I've moved to Slicehost! Yahoo web hosting services wasn't cutting it for me anymore. I stuck with them much longer than I would've wanted to because it was cheap. However, once they started "upgrading me," I decided to switch to a host that would give me more flexibility and value for money. The people at Slicehost really know their stuff and provide very good support.
So apparently I'm having issues with comment spam. Because of this, I had to put back CAPTCHA codes; it sucks, but it's a temporary solution until I get a better comment filter.
So closely listening to the new C-ute single, Edo no Temari II (embedded below), I'm finding out why the Kids, esp. C-ute have been much more popular nowadays. Vocally they sound somewhat similar to old Momusu.
The current Momusu, though decently vocally talented (with the exception of Sayumi) sound very homogeneous. It's difficult to pick out their solo lines at times, but in chorus it's near impossible. Their sound has become choral like. However, the first and second gen members had very different tonalities that were able to harmonize with each other rather than blend.
The Kids are similar to old Momusu in that its members are quite tonally different and it's possible to determine voices in a chorus. I'm a big fan of harmonizing and there are just some dissonant parts in Edo no Temari that make me feel good. It's not the same level as Memory Seishun no Hikari, but I've enjoyed this song more already than Resonant Blue, which I liked a lot. Another thing I think that has helped this song has been how the line distribution is a bit more balanced, Airi doesn't have all the lines (thank you) and even Erika has a few.
As for the video, I really like it. It's quite well done, the costumes are pretty nice, the neon fits with the feeling of the song, and the closeups aren't too close. The closeups are probably one of my favorite parts of the PV; it's like a nice solo shot where I can see more than just their face. And as always, they're really good dancers, but from what I can see it's probably not an overly difficult dance, but I should probably wait for the dance version to make a final verdict there. (Considering how I was wrong about CC). Tsunku, you need to start treating Momusu like you treat the Kids or otherwise C-ute could become the H!P flagship group!
So when IBM said that they traded programming difficulty for speed, they meant it, but probably not in the most obvious of ways.
The current philosophy for x86 architecture to increase speed has been to throw as much hardware as possible into the core to improve performance for existing programs and more importantly programming style. This has worked out somewhat well as GCC has matured over the years to provide highly optimized code to take advantage of the hardware but places a bottleneck on total throughput as the number of ALU's on a chip are quite small because of all the extra hardware added by out-of-order and speculative exectution, branch prediction, etc. IBM has decided to eschew the additional hardware to implement these features to use that room for more ALU's.
The SPU's on the Cell processor for example does not have any out of order execution, branch prediction or cache. This space for rename registers has been traded for 128 architectural 128-bit vector registers. The cache has been traded for a programmer accessible 256KB local store. And all the other space left over is used to fill the die with enough ALU's to get 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance.
So why's this an issue? For a program I coded to work on x86 to apply a filter to a 6min WAV file, it took a little over 10 seconds Although if run with -mno-sse2 it will take about a 1 min 10. A direct port of this code to my PS3 also took a 1 min 10 secs to execute. This shows how well GCC is optimized to run on x86. Unlike on x86, GCC is not quite optimized to automatically vectorize the code into Altivec. It gets even worse when run on the SPU, they have no scalar registers so the code took 7 mins to execute. All scalar operation are done by using a splat (copies one value into all places in a vector register) does the operation, then masks the value. Also since there is no branch prediction with a 21 stage pipeline, all my branches guessed incorrectly would incur a ~23 cycle penalty.
However despite all these shortcomings it is quite simple to achieve high performance but requires the programmer to think differently. If the programmer vectorizes as much code as possible, the program runs quite quickly. I was able to vectorize just the arithmetic and achieved a 30 second run time. The biggest trick to optimization is to avoid branch penalties by unrolling (which I've done somewhat) and using predication (which I haven't). Predication is where you execute both sides of the branch and select the right result. On a scalar processor this is time consuming because this requires 2 operations when you could do just one. However, on the Cell, scalar operations are costly as every instruction is vectorized so a vector operation that does executes both sides of the branch then using a vector select takes up far fewer cycles than branching incorrectly, flushing, then executing.
Currently I'm having quite a few issues with context switching as I tried to thread my filter program, which is an optimization I'll save for another post. Once I find the solution, I'll post my findings.
I just recently got the GUILTY album from Ayu, and I am pretty impressed despite some initial hesitation. It's quite a departure from her typical trance like music; GUILTY has a predominate rock sound to it. Typically when I find myself disappointed when pop artist try rock because the things I love about rock, such as the guitar solos are avoided as to not distract attention away from the pop diva. I think the greatest example of this is during American Idol's Chris Daughtry's debut single "It's not Over" where midway through the song there seems to be a nice guitar solo, but then is cut short when he starts singing again. This kind of behavior waters down the genre in my opinion. At least Daughtry had remnants of rock, unlike many of Avril Lavigne's music, but that's another rant for another day.
