The End Is Near...

For hard disk drives, that is.

The original electronic computers of the late 1940s and early 1950s had hundreds and hundreds of moving parts. The systems I worked on while I was in the U.S. Navy had reduced this to dozens of moving parts – lots of mechanical switches, some relays, cooling blowers (powerful fans), and large hard disks (the size of washing machines) and tape drives (the size of refrigerators) each of which had dozens of motors, actuators, gears, dashpots, capstans, etc.

Once the electronics themselves moved from vacuum tubes to solid state (transistors and integrated circuits), by far the most likely thing to break in a computer was a moving part. In the 1970s, as a data systems tech in the Navy, I spent much of my life cleaning, repairing, lubricating, and adjusting things that moved. The only other common failure was high-voltage solid state electronics, which in those days was still in its infancy. Basically, the fewer moving parts something had, the more reliable it was.

These days, a modern PC generally only has two kinds of moving parts (not counting mouse and keyboard): fans and hard disk drives. Modern direct current fans are very reliable, but they do occasionally still break. Hard disk drives are notorious amongst IT professionals for being the most likely source of problems on a PC. But solid state disk drives have been (a) small, and (b) outrageously expensive.

That's changing, and very quickly. Toshiba is about to introduce a 512GB solid state disk drive – bigger than the hard disk installed on most PCs. It will be pricey – but not outrageously so, and (like all electronic devices) that price will come down rapidly as competitors come on line and production volumes ramp up.

The hard disk is about to become a museum display. I give it 5 years at most, and possibly as little as 2 years.

The only moving part left will be the fan – and as low power electronics get better and better (which they are), the need for these will taper off and eventually disappear altogether...

Security Theater...

Bruce Schneier coined this lovely term (“security theater”) for the actions taken in the name of making us safer, but which actually provide little or no additional safety. The primary value of such actions is political cover, not actual safety. To cite just one of many such examples, Bruce points out that limiting liquids to 4 oz. is completely useless in thwarting a hijacking attempt – any terrorist with an IQ above 50 or so will simply use some other weapon. He repeatedly points out the many ways in which our Department of Homeland Security engages in security theater, irritating a great many American citizens and foreign visitors while accomplishing little to actually make us safer.

Michael Yon, one of my favorite sources for information about the War on Terror, tells the story of a recent encounter with the DHS by one of his friends, a Thai woman named Aew. Here's his conclusion:

When I discovered that she had missed her flight, after about 24 hours of travel thus far, I called immigration at Minneapolis and asked to speak with Officer Knapp. Knapp got on the phone, but this time it was me questioning him. Knapp told me it was legal to read e-mails. I asked for his first name, but he was afraid to give his first name, which was rather strange for someone working within the confines of an airport where everyone has been searched for weapons. Where I work, in a war zone, soldiers give their first and last names and face Taliban and al Qaeda heads up, man to man. I write about al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorist groups who kill thousands of people. My name is Michael Yon. My first name is Michael. Mr. Knapp hides behind a badge bullying a woman whose only activities are Yoga, reading, travel, and telling me what is healthy and unhealthy to eat. Knapp is a face of Homeland Security. How many other officers at Homeland Security bully 90-pound women, but are afraid to give their own names?

Knowing that Homeland Security officers are creating animosity and anxiety at our borders does not make me feel safer. How many truly bad guys slip by while U.S. officers stand in small rooms and pick on little women?

I have just returned from Afghanistan and Iraq on a trip with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and I can assure you that we can do better. We do not have to violate human rights and insult our closest allies to maintain our security.

Meanwhile, Aew had missed two flights; standby seats were full on the second flight, and I was considering flying from Florida to Minneapolis to get her myself. I did not want Aew to have to sleep in the airport overnight.

I had intended to show Aew a bit of my country. But it's taking a little while for her to get over her discomfort at being in America. She was treated better in China. So was I.

Ouch.

Security theater may be popular with the politicians, but it's not real popular with people on the ground. When a security hawk like Michael Yon starts decrying the uselessness and unfairness of a policy, you know there's something wrong with it...

500 Most Common Passwords...

In several different capacities over the years, I've been responsible for corporate IT security. One of the things I did was to test password security, by using the same tools that hackers use to break into password-secured accounts. Most of these tools do the same thing as the first step: they try a relatively short list (usually just a few hundred) of common passwords. I was shocked how often this simple first step worked – a great many people obviously chose the same password.

Now someone has published a list of the 500 most common passwords. My passwords are not on this list. Are yours? If so, you're easy prey for any hacker...

Even More Micrographs...

More fun with the EyeClops! This morning I took the thing outside, and tried imaging a few pieces of Mother Nature. First was a granite rock, at right (100x). It looks basically like some sand under a magnifying glass, with some dirt on it.

