Normally I don’t comment on anything political because, well, a number of reasons really.  Which I won’t go into.  But suffice it to say, it’s intentional.  But last night’s presidential address was just so loaded with manure that I felt like a freaking mushroom!

The war in Iraq is over.

But troops are going to stay there to protect our civilians for another year.

But it’s not a war.

What is it then, a “police action” for the next year or more?!?!  When will the troops actually leave Iraq?

I’m glad Afghanistan was at least mentioned in there somewhere.  Seems like we’ve somehow forgotten about that little blunder.  But I swear more time was spent on talking about the US infrastructure and schooling than Afghanistan, the start of this whole war, was mentioned.

I know Barack Obama came into his presidency with a big steaming pile to sort though.  And a part of me doesn’t blame any normal person for being so hesitant and wishy-washy on digging into the dirty mess and getting things done, one way or another.  Because you just can’t do it without getting a heapfull of dirt on you.  But, and it’s a pretty big “but”, that’s how any normal person would deal.  No one who sits in the big chair should be “normal”.  They should be superior.  They should have a deep well of resolve.  And if they don’t they shouldn’t even be running for the job in the first place.  This isn’t some promotion that snuck up on them.  This is running for the presidency of a superpower nation!

President Barack Obama - As He SHOULD Be!

This is the man we should have gotten when we elected him.  Strong.  Thoughtful.  A real leader.  A man who doesn’t even have to have the “right” answer, because whatever his answer is, he’ll make it the right one through sheer force of will and determination.

So where is he?  Where’s the man who promised change?  Where is the strength of character born of the pride of being the first black American president?

I don’t see him.  All I see is a man like anyone else, too afraid of stepping on toes to make strong decisions.  Too wrapped up in his own agendas to even devote himself to the messes left behind by those who “led” before him.  Too uncertain in times that need definitive action.

I am … unimpressed.

When you go to Comic Con or E3 you really rather expect to see a few “booth babes”, scantily clad women trying to lure people in.  It’s a common enough occurrence for a semi-professional environment.  But when Microsoft hired the Meter Maids booth babes for the 2010 TechEd in Australia, it was perhaps the wrong venue for scantily clad T&A.

Meter Maids, the booth babes for Microsoft at TechEd Australia 2010

There were, of course, objections from the attendants that the gold-clad hussies were objectifying women, blah blah politically correct rambling blah.  I mean yeah, they’re right.  But are women such a protected species that they’re no longer allowed the right to objectify themselves if they want to?  A more reasonable argument would simply have been that the blatant use of T&A does not belong in a fully professional environment.  Even if it is Australia, where people actually have a sense of humor.  And even if the Meter Maids are in fact local talent and even arguably a part of Australian history.

What really got Microsoft into trouble though was not this one questionably poor choice in attracting customers at the event.  No, it was Microsoft’s big mouth when they reportedly claimed to have had no knowledge that the Meter Maids ladies would be scantily clad in gold lame bikinis.  They claimed, and I quote, that they were, “unaware of their exact costuming until the day of the event, at which time it was too late to be addressed.“  Umm … what? One quick look at the Meter Maids website not only reveals all, as it were, but also the history of the Meter Maids is right there, explaining their historic costuming from Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast.  So right off the bat, Microsoft’s words were somewhat less than believable.

To top that off however, chief Meter Maid Roberta Aitchison rebutted Microsoft’s denial with her own side of the story, which was that, “The garments were chosen specifically by them over a period of 2-3 weeks of them looking at photographs of the girls,” and that, “They came back to me by email stating which garments they would like the girls to be wearing.“  Right then!

Microsoft still refused to admit that they simply made a mistake, standing by their word that they somehow had no idea that the Meter Maids would show up in something so provocative.

Un huh.

Yeah.

Who are you going to believe?  A Meter Maid, or Microsoft?

But wait, that’s not all! In a strikingly similar story of sexy women and male egos, we have the (in)famous rapper 50 Cent being booted from Twitpic for failure to adhere to their pictoral guidelines when he uploaded the following picture of a Kim K burger:

50 Cent and his (censored) Kim K Burger pic that got him booted from Twitpic

It’s actually a kind of funny picture, if, you know, you’re adult enough to look at it, somewhere not at work.  Searching for the uncensored version should be easy and entertaining.

