Kai, the 12th track on FSOL's ISDN album, is one of FSOL's best songs, and with its very strong rolling bass, it's also the ultimate song to drive annoying neighbors absolutely insane.

This was only necessary one time, the rest of the term they understood..

I enjoy loud music as much as any child of the 1980's who was raised on hard rock. But there are times when I just need peace and quiet. When I'm studying, this happens to be all the time. Music is a distraction to me -- I'm probably more sensitive to bass vibrations than about 90% of the world.

But during the last year, me and my former roommate had these neighbors -- white girl gangsta wannabes. There were often times when they'd turn their music on, and turn it up loud.

When it's 3:00 in the morning, and all you want to do is sleep, this becomes quite annoying.

These incidents went on throughout most of the school year, until one day I lost my temper. Pounding on the wall didn't work -- I was met with more pounding from the other side. Shouts of "turn it down, please!" were met with louder music.

Like I said, I've always been a fan of loud music, and have a stereo system to match. And at that moment, I was at my breaking point. I placed the subwoofer right next to the wall, disconnected all satellite speakers from my system, and turned on Kai. The rolling bass vibrations made me worry about the life of my poor sub, but I kept giving it more power until (as I found out later) most of the hallway was able to feel it.

While I could have just walked over to their door, knock politely, and ask them to turn down their music, I didn't; for some reason I was quite pissed that day. I'm not sure what went on over in that room once I had Kai rolling, but needless to say, until the point I moved out 5 weeks later, I never heard them play their music again.

Kai, the character on Lexx, is the last of the Brunnen G, a race that was destroyed by the forces of His Divine Shadow 2000 years before the start of the story.

Kai was kept alive as an assassin for the Divine Order. He killed anyone His Shadow ordered him to, mercilessly and emotionlessly. However, he got his memory back from the brain of a Divine Predecessor on the Lexx, and this allowed him to rebel. He also has the memories of the Divine Predecessors and all of his victims, thought these memories can be difficult to access because there are so many of them.

Kai claims to have no emotion or motivation because he is dead; however, he often acts smug or amused. Also, he believes very strongly in justice. He does not have any interest in sex, and, much to Zev/Xev's chagrin, he is incapable of doing it.

Meaning #1

The names of 5 gods in Dragonball Z. Four of them are charged with taking care of one quadrant of the mortal plane, while the fifth is in charge of them and the spirit world. The one known as King Kai is actually North Kai, who has counterparts in South Kai, East Kai, and West Kai. They apparently never show up in Toriyama's manga, but they do show up in the anime shortly after the Cell Saga.

The fifth Kai is called the Grand Kai, and is (supposedly) the most powerful being in the universe. But by the time Goku meets him (after his death during the Cell Games), he is already more powerful than the Grand Kai.

Just to confuse matters, there are 5 more gods, each more powerful than tha Grand Kai, called Kaioshin. All but one was killed millenia ago by Majin Buu (which one is quite uncertain). In any case, the surviving one is called the Supreme Kai (not Kaioshin) in the US anime releases, leading to confused statements like "Even the Kai(0) are not allowed into the sacred land of the Kai(1)" where (0) refers to the actual Kai, and (1) refers to the Kaioshin (the Supreme Kai and his dead pals).

Meaning #2

KAI is the name of a commercial compiler vendor. Actually, it's an abbreviation of Kuck & Associates, but it refered to pretty much exclusively as KAI. The are located in Champaign, Illinois.

For many years, KAI C++ was basically the champion of C++ compilers. It was incredibly portable, running on Windows NT, Linux, Tru64, IRIX, Solaris, and even Cray and Hitachi supercomputers. In addition, it was much further along in terms of standards compliance than other compilers (commercial or free) at the time. Lastly, it could generate could that would blow away what GCC (or most other compilers of the time) could do. Some informal testing by myself in 1999 showed KAI C++ to generate code that ran about 2 to 3 times as fast as egcs. Even today, KAI C++ can compete with the most recent GCC releases in terms of code optimization.

KAI C++ is based on software by EDG (aka Edison Design Group). They basically sell a C/C++ front end, to which various customers can add their own optimizations and support for specific CPUs. Other compilers based on EDG include Compaq's C++ compiler, and (I think) SGI's as well.

KAI added lots of cool optimizations onto EDG's front end, and for a backend, they did a clever trick. They convert the input file (C or C++) into highly optimized C code, and then give this code to the native compiler to actually convert into object code. The first C++ complier, Cfront, also did this (though it didn't have the optimizations KAI C++ has, of course), but most compilers now convert C++ directly into assembly without the intermediate step. This is mostly because Stroustrup probably didn't want to write a complete C compiler, which you would have to, since C++ is a strict superset of ISO C. But once you've got a C compiler working, adding support for C++ is fairly simple.

In addition to their C/C++ complier, they sold various performance analysis tools and an OpenMP compiler for C, C++, and Fortran.

Their support was also about the best I've ever seen. I found 3 or 4 bugs in the optimizer a few years ago, and each time they were fixed within a day or two of talking to support.

In April 2000, KAI was bought by Intel. Since then, they have been essentially shut down - no new copies of any KAI products are being sold, and support will only be available for existing installations for a few more years. Intel recommmends switching over to their line of C/C++/Fortran compilers, and while their stuff is quite decent, and produces very fast code on x86 systems, it leaves KAI users on non-x86 systems out in the cold. I presume that they bought the company specifically because they wanted help on their own compilers, especially since IA-64 compilers need to be very "smart" to take full advantage of the exceedingly complex VLIW instruction set.

In the old Lone Wolf books⁰ (a cross between the Choose Your Own Adventure series and a general RPG), the hero was a member of the Kai religious order. Every successive book let you add an extra Kai "discipline," which gave you an advantage in certain situations (these were attained through study at the Kai Monastery--although this was something of an "independent study," since the first book began with the massacre of the Kai). After the first series ran out, a second series was released where the hero advanced beyond Kai to "Magnakai", with disciplines based on, but more advanced than, the originals. The third series went on to "Kai Grand Master" (although I never got through it)

The only Kai disciplines that I can think of off the top of my head (I probably still have the books tucked away in my attic somewhere) are Hunting and Animal Magnetism.

Footnote ⁰: This should not be confused with the Lone Wolf and Cub series

甲斐

Kai was one of the 68 ancient provinces of Japan, located in what is now Yamanashi Prefecture and bordering on the ancient provinces of Kozuke, Musashi, Sagami, Shinano, and Suruga. During the turbulent Sengoku Era, the mighty warlord Takeda Shingen was master of Kai province.