The Weekly Weird - 2015-04-10

An extra chunky weekly weird served up piping hot just for you Guvnor!

"Computer scientists often look at Web pages in the same way that my friend looked at farms. People think that Web browsers are elegant computation platforms, and Web pages are light, fluffy things that you can edit in Notepad as you trade ironic comments with your friends in the coffee shop. Nothing could be further from the truth. A modern Web page is a catastrophe. It’s like a scene from one of those apocalyptic medieval paintings that depicts what would happen if Galactus arrived: people are tumbling into fiery crevasses and lamenting various lamentable things and hanging from playground equipment that would not pass OSHA safety checks. This kind of stuff is exactly what you’ll see if you look at the HTML" http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/ToWashItAllAway.pdf

• Bodies are weird: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeteners-may-change-our-gut-bacteria-in-dangerous-ways/
• sudo yum remove gnome-screensaver: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/
• A vaguely interesting look at the logistics behind the Falklands invasion: http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2015/04/logistics-of-the-san-carlos-landings/

• A set of interesting posts about password strength. We've been doing this for /how/ long and we still can't get it right?

  • https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/
  • https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325952
  • http://world.std.com/\~reinhold/diceware.html
  • http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/memorize-random-60.pdf

• Vendor? we don't need no stinking vendors: http://smcleod.net/building-a-high-performance-ssd-san/

• Your financial technology business plan is bad and you should feel bad: https://medium.com/bull-market/a-cynic-s-guide-to-fintech-3cd0995e0da3
• See also: https://mechanicalmarkets.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/a-few-notes-about-hft-as-a-business-and-the-virtu-ipo/

• Yike that's fast:

  • http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-SSD-750-Series-12TB-PCIe-and-25-SFF-Review-NVMe-Consumer/Conclusion-Pricing-an
  • http://anandtech.com/show/9090/intel-ssd-750-pcie-ssd-review-nvme-for-the-client
  • (of course this is faster but: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6075/seagate-1200-stx00fm-12gb-s-sas-enterprise-ssd-review/index10.html )

• "Literally" is literally not literally: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/literal-meaning-is-an-oxymoron/

• A grey market in losing (!) lottery purposes to offset the tax liability of gambling wins. What a world: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/06/gamblers-tax-season-lotto-scam.html