[Quote:]

The lax dress code of the open-source community is one of the reasons behind the software’s slow uptake in commercial environments, says former Massachusetts Chief Information Officer Peter Quinn.

Quinn, who played a key role in the Bay State government’s decision to mandate the use of OpenDocument-based products, said appearance matters when trying to convince decision makers of the merits of open-source software.

He pointed to the “sandal and ponytail set” as detracting from the business-ready appearance of open-source technology and blamed developers for sluggish adoption of Linux among businesses and governments.

Based on that idea we should probably switch to a revealing bra and skimpy dress. After all, Britney Spears seems to be moving quite a lot of product…

If you read the documentation on the Sun website, you’ll notice that the “medium” configuration I’m currently testing has “8 cores”, which, if you remember my previous post on the T2000, you migh interpret as being capable of doing 8 different things at the same time. In the startup messages I’ve posted, you could see it presents itself to the operating system as 32 CPU’s, which you might interpret as being capable of doing 32 different things at the same time.

So which is it? 8? 32?

With these new ways of doing processing and having multiple CPU’s in the same chip, sharing some resources, it isn’t as black and white as it used to be back when each CPU in a computer was a seperate chip. So, let’s see if we can find out what the “real” number is.

Maarten asked me why I didn’t do a parallel build of some software, and that’s exactly what I used to see if I could find an answer. PHP is a Open Source computer language. This weblog uses it to generate the web page you’re reading. Compiling that software takes 3 minutes 5 seconds on my 3.2 GHZ Pentium 4. If use exactly the same build method on the T2000, it takes about 27 and a half minute. Sounds awful, but remember that this method would use only about 1/32 of the capacity of the Sun. Maarten’s question was why I wasn’t using the tools that would split the job in a lot of small things that could be done in parallel.

Part of the job can be done in parallel – PHP is a large collection of small source files written in de C language, and compiling each of those files can be done independently from all the others. The results must be combined into a few libraries and applications, and those steps cannot be done in parallel. A rough guess is that about half the work of building PHP cannot be done in parallel, and must therefore be done the “slow” way. This shows that building software is not the best thing to buy a T2000 for, but it allows me to test the machine in one way: how many things can be done in parallel? 8? 32? A number in between?

The GNU version of Make has a parameter that tells it how many jobs it attempts to do in parallel. As this Sun article says:

Your results will vary based on the particular compiler, options, and language being compiled, as well as whether the sources are local or remote. A common rule-of-thumb is to request the number of parallel jobs to be approximately 1.5 times the number of available CPUs on the machine.

I decided to do the reverse: build PHP repeatedly, with a different number of parallel jobs. Afterwards, look at what level the build was at best speed, and then divide by 1.5, and take that number as “the number of CPU’s” in the classic sense.

Here’s a screenshot of what a parallel build looks like:

As you can see, plenty of “cc1″ processes doing work, and a respectable load average. This screenshot was made when using 40 jobs, and there were quite a number of processes in “runnable” state according to vmstat – which means there were processes waiting for an available processor, which indicates that the “classic” number of CPU’s is somewhat less than 40 / 1.5.

So here’s the actual graph:

On the horizontal axis you’ll find the “-j” parameter I gave to make, the number of parallel jobs to use. The vertical axis is the number of seconds the build took. As you can see, with 1 job, or the non-parallel way to build, it took over 1600 seconds. The machine was mostly idle during this time. Increase the number of parallel things the machine is allowed to do, and performance increases rapidly. Optimal build times appear at around 24 jobs, things don’t get much faster by allocating more jobs, so the machine is pretty much using all available resources at that point.

Divide that by 1.5, and you get 16 CPU’s.

So here’s the dilemma Sun must have faced: if they’d told the operating system that this hardware had 8 CPU’s available, the operating system would have scheduled no more than 8 threads executing at the same time, and capacity would have been wasted. But how high should they go? It all depends on the workset that needs to be done, the kind of application that runs – and since not every application needs “just” CPU, but disk- and network access as well, it’s difficult to get the number exactly right for all tasks at hand. So they probably did tests similar to this simple one I did, and concluded that the safe number was to tell the operating system that 32 CPU’s are available. If the operating system actually has 32 threads that need work at the same time, some of them will be slown down a bit, but no capacity would have been wasted. It’s better to overstate the available capacity a bit and work up a run queue than lose capacity because the operating system thinks it hasn’t as many CPU’s available.

