2012 01 31

Media Bias Politicians have to organise bailouts galore. BBC article I see this every day in most news sources - an opinion on a proposed solution is presented as an unqualified fact.

2012 01 30

Thus far one can see that the drama enacted is a familiar one: the stage is rigidly traditional and the performers upon it are caught up in its style. For these actors are not so much people as they are puppets from the old shows, the ones that have told the same story for centuries, the ones that can still be very strange to us. Traipsing through the same old foggy scene, seeking the same old isolated house, the puppets in these plays always find everything new and unknown, because they have no memories to speak of and can hardly recall making these stilted motions countless times in the past. They struggle through the same gestures, repeat the same lines, although in rare moments they may feel a dim suspicion that this has all happened before... - Thomas Ligotti, Nethescurial

2012 01 30

Helter A redraw of Haas Unica - Helvetica's replacement. Link

2012 01 29

The Great Utopia Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany." No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic... The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning. Thus the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. The whole system will tend toward that kind of dictatorship in which the head of the government is position by popular vote, but where he has all the powers at his command to make certain that the vote will go in the direction he desires. Link

2012 01 26

LMAX How to do 100K trades per second at less than 1ms latency. Link

2012 01 18

TOMI With TOMI, the company aims to do what no other chip maker has done before, namely embed a general-purpose processor in vanilla DRAM. The idea is to use the physical proximity of the CPU and memory, as well as extra-wide busses (4,096 bits, in the case of the first TOMI designs), to flatten the memory wall... A very useful side effect of using the simpler DRAM processes is that it's much cheaper to produce a CPU this way. The cost of manufacturing a billion DRAM transistors is less than a dollar versus more than $300 for a microprocessor. But another big savings is in power draw. The Borealis CPU at 2.1 GHz draws a measly 98 mW. Compare that to the 100-plus watts for an x86 CPU sporting a billion transistors... Venray benchmarked their hardware with Sandia Labs' MapReduce-MPI software and an unstructured data application running on their hardware -- a circuit board with 16 Borealis chips (128 cores, 16GB of DRAM). According to the company, the TOMI system was able to achieve nearly 12 times the performance and use less than 1/10 the power compared to the same code running on an Intel Xeon-based cluster. Venray says the hardware would cost about $35 thousand versus $1.65 million for the equivalent x86 system. Link Love this design approach.