The source for the above linked article is pretty far out there, but what I found the most humorous is their merchandise section. They spend some time harping on the evils of the American free-market system in their manifesto and then ask you to participate in it. Arguably, if you really want to "fight the power" in America, the only real way to do it is to buy as few American products as possible. Whoops. Oh well. I guess the free-market-system is okay when the money goes to them.
P.S. Don't get me wrong, I agree this world, and the U.S. in particular has a lot of problems. I just hate hypocrisy.
As evil as McBride may be, he's got nothing on Martha Stewart. Think of it this way... Which of the following is your wife more likely to say to you?
a)Honey, I think we need to spend $5,000 on a Feng Shui consultant to get the chi flowing in the living room... b)Honey, it's not stupid. I swear, Martha used sponges just like these to paint her wall and it looked great! It's not like you had anything better to do today. c)Honey, I think you should pay that Linux IP licensing fee to SCO for that web-server you have in the basement.
Doh. Several European cards have the QAM love going. Why can't a North American card? Heck. I'd buy a card that supported QAM if I had to buy a Mac with it!
The current model for emigration to Canada for people with your qualifications is this:
1. Apply for refugee status. 2. Get rejected. 3. Marry a Canadian. 4. Get a Visa, head on over, and apply for landed immigrant status. 5. Hire an Immigration Lawyer. Start filling out forms. 6. Six months later you will still not have a work permit. This will begin to worry you because you will be almost done filling out forms and the staff at the local government offices now know to run and hide as soon as you enter sight. 7. Bribe, threaten, or blackmail your immigration lawyer into submitting the lynchpin form he was supposed to submit the day you started paying him. He will not want to do this because it will mean allowing you to pass out of his power. Read some Anne Rice novels to more fully understand his or her motivations. 8. Congratulations! Work permit! Your can now use your PHD in physics to find employment in our nation's fine eating establishments, convenience stores, and, if you take night-school, perhaps a mechanic shop. Of course, you will be competing with Canadian PHD holders for many of these positions, so don't expect an easy go at it. (This is one of the downsides to being a member of the most over-educated population on the planet) If you feel discouraged, visit the local pizza hut and laugh at the waitresses holding PHD's in 18th century Russian Poetry who are even more hooped than you! 9. Employment. Now that you're making money it's time to pay 60% of what you earn in taxes. Being from a Scandinavian country you should be used to this. 10. After a few years you will be able to apply for Canadian citizenship. After this point you will be fully qualified to criticize americans and be completely ignored instead of being bombed back into the stone age. By this point in time you should also feel the beginning of a massive inferiority complex setting in and should also be experiencing uncontrollable urges to hold doors open for people while constantly apologizing for everything.
Does anybody remember a T.V. show called "Space: Above and Beyond"? It was pretty derivative and was cancelled after one season, but it did have one thing going for it... All the evil government conspiracies back home were tied to an evil megacorp named Telus... Telus just happens to be the dominant Telco in my province, and yes, they are EVIL.
You should see my bill. Enron should have taken lessons from Telus's billing department when it comes to creative accounting. I pay twice what I agreed to pay in the five-year cellphone contract I unwittingly signed in suspicious smelling red ink. I have no clue why, and they aren't about to tell me.
My cellphone inexplicably dies in my basement while other cellphones on other providers get crystal clear reception. I regularily receive phonecalls at 3AM from people who say things like "What the @#$%!! Stop calling this number you @#$#tard!" or "Hello? Hello? STOP CALLING ME YOU PERVERT!" Of course, the number displayed from these calls is my own, which makes it somewhat difficult to know who I should stop being woken up by calls from at 3am. Is there an evil prankster at work, or are Telus' phone-lines possessed by a minion of the Dark one who relishes the creation minor annoyances? Perhaps it's the same minion who came up with Britney Spears and reality TV...
When Starcraft was first released Blizzard used a similar approach to gather information directly from the registries of computers used to log into suspect accounts. Thanks to a few well-timed privacy lawsuits Blizzard stopped this practice in a very short period of time.
Of course, with all the wonderful new laws passed in the U.S. since then, this sort of thing may be possible to defend in court. A more important question is whether or not this sort of thing *should* be allowed.
No method of crack-detection is incapable of producing false-positives. A little bit of corruption in a seldom-used module of an executable could easily cause it to fail a parity check. A user could have his private information sent out over the web and receive harassing emails because of a corrupt disc sector or two! Personally, I feel this sort of thing is no different than a convinience store owner following you home and breaking into your house to check for stolen merchandise just because you looked a tad suspicious when you were in their store. This is simply not acceptable even if such false-positives are a one-in-a-million occurence.
Personally, I refuse to use any software which will compromise a user's privacy for any unavoidable reason. The chances of being a false-positive are remote, but why put up with them if you don't have to?
P.S. With american countries taking people from other countries to court, it would be nice if things worked both ways. I'd like to see some privacy lawsuits levelled against american companies in countries where draconian anti-privacy laws have yet to be passed. Is this even possible?
First PC's, then consumer electronics, then furniture... What's next? Fast food: iFries and iCola? Deserts: iScream? Bad Movies: iScream 2? Bionics: iBalls? Sex Toys: iLoveBalls?
Ikea must be sweating like mad right now. Overpriced overhyped overtrendy furniture is their turf...
"Texas law allows weddings in which one of the parties is not present. "
Physically absent obviously works, but how about mentally absent? How about both? Could a cardboard cut-out and a talented ventriloquist be all that's needed to wed someone in a coma? Could this lead to a mediocre sequel to "While you were sleeping."? With the wonders of artificial insemination a swinging bachelor could easily wake up from a 20-year coma and immediately face college bills for his kids.
I'm sorry, but the latest little invasion had some stunning examples of verbal sanitizing. "Self Inflicted Difficulties" for casualties from friendly fire. "Shock and Awe" was also used instead of the more accurate term for intimidating a foe with bombs: "Terror Bombing". Of course, I can certainly see why the Pentagon would not want to say they were conducting a "Terror Bombing" campaign in their "War on Terror", especially since it was the Nazi's who pioneered the tactic during the spanish civil war.
This terminology came straight from the Pentagon spokesperson. You could tune into CNN several times a day and watch journalists lap that BS up and it would be in every paper on the continent the next day. It's not precision. It's propaganda. Not all of us bought it.
A reoccuring idea for MMORPG's is that a players online food consumption and physical activity should have an effect on their avatar's physical appearance. Even though this was not the case in Everquest, it used to be a joke that some people would go to great efforts to get exotic foods and healthy vegetables for their online personas while subsisting on ramen noodles and kraft dinner themselves!
From the above article:
"In fact, by selling in-game perishables such as food and water to the players, the monthly subscription fee can be eliminated."
