Slashback: Moon Footage, KillerNic, ZFS Leopard

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories including: some direct answers to Slashdot questions on the KillerNIC, recap in stolen laptop identity theft problems, a victory for one PayPal user, missing moon footage surfaces, Dell laptops unwelcome on Quantas flights, and more ZFS news from the Leopard front Read on for details.

Direct answers to Slashdot KillerNIC questions. Emptynest writes "A bit over a week ago, Slashdot linked a story on GDHardware.com and it was filled with a bunch of 'hard questions from the Slashdot Community" regarding Bigfoot Network's pending 'killer' Network card that promises to reduce in-game lag. It looks as if Bigfoot isn't backing down and has hand-picked several of the questions from the Slashdot Community and answered them in a new article."

Recap of stolen laptop identity theft. Kn10 writes to tell us Technibble has a brief recap of some of the major laptop thefts resulting in personal information being leaked from major organizations. From the article: "According to the FBI, laptop theft is the second most common computer crime and less than 2 percent of those stolen laptops are ever recovered. Four in five (81%) of US firms have had at least one laptop stolen containing sensitive information according to a recent study."

A victory for on PayPal user. Not-So-Anonymous Coward writes "According to his site, 'silic0nsilence', who was featured in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600, has won his long battle with PayPal Fraud. On August 15th, 2006 in Small Claims court, he was awarded $671.12 after almost a year-long war with PayPal and a user. He also successfully won a small claims suit against PayPal to commence in his case with the user."

Missing moon footage surfaces. denis-The-menace writes "Film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film. He had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimeter film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue"

Dell laptops unwelcome on Quatas flights. Thomas Henden writes "The Australian airline company Quantas, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, banned the in-flight use of Dell laptops on battery power. The security personnel even went so far as taping over the contacts in the batteries according to an agreement between Dell and Qantas. However the security is now somewhat relaxed — all you need to do now, is to get in touch with the personal aboard, and tell you want to use your Dell laptop, and then you will be 'advised individually.'"

More ZFS new from the Leopard front. nezmar writes "From the AppleInsider forum comes an interesting discovery about Sun's ZFS and Apple. A user who has the Leopard developer preview searched the system with Spotlight and found a mention of ZFS. He says: 'There is no file system bundle for it, nor is there a mount utility or any other one (no fsck, now newfs, etc.). There is, however, a changed vnode.h.' Looks like the story back in May might have some truth after all."

Comments

PayPal article

[ackthpt]

You have to go to here and click on the link. Otherwise you get a WMD parody.

Re:PayPal article

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Or you can just go here. There's an extra / at the end of the posted URL.

And the WMD thing is from an old meme.

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

From here, they fly North for the winter.

I didn't say anything about winter.

. . . it's because they have magnets in their heads. . .

The magnet is the earth. Not all birds have the iron to make use of it for navigation; apparently relying on good ole VFR. Navigation methods do not address the metaissue of why they fly south.

KFG

KillerNIC responds

[User 956]

So from their response, It's clear that not only does their marketing department design and develop their products, but they also perform most traditional functions, such as put together fluff non-answers for web "interviews".

Re:KillerNIC responds

[ivan256]

*cough*

Describing the benefits of a TCP offload engine as the answer to a question about how they can claim reduced UDP latency is fluff. It's like the magician getting you to look at his assistant's chest while he moves a hidden card to the top of the deck.

Besides, TCP offload is a technology to increase throughput, not to reduce latency.

We are agreed that TCP is not UDP, right?

Re:KillerNIC responds

[snowgirl]

While worms/viruses/etc are always a concern, Killer uses Linux built-in permission and security systems to help protect against this. In addition, users have complete control to choose which FNApps run on their card.

Linux is not immune to worms, it all depends on the apps that are running in the background. If *their* code is crappy, then it can break down the Linux permissions, and voila, worm. And while users may have complete control to choose which FNApps run on their card... um... they already have that option on real PCs, yet things get run without them knowing. Spyware and Adware are things that work around issues such as "you choose what to run".

This is also neglecting the idea of a root kit, such that an app could hide itself from the user.

This can yield multi-millisecond benefits, even on the fastest of today's computers.

Ok, now granted this is a Mac to a Linux box, but:

23 packets transmitted, 23 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.169/0.230/0.416/0.074 ms

This is between two computers on a gigabit network through a switch. Now, please, explain to me how I'm supposed to be expecting these multi-millisecond benefits from bypassing the UDP stack? I mean, if he seriously would like to tax me on this, I suppose I could write a UDP ping program and prove that my network gets that sort of a response regularly even over UDP.

