P4 Meltdown A False Alarm?

John Oram sent me a link to a bit Charlie wrote at Mike's inquirer showing an LGA Pentium 4 that had welded itself to the motherboard contacts.  Charlie suggested that the catastrophe was due to a thermal throttling failure.

 

However, I think this P4 disaster doesn't have anything to do with thermal monitoring. The burn patterns do not originate from the die, but from the contacts.  If the die produced the heat necessary to melt the metals in the pads/contacts as shown in the photo, then all the inner contacts would have been destroyed first and the package would almost certainly be scorched from the inside out.  Also, the package itself has residue primarily along its edges and none under the the die itself.

That wrecked CPU was almost certainly destroyed by water leaking into the LGA socket and shorting out contacts and triggering electrolysis. Considering that the water cooler failed prior to the problem, this explanation makes the most sense.

The Mysterious, Disappearing C7-M Article is Back!

Albeit with a few edits.  It seems that "controversy" is my middle name!

Van Pens VIA C7-M Article

An article that I wrote about the VIA C7-M processor has been published today at VIA Arena.  VIA's itty-bitty, 90nm IBM SOI x86 CPU holds a lot of promise for notebooks, Microsoft Origami, handheld PCs, thin clients, blade servers, network attached storage and other applications where low heat and ultra low power draw are important.

Milosevic Found Dead in United Nations Prison Cell

The odds are favorable that the former Serbian president was assassinated.  His lawyer claims that Mr. Milosevic's death might be due to poisoning.  However, the UN is refusing to permit a medical team selected by Mr. Tomanovic, Mr. Milosevic's lawyer, to examine the body.  Despite the pointed conflict of interest, the UN is only allowing its own team to perform an autopsy on Mr. Milosevic.  While government minions across the world chant the mantra, "nothing to hide, nothing to fear," as they roll out a global surveillance state, the UN leadership demonstrates it has no intention of applying such notions on itself.

 

So was Slobodan Milosevic guilty for crimes against humanity?  When a man is constantly attacked in the mainstream media, as this posthumous article further demonstrates (while trying to make death by natural causes seem plausible), the truth is probably far from what we have been told. 

 

With his death, the UN International Criminal Tribunal charged with determining his guilt will prematurely disband near the end of lengthy proceedings that have dragged on for over four years.  Despite UN prosecutor's claims to the contrary, some court reports indicate that Mr. Milosevic often humiliated his UN adversaries.  Mr. Milosevic had subpoenaed President Clinton to appear as a witness, which, if successful, would have forced the former U.S. President to testify at the Tribunal before the defense rested its case this coming summer.

Buy Our House! SOLD!

We have made an offer on a house and can now be more aggressive about selling our 3288 sq. ft. (quoted from plans) home in Round Rock, Texas, the eighth safest city in the U.S. according to Morgan Quitno Press, an independent research firm quoted by CNN and other media outlets.

 

Our loan is assumable, so the total cost to the buyer for our four-year-old home should be well under $158,000.  Please visit the link above for more information.

What Gives With Google?

For many years a Google search for "Van Smith" would logically yield Van's Hardware Journal as the number one hit.  Although we have not been very active in recent years, we at one time had a quarter-million unique visitors each month and we still have a PR6 ranking.  Very recently, a friend indirectly brought to my attention that our site was still landing at the top of Google searches for my name.

 

But no more.

 

Although Yahoo searches still return this site at the top of a "Van Smith" search, starting in the last couple of weeks or so Google suddenly doesn't list our site at all on the first search page.  Instead, very obscure links appear at the top of the list including a strange pro-Iraq War hit at number 2.

 

At the time that I made the original Google discovery a little over a week ago, MSN still returned our site at the top of its searches.  However, now it does not.  In fact, our site does not show up until the fifth search page with even secondary links from the OSMark forums appearing ahead of VHJ!  Such a reordering is plainly illogical.  

 

So in the course of a couple of weeks, our website has suddenly gone from the number one hit when conducting a directly relevant search to becoming deeply buried by two major search engines.

 

Google has recently come under scrutiny for agreeing to censor searches in China.  This practice has escalated with the search giant banning a mainstream news website from its worldwide search engines.

 

Is Van's Hardware Journal now falling victim to rejiggered search engines designed to bury politically sensitive websites?

 

In any case, once I finish moving my family, I intend to gradually revitalize this site.

'Homeland Security' Opening Snail Mail

And to hell with the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.  The Constitution is "just a #$#$ #$&%# piece of paper!" our leaders appear to believe.  Mainstream Propaganda Media declares the Constitution a "living document" and that strict interpretations are antiquated.

 

Of course, we all have known since the "Patriot Act" that Big Brother Uncle Sam considers all of our email to be his property.  Although the decree also violates the 4th Amendment, the Patriot Act allows, though color of law, Homeland Security to read any and all email sent by anyone to anybody.

 

I've wanted to write a "one-time pad" email program for a long time, but have not been able to get around to it.  The relentless march of our government towards tyranny renews that impulse regularly.

 

"One-time pad" (OTP) encryption is unbreakable if a source of truly random numbers is available.  Up until recently, a good source of "entropy" (randomness) was not widely available for personal computing applications.  Now, however, VIA's C3 and C7 processors include hardware-based entropy engines that are virtually fire hoses of random bits.  What's extra nice is that this entropy geyser is very easy to tap.

 

While there are a few programs that claim to use OTP, unless the key is truly random -- and the only way to reliably achieve this for large bitstreams is through hardware-based RNGs (random number generators) -- the ciphertext is potentially breakable.

 

If you know of any VIA-optimized OTP email programs, please let me know.

Giggling Elmo Asks Toddlers 'Who Wants to Die?'

The grim talking book for toddlers is reminiscent of Wal-Mart's Kid Connection branded, tugboat-shaped crib-toy that whispers into your baby's ear "I hate you" amid soothing ocean sounds.  What would "Buy America" Sam think of this?  Heads would roll, I tell ya, heads would roll!

Hit [F5], Go to Jail

What a "refreshing" felony.  Link gratis Jesse.

Follow the Money

John Oram writes "See if you find your local Democratic or Republican representatives listed at this site."

Border Agents Fired Upon Again

Our border with Mexico is a war zone.

Weather Modification Snafu?

A well defined number "2" appeared briefly in the eye of Hurricane Wilma as the storm made landfall on the south Florida coast last fall.  The Doppler echo structure is so nearly perfect that it is hard to imagine the "2" was a result of a natural phenomena.  Can anyone identify the font?

Beast System Propaganda

Slowly ramping up...  Hell will become a ski resort before this computer enthusiast "gets chipped."

 

Eisenhower, the late U.S. President who warned the American People about dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, is reported to have said, "History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."  Ike should have added "or the stupid" to that list.

Without God There is No Freedom

This is a note that I sent to a friend who frequently wears t-shirts bearing blatant Satanic slogans and who goes by Satanic monikers in some Internet communications.

Why don't you get "666" tattooed on your forehead and be done with it?  :)

Actually, the Mark of the Beast will be a microchip/device that you will be forced to have integrated onto/into your body that will allow the Beast to track and control everything that you buy or sell.  The chip will enable the Beast to monitor when you logon to your computer or to take this "privilege" away at his whim.  The Beast will know what you are viewing on the Internet and what you say to you girlfriend in your email.  Your chip will have to be scanned when you travel, when you check out a book at the library, when you go to the doctor and as you walk down the street.  You might very well even be monitored scrupulously enough so that the Beast will know when you enter or leave your house or when you get up in the morning and go to bed at night.  Nothing will escape his Eye, or at least that is in his plan known as the "Beast System."

Even in my most depraved, incoherent states, I can't imagine this sounding cool to anyone except our Overlords.  Our politicians, both Democrat and Republican alike, seem to be hell-bent on establishing the type of ubiquitous surveillance state required by the Beast.  Bush, through the Patriot Acts and various Homeland Security initiatives, is rolling out huge portions of the Beast System, so true Satanists worship Bush.  All others devil worshipers are simply pretenders.  Of course, I write that somewhat tongue-in-cheek knowing your antipathy for the current President, but there is literal truth in those statements...

The Beast seeks to abolish Free Will.   Christ brought to mankind a message that enabled true Free Will, the type of self determination that led to the birth of our nation.  Free Will requires Truth.  Free Will requires God.  Destroy one, you destroy them all.

Without God, without Truth, you are left with the rule of man which inevitably leads to enslavement. 

 

Without God there is no Freedom.

Christ knew what he was talking about, friend.  Christ was the Son of God.

Buy Our House! SOLD!

To our great disappointment, the arrangement that we had made for our move to a home in the country has fallen through.  Consequently, we cannot afford to sell our house for less than $165,000.

'OpenSourceMark Version 1 Beta 8b VIA Edition' Source Code Now Available

I have posted the full source code to OpenSourceMark Version 1 Beta 8b VIA Edition.  Please see the OpenSourceMark SourceForge project page.

Buy Our House! Now Marked Down!

We are moving and are aggressively selling our 3,288 square foot, four-year-old house on an oversized 120'x100' lot for only $165,000 $159,999.

'OpenSourceMark Version 1 Beta 8b VIA Edition' Now Available

I have posted a new version of OpenSourceMark on the OpenSourceMark SourceForge project page.  You can read more about the release here.

 

And, yes, I am happy to report that it looks like VIA will be using OpenSourceMark as a primary benchmark for promoting their new C7 processor.

 

The SourceForge site has been very unstable over the last week, so downloading the new release might require patience.  SourceForge has gotten a major facelift in the last couple of weeks, so that might be the cause of the recent site issues.

Buy Our House!

We are moving and are aggressively selling our 3,288 square foot, four-year-old house on an oversized 120'x100' lot for only $165,000.

'OpenSourceMark Version 1 Beta 8 VIA Edition' Now Available

I know that we haven't been posting much lately, but follow the link above to see one reason why we have been busy.  You can also get a sneak peek at VIA C7 performance numbers.

Nils Dahl: Nukes, Centaur and Kexi

This item is amusing only because it says, in part, exactly what I said some years ago - about Al Quaida making lots of its money from opium production in Afghanistan, among other things.  You might like to read a 'real professional intelligence expert's words' on the same thing.  After all, what the heck do I know?  Love all those Opteron supercomputers too.

 

And just fyi, I expect to buy a Centaur system late this year.  The motherboard will have to have Firewire and usb 2.0 - ideally - or I can get a card for Firewire.  Well, hopefully this year.  Should be fast enough to run the next build of Suse Linux.  Sometime soon, a database front end called Kexi will reach version 1.0 as a standalone app running under KDE - and that is what I want.  The Kexi version integrated into KOffice will come a bit later, as usual.

 

Oh, Kexi is supposed to be a clone of ACCESS that is somewhat easier to use.

 

I have updated my system.  I just got Opera 8.01 for the old pentium 166 computer.  Works a lot faster and better than IE 5 does.

-- nils dahl

 

Nils wrote the note above in mid-July.  A foreboding postscript to it is a follow-up article suggesting a possible nuke attack this weekend.

Happy 8th Birthday, Flora!

I love you.

Photo of the Day II

The same fireworks photograph that won Photo of the Day at Steve's Digicams for July 14th also won POD for July 18th over at the Imaging Resource.

Photo of the Day

I snapped a few fireworks photographs at CJ's Fourth of July party and sent one of the pictures to Steve's Digicams, a popular digital camera review site.  The picture won Photo of the Day for July 14th.  The unretouched, full-sized version of the 8-megapixel photograph can be found here.

 

I took the picture with a Minolta Dimage A200, an 8-megapixel fixed-lens digital camera.  The Minolta A200 is one of the best all-around "all-in-one digicams" (versus digital SLRs) available today.  Other noteworthy fixed-lens digital cameras are the Panasonic FZ20 and FZ5, and the Fuji FinePix F10.

 

A camera that could have been at the top of my list is the Canon PowerShot S2 IS, which, unfortunately, is hindered by excessive image noise.  Another camera that falls just short of the top is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H1 which is brought down by a relatively mediocre lens, reliance upon Sony's proprietary Memory Shtick Pro and excessive in-camera processing.

GtkPerf Benchmark Released

Marius sends us a link to what appears to be a promising benchmark for measuring GTK+ 2d user interface performance.  This Debian-based benchmark should also be helpful for testing Linux-based thin clients.  A few of GtkPerf's tests might be useful for porting to COSBI, especially the Linux version of OSMark.  The original link to Marius' news item is here.

COSBI Source Code Snapshot

Here is the full source code for OpenSourceMark v1 Beta 7a and all of the other COSBI programs.  I've got the OpenGL tests in this snapshot which I accidentally left out of Beta 6.  The zipped file is about 30MB.

 

To build the executables you will need to install the following freely available libraries:

• Graphics32

• ZipForge Personal Edition

• GLScene

The latest version of OSMark was compiled in Delphi 2005, but the program should also compile in Delphi 7 if you comment out the "Priority" method call for the thread classes.

 

If you just want to run the latest version of OpenSourceMark and don't need the source code, you can get it here.  You can read much more about Beta 7a in the May 27th and May 31st news bytes below.

 

If you want even more information about COSBI, please visit COSBI's forums.

C7-M Mobile Processor: Give it to the Ole' Guard

John Oram wants to get VIA's head honchos riled up.  He writes:

Today I was at a California city's police department. We are going to upgrade their desktop position computers and operating system for the Orbacom TDM-150 circa 1984 8086-class CPU proprietary radio control system.

So the "consultant" asks about using small footprint desktop computer. I said no problem. Only caveat I recommended is to add 2GB of system RAM whether they use W2k or XP with the proprietary software - which you could use with a 500MB hard drive and have plenty of room for temp files. Consultant and IT manager say "City has site license for XP" & I said go for it. Then the consultant tells me he is going to use a 2+GHz Intel P4 in the smallest Dell box. I said okay but it will get way hotter than other options now available like VIA C7-M.

Immediately he starts on a tear about non-Intel CPU's being incompatible with everything. So I stopped him and asked him the last time he tried a non-Intel CPU? He finally admitted he hadn't tried anything non-Intel in over ten years. I laughed at him and asked him how old his home refrigerator was? I changed the subject 'cause I could see he was not happy with me pushing him on his expertise in front of the head IT person for the city.

I am a part of the SurvPC discussion list. Where lots of ole' hardware buffs talk about making early iron work with later software (Linux & MS being primary). I get that same line of pigheaded nonsense from the list members who bought a 80286-8MHz or 80386-16MHz and had a minor issue. But really their "knowledge?" about a possible problem comes from an article they remember they read from some techy publication in that era.

Same sort of media fixation on a potential error like Intel had with the math calculations on one of their early 1990's CPU. By the way I never met anybody in state govt with big databases or engineering calculation software that had a replicate-able issue.

FUD is the life blood of the tech journals, bloggers, and is picked up as gospel by the pseudo-techy gatekeepers...

 

Maybe if we rile up Via's bosses, somebody could wake up to how the real world views non-Intel. Tell those high-paid not-invented-here folks to seed a few of their prize new toys into the hands of the really old journalist - the folks who were pecking at keyboards in the early 1980's. I can give ya names, but I'm sure you probably know 'em as well or better than me.

I go through this same daily waltz around the Maypole with the seven companies we rep for CA & NV.

The two of us at www.apogee.us can say "what ever" 'til we turn green in the face. Then have a prospect at a trade show or especially an existing customer, say the same blinkin' thing; Gabriel's Trumpets Blow, Spotlight in the sky come on, and, everybody in management goes "obviously them folks is brillant" - and skip over the fact we have said "what ever" for five years running at the top of our lungs :-(

Now whether anybody actually gets off their high-paid lazy backsides and DOES something; anything; or, even appear to think about a game plan to accomplish the ideas - that's a whole different kettle of fishes <BG>

As you can tell I get paid commission and do NOT like to lose any deals!

OpenSourceMark Used in Major Athlon X2 System Review

Bill O'Brien used the latest version of OpenSourceMark as his lead-off benchmark in his review of the CyberPower Ultra Workstation 3000.  See yesterday's news item for more about Bill.  You can download Beta 7a in that same news byte.

VIA Introduces The C7-M Mobile Processor

Perhaps even more impressive however is the unique Twin Turbo design which changes the power consumption and clock speed of the CPU on the fly according to the required CPU utilization. CJ Holthaus, Director of System Validation at Centaur Technology demonstrated this technology on a 1.5GHz system. When the system was idle the speed sat just under 600MHz. When he opened a CPU intensive program it shot up to the full 1.5GHz. But most alluring of all, when he opened an MPEG2 movie the MHz remained at 599.82MHz whilst still producing perfectly smooth playback. A member of the audience also bravely put his finger on the processor after the heat sink and fan had been removed. It was not hot to touch and CJ revealed that they were actually not needed. The C7-M is manufactured using the 90nm system-on-insulator (SOI) process to produce the tiny 30mm2 processor die which only requires minimal cooling.

Memorial Day

John Oram writes us:

I was in the US Army as a chopper crew-chief during the Vietnam Era. I watched grammar school friends go overseas to never return. I left the Army Reserves because I opposed how politicians rhetoric used "freedom" to defend their imperialistic facts.

The present Bush Inc administration has at its core the same people who were the political fools in charge during the Vietnam Era. Slowly, ever so slowly, facts are creeping out from under flat rocks that expose the out right lies of the petrochemical barons and their hired political henchmen.

The only light I see at the end of the present political tunnel is even some of my friends who were staunchest supporters of Bush Inc - no matter what absurd excuse he offered to justify his weird world views - say GWB has crossed over and sold his soul to the televangelism fringe bigots like Pat Roberts and Tom Dulay. Always remember no one is more self-righteous than a reformed; no matter what they are reforming from...

Felt and Colson

In an email to us today, James Blasius pens:

I am surprised that Chuck Colson, former Nixon staffer caught up in the Watergate scandal and now prison minister, is upset that Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI, helped root out Nixon's wrongdoings. ""When any president has to worry whether the deputy director of the FBI is sneaking around in dark corridors peddling information in the middle of the night, he's in trouble" he says.

I am disappointed in Colson. As the Bible says, a man can have only one master. In Colson's case, the choice is (or was) for Nixon or for the truth. If a Christian chooses another master than the truth, he is in serious danger.

"For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been carried out in God." (John 3:20-21)

James ends with a quote from Ephesians 5:11: "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them."

