Apparently, today it is possible to buy a child’s home chemistry kit that includes no actual chemicals.

Sigh.

No, really:

Granted, it’s not every IT administrator who has to deal with a C-level executive in a remote office losing confidential company data because an elite armed military force broke into the place he was staying and took it. That said, there’s a number of lessons that IT administrators can take away from this week’s news.

It’s short and interesting.

I want some coffee joulies.

They installed this.

Whoa.

This past quarter, Apple actually made more money than Microsoft. Not “they had a better profit margin;” I mean they netted more actual dollars by a margin of $5.99 billion to Microsoft’s $5.2 billion. N.B. that Apple also has a higher market capitalization than MSFT — $323.53 billion as of this writing, vs. $215.44 billion for the “giant” from Redmond. (It’s worth noting that MSFT’s revenue for the period ($16.428B) was much lower than Apple’s ($24.67B), which is interesting in two ways: one, MSFT is just plain doing less business than Apple; and two, they’re still making more profit per dollar of revenue.)

This is not the result of Apple being overvalued, either, by traditional metrics — their P/E is well within the normal range for a company like theirs even if you discount how much cash they’re sitting on (nearly $30 billion, which is enough to, say, buy Sony (who once referred to Apple as a boutique firm) or Dell (whose founder once suggested Apple be closed and sold off) outright).

(Yes, Microsoft DOES have about 30% more actual cash, but they’re carrying about that much debt, too — and Apple has none, so it evens out.)

The point of all this: Should well all start rallying around the scrappy underdog from Redmond now?

“Chaos Monkey.”

Remember that Amazon Web Services outage last week? One firm that relies heavily on AWS was untouched: NetFlix. Why do you think that is?

Here’s a hint:

We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.

If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

We’ve all seen annoying, silly animated GIF files before, but the odds are that you haven’t seen anything as cool as these animated GIFs they’re calling ‘cinemagraphs’ that seem to capture a single moment somewhat longer than a photo, but less immersive than actual video. Here’s an example:

In truth, they sort of remind me of the moving pictures in the “Harry Potter” world newspapers.

Definitely check these out. There’s more here.

This is brilliant:

Just go watch.

Perhaps the most popular and enduring of Doctor Who’s companions was Sarah Jane Smith, who first showed up with the Third Doctor in 1973, but who was best known for her adventures with the floppy-hatted, long-scarf-wearing Fourth Doctor through about 1977. Gamely played by Elisabeth Sladen, Smith was sort of the viewer’s proxy in riding along with the Doctor’s various adventures — attractive, sure, but not the almost pure cheesecake of some later companions (cough Leela cough, not that I minded at the time).

She even resurfaced in the recent revival, appearing opposite Tenth Doctor David Tennant a few times as an older, wiser Sarah Jane. So loved was she by the Doctor Who faithful that she got her own show for a few years, even.

Sadly, though, Elisabeth Sladen died today, of cancer. She was 63.

[This pretty much rocks](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtCPTspsag even though I don’t completely understand the principles involved. Just watch it anyway.

During my trips to Wichita, I had occasion to observe, from quite a ways off, a very unusual airplane.

The customer there makes airplane parts, and among the parts they make are components for both the Boeing 737 — sort of the default American airliner; if you’ve flown Southwest, you’ve been on a 737 — as well as the new 787 “Dreamliner,” a tremendously large plane indeed. The 737 bodies leave the plant on a rail head that backs up into the actual building, which is super cool in and of itself. But the 787 parts are too big for rail, or for truck. So what to do?

Turns out, Boeing just made a bigger plane specifically designed to carry superbig parts back to Seattle for final assembly. The entire tail section swings open like a giant toy so that enormous components can be placed inside. How cool is that?

Now, of course, this begs the question: What do they move parts for THAT plane around in? Sadly, the answer is not “an even bigger plane!” Apparently, they’re custom jobs done in Seattle.

Fifty years ago today, mankind stopped being a strictly earthbound species. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the planet. Eight years and change later, mankind had walked on the fucking moon.

Tragically, Gagarin himself died in a training crash a year before Apollo 11, and didn’t live to see it. Cold War or no, my guess is that he’d have been pretty pleased with what the space race bought us as a species, regardless of which flag was on the side of the capsule.

Celebrate Yuri’s Night any way you see fit.

Star Wars Prequels Unreasonably Dangerous and Defective, South Carolina Federal Court Finds; go read the whole thing, as it includes some delicious snark.

the Lucas Defendants asserted the affirmative defenses of contributory negligence, assumption of risk, unclean hands, and equitable estoppel, essentially arguing that Plaintiff knew or should have known of the films’ lack of artistic merit and was thus barred from asserting any tort claims based upon his viewing of same. See In re: The Last Airbender, 523 F. Supp. 2d. 147 (N.D. Ga. 2010); In re: Ishtar Litig., 111 F.2d 102 (9th Cir. 1988).

In denying the defense motion for summary judgment, the court rejected the Defendants’ reliance on In re: Bob Dylan Live Performance Litig., 867 F.3d 539 (S.D.N.Y 2006), in which that court held that a once talented artist can devolve and become so well known in the community as a disappointment that damages are not recoverable as a matter of law. See also Shyamalan v. United States, 543 F.3d 129 (6th Cir. 2008).

This multipart, multimedia feature on time zones is pure gold.