But don’t use the above timing numbers to compare it to the 3 minutes my Pentium 4 took – a large part of the build process cannot be done in parallel, and more realistic “benchmarks” will be done later… and you’ll probably find all kind of benchmarks on the web anyway – I wanted to take a slightly different look at what drives the performance of this fairly unique machine…

[Quote:]

Sometimes brotherhood means much more than sharing parents. Sometimes it means sharing hands.

When a young Fort Lewis soldier returned from Iraq paralyzed from the upper chest down, it was his teenage brother who assumed the role of roommate and primary caretaker.

They’ve learned what it means to feel completely dependent and what it means to feel completely responsible.

[Quote:]

Dell is refusing to give a refund to a customer who believes she was wrongly sold a server.

Kate was asked by her boss to contact Dell to buy two new desktop computers and “something to link them”. Dell sold her two PCs and a PowerEdge server, ironically with only one network card.

Kate realised her mistake because she spoke to a more technically-literate friend who told her she needed a cable to link two computers, not a server. Chris asked Dell to refund Kate because the server was effectively mis-sold. Her company has only two employees.

But Dell refused to give her a refund because the order was made through its business channel.

Dell is also one of the very few companies who insist on sending me weekly leaflets with advertising. They’re totally incapable of understanding the word “no”. Any sane company appreciates that you tell them you’ll never buy from them anyway and stop sending crap. Dell is not a sane company.

[Quote:]

It didn’t take long before the wheels started coming off Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland’s campaign to unseat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Things got off to a promising start in early March, with favorable publicity and several national TV interviews for the wealthy, 54-year-old McFarland, a Reagan-era Pentagon official who spent the last 20 years raising a family and has never held elective office.

But then McFarland was hit with embarrassing disclosures about her voting history, including her registering in two places and missing several elections. Records suggest she did not even vote in 1984, when Reagan, her boss and political hero, was seeking re-election, though she believes she didn’t miss that one.

[..]

“Build up, tear down. Build up, tear down. There’s no one who can survive this political process intact,” McFarland said during an interview in her Park Avenue apartment.

“What it means is that real people don’t run for public office anymore,” she added. “Manufactured people run for public office.”

She’s right, of course. And all others will be swift-boated.

[Quote:]

New research suggests German and Dutch people have more in common than cold weather and a Germanic language – the northern neighbours are also the most intelligent people in Europe.

Both countries score 107 in the league table of European IQs drawn up by Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, the Times reported on Monday.

The ‘British Isles’, in contrast, comes 8th in the ranking, with a score 100. The British newspaper takes some comfort from the fact France, its traditional rival, is in 19th place on 94.

42

The Riemann zeta-function ζ(s) is defined for any complex number s with real part > 1 by the Dirichlet series:

(Source)

[Quote:]

We’re left with this nagging feeling, however, that the overwhelming reason why we see so much “bad news” coming out of Iraq is that, in spite of a halting start-and-stop sort of progress toward democratic institutions, things are not going well on the ground. (As the New York Times noted last week, both the number of insurgents, the number of foreign terrorists and the daily number of attacks by those groups more than tripled from February, 2004 to February of this year. And during that period, both oil and electricity production in Iraq have dwindled, as has household fuel availability. Which is why Bagdhad is darker than it was two years ago.)

We’ll leave you with an example of the kind of story Massing longs for, but be warned: It isn’t encouraging. It comes from ABC News and it goes like this: The other day: in search of a “good story,” Jake Tapper visited the set of a popular sitcom, “Me and Layla” filming in the streets of Baghdad and starring the “Iraqi Danny Devito.” Tapper was going to focus on the head of the entertainment company producing the show, a man named Hamid, in an attempt to highlight those “who are trying to make the Iraqi people laugh.” Just as the ABC crew was taping a segment showing the sitcom being filmed, Tapper captured the director running to take an urgent phone call. Hamid, the man who had greenlighted “Me and Layla” and arranged for ABC to do the story, had just been assassinated.

[Quote:]

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn’t hack Tuttle’s web site at all. The city’s hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle’s city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city’s web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town’s IT infrastructure.

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???,” Taylor wrote to CentOS. “Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”

[..]

To see the full transcript of the web server war, travel over here. It’s classic reading.

