Cuil is cool

It's not just pronounced as cool.

For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.
Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

The presentation is refreshing after looking at Google, or any other search engine per se. If anything, MS should consider buying Cuil now.

hurricane and earthquake

I was hedging for Hurricane Dolly when buying DBA and MOO last week. Turns out Dolly wasn't as bad as people thought.
But LA earthquake (something I haven't expected) raises the price for food and agriculture.
This is a short term surge. I will dump some of them tomorrow.

The ETF market is so volatile that any player will become more and more opportunistic. This is especially controversial when most of the agriculture commodity ETFs surge upon bad weather news. 

Acid test for what you should do

There was a classical acid test for judging if a certain thing is moral or not. That is the "Newspaper Test": if you do this particular thing, would you want to see it reported on tomorrow's newspaper headline?
If not, it's not moral.

I just found that there is counter-part of this acid test for "work priorities". That is: if your boss want you in his office in an hour, what you should do in that hour.
If the thing you are working on is on that list. It's high-priority, otherwise, it's not.

The art of programming reborn, thanks to Intel and AMD

The art of programming should be pronounced dead some time after Java 1.6 was released. But then comes Intel and AMD, who change the rule of the CPU speed game by using multi-core.
Before long, every programmer needs to write multi-thread code. And that's where the art of programming is reborn.

Tricky concurrency issues surface because none of the programming language C/C++/Java/Perl/Python/Ruby can guarantee thread-safety. Some are much looser than the other.

At the risk of making our 100-core CPU run like at 1/100 of its top speed, there is the tricky balance between more threads and less concurrency to deal with.
And modern compilers (or JVMs) aren't helping.

So for those who claim that most of the computer programming problems are solved and therefore CS should be replaced by SE (software engineering), re-think.

why we don't want to be tracked

There have been tons of attempts to track users of a website, a facility or just walking on the street. Those to device such trackers always claims it's for the benifit (security) of the person being tracked.

Whether or not such claim holds true, the user almost always refuse the favor of "being tracked".  

 

Why? 

 

I think deep down our heart, we don't trust that every moment of our life can withstand the detailed scrutiny of an omniscience tracker. There are plenty of chances to be misunderstood and misinterpreted in life, and we don't need more of them behind the dark hidden machines. Be it a camera, a browser cookie, a keyboard logger or a search history analyzer, however good the intention of the tracker was.