“The Ksplice Uptrack service is planned to be included as a standard part of Oracle Linux Premier Support, and we will no longer be selling the service separately to new customers moving forward […]”

Ouch?

I think I just dropped my Nokia down the staircase. Accidentally. Stupid me :P

“Figure 25.5. The celebrated little square. This map shows a square of size 600 km by 600 km in Africa, and another in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq. Concentrating solar power facilities completely filling one such square would provide enough power to give 1 billion people the average European’s consumption of 125 kWh/d” (Ch. 25, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by Prof David MacKay).

In case you’re still looking for a good conspiracy theory to explain our current interest in Libya, here’s a starting point!

(More seriously, the book’s really a good read)

CNN writes:

The beleaguered crew had to abandon the plant control room Tuesday night because of high radiation levels, Kyodo News reported, citing plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company.

“Their situation is not great,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. “It’s pretty clear that they will be getting very high doses of radiation. There’s certainly the potential for lethal doses of radiation. They know it, and I think you have to call these people heroes.”

Michael Schuman, reporting for Time on how German managers pulled their companies through the “Great Recession”, writes:

Instead of laying off cherished staff, management deployed idled workers to new assignments. Bernhard Nick, a BASF president, believes the measures taken during the downturn kept the company primed to capitalize on the recovery. “It wasn’t just a family feeling or being nice to each other,” he says. “Even the normal shift workers have such a high skill level, it is not so easy to lay them off. You lose a lot of knowledge, which would give you big problems starting up again.”

Update: I somehow forgot to mention that I only read this thanks to sybreon!

This came as a bit of a surprise to me:

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.

I had really not expected them to keep offline backups for those millions and millions of free accounts (for which they after all don’t make any such promises), and certainly not tape backups. I’m impressed.

I think Intel’s new Thunderbolt protocol/adapter is a truly brilliant move on their part. It’s more than just a new adapter, yet there’s not really a new protocol, in the sense that you don’t get to (nor need to) see much of the protocol.

It sounds like the adapters will be practically invisible in the software layer: we’ll just see PCIe and some display devices. That means stuff will just work, ie minimal “pain” for end-users. Plug in a new external drive, and it will just look like you hooked-up an extra SATA or USB adapter to your PCIe bus.

Ditto on the hardware side of things: we just get a more versatile display connector, not a useless-most-of-the-time Firewire port. If you’ve never heard of Thunderbolt, you can still plug in a standards-compliant DisplayPort device that doesn’t speak Thunderbolt, and nothing will break.

I think these two aspects together will mean that no one will come clamouring for “open standards”. In other words, Intel can be the exclusive source of Thunderbolt controllers for everyone who wants in on this, simply by not annoying anyone who isn’t already in.

And yeah, I know I’m merely stating the obvious, but it’s just quite impressive engineering.

Finally, it’s somewhat ironic that geeks had to complain for years that Firewire should have triumphed over USB based on technical merits, and now we get a controller that’s much more like Firewire from the company that pushed USB so hard. If I was cynical, I’d suggest they didn’t need USB to waste clock cycles and sell faster CPUs any more, now that they’ve hit a clock speed ceiling… ;)

Try not to get your eyes locked onto the delicious pie photo, and scroll past it for the insightful stuff…

Gabriel Weinberg’s DuckDuckGo search engine offers some innovative privacy settings. I played with them at some point, removing query information from DuckDuckGo URLs by switching to POST requests, but later decided that it was just too convenient to have easy access to old queries through the browser history. Mr Weinberg’s latest post on search leakage got me to reconsider:

One site having one of my search terms is irrelevant. That may generally be the case, but unfortunately, tens of millions of sites run ads from just a handful of ad networks. Those ad networks can aggregate your search terms and piece together a large percentage of your search history.

This is rather peculiar:

Now there are opponents and proponents of DRM, and I am not going to get into a discussion about the pros and cons of DRM in this blog; but I will say that Intel Insider is NOT a DRM technology.

Having established what it isn’t, the spokesperson goes on to tell us what it is:

Think of it as an armoured truck carrying the movie from the Internet to your display, it keeps the data safe from pirates, but still lets you enjoy your legally acquired movie in the best possible quality.

Right.

As long as using it is optional, I’m not too bothered that there’s DRM circuitry on board the new chips. What does annoy me though, is that apparently there’s room on the die for all of this (not to mention the new “Quick Sync” video-transcoding engine), yet we still have to get by without support for ECC-memory modules. Priorities, priorities…

From the guys at Ksplice:

There are three basic ingredients that typically go into a kernel exploit: the bug, the target, and the payload. The exploit triggers the bug — a flaw in the kernel — to write evil data corrupting the target, which is some kernel data structure. Then it prods the kernel to look at that evil data and follow it to run the payload, a snippet of code that gives the exploit the run of the system.

The bug is the one ingredient that is unique to a particular vulnerability. The target and the payload may be reused by an attacker in exploits for other vulnerabilities — if ‘Ac1dB1tch3z’ didn’t copy them already from an earlier exploit, by himself or by someone else, he or she will probably reuse them in future exploits.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Via LWN:

For those of you using the Adobe Flash player (including on Linux or Android), and, possibly, Adobe Reader users as well: the company has announced a “critical” vulnerability which, evidently, is being actively exploited.

We get to wonder how this can possibly be a critical vulnerability on each and every platform it runs on. Also, we’ll probably never find out how it worked. It’s the latter that annoys me.

As for security measures, there’s a choice between not having Flash at all, or hammering out a tight MAC policy. For me, the former is less hassle ;)

After punishing myself for several years with the HDF5 C++ API, today I finally discovered h5py. It’s wonderful, beautiful, magnificent. That’s all.

• It’s so thin and light, you’d expect to easily break it at first. But the casing is actually very sturdy.
• Page refreshes are fast. With this and the excellent page-turning buttons, you’d have a hard time turning a printed page half as fast as that.
• Resolution is impressive. In portrait orientation, testing with an almost-a4 journal article displayed full-page (ie at less than 25% zoom), I could still read even the figure captions.
• Switching portrait to landscape mode requires up to eight clicks (in the reader, when there are many active options to jump past). The menu interface is awkward like that in more than one place. At least it’s pretty responsive.
• Connect it to your PC over USB, and it shows up as a mass storage device, no nonsense. Couldn’t be better.
• Try connecting it to your PC over Wifi (say, to share your PCs 3G connection), and it will tell you it doesn’t grok ad-hoc networking.
• The graphite casing makes for a rather hard edge-contrast, I’m not sure this was a wise choice. Of course the white version might have shown more fingerprints.
• Once you really start reading, none of the above matters.