[Quote:]

The steady banter is punctured only by the occasional grunts and yelps of pain from behind the curtains along the right wall, where physical therapists — physical terrorists, the soldiers call them — push patients to the breaking point, stretching muscles that haven’t moved in months, manipulating limbs still gouged and raw. But soldiers who end up here consider themselves the lucky ones. Others are still in comas or so severely brain damaged they will never recognize their own children. Plenty never made it home at all. If you were missing a leg, there was someone nearby missing both. If you were missing two legs, there was someone missing an arm, too. The injuries at Walter Reed were so profound that a single amputation below the knee was often dismissed as an inconvenience.

“There’s always someone worse,” the soldiers say.

For Michael, on this day, that someone was the sickly new guy. As he leaned on his two canes, standing next to Carrie, Michael noticed the ends of the young man’s mangled stumps. They were misshapen and lumpy, like heads of cauliflower. Michael recognized the rogue bone growth — HO, they called it, for heterotopic ossification. Michael had it on his stumps, too. Almost every amputee did. But this guy’s HO was like nothing Michael had seen. It seemed to be pushing up through his skin grafts.

Michael looked again at the young man’s face. Suddenly, his stomach dropped. The frail, battered soldier was from his own unit in Iraq.

on a side note, the photographer is a Pulitzer price winner

[Quote:]

Hong Kong is number one on my list for many reasons: Hong Kong has a whopping 43 buildings over 200 metres tall, 30 of which were built in the year 2000 or later!!! It also boasts four of the 15 tallest buildings in the world… that’s all in one city! Hong Kong’s skyline shows a large selection of distinct sky-reaching towers, with beautiful night lighting and reflection. This city exemplifies the post-modern skyscraper and skyline. Finally, the mountain backdrop makes this skyline (as you can clearly see) the greatest on the planet!

[Quote:]

A confidential memo of a two-hour meeting between President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Jan. 31, 2003, makes clear that the White House was bent on attacking Iraq two months later no matter what, according to The New York Times on Monday based on its review of the document.

Bush made clear to Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second United Nation resolution, “or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons,�? writes Don Van Natta, Jr., after examining the memo written about the meeting written by Blair’s top foreign policy adviser David Manning.

[..]

“The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq,�? The Times relates. “Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.�?

[President Gerald R. Ford's Executive Order 11905:]

(g) Prohibition of Assassination. No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Surely that’s ground for impeachment?

[Quote:]

The career of Russian President Vladimir Putin was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers.
A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

Mr Putin was labelled a plagiarist at the weekend after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the President’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Mr Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

—George W. Bush, after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, June 16, 2001:

[Quote:]

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy….I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

[Quote:]

Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, “You want us to blow your brains out, too?”

Mr. Azawi’s body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city’s homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.

[..]

What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.

[Quote:]

When Congress established Medicare Part D, the new prescription drug benefit, in 2002, it promised American seniors and American taxpayers that it would lower drug costs.

Then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said that private insurance company drugs plans “are going to be able to purchase in bulk with the pharmaceutical companies and hold down prices.�?

I and others in Congress argued that the federal government would save seniors and taxpayers much more if Medicare could negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told us that “competition through the private sector is a more effective means to hold down prices.�?

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mark McClellan continues to argue that “the drug plans are negotiating aggressive discounts that are being passed along to beneficiaries and taxpayers.�?

I decided to find out whether or not these claims are true.

I asked the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.

As I suspected, the facts don’t agree with the Administration’s rosy statements.

Here’s what we found.

The drug prices offered here in Southern Maine by the ten leading private insurance plans for the ten prescription drugs with the highest sales are, on average:

• Almost 80 percent higher than the prices the federal government negotiates for the Veterans Administration;

• More than 60 percent higher than what consumers pay in Canadian pharmacies; and

• More than 5 percent higher than what they cost when purchased from a reliable Internet dealer.

Why is this bad for Maine seniors who now receive the Medicare Part D benefit?

Because their out-of-pocket costs are higher and the purchasing power of the benefit is lower than they should be.

Because they will reach the so-called “donut hole�? sooner.

That’s the gap, between $2,250 and $5,100 in drug expenditures, where seniors are responsible for 100 percent of the cost of their prescription drugs.

So, what’s the government doing about this problem?

