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

I haven't seen it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've seen Oracle's Unbreakable campaign

I guess I've been living in a cave.

Reverse Psychology

[NiftyNews]

Wouldn't it be great if the inverse also worked?

MS could just announce that "Our software code is like swiss cheese when it comes to security" and #POOF#, all the holes would be sealed for good.

Would this qualify under

[ViceClown]

Laws to Punish Insecure Software Vendors?

Same as with the Titanic...

[quigonn]

...unsinkable didn't mean unsinkable, after all...

Security Myth

[Partisan01]

I think the flaw here was that Oracle claimed that no one can break into their software. There's always goign to be a way to get into software. It just might take a while. Unless some security team audited every single line of code over and over, which I can't imagine seeing the size of the software, there's goign to be some holes. To make a truly secure piece of software some performance is risked. From what I know of Oracle they pride themselves on performance. So my money says that they took care of the big holes, and missed a few of the smaller harder to exploit holes.

Nate Tobik

Re:Security Myth

[puppy0341]

yeah, but how to get an security analyse for free?
Announce your softaware is unbreakable :)

Re:Security Myth

[Brendan Byrd]

So my money says that they took care of the big holes

Oh really? A buffer overflow isn't a big hole? 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.

Why are their STILL companies that fall victim to buffer overflow holes?!

Re:Security Myth

[Brendan Byrd]

If you are thinking of security when you write the problem, you won't have any problem preventing buffer overflow bugs. Like the guy says "Fixing buffer overflows is the price of admission."

Writing programs with buffer overflows is just bad programming.

I'd like to know...

[Sawbones]

given the many discussions on /. of late re: full disclosure of security holes, partial disclosure, disclosure to the company only, etc - what does the crowd here think of the way these exploits have been handled? The story says the Litchfield has commented publicly and explicitly on the nature of one of the holes that already has a patch available, but that he's holding close the holes that have patches still under development.

I guess another question would be, while Oracle is by no means a small company, if the company name started with an M and ended with 'icrosoft' would we be demanding more information?

Mirror:

[Saint Aardvark]

http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/oracle

Unbreakable in a legal sense...

[_DMan_]

Oracle9i. Unbreakable. Can't break it. Can't break in.

Legally they are correct. The DMCA says you can't break it, and various other laws say you can't break in.

Re:Unbreakable in a legal sense...

[Harinath]

It does -- at least according to Alan Cox.

The reasoning is that

- Oracle has several "access control" features

- Customers use those "access control" features to control copyrighted material

- An Oracle exploit would then end up being a copyright control circumvention of some customer or the other

Re:Unbreakable in a legal sense...

[anotherone]

If they'd said "You may not break it" then maybe you'd have something...

Wasn't there some kind of cash prize for anyone who could break an oracle db?

Slashdot New Flash...

[gpinzone]

...impossible claim proved wrong. Film at eleven. I can't tell if Ellison's claim that Oracle was bulletproof was the act of a madman or genius. Why genius? Nothing gets security experts to test your software with such vigor than when you tell them it's invulnerable. Question is, does this make the NSA more or less secure in choosing Oracle products?

Re:You mean to tell me...

[Jburkholder]

3 words..

White Star Line

Does seem to be tempting fate to say "unbreakable", doesn't it>

crazy fucking ceos

[dildofire]

i would have to loved to have been a fly on the wall in the oracle engineering department the day ellison announced that their software was unbreakable. i guarantee you the engineers at oracle wouldn't have supported that campaign, if they even knew about it before ellison announced it at comdex. it's tough enough to keep your software secure when your ceo isn't directly taunting every hacker in the world.

Re:crazy fucking ceos

[Sir Tristam]

i would have to loved to have been a fly on the wall in the oracle engineering department the day ellison announced that their software was unbreakable.

Well, here's how the conversation went:

Dilbert: Hey, Wally! Larry just announced that 9i's unbreakable! I guess this means we can stop working on those bug-fixes.
Wally: Way ahead of you there.

Chris Beckenbach

Re:All software is breakable -

[Chris Mattern]

Well, because Forth to understand, like Yoda you must speak, that is.

Chris Mattern

Wasn't Breaking in the whole point ?

[Quazion]

Didn't they start this campaign to get 'hacked' ? so they could close some more holes they couldnt find them selves ?

Now i wonder, it worked they all readdy found 7!

Quazion.

Re:Wasn't Breaking in the whole point ?

[dildofire]

i guess that would make sense. daring the entire world to hack your platform would be one way to make it secure. but it seems that if you've got live customers running the software, they may not appreciate being made into targets for hackers.

i tend to think that this campaign was purely a marketing thing, not an engineering decision. i know i would prefer to keep the software in qa a little longer, rather than take on the world. i mean, if they still had buffer overflow errors in the code, it's far from unbreakable. don't you think they would've cleared out all the obvious bugs if it was their decision. gotta love runaway execs.

A method to the madness, maybe?

[Mark of THE CITY]

By essentially daring people to find holes, Oracle gets QA for the cost of embarassment, which I suspect for L.E. is about one cent.

And this comes from...

[denzo]

the guy who wants all Americans to be on a unified national ID card, having all our personal information in a central database.

That leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

That's odd....

[RoscoHead]

"The Oracle database server itself runs on some sixty odd different operating systems,"


How many non-odd operating systems does it run on??

Re:That's odd....

[roystgnr]

How many non-odd operating systems does it run on??

Have you turned on a computer lately? We've got desk lamp appearing things that have buttons that look like they should be licked instead of clicked. We've got most beige boxes being upgraded to Fisher Price's My First GUI. We've got most of the remainder running a GUI which answers "how many widget sets can you fit into a phone booth". And we've got operating systems designed by the occasional upstart company who thinks they can suddenly "break in" to a saturated market dominated by network effects and owned by organizations who all agree that giving your product away for free is at least better than letting the competition make money.

There are no non-odd operating systems.

does anyone actually expose the DB to the world?

[zzzeek]

Had an argument about this awhile back.....the database listener services are not usually trusted as a secure thing for the outside world in my somewhat limited experience, there is always some kind of application layer as the public interface to these things (these days the outside world's interface is often HTTP based), particularly for services accessed over a WAN. How many people out there have oracle listening to an open port on the internet ?

Weinberg's law of programming;

[eclectro]

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

(this is twenty years old)

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[geekoid]

I hate that quote.
When we have been programming for as long as we have been building things, then that quaote will be valid.
I am willing to bet that the buildings that where built during the first 50 years the human race had been building building wheren't all that good.

Yikes, what a sentence.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[Lemmy Caution]

Yes, it's a well-known fact that several civilizations were wiped out when their stone roofs collapsed into the straw huts they put them on.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[AnotherBlackHat]

Attributed to osiris@halcyon.halcyon.com (J.David Ruggiero)

Dear Mr. Architect:
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion.

My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of thses options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.

I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularily the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[Psiren]

That doesn't count. We all know aliens built them. Haven't you *seen* Stargate?! ;-)

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[scott1853]

Programmer's aren't craftsmen. I'm a programmer and I'll admit that.

Part of it is the tools. A builder uses a hammer to drive a nail into a 2x4. It doesn't matter who made the hammer, it's going to work the same way. That's not quite the same with any development tool. Besides, how many programmers expect their code to still be in use after they die? How many programmers even feel it's their responsibility to fix something after the contract's done?

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[Mr. Slippery]

One word: Pyramids

...which were the end result of centuries of evoluion in tomb design. The first pyramid to be built successfully is surrounded by ruins of decades of failed attempts.

Here's a more optimistic quote:

"Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?" -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

Give us time. Meanwhile, be very wary of trusting anything important to software.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[jgerman]

I agree. Let me point out that the first buildings were most likely in a poorer state in their beginnings than programs were. They were certainly at least as bad, and I don't think I need to point out that the first woodepecker did NOT destroy civilization.

Besides, building now are not bullet proof:

catch(Exception caughtFire) { building.burnDown(); }

Anything not used as expected will cause problems, at least with code we have more room to work.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[0123456789]

From your quote: "Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?"

Surely you're describing Hurd?

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[ahde]

what makes you think construction isn't like this?

Programming is no more complex or harder or easier than any of a number (undetermined) another disciplines. Building happens to be a particularly apt comparison. Why do you think there are so many borrowed terms, like, for instance 'build'?

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[spectecjr]

You are wrong. The law is still valid. There are plenty of new technologies that aren't computer-related, largely (yes, I realize *everything* has some computer element to it these days, that's not my point). How about new surgical techniques? How about new mechanical systems in buildings? Sure, these things break, and go through a period of debugging while people suffer (or die on the operating table). but usually in short order (a few years), they are sorted out.

The problem is, it's the same thing that's being debugged every time when it's a surgical procedure, or a mechanical system.

Software changes. All the time. People write new versions, add functionality, take it and make changes. All the time.

I'm sure that if someone came up with a new way to do a kidney transplant every 6 months, there would be a lot of people dying too.

So take your pick; rapid evolution, or stagnant, bulletproof stability. I'm sure that if I had 12 years to develop an app, it'd be as solid as a rock at the end of it.

Simon

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[sharkey]

Besides, building now are not bullet proof

Well, it depends. Use thick enough concrete walls, or armor plate, and armored glass, it'll stop a bullet.

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[arivanov]

Some cathedrals took a century to complete.

There is a reason for this: the design of the earliest gotic cathedrals had to be modified several times because they could not withstand wind pressure and developed cracks. As a result we have the gotic architecture as we know it. All these side arches across the roof are nothing but cleverly hidden beams that distribute pressure evenly.

