One of my favourite places to eat in London is the brasserie in the Groucho Club. You can guess where the name came from. If not, try here. I’ve been a member since 1989. Among its attractions is pervasive Wi-Fi, so I find it a great place to work when in London.
Interesting comment by ex-Oracle insider, Dave Dargo, on Larry Ellison’s bluster about stealing Red hat’s business. Excerpt:
But what about the other part of [Ellison’s] quote, that [Oracle’s] support has to be better. There’s a survey from CIOInsight that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIO’s in 2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they ranked 39 out of 41.
The other thing I’m most curious about is the concept of Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). The claim is that it takes less than a minute to switch from Red Hat’s Network (RHN) to ULN. It’s going to take more than a minute, and a fair amount of cost, to get through the legal agreements and process of switching over. But even with that aside, I’m mostly curious as to why Oracle’s first real support network is for someone else’s product. Where’s the Oracle Database Network and Applications Network and PeopleSoft Network and Siebel Network? Where are the support infrastructure networks for Oracle’s own products to automatically distribute fixes, patches and alerts? It’s amazing that they can provide all that for a mere $399 for a competitor’s products, but not for their own $200,000 product…
My post about the possibility of the Gulf Stream switching off elicited two interesting emails.
Quentin pointed me to a letter in the Economist from Professor Carl Wunsch, an MIT oceanographer, which said, in part:
The Gulf Stream is a wind-driven phenomenon (as explained in a famous 1948 paper by Henry Stommel). It is part of a current system forced by the torque exerted on the ocean by the wind field. Heating and cooling affect its temperature and other properties, but not its basic existence or structure. As long as the sun heats the Earth and the Earth spins, so that we have winds, there will be a Gulf Stream (and a Kuroshio in the Pacific, an Agulhas in the Indian Ocean, etc).
Shut-off would imply repeal of the law of conservation of angular momentum. The primary mechanism of heat transport in the ocean is the wind-forcing of currents that tend to push warm water toward the poles, cold water toward the equator. Widely disseminated and grossly oversimplified pictures showing the ocean as a “conveyor belt” have misled people into thinking ocean circulation is driven by a sinking motion at high latitudes. A comprehensive literature shows that with no wind, heating and cooling could produce a weak flow, but one not at all resembling the observed circulation.
If the sinking motion at high latitudes were completely stopped, by covering that part of the ocean by sea ice for instance, there would still be a Gulf Stream to the south, and maybe an even more powerful one as the wind field would probably then become stronger. If the sinking were stopped by adding fresh water (a deus ex machina often invoked to change the climate), the Gulf Stream would hardly care except in so far as the wind system changed too. The amount of heat transported by the system would shift, but could not become zero.
Many writers, including scientists, toss around the words “Thermohaline Circulation” as though they constituted an explanation. In the ocean, most of the movement of heat and salt, the real Thermohaline Circulation, is driven directly and indirectly by the wind field. Thus the Gulf Stream, and hence the wind, rather than being minor features of oceanic climate are best regarded as the primary elements. Many real climate change effects exist and require urgent attention; focusing on near-impossible Gulf Stream failure is an unproductive distraction.
My son Brian wrote to point out the irony that GulfStream is the brand name of a very successful executive jet aircraft!
Nice piece by Michael Kinsley about the November 7 elections in the US…
This year does seem to be different. You hear people say – though rarely as forthrightly as the Times – that they are voting for the party, not the person. Well, more accurately, they say they are voting against the party, not the person. The Republican candidate for the Senate or House may be saintlike in general, no worse than muddled on the war in Iraq, and good on stem-cell research. Meanwhile the Democrat may be a grotesque hack just inches from indictment, whose views on Iraq are equally muddled with less excuse (since loyalty to the president is not a factor). Nevertheless, many people are voting for the Democrat simply out of anger at or frustration with the Republican party.
[…]
Even under the American arrangement there is nothing ignoble about voting the party line. It is an efficient way to minimise your information costs. Voting is an irrational act: your vote does not matter unless it’s a tie. And even 2000 was not a tie. The more effort you put into learning about the candidates, the more irrational voting becomes, and the more likely you are not to bother. A candidate’s party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything you would like to know, but it tells you something. In fact it tells you a lot – enough so that it makes sense to vote for your party preference even when you know nothing else about a candidate. Or even to vote for a candidate that you actively dislike.
True, people might question your sanity if you were to declare that you were voting for the Democratic party agenda. The what? If there’s anything worse than ignoring that famous elephant in the room, it’s imagining a donkey that’s not in the room. Even so, a vote for the Democrat is a vote against the Republican. And voting “no” to a record of failure is more important to the functioning of democracy than voting “yes” to any number of promises about the future.