[Quote:]

Citing increased concerns about the quality of drugs entering the United States from Canada, federal authorities have stepped up seizures of the prescriptions and sent strongly worded legal warnings to consumers, including some in Massachusetts, who have ordered the discounted drugs.

“What we’re trying to do is protect the public from unsafe medications,” said Lynn Hollinger, spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “It was a growing problem we felt was of concern to the American public.”

The government crackdown marks a shift in policy for the Bush administration, which has rarely acted against individuals who buy drugs from Canada, reports The Boston Sunday Globe.

The stricter enforcement policy began Nov. 17, and applies only to mail-order shipments, not to U.S. citizens who cross into Canada to pick up their drugs, Hollinger said.

If you really believe Canadian medicine is somehow of a lower quality, I’ve got some prime real estate in Florida for sale for you.

(via)

[Quote:]

A typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food.

[Quote:]

Microsoft employees writing to an anonymous blog are calling for the heads of high-level company executives — including Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin — after the double delay debacle this week when the Redmond, Wash. developer shoved its two most profitable products into 2007.

On the Mini-Microsoft blog, which is maintained by someone who identifies himself as a Microsoft employee and goes by the nickname “Who da’Punk,” an entry tagged “Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!” has accumulated over 325 comments from in- and outsiders.

One of those comments attracted my attention:

Talk around the vending machines in legal is that the delay has nothing to do with coding, slipped schedules or anything else. That’s why very few heads will actually roll and most will simply shuffle positions. Actual reasons have to do with no product, NONE, shipping until after the mess with the EU is cleaned up.

[..]

At 25-40% annual compounded growth rates for Linux servers, the last thing that’s going to happen is for the EU to be able to do what US-Justice failed to do, which is force disclosure of MS server protocols so competitors can copy MS’s IP and gain market share in the market segment on MS’s dime. Samba has never been 100% compatible and that’s the way its going to stay, come hell or high water. Regardless of how much time/delay it takes, Samba and Vista will never be as interoperable as Samba is with PDC, AD, AS currently.

[..]

And remember, any large migrations you get a whiff of, you know where to report them, get details and do it. A single 6 digit desktop migration has repercussions far and wide on many other customers and partners (and media), and we are staring at over a dozen of them and have been unsuccessful in turning any of them around so far.

Over a dozen companies with more than 100,000 desktops migrating away from windows?

*blink*

Woa.

[Quote:]

Microsoft’s public face of security is offering Apple some friendly advice: be more like Microsoft.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

<breathes in>

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Seriously, the only critisism he really makes is about how Apple communicates about security, and even in that area, I think Microsoft shouldn’t try to lecture anybody.

Most of the reviews I’ve found on the net for this machine are pretty technical in nature. Let’s see if I can write something you can use to convince your non-technical manager that this computer is interesting. Again, feel free to ask for clarification on any point..

Most people are only familiar with the computer that sits on their desk and is used to browse the Internet. It has one important chip in it, usually the one that gets them an “Intel Inside” sticker on the box, and the salesman has told the buyer that this “CPU” is a “3 GHz pentium”, and it is very fast. And, indeed, it is. This T2000 computer from Sun also has one important chip in it, the CPU, and it’s “only” 1 GHz. So if you didn’t know any better, you’d think this machine would be a third of the speed of the machine you’re browsing on, right? Well, no. Not at all.

That Intel chip generally has one “core” on it – you could compare it with an office where one person was working very fast. The Sun Coolthreads chip has more than one core on it – compare it with an office that has 32 people working in it. Although each of those 32 people is working slower, together they can perform massively more work than the office with one person in it.

This kind of multiple-core technology will reach the desktop soon enough – Apple already has a laptop available with a new Intel chip, the “Core Duo”, and if you guessed from its name that you could compare this with an office with 2 people working in it, you’d be right.

This trend to change chips from “one core” to “more cores” has been going on for a while now. Why did that happen, exactly?

