Spyware, Trojan, Rootkits will do just fine

As CMOS scaling is approaching the limit of physics, instead
of pursuing ever higher performance, a school of researchers start to become
more paranoid than ever about reliability. (nothing else to do? Even my proposal contains this word.) For those who are acquainted with me
know, I am not a believer of the so-called logic soft errors, much less am I a
believer of implementing wear-out management for integrated circuits. I understand that we need
error correction code (ECC) in a variety of memory structures to protect them
from bit-flipping, the memory type soft errors, caused by neutrons in the cosmic
rays or alpha particle emission from package materials. Nonetheless, anything
more than that, I consider it overkill. Anyway there’s so much machine
downtime caused by buggy software or (known) loop-holes in the OS, why do you
care about bit-flipping during a fraction of moment in the logic switching that almost never happens and
the eventual wear-out of a mortal piece of hardware?

At the same time, processor architects continue to worry
about the slowdown of upgrading computers due to not-so-staggering performance
improvement over the recent years. That is why they now turn to adding new
feature sets to spark upgrade. Well, here, I’m offering a simple but seemingly insane solution: Do —->
nothing.  Or, in other words, deliver unreliable machines to improve the odds of machine upgrades. When machines start
to fail, people will choose to upgrade. After machines wore out, people will
rush to buy new ones. Isn’t this simply how the business of other industries
works? As such, processor designers do not need to pull their hair off to
enhance reliability or the lifetime of a system with anyway less reliable transistors.
  

What do we learn from this “vision” then?  Well, it means spyware, Trojan horses,
rootkits, worms, viruses, are all very welcome from the standpoint of a
processor vendor. Oftentimes my computer-unsavvy friends would ask me —
“my computer has become very slow lately, should I buy a new system?” Their naïve
presumption is that, newer software requires more horse power to run. But if I
have to give them my honest professional suggestion, I would first ask them to
pay, install, and run Spy Sweeper or virus scanner to detect and eradicate any
potential unwanted processes/programs running on their system before giving it another
thought. Well, under the “no-sweat vision” of future computer designs, maybe
they should indeed shell out big bucks to buy the latest multi-core processor systems
offered by Dell.

Conversion

I converted!  It is a big decision to convert from a Windows user to a Mac user.  It can be like converting one’s religion from one to the other. Well, even though I use Linux and Solaris professionally, the use of Microsoft Windows is inevitable in making presentations and playing some games.  I am not really new to Mac.  My Minix hacking experiences went all the way back to 1992 on MacIntosh and later PowerMac machines.  However, for the gradually successful evanglising effort by Intel and partly by AMD, we all became Windows users.  Only until recently, Apple started to use Intel Core processor for their machine (what a smart move), I decided to give it a try for a MacBook Pro running on Intel Core Duo 2. 

 

Thus far I am far more than satisfied with everything on this machine, I am startling impressed.  Mac OS is truly amazing, all the interface looks so sleek. I particularly like the Widgets. With the reach of a single shortcut key, you get Wikipedia, thesaraus, weather, stock market, or even all the US airline schedules in real-time surfacing on top of your faded desktop.  While it is similar to Google Desktop, this is far more powerful with a much nicer user interface in my opinions. The brightness of the LCD panel is self-adaptive with the ambient lighting, which made my jaw dropped when the first time I discovered it when dimming my dinging light.  Since Mac OS X is UNIX-based, using X11 is a piece of cake.  The installation of all Unix/Linux open source packages is simply a simple command fink.

 

Running VMware’s Fusion (beta version that I am using), you can also emulate the MS Windows on Mac OS X. In fact, with Intel’s VT support, it is not quite emulation as the underlying machine is an x86, the MS stuff are just simply tunneled through and executed on the machine natively.  The speed of virtual machine is astonishing. I can even watch Netflix real-time play feature watching movies through the virtual layer, writing OpenGL programs and rendering the Utah teapot with almost no feeling of slowdown.  I guess it is even faster than a fully-loaded or infected native Windows machine.  I am actually writing this blog using the Windows virtual machine. The only missing feature I really wanted in the Mac machine is the stylus or graffiti found in a Tablet PC. That is a knockout feature especially for teaching and grading, and sometimes MSN messenging. So I was able to grade all my remote students’ exam papers without even printing anything out to save a few trees every year.  I had been wondering why Apple, whose CEO Steve Jobs claimed himself a huge fan of touch screen, had not put in this feature to a MacBook.  Hopefully with the new buzz on iPhone, it will come soon to liberate me from Microsoft completely.

