Reading through an article about a wargame being conducted by the CIA I read this line and thought to myself "Somebody is extremely tight-lipped about this thing."
"They spoke on condition of anonymity because the CIA asked them not to disclose details of the sensitive exercise taking place in Charlottesville, Va., about two hours southwest of Washington."
The stupidity of journalism never ceases to amaze me.
Over the past few months we've seen a major change in the way we view the web. RSS has given everybody the ability to instantly reproduce live content from a myriad of sources. Google News has aggregated the remaining sites that don't offer such services yet or offer it in such limited capacity that it is practically unusable. User-driven sites such as digg are a welcome change from the strictly moderated forum known as Slashdot. I'm not proposing that Slashdot should disappear completely as there is still a place for a site that can guarantee a certain level of quality in the articles whereas digg suffers from the possibility that an abusive user would raise the rating of an article to suit their motives.
Podcasts are also causing a stir in the online news reporting world. Marrying the concepts of talk radio and file sharing, podcasts are moving users away from the web browser and into alternative mediums for delivery of what is essentially the same content the difference being that the number of podcasts is still relatively low compared to news sites and therefore are subject to a bit more opinion and control by the authors which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That of course leads me into the largest change in journalism as of late: blogging. Blogging gives everybody a voice, no matter how different your ideals, ethics, values, culture, country, government, friends, family, co-workers, religion, and other affiliations. Everybody has a voice. It is ironic that the internet is finally being used for what it was designed for in the first place: the transfer of facts, opinions, and supporting data between different people. Comments give everybody a chance to voice and opinion on somebody else's opinion. Even if you don't have a blog, you still have a voice. I believe that this is the mentality that will drive new social and communications networks in the coming years, allowing everybody to say anything they want without fear of censorship or reprisal (unless you live in China, in that case you have my condolences).
For those that have been living under a rock without an internet connection (those rocks don't pay for services they don't need, they're solid people) you may have noticed that Kevin Rose, everybody's favorite script kiddie has quit his job at G4 to become a freeloader independent creative force. He released the first episode of his new show Systm after a few denial of service attacks and a flood against the IRC server (script kiddie jealousy I assume). A comment on Slashdot said "The system is down" taking a cue from our beloved StrongBad and The Cheat. Overall, the show was pretty damn good for an internet show, though still a little immature as to the content. In a nutshell, they built a box that uses the reciever from an X10 wireless camera and continuously modulates the "channel" switch between the four settings. Not an amazing feat but I have a feeling that Kevin is headed in a better direction with this one as opposed to his seemingly abandoned internet show, the broken.
I love the idea of internet TV shows. There's just a sense of purity to these things that are untouched by corporate politics and the constant advertising that encapsulates our lives. Unfortunately, I don't think that things will stay this way for long. At some point, people like Kevin Rose have to get paid and in my experience, money doesn't just show up in your bank account no matter how much good you're doing for society (or CS students on summer break). Eventually, a company like G4 will come along and ask if they can air his shows on their channel. From there, it leads to G4 saying "We'll give you an extra 20k if you mention Pepsi." Pretty soon, we're right back where we started with a weekly sponsored show under the iron fist of Soviet Russia G4.
Aside from my little essay on the future of social content on the internet, I haven't been thinking about much. I took another trip up to RIT last week to meet with some professors and get a bit more detailed perspective of what they have to offer. I talked to a professor in the Computer Engineering department that really knew what he was talking about which is exactly what I expected from the former head of the department. Looking at the labs and different projects they were working on helped me to decide that I would rather spend my time working on the software side of things. I enjoy the hardware work and it fascinates me to see how everything is put together at that level but I just have trouble seeing the depth of the system by looking at logic gates and instruction sets. In my mind, languages like C are dominant. I can visualize just about anything in C from the interface on down. Granted this may be because I haven't taken any of the Computer Engineering classes yet, but I prefer to work in an instant gratification environment. When I'm programming, I can run my code at any point in time and know if it works or not, the same is not true of hardware. There is no magic "stub" code you can stick on a board and see the results of the piece you're working on. So, after a rather short conference with a counselor in the Computer Science department, I decided that I will be going for a CS major.
