May I speak with Jordan?

Someone calls and asks, "May I speak with Jordan?"

English teachers taught me that the common "This is him" is incorrect. "This is he" is the right answer because the pronoun is renaming the subject as in "This is he who is speaking". "This is he" sounds worse than "This is him", I think, because the subject-verb-object word order is the most basic conceptual pattern for native speakers.* The common advice from style guides to avoid beginning sentences with "I" is evidence of this. A better solution would be "You are speaking with him".**

But it doesn't make sense to speak of oneself in the third person. The first person version "I am speaking" doesn't really answer the question either and is comically self-evident. "Speaking" is a good but imperfect compromise. It answers the question succinctly which means a lot in communication even if it suffers from a lack of precision. But don't be surprised if I answer "I am the Jordan with whom you wish to speak. However, I am busy and you may not speak with me now".

This leads to a couple more things about English I can't figure out. We know that "I am speaking with him" is correct versus "I am speaking with he". Then I read this sentence "Agreeable people will go with whoever makes a suggestion" and I'm stumped. Who is the subject here? The prepositional phrase strongly suggests using whomever and implying that agreeable people is the subject. So why whoever? If we look at the alternate constructions "Agreeable people will go with he who makes a suggestion" and "Agreeable people will go with him who makes a suggestion" then the former seems correct. After all, we would say "he makes a suggestion" and not "him makes a suggestion". The phrase "whoever makes a suggestion" functions informally, if not formally, as an independent clause and therefore has a subject-verb-object construction its corresponding cases.

* It is also this near functioning, I think, which partially causes people to use the object case for comparatives. The argument for the subject case is perfectly logical i.e., "She is taller than him" versus "She is taller than he [is]", but if we look at the rule for prepositions which are a kind of comparison of the subject to an object: she is near him, she is by him, she is far from him, she is away from him, she is beside him, etc., it's a reasonable inference for comparatives.  I mean we can't even settle 0^0 in the mathematical realm so a little prudence among grammarians is a good idea.

** I know that the correct American use is to place periods within the quotation but this is one case where I think the British use is arguably better. A quote is an insert and the period should always notate the end of the writer's sentence even if it at the expense of the quote's. That's not to say a period cannot do both but that leads to this horrific construction. "This is he who is speaking.". Then again, there was a time when I thought the multitude of parentheses at the end of complex expressions was dumb and now I can't live without them.

Kolchak: The Media Stalker

One of the more interesting, though not entirely original, commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is Project 1917 which is recounting the events in real time. The following for today was written by Alexander Kolchak, former commander of the Tsar's Black Seas Fleet, when he was visiting the United States:

On the day of my departure, the first information was received about the Bolshevik coup, that Kerensky had fled, the government had fallen, and Petrograd was in the hands of the Soviets. Since I had often read such sensationalist stories in American newspapers before, I did not attach much importance to this, especially since it was extremely difficult to believe American newspapers.

 No comment needed

Avira makes me WannaCry

It's humbling when you perform due diligence and still get it wrong. For years I've used Avira as my anti-virus product since it is consistently in the top 3 or so in detection and performance rates according to various antivirus researchers.

But the free version of Avira did not detect WannaCry. Not from any lack of ability but rather because Avira wanted to differentiate their "Pro" version from the free version by limiting the ability to handle ransomware to the Pro version.

Screenshot of Avira failing to stop WannaCry

Why would ransomware ever be considered outside of antivirus' basic scope? The free version of Avira almost certainly has ransomware protection now but I have switched to BitDefender. Kaspersky's AV also has a good detection and performance rating while also having protected against WannaCry. NewEgg runs sales on Kaspersky all the time so that's probably what I'll be using later.*

I've paid for Avira before because I hate the ads, but I manage a lot of computers and there's too much competition to really pay for a dozen licenses as insurance. And not extending protection to "free" users is a major failing in my opinion so I doubt I will use Avira again.

