Month: April 2006

Over a two-year period, Gary McKinnon hacked into Pentagon, NASA and military systems

Interesting Article

I ran across an article which was just too thought-provoking to leave alone:

Is Jesus the next killer app?

For those who don’t want to dive into the whole article, it basically focusses on the exploding market of multimedia and high-tech devices for use in church services.

Now, I’ve been aware of this for a little while. The LDS church recently spent $512 million (IIRC) to build a massive conference center in downtown Salt Lake City replete with state-of-the-art lighting, presentation, and digital recording technology. I’ve heard of other sects spending smaller, but still substantial amounts in order to preserve the attention span of their audiences.

Maybe I’m just a jaded skeptic, but this seems, to me, to be a sign of competition. Churches have noticed their declining numbers (a small percentage of the US self-identified as being non-religious 30 years ago; today, that number is 12-15%), and have to fight to gain the attention of increasingly attention-deficient viewers. Marketing people long ago figured out what attracts and keeps the eyeballs of viewers, and those channels to the primitive parts of our brains are so abused by marketeers that it takes ever more “glam” to keep us glued.

Now we can have presentations webcast, podcasted, burned to DVD and delivered to our doorstep on the weeks we don’t worship. We can ship a sermon around the world, as a friend of mine recently did for me, so that people can sample what worship services are like in our home town before moving or visiting. For around $30,000, the smallest church house can have a multiple-camera rig manned by volunteers which can preserve in order to proselyte.

What does it really buy? It seems as if churches that are jumping on the multimedia bandwagon are growing. Many churches which resist such advances find their congregations in the USA dwindling, or only expanding due to a prodigious birth rate.

Does the price of spreading one’s Good News require a substantial investment in glitz these days? Do you think it’s a case of “adjust or die”? Could it just be a case of “keeping up with the Joneses”? Or could it be that the price of technology has finally dropped to a point where it’s affordable, on a small parish budget, to drop a few bucks to improve the quality of the sermons and music?

First there’s the old classic:

“Happy birthday to you, You live in a zoo You look like a monkey And you smell like one too!”

Or the new one I just dreamed up yesterday,

“Happy birthday to me, I am thirty-three Getting fat, slow, and hairy, Happy birthday to me!”

So if you had to sing the most insulting birthday song you could think of, what would it be? Within the usual decency limits of the site 🙂

I know I’m not a usual post started, but I have info that I wanted to share. Most of this is because I just got back from a 9 day trip to Greece with my new fiancée last week. Rather than typing all the proposal details, I’ll steal Justin’s format from earlier this month and share 10 things I learned.

1) Engagement rings need at least 3 days to be sized. (oops) 2) Hiding a ring from your girlfriend is not as easy as you may think. 3) Airport security will let a ring in your jacket pocket go thru the x-ray machines without pulling it out. (whew) 4) It is possible to go thru customs and run across the Frankfurt airport in 15min. (barely) 5) Failure to make complete #4 can result in having to spend 11 hrs waiting for the next flight. (several members of our group) 6) Sidewalks in Greece are NOT level. 7) Tour directors will do anything to avoid Greek hospitals. (even if stitches may be needed) 8) Once you find the “perfect

I have been working on my BS degree in IT for about a year now with another year to go. One of the classes i am taking this quarter is a Hist & Meth. of Science. So far pretty interesting.

This weeks discussion topic is solar power / photovoltaic solutions for alternative home power. I was suprised at how much this option would cost. I think the idea of solar power /(PV) is a great “green

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, somebody decided on a general rule for handling virtual memory in a computer that went something like this:

“Thou shalt have one and a half to two times the amount of swap space on a hard disk as thou hast RAM in thy computer.”

I think it’s time to revisit this rule from On High with an eye towards real-life numbers.

OK, first thing’s first. RAM is the thing which stores temporary data in your computer. When you see the splash screen when Windows is booting up, what it’s doing is loading data from your hard disk drive into the RAM of your computer.

As most people know, the Windows startup can take a long time. Even on modern, uber-fast machines, you are looking at a 15-30 second startup time, minimum, from the moment you see the Windows splash screen. The vast majority of the time, the computer is just waiting for data to load from the hard drive so that it can execute it and continue on its merry way with booting up.

Once that data is loaded, your computer is pretty speedy at handling it. As a matter of fact, one of the most common upgrades on computers is to add more RAM. Simply creating more of this temporary storage space makes an enormous difference in your computer’s performance (to a point), and it’s one of the cheapest upgrades you can perform. So much so that investing in a faster graphics card, faster hard drive, or faster CPU generally takes a back-seat to having more RAM in your machine.