Just imagine what would happen if virtual food and real food came into direct resource competition!! I can just imagine a player carefully planning his avatar's dietary intake for optimum health using high quality virtual foods he was able to afford by eating only frozen bean burrito's himself!
A bold step forward for Human Case Modding
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Powered by Blood
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are those who mod thier cases and those who mod their bodies... but the lines are blurring. Soon people will be buying LED's and Dracucells to implant under their skin. Just think... You could implant a matrix of LED's in your back to operate like an animated billboard! Who will be the first beach-bum to add a cellular uplink so they can sell ad-space online?
Many have pointed out why Microsoft turning it's attention to the long-neglected usenet could be a bad thing. However, there are some possible benefits to it too...
First of all, Usenet apps are currently quite stagnant. There are new apps out there, but Agent is still considered one of the best and there haven't been any major changes to it in years. The interface is practically the same as it was 5 years ago! If Microsoft enters the news-reader market in a serious way then perhaps it might stimulate some creativity and development elsewhere. If nothing else, at least Usenet will get some publicity and new users. This is the big thing.
Currently, for most people, pay-for Usenet services are the only way to get good feeds at present. With more demand for Usenet from consumers and support from Microsoft perhaps ISP's will take their Usenet servers more seriously. Usenet is a valuable source for thousands of topics, but it is also a great repository for a weath of high-bandwidth materials such as porn, pirated music, videos, etc.. This is stuff that most ISP's don't really care about their users downloading except for the gawd-awful bandwidth costs they incur. A good Usenet server being used by users instead of P2P apps will actually reduce a lot of backbone traffic since the latest copy of Eminenema's album that everybody and their dog is downloading will only have to go over the backbone once to the news-server. From there it's all internal network traffic. Less bandwidth = lest cost, and cheaper internet access, not to mention more speed on less congested lines.
See. There's a silver lining in every cloud, even if it's a MS-sheitstorm.
Now for an alternate take on things... Beer is the root of civilization. Yes, that most lovely of liquids: the Wobbly Pop. Hang on to your brews boys.
Most traditional archaeologists tend to think of civilization as a sort of ladder, and the first few rungs were actually quite slippery. Here's one possible ladder: (there are several)
First, if you want to have a town with art, politics, hookers, etc. the first thing you need is a food supply that is reliable and doesn't move around a lot. Deer, elk, tapirs, camels, elephants, etc. all move around most vexingly. Turnips do not. Agriculture seems like the way to go, but first you need a crop to cultivate. 30,000 years ago that wasn't an easy thing to find. Beans, squash, wheat, turnips, you name it, are all highly domesticated plants that we've been selectively breeding for thousands of years. When agriculture was starting out the ancestors of today's crops just weren't that productive. Take corn for example. Today a stalk of corn puts out great big honking cobs chock full of juicy kernals. 30,000 years ago the stuff looked a lot like grass. It is in fact, more than a little bit unlikely that you could have lived off the stuff back then. (more on that later) So if no suitable crops existed, we had to breed one.
Here we hit a major hang up. Breeding massive changes into plants isn't exactly a speedy process when you *know* what you're doing. How exactly our ancestors ever managed to develop a crop suitable for agriculture is actually quite a hot topic of debate! Still, somehow we managed, but it probably took a while. Even for relatively smart people, it is not inconceivable that this took tens of thousands of years before there was any sort of payoff. So what kept our forefathers going?
Beer.
Living off of primitive wild corn would probably have been impossible. However, collecting relatively small ammounts to ferment into chicha (BEER!) for those important social events (religion?) was a much more reasonable undertaking. Of course, excessive beer consumption does tend to make one lazy, so naturally our fastly-becoming-religious ancestors decided to start throwing a bunch of seeds together in one place so they didn't have to look all over the bloody planet to round up enough for a good er... mass. Gradually they tossed the crappier grass out and the better stuff got inbred, mutated all to hell, and gradually become more and more like the corn of today. Eventually, we got a crop good enough to actually become a dietary staple. Someone might then have said "Hey guys! We can eat this stuff too! F@$* this hunter-gatherer walking-around-all-day BS. Let's just stay here all the time. There's BEER!"
So we have a nice town springing forth from the wilderness. Art, culture, and all the trappings of civilization are flowering forth... and people are shitting in the river. This is baaad. People are getting sick! Fortunately, achohol tends to be safer to drink than brownish water! While the high-proof Canadian beers of today would be a tad difficult to live on, the watered down chicha of the day was just the thing for daily consumption. To this day there are still countries where beer is cheaper than safe drinking water. As a beneficial side effect, people with beer tend to be easier to talk into paying taxes, running off to kill people they've never met before, building pyramids, etc...
Of course, archaeology itself would be nowhere without beer. Seriously, how many major archaeological digs are carried out without beer? Almost any site that has ever been completely excavated is within a short distance of a pub. Occasionally people mount expeditions into the jungles of Yucatan, etc. to discover these fabulous lost cities. They dig for a bit, the beer runs out, and they go home. To any government officials out there who are trying to get some remote lost city excavated, build a pub next to it. The archaeologists will come.
Douglas Hofstadter won a pulitzer for this little gem. This is a fantastic book to read for anyone remotely interested in the mathematical principles behind some of the more glamorous aspects of computing. Hofstadter's "Achilles & the Tortoise" dialogues are a frequently hilarious tribute to Lewis Carol that remain some of my most favorite things in print.
If you're lacking a basic understanding of algebra then this book may be a tad over your head, but if you can get into it you will find it immensely rewarding.
P.S. Algebra? ALGEBRA?!!?? You made it through college without algebra?
CD Reference Levels - Why the $#@! not!!??
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Is Louder Better?
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· Score: 1
Anyone who has watched a decent number of DVD's will note that most films on DVD sound to be about the same volume. Some films do have bigger explosions than others, but conversations come across at about the same levels typically, with the occasional exception. This is because film soundtracks are recorded with a reference volume in mind.
CD's on the other hand, have no such reference and vary in volume wildly. The fate of modern pop has been discussed above. Another infamous CD is Telarc's recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture. This is one of those CD's you literally won't be able to hear after a playing that Rush album. You'll crank the volume up and enjoy some wonderful classical music at a normal volume. Then the cannons will fire and your speaker cones will blow. Many an audiophile has fallen victim to this example of excessive dynamic range. Is it a good recording or should those cannon transients have been tamed a little?