COSBI OpenSourceMark version 1 Beta 7a

This new beta version of OpenSourceMark corrects issues encountered with certain AMD CPUs when running the Mandelbrot test.  Specifically, I have reduced the thread count from 32 down to twice the number of logical processors in the system. 

 

Many thanks to Bill O'Brien for invaluable help on the strange, enigmatic and frustrating Mandelbrot headache.  In addition to running his own fascinating website, Bill writes for PC Magazine and CMP.  Back during benchmarking's more honest days, Mr. O'Brien crafted the original tests for PC Labs, the benchmark development shop for PC Magazine.  This means that Bill holds a place in the tiny pantheon of benchmarking demigods.

 

Scores from Beta 7a are comparable with scores from Beta 7 except for the mobile tests where the baseline system is now a Dell Inspiron 600M equipped with a 1.5GHz Pentium-M (Banias) and a 52.2 Watt-Hour battery.  The new mobile baseline reference system was necessary because the previous baseline, a 1.6GHz efficeon, had performance scores so low that the performance scores for all other systems became very large when normalized against the efficeon.  Therefore, with the efficeon serving as the reference system, performance was overwhelming the battery life component of the overall score for almost all other systems.  The Banias-based Dell notebook is a much more balanced and relevant baseline, especially since the Transmeta efficeon is essentially defunct.

 

If you find any bugs, please post them at COSBI's forums.

OpenSourceMark Version 1 Beta 7 fails on NVIDIA nForce 2

Bill reported a failure that he encountered in Beta 7 during the Mandelbrot test.  We have duplicated this failure only on nForce2-based motherboards, but no other north bridges have failed so far.  We have successfully tested Beta 7 on north bridges from Intel, VIA, AMD and Transmeta.

 

Bill also let us know of a bug in the Result Viewer with Intel chips having L3 caches.  The simplest workaround is to run OSMark from a batch file.  This will dump results into a file and exit the program when finished.

 

If you find more bugs, please post them at COSBI's forums.  You can download COSBI OpenSourceMark Beta 7 here.

COSBI OpenSourceMark version 1 Beta 7

I've updated OpenSourceMark quite a bit since beta 6.  Here is a list of changes in the new version (which can be downloaded from the main link above):

• The benchmark is now compiled in Delphi 2005 Update 3.  This is the first released build done in Delphi 2005.

• OSMark now uses the most recent GLScene and Graphics32 libraries.  The failures seen in Beta 6 when using the newest ATi Catalyst drivers are now fixed.  

• The following tests are newly threaded for Beta 7: BandwidthBP64 (memory bandwidth test using block prefetching along 64-byte strides), MemLatency (a memory latency test conducted across two 16MB integer arrays where random elements are copied from the source array to random destinations in the target array) and Encrypt/Decrypt (an AES encryption/decryption test using Gladman code).

• There are now three new tests, all of which are threaded and all of which were recommended by Kalumba: PNGOut (a popular utility for generating PNG image files), 7zip (a very popular archiving tool that provides extremely high compression levels) and Upx (a utility for compressing executables that are automatically decompressed at runtime).

• The Encrypt/Decrypt test is now normalized against a 1.33GHz VIA C3, which means that the VIA chip will get about 1,000 on this test.  While the rest of the tests remain normalized against a 3.4GHz HyperThreading Pentium 4-Northwood system, I set the AES test apart because the C3 is so much faster than the P4 at encryption/decryption that the overall score for VIA's processors were being skewed upwards by a large amount.  Consequently, the 3.4GHz P4 reference system now has an overall score that is slightly lower than 1,000 since its Encrypt/Decrypt score is now a puny 16.  You will find scores for the reference system in the Result Viewer.

• The Mobile Tests are now functional.  There are two mobile tests.  The "normal" test, which is run if "Max Power Draw" is unchecked, generates a performance score and then spawns an individual test, sleeps a minute, spawns the next test, sleeps a minute... until the battery is depleted.  If "Max Power Draw" is checked, the sleep periods are eliminated.  Both tests generate three scores: performance score, battery life score and overall mobile score.  The overall mobile score = ( performance score + battery life score) / 2.  The reference system is a Sharp Actius MP30 with a 1.6GHz Transmeta efficeon.  Additional instructions are shown when these tests are run.

• I've added theme music to the About page which can be called up by the respective button or by clicking on the logo.

• Dothan L2 cache size is now reported correctly.

• Athlon 64 Winchester cores are now identified properly.

• Threaded tests are now in red.

Thanks to its object-oriented design with fully encapsulated data together with its broad array of threaded tests, OpenSourceMark is one of the best benchmarks available for evaluating NUMA systems like those based upon AMD Opterons.  OSMark is also very useful for showing the performance benefits from the new dual-core CPU designs now appearing from Intel and AMD.

 

Don't forget that you can view graphs of individual test results by either clicking on the graph of the test result segment or by clicking on the grid column header for the test.  The grid also sorts results by the clicked test.  The normal graph is restored by clicking in the same place again on either the graph or the grid. 

 

Look at "sample_commandline.bat" to see how to script OSMark through 3 Official Runs.  Change "i" to a much higher number like 100 for a very robust system stress test.

 

We had thousands of downloads of Beta 6, but we still have not reached critical mass where this benchmark is used widely.  Please promote OpenSourceMark. 

 

I write and run benchmarks and analyze their results for a living.  As a veteran computer hardware analyst and as a CPU R&D engineer, I can honestly state that OSMark has matured into an outstanding benchmark that fares very well when compared with any commercial benchmark, while COSBI OpenSourceMark has the tremendous advantage of being 100% verifiable due its open source nature.

 

At work we have used OpenSourceMark to conduct experiments to dramatically improve processor performance.  We use it daily as a core benchmark for performance testing, functional testing, system level testing and stability testing.  We also use COSBI OpenSourceMark for debugging platform issues, performance optimizing platform settings and many other purposes.  COSBI OSMark has proven to be an invaluable tool.

 

And you can get it for free along with all of the source code.

 

Installing OpenSourceMark is quick and easy and doesn't contaminate system files and doesn't fool around with the registry.  Just download the zipped file and unzip the folder to wherever you want.  To run the benchmark, double-click on "CosbiOpenSourceMark.exe".  If you want official scores, click the "Official Run" button.  If you want the best scores possible, check "Process Idle Tasks" and "Defragment drive".

 

The reference scores were generated at a screen resolution of 1024x768x32 @ 75Hz.  As with nearly all benchmarks, screen resolution impacts scores.

 

I am planning for two more betas before the version 1 Gold.  The Beta 8 will incorporate the thin client test module.  Beta 9 will be for bug fixes, GUI polishing, documentation, integrated help, etc.

 

If you find any bugs, please post them at COSBI's forums.  And please help us out by contributing code to OpenSourceMark.

Arizona Declares Whooping Cough Outbreak

In March, we reported a whooping cough outbreak in the Austin, Texas area.  Since then, a few mainstream media stories have appeared on the subject.  In this latest article linked above, Arizona has declared a statewide whooping cough outbreak and is requesting $500,000 to combat it.

 

Whooping cough is caused by bacteria.  Also known as "pertussis," the recent outbreaks have been spreading northwards from states bordering Mexico.  Whooping cough had been very uncommon in the United States, but the influx of illegal aliens into border states has been vectors for this respiratory malady that can sometimes be fatal, particularly in young babies.

 

As we reported months ago, when we approached our doctor in January he refused to test our children for whooping cough despite the clear cut evidence that we presented.  We have since discovered that our experience is not unique.  Prior to the publicly announced outbreak, we have been told that a nurse in the Austin area recognized that her children had contracted pertussis, but her pediatrician refused to test them for the disease despite the mother's insistence.

AGEIA Supports Xbox 360 with Physics Libraries

AGEIA let us know that, in addition to the recently announced NovodeX Sony PlayStation 3 support, the company also provides equal support for the upcoming Microsoft Xbox 360.  The fabless chip designer is perhaps best known for its PhysX dedicated Physics Processing Unit (PPU) and the Mountain View, California company's NovodeX physics libraries are very powerful tools for game designers seeking to make a quantum leap forward in realism with next generation game titles.

 

Although details regarding the Xbox 360's processor are minimal, it is likely that the NovodeX toolkit will bring greatest benefits to the PlayStation 3.  The PS3's Cell processor design is highly parallel but very "loose" and utilizing all of the hardware resources requires difficult, explicit programming effort.  AGEIA's NovodeX physics libraries come to the rescue of PS3 game designers by tackling the headaches of Cell programming by providing rich physics effects essentially for free in terms of processing overhead.

 

While the Xbox 360's triple-core IBM developed processor is almost certainly a more balanced approach for a gaming CPU, the IBM-Sony-Toshiba Cell chip will likely allow the PS3 to eclipse the Xbox 360 in physics intensive titles.  With equal NovodeX support for both platforms, the physics performance delta between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will narrow, but, more importantly, AGEIA's contributions mean that it is more likely that game developers will include sophisticated physics effects in upcoming games since porting of physics code should be transparent thanks to NovodeX.

AGEIA to Develop Physics Libraries for PlayStation 3

In the upcoming battle between Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, a huge chink in the armor of the otherwise impressive sounding PS3 is the very loose parallel architecture of the IBM-Sony-Toshiba Cell processor.  Unlike the XBox 360's traditional 3-way multicore design that is easy to code to, the Cell processor will be difficult to utilize at anywhere near its peak theoretical throughput without very significant programming investment.

 

However, help is on the way.  AGEIA, the makers of a highly Cell-like physics processor dubbed "PhysX," has announced that it will be porting its powerful NovodeX physics engine to Cell.  With NovodeX, Playstation 3 designers should be able to easily add highly complex physics effects to their games without taking much of a performance hit.  Such optimizations should allow for startling levels of realism never before seen in the console gaming word and will likely raise the bar for what gamers expect from new gaming systems.

 

AGEIA's NovodeX libraries alone should ensure that PS3 titles will have superior game physics than any other contemporary console gaming system.

 

In software that does not leverage NovodeX, the Xbox 360 should easily trump the PS3 in titles that demand raw processing power, especially considering the write-once-port-many mentality necessary in the high-pressure game development world that makes it very difficult to budget the time and coding effort necessary to extract the potential from unique hardware like Cell.

 

With AGEIA's help, Sony's upcoming PS3 console has suddenly become much more competitive with Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Justice Day

National ID Card Passes 100-0

In a highly unpopular move, the United States House of Lords voted unanimously in favor of legislation calling for the establishment of a National ID Card.  King George is expected to sign the bill into law when it crosses his desk later this month.

 

Americans who do not obtain their Nation ID Cards will be faced with many restrictions.  In addition to being barred from driving, flying and train travel, they will also not be able to open bank accounts nor will they be allowed to enter federal buildings.  It is highly likely that nearly every aspect of living in the United States will be negatively impacted for those who attempt to resist the National ID Card since the card will likely be demanded in every big box retailer as identification.

 

Meanwhile, a Cessna 150, an airplane not much larger than a child's kite, puttered slowly into restricted airspace over the nation's capital causing widespread government initiated pandemonium.

Fight the National ID Card!

Contact your Senator.

Fascist UN Bars Taiwanese Journalists

Exposing the organization's fascist, globalist, feudalistic nature, only "formally registered" media existing in countries that are "recognized by the United Nations General Assembly" are allowed to cover UN events.

E-Mail Bombed

Several VHJ email accounts have been bombed by virus laden messages that appear to originate from an XO IP address in Massachusetts (possibly Cambridge, Massachusetts).  The huge number of 75kB messages is enough to fill up our email accounts in a matter of a few hours.
 

Consequently, many emails to us have bounced over the last few days.  If we have not responded to messages that you sent us during this time, please try to resend them.

Inq Drops the Ball with Rambus Commentary

Mike Magee's computer industry insider news magazine, the inquirer, is one of the few websites that I consider essential and I check that site several times daily.  I know Mike pretty well and in a business that is crawling with sell-their-mother-into-slavehood-for-an-ad-contract, deceitful moneygrubbers, Mike is an honest man and, in that proud, independent tradition, a good Scotsman. 

 

However, the anonymously authored Rambus piece posted yesterday on the inquirer is a disservice to Mike's fine organization.

Of those journalists who hammered Rambus back during the days of the Intel i820, Rambus' $500 a share cloud-walk and world domination delusions, my work probably hit the Mountain View, California-based company the hardest.  One of my articles was credited by Reuters, Bloomberg, MSNBC, etc. for deflating Rambus stock by more than $150 in a single day.

 

Contrary to the inquirer piece, I didn't write articles condemning Rambus because the company was arrogant, although many of its representatives certainly were.  I wrote my articles because I wanted our readers to know the truth.  My articles hurt Rambus so badly because the company lied all the time and many of the company's falsehoods were very easy to demonstrate, as were the fabrications spouted by those who peddled Rambus stock, a group that held truth in about the same lowly regards as Rambus did.

 

Perhaps worst of all, many Rambus investors were driven into a frothy feeding frenzy.  Dreaming of unlimited riches and seeing any Rambus critic as a threat to their treasure trove, some Rambus investors went over the edge sending an almost endless stream of abusive and even threatening emails.  When large sums of money are at stake, people can get very nasty.

 

Of course, some of the caustic email originated within Rambus itself.  Relatively recently I received an insulting note from Richard Crisp.  The good Mr. Crisp was perhaps the most important Rambus player involved in the JEDEC SDRAM scandal.  Mr. Crisp was Rambus' representative on that industry standards consortium and was therefore witness to his company's purported machinations.  Some allege that the Mountian View, California IP company deceived the other JEDEC members into incorporating Rambus patents into the emerging SDRAM and DDR SDRAM standards.  Worse still, some claim that Rambus later patented ideas discussed in JEDEC meetings.  In both cases, critics maintain that Rambus tried to then hold the entire DRAM industry hostage to these ill-gotten patents.

 

These allegations are consistent with Rambus' evidence-shredding behavior documented in court.

 

But much of my work focused on exposing Rambus's dishonest performance claims for RDRAM when coupled with Intel's torpid i820 chipset.  Moreover, Rambus and Intel colluded to suppress competing SDRAM technology that would have been both much cheaper and faster performing.

 

From the beginning, I pointed out the benefits of Rambus RDRAM technology like its lower pin count and higher per pin bandwidth.  But from a PC standpoint in the 133MHz FSB P!!! era, RDRAM was ridiculously expensive and underperforming despite Rambus' very loud claims to the contrary.  And their host organism, Intel, shouted just as loudly in pushing Rambus' agenda regardless of the where the truth may lie.

 

That is not to say that Intel always supported Rambus on every fronts.  Publicly, Intel was contractually bound to push Rambus at nearly all costs, but in private signals were not always so clear.

 

I remember an instance early in the history of the Rambus saga when I got the distinct impression that Intel wanted me to continue to expose their lil' parasite's tactics.  On a fine spring day in beautiful Springdale, Arkansas, I leaned against the counter in my kitchen while I argued over the phone with Intel's Minister of Desktop Processor Propaganda, George Alfs.  As I stared at the repeating pattern of squares set out by the white ceramic tile floor, George did what George always does: manipulate.  Perpetually wielding both the carrot and the stick (I think he broke his stick over my head several times while dealing with me through the years), George was harshly critical of a recent article that I wrote about Intel, yet was very complimentary about my Rambus work.  Intriguingly, the Rambus article was far more damaging to that company compared with the relatively minor impact that my Intel piece had on Chipzilla.

 

Contrary to the inq piece, it wasn't the company's failure to engage journalists nor its arrogance nor its naive ineptitude.  Rambus was skewered by several of us in the media because the memory designer had a blatant disregard for the truth as it unabashedly sought to conquer the DRAM market.  Greed and dishonesty mix to make a toxic cocktail and we wrote to protect our readerships from this poisonous brew.

 

The DRAM manufacturers' price fixing spider web is condemnable, but it has nothing to do with Rambus' dirty past.  Just because Pol Pot killed more people doesn't make Vlad the Impaler a nice guy.

 

So journalists from the inq and elsewhere, be mindful of the past and strive for accuracy.  Don't paint history with a euphemistic white wash.  If we do not preserve a faithful record of the past, we are abandoning one of our most important responsibilities and are betraying our readers as well as our own progeny.  In these critical times, we must hold onto the truth with all or our might.

Global Surveillance State Underway

Governments are building a "global registration and surveillance infrastructure" in the US-led "war on terror", civil liberty groups warned yesterday.

The aim is to monitor the movements and activities of entire populations in what campaigners call "an unprecedented project of social control".

Anti-AMD Austin-Area Environmental Group Should Join Minuteman Project

An Austin-area environmental group is complaining about chipmaker AMD's plans to build new headquarters facilities in Southwest Austin.  The group maintains that AMD's 60-acre parcel, currently zoned for commercial development by the City of Austin, is located over the Barton Springs Recharge zone and therefore threatens the local aquifer.

 

While most green groups readily agree that development and expanding population are the biggest menaces to our ecosystem, none has made the obvious connection that illegal immigration is therefore one of the single greatest threats to the health of the United States' environment.

 

Like much of Western Europe, the natural growth of the United States is relatively low, yet America's population continues to soar and a large component of this population growth is due to the rising influx of illegal immigrants.  Despite the American Government's so-called "War on Terror," our country's borders are as porous as ever.  Since 2000, the nation's illegal immigrant population has exploded from 8.4 million to 10.3 million a year ago despite a sagging economy.  If trends hold, that number is close to 11 million strong today.

 

Ignoring the impact to wages and job availability, 11 million additional people, contributing mainly to urban growth, have no doubt taken a toll on the American environment.  Since 14 percent of the illegal immigrant population is concentrated in Texas alone, that means that the Lone Star state bears a burden of an additional 1.5 million people that it would not otherwise have to support if America's borders were as secure as one would hope, especially if foreign terrorist dangers are as imminent as our federal government maintains.

 

The roughly one-million cars used by illegal immigrants in the state of Texas is, alone, no doubt significantly deleterious to the state's air and water quality. 

 

Of course, automotive borne pollution is small considering the amount of solid waste generated by 1.5-million people together with the pollution from power plants producing the energy consumed in their households.  And then there is the urban development required to house and supply this population along with the expanding road system required to carry the increased automotive traffic, all issues very near to the core that motivates the anti-AMD lobby.

 

Pragmatically, perhaps one of the most potent efforts that an environmentally concerned person should join is combating the human flood flowing over our borders.  This flood is rapidly pushing the illegal immigrant count up to 10% of Texas's total population.  This percentage is no doubt already much higher in the state's urban areas like Austin where the effects of overcrowding are manifest on the area's road system.

