Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Today’s post by Robert Scoble on the earthquake that rocked China brings out an important distinction about the nature of a distributed messenging service like Twitter. Scoble eulogizes over the speed of information delivery in his post, thrilled that he knew about the earthquake 50 miles from Chengdu three minutes before anyone else did:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. […] Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

While this is a great leap in keeping the world informed about what is going on in any part of it literally at the speed of light, what Twitter does is let you share perception and opinion with the rest of the world. This is different than sharing facts about what is going on. For example, the USGS report which came out three minutes after Chinese citizens began twittering that there was seismic activity, is full of precise details:

Magnitude: 7.9
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 06:28:00 UTC

Location: 31.099°N, 103.279°E
Depth: 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region: EASTERN SICHUAN, CHINA
Distances 90 km (55 miles) WNW of Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Location Uncertainty: horizontal +/- 5.8 km (3.6 miles); depth fixed by location program
Event ID: us2008ryan

If you look at Robert Scoble’s twitter stream, what you get instead is a succession of misinformation, subsequent corrections, noise, predictions of doom, and frenzy:

• 06:37:49 - @dtan just reported an earthquake in Beijing. Wonder how large it is?
• 06:40:50 - @keso reported earthquake too. @dtan said it lasted 10 seconds. I’d guess it’s a 4.5 then.
• 06:41:21 - @michaelrice says it was a 7.8.
• 06:44:14 - @gaberivera says it’s 57 miles from Chengdu, which has 11 million residents.
• 06:57:46 - @jwalkerjr says to hold off on predictions. Well, I need to pass along my experience with earthquakes. This is a HUGE one.
• 07:15:20 - @casperodj just said it felt like the earth was going to split. Literally everything was shaking.
• For more just wade through the mud…

To his credit, you can get an impression of the event, as seen through his and others’ eyes. You can get an idea of the scope, and the impact it has had on people around the world. But, you can’t get trustworthy facts from listen to what the general public is saying in the face of a disaster. A calm rationality is needed that Twitter cannot provide.

Still, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC is holding out hope that Twitter can mature into a real-time news service:

Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Twitter is fast, and it will let you share your experiences, but it will never replace solid journalism and hard facts. What do you think?

Their article on city corruption, Audit Reveals City Employees Stole $21 Million Worth Of Office Supplies, came through my feed reader, but since leaving a comment requires registration, I’ll just do it here instead:

Let’s say it’s 100 cell phones, with each cell phone costing $199. That comes out to $19,900. Now let’s say 100 employees did the same thing. That comes to $190,000. Wow!

By my math, 10^4 * $199 is $1.99M. Sorry, Don Montrey and the Phillyist, this kind of mathematical typo is simply unforgivable. It’s why “journalist” is a term that applies to someone working with editorial oversight to catch and prevent these sorts of stupid errors, and why bloggers simply aren’t there yet.

Sony support doesn’t suck, but having experienced it for the first time, I have to say it’s not as good as Dell’s. It started almost 3 years ago, in the fall of 2005, when I bought a new Sony Vaio FS-790 laptop, and this service plan:

Product: 4 Year Onsite Service Plan plus Accidental Damage Protection for Notebooks
Total Price: $ 439.99

From then till know I’ve had a great, portable, machine with a great screen and decent specs. But, last Friday, after putting the Vaio into standby mode, it just wouldn’t turn on. I noticed that:

• removing RAM from the primary slot would let it boot
• … but the LCD backlight wouldn’t turn on
• … and putting in the battery shut it down immediately

To me, when one RAM slot fails for memory you know is good, it screams a motherboard issue, so I called the Sony support line. That was where I ran into my first hitch, with a conversation like:

Sony: Can we have you service contract id number?
Me: Yes, but I don’t have it, can you look it up?
Sony: Tell us your phone number?
Me: Tells them my current and previous number.
Sony: We can’t find it!!!!!?!?

