OT: disturbing headlines from Slashdot

[Winfield Hill]

https://slashdot.org/ Latest Slashdot
disturbing headlines from major sources:
arstechnica, zdnet, nytimes, infoworld ...

Big ISPs Worry DNS-Over-HTTPS Could Stop
Monitoring and Modifying of DNS Queries

Russian Malware 'Patches' Chrome and
Firefox To Fingerprint TLS Traffic

Consumer Expert Argues Tech Addiction Is
The User's Responsibility

When Sun Microsystems' Founders and
Former Employees Hold a Reunion

Oracle Outperformed? TPC Benchmarks Show
Alibaba's OceanBase Performs Twice As Well

Microsoft Will Model the Entire Planet For
'Breathtakingly Lifelike' New Flight
Simulator

Did MacOS Stop Allowing Changes to Wifi
MAC Addresses?

Videogame Records Site Refuses To Reinstate
'King of Kong' Billy Mitchell's High Scores


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

[Martin Riddle]

On 6 Oct 2019 18:10:59 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com>
wrote:

https://slashdot.org/ Latest Slashdot
disturbing headlines from major sources:
arstechnica, zdnet, nytimes, infoworld ...

Big ISPs Worry DNS-Over-HTTPS Could Stop
Monitoring and Modifying of DNS Queries

Russian Malware 'Patches' Chrome and
Firefox To Fingerprint TLS Traffic

Consumer Expert Argues Tech Addiction Is
The User's Responsibility

When Sun Microsystems' Founders and
Former Employees Hold a Reunion

Oracle Outperformed? TPC Benchmarks Show
Alibaba's OceanBase Performs Twice As Well

Microsoft Will Model the Entire Planet For
'Breathtakingly Lifelike' New Flight
Simulator

Did MacOS Stop Allowing Changes to Wifi
MAC Addresses?

Videogame Records Site Refuses To Reinstate
'King of Kong' Billy Mitchell's High Scores

The new Microsoft Flight Simulator looks amazing. Real time scenery
data grabbed from a Azure cloud server.

Cheers

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 07/10/19 02:10, Winfield Hill wrote:

https://slashdot.org/ Latest Slashdot
disturbing headlines from major sources:
arstechnica, zdnet, nytimes, infoworld ...

For less lurid and, arguably, more important
headlines, can I point people to comp.risks
and its archive https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

That is low volume and high signal-to-noise ratio,
since it is curated by Peter Newman at SRI
( http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/neumann.html )
since *1985*, thus:

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS
AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann,
moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and
Public Policy

There's about one issue per week, and many of the
contributors have a *very* solid theoretical and
practical background.

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On 6 Oct 2019 18:10:59 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com>
wrote:

https://slashdot.org/ Latest Slashdot
disturbing headlines from major sources:
arstechnica, zdnet, nytimes, infoworld ...

Most of the lurid tech headlines are not really news, but more like
click bait. Most of the following are good examples.

Big ISPs Worry DNS-Over-HTTPS Could Stop
Monitoring and Modifying of DNS Queries

Big ISP's are worried that tracking their customers online activities
and violating their privacy might be might impact their ability to
sell that information to advertisers and governments.

Russian Malware 'Patches' Chrome and
Firefox To Fingerprint TLS Traffic

Yet another impact to tracking users online activities. Including
Russia in this revelation provides the necessary culprit. If you dig
deeper, many of the security holes, bugs, and exploits are theoretical
and useful only in a very limited number of circumstances.

Consumer Expert Argues Tech Addiction Is
The User's Responsibility

Consumer expert states the obvious. Of course, there's a government
funded research program proposed to investigate the possibility of
aversion therapy and a non-surgical cure.

When Sun Microsystems' Founders and
Former Employees Hold a Reunion

Nostalgia, a sure sign that the road ahead does not look very good or
profitable.

Oracle Outperformed? TPC Benchmarks Show
Alibaba's OceanBase Performs Twice As Well

The battle of the benchmarks. Usually, these announcements are based
on contrived performance tests, that highlight the performance
features of whichever product paid for the benchmarking. Unequal test
conditions are also possible.

Microsoft Will Model the Entire Planet For
'Breathtakingly Lifelike' New Flight
Simulator

The current growth market in computing is gaming. The hardware is
expensive, the horsepower required is huge, the storage and bandwidth
requirement are gigantic, and the realism (i.e. 4K) is gorgeous.
Microsoft doesn't want to be left out of this growth market.

"MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR - PREVIEW"
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj8h6yibHHc> (33:00)

Did MacOS Stop Allowing Changes to Wifi
MAC Addresses?

Old news. Apple stopped allowing MAC address changes in 2018.
However, there were multiple work-around. I don't follow Apple
details, but I read somewhere that Apple may have reinstated the
"feature" in current MacOS releases.

Videogame Records Site Refuses To Reinstate
'King of Kong' Billy Mitchell's High Scores

Sigh. This is a headline? I guess the video game site needed to
manufacture something of importance.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 8/10/19 3:47 am, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On 6 Oct 2019 18:10:59 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com
wrote:
Oracle Outperformed? TPC Benchmarks Show
Alibaba's OceanBase Performs Twice As Well

The battle of the benchmarks. Usually, these announcements are based
on contrived performance tests, that highlight the performance
features of whichever product paid for the benchmarking. Unequal test
conditions are also possible.

You don't actually know what TPC is, do you?
It's very well-specified to match a typical commercial TP load.

CH

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 8/10/19 1:47 pm, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

It's interesting that only 5 systems from 2 manufacturers are
considered current for TPC-C tests, and everything else is marked as
"Historical Results".

Is TPC the current gold standard for benchmarking databases, or is
there something more current and up to date?

It's still the gold standard, but - precisely because it has been so
successful - it isn't often a key criterion for selection. The use of a
widely-accepted standard meant that vendors either conformed to the
general ball-park of what is possible on given hardware, or they went
out of business.

[... or they're MySQL, which was written and is used by people who don't
know better or care for other things (the original authors didn't know
what a "transaction" is).]

Anyhow, TPC is much better than the earlier tightly-focussed TPB
benchmark, which basically did a bunch of credit/debit transactions.

A similar thing happened when Ken McDonell's MUSBUS group(*) benchmarked
the top relational database contenders in the 1980's. They instrumented
the Unix kernel so could see every I/O, lock, context switch, etc that
the DBMS performed on a given load. The results were widely variate one
system would use 2000 locks for a load that another did with 4, one used
a hundred I/Os in random order for what could be done in ten. The group
fed the results back to the vendors, and within 2 years all the
surviving top five products had implemented cost-based optimisers to
replace their heuristic ones, and were within about 15% or each other on
all metrics. And that's even before Gray and Reuter's excellent how-to
book was published in 1990 - everything since has used that material.

[Except MySQL's authors didn't know anything about this, and though some
kind folk contributed a proper transactional storage manager, to this
day they don't have a decent optimiser. So much easier to just start
writing a million lines of code instead of, you know, read a book].

Clifford Heath.
* https://sites.google.com/site/kenjconsulting/about

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 08:45:01 +1100, Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net>
wrote:

On 8/10/19 3:47 am, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On 6 Oct 2019 18:10:59 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com
wrote:
Oracle Outperformed? TPC Benchmarks Show
Alibaba's OceanBase Performs Twice As Well

The battle of the benchmarks. Usually, these announcements are based
on contrived performance tests, that highlight the performance
features of whichever product paid for the benchmarking. Unequal test
conditions are also possible.

You don't actually know what TPC is, do you?
It's very well-specified to match a typical commercial TP load.
CH

Somewhat guilty as charged. I know very little about TPC benchmarks:
<http://www.tpc.org>
I also managed to miss the TPC in the headline. At first glance, the
TPC benchmark comparison seems valid for a database comparison, but
I'm beginning to have my doubts and suspicions because of the 8 year
time difference in hardware and testing. See below.

Here's the Slashdot article:
<https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/10/06/198238/oracle-outperformed-tpc-benchmarks-show-alibabas-oceanbase-performs-twice-as-well>
I have not read the reader comments, yet.

Test results:
<http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false&orderby=tpm&sortby=desc>
Oracle set the record in 2011. Presumably, there's been some progress
in computing architecture, hardware, and software in the last 8 years.
Also in cost. 6.25 CNY (Chinese Yuan) = $0.87 USD/tpmC or about 13%
cheaper to buy than Oracle running on a SPARC SuperCluster.

However, note the comment near the top of the page:
Results displayed with a grey background are Historical
Results, which might not be up to date with regards to
pricing and/or availability of HW or SW.

It's interesting that only 5 systems from 2 manufacturers are
considered current for TPC-C tests, and everything else is marked as
"Historical Results". Sorted by "System Availability":
<http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?print=false&orderby=availability&sortby=desc>

Is TPC the current gold standard for benchmarking databases, or is
there something more current and up to date?


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558