 

Consequently, the activist group calling itself the "Minuteman Project" might be the most potent, positive citizens-based environmental force in that state.  This group of activists is currently patrolling the southern Arizona border in what appears to be a largely successful effort to curb illegal immigration in that area.

 

So though they may initially seem strange bedfellows, the "Stop AMD" green group might find its interests better served it if linked arms with the Minuteman Project and began patrolling the Texas-Mexico border.

No king but King Jesus

U.S. Government Coast-To-Coast Sweep Arrests 10,340 in One Week

"Operation Falcon" imprisons over 10,000 people last week.

Pandemic Influenza Strain Sent to 5,000 Labs

Thousands of pathology labs across 18 countries are scrambling to destroy vials of a deadly flu strain sent to them for unknown reasons.

 

Samples of the dangerous 1957 H2N2 pandemic flu strain was sent from a U.S. company to 5,000 labs in 18 countries.  Nearly 99 percent of the laboratories are in the United States.  Included in proficiency kits routinely sent for certification tests, the reasons are unclear why Meridian Bioscience sent out a variety of influenza that killed between 1-million and 4-million people half a century ago.  The Cincinnati, Ohio based firm had been contracted by the College of American Pathologists to provide an influenza A sample from its stockpile for the kits, but for unknown reasons Meridian Pathology sent out the deadly 1957 strain.

 

Shipments of the kits began last year and ended in February.  The samples can be killed through incineration or by chemicals.

VIA Releases UniChrome Driver Source to Linux Community

In a move that will strengthen its position in the Linux world, VIA Technologies released the Linux and Xorg driver source code for its UniChrome integrated graphics cores.  The drivers work with VIA's popular CLE266 and new CN400 chipsets featured in the Taiwanese company's line of diminutive and feature rich miniITX motherboards.

Go, Matt, Go!

Arkansas's pride and joy quarterback wows the NFL with his unworldly athletic ability.  Here are the numbers:

• Height: 6-6¼

• Weight: 242

• 40 time (hand-timed): 4.37 and 4.39

• 40 time (electronic): 4.40

• Vertical jump: 39.5 inches

• Standing broad jump: 10 feet, 9 inches

In a cynical world hardened by the relentless onslaught of athletes involved in criminal activities, the only problem that Matt Jones got into at Arkansas was breaking curfew: prior to a road game, Coach Houston Nutt caught Matt up late in his room reading the Bible.

Centaur Beats Intel Again...

But finished behind National Instruments.

School Killings and the Explosion of Psychotropic Drugs

This brings us to 16-year-old Jeff Weise who, on Monday, March 21, killed his grandfather and his longtime companion, and then went to the school on Red lake Indian Reservation where he killed nine people and wounded seven before, like Harris and Klebold, killing himself. Weise was on Prozac, a medication for depression. Harris and Klebold were both on various mind-altering medications. Not only did they not help them, but the question is whether they may have actually contributed to these acts of murder? How many of the other young killers, dating back to 1997, were also being medicated? And, while we’re at it, how many young suicide victims were likewise being medicated?

Something is terribly wrong in this nation when we can experience a succession of seemingly senseless school killings and not begin to ask whether the national obsession with drugging an estimated six to seven million school children isn’t a contributory factor?

“Why is 80 percent of the world’s methylphenidate (Ritalin and Adderall) being fed to American children?” asked Dr. William B. Carey when he appeared before a House panel investigating the wide use of psychotropic drugs in 2003. “These drugs have the potential for serious harm and abuse,” noted Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-DE). “They are listed on Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act. “

Japanese Schoolbooks and Propaganda

It [a Japanese history textbook] refers to the Japanese slaughter of some 300,000 civilians in the Chinese city of Nanjing as an "incident", rather than the "massacre" it is known as elsewhere...

 

The seven other texts approved on Tuesday are also accused of dispensing with the kind of detail Japan's neighbours say is necessary for a balanced account.

Only one of the books gives figures for the number of civilians killed in the Nanjing Massacre, while the others say "many people" died.

Flu Vaccines Linked to Alzheimer's

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and some childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction.

Intel's Andy Grove Rabid from Flu Vaccine Shortage

"The flu vaccine — this is where I get rabid," Grove says in his deep, rumbling voice...

 

As a last question, I asked Grove if he got a flu shot. "Yes," he says. "I'm in the risk group."

Flu Shots Don't Decrease Flu Deaths in Elderly

A new study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine says that the increased rate of flu vaccinations since the 1980s have not shown any decrease in flu related deaths. In fact such deaths in the over 65s have actually increased.

Mercury on the Mind

Want to avoid both autism and Alzheimers? Then forget the flu vaccine and avoid dental amalgams

More on Whooping Cough Outbreak in Austin, Texas

Mary's family, mentioned below in the article confirming a whooping cough outbreak in the Austin area, has received the results from the health department's whooping cough tests.  All three of Mary's family members who were swabbed have tested positive for whooping cough.

ATi Radeon Catalyst OpenGL Bug?

We have confirmed an OpenSourceMark issue reported to us by Karl W. involving the two OpenGL tests.  When running ATi Radeon drivers version 6.14.10.6517, both the "Lorenz Attractor" and the "N-Body OpenGL" tests will fail at initialization.  We have also determined that the same problem exists across several other programs developed in GLScene, the Open Source library that we use to produce OpenGL tests.

 

Since OpenSourceMark has been successfully tested on virtually every modern video core from nVidia to VIA to SiS to ATi (prior to driver version 6.14.10.6517) to even the Geode GX, and because the problem has been shown to be broader than simply OSMark, this suggests that there is a bug in the latest ATi video drivers.

 

We have reported this bug to ATi, but have not received a reply yet.

 

Ironically, the OpenSourceMark OpenGL tests were developed on a system utilizing an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and ATi cores have fared well on these tests.

Whooping Cough Outbreak Confirmed in Austin, Texas

Following our notice yesterday about an evident whooping cough outbreak in the Austin, Texas area, we received the following confirmation from Mary today:

Apparently the whooping cough is going around the area.  There have been 7 confirmed cases in the past 2 weeks which is apparently high. I don't know where we got it from, but according to the Health Dept. we meet all of the criteria.  Two of my children and my husband were swabbed last week at the health department.  We're waiting for the results.  We haven't been out of the house since my son started coughing and 2 weeks later my youngest.  Which is good because this is when they are the most contagious.

We have also received an email from Lora stating that the health department is now conducting a whooping cough investigation of a music class that Mary's children attended.

 

Here are Kathy's remarks:

As I told several people over the last few weeks, I think that our entire family had whooping cough.

My doctor would not test us for it.

We went in at the end of February to the doctor, which is when I decided that our symptoms, by that time 2nd stage, seemed to be whooping cough.  Despite the overwhelming evidence for whooping cough, our doctor insisted that our girls didn't have the disease and would not test for it.  However, he treated the girls with Zithromax which is an antibiotic typically prescribed for whooping cough.

If we had whooping cough -- and I am virtually certain that we did -- I think that we picked it up sometime in January as Hattie showed classic symptoms of the 1st stage in the first week of February. She was treated that week with antibiotics.

Karl W. writes us:

I realize your concern for your kids but its OK. I had whooping cough when I was kid and was quite sick for a couple of weeks, in fact all the kids in my neighborhood had it at the same time (conveniently arranged by our parents). I was raised in England where whooping cough is just one of those childhood diseases that every gets, I have also had chicken pox and mumps (while young enough not to harm me reproductively).

The death rate from whooping cough (in 1st world countries) is lower than the death rate from the vaccine. And your kids will have a permanent immunity to the disease that can't be equaled from the vaccine.

I know you are terrified everytime they hack their little lungs up, just ease them through it and don't let them catch your panic. My mum swore by vicks vapor rub. In a couple of weeks they will be right as rain. That being said if they do appear not to breath or change color (blueish) call 911.

Finally, Mary writes:

So, if you or any  of your family members are experiencing a nagging cough which has lasted more than 3 weeks and you have never had a cough like this before, you might have need for concern.  It can be misdiagnosed as anything from asthma, bronchitis (in my youngest child's case), allergies, etc.  Here's a web page with tons of information: http://www.whoopingcough.net/main.htm.

Whooping Cough Outbreak in Austin, Texas?

Our children are recovering from a persistent cough that is very obviously whooping cough.  Strangely, our doctor insisted that the girls did not have whooping cough, when their symptoms absolutely indicate that he is wrong.

 

For many people whooping cough manifests as a lingering spate of coughing bouts.  For others, particularly small children, the coughing bouts can be very severe and accompanied with loud whooping sounds as they struggle to intake air -- breathing can become very difficult and is complicated by choking promoted by the thick mucous coughed up.  The coughing episodes can be very frightening to witness and can induce panic in those afflicted.  People can seem normal between coughing attacks, although energy levels are reduced.  The illness persists for about six weeks.

 

Whooping cough can be dangerous and the whooping cough vaccination is not very effective. 

 

We moved our children into our room at night so that we could care for them when they woke up in coughing fits.  We maintained 24-hour watch for several weeks on the two girls most severely ill.  We attempted to isolate Evie, who was initially not infected, and this seems to have helped greatly reduce the severity of her case.

 

When whooping cough is properly diagnosed, antibiotics are often prescribed to prevent bacteriological infection.

 

Whooping cough is sometimes misdiagnosed as "walking pneumonia" since large amounts of mucous are often coughed up and can be accompanied with a low grade fever particularly in the early stages of this malady.

Medical Freedom

A reader sends us this quote from Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence:

The Constitution of the Republic should make special provision for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic.

Terri Schindler-Schiavo and the Right to Die

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The extraordinary men who founded the United States chose their words carefully when they established this country, the greatest nation in the history of the world.  While our basic rights are enumerated in the first ten amendments to our Constitution and eloquently condensed in the quote above from our Declaration of Independence, nowhere will you find mention of a "right to die."  In fact, America's Founding Fathers would be shocked that our democratic republic with its long history of self sacrifice in the cause of freedom would ever be interested in codifying such a dangerous notion.

 

For with each step that our nation takes toward diluting the sanctity of human life, the more power that is given to the federal government.  And we must always consider the ways that this power might be abused should our nation drift further towards tyranny and despotism.

 

In Hitler's Germany the government initiated euthanasia programs that initially targeted the retarded, "mentally defective" and insane.  These outcasts were systematically dehumanized through propaganda.  In time the German people were desensitized enough not to rise up in the defense of these forsaken individuals even though Nazi Germany's euthanasia programs might mean the deaths of close family members. 

 

Eventually the definitions of "insane" and "mentally defective" grew elastic allowing the government to chose victims at whim while the horrors of Nazi gas chambers became perfected inside eagerly willing German mental institutions.

 

And why were so many scientists and doctors enthusiastically complicit to the mass murders committed inside Hitler's Germany?  Because men of science and psychiatry were deified in propaganda as the salvation of Germany, as they were portrayed as evidence for the triumph of man over God.  Killing God was necessary in order to establish morally relativistic laws such as the euthanasia programs.  And those scientists and doctors that criticized the government often found themselves branded insane, shipped to work camps or killed outright.

 

In Hitler's Germany, everyone had a "right to die" and the state exercised this power vigorously against any people it viewed as threatening.

 

And so it was in Joseph Stalin's USSR where perhaps 20-million people "rightfully died" in the name of Communism.  Twice this number perished under Mao's boot in China.  The Chinese found that Hirohito's Imperial Japan was just as willing to impose a "right to die."

 

Today in Florida, the state is denying a woman food and drink in order to kill her, while our televisions show images of jackbooted ASPCA "police" hauling off impoverished fathers to jail for treating family pets similarly.  Thusly, the worth of human life sinks below that of animal lives in a culture whose values have become unmoored and confused.

 

In order to see beyond the insanity of our times, we must always ask ourselves how any new powers that we hand to the state might be abused in the case that our next President is another Pol Pot or is Hitler's second coming.  We must constantly work to reinforce and sanctify the value of human life in order to safeguard our nation from creeping threats of despotism. 

 

The laws of our nation must be our citadel against tyrants, men that continually attack America from both without and within.

China and Russia Team Up to Reherse Taiwan Invasion

The war drums beat louder and louder.  This latest event follows closely on the heels of Monday's news that China's parliament enacted a law authorizing force against the beautiful, peaceful isle of Formosa.

Texas Study Finds Possible Mercury-Autism Link

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center have found "provocative" evidence linking the metal mercury with autism.

ASCII Matrix

Cool!

Group Seeks Vermont Independence

The "Second Vermont Republic" is a movement that seeks to "peacefully and democratically free" Vermont from the United States.  Some of the group's goals are:

• Political Independence. Our primary objective is to extricate Vermont peacefully from the United States as soon as possible.

• Direct Democracy. Vermont's strong democratic tradition is grounded in its town meetings which have served as the state's political mainstay for over two centuries. We favor devolution of power from the federal and state governments back to local communities and the extension of participatory democracy to the workplace and the farm..

• Sustainability. We celebrate and support Vermont's small, clean, green, sustainable, socially responsible towns, farms, businesses, schools, and churches. We encourage family owned farms and businesses to produce innovative, premium-quality, high-value added, healthy products. We also believe that energy independence is an essential goal towards which to strive.

• Economic Solidarity. We encourage Vermonters to buy locally produced products from small local merchants rather than from giant, out-of-state mega stores. We support trade with nearby states and provinces.

• Quality Education. We would return to local Vermont communities the control and financing of small local schools.

• Wellness. We encourage small locally controlled health care systems similar to those found in Switzerland in which, unlike the United States, patients, physicians, clinics, hospitals, and insurance providers are all in community with one another.

• Nonviolence. Consistent with Vermont's long history of nonviolence, we do not condone state-sponsored violence inflicted either by military or law enforcement officials. However, we do support a voluntary citizens' militia to restore order in the event of political unrest or natural disasters. We are unconditionally opposed to any form of military conscription.

COSBI AcroBench Version 0.99

COSBI AcroBench is a unique benchmark that is useful for testing the performance merits of x86 CPUs for printer engine applications.

 

x86 CPUs are beginning to show up in printers, yet there are no benchmarks available to help printer vendors assess microprocessor performance.  COSBI AcroBench is an attempt to remedy that condition.

 

The widely used Adobe Acrobat program performs document rendering actions that are analogous to printer workloads.  When Acrobat renders a PDF document for display, the CPU is crunching through a compressed PostScript-derived script.  PostScript is Adobe's page description programming language used in many printers.

 

Despite the superficial 2d operations of scrolling and scaling, AcroBench is very CPU dependent since interpreting the PDF code is the gating factor in this benchmark.

 

The current version of AcroBench only supports Acrobat 6 which you can download here.  Acrobat 6 must be installed before AcroBench will run.

 

A future version of AcroBench is targeted to support Adobe's brand new Acrobat 7.

 

To run AcroBench, download the compressed file and unzip to a known location while preserving the directory structure.  Double-click Command_AcroBench.bat to begin (or you can double-click on AcroBench.vbs).  The results will be automatically saved to a text file with a name based upon the processor id string generated by the COSBI system identification tool.

 

The VisualTest source code is also included in the ~1.4MB download.

 

If you find any bugs, please post them at COSBI's forums.

Running COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0 Beta 6

While we released the source code to OSMark v1.0 beta 6 yesterday (along with code for several other tools), if you just want to run the benchmark, click on the link above to download the zipped executable.  To run OSMark, just unzip the file while preserving its directory structure and then double-click on "CosbiOpenSourceMark.exe".  In order to generate and overall score, you'll need to click on the "Official Run" button.

 

And don't forget to post your scores on the forums.

Source Code: COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0 Beta 6

As promised, click on the above link to download the full source code for COSBI OSMark (~34MB).  Also included is the source code for several utilities and standalone tools like BandwidthBurn, MemLatencyPlus, WhetBurn, CPUSpeed and others.  Everything is released under GPL.

 

OSMark v1.0 beta 6 is compiled in Delphi 7, but should be easily upgradeable to Delphi 2005.

 

You will need to install the Graphics32 libraries in order to compile OSMark.

 

There are coding instructions in the OSMark subdirectory under the filename "OSMarkCodingDocumentation.html".  These instructions will be posted and expanded upon in the COSBI OSMark Forums.

 

Speaking of the forums, Flickerdown Data Systems has agreed to host the official COSBI forums.  Here you will be able to find out how to run OSMark, learn tips and tricks and post your scores.

 

But most importantly, you can request new tests, post your source code for new tests, participate in the COSBI development process, or examine pending source code updates.

 

The objective of the Comprehensive Open Source Benchmarking Initiative is to be completely inclusive.  This means that no tests will be rejected unless they are redundant or clearly useless.  Even in those cases, you can still post your source code and make a case for your test on the forums.

 

Although the GUI is written in Delphi 7, tests can be submitted in any language that does not require runtime libraries.  See "OSMarkCodingDocumentation.html" for an example of how to incorporate executables written in other languages.

 

We'll also be introducing parallel projects in Kylix, and cross platform efforts in C++ (namely g++).  We've also got a few application level benchmarks developed in Visual Test that will soon debut.

 

Over the following weeks, more details and updates will be posted here and at the forums.

Newegg's 600 Series P4 Claim Deceives

Mario fingers the popular online retail giant.

H.R. 881 Mercury Free Vaccine Bill in Congress

David sends us this.

Autism Society of America (ASA), the nation’s oldest and largest organization dedicated to the supporting individuals and families dealing with autism, is pleased to announce its support of the bipartisan move by Congressman David Weldon, MD (FL-15) and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) to assure the removal of childhood mercury exposure through vaccines. HR 881, the “Mercury Free Vaccine Act of 2005” was introduced last week in the US House of Representatives.

COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0 Beta 6

Here is our most recent beta of COSBI OSMark.  It fixes all known bugs and refines several tests such as Mandelbrot which now looks a lot better and cycles colors over runs.  Scores have also been properly readjusted against a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading and with an 800MHz FSB.

 

We're also posting a simple system information command line utility that is useful for scripting.  The program's output can be redirected into a text file which can serve to quickly document a system's configuration.

 

As always, if you find any bugs, please let us know.

 

Come Hell or high water, we're going to release a snapshot of all of the Comprehensive Open Source Benchmarking Initiative source code next week.

