Austin City Council Condemns Federal Anti-Terrorist Measures

Dear Mr. Osborne,

We write to you to express our deep disappointment with your coverage of Thursday's Austin City Council meeting where hundreds of citizens took a stand against a keystone federal anti-terrorist measure, the USA Patriot Act.  Moreover, the Austin City Council has now also officially voiced opposition against the passage of the Patriot Act II.

And despite your extremely poor understanding of the importance of this event and your equally weak and inaccurate recitation of the revolt by former Texas Governor Bush's constituency against one of his most profound acts of federal legislation as President, your updated on-line piece is one of the most popular articles on statesman.com.

So though you and your editors, who relegated the piece to obscurity deep inside of Friday's newspaper, lacked the insight to recognize the significance of this event, your readers have not.

Coming from Northwest Arkansas, it is true that we are accustomed to a much higher level of journalistic quality than what is routinely produced by the Austin American-Statesman, but your piece falls far short of expectations that have been stunted by over two years of exposure to your Cox Communications' monopolist franchise.

Thursday's Austin City Council resolution signals a clarion call that power hungry politicians seeking to exploit the tragic events of September 11th should fear.  Thursday's event demonstrates that even voters deep in the heart of President Bush's home state are alert to the continuing assault on our nation's beloved Constitution and Bill of Rights by cynical power mongers currently entrenched in our government.

Championed by true patriots Jackie Goodman, Danny Thomas and Raul Alvarez, Austin's City Council resolution joins hundreds of similar official acts of rebellion by cities, counties and states across our great nation.  What once was a mere whisper into the ears of despots has grown into revolution.

The people of the United States will not allow our country to fall to either terrorists or to equally dangerous villains inside our government who pretend to protect us while savaging our rights and broadening their own powers.

Take heed politicians and media organizations who endorse the destruction of our republic through U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights butchering measures like Patriot Acts I and II and Total Information Awareness, we the People are on to you.

Sincerely,

Van and Kathy Smith

COSBI Source Code Coming Soon

We are adding important features...

id software: Intel Coconspirator?

A website recently released a controversial patch to one of the leaders of the 3d computer gaming revolution, Quake III. The website, NewAgeOC, claims that its dynamic link libraries (DLLs) boost performance on this veteran first-person-shooter for certain AMD processors by 30% or more. This significant performance gain is allegedly brought about by correcting SIMD optimizations in the Quake III engine for the AMD lines of Athlon and Athlon XP processors.

Quake3 (even with an Athlon XP) forces AMD chips to use 3DNow, not SSE. Little do people know the 3DNow! code is completely broken in Quake3. It does not help at ALL.

id software’s Quake III is not just a game, but, at least for marketing purposes, it remains perhaps the single most influential benchmark in the world. Historically the Intel Pentium 4 has dominated its AMD rivals on Quake III tests, one of the quirky processor’s most convincing and consistent wins. However, NewAgeOC claims that its patch boosts the performance of Athlon XP processors from trailing the Pentium 4 by significant margins to comfortably beating the Intel flagship.

 

These DLLs don't enable SSE but do help with Athlons.. and if SSE was to ever be enabled in Quake3 for Athlon processors they would blow Pentium 4 chips out of the water even more. In the tests I ran a P4-2.53 @ 3.32GHz, 175/700fsb lost to a "stock" Athlon XP 2700+(2166MHz, 166fsb) using these dlls...

NewAgeOC fuels controversy by claiming that the AMD fix was deliberately held back by the leader of id software, John Carmack, prompting some to call for a boycott against the influential game maker.

These [DLLs] were intended for an official AMD patch however John Carmack wouldn't allow AMD to use the dlls unfortunately.

With cynicism still elevated from last year’s BAPCo scandal that we triggered on our site by exposing a bombshell AMD presentation, it is easy to assume the worst from an industry that provides more than its share of intrigue and deception. No doubt, biasing Quake III in favor of Intel processors would be a major marketing advantage for the Santa Clara, California-based chip Goliath.

 

We decided to test the patch for id software’s Quake III and determine if the DLLs do, in fact, help the relative performance of the Athlon XP in comparisons with the Intel Pentium 4.