Next I tried a moss (below left), one of our chaparral mosses that appear in thick layers on rocks as if by magic just after it rains. Just before the rain it looked like some black dirt on the rock, or even like a thick layer of weathered black paint. Within minutes after it starts raining, it turns bright green. At 100x it looks like your lawn! The two right hand micrographs are lichen, at 200x and 100x. These lichen are pale green, and very common around here on granite rocks.



Finally, I liberated a leaf from a native sage. If you're not familiar with sage, their leaves are pale green and they are ever so slightly “fuzzy”. The left hand micrograph is of the back of the leaf, across its spine, at 100x. The next three are of the front of the leave, at 400x, 200x, and 100x. You can see that the entire surface of the leaf is covered by stubby little hairs, growing in interlocking tufts.

Grunt Pranksters...

Our wonderful U.S. Marines have pulled off a wonderful prank. Read the link below before clicking on it:

http://www.codepinkforpeace.com

Hah!!!

Take that, you detestable pinkers!

Flying Pig Moment...

I rarely link to the Huffington Post; it's the haunt of a stable of liberal/socialist/communist (really!) political writers who rarely say anything I could agree with. Most recently they added Bill Ayers – former Weathermen leader, domestic terrorist – to their lineup (I'm not making this up!). But today I read a story there that definitely qualifies as a flying pig. It's written by Harold Ambler, a musician, writer, and owner of the site Talking About the Weather. He's not an expert on climate, just an interested observer who isn't dependent on grant money. A small sample (but do go read the whole thing, even though it's on the Huffington Post):

Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as "flat-Earthers." This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Indeed, it is Mr. Gore and his brethren who are flat-Earthers. Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. "Their relationship is actually very complicated," he says, "but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer." The word "complicated" here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore's graph. You are probably wondering by now -- and if you are not, you should be -- which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not "complicated." When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998.

I'm certain that at least half the writers at the Huffington Post have orgasmic reactions to the even a whisper of the Goreacle's voice (the other half probably requires visual stimulation, such as a photo of the Goreacle's Hitler-esque speechifying, as well). So why on this earth would the Huffington Post publish this piece by Harold Ambler?

The only reason I can think of is that the Huffington Post folks are trying to provide political cover for Obama and the Democrats to not spend money on mitigating global warming. Their political base has high expectations for serious and incredibly expensive expenditures all based on the notion of anthropomorphic global warming. At this point, to anyone with even 5% of their brain cells functioning, such expenditures are obvious madness – if we're going to spend money, the place to do it is in buttressing the economy, not destroying it with the “green” initiatives demanded by the Goreacle's followers.

If I'm right, this is just one more illustration of the shallowness of the left's ideology.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to know why the Huffington Post (till now a fervent supporter of the Goreacle, brooking no dissent at all) has published this piece...

More Micrographs...

At right is a 100x view of part of one needle from a Noble Fir (our Christmas tree this year). I'm guessing that those white spots are where the waxy and odiferous stuff exudes.

At left is a 100x view of my LCD screen, showing part of a letter ‘e’. If you look carefully, you can see that there are rows and columns. If you look in one row, you can see that each group of three stripes is the same width as the row is high – each of these groups is one pixel. Each pixel contains one red stripe, one green stripe, and one blue stripe. By adjusting the brightnesses of each of these colors, the pixel (viewed at a distance by our naked eye) appears to be a color that is the combination of these three colors (this is the “RGB”, or red/green/blue you may have heard of). To my eye, that ‘e’ appears to be black on a white background – but it sure doesn't look like that in a magnified view!

A Love Story...

Via my mom, the incurable romantic:

A man and a woman who had never met before, and were both married to other people, found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a Trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly..... He in the upper bunk and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, 'Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me asecond blanket? I'm awfully cold'.

'I have a better idea,' she replied. 'Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married.'

'Wow! That's a great idea!' he exclaimed.

'Good,' she replied. 'Get your own damn blanket.'

After a moment of silence, he farted.

Heh!

Quote of the Day...

From Scott Adams (the cartoonist who creates Dilbert):

I'm sure many of you readers are ahead of me on this story. Eventually I realized her head was on the other side of her body, exactly where it belonged. I had been snuggling my face into my dog's ass.

Hah!

Been there, done that...

He's Right, But...

Jonathan Hunt is a reporter for Fox News. Mosab Hassan Yousef (at right) is the son of an imprisoned Hamas leader. Yousef has renounced Islam, converted to Christianity, and is currently living in the San Diego area. He agreed to be interviewed by Fox News, and the whole thing is well worth reading. This quote jumped out at me:

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you believe that Israel can ever strike a peace deal with Hamas?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There is no chance. Is there any chance for fire to co-exist with the water? There is no chance. Hamas can play politics for 10 years, 15 years; but ask any one of Hamas' leaders, 'Okay, what's going to happen after that? Are you just going to live and co-exist with Israel forever?' The answer is going to be no ... unless they want to do something against the Koran. But it's their ideology and they can't just say 'We're not going to do it.' So there is no chance. It's not about Israel, it's not about Hamas: it's about both ideologies. There is no chance.

