Good Morning World: "

Photo by Leslie:

"

(Via Warrenellis.com.)

LifeStraw purifies water instantly for under $2 a year: "

There are gadgets that make life more fun, and then there are
gadgets that make life possible. The LifeStraw from Denmark’s Vestergaard Frandsen Group has the potential to fall into
the latter category. A device about the size of a large pen or drinking straw, the LifeStraw is a complete water
purification kit that draws its power from the person sucking down the water. The LifeStraw is the product of ten years
of development work, based on the goal of creating an efficient, affordable water-purification system for the
developing world, where water-borne illnesses are a major killer. When produced in quantity, each LifeStraw — which
uses a combination of mesh filters, iodine-impregnated beads and active carbon to remove particulate matter and
bacteria — is expected to cost under $2 and be able to provide a year’s worth of pure drinking water. When and if this
hits the market, we hope to see some worthy charity distributing them by the millions (you listening, Bill and
Melinda?).

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Ads by Google

"

(Via engadget.com.)

My mind's voice automatically reads these with the voice of Jon Stewart now.

The Daily Show needs too hire these people. Seriously.

lulululululululululululululu

The Power of Imagination

Giblets will never under...: "

The Power of Imagination



Giblets will never understand these Iraqis. You invade them, flatten their cities, lock up and torture their relatives and what thanks do you get? Either a lot of explosives or the lamest candy-and-flowers display Giblets has ever seen. Weak, Iraqis. Very weak.


Well Giblets can end it all, and pretty damn fast. He has all he needs to end the war right now: an extra hundred thousand troops or so he intends to send to win the war. Where did he get them, you ask? Simple - for Giblets, at least. He got them with the power of imagination.


Yes, even now Giblets is searching his mighty mind for imaginary recruits and within one week expects to crush the insurgency with two thousand armored leprechauns, eight battalions of snuffalupagi, six divisions of heffalumps and the 101st Airborne Oozle Brigade! Guided by the unmatched tactical genius of Mr. Squigglesworth, Giblets's six-armed tap-dancing purple space squid and Secretary of Pretense, Operation: Wishful Thinking cannot fail! And if it does, Giblets will merely declare an Opposite Day. Losing IS winning in pretend!


Do you doubt the genius of Giblets? That is because you are made of stupid! Pretend troops are just what we need to fight for a pretend cause! Only Giblets's imaginary army will finally manage to locate Saddam's hidden stash of nukes buried deep within Fairyland! Only Giblets's fictional fighting men can spread democracy by discovering the long-lost Fountain of Freedom under Baghdad, whose magical waters turn everyone who drinks them into a fully-functioning republic! Only Giblets's dream draftees can end terror forever by assassinating the boogeyman! Everyone join hands and believe - or you stab our glorious playtime in the back! Onward, make-believe soldiers!

"

(Via Fafblog.)

How Not to Run a Company

From: "David Koretz" <david@bluetie.com>
Date: August 12, 2005 3:45:11 PM EDT
To: <david@bluetie.com>
Subject: Full Report on BlueTie Mail Store & Backup

BlueTie Customer,

I know it has been a challenging week with the email problems that
you encountered, and I want to update you on the history and current
status of the email problems you have experienced this week.

This email is being sent now that service has been completely
restored, and all necessary information on the occurrence was
gathered, as that was our first priority.

I would like to personally apologize for any issues this may have
caused you, and assure you that we have made significant changes and
will continue to make changes to ensure that this can never happen
again.

What happened?
On Thursday August 4 the MCI hosting facility in Elmsford NY lost
both primary and backup HVAC, causing the ambient temperature to rise
to 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Had we been made aware of the condition,
we would have immediately shut down our servers to prevent
overheating. We were not notified by MCI due to a failure in their
process and therefore our servers continued to run and the redundant
RAID array on one Mail Store was damaged. Only customers on this one
Mail Store have been affected.

