Of Cell Phones, Signal Quality, and Loud Voices.

Was watching TV today and saw this commercial for some company's wireless service. They where showing a train full of cell users with signal quality bars over their head and one guy had really bad signal. This guy was basically screaming into his cellphone.

Now. There are 3 things wrong with this one. #1, I absolutely HATE people who yell into thier cellphones. That's just a personal pet peeve. But #2 is that ALL modern cell phones are digital. Now if you didn't know, digital cell phones use error corrected packets of data to carry the voice signal. When the signal quality fades, the packets pick up large amounts of errors, and when the packets are too corrupted to correct, they are dropped. This causes breaks in the voice stream. Yelling will not prevent packet loss. And #3, the problem of overmodulation. Basically because we're talking a digital stream, there is maximum limit to the sound intensity. If you go beyond this limit, the quantitizer maxes out and wont go any higher. This leads to clipping (The squaring off of loud sounds) in the audio stream.

But everyone seems to yell when they begin to loose signal. The part that confuses me ('cause I occasionally catch MYSELF doing it...) is WHY we do it...

Ring ring!!!

Mood: Confused

The Buu Suit and Nan Desu Kan

Well, I've decided: I'm going to Nan Desu Kan. This local convention of Americans to share their love for Japanese culture and entertainment (Mostly to talk about Anime, Manga, and Video Games.) This sounds like something I would love to attend.

However, there's a problem. I wanna cosplay. Just sounds like a fun thing to do. However, there just aren't that many 6'3" 285 LBs anime characters. I would rather not go as something that I really don't "fit" the role for. So I mulled the question over, and after talking with some friends, have decided to go a Majin Buu. Buu is a large guy, and if he where my height, he would probably weigh about 500 LBs. This is great because I can always make a costume to make me look bigger. ^^

However, any full body costume (Like this one will have to be) is going to get hot. VERY hot. So, I thought, "Hmm, I'm an engineer. I have a problem. So, let's apply my expertise and solve it."

So my friends and I did some more thinking, and this is what we came up with. First, we make a Buu body suit. We do this by sewing cloth together into a Buu shape (with elastic holes where his much smaller legs are). Then we take bits of foam and shape them the way buu is shaped and sew it into the cloth. The foam will give form to the Buu costume without sacrificing flexibility (Which is a good thin seeing as the costume won't fit through doors otherwise. ^^) Then we make a head out of paper mache and build it so it has a rack with Styrofoam insulation in the upper parts. This rack supports Peltier junction whose hot side is attached to a heat sink and fan combination and the other side have another heat sink and fan, except with the fan rigged to run backwards. This means that the fan will blow away from the heat sink. This will keep my hair from getting sucked in to the fan ^^;;;

The hot side fan intake will come from Buu's head tail, which will be made of fine mesh and thin nylon. This was it can be pink, and air permeable without having the cloth pulled tightly over chicken wire and looking really stupid.

The head will be built so it has supports that rest on my shoulders and will be strapped on. That way I won't have any problems with the head falling off since the head will be considerably unbalanced. This is going to cause a bit of a problem because Buu has a really small head as compared to his body, and I have a big head (Probably from all that ego stroking I give to myself. ^^)

Now, all I have to do is actually build it. Not that it is an easy task mind you ^^;;;

Applied engineering applied to cosplay. Scary.

Mood: Inventive

Little Endian, the Big Indian on Campus

Wow... 1 week of not posting and look what you get. *Whistles* Blogger has really spiced it up.

But anyway, on to the point at hand. I was reading along in STL's website when what do I find? "Little Endian is evil"

I sat there stunned, "Did he just say what I thought he said?" And sure enough, he had. And I'm like, WOAH! A CS guy who doesn't see the silent beauty of little endian? Blastphemy!

Maybe it's just because I'm an Electrical Engineering student instead of a CS student (Although the current plan is to minor in CS) but little-endian numbers are to me what chocolate is to most. See, for those of you who are just plain ol' technically inclined (This topic is WAY beyond 'computer literate') I'll give a quick discussion of Big and Little endian numbers. See, computers keep their data in discrete digits, namely ones and zeros. Now these digits are combined together to form larger chunks of data. Often they're arranged into groups of bytes, words, D-words, and Quad-words (On 32 bit systems, these are 8,32,64, and 128 bits in size respectively.) Now, because numbers are usually made of values larger than one measly byte can hold, we use the larger words to hold them. But because memory is arranged into bytes for addressing purposes, we have to decide how they should be stored. Big endian uses the same principle as you would with notebook paper. If the top left corner of the page is the first spot, it would begin by writing the most significant (the 5 in the number 51223) digit first (or the most significant byte (MSB) in this case.) The last one it would write would be the least significant. Now this would seem obvious to anyone who's written on paper before, but little-endian takes a different approach. Instead of writing the MSB first, it writes the least significant byte (LSB) first. So this is like representing fifty-one thousand, two-hundred and twenty-three by writing 32215 down on the paper. Now this is counter intuitive to most people. Why would you write the last digit first?

This takes us into the beauty of little-endian numbers. Now, stop a second and add the numbers 123 and 789 together, taking notice of how you did it. Notice that you started the addition from the RIGHT and worked left? Now pretend that you could only read one digit at a time and couldn't rewind either the input number or the output numbers. Can you think of any way to do the addition under those constraints? You can't do it without first having yet ANOTHER sheet of paper to hold the values on for a moment. And it would take you a second to copy the numbers down. Now, consider how you would do it if the least significant digit (The one on the right) came first. For me, I'd do our example (123+789) by going: "OK, I have 3 and 9, add, get 2 and a carry. Now I have 2 and 8 and a carry, add, get 1 and a carry. Now I have 1 and 7 and a carry, add get 9. Now the answer I gave is 219, which is correct (in little-endian notation, the answer in common form is 912.) Notice, I was able to do the addition serially (one digit at a time with no look ahead) with only a one bit buffer (notice, I DO have to keep track of the carry.) Because of this, circuits of VERY low complexity can be designed and built to do addition as the numbers are read in. This is very fast and very efficient. Fewer gates mean fewer transistors, means less heat, means higher clock rates, etc. This holds true even if your bus is larger than 8 bits.

But this leads us into one of the pitfalls of big-endian numbers. Since bytes themselves are stored such that the lowest order bit is also the least significant bit, that means that a big endian system has it's bits ordered such that a 2 byte number is written in memory as (using bytenumber(bitnumber) notation) 1(0),1(1),1(2),1(3),1(4),1(5),1(6),1(7),0(0),0(1),0(2),0(3),0(4),0(5),0(6),0(7). Notice how the biggest byte is first but the biggest bit is last? Little endian puts the biggest byte last as WELL as the biggest bit. This means that the bits are ALSO sorted linearly by significance. This is very useful when doing significance (> and <) checks, since with little endian you can start at the very beginning of the two numbers and check them as you go (1 loop), rather than having to skip around to find the next most significant bit (1 loop and another nested loop. Oh, and usually > and < are done with subtraction instead, but there are other kinds of algorithms that bennifit by having sorted bits.)

But, unfortunately, little-endian is just backwards from what we're used to in significance, so programmers, like STL, just don't nessicarily see the essential beauty on the lower level.

I still don't know why we use big endian in handwriting anyway...

Mood: Actually informed by a class... Scary huh?

An Old Friend Reborn

Well, the time has finally come, after 2 and one half years, MuggleEater has gotten the finishing parts to his complete upgrade. Once an Athlon 2100+ XP with 512 MB of DDR 2100 Ram, 80 GB of UDMA 100 Hard drive space, sporting the then trendy GForce 4 4200ti Video card, MuggleEater was the best there was. But two and a half years if a full lifetime in the computer world, 2 for gaming machines, so I spent some money and brought him into 2004. Now, he's equipped with an Athlon 3200+ XP with 1 GB of DDR3200 ram, 160 GB of SATA 160 hard drive space, and the much powerful ATI 9600 XP graphics processor. And I must say: "DA----MN!"


