jawfish

Anybody Can Build a Bugatti
john posted in rides, technologies on November 29th, 2007

But only a few giant companies can build a Corolla.

In the automobile business, hitting the price/performance point could be more challenging than designing a great car. Sure, it takes dedication, some very smart designers, and trainloads of cash to design and build those few hundred Bugattis. But with a corporate conglomerate providing money and will, it’s just a matter of writing the checks. When it comes to designing to the requirements of a popular model, and turning out a million units that will be sold at a profit, that takes some intense organization, engineering, and timing. Alright, not any pencil pusher can design a supercar, but it’s easier than doing a $14,000 compact.

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The legendary Bugatti is back, one of the three fastest cars in the world, hugely expensive and rare.

Bugatti Veyron
image from here

Toyota announced it will build 1.4 million of its econobox Corollas this year, world-wide.

2007 Corolla
image from here

I say the lowly Corolla is a much more difficult feat of engineering than the Bugatti. How can this be? Well here’s my point:

read on …

It’s Simple: Torture is Unacceptablecomments
john posted in politics & culture on November 8th, 2007

There’s no big mystery here: torture is immoral and unacceptable. Moreover, real professional interrogators agree that it doesn’t work. Diplomats agree that it removes diplomatic leverage in world affairs. The entire democratic world, under the Geneva Convention since World War II, has resolved to never use it. It’s illegal, immoral, and stupid.

Waterboarding, as discussed and euphemized during the Attorney General hearings, is torture. Look it up. It was a war crime when Japanese soldiers used it in World War II, it was torture when the Spanish Inquisition used it against heretics. It is not “simulated drowning” it’s slow drowning. It is not a defensive act like returning fire, it is a pre-meditated cool-headed crime. Torturers should be jailed – Nazis, terrorists, Church Inquisitors, Chilean dictators, Khmer Rouge officers, Japanese militarists, banana republic dictators, and yes, US Presidents, officers and CIA employees. In the case of Americans, it is also tantamount to treason, because it subverts the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

So why does the US administration, military and CIA now use torture? Because they are afraid of a few Islamic terrorists? No, because they are afraid their whole cardboard house of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt will come tumbling down. They need to whip up the passions of the populace against an outside enemy in order to cling to their petty little seats of power.

So where do you fit in this chart?

Support and condone torture		Abhor and punish the torture
Nazis	vs	Nuremberg Trials
Japanese militarists	vs	Tokyo War Crimes Trials
Spanish Inquisition	vs	Protestant reformers, rise of constitutional law
Belgian King Leopold	vs	Western nations
Bush administration	vs	Honorable citizens of the USA
Republicans en masse	vs	Some Democrats
Senators Feinstein and Shumer	vs	Senators Leahy and Kennedy
TV show 24	vs	MSNBC Keith Olberman

References:

Keith Olberman’s OpEd video, an impassioned plea for civilized behavior and the rule of law.

Editor & Publisher: An eye witness, Joseph L. Galloway :

Memo to Media: I Witnessed ‘Waterboarding’ — And, Yes, It is Torture
Four decades ago, as a reporter in Vietnam, I saw what it was like. When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs start to fill with water, that is torture.

NPR story on TV torture affecting the real military.:

According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.

LATimes, Rosa Brooks, Torture: the New Abortion The use of torture as a political litmus test. Which Republican, safe in their limos and jets, can call loudest for cruelty to prisoners.

NY Times, Scott Shane, A Firsthand Experience Before Decision on Torture:

…three years ago, Daniel Levin, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, decided to bring reality to bear on his deliberations on the torture question. He went to a military base and asked to undergo waterboarding.

Mr. Levin, 51, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, had served in several senior posts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department since the administration of the first President Bush. But he had never served in the military, where American pilots, special operations troops and others for decades have undergone waterboarding to prepare them for possible treatment if captured by an enemy.

Waterboarding has been used in interrogations at least since the Spanish Inquisition and was used by the Central Intelligence Agency on three high-level terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003, according to officials familiar with the agency’s secret detention program. It involves strapping a suspect to a board with feet elevated, covering his face with a cloth and pouring water on it to produce a feeling of suffocation….

Won’t you call your senator and demand they ban torture and enforce the Geneva Convention?

Mukasey has been approved.

