BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Profile: Aceh's Gam separatists: "Aceh's freedom fighters have been battling for the province's independence for nearly three decades.
The Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or Gam) was founded on 4 December 1976 by Hasan di Tiro - a descendant of the last sultan of Aceh.
The group has grown from an initial membership of just 150 rebels to a military strength now estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000.
While Aceh has a higher concentration of Muslims than the rest of Indonesia, Gam is not seeking to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. Its argument is more about history than religion."

SPIEGEL's Daily Take: Would You Vote in Iraq? - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE: "...Meanwhile, many Iraqis say they are not only too scared to vote, but know little to nothing about the some 7,000 candidates from 256 political groups and independents running.

They have good reason. Most of the candidates have been so terrified of being assassinated they haven't publicly acknowledged that their candidacy. One Iraqi voter explained his confusion succinctly, telling CNN that he would prefer to vote for pop idol George Michael because he knows more about the singer than about any of the candidates. "

Software Infrastructure Bottlenecks in J2EE by Deepak Goel -- Sometimes you can throw more CPUs and memory in a box and your web application doesn't get any faster. This can happen when the bottleneck is not in the hardware but the software; specifically, your application server. Deepak Goel looks at what this looks like in terms of performance characteristics and what you can do about it.

Top Five Home Networking Annoyances by Kathy Ivens -- Kathy Ivens is a certified networking maven. She's been confronted so many times with people's networking annoyances that she wrote the book on it, Home Networking Annoyances. After all, everyone who has a home network has an annoyance, right? She's picked five of the most common annoyances and presented them along with their pragmatic fixes.

Gmail Hacks by Wei-Meng Lee -- Gmail is the best free email service on the planet. Whether you're one of the lucky ones who already has it, or you're waiting for it to throw its doors wide open, Wei-Meng Lee takes you inside and shows you how to get more out of it.

p>Keeping Your Life in Subversion by Joey Hess -- Revision control is great for collaborative projects and distributed projects. How well does it work for individuals? According to Joey Hess, fantastically. He's kept his home directory under revision control for years--here's how he does it with Subversion.

ONLamp.com: Design by WikiPerhaps you already have your language and libraries chosen and now you
only need to write and maintain your applications. How can you share
documentation and design knowledge within your group without adding
crushing overhead or ruling out job flexibility? "Use a Wiki!"
suggests
Jason Briggs. He's written up his experiences using a wiki for
documentation, including techniques for sharing images and figures:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2005/01/20/wikidocs.html

PCWorld.com - Intel Says New Mobile Chip Equals High-End Pentium 4 in Performance
Intel Says New Mobile Chip Equals High-End Pentium 4 in Performance

Sources say company plans to make Pentium M processor the backbone of its chip designs.

Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Notebook PCs based on the most powerful version of Intel's Centrino mobile technology now perform just as well as desktop PCs with Intel's fastest Pentium 4 processors, according to an Intel executive.

During this week's launch of the Sonoma Centrino technology, Mooly Eden, vice president and director of marketing of Intel's new Mobility Group, demonstrated a video game on a new Sonoma laptop and compared its performance to that of the same video game running on a Pentium 4 desktop PC. The Sonoma design contains the Pentium M processor, the new Alviso chip set with support for the PCI Express interconnect technology and DDR2 (Double Data Rate 2) memory, and an Intel Pro/Wireless chip. Intel brands the package as Centrino mobile technology.

In the demonstration, the performance of a Sonoma system with a 2.13-GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB of memory, and the Alviso chip set was said to be comparable to that of a desktop system carrying a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with hyperthreading, 1GB of memory, and the Grantsdale chip set (which also supports PCI Express and DDR2). Intel had previously compared the high end of its notebook technology to the midrange of its desktop technology.

This is an important milestone for Intel as it plans to eventually make the Pentium M processor the backbone of its chip designs, according to sources. Intel has not publicly confirmed such plans.