Apologies to Intel, but I’m going to use them to illustrate some points, but the things I say are more or less true for the entire industry. Intel just happened to be the most visible example of all this. A few years ago, there was a “MHz war” going on. Intel and their competitors (both AMD and the Power consortium) were both marketing to their customers with “we are faster because our chip runs on a higher rate”. Although this used to be true, it also forced the engineers at those companies to look at just one thing for the next version of their chip: higher frequencies. One of the things the engineers realized is that if you chop your work into smaller pieces, you can get through more pieces per second, and thus get a higher rate. How does that work for a computer? Let’s say we have a program in memory that says “add one to whatever number is in that piece of memory”. Sounds like a simple thing, right? But you can split it into a lot of small steps: fetch the program instruction from memory to the chip, decode it to see what it wants to do (“add 1″), fetch the number that is currently in memory, add one to it, store it back into memory. The trick Intel and others invented was to have different parts of their chip do the different steps. In older chips, after the “fetch the program instruction from memory” bit was done, no new “program instructions” were fetched until the entire “add 1″ operation was completed. These days, that’s no longer true. The part of the chip that gets instructions on what to do from memory will go on and fetch the next part from memory while the rest of the chip is still busy adding one to a number. Clearly this can be faster than waiting, however, suppose the next instruction after “add 1″ is “if the result is 100, do this otherwise do that. Which flow of instructions are going to be fetched next? Modern chips have logic for that, called “branch prediction”, and the chip will take a guess. Sometimes this guess is wrong, of course, and then the chip has to back up and redo a small bit of work. The overall speed gain from “guessing” is worth the occasional miss.

This idea is called “pipelining” and it was so perfected in the Pentium 4 that the chip is known to have a “long pipeline”. That means that the entire process of doing work on the chip was chopped into so many pieces it has to go through a fairly large number of stages to get done. The advantage is high clock rates and thus good marketing material, but a fairly large “cost” in speed if somewhere in the pipeline it is discovered the wrong “guess” was made. Every time that happens a large part of the pipeline is cleared and must be refilled, and that costs you speed and processing power.

The Pentium 4 competitors used different methods to get speed from their processor, and although they’ll claim a lower frequency (AMD is typically at 2 or 2.2 GHz) they’ll give you the same amount of actual work as a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz.

A while ago Intel engineers found themselves running into a few technical problems getting the clock rate any higher, and since then it has become clear that to get the speeds up again, something else had to be done. The new Intel “Core Duo” is the first big result. Intel went more or less back to the Pentium 3 chips, and evolved from there, in a different direction. Instead of makeing a longer pipeline, they doubled the chip. Instead of one program doing “add 1 to a number” the chip can have two programs both doing “add 1 to a number” at the same time. This isn’t really a new idea, it had been done before – either by actually sticking to processors in the same computer, or by dividing up work in the chip itself. For example, doing a calculation with two “floating point” numbers (such as 3.14159 times 2.718) would be done in a different part of the chip from doing calculations with “integer” numbers (such as 2 times 3), and those two parts could work on a different calculation at the same time. This multiple-core thing is more or less the same, except now just about all the functionality of the chip is duplicated. There’s a whole bunch of extremely technical stuff I’m glossing over right now, such as sharing the memory that is on the chip (level 1 and level 2 cache) but if you want to read about that, there’s other places on the Internet than this post.

So, back to the T2000 and the CoolThreads chip. The Intel Core Duo presentes itself als two processors to the operating system. The CoolThreads chip in the T2000 I’m evaluating presents itself not as one, not as two, but as 32 processors. Not blazingly fast processors, each presents itself as a 1 GHz chip, but it sure makes that up in quantity.

It also means there are a lot of things this chip is not good at. You probably would not want one to run Word or Excel on it. In that case, you’d be doing one thing only, and you would get one of those 32 parts working for you while the other 31 would sit by idle.

Sun also clearly states on their web site that this chip is not good at doing floating point calculations. So, if you need a machine that is good with floating point and has multiple processors, you’re probably still going to end up with a Enterprise 6900, which has 24 seperate UltraSparc IV chips, each at 1.5 GHz. But that machine costs a cool million dollars, and my T2000 is listed for just a little bit more than 12,000 dollars. Clearly the T2000 is limited compared to the E6900, but there’s a few things the T2000 excels at (and might even give the E6900 a run for its money – I’d love to test drive one of those for 60 days and find out).