 

Windows Vista since its inception has shied enough Windows’ users away.  Some simply refused to jump on this new bandwagon for its many annoying "features", few others like me would opt for an alternative and convert to Mac OS.  A few weeks after I started using my new toy, I dumped half of the Microsoft stocks I owned for obvious reasons.  Given Apple’s Leopard’s coming, an interesting war is imminent. 

The future of advanced education

I recently attended a very good talk given by Dr. Tingye Li, a highly respectable researcher in laser and optical communication and a long time member of both the US National Academy of Engineering and the Academia Sinica. At the end of his talk, he said he had worked for AT&T Bell Labs for 41 years, who would predict Bell Labs will eventually dissolve in just a few years 40 years ago? He then concluded that industry companies come and go, but colleges like Georgia Tech will surely stay for the next 100 years. Then I stuck my neck out and boldly challenged him "are you sure?"

If Jesus Christ is still alive today, has his Bible lecture recorded in Macromedia Flash, and uploads it to youtube.com, the question is that do we need priests at all? Let me put it in a more realistic way: in most of the undergraduate classes, one can always find a "bible textbook." (For example, in computer architecture, the two books by John Hennessy and David Patterson.) If we have these bible books’ authors record their lectures, upload them to youtube.com (or password-protected them somewhere and give you the password when you buy their books), do we need some lousy professors to babble to students in class? It is probably true that no one can do a better job than the bible authors themselves to interpret what they were trying to say in their books. Look at what MIT is doing, they are globalizing almost all of their class materials via Internet with a project called OpenCourseWare, PowerPoint slides now, I guess videotaped lectures soon. Lots of the developing countries from the other side of the globe are restlessly translating these MIT materials into different languages. Pretty soon, the people of these countries will receive close-enough education from one of the most prestigious schools in the world so they will no longer rely too much on their own lagging-much-behind education system. This, is a serious question, and we do not know what eventually it will turn out. Attending colleges may eventually become a ritual to get a printed diploma without any warrantee that you are more knowledgeable or capable than someone from a fishing village with an Internet access in Myanmar. With today’s technology, knowledge is spread and shared in an exponential rate, nothing can slow this down. As a result, it gives me a second thought about my job security.

Going back to Dr. Li’s talk, I felt I learned a lot from his 2-hour seminar. Especially, the last slide he showed this quote "Be dilettante in phantomics research and religious vision." (to mock some surreal, far-fetching research in photonics.) He said "dilettante" is the word one Bell Labs VP liked to use on their employees for not spending too much time in chasing the ghosts. But reading this quote in another way, one has to be truly darned serious when researching a real problem and finding a solution. Maybe this is the cornerstone for the reason why Bell Labs could incubate so many world-class researchers in the last half century.

2007, a year of no significance

A book "1587, A Year of No Significance" (萬曆十五年) written by a world-renowned historian Ray Ren-Yu Huang was quite popular (at least in my room) during my college years in the late 80s. My college roommate who seldom read books outside textbooks considers this is the best book ever written. In fact, this was the only book which is not an EE textbook he had on his bookshelf. After reading this book, I bought almost all the books written by Prof. Huang. This is one of Huang’s books that advocate his concept of "macro history."  This book was also used as a textbook in many US colleges.  Macro history basically studies how a list of small, seemingly insignificant events can eventually generate a huge impact to a country or even the world. (In the case of this book, the Ming Dynasty.)  We are in year 2007, exactly 420 years after 1587, the Emperor Wan-Li Year 15, and exactly seven Chinese zodiac cycles, each 60 years.

