Core Dump

Labels: computing, technology

Labels: computing, technology

The 3-D renderings were generated by applying an iterative algorithm to a sphere. The same calculation is applied over and over to the sphere’s points in three dimensions. In spirit, that’s similar to how the original 2-D Mandelbrot set generates its infinite and self-repeating complexity.

Labels: computing, science

Labels: computing, security

What kind of IT do you have up there?

"We have a significantly large network on board the Station, comprising 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops and 32 Lenovo ThinkPad T61p devices. One of the T61ps is a server, making it a client/server network with a couple of routers and an Ethernet backbone. There are both cabled routers and a couple of Wi-Fi access points up there. There's also a dedicated IP phone for phone calls and some limited video-conferencing abilities if astronauts need to see their families."

How do you choose what technology to use?

"Whenever we go to select a laptop for flying, we have a certification process to determine the best ones. We'll test it for how well it withstands radiation. [The ISS is exposed to as much radiation in a day as computers down on Earth are in a year.] We also test for off-gassing, in case the computer emits chemicals that could create fumes on the Station.

"You'd be surprised at how many computers would survive on the ISS. I can't think of an occurrence when we've have a computer fail from the radiation itself. It may reduce the lifetime of how long we can keep the equipment in orbit, but most of the time the failures are just like the ones here on the ground -- we'll have a hard-drive failure or we'll have an application problem and end up reloading the machine."

Labels: computing, space

As an example, let's take that integer overflow on the Ariane V rocket. That an integer can overflow isn't an error on the part of the processor because it's the way it's supposed to work. But whenever an integer does overflow, the processor sets something called a flag that the program can interrogate.

In the case of the Ariane software, the program didn't check for an overflow; if it had done, corrective action could have been taken. Of course, there will always be a limit to how large an integer can be and how much precision a floating point number can have – and this depends on the processor. But all of today's computers are universal computing machines, which means that they can solve any problem involving logic and maths.

So if a processor's internal instructions can't operate on large enough integers or on floating point numbers with sufficient precision, it's always possible for the programmer to implement arithmetic routines that will.

Labels: computing

When listening to Markram speculate, it's easy to forget that the Blue Brain simulation is still just a single circuit, confined within a silent supercomputer. The machine is not yet alive. And yet Markram can be persuasive when he talks about his future plans. His ambitions are grounded in concrete steps. Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain--that should happen in the next two years--Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body. He's already talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal. "The only way to really know what the model is capable of is to give it legs," he says. "If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we've got a problem."

Labels: computing, science, technology

Intimidating erminology aside, here's what desktop virtualization means today: You can run just about any OS, Mac OS X excluded, inside any other OS. Ubuntu in Mac OS? Sure. Windows 7 within Windows XP? Why not? Windows ME within Snow Leopard? Nobody's going to stop you, I guess! And these aren't patchy, half-assed experiments we're talking about here—these are fully-functioning installations that'll connect to USB peripherals, access the internet, share files with your host OS, and run almost any software, short of 3D games. You can set up as many of these things as you want, and delete them in a matter of seconds. It's pretty great, is what I'm trying to say.

Best of all, virtualization is now something you can try—and stick with—for free, thanks to software like Sun's VirtualBox. It's a free download on any platform, and it does its job spectacularly. Here's how to get started.

Labels: computing, software

Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a shit what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.

Labels: computing, technical communication

Labels: computing

Within the World of Warcraft team, there are some 30 department leads. There are three tiers of management, with France Pierce (Executive Producer) on top. Production Director Brack and Game Director Tom Chilton are below him, and below those two men are arrayed 8 lower-level managers. Brack notes that they try to structure the teams around the people, and not the other way around. They feel strongly that employee strengths should dictate organizational structure, and as a result all reporting structures within the company vary by team.

Each team on the game aims to be made up of 5-8 people. They break that regularly, Brack admits, but that is the goal. The programming department currently consists of 32 people, and envelopes systems, tools, gameplay, server technologies, and UI. Brack singled out the tools team as a critical component of this group. They make tools not only for the developers, but for customer service as well. Blizzard has an expectation of a long life for World of Warcraft, and so they see these tools as products to be fully-supported in-house. These tools go through their own proofing process, with certification dictated within the company. Their UI team is a cross-disciplinary team with artists, LUA programmers, and C++ developers all collaborating on the game's front end. In all, the programming team is responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code.

