tdmackey's comments

tdmackey | 14 years ago | on: Oregon Blogger Isn't a Journalist, Court Imposes $2.5M Judgement

By representing herself and appearing largely ignorant to the law she not only lost the case but essentially made it so that the judge could rule no other way. Ignoring the sensationalist article and looking closer at the actual trial documents as linked http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/obsidian-finance-group-v-... You can see that in many of her responses instead of trying to make a legal argument she just rants about how much she hates the plaintiffs and thinks they are idiots and states things like "This connection is further reason as to why Defendant [sic] Crystal L. Cox Feels [sic] that Kevin Padrick of Obsidian Finance is involved in a plot to kill her."

In addition, she replies to the platiniff "So I want to Let you know and Obsidian Finance that I am now offering PR Services and Search Engine Management Services starting at $2500 a month to promote Law Firms... Finance Companies.. and to protect online reputations and promote businesses.." Which the legal firm didn't take kindly to, "It could hardly be clearer that Ms. Cox is attempting to use her outrageous and utterly false payments about plantiffs as leverage to extort a payment from them."

Also, she ignored a deposition in Montana for which the plaintiffs are requesting the court place sanctions on her which if she didn't would also have made it trivial to move the case to another district court where some weird wording in the Oregon shield law wouldn't have mattered.

The Judge probably wanted to hang himself after reading her motions.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

It's not from a dc to the speedtest node; its from the campus. It wouldn't matter anyway. I work at Cisco and I have gigabit link to the core from my laptop. Problem is the speedtest nodes can't push the traffic fast enough to fill the pipe which is something I regularly do when working with campuses in MA and NC.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Copy-on-write B-tree finally beaten.

Part of my job is working on a in-kernel key/value store for a data center network operating system. The problem it is the context switching between user and kernel space kills your performance if you're targeting sub-millisecond read/writes. That may not matter for something like acunu when you factor in network latency but when you're using the database as part of the packet path it does. In addition, under a high system load your user space process has a high likelihood of getting scheduled out at the ioctl call which makes latency even worse. Although being in the kernel allows you a little leeway in terms durability constraints and all that because if you screw up the entire system comes crashing down anyway.

It will never be in the mainline kernel. Also, although I haven't actually looked at what they did yet, I assume they're just loading a regular old kernel module instead of actually really messing with a lot of the mainline code.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Skip Lists are Fascinating

They are very interesting but in practice often preform poorly due to the cpu not being able to figure out what to cache.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Is employer-based health insurance a barrier to entrepreneurship?

Dont have immediate access to the paper. I agree it is a hurdle to overcome, but I don't really know how many startups ultimately don't get started or fail because of it especially if you look at the number of startups and entrepreneurs consistently popping up in the US compared to some countries where the government provides universal healthcare.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Apple Reports First Quarter Results

That's the idea of buybacks but there's no guarantee it will result in an increased share price. Take Cisco for example, by the end of this year they will have made around $82 Billion in buybacks while their stock has remained flat over the past 10 years.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Why did Microsoft invest so much in F#?

F# is used in quite a number of firms, especially in the Chicago area I am aware of a handful of companies. Initially it was used just for prototyping/modeling type stuff, but more and more it is seeing the light of day in production. It will never see the adoption scale of Java/C# but that isn't the point or the goal.

It makes sense as well if you follow the history of most of these trading firms. Most of them started out just manipulating excel spreadsheets. Then brought in vb macros and such and then from there some diverge into java or go straight to some functional programming solution like ocaml with jane street, but others stay tied to msft with C#. Then F# comes along and allows intelligent developers at these msft firms to express themselves more clearly when dealing with the type of math problems they are solving.

If the firm is using C# I am almost certain that F# is in the mix there as well.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: NoSQL Is for the Birds

At the same time though, you're saying you failed solely because you used HBase? Sure twitter's architecture evolved out of necessity but starting out with some NoSQL solution doesn't automatically set you up for failure.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Peter Thiel: $100k grant to 20 founders who drop out of school

It will be interesting to see what comes of these grants.

I feel that the companies that were successful when their founders dropped out of school were driven by a founder who believed so intently and was committed to his idea that he was willing to drop out and pursue it despite the lack of incentive to do so. Instead of the alternative where a halfway decent guy who just isn't that happy at school goes off to pursue some startup because someone gave him a decent amount of money which i suspect will end in failure almost all the time.

tdmackey | 15 years ago | on: Sony beat the Apple TV without Google TV

This sounds like he is the kind of guy who in less than a year will be writing about how he wished he owned one and will be first in line for the next revision later blogging about how awesome it is.
page 1