The throughput on modern RAM is pretty amazing, too. Some of the more recent technology is staggering! The memory is running at 400 million cycles per second, and usually follows a “refresh” schedule that’s something like 4-3-3-3 (if we’re conservative). That means that out of every 13 CPU cycles, your computer can read or write data for 9 of them. What’s this mean in real life?

9/13 * 400 million cycles per second * 64 bits simultaneous = something like 2 gigabytes per second.

So a computer’s RAM can read and write somewhere around 2 gigabytes every single second (2 billion bytes).

In contrast, the hard disk of a system can deliver maybe 50 megabytes (50 million bytes) per second, and if you have to write to it? Try more like ten, or maybe fifteen, megabytes per second.

In other words, DOG SLOW.

Now, back in the day, memory was extremely expensive. Per megabyte, hard disk drives were much cheaper. Conventional wisdom was that, if you had 4 megabytes of memory in your machine, you should have about 8 megabytes of “swap space” (pretend memory, really) on your hard disk drive. Keeping in mind that hard disk drives have only been increasing in speed rather linearly, while memory access speeds have increased logarithmically (in an increasing curve), this makes sense. Small amount of memory, pretty small swap space.

Fact was, performance was acceptable.

These days, your average new PC ships with 1GB to 2GB of RAM. Realistically, 512MB is a practical MINIMUM for effective operation, and there’s a substantial speed boost going to 1GB from 512MB. Many workstations are shipping with 4GB, and the only reason we don’t commonly have workstations with a lot more RAM than that is because it’s pretty rare (and expensive) to run a 64-bit version of Windows on a 64-bit workstation. 32-bit machines can’t address more than 4GB of RAM efficiently.

So where I work, and elsewhere, I still see people following the “twice as much swap as memory” rule. This means that I see machines every day with 2GB to as much as 8GB of swap space.

Do the math on that, folks. If you are just trying to READ 4GB of swap, it’s going to take eighty seconds to read it, minimum! Considering that generally the machine is also trying to write to the “virtual memory” on a swap partition or file at the same time as it’s reading, multiply that by at least 2, and more like 3 or 4 if the disk is a standard slow-writing consumer disk.

Basically, if the computer is actually using more than a few hundred megabytes of swap space, it has slowed to a crawl, and will be almost completely unusable.

I hereby propose a new rule:

Thy swap space shall equal the maximum amount of data your storage subsystem can deliver within 10 seconds or less.

Now, think about the practical ramifications. If your hard disk can read 50 megabytes a second (like most modern 7200 RPM IDE drives), OK. Get yourself a 500 megabyte swap file. If you have a nifty RAID array which can deliver 100 megabytes a second, fine. Go for a 1GB swap file.

BTW: I’m aware of special cases like Solaris, where /tmp is actually your swap, so it has a direct effect on performance to have this filesystem be quite large. I don’t agree with that particular architectural decision, though… /tmp should be its own space.

The age of large swap files or swap partitions is dead. Let it rest in peace.

So we’ve posted a lot of music here. Unfortunately, some of it has gotten buried beneath mounds of blog postings. My Music Page has become woefully outdated as I haven’t linked all the posts with music in them in some time.

Anybody up to the task (Ben?) of providing links to all the uploaded music? I’d rather not link directly to the tunes themselves, but instead to the blog page listing the tunes. I am a big fan of context, and this site is all about hanging out and telling stories.

I should have put this entry under Matt’s ‘Pet Peeve’ thread, but figured this subject deserved a separate and distinct home.

Over the past year, I have seen many front-page newspaper stories characterizing the actions of particular political representatives and political groups as “quiet.

I have a lot of pet peeves. It’s just the way I am. Usually, I don’t let it get to me and just kind of grin and bear it, but tonight, I need to vent. Don’t know why. Just feeling snippy.