There was a good article on this in Scientific American in the mid-80es.Dunno if it is available on lines.

So, in other words, it took around a 100 years to debug this "minor problem"

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[statusbar]

Right.

Another point I figured out regarding cathedrals. You see all these really old cathedrals and they are still standing! First thought is that they had great building design capabilities.

But in reality many buildings fell down, and they tried again. We don't see the ones that fell down.

And mistakes happen even now with building design. Big example is the 'Save-on-foods' collapse in Burnaby B.C. Canada. Plus there are tons of little ones - like the new office building in Vancouver which had to be renovated a few months ago because the washrooms had no drainage holes in the floor. One overflowing toilet caused major havoc and power failures.

--jeff

Re:Weinberg's law of programming;

[geekoid]

How about new surgical techniques? How about new mechanical systems in buildings
again, bot these improvements are made to a system or iindustry thats 100's if not more, years old.
I am a software engineer ...waits for the cringing to end... I write specs, I build test cases, I adhere to principles, and I have code that has been running for YEARS, in a very load intensive enviroment.
I no people who program for satalites, you try putting all the code you need to operate a satalite in 640k. when your done, you'll be cringing less.
Game programmers, some of those AIs are incredible feats of engineering, not to mention the lan programming.
Buildings have bugs. talk to anybodu whos been in charge of building maintainance in a new building, there are all kinds of things that go wrong.
Now I am actually more forgiving to building engineers for there little bugs, because it is very difficult to have a building in a test enviroment.
Bottom line, we need management to give us the time to test and debug properly. Not you have 1 week to test crap, but actuall testing.
I have had the privilaage of being onm a project that was allowed to set there own timelines, and do proper testing, that product took 3 years to complete, but it is a marvel of behold. No reported bugs in 5 years of opperation, the one upgrade we did was soley for new features, and it is amazingly complex. it cost 100million dollars but the bank made that back in the first quarter. It amazing how much money a bank can save when you take there total cost to process a loan, and quarter it.
On a side note, the most amazing thing is, the software made about 200 people sjob redundant, but the bank did not "let them go", they found work for them.
OTOH someone who pooints and clicks there way through a high level interface will do a lot less engineering.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

First Titanic, now this!

[roman_mir]

In the other news, the largest ship in the world Titanic that was named unsinkable, has sunk.

Comments by the CEO: -Well, you can take it both ways, really, we are defining what Unsinkable really means! The other ship building companies in our field are looking up to us to be half as unsinkable as we are. It's great, really, how our compain brings the best out of this situation.

"We believe the market effect of the 'Unsinkable' campaign raises the unsinkability bar and therefore improves unsinkability overall, both in forcing us to live up to the statement, and forcing others in the industry to begin to do the same," wrote Bruce Ismay. "If our unsinkability today is imperfect but better than the competition, and if customers make a buying decision based on that criteria, than in the long term you will see all products in the market improve."

Re:First Titanic, now this!

[roman_mir]

I did not mean to be funny, damn it! It was supposed to be Insightful. I dug out Bruce Ismay's name for xxx's sake!

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.

Uncle Larry and his problems.

[AnalogBoy]

Larry would likely end up in prison for some of the inflammatory stuff he says, if he weren't one of the richest asshoerr guys in the world. Imagine his mouth vs. a cop, judge, jury..

Hell, i'd like to see a Gates vs. Ellison boxing match on pay-per-view, as long as the money didn't go to either of them (and they had to match 1000 to 1). Seeing as they are both a little lanky, it could be interesting. Just let them use physical equivilants of business tactics.

I'm sure oracle has to struggle to meet the goals spewed larry's big mouth. A "The president just said WHAT on national tv" type response, i.e. NASA in the 60's.

Titanic Oracle

[Mittermeyer]

What happens when Unbreakable Larry Elliott's Unsinkable ego runs into an iceberg called reality?

Thrill as the largest man-made ego in the world shows it too can make a mistake! Gasp as the master engineer makes a crucial error that sinks the RMS Unbreakable! Cry as the star-crossed developers try to escape the sinking PR disaster! Bemoan the lack of escape boats for the VPs who will pay for Ellison's boast!

I swear, can't tell who we need to get first, Gates or Ellison. Neither one is good for computing.

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.

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[Hangtime]

Which means a C2 system with no network access, at Fort Meade and all their couter-measures, and a pack of rapid, hungry hyenas sitting around it in a New York stuido sized apartment.

Yea, we understand what these marketing slogans mean. Unfortunately, nobody has lived up to one yet.

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[clontzman]

Oh, come on... read their marketing fluff...

From http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/ index.html?content.html

The Unbreakable Database Can't break it. Can't break in. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails. What's more, Oracle holds 14 international security evaluations. IBM DB2 has none. Microsoft SQL Server has only one.

If you *can* break it, which clearly you can, their marketing campaign is untrue. Saying "read the fine print" is making excuses for typical marketingese (or, more likely, Ellisonese). If they still try to say that 9i is "unbreakable," they'll be a laughingstock.

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[dgoodman]

And of course those certain environments and configurations would be:

• Unplugged from any network
• Unplugged from any power source

Otherwise there will be some hole to exploit...one cannot expose features without also exposing some vulnerability (be it only social hacking)

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[Angry Black Man]

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

As opposed to most of MS's exploits, which had patches out like 3 months before the exploit became widespread.

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[jgerman]

Hmmm when my server fails, and locks up completely I'm willing to bet that Oracle has gone down as well, and when they power gets cut I'm almost positive. Of course there's no way to prove this case, you can make an inductively strong argument, but it's even worse than seeing what happens to the light in the refrigerator when you close it, at least in that situation you can close the fridge while you're in it.

Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge...

[John Sullivan]

it's even worse than seeing what happens to the light in the refrigerator when you close it, at least in that situation you can close the fridge while you're in it.

Oh go on, upload your brain into your dual-Pentium 4 server then provoke it into blue-screening. Dare ya!

Marketing at work, that's all.

[mystery_bowler]

The reality of it is that most DBAs, programmers and database developers in the working world scoffed at the ad campaign the moment it began. Sure, Oracle has a great product, but we all knew it wasn't bulletproof, no matter how may awards for "best of class security" it supposedly won.

The only real losers in this, other than organizations whose Oracle databases were victimized by a security flaw, were the corporate purchasers who were sold on the hype. They'll have to live with the fact that their DBMS isn't "unbreakable." Honestly, though, there are relatively few of those (none I can think of that are well-publicized, at least), as they are usually run on well locked-down *nix boxes.

It's not anything new. It's just agressive advertising. Some might argue that it's false advertising, but that's probably being a bit harsh. It's more like...overly boastful advertising.

Re:Marketing at work, that's all.

[glwtta]

overly boastful advertising

uh huh, as opposed to your regular, modest, humble advertising that we usually see.

I know, let's make the story something it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on people. Oracle explained that they used the term "unbreakable" because it passed 14 security audits. Some people say you can't crash linux because it typically doesn't - but it can.

By and large the Oracle products are very good... We use them in some extremely large and significant datawarehousing situations and have probably managed to kill the server once in three years. Many times we've been amazed at what developers have thrown at the server without killing it - Oracle is very good at recovering from users mistakes.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what the obvious vulnerabilities are - I dread the number of server upgrades to be tested though. The client I'm working for now has about 250 instances registered with their 24*7 DBA team already... You have no idea how hard it can be to choose a unique 4 character SID sometimes. :-)

Long live Oracle... I'm sure Larry won't lose any sleep (or money) over this since it is still clearly the best product out there.

Re:I know, let's make the story something it isn't

[leuk_he]

We use them in some extremely large and significant datawarehousing situations and have probably managed to kill the server once in three years

Then you certainly have not tried the following thing:
-Install forms 4.5 now. Forms 4.5 is year 2000 complient, the installer crashes (!)(there is a patch but.....)
-use plsql records in a 7.3.4. DB. Bye bye instance.
-use designer 2000 1.2.

and the list goes on and on.

There is a sucker born every minute...

[ngoy]

After reading the article, it struck me as funny how things never change. There are tons of PHB's out there buying up any big flashy ad in their free (if you fill out free survey, otherwise pay $XXX a year) industry mags. I am a Windows user (yeah yeah) but at least I am not stupid enough to buy anything first from Microsoft until they come out with one service pack first. Of course, here at unnamed large x86 cpu company (my company contracts here), they have decided to move to Microsoft's tune within 90 days of them releasing a product. So we have people (not just IT people, HR people, finance people) etc... installing the wonderful IT "engineered" version of WinXP. (Don't get me started on how in the world they think they make Microsoft's stuff more stable through their "engineering".) That anyone would buy into Larry's BS is bizarre. But the PHB's are entirely ignorant of the real world and would gladly believe that Windows XP is crashproof and utterly stable if Bill told them so. I hope somebody has their Oracle9i system hacked and then sue's Oracle for false advertising, amongst other things. --Shango

Re:There is a sucker born every minute...

[grassy_knoll]

We all know there is a difference between the real world and what we see in meetings.

I tend to think Larry put this challenge out to get free security testing from the community. The engineers knew his announcement would be heard as "I fart in your general direction" and geared up the patch writers accordingly.

Yes, some sorry PHB will only remember the campaign, not the bugs. Yes, sales will increase. Perhaps that was the goal, not the free bug testing... but you can't ignore either benefit for Oracle.

