I was a big fan of lighttpd in 2006. It saved us from Apache (in our case replacing Apache + mod_php with lighttpd + php via fastcgi) at a time when we had an acute need to scale up on a limited set of hardware.
But in the last two and a half years, I've lost that positive feeling. Development has slowed dramatically -- point releases are infrequent, version 1.5 seems mired in rewrite after rewrite, bugs with detailed reports go untouched in trac. We had to restart our lighttpds every few days due to memory leaks. More minor issues like true graceful restarts and better proxy features were pushed off to 1.5.
We've since moved critical frontend serving and proxying to nginx, and after almost a year, it's been a dream. nginx has not failed once in billions of requests. We've pushed dozens of configuration changes, served big files, little files, proxying, keepalives, misbehaving clients, SSL, everything. Nginx just keeps on going. No memory leaks, no spurious logging, no complaints. I have literally restarted it once on our production servers, and that's because I'm an idiot and typed "restart" instead of "reload". I was sad. I thought we might get a year of uptime or more on the nginx master processes.
My only complaint about nginx is that the development process itself is less transparent than many open source projects. There are active English and Russian mailing lists, and Igor is stunningly responsive but I wish that there was an open issue tracker, source tree, etc. But that's a minor complaint against an otherwise fantastic piece of software.
There's a reason Steve Ballmer screamed "developers! developers! developers!", and it's not that he forgot to take his medications. Developers are the people who create stuff that makes a platform attractive.
The assets remain intact, the investors who poorly judged the risk lose their investment and those who buy up the assets (to clean things up and bring about a recovery) rightfully reap the rewards of taking on a very high risk.
Enron, to take an example, went bankrupt, but energy kept being generated and traded under new management. Former employees went on to find work at the acquiring company(ies) or took their labour elsewhere. Would things have been better if Enron were still scamming around after a bailout today?
How about the dot.com collapse? What if Pets.com and WebVan were given billions of dollars to continue on?
Bankruptcy is good. It's the market's way of flushing out bad ideas and starting fresh.
If so, why doesn't printing more money fix Zimbabwe?
Zimbabwe has deep problems unrelated to money supply. If you build a successful business in Zimbabwe Mugabe's thugs will kill you and steal it (or allow you to escape the country with the clothes on your back, if you're lucky). In a culture where everyone has to either be a part of the gang that runs the place, or pay for the privilege of mere existence, business cannot grow. The incentives are simply wrong for business to exist. There is no incentive to work hard, build something new, take risks on new ideas, or provide a service (to anyone other than the thugs in charge). If you had no hope of becoming successful would you start a new business? Would you bother working every day to maintain an existing one? Everyone who has the capacity to build products, grow food, and provide knowledge services, has either fled the country or been killed or imprisoned by the government. Of course the economy of Zimbabwe is a shithole.
So, I don't have any answers to any of your other question. I'm by no means an expert on the subject. But the causes of the economic failure of Zimbabwe seems pretty obvious to me. And, the more the US looked like Zimbabwe, politically speaking, the more our economy would look like the economy of Zimbabwe. Luckily, we have a long way to fall to be in quite the same kind of mess as Zimbabwe. But, I do think a bailout without serious oversight and some accountability for the people that caused the problem, would be a big step in the wrong direction.
Both sides have a problem with an attitude and are worthy of each other.
> Contributing to open source projects matters more than your marks in school to us and to a lot of other companies around.
Maybe it matters more to them and perhaps it's specific to India, but in Canada participation of a candidate in open source projects is of just a cursory interest. Besides quoted exchange states that they simply wanted to look at guy's code. If so, then just ask for it. Getting into "thou shalt contribute to the open source" tirade is pretty much pointless given the context.
This is a good article, and I generally agree, but...there's a danger in calling this particular bailout plan "more government", and then arguing against it by saying that more government is always bad.
The problem here isn't "more government" -- it's that the government is showing a willingness to prop up an unsustainable system. If the proposed legislation was a package of hard-nosed reform and regulation, plus some money to bail out the most critical banks to our economy, it would make much more sense. However, in its current state, the bill oinks and waddles just like congressional pork.
We got where we are through a lack of government (regulation), and the solution to the problem almost certainly involves more of it; it just has to be the right type.
Wow, I'm jealous. I think the real question is how you can get a job writing about your experience bribing maître d's and eating free meals at some of the best restaurants in New York.
Edit: I've put a lot of work into the comment below, so I would appreciate if you'd read it and respond to it. I know it's harder to discuss the specific provisions of Glass-Steagall and its affect on the market place than just saying "oh, the Glass-Steagall repeal is responsible for everything wrong". However, if people are going to cite the argument so often that it becomes the commonly accepted viewpoint, then it ought to be incumbent on them to UNDERSTAND it. Anything else is hand-waving.
