Category: Uncategorized

I was shopping for a new computer at Alienware this morning. Some of their upgrade prices, especially for RAM, looked fishy. You can get what appears to be the same items from Newegg for less than what Alienware charges as the upgrade price. The upgrade price means additional cost to what you are already paying for the base component. This seemed especially true for the 2 GB low latency patriot memory upgrade. Alienware wanted an additional $600 but I can apparently buy this from NewEgg for $240.
The memory from NewEgg

If the items are not equivalent I’ll correct this but they definitely need to work on justifying why I should pay $600 for 2 GB of memory.

I found Cyberpowerpc.com which gives you a great deal of freedom in what parts to pick. I built a computer that would cost about twice as much from Alienware. The only problem is that it’s very hard to know what parts to pick given the wide range of options, some of which are incompatible. The website form isn’t that good either, often resetting your choices if you go back and forth between pages.

I basically ordered the top of the line AMD, with dual top of the line video cards.

Code: ULTRASLIQUADZ $2,627.00 x 1 $2,627.00
Gamer Ultra SLI Quad (NO MONITOR)
www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Gamer_Ultra_SLI_Quad/

*BASE_PRICE: [+2259]
CAS: NEW!!! CoolerMaster Cosmos Silent Gaming Tower Case w/ 420 Watts Power Supply (Original Color)
CASUPGRADE: NONE
CS_FAN: Default case fans
CPU: AMD Phenom(TM) X4 9950 Black Edition Quad-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology [+16]
CD: (Special Price) LG 20X DVD+/-R/+/-RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
CD2: NONE [-18]
CABLE: None
FLASHMEDIA: INTERNAL 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer (BLACK COLOR)
FA_HDD: None
FAN: Asetek Liquid CPU Cooling System (Extreme Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA)
FLOPPY: NONE
FREEBIE_OS: None
HDD: Single Hard Drive [-327] (300GB Gaming Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache WD3000GLFS [+244])
HDD2: NONE [-54]
IEEE_CARD: NONE
KEYBOARD: PS2 MULTIMEDIA INTERNET CONTROL KEYBOARD (BLACK COLOR)
MOUSE: Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse (BLACK COLOR)
MODEM: NONE
MONITOR: NONE
MONITOR2: NONE
MOTHERBOARD: (3-Way SLI Support) Asus Crosshair II Formular 780A SLI Chipset DDR2/1066 SATA RAID PCI-E MBoard w/GbLAN,USB2.0,IEEE1394,&7.1Audio [+155]
MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard) 2GB (2x1GB) PC8500 DDR2/1066 Dual Channel Memory [+150] (Corsair Dominator)
NETWORK: ONBOARD 10/1000 NETWORK CARD
OS: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional w/ Service Pack 3 [+61]
PRINTER: None
PRINTER_CABLE: None
PRO_WIRING: Professional Wiring for All WIRINGs Inside The System Chasis with High Performance Thermal Compound on CPU [+19]
POWERSUPPLY: 900 Watts Power Supplies [+38] (Apevia Warlock Series)
RUSH: RUSH!!! READY TO SHIP IN 5 BUSINESS DAYS [+49]
SERVICE: STANDARD WARRANTY: 3-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY PLUS 24/7 LIFE-TIME TECHNICAL SUPPORT
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
SPEAKERS: Logitech (BLACK) X-540 70Watts 5.1 Configuration Speaker System
TEMP: NONE (AS SHOWN)
TVRC: None
USBHD: NONE
USB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
VIDEOCAMERA: NONE
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 1GB 16X PCI Express (EVGA Powered by NVIDIA [+5])
VIDEO2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 1GB 16X PCI Express (EVGA Powered by NVIDIA [+5])
VIDEO3: NONE
WNC: PCI Wireless 802.11g 54Mbps Network Interface Card + GigaByte GN-AT2050D 2.4GHz Indoor Omni-Directional Dipole Antenna [+25]
_PRICE: (+2627)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnWuUcL2otk

I’m moving my money out of US dollars. Foreign currency CDs are the best. Currently Canada has the most sound banking system, so is the least likely to suffer a depression when the dollar crashes.

According to this site, McCain has a 15% chance of dying of old age while in office.
http://www.marshfieldnewsherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081003/MNH06/810030395

The chance of Palin becoming president is higher than that, since you usually are unable to work for some time before dying.

So with that news, according to the public records on this site:
http://clapboard.org/temp/SarahPalinReport.pdf

Palin’s IQ is only 83, over one standard deviation, which means she’s dumber than roughly 85% of the population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

Most of my views lie with Republicans, but the last thing we need is another idiot in office. As much as I can’t stand socialism, I’m going to vote for Obama just so McCain doesn’t become president.

http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?cs_id=22467

Who is my representative?

