Random links of the hour
First, an interesting article from the Telegraph, dating from back in May, which I’ve only read recently. Apparently, the United States had ordered some $400 million of weapons and ammunition from Russia (!) to equip Hamid Karzai’s army:
Pentagon chiefs have asked arms suppliers for a quote on a vast amount of ordnance, including more than 78 million rounds of AK47 ammunition, 100,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 12,000 tank shells - equivalent to about 15 times the British Army’s annual requirements.
I suppose that given the choice between refitting the Afghan army to NATO standards, increasing American troop presence to combat increasing Taliban activity, and placing a massive order with Rosoboronexport, the Pentagon decided that the latter was the least painful option. The size of the order, apparently, caused a notable rise in the market price of the 7.62×39 ammunition.
The BBC has a pair of stories about the experiences of two families, Sunni and Shia, displaced by the fighting in Baghdad. I am wondering how the neocons sleep at night…
Jumping to a totally unrelated subject: Firefox 3 alphas are out, and the Mozilla hackers have started working on Gecko 2, which presumably will be the basis for Firefox 4. It looks like they are planning to integrate Adobe’s recently-opensourced JIT javascript engine, reduce unnecessary uses of XPCOM, and finally break some of the more braindead Mozilla APIs.
Beyond3D has a fascinating article about John Carmack’s legendary InvSqrt() function. Apparently Carmack got it from some of the Indy-era SGI hackers. I have always been amazed by the quality of the graphics that the (by all measures horribly slow) Indy hardware was capable of displaying. The answer seems to be that SGI had a team of genius coders.
Finally, for your reading pleasures, two classic examples of interwebs horror: Ted’s Caving Page and the Dionaea House.