Interesting book and Chromium on Linux


I've been reading a very educational book I just happened to come across while I was visiting the county library on Lindbergh. It is called "Dear Mr. Buffett" and it is written by an author named Janet Tavakoli. She was originally trained as a chemical engineer (which I, of course, consider a good thing), but she later received a business degree and worked primarily in financial analysis positions at commercial banks for the past 20 years or so. She spells out very precisely how mortgage backed securities, CDO's and credit derivatives work, and how banks have used them to make themselves rich earlier in this decade, and how they are now being rewarded for their earlier greed and reckless promotion of these over leveraged and over rated products by the generous bailout funds from the taxpayers. What a great country we live in when you can not only promote a bad product and profit from it, but if you have friends in the government you can even be rewarded for your misconduct! She also did a great interview on CSPAN where she boils down her explanation in less than an hour. She obviously knows her stuff, but is actually very easy to understand. I especially love the term she likes to use: "financial meth lab".

On a completely unrelated topic, I had earlier mentioned how Codeweavers had a version of Chromium that ran under Linux (using Wine libraries) but it was very outdated. In reality there is a development site for Chromium where you can download the latest build of Chromium and it includes native Windows, Mac and Linux versions of all the latest builds. I tried the latest Linux build (3.0.190.0, #18918) and it seems to run fine so far. Why would anyone run an old version of Chromium using Wine libraries when they could just run the latest development build instead?

Comments

Dan Kegel said…
It's probably better for most
people to run the latest dev
channel build. If you install
it yourself from
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
it will get updated automatically
by your system's normal autoupdate
process (if you're running Ubuntu
or Debian, anyway).

Disclaimer: I'm a chrome developer.
11:34 PM
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