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Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

All things aside, all questions of Linus, Bill, Mac, etc. aside, the Microsoft backdoor does illustrate a major advantage of Open Source:

Security.

While I can see the theoretical, practically this is not true. In practical terms almost no one actually analyzes the source with any intensity apart from the people who are the primary programmers (hence the ones who would likely be planting the backdoors). I do CVSups on my FreeBSD fairly frequently and I'm basically entrusting that machine absolutely and entirely to the FreeBSD CVS controllers (which of course means if they were compromised I'd be ownzed). I'd wager >99.5% of open source users are exactly the same way: You presume that because the source is available there are tonnes of selfless individuals busily auditing it, but the reality is quite different.

The simple reality is that most current software projects are HUGE and there simply isn't enough time in a lifetime for each of us to analyze all of the code we run with anything more than a cursory glance. And if anyone thinks they'll scan through and see

// Embed backdoor
if (strcmp(password,"REDHAT")==0) {
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp iPriority=1000;
}
then they have a enormously naive impression of how a backdoor would be embedded in code subtly. For all you know a number of the software products you are running might be waiting for a magic byte string to come along when it bows to its real master.

The successor to IDE is already on the way: Serial ATA. Reportedly, PC makers like it because the thin cables allow them to build smaller systems with better cooling.

If airflow properties are all you're using Serial ATA for, you don't really need it. All you need is to separate your existing parallel ATA ribbon cables every four wires (use xacto knife to make notches, then pull the wire groups apart like Twizzlers candy) and tie-wrap them back together; poof, no more airflow obstruction.

I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python.

Here's three for you, and chances aren't bad that you've already come across any or all of them:

• maps.yahoo.com, a map finding search system written in python
• mailman, a mailing list software package written in python
• RedHat's installer (can't find a URL -- try here?), an installation package written in python

So. Now you've seen three major projects written in Python, and chances are this isn't the first time you've seen one or all of them. Like Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and yes Perl, if you use the internet at all then you probably interact with Python all the time without necessarily realizing it. It's a nice, clean, scalable lanaguage who's one main drawback -- it's slow -- is handled nicely by the fact that it's so easy to integrate it with C. As a result, it gets easy to maintain a large, complex project in Python while optimizing bottlenecks with pure C modules.

Perl can pull some of the same tricks of course, but it's much messier. I like Perl, I mainly use Perl, and I'm not knocking it. But I really can't see the point in arguing the matter: Python is a much cleaner language that is far better suited for large scale projects. If you haven't come across it yet, maybe you just haven't done anything big enough yet.

Here's where you'll find codes of all kinds.

. .

Both the Sun E 10000 (no doubt the attraction of the piece) and the E 4500 have been around a while now, as these slightly longer reviews from 1999 remind me. I expect there will have been numerous updates to shipping variations since launch, nonetheless, which I won't check with Sun's docs right now.

Neither yet support the Ultra Sparc 3, which is the chip and associated ( potentially) massively (1024) SMP platform probably of most interest to anyone evaluating entreprise scale systems right now. Whether Sun have yet fixed the memory / cache problems which apparently still persist, despite numerous fixes, for the USII I can't tell. But if anyone can post a quick summary comparison of cache design between the two chips, and whether there might be a replay of the well publicised memory problems, that'd be darn nifty. US3 has yet to ship in volume with servers, so there may not be any occasional user reports out there for a while.

Personally, I would rather see a story on Ask /. trying to find someone who could write even a short review (particularly of the E 10000) from production environment experience. The story links did not do much for me. I would not be surpised however if Sun has NDAs preventing real world reviews as part of mandatory support contracts for their big iron.

Oh, and for those of you interested in clusters, here's a related snippet :)

JavaBeans address much of your issue, along with all those ready-built COM/ActiveX components you see for sale in the back of DDJ.

I don't know of anything like this for Unix yet, but Bonobo might be promising. It takes a lot of time for something like this to reach a critical mass, though.

The IPv6 global aggregation addressing architecture splits addresses into two parts. The high-order 64 bits identify the network, and the low-order 64 bits identify the node. A format prefix gives the type of IPv6 address. Next comes a top-level aggregation entity, likely to be a country or a large carrier, followed by 8 bits reserved for future growth. Then comes another aggregation entity, likely to be a large company or Internet provider, and finally a site-level aggregation entity, probably assigned by the entity above it. Such addresses are far more efficient to route across backbones.

Aggregation means any address contains its own route. The first few bits of the address might indicate, say, Europe. The packet would go to a router serving Europe, which might see Portugal in the next few bits and forward the packet to Portugal's router. From there, the packet might go on to a router in Lisbon and then on to its final destination.

Figure 2 shows that the Top-Level Aggregation ID (TLA) uses 13 bits. This gives an upper limit of no more than 8,192 (2 to the 13th power) top-level entities, which pares down the size of the routing table a backbone router would have to deal with to forward packets anywhere in an IPv6 Internet. The next 8 bits are reserved, presumably held back, just in case the TLA allocation should be bigger (or the Next-Level Aggregation ID allocation should be bigger).

NLA entities are expected to include large ISPs, among others. These entities get their address allocations from the TLAs, who also handle routing for the NLAs. Each TLA can allocate as many as 16 million or so NLA networks (2 to the 24th) The NLAs, in turn, can allocate as many as 65,536 networks each (2 to the 16th) to Site-Level Aggregation (SLA) entities. In other words, network sites. And each SLA entity still has 64 bits of address space to play around with, for as many as 18 million trillion (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) nodes per network.