Re:There is a sucker born every minute...

[Tony-A]

Heads I win. Tails I win.
If he was right, there is some objective evidence that he was.
If he was wrong, that's maybe the only way of getting right.
In any event, he gets some free publicity and (after patches) a fairly secure product.

Re:Is the gov't still going to use it

[ndfa]

all the porn you've ever downloaded
Just imagine :
select * from downloaded_porn_table where porn_search_string like '%Natalie Portman scared and petrified%'

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?

slogans slogans slogans

[ekephart]

"The more people out there saying they have an unbreakable product, it gives customers a false sense of security," says David Dittrich, senior security engineer at the University of Washington. "I'd rather they boast about having a good programming team, or a good auditing process."

Admittedly, but COME ON Dave, it's just not CATCHY. Slogans are often misleading or linguistically incorrect. Here is a list of "catchy slogans" that are either also false, irrelevant, or just silly enough just to point out.

Slogan [Product/Firm]

• "The real thing" [Coca-Cola] - I feel that I am pretty real, maybe it should be "A real thing"
  
• "Be all you can be." [U.S. Army] - What the hell does this even mean?
  
• "You'll love the way we fly" [Delta Airlines] - And if I don't?
  
• "You're in good hands." [Allstate Insurance] - The cop said I wasn't at fault. The 3 eyewitnesses said the same. Go to hell.
  
• "Just like you, it never quits." [Mennen] - Someone's credulity is running on high. Are you kidding? If it's hard, I give up. "Huh, TV is funner."
  
• "Cool, Crisp, Clear. Obey your thirst." [Sprite] - Too bad I can't patent water.
  
• "Quality is Job 1" [Ford] - HA!
  
• "It's everywhere you want to be." [VISA] - Well, I guess I'm impressed.
  
• "Solutions for a small planet." [IBM] - This is for the most part true. Yes, they do provide "solutions" and this is a relatively small planet.
  
• "We try harder." [Avis Car Rental] - Harder than what? Yesterday?
  
• "I love what you do for me." [Toyota] - Am I supposed to love what THEY do for ME or what I do for THEM?
  
• "Just slightly ahead of our time." [Panasonic] - No, Billy you can't travel into the future I don't care what the Panasonic commercial said.
  

Re:slogans slogans slogans

[doorbot.com]

"Quality is Job 1" [Ford]

That's not misleading. In the 80s, it just meant they can't even get the first step right.

"We try harder." [Avis Car Rental]

Good. I'll try just as hard to pay my bill.

"Just slightly ahead of our time." [Panasonic]

In some ways, this one might be the worst of them all. Many innovations have been ahead of their time yet fallen by the wayside. Just because it's better doesn't mean it will last (BetaMax). Maybe they should change their name to "Gamble your paycheck on our product's longevity."

Re:slogans slogans slogans

[curunir]

Advertising is by nature deceptive. They try to leave out things that would make you not want to buy the product. Here's my take on what they didn't say, but might have meant.

- "The real thing" [Coca-Cola] - if you conclude that thing is meant to be a reference to Coca-Cola, then "The real thing" is a reference to the version of Coca-Cola that they sell, as opposed to the imaginary version that the product development team is currently working on.

- "You'll love the way we fly" [Delta] - you will, at some point in the future, love the way we fly. That point in time, however, is unlikely to be now or anywhere near your flight date.

- "Quality is job 1" [Ford] - Everything else is job 0...every computer person should know that one is hardly a logical starting place.

- "We try harder" [Avis] - ...than we could. This is actually a veiled threat.

- "Just slightly ahead of our time" [Panasonic] - All of our offices are located just west of the beginning of the timezones. So, while it's technically 10:00am, are time appears closer to 10:02. We didn't say we were way ahead of our time, just slightly.

Re:slogans slogans slogans

[fishbowl]

>We try harder." [Avis Car Rental] - Harder than >what? Yesterday?

You're too young, no doubt, to remember the Slogan Wars between Avis and Hertz of the early 60's.

In those days, it was considered taboo for an advertiser to directly mention the competitor's product when making comparisons. In fact, it was quite a shock when, in the mid 1970's we started seeing TV commercials where one brand explicitly stated that their product was better than a specific competitor's product. It's pretty common now, but you never saw it back in the day.

Anyway, some consumer survey gave Hertz marketroids the idea that they were the #1 car rental company (in an unbound domain, with unspecified terms, naturally). Hertz went to town
with this "fact." Worthy of note, the Hertz sign atop the infamous Texas School Book Depository building.

Avis countered Hertz with their own ingenious slogan: various flavors "We're #2, but we try harder."

At the same time, they made yet another marketing innovation -- they designed all their ads so that they could be distinguished at a distance of 40 feet. Thank Helmut Krone for that.

Re:Is the gov't still going to use it

[aralin]

Yes, in proper environment its still as secure as ever. And lets compare it with alternatives...

• Oracle - 14 security certificates
  
• IBM - 1 security certificate
  
• M$ - 0 security certificates
  

It was a marketing ploy

[nzhavok]

It was a marketing ploy and any professional administator who looked at and said "wow, unbreakable, lets buy it" probably wasn't a professional at all.

It's not surprising that a system as complex as Oracle is going to have security flaws. However if you mistaken believed that Oracle had created the perfect piece of software, may I suggest you stow it away in the closet next to your Abdominizer and set of stay-sharp-steak-knives.

Re:It was a marketing ploy

[nzhavok]

Considering that, and the flamage over security that MS has recieved over the last year, it's no wonder that journalists (and /.) are jumping over the story. They set themselves up for the comparison.

Yes they may have set themselves up but to make a fair comparison you also have to realize that Oracle runs on 60 operating systems whereas SQLServer runs on ohhhh, NT.

Re:It was a marketing ploy

[nzhavok]

Whats your point? Linux has to deal with a ton of different hardware specs and API's whilst Oracle has to deal with a ton of OS specs and API's. I don't see how your comment supports an argument either way as to whether an Oracle/SQLServer comparison is fair or not.

Re:It was a marketing ploy

[Karellen]

Strangely, I find that running code on a number of OSs is a good way to find bugs.

Reading the contents of newly allocated memory before initialising it, for example (I did a cut and paste and got a couple of lines the wrong way round once, a long time ago), could give you what you expect on one platform (all initialised - coincidentally - to zeros) and if that was the only platform you tested on, well, there's a latent bug in there.

Test the code on another platform, and it all falls apart within the first couple of seconds of initialisation. You soon track that one down.

K.

Re:It was a marketing ploy

[nzhavok]

You're the guy who said "it's a marketing ploy" and now you are talking about fair comparisons?

You make a fine point so mabye I should clarify what I'm trying to say. "Unbreakable" is a marketing ploy, you would be foolish to believe that the software is perfect. However the marketing was (and this is speculative) aimed at microsofts products with a poor security record, another slashdotter pointed out that Oracle set themselves up for a comparison with microsoft products by doing this campaign. Personally I don't consider Oracle and SQLServer in the same league (although I realise many do) I don't think it's a fair comparison.

Obviously, if multiple platforms was as important as you say, Oracle would have a different slogan!

Surprisingly enough, the importance of certain features of software is not always reflected in their slogans.

Homer again

[ocie]

"The word un-blow-upable is tossed around a lot these days but..."

(BOOM)

Larry Ellison is The Rock

[dstone]

I dunno... I think Larry could take Bill.

Larry looks more than a little like The Rock in this photo. Ever notice how you never see both The Rock and Ellison together at the same time? Hmmm? Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Re:Larry Ellison is The Rock

[lunenburg]

It doesn't MATTER who The Rock is, jabroni! :-)

Re:Larry Ellison is The Rock

[Afrosheen]

Actually he looks more like a Porn Star. Maybe that's what he does in his spare time.

Harry Ballison.

They weren't lying...

[Eric Smith]

they were just "bullshitting".

(with Apologies to Elwood Blues)

Seriously, though, IMNSHO they should get charged under the truth in advertising laws.

Operating systems

[SevenTowers]

"The Oracle database server itself runs on some sixty odd different operating systems," says Litchfield.

First I have to say I'm impressed, I had no idea. Secondly, what are those 60 different operating systems? Does anybody have a list? BSD, Linux, Windows, sun, novell, QNX, MacOS in all their flavors.

But what is the rest?

Re:Operating systems

[SevenTowers]

forgot OS/390 and VMS

Re:Operating systems

[aralin]

Well, the most widely used is HPUX, the system is developed on SOLARIS as primary OS and there is NT branch. Other are just ports. Usually the first ports are: HPUX, AIX, Linux. Of course you have to count in different version of these OSes. I am not sure there is port for MacOS or QNX. There, but basicly any UNIX out there has most likely a port of the RDBMS.

Re:Operating systems

[tswinzig]

First I have to say I'm impressed, I had no idea. Secondly, what are those 60 different operating systems? Does anybody have a list? BSD, Linux, Windows, sun, novell, QNX, MacOS in all their flavors.

Yes, please allow me to list them for you:

Windows NT 3.x
Windows NT 4.x
Windows 2K
Windows XP
Linux 1.0
Linux 1.1
Linux 1.2
Linux 1.3
Linux 1.4
Linux 1.5
Linux 1.6
Linux 1.7
Linux 1.8
Linux 1.9
Linux 2.0
Linux 2.1
Linux 2.2
Linux 2.3
Linux 2.4
...

Do you see where I'm going with this.

Re:Operating systems

[sql*kitten]

Other are just ports.