California in particular.

Register to vote in California

The deadline to register is October 20, 2008.

CA 1 Rep. Michael Thompson Democratic Y

CA 2 Rep. Walter Herger Jr. Republican Y

CA 3 Rep. Daniel Lungren Republican Y

CA 4 Rep. John Doolittle Republican N

CA 5 Rep. Doris Matsui Democratic Y

CA 6 Rep. Lynn Woolsey Democratic Y

CA 7 Rep. George Miller Democratic Y

CA 8 Rep. Nancy Pelosi Democratic Y

CA 9 Rep. Barbara Lee Democratic Y

CA 10 Rep. Ellen Tauscher Democratic Y

CA 11 Rep. Gerald McNerney Democratic Y

CA 12 Rep. K. Speier Democratic Y

CA 13 Rep. Fortney Stark Democratic N

CA 14 Rep. Anna Eshoo Democratic Y

CA 15 Rep. Michael Honda Democratic Y

CA 16 Rep. Zoe Lofgren Democratic Y

CA 17 Rep. Sam Farr Democratic Y

CA 18 Rep. Dennis Cardoza Democratic Y

CA 19 Rep. George Radanovich Republican Y

CA 20 Rep. Jim Costa Democratic Y

CA 21 Rep. Devin Nunes Republican N

CA 22 Rep. Kevin McCarthy Republican N

CA 23 Rep. Lois Capps Democratic Y

CA 24 Rep. Elton Gallegly Republican N

CA 25 Rep. Howard McKeon Republican Y

CA 26 Rep. David Dreier Republican Y

CA 27 Rep. Brad Sherman Democratic N

CA 28 Rep. Howard Berman Democratic Y

CA 29 Rep. Adam Schiff Democratic Y

CA 30 Rep. Henry Waxman Democratic Y

CA 31 Rep. Xavier Becerra Democratic N

CA 32 Rep. Hilda Solis Democratic Y

CA 33 Rep. Diane Watson Democratic Y

CA 34 Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard Democratic N

CA 35 Rep. Maxine Waters Democratic Y

CA 36 Rep. Jane Harman Democratic Y

CA 37 Rep. Laura Richardson Democratic Y

CA 38 Rep. Grace Napolitano Democratic N

CA 39 Rep. Linda Sánchez Democratic N

CA 40 Rep. Edward Royce Republican N

CA 41 Rep. Jerry Lewis Republican Y

CA 42 Rep. Gary Miller Republican Y

CA 43 Rep. Joe Baca Democratic Y

CA 44 Rep. Ken Calvert Republican Y

CA 45 Rep. Mary Bono Mack Republican Y

CA 46 Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Republican N

CA 47 Rep. Loretta Sanchez Democratic N

CA 48 Rep. John B.T. Campbell III Republican Y

CA 49 Rep. Darrell Issa Republican N

CA 50 Rep. Brian Bilbray Republican N

CA 51 Rep. Bob Filner Democratic N

CA 52 Rep. Duncan Hunter Republican N

CA 53 Rep. Susan Davis Democratic Y

For me, it’s John B.T. Campbell III. He voted yes, so I’m voting him out of office next month.

Here’s the list of senators that voted for the amended version of H. R. 1424, the mortgage bailout plan

1. Akaka (D-HI)
2. Alexander (R-TN)
3. Baucus (D-MT)
4. Bayh (D-IN)
5. Bennett (R-UT)
6. Biden (D-DE)
7. Bingaman (D-NM)
8. Bond (R-MO)
9. Boxer (D-CA)
10. Brown (D-OH)
11. Burr (R-NC)
12. Byrd (D-WV)
13. Cardin (D-MD)
14. Carper (D-DE)
15. Casey (D-PA)
16. Chambliss (R-GA)
17. Clinton (D-NY)
18. Coburn (R-OK)
19. Coleman (R-MN)
20. Collins (R-ME)
21. Conrad (D-ND)
22. Corker (R-TN)
23. Cornyn (R-TX)
24. Craig (R-ID)
25. Dodd (D-CT)
26. Domenici (R-NM)
27. Durbin (D-IL)
28. Ensign (R-NV)
29. Feinstein (D-CA)
30. Graham (R-SC)
31. Grassley (R-IA)
32. Gregg (R-NH)
33. Hagel (R-NE)
34. Harkin (D-IA)
35. Hatch (R-UT)
36. Hutchison (R-TX)
37. Inouye (D-HI)
38. Isakson (R-GA)
39. Kerry (D-MA)
40. Klobuchar (D-MN)
41. Kohl (D-WI)
42. Kyl (R-AZ)
43. Lautenberg (D-NJ)
44. Leahy (D-VT)
45. Levin (D-MI)
46. Lieberman (ID-CT)
47. Lincoln (D-AR)
48. Lugar (R-IN)
49. Martinez (R-FL)
50. McCain (R-AZ)
51. McCaskill (D-MO)
52. McConnell (R-KY)
53. Menendez (D-NJ)
54. Mikulski (D-MD)
55. Murkowski (R-AK)
56. Murray (D-WA)
57. Nelson (D-NE)
58. Obama (D-IL)
59. Pryor (D-AR)
60. Reed (D-RI)
61. Reid (D-NV)
62. Rockefeller (D-WV)
63. Salazar (D-CO)
64. Schumer (D-NY)
65. Smith (R-OR)
66. Snowe (R-ME)
67. Specter (R-PA)
68. Stevens (R-AK)
69. Sununu (R-NH)
70. Thune (R-SD)
71. Voinovich (R-OH)
72. Warner (R-VA)
73. Webb (D-VA)
74. Whitehouse (D-RI)