This is not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, many believe that CD's should be mixed to take advantage of the best possible gear, not some POS Bose car stereo. Recordings should reproduce the live event as closely as possible. However, audio reproduction gear just isn't suited for the reproduction of cannon fire. We're talking about volumes that will literally rupture eardrums! Even if the average stereo could reproduce point-blank cannon fire, it would be excessively unwise to make recordings that do so. Most music lovers want to preserve their hearing to some extent. A day or two of ringing ears after a concert is one thing, but acute physical pain and bleeding from the ears are entirely another! Too much dynamic range can be a bad thing if misused.
We could solve all of these problems by introducing reference volumes for albums. These references would crank the volume up for a quiet classical recording with oodles of dynamic range and turn it down for a modern pop album that has almost no dynamic range. There would be no more volume-knob-riding for people with ecclectic musical tastes! Classical music, when played at the same average level as the latest Rush album, will have much louder transients. This is unavoidable, but players could limit the peaks depending on the application to prevent equipment and hearing damage from recordings with excessive dynamic range. A car stereo player might crank up the volume and reduce the dynamic range so everything is audible over the background road-noise while a powerful audiophile system could pull out all the stops.
Sounds like a good idea right? What's the downside? Delivery. While perhaps we could diddle with the red-book standard to include the reference level data on the CD somehow, old CD's would still lack it, and haven't the copyright gestapo messed with the standard enough? A better option would be to add reference volume data to the CDDB database. Any player with an internet connection would then have access to album or even track specific reference volumes. As wireless internet becomes more and more ubiquitous, it would be easy to add this capability to stereo gear.
For example, I use an Anthem avm20 preamp that has an RS-232 interface which allows it to be controlled by external devices. I play.ape files on it from my PC over S/PDIF using kernel streaming to bypass the bit-diddling nastiness of windows kmixer. ID3v2 tags already have a field for reference volumes... They could be used by a winamp plugin to tell my preamp what volume to play each track at...
Actually, to hell with you guys. I could set this up so it just remembers the last volume I set my preamp to when listening to a given track. JOY!!!
It really is amazing how a few extra letters on your resume can gain you international scorn and hatred from people who don't even know if you wear a toupee or engage in kinky sex. It's sort of like changing your name to Lucifer B. Mephisto in 15th century Spain and then going to the arch-bishop's wine and cheese soirée.
Obligatory Python quote: "NOOOOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!"
You could save a lot of effort and just build a quiet PC. In my experience it's a lot cheaper and easier to eliminate noise by the careful selection of noise generating components rather than building large enclosures. Enclosures you might think would block noise can often actually *amplify* it by acting like a horn or resonator.
Anyways... Here are my current picks for a quiet PC:
Overclocking: Don't
CPU Heatsink: Heatsinks change so fast that giving you specific models is pointless. However, as a general rule, if it comes with it's own fan, chances are it's too freakin' loud. Stock HSF combo's from Intel and AMD are right out. Look for a hefty heatsink with a lot of surface area made out of a conductive metal like copper. You can find heat dissipation spec's for most heatsinks online. Odds are you will have to spend 50 bucks or so here, but it's one place not to cheap out. Don't forget to use thermal paste when you install it!
CPU Fan: If you have a good heatsink installed properly you won't need a freakin' hoover to keep your CPU running cool. The minimum ammount of airflow you'll need is going to depend on how much heat your CPU generates and how well your heatsink dissipates heat. I've found that even a 20CFM (cubic feet per minute) fan will do well even on a high end athlon if you have the right heatsink. For comparison, some stock fans do upwards of 120CFM.
Graphics Card Cooling: Go passive. Buy a card with a passive cooler or replace the fan. Those little wussy fans they put on graphics card may look innocuous, but many are cheap pieces of crap that will develop a high-pitched and loud whine in short order. Cheap fans, no matter how small, are the bane of silent computing.
Motherboard Cooling: Ditto. If it has a fan, replace it with a heatsink or don't buy it in the first place. The latter is my personal choice.
Hard-Drives: Once I would have written pages on suspension techniques, enclosures, network booting, etc. to tell you how to avoid noisy hard-drives. Now I can just tell you to buy Seagate Barracuda's. While other manufacturers are closing the gap, these suckers still have a hefty 6dB lead on anything WD has, and a wider lead for any other manufacturer.
Case Fans: Guess what. 20CFM fans are all you need here too. I usually have one blow into the case over the hard-drives and another blow out of the case by the CPU cooler, but there are other configurations you can use. The key thing here it to pick high-quality quiet fans. I swear by 20CFM Panaflo's. Three of them (2 case fans, 1 CPU fan) will not be audible over even a very quiet PSU. These fans are about $15 CAD, so aren't bank breakers either. You can get fans that move more air, but don't bother unless you find you need that extra airflow. If you do, add more low-CFM fans to work in parallel rather than installing high-CFM fans. Note that Panaflo makes other 80mm fans with more airflow, but they are much louder. Stick with the 20CFM fanss.
Power Supply Units: If you've built the rest of your machine properly, the fans in your PSU will be the *only* thing you normally hear. I consider PSU's to be the one item that is lagging behind the rest out there. You can pay a fortune for a fanless PSU such as those TK Power makes, or you can buy a PSU with too much fan noise. Things are getting better though. Antec's Truepower PSU's are high-quality units that are pretty quiet and are also very affordable. They're lightyears ahead of anything Enermax makes anyways. I'd try one of them out first and see if it's too loud for you before resorting to more extreme measures. After that, you can try opening up the PSU and modding the fans to run on lower voltage or use different fans. If all else fails, you can go fanless, but it will cost you bigtime!
Water-cooling: Since the PSU in a system built under these guidelines is all you'll hear, if you aren't willing to watercool your PSU then there's no point to it at all. Watercooled PSU's have yet to go mainstream, so this is heavy modding territory. I have encountered many watercooling systems where the water-pump alone is noisier than three of my systems. Watercooling isn't where it's at... yet. It may be the future though.
When you opt for a quiet night and and rent a movie, are popcorn, chips, or other snacks a part of the video ritual? Does it even matter if you were hungry? When you pick up a Slurpee at the convinience store do you buy the size you feel like consuming or the size that looks like the best deal? "What idiot wouldn't pay 10% more for twice the slurpee!"
A rather large amount of our eating habits are not determined by hunger or fat cravings or anything of the sort. Rather, they're a product of our mental perceptions and habits. We associate certain activities with eating. We force our bodies to eat things they don't really want or need for thousands of little reasons. All it takes to overcome this is a little bit of applied common sense and a rethinking of our priorities.