Well, yes and no. Oracle is developed in two layers, VOS or "Virtual Operating System" abstracts all the primitives like threads, pipes, file handling etc from the underlying OS, and Oracle itself, which is written to VOS APIs. So the core Oracle engineering team code for pure functionality, and the VOS teams keep their APIs in sync with each other on different platforms. If Oracle want to target a new OS or platform, they simply develop a VOS for it.

I believe the Oracle engineers work on Suns, but they are targetting VOS, not Solaris directly.

That's why you have to start the service before you can start the instance on NT. Win32 is sufficiently different from Unix-like systems to need an environment in place before starting Oracle, whereas Unix-like systems can just link the VOS into the main binary. It needs to work like this because Oracle is Oracle, on any platform, once you log into SQL*Plus, it's exactly the same. Oracle is more complex than many operating systems, it provides its own scheduling, resource quotas (storage and CPU), IPC mechanisms (AQ, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_ALERT, etc), programming languages (PL/SQL and Java) and a whole lot more. It is a platform in its own right.

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."

Re:Larry Ellison is The Rock (Rep. OT)

[AnalogBoy]

Personally, i think he looks a lot more like Azmodeus.

Too true

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

"Hello, helpdesk? I forgot my Oracle password."

"Hello, helpdesk? I need to edit the Oracle config files, and I forgot the Oracle user's unix password."

"Hello, helpdesk? Brad Pitt's a friend of mine and will go out with you if you give me the root password for the Oracle box."

Please define 'is'

[mizhi]

Great, so Clinton's wrangling over the true meaning of the word 'is' has spilled over into the marketing gurus ath major companies... this is just double unplus good.

Right, it says more about the certification

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

Is it source-code-level certification? If so, then the value of the certification would seem extremely lame if they can't catch a buffer overflow.

If it's "let's attack the binary and see if we can break it", that's potentially harder to catch something like this, but then again, how hard can it be to see if the binary links against the system C library at the known offsets of gets, fgets, sprintf, etc.

What would be lamest of all is if the certification process goes something like, "What's your security engineering process? Oh, sounds secure to us."

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.

Re:Liability

[JabberWokky]

I was drawing no parallel between the sayings, and never alluded to any. My post has nothing to do with the claim or the way it was phrased, but rather the nature of software in general always having bugs (except possibly TeX) and the ramifications of legal liability.

--
Evan

This is what secrurity laws should address

[ttyRazor]

Laws mentioned in the other article that would punish poorly secured software should target stuff like this, where software is advertized as absolutely secure. Whenever someone claims that open source software can be as insecure as commercial couterparts, they often forget that nobody says that open source is absolutely secure, often its "we think it secure, but we're not completely certain". Companies like Oracle and Microsoft instead try and advertise it as absolutely secure and give managers warm fuzzy feelings about software, to the pont where they think they don't have to worry about it ever again.

irony

[trb]

From the SecurityFocus article:

But Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson says the criticism is unfair. In an emailed response to Mullen's commentary, Davidson wrote that Oracle is giving the holes reported by Litchfield the "highest priority," but suggested that everything depends on what your definition of "unbreakable" is.

Rather than representing a literal claim that Oracle's products are impregnable, the campaign "speaks to" fourteen independent security evaluations that Oracle's database server passed, Davidson wrote, and "represents Oracle's commitment to a secure product lifecycle for our entire product suite."

So Oracle says it's fair that they assert that their software is unbreakable when it is not, but they say it's unfair when others criticize their misleading and errant claim. What's wrong with this picture?

2 cents

[f00zbll]

Ok, I read the article and here's my thoughts as worthless as they are:

revealed that a common programming error -- a buffer overflow -- was present in Oracle's application server, potentially allowing hackers to gain remote access to the system over the Internet.

If the researcher is referring to Oracle 9i application server, it's really Orion Server. Since Orion is pure Java implementation, the threat is pretty low. Reguardless, the Orion developers will fix it. They're pretty quick about bug fixes.

We can actually interject ourselves in between that communications process and run commands as SYSTEM on Windows NT or 2000. If it's running on a Unix system, we can run commands as the Oracle user remotely

I'm not sure what this bug is referring to specifically, but it most likely is related to Oracle's GUI administration tool. If the user can run Unix commands, that doesn't necessarily mean a person can erase all the data. The suggested installation is to have the server run under the Oracle user. If ownership is root and the priv. is execute only, an instance would only be vulnerable to "kill -9". To erase the actual data, the cracker would have to login to the instance and delete the data.

I've done some crazy tests with sql server 6 and oracle 8i on low end hardware and I have to say oracle out performs sql server hands down. This is no excuse for Oracle though. They still need to back up that slogan with real blood.

What's next?

[glwtta]

Next thing you know, they are gonna be telling us that Windows XP isn't the most secure OS ever. Shocking!

Add to /dictionaries/NewSpeak/

[Zen Mastuh]

Oracle's top security manager is quoted as saying that "unbreakable" doesn't really mean unbreakable, or something

So let's see if I have all of these straight:

• "War is peace." Okay, if you say so...
• "Freedom is slavery." Ummm...I'm not sure about that one...
• "Unbreakable isn't unbreakable." Man, you're tripping!

By the time the revolution comes, there are gonna be so many Corporate Newspeak motherfuckers that we'll have to build a bigger wall to put them up against.

As JoelOnSoftware said just a couple weeks ago:

[GeekLife.com]

The unique thing about software is that it is infinitely clonable. Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before. This is very different than what construction workers do. Herman the Handyman, who just installed a tile floor for me, has probably installed hundreds of tile floors. He has to keep installing tile floors again and again as long as new tile floors are needed. We in the software industry would have long since written a Tile Floor Template Library (TFTL) and generating new tile floors would be trivial.

from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000337.h tml

Not "unbreakable", but "is unbreakable"

[Merry_B.Buck]

..."unbreakable" doesn't really mean unbreakable, or something...
Oracle said that 9i "is unbreakable". As President Clinton could easily tell you, the key word here is 'is'.

Re:Whoops!

[moof1138]

You can pretty much get away with saying what you want in ads. Otherwise MS would be in deep legal doodoo for suggesting that you will fly after installing XP.

What about PostgreSQL?

[ortholattice]

How does PostgreSQL compare to Oracle? Is PostgreSQL more or less secure than Oracle? I don't know. I've never heard of a problem with it nor have I had one. Is PostgreSQL faster or slower than Oracle? I don't know, and apparently Oracle desperately doesn't want anyone to find out. From benchmarks that have had Oracle results deleted to benchmarks that someone (I wonder who?) has gotten the ISP to remove for "violation of our Terms of Service" (this used to be a benchmark), Oracle is very aggressive in preventing anyone from finding out how their database really performs. I wonder why? (However what might be another version of the second benchmark seems to have survived by carefully avoiding the mention of names of proprietary products.) All I know is that after trying to deal with the bloat of Oracle on a less-than-mainframe-class PC, PostgreSQL was a lean, mean breath of fresh air. Converting PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL was easy, too.

Better way to spend your $10k Oracle license fee:

[dasmegabyte]

$0 for a copy of PostgreSQL
$2000 for a firewall
$1000 for a thorough security consultation
$7000 for beer & chicken wings

I suppose posturing and unbelievable claims are what you can expect from a company whose CEO looks like The Rock.

Can't even land his airplane on time.

[billstewart]

When you get to the airport, they want to see your Larry-Ellison-approved National ID Card, or at least several forms of ID, take off your hat, jacket, shoes, belt, cellphone, beeper, PDA, and steel hip joint, and then decide whether to let you ride on the airplane you bought a ticket for. But when Larry Ellison gets to the airport, he gets on his own plane. Does he have to go through the security gate where they check his National ID card and say "Sorry, Mr. Ellison, you've gotten 15 tickets for violating quiet hours at San Jose Airport by landing after midnight, so we're not going to take the Big Orange Boot off your airplane wheel unless you show us a flight plan that gets you in by 11pm?" Not bloody likely.

Bull

[FallLine]

Where did he say he wants _all_ our information in a central database? There is a world of difference between having a reasonably secure national ID system that contains reasonable identification measures and _all_ of information (e.g., habits, medical history, etc) in one system. As much as I find Ellison a despicable person, please do not put words in his mouth or misrepresent the words of anyone that might advocate this. It may well be true that he wants that to sell his product, but that's not the same as actually advocating that. Furthermore, this same argument could be said for MS or the developers of mysql even...

Re:Bull

[FallLine]

We already have a single ID, it's called a social security number. Virtually every legitimate citizen in this country has one. It may not provide positive photographic or biometric ID, but for the purposes of a database, it is every bit as enabling. In other words, this would change nothing in that respect.

Re:Bull

[FallLine]

There may be limits in theory, but the reality is that many places ask for it. e.g., credit card companies. In any event, even if this card had some kind of unique identifier associated with it, those same laws could be put into effect with the same degree of success. What's more, unlike the social security number, a strong photographic ID does not necessarily have a number that companies can use to track you with. If the card is smartcard-like, it may simply give the person reviewing the user/card a one time token to reference an online database with to vouch for the cards integrity.

In any event, the entire discussion is rather academic if you ask me. The simple fact of the matter here is that the vast majority of the public, virtually EVERYONE that companies may want to track, can already be tracked just fine. It's simply not that big of a deal, because the kind of paranoid fantasies of some here offer little but trouble to the companies that have the capability.

English, what has it become?

