General Ramblings

In the news there seems to be an increase number of incidents such as this India bound flight or this San Francisco bound flight is this a sign of bad behaviour, over drinking, or something more ingrained into society that is just being coming out with the over crowding that is more and which is more common these days.  What can be done to eliminate this problem, well in short you probably couldn't eliminate the problem. 

These diversions are more than a inconviencience for the accused, but for the fellow passengers and the airlines, and the costs associated with these diversions should not be completely thrust upon the airlines, though they are related to the underlying cause of over-crowding and the feeling of being cattle to the Airlines.  It does also sit on the shoulders of accussed, if they are convicted. To this end, the accussed upon conviction should be required some of the costs that both the airlines and the passengers lose, when they are forced to delay their trips due to the change of the plans with the flight.  Upon conviction they should also lose their priviledges of any future flights, or be required to pay a security deposit for the flight, though a loss of flight privileges on any flight would also make an impact on those who are rich and famous who could afford their own private flights.  Though Civil action should even be taken against the accussed if they are the actual cause, and not convicted.

If a person, knows that he may not only he might face a short visit in jail, but the exceptional costs that the airlines must pay for these diversions, you will see many others thinking twice, about their behaviour, and could be turned around to save the passangers money, or alteratively bring back the benefits that air flight had, such as meals and leg and seat space.

It has been nearly 10 years since Hyper Transport released version 3.1.  This protocol is still very much useful and very capable, but it's starting to age.

Feature of HT 3.1

- 32 Bit wide, but can be sub-devided into smaller widths

- Up to 41Gbps throughput (for 32bit), though most processors including AMD uses at most only half of this. (16 bit)

- Each  pathway is bidirectional and is 5.2 GT/s per direction. QPI is 9.2 GT/s

- Seperated device to device connectivity, such as CPU to Memory, Video Card to Memory, Ethernet Card 1, to Ethernet Card 2

- External connectivity is allowed, therefore you can create a multi CPU environment with 2 boxes.

Future requests

- Up front the width should be increased in multiple stages to 128 or even larger.   This would allow for greater multiple cocket compatibility, this would create a greater spead between the devices.

- Dynamic lane redistribution

- Second which would add to complexity, which be a Hyper Transport switch, this could allow for over committing the Lanes, especially when there are lanes that are under utilized, such as CPU to CPU links could be increased to almost all of 128bit for high CPU processing requirements, but once complete it releases all but the minimal required lanes.

- The biggest benefits with the increase lanes, is what the power can be reduced by lower then the speed, of each lane.

Intel, in 2015 I do not seeing any major change, except pushing harder in the biggest competition in decades, and one that they do not have the competitive advantage or even market advantage, like they did with AMD's Athlon, in the 90's.  In 2014, Google announced that they have licensed the Freescale PowerPC, this will most likely dent in the couple of thousand processors purchased annually to replace the processors.  The second biggest hit, occurred earlier with both Microsoft and Sony deciding on using AMD processors for their gaming platform.  Intel is also competing more head on with ARM in the Mobile market place, and even in all of the other areas of computing.  A great deal of Intel issues is related to their licensing, and this along my come back to haunt them, as it has with Google. 

AMD, will have an interesting year, they are still behind Intel in the x86 arena, but 2 areas that are helping AMD from their problems.  Gaming consoles, have given a breath of life to AMD with the Fusion based processors and the idea of blurring the distinction of the General Processor with Graphic Processors.  This will move further, but I don't see the big pay off this year.  But with bringing back the people involved with AMD's earlier success and rebuilding their x86 lines from scratch, I see that in the coming year there'll be major inroads against Intel in this area.  The area I can see a bigger hit on Intel's processors would be in the Server arena, with their new Operteron series that is socket compatible with AMD's ARM offerings.  The ARM offerings could actually be the saving grace for AMD, and hopefully it will move forward to the highend clustering offerings.

VIA, has one of the more interesting products for years on the x86 market they were aimed at the mobile computing markets, such as Car Video, or Video Signage.  These were for a long time faster then the Atom Processors, Cheaper, and required lower power.  The problem for VIA is that development has stagnated, between VIA and Centaur, the processor line hasn't seen a major overhaul in 6 years, and this was at one point a leader in one area that Intel and AMD have both emulated, which is the on-die encryption, with the chipset, you also had hardware video encoding and decoding, well before AMD and Intel, and this all goes back to 2003.  VIA has recently taken on the ARM world, but their ARM offereings are also very lackluster as well.  I do hope to see more, as I have actually liked their products for a long time, but it's hard to watch a company that seems to have a lack of desire of working for their customers.

