Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Christmas Eve link clearance

Get 'em while they're hot!

  • On the Sony Pictures Security Breach
    Reports say Sony Pictures had trouble attracting and recruiting security talent, which isn’t too surprising for a company known for its disdainful attitude toward technology. Being on the wrong side of issues like SOPA/PIPA couldn’t have helped—what technologist would want to work for a company that is trying to break the Internet?
  • Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?
    The agency's evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn't believe it.
  • The Case for N. Korea’s Role in Sony Hack
    The “silent” part of the moniker is a reference to the stubborn fact that little is known about the hackers themselves. Unlike hacker groups in other countries where it is common to find miscreants with multiple profiles on social networks and hacker forums that can be used to build a more complete profile of the attackers — the North Koreans heavily restrict the use of Internet communications, even for their cyber warriors.
  • What Does "Responsibility" Mean for Attribution?
    Using the Spectrum of State Responsibility, in my assessment, the US government's statements include a range of possibilities, from State-encouraged to State-integrated.
  • Stupid Costly Patent Nuclear War By Microsoft & Apple Against Android Averted
    In short, this is basically Google and Cisco (with some help from a few others) licensing these patents to stop the majority of the lawsuits -- while also making sure that others can pay in as well should they feel threatened. Of course, Microsoft, Apple and the others still have control over the really good patents they kept for themselves, rather than give to Rockstar. And the whole thing does nothing for innovation other than shift around some money.
  • Why String Theory Still Offers Hope We Can Unify Physics
    Most gratifying, the mathematics revealed that one of these notes had properties precisely matching those of the “graviton,” a hypothetical particle that, according to quantum physics, should carry the force of gravity from one location to another. With this, the worldwide community of theoretical physicists looked up from their calculations. For the first time, gravity and quantum mechanics were playing by the same rules. At least in theory.
  • Cerebros and the art of drug smuggling
    This is not the work of a pickaxe army of drug war foot soldiers. These are multi-million-dollar underground networks, created covertly with professional machinery under the guidance of top-end engineers or architects who have been pulled—willing or not—to the dark side.
  • The Future: A Cat Litter Box and DRM
    I did some Googling, and I found that the “Smart” in SmartCartridge is that it has an RFID chip inside of it to keep track of how much solution it has, and once it runs out, well, you can't refill it. I honestly did not believe this and tore one of the cartridges apart, and there it was, looking back at me, a tiny chip holding up it’s little metal finger.

    Seriously CatGenie, you added fairly sophisticated DRM to a litter box? I’m a tad hurt you spent my money on building in a restriction instead of figuring out how to avoid constantly cooking poop.

  • Drobo vs. QNAP vs. Synology vs. G-Drive and MORE! Which Storage Should You Choose?
    To me, the ideal size for a NAS device is at least 4 drives. You can get them with as few as two if you’re really never going to use much storage, and if you are going to do that I’ve got a recommendation for you in a minute, but with 4 or more you can have plenty of space without sacrificing redundancy. And I’ve got three different options for you here. The QNAP TS-470 Pro, The Synology 1513+, and the Drobo 5N.
  • The Top Metrics You Need to Track to Improve Operational Performance
    At PagerDuty we’ve thought hard about what you should monitor and why from a systems perspective, but what about monitoring data on your operations performance? We’d like to share some specific metrics and guidelines that help teams measure and improve their operational performance.
  • Interesting papers from NIPS 2014
    NIPS is the premier conference on Deep Learning. Given the accelerating state of the art, it’s interesting to see what is new.
  • Testing TokuDB's Group Commit Algorithm Improvement
    As part of our effort to verify the new Binary Log Group Commit functionality introduced in TokuDB 7.5.4 for Percona Server, we wanted to demonstrate the substantial increase in throughput scaling but also show the bottleneck caused by the skewed interaction between the binary log group commit algorithm in MySQL 5.6 and the transaction commit mechanism used in TokuDB 7.5.3 for Percona Server.
  • Are We Consistent Yet?
    Traditional systems provide strong consistency, where clients can immediately view updates. Some distributed systems relax their consistency model to allow greater availability or better performance. Eventual consistency manifests itself to clients as stale views of data.
  • The Softsel Hot List for the week of December 22, 1986
    Back in the days before Internet-based software distribution, heck back even before the Internet existed in a form resembling what it is today, one of the most important ways of keeping track of the consumer computing industry was to subscribe to the Softsel Hot List, a weekly poster of the top sellers in various categories. Here is the Softsel Hot List for the week of December 22, 1986
  • Our local fill
    The original wetland that became Lake Merritt was known as San Antonio Slough. From Oakland’s earliest days, the locals kept trying to “reclaim” it by turning it into dry land, just as they did all around the bay. The whole waterfront is reclaimed land. The basic technique was to haul dirt and rock and rubbish down to the water, shove it in and tamp it down. In Gold Rush San Francisco they’d use abandoned ships for fill, but Oakland’s founding fathers had advanced beyond such crude strategems.

For my Christmas Eve meal, my grand-daughter made me hand-made crab-and-shrimp sushi.

Life is good.

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