My Biggest Pet Peeves (today):

1. People who can see that I’m very busily involved in something, and think that whatever they want me to do is obviously far more important than whatever I’m doing.
2. Web pages where they take the mouse focus away from you. If I type something in on the address bar, that cursor is supposed to STAY THERE, not move to some random search box on the page. I’m talking to YOU, AMAZON, MSN, DICTIONARY.COM and EBAY! Die! Die! Die! Vicious Mouse-Cursor-kidnappers of vile fame! When I click on a box on the page, my mouse cursor should stay where I clicked. You shouldn’t randomly delete what I’ve typed and move my mouse to some other box on the page.
3. Animals that run out in front of my car when I’m going way too fast to avoid them. I realize that, over the long term, this kind of behavior will be weeded out of the gene pool by evolution, but in the meantime I’m the one that’s upset because some CUTE, FLUFFY WHITE KITTEN decided to LEAP OUT in FRONT OF ME when I’m driving seventy-five miles an hour. It’s now the FLUFFY WHITE TUFTED CHUNKS OF CUTE KITTENY GOODNESS permanently glued to the inside of my wheel well. I have a pet cat. Dangit, cats, get some web access and read these blogs and stop jumping out in front of my car!
4. Bottled water that says “A product of the Cincinnati municipal water system”. DUDE! If I wanted to drink your FLAMING SEWER WATER, I’d have DRIVEN TO CINCINNATI and STUCK MY HEAD IN YOUR TOILET!
5. Bunnies. Bunnies are evil. Anya was right. Neighbor bought some bunnies. Evil, evil, evil.
6. How come when you buy a CASE OF ORANGES, a third of them are ROTTING by the time you GET THEM HOME? I bought a CASE of oranges, thank you very much, not two-thirds of a case of oranges and one-third of a case of DR. CITRUS’ RANCID FRUIT SCENT.
7. The feet on my laptop. I paid for SIX RUBBER FEET on this $1,600 laptop, and ONLY ONE IS LEFT. I’m typing on a laptop with only ONE RUBBER LEG. If I wanted to type while on a pogo stick, I’d have bought some of those ENLARGEMENT PILLS I keep reading about in my EMAIL.
8. “Dell technical support; my name is Sennacharukharamasra, but you can call me Shirley. What may I be doing for you today?” You’re name AIN’T SHIRLEY, SHIRLEY! You’re working in an IT SWEATSHOP in INDIA for 4000 BUCKS A YEAR. Just cause the drink is yellow don’t make it lemonade, Shirley!
9. THE NEEDFUL.
10. Rice cakes. WTF??? Who’s BRILLIANT idea was this, to make a HALF-DOZEN GRAINS OF RICE EXPLODE and then press-form it into a HOCKEY PUCK?
11. Lactose intolerance. What’s up with this? I hit thirty, and suddenly I’m Dr. Barnson’s FART-O-RAMA just because I drank 8 ounces of two-percent?
12. Energy drinks. Most of them DON’T WORK. You chug down the equivalent of Lake Erie in a can, with the promise of BOUNDLESS ENERGY and ENTHUSIASM, and all you get in exchange is a lighter wallet and FORTY TRIPS TO THE BATHROOM. You’re just as tired as before, and the only thing keeping you awake is the BOUNDLESS PRESSURE ON YOUR BLADDER.
13. Mice. Damned mice. A whole storage room swept clean. Several traps out, laden with peanut butter. The critters manage to scale the equivalent of the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING to chew a hole in your OATMEAL and live like kings until they DIE OF OBESITY. The peanut butter is UNTOUCHED, and I open the door of my storage room to find a hundred pounds of oatmeal on the floor, with little baby obese mice erecting a STATUE in honor of their DEPARTED FATHER who OPENED THE BAG.
14. Idiots at my flying field. What my PARKED CAR isn’t an indicator that you shouldn’t FLY CLOSE ENOUGH TO KNOCK MY CAP OFF? Isn’t four thousand feet of runway room enough for you to HOT DOG? You’ve gotta spoil my fun and DRIVE ME OFF THE FIELD because you can’t figure out how to fly your plane safely?
15. Neighbors who want you to sign an agreement INDEMNIFYING THEM AGAINST POTENTIAL LAWSUITS before they’ll let your KIDS PLAY TOGETHER. Dude!

I’m done. I’m not mad anymore, I made myself laugh. What are your pet peeves today?

Who knows what comes of this, our hopes have been dashed a few too many times in recent years. But AICN is linking to a Daily Variety story that reports that JJ Abrams (you’ve heard of Lost, right?) will produce and direct a new Trek film that “will center on the early days of seminal “Trek” characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.” Here’s the Daily Variety link.

Considering how many times the Superman reboot stopped and started and got tossed around from one bad idea to the other, we have to hope this is a legit story and that they aren’t toying with us. Because there are plenty of really great potential stories to tell about Kirk’s early days that would be great on the IMAX screen.