Four short links: 4 January 2017
Science and Complexity, App Store Farm, Portability over Performance, and Incident Response Docs
- Science and Complexity (PDF) — in the first part of the article, Weaver offers a historical perspective of problems addressed by science, a classification that separates simple, few-variable problems from the “disorganized complexity” of numerous-variable problems suitable for probability analysis. The problems in the middle are “organized complexity” with a moderate number of variables and interrelationships that cannot be fully captured in probability statistics. The second part of the article addresses how the study of organized complexity might be approached. The answer is through harnessing the power of computers and cross-discipline collaboration. Originally published in 1948.
- How to Manipulate App Store Rankings the Hard Way — photo shows a wall of iPads in front of a woman. Her job is to download, install, and uninstall specific apps over and over again to boost their App Store rankings. (via BoingBoing)
- Intel’s 10nm Chip Tech — As has been the case for years already, clock speed isn’t liable to increase, though. “It’s really power reduction or energy efficiency that’s the primary goal on these new generations, besides or in addition to transistor cost reduction,” Bohr says. Improved compactness and efficiency will make it more attractive to add more cores to server chips and more execution units onto GPUs, he says.
- PagerDuty’s Incident Response Documentation — It is a cut-down version of our internal documentation, used at PagerDuty for any major incidents, and to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities. It provides information not only on preparing for an incident, but also what to do during and after. It is intended to be used by on-call practitioners and those involved in an operational incident response process (or those wishing to enact a formal incident response process). Open sourced, so you can copy it and localize it for your company’s systems and outage patterns. (via PagerDuty blog)
