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December, 2008

Media Watch: Al-Jazeera

Sat, 2008-12-27 18:42 — Konstantin

Al-Jazeera, ever the clarion voice of quality reporting, is outdoing itself today. The Arabic edition of its homepage is basically flashing propaganda headlines rather than actual news.

(The translations below are my own and seem pretty accurate, but please let me know if I've made any mistakes.)

“أكثر من مائتي شهيد بمجزرة غزة وإدانات شعبية ورسمية عربية”

“More than 200 martyrs in the Gaza massacre; popular and official Arab condemnations”

A word on "proportionality"

Sat, 2008-12-27 14:08 — Konstantin

Let's say you have a house, and right beside it, there is a wooded area that was recently infested by rodents, and now has a number of teeming rats' nests. Having menaced the woods' other inhabitants into quiet submission, the rats aggressively move outward, constantly damaging your property, attacking and biting your kids and your pets. Everyone in your family has to get rabies shots regularly, you wake up every morning to find another finger bitten and infected, another piece of furniture chewed, another room besmirched.

So you decide to go after the rats - you enter the woods. You get on your hands and knees, chin at ground level, and go crawling around, facing each rat face to face, trying to scratch it and bite it to death. Meanwhile, your face and hands get mangled and bloody, and your efforts do nothing to keep the rats out of the house.

That would be the "proportionate response."

This sounds like a terrific idea, of course, but only if you're rooting for the rats.

Trayless dining

Sun, 2008-12-14 00:36 — Konstantin

I had the inconvenience of having dinner at Quincy House today, where they've taken the iniative of removing trays from the dining hall. I haven't yet found out whether this is a long-term change, or just something that was happening this weekend, but here's a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of a trayless system:

...

HUDS makes no secret of the fact that the goal is primarily to save money. HUDS' director, Ted Mayer, told the Crimson last month that when there are no trays,

"People take less food. They take less food and they waste less. They’re a bit more conscious of their choice. And it also saves money, and if you save money, you can use it for buying more local or sustainable food."

To be honest, it is quite doubtful that the money saved will go towards buying sustainable food. More likely, it will go towards HUDS' bottom line. 

You don't often see Harvard students gaining weight on the HUDS regimen. So trying to scrimp on the meals that students paid for by encouraging them to take less food than they need for proper nutrition — is just a bit unscrupulous.

Hybrid Sleep in Windows Vista, and why you should turn it off

Tue, 2008-12-02 17:57 — Konstantin

In Windows Vista, there’s a feature called “hybrid sleep.” It works by combining hibernation and standby modes.  When you put your computer into hybrid sleep mode:

  1. the contents of the computer’s memory are copied to disk (hibernate mode)
  2. the computer then goes into a low-power mode that doesn’t let you interact with the computer, but keeps data alive in memory (standby mode)

This has one possible benefit: as long as your computer maintains power, you can quickly resume from standby. If the power dies, you don’t lose data; the computer just resumes from the hibernation file stored on disk, which is slower than wake-up from standby, but theoretically faster than having to boot your computer and restart all your applications.

Here are the downsides: