News Jay Does Want to Hear

Linus Torvalds has some rather harsh words for OpenBSD devs, as well as for the security community as a whole. The words are not exactly SFW, but full of win nonetheless. Unfortunately, he's just going to have to live with the fact that security will always be a sexier computing topic than regular old bug stomping.

Election website better than 538 (IMHO) back online

Prof. Sam Wang, a biophysicist at Princeton, has revived his awesome "Meta-analysis of State Polls" that he started in 2004. If you remember how I was in the Fall of 2004, I used to check this site about 20 times a day.

In my opinion, the methodology is better than 538 since it does not include Nate's regression data, cool as it is. I think this is a major source of error for 538, as evidenced by Nate's big misses in the primaries (e.g., KY and SD). Also, Prof. Wang's model doesn't use a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the probabilities, but actually calculates the exact numbers.

If you are an obsessive poll-watcher like me, I would highly recommend this resource.

News Jay Doesn't Want to Hear

Looks like, for Windows, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Or it may, in fact, be a freight train coming your way. Midori is interesting not only because it represents the first hint of a post-Windows era, but may also be the herald of the post-localized OS era, as well. Hosted virtualization is taking off in recent years, and while it has yet to see the light of day in consumer markets, rumblings of similarly web-centric OS’s—the “Google OS”—have been going on for quite a while now. The fact is that the majority of computing functions already exist in some form or another either with a web app, or some sort of virtualization software. Ironically, just as HD’s start to be measured in TB’s, we may just end up using them as caches.

Morgan Freeman Crashes Car, Lives

In yet another threat to the Batman series, Morgan Freeman was in a serious car accident this weekend. He suffered some injuries, but does not appear to be hideously disfigured, avoiding the irony of him having to switch to playing Two-Face. I read other reports of a female passenger, but this BBC article makes no mention of her health status.

The Slippy Express wishes him a speedy recovery because we like movies that he is in.
Conversely, I hope Shia LeBouf's hand gets gangrene and they have to chop it off.

Properly inflating your tires saves more oil than offshore drilling can produce

Over the past few days, Republicans have been gleefully mocking Barack Obama's call for Americans to ensure their tires are properly inflated and to get regular maintenance on their cars to preserve gas. John McCain's campaign has even been passing around tire pressure gauges to reporters and donors to mock Obama. Clearly, Obama's call for tire inflation is no match for McCain's plan to increase off-shore drilling, right?

Incidentally, it was Barack Obama's birthday today and the RNC put this up on their website:

Classy, beating a black man over his head with a long, blunt object. You know, sort of like the nightsticks that Southern white cops used to beat black men during the Civil Rights Era.

Well, it turns out that Obama was right. Time is reporting that

[E]fficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points.

By the Bush Administration's estimates (probably on the extremely optimistic side), expanding off-shore drilling would provide us with only 1% of our oil demand in 20 years.

This is yet another demonstration that if elections were merely about facts, this thing would have been over a long time ago.

No More F------ Around

What drew me to this article about control schemes in military hardware is:

1. That's an X-Box 360 controller in the picture.

2. That's obviously ROB, everyone's favorite Smash robot, Winter SS Variant, ready to rock and roll.

Obama too skinny to be president

Who else but Fox News would release a completely serious "article" arguing that Obama will be unpopular due to being slim? McCain's camp has also criticize him for going to the gym and eating healthy food and nutritional supplements citing these acts as things that only celebrities like Obama do. I think the most cogent response to this comes care of The Onion.

Intel Marches on Discrete Graphics Market

Yes, Larrabee is not entirely a GPU, but it's not a CPU, either. It is, however, discrete, geared towards graphics, and possesses an inherently multicore architecture that will allow it to potentially utilize hundreds of cores (they are starting out with a modest count of about a dozen or so, cough). The article didn't some of the more practical aspects of this type of architecture, however, like how such a hundred-headed beast would not crush a mobo (these are targetted toward consumer PCs) and/or not burn a hole through it.

World's Oldest Joke Traced Back to 1900 BC

Proof that toilet humor predates toilets by a long shot. I don't really get them, but the general themes are timeless.

Fast Food Banned in Poor Neighborhood

Last Thursday, the LA City Council passed an ordinance stopping the construction of new fast food joints in a low income neighborhood. Currently the moratorium is set at one year but might well be extended to two years or indefinitely. Read the article from Slate plus a follow-up posted today.