RISC vs. CISC

The architectural debate between Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) and Reduced Instruction Set Conputers (RISC) really took off in the 1980s:

In particular, two projects at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. Stanford's MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley's RISC gave its name to the entire concept and was commercialized as the SPARC.

For the last decade or more the debate has seemed frozen, with the CISC x86 architecture dominating the server and desktop markets, while the RISC ARM architecture dominated the mobile market. But two recent developments are shaking things up. Below the fold, some discussion.

737 MAX Ungrounding

My post 737 MAX: The Case Against Boeing is a year old and has accumulated 58 updates in comments. Now the aircraft is returning to service, it is time for a new post. Below the fold, Bjorn Fehrm has two interesting posts about the ungrounding.

I Rest My Case

Jeff Rothenberg's seminal 1995 Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents focused on the threat of the format in which the documents were encoded becoming obsolete, and rendering its content inaccessible. This was understandable, it was a common experience in the preceeding decades. Rothenberg described two different approaches to the problem, migrating the document's content from the doomed format to a less doomed one, and emulating the software that accessed the document in a current environment.

The Web has dominated digital content since 1995, and in the Web world formats go obsolete very slowly, if at all, because they are in effect network protocols. The example of IPv6 shows how hard it is to evolve network protocols. But now we are facing the obsolescence of a Web format that was very widey used as the long effort to kill off Adobe's Flash comes to fruition. Fortunately, Jason Scott's Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive shows that we were right all along. Below the fold, I go into the details.

Storage Media Update

My last post on storage media was After A Decade, HAMR Is Still Nearly Here back in July. Below the fold, I look at some of the developments since then.

Even More On The Ad Bubble

I've been writing for some time about the hype around online advertising. There's a lot of evidence that it is ineffective. Recently, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office concluded an investigation into Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum. At The Register, Shaun Nichols summarizes their conclusions in UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?:

El Reg has heard on good authority from sources in British political circles that Cambridge Analytica's advertised powers of online suggestion were rather overblown and in fact mostly useless. In the end, it was skewered by its own hype, accused of tangibly influencing the Brexit and presidential votes on behalf of political parties and campaigners using its Facebook data. Yet, no evidence, according to the ICO, could be found supporting those specific claims.

Below the fold I look at this, a recent book on the topic, and other evidence that has emerged since I wrote Contextual vs. Behavioral Advertising.

The Order Flow

The MacGuffin in the last two books of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy is Chombo, a reclusive hacker. In Spook Country he tracks a container full of US currency, and in Zero History:

"It's the order flow, isn't it?" Milgrim had had no intent to ask this at all. Hadn't been thinking off it. Yet it had emerged. His therapist had told him that ideas, in human relations, had lives of their own. Were in a sense autonomous.
"Of course"
"That's what Chombo was doing. Finding the order flow."
"He found it a week before they kidnapped him, but his work, to that point, would have been useless, Without him, I mean."
"And the market, the whole thing, it's no longer real? Because you know the future?"
"It's a very tiny slice of the future. The merest paring. Minutes."
"How many?"
Bigend had glanced around the empty lounge. "Seventeen, presently."
"Is that enough?"
"Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds, in most cases."

Entirely adequate to make Hubertus Bigend much, much richer, because knowing the order flow allows him to front-run the transactions.

Wikipedia defines front-running thus:

Front running, also known as tailgating, is the prohibited practice of entering into an equity (stock) trade, option, futures contract, derivative, or security-based swap to capitalize on advance, nonpublic knowledge of a large ("block") pending transaction that will influence the price of the underlying security. ... A front running firm either buys for its own account before filling customer buy orders that drive up the price, or sells for its own account before filling customer sell orders that drive down the price. Front running is prohibited since the front-runner profits from nonpublic information, at the expense of its own customers, the block trade, or the public market.

Follow me below the fold for a discussion of why the architecture of cryptocurrencies means that no-one needs Chombo's mysterious skills to front-run the order flow.

The Long Now

A talk by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis about 25 years ago explaining the concept of the "Long Now" and the idea of building a 10,000-year clock to illustrate it was what started me thinking about long-term digital preservation. The idea of Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS), and the acronym came a couple of years later.

Hōryū-ji by Nekosuki, CC-BY-SA

Now, in The Data of Long-lived Institutions on the Long Now Foundation's blog, Alexander Rose refers to Hōryū-ji:

At about 1,400 years old, these are the two oldest continuously standing wooden structures in the world. And they’ve replaced a lot of parts of them. They keep the roofs on them, and even in a totally humid and raining environment, the central timbers of these buildings have stayed true. Interestingly, this temple was also the place where, over a thousand years ago, a Japanese princess had a vision that she needed to send a particular prayer out to the world to make sure that it survived into the future. And so she had, literally, a million wooden pagodas made with the prayer put inside them, and distributed these little pagodas as far and wide as she could. You can still buy these on eBay right now. It’s an early example of the philosophy of “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe” (LOCKSS).

Below the fold, more on Rose's interesting post.