As part of the “Let’s make the web faster” initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”), an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a specification of the protocol, we have developed a SPDY-enabled Google Chrome browser and open-source web server. In lab tests, we have compared the performance of these applications over HTTP and SPDY, and have observed up to 64% reductions in page load times in SPDY. We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code, and test results, to make SPDY the next-generation application protocol for a faster web.
Google wants the World Wide Web to go faster. I think we all would like to have that as well. But what kind of heavy lifting is it going to take? The transition from Arpanet to the TCP/IP protocol took a very long time and required some heavy handed shoving to accomplish the cutover in 1984. We can all thank Vint Cerf for making that happen so that we could continue to grow and evolve as an online species (Tip of Hat). But now what? There’s been a move to evolved from TCP/IP version 4 to version 6 to accommodate the increase in number of network devices. Speed really wasn’t a consideration in that revision. I don’t know how this project integrates with TCP/IP vers. 6. But I hope maybe it can be pursued on a parallel course with the big migration to TCP/IP vers. 6.
What would be the worst thing that could happen is to create another Facebook/Twitter/Apple Store/Google/AOL cul-de-sac that only benefits the account holders loyal to Google. Yes it would be nice if Google Docs and all the other attendant services provided via/through Google got onboard the SPDY accelerator train. I would stand to benefit, but things like this should be pushed further up into the wider Internet so that everyone, everywhere has the same benefits. Otherwise this is an attempt to steal away user accounts and create churn in the competitors account databases.
Singe-chip Cloud Computer sounds a lot like that 80 core and 48 core CPU experiments that Intel had been working on a while back. There is a a note that the core is a Pentium 54c and that rings a bell too as it was the same core used for those multi-core CPUs. Now the research appears to be centered on the communications links between those cores and getting an optimal bit of work for a given amount of interconnectivity. Twenty-four cores is a big step down from 80 and 48 cores. I’m thinking Intel’s manufacturing process engineers are attempting to reign in the scope of this research to make it more worthy of manufacture. Whatever happens you will likely see adaptations or bits and pieces of these technologies in a future shipping product. I’m a little disappointed though that the scope has grown smaller. I had real high hopes Intel could pull off a big technological breakthrough with an 80 core CPU, but change comes slowly and Chip Fab lines are incredibly expensive to build, pilot and line out as they make new products. Conservatism is to be expected in an industry that has the highest level of up front capital expenditure required before there’s a return on the investment. If nothing else, companies like Seamicro, Tilera and ARM will continue to goose Intel into research efforts like this and innovate their old serial processors a little bit more.
On the other side of the argument there is the massive virtualization of OSes on more typical serial style multi-core CPUs from Intel. VMWare and competitors still continue to slice out clock cycles of the Intel processor to make them appear to be more than one physical machine. Datacenters have seen performance compromises using this scheme to be well worth the effort in staff and software licenses given the amount of space saved through consolidation. Less rack space, and power required, the higher the marginal return for that one computer host sitting on the network. But, what this article from The Register is trying to say is if a sufficiently dense multi-core cpu is used and the power requirements scaled down sufficiently you get the same kind of consolidation of rack space, but without the layer of software on top of it all to provide the virtualized computers themselves. A one-to-one relationship between computer core and actual virtual machine can be done without the typical machinations and complications required by a Hypervisor-style OS riding herd over the virtualized computers. In that case, less Hypervisor is more. More robust that is in terms of total compute cycles devoted to hosts, more robust design architecture to minimize single points of failure and choke points. So I say there’s plenty of room to innovate yet in the virtualization industry given that the CPUs and their architectures are in an early stage of innovating massively multi-core cpus.
Almost as galling as the Amazon Web Services outage itself is a the litany of blog posts, such as this one and this one, that place the blame not on AWS for having a long failure and not communicating with its customers about it, but on AWS customers for not being better prepared for an outage.
As Klint Finley points out in his article, everyone seems to be blaming the folks who ponied up money to host their websites/webapps on the Amazon data center cloud. Until the outage, I was not really aware of the ins and outs, workflow and configuration required to run something on Amazons infrastructure. I am small-scale, small potatoes mostly relying on free services which when the work is great, and when they don’t work, meh! I can take or leave them, my livelihood doesn’t depend on them (thank goodness). But for those who do depend on uptime and pay money for it, they need some greater level of understanding by their service provider.