MCI is producing an RFO (Reason for Outage) document on Friday August
12 that will document the causes, immediate resolution, and long term
prevention of future occurrences of this outage. I will be glad to
share the document with you once we have it.

As a result, on Monday August 8th BlueTie experienced intermittent
delays and two temporary outages affecting only the BlueTie customers
housed on that particular mailstore, which includes your company.

The first was a result of a single drive in the RAID array failing at
approximately 11:45AM EST. After running diagnostics and recovery,
the RAID array was fixed and put back in service at 1:00PM EST and
service was restored to all users.

The second occurred at about 4:00PM EST when 3 drives in the same
RAID array failed simultaneously. Important points about this outage:

All mail received while the mailstore was down was queued. None of it
was lost, and it was delivered when your new mailstore came online.
We worked all through the night to recreate all of your accounts on a
new mailstore. By Tuesday morning, all users were able to login and
send and receive email. All accounts were functioning normally. This
was our highest priority.

The next step was to recover your mail from the backup system and
insert it into your new account. This was completed on Wednesday,
August 10 at approximately 4:00PM EST.

Then we merged the new email (sent or received since 4:00 PM EST
Monday August 8) with the recovered mail. This was started at 8:30PM
EST on Wednesday and was completed at 2AM EST Thursday morning. In
order to preserve data integrity we had to once again queue mail,
meaning that incoming mail would not be delivered to your new account
until the rest of the process was completed.

The final steps were to update the attributes on the mails in the
accounts on the new Mail Store (attributes are used to make email
fast and searchable) and release the queue, allowing mails received
since 8:30PM EST Wednesday to flow into your account.

We expected the entire process to be completed by 9AM EST Thursday
morning.

Between 10am and 1pm, users began to see emails restored into their
accounts. At 1:10pm we released the queue, and now all queued mail
has been delivered.

Further Complications
As we worked through the recovery process, it became increasingly
apparent that there were problems with our current backup process:

Incremental backups were not being successfully created on a nightly
basis
The full weekly backup did not backup email audit and messages more
than 100 days old
The full weekly backup retained items that users had marked as
deleted or as junk.
The full weekly backups after July 20 did not include some of the
most recent messages.

What we restored into your account is much less than perfect.
Because there are no incremental backups, emails sent or received
between the evening of August 3 and 4pm August 8 can not be
recovered. They simply do not exist anywhere.
Significant numbers of emails that should have been on the backup
were not, and therefore they are also lost. Specifically, non-POP3
users will be missing messages more than 100 days old and may be
missing messages sent or received after July 20.
Large numbers of deleted and junk mails were put back into your mailbox.

What is in your account now is all the mail that we were able to
retrieve. There is no other resource or archive that might contain
the data.

What about email audit files?
All customers using email audit should have received their CD/DVD for
the month of May. Because June, July and August through the 8th were
on the failed mailstore and were not backed up, that data is lost.

Can anything be retrieved from the damaged RAID array?
There is less than a 1% chance that data can be recovered based on
what we know about what happened to the drives. However, we have
contracted a data recovery specialist firm to try everything possible
to get information from the drives. I will send you another update
as the work progresses.

What is BlueTie doing to prevent this problem from recurring?
Installing temperature sensing equipment in the MCI facility and
connecting it to our monitoring applications so we can independently
monitor them
Completely reworking the backup policy and process to give you full
real-time replication across multiple boxes, in addition to full
daily backups of your entire mailbox
Improving our disaster recovery process and conducting quarterly
disaster recovery exercises to verify the process
Moving to geographically distributed mirror servers for all
components in the BlueTie architecture. One set will remain in the
MCI facility; the other will be in our data center at our corporate
headquarters in Rochester, NY. These servers are architected to fail
over in less than four seconds in the event of an outage.
A low level device monitoring has been implemented. This will report
disk drive deterioration so preventative action can be taken before a
drive fails.
Adding checksum verification to the backup process to validate that
the backup and mailbox are identical.
Audit data will be backed up until it is burned onto CD or DVD for
delivery to you.

