Today when out on a beautiful autumn afternoon walk near the castle in Bratislava, I ran into someone else working in the IT sector.We fell to speaking about international companies coming into Bratislava in the IT sector. IBM has moved 1800 jobs to Slovakia in fulfillment and logistics.
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In fact, they’ll receive the same styling as any image that receives the right class, meaning that the image will be right-aligned with a frame…. You don’t even have to go out of your way to be fancy with Cutline, and that’s how we like it.Update: As of September 28th, 2006, Cutline has been revised so that unstyled images no longer receive default styling.
Leave a CommentWorldNews: Global military spending this year is estimated to reach US$1,059bn, outstripping the highest figure reached during the Cold War in real terms, and roughly fifteen times current international aid expenditure. This growth in military budgets has caused a boom for the arms industry, with the top 100 arms companies seeing their sales increase by almost 60 per cent, from US$157bn in 2000 to US$268bn in 2004.
Leave a CommentScotsman.com News – International – Soldiers ‘laughed’ as they beat detainees, court martial told: Mr Matairi, whose brother was killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, said he felt betrayed at being ill-treated by British soldiers he had welcomed to Iraq.”I put flowers in my children’s hands to welcome the British soldiers when they came to free us from Saddam,” Mr Matairi told the court with the aid of an interpreter.”I could not believe that these criminals were from Britain…. “We were hit all the time, continuously without knowing the reason why,” he added.Mr Matairi, part-owner of the hotel from which he and his staff were arrested, told them “we are going to die”.”They [the soldiers] were celebrating the beatings like it was Christmas,” he said.He said the soldiers laughed at his cries of pain, playing a karate chop game as they hit him.
Leave a CommentIf you go to a live presentation of some sort, you can see, in-person, the other customers of the guru in question. B.S. artist gurus have audiences that look sleazy, unkempt, the bottom of the socio-economic barrel.
Leave a CommentWhile there are people doing life sentences (three strikes and you’re out) for stealing hubcaps in California, one of the five core figures in business crimes which shook the American economy gets six years of minimum security…. ABC News Online: Ex-Enron exec sentenced to six years’ jailAndrew Fastow, who helped engineer the financial trickery that sank Enron Corp and then helped convict his former bosses in the scandal, had four years knocked off the plea deal he made, receiving a six-year sentence instead.US District Judge Ken Hoyt said the 44-year-old former Enron chief financial officer had given “exceptional” assistance to prosecutors, had pledged to help victims and had shown remorse, and his wife had gone to prison for a year.Fastow, who oversaw Enron’s finances during the giant energy trader’s spectacular rise and fall, pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy in 2004, agreeing to a 10-year sentence and pledging to help prosecutors.His testimony helped convict former chairman Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling.His voice breaking in an anguished statement before hearing his sentence, he expressed his shame, pledged to work for redemption and apologised to the victims of the Enron fraud and to his friends and family.”I failed them,” he said.The judge rejected a request from lawyers for Enron victims that Fastow be allowed to delay his surrender until October 23, which they said would make it easier for him to give a deposition that could facilitate billions more in recoveries from Enron’s banks.The judge ordered him into custody immediately.Judge Hoyt imposed no fine and recommended a minimum-security prison for Fastow.Enron’s crash caused investors to lose billions and cost thousands of employees their jobs and retirement savings.
Leave a CommentIf you’ve ever tried to save music videos from your browser onto your hard drive, you’ve run into then name Akamai. Usually the final video, once you’ve removed all the frames and html and everything surrounding it, is hosted from an Akamai address with a bunch of numbers as the URL.
It turns out Akamai is a very old compamy, originally founded in 1995.
Like other Net infrastructure plays, Akamai got swept up in dot-com fever. Following its 1999 IPO, the stock price soared from $26 in late October to $345 on New Year’s Eve. But when the Internet bubble burst, many of Akamai’s customers went bust or just disappeared. Then Lewin was killed on September 11 on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. In 2001, Akamai lost $2.4 billion; a year later, the share price bottomed at just 56¢.
Akamai stock has tripled over the past year to $43.
Lessons to be taken here:
- the value of persistence
- the foolishness of financial markets (i.e. the lemming effect)
- the value over time of good ideas
- the importance of load spreading for speed in web applications (i.e. almost all the big companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft are using Akamai – if there were an easier or cheaper way, they’d be using it)
I’ve just lost lots of hours this week trying to rescue my boot firewire drive. It’s a notebook sized 2.5″ Drive in a sleek little aluminum Firewire 800 case from O’ToStore.
Apparently the drive has been failing for weeks and I just haven’t been noticing. Alas SMART does not work on Firewire drives or I probably would have noticed right away.
The cause of the failure? Bad sectors.
I normally backup my boot drive every week or so, but let it slip for a few weeks this time.
When I got around to making the backup using SuperDuper! (free edition, full backup), my backup failed on an I/O error. An I/O error is the equivalent of a bad sector.
Now I was really in trouble. My backup boot disk was shot as well. Strangely enough the original still worked well enough running the OS as long as I wasn’t trying to back it up.
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