Core 2 Quad Speed Test
john posted in technologies on November 8th, 2007

I just built a new PC for my office desktop, and the performance is quite good for the price, so I thought I’d post up a recipe.

Note: I use Newegg, but all this stuff is available elsewhere.

Spec

My spec: light use of 3D graphics; 1600×1200 21″ LCD. Simultaneous: OpenOffice with 4 300 page documents, 10 Firefox windows, Thunderbird, 20 Xterminals, Reader with 2 300 page documents, two instances of my code editor. I run Linux, but you could buy XP or Vista for this too.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor
about $280.

Motherboard: Intel BOXDQ35JOE LGA 775 Intel Q35 Micro ATX
a basic Intel-made mobo with the Intel GMA3100 video about $115 (good capacitors, usual Intel high quality)

case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW
a basic case $50 before rebate. good external connections.

power supply: SPARKLE SPI350PFB2 ATX12V 350W
a medium-sized power supply $53

RAM: Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
NOTE: you must get the 1.8V memory for this mobo! $70

Optical: re-used a dvd writer

HD: had a 400 gig Hitachi SATA drive already

Keyboard and mouse: will have to buy a USB keyboard, have USB trackball already

Price

Total price: with a DVDwriter and HD about $800. For comparison, a Dell Optiplex 755 of similar spec was on sale for $1200 with XP, monitor, keyboard and mouse, which is not a bad deal.

Speed Test

10X improvement!
Building a Linux kernel my old PIII 1 ghz with 500 megs RAM took 112 minutes. My new box took 12 minutes, and I don’t believe much was gained by having four processors.

Ubuntu Notes

This is my initial use of Ubuntu on my desktop, I have been using Fedora Core 6. So far, Ubuntu is the easiest install I have ever done, and I must have done hundreds over the years – MSDOS, Win95, NT 3.0-3.5-4.0, Win2000, Solaris, Unix, Irix, CentOS, Fedora, Debian on Sparc, MIPS, X86, and PPC machines.

Ubuntu 7.10 ( from the Debian family) installed quickly with a sensible set of standard applications, and the Gnome desktop as default. I was able to install 200 or so extra libraries and applications using the GUI without a hitch. It discovered our network printer, which just uses an ethernet card without the HP software app, and recognized my screen and setup automatically for the native resolution. Finally, the administrative GUI tools actually work to make Samba connections, ssh connections, and setup the network. Ubuntu, unlike the more restrictive Fedora, uses non-free libraries and applications, so sound and video worked after the initial install. KDE apps are easy to install on top of Gnome.

arstechnica extensive review ( readable by non-geeks)

7.10 includes a box-full of desktop interface visual gimmicks, similar to OS X Leopard on the Mac. Things like rotating cubes, wobbly windows, transparency, reflection and on and on. I tried a few of them for one day and then turned them off, as they were distracting or downright annoying.

DARPA Urban Challenge Winner
john posted in other on November 4th, 2007

From a press release by DARPA:

TARTAN RACING WINS $2 MILLION PRIZE FOR DARPA URBAN CHALLENGE

Stanford Racing Wins $1 Million Second Prize, Victor Tango Takes Home $500,000 Third Prize

(Victorville, Calif.) – Tartan Racing’s “Boss” of Pittsburgh, Penn. turned in the top performance in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge and won the $2 million cash prize as the competition’s first-place winner, DARPA announced today. Stanford Racing’s “Junior” of Stanford, Calif., won the $1 million second place prize, while Victor Tango’s “Odin” of Blacksburg, Va., received $500,000 for finishing third.

The Urban Challenge prize winners competed as part of a field of 11 finalists that was selected from 35 semifinalists that competed in the National Qualification Event (NQE) prior to the final event. Semifinalists were selected from the original field of 89 competitors. The NQE and the main event took place October 26 to November 3 at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., that is used by the U.S. military to train for urban operations. The network of roads on the site effectively simulated the type of terrain American forces operate in when deployed overseas.

Vehicles that competed in the Urban Challenge were required to operate entirely autonomously, without human intervention, as they obeyed California traffic laws and performed maneuvers such as merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding obstacles. The vehicles had to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, merge into traffic and safely pass through intersections. Demonstrating safe operation in an urban situation was an effective and consolidated method of testing situations the vehicles might face even while conducting missions in less populated areas.