Category: starred

via Core77
Conan’s Hilarious AirPods Commercial

T-Mobile issued a stern warning to its customers against downloading and installing the new iOS 10 update to their existing 6, 6 Plus and SE iPhone models. According to the T-Mobile website, doing so will, cause the handset to "lose connectivity [to the T-Mobile network] in certain circumstances." Once that happens, the user can only re-establish their network connection by fully powering down the phone and restarting it. That said, the company does expect Apple to push a corrective patch live within the next 48 hours.
Update: On Thursday night, T-Mobile announced that Apple had released its patch for the connectivity issue. If you had already downloaded iOS 10 (and were therefore at risk for this issue), go to Settings > General > About, to install the fix. If you hadn’t yet installed the new OS, feel free to do so without fear of having your cell service randomly drop.

Via: Verge

Source: T-Mobile

via Engadget
T-Mobile tells iPhone owners not to install iOS 10 just yet (Updated)

Last night, we discovered that typing the word “butt” into iOS 10’s new, baked-in GIF search leads you to a certain My Little Pony in a fairly compromised position. Apple’s already corrected that particular oversight, but they’re not done yet—because the new Messages app is also hiding actual, very easy-to-find hardcore porn.

Type in the word “huge,” for instance, and you’ll find an unpixelated version of this:

As we explained last night, Apple seems to be using search (in this case powered by Bing) to pull GIFs from a number of different sources. Its only censorship method thus far seems to be blocking potentially problematic words like “boobs” and “penis” and—as of this morning—“butt.” And there’s no reason for Apple to think that the word “huge” would bring up anything more than, say, a particularly large pillow or strawberry, except for the fact that of course it fucking would.

Now, it’s kind of understandable that a cartoon pony might slip through, but this is about as blatant as it gets. Apple is a massive tech company! You would think that, somewhere, in all their many departments, at least one person would be able to come up with an algorithm that knows when a dick is being sucked.

Because now, anytime anyone opens up their app to search “huge,” they will find the gif below.

Are you ready?

Like … really ready?

If you don’t want to see porn, close the page right now.

Because you’re about to see porn.

Alright, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Here it is.

Apple: It just works.

Update 1:04 p.m.:

Apple has now blocked the word “huge.”

via Gizmodo
There’s Actual Hardcore Porn Hiding In iOS 10 [NSFW]

via Gizmodo
Agents of SHIELD Shows Off Its Badass Ghost Rider in This Fast, Arguably Furious New Promo

via Lifehacker
Vectr Is a Free, Cross-Platform, Online Graphics Editor

This blog post discusses how you can protect your e-commerce database from a high traffic disaster.

Databases power today’s e-commerce. Whether it’s listing items on your site, contacting your distributor for inventory, tracking shipments, payments, or customer data, your database must be up, running, tuned and available for your business to be successful.

There is no time that this is more important than high-volume traffic days. There are specific events that occur throughout the year (such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Singles Day) that you know are going to put extra strain on your database environment. But these are the specific times that your database can’t go down – these are the days that can make or break your year!

So what can you do to guarantee that your database environment is up to the challenge of handling high traffic events? Are there ways of preparing for this type of traffic?

Yes, there are! In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the factors that can help prepare your database environment to handle large amounts of traffic.

Synchronous versus Asynchronous Applications

Before moving to strategies, we need to discuss the difference between synchronous and asynchronous applications.

In most web-based applications, user input starts a number of requests for resources. Once the server answers the requests, no communication stops until the next input. This type of communication between a client and server is called synchronous communication.

Restricted application updates limit synchronous communication. Even synchronous applications designed to automatically refresh application server information at regular intervals have consistent periods of delay between data refreshes. While usually such delays aren’t an issue, some applications (for example, stock-trading applications) rely on continuously updated information to provide their users optimum functionality and usability.

Web 2.0-based applications address this issue by using asynchronous communication. Asynchronous applications deliver continuously updated data to users. Asynchronous applications separate client requests from application updates, so multiple asynchronous communications between the client and server can occur simultaneously or in parallel.

The strategy you use to scale the two types of applications to meet growing user and traffic demands will differ.

Scaling a Synchronous/Latency-sensitive Application

When it comes to synchronous applications, you really have only one option for scaling performance: sharding. With sharding, the tables are divided and distributed across multiple servers, which reduces the total number of rows in each table. This consequently reduces index size, and generally improves search performance.

