To be honest Putin is correct, it are outside factors that are contributing to the decline. For example the US has drastically increased oil production the last few years[1] in order to drop oil prices. Around the end of 2011 oil production really went up, and tensions began to form between the countries. My guess is the US saw the approaching re-election[2] of Putin as a bad move and decided to take action.
Of course I'm not pointing fingers or blaming any side, it's just strange to see history is repeating itself all over again. The news about the NASA budget increase was no surprise for me anyway...
I don't think the US increased oil production to decrease oil prices. It has had a very successful increase in shale gas production due to new technologies. This has affected the oil prices, and Saudi Arabia in turn isn't liking the competition, so it has massively increased its oil production as a matter of policy. This will eliminate a lot of new, marginally profitable energy producers, across the globe, including Russia. Once they've collapsed, expect the taps to close again. I think the current situation is more of a happy accident for US Foreign Policy. A lot of American producers will be burnt by the current price of oil as well.
Saudi Arabia hasn't increased production, but they also haven't decreased production. Within OPEC, the Saudis are supposed to be the swing producer, adjusting their output up and down to maintain price targets. That arrangement has largely broken down as it relied on the other members to respect their quotas. OPEC has found (many times) that when prices drop too far, their members ignore the quotas and feud for marketshare instead.
The Saudis used to keep to their role as swing producer but this time they're letting the rest of OPEC sweat. They've got currency reserves to weather this storm but most of the other OPEC members do not (save for the rich Gulf emirates). The Saudis are trying to teach the rest of OPEC a lesson and bring them back in line.
Couple that with the phenomenal increase in American oil and gas output due to fracking and horizontal drilling and you've got a situation in which two major producers, the US and Saudi Arabia, are flooding the market. Since there's no central authority over American producers, they'll drill whenever the market price will sustain their project. America is unique in that mineral resources are privately held rather than owned by the state, giving private enterprise the incentive to drill as much as possible until the price renders a given well uneconomical.
The end result is that the Saudis have abdicated their role (not for the first time, but this may be the last) and the Americans have picked up.
America is now the world's swing producer. No one saw that coming.
In fairness, USA oil production doesn't have the same sort of "tuning knob" that Saudi or even Russian oil production has. It isn't that government officials play no role, since they can delay permits or employ similar bureaucratic inertia (EDIT: and the bureaucrats in question consider many other values, like the environment, to be more important than international economic strategy), but mostly it's private investors who decide where and how much they will drill. I've heard speculation that the Saudis are currently attempting to burn those private investors and will cut back production after they've been chased from the market. If USA production costs are lower than those in Russia or elsewhere, however, it might be other producers who end up getting chased.
The increase in US oil production and the resulting price drop has been the result of new discoveries and technology breakthroughs related to shale and fracking, not due to any overt intention by the US government. To suggest otherwise is to imply that US oil companies were deliberately holding back on potential profits by not pumping at full production prior to 2011, which in my opinion is harder to believe (Occam?) than the coincidence of the production increase's effects on US foreign interests.
To suggest otherwise is to imply that US oil companies were deliberately holding back on potential profits by not pumping at full production prior to 2011
Most wells don't run at full capacity, and absolutely alter draw speeds to maximize the life and economics of a well. With the drop in prices many large energy companies with the ability to weather these drops in price will of course turn down the taps, reserving the limited holds of their wells for when the price returns. If you have n barrels of oil in your well, and you're certain the price will return to North of $100, might as well save them for then.
new discoveries and technology breakthroughs related to shale and fracking
Fracking is natural gas. On the shale side, it's worth noting that we've known about shale and how to extract it for many, many decades. The only reason it came into the forefront is that the price of oil on the global market finally made it economical -- shale oil is estimated to cost from $25 - $95 per barrel to extract and process. So the paradox is that the collapse of the world price puts a serious wrench in the shale oil production, which purportedly is the reason for the price of oil.
Most wells don't run at full capacity, and absolutely alter draw speeds to maximize the life and economics of a well.
This is correct, but only to a point. Many producers still lease land for limited timeframes (some of them do have "until we are done" clauses, but this is not the norm in Eagle Ford). If your lease has two years left and you don't expect the price to rebound for 18 months, it's still in your interest to produce NOW, since horizontal drilling (far more expensive than the fracking) is a capital cost you've already paid that you need return on.
The US government doesn't really have the authority to set export levels the way OPEC does. Our exports are up because we have so much shale gas. Obama already nixed Keystone XL and now Gov Cuomo has just banned fracking in NY state. The headwinds are against continued increase in output.
> The headwinds are against continued increase in output.
I don't think that follows. For one, Keystone isn't necessary, the industry will just continue doing what it's been doing: trucking the oil from wells to existing pipelines. Keystone is less expensive and more environmentally friendly but not necessary.
While NY banned fracking, other states have seen their opposition movements collapse, like Colorado, where Rep. Polis' petition was withdrawn and a key senator was defeated (Udall), ostensibly due to his opposition to increased production.
> To be honest Putin is correct, it are outside factors that are contributing to the decline.
Sure, but the proximate cause of the ruble collapse is the state-backed Rosneft bond offering expanding the money supply to avoid a bankruptcy. (It's a bailout tactic for one of Putin's top cronies).
The problem with sanctions and manipulation of the oil prices by the US is that while trying to get rid of Putin, they're hurting average Russians, not Putin. And something tells me they know it very well.
In a game between politicians, average people are the real losers.
To some extent, and based on traditional views of sanctions (I won't get into whether they actually work or not), the point of sanctions is to hurt the average people. Economic and political elites in Russia are still going to have lots of money and access to luxury goods, it's difficult to stop that behavior (especially in a kleptocracy/dictatorship like Russia). But if you hurt the people, the theory goes, then they will get mad at their leaders and demand a change in leadership, thus hopefully leading to a new administration with new policies.