[kimihia]

Interesting you should mention that they are defining what "unsinkable" should mean. Check out this garbage:

While Oracle's vulnerabilities are no greater in number or severity than those found in other major software products, some experts charge that the steady stream of security holes transforms "unbreakable" from a harmless marketing gimmick into a potentially dangerous misstatement.

They should have said: "Unbreakable compared to Sendmail", or "Unbreakable compared to MS SQL server with the default password". Or how about "Unbreakable compared to BIND"?

Also notice in the quote I pasted the last word: "misstatement".

WTF is a misstatement? The author isn't George Orwell, so there is no reason for him to use DoubleSpeak. It's a lie. Call it what it is and stop being a lying wimp.

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:Buffer Overflows Myth

[Redking]

What programming language would you write them in, instead of C? Pros and cons of each compared to C? Just want to learn, not trolling.

Re:Buffer Overflows Myth

[Tom7]

I answered this question here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25781&threshol d=1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=2804384. There's a lot of info/evangelizing there!

The short version is that any modern high level language (one that is safe) would be good enough regardless of performance (let's say, natively compiled Java) since the network will be the bottleneck for almost all users anyway. But I prefer SML or O'Caml for their superior efficiency on top of their many other nice language features.

If performance and C idioms are really critical, there is also Cyclone, which is essentially C with some extensions and (most importantly) with safety.

Re:Buffer Overflows Myth

[Tom7]

Well, first of all, buffer overflows are far far more serious than denial-of-service attacks, since buffer overflows can lead to a compromise of your system, and DOS attacks do not. Typically, the attacker needs to continually expend resources in order to carry out a DOS attack, as well.

Second, being free from buffer overflows (and other perils of C programming like manual memory management and core dumps) gives you more time to spend looking over your program for other kinds of security problems. This is good, of course.

Java is not the greatest language, for sure, but safe high-level languages ARE the future, whatever they are named.

"very good"?!

[cduffy]

Oracle 8i not only failed to be SQL99 compliant, but wasn't even compliant with SQL92! Certainly it may be scalable (upwards... it sure as hell ain't downwards-scalable) and more reliable than most smaller solutions, but "very good" is not a label I can see applying to a product that doesn't even make a serious effort to be standards-compliant.

Re:Is the gov't still going to use it

[xmedar]

you forgot... and hot_grits=true

Hmm, well....

[truesaer]

When I used to use Oracle it was unbreakable. The only people who had complete access was the DBA and some guy named Scott Tiger....

Re:SQL Server is based on Sybase, right?

[ZxCv]

It was 7.0, IIRC. I certainly do remember using 6.5 and upgrading to 7.0, which was an enormous boost in performance and usability.

Re:All software is breakable -

[rossz]

What an incredibly stupid statement.

I've dealth with Forth programs. They were just as buggy if not more buggy than programs written in REAL languages.

And yes, I know Forth.

My view

[macdaddy]

I think of it this way. If it's written by humans, it's bound to have problems. How many problems depends on the human and how much they care about their project.

Is Larry related to Harlan?

[Reziac]

I mean, they both lead active fantasy lives... and they sound so much alike!

Overclocking with super-cooling systems?

[FortKnox]

Dude. Overclocking with a super-cooling system is sooo 1999!

Re:Overclocking with super-cooling systems?

[plover]

Yeah, but what is its equivalent overclocked speed in Athlon MHz?

Re:Overclocking with super-cooling systems?

[irecleas]

The disparity is caused by the length of the P4 pipeline in relation to the AthlonXP. So it's a ratio. 2000/1600=1.25 or 1600/2000=0.8
So a 3.5GHz P4 is the equivalent of a (3.5*0.8) 2.8GHz Athlon XP

Re:Overclocking with super-cooling systems?

[Ryan Amos]

Not necessarily. There are a large number of factors that go into the "mHz disparity," including cache, memory, fabrication process, voltage, and heat dissipation. If we were to base the "ratios" solely off pipeline stepping, how would that place a PowerPC G4, with a 7 step pipeline, against a P4, with a 20+ step pipeline? Is a new iMac as fast as a P4 2400? I know they're different architectures, but in actuality the Athlon has a LOT in common with the design of the PowerPC.

The "ratios" are a good guess, and will be reasonably accurate, but as a chip heats up it actually gets slower (i.e. it takes more time for an electron to move through the circuit) and the AthlonXP gets a lot hotter than a P4 a lot quicker. My AthlonXP 1700 practically needs its own air conditioning unit (and why most athlon heatsinks weigh more than the reccomended 300 grams) while, from what I hear anyway, the P4s aren't quite as bad (though not exactly frigid.)

Hope it's running the web server...

[shanek]

...it just might be able to take the Slashdotting!

Uh oh...

[CrazyBrett]

AMD had better come out with a new "Athlon XXXP 3500+" to stay competitive! :)

Neat, now how about my box...?

[TellarHK]

Sure, it's great to take the latest and greatest chips out there and boost the heck out of 'em. But what I want to see are some overclocks of things from a while back. Let's see about pumping some juice through a Pentium 100, or even a 6502C in a Commodore 64. Let's REALLY get impatient for actual powerful, stable chips, and take some PowerPC chips to the tank o' coolant.

You also never see anyone talking about overclocking non-x86 architectures. I'd assume this is due to a lack of BIOS with that kind of speed support, and motherboards without jumpers for clock speeds. But why let that stop us, right?

*insert sarcasm drip here, 50ml hourly*

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[hattig]

You can overclock the G4's in the Power Macs if you know how. The multiplier is encoded by some resistors near the CPU on the CPU card, and if you know the layout, you can overclock your 800MHz G4 reliably to 933MHz or even 1GHz. I don't know if you can do the same with the new iMac2, I reckon there is a good chance of it once someone finds out where these resistors are on the motherboard.

Amigans have been overclocking their 68k series processors for years. Witness the 28MHz 68000 for the A500, or the 75MHz 68060s (instead of 50MHz), a 50% overclock easy when decent coolers are added to the equation.

It is harder to overclock the 8-bits, as the rest of the system messes up in many cases, and the video output and audio go haywire. But it has been done (Enterprise 64 in one example, upping the 5MHz Z80 by a MHz or two, or replacing it with ones that do 10's of MHz I believe. Dunno about the C64 or Atari 8-bits though.

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[ocelotbob]

I've seen a few sites here and there about overclocking non-x86 architechtures. To overclock one of the other architechtures is much more difficult, usually involving desoldering the clock chip. Also, most of the overclocking involves CPUs of a few generations prior; you don't overclock that brand new, $10,000 ultrasparc-III, unless you are clinically insane.

One of the few sites I've found where the guy has been insane enough to try overclocking a non PC is obsolyte.org. Even then, he overclocked a fairly old sun from back when they used 68k processors.

Although as a semi-related topic, you also don't see people talking about case mods on their non-PC systems. Am I the only one out there crazy enough to mod a case for a sun? Please tell me someone else has done it.

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[marcop]

C64. Ever heard of the It boosts the 64K/1Mhz C64 to 16MB/20Mhz!

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[Alan Partridge]

loads of people overclock their G3s and G4s you muppet. My G3 400 (Yosemite) runs very sweetly at 550Mhz with no additional cooling, and my G4 400 (Yikes!) runs at 500Mhz. Apple made it more difficult to adjust multiplier with the Sawtooth models onward - so I can't overclock my dual 533 Mystic without soldering :-[, but there's a japanese guy who overclocks EVERY machine Apple brings out. he got the G4 733 (Digital Audio) running at 1066Mhz, and there are several people who have upped the bus speeds on their iBooks recently.

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[larien]

Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running! These systems didn't have the same kind of clock as modern PCs so timing was handled by running NOPs (or whatever). Instead of increased frame rates (or possibly as well as), you have a game running twice the speed! Sometimes you might want that, but you probably don't.

As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[smyle]

Reminds me of an OLD joke:

How do you accelerate a Mac?
9.81 m/s^2

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[rice_burners_suck]

I distinctly remember having the "too fast" problem with games. My all-time favorite game was Demon Stalkers. It had 16 colors! I think it was written for the 25 mhz 386s (or something like that) at the time. I remember trying to play it on my dad's computer, which must have been a 33 mhz, and it was too fast to be playable. Luckily, that computer had a "turbo" button you could push to reduce the speed or something. (How the heck did that work?!)

Anyway, due to hard coded timing, it won't even run on my P-III, P-IIs, Celerons... even my slowest Pentium is way too fast for this game. One of these days, I'll find some old 386 for sale on eBay or somewhere, and that baby is mine, dude!

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[JabberWokky]

As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed.

That's what the "Turbo" button on the front of your case is for.

You do have a Turbo button, right...

--
Evan "What else has disappeared from PCs that I never noticed?" E.

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[jeffb]

The Powerbooks work this way too, except that the resistors involved are smd type instead of the easier to fiddle with ones on the desktop. In fact, on the desktops, you can clock them with a Circuit Works pen and an X-Acto, if you'd prefer not to solder. I've been running my 1st generation iBook (300MHz) at 400MHz for almost 2 years now, and it has worked well since the day I 'clocked it. (processor temp went up an average of only 6F, which is good, since the iBook also doesn't have a fan). The chart reviewing the various combinations of processor speeds and ratios available on the iBooks and Powerbooks is available at The Mystic Room, if you're curious. (or just want to see a 666MHz iBook in the Apple System Profiler, if only for a sec.)

:jeffb Apple Certified Tech

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[Nehemiah S.]