Hence, some guidelines to follow:
1. Listen to your body. If it's craving a steak, feed it steak. If it isn't hungry, don't eat. 2. When you're deciding what to eat, first ask yourself if you're actually hungry or you're just looking for something to keep your hands busy. Chances are that if you just had a big dinner you don't really need popcorn to go with that after-dinner movie. 3. Your mother taught you not to waste food. First, you probably don't live in Ethiopia. Chances are you will have food tommorow. Second, it's waste whether it gets added to your spare tire or goes in the trash. Sure, a little fat might come in handy if your plane goes down in the Andes, but not to fat bastards like you! The fit people will come out on top when it's Hannibal Lecter time. Next time, don't buy/make/take so much food. 4. When buying food, remember that the true cost of food in our wealthy but relatively inactive society is the calories. Buy the right ammount, not what looks like the best deal. 5. Don't put the chocolate bar on a pedestal behind bowls of fruits and veggies with dip. If you want the F'ing Twix bar, eat the F'ing Twix bar! Don't gnaw your way through 3 pounds of fruit before you finally give in and eat it anyways. Fruit is healthier, but it has calories too. 6. Watermelon is gooooood. 7. If you go to a retaurant, appetizers are your friend. When you become "full" is more a product of when you start eating rather than how much you eat. Eat a roll to start with and you'll probably run out of steam before you finish the Linguini Alfredo uber-platter. If you wait untill the waiter finally brings the main course out you'll be hungry enough to wolf it down before the interogastrone has a chance to hit you. (and regret it later) 8. Eat slow, or if you're a military man home at Mother's for thanksgiving, take one plate, eat fast, and then take a break before digging in again.
That's all I can think of at the moment in terms of eating habits. Others have covered the excersize aspects fairly well. Ignore people who tell you to watch your fat consumption. It's the calories that matter. Fat does have twice the calories as the same mass of carbohydrates, but that's about it. Skim Milk has more fat than Cola, but guess which one has more calories?
If your goal is not to maintain your current weight, but to actually lose weight, remember that our bodies adapt to our caloric intake and activity levels. If you suddenly start eating nothing but veggie platters and running marathons you will lose weight, but your body is going to get a *lot* more efficient. If you stop running and start eating corndogs and hoagies again your body will pack on the pounds like crazy. Short-term diets, temporary exercize regimins and special Jenny Craig food are all futile. Permanent lifestyle choices are the only way to take weight off.
P.S. Beware of diet plans, especially the successful ones like Jenny Craig. I'd be curious to know just how much of their buisness comes from repeat customers...
My sister and her husband bought an absolutely horrendous piece of crap Packard Bell several years ago. It came with one of these lovely discs that wipe your HD and restor it to a "factory state". (Windows, with a sheitload of annoying, not to mention buggy, PackardBell spam and adware)
At some point the computer finally gave up and collapsed under the weight of all the spamware it had been subjected to. They gave me a call and asked me to come over and take a look at it. I told them I'd pop over later on in the evening. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law decided he'd try to fix it before I got there... with Packard Bell's image disc. Financial records, their digital cam photo collection, my sisters grades (she's a teacher), and a thousand other useful things... Gone. Toast. Whoops! I took a red magic marker (the kind teachers seem to have oodles of) and labelled the offending disc "EVIL!". That was about all I could do.
I'm sure my sister and her husband are not the only tech-unsavvy people who have fallen victim to these image discs of EVIL, and they've never even heard of Linux! These discs have been around for quite some time and I'm sure any manufacturer that uses them gets plenty of tech-support calls as a result. The only reason to use these discs seems to be that they let manufacturers include all sorts of annoying and useless software with their name on it. Frankly, it's a stupid practice and it hurts more than just Linux users.
Interestingly enough, the per capita number of guns in Canada is a mere fraction of that in the U.S.. Coincidentally, so are violent crimes and home firearms accidents. Heck, even our military is pretty touchy feely. Half the time we're not sure whether to call it an army or a "peace-keeping force"! The world knows we're F'ing peaceniks, but our biggest fear is the nuclear fallout we're going to get when some pissed off terrorists finally nuke our Southern neighbors.
There is a fine line between a fun hobby and weapons research. The weapon described in the above article is powerful enough to cause severe injury or even kill a target, is silent, and is small enough to be concealed. It's a gun, not a toy. Construction parts and ammunition for these guns are not currently controlled, unlike conventional firearms ammunition. It is quite likely a round fired from one of these guns cannot be matched to the gun that fired it, as with conventional firearms. To sum up, what we have here is a recipe for a gun that can be made from readily available parts and may also not leave incriminating evidence on every round fired. Ammunition for these suckers could be as simple as some batteries and ball bearings. Sounds like a tailor made gang weapon to me.
Is this man's website then, evil? I'd say it isn't. He's an innocent. He has no idea what people will do with his small evolutionary contribution to gauss gun technology. In this sense he's a lot like Pandora. However, the box was probably already open. There are probably several other similar and perhaps even more advanced designs out there anyways, some possibly on the net.
What is important is that theis site's readers realize that designs as refined as this one are not fun projects. They're dangerous weapons. If you build one, make sure you have adequate firearms safety training and follow the proper safety precautions when storing it. Sooner or later somebody's kid is going to shoot themselves with one of these. Don't let it be yours.
That's exactly the sort of "abuse" that a honeytoken in a hospital database is supposed to alert you to. Patient data is confidential and employees should not be looking at a patient record unless they have a reason to. Being bored doesn't cut it, and the employees *know* it. It's like bored police officers breaking out the impounded cocaine for a party with the hookers in holding.
Heck, now I have to wonder if the police intentionally impound guns and drugs associated with fictitious crimes... A bottle of gin and doobie could be a honeytoken? Who'da thunk it!?
It was interesting to see this paper devote so much effort to the completely useless metric of MFLOPS/MHz. This measurement has absolutely nothing to do with performance, but rather, with the approach taken by the chip manufacturer. You can do more in one clock cycle, as AMD historitcally has done, or less, but optimize for faster clock speeds, as Intel has in recent flavors of the Pentium.
One might be tempted to design a chip that does more in one cycle and then clock it as fast as a chip that does less in one cycle. Unfortunately, while reality is a little more complex than this, the basic reason is that the more a chip does per cycle, the more heat it generates per cycle. If you try to squeeze too many cycles through it in a second it will fry.
So showing that the G5 has better performance per clock cycles is no more useful than showing that an AMD chip has better performance per clock cycle than an Intel chip. All that matters is how much performance you can get from a chip before it cannot be clocked any faster without requiring unreasonable cooling methods.
All this paper shows is that, while the G5 is designed to do more in a clock cycle than a P4 is, the chip tested is ultimately not any faster than the P4 they benchmarked it against. It remains to be seen how the G5 will do at higher clock speeds. With this in mind, it would be *far* more useful to see heat dissipation stats on the G5 since that might give us some idea how close to it's design limits. If it is cranking out high-end P4 performance and running cool *then* I will be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
The source for the above linked article is pretty far out there, but what I found the most humorous is their merchandise section. They spend some time harping on the evils of the American free-market system in their manifesto and then ask you to participate in it. Arguably, if you really want to "fight the power" in America, the only real way to do it is to buy as few American products as possible. Whoops. Oh well. I guess the free-market-system is okay when the money goes to them.