Amazon doesn’t make things explicit enough to follow a best practice in configuring your website installation using their services. It appears some business had no outages (but didn’t follow best practices) and some folks did have long outages though they had set up everything ‘by the book’ following best practices. The service that lay at the center of the outage was called Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Many websites use databases to hold contents of the website, collect data and transaction information, collect metadata about users likes/dislikes, etc. The Elastic Block Storage acts as the container for the data in the RDS. When your website goes down if you have things setup correctly things fail gracefully, you have duplicate RDS and EBS containers in the Amazon data center cloud that will take over and continue responding to people clicking on things and typing in information on your website instead of throwing up error messages or not responding at all (in a word it just magically continues working). However, if you don’t follow the “guidelines” as specified by Amazon, all bets are off you wasted money paying double for the more robust, fault tolerant failover service.
Most people don’t care about this especially if they weren’t affected by the outages. But the business owners who suffered and their customers who they are liable for definitely do. So if the entrepreneurial spirit bites you, and you’re very interested in online commerce always be aware. Nothing is free, and especially nothing is free even if you pay for it and don’t get what you paid for. I would hope a leading online commerce company like Amazon could do a better job and in future make good on its promises.
Whenever you need to work with data, don’t overlook the Unix “hand tools.” Sure, everything I’ve done here could be done with Excel or some other fancy tool like R or Mathematica. Those tools are all great, but if your data is living in the cloud, using these tools is possible, but painful. Yes, we have remote desktops, but remote desktops across the Internet, even with modern high-speed networking, are far from comfortable. Your problem may be too large to use the hand tools for final analysis, but they’re great for initial explorations. Once you get used to working on the Unix command line, you’ll find that it’s often faster than the alternatives. And the more you use these tools, the more fluent you’ll become.
This is a great remedial refresher on the Unix commandline and for me kind of reinforces an idea I’ve had that when it comes to computing We Live Like Kings. What? How is that possible, well think about what you are trying to accomplish and finding the least complicated quickest way to that point is a dying art. More often one is forced to follow or highly encouraged to set out on a journey with very well defined protocols/rituals included. You must use the APIs, the tools, the methods as specified by your group. Things falling outside that orthodoxy are frowned upon no matter what the speed and accuracy of the result. So doing it quick and dirty using some Shell scripting and utilities is going to be embarrassing for those unfamiliar with those same tools.
My experience doing this involved a very low end attempt to split Web access logs into nice neat bits that began an ended on certain dates. I used grep, split, and a bunch of binaries I borrowed for doing log analysis and formatting the output into a web report. Overall it didn’t take much time, and required very little downloading, uploading,uncompressing,etc. It was all commandline based with all the output dumped to a directory on the same machine. I probably spent 20 minutes every Sunday running these by hand (as I’m not a cronjob master much less an atjob master). And none of the work I did was mission critical other than being a barometer of how much use the websites were getting from the users. I realize now I could have had the whole works automated with variables setup in the shell script to accommodate running on different days of the week, time changes, etc. But editing the scripts by hand in vi editor only made me quicker and more proficient in vi (which I still gravitate towards using even now).
And as low end as my needs were and how little experience I had initially using these tools, I am grateful for the time I spent doing it. I feel so much more comfortable knowing I can figure out how to do these tasks on my own, pipe outputs into inputs for other utilities and get useful results. I think I understand it though I’m not a programmer, and couldn’t really leverage higher level things like data structures to get work done, no. I’m a brute force kind of guy and given how fast the CPUs are running, a few ugly, inefficient recursions isn’t going to kill me or my reputation. So here’s to Mike Loukides article and how much it reminds me of what I like about Unix.
The schedules may help back mounting beliefs that the iPhone 5 will 64GB iPhone 4 prototype appeared last month that hinted Apple was exploring the idea as early as last year. Just on Tuesday, a possible if disputed iPod touch with 128GB of storage also appeared and hinted at an upgrade for the MP3 player as well. Both the iPhone and the iPod have been stuck at 32GB and 64GB of storage respectively since 2009 and are increasingly overdue for additional space.