The new upgrades give him about 100% more processing power. He scores well there too with a steamy 3801 on the 3DMark '03, up from 2882 (Compare your scores on the ORB at http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=2474924). But we're not just talking the benches here. In my favorite test of total system power, the "Stand at the lower Jeuno AH and spin with the display res at 1600x1200 backed by a 1000x1000 3D buffer" test, he scored a clean 20 FPS (Or so, slightly noticeable frame lag, but damn close to smooth,) after standing there and letting the place fill up with character models. This makes me one very happy person.

The funny part though is the number of people who don't understand why a .5 Ghz processor clock increase (1.73GHz for the 2100+ and 2.2GHz) such a big change in power. And the first hint I'll give these people is: The CPU clock upgrade wasn't why I did it. Turns out that one of the biggest shortcomings of computer architectures is that the CPU needs to access the ram on a VERY regular interval. But unfortunately, the channel that carries the info to and from the CPU is MUCH slower than the CPU. So the reason I purchased the 3200+ XP CPU was the fact that the 3200+ XP (Barton) is designed for the 400MHz Front Side Bus (Well, actually 200MHz, but on both the rise and the fall...) Since the Front Side Bus (Or FSB) is the part of the computer that connects the CPU to the memory, it would follow then that I've effectively doubled the speed at which my computer can communicate with the RAM modules. Because of this, even a slower processor can get faster speeds because it spends less time waiting for memory transfers to occur. Now don't get me wrong, the increase in the CPU DOES matter (Especially since I moved from the thoroughbred core to the Barton core,) but memory is going to be the grand daddy pappa of the process. However... There is ONE tiny thing I overlooked in my upgrade...

column Access Select Latency (or CAS Latency). See I purchased CAS 3, when I really should have purchased CAS 2. The cost differential and the speed differential are about the same, Single digit improvements, but the eligibility for overclocking is much better. But then again, it's really not an issue because I'm not overclocking my system (Nor do I have plans to.) But it does matter. Now that I think about it, I'm using CAS 2.5 timing... Probably why I can't get my chipset to run in turbo mode, probably sends the memory requests a bit too fast for the ram. I'll have to tinker with that later.

Vroommm!!!

Mood: ecstatic

Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me...

So it is official, I'm now a whole 21 years old.

Ah, 21, the last of the "Almost Adult" birthdays, and the true last one in most people's mind. The age where the remaining doors to porn, booze, and adult oriented radio contests open. The only non-elderly services and privileges not currently open to me are reasonable auto insurance costs and rental cars (Both open at 24, and for the same reason.) So of my new privilege, which ones do I plan to use?

None. Not a single one. I don't participate in radio contests, I have no intention of drinking, and well, I'll plead the fifth on the last one. I AM - however - looking forward to being eligible to rent cars in 3 more years, so I can finally go on vacations without having to drive there (If I don't drive there, I have to take taxi or bus once I'm there, and that get expensive/difficult.)

But, on to the topic that is momentarily interesting: Drinking.

"So, you're legal now and you plan not to drink... Why?" you say, and I respond "Why should I?" For the past one and one score years, I haven't had a drop of alcohol. And although there have been tough times where things weren't perfect, I feel that I have had no trouble enjoying myself. So why would I need to drink to have fun? And besides, drinking is bad for you (and those around you) on so many levels. So why should I if I'm content with the way things are? But there are several, quite a few more finite reasons I don't/won't drink.

#1. Drinking to Relieve Stress and Cope With Troubles.
Many people drink because they feel they need to get away from their lives and their problems. However, drinking neither solves their problems or allows them for get away. It DOES however remove the few psychological barriers that keep these people from going crazy, or yelling at the people around them for no reason. When the morning comes, they have a horrible hangover, the original problem (Because drinking doesn't fix anything other than sobriety,) and possibly a few irritated friends. Oh, and no recollection of what kind of trouble they might have gotten themselves into the night before.

#2. Drinking to Ease Up Social Stress
This one I could ALMOST reason why people do it. Alcohol lowers inhibitions. In very carefully administered doses, this can be a very tool in helping a person who is normally a shut in be a bit more outgoing. Possibly as a means to ease up the conversation with women. However the key word is 'carefully administered'. Drinking not only lowers your inhibitions, it also impairs your judgment. The small amount you take to 'lighten up' may be, and often is, enough to cause you to think that either A) it's not working yet so you should have some more or B) More would make you even 'looser' and make this process even easier. In both cases you quickly careen into full fledged drunkenness. Yes, you will be looser, but unfortunately, with all you inhibitions tossed to the winds, you will probably also be loud, rude, and generally out of control. Most women find this to be a BIG turn off (And to a limited extent men do too, but many see an inebriated woman and realize that she's likely an easy score.)

However, I have a couple of special personal reasons I don't drink. The first, and most significant being that when I had my wisdom teeth removed, I requested that the doctor provide me with some means of keeping me under control for the operation, as I don't exactly deal well with the idea of being cut, hammered, or otherwise mutilated. So with his help, (and a couple of narcotics, also provided by the doctor,) I has more than a bit dazed when I went in for the extraction. However, I firmly remember that later, when I came home, I could not seem to operate properly. It was like my brain was turned on, but the cables connecting it to my muscles had been all messed up. I couldn't type, I couldn't traverse stairs without help, I couldn't speak. It was like living in a bubble. Being the egocentric control freak and individualist that I am, this INFURIORATED me. I was unable to function without aid, and had almost no control over anything. I SWORE that I would never put myself into that kind of situation again unless it was absolutely called for, like it was with the wisdom teeth, (I had heart palpitations every time I even thought about it for the three months prior to the extraction.)

The other big reason is drunk driving. I figure that no matter how responsible I may be sober, the whole point of drinking is bash your brain back into the state of a hormone enraged teenager. Because of this, the likelihood that I, or anybody really, will be able to make the right choice and not drive after drinking. And if you didn't already know, I'd rather have unpaid debts to the Russian Mob than see a drunk driver on the road, especially ME drunk driving on the road. So since I wouldn't be able to make a wise decision, I figure I probably shouldn't put myself into a place where I'll have to make it.

My 2 bits.

Mood: Older

E-Voting. The controversy and the apparent state of the problem.

(Hey, a REAL post...)

It's all a matter of trust. Complaints about hackers and viruses are easily addressed using isolated networks (i.e. NOT connecting the voting system to the Internet and using encrypted hard lines to transmit the vote tallies to the central office, maybe even a traditional phone call.

But then we come to the trust of the software. It seems relatively obvious to me that E-Voting is a good way to sure up the election. For all of the failures that can be found in computers (Crashes and lost data), an equal number of failures can be found in hand counting the ballots. But how do we know for sure that the ballots cast are legit? How can we prove that the writers of the software didn't write the winner into the software? 'Use Open Source' many say. Well, we're talking embedded systems here, how can we PROVE that the software on the machine is actually made from the published source? The answer is 'we can't' . But then again, how can we trust the current vote tallies? We can't. As it stands, we know now, 4 years later that Bush won as the result of a supreme court ruling in the state of Florida. Individuals may unfairly represent the votes they count, etc. Now in the human counting method, the bias is adjusted for by the fact that each person has a different view. This means that, roughly, the cheaters are themselves a fair representation of the populace, and as such, convey the will of the masses. In e-voting systems, this distributed network is removed, especially if only one manufacturer is used. This is where the ultimate solution has to come in.

