Google immediately knocked a big chunk off the values of both NavTeq and Tele Atlas, previously the only two sources of turn-by-turn map data.  TomTom's stock dropped 16% after Google's announcement, and Garmin's dropped 21%; between the two of them, they own the majority of the GPS navigation market in the US, particularly after Magellan got bought out.  (I found it surprisingly difficult to find current hard numbers, but it looks like as of the end of 2Q2008, Garmin owned 55% of the US GPS market, with TomTom in second place with 18%.  In Europe, the situation is reversed, with TomTom at 38% of the Eurpoean market and Garmin in second place with 19% as of 2007.)  When you're selling GPS navigation capability based on map data that you're charged a hefty fee for the use of, it's pretty hard to compete with GPS navigation based on map data that you're paid to use.

There's an interesting side effect to all this, too.

Let's recap a little.  Google used to use both NavTeq and Tele Atlas.  But in late July 2007, TomTom bought TeleAtlas, and less than three months later, Nokia bought NavTeq.  That put the writing on the wall for turn-by-turn navigation.  A year later, Google dropped NavTeq, keeping Tele Atlas after a negotiation for looser license terms; and just over two weeks ago now, Google dropped Tele Atlas as well, cut over entirely to its own mapping databases, and made its announcement.

Now, when we moved here, it didn't take us too long to notice that the map data for our neighboorhood was wrong. Streets shown as connecting on the map don't, and the map shows streets that don't exist.  This probably comes from the long-standing practice of commercial mapmakers of introducing deliberate errors into their maps in order to be able to detect and prosecute unauthorized copying.  If you can show in court that a competitor's map faithfully reproduces intentional errors that you have placed in your maps, it makes a strong argument that they simply copied your maps.  Of course, it's bad news for you if you, as a map user, are relying upon that section of the map.

Well, we tried to report the errors on the map.  It took considerable hunting by several different people, one of them a Google employee at the time, to find a place to submit an error report to NavTeq.  I even submitted, along with it, a digitally corrected version of that section of the map.  Not only did NavTeq not correct the error, they never even responded.  More recently — after, I now know, Google dropped NavTeq and began using only Tele Atlas — we noticed that the map had changed, but was still wrong, although the major error had changed — the non-existent connection between Cheshire Circle and Briarcliff Road was gone, but Briarcliff now trailed off to the south instead of running westward.

So, after finding out the news of Google's switchover, I just looked again at the map of our area.  And it's now almost entirely correct.  There's only one error remaining ... and there's a link to report errors, right there on the map.

I'd say this change at Google Maps is going to end up a clear win for mapping users.

After five hours of calling out a drumbeat of "no bid" for properties listed in an auction book as thick as a city phone directory, the energy of the county auctioneer began to flag.

"OK," he said.  "We only have 300 more pages to go."

A four-day auction of Wayne County tax-foreclosure properties pretty much flopped.  Hardly anyone has any money, and most of those that do have money to spend are investors and speculators who are only interested in the choicest properties.  Unless Detroit recovers in a big way, most of them are probably going to find that it's not 2006 any more and they can't sell their "quick flips".  Meanwhile, people trying to buy a house fit to live in because they actually want to stay in Detroit are being outbid on anything livable by the speculators.

And that "phone-book-sized" auction catalog?  That was only the properties seized in 2006.  There's a LOT more where they came from (no pun intended):

The number of Detroit properties in tax foreclosure has more than tripled since 2007 and seems certain to rise further.  The lots for sale last week represented arrears from only 2006, well before the worst of the downturn for U.S. automakers.

The Detroit Free Press estimates that the total vacant land in Detroit now adds up to an area almost the size of Boston.  How much longer, the way things are going, before it adds up to an area the size of ... well, Detroit?

Memo to self:

'xset r rate 250 30' good.

'xset r rate 30 250' bad.

Inadvertently typing the latter makes it ... challenging ... to retype the command correctly.

Not impossible!  But very challenging.

Jalopnik reports that the 2010 Volvo S60 will be equipped with an automated system that not only detects pedestrians and cyclists in or entering the vehicle's path, but automatically brakes if necessary to avoid hitting them.

On the face of it, this is an excellent idea.  But in an inner city, I would hope there's an override.  You see, over and above Jalopnik's concern about drivers coming to rely on the automatic pedestrian/cyclist avoidance system, there's one scenario that comes immediately to mind.