Pentium 4 on the Fade?
Intel's Pentium 4 processor has been the company's flagship product since 2000. However, its useful life is coming to an end as faster clock speeds and smaller transistors have combined to make the chip extremely hot due to its inefficient power consumption. Intel has been forced to devote more and more engineering resources to generate the small bumps in the Pentium 4's clock speed that the company once took for granted, and recently it decided to cap the chip's clock speed at 3.8 GHz.

Given that the Pentium 4 was designed primarily to run at high clock speeds, Intel is investigating other methods of improving its performance. The company has already begun shipping to its PC customers new Pentium 4 processors that have twice as much cache memory as older Pentium 4 processors. Increasing the cache memory within a processor allows the chip to store larger amounts of frequently used instructions in a repository that can be accessed much more quickly than the main memory, improving performance without a corresponding increase in power consumption.

Later this year, Intel will also start to roll out dual-core processors. These chips will have two separate processors within a single package, allowing Intel to reduce the clock speeds of those processor cores in order to save power and reduce heat while increasing overall performance.

However, a long-term change is clearly needed to prevent Intel from hitting a "power wall," as Eden put it in an interview prior to the Sonoma launch. The Pentium M was designed to consume as little power as possible from the start of the project, extending battery life and reducing the size of the heat shields needed to protect the notebook from more power-hungry processors.


Mobile Tech Rules
The fact that Intel now has a mobile technology that happens to equal its most powerful desktop technology is a strong argument for using the mobile technology in products other than notebooks, such as entertainment PCs or small-size desktops.

Pentium 4 systems require cooling fans that can be very annoying to users, especially if the PCs are used to watch movies or television. Pentium M-based systems would not require as powerful a cooling fan as the Pentium 4 systems, leading to a quieter experience, says Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report in San Jose, California.

Pentium M-based home entertainment systems will probably start to appear after Intel launches Yonah, the dual-core version of the Pentium M, in 2006, Krewell says. Users will not accept the new platforms unless they offer the same performance people have become accustomed to with Pentium 4-based systems, and Yonah's performance combined with its cool running temperature will make for an attractive product, he says.

Firefox: The IE Killer
By Jason Dowdell , webpronews

From: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/marketinginsider/wpn-50-20050120FirefoxTheIEKiller.html#here

Yes, you heard it here first. If Internet Explorer doesn't make some serious changes in short order they'll face certain extinction to the hands of Firefox. Why you ask? Isn't it obvious?

Can Firefox dethrone Internet Explorer? Or will IE's seemingly insurmountable edge be just that? Discuss at WebProWorld.

In order to answer that question we'll need to take a little trip down internet memory lane. Our first stop is the home of Linux founder Linus Torvalds. You see, Linus had this crazy idea that he could build a better OS than what was currently available and amazingly he did. Then he opened up his source code and the open source development movement was born. Open source affords anyone anywhere the ability to contribute to a development project or to download and use an application or source code absolutely free of charge. Many a software company lost a fortune due to the open source movement and scores more individuals have benefited from it so needless to say, it's quite a controversial subject with software firms and developers alike.

Fast forward 10 or so years and you'll see several other micromovements that look and smell an awful lot like the open source development movement. The most important difference with these new movements is the fact that they aren't just for developers; they're for the average joe and the Tiny Tims of this world. What are these relatively new micromovements? Forums, Wikis and blogs.

What do Forums, Wikis and Blogs have to do with Internet Explorer becoming extinct?

Well, in order to answer that question we must look at one other area the open source development movement has involuntarily impacted, API's or application programming interfaces. They allow a developer to access data or processes they would otherwise not be able to access. APIs allow developers to grab book and author information from Amazon.com and allow developers to see what the most popular blogs are as seen by Technorati. There are dozens more cool apis and tools built around those apis but the fact of the matter is that APIs are changing the way businesses research and implement new features by allowing them to connect with their users while at the same time conducting free research & development.

That's where Firefox, Mozilla foundation's latest browser comes in. It's the IE killer! Firefox's source code is open and there is a standing invitation for anyone who's interested to write code that enhances Firefox's already robust list of features.

