IT

In 1986, I purchased a Hewlett-Packard HP-15C scientific programmable calculator, for $120 or so. That was a lot of money back then, specially for a penniless high school student, but worth every penny. I lived in France at the time, and HP calculators cost roughly double the price there, so I waited for a vacation visit to my aunt in Los Angeles to get it. HP calculators are professional tools for engineers and you couldn’t find them at the local department store like TI trash, so I asked my aunt to mail order it for me prior to my visit. I still remember the excitement at finally getting it and putting it through its paces.

The HP-15C is long discontinued but I still keep mine as a prized heirloom, even though I have owned far more capable HPs over time (the HP-28C, HP-48SX, HP-200LX and more recently HP-35S and HP-33S) and given most of these away. The HP-15C’s financial cousin, the HP-12C is still in production today and has a tremendous cult following.

The reason for the HP Voyager series’ lasting power is many-fold:

• Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), HP’s distinctive way of entering calculations. For instance, to calculate the area of a 2m radius circle, you would type 2 x² π x instead of the more common algebraic (AOS) notation on TI or Casio calculators π x 2 x² =. With practice, RPN is much more natural and efficient than algebraic notation. When I went from high school to college, the number of RPN users went from 2 (myself and a classmate who owned a HP-11C) to over 50%.
• The ergonomics of the calculators are top-notch, from the landscape orientation to the inimitable HP keyboards with their firm and positive response.
• They offered far superior functionality, like the HP-15C’s built-in integrator, equation solver, matrix and complex algebra, or the HP-12C’s financial equation solver.

The HP-15C offers the right balance of power and usability. The HP-48SX was far more powerful, but if you stopped using it for more than a couple months, you would completely forget how to use it. The more advanced functionality like symbolic integration is better performed on a Mac or PC using Mathematica or the like, in any case.

Unfortunately, Carly Fiorina gutted the HP calculator department in one of the more egregious of her blunders during her disastrous tenure as CEO of HP, outsourcing R&D and manufacturing from Corvallis, Oregon to China. HP has been trying to regain lost ground, but it is an uphill battle as TI has had ample time to entrench itself.

All this long exposition leads to the news HP has released an app (and for other models like the HP-12C)

I benchmarked it by integrating the normal distribution (f LBL A x² CHS e^x 2 ENTER π x √x / RTN) between -3 and +3. On the original HP-15C, this takes about 34 seconds. On the iPhone emulator, it is near instantaneous. On the nonpareil emulator running on my octo-core Mac Pro, it’s more like a minute…

 

I still run Solaris 10 (update 6) on my home server, but this might be the release that makes me jump to OpenSolaris, at least at home (Oracle 10g wouldn’t run on 2008.05 last time I tried at work). A few things I noticed:

• xterm-color is finally recognized as a valid terminal type
• It supports Apple’s Bonjour autoconf out of the box, which is helpful in dhcp-only environments

I seem to be late to this party, but one of the security updates for Windows XP (.NET 3.5) silently installs a Firefox plugin that:

1. tells every web server you visit which version of the .NET framework you have, in my case

<tt>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)</tt>

2. allows websites to install software on your desktop using ClickOnce, a mechanism so abysmally stupid in its insecurity it gives ActiveX a run for its money.

The reason why Microsoft is doing this is to increase penetration of its also-ran Silverlight competitor to Flash for the 20-30% of Windows users who use Firefox instead of Internet Exploder. To make matters worse, the plugin uninstallation button is grayed out. A Microsoft staffer has published instructions on removing this on his blog.

This behavior is of course completely unacceptable. Perhaps Adobe will now join the line of Microsoft-bashers at the European Commission.

Update (2009-10-18):

Good news: Mozilla responded quickly to block this piece of malware. That should also disable Silverlight altogether. Two birds with one stone.

I decided to take action and wrote a letter (PDF) to EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes, apparently the only person in the world who has the cojones to confront Microsoft about its practices.

I attended the OpenSolaris Storage Summit in San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, SSDs dominated the proceedings. Sun is touting its hybrid storage pool approach, where SSDs are used to accelerate the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), a journal, and the L2ARC read cache, to get most of the benefits of SSDs without having to store an entire dataset in expensive SSDs. The presentations on the page are worth having a look into.

Andrew Leventhal commented on how using disk-oriented APIs to access SSDs makes as little sense as using cassette tape adapters to connect an iPod to a car stereo. Sure, it works, sort of, as a short-term compatibility mode, but you are not using the potential of the device. Fusion IO makes SSDs that are connected to the PCIe bus directly and get 5x better performance than the best SATA drive, the Intel X25-E, but it uses proprietary drivers. In one of the video presentations distributed in the conference, Andy Bechtolsheim mentioned he thought a memory channel model is a better fit for the hardware, as the block-device model and all the legacy assumptions behind it is holding back databases from using the full power of SSDs.

A modest suggestion – there is such an API available already: memory-mapped files. In an ironic full circle, an abstraction meant to simulate random access memory on rotating media is actually the best fit to the actual device characteristics. There are also obvious benefits such as DMA.

A few months ago, my former EuroNet colleague Niels Bakker was visiting SF. He works for AMS-IX, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, which is the world’s largest by volume of traffic, and mentioned they work with a mere 25 employees.

Today, I was attending a presentation by Don MacAskill, the CEO of photo-sharing service SmugMug. He has 2 sysadmins managing well over 300 servers.

At the same time, you hear about the astronomical costs of corporate IT departments: data centers that routinely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, plethora of staff delivering pitiful results and systems that have user interface even a novice coder could beat in a single day of coding..

Why is this so?

You have the usual suspects:

• Dysfunctional top-down corporate cultures, specially when decisions are made on political grounds, i.e. which vendor plays golf with the CIO (or CEO). Often the grunts on the ground know what needs to be done, but are defeated and dispirited by years of failing to budge the bureaucracy.
• Use of poorly manageable software like Windows
• A culture of fire-fighting that eschews automation.
• Risk aversion leading to excessive redundancy. I still cannot understand how Red Hat gets away with its outrageous pricing on RHEL 7.
• In most large corporations the concentration of financial responsibility in a separate department means most employees, including sysadmins, do not feel empowered or responsible for looking out for the company’s money. The bean counters, on the other hand, lack the knowledge required to find the cost savings.

One would think the new economic reality would force a reckoning. It would stand to reason that most companies would institute policies of procuring open-source software first, and only purchase commercial software on an case-by-case exception basis, with tough questions asked. This is still novel enough to make the news.