Response: We Are Failing Our Geniuses.

 I recently read an article on Time Magazine about the United States' terrible ability in keeping up with intelligent students. Needless to say, I am angry beyond my ability to express in words. Above all else, it gave me a new mental complex; from now on, all of my writings will be written in this tone of voice (which is meant to sound as if it were written in technical jargon completely) with a more surly high-word-count vocabulary. This is a sad moment for me; I have to check my spelling constantly to compensate for my abhorred spelling.
 I suppose that the most major reason why the article was so terrifying was how well it described my educational history from my point of view. Since the earlier days of my youth, I remember being enthusiastic about going to the school campus. It was a chance for me that opened a doorway into the social delight of having occasional simplistic intercourse with peers when the time was previously scheduled for working on more academic ventures.
 I am not trying to suggest that receiving my education was unimportant to me. Not in the least; schoolwork was a joy, a recurring climax of my life. By the time I was in fourth grade, I did work just for the entertainment value. I have to admit, though, that my during my fifth grade year, I had a bit of a culture shock from moving into a classroom where no order could possibly prevail and the instructor would leave either because she was weeping tears of frustration or, as was the case with the first teacher, a pregnancy. Of course, the thirty (actually more, but I fail to recall by how much) out of control students (most of whom had shown signs of serious problems such as parental abuse, especially of the psychological classification; drug addiction, ADD/ADHD, clinical depression, and of course the torture of being 'perfect' where the average person was a demon under the thin guise of a child).
 Arguably, the pinnacle of my educational career built up so far was around my third or fourth grade year. At about that time, I was officially in GATE - Gifted and Talented Education. GATE was a once-weekly program that students would attend in stead of about one hour of standard grade-school time. The instructor for that class (if a class it can be called) was perhaps the most memorable instructor I have ever had. Her name was Mrs. Meyers, and she was one of the most supporting individuals I had ever made contact with in my entire life. In one of those hours of GATE time, you could expect to do math puzzles, learn about American history (and in a greater depth than in any high-school history class, I should say), broaden your acceptance of the art world, learn ancient roman numbering and Latin writing systems, and perhaps even make a robot. One of the most memorable activities that we ever did in the class a archaeological field-trip to Kyle Ranch; I was mentioned by name in three newspapers and had an appearance on television for that.
 I only went to GATE for one year after that, and there never thereafter. That was mainly because I switched to a different school when the year ended and I found all other GATE classes to be extremely boring. I mean boring in the sense that I did not feel inclusive in those sessions. Those classes were radically different then their predecessors. The previous year's program was designed to get the students' minds to perform more flexibly and effectively. The 'new' GATE was merely a slightly accelerated version of regular school. Next year, I did not attend that program, marking the very beginning of my decline into mediocrity.
 Middle school was the time when my mental recess began to show in more vivid detail. I found myself lacking in focus from boredom every single moment of my presence. I can honestly say to everyone I know that I had learned absolutely nothing in those three years of my life, excepting pre-algebra, perhaps. I found myself moaning from sores gained by staying in one spot for too long.
 As an interesting consequence of this time period, I became especially interested in socializing at this time (Although I was still ostracized from the years before.... It is a phenomenon that I still am unable to explain). As a result, my powers of empathy became extremely sensitive. As we all know, children at this age are all brutish and surly bastards (Harsh, you ask? My opinion is from experience, layman), and as a result, I was hurt emotionally by their cruel words. I ended up getting in a number of fights that conclusively had me transfered to two disciplinary schools, where the students ('convicts' would be a better term) were even more brutish and surly. To this day, I have an aversion to personal physical violence. I find it difficult to strike at anything, even inanimate objects.
 Perhaps the most frightening thing about this time in my life was how the teachers reacted to me. I was known to bring in books and read them during class when I could. What could be more to my argument then the fact that the teachers frowned upon my actions?
 This was also the time that I tried to expand my knowledge to the more ethereal sciences, such as philosophy and psychology (Ironically, I started therapy right after I started reading into the subject of psychology...). I picked up a book from the library, a condensation of the works of Carl Gustav Jung, the complete cannon of his ideas in his own words, taken out of his books.

