Like that shitty relative you have who sleeps in the garage, guess what's back?

November is over!  Yay!

We are now in the much better month of December, where people murder each other for a chance to act like they saved a metric shit ton of money on gifts they pretend to have bought for other people.

This is also known as my favorite month of the year.  But even more importantly, the blog is BACK.  IN.  ACTION.  Now that I'm not writing that pesky novel thing for November, we can go back to talking about how the robots are almost assured to take over humanity in our life times. It's cool.

Speaking of the novel, it isn't actually hosted in it's entirety here.  I don't know if I plan on uploading the finished (ish) manuscript.  After seeking the wise council of people who can actually write,  I've decided to sit on it for a few months before I start edit work.  I'll keep you guys posted n' stuff.

So... what to post, what to post?  Oh, hell if I know or actually plan this shit out.  Lets see what the all-father Google has to say about, um, midgets?

Nothing on the Randy Newman classic, "Short People Got No Reason To Live"?  Google, I am disappoint.

Ok, never fucking mind.

Here's something awesome- Intel recently unveiled their new teraflop chip, which if you don't know, is goddamn fast.  Flops stand for floating point operations per second, so that's 1000000000000 operations every second.  For context, it takes me about 15 minutes to do a floating point calculation by hand, and most hardcore gaming gear can't really push a kiloflop, which is only 1000 operations every second.

Now, before you go rushing to go try and attach the new chip to your rig (or go sell some children into slavery to afford one) do note that this isn't a CPU.  It's a secondary processor, built for its ability to do scientific calculations.  Getting those very high flop numbers requires a lot of optimization.  You'd actually get shitter performance trying to run a standard OS on it.

Or even use it as a GPU.  Don't get any crazy ideas.  Still, the fact that the chip exists is goddamn awesome.  So far, it looks like we're nowhere even close to slowing down Moore's Law.  Which, again, for those playing at home, is the theory that computational power doubles every year.  Which means by 2013, computers will by 16 times more powerful than my laptop, and by 2015, the robots will learn how to use human fear as high octane fuel.

No word on how soon it'll be before people actually go into the information grid, Tron-style though.

As  a computer scientist, this picture terrifies me on many, many levels