Well, either a supernatural schoolgirl or a moeblob. My desktops are Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi and Tanarotte, and for the next desktop I'll probably skip back to Shana. My old notebook is Potemayo. My file servers are Pepper and Salt and will be joined by Sugar as soon as the LaCie 5big Network 2 ships.
Were there any chugakusei or joshikosei kami in 2009 at all?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 31 2010 07:50 PM (PiXy!)
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If I end up getting a second new notebook - this one's an ultralight, and I'm thinking of getting a big chunky model for home - then Index and Railgun wouldn't be bad names.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 31 2010 08:16 PM (PiXy!)
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Pixy, Pixy, Pixy... how in the world could you neglect the HidaSketch girls? How great would it be to have a laptop named Sae, with an external drive named Hiro?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, April 01 2010 08:58 AM (mfPs/)
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Themes! The desktops are all named after schoolgirl goddesses (Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi... and Tanarotte, who sort of fits), the external drives are weather fairies (Sugar, Pepper, Salt). And for computers I usually only ever use one character from a series, because I name my virtual servers for the other characters, as you can see from Tanarotte. I run a lot of virtual servers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 01 2010 10:17 AM (PiXy!)
Sonsaku Hakufu is supernatural. She's possessed by a dragon, and in ITDD she gains control over it, which permits her to fly and to fight with supernatural strength. That, in turn, opens up a lot of other girls' names for virtual machines: Ryuubi, Kanu, Ryoumo...
Arika Yumimiya is supernatural. She's the only otome who can reach "materialize zwei". That, too, opens up lots of other names: Mai, Nina, Natsuki, Haruka, Sara...
But neither of them are deities. Where do you draw the line on how supernatural "supernatural" is?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, April 01 2010 11:05 AM (+rSRq)
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Well, the original theme for the desktops was schoolgirl goddesses who are the main characters of their self-named series (Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi).
Then I ran out (Tanarotte).
I guess for my notebooks I can go with my favourite moeblobs (Yui, Sae).
I'm reserving Shana for my next desktop (might have been a better fit than Tanarotte, actually) and Taiga for if and when I get a Mac.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 01 2010 11:21 AM (PiXy!)
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You think you got it bad? One of the students at Duck U came into the store a few days ago and, with an impish grin on her face, asked if we had any grapes.
I had to reply, "This is a book store, grapes really aren't what we're known for."
I live in fear of her coming back.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, March 29 2010 03:13 PM (mfPs/)
An ad from the provider I'll be getting the next mee.nu server from:
- Pentium D 930 (NOTE, WE ONLY HAVE 10 of these) 2GB RAM 1x500GB HDD 100,000GB Bandwidth *ONLY IN DALLAS* Price: $133.65 /month - free setup
Yes, that's the correct number of zeroes.
I'll be keeping the main system on the current hardware, and using one of these (actually a somewhat larger model, but the same bandwidth) to offload bulk content (podcasts, videos, file downloads, media streams) automatically via Minx. That essentially erases my bandwidth worries for the next five years.
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100 TB for $133?!? Eek! I pay about 20 times more per TB... (Fortunately for my pocketbook, I'm only paying for 1 TB on my teensy tiny server.)
Hmm... If I'm doing my arithmetic correctly, that corresponds to about 300 Mbps continuous for 30 days, can a Pentium D 930 really push that much out (while pulling 38 MB/s off a 7200 RPM drive)?
Posted by: Kayle at Monday, March 29 2010 04:46 PM (a2DI7)
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Realistically, there's no way that server is going to push 100TB a month. But even if you're only getting 10TB, it's still a great deal. And your arithmetic is spot-on.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 29 2010 10:49 PM (PiXy!)
So three series that I have been enjoying immensely are drawing to a close: Hidamari Sketch x Hoshimittsu, for which I held some misgivings that proved quite unwarranted; Sora no Woto, which I was willing to watch on the basis of it being merely K-On Goes to War, but which quite exceeded my expectations, and Kimi ni Todoke, carried over from last season, which transcends not merely genre but time and space and is in fact the pinnacle of all human achievement past and future.
So...
Next season? We have K-On! 2, which I'll certainly watch; if it's just more moe-blobs making music that's fine with me. And there's... There's... Okay, KimiTodo was a surprise, and there's usually a surprise every season, but I'm just not seeing it at this point.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, March 27 2010 09:36 AM (mfPs/)
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I'll [probably watch ITXX, but I won't admit to the fact. Oops!
Angel Beats - that's the dead girls in snow one? Given my reaction to every one of the Key's prior outings, I don't hold out much hope for this.
There's Working and Mayoi Neko Overrun, either of which might not be completely terrible, B Gata H Kei, which almost certainly will be completely terrible, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, which might possibly be watchable, Senko no Night Raid, which promises to be a total train wreck, and a bunch of stuff that I have no interest in at all.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 27 2010 01:09 PM (PiXy!)