% improvement with patch	QIII Setting	AMD Athlon XP	Intel P4	VIA C3-Nehemiah
GeForce FX 5200	1024x768x32	0.42%	0.51%	Not run
	fastest	10.98%	10.49%	Not run
GeForce Ti 4800SE	1024x768x32	8.73%	6.82%	8.36%
	fastest	10.72%	10.77%	10.26%
Radeon 9700 Pro	1024x768x32	9.21%	6.80%	8.24%
	fastest	12.29%	10.17%	9.69%

Our tests indicate that the new DLLs do indeed significantly boost the performance of the AMD Athlon XP on Quake III benchmarks. However, the benefits we saw for AMD’s chip topped out just over 12%, which is well short of the 30% or more that some have claimed for this patch. Moreover, the DLLs accelerated the Intel Pentium 4 and the VIA C3-Nehemiah by almost the same degrees.

 

From this informal observation, it appears that those fearing an Intel-id conspiracy can, with fairly clear conscience, reinstate their orders for Doom III. NewAgeOC’s DLLs appear to elevate performance across the board for chips from all major vendors by similar amounts. This suggests that the performance gains are obtained from the use of newer and better compilers rather than fixing a processor specific coding bug.

 

On the other hand, NewAgeOC’s DLLs do seem to be quite a bit faster than id’s. Gamers interested in wringing out the best performance possible might want to take a look at them.

 

id software's John Carmack was not available for comment at press time.

NAZI Reloaded

The scenes from a long forgotten World War II documentary have great resonance in a modern world slipping rapidly towards an ironic and eerily similar fascistic fate.

 

Renowned for popular motion pictures like It's a Wonderful Life, Meet John Doe and Arsenic and Old Lace, director Frank Capra also made a series of "moral-boosting" documentaries for the U.S. War Department.  Prelude to War, Capra's first of seven entries in the Why We Fight progression, has been released on DVD by Platinum Disk Corporation and portrays the events leading up to World War II.

 

The intense irony of the images contained in the 12.9MB video file linked above requires no commentary especially in light of recent news events.  You will need DivX (BEWARE! the Adware version comes with Gator, a spyware infestation) or other MPEG4 player to view the brief yet powerful scenes that we captured from the Capra documentary.

COSBI Source Code Coming Soon

Sorry for the delay.

Anthrax Vaccine Consequences

On the 7th of this month, we mentioned a UPI story suggesting that the U.S. Army vaccine program might be responsible for recent mysterious and lethal pneumonia cases suffered by American troops in Iraq.  John Bloch sends to us a sobering account of side effects of the Army's Anthrax vaccine program:

I am renovating my house and the plumber informed me about his problem with the Army's vaccines.  Turns out that following the anthrax vaccine, which was injected into his buttock, he developed intestinal cancer.  

Just as a coincidence, several members of his squad developed the same condition at the same time.  Last time I talked to him in March 03, he had surgery to remove 1/3 of his intestine and was prescribed to take heavy medication.  In his words, "With all the complications, I wish I would just die so that I can end the suffering and finally have some peace. I stopped taking the medication.  I look forward to dying".  Of course the army is doing everything it can to cover this up.  As they typically do.

The United Nations, A Global Corporation's Best Pal

No case is too small or too trivial for the globalists.

 

Perhaps one day the U.N. will mandate that all people wear flatulence detectors (sounds uncomfortable) so that our planet can be "protected" from the harmful global warming effects of eating too much cheese.  Don't laugh, New Zealand has already proposed taxing farmers for livestock flatulence in order to abide by the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol.

 

Those who worry about global warming should study paleontology.  The earth has been much, much warmer and wetter than it is today and life thrived.  In fact, we are currently at the tail end of a series of ice ages and the earth's average temperature is still below normal.  Perhaps those chanting global warming Armageddon should adopt the mantra "Preserve the Ice Age."

Bits & Bytes

Van looks at the oh-so-hot Prescott, the chilly-willy Banias, Linux, PocoMail and more.

COSBI to be Released under GNU GPL

Within the next week, we will be releasing on this site all of the source code to COSBI, our free software/open source benchmarking initiative, under the GNU General Public License.

Transmeta Article Popular

By and large, our hosting service has been excellent, but its usage reports are pretty poor.  We can download the daily log file for our site, combine it with older files and process them together, but we have never bothered to do so especially since the original daily reports that Tera-Byte provided were good enough.  About a year ago, the reports changed dramatically and it is now hard to get any useful information out of them.

