The Daily Parker

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Coming soon to a World Headquarters near you

For a big reason that I'll announce tomorrow afternoon, I've just ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a bowl of chicken soup on it); and (c) each of the previous 2-year-old computers was replaced by an incrementally-better one, not a hugely-better one.

The new computer will have a 6-core Xeon E5-2620 2.4 GHz processor, 40 GB (!!!) of 2133 MHz ECC RAM, a 512-GB SSD boot drive and a 2-TB data drive, and an nVidia Quadro K620 video card. It replaces a laptop running a Core i7 2.4 GHz processor with 12 GB of RAM and a single 512-GB SSD augmented by a portable 2-TB data drive that runs through a USB 3.0 port. And whatever onboard video Dell stuck in there.

I'm going to disclose the total cost of this machine because I've just calculated the costs of several other boxes I've bought over the years against the consumer price index. It's a crude measurement, and probably overstates inflation when applied to technology, but it does give you an idea of how things changed over time. Here, then, are a few of my older computers—just the ones I used as my principal, daily machines, not servers:

Bought Config, Processor, Ram, HDD $ then $ now
Mar 2016 Desktop, Xeon 6C 2.4 GHz, 40 GB, 512 GB SSD + 2TB Data $3406 $3406
Dec 2013 Laptop, Core i7 2.4, 12 GB, 512 GB SSD $1706 $1737
Nov 2011 Laptop, Core i5 2.2 GHz, 8 GB, 256 GB SSD $795 $833
Nov 2009 Laptop, Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz, 4 GB, 250 GB $923 $1012
Oct 2008 Desktop, Xeon 4C 2.0 GHz, 8 GB, 146 GB $1926 $2109
Feb 2007 Laptop, Centrino 2.0 GHz, 2 GB, 160 GB $2098 $2445
Jun 2005 Laptop, Pentium M 2.8 GHz, 2 GB, 60 GB $1680 $2048
Oct 2003 Laptop, Pentium M 1.4 GHz, 1 GB, 60 GB $1828 $2343
Oct 2002 Laptop, Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB, 40 GB $2041 $2669
Mar 1999 Desktop, Pentium 3 500 MHz, 256 MB, 20 GB $2397 $3445
May 1995 Desktop, Nx 586 90 MHz, 32 MB, 850 MB $2206 $3437
Oct 1991 Desktop, 80386 33 MHz, 4 MB, 240 MB $2689 $4640

Obviously cost alone doesn't line up with value. Even in the last 5 years the computers have gotten better, despite the flattening-out of Moore's Law. I mean, the software development environment I work in would barely function in 4 gigabytes of RAM, and yet that's what I was using as recently as October 2011. Going farther down the list to the first computer I ever bought, in October 1991, yes it really did have 4 megabytes of RAM (1,024 times less), but that was just fine for Windows 3.1 back then.

Is the new computer going to change my life? Not a lot, though it will significantly cut compile-and-run times while I'm coding (and slightly increase my electric bill). And yet in 10 years I probably won't even have a desktop computer anymore, because I'll be doing my job on some other kind of device. I mean, when I got the Pentium 4 laptop in 2002 for $2,700 in today's dollars, I could hardly have predicted that 10 years later l would get about the same power and storage space in a mobile phone for 20% of the cost.

There are two other computers on the list whose prices I don't really know, because they were gifts, but they're worth mentioning. In 1986 I got a hand-me-down IBM PC with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 640 kB of RAM, and two 5.25-inch floppy drives. I believe that computer originally cost about $9,000, which would be about $22,000 today. Then, in 1988, I got a hand-me-down Toshiba T3100 "laptop" that weighed about 7 kg and came with a 12 MHz 80286 processor, still 640 kB of RAM, and had a huge 20 MB hard drive. That one cost (I believe) about $2,500 new, or $5,100 today. And that 20 MB drive? That's 1/2,048th the storage space of the working RAM that my new box will have.

Still, every time I've bought a computer, I've outgrown it in less than three years. This time I hope I'm getting enough computer to make it four.

The FBI's Apple hack made us all less secure

Bruce Schneier explains:

The FBI...has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation's critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents.

This is the trade-off we have to consider: Do we prioritize security over surveillance, or do we sacrifice security for surveillance?

The problem with computer vulnerabilities is that they're general. There's no such thing as a vulnerability that affects only one device. If it affects one copy of an application, operating system or piece of hardware, then it affects all identical copies. A vulnerability in Windows 10, for example, affects all of us who use Windows 10. And it can be used by anyone who knows it, be they the FBI, a gang of cyber criminals, the intelligence agency of another country -- anyone.