A shard can also be located on its own hardware, with different shards added to different machines. This database distribution over a large multiple of machines spreads the load out, also improving performance. Sharding allows you to scale read and write performance when latency is important.

Generally speaking, it is better to avoid synchronous applications when possible – they limit your scalability options.

Scaling an Asynchronous Application

When it comes to scaling asynchronous applications, we have many more options than with synchronous applications. You should try and use asynchronous applications whenever possible:

• Secondary/Slave hosts. Replication can be used to add more hardware for read traffic. Replication usually employs a master/slave relationship between a designated “original” server and copies of the server. The master logs and then distributes the updates to the slaves. This setup allows you to distribute the read load across more than one machine.

• Caching. Database caching (tables, data, and models – caching summaries of data) improves scalability by distributing the query workload from expensive (overhead-wise) backend processes to multiple cheaper ones. It allows more flexibility for data processing: for example premium user data can be cached, while regular user data isn’t.
  
  Caching also improves data availability by providing applications that don’t depend on backend services continued service. It also allows for improved data access speeds by localizing the data and avoiding roundtrip queries. There are some specific caching strategies you can use:
  • Pre-Emptive Caching. Ordinarily, an object gets cached the first time it is requested (or if cached data isn’t timely enough). Preemptive caching instead generates cached versions before an application requests them. Typically this is done by a cron process.
  • Hit/Miss Caching. A cache hit occurs when an application or software requests data. First, the central processing unit (CPU) looks for the data in its closest memory location, which is usually the primary cache. If the requested data is found in the cache, it is considered a cache hit. Cache miss occurs within cache memory access modes and methods. For each new request, the processor searched the primary cache to find that data. If the data is not found, it is considered a cache miss. A cache hit serves data more quickly, as the data can be retrieved by reading the cache memory. The cache hit also can be in disk caches where the requested data is stored and accessed by the first query. A cache miss slows down the overall process because after a cache miss, the central processing unit (CPU) will look for a higher level cache, such as random access memory (RAM) for that data. Further, a new entry is created and copied into cache before it can be accessed by the processor.
  • Client-side Caching. Client-side caching allows server data to be copied and cached on the client computer. Client side caching reduces load times by several factors. 

• Queuing Updates. Queues are used to order queries (and other database functions) in a timely fashion. There are queues for asynchronously sending notifications like email and SMS in most websites. E-commerce sites have queues for storing, processing and dispatching orders. How your database handles queues can affect your performance:

• Batching. Batch processing can be used for efficient bulk database updates and automated transaction processing, as opposed to interactive online transaction processing (OLTP) applications.
• Fan-Out Updates. Fan-out duplicates data in the database. When data is duplicated it eliminates slow joins and increases read performance.

Efficient Usage of Data at Scale

As you scale up in terms of database workload, you need to be able to avoid bad queries or patterns from your applications.

• Moving expensive queries out of the user request path. Even if your database server uses powerful hardware, its performance can be negatively affected by a handful of expensive queries. Even a single bad query can cause serious performance issues for your database. Make sure to use monitoring tools to track down the queries that are taking up the most resources.

• Using caching to offload database traffic. Cache data away from the database using something like memcached. This is usually done at the application layer, and is highly effective.

• Counters and In-Memory Stores. Use memory counters to monitor performance hits: pages/sec, faults/sec, available bytes, total server, target server memory, etc. Percona’s new in-memory storage engine for MongoDB also can help.

• Connection Pooling. A connection pool made up of cached database connections, remembered so that the connections can be reused for future requests to the database. Connection pools can improve the performance of executing commands on a database.

Scaling Out (Horizontal) Tricks

Scaling horizontally means adding more nodes to a system, such as adding a new server to a database environment to a distributed software application. For example, scaling out from one Web server to three.

• Pre-Sharding Data for Flexibility. Pre-sharding the database across the server instances allows you to have the entire environment resources available at the start of the event, rather than having to rebalance during peak event traffic.

• Using “Kill Switches” to Control Traffic. The idea of a kill switch is a single point where you can stop the flow of data to a particular node. Strategically set up kill switches allow you to stop a destructive workload that begins to impact the entire environment.

• Limiting Graph Structures. By limiting the size or complexity of graph structures in the database, you will simplify data lookups and data size.

Scaling with Hardware (Vertical Scaling)

Another option to handle the increased traffic load is adding more hardware to your environment: more servers, more CPUs, more memory, etc. This, of course, can be expensive. One option here is to pre-configure your testing environment to become part of the production environment if necessary. Another is to pre-configure more Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) instances for the event (if you are a using cloud-based services).

