Month: November 2008

Desuburbanization

In a deep and sustained downturn, home prices would likely sink further and not rise, dimming the appeal of homeownership, a large part of suburbia’s draw. Renting an apartment — perhaps in a city, where commuting costs are lower — might be more tempting. And although city crime might increase, the sense of safety that attracted city-dwellers to the suburbs might suffer, too, in a downturn. Many suburban areas have already seen upticks in crime in recent years, which would only get worse as tax-poor towns spent less money on policing and public services.

it’s not all bad, in other words.

Hangul

Hangul, Korea’s “Great Script,” is perhaps history’s only effort at alphabet reform that is both scientifically rigorous and universally successful. As a result of careful planning, Hangul is easily learned, comfortably written, and infinitely flexible. Consonants are linear (ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ), vowels are horizontal or vertical lines (ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ), glottalized letters are doubled (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ). their shapes are related to the sounds they symbolize.

Mad Max and the Meltdown

This year we celebrate the desacralized “holidays” amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man’s theory: A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

funniest blowhard in some time. apparently the minuscule retreat of religious values in the us is the cause for the financial meltdown. never mind that the us is still at 3rd world levels of religion.

Memory Details

As CPU cores become both faster and more numerous, the limiting factor for most programs is now, and will be for some time, memory access. Hardware designers have come up with ever more sophisticated memory handling and acceleration techniques–such as CPU caches–but these cannot work optimally without some help from the programmer. Unfortunately, neither the structure nor the cost of using the memory subsystem of a computer or the caches on CPUs is well understood by most programmers. This paper explains the structure of memory subsystems in use on modern commodity hardware, illustrating why CPU caches were developed, how they work, and what programs should do to achieve optimal performance by utilizing them

by glibc maintainer ulrich drepper. incredibly detailed, a hefty 100+ pages.

c1000k

Part 1 and Part 2 in this series showed how to build a comet application using mochiweb, and how to route messages to connected users. We managed to squeeze application memory down to 8KB per connection. We did ye olde c10k test, and observed what happened with 10,000 connected users. We made graphs. It was fun, but now it’s time to make good on the claims made in the title, and turn it up to 1m connections.

the next meaningful benchmark might be to serve all internet users in the world from one machine. c1000m?

Giving Up on God

shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs. Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they’ve had something to do with the GOP’s erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, 3 long-term trends have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.

if they get rid of the religious nonsense they might even become electable one day.