Mini-Bits & Bytes: A Tejas Tidbit and a Mini-Mac

Several years ago we exclusively revealed the existence of Intel's now defunct Tejas project along with a few of the project's design objectives for replacing the Prescott Pentium 4.

 

One item that we did not mention is that "Fireball" would be snuffed out.

 

According to our sources, the P4's double-pumped ALUs, codenamed "Fireball," were serving as a speed path and would be excised from Tejas in order for the Pentium 4 architecture to continue to scale to higher clock speeds.

 

A couple of years later, of course, Intel dropped the entire P4 hot potato for reasons that we had written about from the start of that ill-conceived computin' architecture.

 

On a slightly different topic...

 

I've seen numerous Pentium-M articles explore that chip's desktop performance and laud that CPU for it strengths on many applications like office productivity stuff and gaming, while at the same time lament about P-M's underwhelming media encoding and floating point throughput.  There's no debating the fact that the P-M has a weaker FPU than the Athlon 64, but the P-M's FPU is still quite potent.

 

The big problem is Dothan's artificially limited front-side-bus (FSB) speed.  Crank the Dothan's bus to equivalent, contemporary P4-Prescott speeds and you'll really see this cool customer roar.

 

miniMac...

 

Apple has released its mini-sized Macintosh dubbed the "MacMini" and it is a very, very nice computer.  The operating system is a thing of beauty.

 

To gain a little performance insight, I've written a few cross-platform benchmarks and the 1.42GHz G4 miniMac thumped a 3.4GHz Northwood P4 on three out of four tests.  If time permits (and readers request it), I might write up a small miniMac review.

 

One MacMini performance anomaly is in the thin-client area.  The tiny and almost silent Apple system seems nearly perfect for thin-client applications, but when I benchmarked its Microsoft-produced RDP client, the MacMini was one of the slowest platforms that I have ever tested.  Of course, with its donated RDP client program, the Beast of Redmond may have laid a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep of Apple to make sure that no WinCE/WinXP-E licenses would be lost to Mr. Jobs.

 

Speaking of Mr. Steve Jobs, he has apparently fully recovered from a recent pancreatic cancer scare.

 

BTW, the MacMini ships with very, very robust programming tools!  Kudos to Apple for giving the new Macs big time geek bonus points.

 

And one last thing about the miniMac: use your own 5-button, scroll wheel equipped USB mouse-creatures and leave Apple's single-button jobs at the store.  OS X fully exploits all five buttons along with  the scroll wheel and, so endowed, the OS becomes a much more enjoyable experience.

 

multi-core butterflies...

 

As you all know, I do a lot of benchmarking.  I recently tested a dual-processing Linux system and noticed much greater than expected scaling when going from one processor to two.  Although I anticipated nearly 100% performance improvements when running multithreaded code, I saw scaling well above this.  I even saw significant scaling on single-threaded tests!

 

These results seem initially very odd until you realize that there are a few Linux processes and commonly running utilities that are real big resource pigs.  The X windowing system alone is a sizable sow and is almost constantly hogging a bunch of CPU cycles.  As a result, the dual-processing system was also much, much more responsive when opening programs, browsing the web, redrawing the screen, compiling and other normal, everyday tasks.

 

In any case, the upcoming tidal wave of dual-core chips will serve Linux a big kick-in-the-pants performance-wise.

 

Linux has come a long way over the last few years and new desktop distributions like Linspire 5 are probably giving Microsoft whiplash from looking over its hunched-back shoulders.

COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0 Beta 4 (this link now points to the latest beta)

We've finally fixed the notorious "1.01" floating point bug in the GridBlastFP test.  This subtle problem only hit users in countries that do not use a period for the radix point, which explains why we were never able to reproduce the error. 

 

The radix point separates the whole part from the fractional part of a floating point number.  While the U.S., Britain and many other countries use a "." for this purpose, Germany and several other nations us a comma (",") for doing this.

 

Special thanks to Rolf for suggesting that the GridBlastFP problem was a regional issue.  Although we've had numerous reports of the "1.01" bug, it was never apparent that the problem was occurring primarily outside the U.S.

 

We failed to mention in our last post that there are now a lot of multithreaded benchmarks in OSMark.  Many of these tests will automatically use every available processor in the system.  We have added so many threaded tests in order to be ready for upcoming dual-core chips.

 

One interesting performance observation is that there appears to be a big performance advantage for ATI-based video cards over nVidia-based video cards on OSMark, particularly on the OpenGL tests.

 

We are looking for additional SSE/SSE2/SSE3, as well as DirectX and OpenGL tests.  Submitted benchmarks are acceptable written in any compiler that does not require runtime support.  Non-Delphi benchmarks should deploy a fixed workload automatically when called from the command line and terminate at completion.  The OSMark shell will automatically time and score the application time.  Tests should take no longer than a minute to run on a fast system.  All source code will need to be GPL'ed.

 

If you are interested in contributing tests to OSMark then send us a note here.  No test will be rejected unless it is redundant!  One of the most important and basic goals behind COSBI OpenSourceMark is to be totally inclusive, allowing the user to decide which tests are useful and which are not.  Eventually we will roll out a "MyMark" button that will execute and score a user customized benchmark suite.

 

As always, if you find any bugs, please let us know.  And thanks to those who have been sending in reports!

COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0 Beta 3 (this link now points to the latest beta)

We are releasing today the first public beta of COSBI OpenSourceMark Version 1.0.  The program has changed extensively and now all COSBI tools are integrated within OSMark.  New tests have also been added.

 

Mobile and Thin Client tests are forthcoming, but all other aspects of the program should be operational.

 

If you find any bugs, please let us know.

 

We are looking for additional SSE/SSE2/SSE3, as well as DirectX and OpenGL tests.  Submitted benchmarks are acceptable in any compiler that does not require runtime support.  Non-Delphi tests should deploy a fixed workload automatically when called from the command line and terminate at completion.  Tests should take no longer than a minute to run on a fast system.  All source code will need to be GPL'ed.

 

If you are interested in contributing tests -- and no test will be rejected unless it is redundant -- to OSMark, send us a note here.

Van's Hardware Journal Endorses Peroutka for President

 

FBI Raids Independent Media Center

In a what could turn out to be a very chilling strike against free speech, the United State Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided one of the Internet's most influential independent media organizations.  The following quote comes from the Argentina Indymedia website.

US authorities issued a federal order to Rackspace's office in the US ordering them to provide Indymedia's hardware located in London to the requesting agency. Rackspace is one of Indymedia's web hosting providers with offices in the US and London. Rackspace complied, without first notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This affects some 20+ Indymedia sites worldwide.

Since the subpoena was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia, the reasons for this action are still unknown to Indymedia. Talking to Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from updating the concerned parties on what is happening.

It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities.

At the same time a second server was taken down at Rackspace which provided streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (linux distro), and a handful of miscellanous things.

The last few months have seen numerous attacks on independent media by the US Federal Government. In August the Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the NYC IMC before the RNC by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the Netherlands. Last month the FCC shut down community radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI requested that Indymedia takes down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue. On the other hand, Indymedia and other independent media organisations were successfull with their victories for example against Diebold and the Patroit Act. Today however, the US authorities shut down IMCs around the world.

The list of affected local media collectives includes Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site.

Linspire 5.0 Might Be Outlawed in the U.S.

The proposed Senate Bill S. 2560, also known as the "INDUCE Act," is currently sneaking its way through Congress and contains language that could make Linspire's next operating system illegal.

But Linspire 5.0 may not be legal if the INDUCE Act is passed, since it could be used to "induce" file sharing. And it's not just Linspire that will be affected, since a wide range of both hardware and software devices could be interpreted to induce file sharing. When I started MP3.com, the music industry wanted to outlaw MP3 and portable music players, but the law did not support them. If the INDUCE Act had been law back then, we may never have seen the MP3 market bloom as it has. They would have surely attempted to use this law to stop MP3. I encourage you to find out where your representative stands on the INDUCE Act, and do what you can to prevent it. Visit ClickTheVote.org to send a fax to your congressman and find other easy steps you can take to help prevent the INDUCE Act from becoming law. Linspire 5.0 is depending on you!

FutureMark Apologizes

But is it too late for the benchmark maker's credibility?

More Benchmark Controversy

Love him or hate him, you have to give Kyle credit for consistently stating his mind.  This time Kyle has riled up FutureMark, the makers of 3dMark05.  FutureMark is threatening to sue Kyle for his published opinions about 3DMark. 

 

From this vantage point, it looks like Kyle is clearly in the right.  Kyle's complaints over the years about 3dMark have generally been thoughtful albeit sometimes coarsely expressed. 

 

This could turn into a public relations fiasco for FutureMark, which would be disastrous for a company whose fortunes, as a benchmark purveyor, are based upon establishing and maintaining the trust of the media and the public.

Propaganda Becomes Obscene: Thimerosal Now Good For Children

Incidents of neurological disorders among children have exploded over the last two decades.  Anecdotal and formally derived evidence -- even studies conducted and later buried by the CDC -- have shown a link between the highly toxic mercury-based preservative thimerosal and disorders such as autism.  Autism rates among children closely track their increased exposure to thimerosal-laced vaccines over the same timeframe.

 

Despite media propaganda to the contrary, which has outlandishly even attempted to portray autism as an evolutionary step forwards, autism is an often very devastating neurological disorder which can profoundly impair a child's ability to interact with other people.

 

There is no doubt whatsoever that thimerosal is virulently toxic.  The main excuse for adding it to inoculations is to reduce costs, particularly when vaccines are delivered in multi-dose containers. 

 

"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 a UPI investigation we initially linked to last year.  "I know that they (the CDC) knows and that is what bothers me more than anything else," he stated.

 

Thimerosal-tainted vaccines expose children to up to 125-times the EPA safe limits set for mercury.  Mercury is a well understood, potent neurotoxin known for directly causing neurological disorders analogous to those observed in immunized children.

 

Well, Dr. Haley has been proven wrong, at least in practice.  Two new "studies" out of England conclude that Thimerosal is actually good for children.  So, presumably, not only should we stop taking it out of vaccines, but we might have reason to add it back!

Immunizing infants with vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal may actually be associated with improved behavior and mental performance, according to two British studies published in the medical journal Pediatrics.

Mark Sircus, writes the following comments about the Reuters article linked above:

Almost a year ago I wrote the Dark Ages of Medicine but nothing could have prepared me for what I read yesterday from Reuters Health News on an essay published in Pediatric medical journal. If there is any article that single-handedly destroys the integrity of modern medicine and the field of pediatrics we have it in hand. It really is a sad day for medical science and medical journals for what has been published destroys the concept of peer review and the integrity of epidemiological studies and evidence.

Bizarro World of Fascists: Pascifist Pop Singer Denied U.S. Entry; Airliner Diverted

When Londoner Cat Stevens boarded his plane to Wasington this morning, the singer, famous for wildly popular '70s songs like "Peace Train," "Morning Has Broken," "Moonshadow" and "Father and Son," was probably not thinking that he was a threat to United States national security.

 

But in the increasingly bizarre world of Homeland Security, Stevens, who now calls himself "Yusuf Islam" after becoming a Muslim decades ago, is apparently considered such a threat to our country that the United Airlines transatlantic airliner he boarded was diverted to Bangor, Maine where Yusuf Islam was barred entry into the U.S..

 

Islam, whose gentle tunes iconized popular pacifist sentiments of the 1970s, still maintains his connection with his old "Cat Stevens" moniker and has publicly condemned acts of terror committed under the guise of the Islamic religion.  Nevertheless, Homeland Security is protecting us from Cat Stevens, and has the "Peace Train" author booked on the first flight back to London on Wednesday.

 

Of course if Yusuf Islam was really concerned about gaining entry into the U.S. to undermine national security, he'd just cross the U.S.-Mexican border where thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants successfully enter our country everyday.  The tidal wave of illegal immigrants coming across our borders is ill-reported in the corporate press and neither is the fact that this influx has stepped up with Bush's talk of amnesty and promises of Social Security for aliens who obtain illegal entry into the United States of America.

 

Our border with our southern neighbor is so poorly guarded that an activist group successful brought across simulated backpack nukes several times, with one successful attempt ending on the doorsteps of the Tuscon, Arizona Federal Building.

 

So the diversion of Cat Stevens's flight is either a propaganda stunt pulled off to elevate the profile of Homeland Security, or a head spinning demonstration of the idiocy in charge of our government who leaves our borders wide open while sending our troops into imperialistic quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In either case, we should be worried.

Desensitization That Could Soon Be Patrolling Our Streets

American troops have been placed in impossible positions in Iraq.  The sometimes ruthless police state tactics deployed in that war-savaged country in order to "pacify" Iraqi resistance take tolls on the souls of the haggard and threatened soldiers.  Without proper leadership, instances of moral and ethical degradation are common and severe.

 

In the increasing likelihood that martial law will be declared here in the U.S., these same hardened and ill-prepared troops will be policing our cities, our streets, our schools and even our homes.

 

Read the article above for a sobering preview of what military law could be like in the United States in the not too distant future.

 

And we don't have to wait for the police state tactics deployed in Iraq to be brought stateside.  During the Republication National Convention in New York, sonic cannon weapons were rolled out on the streets with fanfare.  Soon to see action in Iraq are microwave guns mounted onto armored vehicles euphemistically called "Sheriffs".  While this article here gleefully discusses the intense physical pain caused by these weapons, no mention is made of what would happen if beams are shot into people's eyes or if the microwaves were trained on individuals for prolonged periods of time.

'Sympathy Killings' by Dutch Doctors Now Target Children

Sixty years ago the Netherlands was under the boot of Hitler's Germany.  Today, the Dutch medical establishment appears bent on returning to Nazi eugenic ideals. 

First, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with incurable illnesses or disabilities. Then, when doctors began killing patients who were depressed but not physically ill, not to worry, they told us: only competent depressed people whose desire to commit suicide is "rational" will have their deaths facilitated. Then, when doctors began killing incompetent people, such as those with Alzheimer's, it's all under control, they crooned: non-voluntary killing will be limited to patients who would have asked for it if they were competent.

 

And now they want to euthanize children.

NOTE: Although The Weekly Standard is a well known American publication and is owned by News Corporation, a reader writes:

I live in Belgium, that's a small country next to Holland and am myself of dutch origins. I must say I NEVER heard of such abuses concerning euthanasia there. You should know Belgium and Holland have pretty narrow communication between each other (similar culture, mostly same language, ...) and this is the first time I read about this. In fact, I've seen quite some documentaries on euthanasia in Holland and it didn't seemed to be returning to Nazi ideals AT ALL. In fact, I think it's very well regulated.

Please double check your sources on that one (or this Wesley J. Smith should), what you're saying is pretty harsh.

UPI: Pentagon Casualty Press Reports Are Nearly 17,000 Casualties Short

A UPI report that has investigated the casualty data released by the U.S. Pentagon has concluded that the current total of 8,264 casualties falls nearly 17,000 casualties short. 

The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

...

The casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the organization") are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.

Hepatitis B Inoculation Linked to Multiple Sclerosis

In the September 14th issue of the journal Neurology, a new study reports that the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is linked with a threefold increased risk of multiple sclerosis.

 

Originally developed for teenagers and adults, the hepatitis vaccine failed to gain a foothold in its target market.  Its developers then lobbied to force the jab on infants.  It is now nearly impossible to give birth in an American hospital without doctors and nurses pressuring parents into accepting this unnecessary vaccine.

 

Worse still, some hepatitis B immunizations still contain the highly toxic mercury-based preservative Thimerosal.  Thimerosal has been widely linked to increased instances of autism and other neurological disorders.

Drive Your Car on Vegetable Oil

The jig is up.  It is now becoming obvious that oilman and U.S. President G.W. Bush's primary motive for entrenching our country in the Iraqi quagmire was not to protect our country from "weapons of mass destruction" but to control the vast petroleum reserves of Iraq while lining the pockets of his Halliburton buddies in the ensuing rebuilding efforts. 

 

Even after the initial "War on Terror" ruse for invading Iraq is becoming increasingly transparent and while American men and women continue to die in Iraq, many U.S. citizens have attempted to rationalize Bush's imperialistic oil gambit.  Certainly America is dependent on foreign oil isn't it? 

 

Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way.  In fact, the internal combustion engines that power our cars could be fueled by renewable and environmentally friendly alternatives like vegetable oil and alcohol.

 

And this is not a new concept.  Rudolph Diesel's "first diesel engine suitable for practical use" drank peanut oil.  Diesel envisioned a world where the "commonfolk" could produce their own renewable energy source at a time when monopolies controlled almost all energy production (and still do).

 

Unfortunately, Rudolph Diesel died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1913 when he disappeared over the side of a ship en route to England and "biodiesel" lost one of its most influential proponents.

 

Like vegetable oil, alcohol is a readily renewable and environmentally friendly resource derived from common crops.  And like vegetable oil, alcohol was initially a fuel of choice for internal combustion engines.  The first prototype internal combustion engine built in 1826 ran off of alcohol and turpentine.  Alcohol powered German inventor Nicholas August Otto's first four-stroke engine.  Otto's four-stroke engine was the direct ancestor to motors used in most cars today.

 

Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were both proponents of fuel alcohol.  Henry Ford's first car ran on "farm alcohol," or commonly distilled ethanol.  Like vegetable oil, ethanol, the preferred alcohol fuel derived from crops, is nontoxic.  In fact, ethanol is the "kick" in spirits such as whiskey and moonshine.

 

A major setback for the use of either vegetable oil or alcohol as fuels occurred in the 1920s and 30s when Big Oil poured money into the development of petroleum driven engines.  Over the years, Big Oil has also funded propaganda efforts to discredit petroleum alternatives and has often worked to produce legislation that impede the adoption of anything other than petroleum based fuels.

 

Certainly Prohibition, ratified in 1917 and enforced for 13-years beginning in 1920, came at a bad time for the alcohol fuel proponents since regional distilleries were put out of business all over the country and alcohol became much more valuable in the illegal booze trade than in powering automobiles.

 

Today, while there is a major thrust for hybrid engines and fuel cells, a grassroots movement to resurrect the use of crop derived fuels, particularly vegetable oil, has been gaining momentum.

 

Although alcohol fuel proponents are also growing in number, kits and "how-tos" about converting existing diesel engines for use with vegetable oil are popping up all over the Web.  Many engines will work with "biodiesel" without modification.  In addition to the main link above, you can read more about this issue here, here, here, here, here, and here.