Yousef is a well-informed Palestinian who says the same thing on this topic that large numbers of Palestinians say. Michael Totten's reports from the area have been most informative on this subject; it's clear that this sentiment is the norm amongst Palestians (and also much more widely, amongst the Muslim world). But Yousef is on the mainstream media, and those other Palestinians are not – so it's interesting to see this notion in the light.

This is the issue that Israel has been living with since the day they were founded, just over 60 years ago. They are completely surrounded by an implacable enemy who openly declares their objective: to wipe Israel off the map, to kill all the Jews.

Yousef is right. There will be no lasting “peace deal” with Hamas, Fatah, or any other organization of Palesistians.

But that is not the same thing as saying there can be no peace. The world has learned this lesson so very many times, and yet still many reject it. Consider: on January 3, 1941 there was no peace deal to be had with the Emperor of Japan, or with Adolf Hitler. And yet now we are at peace with their nations – even more, we count them amongst our close allies. How did this happen? Did we have discussions? Did the U.N. issue an edict? Did we make “proportionate” military responses to their attacks? Did the Secretary of State send a strongly worded letter?

Of course not. We defeated these countries militarily. We used politically sanctioned violence to forcibly take away their ability to harm us. We fought a war in which millions of civilians were killed, along with tens of thousands of American soldiers. We fought with resolve and desperation and a level of violence nearly unimaginable today.

I believe this is the only way to peace in the Middle East – one side must defeat the other, utterly and overwhelmingly. This may well involve large numbers of civilian casualties. But only then will we have peace in the Middle East.

Personally, I'm rooting for the Israelis. I hope they have the balls to finish the job in Gaza – that would make a great start...

Reflections on 2008...

Via my mother:

As I reflect on 2008, I can say we had a great year:

Blacks are happy; Obama was elected.

Whites are happy, OJ is in jail.

Democrats are happy; George Bush is leaving office.

Republicans are happy: Democrats will finally quit saying George Bush stole the election.

And all of us are happy; The election is finally over!

2009 should be even better: Immediately after his inauguration, Obama will balance the budget, revive the economy, solve the real estate problem, solve the auto industry problem, solve our gas/alternative energy problem, stop the fires and mudslides in California, ban hurricanes and tornadoes, stop identity theft, reverse global warming, find Osama, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, get rid of corruption in government and achieve world peace.

Then on the 7th day, He will rest.

Expectations for The One are very high, and the press seems to keep ratcheting them up even higher. Some Democrats are already actively trying to set expectations lower, as they know even The One can't possibly meet them all.

Judging from his Cabinet appointments (about all we've got to go on so far), The One doesn't appear to be all that much of a change from the current Administration – a surprising development indeed. Most of the conservatives and libertarians I've talked with sound more hopeful than the liberals I've talked with, as the latter are in despair over The One's apparent abandonment of liberal objectives such as immediate withdrawal from Iraq, diplomatic engagement with Iran, and a more pro-Palestinian position in the Middle East.

The most hopeful thing I've seen so far is Obama's decision to retain Gates as Secretary of Defense, something I certainly didn't expect after Obama's campaign rhetoric decrying the current prosecution of the war in Iraq...

Respecting Your Neighbor...

Click the cartoon at right to find out how you can be very respectful of your neighbor's right to ban all guns. And protect yourself and your family at the same time...

Via my wife, who shares my own views on the utility of fine weapons and large stocks of quality ammunition. She's perfectly capable of using our Berretta riot gun (a semi-automatic shotgun with a 7 shot magazine), plus she's a fine shot with a .357!

Unbelievable, But True...

Every single night of 2008, over 100 cars were burned – nearly all of them by young Muslim men. Then on New Year's Eve, two nights ago:

PARIS (AFP)--More than 280 people were detained and more than 1,000 cars torched during New Year celebrations across France, mostly in its troubled suburbs, the interior ministry said Thursday.

Four police officials were slightly injured, according to the interior ministry, which said its security forces "were of the unanimous view" that New Year's Eve was "rather calm and without major incident."

The interior ministry had earlier said 445 vehicles were set on fire overnight, but later revised that figure to 1,147.

Can you imagine even the much larger U.S. tolerating such a thing? This is multi-culti at its “finest” – totally ignoring the reality of the situation, and dealing with it by forbidding the press from making accurate reports (they're not allowed to mention that the perpetrators are almost entirely Muslim). The numbers of cars burned each night is incredible – over 40,000 in 2008 – but the French media is not allowed to report this. Still, with that many cars being burned it must be common knowledge there.