Whichever method, be sure you verify and test your extra servers and environment before your drop-dead date.

Testing Performance and Capacity

As always, in any situation where your environment is going to be stressed beyond usual limits, testing under real-world conditions is a key factor. This includes not only testing for raw traffic levels, but also the actual workloads that your database will experience, with the same volume and variety of requests.

Knowing Your Application and Questions to Ask at Development Time

Finally, it’s important that you understand what applications will be used and querying the database. This sort of common sense idea is often overlooked, especially when teams (such as the development team and the database/operations team) get siloed and don’t communicate.

Get to know who is developing the applications that are using the database, and how they are doing it. As an example, a while back I had the opportunity to speak with a team of developers, mostly to just understand what they were doing. In the process of whiteboarding the app with them, we discovered a simple query issue that – now that we were aware of it – took little effort to fix. These sorts of interactions, early in the process, can save a great deal of headache down the line.

Conclusion

There are many strategies that can help you prepare for high traffic events that will impact your database. I’ve covered a few here briefly. For an even more thorough look at e-commerce database strategies, attend my webinar “Black Friday and Cyber Monday: How to Avoid an E-Commerce Disaster” on Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:00 am Pacific Time.

Register here.

via Planet MySQL
Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Best Practices for Your E-Commerce Database

The hacker that pillaged the DNC’s computers known as "Guccifer 2.0" has released another collection of documents at a cybersecurity conference in London. While it doesn’t contain private emails this time around, it has what appears to be several members’ personal info, including the cellphone number of vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine. The collection also includes the finances, email ads, phone numbers and addresses of the party’s donors, along with the DNC’s network infrastructure. Take note, though, that this latest cache was uploaded on a file-sharing service instead of on Guccifer 2.0’s website or on Wikileaks, and the documents haven’t been verified yet. Wikileaks’ Twitter account shared the link where you can download the 670MB file, though, along with its password.

Interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile put the blame on the Russian government and its quest to influence the presidential elections in the US. According to Politico, she also said that if there’s anyone who’ll benefit from all these leaks, it’s Donald Trump, who has "embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin" and "publicly encouraged further Russian espionage to help his campaign."

Guccifer 2.0 got his name from the original Guccifer, who broke into Hillary Clinton’s private email server to steal and distribute her digital missives, medical and financial information. Unlike the first Guccifer who was already sentenced to a little over four years in prison, we’re still not sure who 2.0 really is. Security experts believe, however, that the persona is just a front for Russian cyberspies carrying out government-sanctioned attacks.

678.4 MB of new "DNC documents" from @Guccifer_2https://t.co/zJhERxABiv
use 7zip to unpack
password: GuCCif3r_2.0

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 13, 2016

Source: NBC News, Politico, WikiLeaks (Twitter)

via Engadget
Latest ‘Guccifer 2.0’ leak drops Tim Kaine’s phone number

As a general rule, I don’t believe in miniaturizing things for the sake of miniaturizing them, and that includes dogs and baked goods. (Golf is fine.) But this tiny house is an exception.

It’s called France, and it’s a prototype designed by Joshua Woodsman of Pin-Up Houses, which sells plans for sheds, cottages, and tiny houses. According to Woodsman, his latest creation only costs $1,200, and takes a team of three people about three hours to put together.

Woodsman says the prefabricated tiny house has 21 insulated panels connected by threaded rods. It comes with three sections—red, white, and blue—that feature a sleeping space, a “day zone” with a table and chairs, and a tiny kitchen. All in all, it comes in at 74 square feet, according to New Atlas. (There’s no bathroom, but that’s what the woods are for.)

It’s only a prototype, so unfortunately, you and I can’t buy one and plant it down in that empty lot down the block. But Woodsman, whose name is so apt it might be fake, wants to “spread our tiny-house movement around the world,” so perhaps France will one day be ours. At least it’s bigger than my bedroom now!

[New Atlas]

via Gizmodo
This Tiny House Costs $1,200 and Takes Just Three Hours to Build

By Mark Smirniotis

This post was done in partnership with The Sweethome, a buyer’s guide to the best things for your home. Read the full article here.