* Uninformed people think Kaspersky is some kind of Russian backdoor but any top intelligence agency can easily break into any typical PC, antivirus or not thanks to "features" like Intel's Management Engine. WannaCry itself shows that the Russians shouldn't really be our top concern.

Windows Creator's Update

The hits just keep on coming with Microsoft Windows 10's new Creator's Update! Despite having Windows 10 Professional and disabling forced updates, Microsoft decided to helpfully throw me out of my fullscreen application and remind me anyway. Nagging the user is just the sort of behavior I expect from amateur shovelware, which, to be honest, is what Windows is. I can console myself in knowing that non-Americans, once again, paid more than I.*

Not only did this new update reset my sound configuration, it re-enabled XBOX GameDVR because I mean, maybe I really didn't mean it the first time when I went out of my way to disable it with the Anniversary Update. And what is this?

Just as with the forced updates and telemetry that remains on even when disabled, to make settings hidden or "managed by your organization" is another slap in the face of the user. It's too bad because Windows previously behaved as a background environment to control devices and run programs, i.e., an operating system. Now it feels like Apple software in that it limits user control, constantly tries to integrate with the Cloud, and tries to force a certain experience on users.**

At least it didn't change my wallpaper this time around. That and my software volume seems to have returned to a logarithmic scale (though it still mutes at 5). Good job, Microsoft.

* At current exchange rates that is $285 USD for UK buyers and $307 for EU.

** Maybe MSFT looks at AAPL's market cap enviously and figures if they can't copy Apple's amazing hardware (Microsoft's hardware and peripherals were good but just not Titanium Powerbook/iPad/iPhone/Air etc., good) they can get away with copying Apple's horrific software.

A Month of Using JavaScript Whitelisting

It turns out that whitelisting Javascript on a site-by-site basis is probably more trouble than it's worth. For my browsing habits, I visit enough new pages that I need to enable functionality daily. Not only that, it's one of those things where if a page is malfunctioning and I reload with Javascript enabled that I can't quite rule out the possibility that a page might be calling on a third party site for Javascript which somehow might end up blocked.

I'm sticking with the whitelist system for psychological reasons. Time saved is probably negative but whitelisting helps avoid a negative first impression and I think negative impressions weigh more strongly than non-negative impressions. Even if I enable Javascript on a site and it turns out to have annoying ads, I am not caught by surprise. It's all a user versus webmaster control issue.

Giving the user more control over the application of pain actually lessens the pain. At least that's the lesson I took from Dan Ariely's story about his treatment for burns at a hospital; it was much more painful when the nurses just ripped his bandages off than when he was allowed to remove them at his own pace.

The same psychological mechanism informs, I think, my aversion to Windows rebooting itself automatically, giving control of software or media to Digital Rights Management e.g. Steam, Netflix, etc., or trusting my data to the Cloud. But it's clear that we are more or less conditioned to accept less client control in IT, and that's fine, but it's important to understand that it doesn't have to be that way.

Moore's Law: An Originalist Perspective

The reports of the death of Moore's Law have been greatly exaggerated. At least that's what Intel will have hoped you believed after its March 28th industry advertorial blitz Technology and Manufacturing Day. There are many formulations for Moore's Law but here it is as stated by Gordon Moore himself:

The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 24 months

It's a little tricky because you can always add more cores or even fluff like a GPU or fixed function accelerators to increase transistor counts even if yields degrade and programs suited for using these resources are rare. The law doesn't make an exception for these, or more pertinently, multicore designs, so let's see how the biggest chips from Intel compare over the past 20 years. I'll do GPU transistor counts as well to see how that compares. I expect that doubling transistor counts every two years is probably true, but for Nvidia rather than Intel.

An hour of googling later:

Man I hate wccftech so much. How such a garbage rumor site constantly gets top billing on Google searches is a mystery. It's almost a reverse hierarchy with rumor trash like wccftech and Motley fool on top, data-dredged (but still useful) SEO clickbait like CPUBoss after, followed by amateur enthusiast sites like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, then professional sites like NextPlatform, and finally expert but accessible sites like David Kanter of Microprocessor Report Linley Group's RealWorldTech buried underneath.