This went on for about 5 calls spread over two days, until someone was helpful enough to actually find it. I’m not sure what she did differently, since she asked and got from me the same information I’d been giving out previously, but I finally had my service contract number. I was forwarded to Level 2 tech support, put on hold for 20 minutes, and asked about my symptoms, which I described as above. The tech said he’d replace the motherboard and LCD backlight inverter and schedule me to talk to the onsite guy. Three days later, I get a call from the onsite technician, and schedule the appointment for two days hence.

When the technician arrived, he first assessed the state of the laptop, verified that the problems I had been experiencing could be reproduced, and then slowly–over the course of two hours–took the laptop apart and replaced the motherboard and inverter.

The monitor got prints all over it from the Sony repairs

I can live with fingerprints. I cleaned them off, and put in a live CD memory test to make sure the RAM really was ok. Two hours later I come back and see that my RAM passed all the tests (and that my L1 cache runs at 25Gb/s), and noticed that the laptop was extremely hot everywhere, and that the fan wasn’t blowing. Want to guess why?

The fan assembly, lying on the motherboard

Can you see it? Let me help:

Yeah, the fan wasn’t plugged into the motherboard. I had to take out all the screws on the back of it again, just to connect that one little missing bit. To Sony’s credit, their technician, if not meticulous and brilliant, was good-natured and careful. On the other hand, my previous experience with Dell stacks up just a little bit better:

I am happy with Sony; it took a week, but they fixed my notebook. But, they’re just providing what they have to. They’re not actually trying to get a fast, responsive, integrated support experience like Apple or Dell gives. The fact that they outsource their warranties to divers numbers of third party companies is evidence of that. If I had to do the notebook thing again, I would probably be going with Apple, both for their support and for the quality of the macbook line.

Don’t download the Hitman movie with Bittorrent when Apple will give it to you free on iTunes. Just hit “Browse” on the Quick Links on the right side of the main iTunes home page. Then, select “Movies” and “Thriller.” You’ll see the title “Hitman” for free, just 1.1GB away:

You might not want to watch it, Rottentomatoes gave it a 15%.

Hans Reiser was recently convicted for first degree murder for killing his wife in 2006. The six month trial and three days of Jury deliberation reached the guilty verdict primarily based on circumstantial evidence and poor testimony from Hans Reiser:

In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead. By the time prosecutor Paul Hora rested his case February 14, he had called some 60 witnesses, but presented mostly circumstantial evidence demonstrating animus between Reiser and his wife, and suspicious behavior by the defendant following Nina’s disappearance in September, 2006.

The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.

In his 11 days of testimony, Reiser offered lengthy and verbose explanations for every piece of circumstantial evidence. But Reiser’s version of events often drew disbelieving head shakes from jurors — and occasional smirks from the trial judge.

Namesys, who develops the ReiserFS and Reiser4 linux filesystems, is essentially dead after the verdict. The Namesys website is down due to a DNS problem, and a potential private sale of the company found no buyers. Worse, ReiserFS sucks, according to Kerneltrap:

Reiserfs might be suitable for very specific applications, but to use it in production machine, you need to have some guts.

My last reiserfs partition was blown up two days ago, because of a bad sector, plus a fatal oops, looping endlessly. This was the second time, and the last one, as none of my ext3 filesystems *ever* had similar problems, despite numerous other bad sector issues. Not mentioning the funny “recovery” tool, which generally finishes to trash your data.

And in a bit of off-the-mark dark humour, an anonymous Wikipedia editor added a new column to Comparison of file systems:

There are some irregularities surrounding the Hans Reiser trial, namely that “Sean Sturgeon, a one-time friend of Reiser, and alleged ex-lover of Nina, confessed to killing eight other people and leaving a ninth for dead. However, he claims he did not kill Nina. According to preliminary court testimony, Sturgeon dated Nina, but she broke off the relationship in January 2006.”