2002:

200 million a year banker: “Hey, lets give credit to anyone that wants to buy a house, regardless of income or credit. We can sell these loans as securities, and leverage it out 30 to 1.”
Irresponsible buyer: “Wow, I can buy a mansion even though I work at 7-11”
Average taxpayer: “These housing prices are insane. I’m going to keep renting.”

2008:

Irresponsible buyer: “Hey, my 200K house isn’t worth a million dollars now that nobody wants to pay for it. Cya.”
200 million a year banker: “The economy is fucked unless the taxpayers pay for our bad loans.”
George Bush: “Have a trillion dollars.”
Average taxpayer: “WTF?”

Congress voted and passed a bill today in the House to bail out Freddie and Fannie May up to 800 billion dollars. So in other words, you and I are paying for greedy and/or stupid people who bought houses they couldn’t afford. And the stupid and/or greedy lenders that loaned to them. Responsible people, such as myself, who passed on insane house prices are currently living in apartments and end up paying for those that were irresponsible.

To make things worse, you’re not even bailing out the irresponsible home buyers. You’re bailing out the fat bankers that leveraged themselves that put themselves in this mess.

Why is it the goverment doesn’t step in when home prices go up 25% every year for 8 years? Yet, when the bubble bursts and prices go down 15% in one year it’s suddenly a crisis?

As usual, Ron Paul is the voice of reason.

http://www.house.gov/paul/index.shtml

“Have a dictionary of nouns of at least 1000 commonly used nouns. For example “Tiger, Snake, Man, Computer, Stapler, etc.” Using PHP or other means, search for this noun on Google image search, with safe search turned on. Pick a random Google cached image off the front page of the results. Display this image to the user, along with a question asking for the original noun. And do this twice, otherwise the attacker could just attempt your dictionary for a .1% success rate. Certain search terms will often fail even for humans – therefore, store the success rate along with the noun in a database, and any noun with a less than x% success rate won’t be used.

The noun database should also store unique synonyms for each noun, which will reduce the human fail rate without affecting the bot fail rate.

This captcha works because
1. Humans are good at random image recognition, while computers are not.
2. Although there are only say 1000 nouns, the nouns times the possible number of images (especially if you use common nouns) might be in the millions.
3. Asking twice prevents attackers from just guessing nouns directly. With a dictionary of 1000, asked twice, this results in a 1 in a million chance of successfully asking at random.”

From the
Joel on Software Forums where someone asked if they should take a goverment job.

– The head of IT has been in government for 27+ years. She is the one making purchasing decisions and setting strategic direction. She does not own a computer or have an external email address. She does not buy on-line, and she has the web monitor set so tight you can forget about using the Internet. No IM. No webmail. Then to ensure you cannot possibly reach the outside, no non-government equipment permitted in the building without a specific exception. This will be your organizational leader as the rule – not the exception.
– Change is glacial. Two weeks I did nothing because they could not allocate a machine for me to access the network, until I had a badge. To get the machine, a form needed to be signed by my boss, his boss, her boss, and his boss. My boss walked it around, and was told that was inappropriate, and it still took 4 hours. Then it went to the help desk who took 9 business days to process and deliver the equipment. Deliver in this case meant coming to my desk and providing a user id and password to a machine sitting there. To install software requires you to have an exception form filed. Another round of 4 signatures in my department, one from security, one from the helpdesk and one from a person who no one can explain except they need to sign the exception form – six days. Complain or bother anyone about a request and it will disappear. Petty is an understatement.
– It is true that no one gets fired. But worse, making decisions is career limiting. The solution is to ensure you never do anything of risk. What you want is to be tied into a project you can claim some responsibility with, if it goes well, and disavow any relationship if it fails.
– No _one_ makes any decisions because there is safety in numbers – very large numbers. All decisions are by committee and expect it to take weeks. They spent 12 weeks, with a minimum of six people in nearly 20 meetings discussing a database key. One key. It is an extreme example but that it can happen says it all.
– If you take any type of leadership position and do anything that employees do not like – they submit a grievance. Why? Because while one is pending, they cannot do anything to you, include request work, or deny automatic or scheduled promotions in grade. A 25 year developer? here has had a grievance on her various leaders, continuously for over 12 years. She is proud of it. “They don’t tell me what to do!”
– Write off leaving government. You can always leave right? Wrong. Would you hire someone from an environment that fosters the behavior above? With very few exceptions, spend more than a year or two as a “gov-e” and you can kiss the private sector good bye. Who would want this behavior and if it took you more than a year to figure out you should quit, that says volumes.