So allow me to propose a complete handling solution. First it should be obvious that, "to promote competition" (and evenly distributed biases, *wink wink*) at least 3 different manufacturer's products must be used in EVERY district. Each manufacturer must publish their source code, as well as the MD5 sum for their roms which must be displayed by the machine (Not that we actually trust that number, since it could be saved and displayed. But if the companies make it actually generate that number, then it can be used to detect viruses and the like.) The device must be designed so that the GUI software is encoded onto true ROM modules. EEProm modules may not be used for the GUI. The subjects being voted on will be encoded onto a flash ROM module along with a public key provided to the voting district by the central voting authority. The flash rom module will be secured into the device using a unique head screw holding a cover over it. If at any time this cover is removed, an audible alarm MUST sound. The format of this flash ROM module will be defined by a UNIVERSAL STANDARD and as such will be usable in ALL manufacturer's designs. The votes will be encoded using the public key found on the flash, and the votes will be written onto the flash module along with the card's checksum up to that vote. Some mechanism (preferably standardized) will be used to control voting frequency, such as a single use mag stripe card that is encoded with a card ID number, and automatically wiped when used. The card will be provided by the voter management clerks at the voting center (similar to how ballots are managed today.) The ID number will be written to the flash module and DOES uniquely identify a voter. As an added precaution, the ID code will NOT be associated with the vote, just stored in a list of voters who have voted. NO other network devices, including wireless transmitters, Ethernet cards, alternative removable media, or built in flash ROM devices may be incorporated into the device. The device MAY NOT have the ID of the voter and the vote outcome ANY portion of RAM at the same time. Once the voter is authenticated and his/her ID written to the card, memory must be wiped before voting may commence. A thermal or other inkless printer will be integrated with the device which will print out votes (WITHOUT the voter ID) and cut them into individual slips, which the voter will then place in a ballot box. This is to provide a paper backup while simultaneously ensuring voter anonomy. The paper backups will be handled with the care necessary. (Such as being stored in a cool, dark place in the case of thermal paper) After voting is done, the flash modules, and the ballot box will be transported to the central voting authority who will then use the appropriate private key to decrypt the votes and tally them up using the decryptors of EACH of the different manufacturers. Thus, if 5 manufacturers devices are used, than each card will be decrypted and compared in EACH of the 5 devices (Thus why the flash module's format is standardized) If the results come out different on even 1 machine, ALL of the manufacturers will be investigated. This will keep at least the decoder devices honest. Before the beginning of the voting, each voting machine will be tested to ensure reliability by the voting booth clerks, this includes posting several votes and verifying the results using a decoder. At least one device, from each manufacturer, selected at random, will be tested by submitting a COMPLETE vote load to it. This means if the machine can be expected to see 1000 votes, then at least one will be tested 1000 times and the results verified. ABSOLUTELY NO BATTERY BACKED UP DEVICES OF ANY SORT MAY BE USED.

These measures will almost assuredly guarantee that the voting machines themselves are clean, so all of the 'cheating' would have to be done by humans. The measures are a bit extreme, but they do address the issue.

Fascist security... I wouldn't be surprised if those machines where less likely to make a mistake counting a million votes than a human counting 10.

Mood: Accomplished. That's a lot of planning there...

Junk Used Twice Still is Junk

Since the discussion seems to continue, I'm going to post the current comment chain for the Comunalisim post here to orginize it in a better form. That, and I havn't posted in like a week, so I figure I probably should do something... :)

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Not that there aren't people who try to force one or the other system to stop existing. Despite being completely within our rights to set up a communal system, some folks (aka Microsoft, and also SCO which made some ridiculous claim about the GPL being unconstutional or some such) try to stop us.

Also, reminds me of something or other I read once... about gift cultures and such... Probably Raymond...
Posted @ 3:47 PM on Apr 14 by Geoff

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SCO is just grasping for anything because with the exception of their "unfair busines proactices" claim against IBM (which is quite valid BTW), the rest of their suit is absolutely frivilous. As for Microsoft, they are the epitome of what capitolistic view is and since the two views are incompatible, they have to. Remember the communalistic view also has people trying to destroy the capitalists (The anti-SCO virus and the whole of the music sharing community.)
Posted @ 8:12 AM on Apr 15 by JimTheCactus

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They actually aren't incompatible... And it's rather unfair to say that simply because some people (who often, I might add, don't have a good grasp on the concepts involved [which, I admit, is occasionally me as well]) who have the same viewpoint as others try to destroy the "other side" doesn't mean 1) that they are representative of the whole of the viewpoint 2) they are the epitome of the viewpoint or 3) that the two (or more) can't co-exist... just that some folks think that way. (Both your examples: anti-SCO virus and m$)

Would you want me to lump you with Timmothy McVeigh, because he's American and so are you? Or to lump you with Fred Phelps, because he's a white middle-class american "christian" (though I know you aren't christian... but otherwise)?

Also, I think you'd be hard put to prove that the music sharing community was sharing music for the purpose of destroying capitalism. Were they engaging in communal practices? Yes. Did they do harm to the music industry? Depends on who you ask. Were they doing it either in protest or as a way to harm the music industry? Perhaps some were, but most weren't.

And, yeah, SCO is grasping at anything because they WAY overextended themselves and needed any excuse to make their fight seem worthwhile instead of the waste that it is. _There's_ capitalism in action. There's no justice for those who can't pay for it.
Posted @ 5:01 PM on Apr 15 by Geoff

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I'm not sure if you and I are working from the same definition of "Capitolisim". I'm working on the oe from Websters dictionary: "An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market."

Communalisim puts no value on investment, but capiolisim lives and dies on investment value. This is where the two systems are incompatible.

And unless you're trying to rationalize a crime (And it is one), music sharing has, on the whole, harmed the sales of CDs.
Posted @ 12:50 PM on Apr 16 by JimTheCactus

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But in communalisim, the fact that the person that recorded the song doesn't recieve any payment isn't an issue. The premise is that they will recieve another product of equal value eventually as well. The way we ensure that this "fair trade" in a capitalistic society is by the accumulation of "money" to show, roughly, how much the society in general ows us to pay up that exchange debt. The reason that communalisim sprouted in our society is that the "Money" became more important than the fair excange of goods, so people began to do things that helped them "cheat" the fair exchange, like the record companies screwing with prices till they got an "unfair" share of the value. This process grew quickly out of control with information, things that could be easily created but where being sold for prices 100X or more over the actual cost of development. Things like software, music, videos, etc. The idea of communalisim, as implemented today, suggests that only the cost of the media itself, (which means the full cost of food, and about 100th the cost of music/videos when distributed on cds or dvds, and no cost at all for stuff sent across the Internet.

That's why they're incompatible. And I understand that lumping people together is unwise, but if you consider the basic premise of microsoft, they are persuing to increase their wealth through free trade, which would the show them as being the "perfect example" or epitome of capitolisim.
Posted @ 1:11 PM on Apr 16 by JimTheCactus

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Okay, firstly: yes, for the music sharers to have done absolutely no harm then you'd have to somehow magically prove that not one of them forwent buying a real CD because of being able to download the song online, which would be extremely difficult to prove and is (most likely) untrue anyway.

So perhaps I misspoke. Now, on the other hand, you would also have a hard time proving that the sharers _significantly_ negatively impacted the sales of CDs. Is it true that some folks stopped buying CDs because of the filesharing? Yes. Is it also true that some purchased CDs they would otherwise not have because they had a chance to listen to some of the tracks first? Yes. Is it true that during the past few years the economy has been on the downturn, leaving less money available to purchase CDs? Yes. Is it true (or at least possible, I haven't done a study) that much of the music being purchased on CD was being purchased by an aging boomer generation, and that as they finished replacing their tape/record collections with CDs, the demand slacked off? Getting farther, but yes, certainly possible. I know my parents haven't bought any CDs for a few years... and even my sister isn't quite as rabid as she once was (and she doesn't have any illegal copies of songs either).

So, you see whether the music sharers have _significantly_ harmed the sales of CDs or whether it was a combination of factors wherein music sharing played a minor part, it depends on who you ask.