 Then High School began, which gave further proof of the failure to tap into my potential. I was recommended into honors classes by my eighth-grade teachers in the three major courses; English, Science (Biology), and Math (Algebra). The habits I obtained through my torturious hours at the junior high school had transfered to that time, making me sleepy with laze about doing most work in the class, almost never doing any homework. I ended up passing time by memorizing the texture and color patterns of the objects around me. Comically, I ended up getting very dizzy after some of the teachers would reorganize the room.
 I failed a semester of Algebra and English that year. The only reason why I did not fail any of the other classes was because most of the teachers for those courses were actually attentive to my state of mind and tried to snap me out of it. Though two classes actually held my attention: Theatre I and AF JROTC. I owe that to genuinely interesting instructors who appeared to be more like human beings then teachers.
 My sophomore year was about as bad, but I denote a positive light to this time. That year, I was given a zone variance to go to Durango, obtained by a somewhat abusive letter that I sent to the superintendent of schools (It was harsh, true, but there were no lies contained in it. By the way, FIRE MRS. BRADFORD!). There I learned how to 日本語をします。(If you can't read it, your operating system is obsolete) At that time, I made a number of good friends (all of which I have lost track of...), none of whom I would expect of killing a man, nor even robbing them - a grand improvement over the previous series. I generally improved myself at that time. I didn't fail any classes, but with most of them, I was very close to the border.

 I would like all of my readers (all three of them, perhaps?) to take note of the part of my life in junior high school. This is a common occurance among youth across the country. I emplore you to please write your local representative to look into this important subject, as many are suffering with that issue as a cause of misery. I, personally, would be the first to vote for the bill to remove those terribly horrifying years from the public school system. Not even a reimbursement for the years of therapy I went through as a consequence of that time would suffice to me.

Amazing Revolutions

 Yesterday, Sun Microsystems made the most astounding announcement of the decade - if not the century. They have officially announced that they are going to license it's UltraSPARC T2 architecture to the public under the terms of the General Public License, as part of it's OpenSPARC project.
 Sun is known (as far as business practices) for it's internal investments. It constantly invests into it's self ($2Bn per year in R&D alone), making proprietary programs for their proprietary computers that run on their proprietary processors. This essentially means that when a business comes to Sun for their own solutions, and Sun would give them a complete package with no additional setup needed. But lately, they've been opening up their components. Solaris, their operating system, has already been made free to the general public. Above that, it's available for non-Sun systems like x86-64. UltraSPARC T1 itself has already been released under GPL as well, which has, in the words of Sun's representatives, caused a great amount of value to be added to the arch.
 Which brings us to the UltraSPARC T2.

 Sun's UltraSPARC T2 is the second in the "Niagara" series, and takes the firm foundation of the T1 to new heights. With the UltraSPARC T2, developers are given a single microprocessor chip with up to eight cores in it (double Intel's latest), each core supporting eight simultanious threads at 1.4GHz each. Doing the math, you have sixty-four threads and a net clock speed of 89.6GHz. Not too long ago, that would have been considered a supercomputer. The T2 also comes with some essentials already included right in the microchip, such as PCI Express (x8 1.0), two separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections (Not too shabby, considering that your average computer only has a single 10/10 megabit connection, and usually not built into the CPU), and four dual-channel FBDIMM controllers. It also has a couple of unbelievable hardware features built in, like one FPU and tow ALUs per core for extensive math requirements (Calculating the millionth digit of pi has never been so fun!) and eight encryption engines in every chip, each one capable of encoding and decoding DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA-2048, ECC, and CRC32. It's internal memory is a bit low, but 4MB isn't too shabby for an L2 cache.
 Possibly the greatest thing about this chip, though, is that it's licensed under the GPL. Because of this, it is possible for any capable organization or individual to create one, which means that it's highly possible that you'll see some branded by AMD, NEC, LG, and other high-density semiconductor companies. It can also be changed so long as the derivative is also licensed under the terms of the GPL. It's likely that it will be ubiquitous within a few years of use, meaning that some version of Windows will likely be ported for it.
 At such a level of advanced multilevel processing, The UltraSPARC T2 is a great leap in terms of bringing massively-parallel computing to the masses. I'm only sad to see that BeOS doesn't run on it. Oh well, there's hope for Haiku.

Oh, and FYI, T2 PWNz the PS3's Cell.