Anyway here are the tables.* First GPU:

Date	GPU Name	Transistor Count - millions	% change over previous	Expected
April 1997	Riva 128	3.5		3.5
March 1999	Riva TNT2	15	328.57%	7.00
February 2001	GeForce 3	63	320.00%	14.00
January 2003	GeForce FX5800 Ultra	125	98.41%	28.00
June 2005	GeForce 7800GTX	302	141.60%	56.00
May 2007	GeForce 8800 Ultra	681	125.50%	112.00
January 2009	GeForce GTX 285	1400	105.58%	224.00
May 2011	GeForce GTX 580	3000	114.29%	448.00
May 2013	GeForce GTX Titan	7100	136.67%	896.00
May 2015	GeForce GTX Titan X	12000	69.01%	1,792.00
1H 2017?	Titan Volta ?

Wow! GPU workloads are more parallel but it's clear Nvidia is outpacing Moore's Law by a comfortable margin. Not quite Kurzweil "accelerating change" fast but Nvidia could stagnate for four years and still be ahead. I'd say good job Nvidia but they've already taken a ton of my money which is all they really ever wanted anyway.

Now CPU:

Date	CPU Name	Transistor Count - millions	% change over previous	Expected	Core Count
May 1997	Pentium II Klamath	7.5		7.5	1
February 1999	Pentium III Katmai	9.5	26.67%	15	1
April 2001	Pentium 4	42	342.11%	30	1
March 2003	Pentium M Banias	77	83.33%	60	1
May 2005	Pentium D Smithfield	230	198.70%	120	1
April 2007	Core 2 Kentsfield MCM	586	154.78%	240	2
March 2009	Xeon Gainestown (w5580)	750	27.99%	480	2
April 2011	Xeon Westmere (E7-8870)	2600	246.67%	960	10
June 2013	Xeon Ivy Bridge (E5-2697 v2)	2890	11.15%	1920	12
May 2015	Xeon Haswell (E7-8890 v3)	5600	93.77%	3840	18
1H 2017?	Xeon Kaby ?

Well there it is, Intel really has been able to keep Moore's Law on track! Granted, the samples from Westmere onward aren't consumer chips but rather pricey server parts with lots of cores, but they aren't one-off tech demos either. 

Moore's Law doesn't say anything about price or performance either which is why it technically doesn't matter that the E7-8890v3 was released at $7,200 whereas the Pentium II was $1,200 in 2017 Dollars.** Or that the 8890v3 is an 18 core chip that will be no faster than a one or two core version for most programs.

Anyway, I stand corrected. Or do I? Intel's answer to whether Moore's Law is dead was this chart:

The cost per transistor proves nothing except to show that even Intel isn't immune from imputing different intents to Moore's Law i.e., "What does a biannual doubling of transistor counts per chip mean?" 

For many years, increasing transistor counts meant a direct increase in performance which is why there was a big difference between a 286, 386, 486, etc. Those gains are gone. Intel's presentation points out how they are able to pack more transistors per area than ever before and how cost per transistor has gone way down thanks to their $10 Billion fabs - although you wouldn't realize it given their SKU pricing over the past decade.***

Intel's cost savings haven't translated to customer savings although the incidental benefits of lower power consumption and better frequencies for those lower power parts have. At the consumer and high end, the lack of real competition and price gouging isn't a big secret. Thankfully, Zen will bring sanity back to the market so Intel will probably have to cut this slide of their 60%+ Gross Margins at their next Technology and Manufacturing Day.

But the attack of Naples and Ryzen won't bring back the old days of huge IPC increases. Maybe it brings large price drops across the board where the $7,200 5.6 Billion transistor E7 gets priced closer to the $800 12 Billion transistor 1080Ti. Big whoop.

The single thread performance leader has never been the chip with huge core counts. And there are still architectural advantages that are unique to AMD, Intel, and IBM that could provide cumulative improvements to future chips using existing technology. Then there are not-yet-existing technologies that promise the world. Popular Science/IEEE Spectrum sort of "breakthroughs" that you stopped paying attention to years ago because it was beyond vaporware. Plasmaware?