With solar power, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. If buying a home is the largest financial investment most people will make, installing solar could very well be the second. Every installation needs to take into account electricity consumption, geographic location, roof orientation, local permits, and a host of other considerations. Once you have a rough idea of how much power you’ll need, in most cases the first option you should consider is a grid-tied system made up of Suniva Optimus 335W monocrystalline solar panels paired with SolarEdge P400 power optimizers, plus a SolarEdge inverter at the heart of it all.

Who this is for

Scene from The Last Man on Earth.

Not everyone who goes solar will need to shop for their own equipment. Our picks are intended for people who will buy and install their systems alone, or with their own electrician or contractor. If you buy or lease your equipment from an installer, you may not have much choice in which equipment you get, but understanding our picks can help you evaluate quotes and proposals.

In the future we may consider looking at off-grid components such as purpose-made inverters, charge controllers, and batteries, but for now we’ve focused on the grid-tied equipment that’s most common.

Regardless, everyone who is thinking about solar needs to start with the basics of system sizing and purchase options, as well as answer some fundamental questions about financing and installation. We go into the details of how to shop for solar power in our full guide, but to get you started we’ve gathered the basics into this flowchart that will help you figure out where you need to focus.

How we picked

How power flows through a grid-tied system when the sun comes out.

Before deciding whether we could recommend any components for solar power, we spent weeks compiling statistics, reaching out to solar-industry representatives, wading through specifications, and getting expert input—and even so, the picks we make here represent only a starting point on the road to solar for most people. With that in mind, we didn’t just pick equipment for people already interested in self-installation; we also looked at the best ways to learn about and shop for solar.

If you’re comparing solar panels, your first consideration should be reputation and warranty, followed by price and, to a lesser extent, efficiency. In the past five years, solar panels have started to become a commodity item, with small technical differences that are immaterial to most homeowners.

Every solar-power system requires a second component, called an inverter. These devices turn the direct current (DC) that the solar panels produce into alternating current (AC), which is what your home operates on. You can determine a good inverter going by some of the same qualities you’ll find in a good solar panel, namely reliability, warranty coverage, and cost.

Our pick for solar panels

Made by a reputable firm with a strong warranty, this module provides good output without a premium cost.

Suniva panels are efficient, affordable, and backed by a reputable warranty from a company with manufacturing in Georgia and Michigan. These panels come with a 10-year warranty and a 25-year power guarantee, matching the coverage of most other top-tier manufacturers. Currently around $1 per watt, the price is competitive, too, but prices fluctuate, and a local installer may have competitive costs on a similar panel. The Suniva panels are right in the middle of the pack for efficiency, not so low as to require the extra space that cut-rate panels may need, but not so high that you’re paying 50 percent more for engineering prestige you’ll never notice. If you can find panels from a similarly reputable company with the same warranty and similar efficiency but a lower price tag, you’ll probably be just as happy with them. But the Suniva panels should be the bar that you try to clear as you shop.

Our pick for an inverter

Left: SolarEdge power optimizers installed on the racking, each waiting to be paired with a solar panel. Right: Two SolarEdge inverters at the heart of a large system turn DC power into AC power. Photo: SolarEdge

Even the best panels are only as good as the inverter you pair them with, so for most grid-tied systems we recommend looking at SolarEdge single-phase inverters and the company’s line of independent power optimizers before looking anywhere else. SolarEdge’s hybrid platform borrows the efficiency gains and individual panel management of microinverter systems yet avoids the extra costs and reliability issues that have kept microsystems from becoming mainstream. Think of the SolarEdge platform as being like a plug-in hybrid car, which has the low driving cost and emissions of an electric vehicle but the range and convenience of a combustion engine. Although the SolarEdge platform costs about the same as a traditional, top-of-the-line string-inverter system, it allows for more flexibility in roof planning, gains in power production, and reliable service with panel-level monitoring.

If you have no idea what we’re talking about

Solar power is full of brilliant engineering, and you really don’t need to understand most of it to make the switch from utility-based power. When the sun is out, you get free electricity; when it’s not, your power comes from the utility company just like always. If you produce more power than you need during the day, you may be able to sell it to the utility company for service credits or cash. In fact, with equipment costs as low as they are now, a properly sized solar installation will result in your net utility bill at the end of the year being zero. We go into more detail about how solar works in our full guide, but the benefits we’ve just described are what make solar such a great investment for so many people: Done right, solar will let you avoid a utility bill indefinitely.

This guide may have been updated by The Sweethome. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

via Engadget
The solar panels and inverter we’d buy