I understand the frustration of cops everywhere who see these troves of data that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago just out of reach thanks to manufacturers' security measures. But it shouldn't take a security expert like Schneier to convince people that those features protect us more than they hurt us.

Break-Fix, or why it's nice to know the developer

The IANA time zone database published an update a couple days ago, and yesterday I uploaded the changes to a few of my web applications. Then one of the applications blew up. This is because I hadn't accounted for the possibility that a time zone abbreviation could include non-alpha-numeric characters.

Within an hour I'd updated the affected code and published an updated NuGet package. So now it's fixed. I just have to update a couple of applications that have all their time zone data in caches, so that when they reload the data, they continue functioning. (This blog is one of the apps.)

Meanwhile, you can see the problem if you go to the Inner Drive time zone demo, select Europe/Astrakhan, you'll see the "+03" or "+04" that my stuff couldn't parse properly.

So one of my customers, not quite understanding how NuGet works, asked about what they should do if they need something in an Inner Drive package changed. Let this be an example of why they might not need even to ask. And also, contrast this quick response with, say, Microsoft, who created most of the packages that people use in ASP.NET applications.

Brussels Airlines routes around the damage

Cranky Flier thinks Brussels Airlines has done a remarkable job keeping its passengers moving after its principal hub closed for repairs last week:

Two days after the bombing, Brussels Airlines started to get things running, but only on its short haul network. It deployed its Avro RJ100 aircraft to Antwerp, a mere half hour north of Brussels Airport, to fly within Europe. That may sound ideal, but the airport has a runway less than 5,000 feet long. The Avro can handle that with ease, but it’s not great for much else.

Meanwhile, Liege, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Brussels Airport, picked up a bunch of flights with the A319/A320 fleet. Liege is the cargo hub of Belgium, but it doesn’t usually do much in the way of passenger flights. The airline is offering free shuttle bus service to both airports from Brussels.

The next day, Friday, Brussels Airlines got at least a piece of its long haul network off the ground. With those flights service a fair bit of connecting traffic, Liege wasn’t the best option. Instead, Brussels moved those flights to operate from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt hub as well as from the Swiss hub in Zurich. (Swiss is owned by Lufthansa as well.)

This was a brilliant move. It allowed Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada travelers to continue to connect on to these African destinations. And for those who were starting or ending in Brussels, Lufthansa-operated flights were added from Frankfurt and Munich to Liege to help feed people into the new network. Brussels Airlines is flying from Antwerp to Zurich as well.

I'm always encouraged to see a business responding effectively after a major event, especially in aviation.

Hackers attacking law firms

Interesting. A Ukrainian criminal has essentially announced his intention to attack 50 law firms worldwide in order to get insider information on securities:

The mastermind, a broker named "Oleras" living in Ukraine, has been attempting since January to hire hackers to break into the firms' computer systems so he can trade on insider information, according to a Feb. 3 alert from Flashpoint, a New York threat intelligence firm.

Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin, McDermott Will & Emery and Jenner & Block all were listed on a spreadsheet of potential marks. It named 46 of the country's largest law firms, plus two members of the UK's Magic Circle.

In this latest scheme, Oleras posted on a cyber criminal forum a plan to infiltrate the law firms' networks, then use keywords to locate drafts of merger agreements, letters of intent, confidentiality agreements and share purchase agreements. The list of targeted law firms also included names, email address and social media accounts for specific employees at the firms.

Now, having worked in both law and IT, I am a bit worried about this. Attorneys, bless their hearts, are not the most technically-savvy group of people, usually. I hope the targeted law firms have really good IT staffs—but that won't matter if the attorneys themselves get targeted in spear-phishing attacks.

Maybe we just need to make them liable for information disclosure. That will get their attention.

What's wrong with Chicago?

In the wake of last week's news that Chicago lost close to 0.2% of its population last year, Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton says it's not too bad here:

Maybe it's time to face the truth: Chicago has been in a downward spiral lately and our reputation is tarnished. We've slipped in a lot of crucial areas and moved to the top of the heap in several areas where we'd prefer not to compete.

For example, we recently learned that our beloved Willis Tower — or Sears Tower as Chicagoans still insist on calling it — had been kicked off the list of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world. We were barely hanging on to the last spot, when Shanghai Tower came in and knocked us to No. 11.

We conceded a once fierce battle with Atlanta for the nation's busiest airport years ago. And now O'Hare International Airport has slipped from another list — travelers no longer rank it as one of the world's 100 best.

