Our
brains may never be well-enough equipped to understand the universe
and we are fooling ourselves if we think they will.

Why should we expect to be able eventually to understand how the
universe originated, evolved, and operates? While human brains
are complex and capable of many amazing things, there is not necessarily
any match between the complexity of the universe and the complexity
of our brains, any more than a dog's brain is capable of understanding
every detail of the world of cats and bones, or the dynamics of
stick trajectories when thrown. Dogs get by and so do we, but do
we have a right to expect that the harder we puzzle over these
things the nearer we will get to the truth? Recently I stood in
front of a three metre high model of the Ptolemaic universe in
the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and I remembered
how well that worked as a representation of the motions of the
planets until Copernicus and Kepler came along.

I tend to not care for these guys, but this one is interesting.

The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe

Although the Itanium is capable of sustaining a theoretical maximum of 6 instructions and executing up to 11 instructions, and despite its massive register set, it uses fewer transistors for its core than all competitors. The main disadvantage is that it needs much more cache and instruction fetch width, but the disadvantage of needing more cache diminish as process technology gets better (smaller). To improve performance, the Itanium needs much bigger caches than its competitors, but this adds very little to the overall power consumption. As superscalar RISCs in x86 competitors increase their instruction execution width, they need to upgrade the Out-Of-Order buffers and more importantly, increase the complexity of the schedulers. This leads to a much higher complexity and power consumption.

As the focus shifts to Thread Level Parallellism, the Itanium's small cores make it easier to use more cores without increasing the power consumption too much. Montecito will be the living proof of this. The Itanium is also wider than the competition, which results in bigger benefits from threading techniques.

While Itanium may not be very popular in the hardware enthusiast community, it is definitely an architecture that, from an academic and technical point of view, deserves a lot more attention. We'll delve deeper in upcoming articles.

Welcome to AnandTech.com [ Article: Itanium - is there light at the end of the tunnel?]

The Sockets API lets you develop client and server applications that can communicate across a local network or across the world via the Internet. Like any API, you can use the Sockets API in ways that promote high performance -- or inhibit it. This article explores four ways to use the Sockets API to squeeze the greatest performance out your application and to tune the GNU/Linux� environment to achieve the best results.

Boost socket performance on Linux

Danyel Fisher wrote in with the original Simpsons quote (from
Deep Space Homer) in context:
News announcer Kent Brockman mistakes a
floating ant in a space shuttle experiment floating close to the camera
for a giant space ant:

"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will
-- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this
vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely
enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the
ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be
helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Language Log: I for one welcome our new * overlords

For gaming manufacturers developing gaming products using the new Best of Breed (BOB) and System to System (S2S) open standards, Digital Dynamics is demonstrating new data scopes to greatly facilitate software and protocol communication development. The data scopes enable developers to easily capture and analyze the following protocol communication layers: TCP/IP, HTTP, SOAP, and S2S/BOB. The data scopes help engineers easily view and dissect all the communications traffic on the slot floor network. The data display can be refined with filters to focus only on specific data that is desired to be reviewed and analyzed.
The message builder tools for the BOB and S2S communication protocols helps software developers quickly construct and validate gaming communications messages to ensure compliance with the GSA's open standard protocol specifications. Developers can use the point and click message building interface to create a BOB or S2S message and send it to the desired recipient. Combined with the data scopes, developers will have incredibly useful tools to facilitate their BOB and S2S software development and protocol compliance testing.

digital dynamics software

Multimedia Games Inc. (MGAM)

MGAM: Profile for MULTIMEDIA GAMES - Yahoo! Finance

IGT

IGT: Profile for INTL GAME TECH - Yahoo! Finance

Listmania!

The Whole MBA Thing

Amazon: Listmania! - The Whole MBA Thing

ALLIANCE GAMING ANNOUNCES
DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE
SIERRA DESIGN GROUP Marks strategic entry into Class II markets, further develops VLT and central determination product lines and significantly grows systems business

ALLIANCE GAMING ANNOUNCES DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE SIERRA DESIGN GROUP

Seminole Hard Rock Casino Adopts New Standards
4 October 2004


LAS VEGAS – (PRESS RELEASE) -- The Seminole Tribe of Florida has announced it is implementing GSA's landmark Best of Breed (BOB) and System-to-System (S2S) protocols at its Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and Seminole Casino properties in Florida. The Tribe selected GSA's BOB and S2S standard for the 6,000-game operation because the Tribe wanted to have an open, non-proprietary standard for its casinos.
The implementation required manufacturers to license GSA's standards. BOB and S2S standards are available free of charge to its members and is also available for licensing to non-members.

Seminole Hard Rock Casino Adopts New Standards