Friday, March 15, 2013
Mystery Malware “Warhead”...
The Trojan named “Gauss” has a mysterious encrypted warhead whose purpose has not yet been deciphered. But security folks think it's likely something awesome – the cyber-spying equivalent of a nuke...
Non-Transitive Dice...
With ordinary cubic (six-sided) dice, each side has a different number of dots on it, from 1 to 6. If you roll two ordinary dice in competition, over the long term the two dice will be exactly tied.
But it is possible to construct dice with other numbers on them. For example, imagine three dice with numbers as follows:
Die A: 1:1:1:1:1:1
Die B: 2:2:2:2:2:2
Die C: 3:3:3:3:3:3
Now these would certainly be boring dice to play with! But consider this: if the dice A & B were competing, B would always win. If dice B & C were competing, C would always win. If dice A & C were competing, C would always win. These dice exhibit transitive behavior: B beats A, and C beats B, therefore C beats A.
Now consider this set of dice:
Die A: 3:3:3:3:3:6
Die B: 2:2:2:5:5:5
Die C: 1:4:4:4:4:4
In this case, A will beat B, and B will beat C. You might say to yourself “Therefore A will beat C” – but if you did, you would be wrong, because C will beat A!
Read all about this and other interesting properties of Grimes' Dice...
But it is possible to construct dice with other numbers on them. For example, imagine three dice with numbers as follows:
Die A: 1:1:1:1:1:1
Die B: 2:2:2:2:2:2
Die C: 3:3:3:3:3:3
Now these would certainly be boring dice to play with! But consider this: if the dice A & B were competing, B would always win. If dice B & C were competing, C would always win. If dice A & C were competing, C would always win. These dice exhibit transitive behavior: B beats A, and C beats B, therefore C beats A.
Now consider this set of dice:
Die A: 3:3:3:3:3:6
Die B: 2:2:2:5:5:5
Die C: 1:4:4:4:4:4
In this case, A will beat B, and B will beat C. You might say to yourself “Therefore A will beat C” – but if you did, you would be wrong, because C will beat A!
Read all about this and other interesting properties of Grimes' Dice...
Vannevar Bush's “Memex”...
Some historians credit Bush's Memex as the original idea that spawned the Internet's World Wide Web, and other computerized knowledge bases...
Kiiking...
Estonia has several interesting sports that either originated there, or were popularized there. Kiiking, for example (watch video below). Or wife carrying. Or sauna rallying. Or beer swilling. I could go on...
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Singing the MacBook Pro Blues...
Update:
Fixed (at least with initial tests). Apple has released an update that appears to fix the problem. It was a firmware issue in the System Management Controller (SMC).
Original Post:
Late last year, I purchased a shiny new 15" Retina MacBook Pro for my own personal use. I love this machine! It's very small and light, but has plenty of RAM, storage, CPU power, and battery life. It also connects (with just two cables, including power, thanks to Thunderbolt) to a suite of peripherals that would be part of a programmer's high-end desktop machine. It's a thing of geekly beauty.
But it has a flaw.
The MacBook Pros are usually completely silent, but it has somewhat noisy fans that will kick on when things get too warm internally. I've been using MacBook Pros for almost six years, and I'm very familiar with this phenomenon. In all my prior experience, the fans kicking in – especially if they kick in at high speed – has always meant the same thing: the CPU is working really hard, so the CPU chip got hot.
Not this time.
Debbie (who works in the same small office that I do) have often noticed the fans kicking up at very surprising times. Every single time that I've checked the CPU is almost unloaded, and the CPU temperature is near room temperature. I had no idea why the fans were kicking on.
Yesterday, out of idle curiosity, I googled the issue and immediately found this very active thread.
Oh, my.
I am not alone – lots of people are having this exact issue. Furthermore, one enterprising fellow found a completely repeatable diagnostic: if you play a particular song on iTunes, at about 2 minutes into the song the fans will kick up high, then drop slightly, then kick up high again and stay there.
So of course I ran this diagnostic on my machine. It matched the above observations precisely. How weird!
But it gets even better. With enough people reporting, a pattern becomes clear: only MacBook Pros made after late 2012 and equipped with a SanDisk SSD are having this problem. Those with a Samsung SSD do not.
As usual with any open forum on the Internet, the posters are a mixture of certifiably insane, over-the-top inflammatory, sensible, despondent, smart, idiotic, and amusing. Apple's response so far is distinctly unimpressive and very disappointing.
