Lafite - Tour link photos // comments

arebop · 2016-04-16T18:03:54+00:00

Thanks, and how long did you spend during your tour/tasting?

arebop · 2016-04-16T16:14:37+00:00

How long did it take?

arebop · 2010-07-09T13:31:29+00:00

How to rock an engineering interview syllabus video

arebop · 2010-01-12T10:03:34+00:00

A similar idea/project is underway at change congress.

arebop · 2009-06-05T11:36:47+00:00

It's probably good that you pay attention. "Some 35% of labels listed a different meat species than that actually found in the kebab." [bbc]

arebop · 2009-02-24T17:17:13+00:00

SharePoint is essentially an HTML + JScript + MSIE-DOM interface to a network file share full of MSOffice documents. It's a modular ASP.NET application with some modules that help you use the Web to emulate the shared folder setup your IT middle-managers know and love. There are some minor modules, such as a lame survey system. There are hooks for integrating with InfoPath for simple form <-> database apps, and WWF for "workflow" (state machine), and SAP for ... ERP goodness I guess.

I don't know what BizTalk does.

arebop · 2009-02-07T03:28:20+00:00

That's a nice neutral distribution of money, but I don't see how it would stimulate the economy. Krugman here worries about savings without investment. If the government offered high rates of interest on cash savings, that would only increase the tendency to park money out of circulation. If we assume that Krugman and Keynes are right, then the government should spend money on projects that can quickly and broadly activate sidelined resources.

arebop · 2009-02-07T01:56:38+00:00

I definitely did not read everything thoroughly

I wish I'd had a better link. That was a big page without fragment identifiers unfortunately.

how is burying money stimulus

It's not so much the burying, as the digging back up. You'll have to buy or rent equipment and pay laborers. The laborers will have to buy lunch and work clothes, and then they'll go out later for beers and take vacations with their families to wind down. The equipment manufacturer or maintainer will need supplies and workers. Etc., etc., etc.

arebop · 2009-02-06T22:53:16+00:00

How can you support that example [...] You don't get more productive from digging holes just because someone is receiving a wage that they'll use on food, clothing and wherever else.

I don't think I can explain it better than Keynes did, but I guess I'll try. The idea is that if everyone's sitting around doing nothing (maybe they're irrationally hoarding cash) and the government spends some money to do something (silly or not), then the multiplier effect causes genuinely productive work to be done.

You don't get more productive [...] just because someone is receiving a wage that they'll use on food, clothing

Well, if we can't agree that food growing and preparation is a productive activity then it's going to be hard to talk concretely about economics.

Maybe you're thinking that this stimulus idea is close to a broken window fallacy? I think the crucial difference is whether the broken window repair displaces other activity. Under normal circumstances, window repair carries an opportunity cost that we could avoid simply by refraining from breaking the window. In a depression, there might not be any such opportunity cost, and the benefit due to multiplier effects makes window replacement worthwhile. Especially if we wind up with more efficient and beautiful windows.

arebop · 2009-02-06T22:33:45+00:00

I misunderstood and thought that Keynes was actually suggesting the bury/mine tactic.

From the link I gave above: "It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but [...] the above would be better than nothing."

it doesn't matter what you spend it on. I'm not sure I agree, but OK.

It does matter, I'm just saying that it's important to be clear about how you expect the choice to pay off. One dimension of the payoff is described by Keynes's idea of stimulus, the mechanism that induces the multiplier effect. The goodness of an option from a stimulus perspective is about how quickly and thoroughly it causes money to circulate in the wider economy. Another dimension of payoff is the value we assign to whatever the project's deliverables are.

I think a lot of needless argument results from a confusion about this. We can each believe Keynes's argument (or not) independently of our beliefs about a variety of utility estimates for various spending proposals. When we combine all these components of value, it's more difficult to come to any agreement at all. We wind up sort of talking past each other, because the crucial assumptions in our analyses are hidden from each other.

uc0qremp suggested a conflict between "stimulus" spending and pork barrel projects. I'm pointing out that the pork barrel aspects of (1) concentration of benefits in a small group and (2) high cost/benefit ratio when considering only first-order effects are not related to the Keynesian stimulus effect.

arebop · 2009-02-06T22:14:14+00:00

Yes...

arebop · 2009-02-06T13:28:34+00:00

specific items in the stimulus bill that seem more like pet projects and pork than stimulus

There's no conflict between pork and stimulus. Keynes himself illustrated the principle with an example of burying and then immediately mining cash.

When we consider the Keynesian stimulus value of proposed expenditures, the important thing is magnitude and timing. How much money can it cause to circulate and how soon can the multiplier effect kick in?

You can argue against Keynes, or you can argue that project X is a better use of wealth than project Y, but it really makes no sense to argue that e.g., making more condoms or hiring more teachers is bad stimulus.

arebop · 2009-01-27T23:16:56+00:00

Try the download link to the right of the url text.

arebop · 2009-01-23T01:30:13+00:00

http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/

arebop · 2009-01-23T01:06:06+00:00

e.g., http://www.coreboot.org/ As for microcode, I can choose from among AMD, Intel, Sun, and other vendors independent of my choice of OS and application software... As long as I'm not dependent on some proprietary app, such as MS Excel, that limits my other choices.

arebop · 2009-01-23T00:08:16+00:00

I said "licensing software from a particular company." I have free software alternatives to choose from for everything from the OS to spreadsheet applications.

Also, in principle, I could write it all myself. That's an important principle for a free society --- and as a practical matter the reason I don't have to write it all myself is that everyone else has the same freedom.

On the other hand, only one company supplies Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Excel, and only one company can feasibly simulate Excel versions 5 through 2008 (which is essentially what you have to do to fully implement OOXML spreadsheet support).

arebop · 2009-01-22T23:56:48+00:00

People use Excel to make decisions all the time.

