Saddam's weapons of mass irritation

It might seem surprising but Saddam has a lot of hidden weapons against the civilized world - weapons that will bring terror among us and might forever change our way of life as we know it!

The first of those weapons is ... good old spam - as in unsolicited and unwanted email - in case you have missed it, recently there were quite a number of articles in the media about "spam kings", "spam queens" and their 1 million US$ homes.

If you really think that spam is mostly harmless let's do the math again - given the incredible low returns from spam for each 1 million US$ made by one of the spam lords he/she must have sent at least 10 (and sometimes maybe even 100) billions emails and the people being spammed might have actually lost around 1 billion US$ - so now for Saddam it's only a matter of time until he will gather enough spam experts that will fill our mailboxes with junk - and maybe it's not a coincidence that some of the largest US spam kings are former convicted crooks converted to a more "legal" business :(

Not long time ago, spam was under one percent of the email that we were receiving but that number has recently increased to almost 40% and ideally Saddam should aim for 99% until the end of next year and 99.9% in two years - can you imagine a time when you will first have to dig a huge heap of "amazing" offers for sex enhancers and incredible diet recipes just in order to find that boring statement from your bank or the details of your next job interview? You already have to do that? Oops, some people might be moving faster than I thought :)

But spam in itself might not be enough - even 1 trillion US$ lost each year is only "small change" for the world economy - so actually Saddam will need something more, eventually something that could be easily connected with spam ... what about some good scams ? Of course that he can push a little further the old Nigerian scam, but it's also the time for something more innovative - maybe in the first stage he will come with the story of some of his former aids that need to be rescued together with several million petrodollars from some remote land - but at some point he will need to think about something more creative than that - maybe Dell and some other large US corporations might be a source of inspiration - after all, the "mail rebates" trick is still perfectly legal and more important - quite effective - with 50-80% of the people not actually cashing those "rebates"! The logical next step for Mr. Evil might be internet-related theft and especially identity theft - if small crooks can easily get 10000 US$ credit lines by pretending to be valid customers it is easy to imagine the amount of damage that can be done by a really well- organized group. And if they do their "homework" right, not before long an important percentage of the transactions at sites like eBay or Amazon will be pure fraud! What, that is already taking place? Oops :)

But probably the "nucular bomb" in Saddam's arsenal is the stock market - while some people are already cheering that the recession is over and that the good times will soon be back, huge surprises might still be waiting for the day of "maximum damage" - what would you think about a company with 5 billion outstanding shares currently valued by the free market at over 200 billion US$ - yet that company (which, by the way, has NEVER issued dividends, and all the important shareholders have been only selling their shares for the last 10 or 20 years) will need 50 years at the current level of income to only recover that amount of money - and that is INCOME (at probably the best level in their history), not PROFIT (not even "paper profit")!!! And yet that company is one of the greatest companies in the world, and we might assume that it's not the only one in this situation - isn't that a pyramidal scheme waiting for a spectacular crash?

Our only hope is that Saddam might not be able to control those "hidden bombs" at his will - after all, the federal government which in theory is supervising all those things seem to have very little or no control at all :)

Best wishes,
Catalin Caranfil

Subject: Is the music industry dying?

As the music industry desperately lashes out at users of peer-to-peer networks and blames all its woes on them, others say declining sales are because of the weak economy, the near total disappearance of the single to encourage album sales, the dearth of innovative material, and competition from things like video games and movies for the same expendable dollar. Although I think these are all contributing factors I have come to the conclusion the root of the problem is the music industry, as we know it today is dieing, and I think there is plenty of incidental evidence to back up this view.

The music industry likes to point out the huge volume of MP3's being traded as evidence of demand, but that just reaffirms the fact people are gluttons for free things. A better way to judge demand and how music is used is to look at sales of playback devices, and a trip to an electronics store tells the real story.

Over the last decade stereo departments have just about disappeared to be replaced by big screen TV's and home theater systems. Most stores now have a larger selection of personal playback equipment than stereos for the home; it's also why I think hope that DVD-Audio will revitalize the industry is a joke since it's useless for the mobile environment.

Even the automobile where music for decades held a monopoly for entertainment has seen that come to an end with TV sets and DVD players becoming options on more vehicles every day. By the way if you think people using mobile phones while driving is scary think of the danger of someone watching Star Wars going down the road at 70 MPH represents, thank god that it's illegal in most countries, but I am afraid that won't stop some people from trying it.