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Kiss x sis 01 was at Tenka Seiha and it seems kinda ok, unless you read Aroduc's write-up.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, March 27 2010 02:17 PM (/ppBw)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 27 2010 05:04 PM (PiXy!)
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Pixy, I hate to waste your comment section again, but it seems that my little read blog has once again exceeded bandwidth usage and been suspended. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Posted by: physics geek at Sunday, March 28 2010 12:37 PM (llWHs)
Now let me see if I can find where all that bandwidth is going...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 28 2010 05:52 PM (PiXy!)
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It looks like it's Google Image Search. I suspected hotlinking, but that doesn't appear to be happening. But you've had 166,000 hits from Google Image Search alone this month.
That's fine. Now that I know, it's not a problem.
I'll be adding a new server in April and another 100TB of bandwidth (we currently have 6) which will mean all the bandwidth limitations will go away.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 28 2010 06:02 PM (PiXy!)
What the heck picture has he got which is so damned interesting?
Google can do that kind of thing. For months now the single most read article on my blog is the one about PedoBear, which consistently gets hundreds of refers per week from Google Image Search. But not even remotely 166,000 per month! Nor do any of my ecchi cheesecake posts, not even the ones with nude pictures from Ikki Tousen.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 29 2010 10:07 AM (+rSRq)
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Photos of young ladies who have mislaid much of their clothing.
I've had mu.nu blogs become the top hit for popular Google Image searches before, and the traffic it can deliver is enormous.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 29 2010 11:01 AM (PiXy!)
I plead guilty on the young ladies, although none of them have big tits AND a flamethrower. Ahem. Anyway, the vast majority of my junk isn't titillating to anyone except nerds, so I'm surprised how many people actually find my blog via search engines. The most searched picture in recent times is one of Alyssa Milano actually wearing clothes; there are photos without.
Posted by: physics geek at Wednesday, March 31 2010 01:57 PM (llWHs)
I don't really have much to add to THAT's excellent review (not as awesome as their KimiTodo reviews, but still very good).
K-On Goes to War certainly broke free from its assigned stereotype, and though it went a little wobbly now and then (including in this final episode), it's a fine little series and well worth watching. Three supernatural schoolgirls out of four.*
* May not contain any actual supernatural schoolgirls.
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Kimi Ni Todoke - Fin?
Perfect ending.
Five supernatural schoolgirls out of four.
...
Wait, there's more? YAY!
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Friday, March 26
Multiple Stupids
There are reports all over the place about AMD's upcoming Opteron X12 processor, which is desgined for 2- and 4-socket motherboards and has 12 cores (except when it doesn't).
The same quote appears over and over:
Provantage is taking orders for Opteron X12 6100 series chips that run at clock speeds between 1.7GHz and 2.4GHz. The chips have 12 cores, with 16MB or 18MB of cache, and draw between 65 watts and 105 watts of power.
Which means that no-one has bothered to think about it.
The X12 (codenamed Magny-Cours) is two Istanbul chips in a single package with an internal HyperTransport link, providing four memory channels and four external HT links. Istanbul, which is based on the desktop Phenom II, has 512K of L2 cache per core and shared 6MB of L3 cache.
What that means is that a 12-core processor will have 18MB total cache.
Those 16MB processors are 8-core. So far as I can tell, no-one has noticed that.
Which leaves the question of why they hell are they called X12 processors when they're really X8?
Update: Oh, yeah, the reason I wrote this is that the cheapest of the X12 chips runs at 2GHz and costs $293. That would be incredbily cheap for a quad-socket 12-core CPU, even one that runs at 2GHz. Those chips commonly run to thousands of dollars. But it's really only an 8-core CPU, which is just terribly disappointing... Okay, actually, it's still pretty amazing value. If quad-core motherboards turn out to be affordable (and they could be, because they won't require any special glue logic) then you can build a very nice 32-core system for not a lot of money.
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Wednesday, March 24
Kannagi Update
Finally went back and finished watching Kannagi; in fact, it's been so long that I simply started again from the beginning. Caught up on the final episodes last night while baby-sitting a new server.
It went in a different direction from what I was expecting, and was a bit uneven overall, but still earns three supernatural schoolgirls out of four. (By comparison, Shana and Haruhi each get 3.5, and Kamichu! gets 5.)
The ending itself wasn't as strong as it might have been - again, uneven - but the very last bit, with Tsugumi, was perfect.
Well worth a watch. A level 2 teenage angst warning applies.
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Yeah, an uneven show all around. Wacky supernatural hijinks, then wacky otaku-referential comedy, then a hard right into the Pointless Angst zone... Had some good jokes, though.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Friday, March 26 2010 06:45 AM (pWQz4)
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I wouldn't say pointless angst -
Nagi's angst was meaningful and completely understandable, though
Jin acted like a teenager. Well, okay, he is a teenager. Still...