I was always under the impression (according to Wassenaar Arrangement) that a 300mm fab would never be built in a so-called controlled country restrained by the US government. Today, to my surprise, Intel officially announced its plan, after much speculation, to build its 3rd outside-US 300mm fab in Dalian, China in addition to the other two in Ireland and Israel. Although the new fab won’t manufacture microprocessors (only chipsets for now) and won’t be operational until 2010, nonetheless, it is still a stunning news.  Moreover, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini hinted that the fab may eventually make microprocessors. Many years ago, there were such talks that China’s semiconductor business, in particular, design services, would never catch up foundry companies like TSMC or UMC of Taiwan within 20 years due to the fact that the US government would never approve any sale of the semiconductor manufacturing equipments to China. Back then, the speculators expected eventually Chinese will get these equipments from Japan, whose economy has been trapped in tar pit for more than a decade.  Now, these analysts may have to think again if Intel is making such a bold move. When I was working at Agere/Motorola, designing the next generation DSP of StarCore’s SC-140, one of the most powerful DSP processors in the world a few years back, the export control policy of the US government practically banned the SC140 chips to be sold to controlled countries like China.  Intel’s announcement is somewhat shocking. It basically opened the Pandora’s box for Chinese high-tech business. The aftermath and impact to other US high-tech behemoths in the business will be interesting and remain to be seen.   Intel’s move, if blessed by the US government, will have a long term impact.

I watched a movie called The Last Mimzy during the spring break.  It is a science fiction movie aiming for kids, but from which you can see what role does Intel play in a layman’s eyes. What amused me  was in a scene in which the scientists broke up the "energy generator" the kids found on the beach nearby their vacation home, and placed one shard under an electron microscope for examination. They zoomed in the "chip shard" about 10 times, like peeling an onion, and found this "Intel" logo embedded deep inside the chip, assembled atom-by-atom.   Then an Intel employee showed up and was interrogated by the FBI. He swore he worked for Intel for more than 20 years and Intel’s nanotechnology was not even close to what this chip is capable of. On the other hand, those FBI interrogators did not look convincing at all and thought Intel is conspiring something.  I feel lucky to have worked for such a high-profile, high-tech company, so high-tech and start becoming "mystic" to others.

www.chacha.com, yet another amazing search engine on earth

I read an article from New York Times today regarding a new wave of seach engine startups. The NY Times listed a few top contenders (e.g. Powerset, chacha, and snap) who are backed with tens of millions of dollars by venture capitalists. To differentiate themselves from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, these new breeds of search engine companies mostly focus on techniques based on a decade-old research topic in AI — natural language processing. Out of curiosty and try to understand how much progress has been made in this area since my first encoutner with natural language processing in 1988, I tried www.chacha.com.

The portal design has a similar look to Google, with a logo much ensembled Coca-cola’s. There is a distinguished button called "search with guide," I then first tried a query in natural language semantics: "My Scooba is broken, how do I fix it?" and clicked the "search with guide" button. It generated a "Guide session" on the left, similar to a Google chat or any kind of chat box, and said "connected to a guide … DarrellC." Subsequently, it came out with some results which look sort of relevant with the chatbox showing "what else can I do for you?" I thought, umm, this search engine does understand my plain English. Then, I tried another wilder search. I typed "Please find me the hottest girl at Atlanta" and waited to see what would come up. Then what I saw completely blew me away. The Guide returned the following "LOL, I don’t think I know the answer for sure." Wonderful, I thought, this computer or AI program is really smart! Not only know how to handle an inappropirate query, but also know how to use Internet Lingo such as Laugh Out Loud ! Sweet! But then, I became suspicious and thought — maybe there is a real person behind this so-called "natural language processor." Boldly, I typed in the chatbox "are you being paid by chacha.com to handle my search question?" Followed my query is a humanly reply: "Yes, we are being paid by cha cha to guide your request." Bingo, a real person (maybe from India again) is behind this, no wonder, my questions, sometimes in mis-spelled English, were all handled quite intelligently. Then I started to think, maybe it is more economical to hire these "guides" from India or China then to develop a real, human-like natural language processor, and it will be faster, too, if anyone tries to take down Google immediately. After their candid answer, the "search guide" continues the conversation and asked me if I want to continue my search, he could help me to connect to eHarmony.com or places like that. I said, no thanks, I was just mocking you (or your computer as I thought to begin with.)

