So, a lady comes into the store today and asks for some wooden blocks that have "I love Jesus" written on them. We sold the aforementioned product, around Easter. Currently in the same spot are small, plastic molded Jack-O-Lanterns. So when I explained to the lady, that yes they used to be there, but that was back in Easter and if it had still been there would have been packed up anyway, because everything is being moved for our Halloween stock, she replies, "Yes to make room for this satanic stuff." Now, I am sorry, but how are small plastic molded Jack-O-Lanterns satanic? How is Halloween satanic?
A quote from Wikipedia: "Some Christian churches commonly offer a fall festival or harvest-themed alternative to Halloween. Most Christians ascribe no significance to Halloween, treating it as a purely secular entity devoted to celebrating "imaginary spooks" and handing out candy. Halloween celebrations are common among Catholic parochial schools throughout North America, and in Ireland, the Catholic Church sees it as a "harmless ancient custom."[cite this quote] Father Gabriele Amorth, a Vatican-appointed exorcist in Rome, has said, "[I]f English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that."[31] Most Christians hold the view that the tradition is far from being "satanic" in origin or practice and that it holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children: being taught about death and mortality, and the ways of the Celtic ancestors actually being a valuable life lesson and a part of many of their parishioners' heritage.[30] A response among some fundamentalists in recent years has been the use of Hell houses or themed pamphlets (such as those of Jack T. Chick) which attempt to make use of Halloween as an opportunity for evangelism.[32] Some consider Halloween to be completely incompatible with the Christian faith, due to "its preoccupation with the occult in symbols, masks and costumes," its origin as a Pagan "festival of the dead", and the fact that it is also observed, albeit in a non-traditional form, by Satanists. In more recent years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has organised a "Saint Fest" on the holiday.[32]"
So anyway, this lady was obviously confused and a little ignorant, but I would expect no more from the religious zealots in Tyler Texas.
I don't know, my two cents. Now I am glad I have only two weeks left. YAY!!
Friday, August 24, 2007
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Who the hell is that? It isn't Star Jones
So I saw a commercial for a Court TV show called Star Jones, how original. Anyway, it showed this grotesquely thin black lady who is quite ugly. However, as we all know Star Jones is really fat.
=W=
=W=
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Massively multicore processor runs Linux Aug. 20, 2007
A startup founded by an MIT professor claims to have "solved the fundamental challenges associated with multicore scalability." Tilera's first products include a 64-core Tile64 SoC (system-on-chip), PCIe Express add-in board for networking and video-processing applications, multicore-optimized Linux libraries, and an Eclipse-based multicore development environment toolset.
Fabbed on 90nm process technology at TMSC, the Tile64 chip is "the first in a family of chips that can scale to hundreds and even thousands of cores," Tilera said. The company plans to bake a 120-core version on 65nm technology in the future, it added.
The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux -- or other OSes, once they become available. Alternatively, the whole chip can run Tilera's 64-way SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) implementation.
Tilera Tile64 architecture
(Click to enlarge)
The crown jewel of the Tile64 architecture is a network-like "iMesh" switching interconnect said to eliminate the centralized bus intersection that in previous multicore designs has limited scalability, according to the company. Tilera's founder, MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dr. Anant Agarwal, has experimented with mesh-like chip interconnects since 1996, the company said.
Each of the Tile64's cores clocks between 600MHz and 900MHz; each has its own L1 and L2 cache. L3 cache is handled in an interesting way, as Bob Dowd, director of marketing, explains. "We take all the L2 caches and consider them in aggregate to be the L3 cache," he said. "It's highly effective, because if you reference your own cache, and don't find the data you're looking for, a neighbor may have it, and that's faster than going off chip to external memory by a good ways."
The Tile64 is implemented as a a system-on-chip (SoC) with no requirement for external northbridge and/or southbridge chips. This saves power, at the expense of locking in a specific peripheral mix, essentially tying the chip to specific verticals, according to the company. Dowd noted, "We did a lot of research, and believe we have the peripheral mix right for the markets we are targeting -- networking and video. If we went into storage with a new processor, we'd add fiber and disk drive interfaces."