Labels: computing, gaming

Now, I travel. A lot. I want portable computing.

I've tried Netbooks. The problem with netbooks is this: they suck. Many of them have keyboards designed by folks for whom western European languages are not their first, or even second, script. I am sick and tired of keyboards where the right shift key is buried among the arrow keys, so that half the time you try and type a W or A you end up inserting a lowercase letter on the line above. I am sick and tired of keyboards too small to type on, or with missing characters. Welcome to netbook land!

If the keyboards are good (and HP have got them right), the screen resolution is low. And if they get the screen right as well, you end up battling with an asthmatic, gutless processor. The Intel Atom family CPUs have just about no cache, and they deliver piss-poor performance. The icing on the cake for me was installing OS X on an Asus Eee 1000 with an SSD. Two minutes to boot! Welcome back to the 1980s and the world of floppy disks.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

Labels: computing, MadCap.

This visualization illustrates some of the rupture and wave propagation phenomena of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in Southern California. It shows how an earthquake originating 60 miles south of Palm Springs can end up shaking Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara minutes after the original fault rupture. The animation captures more than four minutes of complex dynamic rupture and wave propagation. Nearly 12 terabytes of earthquake simulation data was used to generate the animation.

Labels: computing, science, video

What with Google, dating sites, and a slew of social networks, it's not difficult to get to know a person digitally before choosing to interact with them in a brick-and-mortar environment.

Labels: computing, technology

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

Labels: computing, SF, technology

Labels: computing

There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others. Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public. Decades later, we can still learn from these multi-million dollar mistakes. By no means is the following list exhaustive; one could probably write about the flaws of every PC ever released. But when considering past design mistakes, these examples spring to my mind.

Labels: computing, history

At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”

Tukwila is one of Microsoft’s smaller data centers (they number “more than 10 and fewer than 100,” Manos told me with deliberate vagueness). In 2006, the company, lured by cheap hydropower, tax incentives and a good fiber-optic network, built a 500,000-plus-square-foot data center in Quincy, Wash., a small town three hours from Tukwila known for its bean and spearmint fields. This summer, Microsoft will open a 700,000-plus-square-foot data center — one of the world’s largest — in Chicago. “We are about three to four times larger than when I joined the company” — in 2004 — “just in terms of data-center footprint,” Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, told me when I met with her at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash.

Labels: computing, technology

Labels: computing, history

We can confidently predict that by then, computer games will have been around for nearly sixty years; anyone under eighty will have grown up with them. The median age of players may well be the same as the median age of the general population. And this will bring its own challenges to game designers. Sixty year olds have different needs and interests from twitchy-fingered adolescents. For one thing, their eyesight and hand-eye coordination isn't what it used to be. For another, their socialization is better, and they're a lot more experienced.

Oh, and they have lots more money.

If I was speccing out a business plan for a new MMO in 2025, I'd want to make it appeal to these folks — call them codgergamers. They may be initially attracted by cute intro movies, but jerky camera angles are going to hurt their aging eyes. Their hand/eye coordination isn't what it used to be. And like sixty-somethings in the current and other cohorts they have a low tolerance for being expected to jump through arbitrary hoops for no reward. When you can feel grandfather time breathing down your neck, you tend to focus on the important stuff.

But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners.

Labels: computing, technology

Labels: computing

I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.

Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed.

Labels: books, computing

Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market--even though they haven't been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products that are available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they're obsolete--long after the rest of the world has moved on.

For this story--which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose "Whatever Became of . . .?" books I loved as a kid--I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; and some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant--if "extant" means that they remain for sale, in one way or another--and didn't address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you're like me, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that some of these products are still with us at all--and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Labels: computing, technology

You may be ordered to crawl into the nastiest corners of your office -- or to explore the nastiest corners of the Web. You may be required to stare zombie-like at a network monitoring console, waiting (possibly hoping) for the alarms to go off, or be chained to an endless series of spreadsheets and Word docs, looking for minute differences in data. You may end up berated, belittled, or sobbed at for circumstances that have nothing to do with you.

And at some point in your IT career, you will probably be asked to spy on your fellow employees -- or even your boss -- and fearlessly report what you find.

