I'm just a poor software engineer, so I was confused by all these complex stories about proper banking policy and intermediate treasury notes and pension funding projections.
Happily, a person who understands economics much better than I do has created an infographic which explains it all.
Here's a random collection of this and that:
NetWars CyberCity participants, which include cyber warriors from the Department of Defense and other defenders within the U.S. Government, will be tasked with protecting the city's critical infrastructure and systems as they come under attack. Cyber warriors will be presented with potential real-world attacks; their job is to defend against them. Missions will include fending off attacks on the city's power company, hospital, water system and transportation services.
While many of the original assumptions of SDN have turned out to be less relevant than expected, SDN continues to hold its promise for changing the networks as we know them. I argue the change will not materialize through any individual improvement, new feature, or mechanism but through new abstractions and structures further refining our understanding of network architectures. I will discuss two practically proven examples of such new abstractions and structures – network fabrics and network virtualization – and how they together with software forwarding can help to reorganize functionality within networks, making future networks flexible, evolvable and simple to manage.
Basically, you could get two whole avocados at the market for the price of one scoop. Consider ordering a burrito bowl, and adding your sliced avocado on top. Ultimately the guacamole decision is a value call and you have to look deep within your heart and wallet to make the decision that’s right for you. NOTE: If you forgo the meat, the guacamole is free.Tell me, though, doesn't it make you think of that classic: The Ultimate In-N-Out Secret Menu (and Super Secret Menu!) Survival Guide?
Things just got a whole lot more fun. We proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes poring over our options, colluding like '80s kids in a clubhouse trading Garbage Pail Kids, expanding my original list with Thomas' insider information.
A phantom island can be defined as ‘An island once believed to exist, and accordingly depicted on maps, but of which the existence was later disproved, and its cartographic representation removed’.
Deterministic application record and replay is the ability to record application execution and deterministically replay it at a later time.
The second is the one that you don't like: The unexplained improvement. The memory usage activity went down a lot, but you don't remember making any changes that affect your program's memory usage profile. Things got better but you don't know why.The danger here is that the performance gain may be the result of a bug. Maybe the scenario completed with half the I/O activity because the storage system is ignoring flush requests. Or it completed 15% faster because the cache is returning false cache hits.
I am reading a most remarkable book.
William Trogdon, who also goes by William Least Heat-Moon, is best known for his book Blue Highways.
I have not read Blue Highways.
I am not reading Blue Highways.
I am reading one of Least Heat-Moon's other books: PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country.
I don't really want to tell you what this book is about, partly because you'll come to the wrong conclusions, and partly because it isn't about what you think it's about.
Here's what Publisher's Weekly said:
Whereas Blue Highways dealt with Heat-Moon's auto trip across America, PrairyErth (an old term for heartland soils) records a journey mostly on foot across the tallgrass prairies and grasslands of Chase County, Kans. In a great cornucopia of a book, a majestic, healing hymn to America's potential, Heat-Moon attempts to penetrate the spirit of the land...
I guess that's actually not too far off.
But let me try two other descriptions:
PrairyErth is an entire book about a single county in rural Kansas.
PrairyErth is the story of a country and a people, and of how the influences of geography, history, culture, biology, and sheer dumb luck left us where we are.
Oh, heck, I don't really want to tell you what this book is "about", because you'll say to yourself: "sounds boring."
And it's not boring, at all.
In fact, I find myself savoring, inching, crawling through the book, a page at a time, enjoying every bit.
Least Heat-Moon calls himself "an inspector of the ordinary", which, I think, is just marvelously appropriate. He is the sort of author who can write an entire page about a hill, or a bush, or a gust of wind, or the doorstep of a house, and you'll find yourself simply enthralled. Here he is, just going for a walk, "in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far":
There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because you then begin to believe you're not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn't fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark. On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, a thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far, and it seemed every time I raised a step the earth rotated under me so that my foot fell just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere.
As it turns out, Least Heat-Moon doesn't need to "really get somewhere," as he is fascinated by where he is:
I'd come into the prairie out of some dim urge to encounter the alien -- it's easier to comprehend where someplace else is than where you are -- and I had begun to encounter it as I moved among the quoins, ledgers, pickled brains, winds, creek meanders, gravestones, stone-age circles. I was coming to see that facts carry a traveler only so far: at last he must penetrate the land by a different means, for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That's how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense.(The "pickled brains," by the way, are an exhibit in the county museum.)
At times it may seem like Least Heat-Moon is just wandering, bouncing from topic to topic ("I'm scribbling things down", he says), but it's not like a child with ADD, unable to sustain any interest; rather, he is deeply, deeply interested, and finds himself interested in everything about Chase County, Kansas.
As Least Heat-Moon observes, this was not a likely place for people to settle, and it took effort, and a rather subtle form of deception, to convince them to travel so far, and to such a place; appealing to their sub-conscious urges was necessary:
Of the fifteen longitudinal streets, ten have the names of trees, and none of a prairie grass or native forb or legume. These names are fossil history of attitudes that town promoters employed to attract settlers from the eastern woodlands, people who had experienced little to prepare them for this big grassland, even the pioneers from the smaller and wetter prairies of Illinois and Indiana. The homesteaders brought with them a notion corroborated by their Christianity that this hugely open spread was a kind of failed forest that needed only the hand of civilized man to redeem it from its appalling waste, and they reversed here their usual practice of axing wilderness: they planted trees to remove it. Rather than learning what the prairie could provide and then changing their ways to harmonize with a land new to them, the settlers began trying to remake it into the East.