Greg Douglas at www.reputable.com managed to get 240mhz out of an old sgi indy r5k 200, and someone (can't find article) got 300+ out of an indigo II r4400 (orig 200 or 250 mhz). However, both required cheating- replacing clock oscillators, soldering faster memory into the L2 cache spots, etc. It's a bit more involved than just changing a jumper and pouring liquid nitrogen over it...

neh

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[mattbee]

Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running!

The best game this ever happened to was Wipeout 2097-- I think it came out in 1996 or something so they should really have known better, but when playing it on my Celeron 400 with a Voodoo 3 graphics card, it went at about three times the normal speed which is already pretty fringging quickly, as anybody who's played it will testify :-)

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[benwb]

I o/c'ed the 65816 in my Apple IIgs to 20mhz way way back in the day. (It started at 2.7)

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[Lars T.]

Mac Plus Speedup

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[achurch]

As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*

Ever hear of Night Mission Pinball? One of my favorite games when I was younger, but it was written for an IBM PC with an 8086 processor. You know, the old 3.whatever MHz things. Well, I came across it a few years ago while going back through old floppies, and after locating a 5-1/4" floppy drive, booted it on my 200MHz Pentium.

Let's just say that the "ball launch" button turned into the "ball drain" button...

Re:Neat, now how about my box...?

[Alsee]

I want to see are some overclocks of things from a while back.

I bet that with liquid Nitrogen cooling you could crank an ENIAC up to around 5-600 FLOPS!

-

Re:Bah, this link is nothing more than a picture!

[2Bits]

Right, I want technical details on how to do it too.

Look at this CPU, the physical dimension and the heat it generates, are just perfect for making my omelette in the morning.

Looks simple

[GigsVT]

It looks like you just pour the nitrogen into that big metal bucket that sits on the processor. This is more of a novelty than a usable system, I'd bet the nitrogen boils off in less than an hour.

Still, pretty amazing.

whoopie

[hattig]

So, this is probably how Intel demo'ed their 3.5GHz P4 last year. Shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

A 3.5GHz P4 probably would perform like a 2.5GHz Athlon, given the difference in IPC. However, factor in SMT (HyperThreading) into the equation and it gets a lot more interesting. Hammer will have some competition when it comes out, even with a PR rating of 3400+ - the P4 will probably get to 3GHz by the end of this year.

In the end, the consumer is the one to win. But remember, speed in a processor is only good if the rest of the system can keep up with it. Witness i845 (the SDRAM version) as a way of making a fast P4 perform even worse than before.

I am more interested in the upcoming GeForce 4 and R300 chips myself as a way to increase gaming performance - processor power is secondary, as long as it is sufficient. For rendering performance however, I am interested in fast processors, and it looks likely that SMT P4's will rock with Lightwave 7b on a quad CPU board (8 virtual processors!). Not that I could afford one of these anyway, so the point is moot.

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!

Re:whoopie

[Steveftoth]

You know who really wins?

SETI.

Everyone gives them their cpu time, hopefully they are able to use it to the best.

Re:whoopie

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

So, this is probably how Intel demo'ed their 3.5GHz P4 last year. Shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

No: the 3.5GHz P4 Intel demoed at IDF last fall was air-cooled. On the other hand, it was certainly hand-picked from a special run of chips on a boutique process tuned to produce a few very high clocking chips at the expense of overall yield. Which, yes, shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

On the other hand, the fact that they are showing it off is an indication of where they're going. Intel showed of an (air-cooled) 2 GHz P4 at IDF fall '00, and launched the same part, not coincidentally, exactly at IDF fall '01. They showed a 3.5 GHz P4 at IDF fall '01, which means...?

No, they probably won't get one out quite so early (3.0 is more like it), but it'll be here around the end of the year. Incidentally, the top speed of an air-cooled hand-picked chip on a special process is probably more relevant to future clock scaling than that of a Liquid Nitrogen cooled off-the-shelf part, for the simple reason that the process will be tweaked to be more aggressive as time goes on, but the temperature is never going to magically drop to -196 deg C. (And yes, the difference matters, as lower temperatures attack different limiting factors for clock rates than tweaked processes do.)

Those crazy Finns

[milkmandan9]

Are at it too.

Here you can see they've got it to boot at 3.674GHz. The page is in Finnish (I assume), but there's some English text at the bottom too.

Re:Those crazy Finns

[staili]

Damn, you were faster. :)
Here's that english summary from muropaketti:

English summary!

Today we cooled the new Intel Northwood 2,2GHz CPU with liquid nitrogen (LN2 -196C).

The motherboard used in the tests was Asus P4B266 based on the Intel 845 chipset (DDR). There was a voltage modification on the motherboard which allowed the VCore to be raised as high as we needed. The memory module was Crucial PC2100 128MB and memory settings were the fastest possible (CAS 2 2-2-5).

We used a copper bowl on top of the CPU and poured some LN2 into it. It took a while until the CPU temperature started to drop and when it was cold enough, we started the test.

First test was run at 3300MHz (FSB 150MHz) and with no problem at all (VCore 1,9V). The next step was rather high but after raising Vcore to 2,05V Northwood worked stable at 3520MHz (FSB 160MHz). We went on with the tests and finally hit the limit.

We were able to boot to Windows 2000 when the CPU clock frequency was 3675MHz (FSB 167MHz) but we couldn't run any benchmark programs. The highest STABLE CPU clock frequency we were able to reach was 3630MHz (FSB 165MHz). At 3650MHz we were able to run heavy benchmark programs such as SuperPi and Pifast successfully although the VCore was quite high (2,12V). It seems that Pentium 4 can handle it without any conflicts.

Check out the pictures above

I think the 3675MHz Wcpuid-shot we were able to get can be considered as the overclocking world record at this moment (17/01/2002), but I'm pretty sure the Japanese will try to beat it as soon as possible :-)

BTW, Quake 3 Arena was quite fun to play when the CPU was running at 3500MHz! o_O

Take it with a grain of salt

[vlad_petric]

Some components of the P4 core operate at double speed (i.e. in a 2.2GHz processor they would operate at 4.4GHz). It's very difficult to believe (at least for me) that those components could work at 7GHz (2*3.5)

The Raven.

Re:Take it with a grain of salt

[recursiv]

It's very difficult for me not to believe that those components could work at 7GHz(2*3.5). After all, it was posted to /.

Anyway, what makes it hard for you to believe?

link to the most important part

[carlcmc]

the picture of the results that ISNT IN JAPANESE.

Re:Japanese only

[GoRK]

You mean you don't speak Japanese like the rest of us?

You obviously have enough time to waste to post this crap.

Old news

[staili]

And one finnish hw-site has already overclocked 2.2Ghz to 3.675GHz

This strikes me as overkill...

[nherc]

Sure it's neat to see how cold and therefore fast you can make the latest chip run... for a whole couple minutes (until you run out of liquid gas coolant). What I find more interesting, are innovative solutions to cooling CPU's that are practical, stable and last more than one game of Quake.

i'm curious....

[Hadlock]

the processor can only dissapate so much heat through the silicon/whatever and the heat sink. it seems that that is the weakest link, is the connection between the core and the sink itself. would the processor run cooler w/o the heatsink (as it is disapating heat into the liq nitrogen too, that is in turn cooling the core), or does it really need a heatsink at such absurdly low temps? i understand the need for higher surface area to heat ratio concept, but it seems like with temps as low as -250* F or so, that one wouldn't need that 2" square tubing of copper as a heatsink: just stir the liq nitrogen really well :)

as a side note, that site is entirely in japanese. when is babelfish gonna support japanese? all i got out of that was a picture of the boot screen saying 2250 that was undelined in red. i'd mirror it, but i don't see what you would get out of looking at a bunch of pictures that don't seem to support their claim.

Re:i'm curious....

[GoRK]

Um, babelfish does do JE though not particularly well. Out of curiosity, I pulled it up on this site and it was more than adequate.

I've supercooled my Dreamcast

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it runs faster than an X-Box.

Much like this article, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Also, I'm running Linux on my Nokia cellphone. I'll try to post some pictures when I can get my NetBSD digital camera to boot.

Only 3.5GHz?

[repvik]

And this happens 15 minutes after I submitted my story on the Intel Northwood 2,2GHz overclocked to 3675MHz.

http://www.muropaketti.com/artikkelit/cpu/northw oo d2200/ln2/index.phtml

Is 3.5 GHz enough?

[4of12]

I've got a plot showing SPECint2000 vs SPECfp2000 for eight different chips, including the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz.

From the looks of it, overclocking to 3.5 GHz might make the Pentium 4 almost equal in performance to the IBM Power4 running at 1.3 GHz.

Re:Is 3.5 GHz enough?

[TheAwfulTruth]

If the entire use of a processor was crunching SpecInt tests...

Re:Is 3.5 GHz enough?

[SirSlud]

More like, if all the software available on the x86 platform didn't depend on the chipset extentions rather than the raw architechture.

Don't confuse 'real life performance' with 'optimized for SSE/3DNOW/MMX' yadda yadda. Unfortuanetly, even though chips may be raw number crunching daemons (and Photoshop optimized for the G4 absolutely screams (maybe 33% better) over a faster clocked P4 in my first hand experience), and even though people may know that Mgz != speed, I think too many people still fail to remember that much of the percieved 'power' of certain chips come from compiler optmizations for that specific chip, not a lack of power in its competitors or an inability to turn FP and Int performance into 'real world' performance.

That's nothing...

[brogdon]

If I put my Athlon in the microwave, I can get numbers out of it that don't exist in nature.

