Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • Steve Irwin

    Rest in peace. AICN has a fantastic eulogy. I think that Irwin lived a life on the edge because he genuinely loved these animals, and because he wanted to share that love with children. This is the answer to anyone who says that zoos are evil; only by education can we instill the feeling of love and respect for nature that is a prerequisite for us to be good stewards and appreciate the fragility of nature’s bounty.

    Was he a bit of a nut? Well, yes. So what? Steve paid the ultimate price but in doing so he did a lot of good and taught a lot of children about nature, and that will be his legacy.

  • 45nm horizon

    Reading this, I muse that were someone from 1900 to take apart a computer from today, they’d find that all the electronics were ultimately centered around a small square piece of silicon, silicon so pure and featureless that even the best microscopes they had couldn’t find any reason for why pure silicon would have such central significance.

  • reality is real-time

    When I read this at Slashdot today, I couldn’t help but reminded of this old post by Shamus.

  • Merom is here

    Ars has the details. Bottom line? The thermal design power (TDP) rating of the Core 2 Duo (ie, Merom) T7600 (2.33 GHz, 4 MB cache) is 34W, just 3W greater than the Core Duo (ie, Yonah) T2700 (2.33 Ghz, 2 MB cache).

    Remember that Merom is pin-compatible with Yonah, so if you buy a Yonah laptop* today you can swap in Merom later. All the recent sturm und drang about Microsoft’s decision to limit HD-video playback to only 64-bit devices is therefore rather overwrought.

    For anyone in the market for a notebook, my updated advice is to go ahead and buy a Yonah-based laptop now rather than wait. As usual I recommend NoteBookReview.com for buying advice, though you are also welcome to leave a comment if you’d like to solicit my opinion on a given machine.

    NBR also has a piece on the Merom launch, which includes a most recent list of available models with Core 2 duo from the major manufacturers. And, because not all laptop manufacturers are shipping Core Duo-based laptops with the correct settings in Windows XP to take full advantage of the dual-core performance, they also have a registry hack that all Yonah/Merom owners need to make sure is in place. I’ve reproduced it below the fold.

    *if the motherboard uses Intel’s 945 Express chipset.

    (more…)

  • anime mashups

    This is really a new artform. I agree with Scott’s comments at DW – the sum of the source materiel is truly greater tan the whole. And remember that this is possible despite the insane content-control regime imposed on end users… remember how easy it was to create audio mix tapes? Doing that with DVD source material is orders of magnitude harder, yet people are doing it anyway, and with brilliant results as above. Still, just imagine the explosion of creativity were these strictures to be even marginally looser…

  • Opteron/Solaris

    I’ve ridiculed sharikou a bit here for his doomsday attitude towards Intel, but that’s the desktop. When it comes to servers, sharikou is right on the money: Sun offers far more bang for the buck with it’s SunFire line than anything coming out of the IBM/HP camp. Check out his post for the details. It only confirms with hard numbers what my friends who do IT in the field are saying.

    For anyone doing IT in an enterprise environment, there are three things you can do to put yourself ahead of the pack. They are: 1. build your own Opteron box, 2. install Solaris 10 on it, and 3. install Centos (ie, RedHat without the licensing). If you have admin-level proficency on this platform, you’re gold.

  • Dean Devlin talks Stargate sequels

    AICN has an interview with Dean Devlin that touches on, among other things, the Stargate sequels.

    QUINT: You mentioned on the panel that you finally have the rights back to make sequels to STARGATE. What was holding the rights up?

    DEAN DEVLIN: It’s not that the rights have cleared up. The previous regimes at MGM have been very wary about doing the sequel movies. There’s a new group of people running MGM now and they’re all big science fiction fans. So I’ve been talking about doing the sequels with them. There is no deal in place yet to make these films and we’re only in the very early stages of discussion. But at least there seems to be genuine interest in continuing the franchise.

    QUINT: Will the second film pick up with the same characters from the original, continuing that story?

    (the answer is a spoiler, so the rest of the interview is below the fold) (more…)

  • muck about in the water and have a good time

    Dolphins are dumb?

    For years, humans have assumed the large brains of dolphins meant the mammals were highly intelligent.

    Paul Manger from Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, however, says it is not intelligence that created the dolphin super-brain — it’s the cold.

    To survive underwater, these warm-blooded animals developed brains that have a lot of insulating material — called glia — but not too many neurons, the gray stuff that counts for reasoned thinking.
    […]
    Yet while dolphins aren’t as smart as people tend to think, they are as happy as they seem. Manger said dolphins have a ”huge amount” of serotonin in their brains, which is what he described as ”the happy drug.”

    While the scientific aspect of these claims is beyond the scope of Haibane.info, let us remember what the Guide had to say:

    Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason.

    Discuss.

  • Turion 64 X2 benchmarks

    Tom’s Hardware does the legwork. They conclude:

    Though AMD has not landed a great coup with the Turion 64 X2, the first 64 bit CPU with two execution units for laptops, the engineers in Dresden and Sunnyvale deserve commendation. They have succeeded in developing a laptop CPU that provides considerably more performance than its single-core predecessor Turion 64, but whose power consumption is the same or only slightly higher.

    However, compared to an Intel platform based on the Core Duo and the company’s own GM 945 chipset, the combination of AMD CPU and ATI chipset is inferior in terms of battery time and multitasking performance. Therefore, under equal conditions, it can only be regarded as the second choice – if it is worth getting at all. The Core Duo 2, Intel’s next generation of laptop processors is already at hand, and first measurements show that the Core Duo 2 is even more powerful while not consuming more power.

    This is not to say that buying a Turion laptop is a mistake; after all, the laptop decision rests on a number of other axes, including price, features, weight, etc. There is a lot of room for innovation and the CPU performance is not the sole metric by which consumers make their choices. The Turion looks to be a decent chip at a reasonable price, and its presence in the market is a positive thing overall. With Dell already selling AMD desktops and soon to follow with its notebook lines, the new Turion simply means more choice.

    Still, it will be fun to see Sharikou‘s reaction to these benchmarks 🙂 He hasn’t posted yet…

  • The N Laws

    via Mark, this gem from Slashdot, about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

    Have any of them actually read I, Robot? I swear to god, am I in some tiny minority who doesn’t believe that this book was all about promulgating the infallible virtue of these three laws, but was instead a series of parables about the failings that result from codifying morality into inflexible dogma?

    The beauty of the Three Laws was that every story he ever wrote about them was about an apparent violation of them. Of course the apparent violation was always revealed to be false and the Three Laws remains supreme and never violated (unlike in the regrettable I, Robot movie). But it was always astonishing how Asimov could start with such a restricted premise and yet extract such fascinating complexity from it. That was part of his genius.

    Of course, when we talk about the Three Laws, we really mean the First Law: A Robot may not, through action or inaction, allow a human to come to harm. But what exactly constitutes harm? And what are the limits of inaction? It was by considering these issues that R. Daneel and R. Giskard ultimately formulated the Zeroth law: replacing human with humanity. In a sense, the dominant political philosophy of both Left and Right is really just a variant of the Zeroth Law. And the same struggle with “harm” and “inaction”. And therein lies, perhaps, most of the dysfunction.