 

Particularly popular is collecting waste cooking oil from restaurants and using it, after proper preparation, to fire up diesel engines.

 

Not surprisingly, Great Britain, an insanely regulated country whose people we lambasted yesterday for allowing universal gun confiscation along with the consequential proliferation of Big Brother surveillance cameras all over that nation, is sending in the tax Nazis to arrest people who buy vegetable oil in the grocery story and pour it into their cars as fuel.

 

While mainstream press loves to cover hybrid engines and fuel cell development, alternatives like biodiesel empower people to be self sufficient while combating the environmental poisons of the oil industry.  In our quest for alternative fuels, biodiesel is a cheap, clean, readily obtainable solution that car companies should revisit.

 

With Americans dying in Iraq in an effort to control foreign oil reserves, Americans should take a look at the history of internal combustion engines to rediscover the fuels we should have been using all along.

Great Britain: 'Protect Me, Big Brother!'

Once upon a time the people of Great Britain had backbone.  Now, after giving up their guns resulted in an inevitable explosion in violent crimes, the suddenly timid subjects of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II are begging Big Brother to look after them.

 

According to the gushing CNN article linked above, there are about 4.2 million closed circuit surveillance cameras in the U.K. that lovingly watch over the sheepish and damp British population.  Of course, violent crime continues to explode there, but the British government, never a body to let an opportunity to extend its hegemony go to waste, is making sure that it takes full advantage of its fearful, trembling, timorous subjects' supplication for a loving, all seeing, all powerful Big Brother. 

 

Doubtlessly, the mild mannered British subjects are comforted by the knowledge that each one of them are scrutinized by an average of 300 cameras each day despite the fact that serious violent crime continues to skyrocket all around them.

1GHz VIA C7 to Consume Only 3.5W

VIA Technologies announced today that its next-generation x86 processor will be marketed under the "C7" moniker.  Known previously by the codenames "Esther" and "C5J," the C7 will sip at maximum power a measly 3.5W at 1GHz.  The C7 will also scale upwards to 2GHz and perhaps even higher. 

 

With an FSB that runs up to 800MHz and with full SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 support, the C7 should serve a significant performance bump upwards for VIA's line of low-power microprocessors.  The C7 also boasts NX compatibility for resilience against buffer overrun-driven computer viruses.

 

VIA also extends its sizable lead in the security arena by integrating into C7 powerful RSA encryption and Secure Hashing (SHA-1 and SHA-256) features.  This goes beyond the C7's AES and random number generation abilities that debuted with the chipmaker's "Nehemiah" C3.

 

At under 32mm^2, the C7 packs around 26,200,000 transistors into an unbelievably tiny die that is produced using IBM's most advanced 90nm SOI technology.  With the combination of the C7's miniscule die and IBM's 12" wafers, expect VIA to see nearly a whopping 2,000 C7 die candidates from each wafer.

 

The VIA C7 looks to be a very formidable microprocessor for the low power x86 applications that VIA has traditionally pursued.

Taiwan Loses Bid for U.N. Representation

Although the President of Taiwan pointed out that such a decision would be tantamount to "political apartheid," the communist People's Republic of China waged another successful attempt to isolate the small, but beautiful island nation formerly called Formosa.

Chen argued the resolution dealt with China's right to represent its people, not those of Taiwan. He said the resolution was being misinterpreted and distorted by China.

 

"Taiwan is Taiwan," Chen said. "Taiwan cannot and will not fight to represent China."

 

"A free and democratic country like Taiwan should not be the missing piece in the United Nations' principle of universality," he said.

 

Chen's briefing was held at a hotel near U.N. headquarters because of U.N. officials' objections to hosting it in the complex where Taiwan is not represented. The U.N. Correspondents Association strongly protested the U.N. Secretariat's refusal to allow the video conference at the United Nations.

In the U.S., the fascist nature of the United Nations is becoming clear to more and more people with several third party U.S. Presidential candidates now openly lobbying for both the withdrawal of the United States from the U.N. and the expulsion of that corporately driven, global government-in-waiting monstrosity out of our country.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

-- James Madison

Russia Preparing for Major 'Counter-Terror' Military Operation in N. Caucasus?

Russia closes border with Georgia to road traffic from Wednesday and its skies to Georgian air traffic from Oct 1 claiming unpaid debts. However, similar curbs imposed Tuesday also on Russian border with Azerbaijan.

John sends us this news.

Analyst: Intel was Blindsided!

"Intel was definitely blindsided by the thermal issues around clock speed and leakage," said Martin Reynolds, a senior analyst with Dataquest.

Readers of VHJ will beg to differ with Mr. Reynolds since we have been reporting these very shortcomings of Intel's Pentium 4 designs since that processor line's inception several years ago.  The irony is that instead of heeding our advice, Intel covertly sent us nasty letters and tried to undermine our site in various ways in order to stop us from telling the truth. 

 

Of course, although the chip giant is now following our advice to the letter by committing to Pentium M derived desktop designs and going multicore, the company waited so long that Intel is in worse shape than many recognize right now.

Nazi Origins of Olympic Symbols

The torch relay, which culminates in Friday's ceremonial lighting of the flame at the Olympic stadium, was a creation of Adolf Hitler, who tried to turn the 1936 Berlin Games into a celebration of the Third Reich.

 

And it was Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine that popularized the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the games.

Considering that the International Olympic Committee barred athletes from posting blogs, pictures or videos of their experiences during the recently finished Olympic Games in Athens, it would seem that there are still Nazis serving in the IOC.

Study: Most Americans Would Not Cooperate with Feds in Smallpox or Dirty-Bomb Attack

A study released today shows most Americans would not cooperate with government's attempts to protect them in the aftermath of a domestic terror attack.

... 

"The public's concern about the smallpox vaccine is well-founded," said study co-investigator Alonzo Plough, Ph.D., director of public health in Seattle and King County, Wash. "Concerns about the vaccine's side effects were a major reason that so few health-care workers agreed to be vaccinated in CDC's recent Smallpox Vaccination Program."

Alert Issued for the Entire Alaskan National Guard on Friday

John sends us this.

An alert order for the entire Alaska Army National Guard was issued today, said a spokesperson with the Alaska National Guard public affairs unit.

 

The Kodiak armory is home to Det. 1, Bravo Co., 3rd Scouts Battalion of the Alaska Army National Guard.

 

Previously, only the 117th public affairs unit of the Alaska National Guard had been issued an alert order this year.

 

An alert order is an instruction to await further orders which may or may not come.

North Korea Goes Nuclear?

If Thursday's large explosion over North Korea proves to be a nuclear test, then this could turn out to be one of the most important events of the decade.  If the bizarre "Dear Leader" Kim Jung Il, who has a history of kidnapping Japanese women, possesses "the bomb," it would serve to seriously destabilize an already shaky region of the world. 

 

The blast could possibly be a massive, military related accident, but, judging from the size of the mushroom cloud, the detonation would have to either be nuclear or involve a staggering amount of conventional explosives.

"We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 3.5- to 4-kilometer (2.2 miles to 2.5 miles) in diameter was monitored during the explosion," the source in Seoul told Yonhap. Yonhap described the source as "reliable."

There is no doubt, however, that our political leaders knew almost immediately whether or not the event was a nuclear explosion, since there are a variety of atomic blast signatures, ranging from seismic to gamma ray bursts to fallout, that are very easy to detect.  Whether nuclear or not, it is highly disconcerting that our public servants decided to hide such important information from their bosses, the American people. 

 

Strangely, this belated New York Times story published just moments ago seems to postdate the AP story link in our headline.  Have the New York Times White House sources grown that stale, or is this story an attempt to set the stage for a disclosure that will likely occur later today?

President Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports in recent days describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first test explosion of a nuclear weapon, according to senior officials with access to the intelligence.

If the North Korean blast was of nuclear origin, let us hope that the news will not be played up for political gain or used as an excuse for launching even more assaults on our Bill of Rights.  And let's pray that this does not set the stage for nuclear terrorism.

 

UPDATE: A U.S. official now claims that the explosion was not the result of a nuclear detonation.

COSBI BandwidthBurn Version 0.90

We've updated BandwidthBurn so that the memory bandwidth curves are now much smoother even though it is now plotting bandwidth results in real-time.  Also the program can now graph dataset ranges up to 16MB.  For mobile processors that like to idle down to low clock frequencies, there is now a "spin-up CPU" option to ensure that the CPU is running at the highest clock rate before bandwidth measurements begin.

Half of New Yorkers Believe that U.S. Leaders Knew About the Impending 9/11 Attacks Yet Consciously Failed to Act

According to this Zogby Poll, Americans appear to be awakening from the Matrix.

Ron Paul: Reject the National ID Card

One of the few true champions of liberty in Washington D.C., U.S. Representative Ron Paul has published a dire warning to Americans that a National I.D. card with biometric identifiers is both a real, near term possibility and a sinister threat to our freedoms.

A national identification card, in whatever form it may take, will allow the federal government to inappropriately monitor the movements and transactions of every American. History shows that governments inevitably use the power to monitor the actions of people in harmful ways. Claims that the government will protect the privacy of Americans when implementing a national identification card ring hollow. We would do well to remember what happened with the Social Security number. It was introduced with solemn restrictions on how it could be used, but it has become a de facto national identifier.

 

Those who are willing to allow the government to establish a Soviet-style internal passport system because they think it will make us safer are terribly mistaken. Subjecting every citizen to surveillance and "screening points" will actually make us less safe, not in the least because it will divert resources away from tracking and apprehending terrorists and deploy them against innocent Americans!

Dr. Paul, a strict Constitutionalist from Texas, also blasts the 9/11 Commission as a sham.

As I have written recently, the 9/11 Commission is nothing more than ex-government officials and lobbyists advising current government officials that we need more government for America to be safe. Yet it was that same government that failed so miserably on September 11, 2001.

VIA Releases 'Padlock' SDK

Taiwanese chipmaker VIA Technologies released today a "Padlock" developers kit to allow coders to more easily exploit the powerful encryption and random number generation features of the company's current "Nehemiah" C3 x86 microprocessors.  VIA has made available both Windows and Linux versions of the Padlock SDK.

How to Cook An Alien

Space alien that is.  Thanks to Terry for the link.

Windows 3-Way SMP

From the "Top Secret" drawer: A tri-core or something else?  Although our sources bind us to secrecy, you can rest assured that this system is something new, operational and cool.

Free P4 Motherboards

NewEgg is offering the SOYO "SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0" Socket 478 Pentium 4 I865PE-based motherboard for $75, but with the $75 mail-in rebate that comes out to $0 plus shipping.

'bin Laden on Ice/October Surprise' Rumors Coming True?

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told a stunned Fox News Channel analyst last December that she suspected President Bush would stage the capture of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden immediately prior to the upcoming presidential election in order to secure the White House for a second term.  According to "Roll Call" reporter Morton Kondracke, Albright believes that the Bush administration may already have secured bin Laden, but will sit on the news in order to orchestrate an "October surprise."

 

Soon after this news surfaced, radio talk show celebrity Alex Jones claimed that a source close to the Bush family disclosed that bin Laden, for whom the CIA is known to have served as a benefactor, is dead.  Under agreement with the powerful bin Laden Saudi oil family, Osama's frozen corpse would be thawed to serve in a fake capture event planned by the Bush Administration to occur this October before the elections.

 

As absurd as these "conspiracy theories" might seem, Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, escalated rhetoric last Saturday, prompting claims that the U.S. is now "near seizing bin Laden."

 

With October only a few short weeks away, we should keep an eye open for signs of a "bin Laden on ice" conspiracy unfolding.

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, "Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree."

Politics have no relation to morals.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Anarchists Planning Mayhem for New York

During the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle, a small handful of "anarchists," clad in black and wearing masks, vandalized businesses and spread chaos in downtown Seattle while garnering worldwide press coverage.  These destructive actions of a few dozen professional rabble-rousers were able to discredit the peaceful yet massive protests of many thousands of people from all walks of life who are opposed to the actions of the WTO.

 

Well it appears that some of the same instigators are expected to be back in force at the Republican National Convention in New York City.  If you are part of a large peaceful protest group, you should strongly consider assigning members of your group to follow and continuously videotape any of these black draped, professional troublemakers that appear in your midst.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

VIA Xine Media Player

VIA has enhanced the very popular Open Source Xine Player to take advantage of VIA's hardware media acceleration technology.  You can visit the SourceForge project page by clicking on the link above.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy [the people] until it is ripe for execution.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Christianity is not about compromise.  God's Truth does not change with the latest poll results or with the most recent fads in psychology.  And don't be fooled that the "War on Terror" has Jesus now believing in torture.

Feds Escalate Assault on Internet Freedoms

Under the quickly thinning ruse of "The War on Terror," a U.S. government commission decided to extend wiretapping regulations to the Internet.  The Federal Communications Commission voted 5 to 0 last week to require snooping backdoors on all Internet-based phone services.  However, the FCC stopped short of a complete hijack of Internet communications and declined the FBI's request to also legally demand backdoors on all instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) applications that do not use the established phone system.  Of course, making such mandates on IM and VoIP would have been grievously unpopular and very difficult to enforce.

 

Email, the most popular method of Internet communications, is now probably the least secure.  Under the so-called "Patriot Act," the U.S. government can now, without obtaining a warrant and without a probable cause for suspicion, read through all of your email without ever telling you they did so or why.  More recently, even private businesses have been given this same egregious level of email spying authority.

 

We first reported about the FBI's Internet snooping gambit in a May article.

Strange Defense of LGA

One of my favorite tech writers has just completed a strange, apologetic defense of LGA and it has me befuddled.

 

In the process, the author, who should know better, set up and knocked down a series of straw-man arguments that had no bearing on the pins versus pads debate.  Among them are:

• improved motherboard trace routing: Intel would have made the same or very similar routing decisions regardless of PGA versus LGA.

• the physical layout surrounding the LGA socket has improved: the keep-out zone and the z-height requirements have nothing to do with Intel's decision to drop pins.

• the heat sink is no longer holding the CPU in the socket with LGA requiring much less retention force: the idea that the heat sink is used to hold the CPU in a closed PGA socket is a strange one considering that the frictional force of a closed ZIF socket is usually pretty significant.  The main reason for the prodigious clamping forces on P4 heat sinks is to improve thermal conductivity across the contact interface.  The chip might give way a little under current PGA sockets, but an LGA775 retention mechanism could have been developed for PGA if this was a real issue.

• increasing pin counts demand a shift to LGA: while LGA allows for somewhat greater contact density, the Opteron, which has many more contacts than LGA775, has no problem accommodating its hundreds of additional pins. 

The big issue that has motherboard makers up in arms is that the fragile physical interface between chip and system has shifted from the CPU to the mainboard.  If you bend a pin on a CPU, you can usually straighten it out.  If you accidentally snag an LGA socket finger, or fumble the CPU into the socket cockeyed, good luck.  Often you are going to have to trashcan the motherboard.  And the motherboard vendors, who operate on the slimmest of margins, are going to have to swallow these additional returns.

 

And if Intel really believes in the contact density mantra, why didn't it design the fragile contact fingers to sprout from the bottoms of its microprocessors while placing the robust pads on the motherboards?

 

Make no mistake, Intel benefits tremendously with a successful shift to LGA.  As we discussed back on June 6th, LGA processor packages save Intel several dollars per CPU.  Multiply this number alone by the millions upon millions of units that Intel ships and this turns out to be a big chunk of change.  And this doesn't include the fact that all pin related returns will be eliminated for Intel with the adoption of LGA.

 

In the grand scheme of things, is LGA good or bad overall?

 

From a processor vendor's point of view, LGA looks really, really great.  You can bet that there are people inside of AMD and VIA et al who would very much like to see Intel's LGA initiative take hold since it would help facilitate an industry-wide shift to pinless CPUs.

 

Motherboard makers, on the other hand, will have to adjust to a more expensive socket, while absorbing an entirely new and substantial vector for motherboard returns.  Returns serve motherboard vendors significant harm because profit margins are already so very narrow for them.

 

Ironically, in the not too distant future, microprocessors will likely be made completely electrically isolated and will communicate with the rest of the computer through optical interfaces.  In the interim, PGA-based CPU packages have enough "legs" to bridge this gap.  LGA will almost certainly not be necessary, but LGA may win out simply given Intel's market strengths.

 

So is LGA a "conspiracy?"  Intel is a business and as such its design decisions certainly consider profit impacts.  There is no doubt that the company was well aware that it was shifting costs and risk vulnerability away from itself and onto motherboard vendors with its LGA scheme.  The giant chipmaker would have to be unbelievably inept if it had not considered this impact on the motherboard-CPU ecosystem.  The benefits of LGA are almost entirely on the CPU side while the drawbacks fall almost totally onto motherboard vendors.  If the consumer's best interests have been served is yet to be determined.

COSBI OSMark Version 0.99e

Click on the link above to download the new version of COSBI OpenSourceMark (~8.6MB).  In addition to a number of bug fixes, we have added a lot of new features, some of which are:

• Two new OpenGL tests: Lorenz Attractor plots the famous chaotic curve and traces it with a lighted sphere.  N-Body OpenGL is a precise 3d version of the 2d N-Body test.

• Spin up option is useful for testing mobile CPUs that leverage dynamic frequency transition technology.  Spin up  deploys an artificial load before each test in order that the CPU will be at its highest clock speed throughout all tests.

• Drive Target for drive tests can be selected.

• Process Idle Task will force Windows XP to process idle background tasks before starting the tests.

• If Defragment drive is checked in Windows XP, the target drive will be defragmented five times before testing begins.

• Command line scripting: The OSMark executable now accepts a variety of command line arguments for scripting and burn-in testing.  A sample "go.bat" file is provided.

• We've updated the GoGo MP3 encoder and the P4 gets a huge performance boost.

• Persistent application settings: OSMark now uses an INI file to retain the state of the last session.

All scores have now been normalized against a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading and a GeForceFX 5600.

 

This is an interim release and we have no comparison scores in the database.  If you find bugs with this build, please let us know.  If you have any suggestions for new tests, please drop us a line.  If you would like the source code, just send us an email request.

Iraqi Christians

James writes us:

A cool article: the Iraqi Christians whose churches were bombed have been praying for forgiveness of those who did it: http://tinyurl.com/5xtc2

In a nation of supposed Christians, with Christian leadership and Dubya invoking God at every point, I have desparately desired to see this response from U.S. Christians. Instead I heard it from the depths of a Muslim country which I didn't even realize had Christians.

