Posted on by lhl

I put in a rewrite rule to block outside referers in my junk folder. It wasn’t so much the bandwidth that was the problem (it was minimal anyway), but it struck me as sort of obnoxious for people to be linking to that stuff willy nilly.

Posted on by lhl

AMD launched the Opteron today. I found Ace’s Hardware’s review (stupendous server performance coverage) and AMDZone’s review (regular workstation numbers) the most informative.

Based on the Ace’s reviews, it looks like the Opteron blows away the competition on Linux. Check out the MySQL performance on that sucker.

FiringSquad also has a great interview with Tim Sweeney on the impact of 64-bits on gaming:

In Unreal Tournament 2003, we built 2000-polygon meshes, texture map them, and use them in-game with diffuse lighting. That was a simple process, which didn’t require any memory beyond that taken up by the mesh and texture maps.

In our next-generation technology, we are building 2,000,000-polygon meshes, and running them through a preprocessing program that analyzes the geometry and self-shadowing potential of the mesh based on thousands of incident lighting direction using per-pixel floating point math, and compresses all of this data down to texture maps, bump maps, and 16-component spherical harmonic maps at as high a resolution as possible.

This process uses many gigabytes of memory, and implementing it on 32-bit CPU’s places a lot of constraints on the size of meshes we can preprocess and the resolution of maps we can generate. With onerous programmer gymnastics, this kind of algorithm could be made disk-based or Address Windowing Extensions aware, but these approaches require an order of magnitude more development effort, and aren’t practical given the frequency with which we change and improve our algorithms.

Posted on by lhl

The True Cost of Hegemony: Huge Debt

Foreign investors now have claims on the United States amounting to about $8 trillion of its financial assets. That’s the result of the ever-larger American balance-of-payments deficits — totaling nearly $3 trillion — since 1982. Last year, the balance-of-payments deficit, the gap between the amount of money that flows into the country and the amount that flows out, was about 5 percent of gross national product. This year it may be larger still.

An interesting article that raises some questions. Niall Ferguson, the author also raises the spector of the rising Euro (Krugman disagrees). See also: concerns about fiat systems, national debt

Via Ming, who’s been covering all sorts of relatedness lately.

Posted on by lhl

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, by Eddan Katz is great. [CC Public Domain]

Reproduced in its entirety:

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.

You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.

You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,

Or hold your Kazaa download queues,

Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV

Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.

Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya

Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by

Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney

Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,

Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on

The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base

And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee

Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart.

Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.

Revolution will not get rid of spam.

Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not

An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and

Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,

Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for

That refurbished iPod 20-gig.

MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida

Or fact-check the Drudge Report.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing

Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.

There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman

Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo

As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs

That he has been saving

For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire

Will no longer be so damned relevant, and

People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with

Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information

Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the

World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no final pictures from inside the

World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,

Linux-booting white hat hacktivists

And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or

Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,

Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after

Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.

You will not have to worry about a

Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a

Worm in your recycling bin.

Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.

Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.

Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,

Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;

Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.