Cory Doctrow is a great writer. One of his short stories was published by Salon in 2004 under the creative commons license, and I just found a copy of it that doesn’t require one to go through the trouble of a Salon registration. Have a read, especially if you’re addicted to MMORPG’s.

Oh yeah, what I wouldn’t love to have a profession in the exciting world of law enforcement… oh how grand it would be to be a clop.

In 1997, Deep Blue beat Champaign Gary Kasparov. Deep Blue was able to calculate 200 million positions a second, and was capable of thinking 8 moves ahead of the current board. AMD decided to test whether their dual-core Opteron 275’s were capable of matching Deep Blue. They called the project Deep Blitz. In the end, Deep Blitz was severely hampered by software. Since AMD wasn’t willing to fork over $100 million to develop their own custom chess hardware, they elected to go with existing software. Unfortunately this software was 32-bit … and built for windows. This precluded clustering and juicing the most out of the Deep Blitz system. In the end, Deep Blitz came in at 5 million positions a second. About 2.275% of the processing power of Deep Blue, however it was also approximately 2.275% Deep Blue’s size and weight. In theory, four-four dual core opteron 275’s would be match Deep Blue’s thirty-two processors back in 1997. However, I still wonder they type of numbers from a 64-bit version of the software under linux, with clustering capabilities.

For more details on Deep Blitz, check out the Extreme Tech article.

This is so cool, a mirror mod for a Titanium G4 PowerBook. In a similar vein, they also made a G5 cube.

Cute… I saw this ad and I had to share

To be honest, I can’t forsee Harper being much of a threat on either issue, at least not with a minority government.

Following the election we’ve all been stripped of our rights.

Want a guy?   Laugh at his jokes.   Want a girl?   Make her laugh.   Or so this article claims.

Sweden makes a commitment to be oil free by 2020.

Amusing.  The MPAA has been accused of pirating the movie “This movie has not yet been rated”.

I’ve always wondered why the alarm clock we use today is relatively the same one they used in the fifties.   Decades of techonological advances moved them from windup analog/mechanical clocks to fancy digital clocks, but the method of waking people up is the same.  Today I ran across an article announcing the launch of the Axbo Alarm Clock, the world’s first phase alarm clock.  What is a phase alarm clock?   Humans sleep in cycles.   There is an optimal cycle within a 30 minute window in which we are the most easily awaken.   By wearing wireless sensor wristbands, the clock can accurated detect when it is optimal to awaken you … and does.   I’m not sure if does so through an alarm though.   Apparently the alarm clock works fine for two people, with different optimal wake up times.   I’m not sure exactly how it does that, but it causes me to suspect that it doesn’t use an audible alarm (maybe the wristbands vibrate?).   In any case, the website is rather vague.  If it wasn’t for the $199 euro price tag, I’d be the first in line for one these.   Never oversleeping an alarm would make me happy.  So very happy.