Toshiba has revised its flash memory production lines again to keep pace with the likes of Intel, Micron and Samsung. Higher densities and smaller form factors seemed to indicate they are gearing up for a big production run of the highest capacity memory modules they can make. It’s looking like a new iPhone might be the candidate to receive newer multi-layer single chip 64GB Flash memory modules this year.
A note of caution in this arms race of ever smaller feature sizes on the flash memory modules, the smaller you go the less memory read/write cycles you get. I’m becoming aware that each new generation of flash memory production has lost an amount of robustness. This problem has been camouflaged maybe even handled outright by the increase in over-provisioning of chips on a given size Solid State Disk (sometimes as low as 17% more chips than that which is typically used when the drive is full). Through careful statistical modeling and use of algorithms, an ideal shuffling of the deck of available flash memory chips allows the load to be spread out. No single chip fails as it’s workload is shifted continuously to insure it doesn’t receive anywhere near the maximum number of reliable read write cycles. Similarly, attempts to ‘recover’ data from failing memory cells within a chip module are also making up for these problems. Last but not least outright error-correcting hardware has been implemented on chip to insure everything just works from the beginning of the life of the Solid State Disk (SSD) to the finals days of its useful life.
We may not see the SSD eclipse the venerable kind off high density storage, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Given the point of diminishing return provided by Moore’s Law (scaling down increases density, increases speed, lowers costs), Flash may never get down to the level of density we enjoy in a typical consumer brand HDD (2TBytes). We may have to settle for other schemes that get us to that target through other means. Which brings me to my favorite product of the moment, the PCIe based SSD. Which is nothing more than a big circuit board with a bunch of SSD’s tied together in a disk array with a big fat memory controller/error-correction controller sitting on it. In terms of speeds using the PCI Express bus, there are current products that beat single SATA 6 SSDs by a factor of two. And given the requirements of PCI, the form factor of any given module could be several times bigger and two generations older to reach the desired 2Terbyte storage of a typical SATA Hard Drive of today. Which to me sounds like a great deal if we could also see drops in price and increases in reliability by using older previous generation products and technology.
But the mobile market is hard to please, as they are driving most decisions when it comes to what kind of Flash memory modules get ordered en masse. No doubt Apple, Samsung and anyone in consumer electronics will advise manufacturers to consistently shrink their chip sizes to increase density and keep prices up on final shipping product. I don’t know how efficiently an iPhone or iPad use the available memory say on a 64GByte iTouch let’s say. Most of that goes into storing the music, TV shows, and Apps people want to have readily available while passing time. The beauty of that design is it rewards consumption by providing more capacity and raising marginal profit at the same time. This engine of consumer electronics design doesn’t look likely to end in spite of the physical limitations of shrinking down Flash memory chips. But there will be a day of reckoning soon, not unlike when Intel hit the wall at 4Ghz serial processors and had to go multi-core to keep it’s marginal revenue flowing. It’s been very lateral progress in terms of processor performance since then. It is more than likely Flash memory chips cannot get any smaller without being really unreliable and defective, thereby sliding into the same lateral incrementalism Intel has adopted. Get ready for the plateau.
“Could Apple be opening up the platform more?” he asked. “What happens to NVIDIA? Why support for cards that aren’t in Macs yet? Will the 2011 Sandy Bridge iMacs contain one or more of these new 6xxx cards?”
This is an interesting tidbit of news. A Macintosh hacker has discovered within the most recent update of Mac OS X 10.6 a number of hardware drivers for ATI graphics cards that do not ship and are currently ‘unsupported’ on the Mac. Anyone who has attempted to buy after market, third party OEM graphics cards for Macs know this is treacherous minefield to navigate. The principle problem being Apple absolutely positively does not want people sticking any old graphics card in the Macintosh Pro towers. Or even in old legacy towers going back to the first PowerPC/PCI based Macs. No, you must buy direct from Apple the bona fide supported hardware with drivers they supply. In a pinch you might be able to fake it with a PC graphics card that has had its BIOS flashed to make it appear to be a genuine Apple part.