BlueTie is Issuing a Service Credit
BlueTie will be crediting you for the entire month of August. You
will receive a bill marked Paid In Full for the month, along with
another letter from me that outlines the completed improvements we
have made to give you confidence that we have permanently resolved
the problem.

We are also going to have a technical auditor come in and evaluate
our new backup process and redundancy and give us an independent
verification and appraisal to give you further confidence. I am happy
to share this verification with you once we have completed the process.

I appreciate your patience and understanding during this situation,
and am totally committed to ensuring we deliver an incredibly
reliable solution that you are thrilled with.

Best regards,

David Koretz
President & CEO
BlueTie Inc.

This message is intended solely for the individual(s) to whom it is
addressed.
If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination or copying
is strictly
prohibited. If you believe you received this message in error, please
notify
the sender and delete from your system. Thank you.

Does exposure to the Phishers of the internets translate into to "Verify, then Trust" in the real world?

I don't think so, but I'm not so sure it would be a bad thing.

IT: Anti-Phishers Pose as Phishers to Make Point: "Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes 'This article notices a new trend in efforts to fight phishing: Anti-fraudsters are posing as phishers to 'to train users to be more careful about sharing sensitive information online.' Or, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, 'To fight computer crime, the good guys are masquerading as bad guys pretending to be good guys.' West Point cadets were among those who got fake phishing emails -- in their case, from Aaron Ferguson, a teacher at the academy. 'The gullible cadets received a 'gotcha' email, alerting them they could easily have downloaded spyware, 'Trojans' or other malicious programs and suggesting they be more careful in the future. ... Nonetheless, he says the exercise upset some cadets, who felt it exploited their inclination to follow an order from a colonel, no questions asked. He says the new edict is, 'Ask questions first, then execute.' ''"

(Via MirrorDot.)

We can call this Best Economist Job Evah!

Angelina and the Economist: "

Besides filming the new Robert DeNiro-directed The Good Shepherd in New York City and becoming an honorary Cambodian citizen, and besides shtupping America's Favorite Friend's husband and being hotter than hell, Angelina Jolie is making news with the announcement that MTV will air a 'video diary' of her trip to Africa. Jolie and Jeffrey Sachs - yes, that Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, the noted economist who works for Columbia's Earth Institute and advice UN Secretary General Kofi Annan - traveled to Africa with Sachs' team that is trying to stop poverty and hunger. Though Angelina gets top billing, we love how the name of the show actually is 'The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr Jeffrey Sachs in Africa.' Way to go, MTV, for trying to give world economists a higher profile - even though your audience wants to know whether Stephen will chose Kristin or LC more.

More information about Sachs' UN Millennium Project. And Sachs does have a wife, so Angelina is not always a homewrecker. Yet.

"

(Via Gothamist.)

In the midst of reading business news, sometimes you come across a gem, like this comment from Linspire/Lindows/MP3.com's Michael Robertson:

We were sorry to lose him, but love is thicker then VOIP.

Some Changes at SIPphone: "

My colleague, Erick Schonfeld reports that Jeff Bonforte, president of SIPphone and the man spear-heading the Gizmo Project has jumped ship and joined Yahoo. Yahoo’s aggressiveness in the VoIP space is no surprise, but I wonder if Jeff’s departure leaves the two companies in a bit of a limbo.

‘I have to figure out how to integrate voice everywhere it should be—and to beat Skype,’ he tells Business 2.0. Jeff will report to Brad Garlinghouse, and will try and figure out ways to take Yahoo’s VoIP beyond just a ‘VoIP+IM’ client. Bonforte assured me that it was more of a personal decision and things are going well at SIPphone, and The Gizmo Project.

