State of the Union 2010 « Whatever

State of the Union 2010 « Whatever: "As for the Republicans, a recent reader was distressed when I said they were “hopped-up ignorant nihilists,” but you know what, when your Senate operating strategy is “filibuster everything and let Fox News do the rest,” and the party as a whole gives it a thumbs up, guess what, you’re goddamned nihilists. There’s no actual political strategy in GOP anymore other than taking joy in defeating the Democrats. I don’t have a problem with them enjoying such a thing, but it’s not a real political philosophy, or at least shouldn’t be."

Kernel Planet

Kernel Planet: "ntelligent Power Sharing (IPS). Core i7-6xx and 7xx chips are MCP (multi-chip packages); both the CPU and GPU/MCH are in the same physical processor package, but not on the same die. This means they share a thermal and power design domain. In many cases, only one of the components will be very busy, and thus generating much heat or drawing much power, and it would be a waste to let any extra thermal or power headroom go unused. IPS allows one component to use more than its share of power or thermal budget so long as the other component is idle enough to allow it. One of the key parts of this technology is so-called “graphics turbo', in other words the capability of the GPU to exceed its default frequency (and therefore thermal and power budget) when possible."

Benlog » Don’t Hash Secrets

Benlog » Don’t Hash Secrets: "So, again, don’t hash secrets. HMAC them."

Apple A4 SOC unveiled - It's an ARM CPU and the GPU! - Bright Side Of News*

Apple A4 SOC unveiled - It's an ARM CPU and the GPU! - Bright Side Of News*
A4 is a System-on-a-Chip, or SOC, that integrates the main processor [ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore i.e. Multi-Processing Core, identical to ones used in nVidia Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon] with graphics silicon [ARM Mali 50-Series GPU], and other functions like the memory controller on one piece of silicon - not unlike what Intel is trying to achieve with its future "Moorestown" Atom processor that debuted inside LG's Smartphone. http://scoop.intel.com/2010/01/intel-moorestown-smartphones-at-ces.php

CommsDesign - Who's in $1 billion capex club?

CommsDesign - Who's in $1 billion capex club?
According to IC Insights, the $1 billion spenders include the following IC firms in 2010: Samsung ($6 billion), Intel ($5.3 billion), TSMC ($3 billion), Hynix ($2 billion), Toshiba ($1.95 billion), AMD/GlobalFoundries ($1.9 billion), Micron ($1.3 billion), Nanya ($1.1 billion) and Elpida ($1 billion).

SSL for free - step by step - The H Security: News and Features

SSL for free - step by step - The H Security: News and Features: "Israeli vendor StartSSL offers free SSL server certificates that are valid for a year."

Internal Memo: Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Staff | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Internal Memo: Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Staff John Paczkowski Digital Daily AllThingsD
to the engineers and marketers who’ve fostered a perpetual belief that innovation creates its own opportunity – thank you. You’re right. Innovation does create its own opportunity. Like Oracle, we’re an engineering company in our heart and soul, our potential together is limitless.

Cloud Best Practices

cloudbestpractices-jvaria.pdf (application/pdf Object)
For several years, software architects have discovered and implemented several concepts and best practices to build highly scalable applications. In today’s "era of tera", these concepts are even more applicable because of ever-growing datasets, unpredictable traffic patterns, and the demand for faster response times. This paper will reinforce and reiterate some of these traditional concepts and discuss how they may evolve in the context of cloud computing. It will also discuss some unprecedented concepts such as elasticity that have emerged due to the dynamic nature of the cloud.
This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud.

Coachella - Official News

Coachella - Official News: "COACHELLA VALLEY MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL
ANNOUNCES 2010 LINE-UP

JAY-Z, MUSE AND GORILLAZ HEADLINE
3-DAY FESTIVAL WITH MORE THAN 130 ACTS
ROUNDING OUT LINE-UP"

Apple & LaLa

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/19/apples-secret-cloud-strategy-and-why-lala-is-critical/ "An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet. The Lala upload technology will be bundled into a future iTunes upgrade which will automatically be installed for the 100+ million itunes users with a simple “An upgrade is available…” notification dialog box. After installation iTunes will push in the background their entire media library to their personal mobile iTunes area. Once loaded, users will be able to navigate and play their music, videos and playlists from their personal URL using a browser based iTunes experience"

Apple Share

ShareThis: "Apple's year-over-year growth at 23%, and also put it in fifth place, behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Toshiba. Apple's new position is down one from the same quarter in 2008."

Who-T: git patches from tarballs

Who-T: git patches from tarballs
It is quite easy though to create git patches from your tarballs. Simply run the following command in the extracted directory:git init && git add --ignore-errors .; git commit -m "`basename $PWD`"

LoJack For Laptops- New York Times

LoJack for LapTops: "Intel’s newest line of notebook chipsets for 2010 have an extra security feature: They can be ordered remotely to lock up at a below-the-operating-system level, so the laptop will only boot a notice that it’s not available. It can optionally display, say, the owner’s name and email, in case it’s brought into a pawn shop. To turn it back on, it needs an extra-special password that only the user, an IT worker, or Absolute can provide."

Rethinking artificial intelligence

Rethinking artificial intelligence: "The project is being funded by the Make a Mind Company, whose chairman is Richard Wirt, an Intel Senior Fellow."