ARM and Freescale, both have liberal licensing methods going for it, this allows for partners to join up and develop products that use the Intellectual Property and to develop specialty products, becauses of these licenses, a great deal of products have been generated in the past year, from Network Switches and Routers to Mobile Phones.  These all have both the Processing IP from the ARM or Freescale, but also includes a great deal of vendor specific IP, that is not publically available.  Examples of this would be Qualcomm's processor lines include Cellular radio's.  For the ARM processors, I do see that there will be improvements in speed, and a reduction of power requirements, but I also see that there will be even more fragmentation, like there is now, with no one single "ARM" platform that can have a standardized OS.  For Freescale, I have one word, GOOGLE.  Google has licensed to both manufacture and design their own PowerPC based processor, and has even released their own motherboard.  People might wonder why Google has gone away from their hundreds of thousands of Intel servers, to build their own processor, and it's customatization, if they could offload some of the work for their Map Reduce to the CPU it will speed up their services and reduce the power required to operate their globally distributed system.  Beyond this  Freescale's PowerPC basically coasts this year as well.

The biggest changes will not be the processors, but with what's around them, improving memory, faster/larger storage, graphics all will see more changes then the processors.  But I have been wrong before, so we will see, either way this will still be an intresting year.

Upon reading Mike Rowe's response to a question he received from one of his fans, I want to state that this is by far the best response to the debate, I have seen so far.

Born both as a visible minority and born into poverty, I was raised to respect authority figures, even if I felt that their point is wrong, as there are always methods to show your disapproval of the authority figures, in your life, and society that are legal.  Disrespecting or insulting authority figures do not get your point across, and even less will have them see your point of view, they will only see the disrespect that is being portrayed.  Now the second side of this argument, is that "Well I won't respect the cops, until the cops, respect us", but a level of respect still must be given to them as without them on the street doing their job, the costs to society would be massively higher.

In reality cops do not want to arrest or shoot people, they really want to make sure people are safe, they are really more likely to let minor crimes go, as this means they don't have to do the paperwork that come along with this, and then the potential of off-hour time that would have to be spent at court.  In reality like, the rest of us, they would prefer to be home with family and friends.  If a police officer asks you to stop, it's so much easier to stop, and to be polite then to run and face more severe penalties, then if you stop.  In some cases the officer may just give you a warning and tell you to go.

Now if you are being arrested, one of the biggest mistakes is resisting or fleeing the arrest, or attacking the officer, this is more likely to get you hurt or even killed.  If you feel that the arrest isn't valid, or even the detainment is invalid, there is multiple methods of resolution to this, that are more impactful then a physical confrontation.  There's the media, upper management of the police, police's internal affairs, local government, state government, federal government, state law enforcement, federal law enforcement, civil court.  More importantly if you do not resist arrest, and you can prove it is unjustified and biased the civil direction has the benefit of financial gains, but this can completely disappear once you resist the arrest, as you are now committing a crime, hence your arrest is not biased anymore.

The only methods to improve the society, is to level the societies playing field.  By improving education, health care and salaries to the lower and middle classes, and by reducing the vast chasm between the upper 1% and the rest of the 99% of society.  So many politicians these days believe that if they give tax breaks to business and the top 1% of all money makers that there will be more money floating around the economy.  But this is not even close to being true, or many countries would have not have deficits at all, as the top 1% would be putting a great deal of money back into the economy to cover the deficits.  The group that does cover the majority of society is the middle income, they are the ones that buys the majority of the products, pays most of the interest because of loans and mortgages.  But in reality 80% of the workforce has seen negligible salary increases since the 1970's, but the top 20% has continued to receive increases. 

Why this proposal?

Well over the past year, there has been an increasing number of attacks against POS systems?  And this has lead me to think up what I feel is a more secure system.  The idea I have come up with, is to remove the direct storage or usage of the credit card number by the POS terminal or the vendor, while maintaining a method of credit card authentication.

First I am really excited at the idea of the Google's Project ARA phones, I think this is a great option for users to allow for growth on demand.  It could also extend life of batteries by only having what is required in the modules to reduce the power requirements.  Project ARA could provide a great deal of capabilities to the device, from a phone to a mobile medical monitoring device, to data collection and gathering systems.  Think of having a mobile device that can be configured for EMT's for collecting vital medical statistics, and the modules could then be removed and sterilized, or anything else that can be made into a module.