Re:That's nothing...

[bryan1945]

Metals also conduct (resonate? not sure of the correct term) microwaves so by subjecting a chip to microwaves you induce some serious voltages- to the point of sparking (where the voltage differentials are enough to ionize the air and create an electron flow- a mini lightning bolt). Since chips run at 3.3 volts, you can imagine what a kilo-volt would do to the circuitry.

Re:WTF

[cr@ckwhore]

And on another note...

If I put a piece of copper on my motherboard, took a picture of it, and claimed it was an overclocked Athlon t-bird running at 6 gHz cooled by moon rocks, would it get posted?

Re:Bah, this link is nothing more than a picture!

[jarodss]

Easy, take the case of your system, take a big ass hollow copper tube, with a sealed copper base of course.
Secure the base to the processor die with some arctic silver or other compound of your choice and some rope, wouldn't want a catsicle when fluffy knocks over your box.
Fill said copper tube with liquid nitrogen, and a steady drip from your nitrogen storage container, it turns gaseous really fast.
Boot system, enter bios, overclock to your hearts desire.
(Just don't forget to take pictures of the rig, and take the heat sink off in a video would be cool too, I'd love to see a P4 3.5 drop the heat sink and become a P4 500Mhz or whatever in half a second.

Speed is no longer important

[wiredog]

Well, if you're factoring large primes it is, but for 99.99% of us it's a non-issue. After all, when was the last time you heard someone talk about spreadsheet recalculation times?

Re:Speed is no longer important

[Joe U]

Isn't 3.5GHz the minimum speed requirement for the latest Everquest expansion?
That and a spare 2 GB of RAM.

Re:Speed is no longer important

[Rude Turnip]

/me raises his hand. Last year I would have agreed with you, however. When you start getting into spreadsheets with over 11,000 rows and a dozen or so fields in each row and the need to analyze all that data, one starts to appreciate having something faster than a Pentium I 200.

Re:Speed is no longer important

[Lionel Hutts]

Son, do we need to remind you exactly how little power one needs to factor primes?

Re:Speed is no longer important

[aardvarkjoe]

You wouldn't believe how slow those spreadsheets can get when they get large enough. It's almost to the point where I think I might upgrade my IIe.

Re:Speed is no longer important

[jonbrewer]

Civ III is an absolute dog on my Athlon 800, which just 18 months ago was so incredibly fast.

Civ CTP is insane on my PC, just amazing speed. Age of Empires runs 1280*1024 with 1000 pieces on the board (five empires with 200 player max) I think this also is insane. AOE was the reason I bought the Athlon. :-)

But Civ III, alas, is slow as shit in winter. 800 MHz (with 512MB RAM and a 32MB TNT2 and IBM disks) isn't fast enough anymore.

So, speed is still important.

I'm amazed

[k98sven]

That the thing still functions at 77 Kelvin.
Incredible that the motherboard doesn't break, at that low
temperature, the resin should undergo a phase transition and become very, very brittle.

(Some notes for all those D.I.Y.ers out there:
Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than milk.
Short-circuits can't occur, N2 doesn't conduct.)

Although why he used nitrogen and not dry ice, which is cheaper, easier to handle, and probably
better for these purposes, beats me.

Re:I'm amazed

[drodver]

Liquid nitrogen has a bigger neato factor. Although having dry ice smoke coming out of your PC would be pretty neat.

Re:I'm amazed

[neurojab]

Yes. Please add salt. Lots and lots of salt.

Re:I'm amazed

[Alsee]

poured liquid nirogen in his mouth and spit it out almost instantly to form a shower of Ice crytals Im assuming was his saliva , with no ill effects.

Hehe. I used to get dry ice for my parties...

I used to swallow dry ice chips, with a chaser to wash it down. The chips sublimate back to a large quantity of CO2. It pretty much guarantees victory in a burping contest.

Disclaimer:
Trying this at home is probably even more stupid than trying the "spitting liquid nitrogen" trick. If you screw up spitting liquid nitrogen, you'll probably just destroy a bunch of tissue in your mouth - like your tongue for example. If you screw up swallowing dry ice (or liquid nitrogen either for that matter) you can destroy internal tissue - perhaps something important, and potentially worse you could cause an internal pressure rupture. Kinda like you're own little pressure bomb in your chest. Hmmm, Alien anyone?

-

Case Modding

[TellarHK]

Hey, now that's a pretty cool thought. This nice little Sparc Classic I just got up and running a couple weeks ago... Hmmm... A little neon, a window... One of those biohazard stickers, maybe a marble paint job. Oh yeah, baby. A SMOKIN' 50Mhz Sparc.

I sense a new website coming, someday... somewhere.

slow mobo

[cweber]

You can overclock all you want, but to have an all around fast system you need the appropriate data channels to feed data to this smoking hot CPU. Although bus standards and real, available PC motherboards have gotten a lot better in the past few years, a PC still tends to slow down terribly when given a huge data load to crunch on.

Personally, I still prefer purpose-built well balanced Unix workstations, despite their higher price tag. But then, I am a scientist and not a gamer.

Compare it to an Athlon

[scott1853]

I got a P4 1.4GHz at work a few weeks ago. I have a Athlon 800MHz at home. The RC5 client from distributed.net runs at 2.9 Mkeys/s on my home system. My machine at work only runs the client at a whopping 2.4 MKeys. So based on my result, a 3.5GHz P4 would be like a 1.8GHz Athlon.

Flaming/joking aside - anybody know why the RC5 client does so poorly on a P4 compared to a much slower Athlon?

Re:Compare it to an Athlon

[kawaichan]

Do you want to konw why P4 is slower than Athlon? Probably one of the main reason is not the subsystem in your case, since RC5 only utilizes your CPU, P4 has a longer pipeline than your Athlon, making the CPU doing less calculation per clock.

Long Pipeline does have an advantage however, longer the pipeline usually mean higher Mhz.

Re:Compare it to an Athlon

[rograndom]

And my 450 mhz G4 cube does about 4 MKeys, so a 3.5GHz P4 is like a 650mhz G4, or much slower than the new iMacs. ouch.

lies, damn lies, etc.

Re:Compare it to an Athlon

[rschwa]

P4 lacks a certain shift instruction in hardware, it's emulated, and it's the biggest part of the rc5 algorithm.

Re:Compare it to an Athlon

[GauteL]

The P4 also has a less advanced FPU. When it comes to RC5 I guess there aren't as many clever little tricks you can use (like SSE), as the case is in 3d-graphics, so Athlon wins on brute force since it has a much better FPU.

Re:Compare it to an Athlon

[rschwa]

I'm not sure. From The Dnet FAQ

Integral to the mathematics of the RC5 algorithm are 32-bit rotate operations. For whatever reason, the designers of the IA32 (32bit Intel x86) and the PowerPC architectures decided to implement the rotate function as a hardware instruction.

Many other CPUs do not have built-in hardware rotate instructions and must emulate the operation by (at the very least) two shifts and a logical OR. This handicap is why many non-32bit-Intel [1] and non-PowerPC computers run RC5 slower than one might expect based on real-world benchmarks. It is also the main reason why the RC5 client is a poor benchmark to use in determining the speed or performance of a particular CPU.

[1] The IA32 architecture is that used by the Intel 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4 processors. The Pentium 4 does not however have a hardware rotate instruction.

(emphasis mine)

Well, yeah

[wiredog]

But the newer processors, 800MHz and faster, are what I'm talking about. Modern systems are I/O bound, and likely to remain that way. Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?

Re:Well, yeah

[achurch]

Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?

You do if you're holding a lungful of air in the total vacuum of space.

Re:Well, yeah

[jonbrewer]

What, you think the heart of gold's improbability drive actually bothers with recompiles? it turns missles into potted geraniums and sperm whales, for g-d's sake.

It'll pluck you out of space by 30th second no matter what.

Who needs nitrogen?

[GeekLife.com]

homemade nitrogen cooling system overclocked a P4 from 2.2Ghz to an incredible 3.5ghz.

Quick tip on "overclocking" from Ghz (Gigahertz) to ghz (gravity hertz): Throw your machine out the window. To get to decent speeds, you'll want to be at least on the 4th floor or above.

(Alternate tip: to perceptively increase GHz, throw the Windows out of your machine)

oops

[wiredog]

I meant "find prime factors". And I was a math major, too. Hope Prof. Heath isn't reading this thread.

Overclocking Pitfalls

[Rice-Pudding]

Speaking as someone who does digital design: I would *never* overclock a chip on a system that I wanted to be reliable unless I knew that the manufacturer was deliberately marketing their chips at a lower speed than they were capable of. There are just too many ways that this can bite you.

The main problem is that you just don't know when you have gone over the line. Overclocking might be suitable in most cases except that one critical path which doesn't get executed very much.

That being said, for getting the latest gaming system, overclock to your heart's content. Who cares if the game crashes once in a while?

now he just needs more bandwidth

[liquidsin]

It'd be nice to run the web server on that 3.5 Ghz, but without more bandwidth, you're still slashdotted...

My first OC experience - Mac IIsi

[joeflies]

The Mac IIsi, a 20mhz 68030 machine internally looked very similar to the Mac IIci 25 mhz machine. People got around to just soldering in a new socket to swap in a new clock chip.

I broke open my $1800 mac, trusting my non-existant soldering skills and did it, and a $20 upgrade for 25% extra performance was really something. I could almost run Marathon on it :>)

I sneer at the BIOS OCers, if it doesn't require solder then I don't want it :>)

Maybe a little rusty...