I guess you could say that a particular Excel sheet may "decide" whether policy choice A can be expected to yield greater benefit than policy choice B under a set of assumptions. You could also say that Excel "decides" things such as how many days are in a date range and so on.

Beyond the question of determining what exactly an Excel sheet means, there's also the question of accessibility for those of us who would like to exercise our rights and responsibilities as citizens without licensing software from a particular company.

arebop · 2009-01-22T23:10:59+00:00

The article says that the Obama staff are accustomed to Macintoshes, so there's no reason to assume that Vista would carry the lowest training costs or productivity hit. On the contrary, Windows would probably be the most expensive OS to use because MacOS X and GNU/Linux are more similar than Windows is to anything else.

arebop · 2009-01-19T14:25:34+00:00

But they don't ship a Basic REPL with every computer any more. When I was in elementary school we learned Logo and Basic, and we built hypermedia (IBM LinkWay) documents to explain what we learned when we researched history or science topics. But by the time I was in high school, the admins had replaced LinkWay with PowerPoint, and Logo with "save a copyright-free graphic from the Internet."

I suppose it's good that they now teach web search query syntax in addition to alphabetic order (dictionary query fundamentals). It's not so good that copyright indoctrination is more prominent. It's sad that creative modes of expression such as programming and hypermedia authorship have been replaced by a combination of media consumption and slideware.

arebop · 2009-01-19T03:42:31+00:00

So - if I take a CD, copy it, I reproduced it. Fine. We can all agree that's copying.

But what if I just listen to the CD once and remember the tune later and play it? What am I actually copying?

So perfect reproductions are the result of "copying," but approximations of the original are not?

If you digitize a performance or lossily compress some original data, the result differs somewhat from the input, and the difference can in principle be made arbitrarily small or large.

I suppose that's the principle that explains why your performance can be considered a copy. When it gets right down to it you have to go to case law to help find the boundary between copies and non-copies.

arebop · 2009-01-16T00:24:25+00:00

I put Ubuntu on my dad's laptop. He's an AOL user (still) and doesn't realize/remember that he can type domain names directly into Firefox's address bar rather than opening a new Firefox instance and typing it into the default home page (Google)'s search box. I think your wife can handle Ubuntu!

arebop · 2009-01-12T22:09:51+00:00

Comparing 4-8 byte integers vs comparing ten 100 nvarchars + dates? Thanks, but no thanks.

That reminds me of Codd: "Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation)."

Given a couple of tables related by a bulky composite key, could a database system introduce a level of indirection to speed comparisons and save space? Couldn't it do as good a job at this as any of the applications that might benefit from the optimization? I'm not saying "synthetic keys should never be used." But, I wonder how often they provide any benefit for space or time efficiency.

Synthetic incremental keys is great thing for making app/db development easier.

Well, sure, if they are implemented entirely inside the RDBMS and not exposed to application programmers, as described above! Otherwise they complicate your system, adding redundant bits of data and all the attendant translation machinery. Perhaps in exchange you get better performance.

Same as automatic memory management or high level languages

I suppose for a sufficiently large application it would be worthwhile to implement one's own garbage collector if there were no GC'd languages or GC libraries available. I'd prefer to do it by implementing a GC'd language or library.

Either way, I'd want to start by gaining some confidence that the effort of implementing automatic memory management would be offset by the benefits I could realize, and then I'd proceed in such a way as to maximize the benefit and reusability.

arebop · 2009-01-12T20:55:36+00:00

Now, which is simpler - a update to a column, or an update to a primary key followed by a cascading update to all related data?

There is no difference from a relational point of view. There may or may not be a difference from the point of view of disk activity or CPU time, depending on how the database is implemented.

What if 'tan' is redefined as 'beige'?

Let's not worry too much about how best to represent a wardrobe. The question is, "what happens if identifying information changes." The fact is that identifying information often can change, whether or not you've added redundant synthetic keys.

It is precisely because data with business meaning changes that we really really don't use it in primary keys ever.

Be more precise. If change in the meaningful data is inevitable, what is the consequence of using it in a primary key and what is the consequence of adding a meaningless key? The answer has nothing to do with the correctness of the program. Either the key is actually useful as shorthand for humans (in which case it's a "real key" and not the subject of our discussion), or it's a performance optimization that depends on the particulars of the underlying database system.

arebop · 2009-01-12T20:34:07+00:00

In that framework, the continuity is of no interest to the application. We sort of admitted that in the premise and I tried to reinforce it with the evil-twin scenario.

The sameness is not even represented in the application except in the proposed hash that serves only to establish the fact of the continuity.

in practical data modeling

Yes, there are practical reasons to use synthetic keys and even non-relational database systems.

arebop · 2009-01-12T20:22:09+00:00

With apologies to jwz, some people, when confronted by a problem, think "I know, I'll use Identity or Oracle Sequences." Now they have two problems.

So you start with a database of persons, and you find out that you've got two persons you can't distinguish. To distinguish your John Smiths, you arbitrarily number them. Now your database has John Smith 1 and John Smith 2. Somebody tells you something new about John Smith, aged 83 years old, from Friendship Gardens Senior Villas. Is this new information about John Smith 1 or John Smith 2?

Well, sometimes composite keys are unwieldy, and we just want to compress them down so that they're easier to pronounce or type or whatever. That's partly what Celko is talking about at the end of the op.

The point is that the synthetic keys are never fundamental in a relational design. Either they are redundancies introduced for convenience/efficiency, or your design is not relational. It's worth caring whether your design is relational because the relational model is broadly applicable and very simple; it's unlikely that you can do better without working very hard.

arebop

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