 

However, it appears that we had at least 125,710 hits last month for the Transmeta article that we published on July 15th.  Since we do not break our articles up into many pages nor make them uncacheable, this is roughly equal to one-million hits on some other hardware sites.  A million-hit article is considered to be very, very good even at the largest hardware sites.

 

While that is a long stretch from being our most popular article ever, given that we were closed down for a year, the popularity of that piece is humbling.  Thank you for your patience and your loyalty.

 

We have never responded to many, many emails sent to us after we closed the site last year.  In fact, I still have not read hundreds of these letters because they tear my heart out -- and it is still very painful to view them.  I apologize for our unresponsiveness, but we were simply overwhelmed by the circumstances of last year.

VHJ Will Not Be Reviewing the Athlon 64

AMD's Damon Muzny informed us that we will not be getting an Athlon 64 system to review for the September launch.  We know expectations are high for our assessment of AMD's most important product ever and we apologize to our readers for this disappointing development.

AMD's Coatue Acquisition

In addition to the main link above, Keith directs us to here, here and here.

Was 9/11 Allowed to Happen?

Terry sends us this link.

Smart Stamps

Mike points us to this old, but overlooked article .

Transmeta TM8000 is now "Efficeon"

"We looked at lots of different versions of Astro: Astrino, Aztro," he said. Unfortunately, many of the Astro trademark variations were owned or controlled by Hanna-Barbera, creators of "The Jetsons" cartoon. Astro was the family dog on the show."

Global Warming Apocalypse Sanely Refuted

Speaking of Flickerdown, a few of the most thoughtful posters on the Internet still frequent its forums.  One of my favorite writers there is the not-so-evilpaul who started an interesting thread regarding global warming.  He cites an article that takes a step back from the global warming debate and refreshingly frames it within the lifespan of the earth.

New Affiliates

We welcome 4peeps.com and Flickerdown.com as affiliates.  Flickerdown started as our message board service.  We wish them luck.

Why America Lost the "Civil War"

Dave sent us this Southern perspective quite a while ago and it applies to our current times.

"Pretty Slick," Phillip K. Dick?

Valis send us this.

Microsoft Outsourcing?

TM points us to this simian software source.

Fluoride

I once thought water fluoridation opponents were nuts, but this article presents convincing arguments against dumping sodium fluoride, a hazardous byproduct of the fertilizer industry, into our drinking water.

"Our members' review of the body of evidence over the last 11 years, including animal and human epidemiology studies, indicates a causal link between fluoride/fluoridation and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment and bone pathology. Of particular concern are recent epidemiology studies linking fluoride exposures to lower IQ in children.

Little Boy Needs Help

Sid Sawyer of 4peeps.com has just told me that an owner of the site has an eight year old nephew, Kevin, suffering from cancer affecting his spine. You can read about it here and here.  Please pray for the little boy.  The hardware enthusiast site is also collecting donations to buy gifts for young Kevin.

Federal Government Still Stealing Indian Children

...a long and ignoble history.  Yet another reason to reduce the size, power and scope of an American government that has grown to menace the freedoms of its own citizenry.

Goodluck, a Navajo, said there also may have been a cultural issue.

She said she was "upset" by the inquiry. "The social worker kept asking for all this information. She would ask me all these questions when we were alone, then stop when someone else walked in the room. If I didn't tell her what she wanted, she threatened me. She said, 'I'm going to take your kid away.'

"She said the doctors were concerned about my homelessness, but my friend took pictures of our house and brought them in. It's so stupid. I gave her all the information. I don't know what she was looking for."

COSBI CPUSpeed v0.91

Need to detect throttling?  Perhaps you want to graph the dynamic frequency transitions of your new laptop as it runs through a gauntlet of applications.  COSBI CPUSpeed can help by graphing the CPU frequency over time.  This data can then be saved to a CSV file so that frequency performance can be easily transferred into spreadsheets.  There are other goodies built into this utility that we will describe at a later date.