What's the Best Way to Share Files Across Multiple Home Computers? - File Sharing - Lifehacker

What's the Best Way to Share Files Across Multiple Home Computers? - File Sharing - Lifehacker: "ou could also put together your own network-attached storage (NAS); FreeNAS is an extremely popular free and open-source NAS worth checking out.

One of our absolute favorite ways to swap files is with Dropbox. For the low cost of free, you can install a folder on any Window, Mac OS X, or Linux-based computer, then just drag and drop files right into it that you want to share with others. Once you stick a file into the folder, it instantly syncs to Dropbox's server and is available to the rest of your family on their own computers in just a couple of clicks."

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Microsoft 2010 SP1 - Cringely on technology

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Microsoft 2010 SP1 - Cringely on technology: "For a company with 10,000 employees, setting them up to use Microsoft technology will cost you $3,360,000. Over half of that will be for Office and you’ll pay that Office tax every year."

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : First Cousins Once Removed

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : First Cousins Once Removed: "Take two different people who have a common ancestor but who are not related by direct succession (that is, neither is the mother, father, grandmother, and so on, of the other):

Degree of cousin-hood is the minimum of the numbers of generations back that you have to go to find the nearest common ancestor, minus one.

Removed-ness is the absolute difference between the numbers of generations back you have to go to find the nearest common ancestor."

A Software Insider’s Point of View » Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision

A Software Insider’s Point of View » Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
Technology strategy: “C+”. Middleware strategy remains murky at best. SAP should revamp NetWeaver or junk it. NetWeaver is to Blackberry as Salesforce.com’s Force.com is to iPhone. It’s so much easier to build apps on Force.com and iPhone than it is for SAP’s NetWeaver and RIM’s Blackberry. The decision to emphasize the NetWeaver ABAP stack over the NetWeaver Java stack will leave customers and partners confused despite how much more efficient it is to build on ABAP. In addition, the lack of good business process orchestration at both run time and design time remains a critical hole for investment and gives vendors such as IBM and Cordys opportunities to sit on-top of SAP apps. Mobile strategy at first seems less emphasized with the rare mention of native apps development on Blackberry and other platforms. Nevertheless, SAP’s decision to leave mobile platform integration of Blackberry and others at the NetWeaver Mobile layer may prove to be the most efficient and effective approach. The move to in-Memory will help with future development, yet customers lack confidence in SAP’s execution of the Timeless Software argument, despite its best intentions. It appears that SAP will have 2 OnDemand strategies. Lighter applications will be built on Java. More complex applications to be built on the OnDemand stack.

blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Why did we take reddit down for 71 minutes?

blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Why did we take reddit down for 71 minutes?: "We use a lot of the EBS disks. All of our databases were each using one EBS. This worked really well for us up until a week or so ago. Then all of you came back from holiday and decided that work was just too boring or something, and our traffic spiked, essentially breaking the camel's back, if you will.

In response, we started upgrading some of our databases to use a software RAID of EBS disks, which gives drastically increased performance (at a higher cost of course). This worked really well, but there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.

Part of our setup uses what we call a 'permacache', which uses Memcachedb. Memcachedb is Memcached with a built-in permanent storage system using BDB. One of the 'features' of this system is that it saves up its disk writes and then bursts them to the disk. Unfortunately, the single EBS volumes they were on could not handle these bursting writes. Memcachedb also has another feature that blocks all reads while it writes to the disk. These two things together would cause the site to go down for about 30 seconds every hour or so lately."

Getting Good IO from Amazon's EBS

Getting Good IO from Amazon's EBS: "Now, I just need to take a moment to point something out. Performance testing on EBS is very hard. The disks speed up and slow down on their own. A lot. Telling when your tweak is helping vs it just being luck is not easy. It feels a bit like trying to clock the speed of passing cars with a radar gun from the back of a rampaging bull. I fully expect to find that some of my discoveries here are just a mare’s nest, but hopefully others will prove enduring."

Windows 7 RTM God Mode (GodMode) - Windows client deities are actually in short supply - Softpedia

Windows 7 RTM God Mode (GodMode) - Windows client deities are actually in short supply - Softpedia
The trick lies in a fully documented Windows 7 shell feature that developers can leverage, namely “Using File System Folders as Junction Points” according to BrandonLive. Devs have the possibility to use MyFolder.{Extension CLSID} in order to transform file system folders into junction points. This means that folders created in this manner will feature the MyFolder label in Windows Explorer, in the search box in the top right hand side corner.

Mark Nandor's Solution to the Longest Line Question

Mark Nandor's Solution to the Longest Line Question: "Our journey starts at Ocean Creek by the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington (124° 41' 38'' W, 48° 21' 44'' N), and our amazing journey ends near 1 Ocean Drive, Jupiter, Florida, 33469 (80° 4' 29'' W, 26° 57' 11'' N). The distance between these two points is an impressive 2802 miles"

FT.com / Books - Books of the year

FT.com / Books - Books of the year: "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
By Craig Nelson
John Murray, £18.99
This punchy, popular history focuses on the Apollo programme within the context of the space race – the US and the USSR’s contest to outdo each other in space technology. Gripping, geekily detailed accounts of what it was like to ride a Saturn V or walk on another world are interspersed with a lively take on the cold war rivalry that made it happen."

Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com

Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com: "Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them."