Google Nexus phones

With the release of the Nexus 6, many of my past desires still apply.  But it would be nice to have 2 size versions, not everyone needs or wants a massive phone.  In the case of the Nexus 6, this would be very easy as Motorola has made other models such as the Motorola X and Motorola S, that could be upgraded from their current specs.

Improved antenna design would be great, and this goes with ergonomic design, to design locations for the antenna's based on how people would use the device, this would ultimately give an ideal position fo antenna location to be less impacted by hand interference, this can be done with smart reconfigurable antenna arrays with software programmable radios, I can see this as a saving on power, and provide with an option to relocate the antenna to improve signal quality.

Google should make the Nexus as a Flagship of the Flagship's, they should be creating the line as an example of future technology, and be closer to the cutting edge, and pushing the edge of the technology and the OS.

Android

Again Enterprise view, having an enterprise package to allow for an enterprise to manage their employees work supplied cell phones, and to push default software and policies.  Online phone backups and restores, right now the only method of backup without root access is via access to the bootloader.

Another feature would be to imbed "Security" priviledge, that would have sub-priviledges, for example a program may need special permission to turn on the GPS and Location features for device recovery, or an option to update the IPTables configuration, but without needing root permissions.  This priviledge level would require code audits before being placed into Google Play.

Linux

This is a wish of Linux as a whole, a migration to "User Kernel Modules", taking a similar approach as FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace).   The idea with this system would be to allow for drivers for hardware to be upgradable outside of the Kernel level, this would also allow for features such as the Android phone to have drivers which are kernel agnostic, this would allow for device manufacturers to provide drivers for their hardware, without the requirement of rebuilding the complete kernel.

There is so much worrying about Ebola, and the rapid spread that has happened recent weeks.  The problem isn't that people aren't being isolated, of such a serious virus, but the lack of knowledge.  Both the general population and the professional health care workers have very little knowledge when it comes to this virus. 

Ebola is a very serious virus, but most of the precations that are recommended will protect most people.  Though the virus can survive for many days on a surface, this doesn't mean that if you touch it, you will come down with ebola, it requires that the virus to reach a point of ingress that can allow the virus to enter directly inside of the body.  Basically for most, hand washing for the general population would be sufficient, just like any other virus or bacteria.  You should be washing your hands anyways, to help in the prevention of the spread of germs.

For medical professionals, this is drastically different, as they are going to come into contact with a great deal of the virus in body fluids. These are the people that need to be protected, and must be protected from head to toe all clothing must not allow the body fluids through, and must be disposable and must be destroyed after use.  Putting on the protective gear and then removing it should be done in a proper format, and people who are treating theill should limit their travel for a period of 3 weeks after treating the last patient.

One interesting read, also would be The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

In recent years there have been many IT Security mistakes, but these mistakes are not necessarily a problem with IT personel.  But you still see a large number of people who will blame the employee themselves, without knowing the whole environment or corporate culture behind the webpage.  This entry is meant to try to educate the lay person of what issues surround IT Security, which is often larger and wider scoped then what most believe.

For most there are only 2 things that are IT Security, which is Network Security and Host Security, but these are not the only areas that must be managed to make a secure environment.  There is also physical security, and this is a very complex, because you have to weigh, access with security, if you are too secure the user may not be able to do their work, but you also can't give full access either.  But you also have to weigh in the risk of your information being available to the people involved, because with enough money, all physical, network or host security could be bypassed, with the access to the right person or people.

Risks

• Firewall Configuration
• Network Configuration
• Network Design
• Host Configuration (Computer and Server)
• Employees
  • Management
  • Employees
  • Contractors
  • Foreign Workers
• Financial Constraints

So OpenSSL has released their Project Roadmap, to many this seems to be a push in the right direction after many notable vulnerabilities in the past, which has caused at least to forks to be created. 

I have noted in the past, many issues with the OpenSSL code base, which has finally been brought to light, these consist of a constantly changing API, poor or non-existant documentation, complexity of the code, readability of the code, and the shear number of versions.

Changing API

The API in a release should never change, for any version of 0.9.8*, they API should be unchanging.  Once the version has been released no new features should be added, only security fixes.  This reduced the headache of refactoring code when some major change has occurred.  API Changes should occur in phases as well, with deprecation of previous functions occuring over a long period, this would allow for updating to newer major versions with little impact to the third party code.