I keep getting surprised (though I suppose I shouldn't be) at how many Americans are completely unaware of this front of the radical Islamic war against civilization. A single car burned by radical Muslims in San Diego would be all over the news, and not tolerated – of this I am certain. But I'm not certain how long that will be true, for the party that just came into power routinely holds France up as an example of how we should approach radical Islam...

More EyeClops...

Here are a few more micrographs from the EyeClops. This time I've got four views of the same digit ‘4’ from the CI scale of a top quality slide rule (a Hemmi 269, for you slide rule aficionados). The characters on this slide rule are “engraved” (actually they are hot-stamped into the plastic). From left-to-right, the magnifications are 100x, 200x, and 400x. Click to enlarge.



The slide rule's plastic is actually bright white, and the red doesn't look quite as vivid as it does in these micrographs. I believe these color distortions are due to the LED lighting used on the EyeClops; I'll test that when I get a chance by using sunlight. In any case, I'm still blown away by how good these images are, produced by a cheap toy...

Operating System Shocker...

It's been a while since I last took a look at what operating system my readers are using (your browser reports this information to the blog). The graph at right (click to enlarge) shows the results, but here are the top four:

62% Windows XP
14% Macintosh OS/X
11% Windows NT
09% Windows Vista

The first one is no surprise, except the number seems a little low – virtually every workstation I know of that isn't a Mac is running Windows XP. The Macintosh number just blows me away – Apple is making real inroads amongst my readers, that's for sure! A year or so ago, this number was under 2%. But the biggest surprise for me was Windows NT – who in the world is still using that? At first I thought it must be Windows 2000 being reported as Windows NT, but no, Windows 2000 is separately reported (at 2%). Finally there's Vista, with a pretty sorry showing – Microsoft's 10 year old OS (Windows NT) is still beating out their latest!

Go, Mac!

Why I Rant...

Why do I rant about the lamestream media? Patterico summarizes a year's worth of just the most egregious “reporting” by one of the country's most respected newspapers: the Los Angeles Times. And this is just one of them!

IDF Links...

For those of you following the events in Gaza, here's the IDF's YouTube channel, their web site (English), and their official blog. All of these are being updated frequently...

Jihad 2008...

Bill Roggio has an excellent summary of terrorist activity and status, worldwide. It's exactly the sort of factual reporting I've come to depend on alternative media for, instead of the meaningless blathering the lamestream media calls “reporting”...

EyeClops...

Amazon had a toy on sale just before Christmas, at a price I just couldn't resist – so I bought one. Shipping was free, because I'm an Amazon Prime member. It was so cheap, I figured even if it was a total bust, I'd only have wasted the price of a couple cups of fancy coffee.

The thing is called an EyeClops, and it's a combination microscope/video camera/still camera – and you can upload the results to your computer.

The results exceeded my expectations, by a long shot. Below are three photos I took this afternoon with my new toy. The first one is a digit on a wooden slide rule, at 100x magnification. The second is another digit, at 200x. And the third is the very fine fabric covering my mouse pad, at 400x. Considering the price I paid, I'd call these results absolutely remarkable. Click on the small photos to get a larger view...

What Israel Is Fighting...

In an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post, I learned two things. First:

Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

Aren't those Hamas folks just the warmest and friendliest you've ever heard of?

Makes me think of a cheap way to dispose of a few of our excess nuclear weapons, creating a nice layer of multicolored glass in the process...

Next, there's this:

There is a great deal of ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn't their fault. They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions that they believe advance their goals.

The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.

As far as the West's leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West's leading foreign policy "experts" and decision-makers are concerned, the only true actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on the world stage, is referred to as political "realism."

The "realist" view was given clear expression this week by one of the "realist" clique's most prominent members. In an op-ed published Tuesday in Canada's Globe and Mail titled, "We must talk Iran out of the bomb," Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that given the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the dangers of a US or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations, the incoming Obama administration must hold direct negotiations with the mullahs to convince them to end their nuclear weapons program.

In making this argument, Haass ignores the fact that this has been the Bush administration's policy for the past five years. He also ignores the fact that President George W. Bush adopted this policy at the urging of Haass's "realist" colleagues and at the urging of Haass himself.

Moreover, Haass bizarrely contends that in negotiating with the mullahs, the Obama administration should offer Iran the same package of economic and political payoffs that the Bush administration and the EU have been offering, and Teheran has been rejecting, since 2003.

Even more disturbingly, Haass ignores the fact that Teheran made its greatest leaps forward in its uranium enrichment capabilities while it was engaged in these talks with the West.

Until I read this piece, I didn't know that these knuckleheads were still at it! The author is right – it is just plain bizarre that after repeated failures of discussion and diplomacy to accomplish anything at all, the proponents of more talking call for … more talk.

How does someone with such a miserable track record get to be “prominent” in a field, anyhow?