Vaccines Possibly Killing U.S. Troops

Vaccinations might be responsible for the recent outbreak of lethal pneumonia suffered by American troops in Iraq, a UPI news story reports.  A Mayo Clinic coroner listed on his death certificate for one deceased soldier "post-vaccine" complications as a possible cause of death.  This follows only days after our recent news item highlighted the dangers of the CDC vaccine regimen prescribed for American children.

A VIA Royal Wedding

VIA Technology founder Cher Wong marries VIA Technology CEO Wen-Chi Chen.  These Christian ties that bind, let no man put asunder.  Best wishes and prayers to the newlyweds!

Vaccination Dangers Erupt from "Corrupt" CDC

A recently published UPI investigation harshly criticizes the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for "a pattern of serious problems linked to vaccines recommended by" that organization.  The report also discloses the close ties between the powerful government agency and the giant pharmaceutical companies responsible for vaccine production.

 

According to the study, in the last four years two CDC endorsed vaccinations were pulled off the market after "a number of infants and adults appear to have suffered devastating side effects, and some died."  The UPI story also uncovered direct financial connections between members of the CDC's Vaccine Advisory Committee and vaccine manufacturers.  The story also maintains that the CDC is "in the vaccine business" with 28 licensing agreements for vaccines and vaccine related products.

 

Yet in spite of mounting evidence of the dangers that the out-of-control CDC vaccination program poses to our nation's delicate youth, politicians, like Texas State Representative Jaime Capelo, are working hard to force these vaccinations upon all children.

 

A lawyer who, like former Texas governor Bush, attended Yale University, Capelo is using his position as head of the Texas House Public Health Committee to introduce legislation that would effectively mandate all vaccinations for all school age children in his state.

 

While there is little doubt that some vaccines have been successful in controlling the spread of disease, there is also no doubt that vaccinations carry varying risks for serious side effects.  Vaccination risk is underscored by the fact that very few in the medical community have rolled up their own sleeves to accept the smallpox vaccination program pushed by the Bush administration.

 

The state of California has experienced a very real and very well documented explosion in autism rates over the last two decades.  A debilitating and irreversible brain disorder portrayed in the movie Rainman, autism is believed by many to be directly associated with the barrage of nearly forty vaccine doses commonly administered to children before the age of two. 

 

According to some studies, autism rates have increased by as much as tenfold in this twenty year period.  The rise in autism rates coincides with the CDC's doubling of endorsed vaccinations.

 

Specifically, the mercury based vaccine preservative thimerosal has been singled out as a possible cause for the vastly increased incidence of autism in recent years.  Just weeks ago, a study led by Louisiana doctor Amy Holmes released findings that support the connection between autism and exposure to mercury, even at very low levels.  And according to the UPI exposé, vaccinations have exposed American children to up to 125 times the mercury limits set by the EPA.

 

"It is just too damn toxic," says Boyd Haley, chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky.  "You can't do a study showing it (thimerosal) is safe," Dr. Haley maintains in the UPI investigation.  "I know that they (the CDC) knows and that is what bothers me more than anything else," he stated.

 

Disturbingly, through the Homeland Security Bill, U.S. President Bush attempted to protect drug giant Eli Lilly from a tidal wave of lawsuits erupting from parents who believe their children have been poisoned by the mercury-based vaccine preservative produced by the global pharmaceutical goliath.

 

Few would argue for the elimination of all vaccinations, but it is now obvious that parents must be allowed to make decisions about what levels of risk their children are exposed to through so-called "immunizations."

 

If lawmakers like Texas State Representative Jaime Capelo get their way, state governments will enforce vaccines regardless of the risk involved.  No doubt, lawyer Capelo, who has been recently accused of commercial bribery for allegedly accepting a $100,000 kickback from CITGO Petroleum, was pleased with a recent UK high court verdict forcing two mothers to vaccinate their four and ten year old year old girls for measles, mumps and rubella. 

 

Passage of Capelo's vaccination initiative would effectively require the state of Texas to play Russian Roulette with every child inside its borders.  And there is no doubt that many -- perhaps many thousands -- of Texas's children would lose this devastating game of chance.

 

"Educate, don't mandate" is the much more intelligent alternative to forced vaccinations.  Educational programs promoting continued studies by independent research groups into the merits and risks of vaccines should become the focus of national, state and local government bodies concerned with boosting immunization rates.

Carbon Black: TIM in Time?  

