Author: skyrien

15-Apr-2007

by skyrien

Real post coming up… in the mean time… more Ars!

Geek Squad playing Peep Squad

According to a lawsuit filed against Best Buy this week, at least one
Geek Squad technician has been doing more than just fixing computers.
On March 4th, technician Hao Kuo Chi reported to the home of Natalie
Fornaciari and Sarah Vasquez. While there, he allegedly placed his cell
phone in the bathroom, where it caught 22 year-old Sarah Vasquez
showering. Upon exiting the shower, she discovered his cell phone
placed behind the sink, with the “Record” function enabled…

Read more about this idiot…


China: Internet porn has “perverted China’s Young Minds”

After announcing a crackdown on online gaming by minors and introducing a plan to clean up television shows like Happy Boys Voice , the Chinese government has now embarked on a broader plan to scour porn from the Internet .
And this is more than a “block a few web sites” scouring—it’s the
full-blown, put-your-whole-body-into-it abrasive scrubdown. Just ask
Chen Hui, one-time operator of the largest porn site in China. After
his arrest late last year, Chen was sentenced to life in prison.

Go Guofeng!

 

Going Faster, Sideways

by skyrien

I <3 Ars…

Now, however, we’ve entered a period of system integration for integration’s sake, because the clockspeed increases have slowed down and integration is what we have left. This new era of “integration first, then clockspeed” is one for which the industry is relatively unprepared. In particular, it’s now much harder to sort out what should happen next.

One artifact of the previous decade’s focus on steady processor clockspeed increases is that everyone got used to knowing what the future of computing would look like. Things would be much as they are, we figured, except processors would run faster, and programs would run faster as well. And for the most part, this view of the future held true right up to the moment where the semiconductor industry hit the power wall and the clockspeed party ended relatively abruptly.

Now the future of computing is substantially murkier, and both industry and academia are still in the midst of a collective “now
what?” moment. Everyone is clear on one fact: the future is less about clockspeed and more about die-level integration. But beyond that, every aspect of the way that computer systems are built and programmed is up for grabs.

– Beyond the Teraflops: Why Intel really put 80 cores on a single chip, Ars Technica

I’ll write something later…