When a developer writes a piece of code for Firefox it's known as an extension. Currently there are 178 and the list is growing all the time. These extensions aren't just colorful skins there much more. In fact, they're the key reason Firefox is my browser home. They're saving me time and money by encapsulating functionality I could only get before from various web sites and software. Now instead of going over to the w3c to validate an html page I just right click on the page, select Web Developer then HTML Validation and I'm automatically using the w3c validator to find all the errors on a single page. Or I could just hit ctrl + shift + v and do the same thing in a single keystroke. That's possible because I downloaded the Web Developer extension from the firefox site.

Here are some other cool features I could never easily do with Internet Explorer (in its current state) or without installing 5 different toolbars filled with features I'll never use.

Switch user agents and pretend I'm Googlebot or Yahoo's Slurp to detect cloaking.
Easily read an rss feed.
Pretend I'm a user in Argentina to see if Google serves up the Polar Bear Logo down there too.
Disable the referer info when browsing.
View all the http headers a server returned when I clicked on a link.
View the source code for a site in a neatly formatted text editor that's color coded.
Show all the anchors in a page.
Show all the heading tags in a page and in the order they're rendered.
Validate a page's css.
View a page's style sheets.
Disable cookies, java, images, etc... all with a single right click.
Save specific sessions / visits on a web site.
Delete my downloads after viewing them.

The list goes on and on but here are a few key factors that may foreshadow the defeat of IE in the browser war.


Firefox has generated incredible brand loyalty by allowing average folks to contribute extensions to its evolution as a browser / internet application. By opening the hood and letting developers peek inside, they're making Firefox better. Not only is this making Firefox the better browser but it's also building the type of brand loyalty you can't buy. This is something Microsoft may never been able to accomplish with its current business model (not they would want to anyway).


Mozilla extended this grass roots approach about getting users involved down to the development of the Firefox Logo. Selecting the design team of SilverOrange to create the new logo, who then recruited John Hicks of Hicks Design, was a stroke of genius. Small companies run by individuals demonstrating the less fluff more stuff attitude and less is more approach to design / layout / media. This immediately seeded Firefox into the roots of bloggers across the web.


Mozilla is making our lives easier by allowing us to use Firefox as much more than just a web browser. It's a validator, backlink checker, web developer tool wizard and more. This saves me time and with the tight schedule I keep, that's a huge advantage over IE.


Extensions are easily downloadable and arranged in a way that makes them easy to find. Even better still is that I can see who contributed an extension, when and what other people's rating of that extension is. Mozilla is giving credit to the little people that are making their product better and Microsoft doesn't like to touch little people, they're icky.


Firefox is capitalizing on the API wave and user generated content (open source) wave hitting the internet today. Combine that with a strong product that will only get stronger and you have a solid case for the death of IE.


With the creation of the SpreadFirefox website and the amount of community feedback they're getting, the brand loyalty levels are insane.

That being said, it's also important to note that Firefox is a voluntary download. Meaning, I have to want it in order to get it on my machine. Internet Explorer ships out standard with the Windows operating system and that may very well be enough to foil the death of IE. However, good things have a way of coming to the forefront of society and my money's on Firefox. I don't believe Microsoft can mount a campaign strong enough to deny Firefox its place on our systems but I could be wrong. If you think about it though, that's MSFT's business model.

"Find the best and brightest and if you can't buy or hire them then we build a better mousetrap and use our existing infrastructure to bombard the marketplace with it. Sure we'll take a pr beating for it but that's what we hired Scoble for."

All kidding aside, its going to be an interesting 2005 on the Firefox vs. IE front. I'm not the only one talking about it either. Even BoingBoing is commenting on it. Here are some stats on the emergence of Firefox as the IE killer.

What is the different between Centrino and Pentium M ?