P.S. Don't get me wrong, I agree this world, and the U.S. in particular has a lot of problems. I just hate hypocrisy.
As evil as McBride may be, he's got nothing on Martha Stewart. Think of it this way... Which of the following is your wife more likely to say to you?
a)Honey, I think we need to spend $5,000 on a Feng Shui consultant to get the chi flowing in the living room...
b)Honey, it's not stupid. I swear, Martha used sponges just like these to paint her wall and it looked great! It's not like you had anything better to do today.
c)Honey, I think you should pay that Linux IP licensing fee to SCO for that web-server you have in the basement.
Could this mean the PMS avenger is coming to consoles soon?
Doh. Several European cards have the QAM love going. Why can't a North American card? Heck. I'd buy a card that supported QAM if I had to buy a Mac with it!
The current model for emigration to Canada for people with your qualifications is this:
1. Apply for refugee status.
2. Get rejected.
3. Marry a Canadian.
4. Get a Visa, head on over, and apply for landed immigrant status.
5. Hire an Immigration Lawyer. Start filling out forms.
6. Six months later you will still not have a work permit. This will begin to worry you because you will be almost done filling out forms and the staff at the local government offices now know to run and hide as soon as you enter sight.
7. Bribe, threaten, or blackmail your immigration lawyer into submitting the lynchpin form he was supposed to submit the day you started paying him. He will not want to do this because it will mean allowing you to pass out of his power. Read some Anne Rice novels to more fully understand his or her motivations.
8. Congratulations! Work permit! Your can now use your PHD in physics to find employment in our nation's fine eating establishments, convenience stores, and, if you take night-school, perhaps a mechanic shop. Of course, you will be competing with Canadian PHD holders for many of these positions, so don't expect an easy go at it. (This is one of the downsides to being a member of the most over-educated population on the planet) If you feel discouraged, visit the local pizza hut and laugh at the waitresses holding PHD's in 18th century Russian Poetry who are even more hooped than you!
9. Employment. Now that you're making money it's time to pay 60% of what you earn in taxes. Being from a Scandinavian country you should be used to this.
10. After a few years you will be able to apply for Canadian citizenship. After this point you will be fully qualified to criticize americans and be completely ignored instead of being bombed back into the stone age. By this point in time you should also feel the beginning of a massive inferiority complex setting in and should also be experiencing uncontrollable urges to hold doors open for people while constantly apologizing for everything.
Does anybody remember a T.V. show called "Space: Above and Beyond"? It was pretty derivative and was cancelled after one season, but it did have one thing going for it... All the evil government conspiracies back home were tied to an evil megacorp named Telus... Telus just happens to be the dominant Telco in my province, and yes, they are EVIL.
You should see my bill. Enron should have taken lessons from Telus's billing department when it comes to creative accounting. I pay twice what I agreed to pay in the five-year cellphone contract I unwittingly signed in suspicious smelling red ink. I have no clue why, and they aren't about to tell me.
My cellphone inexplicably dies in my basement while other cellphones on other providers get crystal clear reception. I regularily receive phonecalls at 3AM from people who say things like "What the @#$%!! Stop calling this number you @#$#tard!" or "Hello? Hello? STOP CALLING ME YOU PERVERT!" Of course, the number displayed from these calls is my own, which makes it somewhat difficult to know who I should stop being woken up by calls from at 3am. Is there an evil prankster at work, or are Telus' phone-lines possessed by a minion of the Dark one who relishes the creation minor annoyances? Perhaps it's the same minion who came up with Britney Spears and reality TV...
When Starcraft was first released Blizzard used a similar approach to gather information directly from the registries of computers used to log into suspect accounts. Thanks to a few well-timed privacy lawsuits Blizzard stopped this practice in a very short period of time.
Of course, with all the wonderful new laws passed in the U.S. since then, this sort of thing may be possible to defend in court. A more important question is whether or not this sort of thing *should* be allowed.
No method of crack-detection is incapable of producing false-positives. A little bit of corruption in a seldom-used module of an executable could easily cause it to fail a parity check. A user could have his private information sent out over the web and receive harassing emails because of a corrupt disc sector or two! Personally, I feel this sort of thing is no different than a convinience store owner following you home and breaking into your house to check for stolen merchandise just because you looked a tad suspicious when you were in their store. This is simply not acceptable even if such false-positives are a one-in-a-million occurence.
Personally, I refuse to use any software which will compromise a user's privacy for any unavoidable reason. The chances of being a false-positive are remote, but why put up with them if you don't have to?
P.S. With american countries taking people from other countries to court, it would be nice if things worked both ways. I'd like to see some privacy lawsuits levelled against american companies in countries where draconian anti-privacy laws have yet to be passed. Is this even possible?
First PC's, then consumer electronics, then furniture... What's next? Fast food: iFries and iCola? Deserts: iScream? Bad Movies: iScream 2? Bionics: iBalls? Sex Toys: iLoveBalls?
Ikea must be sweating like mad right now. Overpriced overhyped overtrendy furniture is their turf...
"Texas law allows weddings in which one of the parties is not present. "
Physically absent obviously works, but how about mentally absent? How about both? Could a cardboard cut-out and a talented ventriloquist be all that's needed to wed someone in a coma? Could this lead to a mediocre sequel to "While you were sleeping."? With the wonders of artificial insemination a swinging bachelor could easily wake up from a 20-year coma and immediately face college bills for his kids.
I'm sorry, but the latest little invasion had some stunning examples of verbal sanitizing. "Self Inflicted Difficulties" for casualties from friendly fire. "Shock and Awe" was also used instead of the more accurate term for intimidating a foe with bombs: "Terror Bombing". Of course, I can certainly see why the Pentagon would not want to say they were conducting a "Terror Bombing" campaign in their "War on Terror", especially since it was the Nazi's who pioneered the tactic during the spanish civil war.
This terminology came straight from the Pentagon spokesperson. You could tune into CNN several times a day and watch journalists lap that BS up and it would be in every paper on the continent the next day. It's not precision. It's propaganda. Not all of us bought it.
A reoccuring idea for MMORPG's is that a players online food consumption and physical activity should have an effect on their avatar's physical appearance. Even though this was not the case in Everquest, it used to be a joke that some people would go to great efforts to get exotic foods and healthy vegetables for their online personas while subsisting on ramen noodles and kraft dinner themselves!
From the above article:
"In fact, by selling in-game perishables such as food and water to the players, the monthly subscription fee can be eliminated."