I enjoyed it, but it failed of greatness due to the uneven directing. Very likeable cast of characters, great OP, great first ep, good exploration of the theme, but too much floundering in the middle.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 26 2010 10:30 AM (PiXy!)
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Monday, March 22
Crapple
When I plug in my iPod, iTunes crashes.
Update: The iPod lost all the music, but still had the podcasts. So I tried resetting it - whereupon it lost everything and wouldn't even start up. Which left me with an hour's commute each way, no iPod, and a notebook with a 20-minute battery life.
Update: Reset, reboot, restore, and Unagi-tan is back to life, albeit very empty. And now it thinks it's syncing. Ah, there we go. It's just worked out that it's a 160GB iPod and I have nearly 500GB of stuff in iTunes, so it's selected some unspecified subset for me...
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Sunday, March 21
A Terrible Thought
If Hidamari were to return for a fourth season, then Sae-san would graduate and have to leave the show.
Nooooooo!
Though... Come to think of it, she was a second-year in season one, and only moved up to third year in season three, so we're safe for now.
If Hidamari were to return for a
fourth fifth season, then Sae-san would graduate and have to leave the show.
Nooooooo!
Oh, and: Kimi ni Todoke continues as the heir apparent to Gurren Lagann in terms of pure awesome, and K-On Goes to WarSora no Woto ain't half bad either, as it turns out.
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I'm glad there's someone else out there who has a deep abiding affection for our glasses-wearing, short-haired authoress. FWIW, the anime just might catch up with Vol 4 of the translated manga, and (at least) one more will be released in Japan.
So unless Hoshimittsu completely tanked in Japan, we'll see another series!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, March 22 2010 06:34 AM (mfPs/)
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I like all the girls, even our new-found soggy biscuit, but yeah, Sae is my favourite. In case you hadn't guessed.
I admit to some initial trepidation with respect to the current season, but they've carried it off with all the charm of the first two, and I'd now welcome a fourth.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 22 2010 10:27 AM (PiXy!)
Book 5 of Charlie Stross's The Merchant Princes. The initial adventure story has, at this point, devolved into a seven-sided war spanning
four universes which is just the way I like it.
Update: One problem with this series is that Stross appears to have let his political views colour the story, and his political views are asinine. If those aren't his actual views, he's still badly mismanaged that part of the story.
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I'm through three of those, and sort of taking a break before picking up #4. I like Stross well enough (just got into him midway through last year) but there's something just a bit off-kilter about his storytelling, I find I can only take him in one-or-two-book doses.
Posted by: GreyDuck at Friday, March 19 2010 11:51 PM (7lMXI)
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There is in some of his books, yes. The more hard-SF ones like Iron Sunrise and the lighter ones seem to be free of this, Merchant Princes has a touch of it, but Accelerando I found unreadable.
I've also got a new Glen Cook SF novel and a new Alastair Reynolds after that, so I think a nice quiet weekend is called for.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 20 2010 12:02 AM (PiXy!)
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Book 6 recently appeared here, I'll get to it shortly, I think. IIRC, it would not be wrong to characterize Stross as socialist, economically speaking, is that what you thought was leaking?
Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, March 20 2010 08:26 PM (hphNU)
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The basic economics seem reasonable to me (I'm no economist) - a big part of the plot is that the Merchant Princes are running a, what's the term, mercantilist economy, and Miriam is trying to introduce them to capitalism.
On the topic of political economy, particularly with regard to our own world-analogue (he slips in some facts to indicate that it's not precisely our world), he's talking nonsense. And since he appears to actually hold the views expressed by the plot in that respect... Yeah.
Bit of a shame, since he's a fine writer and (I've chatted with him briefly online) a genuinely nice guy. It's not enough to ruin the story, but it still detracts from it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 21 2010 12:02 AM (PiXy!)
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IIRC, Stross is some sort of cognitively dissonant left-wing libertarian-anarchist, who's nominally in favor of the free market, but can't resist all sorts of altruistic rentseeking giveaways which necessitate governmental tyrannies, while always pining for pie in the Singularity, in a Marxist withering-away-of-the-state sense.
That, and he's got a simply monstrous case of revolutionary fetishism. It creeps into every one of his books I've read.
What are the facts which set his Earth Prime apart from the real world, Pixy? I didn't notice any in the first four volumes; I've not bothered reading the fifth one yet.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Sunday, March 21 2010 03:30 AM (jwKxK)
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The Earth Prime-ness doesn't really pop up until the fifth book. I kind of get the impression he wasn't intending it to be that way, but then real world political events meandered away from his plot setup.
Posted by: Mark at Sunday, March 21 2010 05:30 AM (bBxKr)
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I seem to recall there was something in book four, but can't remember exactly what it was.
But in book five - Chief Justice who?!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 21 2010 10:58 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, March 18 2010 03:45 PM (mfPs/)
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That 40% is just through today, btw. You know TRSI and their fondness for rotating studio sales. They treat themselves just like every other studio...
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, March 19 2010 02:33 AM (jwKxK)
