January 11th, 2008

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Friday, January 11th, 2008 11:48 am

Amid continuing problems getting its four-core processors to market, it appears AMD will be repackaging four-core processors with minor faults on one core and selling them as triple-core processors.

Now tell me:  What was your first thought?

Yeah.  Mine was, "I wonder how long it's going to be before somebody hacks up a fault-tolerant Linux/BSD/whatever (or perhaps a completely custom OS) that runs a separate kernel thread on each core, with cross-checking and two-of-three majority voting?"

I mean, come on.  It's the obvious use for a triple-core processor.

unixronin: (Say what?)
Friday, January 11th, 2008 03:00 pm

So.  NH primary, right?  McCain comes out of it on top of the Republican ticket, Hillary Clinton tops the Democratic ticket with 39% of the vote, with Barack Obama just behind her at 36% (or 37%, depending who you ask and which way they rounded the numbers).  WAAAAY behind both of'em, Dennis Kucinich is in fifth place with 1% of the vote, only fourteen hundred votes ahead of the total write-in candidates.

So now Kucinich wants a recount.

...Say WHAT?

Seriously now.  He'd have to triple his vote count just to get within reach of fourth place.  What on earth could he possibly hope to get out of a recount?

But then you dig a little further ...

In a letter dated Thursday, Kucinich said he does not expect significant changes in his vote total, but wants assurance that "100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted."

Kucinich alluded to online reports alleging disparities around the state between hand-counted ballots, which tended to favor Sen. Barack Obama, and machine-counted ones that tended to favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.  He also noted the difference between pre-election polls, which indicated Obama would win, and Clinton's triumph by a 39 percent to 37 percent margin.

So wait a minute here.  Kucinich wants a recount not because he thinks he got shorted, but becuase he thinks Obama got shorted?  Are we supposed to be concluding from this that even other Democratic candidates (well, Kucinich, at least) are watching the primaries and muttering "Anyone but Clinton, anyone but Clinton"?

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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Friday, January 11th, 2008 03:46 pm

Here's a very odd case ... a 20-year-old Marine, 8 months pregnant, missing from Camp Lejeune since mid-December, has been declared dead by Onslow County, SC Sheriff Ed Brown.  But he's "not ready to call her death murder", the suspect — also a Marine — is on the lam, and they don't have a body.  The most Sheriff Brown will say is she died from "an injury to her" and that "authorities had obtained physical evidence of Lauterbach's death" which "links [the suspect] to her death".

Uh, now, pardon me, but ... unless this "physical evidence" is, say, a major severed body part or something comparable ... if you don't have a body, you don't have a witness¹, you don't have a suspect in custody, and you don't have a confession, isn't it a little premature to be declaring her dead?  "Missing, presumed dead", sure.  But it doesn't seem like they have enough to be saying flat-out "She's dead."

[1]  Unless, of course, the "female former Marine" who "contacted military authorities" this morning was a witness to her death.  But if that's the case, why not say they have a witness, and why say they're not ready to call it murder?  Or perhaps she stumbled across Lauterbach's body; but in that case, why are they still looking for it?

Update:

Looks now like some of the mystery is starting to unravel.  Poor girl.

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Friday, January 11th, 2008 07:55 pm

There was an interesting segment on NPR this evening while I was out buying electrical parts.  They were talking about the current banking situation and its effect on the stock market, and the point was made that one could say the current subprime crisis came about in part because the Fed was doing too good a job.  Not that the Fed did anything wrong — the trouble is that it did too much right.  The banks and, in particular, the financial investors and speculators got into the mindset of thinking that it was OK to take chances, because the Fed would always be there to bail them out if it all went pear-shaped, and whatever they broke, the Fed would be able to fix.

What was that again about perceived-risk adaptation...?