[SecurityRatty] tag: compound

Indian IT market will be $110B by 2012, Gartner says

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000

India's IT spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.8 percent to US$110 billion by 2012, according to Gartner. Most of that spending will be on telecommunications services and equipment which is expected to reach $82 billion [b] by 2012.

E-Discovery's Great 'Urban Myth' - And Why You Shouldn't Believe It

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:59:45 +0000

I'm in the process of reviewing the first 150 court cases using the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) for electronic discovery (e-discovery), which went into effect on 1 December 2006. Now, I know what you're thinking - but it's not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. The decisions average 40 single-spaced pages in length, they're painfully detailed, and the writing is as dense as only a lawyer can make it. It takes several cups of strong black coffee just to get through one case, and believe me, it's not something you want to try doing late in the afternoon.

Some of these cases are making serious progress toward closing the gap between the requirements of public policy mandates and the market-driven power of technology. But far too many of them are tangled up in two fundamentally opposed, but equally dangerous, fallacies: 1) the "urban myth" that it's impossible to erase an e-mail or other piece of digital information; and 2) the idea that the only smart practice is to keep nothing.

Where e-discovery and especially e-mail are concerned, most enterprises find themselves at a critical juncture at which public policy is failing to keep pace with the evolution of technology. I call this situation "Star Wars technology with Gutenberg laws." Just how bad is the business/technology/policy disconnect? Well, when I graduated from college in 1975, I got a job with United Press International (UPI), which had just implemented a rudimentary form of computer-based "e-mail" to replace the telex (TWIX) messaging system. The messages we sent were available on the computer for 24 hours, not a second more. If we needed a copy of one, we had no choice but to print it out. That's the way e-mail was originally conceived - as the technological equivalent of a Kleenex tissue - to be used once and thrown away. But that's not the way most enterprises are using e-mail now.

The fact is, for many enterprises, e-mail is now the primary workflow tool, the primary collaboration tool, the personal archive and, in some cases, the institutional archive. If there's any e-mail product that was designed with those uses in mind - and with the robust features and functionality to support them - I'm not aware of it. And that's where the business/technology/policy gap comes from. We have tools deployed that were originally designed for ephemeral communications, which are now expected to be eternal repositories of the truth. And, of course, to compound that problem, the world is full of litigators who are happy to win cases on mechanics, rather than merits - all because somebody didn't get e-discovery exactly right.

The bottom line: Don't accept the urban myth that you'll never be able to erase an e-mail, and don't believe that the only smart practice is to keep nothing at all. The trick is to understand what you need to keep, to know where it is, and to make sure that you can get at it when you need it. It's not simple, and it's not easy, but it is absolutely critical.

lcms speed

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:01:23 +0000

Note for other open source color management system users searching for more transform speed from the LittleCMS library:

Turning off the one-entry cache cuts 40% from runtime - unless you’re transforming large uniform blocks for which a one-entry cache is actually suitable.

Eliminating the general-purpose byte packing and unpacking functions and replacing them with inline encoding-specific equivalents cuts another 15% of runtime.

Compound savings: 49%, or 2x speedup, which is what someone claimed on an lcms mailing list once without providing the code.

Future work: The cached performance could be made better by observing that all the thread-safe memory locking I find in lcms-1.17 is unnecessary if you assume that thread-local caches on the stack are just fine. Forget the locking, and inline the cache comparisons. I had no need to implement it though, so this is only theoretical.

[If you found this by search engine and it helped you out, drop me a note.]

XBOX 360 Dies Again

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:57:00 +0000

Two days ago my XBOX 360 quit working after a few minutes of play and started blinking red. I checked out the error message online and it seems to be a simple overheating issue. I contacted Microsoft, and they agreed to fix the console (only 6 months old), but that it would take 3 to 5 days to send me a box to ship it to them in, and then another 4 to 8 weeks for them to fix it and send it back.

I thought about it for a minute, and decided I rather buy a new one rather than sit around and wait on them for two months. First though, I looked around online for a fix and saw that quite a few people were having the same problem. Everyone had an opinion on what the problem was and what to do about it, so I decided to do a couple of things: replace the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU and extend the fan shroud over the GPU using cardboard from a cereal box wrapped in aluminum foil and attached to the existing fan shroud.

That fix worked like a champ until today, when the rear fan on the GPU completely died. I don’t know if it started to fail 2 days ago and finally quit, or if the fan controller is cutting the fan off intermittently. I have a plan to fix it either way though. I ordered a replacement Talismoon fan from llama.com and found a spot on the board to solder it to, which will circumvent the variable speed fan controller.

The replacement fans are supposedly quitter, but they will be moving from a 5V variable speed controller to a 12V power source. I hope it ends up with about the same noise profile, but at least I’ll have a functioning XBOX when Halo 3 is released in a few weeks.