The Sun web site calls it “the fastest web server”, and not without reason. Let’s look at what a busy webserver does: serving lots and lots of people web pages. Some of those pages will need to be generated on the fly (for example because they contain personalized information). Lots and lots of websites these days do it on a server with a Pentium 4 in it. The server hosting this weblog, for example, is a computer with 1 chip in it, a Pentium 4. That may change in the coming week or so, as the software I’m installing on the T2000 should be able to handle my weblog nicely, and that’s a great thing to try. I get between 3000 and 4000 visitors on my weblog per day, spread out over the day. That’s not much, but imagine the other website I’m working on, where those same 3,000 to 4,000 visitors browsing the site at the same time would be considered a quiet moment. Now mind you, when I say “at the same time” I mean they’re browsing at the same time, and requesting something like ten to fifteen webpages during the ten minutes that their visit lasts.

Back to that same image of the office with one worker in it – if that one worker had to serve webpages to those 4,000 people, that one worker would have to switch jobs a lot – so often, actually, that the overhead of switching would hurt performance. That same office with 32 slower workers however, would serve those 4,000 people a lot better. The kind of work (compositing web pages and handing them out through the net) and the nature of the work (lots, lots and lots of jobs that have no dependency on each other – each visitor gets their own web pages and they have no relationship to the other 4,000 pages generated at the same time) makes the T2000 a perfect match.

Now, since most of my work involves getting webservers to handle lots and lots of visitors, you realize why I’m testdriving it.

Whilst installing software I’ve already seen the first effects of the way this machine works. Building software is sequential work – the compiler will generally only do one thing at a time. And the machine does not “feel” fast when I’m doing that. But for some software I can install two parts at the same time – so I open a second window, and start a second build in that window. That’s not the way I’m used to doing things, since when you do that on a machine with a Pentium in it, you’ll notice both builds will indeed go slower. The total amount of time it takes to build both pieces of software remains the same (or sometimes goes up since you add work-switching overhead). With this T2000, that is very clearly not the case. Build three or four pieces of software at the same, and you won’t notice any slowdown in any build. It helps that the machine has nice little fast disks, of course, since the build results need to be stored on disk, but it’s a nice indicator of things to come.

[Quote:]

Germans risk two years in prison if they illegally download films and music for private use under a new law agreed yesterday. Anybody who downloads films for commercial use could be jailed for up to five years.

The measures, some of the toughest in Europe, were announced after an aggressive campaign by the film industry in Germany, the largest market in the EU and one of the most computer-literate populations.

[..]

Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, said: There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.

I didn’t know kids were getting jailed for two years when they steal a pack of gum…

This law is insane – if “downloading copyright material” is enough to get you in jail, any german clicking this link is now eligible for a bunk in a prison.

Germany’s is the first government that has officially conceded to all lobbyism efforts on behalf of the industry and adopted a policy that supports the industry’s demands fully while completely disregarding the rights and needs of its citizens.

This can no longer be attributed to “goodwill” towards the industry and stupidity alone, corruption is the word you’re looking for.

(but to end on a funny note, can we now rewrite this arcicle and measure the new speed in “years of jailtime per second”?)

[Quote:]

A new advisory committee in the Homeland Security Department is free to disregard a law designed to keep meetings open and proceedings public, according to a departmental notice.

The newly created Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council is charged with sharing information aimed at protecting the nation’s infrastructure, cybercomponents included. Michael Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, cited security reasons when he signed off on exempting the council from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA.

The decision, which many private-sector players had strongly recommended, was released in a departmental notice published Friday.

Please note that ANY meetings under FACA can already be closed, but a 15-day notice must be given of such closure. The end result, since 1972, is still that the meeting is closed.

The issue here is that the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council may decide it needs to have an emergency meeting, AND that it should be closed, but can’t wait 15 days to hold the meeting. The waiting period would seem designed to discourage federal agencies from routinely closing meetings without an announcement period that presumably may allow for recourse, official or otherwise, if such a closure is improper.

The 15 days waiting period may be a pain in the ass, but that’s by design, to prevent the council from closing everything so they won’t be “bothered” by any scrutiny.

(but if the council is right, and if this should indeed all be secret, shouldn’t a predident be able to get a blow-job in private?)

Some person on Slashdot said it like this;

[Quote:]

As I recall, in 1972, we were in the midst of fighting a Cold War that had, as a very real possible consequence, the end of life on Earth as we know it. We were fighting against a highly organized and well-funded enemy that had thousands of spies at all levels of government and industry, sleeper agents ready to be called on when necessary, and military capabilities that made us legitimately doubt whether we would prevail in any conventional armed conflict. An attack from their formidable stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles would give us less than an hour to pray to the God of our choice before the sun vanished and our component molecules were suddenly and violently redistributed into the ash that would, hopefully, someday support life again.