The sad part is, I’m not even entirely sure what part of the picture is violating the terms and conditions.  You’d certainly have seen just as much had she been wearing a thong bottom.  And at the beach, that happens.  Kids are seeing that much every day.  She even has her bikini top on, not that it matters from that angle.  It might be “in bad taste”, but I’m rather failing to see where it could actually harm minors.  Still, this is a (supposedly) professional blog, so I’ve censored the image for you, just in case little Timmy is looking over your shoulder.

Now, again, just as with the Microsoft story, the looky looky was perhaps a poor choice for the venue.  It’s a simple enough mistake to own up to, and certainly wouldn’t have been any big deal if that had been that.  But this is 50 Cent we’re talking about, so of course that wasn’t that.  Open mouth.  Words come out.  It’s what he does after all.

The saga is, of course, on Twitter, where 50 Cent tweeted his suspension angst, amongst other pearls of wisdom.  The following quotes are, of course, censored.  They began with, “Twitpic just suspended my account damn They got 30mns to get it back or ima go haywire,” and went on with such wonderfully colorful tweets as, “Man they took my twitt pic down I told them motherFriends put it backI run twitter nWord don’t touchin my sh..Stuff.“  If you want the uncensored … stuff … just follow the previous link to his Twitter page, but be warned, it is most definitely not safe for work.

So there you have it.  Yes, parading women around like objects can indeed catch you some flack, especially if you’re doing it in a place where that’s really not the proper dress code.  However, opening up your big mouth to say anything other than, “Mea culpa,” is just going to make your little faux pas ten times worse.

We all make mistakes.  Own up to them.  People will respect you more for it.

The dual boot: it’s the answer to all of life’s mysteries.  Well, okay, so maybe not all of them.  But the biggest one, of how to enjoy the security of Linux whilst still being able to use all of your Windows apps and play all of the latest games.  Because as good as Linux is, it just isn’t gaining any popularity, so most software is still in the demesne of Windows.

Well, okay, so in theory there’s also Macintosh in there somewhere.  But honestly, who cares about that?

And, again, another theoretical solution is to use virtualization, like VMware, to run one OS natively and the other on virtualized hardware from inside the native OS.  Except that’s not really the solution that it should be.  If you run Linux native and Windows virtual, it’ll work, sure, but the point of a lot of people of running Windows is to play games that Linux can’t, and even though VMware has made some great strides in graphics virtualization, now that they actually virtualize the 3D acceleration as well, there’s still a significant performance loss running on virtualized hardware.  Which rather defeats the purpose.  Who wants to play their games slowly? But the alternative, running Windows natively so that you get full performance, and virtualizing Linux, is frankly even more useless since you’ve just thrown the whole Linux security advantage out the window.  And really, what can Linux do that Windows can’t?  So then what would be the point of using Linux at all if you were going to make your base OS Windows?  You could just use Windows.

So the answer is to dual boot.  Install Linux and Windows side-by-side and choose which one you want to load at startup.  It’s supposed to be easy.  And solve all of your problems.

Except for when it isn’t, and doesn’t.

Frankly, Linux (and all things related) is really starting to piss me off.

To start with, I decided to try a distro I’ve never touched before, because I’m old school I guess: Ubuntu.  It’s cute.  It’s snazzy.  Shame it couldn’t properly recognize my RAID0 array and trashed it each and every time I tried to install it.  Having installed Windows first in the process, that meant a lot of re-installing Windows, drivers, etc.  It was a royal pain in the asterisk.

But I’m nothing if not persistent.  I switched from using my Intel Matrix RAID controller to the dinky JMicron one that I don’t trust worth a darn, and voila, Ubuntu stops trying to access the component drives separately and treats the RAID0 array as a single disk.  Windows, mind you, had no problem properly using either.

That settled, move on in time.  To a procedure I’d put off perhaps a little too long: making my first backup.