Now, for your remark about it being a crime. Firstly, I never said it wasn't a crime. Nor was I trying to rationalize it in my earlier statement (or, in fact, just now). I was pointing out that the actions of the filesharers was not some act of protest or an effort to bring the music industry toppling down. Their actions were to get "free" music. Or at least for the vast vast majority of them.

As for criminality, one can point out many things in the past that have been crimes which aren't now. But the topic of criminality in a philosophical discussion is irrelevant, since laws change. Tomorrow the congress _could_ do away with copyright. They probably won't, and would be in violation of the Berne (I think) convention, but they could.
Posted @ 6:02 PM on Apr 16 by Geoff

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By "investment," do you mean simply the money that is put towards creating the product (including research etc.)? That's what the dictionary entries I'm reading seem to point to. And in that respect you're certainly correct. The money "invested" in communalism has no financial return to the investor, and so you say that communalism doesn't value investment.

But, like most people, I think you're taking it a bit too simply. You fail to take into account non-monetary expenses and benefits. Reputation (benefit) is one of those (and does play a major factor in "gift" cultures). Time is an expense. Expertise and knowledge are benefits. Certainly, in a system with money, money can be an expense as well. But, the biggest benefit of being in such a culture is the culture itself. As a participant in the culture, investing your time and effort into it, you gain access to all the "tangible" benefits of the culture (ie, in the music-sharing example, the music [putting aside, for now, issues of legality]).

I'll write more on the topic of how the two aren't incompatible later; I have to get dinner and go home.
Posted @ 6:29 PM on Apr 16 by Geoff

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But look at the trends in sales, CDs have steadilty be FALLING not rising. Fewer and fewer CDs are bought per year, and this trend has been running since about 2001. If piracy, which is what happens when communalisim and commercialisim meet, is 'helping' the commercialists by providing some kind of advertising or what not, the numbers sure don't seem to show it. Not that I trust the RIAA (essentially I consider them the ultimate evil and prime example of the slime that is the unethical commercialist), but they are the best represenitive source of information for record sales. The information I'm working from comes from their report on annual sales, which can be found at http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/yearend.asp

Since the MP3 format was introduced, and music file sharing became popular, music sales have fallen off their general rise and gone into a downspin. Unless there's some other legitamate media other than CD, Vinal, and Audio Cassette tape availible in 2001 (Which predates ITunes) then I would venture to say that piracy has hurt, and hurt BAD, the recording industry. Remember that live preformances are the property of the artists not the record companies, so higer concert sales can't be considered a fair comphensation (and you can't increase sales to sold out shows like Brittney Spears or Metallica anyway.) So I'm failling to see your point. (Plus they're already veterans of the recording business, I don't think that they really gain all that much experience...)
Posted @ 9:58 AM on Apr 26 by JimTheCactus

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And that's where we're at so far. Let the commenting Continue!!!

Blog Filler... How sad...

Mood: Self-Dissapointment

Gibberish on the Whole

I had a really srong minded post for today, but my reasearch into the matter kinda changed my view... Seems that what I was going to rant about was unrelated to what The actual matter was... So I'm abandoing the post and instead posting the disjointed remains of what I had before (With the edits from my research, see I started off thinking that the ban trans fats thing was about weight loss, but it turns out that it's only remotely related to it...)

So here's what's left of my post...

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Well... Not that I'm a shining example on the matter, but I would like today to discuss dietary radicalisim.

Specifically this is a bit of a remark of shock and amazement at this post on the blog blogkini, blogheels. I did a bit of research into the matter of tran fats. Seems that the regular process of cooking with "healthy" fats can actually harm them and make them into the "trans" fats (Which are nothing more than regular polyunsaturated fats altered by changing the general entropy level in the molecule, i.e. heating it up, and as such, it will bind in your metabolic processes, but can't do it's job right. If you hydrogenate it COMPLETELY then it doesn't matter because you render the molecule inert, but partial hydrogenation leaves some of these corrupt molecules.) The reason that the matter even comes up is because you can use a cheep oil (Like vegitable oil), heat it up and hydrogenate it, then use it as an inexpensive substitute for butter or lard in cooking.


But this is just one example of dietary radicalisim. As it turns out, the biggest problem with the obesity of americans doesn't come from their diets, instead, the fact that life has become much easier than it was before, and thus requires us to do less manual labor, is almost entrirely to blame. Yes diet needs to be controlled and not intentionally thrown to the winds, and fitness radicalisim is equally messed up, but we do need to get out more.

The only question I have is, why? It's extreamly clear to me, (And the scientific community) that diet and exercise are correlated. If you have high chloresterol, you're supposed to adjust your diet AND your exercise. Why is it that everyone does one or the other? Keep in mind, if you have a #1 from McDonalds large size with a Coke (My personal favorite) it's worth 600 (Big Mac)+ 520 (Large Fries) + 310 (Large Coke) or about 1430 calories. Now, what does this mean to you? Well, in my case, if I where to go out walking at 3 mph (Or about 20 minutes per mile, good for a swift, but not stressed pace) I would burn about .027 Calories per pound per minute, or about 8 a minute. This means I have to walk at that pace for 3 hours to burn off a #1. We could up the pace to my hastened walk (Gym walk/late for the bus walk) which doubles the burn rate, and I only have to walk for an hour and a half. Or, if I wanted to be able to burn off the meal in only 30 minutes of a light walk, I could eat only 240 calories (Which is less than the soda by itself.) But what if we where to balance the process out? What if instead we took a smaller portion AND increased the exercise? We could acomplish the goal with less work than all exercise and less starving than dieting.

(It's important to note that your body burns off more than half of the average person's diet in just doing body things. Digesting food, fighting off disease, rebuilding damaged and ageing tissue, all of those kinds of things use energy from your food, and a lot of it. But it leaves you to wonder, why do fat people not get fatter? Well, since this extra energy is proportionate to the amount of tissue, and the type, as the fat person gets fatter, the 'idle' consumption rate increases and eventually matches their chaloric intake + their exercize, and what exercize they DO do is more significant...)

In my reasearch on the matter, I still found some real gems from the scientific community, like: We discovered exercise to lead to more calorie consumption than just the exercise would have caused. DUH! If you change the average level of activity you engage in, your body adapts to be ready for it more quickly. This means that it's going to pick a higer 'idle' rate, and thus burn more calories, and on top of that, the 'idle' consumtion rate of muscle tissue is giger than everything else, so if you build muscle mass, you increase your 'idle' consumption.

But now I'm rambling... So I think I'll shut up...

---

End disjointed post.

3800 Cals a day for me to meet idle, Cool!

Mood: Conflicted

Because Every Blog has to Talk About it at Least Once

Ok, it's time once again to poke society in a tender spot. Today's controversial topic: Abortion.

First things first: I believe in Pro Choice.

Wait!!!! Don't tune me out yet, it's not your mother's "I can kill my baby if I want too" pro choice. To me there's a lot more to the problem than just mothers killing or saving babies (if you look at it from the right perspective.)

To explore the matter, let us begin with a little thought experiment. I, as a single, sexually inactive male will not ever be subject to the circumstances where I would have to make the decision. In court, this would make me unable to file any kind of claims. So can I fairly make any claims to this matter? I would say no, but that doesn't prohibit me from analyzing the problem and coming up with what I believe; It just prohibits me from trying to force it onto someone else. So along those lines I'm going to discuss the matter at length, although we're going to assume that there's a need for abortion in some rare medical situations where even a planned pregnancy may endanger the life of the mother that is irrefutable (Which it isn't, but work with me here...)

First of all, let's take a glance at all the steps (And label the for future shorthand) involved in bringing a child from nothing through birth and into adulthood. Step 1 in the process, and by far the best place to control the matter, Conception. From conception we move into Step 2 the pregnancy, the most discussed part of the matter. Then Step 3 Birth. Then Step 4 early childhood, Step 5 The Teen Years, and lastly Step 6 adulthood.