Michael Robertson wrote back in an email: ‘Jeff’s move was planned for some time because his fiance lives in San Jose. We were sorry to lose him, but love is thicker then VOIP. Jason Droege is now President.’ Robertson says there have been some improvements in the software. ‘We’ve implemented new firewall penetrating code that is very effective at getting past troublesome routers and firewalls which is a big deal for SIP software,’ he says. So far, there have been 100,000 downloads of the Gizmo software.

(Why do I feel it in my bones, that something is going to happen at Gizmo/SIPphone very soon? Maybe I am looking for shapes in shadows….)

"

(Via Om Malik on Broadband.)

Great Lines

The unidirectional nature of the time continuum makes that an unlikely possibility.


A great line from Ronald Moore written for Data in Season 4.

I've had my eyes on this for a while. I do need living room speakers...

Yamaha rolls out YSP-800 Digital Sound Projector: "

As previously noted, Yamaha has been working on a more affordable successor to its $1,300 YSP-1
Digital Sound Projector, and it looks like it’s about to land in Europe. The new YSP-800 is a similar compact system
that simulates 5.1 surround sound without requiring you to set up speakers all over a room. The newer model has a
somewhat lower output, at 82 watts instead of 120, which should still fill most home theaters or living rooms. Other
features include an automatic sweet-spot setup and ‘Night Listening Enhancer,’ which automatically lowers the volume
and enhances speech, so that you can keep Jerry Bruckheimer’s explosions from waking the kids, but not miss any of the
gripping dialogue. The YSP-800 is expected to be out in Europe this month for €699 ($866).



[Thanks, K.Y.]

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

"

(Via engadget.com.)

I remember the framed Playboy bunny symbol that was over my bed when I was a child. My parents really didn't know about the symbol's pedigree, and had put it up on purely aesthetic grounds.

In retrospect, quite amusing.

CULTURE: Playboy for Schools: "One of Britain's leading stationary retailers top selling brands is its Playboy themed range.

'Playboy is probably one of the most popular ranges we've ever sold,' says head of media relations for WHSmith, Louise Evans. 'It outsells all the other big brands in stationery, like Withit [a range of cute cartoon animals], by a staggering amount. That should give you an idea of how popular the brand is. We offer customers choice. We're not here to act as a moral censor.'

Several protest groups are up in arms about the use of Hefner's logo on stationary aimed at children. Eleanor Kirwan of Coloma Convent Girl's School has organised numerous protests outside WHSmith's Croydon, London branch.

The pressure group Object, which is also campaigning against WHSmith's promotion of the Playboy brand to children, says: 'Playboy's logo clearly represents pornography. The magazine routinely features sexualised and full-frontal images of naked young women. It also promotes pornographic videos and strip shows. Playboy is about men buying women and presents this as natural and normal male behaviour, together with fast cars, football and male role models (not shown naked). WHSmith is therefore endorsing pornography to young, impressionable and possibly underage girls.'



Kirwan says the teenage girls in her school 'are aware of what the Playboy icon is' and 'were saying that, even though the pencil cases feature no blatant pornographic images, the bunny symbol represents pornographic images. The girls are able to acknowledge that symbols have a deeper significance than that which is on the surface. For stockists and manufacturers to deny this is shockingly disingenuous.'



But for WHSmith it's a style choice. 'We believe it is a fashion range,' says Evans. 'There's no inappropriate imagery. It's just the bunny. It's a bit of fun, popular and fashionable.'



While some will always defend the media being saturated with images of women as sex objects and the mainstreaming of porn as 'a bit of fun', others are deeply concerned about the damaging effects it is having on the perception of women. Kirwan's class debates confirm that children do not always understand that media representations of women are not real. 'The girls do not yet have the mental sophistication to recognise that the Playmates are not real. They don't realise that the image of female beauty that they see in the media is staged and not something they can expect to emulate. They really didn't know about the amount of styling that someone like Posh [Victoria Beckham] has. I do recognise an attitude among the older ones that it's not a problem to be a glamour girl or a playgirl. '



Talking about any kind of sex, particularly in school, is excruciating for some children. 'One 12-year-old told me,' says Kirwan, 'that since we had started discussing the stationery, she had thrown her Playboy pencil case away. 'It's gross. I don't want that on my stuff,' she said. These are girls of the age where even using the words sex or pornography can be embarrassing. Lots of the 11- and 12-year-olds hadn't even heard of pornography and yet had the porn king's logo on their school equipment and plastered across their chests at weekends.'