Just imagine what would happen if virtual food and real food came into direct resource competition!! I can just imagine a player carefully planning his avatar's dietary intake for optimum health using high quality virtual foods he was able to afford by eating only frozen bean burrito's himself!
There are those who mod thier cases and those who mod their bodies... but the lines are blurring. Soon people will be buying LED's and Dracucells to implant under their skin. Just think... You could implant a matrix of LED's in your back to operate like an animated billboard! Who will be the first beach-bum to add a cellular uplink so they can sell ad-space online?
You know, I bet MPAA lawyers could make a good case for sueing anybody who mirrors their slashdotted site. Hey, it's copyright infringement isn't it?
Many have pointed out why Microsoft turning it's attention to the long-neglected usenet could be a bad thing. However, there are some possible benefits to it too...
First of all, Usenet apps are currently quite stagnant. There are new apps out there, but Agent is still considered one of the best and there haven't been any major changes to it in years. The interface is practically the same as it was 5 years ago! If Microsoft enters the news-reader market in a serious way then perhaps it might stimulate some creativity and development elsewhere. If nothing else, at least Usenet will get some publicity and new users. This is the big thing.
Currently, for most people, pay-for Usenet services are the only way to get good feeds at present. With more demand for Usenet from consumers and support from Microsoft perhaps ISP's will take their Usenet servers more seriously. Usenet is a valuable source for thousands of topics, but it is also a great repository for a weath of high-bandwidth materials such as porn, pirated music, videos, etc.. This is stuff that most ISP's don't really care about their users downloading except for the gawd-awful bandwidth costs they incur. A good Usenet server being used by users instead of P2P apps will actually reduce a lot of backbone traffic since the latest copy of Eminenema's album that everybody and their dog is downloading will only have to go over the backbone once to the news-server. From there it's all internal network traffic. Less bandwidth = lest cost, and cheaper internet access, not to mention more speed on less congested lines.
See. There's a silver lining in every cloud, even if it's a MS-sheitstorm.
Now for an alternate take on things... Beer is the root of civilization. Yes, that most lovely of liquids: the Wobbly Pop. Hang on to your brews boys.
Most traditional archaeologists tend to think of civilization as a sort of ladder, and the first few rungs were actually quite slippery. Here's one possible ladder: (there are several)
First, if you want to have a town with art, politics, hookers, etc. the first thing you need is a food supply that is reliable and doesn't move around a lot. Deer, elk, tapirs, camels, elephants, etc. all move around most vexingly. Turnips do not. Agriculture seems like the way to go, but first you need a crop to cultivate. 30,000 years ago that wasn't an easy thing to find. Beans, squash, wheat, turnips, you name it, are all highly domesticated plants that we've been selectively breeding for thousands of years. When agriculture was starting out the ancestors of today's crops just weren't that productive. Take corn for example. Today a stalk of corn puts out great big honking cobs chock full of juicy kernals. 30,000 years ago the stuff looked a lot like grass. It is in fact, more than a little bit unlikely that you could have lived off the stuff back then. (more on that later) So if no suitable crops existed, we had to breed one.
Here we hit a major hang up. Breeding massive changes into plants isn't exactly a speedy process when you *know* what you're doing. How exactly our ancestors ever managed to develop a crop suitable for agriculture is actually quite a hot topic of debate! Still, somehow we managed, but it probably took a while. Even for relatively smart people, it is not inconceivable that this took tens of thousands of years before there was any sort of payoff. So what kept our forefathers going?
Beer.
Living off of primitive wild corn would probably have been impossible. However, collecting relatively small ammounts to ferment into chicha (BEER!) for those important social events (religion?) was a much more reasonable undertaking. Of course, excessive beer consumption does tend to make one lazy, so naturally our fastly-becoming-religious ancestors decided to start throwing a bunch of seeds together in one place so they didn't have to look all over the bloody planet to round up enough for a good er... mass. Gradually they tossed the crappier grass out and the better stuff got inbred, mutated all to hell, and gradually become more and more like the corn of today. Eventually, we got a crop good enough to actually become a dietary staple. Someone might then have said "Hey guys! We can eat this stuff too! F@$* this hunter-gatherer walking-around-all-day BS. Let's just stay here all the time. There's BEER!"
So we have a nice town springing forth from the wilderness. Art, culture, and all the trappings of civilization are flowering forth... and people are shitting in the river. This is baaad. People are getting sick! Fortunately, achohol tends to be safer to drink than brownish water! While the high-proof Canadian beers of today would be a tad difficult to live on, the watered down chicha of the day was just the thing for daily consumption. To this day there are still countries where beer is cheaper than safe drinking water. As a beneficial side effect, people with beer tend to be easier to talk into paying taxes, running off to kill people they've never met before, building pyramids, etc...
Of course, archaeology itself would be nowhere without beer. Seriously, how many major archaeological digs are carried out without beer? Almost any site that has ever been completely excavated is within a short distance of a pub. Occasionally people mount expeditions into the jungles of Yucatan, etc. to discover these fabulous lost cities. They dig for a bit, the beer runs out, and they go home. To any government officials out there who are trying to get some remote lost city excavated, build a pub next to it. The archaeologists will come.
Douglas Hofstadter won a pulitzer for this little gem. This is a fantastic book to read for anyone remotely interested in the mathematical principles behind some of the more glamorous aspects of computing. Hofstadter's "Achilles & the Tortoise" dialogues are a frequently hilarious tribute to Lewis Carol that remain some of my most favorite things in print.
If you're lacking a basic understanding of algebra then this book may be a tad over your head, but if you can get into it you will find it immensely rewarding.
P.S. Algebra? ALGEBRA?!!?? You made it through college without algebra?
Anyone who has watched a decent number of DVD's will note that most films on DVD sound to be about the same volume. Some films do have bigger explosions than others, but conversations come across at about the same levels typically, with the occasional exception. This is because film soundtracks are recorded with a reference volume in mind.
.ape files on it from my PC over S/PDIF using kernel streaming to bypass the bit-diddling nastiness of windows kmixer. ID3v2 tags already have a field for reference volumes... They could be used by a winamp plugin to tell my preamp what volume to play each track at...
CD's on the other hand, have no such reference and vary in volume wildly. The fate of modern pop has been discussed above. Another infamous CD is Telarc's recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture. This is one of those CD's you literally won't be able to hear after a playing that Rush album. You'll crank the volume up and enjoy some wonderful classical music at a normal volume. Then the cannons will fire and your speaker cones will blow. Many an audiophile has fallen victim to this example of excessive dynamic range. Is it a good recording or should those cannon transients have been tamed a little?