Here’s a freaking rant in and of itself.  Windows Backup in Windows 7 can’t be used because the Linux bootloader partition used by GRUB I stupidly partitioned and formatted for Linux.  You might think “duh” there, as what else would you do?  Well Windows 7 has a stupid shadow copy technique used when backing up drives.  This is poorly programmed, and requires so much free space on each partition.  And yes, you guessed it, Windows both is smart enough to recognize that it needs to backup that bootloader partition, but too dumb to know how to read any Linux-formatted partitions.  So unless you were smart enough to make that bootloader a FAT32 or NTFS format, Windows Backup fails each and every time because it can’t shadow the bootloader partition.  Never mind that you could have literal terabytes of space free on your drive.  The shadow has to be on the partition being copied, and if the partition format can’t be read by Windows, you’re SOL.  And, in fact, I can’t even be sure that making that partition Windows-readable will fix this Windows Backup woe, because I have yet to try it.  It’s only a theory that it might make Windows Backup usable on a dual-boot box.

But honestly, it’s no big deal.  That’s okay, because Windows Backup is a PoS anyway.  There’s so much better software out there, right?  Comodo, for example, is free and does a much better job.  I would have just used my old copy of Norton Ghost, like I have on so many Windows XP boxes past, but it’s not compatible with Windows 7.  Oh, sure, some newer version is, but I’m not going to stump-up cash for that if there’s a free alternative that meets my needs.  And besides, I don’t want to just back up my Windows partitions anyway.  We’re talking dual boot.  We’re talking Windows and Linux living side-by-side.  So a Windows-only backup would be darn stupid anyway.  Just as a Linux-only backup would be.

So let’s try bringing in something truly multiplatform, that can read NTFS and Linux formats equally well, and will respect the whole of the hard drive, the master boot record, the partitions, everything exactly as they are.  Why not try something like Partimage Is Not Ghost (PING) then.

And then watch during a routine backup as PING totally destroys the Windows partition so badly that no Windows or Linux tool can restore it without reformatting the whole NTFS partition Windows used to be using before it was slaughtered by bad programming and heavy Linux hands.

Honestly.  Can anyone tell me why anyone would think a typical Windows user would, at this point, having had his Windows install raped and slaughtered repeatedly by Linux, be even remotely interested in trying to use Linux at this point?  At all?  Ever?

I can’t think of a single reason.

In fact, I feel pretty damn stupid for even giving Linux this many opportunities to nuke my Windows install.

I honestly have no idea why I’m so determined to use Linux at all.  Dualboot is just not working here.  I don’t know why not.  It’s a freaking simple concept.  I know Linux works just great on its own.  And Windows, well, is Windows.  Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.  So…

…I keep on trying.

But if anyone has ever wondered why Windows users don’t switch to Linux for the better security, lower overhead, and easier access to a plethora of wonderful free software?  There you go.  It’s because of all of the bad things that Linux does, that Windows doesn’t.  Like happily deconstruct a RAID array and then write to the drives individually, destroying the array.  Or blithely nuke Windows during a routine hard drive backup, when it should only be reading from the Windows partition in the first place.  Not many Windows users would be happy to reinstall everything from scratch because “oops” we had a little bug.

I’ve decided that I really don’t like Ubuntu though.  So maybe I’ll go back to openSUSE.  Or Fedora.

But later.  Much later.  When the seething anger has gone back down to a dull ache and I can burn a distro to DVD without wanting to throw it across the room, grind it into pulp, etc.

I really never thought I would cherish anything Microsoftian this much.  But I’m about damn ready to mount my Windows 7 disk on a wall.  With those holograms, it’s even kind of shiny…

I was recently caught off guard by a video game commercial for Halo Reach.  It claimed to be the most anticipated game of 2010!  Really?  So Bioshock 2 wasn’t more anticipated?  And I suppose no one has even heard of Starcraft 2?  Yeah.  Un-huh.  Suuuuuure.

The most anticipated game of 2010: Halo Reach? Or StarCraft II?

Don’t we have some kind of regulatory agency that requires some kind of truth in advertising or something?  Like, I don’t know, maybe the Federal Trade Commission…

Intel has recently upset a few people over at nVidia by releasing a technical paper, Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU Myth:
An Evaluation of Throughput Computing on CPU and GPU.  Actually, truth be told it’s more than nVidia that Intel is stepping on the toes of.  That’s just where they started.

