其次，我们还是得把迷信和宗教的标签都贴在正确的对象身上，或者说，得区分好的和不好的航标。轮子功之类的自不必说，违背人性。而很多世俗化的宗教，也实在令人惋惜。昨天一行四人到南普陀，山门紧闭，通告说台风来袭暂停开放。怏怏的转身，无意中听见一位老僧人在请前来的一辆轿车返回，对车内的女子说“把你的生辰告诉我就可以了”云云。想必是替那女子念经祈福吧。这在信佛的善男信女中早已形成了很完善的一套体系，让他们通过寺庙和一定的程序来获得希望的平安。佛教也许是世俗化最彻底的大宗教了。终日烟雾缭绕的寺庙中，不知有几位信徒读过佛家经典，想着跳出轮回，他们想的应该更多的是今生的富贵与平安吧，佛祖看了也许该哭笑不得。佛家始终劝告世人舍弃贪欲，不贪恋今世，超脱人类作为动物的本能的束缚，如今却成了这副模样。不过这样功利性十足的转变也确实十分适合中国。原本一切教规的设立都不是为了充当达到修行目的的交换筹码，而只是防止误入歧途的手段，但如果按照教规程序化地花钱进贡能够换得荣华富贵，能使犯下的罪过得到宽恕，其实也是很吸引人的，无论是信徒还是寺庙。只不过，这样一来宗教沦为了泥菩萨，而信徒脑中依然空空，依然困于尘世财色的欲望，全然不是宗教的本意了。宗教之所以能够伴随人类盛行千年，就在于它能带领信徒为善。如果人人脑中都是想着如何造福他人，如何积德行善，那社会必将是幸福和美好的。从这个意义上说，共产主义也是很有魅力的宗教了，至少在建国初期，看全国人民如何团结一致的建设祖国、抗击自然灾害、痛击帝国主义，感人至深。只可惜，它也沦落成为现今社会的一套游戏规则，被一群连共产党宣言都未曾读过的个性青年们讥讽。
Month: July 2008
下午在世贸的光合寻找圣经未果。这本全世界最畅销书难道只有教堂卖么？
想起YoYo说的尼西，牛和雷陪着我从世贸转战博物馆。问明来意，老板很干脆的送了我们三人各一本厚厚的中英对照版。惊讶之余，更是折服于老板的热情，问我们在哪上学，毕业后去哪，是否接触过教会等等。捧着那本厚厚的圣经，很惭愧地只能笑着如实回答，现在是抱着了解的心态来拜读。
那么，这一步之后我也算浅尝了世界三大宗教了吧。
昨天看到了Yo页面上一个同学的留言，先是引了“笛卡尔就在设法论证上帝的存在时发现一个可能的邪恶的上帝”，再来一句“科学就可以靠边去死了”。于是触发了我发牢骚的欲望。
首先，红色的课本从小到大都在暗示我们，宗教是类似于迷信的，而科学又是破除迷信的利器，那看来科学和宗教是你死我活的关系了。渐渐的才算明白，有些宗教的东西是迷信，而更多的，藏在阁楼深处远离尘嚣的却不是。古人很愚钝的认为百年古树里住着神仙，因而毕恭毕敬，好好保护，古树也自然枝繁叶茂的庇护全村老小，提供纳凉之所。现代人可以很神气地拿着X光机对大树扫描一番以证明神仙乃子虚乌有，顺便嗤笑古人愚昧无知。但此时，是否应该对祖先小小的粗陋的“迷信”表达一点儿感谢呢？面对那个无法证明的神仙，正是这么个善良的小小的“迷信”让这棵大树得以保留至今，否则它早已被大卸八块做成谁的家具了。古人是无知的，他们没有X光机；我们现在也不过尔尔，连299792458 m/s的尾数都难以达到。从某种意义上说，我们知道的多了，因此也更无知了。面对未知，古人如果挥动铁斧砍掉大树便是不幸，我们如果卖弄半桶水的科学，不也可悲么？所以，宗教也许是指导我们在未知中向善良和美好前进的最好航标了，而科学则是用来扩建航船的材料，少了谁都是不好的。
Categories
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad(zz)
呃，我可怜的133……
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/nvidia-g84-g86-bad
THE BURNING QUESTION on everyone’s mind is what Nvidia parts are failing in the field? No GT200 jokes here, NV personnel are still quite sensitive about that, but our moles have told us about the bum GPUs.
The short story is that all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. No exceptions. All of them, mobile and desktop, use the exact same ASIC, so expect them to go south in inordinate numbers as well. There are caveats however, and we will detail those in a bit.