This is not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, many believe that CD's should be mixed to take advantage of the best possible gear, not some POS Bose car stereo. Recordings should reproduce the live event as closely as possible. However, audio reproduction gear just isn't suited for the reproduction of cannon fire. We're talking about volumes that will literally rupture eardrums! Even if the average stereo could reproduce point-blank cannon fire, it would be excessively unwise to make recordings that do so. Most music lovers want to preserve their hearing to some extent. A day or two of ringing ears after a concert is one thing, but acute physical pain and bleeding from the ears are entirely another! Too much dynamic range can be a bad thing if misused.
We could solve all of these problems by introducing reference volumes for albums. These references would crank the volume up for a quiet classical recording with oodles of dynamic range and turn it down for a modern pop album that has almost no dynamic range. There would be no more volume-knob-riding for people with ecclectic musical tastes! Classical music, when played at the same average level as the latest Rush album, will have much louder transients. This is unavoidable, but players could limit the peaks depending on the application to prevent equipment and hearing damage from recordings with excessive dynamic range. A car stereo player might crank up the volume and reduce the dynamic range so everything is audible over the background road-noise while a powerful audiophile system could pull out all the stops.
Sounds like a good idea right? What's the downside? Delivery. While perhaps we could diddle with the red-book standard to include the reference level data on the CD somehow, old CD's would still lack it, and haven't the copyright gestapo messed with the standard enough? A better option would be to add reference volume data to the CDDB database. Any player with an internet connection would then have access to album or even track specific reference volumes. As wireless internet becomes more and more ubiquitous, it would be easy to add this capability to stereo gear.
For example, I use an Anthem avm20 preamp that has an RS-232 interface which allows it to be controlled by external devices. I play
Actually, to hell with you guys. I could set this up so it just remembers the last volume I set my preamp to when listening to a given track. JOY!!!
It really is amazing how a few extra letters on your resume can gain you international scorn and hatred from people who don't even know if you wear a toupee or engage in kinky sex. It's sort of like changing your name to Lucifer B. Mephisto in 15th century Spain and then going to the arch-bishop's wine and cheese soirée.
Obligatory Python quote: "NOOOOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!"
Or...
You could save a lot of effort and just build a quiet PC. In my experience it's a lot cheaper and easier to eliminate noise by the careful selection of noise generating components rather than building large enclosures. Enclosures you might think would block noise can often actually *amplify* it by acting like a horn or resonator.
Anyways... Here are my current picks for a quiet PC:
Overclocking: Don't
CPU Heatsink: Heatsinks change so fast that giving you specific models is pointless. However, as a general rule, if it comes with it's own fan, chances are it's too freakin' loud. Stock HSF combo's from Intel and AMD are right out. Look for a hefty heatsink with a lot of surface area made out of a conductive metal like copper. You can find heat dissipation spec's for most heatsinks online. Odds are you will have to spend 50 bucks or so here, but it's one place not to cheap out. Don't forget to use thermal paste when you install it!
CPU Fan: If you have a good heatsink installed properly you won't need a freakin' hoover to keep your CPU running cool. The minimum ammount of airflow you'll need is going to depend on how much heat your CPU generates and how well your heatsink dissipates heat. I've found that even a 20CFM (cubic feet per minute) fan will do well even on a high end athlon if you have the right heatsink. For comparison, some stock fans do upwards of 120CFM.
Graphics Card Cooling: Go passive. Buy a card with a passive cooler or replace the fan. Those little wussy fans they put on graphics card may look innocuous, but many are cheap pieces of crap that will develop a high-pitched and loud whine in short order. Cheap fans, no matter how small, are the bane of silent computing.
Motherboard Cooling: Ditto. If it has a fan, replace it with a heatsink or don't buy it in the first place. The latter is my personal choice.
Hard-Drives: Once I would have written pages on suspension techniques, enclosures, network booting, etc. to tell you how to avoid noisy hard-drives. Now I can just tell you to buy Seagate Barracuda's. While other manufacturers are closing the gap, these suckers still have a hefty 6dB lead on anything WD has, and a wider lead for any other manufacturer.
Case Fans: Guess what. 20CFM fans are all you need here too. I usually have one blow into the case over the hard-drives and another blow out of the case by the CPU cooler, but there are other configurations you can use. The key thing here it to pick high-quality quiet fans. I swear by 20CFM Panaflo's. Three of them (2 case fans, 1 CPU fan) will not be audible over even a very quiet PSU. These fans are about $15 CAD, so aren't bank breakers either. You can get fans that move more air, but don't bother unless you find you need that extra airflow. If you do, add more low-CFM fans to work in parallel rather than installing high-CFM fans. Note that Panaflo makes other 80mm fans with more airflow, but they are much louder. Stick with the 20CFM fanss.
Power Supply Units: If you've built the rest of your machine properly, the fans in your PSU will be the *only* thing you normally hear. I consider PSU's to be the one item that is lagging behind the rest out there. You can pay a fortune for a fanless PSU such as those TK Power makes, or you can buy a PSU with too much fan noise. Things are getting better though. Antec's Truepower PSU's are high-quality units that are pretty quiet and are also very affordable. They're lightyears ahead of anything Enermax makes anyways. I'd try one of them out first and see if it's too loud for you before resorting to more extreme measures. After that, you can try opening up the PSU and modding the fans to run on lower voltage or use different fans. If all else fails, you can go fanless, but it will cost you bigtime!
Water-cooling: Since the PSU in a system built under these guidelines is all you'll hear, if you aren't willing to watercool your PSU then there's no point to it at all. Watercooled PSU's have yet to go mainstream, so this is heavy modding territory. I have encountered many watercooling systems where the water-pump alone is noisier than three of my systems. Watercooling isn't where it's at... yet. It may be the future though.
Splinters.
And in the worst possible part of your anatomy too.
When you opt for a quiet night and and rent a movie, are popcorn, chips, or other snacks a part of the video ritual? Does it even matter if you were hungry? When you pick up a Slurpee at the convinience store do you buy the size you feel like consuming or the size that looks like the best deal? "What idiot wouldn't pay 10% more for twice the slurpee!"
A rather large amount of our eating habits are not determined by hunger or fat cravings or anything of the sort. Rather, they're a product of our mental perceptions and habits. We associate certain activities with eating. We force our bodies to eat things they don't really want or need for thousands of little reasons. All it takes to overcome this is a little bit of applied common sense and a rethinking of our priorities.
Hence, some guidelines to follow:
1. Listen to your body. If it's craving a steak, feed it steak. If it isn't hungry, don't eat.
2. When you're deciding what to eat, first ask yourself if you're actually hungry or you're just looking for something to keep your hands busy. Chances are that if you just had a big dinner you don't really need popcorn to go with that after-dinner movie.