Picture this.  You've been into the city for dinner and a movie with your spouse.  On your way home, you pull up to an intersection and stop at the red light.  A figure appears out of the shadows and up to the side of the car.  He brandishes a weapon, be it as simple as a length of iron pipe or a baseball bat, and orders you out of the car.  With no cross-traffic in sight, you quickly step on the gas to get away.

...And nothing happens, because by now his two friends are standing in front of and behind the car.  You see carjackers ... but the car sees only pedestrians, and it won't let you endanger them.

Today, Washington politicians can busily “solve” one problem, knowing that unintended consequences from that “solution” will keep them and their friends all very busy tomorrow.  The people are ultimately left suffocating under the burden of Washington’s helping hands.  It is coming to a point where our economy, our dollar, and indeed, the rest of the world have had about all the help from Washington that they can stand.

— Ron Paul

This is something I’ve been saying for at least ten years now.  It is not in Washington’s interest to actually FIX problems.  Any problem that they actually successfully fix is one that they can’t use in the next term’s election campaign or to justify part of the next fiscal year’s budget.  The way our government currently works not only tolerates, but rewards bungling, incompetence, inefficiency and waste.  So of course we get more bungling, incompetence, inefficiency and waste.

As Ron observes, “Sadly, whatever is bad for the greater economy is good for the economy and job market in DC.”  America, and America’s government, operate at cross-purposes, because it is not in the interest of America’s government to govern America effectively and responsibly.

Microsoft announced today that it has managed to recover contact address-book information for Sidekick users, three weeks after Sidekick users lost access to their data ... and is already starting to spin it as "a minority of customers" who lost data from their Sidekicks.

Now the question here is, minority of which customers?  Is Microsoft trying to claim that only some Sidekick users lost data when the entire Sidekick server back-end went down?  Or is Microsoft saying that Sidekick users are only a small minority of Microsoft's customers?

The devil is in the details.

Vaporware is exactly Microsoft’s core competency as a company.

Money quote from Dan Dilger's post on the ongoing Sidekick data-loss failure, and Microsoft's part in it. Datacenter failures happen, but a datacenter failure isn't the reason why Microsoft still hasn't been able to demonstrably recover any Sidekick user data.

Turns out the reason Microsoft hasn't been able to recover the data is the same as the data was lost in the first place: Microsoft managers, over the objections of Danger engineers, cancelled a pre-SAN-upgrade backup, two days into a six-day backup, because they didn't want to take the time to do it and Hitachi had assured them the backup was "safe". But Microsoft's servers have room for only one backup. So to START the new backup— the one they cancelled two days in — they had to delete the old one. So when the "safe" upgrade failed, there was no backup of the data.

Microsoft has been frantically trying to blame Hitachi, EMC, Sun, Oracle ... anyone but themselves. But the fact is, regardless of the cause of the failed SAN firmware update — which could be a Hitachi/EMC failure, but since no-one else has reported problems with it, is more likely a procedural error at Microsoft — the loss of the Sidekick data is because Microsoft erased its backup of the data, then couldn't be bothered to wait for a new one to complete. After all, it's only user data, right? So much for the safety of the cloud.

Now Microsoft is promising that they have, like, nearly all of most of some of the Sidekick user data recovered, well, nearly recovered, or at least, it'll be nearly recovered soon. Some of it. Maybe. They promised that they'd soon have ... a status update.  Any time now!

Dan Dilger suggests that the "recovered data" will turn out to be one more piece of vapor that Microsoft will turn its back on and walk away from once people's attention has been distracted elsewhere, and that if Microsoft does somehow manage to recover any significant fraction of the Sidekick user data, it'll be not so much due to any technical ability in Microsoft's part as a testament to the resilience of the underlying Sun/EMC/Oracle platform the Danger unit runs on.

I think he's probably on the mark. I predict a lawsuit from T-Mobile for failure to adhere to the Sidekick SLA, and I predict that Microsoft will, as quietly as it can, settle the suit and sweep it under the rug on conditions of non-disclosure, as it has so many times before.

(Article pointer via 7leaguebootdisk)

Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, writing in the LA Times, compares Obama's foreign-policy blundering and dithering to Ethelred the Unready.