These seven jobs are not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. But they're out there; in these dark economic times, you might consider yourself lucky to have one of them.

Labels: computing

Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.”

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

Labels: computing, Internet

Lipson and Schmidt designed their program to identify linked factors within a dataset fed to the program, then generate equations to describe their relationship. The dataset described the movements of simple mechanical systems like spring-loaded oscillators, single pendulums and double pendulums — mechanisms used by professors to illustrate physical laws.

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton's second law of motion.

Labels: computing, science

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about -- it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

Labels: computing, technology

The nearly 400-year history of mechanized calculation was created by men and women with varying and diverse talents, temperaments, backgrounds and education, working in such fields as mathematics, the sciences, government, business and commerce. It is a history not just of singular inspiration and genius but also the continuing, collective discovery of new materials, skills, technologies and techniques to implement and enhance the plans and dreams of individual inventors and scientists.

Down through the years, beginning largely in the 1930s, IBM has helped to chronicle and contribute to this history by collecting a number of significant counting and reckoning tools and devices -- including abacuses, slide rules, calculators, arithmometers and tabulators -- and by preserving some of its own and other pioneering products.

Labels: computing, history, technology

Some time ago, I was entering a number into a web form. Let's say I entered "120,000". When I clicked Next the following message came back:

Sorry! That does not appear to be a valid number. Please try again
OK

The OK button stared out at me, and I thought: 'This is not OK. You've told me that I've entered an invalid number. Well, it looks pretty valid to me, and even if it is invalid, as you say, you haven't told me why. You haven't told me how I can correct the error of my ways.'

Most times I come across the OK button, something not-OK has happened. It's like my cat coming into our kitchen and saying. "Hello Gerry. Just wanted to let you know I did a pee in the sitting room. OK." Well, sorry, it's not OK.

Labels: computing, technical communication

Before you make a clean start, you need to consider the applications you’ll be bringing with you. First, make sure you have all of your application discs. One of the most important tasks is to take stock of any registration codes that you need for your software. Locate and record the registration keys that you will need. If you can’t find the keys, try Magic Jelly Bean 2.0, a free utility available at Download.com or Sourceforge.net. The application will search through the registry for application keys. It won’t find all the keys you need, but it might help you locate that one key you can’t find.

Magic Jelly Bean 2.0 is sometimes identified as a hacking tool by antivirus apps, but if you download it from a reputable site such as Download.com, you should be fine. If you can’t locate a particular key, contact the vendor for a replacement key or a copy of your original key before you proceed if you know you’re going to need access to the app. You did write down your Windows XP or Windows Vista key, right?

Labels: computing, Vista, Windows XP

Every time Microsoft bought out a new release of Word, they introduced a new file format. The new version of Word could read documents created by about the last three versions, plus RTF. If you were in business and needed to exchange electronic documents with business partners, you had to upgrade in lockstep so that you could read the files they sent you. This was used quite coldly as a marketing tool, to compel the herd to buy new copies of a word processor — which, by then, was a mature technology. The upgrade cycle was about 18 months to two years long, and I suspect it had more to do with accounting and depreciation rules (so that a corporate customer for MS Word licenses would only have one generation of the software depreciating on the books at a time) than with development time. The upshot was that, unless you took precautions, your documents would become inaccessible due to designed-in obsolescence within about 4-6 years.

I am not in a business with a 4-6 year document retention cycle. I am in a business where I hope that what I wrote ten years ago will still be accessible a century hence. Microsoft's policy was deliberately destroying my life's work.

Of course, Microsoft was not (then) in the business of selling software designed to meet the requirements of novelists; it's in the business of making money by selling software to offices where the average document has a life of a couple of months to a couple of years, and where paper files are routinely destroyed after 5-10 years to save archival storage space. And realistically, how do you go about selling a mature product (word processors) into a market like that? Well, a simple solution is to get the users to give you their data — and then charge them rent for accessing it. Microsoft charged rent in the form of payments for regular rolling upgrades. Now they're pinning their hopes on Cloud Computing, where all your data will be stored in a nebulous cloud somewhere on the internet — sort of like Google Docs and Sheets with a Microsoft tax on top (Google monetize it by advertising, of course).