Photonics, neural networks, quantum computing. Maybe those really are the future but I'd rather see an effort into proven methods for improving performance. Extreme cooling. Optimize packages, processes, and IT infrastructure for superconducting temperatures. I'm just being Cray Cray.

* I didn't factor in paper launches, custom runs, or more exotic chips like Tesla and Phi. Currently, the Xeon Phi 7290 with 72 cores holds the record as Intel's biggest chip with over 8 billion transistors. On Nvidia's side is the 15.3 billion transistor P100. Both aren't that much larger than the "mainstream" parts.

** Back then the Pentium Pro was better thanks to faster cache despite being an older design. That sort of imprinted the importance of cache in me like a little baby duck. Caches used to be on a separate socket, then moved onto the CPU board on a separate chip, and then onto the CPU itself. But there's still a case to be made for caches physically separate but still closer than RAM as you have with eDRAM. For desktops where power consumption isn't important, it would be great to see a socketed cache maybe on the underside of the CPU package made of good ol' fashioned $RAM. 

Change the standard for high performance computers to use liquid cooling to allow RAM to be even closer. We're at the point where the highest memory frequencies are on boards where RAM channels and traces are a shorter distance versus comparable motherboards. 

*** One thing that would be really great to see adopted is Intel's definition of transistor density to differentiate processes. While I'm not sure about the weighting of 60% to NAND and 40% to Scan Flip Flop units, it's a whole lot better than the 14nm 10nm marketing that isn't fooling anyone. Actually I think just a raw maximum transistors per square mm and some sort of confidence interval for maximum frequencies achievable at various temperatures would be best.

Wow, all these cool ideas that I have no ability to implement. I'll design the logo.

Flash down, Javascript to go ...

I didn't notice when Google set Chrome to block Flash by default. It's been years since I've played a Flash game which, I suspect, is the only use I or anyone else has had for the technology in recent memory.

The ecosystem of Flash-based games was impressive in a kind of eighties and nineties way. Back then, it was more common for programs to be authored by a single person which made for some idiosyncratic experiences – different user interfaces, different methods to solving some problem, different methods for accessing and extending program functions. Windows and Flash homologated some of that but single-author programs and games still feel very different.

Apple famously blocked Flash on its iPhones citing security and performance concerns but the security issue was overblown. iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, Tor, LastPass, Antivirus – all compromised. But the performance issue was real and it was a miracle that Flash games ran at all.* Even Flash advertisements could bog down a browsing session which was a big incentive to use an adblocker.

Most website designers never really learned that pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplaying videos with sound, animated Flash ads, affiliate redirects, advertorial sections, and the like are never going to be accepted. Rather than redesign their sites to use unobtrusive locally hosted linked images the way Techpowerup does when encountering an adblock user, we're increasingly seeing this:

This behavior isn't new and I wrote a while ago about how to bypass some of these types of page elements.

My first response is to block Javascript using the little ⓘ symbol next to the URL before resorting to manually blocking page elements. Sometimes it's easiest to just hit escape or click if it's an obscure site you doubt you'll visit again but this particular method of interfering with site access is so pervasive that I've switched to globally blocking Javascript and whitelisting sites.

The main issue here is that Javascript is still required for many sites. Page formatting is usually more primitive as well for non-Javascript versions**

At some point, I can imagine website designers requiring Javascript at which point the next step will be to switch to FireFox and install AdNauseam or even switch to Opera.

* I remember that most Flash games would get bogged down quickly at later levels even on powerful hardware as more things were happening on the screen. Setting Flash to "low quality" didn't fix much either. And the games were very primitive. The equivalent DOS game would have run fluidly on a 50MHz machine but when given the Flash treatment would well over ten times the computing power.

** I did notice that Google's non-javascript search includes limited chronological and verbatim filtering directly on the results page which is maybe the only advantage over the regular search.