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June 10, 2003

World  Rocking the Casbah

Reason Online has a fascinating article up titled Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah:

Eroticism like this, which seems to emerge from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, isn’t usually very noteworthy. Indeed, the video’s assumption that there’s something "forbidden" about its subject matter that must be approached in an "artistic" fashion may seem outdated. But in this case it is exactly such elements that make the production compelling. The reason is the video’s cultural context: This is not an American or European or Japanese video; it is an Arab artifact. The woman is a singer named Elissa; her song, which has made her a leading celebrity in the Mideast, is entitled "Aychaylak" ("I Live for You"); and both her song and her video were among last year’s biggest music hits in the Arabic-speaking world.
Exactly what the broader implications of this trend are is beyond me, but it's bound to have an impact on the Arab world.

(via Motley Cow, who comments Peace on Earth through Arab pop sex kittens?)

Posted by Pixy Misa at 05:15 PM | World | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Blog  Geographica

Blog of the Day is Geographica, hosted by Mapchic:

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
I’m still unemployed
And I have no money.
Oops, that was five days ago. Sorry, Mapchic!
I have to admit that I am a bit sad that I did not get a chance to go to China and see the Yangtze before the gorges were flooded. I understand that it was a lovely region.

What I do know for certain is that this dam will render all previous physical maps of China obsolete.

The changes wrought by this dam go way beyond those of a simple new roadway – instead there will be a new physical map of China. A new lake (no name has been released) will be created it is expected to stretch for almost 400 miles upstream along the Yangtze. The flooded area will cover 2 cities, 11 counties and 116 towns.

Yes, and I wish they'd stop moving borders around and changing names and stuff like that! I just bought a new atlas and I'd like it to last at least a little while, thank you!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:56 PM | Blog | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Useless Motherboard Features

The Useless Motherboard Feature of the Day Award goes to Gigabyte for their GA-7NNXP, GA-8PENXP, and GA-8KNXP. Why's that?, you ask. I'll tell you. The GA-7NNXP has four memory sockets. How many memory modules do you think you can use with it?

Wrong. Guess again. That's right, three.

Similarly, the GA-8KNXP has six memory sockets. How many can you use? Yes, that's right. Four.

The 8KNXP's problem is actually understandable: The chipset supports two channels, and each channel supports four banks of memory. A double sided module - and almost all modules are double-sided - has two banks. Which means you can only use two modules. Unless you happen to have single-sided modules lying around. There's no point in buying single-sided modules, because they have half the capacity of the double-sided ones but cost rather more than half as much.

The 7NNXP also has two channels. One channel can apparently support four banks of memory, and the other... Well, the 7NNXP (and the five other boards in the same family) is the only Nforce motherboard I've seen with four memory sockets; all the others have three. It would seem that the second channel can only support two banks. If you plug three 512MB double-sided modules into a 7NNXP, you get the expected 1.5GB, but because the memory isn't balanced across the channels, it doesn't work in dual channel mode. If you add a fourth module, you still have 1.5GB of memory - it disables one side on each of the third and fourth modules - and it still doesn't work in dual-channel mode.

Gah. What's the point? Apart from the four people in the world who happen to already have DDR400 single-sided modules that they aren't using, who needs this? And why isn't there a big notice on Gigabyte's site saying "extra memory sockets will not work for most users"?

Grumble. I'm upset mostly because these looked like really nice boards. As it stands, there's nothing really to set them apart from boards from the other manufactures like AOpen, Asus, Abit, Albatron, Asrock... Except that Gigabyte starts with a 'G'.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 02:53 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Art  Peripatetic

Word of the day is peripatetic. (Yes, and I assume it will be gone by tomorrow? — Ed.)

Posted by Pixy Misa at 12:57 PM | Art | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Cool  We're the Phone Company

I've always loved this Lily Tomlin sketch from Saturday Night Live, perhaps because I've worked in the industry for (mumble) years. Every so often I'll trot it out when the opportunity arises - or indeed for no reason at all.

Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year, serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth. We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Watch this -- just lost Peoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 02:53 AM | Cool | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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