Poor or Non-Existant Documentation

This is a pretty annoying issue.  There is little in the way of useful documentation, this is more of a problem for new users to using OpenSSL,  many of these questions aren't answered on the OpenSSL site at all, but are elsewhere, on potentially less reliable or trusted sites.  Now some of the questions have been answered, but still not in such a way that a lay-person could easily understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, or the potential risks?  These are such questions

• How to create a self-signed certificate?
• How to generate an SSL Key?
• How to generate an SSL Certificate Request?
• How to revoke an SSL Certificate, or Key?
• How to remove the passphrase from a Key?
• Descriptions of each encryption, random number generation, and hashing methods, and the pro's and con's of each.
• As a developer, How to use each function?  (This can also have a wrapper to simplify development, by having 1 or 2 functions that do the required steps for the developer, this means that common security mistakes can be avoided, for the less advanced)

These are all very important questions, and not always covered by the developer, but often through third party sources.  Mind you, I have noticed more information cropping up in recent months and years.  For functional documentation, the POD files generated should be on the website, and documented inline, if it isn't already.

Complexity of the Code 

The OpenSSL code is notoriously, complex to browse through with the multitude of files.  Many things should be done to simplify the code tree.

• Group together similar items in the source.
  • Encryption routines
  • Hashing routines
  • Formatting routines
  • Configuration routines
  • Platform Specific code (for adding missing functions from a platform, or Assembler code)
  • Applications
• Abstract functions to allow for a single code base to support multiple platforms, don't ifdef the crap out of the code
• Standardize on coding practices
• Code reviews
• Internal and External Audits
• Modular coding style, this would then allow for functions/features to be stripped away, with very little change to the base code, such as delete a directory, and a single line change in the base code.
• Remove the external engines, as useful as it can be, this should be part of the OS, and if you are keeping them use them as a data source for RNG not as the RNG.

A major thing is that is missing that should be implemented would be

Number of Versions

This has always been a sticking point for me, there shouldn't be the number of versions on the go as OpenSSL currently has, this creates code complexity, as a change for one might have to be back ported and forward ported to the various releases, right now there's at least 5 in development if not more. 

• 0.9.8* series that dates back to 2005
• 1.0.0* series that dates back to 2010
• 1.0.1* series that dates back to 2012
• 1.0.2* series is in Beta
• 1.1.0* is in development
• Two FIPS modules for OpenSSL

Of these 0.9.8* should have been retired awhile ago. 1.0.0* should be in a stage of critical bug fixes.  1.0.1* should be fixes and usability improvements. 1.0.2* should be still changing, with creating wrappers for the new API to port the old code to using it. and 1.1.0* should be in API flux.

I have the same wish list as last time

1) Mini SD Card Slot, I do understand the reasoning to make it easier for developer support, but having the option is a big benefit for even for the storage of backp of files.

2) Enterprise direction in support, Google may make a worthwhile partnership with RIM, to take advantage of BES.  Biggest benefit for business, is that they could control all aspects of the phone, business would appreciate this option.

3) Virtualization of seperate environments for business and home.

One item not really for Google, but in general for Java is to take an idea from VMWare with their Bubble Memory idea, where duplicate applications with the same libraries do not use up anymore memory but threads are isolated from corruption.   This would be probably done with a Java Hypervisor, that runs the JRE's as seperate threads of the Java Hypervisor, instead of  the JRE

For the past year or 2, I've been on the hunt for an Optical Jukebox that could load DVD's as required for both near-line and offline storage.  This is could be useful to backup Information and Recovery of information, without having to have spinning drives unless it is required. 

This is until I found Digistore Solutions, with their Centurion DiscHUB product line, this seems to fit the bill, the only issue I can see is that it would be nice to have Blu-ray disc's but I can't complain.  I do know there are also other similar options, but I have yet to find any even in the $600 price range.

In my usual daily surfing I was shocked and suprised that one thing I felt someone should do, is being done by NVidia, with Project Denver.  I had originally proposed that AMD should do something similar to this.  From what I have read, this is a processor with it's own unique instruction set, and an on-chip firmware layer to convert ARM instructions to it's own internal Instruction Set, which is similar to what was used in the Transmeta Processors. 