Here's hoping Apple gets their act together and fixes the problem, or otherwise makes it right...
Fixed (at least with initial tests). Apple has released an update that appears to fix the problem. It was a firmware issue in the System Management Controller (SMC).
Original Post:
Late last year, I purchased a shiny new 15" Retina MacBook Pro for my own personal use. I love this machine! It's very small and light, but has plenty of RAM, storage, CPU power, and battery life. It also connects (with just two cables, including power, thanks to Thunderbolt) to a suite of peripherals that would be part of a programmer's high-end desktop machine. It's a thing of geekly beauty.
But it has a flaw.
The MacBook Pros are usually completely silent, but it has somewhat noisy fans that will kick on when things get too warm internally. I've been using MacBook Pros for almost six years, and I'm very familiar with this phenomenon. In all my prior experience, the fans kicking in – especially if they kick in at high speed – has always meant the same thing: the CPU is working really hard, so the CPU chip got hot.
Not this time.
Debbie (who works in the same small office that I do) have often noticed the fans kicking up at very surprising times. Every single time that I've checked the CPU is almost unloaded, and the CPU temperature is near room temperature. I had no idea why the fans were kicking on.
Yesterday, out of idle curiosity, I googled the issue and immediately found this very active thread.
Oh, my.
I am not alone – lots of people are having this exact issue. Furthermore, one enterprising fellow found a completely repeatable diagnostic: if you play a particular song on iTunes, at about 2 minutes into the song the fans will kick up high, then drop slightly, then kick up high again and stay there.
So of course I ran this diagnostic on my machine. It matched the above observations precisely. How weird!
But it gets even better. With enough people reporting, a pattern becomes clear: only MacBook Pros made after late 2012 and equipped with a SanDisk SSD are having this problem. Those with a Samsung SSD do not.
As usual with any open forum on the Internet, the posters are a mixture of certifiably insane, over-the-top inflammatory, sensible, despondent, smart, idiotic, and amusing. Apple's response so far is distinctly unimpressive and very disappointing.
Here's hoping Apple gets their act together and fixes the problem, or otherwise makes it right...
Climategate 3.0...
Mr. FOIA (pseudonym of the person who released the original Climategate data dump) has dropped the other shoe – he (or she?) has released the password to the mysterious encrypted file included in the original Climategate dump. There has been much speculation about what's in the file; now we're all going to know. The password was released only to a group of people whom Mr. FOIA judged to be appropriate, for reasons only he (or she) knows. Here are some posts from various and sundry folks on the topic.
Anthony Watts
James Delingpole
Bishop Hill
Steve McIntyre
Jo Nova
The next few weeks ought to be interesting...
Anthony Watts
James Delingpole
Bishop Hill
Steve McIntyre
Jo Nova
The next few weeks ought to be interesting...
Education...
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've heard me railing about the poor quality of our public education system. If this topic is of interest to you, you need to read Sarah Hoyt's story. Just go read it...
Rachel Takes Bloomberg to the Woodshed...
Ah, Rachel. She's not happy about Bloomberg's nanny-state silliness. Here's the beginning of her (patent pending) rant:
...The point is that you can’t demand we see you as a grown adult if you’re perfectly happy for low-IQ, power-hungry bureaucrats to tell you what to do, to help you protect you from yourself as though you are a 3-year-old who just shit himself and needs to run to the potty to change his Pull-Ups.You most definitely want to go read the whole thing...
Some questions you might want to let roll around in your mind between trips to the bathroom:
If the government is right to limit the size of certain sugary soft drinks that you may purchase – for your own good – why is it not right to limit the total amount of food you may purchase? Please be specific in your answer. Eating too much leads to obesity and its harmful effects just as well as drinking 20 ounces of Pepsi. Surely, then, you support a prohibition against consuming more than survival-level calories per day...
Chinese Traders in Africa...in the 1400s...
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Primo on Politics...
Rachel Lucas' new dog Primo comments on politics:
Rachel calls this “mellow” – I say “cogent commentary” :)
Rachel calls this “mellow” – I say “cogent commentary” :)
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do...
This article about breaking up with an old car instantly resonated with Debbie and I. We recently traded in our old '96 LandCruiser – which we named “Siggy” (after the “8SIGMAS” on its plate). So many wonderful memories in that car; so many hours of companionship provided...
How's That War on Drugs Going?