But now if Apple is just bundling up a bunch of drivers for various and sundry graphics cards (albeit from one supplier: ATI), is it possible you could finally buy any card you wanted and it would work? That would be big news indeed for any owner of an end-user upgradeable Macintosh Pro owner and welcome news at that. I’m hoping that this news continues to develop and Apple comes out with a policy or strategy statement heralding a change in past policy towards peripheral manufacturers. More devices being supported would be a great thing.
Probase is a Microsoft Research project described as an “ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving.” Its primary goal is to “enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication.” It can be compared to Cyc, DBpedia or Freebase in that it is attempting to compile a massive collection of structured data that can be used to power artificial intelligence applications.
Who knew Microsoft was so interested in things only IBM Research’s Watson could demonstrate? AI (artificial intelligence) seems to be targeted at Bing search engine results. And in order to back this all up, they have to ditch their huge commitment to Microsoft SQL Server and go for a NoSQL database in order to hold all the unstructured data. This seems like a huge shift away from desktop and data center applications and something much more oriented to a cloud computing application where collected data is money in the bank. This is best expressed in the example given in the story of Google vs. Facebook. Google may collect data, but it is really delivering ads to eyeballs. Whereas Facebook is just collecting the data and sharing that to the highest bidder. Seems like Microsoft is going the Facebook route of wanting to collect and own the data rather than merely hosting other people’s data (like Google and Yahoo).
However, Windows’ Shadow Copy is really intended for creating a snapshot of an entire volume for backup purposes; users can’t trigger the creation of a new version of an individual file in Windows. This makes Lion’s Versions a very different beast: its more akin to a versioning file system that works like Time Machine, but local to the user’s own disk.
Reading this article from Apple Insider’s series of previews of Mac OS X 10.7 has been an education in both the iOS based universe and the good ol’ desktop universe I already know and love. At first I was apprehensive about the desktop OS taking such a back seat to the mobile devices Apple has been introducing at an increasingly fast pace. From iPods to iPhones to iPod Touch and now the iPad, there’s no end to the permutations iOS based devices can take. Prior to the iPhone and iPod Touch releases, Apple was using an embedded OS with none of the sophistication and capability of a real desktop operating system. This was both a frugal and conservative approach as media players while having real CPUs inside were never intended to have network stacks, garbage collection on UI servers, etc. There was always enough there to present a User Interface off some sort, with access to a local file system and ability to sync files between a host based iTunes client and the device (whichever generation iPod it might be). Along with that each generation hardware most likely varied by degrees as video playback became a touted feature in newer iPods with bigger internal hard drives (so-called video ipods). I can imagine that got complicated quickly as CPU and video chips and media playback capabilities ranged widely up and down the product line. As each device required its own tweaks to the embedded OS, and iTunes was tweaked to accommodate these local variations, I’m sure the all seeing eye of Steve Jobs began to wince at the increasing complexity of the iPod product line. Enter the iOS, a smaller, cleaner fully optimized OS for low power mobile devices. It’s got everything a desktop OS has without any of the legacy device concerns (backward compatibility) of a typical desktop OS. This allowed for creating ‘just enough’ capability in the networking capability the UI Server and the local storage. Apps written for iOS were unique to that environment though they might have started out as Mac OS X apps. By taking the original code base, re-factoring it and doing complete low level rewrites from top to bottom, you got a version of the Safari web browser on a mobile device. It could display ANY webpage and kind of do some display optimizations of the page on the fly. And there were a number of developers rushing to get an app to run on the new devices. So wither the Apple Mac OS X?
