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23 Sep 2010 21:15

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U.S.: Why Facebook broke: A configuration error, a feedback loop

  • Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it.
  • Facebook employee Robert Johnson • Explaining why Facebook was so broken today. Simply put, there was a configuration error so huge that it caused the entire site to fall over itself. It created a feedback loop in a cluster of databases and couldn’t handle the number of requests. All engineers could do to stop it was turn off the site for two and a half hours. That’s right. The entire site. It’s not often that Facebook crashes at all, let alone in the middle of the day on a weekday. That was epic, eh? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Jun 2010 12:33

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U.S.: Alvin Greene case: Why is the filing fee so much, anyway?

  • 1% the percentage of your salary per year set aside for the filing fee in South Carolina
  • $10k the cost of filing for the Senate in South Carolina – the amount Alvin Greene paid
  • $3,480 the cost of filing for the House in South Carolina – less because it’s only two years source
  • » Is this the same everywhere? No. Most states charge a modest (less than $500) fee to get on the ballot. And three states (Arizona, New York and Michigan) don’t even have the fee at all. In fact, only one other state charges as much as South Carolina for their Senate filing fee – Florida, which charges 6 percent of the first year’s salary.
  • » A way out for Alvin: Pretty much because the Democrats think he’s in over his head, they’re willing to give him back his fee if he really wants to quit. And based on horribly uncomfortable interviews like this one, we can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to quit.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Apr 2010 15:00

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Tech: Blippy folks on credit card leak: No, really, it’s not that bad, guys

  • While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for the 4 people who were affected (to whom we apologize and are contacting), and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks at first glance.
  • A message from Blippy • Attempting to do damage control after it turned out some credit card numbers leaked. They claim just four cards were exposed through a Google search that looked fairly scary and got spread just about everywhere. The company better hope that’s the case – it just went through a venture capital round and doesn’t need this level of controversy right now. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 Mar 2010 12:31

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U.S.: Neat: Everyone in the U.S. could neatly fit into New Hampshire

  • So, if we all lived somewhere with the density of Brooklyn (which is packed, but comfortable), we could all fit into New Hampshire. How cool is that, kids? Kudos to Shane Keaney, who designed this clever graphic as part of a Good Magazine contest. Sadly, some of the graphics are a little messy compared to Shane’s, which does a great job of explaining a very detailed concept in incredibly simple terms. Great job, dude. If we had money, we’d give you a job blogging for us or something. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

27 Feb 2010 12:50

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World: Here comes the science: How tsunamis work

  • National Geographic’s explainer on what tsunamis are (two-word description: giant waves) seems like a fitting thing to pull out of the bag right now.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Dec 2009 19:06

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Biz: The decline in unemployment, tempered by a depressing cartoon

  • Dear Mint.com: Thanks for accurately depressing the heck out of us. It’s a good explanation as to why the 10% unemployment rate sounds good, but is really not telling the whole story. We hope they didn’t create this whole thing today. Click the link to see the corresponding graphic. Whoever does their graphics is awesome, BTW. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

25 Oct 2009 14:34

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U.S.: The coolest, most awesome political graphic you’ll see all week

leftvsright1025
  • This is one of thoseincredibly awesome graphics that makes us warm and fuzzy inside. It’s impartial, smart, fun to read, and downright awesome in execution. It’s so awesome that it comes in two versions – the U.S. version (above) and a world version which flips the red and blue, much like the U.S. flips the metric system on its head. Information is Beautiful did a beautiful job on this information breakdown. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 5 Comments • Permalink
 

16 Sep 2009 10:32

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U.S.: More on the health care bill to end all health care bills

  • For the uninsured The uninsured will be offered a lower barrier to medicaid – 133% of the poverty line. For those between 100% and 300% of the poverty line, subsidies will be available. Between 300%-400%, premiums are capped at 13% – a little high, but still cheaper than right now.
  • Paying for it The bill, which requires all families to have insurance (or pay a $3,800 fine), asks for employers to defray costs of government subsidies. High-end insurance plans would also be taxed at 35%, and players in the medical industry would help pick up part of the bill.
  • What’s missing?The big one: There’s no public option. Instead, it relies on nongovernmental consumer cooperatives. Also, Republicans dislike the way cost has been handled and say issues related to abortion and illegal immigration have not been quashed in this bill. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

15 Jul 2009 14:40

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Politics, U.S.: Gee, House Republicans, when you explain health care like this …

healthcare0716
  • Wow. Where to start, where to start … We are not going to blame the Democrats for coming up with a complex, bureaucracy-filled health care plan. NO. We’re going to blame the Republicans for coming up with the most complicated, noise filled graphic possible to explain their point. You can make anything seem like the scariest thing ever when you make it look like this. Gray background? Not necessary. Loud, garish colors? Even less so. This is politics through bad design. (Grab the full PDF to get an idea.) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 20 Comments • Permalink

08 Jul 2009 23:25

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Tech, U.S.: That DOS attack may not have come from North Korea after all

  • This is not something that your average ‘script kitty’ can do. On the other hand it doesn’t require it to be state-sponsored.
  • Security expert Mark Rasch • Who’s currently of SecureITExperts and led the Department of Justice’s computer crimes unit during the George H.W. Bush administration. Rasch raised doubts over whether it was a definite slam dunk that these attacks, which hit major financial, government and media sites in the U.S., came from a North Korean source. At this time, we’d like to point your attention to this Wired article from back in the day about the Estonian denial of service attacks. This graphic in particular provides some good explanation about what’s happening now. • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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