Both of these ASICs have a rather terminal problem with unnamed substrate or bumping material, and it is heat related. If you ask Nvidia officially, you will get no reason why this happened, and no list of parts affected, we tried. Unofficially, they will blame everyone under the sun, and trash their suppliers in very colourful language.
The press is totally stonewalled, but analysts are quite another story. If you call up with Wall Street credentials, they will tell you what is going on, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate. What analysts tell me they were officially told is that it is a specific batch of parts that only HP got.
The official story is that it was a batch of end-of-life parts that used a different bonding/substrate process for only that batch. Once again, the trusty INQUIRER bullshit detectors went off so loudly that the phone almost vibrated out of my hand. More than enough people tell us both the G84 and G86 use the same ASIC across the board, and no changes were made during their lives.
When the process engineers pinged by the INQ picked themselves off the floor from laughing, they politely said that there is about zero chance that NV would change the assembly process or material set for a batch, much less an EOL part.
On the less technical side, multiple analysts also told us that NV specifically told them that this problem is confined only to HP. I wonder why Dell is having failures in huge numbers for their XPS lines and replacing them with ATI parts? Why is Asus having similar problems? Go check the message boards, any notebooks that came with G84s and G86s have boards filled with dead machine problems. Most of these, especially on the NV forums are being quashed and removed by admins, so act quickly and take screenshots of your posts.
Basically, NV seems to have told each analyst a highly personalised version of the story, and stonewalls everyone else who asks. Why? The magnitude of the problem is huge. If Dell and HP hold their feet to the fire, anyone want to bet that $200 million won’t cover it? This has all the hallmarks of things the SEC used to investigate in a time before government was purchasable.
The other problem is the long tail. Failures occur due to heat cycling, cold -> hot -> cold for the non-engineers out there. If you remember, we said all G84s and G86s are affected, and all are the same ASIC, so why aren’t the desktop parts dying? They are, you are just low enough on the bell curve that you don’t see it in number that set off alarm bells publicly yet.
Laptops get turned on and off many times in a day, and due to the power management, throttle down much more than desktops. This has them going through the heat cycle multiple times in a day, whereas desktops typically get turned on and off once a day, sometimes left on for weeks at a time. Failures like this are typically on a bell curve, so they start out slow, build up, then tail off.
Since laptops and desktops have a different “customer use patterns”, they are at different points on the bell curve. Laptops have got to the, “we can’t bury this anymore” point, desktops haven’t, but they will – guaranteed. The biggest question is whether or not they will be under warranty at that point, not whether or not they are defective. They are.
If you look at the HP page, the prophylactic fix they offer is to more or less run the fan all the time. Once again, for the non-engineers out there, fan running eats a lot of power, so this destroys the battery life of notebooks. Basically, people bought a machine with a battery life of X, and now it is Y to prevent meltdown from a bum part. It doesn’t fix anything, it just makes the failures take longer, hopefully past the warranty period, at a huge battery life cost. Fire up your class actions people, you got shafted.
Back to the engineering, we intoned that this was a cover-up of engineering failures by Nvidia. We also said that they probably knew what was happening. Think we were kidding? Read this, twice, linked again here for those that can’t move their mouse to the left, it is that important.
If we knew a year and change ago that these exact parts had heat problems, think Nvidia did? Think the voltage difference between A02 and A03 is coincidence? This is a classic example of not meeting engineering goals and overclocking through brute force (voltage bump in engineering terms) to compensate.
HP and the others were blindsided by this, it happened far too late in the design cycle to compensate, and it looks to have been covered up hastily, badly, and eventually fatally. Blaming suppliers, OEMs and users is completely unfounded and says that NV is unwilling to properly address this issue, only hide from it. NV knew, they made silicon changes to fix another problem that directly lead to this problem.
Nvidia is covering this up, hard. All the usual sources are keeping mum on the topic with only a few daring to speak out. Given the sheer magnitude of this, their marketshare for notebooks was huge in the period, this could very well suck up most of their remaining cash. Don’t underestimate how bad this is going to be for NV, we highly doubt $200 million will even begin to cover it.
30岁的生日对于一个女性来说意味着什么？Rachel在她的三十岁party上哭丧着脸，甩掉了嫩得出水的小男友。不知道今天的寿星是什么心情。
心里很清楚，她只是一个远在南洋的女子，只不过出现在我寻找寄托而不得的时候。她的音乐、照片、新闻，种种信息构成了我所欣赏的那个人。
真实。也许这是我最看重的一点，毕竟虚伪从来是一文不值的东西。这个瘦弱身躯中迸发的力量是令人惊叹的，因为她可以不必用假声无病呻吟，可以不必用性感舞姿来遮掩，所以可以把所有的力量用来驱动她最真实的声音。除了体态臃肿的帕瓦罗蒂们，能在古希腊剧场上唱出声音来的也大概只有她了吧，而不是宁静的夏天，不是布拉格广场，更不是嘻唰唰。
有了真实之后，就能够相信一个人的一切。笑容，就是她的愉悦；眼泪，就是她的不舍；抱着骨瘦如柴的非洲孩子，就是她的悲天悯人。毕竟真实需要太多的必要条件，自信、信任、修养，需要骨子里就是个善良的人。
一个过于了解的人总是难以形容。Happy 30th birthday.