Now, as with any problem, the best method for discussing it is to find the source and start there. Technically, this problem actually starts long before we even get to step 1, but complaining about character and upbringing and yelling at the parents of the adults today is pointless. So we'll just skip to conception. This is the place where choice is easiest. There are several options that are available at the level that prevent the need for abortion, like abstinence, contraception, and planning. Obviously, the best method for avoiding abortions is to not conceive, and the best way to not conceive is to not have sex. "Not have sex?! Blastphemy!!!" many say. Some people are just the kind of people who absolutely have to pleasure themselves, despite the consequences.

For those people there's a second, 99.5% effective way of preventing the need for abortion, contraception. Protected sex, although not ideal for birth control, and never perfectly reliable, reduces the risk of pregnancy (if used for such a purpose) and STDs (Again if used for such a purpose) in those people that just HAVE to have sex with people other than themselves (For the non catholic abstainers, masturbation is still a viable path to pleasure, and with proper technique is almost perfectly safe for everyone. ;) However, condoms, diaphrams, and contraceptive pills are not always effective, and there is a small cross section of people who absolutely HAVE to have sex who also have some religious concerns with contraceptives.

Which brings us to the final point of choice: planning. If you're going to have sex (protected or otherwise) then planning is required. Every time you have sex with someone else (obviously excluding same sex relationships in which case the whole abortion point is kind moot...) you have the risk of pregnancy. In some cases this is desirable (duh...) But before you just go off and do the dirty dance, you should sit down and discuss with your partner whether or not you are ready to have a child. Can you provide it a loving, caring, stable environment? Can you provide for it's monetary needs? Can you make the sacrifice to care for it when it's sick or sad? If you can't, then you're just going to have to take a cold shower and get over it. It's not like you can't live without sex. Once you make the choice to do the deed, then you full well accept the consequences of your actions. Your decision is made and you're just going to have to live with it.

But there are some exceptions, 2 big ones I can think of at the moment, Rape and 'Moment of uncontrolled passion'. For rape victims I would say that early process abortion is reasonable, as their choice has been removed. But if they don't report the crime and seek treatment, then they are making the choice that they feel capable of raising a bastard child. (Ya, this seems a bit harsh on the poor victims of rape, but part of the process of adulthood involves dealing with life as it comes to you, and not letting things get in the way of what needs to be done.)

As for people who find themselves in 'moment of uncontrolled passion' situations a bit of pre-planning is necessary. Since you can't anticipate these situations, then sexually active people need to take steps in advance to reduce their risk of pregnancy, and be ready to accept the consequences as they come. This means packing condoms and going on birth control. Both men and women should carry condoms, and ideally, both parties should also have diaphrams on hand, 'cause you never know if your partner did any advance planning. And since you're effectively play a game of Russian Roulette with your career, lifestyle, and just about everything else, you don't want to have more than one bullet in the gun if you don't have too. Also, have a plan laid out for what you're going to do if you become (or make someone else) pregnant. You're going to have to be ready to satisfy all of the normal planning concerns in 9 months or less, and women are going to need some mad cash for prenatal checkups in only three months. And if you seem to find yourself in a large number of these 'Moments' you may want to reassess your life. You're probably intentionally putting yourself in these situations, and should consider adjusting your activities to reduce the number of situations where you won't be able to control the outcome of your life.

*WARNING!!! STIFF OPINIONATED VIEWS FOLLOW*
But if you get to the level of pregnancy (Or got someone else there) then you've already made your choice. If you've been a responsible adult and planned ahead (like you should be doing with taxes, health care, auto insurance, etc) then you should not be surprised or unprepared for the challenges ahead of you. Killing off a new budding life because you thought that sex was fun and didn't feel like being ready for what comes of it is roughly equivalent to buying a puppy, playing with it for about an hour and a half, and then shooting it when you get bored and disposing the corpse in the dumpster in back (And with the "no new stem cells" thing, we can't even use the liver from that puppy to save another, but we'll save that discussion for another post.)

Um... I guess it's actually kinda pro life, but not in the traditional sense...

Mood: High and Mighty (Y? 'Cause I can be!)

On Free Software and Communalisim in the Minds of Gamers

Long title, *whew*. Anyway, I was sitting there, thinking about the service that Blogger and Live Journal offers, and got to thinking: "Why would I ever pay for this? It's not something I would expect to have to pay for." And at that moment it hit me, BAM!: "Wait a second... This service they provide me isn't free to them, it costs money, just like running Motoko. I don't collect a fee for my project, mostly because I don't see how I could anyway. But that means they spend money on it too... So why should I feel so important as to think that they should GIVE me this service." So I stopped and though about all the things that I expected SHOULD be free: search engines, blog systems, online comics, etc. And I realized that NONE of those things are free to the people that run them. Now most search engines sustain themselves on "preferred listings" and banner ads, and blog systems do it by having at least some paying costumers who support a louse like me who uses the software and storage for free, and web comics sustain themselves on "fanboy" items (tshirts and the like) and I realized that I really should contribute to these companies and individuals who are providing me with these services. Especially blogger since there are absolutely 0 ads ANYWHERE on my blog or on the blogger main page.

But then I thought: "Ok, so I take a bunch of free, non-free stuff for granted, but why?" This is when I realized what it was; the society, at least the part of it that I belong to, has been tainted by the extreme commercialism of the '90s and formed a communalist system. Not that it's really all that noble or anything (since it's driven by personal greed and rationalization,) but people in my generation typically work on the premise that anything non-consumable and easily duplicated should be shared. This includes music, software, ideas, etc. This would explain why I expected the Blogger and Live Journal systems to be free, why music/game piracy is so rampant, and the entire open source community (of which I am both a giver and a taker.)

But this poses a problem, as with any social revolution, the communalist viewpoint is the exact antithesis of the commercialist view, just like the prudishness of the '50s created the sexual revolution in the '60s. The problem is that both systems, at least for the moment, must coexist. So what can we do to help these two differing view points cooperate until one of them becomes the dominant social viewpoint? I think that answering that might be the biggest challenge facing our generation. And as for me, I have no good ideas.

P2P vs. 401(K) in an all out battle to the Bank!

Mood: Contemplative.

The Problem with the Dot Coms, From the Other Side

Ok first things first... See that link there in the links section of my blog? Ya, the one labeled NQIG News? I may not update it often, but it would be wise to check it at least once a week. Oh, and if you want to be able to post to it, JUST TALK TO ME. No strings attached. It's purpose is for communicating NQIG news to NQIG members (Although anyone can view it.) I would like similar content guidelines as the forums to be upheld, but beyond that it's ripe for the taking!

But enough plugging the blog, let's move into today's topic of interest: "If I was free to do anything I wanted in the future as my primary income source, what would it be?" And, and many would suspect, the answer is "Run my own ISP". But I don't think I could do it, not without some venture capital, so I'm going to do the next best thing, write up the business analysis and plan here on my blog. ;)

OK... Let's consider what an ISP is: An ISP is a company that provides access to the internet to some group of users. Technically I kinda run my own little free ISP at home, but we're looking for a way to turn it into a business. The question then becomes, what kind of service do I want to provide? Raw network access? Traditional business class service (Web site, E-Mail, Internet Access, custom domains)? Open home access (E-Mail, Internet Access), Firewalled Home/Business access (Users behind a NAT firewall(s), E-Mail, maybe website and domain)? Collocation services? Server cluster services?

Well... I think I would probably target 4 markets Ultra Cheap Access (NAT only), basic home user access (e-mail, NAT), gamer access (Single Static IP, e-mail, broadband only), and general access (Dynamic IP, e-mail). This means that I need at least 1 master router, 1 high bandwidth switch (Gigabit), 1 dialup/nat router (Preferably 2 for redundant dialup), at least 2 servers (For e-mail) preferably 3, at least 1 office, preferably 2 (A small one for the secondary server on a completely different provider to make e-mail fault tolerant,) at least 1 net link (Preferably more, and to different sections of the internet), office furniture, and staff.