Migrating to 90nm process technology is going to be tough. For instance, Intel is finding that Prescott, its soon-to-be-released successor to Northwood, is going to be a lot hotter furnace than the CPU maker anticipated. Not only will Prescott exceed the Northwood core by >20% in the heat it produces, but Prescott has a significantly smaller die. Together this means that Prescott is going to have much, much greater thermal densities than current P4s, which already produce more heat than any other desktop CPU.

One advancement that might begin to help tackle Intel's skyrocketing Prescott thermal density problems is a new thermal interface material (TIM) based on carbon black, a material used to reinforce rubber and make pigments. The developer claims that its carbon paste TIM "surpassed the pure metal bond in thermal conductivity by 33%." If accurate, carbon black pastes will greatly surpass existing thermal interface materials.

Supposedly cheap to produce, carbon black TIMs won't be a panacea for all thermal density problems, but it might become a necessary requirement for some 90nm, 60nm and smaller-process based CPUs.

COSBI Orthogonal Threads v0.11

Sharing neither code nor data, threads in the COSBI Orthogonal Thread Benchmark represent a best case scenario for obtaining perfectly linear scaling in SMP environments.  Scores are currently normalized against a 1.7GHz P4-Celeron Dell system (=1000), but this will be changed to fit in with QuickTests where these tests will be absorbed into the next version of that test suite.  All COSBI benchmarks have been tested in WinXP, but they should all work within Win98SE, although the system information module may display an error message in that OS at the startup of some COSBI programs.

COSBI FileCopy v0.52

Unlike many disk tests, COSBI FileCopy v0.52 is a real-life benchmark and has direct relevancy for everyday work.  COSBI FileCopy creates a randomized file and copies it.  Both file creation times and file copy times are tracked.  Scores are normalized against a 2.53GHz Dell Pentium 4 system using a 20GB 7200rpm ATA100 Seagate Barracuda drive.  This system scores 1,000 on all tests.  Gratitude to Dave Graham for his input which helped refine this benchmark.  Dave has used COSBI FileCopy in several of his hard drive reviews at AMDZone.  All COSBI tests are still under development, so if you find any bugs or have any advice for improvements, please let us know.

COSBI MemLatencyPlus v0.61

Want to know the impact of altered cache set associativity on a new CPU design?  Does a new memory technology or memory controller or cache line length have drawbacks or advantages on memory latency?  MemLatencyPlus puts real life latency impacts of memory subsystem designs under a magnifying glass.  Poor performance on MemLatencyPlus is usually a good predictor of lackluster database throughput and sluggish business application performance.

COSBI BandwidthBurn v0.82

More memory bandwidth tests are added, larger cache sizes can be tested, the background image can be changed and various usability tweaks set this version of COSBI BandwidthBurn apart.  BandwidthBurn is an indispensable tool for understanding a computer system's memory performance characteristics.

COSBI QuickTests v0.60a

This version of QuickTests adds pi calculation, Dhrystone and whetstone benchmarks.

The Passion

The Son of God, spiritual perfection in human form, and look what we, humanity, did to Him. Are we any more receptive to His Message of love and selflessness today? Link courtesy of Flickerdown Hardware. The QuickTime trailer of Mel Gibson's new movie takes a minute or two to download. If you have problems with the main link, we are also hosting the 23MB file here.

Tracking Transmeta

In our first major article in nearly a year, we closely examine the merits of the struggling, brash little CPU designer and its chances to reverse its fortunes with an ambitious new design dubbed "Astro."

The Miracle at Dunkirk

Finding God in war, my late father penned this true story about twenty-five years ago.

The Fall of Baghdad

Baghdad has not fallen, but a new, terrible war has begun.

 

Coalition forces have recently entered the besieged Iraqi capital of Baghdad encountering only token resistance.  With over a hundred-thousand of Iraq's best trained and best equipped soldiers poised to protect Baghdad, many experts foresaw a protracted siege of the massive city as inevitable. Consequently, the rapid melting away of the Iraqi military along with the complete disappearance of Iraq's command and control apparatus have prompted the U.S. and its mass media organs to triumphantly declare the fall of Baghdad.