It's not just word processing. I briefly looked at Microsoft Outlook as an email client, once. It turns out that Outlook stores email in a proprietary data format that only Outlook can easily read. Needless to say, I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole. Ever since I first got email in 1989, my acid test for an email system is "can I get at the content from outside?" To put this in perspective: last month I rediscovered a DC 6150 tape cartridge containing a backup of emails I'd sent and received in the period 1991-95. I'd thought it lost forever, and indeed, I had no way of reading it. But thanks to a friend of mine who did, we were able to retreive the contents — mailboxes stored in MMDF and Mbox formats (MMDF is similar but not compatible). Both are still in use, and still readable, to this day, using open source clients — or even a text editor (they're simply long text files with individual email messages separated by a header). The tape had been written using tar, a UNIX archiving tool that's been around since the late 1970s.

Labels: computing

Mr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify the latest technological gadget that he says could make life easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.

“What Raman does is amazing,” said Paul Schroeder, vice president for programs and policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology that can help visually impaired people. “He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his capacity to design and alter technology to meet his needs is unique.”

Some of Mr. Raman’s innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, “How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?”

Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could benefit from eyes-free access to a phone. They could also appeal to aging baby boomers with fading vision who wantto keep using technology they’ve come to depend on.

Labels: computing, technology, usability

Labels: computing, environment

Java would be Fundamentalist Christianity - it's theoretically based on C, but it voids so many of the old laws that it doesn't feel like the original at all. Instead, it adds its own set of rigid rules, which its followers believe to be far superior to the original. Not only are they certain that it's the best language in the world, but they're willing to burn those who disagree at the stake.

Labels: computing, funny

Labels: computing

Labels: computing

Labels: computing, history

Labels: computing, software

I am, admittedly, prone to swooning over a well-designed bit of IT kit, but I have never developed as deep and meaningful and instantaneous a relationship as the one I formed with the two tape-loading robots in the basement of the CERN data centres.

The Vader-black machines, one built by StorageTek, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, the other by IBM, are housed in square, meshed-in casings the size of small shipping containers. From within them comes a continuous clacking noise like the rattling of steel polyhedral dice on a giant's Dungeons & Dragons table. I pressed my face against the mesh and peered in fascination at the robot arms zipping back and forth with tiny, precise movements, loading and unloading 500-GB tapes with the serene grace of Shaolin monks. Did I say tape is tetchy? I take it back. Tape is beautiful.

Each robot-librarian tends 5 PB of data. It will jump shortly to 10 PB each when the 500-GB tapes are switched to 1-TB models — an upgrade that will take a year of continuous load/read/load/write/discard operations, running in the interstices between the data centre's higher-priority tasks. When that is done, there should be 2-TB tapes to migrate to, bringing the two robots' total up to 40 PB. At least, that's what CERN hopes.

Labels: computing, technology

Microsoft will use an approach in which servers arrive at the data center in a sealed container, already networked together and ready to go. The container itself is then hooked up to power, networking, and air conditioning.

"The trucks back 'em in, rack 'em, and stack 'em," Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told CNET News. And the containers remain sealed, Ozzie said. Once a certain number of servers in the container have failed, it will be pulled out and sent back to the manufacturer and a new container loaded in.

Labels: computing, technology

The cipher machines and radio equipment naturally form the centerpiece of the museum, and there's an entire computer history museum onsite (it was closed, with the strangest sign I've ever seen, words to the effect of, "This site is closed for maintenance. Enter at your own risk. You may be escorted off the grounds by security if you are caught here." Huh?) along with the notorious Nazi Enigma machine that was kidnapped in 2000 and ransomed back (the crime was never solved). The historic material on the Enigma (which began life as a commercial product before the war!) is really excellent, as are the technical explanations of how it worked.

Labels: computing, history

Labels: computing

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the Army's effort to use software and computer networks to turn itself into a quicker, lighter, more-lethal force by 2017. The vision is for fleets of new armored vehicles, ground robots and flying drones to be linked together by a wireless internet for combat, and by a common operating system. But FCS has been in trouble, almost since the day it began, with slipped deadlines, bloated budgets, unproven technologies and unrealistic expectations.