3. Your mother taught you not to waste food. First, you probably don't live in Ethiopia. Chances are you will have food tommorow. Second, it's waste whether it gets added to your spare tire or goes in the trash. Sure, a little fat might come in handy if your plane goes down in the Andes, but not to fat bastards like you! The fit people will come out on top when it's Hannibal Lecter time. Next time, don't buy/make/take so much food.
4. When buying food, remember that the true cost of food in our wealthy but relatively inactive society is the calories. Buy the right ammount, not what looks like the best deal.
5. Don't put the chocolate bar on a pedestal behind bowls of fruits and veggies with dip. If you want the F'ing Twix bar, eat the F'ing Twix bar! Don't gnaw your way through 3 pounds of fruit before you finally give in and eat it anyways. Fruit is healthier, but it has calories too.
6. Watermelon is gooooood.
7. If you go to a retaurant, appetizers are your friend. When you become "full" is more a product of when you start eating rather than how much you eat. Eat a roll to start with and you'll probably run out of steam before you finish the Linguini Alfredo uber-platter. If you wait untill the waiter finally brings the main course out you'll be hungry enough to wolf it down before the interogastrone has a chance to hit you. (and regret it later)
8. Eat slow, or if you're a military man home at Mother's for thanksgiving, take one plate, eat fast, and then take a break before digging in again.
That's all I can think of at the moment in terms of eating habits. Others have covered the excersize aspects fairly well. Ignore people who tell you to watch your fat consumption. It's the calories that matter. Fat does have twice the calories as the same mass of carbohydrates, but that's about it. Skim Milk has more fat than Cola, but guess which one has more calories?
If your goal is not to maintain your current weight, but to actually lose weight, remember that our bodies adapt to our caloric intake and activity levels. If you suddenly start eating nothing but veggie platters and running marathons you will lose weight, but your body is going to get a *lot* more efficient. If you stop running and start eating corndogs and hoagies again your body will pack on the pounds like crazy. Short-term diets, temporary exercize regimins and special Jenny Craig food are all futile. Permanent lifestyle choices are the only way to take weight off.
P.S. Beware of diet plans, especially the successful ones like Jenny Craig. I'd be curious to know just how much of their buisness comes from repeat customers...
My sister and her husband bought an absolutely horrendous piece of crap Packard Bell several years ago. It came with one of these lovely discs that wipe your HD and restor it to a "factory state". (Windows, with a sheitload of annoying, not to mention buggy, PackardBell spam and adware)
At some point the computer finally gave up and collapsed under the weight of all the spamware it had been subjected to. They gave me a call and asked me to come over and take a look at it. I told them I'd pop over later on in the evening. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law decided he'd try to fix it before I got there... with Packard Bell's image disc. Financial records, their digital cam photo collection, my sisters grades (she's a teacher), and a thousand other useful things... Gone. Toast. Whoops! I took a red magic marker (the kind teachers seem to have oodles of) and labelled the offending disc "EVIL!". That was about all I could do.
I'm sure my sister and her husband are not the only tech-unsavvy people who have fallen victim to these image discs of EVIL, and they've never even heard of Linux! These discs have been around for quite some time and I'm sure any manufacturer that uses them gets plenty of tech-support calls as a result. The only reason to use these discs seems to be that they let manufacturers include all sorts of annoying and useless software with their name on it. Frankly, it's a stupid practice and it hurts more than just Linux users.
Interestingly enough, the per capita number of guns in Canada is a mere fraction of that in the U.S.. Coincidentally, so are violent crimes and home firearms accidents. Heck, even our military is pretty touchy feely. Half the time we're not sure whether to call it an army or a "peace-keeping force"! The world knows we're F'ing peaceniks, but our biggest fear is the nuclear fallout we're going to get when some pissed off terrorists finally nuke our Southern neighbors.
There is a fine line between a fun hobby and weapons research. The weapon described in the above article is powerful enough to cause severe injury or even kill a target, is silent, and is small enough to be concealed. It's a gun, not a toy. Construction parts and ammunition for these guns are not currently controlled, unlike conventional firearms ammunition. It is quite likely a round fired from one of these guns cannot be matched to the gun that fired it, as with conventional firearms. To sum up, what we have here is a recipe for a gun that can be made from readily available parts and may also not leave incriminating evidence on every round fired. Ammunition for these suckers could be as simple as some batteries and ball bearings. Sounds like a tailor made gang weapon to me.
Is this man's website then, evil? I'd say it isn't. He's an innocent. He has no idea what people will do with his small evolutionary contribution to gauss gun technology. In this sense he's a lot like Pandora. However, the box was probably already open. There are probably several other similar and perhaps even more advanced designs out there anyways, some possibly on the net.
What is important is that theis site's readers realize that designs as refined as this one are not fun projects. They're dangerous weapons. If you build one, make sure you have adequate firearms safety training and follow the proper safety precautions when storing it. Sooner or later somebody's kid is going to shoot themselves with one of these. Don't let it be yours.
"Or they were poking around bored."
That's exactly the sort of "abuse" that a honeytoken in a hospital database is supposed to alert you to. Patient data is confidential and employees should not be looking at a patient record unless they have a reason to. Being bored doesn't cut it, and the employees *know* it. It's like bored police officers breaking out the impounded cocaine for a party with the hookers in holding.
Heck, now I have to wonder if the police intentionally impound guns and drugs associated with fictitious crimes... A bottle of gin and doobie could be a honeytoken? Who'da thunk it!?
It was interesting to see this paper devote so much effort to the completely useless metric of MFLOPS/MHz. This measurement has absolutely nothing to do with performance, but rather, with the approach taken by the chip manufacturer. You can do more in one clock cycle, as AMD historitcally has done, or less, but optimize for faster clock speeds, as Intel has in recent flavors of the Pentium.
One might be tempted to design a chip that does more in one cycle and then clock it as fast as a chip that does less in one cycle. Unfortunately, while reality is a little more complex than this, the basic reason is that the more a chip does per cycle, the more heat it generates per cycle. If you try to squeeze too many cycles through it in a second it will fry.
So showing that the G5 has better performance per clock cycles is no more useful than showing that an AMD chip has better performance per clock cycle than an Intel chip. All that matters is how much performance you can get from a chip before it cannot be clocked any faster without requiring unreasonable cooling methods.
All this paper shows is that, while the G5 is designed to do more in a clock cycle than a P4 is, the chip tested is ultimately not any faster than the P4 they benchmarked it against. It remains to be seen how the G5 will do at higher clock speeds. With this in mind, it would be *far* more useful to see heat dissipation stats on the G5 since that might give us some idea how close to it's design limits. If it is cranking out high-end P4 performance and running cool *then* I will be impressed.