climenole’s posterous

« Matbe.com, c’est fini. La crise actuelle, au départ financière, a touché de nombreux secteurs de l’économie. Il en a résulté des comportements de prudence tant au niveau des consommateurs qu’au niveau des annonceurs. Vous n’êtes pas sans ignorer que la presse, papier et en ligne, souffre particulièrement de cette situation. D’autant plus de notre côté puisque nous vous proposons gratuitement des informations et des tests, nos seules sources de revenus étant la publicité et le comparateur de prix. Pas de panique cependant, soyez rassurés, nous ne cessons pas nos activités mais procédons à une réorganisation de nos équipes. Nous avons en effet décidé de fusionner Matbe.com et PCWorld.fr ...»

Ouf... au moins ce n'est pas une disparition complète mais, disons, une fusion et un renouvellement. À suivre et bon succès pour le nouveau site.
:)

It goes without saying that nobody wants to be in the hospital. Bland food, no privacy, and gowns that leave nothing to the imagination — not to mention the procedures being performed — don't exactly make ones visit a relaxing trip to the spa. We all know, however, that Linux can make anything better, and now, whether you're recovering from a lung transplant or liposuction, Linux is there to make your life in the infirmary just a little bit sunnier.

How exactly is Linux livening up the land of the sponge bath?

Jacqui Cheng wrote: « When you delete embarrassing photos from sites like MySpace and Facebook, they don't disappear immediately. In fact, more than a month after we deleted two test images from the sites, they are still accessible to the world. »

(PhysOrg.com) -- Despite recent declines in cigarette use in the U.S., nicotine dependence has remained steady among adults and has actually increased among some groups. The finding by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health suggests that public health initiatives have been far more successful in preventing Americans from taking up smoking than in persuading hard-core smokers to stop. The study is available online in the American Journal of Public Health and will be published in the August 2009 issue.

Nota bene: «The new study finds not only that the number of nicotine-addicted Americans has held steady over the past several decades, but also that the proportion of cigarette smokers who are addicted to nicotine nowadays is greater than in previous generations. Dr. Goodwin cites a possible explanation for this latter finding. She suggests that fewer people are taking up smoking, perhaps because of anti-cigarette campaigns, leaving the ranks of current smokers filled with the nicotine dependent.» ...

Lee Mayhews remarks: «With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 and developments like Moblin and HP's MIE creating quite stir, plenty of people were saying that 2009 would be 'the year of Linux on the desktop.' Not that the statement hasn't been made before, but there appeared to be some real momentum this time around.» ...

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

In a longer explanation posted later by the App Engine team, the problem was apparently due to an issue with GFS (the Google File System) in one of App Engine’s datacenters. This in turn broke Bigtable, which App Engine’s Datastore depends on and also caused the application serving problems (in plain English: causing actual application downtime, not just slowdown).

As the article mention: «Whenever something like this happens, it clearly reveals one of the big drawbacks with cloud computing: Cloud computing services become the single point of failure for all applications depending on that service. Therefore any service downtime will have a wide impact.

From many companies’ perspective another drawback is also relying on an external service for something that may be business critical, but that is a discussion for another day. » ...

Cloud computing, eh? ;)

I sometimes feel I'm fighting a one man war for balanced reporting. If a company does something good, I will praise them. If they screw up, I will point it out, often using harsh language.

What I will not do is automatically praise everything company A does and diss everything produced by company B. Microsoft screws up, Mozilla screws up, Intel screws up, AMD screws up.

What I find unacceptable is that a sizeable number of people with the bare-faced cheek to call themselves journalists have ignored the fact that Mozilla has just released a pile of crap on an unsuspecting world.

[...]

The question these writers need to answer is this: Are you journalists or fanboys?

You can't be both. Not in my world.

Journalists OR Fanboys: that's the question! An excellent article of Andrew Thomas I recommend you to read. It's about the respect of the FACTS which are far more important than ANY believers and "evangelists" gossips.

« Saviez-vous que vous êtes en mesure de repérer et d’identifier des gens infectés par la C’est difficile ? Eh oui, c’est possible ! En fait, il existe sept grands types de comportement ou traits de caractère qui nous permettent de savoir si une personne est infectée ou non.

Par contre, je dois vous préciser que cette petite grille d’analyse peut également vous permettre de savoir si vous êtes vous-même infecté. Ce que vous devez prendre en considération, c’est que nul n’est à l’abri de l’infection par la C’est difficile, et que vous devez prendre tous les moyens à votre disposition pour l’éradiquer. Il va sans dire que la chose n’est pas toujours facile, car la C’est difficile est avant tout une maladie sociale, et qu’elle a même érigé en système la médiocrité » ...

« Anyone who has spent any time simply browsing the Internet for interesting things to read quickly realizes that while the Internet is certainly filled with interesting and fascinating websites covering all sorts of useful topics, it’s also overrun by countless rotten websites that promote things like racial hatred, anti-semitism and even encourages fanatical censorship.

Sound hard to believe? » ...

« The mainstream news industry dug itself this hole by not staying smart, humble, hungry and focused, and now it blames the geeks.

Some of the incurious double-digit-IQ nonsense I've heard in the newsrooms of old-line mainstream publications would make the average geek bite a mousepad in half. Frankly, a lot of people with journalism degrees are the last people who ought to become journalists. »

This is one of the best article I ever read about these issues. Worth to read and to keep as reference.

:)