Well, the theory has not gone well at Cuba or Iran. If you hurt the people, the leaders will tell them that it's US fault, and the people will get mad at the US, because the leaders control the media and can convince the people of whatever they want. I cannot imagine that in Rusia is going to be any different.
>My guess is the US saw the approaching re-election[2] of Putin as a bad move and decided to take action.
US energy independence is unrelated to Russia. The entire Russian economy could go down the toilet and the world would hardly notice. Short of starting a nuclear war Russia is irrelevant at this point. They will have to get along with Europe at some point but a whole generation is now lost.
I'm not saying this is because of energy independence.
It's just that the best way to put pressure on a country like Russia, is by affecting the GDP. Unfortunately for Russia this has proven pretty easy since a big chunk of the GDP comes from oil and gas.
Well, it's possible if you're somewhat interested in linux in general.
I'm a webdeveloper, mainly doing php, and I found a use case for php-fpm and systemd thanks to a blogpost of a friend. Its php-fpm pools ondemand, if you're interested I've written a blogpost about it here: http://thanatos.be/2014/04/12/php-fpm-ondemand.html
I guess It all depends on what your goal is or what you like achieving with your code, but imho systemd has some nice features for developers (and doing fun stuff in general). Also have a look at Joey Hess his blogpost about his systemd alarmclock: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_usin...
I had the same moral objections as you and I've been using btsync (http://www.bittorrent.com/sync) and must admit it works great. My archive is not that big tough, ymmv.
To be honest I won't use dropbox again, even if Rice quits, since btsync is vastly superior for my use cases.
Well, pointing out what is wrong with systemd proves to be very easy for some people, but fixing the issues pointed out or even start building something different that doesn't have these flaws and still can innovate, is quite another story. There is definitely a lot of hate towards systemd (ignore the justified or not argument), but a complete lack of equally innovative alternatives.
Imho this is the semi-religious 'vim vs emacs' debate all over again, except this time it's not between equally good pieces of software but a 'systemd is garbage' group against the rest...
Aah, Ralph Brown's interrupt list, that takes me back a long time. I used to write assembler quite a lot when I was ~14year old. Now I'm a webdeveloper mainly doing php and some basic sysadmin stuff and it strikes me how far apart those things are. Assembler needs a different mindset and it's quite hard to get into it again.
The people at Google are really pushing for broad adoption of G+. If you think about it, it's pretty logical as they know Facebook is only going downhill and they are trying to get everybody onboard. The reaction I'm hearing a lot however, is they are being too pushy.
I've even had a few people who accidentally signed up for a G+ account ask me how to delete it because they kept receiving 'Top X posts on G+' mails without knowing what it is. I don't think a lot of good things come with this kind of tactic.
Too bad the author makes it sound like digitalocean has severe problems while his setup was clearly flawed. The really sad part is that this kind problem will unfortunately only grow as vps systems become cheaper and cheaper. People with less knowledge will set up their own stack and not think of the consequences... I wonder what hosting providers will come up with to tackle this problem.
My setup was clearly flawed and I acknowledged that in the message. Their system /does/ have serious problems though since someone is likely intercepting their password reset emails or else accessing their root password database which shouldn't even exist. I'd say those are real problems regardless of the poor config of the machine (which I readily accept my mea culpas for).
Well, to be honest, every setup has serious problems, it just depends how far you want it to go. 100% Secure doesn't exist and while it may look like bad service from your point of view, truth is I've seen other vps solutions do the same thing. The issue here is that people with experience in system administration change the default password and set up key based authentication and try not to rely on password management from others. It's a shame your box got hacked, but immediately jumping to the conclusion the whole of digitalocean has a root exploit in the wild is a bit much imho...
Was fail2ban even working? After a reformat, did you install fail2ban manually, or from a repo? Are you using syslog or rsyslog? Each's log format is slightly different, meaning you have to edit the filter to accomodate. The base install filter didn't even work correctly for me on a fresh CentOS re-image. Also, the latest version on the website is v0.8.7.1, but on CentOS epel it's v0.8.4.
Yes, a led that lights up does sound pretty suspicious to you and me, but if you don't know anything about computers and you see it on all the time it becomes natural. The same phenomena as clicking 'yes' and 'ok' buttons without reading anything.
I'm sticking with firefox for most of the same reasons as the author notes, but I do wish the mozilla team used some common sense when they think of new features.
A good example of the lack of common sense (imho) is the addon bar. Why do I want an extra bar with 2 or 3 icons? Most people will probably remember the status bar in browsers and they ditched that because it was not needed and you lost valuable screen estate. What was the best solution mozilla could come up with to handle the extension icons? An extra bar in the bottom of your browser. Just implement an omnibar already and put those things there...
If anyone from mozilla is reading this: you've done a great (GREAT!) job at making firefox faster and use less memory, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood I'll buy you a beer. Now please also start thinking about those little things that just don't make any sense.
It might not be useful for you, but I for one find the "addon bar" really great. I've about 10 addons installed and configured most of them to be at the bottom, all in a single place. You can toggle it with "CTRL + /" at anytime, which pleases both parties.
If you customize toolsbars (on Mac, View > Toolbars > Customize..., similar on Linux and, I assume, Windows) you can move all (most?) of those icons to the addressbar. I think this is going to be the new default in the upcoming new Firefox theme (see <https://people.mozilla.com/~bwinton/australis/customization/...).
Of course I'm not pointing fingers or blaming any side, it's just strange to see history is repeating itself all over again. The news about the NASA budget increase was no surprise for me anyway...
[1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MC... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia–United_States_relations#...