Tilera claims that the Tile64 outperforms Intel's dual-core Xeon processor 10 times, while offering 30 times better performance per Watt. Compared to TI's top-of-range TMS320DM648 DSP, performance per Watt is claimed to be 40 times better.
Another touted benefit is the ability to consolidate control- and data-plane functions on a single device, with "solid-wall" processor boundaries reinforcing security and licensing containment barrier. In this regard, the Tile64 chip resembles another heavily multicore MIPS64 chip, Cavium's 16-way Octeon.
Software environment and tools
Tilera claims that existing, "unmodified" Linux apps will build for the Tile64 processor using the company's toolchain. The toolchain includes a compiler licensed from SGI and based on MIPSpro.
Alternatively, developers can port their applications to Tilera's iLib C library, aimed at exploiting parallelism while still supporting standard system calls. The approach appears to resemble that used in Intel's Threading Building Blocks, recently released under an open source license.
Finally, for users wishing to manually tune multi-core application performance, Tilera will offer a full "MDE" (multicore development environment) toolsuite based on Eclipse. In addition to a full IDE (integrated development environment), MDE includes a parallel debugger, along with an application profiler aimed at helping developers figure out what parts of their code to optimize for multicore.
Tilera is in discussions with "all major Linux support providers," Dowd said, adding, "We'll have ecosystem announcements coming out as we line them up."
Early markets, customers, reference implementations
The first Tile64 chips target network and video devices that require significant application processing, such as surveillance systems, and firewalls with deep packet inspection. Early customers in the networking space reportedly include 3Com and firewall vendor TopLayer, while early video customers reportedly include U.K.-based high-definition videoconferencing equipment provider Codian, and BackupTV, a vendor of network-based video recording and other head-end services for cable TV network providers.
To hasten adoption, Tilera is offering processor daughterboards implemented as PCI Express cards with six or 12 gigabit Ethernet ports. The cards can be used in production systems with passive backplanes, or as targets in development hosts, Dowd said. He declined to specify pricing.
Tilera TILExpress-64 PCIe card and its architecture
(Click architecture diagram to enlarge)
CEO Devesh Garg stated, "This is the first significant new development in chip architecture in a decade. We developed this new architecture because existing multicore technologies simply cannot scale. Moreover, customers have repeatedly indicated that the current multicore software tools are very primitive because they are based on single-processor-core models. We're introducing a revolutionary hardware and software platform that has solved the fundamental challenges associated with multicore scalability."
Availability
The Tile64 is available now, in three variants differentiated by I/O mix and clock. Pricing starts at $435 in 10,000 quantities, the company said. Tilera's iLib and MDE tools, and TilExpress-64 board are also available at undisclosed pricing.
--Henry Kingman
Fabbed on 90nm process technology at TMSC, the Tile64 chip is "the first in a family of chips that can scale to hundreds and even thousands of cores," Tilera said. The company plans to bake a 120-core version on 65nm technology in the future, it added.
The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux -- or other OSes, once they become available. Alternatively, the whole chip can run Tilera's 64-way SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) implementation.
Tilera Tile64 architecture
(Click to enlarge)
The crown jewel of the Tile64 architecture is a network-like "iMesh" switching interconnect said to eliminate the centralized bus intersection that in previous multicore designs has limited scalability, according to the company. Tilera's founder, MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dr. Anant Agarwal, has experimented with mesh-like chip interconnects since 1996, the company said.
Each of the Tile64's cores clocks between 600MHz and 900MHz; each has its own L1 and L2 cache. L3 cache is handled in an interesting way, as Bob Dowd, director of marketing, explains. "We take all the L2 caches and consider them in aggregate to be the L3 cache," he said. "It's highly effective, because if you reference your own cache, and don't find the data you're looking for, a neighbor may have it, and that's faster than going off chip to external memory by a good ways."