这篇应该在前天发布的，今天才发现这里一直没发出来。看来邮件发布又挂掉了。
网上早就司空见惯了指责官商勾结的文章，并对西方政体致以了无限向往和赞美，那倒不如先来看看美国的市长如何对待一条出现在金矿海滩边的大白鲨。首先是在第一起食人事件之后阻止警长关闭海滩，警长因接下来的第二起事件承受责骂时，他倒是虚情假意的为其鸣了不平。国庆，面对龟缩在沙滩上不敢下水的游客，他又热情邀请老幼妇孺下水享受。当然也不乏假鲨鱼出现时把老人孩子踩在脚下的壮汉。
描述过人性之后就是人鲨大战了。效果之逼真令人赞叹。灭鲨无数的船长葬身鱼腹也算了结恩怨了。
对于电影中的鲨鱼充满好奇，在那个数码特效尚未登场的时代，做出如此效果实在不简单。“……尤其是对于本片的主角“大白鲨”，他更是倾注了大量的心血和精力，为了配合剧情的拍摄和进度，他特别安排特效小组制作了三个鲨鱼模型，每个重达1.5吨，共耗资300万美元，它们都被固定安装在水下的钢板上，需要时再整个拖到拍摄现场。当然在水中操控的工作人员一个都不能少，至少要出动13条大汉才能使“鲨鱼”庞大的身躯灵活潜游、疯狂猎食、“象真的一样”。没有任何数码特效作为依托，能把深海巨兽摆弄得伏伏贴贴、活灵活现的，只有斯皮尔伯格一人，……”
Categories
我的大学(2)
毕业了。
7月7日，离开的日子。凌晨，K歌后嘶哑着嗓子回到寝室，和邵、牛一起，搞定了毕业相册的最后一些工作，打包好行李，已是三点。huhu大概不堪睡意，两点多就上了床，悄无声息。于是，最后一次卧聊只剩我和邵了。这个每天一起身就能看见的好兄弟呀，这是咱们的最后一次卧聊。再也不能一起睡在523B的西墙边，再也不能一起听你放的音乐，再也不能和你一起为阿森纳熬夜……莫悲伤，莫悲伤，离开了523B咱们还是兄弟，距离不是问题，没有了这些“一起”，咱们还会迎来新的“一起”。
最后这一夜，我们怎么舍得睡去。再聊一次过去的四年，再聊一次将来的几十年，再聊一次你要修的正果，再聊一次523。记下你送我的话，也送你我的修行建议。huhu也终于被我们弄醒，有一句每一句的搭着。窗外渐渐泛起了晨光，时间还是走到了七点半。拿起牙杯，最后光顾一下盥洗室和WC。老牛来了，不能不走了。伴我三年的523B3，很难得地把它的被子叠好，但书桌上、地上还是有好多带不走的物件，还有那张六个轮子都已不知去向的蓝色转椅。跟huhu大吼一声，“陈志湖，走啦”，他闷着被子“嗯”了一声，丫的，连脸都不露。走到门口，右手边，张鹏的床空着，他没能跟我们吃上昨晚的桃李三层大餐，同寝四年，怎么偏偏这时候胃疼，唉。回头，邵斜倚在床边，没戴眼镜，嘟囔着。我靠着门，几秒钟，脑袋一片空白，腾空了才能记住你躲在蚊帐后的模样。下一次再见是什么时候？“好了，走了”，最后一次，带上523B的门。
伴着阳光，跟老牛一起走在紫荆前的路上。这个天才绝顶的家伙，有着与他的智慧匹配的狂妄自傲，只能用他的姓来形容。跟他什么话都能说，也经常什么话都不说。最关键的时候有他帮我绞尽脑汁想办法，也总能被我弄得羞涩无比，双臂抻直不知所措。还好，一切顺利的话咱们会一起到北美，生活在零时差。留学生楼下，出租车很快拦到了，塞好行李，道别……
四年前，坐着车从拥挤嘈杂的西门踏入清华；四年后，坐着车从宽敞整洁的东门离开。这里有我四年的青春，也有我最好的朋友，叫我怎能忘记。