FIFA World Cup 2006 Trivia
June 30th, 2006 by ktula
Question: Pictures below, which ones are natural and which ones are artificially-inflated?
Photo credit: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Photo credit: MARCUS BRANDT/AFP/Getty Images
Archive for June, 2006
Deutschland beats Argentina !!!
June 30th, 2006 by ktula
Photo credit: OLIVER LANG/AFP/Getty Images
Headline in the German paper Die Welt:
USA Today had a very interesting article about the German coach Juergen Klinnsman last December. For those who are not familiar with Juergen Klinnsman, he was considered as one of the best German football players. When Juergen Klinnsman took over as the coach for the German national team two years ago, he was heavily criticized unorthodox - for the Germans - way of coaching and for residing in California.
Aufgehts Deutschland!
Related posts
Media fairness?
June 29th, 2006 by ktula
If you have just arrived from Mars, by reading the recent news in the mainstream media about ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, you most likely would have come to the conclusion that the Palestinians are the aggressors in the hostility. The mainstream media is constantly portraying Israel as the victim while using words like “terrorists”, “extremists”, “religious fanatics”, “militants” to describe the Palestinians in this asymmetrical war between the two parties, in which ironically Israel now plays the part of Goliath.
The recent capture of an Israeli soldier by a Palestinian group is a good example that clearly demonstrates how the media is legitimizing Israel’s actions while criminalizing the Palestinians’. Since both parties are at war with one another, the captured Israeli soldier should be considered as a prisoner of war, and so should the tens of thousands of Palestinians being kept in Israeli prisons.
Israelis Batter Gaza and Seize Hamas Officials
New York Times
Israel stepped up its confrontation on Wednesday with Palestinian militants over the capture of an Israeli soldier, battering northern Gazan towns with artillery and sending warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.
When the Palestinians are being captured, they are seized. However, when the Israeli soldier is captured, he is kidnapped.
Many eyes for an eye
Guardian
Has Israel gone over the top in its response to the kidnapping of one of its soldiers?In its current attack on Gaza, Israel has chosen to play the “many eyes for an eye” card and take 64 “hostages”, a number of whom are elected Hamas MPs.
Notice the author used the term kidnapping to describe the capturing of the Israeli soldier, and yet, when describing the capturing of the 64 Palestinian legislators, he actually double-quoted the term hostages, as if it is not an appropriate term to use to describe the status of the captured Palestinians.
Hamas provokes a fight
Internation Herald Tribune
The responsibility for this latest escalation rests squarely with Hamas, whose military wing tunneled into Israel on Sunday, killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third.Israel does not seem to want to reoccupy Gaza, but its reported detention of several cabinet ministers in the West Bank is unsettling.
The New York Times editorial on the International Herald Tribune considered the captured soldier as kidnapped while reporting the capturing of the Palestinian cabinet ministers as detention.
Militants taunt Israel over kidnapped soldier
Reuters
Palestinian militants involved in the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier taunted the Jewish state on Thursday by saying the conscript could be dead or alive.
Even Reuters considers the captured Israeli soldier as kidnapped.
Israel arrests Hamas leaders
Reuters
Israel arrested dozens of Hamas cabinet ministers and lawmakers on Thursday in a move the Islamic group said aimed to topple its government, as the army pressed on with a Gaza offensive to free an abducted soldier.
And yet, in another news story released by Reuters, the capturing of the Palestinian cabinet ministers and lawmakers are described as arrests, as if Israel has the legitimate authority and jurisdiction over the Palestinians.
Israel detains Hamas ministers
Guardian
Israeli troops arrested dozens of Hamas ministers and parliamentarians today as they stepped up their campaign to free a soldier kidnapped by militants in Gaza at the weekend.The group’s leader, Khaled Meshaal, who is suspected of ordering the kidnap of Cpl Shalit, lives in Syria’s capital Damascus.
In another article on the Guardian, words that are used to describe the capturing of the Palestinians are arrested, detains and yet the Israeli soldier is kidnapped.
If i have to go on and quote all the articles from the mainstream media to show the media bias favoring Israel in this conflict, i will probably have to make this my primary job. A search on Google News on the terms “israel kidnap soldier” came back with 527 results and this is just for news articles from the last five days.
So either the Israeli soldier and all the Palestinians sitting in Israeli prisons are “kidnapped”, or they are “captured” as prisoners of war. There can be no other way to describe it.
Related posts
War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers
June 28th, 2006 by ktula
War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers
By Dave Lindorff
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
www.freemarketnews.com
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know biased reporting when I see it, and the reporting here in the U.S. on that ongoing bloodletting in Palestine is certainly biased in the extreme.
Just look at the latest story, about the capture of an Israeli soldier. Palestinian fighters, allegedly linked to Hamas, in a daring raid, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers near the border of Gaza, killing two and capturing one.
This incident came after a period when the Israeli military has been shelling and rocketing Gaza, quite likely killing a whole family of beachgoers (though the Israeli military claims rather improbably that this was the result of a Hamas mine, not of a shell), and a number of other civilians.
