Stephenson <=> Protagonist

So I installed the Six Degrees Facebook app, and while browsing famous and/or interesting people I found that Neal Stephenson is friends with... Hiro Protagonist.

<=>


Talk about life imitating art. Or is that life intimating art?

Sun's not very contrarian thinking

Since Sun seems to be treating the launch of their new T5x20 servers as the second coming (and it is, of Niagara, that is), why haven't they done the logical thing and proposed a Niagara/ClearSpeed combo?

Various reasons indicating such a combination would be in demand include:

1. Power usage
   Since the ClearSpeed boards have approximate power consumption of 25-33 Watts (depending on model), adding two of the PCIe-8x boards to a a T5220 would only increase power usage by 66W with an aggregate 133 GFLOPS increase in computing power. Sun obviously believes stuffing ClearSpeed boards into their servers are a valid play: TIT's Tokyo Tech's TSUBAME cluster achieved a 24% speedup for a 1% increase in power usage.


2. Floating Point performance
   Real World Tech's excellent article posits that the floating-point ratio in the instruction mix on the first Niagara iteration could exceed no more than 1%-3%. Clearly, the demand for floating point was sufficient to increase the resources dedicated to it from 1 FP unit per chip, up to 1 FP unit per core. Presumably further FP acceleration would be even more beneficial.

Of course, Sun might have more than a little trouble with the integration. Perhaps they might have more luck hooking up some ClearSpeed X620s into a Thumper...

In accordance with prophecy

And lo, it has come to pass that Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is finally being implemented. This has been much lamented for many years since it was tabled.
Amusingly, the heretics at Ars Technica point out:

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an "out," in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he's been up to.

Seems like it's time to bring back / bring forth SFS (née VS3FS) [Citeseer]. Carl and/or Paul and/or Peter: where are you? *
With SFS you can at least claim:

1. not to have incriminating data on your disk at all and, if that fails


2. to have only mildly bad data on your disk - maybe a pirated eBook

It's easier than claiming you "forgot" your keys...

*(presumably Paul is still on the road from Damascus - no online presence detected...) (also note the biblical naming: Peter & Paul!?)

A companion blog

Dear faithful reader[s],

The Daily Fail, a new companion blog, has been started in order to keep up with the huge amount of stupidity out there in the dangerous world.

Please be careful. Regular reading of The Daily Fail will help you avoid becoming a statistic. Except that you'll be statistically more likely to read The Daily Fail:

Bolt-on PC

via [excuse the pun] Engadget

What's so interesting about the back of that LCD monitor you ask? Well, you're actually looking at the computer. VIA's VESA mounted vm7700 PC in fact, which converts any standard VESA display into a make-shift all-in-one PC. Completely fanless, the PC sports your choice of VIA C7 1GHz or Eden ULV 1.5GHz processors, up to 1GB of memory, optional 802.11b/g WiFi, and choice of standard 2.5-inch SATA disk or DOM (Disk on Module) supporting Linux or WinXP/XPe pre-loads. Hardware-based MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 acceleration turns the device into an instant digital signboard from which to advertise your gothic loathings about modern man.