With the advent of graphics cards (GPUs) being able to execute program code instead of just draw graphics now, a lot of people are finding that the graphics cards with tons of floating-point math units capable of processing amazing amounts of per-pixel operations and having access to a cache of very low-latency high-speed RAM to play with can offer some absurdly high parallel processing power to applications now that their architecture is available through general-purpose programming APIs.  Processing power which traditional computer processors (CPUs) just can’t match, in some applications.

Only, not according to Intel.

Intel’s tech paper rather somehow finds that GPUs are only two and a half times faster than their best CPUs.  nVidia begs to differ. And frankly, one can see nVidia’s case.

To start with, let’s look at the hardware Intel chose to compare.  In Intel’s corner is the magnificent Intel Core i7-960.  It’s the most state-of-the-art desktop CPU from Intel.  It comes with 4 cores, each capable of Hyper Threading, for a virtual total of 8 cores.  It runs at 3.2GHz, self-overclocks to 3.46 GHz, has 8MB of cache, and currently retails for around $570.

In nVidia’s (and really, all GPUs-used-as-GP-processors) corner is the nVidia GeForce GTX 280.  Umm … which is so last season.  Not nVidia’s the latest and greatest.  Still, it has 240 CUDA cores, runs at 1.3GHz, and has 1GB of cache running at 1.1GHz.   It currently retails for around $300.  Yes, it costs half as much as Intel’s best CPU.  Because it’s not the latest technology.

For the record, nVidia’s latest graphics card is the nVidia GeForce GTX 480.  It runs on nVidia’s new Fermi architecture.  It has 480 CUDA cores, runs at 1.4GHz, and has 1.5GB of cache running at 1.8GHz.  It currently retails for around $500.  But Intel didn’t compare to this GPU.  Gee, I wonder why not…

So already we see a grave technological disparity here.  Intel chose their latest and greatest, while choosing nVidia’s last-season runner-up.

But that’s not the only point of contention.  Intel chooses a number of CPU-specific benchmarks.  Okay.  Not exactly the fields where people are trying to optimize for GPUs, but this is Intel, so of course they’re concerned with their own bailiwick and not the stuff people are actually using GPUs for.  So I’ll give them that much.

However, the next major point to ponder, nowhere in Intel’s paper is given the information on how the code was compiled and built.  We have no idea what optimizations are and aren’t being done, for Intel or for nVidia.  So for all we know, the code could be highly optimized towards Intel and not optimized at all for nVidia.  We simply don’t know.  It’s a rather glaring omission from Intel to have left this information out in a performance comparison.

And, of course, we then come to the final point of contention, Intel’s conclusion.  Intel concludes that the performance gain of using a GPU over a CPU is only 2.5 times better performance.  Even though their own benchmark result comparison chart is scaled to 6 times the performance of the Intel Core i7-960, and one of the benchmarks actually reaches 14.9 times greater performance.

Intel CPU to nVidia GPU Benchmark Performance Comparison

So then which is it?  Only 2.5x faster?  Or potentially 14.9x faster?  Or more?

And that’s using last-gen graphics technology for comparison, with half of the cores, less memory, and slower clocks all around.  On software where we have no way of knowing how it was (or wasn’t) optimized, so an invisible bias may or may not also be involved.  In benchmarks undoubtedly hand-picked by Intel.

It’s no wonder then that nVidia, in their response to Intel, prefers to use real-world applications in its rebuttal.  These are projects actually performed by real people, with real results, that are documented and reproducible.  And the performance gains range from Cambridge University seeing 100 times the performance, to Massachusetts General Hospital seeing 300x gains using GPUs over traditional CPUs.

There’s a reason why so many people are interested in this technology and are using it.  It’s sad to say that even the worst possible biased view against using a GPU in mathematical applications is still 2.5 times better than a CPU.  And the best?  A hundred times better or more, apparently.

Sorry Intel, but even if we believed your FUD of only a 2.5x performance gain, it’s still an Epic Fail if you’re trying to convince us not to look into using nVidia’s GPUs instead of just your CPUs alone.