Well in the rush of creating an iOS app universe, the iOS development team added many features along the way. One great gap was the missing cut & paste analogy long enjoyed on desktop OSes. Eventually this feature made it in, and others like it slowly got integrated. Apple’s custom A4 chip using and ARM Core 8 cpu was tearing up the charts, out competing every other mobile phone OS on the market. Similarly the iPad took that same approach of getting out there with new features and becoming a more desktop like mobile device. A year has passed since the original iPad hit the market, the Mac OS is due for a change, the big question is what does Steve Jobs think? There were hints and rumors he wanted everyone to enjoy the clean room design of the iOS, dump the legacy messiness of old Mac OS X. Dan Lyons of Newsweek gave voice to these concerns quite clearly in his June 8 article in Newseek. Steve Jobs would eventually reply directly to this author and state emphatically he was wrong. Actions speak louder than words, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in 2010 seemed to really hard sell the advantages of developing for the new iOS. Conversely, Microsoft has proven over and over again, legacy support in an OS is a wonderful source of income, once you have established your monopoly. However, Apple has navigated the legacy hardware seas before with its first big migration from Motorola 68000 processors to the PowerPC chip, then subsequently the migration from PowerPC to Intel chips. From a software standpoint attrition occurs as people dump their legacy hardware anyways (not uncommon amongst Apple users to eventually get rid of their older hardware). So to help deliver the benefit of newer software requirements are now fully in place that even certain first gen Intel based Macs won’t be able to run the newest Mac OS X (that’s the word now). Similarly legacy support for PowerPC native apps running under Intel in emulation (using the Rosetta software) will also go away. Which then brings us to the point of this whole blog posting, where’s the beef?
The beef dear reader is not in the computers but in ourselves. As Macintosh OSes evolve so do the workflow and the new paradigm being foisted upon us through the use of mobile devices is the lack of need to go to the File Menu -> Choose Save or Save As… That’s what the new iOS design portends in the future. Same goes for open documents in process, everything is done for you at long last. The computer does what finally you thought it did all the time and what Microsoft eventually built into Word (not the OS itself), Autosave. Newly developed versions of TextEdit made by Apple to run under OS X 10.7 were tested and tried out to see how they work under the new Auto Save and Versions architecture. Now, you just make a new document and the computer (safely) assumes you will most likely want to save the document as you are working on it, and you may want to go back and undo some changes you made. After all these years of using desktop computers, this is now built right in at long last. So from the commandline to the GUI and now to the Mobile OS, computer architects and UI engineers have a good idea of what you might want to do before you choose to do it, and it’s built in at the lowest level of the OS finally! And all of these are going to be in the next version of Mac OS X, due for release this July, 2011. After reading these articles from AppleInsider looking at the screenshots, I’m way more enthused and willing to change and adapt the way I work to the new regime of hybrid iOS and MacOS X going forward.
Finally, despite Apple’s dropping of the Xserve line (see “A Eulogy for the Xserve: May It Rack in Peace,” 8 November 2010), Mac OS X Server will make the transition to Lion, with Apple promising that the new version will make setting up a server easier than ever. That’s in part because Lion Server will be built directly into Lion, with software that guides you through configuring the Mac as a server. Also, a new Profile Manager will add support for setting up and managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Wiki Server 3 will offer improved navigation and a new Page Editor. And Lion Server’s WebDAV support will provide iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share server-based documents.
Here’s to seeing a great democratization of OS X Server once and for all time. While Apple did deserve to make some extra cash on a server version of the OS, I’m sure it had very little impact on their sales overall (positive or negative). However, including/bundling it with the base level OS and letting it be unlocked (for money or for free) can only be a good thing. Where I work I already run a single CPU 4core Intel Xserve. I think I should buy some cheap RAM and max out the memory and upgrade this Summer to OS X Lion Server.
Professional network LinkedIn has just introduced the beta launch of a new feature LinkedIn Skills, a way for you to search for particular skills and expertise, and of course, showcase your own and in LinkedIn’s words, “a whole new way to understand the landscape of skills & expertise, who has them, and how it’s changing over time.”
It may not seem that important at first, especially if people don’t keep their profiles up to date in LinkedIn. However, for the largest number of ‘new’ users that are in the job market actively seeking positions, I’m hoping those data are going to be more useful. Those might be worth following over time to see what demand there is for those skills in the market place. That is the promise at least. My concern though is just as grades have inflated over time at most U.S. Universities, skills too will be overstated, lied about and be very untrustworthy as people try to compete with one another on LinkedIn.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 