For the bare essentials we're looking at about $6000 in network hardware $5000 in network setup fees and $20,000 in non-network expenses (Furniture etc) up front. Then I need a staff of at least 3 people (3 * 8 hour shifts = 24 hour monitoring) besides me who all have expertise in maintaining the system at $15-$25 an hour, and at least 3 people for costumer relations at $6 to $15 an hour. These numbers will need to grow with our client base. Then I need advertising. I could easily blow $100,000 on that, but we'll keep it small and say I need about $20,000. Then we have office rent running at about $1000 a month if I'm REALLY lucky and can find an office with 2 rooms; an ISP doesn't need that much space (A funny point about them is that you really only need 1 room, but people get worried when your networking hardware and your secretary are in the same room. Plus, it's bad security.) Then I need $1000 a month in bandwidth and $300 in telephone service.

What does this boil down too? Well, assuming the business doesn't fail before it becomes profitable, you need (for 0 revenue for the first year and profitability after that): $88,000 in wages, $51,000 in physical stuff and setup, and $30,000 in month expenses money. This comes to an initial investment of $169,000. A very possible business proposal. Remember though, the owner of the company was assumed to make no salary and be able to do both network maintence and secretarial when their normal employees call in.

Considering that $1000 monthly accounted for a T3 link and IP junction with Level 3, that means 672 64K channels. Allocate 10 of them to the PBX for your secretary, set aside 24 for your server, and place the rest on the network backbone. 2 channels = 1 dialup user (One for the phone line and one effective channel for network), 10 channels = 1 640K DSL user, and 24 = 1 T1 user. If you then oversell your channels by about 100-200%, depending on the distribution of your connections (you can oversell dialup more, DSL and T1 less) then for most of the situations, you'll have more bandwidth that will be requested for 90% of the time. If you charge for bandwidth by channel count (Don't tell your users this, tell them your selling by the Kilobit) and tada. 672-24-10= sellable channels = 638 channels. If you charge $5 a channel subtracting $1 for every 5th channel, then you can turn a monthly revenue of about $8000 . $2300 in fixed costs + $18,000 in salaries....

Wait...

Ok... Well that doesn't work. If you're paying $18,000 in salaries just for babysitters... You'll never be able to survive... Hmm

I guess the ISP thing doesn't work...

*Sigh*

Mood: Depressed

WIKI!

Ok... So I started off with the question: What in the heck IS Wiki?! Well... Turns out that Wiki isn't a piece of software or anything like that, Wiki is actually a collaboration methodology that has led to the production of software and communities. Specifically, Wiki suggests open collaboration between UNREGISTERED users on a self linking website. Basically envision this. You create an article and call it WhoCaresAboutWiki. The you write a bunch of stuff. Then someone else creates an article ReasonsToLikeWiki. In it they include the word WhoCaresAboutWiki. This word is automatically linked to the article you wrote. Now what makes Wiki different from other methods is the fact that ANYONE can edit the articles. Or delete them! And I mean anyone. There is not supposed to be any kind of user authentication on any level.

As a sys admin I worry about those kinds of things. It sounds like a great idea in a utopian society, but it only takes 1 person to mess up the whole thing. Oddly enough though I'm not worried about someone deleting all the posts. A simple forward looking DB could easily handle that. I mean, create a base file from the original post, and every time someone edits the post, create a differential file that is Huffman or Run-Length encoded and then only keep the most recent post in the DB's main file. This way you can "rebuild" the post up to any particular date by "replaying" the differentials. Then every so often, when everything looks ok, update the base file up to some number of edits from present to minimize wasted overhead. What I worry about isn't content deletion, trolling, spamming, etc, I worry about overflow. What happens if you have an innovative person trying to overwhelm the DB server?

In my comment program I control this with maximum post frequency and maximum post size, but would that be practical in a Wiki? I would say yes on post frequency, but unsure on max post size. Maybe if you allowed them to post 10,000 characters once every 30 seconds... Naw, because of the "repost the whole page" thing, they would really have to keep the whole page under that limit...

Well, anyway, I like the ideal case, but feel that Wiki is just not practical in the modern day. However, the forum effect is quite desirable because at the very least you make an individual responsible for their own content by associating it with a username.

Still doesn't mean I don't mind posting on other people's wikis...

Mood: Inquisitive

The Oddesy of the Ruby

A tale of hardship, companionship, and the lives of small squishy creatures

Ok, so I knew it was coming, but none-the-less, I have begun the hunt for the Carbuncle ruby. For those that have undertaken this task, you can sympathize with me on my plight. 4 hours and I still haven't found one to call my own. The scary thought is that 4 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what most people spend trying to get it. Ironically, Etheralith and I found one just 20 Mins into the search, but thanks to a poorly timed IM, I was forbidden to have it (Stupid Fates... Just wait... One day I'll find you guys and put a pointy stick through that eye of yours!!! You'll See!!!)

So I have continued the search. The time passes better with a team, but unfortunately the possibility that I'll find one and actually get to keep it is smaller. And if I'm not the one who gets it, they'll probably leave without helping to find another one for me. *Sigh* 'Tis the dynamic of people in groups.

As for the leeches themselves, I would have to agree with Ether... They are actually kind of cute. Cute in that 'I expect to find a Bennie baby Poison Leech named Floppy one of these days' kind of way. I personally wouldn't buy it mind you, but it would be a good canidate. I've also found them to have a terribly annoying set of special skills that seem to proc unreasonably often. It actually kind of bugs me. Regen, Attack down, Blind, Stun, and both TP and MP drain all used in the same fight would get on anyone's nerves. But the fact that soloing them I can take about 5-7 of them between resting is quite assuring of the power of my char's design. I could take more if I could learn the ninjitsu that gives me the copy image effect, but that's either really expensive or really time consuming to get. *Sigh*

Maybe Ether will help me find a ruby tonight.

Mood: Kinda sad, kinda anxious, kinda proud. A virtual stew of human emotion. :)

The Universal Stance

Why not... I think I'll categorize my beliefs for all to see... Why? Read the comment at the bottom. ;)

#1. There might be a God, there might not, it's actually unimportant. Live your life in a way that is most conducive to the overall well being of yourself and the world you live in and a compassionate God would never sweep aside your deeds over a simple logistic that you had no proof to support anyway. Plus, there's no promise that even if God exists, that he's compassionate. The directly observable evidence would show to the contrary anyway. (Evil exists in the universe, or at the very least suffering...)
#2. Conciousness can only be proven for an instant, and any given view of the universe may be fleeting. However, it is impractical to live by this ethos. So instead, live your life for the long haul, but your end (and the end of everything) may come in an instant. Fear not, as it is folly to consern yourself with such things that are beyond your control. Also, consider that you may have just winked in too.
#3. The paradise afterlife is nothing but a game played by humans to quell their fear of death.
#4. In actuality we live in paradise now. Yes, living in a place where all our needs are met would be great, but it is impossible to enjoy that paradise without the contrast of suffering to judge it by.
#5. Religion is the opium of the masses. Spiritual advancement makes sense only when you remove the bias of both church and state, and seek insight on your own. Religion does nothing but taint your opinion and bias your view. Instead, seek forums of free spiritual expression and exchange ideas freely with others.
#6. Believing in spiritualisim is sappy, and yet again an act of man (not God) to rationalize all those little nagging questions about their universe that they either can't, or won't bother to answer. As such, #5, although good advice for those who need that kind of 'catch-all' for stuff that doesn't make sense, is unnecessary if one can come to accept that the only way to answer questions is through experimentation and logic. Nothing has to be accepted as-is, and nothing should be.
#7. There are premises that I accept as fact only for the scope of conversations with other people (Because most people really don't want to forego anything that can't be solidly proved), and these premises are useful for interaction with my universe. For example time is continuous, I existed a moment ago, and will continue to exist in the next moment barring death, etc. Without these I could not function.
#8. I believe in the philosophical theory of fundamentalism (Which is completely different from religious fundamentalism.) Human thought is the result of processes explainable (eventually) by science. In time we will discover this process, and may be able to implement it using other means. As such, humanity is in no way superior to animals or plants, we just have a different natural tool for situational adaptation.
#9. All universal combinitions are possible. Even chaos may spring a complete universe for no reason at all. Because of this, it is unwise to assume that anything is fact. There may be an omnipotant thing in the universe, and it may be evil. There's no real way to tell.