There is some of the watered down feeling present in a GUILTY; although the solos aren't cut short, they aren't exactly Dream Theater or DragonForce epic solos either. But, I think what made the album work is the same thing that makes the rest of her albums work (other than the gigantic marketing engine that Avex is), her voice. The dryness of her voice that worked so well for trance music translates strangely well to "rock" music such as in "Decision". The songs are laced here and there with the typical Ayu electronic sounds. Also in typical Ayu fashion, there are a few ballads that give nice breaks in pace. Another nice touch is the use of string instruments in a few songs such as "Marionette." I've uploaded a few songs from the album into the jukebox, it's worth checking out.
For all you Perfume fans out there, the mastermind Nakata Yasutaka has joined up (yet again) with Suzuki Ami to lay down some funky beats and just good electronic music once again. I provide the PV as well, but to get a good impression of it, just listen to it and don't watch it; the video is boring as hell. The choreography is lame, and she really isn't as cute as Perfume or Hello! Project offerings.
Honestly, I wanted to write more about this, but I could seriously copy and paste my Perfume review and that's what this song is like but with one voice instead of three. Her older stuff is completely different, and not to my liking.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. When I heard Cinderella Complex, I didn't like it much, but that's a whole different story with the c/w track.
I've been playing Kioku no Meiro on repeat ever since I downloaded it. It has everything that made me musically like Hello! Project in the first place. It's catchy, it has a nice electronic beat and melody. Listening to this song is like listening to all that is good about Perfume without all the electronic voices and the best vocal talent H!P is capable of producing.
I'm really enjoying this song, I know I should stop playing the song because I might get sick of it too quickly, but it's just really fun to listen to.
On another High King related note, I decided to include the video of Cindarella Complex:
For a video as hyped up as this was, it was a bit of a disappointment. And the other insult to injury is that there is a lot of Reina in it... and she doesn't look as good as she has in other videos. The biggest downer of them all is that, you could tell that they easily spent the most amount of money on this PV compared to all the other PV's released this year, but it's just a gigantic letdown.
I personally thought the dancing was ok, but it wasn't as technical as they kept hyping it up to be or what these girls are capable of. (Come on Tsunku, you have Saki and Maimi, these girls know how to dance, they were your backup dancers for years!)
I have to admit... it's growing on me.
I think the initial radio rip was so poor that my audiophile side of me wouldn't accept it. However, the rip is better this time around so the song is slowly growing on me. I've only been able to identify the voices of the Momusu members and Maimi. As much as I like Saki, I don't listen to Berryz enough to know her singing voice, so I can't distinguish between her and the egg.
I didn't like it much at first because I'm not a huge fan of the composition, the rhythm of the beat is not one that I take a liking to. The song also sounds a bit too hip-hop for my liking, and I'm not a fan of hip-hop music at all.
There's something about the harmonizing that I do like. And if there's one thing that H!P knows how to do, it's making catchy songs. (Not as well as Perfume does though, I just can't stop listening to them...) My opinion of this song is opposite from my opinion of typical H!P songs; typically I like the chorus but I like the verse much more in this song because the "Na na na" of the chorus is a bit lame and too hip-hop. But the switching of solo lines between the members for the verse kinda keeps things interesting and well I'm really starting to crush on Maimi's ...voice. (Well, with one of the best thighs in H!P, it's hard to not like her for her other... assets, man that was corny. In case you don't know she's the second on the right.) Overall, I'd rate the song somewhere around a 6.25/10 but it does make me kinda interested in seeing the musical.
So I used to be saddened by smaller pay and less "perks" that Freescale used to offer compared to companies like AMD, Motorola, and especially Centaur, but no more!
The Senior VP of our division hosted a meeting and provided catering and even more importantly, provided free beer! Nothing like raising morale like a little alcohol at the end of the day. I suppose that's the perks of working for a division that actually makes profit for the company.
You know it's bad when the vending machine has a credit card reader on it...
...you know it's worse when you're probably gonna use it all the time because of this.
So I was getting pretty tired today at work, and I had passed this vending machine a few times on my way to the restroom so I decided I'd get myself some "liquid motivation" and when I approached this machine I noticed something special... it had a credit card reader. At first I thought, "How convenient!" because I barely ever carry cash. (I did happen to have cash at the moment though.) But then it hit me, I'm gonna be wasting ~$1.30/day. In the past, the lack of cash stopped me from getting drinks, which is good for my wallet, but even more importantly, good for my health. Now, nothing is stopping me other than my conscience, and well I'm admittedly pretty weak-willed when it comes to these kinds of things. It's little things like these that make Americans so damn obese as a nation. Oh well, at least I won't fall asleep on the job anymore (hopefully, *knock on wood*).
Yes, I know you get free drinks at work, Doug; I don't, so get over it. At least the coffee is free, I should probably drink that instead.