P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz

GraveD sent linkage to a site explaining how a homemade nitrogen cooling system overclocked a P4 from 2.2Ghz to an incredible 3.5ghz. There's plenty of stuff to poke at over there. Update: 01/17 20:42 GMT by T : boaworm writes: "According to this paper, the Finnish geeks have successfully oveclocked a Pentium 4 to 3675 Mhz. They claim it is a new World Record, and it sure looks like they beaten another O/C'd Pentium 4 submitted earlier today on slashdot. (Summary in English in the end)."

Comments

Re:does anyone actually expose the DB to the world

[The Man]

Of course we would hope people would not expose the database to the world, but there are plenty of people who do. And more interestingly, the database is usually exposed to some internal networks (for example, a database for financials might sit well inside a firewall in the accounting department - on a corporate network). So there is still risk at least from people who can compromise firewalls, bypass poor security checks in applications, or from disgruntled employees.

The fact that defense in depth is a good idea does not justify allowing one of the layers to be weak. The defenses at every level should be as strong as possible, and that ideally means a bug-free app server and a bug-free database.

Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[aralin]

Apparently nobody bothered to read the Oracle challenge. Oracle states that not the database itself, but the database in certain environment, properly configured and secured within the environment is unbreakable, which still is.

The only thing that this researcher proved is that in certain environments you can break in the system, which basicly holds true for every system.

No matter what, you can be sure that contrary to M$, these holes will be worked on 24/7 and fixed like yesterday. :)

Anyway, enjoy you uninformed, senseless bashing and flaming... trolls.

Quote the Security Manager?

[Havokmon]

As if ANYONE on this site hasn't ever had to explain something that a some moron ^H^H^H^H^H^H manager said could or couldn't be done..

HIS boss is still the boss, wtf is he supposed to say?

To paraphrase an old koan:

[mblase]

A software company said to the public, "Our product is unbreakable." The public replied, "No, you are not unbreakable."

Another software company said to the public, "Our product is not unbreakable." And the public replied, "You're right, you are not unbreakable."

Liability

[JabberWokky]

I brought up the topic of Liability for software bugs with my Dad (he's a VP at one of the big banks). He replied that the current software companies would be "shot in the street". Now, I was confused until he explained: "Shot in the Street" simply means that the public and government would turn on them so hard legally that they would be driven out of business. Sure, some people would have legitimite grounds for a lawsuit, but most would be pressing legal action for their "piece of the pie". The companies (we were discussing MS in particular) wouldn't even have the *option* of beefing up QA and addressing the issues.

The more I've thought about this, the more likely it seems. And a key aspect to this is that my OS vendor, SuSE, and ilk (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc) would be nailed just as much as MS, except with less money in the bank, they would be killed much more swiftly. Now, two of those are outside of the USA, so it's not a direct correlation, but there are some serious ramifications to software liability that occur in as reactive a society as we have today.

Certainly this announcement would instantly have a dozen law firms seeking people running Oracle to launch a multi-billion dollar suit of some flavor. And while certainly not "unbreakable", and (IMO) a bit overpriced, Oracle being available is a Good Thing. Of course they have holes. I'm equally sure that they will likely address them quickly (Quickly being relative to the company involved). Introducing *sane* liability (at least in America) is going to be very difficult in a society that is making it neigh impossible to be a medical doctor, and is driving up medical costs due to the extensive CYA documentation (videotapes, extensive reports, etc) now required by industry insurance.

--
Evan "I'm pretty sure this is ontopic" E.

Buffer Overflows Myth

[Tom7]

> Buffer overflow bugs can be prevented by a
> middle-school hacker. This is elementary stuff.
> Doesn't anybody believe in putting limits on
> characters? This is simple to prevent.

This is pure bullshit. Are the programmers of
Apache, IIS, Half-Life, Quake 3 Arena, Perl, SSHD, glibc, wu_ftpd, or BIND at the middle school level? Windows NT? How about the linux kernel? All have had buffer overflows, and I'll bet that many of them still do.

Unfortunately it is not always as simple as "putting limits on characters". The simple fact is that the C language is practically designed to make buffer overflow bugs easy to write and easy to exploit.

I agree with you that buffer overflows are serious, though. That's why I think it is ridiculous that we still write security-critical network software in C. Sometimes it is hard to get around, like in the linux kernel when you need to do hardware access (a microkernel architecture might make it easier to write certain parts in higher-level languages). You might argue that performance would be impacted (I don't think this is true, especially with network software where the network is the real bottleneck), but even this argument falls through for 99% of users, since most users are far from full utilization of their processor. However, almost all users *are* affected by security holes.

Re:whoopie

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Can you really say that its the consumer who will win when no consumer programs require much processing power over a P2 400 or so?

I mean, it's nice that intel and AMD can make such fast processors, but where's the bottleneck on overall performance nowadays? I'm willing to bet it's not in the chip.

I think we've reached a point in personal computing where the software is years behind the hardware. Only in the fields of gaming or professional rendering do we need such high performance machines.

My friend's parents recently purchased a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 for day to day bookkeeping!