Unless you want to do what you are being hired to do for the next 20 years, with 2.5% annual increases in pay, bosses who make no decisions and run the same technology for decades – run away.
Hiding
Friday, May 30, 2008

Followed by:

A prime example of the type of person you will be working with. Again, I work for the govt and recently got promoted. There is one other person at my agency with my new title. As part of promotion, they are requiring that I get a certain Microsoft certification. I talked to the other person with my same title if he was planning on getting the same certification, since he didn’t have it and they had just amended the job description to require the MS cert.

I asked him just so I could see if we could possibly share study materials and whatnot.

He responded that he wasn’t planning on getting the certification because they couldn’t force him to get it since it wasn’t in the job description when he got hired AND he explained that I am young and he since is older he is planning on just “coasting” till retirement.

The thing is, he doesn’t look that old. I asked him how long until he could retire? He said 18 YEARS!

He plans on coasting for the next 18 years!

And yes, plan on every single decision to be made by committees and groups. They will often be filled with people who have no idea what you’re talking about. At my agency when we need to fill a committee for anything, it’s pretty much just putting warm bodies in a seat. They don’t care if they are remotely qualified to help decide whatever we’re trying to decide.
Anon
Friday, May 30, 2008

I’m wondering about a possible correlation between the internet bubble and the housing bubble.

Internet bubble started in 1995, burst in 2001:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

A graph from the New York Times that shows the housing bubble, with prices adjusted for inflation, over the last 110 years. The darker graph is the Nasdaq prices from Wikipedia superimposed on the image.

There’s some lag – the housing bubble started 2 years after the internet bubble. Although not reflected in the graph, the downturn started first quarter 2007.

I was living in San Jose when the internet boom and the housing bubble started. From my perspective and location, internet companies were starting up constantly, and people were snapping up houses as soon as they went on the market. I was listening to a realtor talk about how it wasn’t enough to be pre-approved. You had to have the money in-hand to buy a house, and if you didn’t the house would have been sold to someone else the following week.

My grandmother’s house jumped from the 300K range to 700K plus. My dad lives about 30 miles away in what used to be farmland, and was at the time pretty shabby houses each with an acre or so. As the prices started to become unreasonable, it was now worthwhile for people to commute an hour plus to work. So instead of spending a million dollars for a 2000 square foot house, people would buy these old shabby houses for 350K, tear them down, and rebuild mansions. Even now about 30% of the houses in that area are mansions with an acre of land, with the other houses basically shabby farmhouses.

Prices actually become unsustainable in 2000. My theory is that the internet boom kept the prices going until 2001. Over the next 5 years prices continued to rise due to speculation, temporary fixed-rate ARMs, and towards the end, dishonesty, shortsightedness, and greed on the part of lenders and buyers. Now the ARMs are coming due, people are losing their houses, and prices have dropped 10-20% depending on the house you are looking at.

Right now as I go house hunting I am looking at houses between 550K and 600K, 2000-2500 square feet. It’s very hard to find houses at that prices level that are not damaged or undesirable in some way. Last week my Realtor took me to a house with 6 families of illegal aliens in it in the process of a short sale. They had even converted the garage into another room. You can imagine the condition of the house. Another house had been abandoned in a damaged state by the prior owners, with big telephone transformer poles in the backyard. We did see one nice house for sale by owner for $850K, but he was asking that while his neighbors were asking $700K.

I don’t know of any fundamental reason why prices should be where they are right now. I think the only reason it’s taking as long as it is for prices to drop is reluctance on the part of sellers to accept 6 figure losses in home value. If the downturn takes as long as the upswing, prices should drop for the next 10 years to about half of what they are now.