Almost universally in the U.S. media, including on National Public Radio, the captured Israeli soldier is being referred to as a hostage and his capture is referred to as a “kidnapping.”
Continue reading ‘War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers’
Related posts
Thecus N2100 2.1.00.2 Beta firmware performance
June 23rd, 2006 by ktula
Test configuration:
- Powerbook G4 17″ 1 GHz 1 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.5
- Network: Direct connection using crossover patch cable running at 1000 Mbps
- Thecus N2100 configuration: 2 Seagate Barracuda SATA 3.0 Gbps in RAID 0 configuration with stripe size at 128 KB.
The tests were done using IOzone. For the shared folder was mounted using AFP, i was not able to get an accurate read result because OS X was caching whatever it was writing in the buffer. When IOzone is performing the tests, it does the write test first follow immediately by the read test. In all of my tests with AFP, OS X was caching all the test files that were smaller than 512 MB. I modified the parameters for IOzone so that it would unmount/remount the shared folder after each test, in the process, getting rid of the cached information.
The old iozone parameters i was using:
./iozone -Rab output_filename -i 0 -i 1 -g 1G -+u -f /shared_folder/testfile -z
The new iozone parameters:
./iozone -Rab output_filename -n 32m -i 0 -i 1 -g 1G -+u -f /shared_folder/testfile -z -r 64k -+q 4 -U /shared_folder
I am basically following the new IOzone test method, specifying file record size of 64 KB and using test file sizes from 32 MB or greater. To make sure that there is enough time in between the tests for the umount/mount operation, i added a 4-second delay after each test (-+q 4).
Because the mount command run by IOzone is the system default mount command, IOzone was not able to mount the shared folder in AFP and SMB. I had to temporarily rename the original mount command and replace it with a shell script with the following content (Note: Make sure that you restore the original mount command prior to rebooting. Otherwise, you won’t be able to boot up your Mac OS X):
For AFP:
mp=$1
mkdir $mp
/sbin/mount_afp afp://username:password@servername/shared_folder_name $mp 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
mkdir $mp
/sbin/mount_afp afp://username:password@servername/shared_folder_name $mp 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
For SMB:
mp=$1
/sbin/mount_smbfs //username:password@servername/shared_folder_name $mp 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
/sbin/mount_smbfs //username:password@servername/shared_folder_name $mp 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
The write performance when the share folder is mounted using AFP is only mediocre - it is half that of SMB.
The AFP read performance is slightly better than SMB.
Related posts
2.1.00.2 Beta firmware for Thecus N2100
June 22nd, 2006 by ktula
A very kind tech support at Thecus sent me the beta firmware that included the support of AFP (Apple Filing Protocol). The firmware upgrade went smoothly without any issue.
The new beta firmware added an item for “Apple Network” under the Network menu.
The “Apple Network” is basically a configuration screen that allows you to enable/disable AFP. I am not sure what the “Zone” field is for.
After enabling AppleTalk File Service (not really sure why this is not called Apple Filing Protocol instead), i was able to mount all the shared folders on my Powerbook. I have an iTunes folder on the N2100 that i used for storing my MP3s and i had configured the users group to have write permission on that folder. However, the user which i used to mount the folder did not have permission to see the iTunes folder, even though the user was under the users group. After i changed the ACL to specifically include the user to have writable permission, i managed to mount the iTunes folder without any issue. Additionally, it seems like AFP is case-sensitive. It did not allow me to mount the iTunes folder when i typed it in lowercase.
Another issue i had was Retrospect not being able to access the backup filesets. After mounting the same folder using SMB, transferring the files to my Powerbook, remounting the same folder in AFP, and tranferring the same files back, the files are accessible by Retrospect. Strange.
From the basic file transfer tests i did last night, to my surprise, the AFP file transfer rate for a 349 MB file is not as good as SMB. The write rate was 4.92 MB/s and the read rate was 5.54 MB/s. I will do an IOzone test later for a more accurate comparison.
For those interested in acquiring this beta firmware, you can either send a note to the tech support at Thecus, or you can leave me a comment.
Update: 06/23/2006 01:01
The DVD playback on Mac OS X using DVD Player off the movies stored on the AFP shared folder is perfect! The CPU utilization of the N2100 during the DVD playback hovers around 10%. In comparison, when the shared folder is mounted in SMB, the DVD playback is never smooth and the CPU utilization is always more than 90%.
Related posts
AFP support in next version of Thecus N2100 firmware!
June 20th, 2006 by ktula
According to Thecus support, the upcoming firmware release for the Thecus N2100 will have support for AFP 3.0 (Apple Filing Protocol). Yeahhhh! This is one firmware release that i am certainly looking forward to installing because i am kind of tired of my SMB shared folder being unmounted from my Powerbook for no good reason. SMB in Mac OS X is not known to have good performance so i am hoping that the AFP support in the N2100 will not only have better performance but most importantly, the stability that allows my Powerbook to be backed up without the shared folder being unmounted midway through the backup.
Related posts
A great quote from Uncle Joey
June 17th, 2006 by ktula
You gotta keep the peace to use the piece.
- Uncle Joey, referring to relationships with women in general