The green line shows what we're spending, per capita, on the war on drugs. The blue line shows the drug use, per capita, over the same period. Chart is by Matt Groff.
What a stunning success!
Yes, that was tongue-in-cheek. Sure wish we hadn't wasted those billions of dollars...
What a stunning success!
Yes, that was tongue-in-cheek. Sure wish we hadn't wasted those billions of dollars...
Curiosity: Life-Friendly Environment on Mars...
Curiosity has finished analyzing the rock powder its drill produced a few weeks ago. The results show that ancient Mars had all the right attributes to sustain life. They're not claiming (not yet, anyway) proof that life actually did exist there; just that it could have...
15:1 Server Reduction...
Applications running at any significant scale typically execute on clusters of servers. These clusters are composed, generally, from multiple similar servers. These servers share the overall load of the app, allowing many more concurrent users than could ever run on a single server. You could think of the clerks in the grocery store checkout as a human equivalent. Having multiple servers also provides an arbitrary degree of redundancy, so that if one or more servers fail for any reason, the working servers remaining can pick up the load. Building big clusters (if big enough, often called “server farms”) is the brute force way to scale up almost any modern web application. It's the standard, “out-of-the-box” way to scale up to large loads; it's what everybody does.
Well, almost everybody.
Depending on the business model of the application in question, the cost of the additional servers may be significant. In other words, if your application doesn't make a lot more money than the servers cost, you're going to care about that server cost. How can you reduce the number of servers required to handle the load?
The answer to that is very specific to the precise nature of each application. There are several general approaches one can take, ranging from the traditional iterative bottleneck identification-and-destruction technique to the raze-and-rebuild technique.
In the latter category is this: figuring out that you made a poor choice of programming language, and rewriting your entire application from scratch in a new language. In our real-world equivalent, it's as if you replaced the ordinary checkout clerks with supermen who worked many times more quickly. That's what these folks did, moving from Ruby to Go – and their reward was a reduction from 30 busy servers to 2 idling servers (and only 2 in order to provide redundancy!).
As one of the commenters points out, probably moving from Ruby is the important part of the exercise – most likely nearly any choice of a “normal” programming language (C, C++, Java, Erlang, etc.) would have achieved similar gains. The author, however, makes some interesting points about Go – to me, most especially concerning its support for concurrency...
Well, almost everybody.
Depending on the business model of the application in question, the cost of the additional servers may be significant. In other words, if your application doesn't make a lot more money than the servers cost, you're going to care about that server cost. How can you reduce the number of servers required to handle the load?
The answer to that is very specific to the precise nature of each application. There are several general approaches one can take, ranging from the traditional iterative bottleneck identification-and-destruction technique to the raze-and-rebuild technique.
In the latter category is this: figuring out that you made a poor choice of programming language, and rewriting your entire application from scratch in a new language. In our real-world equivalent, it's as if you replaced the ordinary checkout clerks with supermen who worked many times more quickly. That's what these folks did, moving from Ruby to Go – and their reward was a reduction from 30 busy servers to 2 idling servers (and only 2 in order to provide redundancy!).
As one of the commenters points out, probably moving from Ruby is the important part of the exercise – most likely nearly any choice of a “normal” programming language (C, C++, Java, Erlang, etc.) would have achieved similar gains. The author, however, makes some interesting points about Go – to me, most especially concerning its support for concurrency...
Cheap, Simple, Small, Safe Nuclear Power...
Molten-salt fission reactor technology sounds compelling to me, the more so every new time I read about it. In a rational world (that would be some other planet, most likely in some other space-time continuum), environmentalists would be demanding the use of technology like this in place of coal- or gas-fired electrical generation. I've only seen them railing in mostly mindless opposition, though...
Lakes Entertainment, Cleaning Up the Mess Edition...
Lakes Entertainment has posted its 2012 Q4 and Y results, which prominently features the wind-up of it's agreement with the Jamul Indian Tribe. There no real news here, just an opportunity for some schadenfreude and satisfaction...
How I Wish Congress (or Obama) Behaved...
This brilliant clip lampoons Congress and Obama for ratcheting up the national debt – and it does so in a way that absolutely anyone can comprehend. The facial expressions of the banker eloquently convey the reactions that any fiscal conservative would wish that Congress and the executive branch would have when asked to raise the debt limit. I know, I know, it isn't going to happen. But I can still hope, can't I?
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