I think that's the just of it. Figured it's not fair to dis on someone else's beliefs unless I expose mine and allow them to be critiqued too. Besides, I believe in #5 (duh) and since I'm in a 'sappy, and feel like using religion as a form of entertainment' kind of mood, I might as well. ;)

Pop goes the universe...

Mood: Sappy, and feel like using religion as a form of entertainment. :p

Snooping About, and Responding to Blogspace

Reading Nara's Livejournal... again... (mostly because of all the journals I try and follow, hers is the only one that is regularly updated...)

Today she's talking about a religious argument between her and her mom, and just because I'm that kind of person, I'm going to post some third party comments in response to some of her mothers (and possibly her) statements. See the original post here

Ok Here we go. (Oh and just as a bit of a headnote, I'm not personally homosexual, and don't see the wisdom in it as a practice for genetic propagation, but believe that 2 consenting people should be allowed to experience the pleasure of sex without it leading to issues based on their decisions, despite gender, color, creed, etc...)

amidsthespires: I studied the Bible with a homosexual in NYC and I CAN identify gay men almost immediately but Genny you are dabblling in death-dealing attitudes
amidsthespires: why do you rejoice when people have been misled by Satan into behaviors that will kill them?

?! Homosexuality is lethal? Since when? STDs are just as common in heterosexual relationships as they are in homosexual, so that's not it... As far as I'm aware, the process itself is rather harmless. And although I can see an increased risk of hepatitis A if we're looking at homosexuality in men because of the hoof and mouth problem, the same increase can be found if you don't was your hands after taking a dump.

stardust enigma: If God is Love, why do his followers so love condemning people?
amidsthespires: you should stay away from it and people who delve in it His true followers convey HIS thoughts about it and His Warnings

Isn't this "Don't question God! He is because he is!" And, as of the last I checked, it is impossible to judge who is a 'true' follower anyway. I mean, you can't assume the clergy is a true follower, I mean, consider the pedophilic priests we're dealing with at the moment. Even the Bible itself was composed, and then later tainted, by men who had political agendas.

There are numerous references to 'Satan' in the proceedings... A point which I will contend with one sentence: 'If god is love, then why the heck would he, the grand creator, create suffering?' But remember, I don't even believe in a God as of this particular moment, (more of that Instantaneous consciousness thing)

And a discussion on the rather interesting fundamentalist view of the Jehovah's Witnesses belief structure will be left out for now, seeing as arguing with fundamentalists is a basic waste of time, considering that they hold something to be fundamental, and as such, not up for debate. I definatly want to come back to it however, because it's, well... Not to be rude but... Well I would explain it as entertaining, considering the volatility of the Bible. But at least they don't believe that the Christ was God himself, a point that many of the sects of Christianity seem to miss the plausibility problems of.

stardust enigma: A whole eternity of getting to be around people who hate anyone different.
amidsthespires: they are only repeating what God has clearly stated for milleniums
stardust enigma: Eternal life among JWs.
stardust enigma: I'd rather die.
amidsthespires: it isn't hateful to tell someone that they are skating on thin ice and endangering their life
amidsthespires: you will
stardust enigma: I'm not interested in Jehovah's paradise.
amidsthespires: obviously
stardust enigma: I wouldn't want to live in a place like that.

There's more to this part of the discussion so I recommend you read all of it, but what I want to say is that, after reading about the beliefs of the JWs, I would absolutely have to agree with stardust on this one. JWs (according to the views clarified by the JWs master periodical"The Watchtower", the only people who can go to Jehovah's paradise are JWs. And better than that, they have 6 million members, and only 144,000 of them get to come along for the ride. But the reason I agree is because of their belief on death: they believe that your consciousness dies with your body. Because of this, I have to choose between the pentultimate in "I don't care" (No consciousness tends to do that) or live with 144,000 other fundamentalists Christians whose entire lives where dedicated to getting to said paradise and involved no plans as to what they where going to do with themselves if they ever did actually reach it. 143,999 people with no plans, a fanatical viewpoint, and a religion with no post-apocalypse guidance...

For now I think that's enough religion bashing for the moment... Don't want to start getting any nasty hate mail now do I... ;)

Homosexuality as a way to death... Ya...

Mood: Reflective

SATA and Linux, A Tale of Woe.

Well... A while back I purchased a new video card. I was the happy owner of a ATI 9600 XT. But there was a problem: My poor ol' ancient MB (2 1/2 years old) couldn't give it the support that it needed. The card was trapped using a 4X AGP bus. So I decided that I would replace it. (I had been considering this for some time now, seeing as I didn't even have a USB 2.0 controller...) So I replaced it. The new board (A SOYO KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum) Was wonderful. SATA, USB 2.0, the whole nine yards. But there was a problem... I wanted to upgrade my aging HDD and install a new one so as to keep my data on a non-faulty drive. So I bought a shiny new 160 GB SATA 150 HDD. Well... Turns out that I may have made a mistake by accepting a new HDD standard before it really hits the mainstream. Seems that neither Windows, nor Linux 2.4 had integrated support for its exotic VIA and silicon Image SATA controllers. This meant that for Windows, I had to configure a special external RAID controller driver. And for Linux, I have yet to find a device module.

So I figured, "Heck, I still have the old 80 GB HDD, and I can have both the SATA and the E-IDE drives connected at the same time, so why not?" This is where I discovered the second problem. Turns out that the ultra schwea gigabit Broadcom Ethernet controller is also not directly supported by SOYO on Linux. Sad for me... :(

But I know that Broadcom has their own driver available for download, so I'll spend some time later and make a pass at installing the driver into a kernel so I can install the network version of Debian.

*Sigh*

I didn't have Linux on my desktop originally anyway, so the fact that it's not on there now isn't too important, it's just kinda inconvenient since I had kinda hoped it would be. ^.^;;;

"The power of DOS compels you!"

Mood: Disappointed

Of Radicalisim and Race

If you've been following my blog for a while now (or at least went back and read the archives) It should be reasonably clear that I have a bit of a liberal approach, and typically am critical of the current administration on many points including environment, taxes, and foreign policy. However I do believe that it's important to realize that I am not against a war on terror. Note: I said A war on terror. This is completely disjoint from the imperialistic conqurefest that the US has been engaging in since 9/11. Basically, the big problem comes from using a 20 lb mallet to drive in a thumb tack. The problem is that terrorism is an act done by a few individuals. The country of Iraq cannot commit an act of terrorism. When one country attacks another it has the common name of 'invasion'. You know, like the one Iraq did to Kuwait back in '90, or the one we did to Iraq in '03? See the problem?