 

However, the behavior of the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units tasked with the defense of the ancient capital is incongruous with the fanatical resistance Coalition troops encountered against lowly conscripts and militia in southern Iraq earlier in the war.  Moreover, the total evanescence of the inner circles of Saddam Hussein's government points to a preplanned strategy to take the war underground and onto the streets.

 

Despite the awesome might and accuracy of the American war machine, in terms of human material resources, the Iraqi military remains almost completely intact, although in apparent disarray.  From a strategic point of view, the Iraqi military stood no chance in traditional warfare against an enemy dramatically better equipped, but in protracted low level engagements stretched out over months and years, Iraqi attacks will find a much higher rate of effectiveness.  It makes sense for the Iraqi military to shift this war into an unconventional arena if victory is their end game.

 

Cutting off the head of the Hussein regime might prove to be difficult because mounting evidence suggests that at least some of its elements have reached sanctums in nearby sympathetic states. Saddam Hussein himself might have been spirited away in a recent Russian convoy from Baghdad to Syria.

 

For America, we may now face the worst possible outcome as a million strong army of subversive holy warriors fight for their sovereignty directed by shadowy leaders tucked away in untouchable and unseen refuges.

 

This is the war of the 21st Century.  This is World War III and it will reach deep into America.  And this war is a direct result of neo-Colonialism: a power grab for the Black Gold erupting from the navel of civilization.

 

Distortions of the conditions inside of Baghdad are reckless and premature.  We must now, more than ever, demand accuracy and honesty in the media.  And if the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to comply, then we must establish our own news reporting channels.

 

With over 90% of the Iraqi military's human material assets still intact and perhaps now focused on a bloody guerilla war, Iraq might well turn out to be Somalia magnified a thousand times.  But worse, if we did not before, we now face a very real terror war that will be waged on our soil. 

 

And the American people will be attacked on two fronts: from the terrorists themselves and from zealous opportunists inside our government seeking to expand their power while stealing our liberties and God given rights.

 

Pray for America and fight for Truth and Freedom. 

VIA's MPM and Antar at CeBIT

VIA Technologies is showing off samples of an innovative Multi-Package Module, or MPM, at CeBIT.  The VIA MPM, pictured above, integrates the tiny Nehemiah C3 core onto the same module as the North Bridge thus enabling even smaller form factors than VIA's famous mini-ITX.

 

The linked mycom pcweb article also discloses some information on VIA's upcoming Antaur mobile processor.  The Antaur shown in the article is in an EBGA package similar to what VIA uses in its popular and diminutive EPIA line of motherboards.  EBGA stands for "Enhanced Ball Grid Array" where processor pins have been replaced by solder balls and the package shrunk accordingly.

New Mexico's House of Representatives Takes Stand Against Patriot Act

In a remarkable show of unity and courage, New Mexico's House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation putting the state on record as opposing many provisions of the Patriot Act.

 

"Terrorist attacks changed the way we live but should not invade our freedoms that Americans enjoy and the reason why our country was founded," Coll said.

 

Bravo!  Now let's see if the New Mexico Senate has as much backbone.

Did the U.S. Set Fire to Kuwait's Oil Fields?

A popular radio program heard worldwide claims to have proof that the United States, working under the auspices of the United Nations, was responsible for igniting the massive oil field fires in Kuwait at the close of the first Iraqi war.  The controversial talk show team of Joyce Riley and Dave VonKleist host the Missouri-based program "The Power Hour" which is carried mostly by independent and "patriot" radio stations.  The program boasts an audience of several million listeners.

 

The duo has provided a transcript of an interview recently conducted with a Gulf War veteran who alleges that he participated in the covert detonation campaign of Kuwaiti oil wells, crafted to implicate Iraq, in order to "remove any doubts that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a terrible evil that had to be dealt with."  This mission was allegedly necessary because "there was concern that America... might see this conflict as an unnecessary thing."

 

The talk show hosts, who gained notoriety for championing causes supporting Gulf War veterans, assert that this interview is bolstered by other independent testimonials they have received.  "The information provided over a series of meetings with this veteran corroborates the reports from other veterans who are totally unconnected with this individual," the duo states in their press release.

HyperThreading, Hammer, and Hot Peppers

Nils offers his always interesting insight and ends on a mysterious note.

Handle Terror the Nils Dahl Way

No duct tape here.