I hear this a lot, too, but it's hard for me to see how the Glass-Steagall Act repeal had anything to do with the current crisis. In fact, deregulation seems to have mitigated the damage. The reorganization of Bear, Merrill, Morgan, and Goldman would have been impossible were the Glass-Steagall Act still in full force. They would have all gone bankrupt or had to be rescued by the government. Many of the entities that are in good financial shape are the large financial conglomerates that would have been illegal were G-S still in place. Customer bank deposits provide a stable source of funding when lenders are skitish. Reducing the supply of capital in an embattled industry would be the height of stupidity.
Many foreign countries never had any law like Glass-Steagall in place and they don't seem to be suffering the same problems. As logic tells us, the current crisis seems to be orthogonal to the presence or absence of Glass-Steagall.
Mcardle also had a wonderful post FACTUALLY summarizing the provisions of Glass-Steagall and its relation to the current crisis:
A large problem during the Great Depression was that the United States had laws that artificially limited the size of banks (see "Unitary Branching Laws"). The result was that institutions in the United States had smaller financial cushions in crisis time and were more likely to go under. The United States suffered a FAR higher rate of bank failure than other countries, and states with unitary branching laws had higher failures than those without.
So I know blaming the Glass-Stegall repeal for our current problems is popular(populist) wisdom, but it seems to me that popular wisdom is, as usual, wrong.
So, when times are good, "think dumb and burn money"?
Seriously, these are good points but why only follow them when the economy is down? In my opinion, really smart businesses do these things all the time. My business partner is a total non-geek. But he does these things and I think it's part of the reason we've done well over the last 5 years (he runs the money, I run the dev).
Also, the FDIC thing is tough. If you have a business where purchases/payments are coming in from a merchant account daily, I'm not sure how you can keep that account balance under $100K at all times.
This is a Substitute Bill. All of the language of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters etc was replaced completely with the economic bailout language. It's done commonly in the house to expedite legislation because they still have to follow complex rules of parliamentary procedure.
Obviously, Flash on iPhone is in Adobe's interests, and against Apple's interests.
But in terms of consumer interests, is it such a bad thing? There are three posts in favor of Flash on the iPhone here and as of this posting, they have all been downmodded to -1. Assuming they are legit opinions, I don't understand the Flash hate.
In the face of standards, fine. But knowing that the consumer doesn't care about standards, the ability for a Flash application to appear consistent across platforms, which is plain drudgery in HTML now (and given IE6's prevalence, will last for a good while, like it or not), I can see downsides, but it doesn't look overwhelmingly bad.
Or, would you explain the principle argument against it, aside of the standards bit?
I'm not necessarily representing my view. But a view:
Economics is far from a fundamental science. Very far. It is really more of a description of what happens via all sorts of analogies that usually hold true & help to explain the things that we see happening. Some parts of economics are stronger then others because they are based on manipulating tautologies of various sorts. But others are really more along the lines of: 'If we put a dog here, the sheep will go there'.
As with most non fundamental sciences, economics can break down in extreme circumstances. Neuton's Mechanics is not as fundamental as relativity. It breaks down in extreme cases. That only seems strange because physics is very fundamental. But with Zoology, Sociaology, Phsychology or other "downstream" sciences, this is expected. No one's surprised when techniques break down during psychoanalysis of a woman raised by wolves.
Psychology is explained by Biology, explained by chemistry, explained by physics. And each of those words is just really a number of links in this chain in themselves.
Economics is two or three links up that chain. So here's how we go back to the topic:
If a supermarket chain that supplied 85% of food in a region goes out of business, leaving it empty of competitors, what happens? The rules still apply. Consumers seek alternative. Small shops, mail order shopping, markets become very lucrative. Consumers spend more on food or get 'less' for a period. Eventually, a new equilibrium is found.
But what happens if the equivalent food producers go out of business? Wheat doesn't get sown. Coke doesn't get bottled. Sure it's a great opportunity for boutique vegie growers. But the same rules no longer apply. 20% of the food supply means there isn't enough for everyone to eat right. Maybe people sell off Apartments to buy houses with backyards (to grow food). Maybe they take time off work to plant. Maybe things are too volatile for boutique farmers to get investment to grow.
I'm not saying this is a close analogy. I'm certainly not saying the 'bailout' should've happened. If I were American, I'd be as suspicious as SwellJoe of a bill that's called "tax breaks for Peace Corps & stuff" which gives unreal sums to big companies while the salesman-like proponents chants 'This is too complicated for you to understand', 'You need to decide now' & 'Apocalypse is coming so pick mine.' But I am saying that relying on high level economic principles here is not like relying on gravity. Not at all. At best it's like relying on wolves attacking a calf over a bull. It makes sense. It usually happens. But who know what happens to traumatised wolves from a a circus during a thunderstorm.
It is TREMENDOUSLY biased, as Norvig has been in previous elections when he wrote about the topic.
One example: he mentions McCain receiving Fannie Mae money - but, Obama (despite his much shorter stint in the Senate and indeed, politics at the national level) is #2 on the list of those receiving the most money from Fannie Mae (McCain is about # 50 on the list) .
How about people who don't capitalize first letter in the sentence and don't put a dot at the end ? :)