The picture may be even more bleak than has been previously been understood, however. A soon-to-be-released Government Accountability Office report, first obtained by Inside the Army, notes that FCS' core software programs are now slated to take up 95 million lines of code, nearly triple the original estimate. Only two of Future Combat Systems' 44 key technologies are where they should have been -- at the beginning of the program. Things are so bad that the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, is now recommending that the Pentagon start “identify[ing] viable alternatives to FCS." That's government-speak for chopping the program into bits, and starting over again. And the Department of Defense "concur[s] with [those] recommendations," according to the study.

Labels: computing, military

A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.

Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…

Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?

Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.

Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.

Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?

Caller: Yes, I sure do.

Agent: OK, now press Control-A.

Caller: I am, but nothing happens.

Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?

Caller: No, there’s no change at all.

Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.

Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?

Labels: computing, funny

Right now the cheapest Mac on sale at the Apple store is a $600 Mac Mini sporting a 1.83GHz proc, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. For $200 more, your Hackintosh can boast a 2.2GHz proc with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB drive, and a completely upgradeable case for expanding your setup in the future.

Building a DIY Mac requires some work on your part, so be ready to dedicate time to this project. To make things as easy as possible, I'm going to lay out how I built my Hackintosh from start to finish, from the hardware I used to the final patches I applied to the Leopard install. If you can build a Lego set and transcribe text, you've got all the basic skills required.

Labels: computing

Apparently—and this is all based on blog rumors and innuendo—Microsoft has had a long term policy of eliminating all software testers who don’t know how to write code, replacing them with what they call SDETs, Software Development Engineers in Test, programmers who write automated testing scripts.

The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.

None of those things could be checked by automated scripts. And so one result of the new emphasis on automated testing was that the Vista release of Windows was extremely inconsistent and unpolished. Lots of obvious problems got through in the final product… none of which was a “bug” by the definition of the automated scripts, but every one of which contributed to the general feeling that Vista was a downgrade from XP. The geeky definition of quality won out over the suit’s definition; I’m sure the automated scripts for Windows Vista are running at 100% success right now at Microsoft, but it doesn’t help when just about every tech reviewer is advising people to stick with XP for as long as humanly possible. It turns out that nobody wrote the automated test to check if Vista provided users with a compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

Labels: computing

Mankind has always had a relationship with our tools that’s far deeper than treating them as mere instruments to accomplish a task. Every since Grok carved his initials into the first club, we’ve been customizing our tools to suit our personal tastes and work habits. It’s inconceivable to think that knowledge workers are any different, yet for two decades we’ve stuffed our best and brightest onto corporate-standard desktops and laptops and made them sign paperwork placing their job in jeopardy if they download an unapproved application they need to get a job done.

And for good reason; more often than not those users are downloading file sharing software (and sharing their entire corporate hard drive), or the latest weather (or porn) widget full of malware. Even our technically literate users are prone to customizing their tools in incredibly stupid ways. Yet eventually we’ll hit the day where potentially employees will look upon locked-down IT shops as little more than undesirable digital sweatshops. What? You wont let me Twitter from work? Can I have that application back?

Thus we need to reconcile a workforce that’s used to completely controlling and customizing their technology with the needs of an organization that must limit security risks. One of the most powerful

Labels: computing

The dirty little fact everybody in the consumer computer trade have been trying to ignore — Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Apple, all of them — is that the computer biz is overdue for commoditization. There is no intrinsic reason why a kilogram of plastic and metal with a couple of silicon chips in it should sell for more than its weight in silver. Nor do we need ever-more-powerful personal computers; the heavy duty processing is moving off our desktop and onto servers, and has been for years, and only idiocy of the finest water (such as Microsoft's attempt to turn Vista into a surveillance state in microcosm) can justify it. Moreover, there is enough competition in this business that prices should be falling, steadily. Apple have staked out a boutique territory for themselves, and more power to them for noticing that they needed to do that in order to survive: but that's a small lifeboat, and not everyone can market themselves on being cooler than everyone else.

Labels: computing

s the newly hired tech specialist of a 500+ store chain of fast food restaurants, it was my responsibility to work with food scientists, designers, and management to research new methods of providing food safely and quickly into the customers' hands.

