The complexities of interpreting a benchmark

Benchmark wars are no fun, and I hate them as much as the next engineer. So it's a breath of fresh air to read, over at the Real World Technologies web site, David Kanter's thorough and detailed analysis of the recent benchmarks of the new AMD server micro-architecture code-named "bulldozer".

It's worth reading Kanter's article just to get some perspective into how hard it is to conduct a detailed and accurate analysis of a benchmark of a modern server. Kanter identifies dozens of variables that can affect the overall results, both procedural aspects such as compiler settings and runtime options, as well as engineering decisions such as system bus speeds, memory subsystem design, power management, etc.

Kudos to Kanter for taking the time to study the issues in such detail, and for sharing with us the thought process he went through as he analyzed the data that has emerged so far. For my part, I'm much less interested in the results than in the process, as it's always good to consider how one can become a better benchmarker, and reading a benchmark critique is a great way to do that.

Amazon CloudDrive debuts

Amazon has announced its CloudDrive service, which is kind of a competitor to systems like DropBox, or perhaps to online backup services like Carbonite or Mozy.

The Amazon pricing model appears quite simple: $1 / GB / year. The service is positioned as a place to store your music and books and other digital media that you purchase from Amazon, and for those purposes: "Any Amazon MP3 purchases that you elect to store on your Cloud Drive at the time of purchase do not count against your storage quota."

Note that a raw storage device is not a complete backup solution, of course; a backup solution knows how to keep multiple versions of your files on the backup device, can take full and incremental backups, can restore you to a point in time, etc. So if you wanted to use CloudDrive for backup, you'd need to combine it with some of those procedures. Of course, maybe Amazon will add to the service in the future.

Up and Down California

I just happened upon a wonderful blog that I hadn't seen before: Up and Down California. The blog is, one post at a time, publishing and illustrating the travels of the 1860 Whitney Survey of California.

Although, like most blogs, the website loads with the newest article at the top, the authors have kindly provided an index and you can start reading from the beginning by going here.

This is great work, and the pictures really bring the stories to life. Enjoy!

Gosling joins Google

The net is abuzz with the news that James Gosling has joined Google. Congratulations Google! I'm sure he'll be an interesting person to have around.

I tend to doubt he'll work on Java though; I suspect he's over that.

I wonder if he'll work on Go?

The information is available, if you are a subscriber

There's been a lot of discussion about access to information lately, brought particularly to the forefront by the New York Times's decision to join the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and other major publications in restricting access to its online articles to those who have paid to subscribe.

Reader of my blog will know that I have long been frustrated by the computer science research community's use of academic research journals to publish their research, journals which charge enormous fees to access the information, even years or decades later, yet which are publishing work that is largely (though not totally) funded by public taxpayer grants. This hurts everyone. However, the publishing industry is very wealthy and can afford Washington lobbyists.

So I was interested to see a recent article discussing an effort by a group of librarians to try to organize an effort to address this problem. It sounded like a promising idea, so I thought I'd link to the article.

But it's only available to subscribers willing to pay for access.

Nice short soccer video from Thailand

I thought this was a nice video to watch.

Comodo fraud incident

This short incident report from Comodo is fascinating; in particular, check out the last line!

This nice summary report over on Freedom to Tinker does a good job of summarizing what is currently known about the event.

The Freedom to Tinker report links to this awesome post by Jacob Applebaum over at the Tor project discussing more details.

There are also short posts from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google.

This is all very interesting, and I suspect we'll learn more about this in the coming weeks.

For now, though, I instantly wonder (and presumably others do as well): is this the first salvo of a Stuxnet counter-attack?