Hopefully I have whetted your appetite for this delightful book, and for Least Heat-Moon's insight, his clarity, and his superb phrasings and poetic voice.
You may think that you care nothing about Chase County, Kansas, and wonder why it would be worth the time to learn about it; I can only hope that this brief taste gives you the motivation to give PrairyErth a try.
Check out this feature in USA Today: Chuck Yeager, still soaring at 89.
"I'll be 90 in February, and while I'm not gonna run no marathon I still hunt and fish and fly," says Yeager, resting in the shade of a tail-dragger prop plane that he solos in regularly.
I love this:
"What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything," Yeager says. "You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it."
Still an inspiration, at age 89.
If you think grandmaster chess is boring, with lots of positional strategic maneuvering, you owe it to yourself to play through the game between World Champion Viswanathan Anand and England's Gawain Jones in round 5 of the London Chess Classic.
You can find the game here: Round 5 Games.
The Hindu explains a bit about what's going on: Anand tames Gawain Jones in London Chess
Surprisingly, Jones decided to give Anand a taste of his own medicine. The Samisch system, the Grunfeld defence has been deeply analysed by the world champion for the World Championship match against Gelfand earlier this year and Jones chose the same as white.Anand went for a complicated variation and Jones was at sea right from the early stages of middle game. The Indian ace had no troubles eating the material that came his way and by move 20 everything was in control. Jones resigned after 29 moves.
I'll say it was a complicated variation! On move 12, Anand's knight moves quietly to f6, seemingly just to protect his king from the pawn advance of Jones. But three moves later the knight advances, apparently all alone, a lone soldier against the massive White forces.
Then two moves later out comes Anand's queen, and it becomes clear that all of Black's pieces are in perfect position, and in just a few more moves White is reduced to nothing.
Meanwhile, as The Hindu observes, Carlsen continues his phenomenal pace in this tournament:
The victory took Carlsen to an astonishing thirteen points from four games in the soccer-like scoring system in place here. Kramnik remains on the toes of the leader with eleven points in his kitty and the rest of the field is now far behind.
But don't count Nakamura out! He won again, too!
It's brilliant entertaining chess. Don't miss it!
At times I wish I had my own switch to turn off the Internet...
But more seriously, last week's episode in Syria is interesting: was Syria off the Internet? How did it happen? Who caused it to happen? Why was that decision made, and why was it subsequently reversed?
Two interesting blogs have more details:
The following network providers typically provide connectivity from Syria to the rest of the Internet: PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers with Telecom Italia and TATA for additional capacity. When the outage happened, the BGP routes to Syrian IP space were all simultaneously withdrawn from all of Syria's upstream providers. The effect of this is that networks were unable to route traffic to Syrian IP space, effectively cutting the country off the Internet.
Traffic to the CloudFlare network from Syrian IP addresses appears to have returned to levels seen prior to the shutdown. Almost immediately after the first links were reestablished we saw traffic levels jump back up.
In some countries, international access to data and telecommunications services is heavily regulated. There may be only one or two companies who hold official licenses to carry voice and Internet traffic to and from the outside world, and they are required by law to mediate access for everyone else.Renesys identify 61 countries where this situation is the most clearly-defined:
If you have only 1 or 2 companies at your international frontier, we classify your country as being at severe risk of Internet disconnection. Those 61 countries include places like Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Libya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Yemen.Of the 61 countries they identified, most are tiny island nations like Saint Pierre and Miquelon; in such cases both geography and country size mean that the presence of only 1 or 2 cross-border Internet gateways is little surprise, and (to me) does not necessarily correlate with any particular policy choices.
Meanwhile, since we're talking about duh Netz, I enjoyed this little rant from the Internet Governance Project's blog: Three Little ICANN Atrocities That Make the ITU Look Good By Comparison.
Fussing about the threat to the Internet posed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is reaching that state of critical mass where media outlets write about it mainly because other media outlets are writing about it. The tacit assumption behind much of this fussing is that the status quo, exemplified by ICANN and other “multi-stakeholder institutions,” is doing a wonderful job and we should strive to preserve them.But the status quo is not so wonderful.
The world changes, but the basic issues remain:
"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.
All eyes are focused on Magnus Carlsen as the London Chess Classic kicks off this weekend. Carlsen is currently just four rating points away from Garry Kasparov's all-time rating peak of 2851, and with Aronian, Kramnik, and Anand in the draw, Carlsen has some big opportunities to pick up those final few points that all have expected for so long.
But don't overlook Hikaru Nakamura. Although he's had a few ups and downs this fall, 2012 has been a wonderful year for Naka, with some tremendous victories.
The first round is now complete, and from all appearances this will be a fighting tournament: all 4 first round games were decisive, and in three of the four games the player with the black pieces was the victor.
Nakamura's victory, with black, over world #2 Levon Aronian, was just superb.
Is he poised for a breakout tournament, under the lights, with all the world's best in attendance?