If I had to guess, what the internal Instruction Set is, the Firmware will be converting ARM instructions to the GPU's instruction set.  Doing this only makes sense as GPU's these days handle more Floating Operations per Second then even the fastest CPU.  

Now originally I felt that AMD (and even Intel) could have used Transmeta Code Morphing patents to generate multi-core processors, that is seen as a single unified processor to the Operating System.  Now for AMD this can be a massive beneficial switch for them, as they can take advantage off the GPU capabilities and increase the quality and performance of the graphic market, and use "Code Morphing" technology to translate x86 based code to the GPU code.  This could provide for high performance computing, with power management from being able to power down gpu cores as they are not required, this would also allow for a simplification of accessing memory.

My two cents

This is a wishlist for Cacti cacti.net

• New Templating system, possibly built of Smarty, it may make templating a lot easier, this could also provide language support.
• Spine to be converted into a daemon, this would remove some of the overhead, of spawning processes, and it could cache data so this doesn't require as many  SQL queries.
• There is a bug when you have a large number hosts, Modifing a Graph Template, can corrupt the database

I have been using Google and android phones for awhile, and I have found a few things that I would like to see.

First I want to see a Mini SD slot, I do know google has said it confuses people, and makes it difficult, but I would say many technophobes will not be using an Android phone, and newbs will not even know about the installing a card to begin with.  The benefits though, are areas for backups to be stored (this is another gripe, to be brought up later).

Second have the antenna part of the battery cover such as the BlackBerry 9300, this would offer a larger antenna surface area to improve signal quality.  This can also be increased massively by different battery covers that could increase the antenna size.

Third, seperating user applications, user configuration, and system applications.  This would allow for a user to backup the complete configuration without having to reinstall seperately.  And especially without having to go into fastboot or another other mode.

Fourth, being able to backup the Operating System, such as what's offered to by clockwork mod and some of the other open source recoveries.

Fifth, this would be a big push for enterprises, offer an ability to centrally manage and secure devices.  Again Blackberry has the BES services.

Lastly, I do feel that Google should work with the manufacturers and at least one of the 3rd party firmwares such as cyanogenmod, to provide updates for older hardware for at least a few years longer.  This would reduce requirements for the manufacturers to maintain products that have long since been dropped, and would ultimately help the vendors to maintain their product lines.  The only thing the manufacturers would be required to do is provide updated closed source drivers.  Google can also have vendors compete for the "Nexus" model each year, by providing the manufacturers a list o requirements, such as "minimum quad core, 2000mwh battery, 8Mpix camera, etc " and let the companies compete with each other. for the right to provide the phone.  They also own Motorola Mobility so they can also provide their own phone, which they may start using for their phones in the next few years.

This is my 2 cents.

There has been much growth in the processor industry over the years, from Intel to AMD taking shots across each others bows for years, to VIA stagnation, to ARMs growth, and Transmeta's dismal demise.

Intel is by far, the most dominant manufacturer in the Processor field, but what could they do to improve their products, this one is a hard one to say.  There probably isn't a great deal they need to do to improve but to keep innovating.  They may also do well with obtaining NVidia.

AMD has major issues now, including high power usage, and poor performance.  The only bright points are AMD and the Fusion processors, though I do not think they went far enough with the idea.  AMD may do well with purchasing VIA's processor designer Centaur, or the patents from Transmeta's patent holders.  AMD also needs to fully take advantage of the HyperTransport, they currently are only using 16bit of the 32bit. (Though the Opterons use 3x16 bit pathways)

VIA is the small player on the block, but has many nice features, and for a great power point, the negative they have created is the number of motherboards, and the fact they have created a great deal of on processor features that are not fully usable due to the lack of an API.  The VIA Nano could really hurt the Intel Atom if they were placed on the same playing field, but at this moment they are not even in the same Continent.

Ideally it might come down to a technology change from monolithic processors to a design more like the Video Processors or the Cell Processors.  A large number of simplistic cores or cells to provide the functionality of the larger whole.  Taking a page from Transmeta, the ideal may be a multi-core RISC processor, with the use of a translation engine built into the processor to convert CISC based instructions to the RISC instructions.  This would allow for simplification of multi processor programming, by moving the threading to be moved to the processor itself, even non-threaded applications could be threaded this way.  This would also allow for the cores to be shutdown when not required for the desired performance requirements, this should also be independant of the Operating System, it could be tied to the number of waiting instructions.

 This same method could be used for converting for other processor technologies, even future technologies, such as quantum processors, etc.