There's a little more good news as well, at least for single people looking for love.

Chicago was named the best city for dating in the U.S. by "The Great Love Debate," a national touring event that unites single men and women in the audience with a panel of relationship experts to discuss dating.

And when it comes to deep-dish pizza, we are way ahead of the game. The smart folks at TripAdvisor listed Chicago as No. 1 on the list of the top 10 U.S. pizza cities.

There really are a lot of areas where Chicago deserves its ranking at the bottom of the barrel. But hockey is one of the few areas where we have consistently risen to the top.

But it takes more than a good sports team to keep people from moving away.

Yeah, but a lot of people are also moving here. Remember, 2015 was the first year in 7 that saw net out-migration from Chicago. Let's see what the next few years look like before we write the obituary.

Also, many people leaving Chicago are heading to warm places in the South and Southwest. This is a mistake, and they may be back, particularly when those places get a few degrees warmer—and so does Chicago.

Student debt and deflation

As someone with both student debt and mortgages, our encroaching deflation (and consistent below-target inflation) frustrates me. Take a look at this special report by Crain's showing how bad the problem of student debt has become in general:

The share of college grads owing at least $30,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars jumped from 6 percent to 30 percent in the eight years ended in 2012, according to the College Board, while the average debt of new graduates in Illinois ballooned 85 percent, to $29,984, over the last decade. Among 46 Illinois schools reporting data to the Princeton Review, 19 say 2014 graduates' debt averaged more than $30,000. Debt for graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was $42,097, topped only by downstate MacMurray College's $50,039. Neither school commented.

A study published in 2014 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, noting that small businesses account for about 60 percent of net jobs and rely primarily on personal debt for startup capital, found "a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation" between growth of student debt and small-business formation.

February's unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds was a seasonally adjusted 5.1 percent, not much higher than the 4.9 percent overall rate and down from 9 percent four years ago. Yet median compensation for 30-year-olds in 2014 has dropped over the last decade to mid-1980s levels, according to the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

So let's review:

  • You need a college degree to meet the minimum qualifications for most jobs.
  • College costs have risen at multiples of inflation for 20 years or more.
  • Students have to borrow more money than ever before to get the college degrees they need to get jobs.
  • The resulting debt service depresses consumer spending, reducing demand for goods and services, and making the jobs even scarcer.
  • Republican Party policies aimed at reducing taxes and government spending, especially in the wake of the 2008 crash, have also suppressed demand for services.
  • Republicans have also simultaneously chipped away at the social safety net built up by bipartisan governments from 1934 to 1976, making repaying debt even harder for people living on the edge.
  • Let's not forget the Republican-drafted, Bush-approved bankruptcy law of 2005 that makes it impossible to get out from under crushing student-loan debt in most circumstances.
  • All of these Republican policies cause—cause—lower inflation verging on deflation, which makes it harder to repay debts. Keep in mind that the biggest beneficiaries of lower inflation are the bankers who contribute disproportionately to Republicans.

As we say in software, the transfer of wealth from young students to old bankers is a feature, not a bug, of Republican economic and tax policies.

You want to know how to keep student debt from destroying the Millennials? Simple. Government stimulus to get us out of the deflation trap, and allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy.

You want to know how to do those things? Simple. Elect Democratic majorities in Federal and state legislatures, and vote for Hillary Clinton on November 6th.

Quiet implementations of Moore's Law

Jeff Atwood uses a complaint about how computers have ruined chess forever to make an important point about security:

What's not clear in this table [of exponentially decreasing dollars per gigaflop] is that after 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks.

Let's consider a related case of highly parallel computation. How much faster is a GPU at password hashing?

Only 155 times faster right out of the gate. No big deal. On top of that, CPU performance has largely stalled in the last decade.

I'd like to emphasize how much it sucks to be an 8 character password in today's world. If your password is only 8 characters, that's perilously close to no password at all. That's also why why your password is (probably) too damn short. In fact, we just raised the minimum allowed password length on Discourse to 10 characters, because annoying password complexity rules are much less effective in reality than simply requiring longer passwords.

Talk about burying the lede. But Atwood is correct; unless you're in the habit (as I am) of using a strong, unique password for every single website, use a set of strong passphrases instead. (The Ars Technica article Atwood cited is pretty good.)

Also, I'm looking for a really good video card now...

Haven't escaped my notice today

I've been running around all day and only have a couple of minutes to list some things I've read on my phone while running around. All day.

There were a few other things in there, but these were the ones I paid most attention to.