The IPv6 global aggregation addressing architecture splits addresses into two parts. The high-order 64 bits identify the network, and the low-order 64 bits identify the node. A format prefix gives the type of IPv6 address. Next comes a top-level aggregation entity, likely to be a country or a large carrier, followed by 8 bits reserved for future growth. Then comes another aggregation entity, likely to be a large company or Internet provider, and finally a site-level aggregation entity, probably assigned by the entity above it. Such addresses are far more efficient to route across backbones.

Aggregation means any address contains its own route. The first few bits of the address might indicate, say, Europe. The packet would go to a router serving Europe, which might see Portugal in the next few bits and forward the packet to Portugal's router. From there, the packet might go on to a router in Lisbon and then on to its final destination.

Figure 2 shows that the Top-Level Aggregation ID (TLA) uses 13 bits. This gives an upper limit of no more than 8,192 (2 to the 13th power) top-level entities, which pares down the size of the routing table a backbone router would have to deal with to forward packets anywhere in an IPv6 Internet. The next 8 bits are reserved, presumably held back, just in case the TLA allocation should be bigger (or the Next-Level Aggregation ID allocation should be bigger).

NLA entities are expected to include large ISPs, among others. These entities get their address allocations from the TLAs, who also handle routing for the NLAs. Each TLA can allocate as many as 16 million or so NLA networks (2 to the 24th) The NLAs, in turn, can allocate as many as 65,536 networks each (2 to the 16th) to Site-Level Aggregation (SLA) entities. In other words, network sites. And each SLA entity still has 64 bits of address space to play around with, for as many as 18 million trillion (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) nodes per network.

OK, I tested this, so I know it works. Tools->Internet Options->Security

Choose 'Custom Level' and disable Active Scripting. To test this on a page that has right-clicking disabled, go to this page.

> Is anybody actually using Beowulf in a non-academic, non-experimental system?

Visit www.beowulf.org.

Yes, there is a strong correlation between "Beowulf" and "academic", but it's not 1.0. And there's an even stronger correlation with "experimental", since massive number crunching is so important to modelling.

But if you skim the list at the link, you'll see that a lot of the applications have commercial potential, even if (mostly) currently used in research: applications in chemisty, meteorology, graphics, economics, satellite imagery, materials design, etc.

Also, a googling turns up this older article claiming that Beowulfs were in use (or at least under study) at Boeing, Bristol Myers, and Proctor & Gamble. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a lot of companies were beowulfing, since most companies don't make a big PR noise about their IT infrastructure, and might even prefer to keep it secret as if it were a competitive advantage.

Finally, I vaguely remember an older /. article talking about a company that uses a 1000-node Beowulf running genetic algorithms to produce patentable software products.

--

Here's an article from the other architect of delphi on the guy.

He was also the guy behind the WFC for java that started the lawsuit rolling between microsoft and sun.

Funny how people always compare Linux with NT when there is a security bug in Linux.

Why not compare Linux with another opensource OS like, OpenBSD? *BSD, as far as I can understand, use a very cathedral like development model.
And then compare NT with a closed source OS, like Solaris.

Now, which one have given the more secure OS in their category?

And BTW, I thought that article on the developer's website showed that open source does not guarantee security nor that security bugs will be found?

What are the chances of getting some editorial accountability around this place?

Comments like yours are our editorial accountability :-)

Jamie, before you go stating that "OSS != Security," please consider:

Bugs in crypto systems are extraordinarily difficult to hunt down and squish. Read Applied Cryptography if you feel like getting your brain around why. A bug of this magnitude in a product with source code not available would probably never have been discovered.

Many crypto bugs are hard to find. This bug should not have been. Passing in a pointer to a buffer and then assigning the function result to that same buffer? I bet there exists an automated tool which understands the parameters to read() and would find that error.

It's not like read() is an obscure system call. Using it improperly like this is practically criminal.

And I never said "OSS != Security," in fact, I explicitly said the two were not necessarily equal, "emphasis on necessarily."

PGP's license has never met the Open Source Definition (it's free to use only under certain circumstances).

OK, you got me there - Dan Kaminsky also wrote in to mention that its license prohibits commercial use, adding "many of the eyes that would have otherwise been directed at the PGP codebase wouldn't touch the product."

I'm not entirely sure that's true. PGP should naturally attract a lot of eyes by virtue of being high-profile. Many of the people who would be or should be looking for bugs like this one are up-and-coming cryptographers, for whom finding a bug in PGP would garner street cred. They wouldn't care whether they could use the code commercially.

Still, point taken. Let me talk to a friend who knows PGP better than I do, and I'll look into revising the headline and/or updating the story in the next few hours.

Despite this technicality, your headline is stupidly sensational and self-defeating. Wouldn't it have been much better to title it "Key Generation Bug Found in PGP 5"?

When we get two submissions that are both important, and related, it makes for a more interesting discussion to link them together. Unfortunately I think many readers are only reading the PGP story, and skipping John Viega's excellent article - or at least there hasn't been much discussion of it, which is a shame.

Jamie McCarthy

Read this article by John Viega, one of the authors of Mailman. He talks about how Open sourced software does not necessarily mean security, how many eyes on does not mean they will look for loopholes, and why. Also other interesting points.

I haven't looked at it in a long while, but Gamelan used to be a pretty comprehensive archive. It only had one major flaw - it mixed in commercial stuff and "freeware" together, and it was hard to find just open source or whatever.

Another archive was JARS. Again, I don't think they really made much differentiation between stuff you could buy and stuff whose source code you could look at.


--
A "freaking free-loading Canadian" stealing jobs from good honest hard working Americans since 1997.