Matisyahu's Blog

Another day of horrible weather – raining, windy and cold. Tonight I had some garlic bread, oven fries and chicken nibbles for dinner – something to warm me up on a cold evening. I’ve got my heater going but I’m hoping that the weather will get better because this is ideally the time when the weather improves, temperatures rise and my power bills come down as I should be using less power. On a good side, I’m happy that my place has double glazed windows along with insulation in the roof and floors so that what electricity I use for heating I’m retaining that heat rather than it disappearing out the walls and ceiling to the neighbourhood. When I was living in Christchurch it was the thing I hated most about the place – the lack of insulation resulting in spending a fortune on power only to find that the house was only marginally warmer than if we hadn’t turned on the heater in the first place.

One bit of news that popped up recently was the agreement between nVidia and Intel about creating custom x86-64/nVidia SoC with much speculation that Intel was going to reduce its investment in its own GPU. Personally I think such speculation is unfounded because nVidia and Intel go after different markets, Intel for integrated solutions for OEMs where as nVidia being for those at the high end or those that rely on the CUDA framework. Intel is about providing an integrated solution for thin and light laptops where as nVidia is all about ‘balls to the wall, power supply melting performance at any cost’. There is also the reality that even if nVidia were to finally ship their N1X SoC which uses an ARM CPU at its core there is still a lot of work out there that is designed to work on x86-64 and it is highly unlikely we’re going to see a massive migration from x86-64 any time soon.

Politics in the US is stumbling from one crisis to another but something tells me that as long as Americans embrace hyper individualism where their only concern is ‘what is in it for me’ it appears that the ‘but we didn’t vote for this crowd’ are only unhappy because they bad things they wanted happening to other people are happening to them as well. If you create a society that adopts the Gordon Gekko ethos of ‘greed is good’ then don’t be surprised that bad things happen. There is a greed in every country but in most countries there is a limit when the disparity between the rich and poor, between the haves and have nots become so extreme that the society no longer tolerates what is taking place and demands a correction. The US however it has becoming more and more extreme yet the self correcting mechanism within society hasn’t kicked in, the moment when even the wealthy in society can recognise the damage that is occurring and demand something to be done. As long as Americans keep embracing hyper individualism in the name of freedom I wonder whether there is a built in self correcting mechanism in US society that will eventually pull the US back from the brink.

On a lighter note, I ordered some groceries online via Woolworths for delivery including some crusty bread and pumpkin soup that will hopefully be delivered when I get up tomorrow morning. That will be a nice breakfast in the morning to wake up to something warm and nourishing before work.