I think it's pretty clear that the only places where music listening remains strong are those where TV watching is impractical since most of the equipment being sold now is for mobile use, and that the home stereo has pretty much been replaced by the home theater. With this being the case the music industry has to come to grips that it's listeners want highly portable music formats and that CD's don't fit that bill, and that copy protection will only hurt those who buy legitimate recordings since they will be limited to using them in there original form only. Besides that it won't stop people from doing D to A and back to D recordings to get around the copy protection, and since most will end up in MP3 format they will be virtually indistinguishable from a direct digital rip.

The only workable solution is some form of subscription service that downloads to people's players, and it's going to have to be relatively inexpensive if it is to fit the smaller budgets most people have left after video games and movies. Also it can't be limited to older titles if it is to have a chance of fulfilling consumer's desires and expectations. And if any of the old guard wants to have a part of what's to come they are going to have to accept that their current business model is as good as dead and move towards becoming a service industry or die. They might not like this, but there is no way of preventing it, and it is clear a fundamental change in peoples listening habits is already well underway. The only question left is will the industry see the lights have changed before its all over?

Jay Namon

Subject: RISC vs. CISC, Reasons why CISC wins

Before I get to my points, why was CISC made? The first processors had tiny instruction sets, did they not? There was a major problem with the simplicity of these instruction sets as it lead to lengthy code and large programs in a time where a MB of RAM was Millions of dollars. CISC was designed to address this. Because RAM was expensive, complex instructions were designed to minimize RAM usage. CISC was, in a sense, instruction compression.

Fast forward to the days of big RAM! RAM is cheap now, right? AMD and Intel are even moving forward on 64bit technology to address the very issue of breaking the 4GB barrier! RISC should WIN!!!!

Well, when you buy RAM, what else do you worry about? Lemme give you time to think.

Ready? No? I'll wait.

Need a incentive? Fine, if you guess right, I'll give you a 10GHz P23 with 100GB of 60NS EDO RAM (that is, if I can find one.)

POINT 1, RAMming SPEED!!!

That's right! RAM speed! You've caught on!

In a white paper written by an high level engineer behind Alpha (don't know his name or where I can get the paper again. The first person to Spam The Inquirer with said white paper will win another 10GHz P23 with 100GB of 60NS EDO RAM (that is, if I can find one)) describing why CISC would eventually win. He describes that the demands of a RISC system will always out grow the memory bus, because of the simplicity and quantity of the instructions, long before a CISC system. He also said that RISC systems inherently need more cache because of the simplicity and quantity of the instructions. If you factor in the larger hit from disparity between a RISC CPU and its memory bus, the size of the CACHE required to keep a RISC CPU fed grows exponentially

He then went on to applaud Intel's P-Pro for decoding CISC instructions into RISC instructions, gaining the benefit of both worlds. Sure it increases the length of the pipeline, but as we can see, a huge pipeline hasn't hurt the P4 too terribly, though Intel is really pushing it.

Now, this is a gross summary of the white paper, and wish I had it on hand, because it was a great read, it would support my argument and keep me from getting flamed.

POINT 2, CISC in, RISC out! Flexibility AND Legacy, all rolled in to one!

POINT 2.1 Swing batta batta!

One of the fun things about the war between Intel and AMD is watching AMD smack Intel's curve balls out of the park; when Intel released MMX, AMD countered, when Intel released SSE, AMD included it in the Palomino, now AMD is going to included SSE2 in the Hammers! Why is AMD able the follow Intel's lead so closely? Shouldn't it take years to implement these CISC instructions into a CISC CPU? No! Not when you can decode these new instructions into RISC(like instructions)! AMD is taking the new instructions Intel throws at it, and dealing with them in a very general purpose manner.

POINT 2.2 Reading Latin, Speaking Italian

So you've built a processor, but you feel you did everything wrong. Now you have to build a new processor, but because you are now "doing it right," everything written for the old processor won't work! What if you make a processor that reads legacy code and decodes it into proprietary code that never leaves the CPU? You could redo your processor a million ways and still be able to run the same code! Your CPU1 code will run on your CPU2, CPU3, P4, etc! No two need to operate the same way, just speek the same read the same code.

Well, I stretched my half-hour lunch 30 minutes longer than I was 'spos'ta. Enjoy, and flame on.

Oh yeah.

P.S. Please withhold my contact info.

µ