MMX 2010

No, I am not talking about some gadget. Its just the next 12 months, as marked by the Reformed Gregorian Calendar system, by which we synchronize much of planetary society.

Fans of BBC and Columbia Pictures who wait until all credits have rolled by, might remember copyright notices in Roman numerals. And, yes, I am really showing my age when I say I loved the Sherlock Holmes series by Granada Television, which I remember watching back in MCMLXXXVIII.

Yes, despite the mathematical dead-enders and cultural degenerates that the pseudo-logical Romans turned out to be, there is a certain charm in this system of numeral representation which makes addition and multiplication mysterious, and provides a few programming exercises for n00bs.

For the CPU-savvy, MMX was the Multi Media aXeleration instruction set that Intel introduced with the Pentium. Some people I know have fond memories of writing MMX optimizing compilers and speeding up video codecs. Coincidentally, the letters MMX (plus the word Pentium) sparked a long curve of stock growth and splits for those other four letters, viz. INTC, leading to more fun times, which many more people I know might remember even more fondly. But hey, its been X years since INTC peaked.

Continuing in CPU-speak, the New Year is like the leading edge of the synchronizing clock pulse, at which various processing entities do stuff. Memories get refreshed, and values get latched. As it is for DRAMs and Registers, so it is for people and news organizations. So, have fun making those resolutions and reviewing the year as it went by. More on that later.

Happy MMX-ing ya’ll.