Imagine what it would have meant to the world if 250 million of us had forgiven our enemies rather than flailing off almost singlehandedly into a set of wars that had very little to do with the attacks. And what terrorist group could long sustain an offensive against a country bent on forgiving it, a country following its Lord's directives wholeheartedly?

Revelation 3:17 (in the ESV), spoken to the lukewarm Laodicians, says "For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked." Our wealth does not make our suffering special and does not remove our obligation to forgive. I am thankful to have seen the wondrous example of the Iraqi Christians.

John Kerry's Worrisome Tech Record

Kerry didn't go so far as to say that strong encryption should be outlawed, which Freeh had wanted. But in 1997, the Massachusetts senator did vote for an FBI-friendly bill that would have forced the U.S. technology industry to head in the extremely troublesome direction of key escrow. ("Key escrow" means backdoors in encryption products for the surveillance convenience of police and spy agencies.)

Beast System Brewing?

Apple's cofounder Steven Wozniak is cooking up tracking chips for your children according to the inquirer.  It is not clear if Woz's devices are implantable like Applied Digital's "Mark-of-the-Beast-like" Verichip.

 

Meanwhile, Mr. Wozniak's former Apple partner, Steven Jobs, has undergone surgery to remove an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, a type of pancreatic cancer.  Other forms of pancreatic cancer are incurable and extremely virulent and have resulted in the deaths of actors Michael Landon and Rex Harrison and several of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's family.  Some reports claim that the late singer George Harrison also succumbed to pancreatic cancer.  Incurable adenocarcinoma, the most common form of pancreatic cancer, has essentially a 100% death rate.

 

It appears that Mr. Jobs's surgery was successful and the 49-year-old tech icon plans to return to the helms of Pixar and Apple in September.

Chickenpox Vaccine Quickly Wears Off

About two years ago, a sizable chickenpox eruption occurred in Minnesota schoolchildren.  Embarrassingly for the CDC and its giant pharmaceutical puppet masters, the outbreak was triggered by a six-year old who had already been vaccinated for the disease.  Worse yet, many of the children who came down with the virus had been similarly immunized.

 

The link above points to an article discussing a study that confirms that a substantial number of the Minnesota children who fell ill during the chickenpox spate had been inoculated for the disease.  The study concludes that the vaccine wears off quickly with time.  But instead of questioning the usefulness for this balky vaccination for an illness that is usually mild for most children, the article pumps for even more chickenpox "immunizations" through booster shots.

 

The obvious problem with this strategy is that it could result in an adult population that is vulnerable to the sickness.  Chickenpox is a much more severe malady if it is contracted during adulthood, hitting adults significantly harder than it does infants who themselves are more vulnerable to complications than older children. 

 

There is also concern that childhood chickenpox jabs could lead to increased incidence of shingles in adults.  In fact, one British study suggested that the resulting shingles deaths could be as high as the number of chickenpox deaths prevented by the vaccines.  Worse still, shingles is now being observed in children, appearing in those who have been inoculated for chickenpox.  And the chickenpox vaccine itself can directly lead to serious side effects including death.

 

As with all vaccinations, use your own good judgment before subjecting yourself or your children to unnecessary risks.  And above all, do not take the CDC's or Giant Pharma's words for anything.

Breast-Feeding Cuts Breast Cancer Risk

More evidence for the health benefits of breast-feeding.

China Threatens War with Taiwan

Relinquish sovereignty or be invaded.

Attending Doctor, Commanding Officer Dispute Kerry Purple Heart

As an officer in command (OIC) in training, Kerry reported during this mission to William Schachte, who eventually retired as a Rear Admiral. Schachte flatly contradicts Kerry's claim to have been wounded by enemy fire, saying that after his M-16 jammed, Kerry picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade that exploded too close to the boat, causing a small piece of shrapnel to stick in the skin of his arm. Kerry himself did not report receiving hostile fire that night, which would have been required, and there is no record of hostile fire for the mission.

Kerry succeeded in keeping the small piece of shrapnel in his arm until the following day, when he was treated by Dr. Louis Letson, whose version of the event matches William Schachte's account rather than Kerry's:

I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay. John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat.

The following morning, John Kerry arrived at the office of Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard to apply for a Purple Heart. Having already been informed by Schachte that Kerry's injury was self-inflicted rather than the result of hostile fire, Commander Hibbard told him to "forget it." Hibbard recently said of Kerry's minor scratch, "I’ve seen worse injuries from a rose thorn."

Google Search Engine Thinks Bush is the Ultimate Failure

An "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search on the word "failure" takes you to current American President G.W. Bush's bio at whitehouse.gov.  To see this yourself:

1.  Go to www.google.com.

2. Type "failure" into the search box.

3. Hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Of course, this may not work this way forever...

Violence Mars Final Day of Boston DNC Demonstrations

More black-hooded "anarchist" instigators triggering clashes with the Storm Troopers a la Seattle?

How to Install Linux on VIA EPIA Mainboards

Andrew Howlett provides a this promising document.

Group Smuggles Simulated Backpack Nuclear Bomb Across Border to Tucson Federal Building

In the middle of the "War on Terror," our borders are left wide open while Bush entices hoards of illegal aliens to pour into our country by promising Social Security benefits when our Social Security system is very near to implosion.  And at the same time Bush sends our troops, who should be guarding our borders, into Iraq where he creates a veritable "terrorist" incubator.  Bush then has our trusting, patriotic troops beat this hornet's nest with a very short stick by imposing marital law resulting in our soldiers and the American people getting stung.

 

Wakeup!  The "War of Terror" is really a "War on Your Freedoms" using the fear and uncertainty of terrorism to make you comply!

John Kerry Faked War Footage

Illusion on top of illusion.

For more than thirty years, most Vietnam veterans kept silent as we were maligned as misfits, addicts, and baby killers. Now that a key creator of that poisonous image is seeking the Presidency we have resolved to end our silence.

The time has come to set the record straight. 

...

John Kerry's service in Vietnam lasted 4 months and 12 days, beginning in November 1968 when he reported to Cam Rahn Bay for a month of training. His abbreviated combat tour ended shortly after he requested a transfer out of Vietnam on March 17, 1969, citing Navy instruction 1300.39 permitting personnel with three Purple Hearts to request reassignment. So far as we are able to determine, Kerry was the only Swift sailor ever to leave Vietnam without completing the standard one-year tour of duty, other than those who were seriously wounded or killed.

It is clear that at least one of Kerry's Purple Heart awards was the result of his own negligence, not enemy fire, and that Kerry went to unusual lengths to obtain the award after being turned down by his own commanding officer.

John Kerry has long insisted that using the three-injury loophole to leave combat early was his own idea, but Kerry's fellow Swift officer Thomas Wright, who served on occasion as the OIC (Officer in Charge) of Kerry's boat group, contradicts that claim. Wright reports that he "had a lot of trouble getting Kerry to follow orders," and that those who worked with Kerry found him "oriented towards his personal, rather than unit goals and objectives." He therefore requested that Kerry be removed from his boat group. After John Kerry qualified for his third Purple Heart, Thomas Wright and two fellow officers informed him of the obscure regulation, and told him to go home. Wright concluded, "We knew how the system worked and we didn’t want him in Coastal Division 11."

Constructing a complete picture of Kerry's service is difficult due to gaps in the Naval records provided by the Kerry campaign. These gaps include missing and incomplete fitness reports, missing medical records and missing records related to his medal awards.

For this reason we call upon Senator Kerry to authorize complete access to all his military records by filing a standard Form 180, a simple two-page release form.

And from another source:

O'Neill's book says Kerry "would revisit ambush locations for re-enacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero, catching it all on film. Kerry would take movies of himself walking around in combat gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits. A joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of himself to take home for his planned political campaigns."

Full Frontal Attack on Free Speech in Austin, Texas

In general, television is like a giant hypodermic needle injecting septic tank sludge directly into our brains. 

 

However, there is an exception.  In a handful of communities, cable access channels have blossomed like the Internet into bastions of free speech.  One of the most glorious examples of this phenomena has occurred in Austin, Texas where not only is there a wonderful mix of award winning eclectic programs, but many of these access TV programs are more intelligent and entertaining than anything found in the corporate cesspool. 

 

Also, a great number of these locally produced shows have unplugged from the Matrix and take on the globalists -- Republican and Democrat Illuminati alike -- head-on.  And the Austin access channels often have ratings that pummel corporate programming.

 

Despite the demonstrably wild success of Access TV in the area, Austin Community Access Television plans to effectively kill the 31-year-old institution.  If you live in Austin, you can speak out today against this blatant affront to free speech by following the link above.

China Continues to Practice for Taiwan Invasion

The beautiful island of Formosa is considered "the most dangerous flashpoint in the Asia-Pacific region" according to this Reuters article.

John Kerry's Contempt for the First Amendment

The Skull and Bones "Long Devil" blueblood and the Democratic National Convention give us a glimpse of what the U.S. would be like under Kerry's reign.  And it would be more of the same butchering of the Bill of Rights that has progressed under Bush and Clinton...

Site of the Day: From the Wilderness

Kevin kindly sends us this highly relevant link.

'Butcher of Waco' Jumps on Kerry Bandwagon

Former American President Bill Clinton, whose popularity remains high in certain circles, has cheerfully agreed to take a prominent role in fellow Democrat John Kerry's Presidential bid.  One of William Jefferson Clinton's most lasting legacies is the brutal massacre of the 74 men, women and children from a small, eccentric, separatist, religious group in Waco, Texas.

Heil Heinz-Kerry!

Civility is a one-way street for the aristocrats.  Captured below in a Hitler-esque pose, the fabulously wealthy blueblood angrily tracked down a reporter and told him to "shove it!" just minutes after she completed a speech about civility and dignity.

 

Democrats Cage Free Speech

If you want to exercise your God-given, inalienable rights to free speech at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, you'll find yourself herded into the caged "Free Speech Zone," double speak that would make Orwell proud.

People, WAKEUP!  The highest levels of the Democratic and Republican parties are working for exactly the same goal: the dissolution of the American Bill of Rights and the establishment of an oppressive, brutal, Godless, fascist world government with a handful of inbreed aristocrats and financiers at the top.

Uncle Sam Wants You... to Have Bigger Boobs...

While he shafts the vets.

 

The United States military now provides its soldiers and their families with free (taxpayer funded) breast enhancement surgery.  Liposuction, nose jobs and face-lifts are also available at no charge.

 

And at the same time, veteran's benefits are being cut, while the government is shutting down VA hospitals.

We're reaching the Orwellian point at which "that which is not forbidden is compulsory."

-- Claire Wolfe

Heroic National Archive Workers Set 'Sting' on Berger

In an example of how the common man or woman can still make differences in our country today despite the rapid consolidation of power into the soiled hands of aristocracy, National Archive workers set a "sting" operation into effect after suspicions arose that Clinton high priest and former Kerry lieutenant Sandy Berger was stealing highly sensitive documents from under their watch.

Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.

What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.

After Berger's previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal sources familiar with the case.

The notion of one of Washington's most respected foreign policy figures being subjected to treatment that had at least a faint odor of a sting operation is a strange one. But the peculiarities -- and conflicting versions of events and possible motives -- were just then beginning in a case that this week bucked Berger out of an esteemed position as a leader of the Democratic government-in-waiting that had assembled around presidential nominee John F. Kerry.

Smoke and Mirrors 9/11 Panel Recommends Greater Intelligence Committee Powers

The 9/11 commission report to be released today recommends handing control to both spending and policy for much of the "War on Terror" to permanent joint Congressional intelligence and domestic security committees.  The new joint committees would absorb, restructure and eliminate existing organs while wielding tremendous centralized power. 

 

The sham commission also recommends the creation of a Cabinet-level national director of intelligence who would be given authority over the CIA (America's foreign intelligence), FBI (America's domestic intelligence) and other agencies. 

 

Together, these moves would significantly distill control of our emerging police state apparatus into fewer and fewer hands.

SCO Smashed in Court

Daimler-Chrysler's motion for summary dismissal of all of SCO's actions against it appears to have been sweepingly successful.  Only one trivial charge from the SCOurge still lingers.

'Freelance' Torturer Claims U.S. Defense Department Link

Jonathan Idema, an American citizen "terrorist hunter" operating at large in Afghanistan, claimed in an Afghan court that his personal "war on terror," which involved capturing and torturing Afghans, was exercised under the auspices of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Photographing Scenic Bridge Lands Student in Homeland Security Hot Water

Ian Spiers had just hours to finish an assignment for his photography class. He was taking shots of a railroad bridge near the Ballard Locks when an officer with a German shepherd approached him, asked him what he was doing and requested some ID.

Later, he was questioned and photographed by a Homeland Security agent.

It was the second time in less than two months that Spiers had been questioned about taking pictures of a landmark that attracts hundreds of tourists a day, many of whom snap photos of the ships passing between Lake Union and Elliott Bay.

A growing number of photographers around the country have been similarly rousted in recent years as they've tried to take pictures of federal buildings and other major public works, said Donald Winslow, editor of the National Press Photographers Association's magazine.

"We've seen the constant erosion of our civil liberties amid this cry for homeland security by doing things that have an appearance of making us safe, but in reality it's a sham," Winslow said. "No one showed up at the World Trade Center and took photographs from nine different angles before they flew planes into it."

When only cops have guns, it's called a police state.

-- anonymous

Mysterious Maryland Creature

A reader sends us this link to a story about an unusual animal seen and filmed in Glyndon, Maryland.  The superficially hyena-like or perhaps thylacine-like creature is not shy and has been seen by many people in broad daylight and at short distances.

This strange looking animal vaguely recalls an old pet of ours.  Disgusted with the high costs of professional grooming, years ago I shaved the family schnauzer, Pogo, so that he had a bushy mane and a narrow, spiky ridge of hair down his back.  It was fun to take Pogo out to the yuppie-filled jogging trails and watch the runners gasp and jump out of our way at the sight of our leashed, grunting, warthog-like companion.

Clinton National Security Advisor Smuggled Out Highly Classified Terrorist Secrets From National Archives in Pants and Socks

Former Clinton advisor Sandy Berger allegedly smuggled out highly sensitive terrorist reports and related notes from the National Archives.  Some of this material, transported out in Berger's pants, socks and jacket, has since disappeared.  House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) comments:

What could those documents have said that drove Mr. Berger to remove them without authorization from a secure reading room for classified documents?

What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets?

Did these documents detail simple negligence or did they contain something more sinister? Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission and potentially put their report under a cloud?

Microsoft and Lindows Settle Trademark Case

We just received this Linspire press release:

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN DIEGO — July 19, 2004 — Lindows.com and Microsoft Corp. today jointly announced that a worldwide settlement has been reached in the trademark infringement cases between the two companies.

"This case was centered on the fundamentals of international trademark law and our necessary efforts to protect the Windows® trademark against infringement," said Tom Burt, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft. "This settlement addresses those concerns, and we are pleased that Lindows will now compete in the marketplace with a name distinctly its own."

"We are pleased to resolve this litigation on terms that make business sense for all parties,” said Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows, Inc. “Over the next few months Lindows will cease using the term Lindows and transition to Linspire globally as our company name and primary identifier for our operating system product."

The settlement agreement resolves all claims in this litigation, both in the United States and internationally. Terms of the settlement are confidential.

The "Lindows" moniker will be dropped from all Linspire products by September 14th and all Lindows related URLs will be transferred to Microsoft in exchange for a cash settlement of $20,000,000.

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Bobby Fisher Nabbed

Chess icon Bobby Fisher faces deportation from Japan to the U.S. after Fisher's passport was suddenly revoked.  Back in America, Fisher will face charges for playing a chess match in the former Republic of Yugoslavia under alleged violation of U.N. sanctions.  Fisher could spend up to ten years in prison and suffer a fine ranging into the millions of dollars.  Yes, fascism, both in U.S. and U.N. guises, knows no limits to absurdity.

 

To be sure, Fisher can be a fountain of caustic diatribe, but how does anyone warrant a blatantly and offensively manipulative piece in the pretentious Atlantic Monthly?  The wildly vitriolic article boxes in the reader so oppressively that there is no space to form an independent opinion.  Maybe Fisher really is crazy, vain and hateful, but we should trust corporate media least when it demands that we abandon our own powers of appraisal.  And we should question their motives just as we should scrutinize the sudden extradition of Fisher.

China Building Up Submarine Fleet In Preparation for Taiwan Conflict

One official said the new submarine was a "technical surprise" to U.S. intelligence, which was unaware that Beijing was building a new non-nuclear powered attack submarine. U.S. intelligence agencies have few details about the new submarine but believe it is diesel-powered rather than nuclear-powered, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

 
The new boat, which appears to be a combination of indigenous Chinese hardware and Russian weapons, suggests that China is building up its submarine forces in preparation for a conflict over Taiwan, defense analysts say.

Zambia's Life Expectency Now Only 32 Years

The enormity of sub-Saharan African pandemics is staggering.  Be forewarned that this information comes from the U.N.

Checkpoints Set Up Throughout Southwest

We have been informed that checkpoints have been set up in every state from Texas to California on Interstate 10 and that all vehicles are being pulled over for both eastbound and westbound traffic.  Drivers are minimally asked about their travel plans, but many are searched.  With a recent "Supreme Court" ruling, all drivers must answer police questioning and produce identification or risk imprisonment.

 

Strangely, this radical escalation of police state behavior has gone largely unreported in corporate media.

Government Site Hosts Pro-al Qaeda Propaganda

An Arkansas Transportation Department server housed more than 70 files on an FTP site reserved for contractors.

Mexican Government Officials Microchipped

Like cattle and pets, and echoing the pages of Revelations, certain Mexican law officials are to receive id/tracking chip implants.  Supposedly the chips cannot be removed, but since each microchip is implanted in the arm this begs an obvious possibility...

 

This follows the Spanish Baja Beach Club that launched similar implants for "VIP members."

A Teeny-Tiny Review of the Macally Qball USB Optical Trackball in a WinXP Environment

The title is almost longer than the article.

Education Secretary to 6-Year Old: 'Stupid, Dirty Girl'

What could prompt the wealthy, 74-year-old California Education Secretary to tell an unsuspecting 6-year-old that her name means "stupid, dirty girl"?  You can view the taped episode in both Windows Media Player and Real Player.