At first glance, RIT's Computer Science curriculum is super easy and simple. On paper, it looks like a factory program. Once the structure of the requirements was explained to me, I found that there are enough elective credits available that this program really covers just about everything. It's only written with structure to appease the bureaucratic types but it really encompasses any specialty that you would want to play with up to the point where it's even possible to get a minor in another CS related field without having to take any more classes than the next guy. This type of flexibility is what is drawing me toward RIT's CS program.
On one final note, I'd like to request that anybody reading this please leave a comment on what you'd like to see here. Would you like something changed? Or added? Do you want a new feature for end users? Do you want me to get off my ass and fix the RSS feed? Let me know.
For those of you that are completely oblivious to the gaming and technology worlds, I'll shed some light on the more recent developments at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). The biggest announcements to come so far have been the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Not only are these extremely powerful systems, they're also going to change the way we think about home entertainment.
The Xbox 360 was unveiled last week on MTV in a somewhat disappointing light with the influence of today's pop idols drooling over it. Since then, we've managed to get an ever increasing amount of detail as to what the system contains. Here are the basic specs: Triple core PowerPC processor at 3.2 GHz and a custom ATI graphics chip for a total system performance of 1 TeraFLOP. Impressive to say the least. On the software side, the 360 runs Windows Media Center Extender under the hood. All of the functionality of Windows Media Center Edition will be available provided that you have another Media Center box on the same network to host the data. Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming service will be a free service with every Xbox 360. A paid subscription to the service will yield a "Gold" level account with unnamed higher-level features.
Sony's Playstation 3 was debuted on Monday at E3 in an extremely Japanese fashion: Elegant graphics, music, and light shows with a narrative by the owners of the company, not the people that built the product as opposed to Microsoft's "hip and young" approach. Regardless of the presentation, the PS3 is also PowerPC based at 3.2 GHz using what they are calling a Cell processor. From my understanding, a Cell processor is basically a multiple-core processor with the ability to do IPC (Inter-Process Communication) on chip. From a computer architecure standpoint, this should be magnitudes faster. This is reflected by the initial specs released by Sony stating that the PS3 will be able to push 2 TeraFLOPs, doubling the performance of the Xbox 360.
As we have seen in the past though, big numbers on a spec sheet can be misleading. While the PS3 does have more power overall, 1.8 of those TeraFLOPs are in the graphics chip, giving programmers very little flexibility toward using the power for anything other than pushing graphics. The Xbox 360 focuses most of it's processing power in the system processor where it can be used in a truly multipurpose fashion. Time will tell if this really makes a difference or not.
From a graphics standpoint, both systems are going to be stunning. They both support full HDTV output in one form or another. The PS3 excels in this area with it's ability to drive two channels of HD output at 1080p whereas the Xbox 360 only supports one channel with a maximum of 1080i. For the uninitiated, this means that the PS3 can handle two displays at a "theoretically" higher resolution than the Xbox 360. In actuality, the number of people in the world with an HDTV are still fairly few and having two HDTVs is almost unheard of at this point. Again, time will tell if it really makes a difference. In my opinion, without the CPU power to create those graphics, the PS3 will fall behind with nothing to drive all of those overperforming output chips.
The biggest development to come from all of this in my mind is the fact that both systems are running PowerPC based architectures (with rumors of Nintendo's Revolution doing the same). There is also some fairly strong evidence to suggest that Microsoft and Apple are teaming up once and for all. I make the following contentions:
From these facts, I feel that it is safe to make an assumption that there is something brewing behind closed doors in Seattle and Cupertino. I'm sure that IBM is enjoying all of this, seeing that the architecture that they stumbled into is becoming dominant just about everywhere. I have to make a point of saying that I am definitely a proponent of the PowerPC architecture because it is RISC based and from a design standpoint is just better for many applications today.
Amidst all of these releases and platform confusion, the former king of the gaming industry Nintendo, is nowhere to be found. Some very obscure and small leaks regarding the dimensions and processor of the Nintendo Revolution have made their way to the surface but very little else. Either they're staying extremely tight-lipped about their new console, or they're having an "oh shit what do we do now!" moment.