The Tile64 is implemented as a a system-on-chip (SoC) with no requirement for external northbridge and/or southbridge chips. This saves power, at the expense of locking in a specific peripheral mix, essentially tying the chip to specific verticals, according to the company. Dowd noted, "We did a lot of research, and believe we have the peripheral mix right for the markets we are targeting -- networking and video. If we went into storage with a new processor, we'd add fiber and disk drive interfaces."
Tilera claims that the Tile64 outperforms Intel's dual-core Xeon processor 10 times, while offering 30 times better performance per Watt. Compared to TI's top-of-range TMS320DM648 DSP, performance per Watt is claimed to be 40 times better.
Another touted benefit is the ability to consolidate control- and data-plane functions on a single device, with "solid-wall" processor boundaries reinforcing security and licensing containment barrier. In this regard, the Tile64 chip resembles another heavily multicore MIPS64 chip, Cavium's 16-way Octeon.
Software environment and tools
Tilera claims that existing, "unmodified" Linux apps will build for the Tile64 processor using the company's toolchain. The toolchain includes a compiler licensed from SGI and based on MIPSpro.
Alternatively, developers can port their applications to Tilera's iLib C library, aimed at exploiting parallelism while still supporting standard system calls. The approach appears to resemble that used in Intel's Threading Building Blocks, recently released under an open source license.
Finally, for users wishing to manually tune multi-core application performance, Tilera will offer a full "MDE" (multicore development environment) toolsuite based on Eclipse. In addition to a full IDE (integrated development environment), MDE includes a parallel debugger, along with an application profiler aimed at helping developers figure out what parts of their code to optimize for multicore.
Tilera is in discussions with "all major Linux support providers," Dowd said, adding, "We'll have ecosystem announcements coming out as we line them up."
Early markets, customers, reference implementations
The first Tile64 chips target network and video devices that require significant application processing, such as surveillance systems, and firewalls with deep packet inspection. Early customers in the networking space reportedly include 3Com and firewall vendor TopLayer, while early video customers reportedly include U.K.-based high-definition videoconferencing equipment provider Codian, and BackupTV, a vendor of network-based video recording and other head-end services for cable TV network providers.
To hasten adoption, Tilera is offering processor daughterboards implemented as PCI Express cards with six or 12 gigabit Ethernet ports. The cards can be used in production systems with passive backplanes, or as targets in development hosts, Dowd said. He declined to specify pricing.
Tilera TILExpress-64 PCIe card and its architecture
(Click architecture diagram to enlarge)
CEO Devesh Garg stated, "This is the first significant new development in chip architecture in a decade. We developed this new architecture because existing multicore technologies simply cannot scale. Moreover, customers have repeatedly indicated that the current multicore software tools are very primitive because they are based on single-processor-core models. We're introducing a revolutionary hardware and software platform that has solved the fundamental challenges associated with multicore scalability."
Availability
The Tile64 is available now, in three variants differentiated by I/O mix and clock. Pricing starts at $435 in 10,000 quantities, the company said. Tilera's iLib and MDE tools, and TilExpress-64 board are also available at undisclosed pricing.
--Henry Kingman
Monday, August 20, 2007
School is back again
So, school is almost upon us again. The fall semester starts on Wednesday. Boo!!
I for one am not looking forward to classes.
At least I only have two classes that day, so it could be worse.
Thursday on the other hand will be worse, I am sure.
=W=
I for one am not looking forward to classes.
At least I only have two classes that day, so it could be worse.
Thursday on the other hand will be worse, I am sure.
=W=
Friday, August 17, 2007
Hurricane Dean
Edit: Pictures Update Over Time
So this thing could be a bad one. I am not a meteorologist, but looking at the predictions, it doesn't look good for people sitting in coastal areas.
So this thing could be a bad one. I am not a meteorologist, but looking at the predictions, it doesn't look good for people sitting in coastal areas.
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