[Lxy]

My Japanese is a little.. well, ok, I don't know any but I gather from this picture and this picture that 3 Ghz isn't all that hard to do. Apparently an array of copper heatsinks and a few extra fans can squeeze that extra speed without the use of nitro. This looks like a much more efficient way to cook an omelette than the posted nitro method.

Re:Japanese only

[Lxy]

I have little time to look at nothing more than a booklet of pretty pictures

If your time is so valuable, why do you read /. in the first place?

G3 overclocking - all the rage.

[Elazro]

Not only can you overclock PowerPCs, but when G3 upgrade cards came out for older PowerMacs, some (notably PowerLogix) had thumbwheels on them to control bus speed/multiplier settings. No yanking of boards, no dropping jumpers into the dark recesses of the case. Shutdown, rotate the dials, startup.

Overclocking for the rest of us.

-matt

OC'ing 486 boxen to play Doom...

[bgarcia]

I remember overclocking an extra 486 box I had lying around so that it would play doom at a decent rate.

But I didn't overclock the processor - I overclocked the ISA bus!

The standard speed for an ISA bus is about 8 MHz, but my motherboard had jumpers for running it at different speeds. I had that baby running at 20MHz, and was lucky enough to find an ISA video card and network card that could run at that speed!

It really helped bump up the FPS when playing doom. <g>

Re:Other overclocking

[Omnibus]

There is a Palm app called "afterburner" that is used to overclock palm based pda's.

Be Careful!

[Kozz]

I think these guys are getting dangerously close to cause irreparable harm to the universe as discussed here.

their edge was being in Finland in January

[2ms]

Pretty much all you have to do to set overclocking records in Finland is put a jacket on and open a window.

(OT) crazy moderation!

[A nonymous Coward]

Insightful? Informative? Did those two even follow the link? Presumably the Funny moderator did.

Sheeeet, I oughta donate all my karma to something usful, like advancements in cheese spreads.

The Mhz Myth

[nihilist_1137]

Here is a Apple Video of the megahetz myth. It basically explains why a bigger Mhz doesnt always mean more perforance when it comes to things like pipeline length and recursive instructions.

Wow!

[mindstrm]

Nice experiment. Very nerdy.

So where does one obtain LN2 for experimentation?

Re:WTF

[bonk]

Not only would it get posted, it would get reposted 6 months from now as a ground breaking story.

That's great...

[Bunkryrass]

... now how about some faster hard drives? Seriously I sit in front of my P4 1.7, and my T-Bird 800, which both have extremely fast hardware, but I wait for the hard drive to load large graphics, save files, etc... When do we get 10,000 RPM Hard drives? What happened to Serial IDE? Wasn't that supposed to be the next big thing? A hard drive spinning at 7200 RPM, and transfer rates of 100 MB/s really are a huge bottleneck now. And don't say we don't need anything faster than that, I'm pretty sure we don't need anything faster than 2GHz for our home computers either... I don't have enough money for Fibre Channel... would be nice though.

PowerPC overclocking

[Paladeen]

You can actually overclock quite a lot of Mac systems, way back to the 68k's.

F.e. you can OC the original iMacs (don't know about the new ones, but I had one running on 300Mhz, up from 233), the G4 Sawtooths and quite a bit of the older machines and clones.

However, this often requires soldering on or removing transistors on the motherboard, as is the case with todays G4s.

One notable exception to this are the PowerMacs based on the Yosemite motherboard (Blue & White G3 and the Yikes! PowerMac G4, which had a modified Yosemite). They have transistors on the motherboard and its remarkably easy to change the bus speed and clock speed.

For a good source on Mac overclocking, check out www.xlr8yourmac.com.

Liquid Nitrogen sources

[Raetsel]

Try your local welding gas store.

IIRC, LN2 is a byproduct of Liquid Oxygen production. It's a happy coincidence, so it's relatively cheap.

The refridgerators to make it aren't, though. So you end up pouring a constant stream of it into your system, and being plugged into their 'scheduled delivery' system worse than a crack addict.

That's when it gets expensive.

• "Oh, you don't want your precious computer to melt? I've got just the thing! Now... what are you going to do for me...?"

Just kidding... they're not quite that bad. Close, though.

LH?

[caveat]

i've played a little bit with cryogenics in Phys Chem lab, and while LN2 rocks, liquid helium is an order of magnitude colder (4K vs. 77K, also $14.99 a liter, $0.89/L for LN2)...begging the question, what would happen if you used liquid helium to cool your system? iirc, silicon is a superconductor at 4K. would the superconductivity short out the chip (by making the substrate conductive), or would you be able to crank it up to any speed you want, say a few THz? (/no/ resistance = /no/ heat) it'd be a real bitch to manage, and you'd have to sink your whole motherboard in the very-well-insulated LH (but then eveything would be @ 4K and superconducting...hmm...1GHz FSB?), but could it work?

just a little food for thought.

Re:LH?

[bryan1945]

I don't think pure silicon superconducts at all since it is a natural insulator, meaning no electron flow. There are just no spare electrons to push around. However, doped silicon (hey, man, pass it around! sorry, bad joke) could become a superconducter.

As for speed, the absolute speed limit is the speed of light, but electrons are inhibited by their mass. There is an equation for this, but I forget it right now.

Also, at these crazy speeds, you now have to take into account the switching speeds of the transistors in the chips. They are fast, but they are limited, no matter how cold they are.

Another side effect that most people have missed is that if you cool this chips and boards to extremely cold temps, they become very, very brittle. I'm not sure how brittle, but how funky would it be to sneeze and watch your mobo shatter?!

What about underclocking?

[slickwillie]

Why don't you guys ever have any articles on underclocking? Are underclockers really that bad? What are some of the advantages of underclocking?

- Underclock a 2.0GHz to 1.0Ghz, and you can throw away your CPU fan.

- Underclock to 500MHz and you can get rid of your case fan.

- Underclock to 4.77Mhz and you can run older versions of Fligh Simulator.

- Underclock to 4.0 MHz and you can pretend you are running a Z80.

- Underclock too 100KHz and you can actually watch your instructions exeecute.

Re:What about underclocking?

[collar]

Underclocking is actually usefull. I used to work for a company that used embedded PC hardware, we used to routinely underclock chips when we knew that they would be going into very hot climates or in places where the ventilation would be poor.

Re:What about underclocking?

[Alsee]

Underclock too 100KHz

Heh. You're just another wannabe underclocker.

A real underclocker wires up his own hardware. Scavange a wall switch, mount it on the side of your keyboard, and run a line to the CPU CLOCK-IN.

.31337 Hurts

-

Pentium 100

[ImaLamer]

This reminds me that when the pentiums first came out that rumors were flying that those machines would need Liquid N.

Kinda funny considering the work that is needed to get Liquid N, and the work needed to OC these chips.

To OC my classic Athlon I need to do a lot of work... not worth it considering it's more than enough speed.

How to underclock ?

[Taco Cowboy]

I _really_ wish I can underclock my system (AMD XP 1900+)

But how ?

My mobo doesn't permit me to underclock it to 100 KHz.

At least, I don't think it'd go that low.

Re:Funny that you mention those things 'cause...

[leuk_he]

I just installed Forms 4.5 for someone yesterday. No crash. No patch.

What version of installer are you using? 3.1 (No c. in the end). Then try start up "orainst.exe" and see it crash when adding some software component.

40 Oracle 7.3.4 servers (39 production, one test)

this is important:
7.3.4.0 or 7.3.4.4? (if it is 7.3.4.0 you should really upgrade to 7.3.4.4)

They all have PL/SQL based forms (somewheres around 40-50 forms,
Oracle forms: then your pl/sql is version 1 and that does not even support plsql records. Let alone you could crash something. PL/SQL( server based )had some very specific bugs in 7.3.4. They were solve in 7.3.4.1, but introduced some "features" in database links.

By the way 7.3.4 is now more or less unsoprted by oracle. If you find any bugs their respons will be: upgrade.
I also use Designer 2000 with no problems, though I'm not sure of the version
I understand you are not aware of the subversions, but if you are not sure if you are running a 1.2, 1.3, 1.6 or 2.0 release then i do not beleive you really use it.

Never had a "bye-bye instance" (in the 14 months I've been involved, anyway).
Never had a bye bye isstance on production either. But on test/development i sure had some. and then i do not mean a bye bye isstance because some dumb administator rm -f Some oracle file or disk crash.

I could produce a much longer list on oracle bugs. but i must add this product can be made very stable in the end. Something i can not say from a Microsoft access based Database.

Bugs

[Tony-A]

All non-trivial programs have bugs.
With the possible exception of some stuff by Donald Knuth.

Intel had a problem with division on some of their chips. That stuff is well defined and analyzed extremely carefully, but occasionally something slips through the cracks. Software always tends to be buggier than hardware.

Having bugs is not the same as a user being able to encounter one. Mostly they lurk in the shadows waiting for a chance encounter with another bug. If a user encounters a bug, there are usually at least two bugs in the program that are responsible.

Re:This is just what

[tcd004]

Wow. there's got to be some kind of award for racking up this much moderation:

Moderation Totals: Offtopic=3, Insightful=1, Informative=1, Funny=4, Overrated=1, Total=10.

tcd004

Re:Whoops!

[Tony-A]

Considering the aftereffects of the guys that see the "Yes, you can", snicker "Oh yes we can", and can do, there's gonna be some people flying.
Off the handle that is ;-)