And yet, even with this Sword of Damocles hanging over our very survival, we had the conscience and foresight to realize that while we cannot control the behavior of those who would be our enemies, we can control ourselves, and refuse to sacrifice the ideals we believe more important than life in the vain hopes that by abdicating oversight of our government we will somehow gain immunity from outside aggressors.

I find it the greatest irony of all that those in power right now, who present themselves so vaingloriously, act with such great cowardice. Their willingness to preemptively sacrifice the ideals we hold dear is an insult to the oaths they took, and the people who trust them with their lives.

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It turns out that Barbara Bush’s donation to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund is going straight to Ignite!, an educational software company owned by Neil Bush, the current administration’s very own “Billy Carter/Roger Clinton” type character. (You may remember Neil as the fellow who headed Silverado Savings & Loan in the 80s. When the bank failed under his watch, he walked away with a mere sanction while taxpayers were forced to clean up his mess by forking over a $1 billion bailout.)

In his Talking Points Memo, Joshua Micah Marshall says Ignite! makes its money by jetting Neil to exotic locales, where he visits “international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to ‘invest’ in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with the brother in the White House.”

(Bush’s international influence-peddling jaunts have also proven to be a great way for him to get laid, according to CNN:

[Bush] admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.

The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.

“Mr. Bush, you have to admit it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her,” Brown said.

“It was very unusual,” Bush said.)

It turns out that lots of people besides Barbara Bush believe in her energetic young man: the rich kids of China’s rulers, the United Arab Emirates, and Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky (who has been accused of trying to overthrow Putin’s government to help his company) are all eager investors in Ignite!. Now, who’s to say that the individuals in this rogues’ gallery are only interested in getting the president to think kindly of them? Perhaps they truly want to help children learn.

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Brazilian mega-star Marisa Monte’s new CDs from EMI (“Infinito Particular” and “Universo ao Meu Redor”) come with DRM that can’t be uninstalled, and requires you to “agree” to a contract that isn’t published in Portuguese. Even if you disagree, the malware is installed.

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Twenty days ago I received a cease and desist letter from Liberty Counsel, a law firm representing Exodus International, a group that claims to offer gay people “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.�? They demanded that I take down a parody image I’d created (seen above) of an offensive, anti-gay billboard which they’d put up around the country, on the grounds that it infringed upon their intellectual property rights.

I immediately contacted the ACLU, EFF, and anyone else that I thought might be interested or would be able to lend a hand. The ACLU looked into the facts of the case and very generously offered to represent me in partnership with the law firm of Fenwick & West. Free of charge. And I don’t mean a single lawyer, I mean a team of four experts in Intellectual Property, Free Speech, Copyright, and GLBT Rights.

the article quotes the entire ACLU letter defending the parody. Well worth a read.

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It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world’s most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration’s penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.

[..]

The administration is now divided between those who understand this complexity and those who do not. On one side, there are ideologues, such as the vice president, who apparently see Iraq as a useful precedent for Iran. Meanwhile, officials on the front lines in Iraq know they cannot succeed in assembling a workable government in that country without the tacit blessing of Iran; hence, last week’s long-overdue announcement of plans for a U.S.-Iranian dialogue on Iraq — a dialogue that if properly executed might also lead to progress on other issues.

Madeleine Albright — secretary of State from 1997 to 2001

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De marine heeft afgelopen zomer vier matrozen van boord van het marineschip Hr.Ms. Amsterdam gehaald, omdat zij bij wijze van grap martelingen in de beruchte Iraakse gevangenis Abu Ghraib hadden nagespeeld. Deze matrozen hadden zichzelf vrijwillig naakt op elkaar gestapeld, liet een woordvoerder van de Vakbond voor Defensiepersoneel VBM NOV vrijdag weten.

Ook verwijt de marine een vrouwelijke matroos dat zij in haar taak als ‘klassenoudste’ niet heeft ingegrepen. Een woordvoerder van de marine zegt niet specifiek op de gebeurtenissen te kunnen ingaan, maar erkent wel dat er destijds een ernstig incident is geweest, waarbij de betrokken marinemensen “het vertrouwen in de organisatie hebben geschaad”.