 

Could it be that Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles who keeps company in the highest political circles, was irked by the child's name "Isis"?  As bizarre as it may sound, the ancient Egyptian goddess is still worshipped in weird rituals by FreeMasons and related organizations like Skull and Bones and others.  Of the 800 living "Bonesmen," who are created at a rate of only 15-per year, two are facing off this year in the false dichotomy that is our country's Presidential elections.

COSBI Source Code: FileCopy v0.52a

Here is the first batch of source code for our COSBI benchmarking tools.  We recommend that you create the directory structure "c:\data\cosbi" and extract the zipped Delphi code into it.  In addition to the FileCopy benchmark, you will also find common files used throughout COSBI projects.  Included is a complete, fully implemented, object oriented CPUID unit, structures for extracting WMI information, a comprehensive "StopWatch" class for timing events and a wide variety of useful routines.

 

To fully compile this project you will need to import two type libraries for the WbemScripting_TLB, and ActiveDs_TLB units: "Active DS Type Library" and "Microsoft WMI Scripting V1.2 Library".

 

All of this code is released under GPL.  If you would like to contribute source code to COSBI, please send it here.

The Nightmare of LGA

Intel recently migrated its end-of-the-line Pentium 4 Prescotts to a new socket design marketed as "LGA" or "Land Grid Array."  Gone are the familiar armies of CPU pins which have been sources for large percentages of processor returns.  As an added bonus to Intel, the "penny a pin" rule of thumb for guesstimating package costs means that the Santa Clara processor peddler may be shaving up to $7 a chip by going the smooth-bottomed route. 

 

LGA comes at a good time for Intel because the chipmaker needed more contacts for Prescott since the I*R drop on 90nm wires is very steep -- steeper than expected -- and voltage droop is a big problem.  More contacts mean more power and ground points to help alleviate voltage droop.

 

LGA chips are in a BGA style package similar to those seen in embedded applications.  VIA's EPIA motherboards have BGA C3's soldered to them.  Cheap and robust, from a processor maker's point of view BGA-style packaging is very attractive.

 

However, Intel's LGA scheme shifts the exposure of product returns from the CPU vendor to the motherboard maker.  Production costs are also migrated to motherboard companies because the complicated LGA sockets are not cheap.  In fact, prior to LGA, similar sockets for testing BGA parts cost hundreds to thousands of dollars a piece.

 

There is no question that motherboard companies recognize Intel's motivations for moving to LGA.  For many years we have all heard muffled grumbling that Intel has bullied component suppliers in line behind various Intel-led initiatives or that the Santa Clara corporation even pressured critical infrastructure suppliers to neglect support for processors or related technologies from competing CPU vendors.  But these accusations were usually made "off the record."  However, since LGA clearly marks an extreme change in the cost structure and risk exposure in the motherboard-CPU "ecosystem," many motherboard makers are being quite vocal in their displeasure with Intel's LGA.

 

Our link points to an official Intel document that details instructions to "professional system integrators" on how to properly install 775-land packages into motherboards.  The contact photos make it crystal clear why motherboard vendors, primarily Taiwanese who already operate on hair-thin margins, are loudly gnashing their teeth about LGA775.

Army Psy-Ops Staged Toppling of Hussein Statue

This is as pseudo-revelatory as Fahrenheit 9/11.  For most of our readers, the Army's disclosure is exposing what we knew from the beginning.  In fact, the Army's report still withholds the detail that a group of Ahmed Chalabi's henchmen were trucked in for the staged "freedom celebration."

 

As an effort to quell Iraqi resistance, the Psychological Operation measure was a miserable failure.  But as "Homeland" propaganda, knocking over Saddam's American flag draped effigy was a huge success.  All of the major news media trumpeted the statue leveling event as a landmark in freedom's history.

 

Yet it was all a lie.

 

A Democratic-Republic cannot function if its citizenry do not know the truth.  Demand accountability from your elected servants in Washington, turn off the corporate media disinformation and leverage the Internet's vast storehouse of information to find the real truth!

Intel Prescott Pentium 4: Computes and Cooks at the Same Time

Crapco Computer Cookery 5000.

Boca Raton, Florida Middle School Rolls Out Hand Scanning

The Sunshine State is at the forefront of transferring prison technology into the hearts of its public schools.  On March 9th, we reported that a Pinellas County, Florida school district obtained a grant from the Department of Homeland Security to fund a $2-million thumb scanning project in order to track all of its children as young as the tender age of 5.

No Retail WinXP64

Leif sends us this interesting post from Microsoft's Brian Marr.

Hi Everyone -

My name is Brian Marr and I work in the Windows Client Product Management Team - I am the product manager for Windows XP64, which means that I am responsible for making the decisions that will affect how you get your hands on the product (along with a few other things).

I've been reading these threads and wanted to clarify some things about availability. Below is a summary of what we have planned.  I hope this will answer your questions.

BETA PROGRAMSz
Today we have a customer preview program, which it sounds as though most of you have taken advantage of.  I realize that we have a very old build out there and I'm working with our release management team to get an update out asap.  I think you are going to be impressed by how much work our development team has put into the OS since Beta 1 and look forward to hearing your feedback on it.

There is also a technical beta program - my understanding is that we'll open this back up again after XP SP2 ships.  This is a great way to get builds more often, but there are some requirements around filing bugs etc that you'll be responsible for.

FINAL RELEASE
Now to the big question - what happens when this product releases?  Here is what we have planned:

1.  The OS will be available on some new OEM PCs.  No surprise there.  The OEMs are responsible for deciding which systems they want to support it on.

2.  The OS will be part of MSDN

3.  The OS will be part of Software Assurance

4.  The OS will be sold through System Builders and Distributors. You can either purchase it pre-installed on a system builder PC or just purchase the OS with some piece of hardware.  As Darrell mentioned on another thread, this can really be anything (a cable, for example).  If your system builder of choice wants to only sell it with high-end components, I'd suggest finding a new place to buy your equipment.

5. There will not be a retail fully-packaged product. I've read some interesting posts here where some of you sound angry because we're not doing a retail box.  This really surprises me - SB/Disti is the easiest and least expensive way to get your new OS, especially if you build your own PCs.

"EXISTING 64-BIT SYSTEMS..."
Finally - I am working on something that would let you trade your 32-bit XP Pro license for 64-bit.  Nothing final here... no details... but the point is that we want to take care of the people who go out and buy or build x64 systems before we ship.

At the end of the day my colleagues and I work on this project for a reason - we (you and I) are the people driving the transition into the next phase in computing.  Our job isn't to squeeze money from your pockets or make this hard for you - we want to make it *very* easy.

Hopefully consolidating some of this info will help.  If you have any other questions about our plans, feel free to ask.  If I can answer them, I will.  Have fun with the OS... I'm looking forward to organizing a friendly game of 64-bit UT04 pre-release with anyone interested sometime soon .

Brian

Feds Nab Art Exhibit Under Anti-Terrorist Ruse

Despite no apparent evidence of dangerous or illegal materials, the FBI has impounded an art exhibit and may charge the four responsible artists with biological terrorism.  The federal legal actions appear to be intended to halt the artists' demonstration of the rapid and unreported proliferation of genetically modified organisms into our food supply.

The equipment was to have been used at MASS MoCA to conduct simple experiments on food products to determine if they contained GMOs, genetically modified organisms. Critical Art Ensemble has staged such performative-art installations in this country and Europe to call attention to the proliferation of food-related biotechnology.

 

According to news reports, the FBI also seized samples of three relatively benign bacteria used to demonstrate the presence of manipulated genes in common food items. Erie County health officials later reported they had tested Kurtz's possessions and found nothing to endanger the public.

 

The FBI referred the case to U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr., chief of the anti-terrorism unit in western New York. Hochul would not comment on the Kurtz investigation, and no charges have been filed to date.

 

But reports from individuals interviewed by federal authorities, including other members of CAE served with subpoenas, say the tone of questioning suggests Hochul is attempting to build a case against Kurtz as a bio-terrorist. Beatriz de Costa, a member of the CAE collective, told The New York Times the grand jury is looking into "possession of biological agents."

Following historical trends of other countries that plunged into fascism, the U.S. government continues to broaden the application of recent, sweeping anti-terrorism legislation to encompass activities that clearly fall outside of the realm of terrorism.  Using these laws for censorship further extends this disturbing and rapidly expanding phenomena that started with the application of Patriot Act provisions on drug raids.

 

Food using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must be rejected and we cannot rely on corporations or governments to protect us.  Not only are there obvious potential health concerns, but patented, genetically engineered material has already escaped and contaminated vast areas of crops.  The inevitable consequence of GMO exploitation will be the displacement of naturally occurring food producing organisms with patented, self terminating, sterile counterparts.  This will wrest control of our food supply into the hands of a global corporate-government elite who will own the patents on all livestock and crop producing plants.

IBM Linux Notebooks

Uses Intel Centrino.

Glenn Henry Interview

LinuxDevices has published a fascinating, in depth interview with the founder of Centaur Technology, Glenn Henry.  In the article, Mr. Henry recounts the inspiring story of the genesis of the Austin-based CPU design firm.  This tale has become one of the signature sagas of the semiconductor industry.

Our engineers are extremely experienced, and very, very productive. One engineer here does the work of many, many others in a big company. I won't go through all the details, because they're not technical, but basically, we started with the theory, "We're going to do this with 20 or 30 designers." Remember the 82 people I mentioned? Of those, only 35 are actual designers. The rest are testers, and things like that.

So, we said, we were going to do it, with that many people. As I said before, we had this idea to constrain the complexity of the hardware. We hired just the right people, and gave them just the right environment to work in. We bought the best tools, and developed our own tools when the best tools weren't available, etc., etc.

So I have a long story there, but the punchline is that we were able to hire extremely experienced and good people, and keep those people. We just passed our nine year anniversary, and the key people who started the company in the first year are almost all still here.

So, this is the secret, actually: all the things I do are underlying things to allow us to hire the right people and keep them motivated and happy, and not leaving.

Our general claim is, "This is a company designed by me to be the kind of place I wanted to work in as an engineer." It doesn't fit everyone, but it fits certain people, and for those people, it's probably the best environment in the world.

...

We design products very quickly. That was also part of my theme: be lower cost than everybody else, and be able to move faster than everybody else. The things that make you able to do things with a small group also allow you to do things quickly. Actually, the more people you have, the slower things go: more communication, more decision-making, etc.

By the way, I stole this idea from Michael Dell. Quick anecdote: I was an IBM Fellow, and I managed very large groups -- hundreds of people -- at IBM. And I went to Dell originally to be their first Vice President of R&D. This was in 1988. So, I get to Dell, and find that the R&D department is six or seven guys that work directly for Michael! And Michael says, "Your job is to compete with Compaq." And I say, "Well, how can you do that with six or seven guys?" And he says, "That's the secret. We'll always be lower-cost, and we'll move quicker than they are." And of course, that's worked out very well at Dell.

We put out a lot of products, in a short period of time, which is actually a major competitive advantage. To give you one minor example, early this year, Intel started shipping a new processor called the Prescott. It's a variation of the Pentium 4. And it had new instructions in it, basically, that are called SSE3. We got our first part in late January. Those instructions are already in the next processor, that we've taped out to IBM.

Happy 9th Anniversary, Kathy!

Love, Van.

COSBI OSMark for Linux Version 0.1

Here is the first port of the COSBI OSMark benchmark to Linux.  While most tests work, a few are not yet implemented.  Maze Threads test only partially works, as it will run off the road and into weeds very quickly.  The Rich Edit test has mutated into a simple Memo Test since the Rich Edit control is only native to Windows.  The Result Viewer does not work yet and will be one of the last things attacked since we will need to write a chart control from scratch.  System info is only partially working right now.

 

To run the benchmark, you'll first need to install the Kylix libraries available here.  If you are using a Debian-based distribution, download each of the "deb" files and, from a console, run "dpkg -i kylix_library_filename.deb" for each of the deb files.  This should create a /usr/lib/kylix3 directory filled with 17 files.

 

Now download and unzip this file while preserving the directory structure (usually the default action of an archiving program).  From a command line, navigate to the OSMark directory and execute the "go.sh" script (e.g. "bash go.sh").  This should launch the OSMark GUI.  Other than the caveats above, the program behaves like the Windows version which you can read about here.

 

All scores are still normalized against a 3GHz P4 Dell system running Windows XP.  Although the Linux version differs from its Windows counterpart in terms of the 2d library used, you will likely be distressed at how much slower Linux is on any test that does plotting/drawing operations at all (besides filled circles which blazes on my system).  I suspect that the terrible graphics performance is due to poor driver implementation, but I've only had a chance to run OSMark on my Lindows system: an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB of PC2100 and an old GeForce3.

 

If you'd like to lend a hand and want the Kylix source code to tweak (or just want to peruse), drop me a line.

Email Notice

If you want to make sure that your emails to us do not get swallowed by our aggressive spam controls, please begin the subject line of your message with [vhj] or [cosbi].

Leatherman Busted Over 'Made in USA' Claims

A California judge has ordered the maker of popular pocket multi-tool knives to pay more than $13-million for misuse of the "Made in USA" label.  A spokesman for the Portland, Oregon-based company said that an appeal is likely.

PoopMoose

Bizarre, high quality, handmade, wooden candy dispensers come in a variety of animal forms and poop out candy.  Those crazy Alaskans!

Ronald Reagan Passes Away

The 93-year old former U.S. President died today after a protracted battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Father of Unix Puts Nail in Coffin of Anti-Torvalds Piece

Dr. Dennis Ritchie, one of the fathers of Unix, undermined the credibility of a forthcoming book that claims, among other things, that Linus Torvalds did not sire Linux.

 

The "Alexis de Tocquelville Institution" (ADTI) press release promoting an upcoming tome by its president, Kenneth Brown, states that Brown's work is based "on extensive interviews with more than two dozen leading technologists including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum." 

 

However, the iconic Dr. Ritchie reveals in a note to Groklaw that his only real interview with Brown consisted of a single, very brief email.  That exchange, published in full at Groklaw, is telling both in its brevity and by the obvious ways that Brown unsuccessfully attempts to simultaneously "butter up" Ritchie while trying to extract any pent-up venom against Torvalds.

In my opinion, you wrote Unix (UNICS) from scratch. In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer that insists that Linus had the Unix code (the Lyon's Book) and Minix code. Without those two, who could not have even come close to writing Linux. I hate to ask such a bare-knuckle question, but I really feel that this part of history is very gray.

I have worked in the analyst/writer/tech world long enough to recognize that Brown's writing stinks with the "gun-for-hire" bovine fecal odor.  What is funny is that Brown is not very good at it.  What is not humorous is that he is being promoted effectively enough to get his press releases into corporate media.

 

With Dr. Ritchie's condemning disclosures, all three of Brown's marquee sources have publicly refuted characterizations that are critical to the credibility of the ADTI book.  Both Richard Stallman and Andrew Tanenbaum have already vigorously disputed Brown's "findings" based on their interviews.

 

Now Brown is taking a cheap shot at Tanenbaum, one of Brown's key-but-now-indicting sources, by effectively labeling the Dutch professor and Minux creator as a loony.

In an interview with Tanenbaum, it became immediately noticeable that the professor was an animated, but tense individual about the topic of rights and attribution. He felt that well-known facts about Minix/Linux development should not have to be questioned. It was clear that he was very conflicted, and probably sorry that he sent the email in the first place.

In another piece, Brown attacks Linux while expressing strongly fascist notions that clearly benefit the corporate-government entity.  Brown, who has labeled Linux as "a leprosy," attempts to knit the Open Source and communist movements together.

In an eerie coincidence, the [Marx's Communist] Manifesto and leaders of the open source community both point to distrust of “bosses” and large corporations as the biggest threat to shared community ownership of property. As Linux continues to assert itself within the private sector, we will soon learn if this cynicism was indeed well-placed.

While Brown's argument is patently [pun intended] preposterous, it is not one that we should take lightly.  Driven by strongly libertarian ideals and idealists, the Open Source movement is one that our Founding Fathers would be proud of.  As such, the political motivations for Open Source -- among them: personal responsibility, personal initiative, personal freedom and personal liberty -- are as far away from communism -- which espouses complete state control over almost all aspects of people's lives -- as ideologies can get.

 

However, Brown is fear mongering, and truth, regardless of how obvious, is usually not a concern when the overall goal is to get people to react irrationally out of panic.  This is especially easy to accomplish if the topic is remotely foreign to many people like software development is. 

 

Sickly ironic, Brown's neo-Fascist positions hand off godlike powers to the corporate-state who can then own things as ethereal as ideas (like "double-clicking": see below).  This places Brown himself somewhere in the narrow gap between Lenin and Mussolini.

 

As jackbooted crazy as Brown, whose portrait looks remarkably like the Penguin from the campy Batman '60s TV show, may appear, we should not take him lightly as his ideas are very similar to SCO's and those expressed by Green Hill's Software (see the May 28th news item).

 

Clearly there is a concerted and well-funded effort to undermine Open Source software, but don't think for a second that this is about money.  It's about freedom: stealing your personal freedom to pimp videos and allow a fascist corporate-state to spy into your private life.  Only tightly controlled closed source software is suitable for embedding snooping and tracking mechanisms that both corporations and governments are drooling for.

Toasty Chips Mean Hot Business for Cooler Vendors

Meanwhile, CPU makers VIA and Transmeta try to walk the less fiery path.  Thanks for the link, Kerry.

All Your Clicks Belong to Microsoft

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are living in the Twilight Zone.  Exhibit 458b is Microsoft's successful attempt to obtain a U.S. patent for the use of different click patterns to trigger various software functions.

Microsoft has successfully patented using short, long or double clicks to launch different applications on "limited resource computing devices" - presumably PDAs and mobile phones. The US patent was granted on 27 April.
 

Now any US company using a variety of clicks to launch different software functions from the same button will have to change their product, pay licensing fees to Microsoft or give Microsoft access to its intellectual property in return.

Software patents are not just evil, but, as the Redmond bit peddler demonstrates, they are absurd.

You're Too Smart to be a Police Officer

A US man has been rejected in his bid to become a police officer for scoring too high on an intelligence test.
 

Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took an exam to join the New London police, in Connecticut, in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125.
 

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
 

Mr Jordan launched a federal lawsuit against the city, but lost.

COSBI CPU Speed v0.99

Here is the updated COSBI utility that we used when we stuck a Transmeta efficeon notebook into our deepfreeze.  COSBI CPU Speed dynamically measures and charts the clock speed of a system's CPU.  The graphs and raw data can be saved to disk.  The program also has a non-graphical logging feature that minimizes CPU overhead.