Considering the age of the children buying this range, what do you think?

(Written by: SomeOneUK)

"

(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)

Women in Science.

1. Greenlighted Fark headline:


(Some Nervous TFette)

TFette's satellite is finally launching today at 6:32 EST. Come in and give some support. Yes, she's even TFing on launch day. (Link goes to satellite's NASA page)
(177)



2. A Register article points to a very simply way to increase the number of women majoring in Computer Science:

... it seems that restricting the choices available to adolescents, and making it mandatory for all pupils to study maths and science subjects throughout their secondary education, correlates with a higher proportion of women going on to study computer science at university.


"The principle of being free to pursue your preferences is compatible and coexists quite comfortably with a belief in essential gender differences. This essentialist notion, which helps to create what it seeks to explain, affects girls’ views of what they're good at and can shape what they like," said Charles.

I'm seriously considering this...

Build your own Mac for $199US: "

Filed under: Hacks, Cult of Mac

While this may not be the first time we've seen a homebrewed x86 Mac, it just may be the cheapest. This post at the OSx86 project website lists exactly the parts used to create a functioning Mactel:

1. Case - $9.95
2. Motherboard - $52.99
3. Processor - $60.77
4. 2x 256 RAM - $38.00
5. 20 Gigabyte HD - $25.95
6. DVD Drive - $12.00
7. Grand total: $199.66US
   

Ok, so this machine won't be winning any design or speed awards, but I think this falls more under the 'because I can' category than anything else. If you need more information than just a hardware shopping list, check out this very detailed tutorial.

The whole idea is interesting, and I'm sure it's inevitable that we'll see more and more basement solutions as time goes on, but I've still got to agree with C.K. on this: while this may be a fun weekend project, I'm still content to have OS X running beautifully on Apple hardware.

[Via Make:Blog]

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"

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

More Umich Library love.

UMich Archives Old New York: "

From bridges to pandas, Gothamist loves a lot of things (what can we say, we're passionate people) but if there is one thing we have an undying love for its the history of our fine city. Which is why it was with great pleasure that we found the lead article in the Times City section today on the University of Michigan's Making of America digital archive. Sponsored by Lawrence J. Portnoy, a Manhattan lawyer, the archive currently include over 300 books from the turn of the century on the state of New York City. We're talking about titles like 'The nether side of New York; or, The vice, crime and poverty of the great Metropolis' from 1872, 'Who's who of the Chinese in New York' from 1918 and 'Working girls in evening schools: a statistical study' from 1914. The Times selections from the archive include such juicy tidbits as what a 20s 'shop-girl' ate to stay on her feet (gumdrops and éclairs), the best way for a prostitute to rob her john blind (have a co-conspirator hidden in the walls of her bedroom) and how much it cost to live in luxury while incarcerated in the Ludlow Street Jail (anywhere from $15 to $100 a week depending on how much luxury one wanted).

The complete UMich collection on New York can be found here. You can print out and keep as much of it as you want, or you can have Michigan print a book out and send it to you for a variable fee.

Still want more? You can always check out the New York Public Library's increasingly awesome Digital Library.

Photograph by Fabrizio Constantini for the Times

"

(Via Gothamist.)

The Database of North Korean Propaganda.

Relive the twentieth century, as North Korea thinks it is living it now.

Also, note this giant penis in North Korea.

fried turnip cake

fried turnip cake
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Ready to go to the table on a Dim Sum sunday at 103 Mott.



Yes of course there is pork in there.