Later before I went to bed, I tried chacha.com again. This time I was more serious. The last few days, I’ve been trying to find a really small easel for supporting my award plaque frames but could not find any in Officemax or Home Depot. I sent the query to chacha.com, a KimM was connected as the guide. I typed "find the support or easel for picture frame" and then type more specifically with "I want a small easel (not those poster kind)" since I know there is a real person on the other side. Within one minute, KimM solved my problem and located real nice picture frame size easels for me, and even told me where to find them at Atlanta local stores. Now I am convinced that this can be an extremely useful search engine, especially for people who are not keyword savvy (mostly seniors I guess) or lazy enough even though the whole searching process is by no means "high-tech."  Nonetheless, the caveat is that since the function of this search engine resembles a chat room very much, maybe these paid "search guides" will quickly be taken up by online yahoos or goofballs who have no better things to do, once chacha.com becomes popular.

Pretty soon, a new fad like "Did you cha cha today?" might be equivalent to"did you dupe some innocent search guides lately?"

Yellow Squash Bisque

For those who do not want to shell out 10 bucks for a small cup of squash bisque in upscale, dress-code-enforced restaurants, here is one way to prepare it with less than 4 dollars.  

 

Yellow Squash soup

———————–

Serve 4 bowls

3 yellow squash (sliced)

1 large onion (chopped)

1 small carrot (optional)

2 to 3 cloves of garlic (crushed)

2 teaspoons butter

2 cans of chicken broth

1 cup of milk (0.7 cup whole milk, 0.3 cup of half-half)

 

Steps:

——-

1. Saute chopped Onion and crushed garlic in a fry pan with the butter until the onion turned golden color.

2. Add sliced squash into the pan and stir fry it till it becomes soft, move them to a cooking pot.

3. Add the 2 cans of chicken broth and about 3 cans of water.  (You can add more water if you prefer a less saulty flavor.)

4. Cook with medium heat for about 20 minutes.

5. Turn off the gas and leave it till it cools down.

6. Pour the soup into a blender and blend them.

7. Puree the soup mixture until it becomes smooth.

8. Pour the soup back to the pot.

9. Add milk and start heating with medium heat.

10. Once heated, ready to serve.

 

Spaghetti Carbonara

The most memorable experience I had in Vienna is neither the music nor the free concerts for Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary, but this — Spaghetti Carbonara in Melk, a remote little fairytale like town about 50 minutes downstream by Donau River from Vienna.

I have to admit that I never liked Italian food, yet this dish totally changed my view about Italian cuisine. When I came back to Atlanta, I scoured the web and found an Italian restaurant which offers this dish on their dinner menu. Went there, tasted awful, just like all other Americanized Italian restaurants— unimpressive. To recreate the taste of Melk’s Carbonara, I started doing some research about the secrecy of the recipe. At the second attempt, I did cook up something that came close to the dish I had in Melk. Here is my Spaghetti Carbonara. The picture on the right is the one I got at Melk, Austria, while the one on the left is mine. Enjoy.

Spaghetti Carbonara
——————–
Serve: 2
Spaghetti: ~7 ounces
Virgin olive oil: 2 tablespoons
Bacon bits
Ham: about 2 round pieces
Garlic: 2 or 3 cloves, minced
Green onions: 3 tablespoons
Parsley: minced, 5 tablespoons
Milk: 2 cups
Butter: 3 tablespoons
Flour: 3 tablespoons
Parmesan Cheese: freshly grated

Steps:
——
1. Boil "spaghetti" till ready
2. Put "butter" into microwave oven, heat 2 minutes till melt
3. Put "flour" and "milk" into melt butter and stir, this is the sauce
4. Chop ham and green onions. Mince parsely and garlic.
5. Heat "virgin olive oil," cook "ham," "bacon bits," "garlic," and "green onions," blend well in a fry pan
6. Add the cooked "spaghetti" and "parsley" into the pan and stir evenly
7. Add the "sauce" made from 2. and 3. into the pan, stir for 1 to 2 min.
8. Sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese on top. Ready to serve.