However, terrorists, like Bin Laden, are total wakkos. They do need punishment. They need to be isolated and given their due. However, it's important not to forget that terrorism doesn't have a skin color or national origin. Consider, can you think of any terrorist acts that occurred during the Clinton Administration? You'd better be able too. There's the World Trade Center Bombing in '93 by Bin Laden, the US embassy Bombing in '98 by Bin Laden, and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 by Bin Laden. Hmmm... I'm thinking... Nope... Missed one... The '95 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Center by a radical gun totting white American citizen named Timothy McVeigh and his buddy Terry Nichols. True blooded Americans in the since that Jefferson had intended it. So why the heck are we so afraid of Arabs? I mean, consider: 86% of white victims were killed by whites (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics) and 94% of black victims were killed by blacks. For homicides committed by a stranger to the victim, 3 in 10 are interracial. This means that if someone you've never met before kills you, there's only a 30% chance that you will be killed by someone of a different race. And of all of the homicides, only 2% of them where done by Non-white/non-black people (Including Hispanics, Arabs, and people from the far east.) As it works out, a woman is far more likely to be killed by her boyfriend/husband/ex than she is to be killed by a non-white/non-black stranger.

This kind of discrimination is one of those things that bothers me.

Hah! They frisked Habib, but didn't even bother to check that white guys bag labeled "Warning! High Explosives!"

Mood: Irritated

Memes: Why not?

I was rummaging through some random blogs in blogspace and came across this person who had the answers to 5 questions in their blog. Further inspection showed that they where responding to a special kind of blog called a meme (A replicating idea that spread about weblogs.) So I figured, 'Why Not?' So I'll probably be responding to the Friday five every week (Probably on Monday or Tuesday) from now on, just to keep it interesting.

Friday Five
If you...

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
Things with rice, potatoes, noodles, cheese, and corned beef hash.
2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Bandwidth. (Yes, I aspire to run an ISP one day)
3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Hmm... Either Sci/Fi, Romance, or How-To
4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?
Circuit Theory
5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Trance and Delirium, mostly because you don't want to hear me sing.

But that will only come with another topic. ;)

Like this weeks alternative discussion: Bochs.

Bochs (Pronounced Box) is an IA-32 Processor and system environment emulator. In layman's terms, that means it is a PC emulator. But why would someone like me, a PC user, even need such a program? The answer is actually very simple, I can emulate a linux console inside of the windows environment without having to reformat my PC. Can't get Knoppix to run on it (lol) but all of my boot disks work with it, and when I have the time I may try installing a full blown linux dist on it. The problem is that, like with any emulated system, the Emulated PC in Bochs runs MUCH slower than a real pc. So I figure it will take me about a day to actually install a minimum text install. But that's the way things go.

Really what makes me excited about this though, is that many of the older DOS only games like CIV I and the like have reopened to me. I can just make disk images, or directly map the the drive and run it in the console. I think I might try cranking up the IPS though, mostly because 500KIPS is actually really cruddy. But then again, I don't think that's the cause, I think it's just that emulating a PC on a PC is a daunting task. Well see when I get the time to mess with it. :)

Now what I really need is a VM system

Mood: Excited

Knoppix: Linux for the Non-Commited

"... and now on location is JimTheCactus, Jim?" "Thanks Diane,"

Well...I'm coming to you live from my latest little experiment: Knoppix. For those of you that don't know, Knoppix is a version of Linux availible for download that runs completely from a CD. It mounts all of your hard drives as read only, and with just a small bit of tweaking, can be configured to keep the home directory on an image file on a USB flash device, effectively allowing you to operate completely independantly of whatever OS is living on the HDD. Amazingly, Knoppix uses something that I guess is like virtual memory, except that it works in reverse. From what I've been able to discern, Knoppix has a compressed filesystem living in an image file that it seems to decompress and store on a ramdisk everytime a file is called for. This method is absolutely wonderful on systems with very large amounts of memory (like mine) but would be difficault to use if you had small amounts of ram. Mostly becase with less ram, you need a larger percentage of it to accomplish the role, but for systems like mine where it allocated 407 megs of ram and left me with about 128 megs of usable ram (Which I might add, it doesn't allocate all at once, but instead allocates it dynamically, allowing you to use more of it if you aren't using too much for file caching...)

In any case, this thing is frickin' sweet. I think I'm gonna shove this disk (Or a copy of it) into my laptop bag so I can use Linux when I want to on my laptop. Not that I recommend Linux to most people as a desktop platform, since it's really more intended for terminal and server use, but who am I to complain? ;)

This disk - is - frick-in' sweeeeeeeeeet!

Mood: Elated

The EU and the Borg: Is it too much?

Hello again my minions... Uh... I mean readers.

I am back from my stint in the FFXI world come to speak to you about an important topic; The EU's punishment of Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws.

Now don't get me wrong; Micro$oft is an evil corporation. I say this not because I support an alternative operating system. I say this because they behave under the same rules that are used to describe lawful evil in the D&D system. And I agree that Microsoft should be punished for their misbehavior as a business. In their attempt to rule the information technology universe, they have squashed literally hundreds of up and coming companies, as well as several major competitors.

But I?m not writing about how I agree with the EU, what kind of blog would that be? Instead I'm writing to discuss one of the many (and once before issued) punishments that the EU is considering: the separation of the browser and media player from the shell.

"Shell? What do you mean shell? It's an operating system, not a turtle!" Ah... Now we come to an important point that most people miss: Microsoft Windows Explorer, the part that we, the users, interact with, is a GUI written to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. This is an important distinction that anyone who's worked with the *nix clones is very familiar with. An operating system (like Linux) is really of no use without a shell like BASH or CSH or X Windows with an appropriate window manager (like KDE, a good choice for analogy that I'll refer to later). However, the 'integrated parts' that the EU might propose (and the US courts demanded) to be removed, are parts of the shell, not the OS. And, like CSH and BASH in Linux, you can change the shell that runs on Windows (anyone remember Norton Desktop for Windows?)

But this little semantic is far too trivial for my discussion; instead, I plan to approach a much more important issue. To introduce this, let's begin with a similar situation with slightly different details. Let's consider Ford Motor Corporation. Pretend that they developed a car back in the 80's. Then they took that car and tweaked it. As time went on they design a computer that can be used to display your car's location and other important information to the driver. Then some guy at Ford says, 'Hey, know what? We could integrate this new bit of hardware into the car to automatically control the transmission, which will let us completely remove the complicated hydraulic systems that are currently used to run it!' And the big shots pat him on the back as tell him to do it because it will save hundreds of dollars in the manufacture of the car, make the transmission lighter, easier to replace, and allow the driver to tweak their transmission without having to know a lot of gruesome details. Now, let's add in another variable; let's consider that Ford has been buying up all the other motor companies in hopes that they will be the only auto maker in the country, maybe the world. However, the government is wise to this plan and charges them with an anti-trust suit. As punishment, Ford may not include this new computer control system into their car, and instead must make the transmission not only work the way it used to, but also must make it possible for other companies to put their automatic transmission control systems into Ford cars, even though you could put in a new display computer without having to change out the old one.

There, now that we've setup the playing field, let's make the analogy. The transmission is the Shell, the computer control system is Internet Explorer, and Ford is Microsoft (duh...) Ok. Now, it should be clear to everyone who has ever done product development that by integrating I.E. a browser component into their shell, they could save themselves literally thousands of lines of code, hundreds of hours of testing, and millions of dollars. This would also give I.E. the ability to behave like a file folder for things like FTP, while continuing to be perfectly inter-compatible with the Shell, since they where actually the same software package. What the EU might ask them to do is start over and completely re-write the shell, completely excluding the I.E. integration. Based on this premise, KDE, a popular Linux window manager, should also be required to de-integrate the Konqueror software from their system. With KDE it's clearly a stupid thing to suggest, and is equally stupid to request that it be removed from Windows Explorer.

So why are they suggesting this? To be honest, I have no idea. If Microsoft had code in the API to make it impossible to write other browsers, I could understand a request by the courts to remove said code. But I happily have run I.E., Mozillia, Lynx, and Opera SIMULTANEOUSLY on the same machine (why? It's a long story...) No such code exists.

What? The transmission control system is sold seperately?

Mood: Rested and annoyed.