Y Safle

The BBC writes:

One in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained
malicious code that could infect a user’s PC.

That may seem a worryingly high proportion! Fortunately it is also nonsense.

Looking at the actual paper, it seems that Google in fact analyzed several billion pages, and sifted these with a preliminary analysis tool called MapReduce

“MapReduce processed all the crawled web pages for properties indicative of exploits”. As it says in the paper, “MapReduce allows us to prune several billion URLs into a few million”. This process left around 4.5 million pages that were likely candidates. Out of *those*, they found 450,000 pages that they were confident were correctly identified as malicious.

So it is not 1 in 10 pages. It is perhaps 450,000 pages in several billion. It’s more like 1 in 10,000.

The BBC failed to spot this – although perhaps that is not surprising, considering some examples of previous sloppy scientific reporting by the corporation (and most other media corporations of course).

In the news this week, as Tony Blair plans to step down from his role as Prime Minister of the UK, he has indulged in one final round of constitutional change and agreed to move parliament to Aberystwyth. See News Biscuit for the full story.

Should children be present in the communion service? This was a question recently on MInTheGap’s weblog. It is also a question I have come across before regarding practices in churches where infant baptism is practiced. The question is asked, “if baptism is the mark of a Christian, what right do we have to refuse communion to children?”

As I understand it, membership of the Christian Church is through
baptism. This is, I think, a subtlety that is important to protestant congregations that practice infant baptism. Because those who believe in baptising children too young to answer for
themselves, do so on the belief that there is some special benefit of
so being a part of the Church, whilst not actually a believer. c.f. 1
Cor 7:14 (which is talking about marriage partners, but it perhaps
conveys the same idea).

Now if this accepted, then it follows that when one comes to faith,
the promises made for them at baptism are now owned by them. Their
membership of the church is confirmed in some sense by their faith.

On the other hand, those of us who hold to believers baptism say that faith should precede the baptism, and the baptism itself is the symbolic or sacramental enactment of our new birth. But even so, we can still hold to a view that the children present in our church are in a priveleged position, benefiting from teaching and nurture and the love of our community. Churches that practice believer’s baptism usually have some kind of dedication ceremony symbolising the special responsibility of the church to that child.

Now communion is a feast for the believer, and only for them. If
people are baptised into the Church, and properly instructed as to the
purpose and meaning of communion, then the act of taking communion
itself is a declaration of faith. Thus, someone who might say that the
eucharist defines the church is quite right. The true Church, the body
of baptised believers is self defined by the very act of taking communion.

This being so, it seems to me that any age limit applied by us on the
taking of communion simply says that we do not believe anyone under
that age can be a true believer, or sufficiently capable of making a
declaration of faith.

Now we might argue that this is so, but I wonder how this differs from
the argument that is thrown against “believer’s baptism”, which
argues that very young children are either unjustly denied baptism, or
else the believers baptism is virtually infant baptism in any case.

One minister I spoke to recently suggested we don’t *baptise* the children until they are eight, but this still suggests we do not believe the statement of faith of a
seven year old, if they should make one.

It is all something of a knotty issue, but I think the key issues are
flexibility, a good understanding of grace, and the ability to believe
the testimony of young children, without falling into gullibility.

But one thing is clear: if we don’t allow children at the communion table – if we just ship them off to their own age specific activities – then we are making a statement that these people are *not* believers.

The solution, as practiced in many churches, is to allow children to take part in the communion service but suggest that they receive a special prayer rather than the bread and the wine.

Now in churches with believer’s baptism, we have a good date for when they first take communion – at the first opportunity after their baptism. Churches that have infant baptism, or believer’s baptism only after a certain age have a thornier problem. But if children are really to benefit from the worship of a communion service, and if they are to understand how deeply we feel about Christ’s sacrifice, and the glorious hope that we will one day drink from the fruit of the vine with Christ in His Father’s kingdom, then however we deal with this issue, we are wrong to take them out of the service altogether.

You may not have known it, but Moore’s law appears to have reached its limits.

If you don’t know what Moore’s law is, it is a law proposed by Gordon Moore (a co-founder of Intel) that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years. Double the number of transistors on a chip and you essentially double the speed by halving distance between transistors. This he predicted in 1965.

And he was right! What a star!!!

So essentially since 1965 we have seen chip speeds (including, of course, processor speeds) doubling every two years (or less). And now we have processors that run … well .. very fast.

There have been some problems on the way. The technique of etching a circuit into silicon is based essentially on a photographic technique, but at some point the transistors got so small that the wavelength of photographic light required was so tiny that it was in the X-ray spectrum. The result – the X-rays passed right through the silicon. But clever people solved these and other problems.

But now there is a new problem. Each transistor gives off a tiny bit of heat, and all those transistors working together are running the chips too hot. Heat dissipation is a major issue, and of late we have not seen the big increases in chip speeds – which is why we are going to parallel multi-core designs.

But wait a minute! Does an increase in the clock rate really increase the speed of the chip? Perhaps we could keep the clock speed static with more intelligent chip designs.

Why? Because of pipelining. One instruction is not executed each clock cycle any more. Instead, processor pipelines are created and in a clock cycle, one part of one instruction and another part of another instruction is executed.

Consider a launderette which opens with just one washing machine, spin tub thing (whatever that bit is called) and one dryer. I go in and wash my clothes in the first wash cycle. In the second wash cycle I use the spinner thing and Fred washes his clothes. In the third was cycle I dry my clothes, Fred spins, and Mary washes her clothes.

This is the way processor pipelines work.

And Apple made an excellent point about processor speeds and pipelines here:

Megahertz Myth

Their point – run the chips slower with shorter pipelines and you could improve performance.

But I guess the question is: if PowerPC architecture is so much better than the Intel arhitecture, why did Apple switch to Intel chips?

Hmmm.