As new items were added to the menu, we needed to modify existing kitchens to accommodate new equipment. I was tasked with visiting a local unit to confirm some measurements, so before I left HQ, I asked the department secretary if I could borrow the Polaroid camera (this was the 80s) to snap some pictures to help me in this retrofit. Before she could answer me, a voice rang out from one of the nearby cubicles "You can't take flash pictures in the restaurants!" It was Tony, a long time employee of the R&D department.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because ..." Tony said, "if you use the Flash from the camera in the restaurant, the computer-operated cash registers will shut down!"

Labels: computing

It is dismaying that after decades of experience with manned space stations, Russian space engineers still couldn't keep unwanted condensation at bay. But what's worse is that they designed circuitry that would allow one spot of corrosion to fell a supposedly triply redundant control computer complex. Another cause for dismay is that when trouble did develop, the Russians' first instinct was to blame their American partners. Such deficiencies need to be worked out in the years ahead, on the space station, before both the technology and the diplomacy can be thought reliable enough for far-ranging missions that replacement shipments wouldn't be able to reach.

Labels: computing, space

Labels: computing

Now that we had the first hump over, I wanted to type something by myself. The commands were so arcane that I had to type 5 characters just to make something bold. Think about that. And there is no specific “Delete” key. Just a left backspace.

Everything about the word processor was so mind-numbing and tediously repetitive that I would have produced a draft on a typewriter more quickly. Once again, I felt a tinge of pity for the individuals who had to actually slog through the manuals.

Labels: computing

Fast-forward four decades, and recently discovered tape recordings of Gunnarson's works form the basis of a touring song-and-dance performance, IBM 1401: A User's Manual. The show was composed by Gunnarson's son Jóhann Jóhannsson, with interpretive dance choreographed by Erna Omarsdotti, whose father is another IBM alum.

The work, named in part for a companion recording of a voice reciting the manual for an IBM 1403 printer, was performed in Wales, Tokyo, Copenhagen and Belgium this summer. Part of the original 1401 recordings were scored for a 60-piece orchestra, which Jóhannsson has adapted for piano and Hammond organ. Omarsdotti's mechanistic body movements channel the whirring of the primitive machines -- music to the ears of fellow IBM-heads.

Labels: computing, music

"The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring underground that accelerates protons to high energy and smashes them together in the ring to produce a fireworks of particles," said Francois Grey, director of IT communications at CERN, in Geneva. "Huge underground detectors will pick up the signals [from the collisions] using millions of channels that will read out every 25 nanoseconds. The rate at which [the data] will come out [of the four detectors in place] to be stored is in the hundreds of megabytes per second."

Along with lessons about what the universe comprises, the LHC Computing Grid project will teach network engineers valuable lessons about what it takes to run and manage one of the largest 10G-bps networks in the world.

"Everyone is looking to see who's installing a large backbone on that scale. We've become a reference for other people waiting to see what happens," Grey said. "We have no choice because we need that speed. We're also learning a lot about shipping data at high rates and how to optimize a grid between 10G bps and slower links."

Labels: computing, science

The collider will give protons a pop hoping to catch a glimpse of the Big Bang, or at least the subatomic particles that are thought to have last been seen at the big event 10 billion to 15 billion years ago that led to the formation of the universe. The CERN collider will begin producing data in November, and from the trillions of collisions of protons it will generate 15 petabytes of data per year.

By comparison, 15 petabytes would be the equivalent of all of the information in all of the university libraries in the United States seven times over. It would be the equivalent of 22 Internets, or more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress. And there is no search function.

"Once this data is distributed to the physicists at the universities, they will require massive amounts of computing power and data storage in order to analyze it," Hacker says. "When the data transfer is live, we will stream data out to physicists as we quickly as we can - real time if possible."

Labels: computing, science

Although there is a wide range of estimates of the overall infection rate, the scale and the power of the botnet programs have clearly become immense. David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who is a co-founder of Damballa, a start-up company focusing on controlling botnets, said the consensus among scientists is that botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet.

Labels: computing, security

Labels: computing

Santa Clara-based Sun said it is making nearly all of Java's source code - excluding small pockets of code that aren't owned by Sun - available under the GNU General Public License. The same type of license also covers the distribution of the core, or kernel, of the popular open-source operating system Linux, which competes against Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

Making Java an open-source project allows programmers from around the world to examine, modify, fix bugs and contribute new features in Java's underlying code. It requires that any changes be made public.

Labels: computing