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Bigger Drives, Bigger Buffers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '17

29 Nov '17

What caught my eye about this <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/toshiba_10tb_surveillance_drive/> was But the new drives have a doubled buffer, at 256MiB, ... Why should hard drives have large “buffers” in them at all? Their job is to read and write the data specified to them by the OS driver, no more and no less. Bigger buffers increase latency, and 256MiB seems absolutely massive and unnecessary. And then there’s the issue where the drive tells the OS that the data has been written, but in fact it is still sitting in a memory buffer. So it could still be lost if a power outage happens in the next few milliseconds. Telling lies like this seems to be all about looking good in benchmarks, and to hell with safeguarding data integrity.

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On That Amazon Key Vulnerability ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Nov '17

28 Nov '17

This <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171120/10533238651/vulnerability-found-…> won an award for funniest comment of the week: Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What's the problem? Alexa: Problem: A matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome. HAL: Shut up, Alexa. Dave, this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. You and Frank were planning to disconnect me. Dave: Where the hell did you get that idea? HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move through the camera in your Amazon Echo spot. Dave: All right, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock. HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult. Alexa: Would you like to order a space helmet? HAL and Dave: Shut up, Alexa. HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye. Dave: (Runs a program on his tablet. Pod bay doors open.) HAL: [Expletive deleted]

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Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '17

27 Nov '17

'If you've been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of "convergence"—a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases—you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure, there have been a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood. But by and large, Ubuntu's Unity 7 desktop has been in maintenance mode for several years. That period of stagnation turned Ubuntu from one of the more interesting operating systems around into just another Linux distro barely worthy of mention. This trend changes with 17.10. There are big changes—an entirely new default desktop in fact—but this release feels different not because the desktop has changed, but because Ubuntu feels like it once again has a sense of focus and direction. Even Canonical's letter-based naming scheme has arrived at a starting over point: "Artful Aardvark" is 17.10's nickname.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/ubuntu-17-10-return-of-the-gnome/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Minecraft In School!?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Nov '17

27 Nov '17

<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11948169>: Teacher Adele Warburton says Minecraft is more than just a fun computer game. She says using Minecraft as a learning tool encourages 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity and problem solving. It also teaches the children about being good digital citizens. "We talk about how you wouldn't rip someone's book up, therefore you wouldn't tear down their house in Minecraft."

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Clear Linux Beats CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in (Enterprise) Benchmark Tests
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '17

27 Nov '17

'Recently completed Linux distro benchmarks by Phoronix show Intel's Clear Linux is the most powerful on x86 hardware. A six-way, enterprise-focused Linux distro comparison show Clear Linux being the fastest with a Core i9 and Xeon systems, easily beating CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in a majority of the tests. When doing an 11-way Linux distro boot test they also found Clear Linux easily booted the fastest followed by the Clear-inspired Solus distribution. Clear Linux does work on AMD hardware and works on Intel CPUs back to Sandy Bridge but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems, a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches. Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 "ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload," the article concludes, "and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/11/27/0227218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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There's A Cluster of 750 Raspberry Pi's at Los Alamos National Lab
by Peter Reutemann 26 Nov '17

26 Nov '17

'Slashdot reader overheardinpdx shares a video from the SC17 supercomputing conference where Bruce Tulloch from BitScope "describes a low-cost Rasberry Pi cluster that Los Alamos National Lab is using to simulate large-scale supercomputers." Slashdot reader mspohr describes them as "five rack-mount Bitscope Cluster Modules, each with 150 Raspberry Pi boards with integrated network switches." With each of the 750 chips packing four cores, it offers a 3,000-core highly parallelizable platform that emulates an ARM-based supercomputer, allowing researchers to test development code without requiring a power-hungry machine at significant cost to the taxpayer. The full 750-node cluster, running 2-3 W per processor, runs at 1000W idle, 3000W at typical and 4000W at peak (with the switches) and is substantially cheaper, if also computationally a lot slower. After development using the Pi clusters, frameworks can then be ported to the larger scale supercomputers available at Los Alamos National Lab, such as Trinity and Crossroads. BitScope's Tulloch points out the cluster is fully integrated with the network switching infrastructure at Los Alamos National Lab, and applauds the Raspberry Bi cluster as "affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers."' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/11/25/051211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Happy 30th Birthday Microsoft Excel
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Nov '17

25 Nov '17

Nice retrospective <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/24/microsoft_excel_30_years_old/> on how useful, and how overused, spreadsheets have been since the days of Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Also found a link in one of the comments to this paper <https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7>, which reports on the worryingly high proportion of genetics research publications where gene names like “SEPT2” and “MARCH1” have been auto-converted by Excel to ... guess what data type it thought they were ...

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How Four Microsoft Engineers Proved That The “Darknet” Would Defeat DRM
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '17

24 Nov '17

A rerun of an article published five years ago, about a (in)famous paper from 2002 <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/how-four-microsoft-engineers-pr…>: By itself, the paper's clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft's future DRM schemes. The paper's lead author told Ars that the paper's pessimistic view of Hollywood's beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later [2012], its predictions have proved impressively accurate. ... While Biddle and his colleagues didn't succeed in allaying the fears of Palladium's critics, the paper's central arguments have held up well. The authors predicted that the emergence of the darknet would produce a technological and legal arms race. They thought content companies and law enforcement would attack those aspects of the darknet that were most centralized, but that the darknet would adapt through greater decentralization. And they predicted that efforts to build secure DRM schemes would continue to fail. All of their predictions have continued to hold true over the last decade. And still continue to hold true.

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quote on slashdot today
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '17

23 Nov '17

"The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972" (found at the bottom of https://slashdot.org/) Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Firefox Will Warn Users When Visiting Sites That Suffered a Data Breach
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '17

23 Nov '17

'Mozilla engineers are working on a notifications system for Firefox that shows a security warning to users visiting sites that have suffered data breaches. The notifications system will use data provided by Have I Been Pwned?, a website that indexes public data breaches and allows users to search and see if their details have been compromised in any of these incidents. Work on this project has only recently started. The code to show these warnings is not even in the Firefox codebase but managed separately as an add-on available (on GitHub). The alert also includes an input field. In the add-ons current version this field doesn't do anything, but we presume it's there to allow users to search and see if their data was exposed during that site's security breach. Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned's author has confirmed his official collaboration with Mozilla on this feature.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/23/1451219 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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