The Ecologist: Fluoride Can Kill

After a sleepless night, Lester contemplated the fluoridation dilemma as he soaped himself in the shower. "They say they are simply adjusting the level of natural fluoride in the water – which is calcium fluoride – but they are using a pure grade of sodium fluoride and very pure water for the rat experiments in the laboratory. But they are adding toxic pollution scrubber liquor to my drinking water!"  It didn’t make sense.  He called a man at the dental association and told him what he had learnt. The man said, coldly: "If you value your licence to practise, don’t ever mention this subject again!"

Honolulu, Hawaii voted recently to ban water fluoridation.  Few people in the U.S. are aware that most of Europe rejects the mass medication of populations through the introduction of fluoride into the water supply.  Even the bulk of scientists inside the EPA oppose water fluoridation.

Another Enemy of Open Source: Green Hills Software

Software "bugs" are coding errors that cause programs to fail or behave in unexpected or undesired ways.  Bugs are inevitable in complex applications and many bugs can go undetected for years and may never get resolved.  The vast majority of bugs are discovered by running compiled programs and comparing observed behavior with desired behavior.  However, there are many classes of software flaws that can only be found by stepping through the source code or, more painfully if the source code is not available, by using debugging tools like SoftICE.  Experienced software developers know that the only applications that can really be trusted are those that coders can verify themselves by stepping through the source.

 

"Open Source" software are a genre of free programs where the source code can be obtained without cost or obligation.  In the last few years, Open Source development has picked up a lot of steam with Linux having perhaps gaining the most momentum.  The allure of Open Source is obvious: the programs are free, high quality, customizable, and verifiable.  On top of this, the number of programmers familiar with Open Source operating systems, applications and programming tools is shooting up like gasoline prices.  And in terms of security, no self respecting coder would ever favor adopting closed source over a viable Open Source alternative.

 

Security vulnerabilities are the result of either bugs or deliberately inserted malicious code.

 

While the Open Source threat to Microsoft gets a lot of press, makers of boutique, closed source, embedded operating systems, compilers and applications are gravely challenged by the rising Open Source tidal wave.  Instead of paying for closed source tools, applications and operating systems, embedded hardware makers can now simply hire a handful of competent programmers to tweak the Linux kernel, build appropriate device drivers, massage existing Linux applications, and craft a few specialized programs.  Because many embedded applications are highly specialized requiring significant outlays in custom programming, Open Source costs can be much lower.  But more importantly, the embedded hardware company's fate and reputation are not in the hands of a third party.

 

One of the biggest closed source embedded software providers is Green Hills Software.  Over twenty-years old, Green Hills provides a variety of operating systems, compilers and programming tools targeting embedded development.  The Santa Barbara, California, privately held company has found success in such fertile grounds ranging from the defense industry to consumer electronics icons like Sony.

 

Instead of taking the high road in its fight to remain closed source and inherently unverifiable, the CEO of Green Hills has posted on his company's website a lunatic rant against Linux.  Borrowing a page from SCO's playbook, Green Hills's Dan O'Dowd claims that Linux is an "urgent threat to national security" and continues:

Many people have called me an alarmist for saying that the spread of Linux through defense systems is an urgent threat to national security. They ask: “What is the big problem? Sure there are plenty of malicious hackers releasing worms and viruses on the Internet bringing down Linux systems, inserting keystroke loggers on computers to steal passwords and credit card numbers, and lots of other mischief, but what does that have to do with national security?”

It's ironic how the most prominent closed source Linux alternative, Microsoft Windows, can be seamlessly dropped into the paragraph above while making Mr. O'Dowd's words demonstrably more accurate.

 

No, Mr. O'Dowd, you are not an alarmist.  You are a man so grafted to a business model that will inevitably fail that you are willing to spread outrageous, disingenuous, defaming disinformation. In fact, you stoop to the repugnant low as to attempt to stitch together Linux and the "9/11 terrorist" threat:

The 9/11 terrorist organizers had creativity, patience, and a desire to kill as many people as possible. The terrorists’ success and their continued ability to evade capture provides an example and encouragement to others. We must not turn our national defense over to Linux or any other operating system that is vulnerable to easy attack and subversion at all times. The 9/11 terrorist organizers, and all those whom they have inspired, are still out there, and they are still creative and patient. And if we make our national defense easy to attack, they will kill a lot more people. If Linux is deployed in critical defense systems, the result will be catastrophic.

It is fatally ironic to your perverse line of reasoning that the CIA example that you held up as evidence of how intelligence organizations could deliberately attack and undermine Linux was, effectively, deployed through closed source since the CIA's methods were hardwired in embedded controllers.  In fact, the type of proprietary, closed source tools that your company provides are the perfect vectors through which intelligence agencies can covertly deploy attacks.  In closed source applications you can hide anything.  In Open Source, there is no place to hide and coders can be tracked down and held responsible if they deliberately attempt to insert malicious code into official distributions.

 

Mr. O'Dowd, stick to showcasing the strengths of your products and stop the SCO-wannabe-foaming-at-the-mouth-madman anti-Linux tirades.

 

Oh, and I'm writing this rebuttal as a response to your own irony-filled challenge:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Deepfreezing a Transmeta efficeon

What's that next to the Tony's pizza, frozen vegetables and Lean Cuisine?  Why a wirelessly remote controlled, $1,500 Transmeta efficeon notebook running benchmarks.  And what happened?  Performance improved up to 20%, among other things.

Bits & Bytes: The P4 is Dead

The future of computing, Transmeta's Achilles' Heel, The Creature From Jekyl Island and more.

'Got His Own'

This is a song from the very talented Blues duo, Johnny and Anya.  John is Kathy's brother and lives in Denver.  You can find a few more samples of their music on their site.

Winnie Vandora Smith

Born April 25th, 2004 at 6:05PM in Georgetown, Texas.

COSBI OpenSourceMark Preview

Get a sneak peek at this COSBI OpenSourceMark beta, the most flexible, useful and verifiable benchmark available today.  OSMark is a comprehensive benchmarking suite that is easily user extensible and will be ported to Linux.  We'll be releasing the source code as soon as we finish the documentation and stomp out the remaining bugs.  Follow the link above to learn how to use OSMark and download the beta.

American Indian Man Arrested for Performing Ritual on Dead Eagle He Found

More lunacy from "Governments Gone Wild!"

Local 6[66] News reported that Rogers is licensed to handle the bald eagle but not to dismember them after they're dead.

Weird News from Pravda

Formerly the notorious propaganda mouthpiece of the Soviet Union, Pravda still lives on with ambitions of becoming an influential international Internet news source.

 

However, the Russian newspaper has published several very weird and incredible stories, especially in their so-called "Science" section.  This first piece claims that, eight years ago, American and British scientists discovered a "time gate" above the South Pole that propels weather balloon lifted chronometers thirty years into the past.  The article asserts that the United States intends to send agents from the CIA or FBI into this time vortex to manipulate history.  Advances in Russian time machine development are also discussed:

The program was resumed in 1987 when the Institute already functioned on the territory of the Soviet Union. A tragedy occurred on August 30, 1989: an extremely strong explosion sounded at the Institute's branch office on the Anjou islands. The explosion destroyed not only the experimental module of 780 tons but also the archipelago itself that covered the area of 2 square kilometers. According to one of the versions of the tragedy, the module with three experimenters collided with a large object, probably an asteroid, in the parallel world or heading toward the parallel world. Having lost its propulsion system, the module probably remained in the parallel world.

 

The last record made in the framework of the experiment and kept at the Institute archives says: "We are dying but keep on conducting the experiment. It is very dark here; we see all objects become double, our hands and legs are transparent, we can see veins and bones through the skin. The oxygen supply will be enough for 43 hours, the life support system is seriously damaged. Our best regards to the families and friends!" Then the transmission suddenly stopped.

This Pravda article contains a purported photograph of a tiny dead space alien.  A group of Japanese has apparently erected a monument in remembrance of the 10"-high extraterrestrial that had been adopted by a mentally disturbed Russian woman before both the lady and the space alien met with tragic deaths.  And for more menacing ETs, Pravda also claims that the Soviet Army fought UFOs.

Dell Drops Prescott for Northwood

And in March, Dell switched from the latest version of Intel's Pentium 4, a chip dubbed Prescott, to Northwood, an older version of the Pentium 4 that comes in speeds similar to those of Prescott, as the main processor offering for Dell's Dimension XPS and Dimension 8300 desktops.

Supplies of the Prescott chips and also of the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip have not been sufficient to meet Dell's needs, so the company has shifted away from them, rather than disappoint customers with lengthier delivery times for new desktops, a company representative confirmed.

Benchmarking Transmeta's efficeon

Van puts Transmeta's shiny new flagship processor under a microscope.  What he finds will surprise you.  With very little provocation, the massive efficeon throttles to beat the band, so when you need that 1GHz that you paid for, the efficeon clocks down to 933MHz, 800MHz or even lower!  Inside the exhaustive review, you can also download the tool used to discover this throttling scandal.

Boosting the Floating Point Performance of VIA's C3

A tiny optimization tip can yield more than 2.5x better FPU performance.

Centaur Defeats Intel

Off to the races!

The Insanity of Outsourcing

About a decade ago, I worked at a large corporation as a senior programmer.  This company was just beginning to outsource some of its surplus programming needs to offshore outsourcing consulting firms primarily located in India.  At the time, the economy was robust and no domestic jobs were being cutback.  Despite this, I was distressed by many of the consequences of outsourcing that I had observed.

 

I took my concerns to the VP of IT.  The following is a partial enumeration of issues I had noticed from our foray into outsourcing our programming needs to India:

1. The quality of work that I had observed from most of the outsourced contractors was inferior to that obtained from our locally hired workers.

2. Although most of the outsourced contractors spoke English well, large cultural divides continued to exist resulting in communication issues that inevitably impacted timelines.  Cultural differences also led to a degraded social environment inside the IT department, lowering overall worker comfort and reducing job satisfaction.

3. The average wage paid to an Indian contracting firm for the services of one contractor was $50/hour and did not represent a significant savings to the company.

4. Contractor qualifications were often overstated.

5. It usually took an investment of about three months of intensive onsite training to impart enough knowledge about the company's proprietary software system before a worker of any type could begin to become productive.  With an outsourced consultant, this investment would be wasted since time spent with the company by a typical contractor was usually limited to one or two years.

6. The company's proprietary software technology was at risk of being compromised by the revolving door of outsourced consultants.

7. It was morally wrong to ship money out of the local economy, away from the families and friends of our local communities, especially when local alternatives existed.  What made the current outsourcing trends especially repugnant is that there was no clear win for the company, short term or otherwise.

As an alternative, I suggested that we establish a cooperative education program with the local high schools, colleges and universities for the some of the following reasons:

1. Wages of $10-$20/hour represented a significant savings to the company, but would seem generous to young men and women still in high school or trying to make their way through college.

2. The work ethic of the local culture in NW Arkansas was superlative.  Cultural expectations would be familiar and comfortable to the salaried workers.

3. Since coop workers would be harvested from local homes, they had great incentive for staying in the area, meaning that the company's training expenses could be amortized over much longer periods.

4. To work in the company's IT department, a formal programming degree was really not necessary since the company's proprietary software base required extensive in-house training.  What was more valuable to the company was proven problem solving abilities, coding skills, ability to communicate and work well with others, and work ethic.  All of these qualities could be obtained through coop candidates.

5. Putting the company's money in elevating the targeted skill levels of people in the local area would be good PR and would help sustain the local economy.

6. It would encourage youth in the area to acquire education in software development.

Before I left the company, I was able to establish a fledgling coop program with a local high school.  The first candidate that came through was a resounding success.  He trained faster, his quality of work was outstanding, he communicated well, and everyone liked him and felt at ease around him.  And he was cheap!  It really looked like the coop program could eventually eliminate most if not all of the company's outsourcing needs.

 

Several years after I left the company, I contacted the VP of IT to find out the status of the coop program that I had left in its infancy.  Sadly, she said that it no longer existed and she didn't know why, especially considering the early success it had seen.  I suspect that it failed because the program no longer had a champion, someone to stand up, advocate and push through an alternative solution when the rest of the industry is migrating like lemmings in the same wet direction.

 

Of course, now outsourcing has become a blight on the software development industry, resulting in lost domestic jobs and decreasing wage levels.  If you work as a programmer and see the insane trend towards offshore outsourcing threatening jobs in your area, stand up and advocate sane alternatives like coop programs with local high schools and colleges.  In the long run, the company will benefit and so will your country.

Mac Smacks P4-Xeon in Benchmarks

At least according to the April, 2004 edition of Popular Mechanics.  On page 39 of the venerable magazine:

Not Being able to run SPEC tests, we turned to BLAST and HMMer, which are DNA and genome-sequence matching tests, as well as Bibble, a batch image-processing application...  And we were surprised [by our Linux results].  The G5 was 59.5 percent faster than the HP at processing 85 high-resolution color photographs totaling 684.6MB of data.  In the HMMer tests (61.3MB of data), Apple was 67 percent faster than the PC and under BLAST (32.8MB), Apple was 85.9 percent faster.  These results are in line with those now published on Apple's Web site.

The Apple Power Mac system was a dual 2GHz G5 with 2GB RAM and an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro.  HP loaned PM an xw6000 workstation with dual 3.2GHz Xeons, 2GB of RAM and an nVidia Quadro FX1100.  The hard drives were not named in the article which could be critical giving the large working sets of these benchmarks.

New Science Site...

Added to our links page.  Thanks, Tom.

More on Prescott

Bush, that is.  Link courtesy Robert.

Bits & Bytes

A look at two Prescotts.

ReactOS

An Open Source Windows NT clone project.

Odd Coincidence?

There are exactly 911 days between the New York attacks on September 11, 2001 and the Madrid bombings on March 11, 2004, precisely 2.5 years later.

Children to be Forced to Thumb-Scan to Ride School Bus

The Pinellas County, Florida school district plans to use a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security to fund a $2-million thumb-scanning project.  From ages 5 and up, all children will have to submit to thumb-scans before being allowed to board or depart the school district's busses.

 

A thumb-scan is a process of reading an individual's thumb print into a computer for identification purposes and is just one of several "biometric" tracking technologies that have become vogue since the ghoul of fascism arose from the ashes of the World Trade Center.

School bus safety has been getting more attention since a January 2002 bus hijacking in Pennsylvania. A Berks County school bus carrying 13 students was overtaken by a man with a rifle, and found in Maryland six hours later when the hijacker turned himself into police.

Hmm, so I supposed that if thumb-scanning had been implemented in the Berks County case, then the school bus driver would have been alerted that the rifle toting man was not, in fact, seven-year-old Alice Jones or 12-year-old Frankie Olsen?  Dear Lord, are we expected to surrender our children to such malicious stupidity? 

 

In the last few years, it seems as if we are rapidly transforming our nation's public schools into penal colonies that rob our children of dignity, free speech (and other Constitutional rights), innocence, and, sadly enough, education.

 

$2,000,000 is a lot of money and it sounds like Pinellas County schools could put it to much better use by hiring a few decent American History teachers.  Or they could purchase about 4,000 new computers.

Toyota Believes the Government Should Control Your Car

"The power output of the engine can be restricted according to the license grade, and drivers whose licenses have been suspended would be unable to operate the car at all."

 

Time to get a Chevy?  At least GM took the FBI to court to protest using OnStar to eavesdrop on your conversations.  While GM won this case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal's ruling leaves open the clear possibility that similar technology will be used in the future for such reasons.  And under the Patriot Acts, surveillance orders are getting much easier to come by.

 

Meanwhile, Ford's Volvo has created a concept car that has no hood and would actively and autonomously communicate with the company.

The car's bonnet is another fun feature.

The whole front of the car is moulded in one piece which can be removed only by a Volvo mechanic.

"Honestly, the only time I open the bonnet on my car is when I want to fill up washer fluid," said Tatiana Butovitsch Temm.

"Do we need to have a one metre square hatch for that or could we do it in another way?

"So we shifted the filling station for washer fluid to the side of the car, next to where you fill up fuel, and we closed the bonnet for good."

The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet, then send a message to the garage to let them know.

The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them over.

"If the car says nothing, then everything is fine," said Ms Temm optimistically.

No thanks!  Make mine a '57 Chevy. 

 

Seriously though, let car companies know that Orwellian "features" are unacceptable and unmarketable.

 

And if you think this automotive news is alarming, similar things are rapidly brewing in the computer industry... but one company is fighting the trends toward pervasive surveillance and governmental control...

The Passion of the Christ

Jesus was the Son of God, but he was also a man. As a man, he felt happiness and pain, love and fear in the same manner that you and I do.

With the foreknowledge that came with his divinity, the dread and terror he experienced immediately prior to his betrayal was, no doubt, magnified. Like all of us when faced with a situation involving pain and death, Jesus was tempted by Satan to shrink away, cower from his fears in order to pursue his own safety.

Unlike most of us, Jesus didn't run, but confronted his dread and stood firm for his cause: the Truth of the Father.

Though he did not have to do so, Jesus endured monumental agony as a man and his example through bearing such terrible suffering is his greatest gift to us. Jesus is more than his teachings; Jesus is a paradigm of courage, selflessness, love, compassion and unwavering faith.

Living in corrupt, decadent times that are in many ways similar to our own, Jesus' example is one we need to fully comprehend so that we too can stand unyieldingly for the Truth that is the Father against a global anti-spiritual movement designed to separate us from God in order to reduce us to cattle.

The Passion of The Christ is a brave and sincere attempt to communicate Christ's most important message. Jesus died for our salvation, but, in doing so, he conquered his fears as a man in a display of his devotion to the Truth and as testimony to his love for us all.

Jesus Christ was Son of God, man, hero and example for mankind.

Just Say "No" To E-Voting Terminals

The rapid adoption of electronic touch screen voting machines sends chills down the spines of nearly every computing expert you will find (including this one).  The current systems are vulnerable to voting fraud on levels never before seen in this country.  Insist on a paper ballots at the polling places you plan to use.  Electronic Voting Machines, or "EVMs," pose an immediate threat that could potentially destroy our election process.

Dallas City Council Denounces Patriot Act

Dallas, Texas joins Austin and hundreds of other U.S. communities and several states in passing resolutions decrying the freedom robbing Patriot Act.