Update: 5/17/2005 6:00 AM
I've been doing a bit of research on J. Allard, Microsoft's Xbox figurehead that looks like a pirate... Seriously. Anyway, his official job is Chief XNA Architect. My first reaction to this was "Great! What's that mean?" Apparently, XNA is a set of game development tools for the Xbox from Microsoft. I'd love to get my hands on such a beast but found nothing to even suggest that it will be available to lowly casual programmers such as myself.
In my research came across a fairly interesting quote on the XNA website. "In the next generation, software-not hardware-will drive the games industry forward. Microsoft XNA software brings together chip and OEM partners to ultimately deliver thousands of integrated digital entertainment devices that work together and give consumers choice. Sony is talking about a fixed world of hardware that requires everyone to buy everything Sony. Sony's Cell is a hardware solution. This is a software revolution." Interesting indeed considering that the PS3 delivers almost twice the power of the Xbox 360 (see my last post for my opinion on this matter).
It's certainly about time! I added a way for you (the reader) to add comments to this blog. Amazing, it's almost full featured now. Who would've thought that I could write such a thing?
As some of you may be aware, I made the switch a few months ago with the Mac Mini. I simply love it. Everything is easier and just makes sense. But since my initial reactions to the Mac have faded, I've moved back toward using my laptop almost exclusively. You just can't beat the portability factor. So last week I installed Gentoo on the Mini and have been using it as my "Home away from home" system. In a nutshell, this means that I've been sshing into it to do anything more than web browsing.
So my use of the Mac was hindered for no reason other than the fact that it's not as portable as I'd like. Seeing as how I don't have the money to go out and buy another system on a whim, I've decided that this sort of setup will have to do until my laptop either dies or becomes completely outdated. I figure that either way, I'll be needing a new system in three to five years depending on how rapidly the technology changes (Moore has admitted that it was never a law, only a theory).
You may be reading this and wondering "Ok, why the hell did he mention this?" Honestly, I'm using the Mac again. The simplicity of OS X is too good to just leave alone. I can't just brush it aside because I need to sit at a desk to use it. Currently, I'm dual booting it with Gentoo so that I can still ssh into the box when I'm away and have a 100% GNU/Linux system. I'm planning to play with some of the hybrid package management systems like Fink and Gentoo's Portage on OS X in the next few days to see if I can find a way to work without having to dual boot.
I've been playing with a few new things lately, one of which has been 3D Studio Max. I'm really having a lot of fun modelling and texturing objects. I'm not quite sure why it's so much fun, it just is. A fork off of that interest has been distributed rendering. Most of the tools/programs/scripts for distributed rendering were designed for homogeneous render farms of high-end systems with node-based licensing schemes. There are many problems inherent in this for a student like myself. The most difficult one to overcome is the fact that no two systems on my network are the same and it's split about 50/50 between Linux and Windows. At the moment, I've gone back to just rendering on one system because it seems to be faster than any of the networked solutions I've tried.
Distributed computing alone has become a primary interest of mine. I love the idea of using lots of low-powered systems to build an extremely high-powered one. In pursuit of this interest, I'm learning to work with MPI in C. Using LAM/MPI on all of my Linux based systems has yielded me a large amount of computing power without adding any hardware at all. At the moment I'm running three nodes (four with my laptop) for testing and debugging a program called mpi_netperf. It's purpose is simple: Measure the latency of all connections in the MPI cluster. This means that every node establishes a connection to every other node, sends some data, and figures out how long it took. Each node then reports back to the master node with the times. Once I've got stable code running on my makeshift cluster, I can send it to Matt Haas and have it run on one of the many clusters at Geneseo's DSLab. I signed up for Matt's Distributed Systems class for the summer. He managed to get three more Alpha DS10T systems to build a cluster for us to play with.
The developers of Azureus have truly outdone themselves with the latest release. It includes a new tab under each torrent that presents a graphical representation of the torrent's network connections with each host in a circle around your computer with lines connecting them all. Blocks can be seen moving up and down along the lines. It is a simple and beautiful visualization of quite a bit of complicated data. That's a major part of distributed computing: The ability to represent all that good data in an easy to understand manner. Gotta love computer science, no?