Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 15, 2002

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PC clusters ranked in supercomputer Top 10: "PC-based cluster computers have entered the Top 10 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the Top 500 supercomputer list released this week. The 20th edition of the list was released in time for the annual SC2002 supercomputer conference in Baltimore, due to run from Nov. 16 to 22." [InfoWorld: Top News]

The list is found at the top500.org site. The biggest supercomputer in Finland is at CSC and in position 37 in the list.

The Great War -- Comment()
I today submitted and published a new net column at MikroPC magazine (in Finnish). The title is The Great War (Suuri taistelu), and the text tells about the strategies and aims of the Microsoft corporation. The recent MS operation in India inspired this text. I must say that I respect and admire Microsoft a lot. Do the other participants in the war have any possibility of winning?

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Hacking the Xserve: "Perhaps the only server impervious to hackers is the one still sealed in its packing box. Once a server is plugged into its grounding source and running on a network, it immediately becomes a target. Apple's new rack-mounted Xserve is no exception -- but the Xserve may be inherently more secure than Windows servers." [osOpinion]

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IBM racks up 128 CPUs with P655: "IBM today launched an ultra dense Unix server targeted at the high performance computing and supercomputer markets. The eServer p655 packs 128 POWER4 processors in a single rack and is available in four or eight processor building blocks. It has a maximum performance of half a trillion operations per second at maximum configurations." [The Register]

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OmniDiskSweeper updated for Jaguar. "The Omni Group has released OmniDiskSweeper 1.3.1, an update to the the company's Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting large, useless files and thus making space on a users hard disk. Version 1.3.1 includes new compatibility for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and improvements to the Software Update function." [MacMinute.com: Up-to-the-Minute Apple Mac News]

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The Memo That Roared: Microsoft and Open Source: "The recent Microsoft internal memo about open source software makes it clear that the software giant feels fear and loathing toward Linux -- maybe more fear than loathing at this point. The fact that Microsoft bothered to conduct a telephone survey about open source with IT workers across the globe certainly shows a little weakness in the knees." [osOpinion]

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View PDFs from within your browser: "The PDF Browser Plug-In plugs a long-standing hole in the OS X experience, and does exactly what the name suggests - with it, you can view PDFs in your browser. I see a minor cosmetic issue with it, but I'm very happy to have it. Forget Pick of the Week; nominate Manfred Schubert for beatification." [Mac OS X Hints]

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Full of excuses? Deflecting blame not always wise: "Excuses for bad behavior may abound in our but-it's-not-my-fault culture, but researchers say that shifting blame from one's self can often backfire. [...] Psychologists at the University of Florida found that under certain circumstances, excuses gain nothing more than ill feelings from others. Their study of college students showed that people who routinely avoid responsibility for mistakes and misdeeds risk being viewed as lacking character and being deceitful and self-absorbed." [Reuters Health eLine]

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It's a Google Universe: "Craig Allen points us to a science fictionish story by Paul Ford about how Google could become the center of the known universe." [JOHO the Blog]

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Boing Boing Blog points to Mozilla adds Bayesian spam-filter: "Another reason to praise Mozilla: Mox hackers have added a Bayesian spam-filter to the Mozilla mailer. A Bayesian filter learns from its user -- you give it some examples of messages that are and aren't spam, and it will use statistical analysis to guess whether new mail is more like spam or more like not-spam. When it guesses wrong, you give it a gentle corrective feedback and it learns, getting better all the time."

This seems to be a similar approach than the one which is used in the Mail program on Mac OS X. So far I have been extremely pleased with the spam filter of Mail.

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Boing Boing Blog points to SGI and fluid dynamics in disposable diapers: "Procter and Gamble are buying gigantic SGI supercomputers to model the aerodynamics of Pringles chips -- less aerodynamic chips won't take flight from the fast-moving conveyors -- and the fluid dynamics of human waste in disposable diapers."

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Seb's Open Research points to SIAA lobbies to shut down other free access resources and quotes More Sites Targeted For Shutdown: "Having successfully shut down PubScience, a site that offered free access to scientific and technical articles, commercial publishers are now looking to attack other sources of free information."

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Seb's Open Research points to How we write our blog and writes "I try to follow a similar approach, though my focus is rather wide. See also Mark Bernstein's excellent ten tips."

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Metafilter asks Are newspapers becoming opinionpapers? "The papers are cutting back on news, especially international news, in favour of news lite or opinion columns. Or what's styled as opinion but is really pieces by 'columnists' who are totally self-referential and whose idea of research is interviewing their own friends. The article is very Can-Con (high Canadian content) but it'll be interesting if Me-Fiers from other countries weigh in with data/observations about their own media. Canadian media doesn't probably doesn't stand alone in this trend."

Bad Spam Filters -- Comment()
Joel on Software writes:

Spam is getting worse and worse. My incoming spam ratio is well over 50% by now. SpamAssassin catches and tags most of it; these are automatically shuttled into a "Spam" folder. About once a week, it takes me 15 seconds to make sure there's nothing important in there and throw it out.

On the other hand, overzealous system administrators are causing serious damage to the connectivity of the Internet by imposing draconian spam filters. The Joel on Software mailing list is operated by a legitimate email delivery company with strong anti spam policies; it is double-opt-in, of course. Increasingly, emails sent to the mailing list are getting bounced -- not tagged -- before they even get to the users. In the last half hour, five people tried to sign up, but the confirmation email didn't even get to them. Apparently my mailing list provider's IP address is now blacklisted by SpamCop. OK, fair enough. But if you or your ISP is using a spam filter that bounces mail, you're going to lose stuff that you didn't want to lose. So don't do it. Use tagging systems instead -- have the spam filter add a tag like "***SPAM***" to the subject line, and let your email client shuttle these off to another folder.