Here is a quick answer:
(taken from: http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7587-0.html?forumID=69&threadID=49577&messageID=590268)

In general, a processor's power can be determined by 3 things:

1. Clock Speed
2. Bus Speed
3. Cache (L1, 2, and 3)

Clock speed is a large indicator of a processor's power. It is the speed at which a processor can execute instructions. While we might think of an instruction as "Save a file", really that might consist of hundreds of instructions. As software becomes more complex, it becomes necessary to have the ability to execute more instructions per second.

A processor with a 1.0 GHz clock speed can execute 1 billion instructions per second. The unit here used is Hertz, which is also Cycles Per Second. So Giga-Hertz is a Billion-Cycles-Per-Second measure. Pentium 4 Processors generally have higher clock speeds, so they have an edge over Pentium M processors in this department. However, other factors are in play . . .

Bus Speed is the speed at which the processor communicates with the computer. Bus speeds are measured in Mega-Hertz, millions of cycles per second. So, Pentium M processors in general have 400-MHz buses. This is not bad, but Pentium 4m Processors have between 533MHz and 800Mhz bus speeds. Point to Pentium 4 again.

To understand cache, you have to understand the layered storage architecture in the computer. The computer uses several types of storage which increase in speed based on how often the data is accessed. The slowest is the hard drive of course. This is secondary storage. Above that, you have the system memory. This is faster, but not as fast as Cache.

Cache is a small portion of memory that is super-fast. It comes in levels. Level 1 is the fastest, and there's usually about 64 Kilobytes of this. This cache is integrated onto the chip. This is the fastest storage the processor has available.

Level 2 Cache used to be stored on the motherboard. It was called Pipeline Burst cache, and back then, if you had 256K of it, you were smokin'. But starting with the late Pentium IIIs and Athlon XP's, L2 Cache was integrated onto the chip.

Some chips integrated Level 3 cache as well. But the only chip I can remember having L3 Cache was the Xeon and Pentium Pro . . .

In any event, it's fast ram storage for the processor. Pentium M's have 1MB Cache in the "Banias" core chips (1.6 GHz and below), and 2MB Cache in the "Dothan" Chips (1.6 and above, designated by number 725 and above). Pentium 4's have 1MB.

So the one edge (performance-wise) that the Pentium M processors have is that they have more Cache (in some cases).

So why the Pentium M?

It uses much less heat and power than the Pentium 4. So in a laptop, it is much cooler and lasts longer than a P4 laptop.

Intel Centrino Technology is simply the Pentium M processor and chipset plus integrated Wireless B or G.

A caution: Celeron M processors are Decontented Pentium M processors. Ken has mentioned this many times (in fact if you google "Decontented Processor" you will come up with about 6 posts of his. )

What that means is that it's a Pentium M processor with less speed and features (like Cache and Bus Speed) than the Pentium M.

It's like when they sell you a Toyota in South Florida but want to charge extra for Air Conditioning.

Hope that helps.

Posted by: Ryan T Posted on: 12/06/2004 11:24 AM

Indonesian Islamic Party Reaps Rewards of Goodwill (washingtonpost.com): "An Islamic cleric and political organizer, Azmi Fajri Usman, pulled up at a camp of about 200 tsunami survivors stranded in a city park....
The party has filled a perceptible void here and in other parts of the country. The civilian government does not have an equivalent program and says it intends to manage voluntary organizations rather than implementing relief operations."

Once Again, No Regrets (washingtonpost.com)On the same day that the White House conceded that its futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was, indeed, finally over, President Bush told Barbara Walters that the invasion of Iraq was "absolutely" worth it...

Surviving the Tsunami - What Sri Lanka's animals knew that humans didn't. By Christine�Kenneally: "Reports from Sri Lanka after Sunday's tsunami say that despite the enormous number of human casualties�116,000 deaths and rising, at last count�many animals seem to have survived the tidal wave unscathed.
...
There's a good chance the wildlife knew trouble was on the way. History is littered with tales about animals acting weirdly before natural disasters, but the phenomenon has been hard for scientists to pin down. Sometimes animals get crazy before a quake, sometimes they don't. Here's what we know: Animals have sensory abilities different from our own, and they might have tipped them off to Sunday's disaster."