dwc

Employment at Apple

"How Not to Get a Job at Apple"

SUVs

Bjorn Lomborg claims in his editorial, "The Environmentalists Are Wrong", that it is "[o]nly when people are rich enough to feed themselves [that] they begin to think about the effect of their actions on the world around them and on future generations". Makes me wonder why I see so many sport-utility vehicles.

Benchmarking

After reading this article on AMD's Opteron, I ran the OpenSSL benchmark on my workstation:

[dwc@fortuna dwc]$ uname -a
Linux fortuna 2.4.18-4 #1 Thu May 2 18:06:25 EDT 2002 i686 unknown
[dwc@fortuna dwc]$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Red Hat Linux release 7.3 (Valhalla)
[dwc@fortuna dwc]$ openssl version
OpenSSL 0.9.6b [engine] 9 Jul 2001
[dwc@fortuna dwc]$ openssl speed
...
sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
rsa  512 bits   0.0010s   0.0001s   1021.0  14064.4
rsa 1024 bits   0.0043s   0.0002s    233.7   4956.0
rsa 2048 bits   0.0244s   0.0007s     41.0   1484.3
rsa 4096 bits   0.1621s   0.0025s      6.2    397.7
sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
dsa  512 bits   0.0008s   0.0009s   1326.1   1166.0
dsa 1024 bits   0.0021s   0.0024s    480.8    408.3
dsa 2048 bits   0.0068s   0.0083s    146.1    120.2

Considering that my processor (Athlon XP 2000+) has a little over twice the clock rate, the 800-MHz Opteron put up some pretty impressive numbers. Of course, there are too many variables in the benchmark to take it seriously - such as the memory hierarchy, the operating system, and the version of OpenSSL - but it's an interesting comparison nonetheless.

Here's another article that gives a better comparison of the Opteron and the Itanium processors, which was the original point of all this.

Slashdot Conspiracy Theories

Another Slashdot conspiracy in the making.

Thinking

This is only slightly frightening:

"If you've got a good idea, keep it under your hat. That, or abstain from thinking altogether."

Mail.com

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHH!

Rejoice

The semester is over!

Music Log

I fixed the whole music thing so that it actually updates.

Mac OS X

This update is for Kim. First, I wholeheartedly recommend getting a Mac, but only if it runs Mac OS X and has lots of RAM. :-) I've been using a 500 MHz G4 at work for about a month now, and I love it. I made some screenshots (1 and 2), which show me running lots of fun stuff: XDarwin (running Window Maker, of course), Chimera, and a few other nifty little applications. (I'm using two monitors, in case you are wondering why there are two screenshots. :-P)

And I thought Romeo and Juliet was hilarious. :-)