And as the perfect finale, their question number 1 was from me:

1) Seriously, who else but a marketing department would think that it's a good idea to trademark a name describing everything "new" that your product does? And the page is so full of TLAs (three letter acronyms) that you need a glossary to read it.

Bigfoot: Virtually all technology companies trademark their features, including Intel, AMD, nVidia, Razer, and us! But we understand you want to understand the technology, so check out Killer's new product page at our website. You will find that it is much more detail driven in terms of how the technology works. Also, you'll find plenty of meat in our FAQ here.

I'd like to point out that my issue was that they're trademarking EVERYTHING, not just NetBurst, or SSE, or AltiVec, etc, or any other of the individual names that companies have thrown out to describe their new products. But when I look at an ad for a product and there literally is nothing describing the card or product that doesn't have a little (tm) next to it, I get suspicious.

When you have to go to such great lengths to make something sound so totally rad, that's usually the biggest indication that something is wrong with it.

As a personal rule of thumb: the slimier the salesman, the more seriously you need to consider what he's trying to offer you.

If they feel that they have to trademark a word "MaxFPS(tm)" that provides absolutely no information about what it does, rather than just say "Network Process Offloading" be warry.

Oh, and then the creativity of all their new trademarks. I mean, they're just words squished together. It's not like you're getting a cool name like "NetBurst" or "AltiVec" or something new, no, you get "PingThrottle", and "GameFirst", or "UltimatePing". Who did they have working as the creative director on these names? Nim Chimpsky? They are so uninteresting, and bland, that it just smacks of "We didn't want to even try to be cool, because we didn't care."

Personally, I for one welcome our new NetworkOverlords(tm), with their NiftyTrademarks(tm), with their SuperCreativity(tm).

Tell you what Bigfoot, send me a KillerNIC to review, and we'll start talking about if any of your lame lame lame marketing is worth anything at all. Until then, I'll slam it anytime I can. With my patent pending HyperDis(tm) technology.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[0xygen]

*cough*

You will actually find that TOE frequently refers to TCP/IP Offload Engine, which includes the IP packet checksum. If this is quick enough, it would indeed also improve the latency, as less (slower) code has to be run in the OS IP stack (although I certainly agree with you that this would most likely not be noticable in a gaming environment).

TCP is indeed not UDP, however the IP checksum falls under TCP/IP.

bigfoot networks

[larry bagina]

I can't be the only who thinks of goatse when I see the bigfoots network logo...

you think that's bad?

[User 956]

You should see the logo for Westnet Broadband in Australia.

WTF

[Phantom100]

The airline said that although passengers would be allowed to carry their Dells either as checked or cabin baggage, they could only use them on battery power or through the aircraft power supply available in some first and business class cabins once they have first removed the batteries from the unit.

How does someone run on battery power with the battery removed?

Re:WTF

[Shadow Wrought]

The airline said that although passengers would be allowed to carry their Dells either as checked or cabin baggage, they could only use them on battery power or through the aircraft power supply available in some first and business class cabins once they have first removed the batteries from the unit.

You can use the battery, or use the cord, but you can't use both.

Re:WTF

[Pinky3]

The word you didn't read was OR.

You may use it with a battery in it. OR you may use it with a power cord and no battery in it.

You may not use it with a power cord and a battery in it, i.e. no charging.

Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[khasim]

In TCP/IP world, CPU utilization has been known to be dramatically reduced by offload technologies, but the biggest benefits of Killer come from its unique 'hardware network stack'. This literally bypasses the Windows network stack and uses hardware interrupts to get data directly to the game, skipping tons of queuing, and 'software interrupts' that are common with the operating system's network stack.

Yes, that is your claim.

But the "network stack" is a bit more complex than you seem to be implying. I'm sure that most people here are familiar with the old OSI model:

Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical

Now, explain how those "hardware interrupts" substitute for the processing that needs to happen.

I'm not saying that the Windows TCP/IP stack could not stand some optimization. I'm sure that it could.

I just don't see how claiming "hardware interrupts" are the solution is an answer if you don't explain how those "hardware interrupts" handle the processing and where/when they are called.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[A nonymous Coward]

I think all they've done is replace a general purpose PC network stack with a dedicated one on the NIC. They get to optimize the stack, they get to avoid general OS interruptions, they avoid PCI latency, but not much else. Good for a millisecond or two, maybe.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Trogre]

You forgot the top layer in the OSI stack:

8: Operator

So many network problems I've had to troubleshoot have been tracked to layer 8.

Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[GreyKnight]

Now, explain how those "hardware interrupts" substitute for the processing that needs to happen.

The problem here, is that they aren't actually attempting to answer the questions, just produce the appearance of answering the questions, for the benefit of their target demographic (who likely don't understand either side of the exchange).

They also managed to get another link posted from slashdot in the process. *Cough*.

From the "answers":

This can yield multi-millisecond benefits, even on the fastest of today's computers.

The ping time to my firewall, (a Pentium classic, underclocked to 75 MHz), is ~0.45 ms. Pretty hard to make a multi-millisecond improvement on that.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[schon]

I really like how the question being answered specifically related to UDP nothing about TCP.

Actually, my favouite part was that he ignored the fact that clients and servers have vastly different requirements - namely that servers process much more network data.

"Oh, it's useful on a server, therefore it must be useful on a client!"

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Svartalf]

You don't avoid PCI latency- you STILL have to cross the bus.
You don't avoid hardware interrupts- HOW do you let the OS know that you've sent the data or got it?
Optimizing the stack- optimizing WHAT? It's allegedly speeding up UDP traffic; there's little to "optimize" there.

I'd buy TCP Offload maybe needing to be done- for 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware. I should know;
I work with that sort of hardware for a client. UDP's not needing diddly at any lower speeds than that-
the offloads that make sense and work are scatter-gather DMA of the packet instead of needing an assembly
buffer and checksum calculation. Most modern cards worth their salt do this already.

They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the
problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're
allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be
but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.

Not much of a victory, and nought to do with paypa

[A nonymous Coward]

Near as I can tell, his victory is a small claims court win against the buyer who claimed a fraudulent chargeback. Not only is paypal not a direct part of that victory, it's a pretty small victory, since he still has to collect payment, and that is much harder than merely showing up in small claims court with your opponent missing. He still intends to pay off NCO and paypal, so they won't lose much at all from his "victory".

Qantas flights and Dell

[wonk]

I took a Qantas flight yesterday and can confirm they are not allowing Dell computers to be used on their planes. They didn't actually ask people indidivually if they had a Dell, but part of the pre-takeoff announcement was "Dell laptop computers must not be used at any time on this aircraft".

ZFS Port

[joe_bruin]

ZFS is an amazing file system. However, despite both Solaris and OSX having POSIX semantics and BSD heritage, porting ZFS to OSX is not a simple matter as, for example, porting UFS or EXT2 would be*. ZFS consumes the block driver, the volume manager, and the RAID layer into one giant entity. It further adds things like FS snapshots, compression, and dynamically resizable partitions that OSX may not be prepared to handle. If this is happening, it will take time. Lots of time. But hopefully, they'll do it. ZFS addresses shortcomings present in most (not-so-)modern file systems.

* example only, I imagine these exist already.

Re:ZFS Port

[PygmySurfer]

Dtrace has already been integrated into Leopard, which I thought was pretty impressive. I imagine its not as complex as ZFS, but, I still think its quite the accomplishment.

That said, I hope ZFS makes it to Leopard. And FreeBSD.

Re:No 'U' in Quantas

[kfg]

It is an acronym . . . not a word.

Laser, radar, scuba. . .

KFG

DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA can now join the legion of other corps/organisations that have had their content rescued solely because an untrusted third party just happened to have a non DRM-locked copy lying around (The BBC is famous for this). It would be very interesting to see what sort of licencing regime Peter Clifton will require in order to return the footage NASA. Alternatively this could be a case of DRM 'do as I say not do as I do' and NASA will just be given the unencumbered media to copy and distribute.

As an aside - is this footage in the public domain? If it isn't, this would be a unique opportunity to have the footage placed there. Original licencing agreements with NASA last century really don't matter anymore if you have to only copy of the footage. (This from a very pragmatic perspective, not a legal one).

Queansland?

[Peter Simpson]

That'd be Queensland, mate.

Dark Side of the Moon

[Rob T Firefly]

Film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film.

Strangely enough, it turns out that the moon landing footage syncs up perfectly with "The Wizard of Oz."

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[Nefarious Wheel]

Strangely enough, it turns out that the moon landing footage syncs up perfectly with "The Wizard of Oz

What are the sync points? Curious from a multimedia production pov.

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, one of them is that when Neal first sets foot on the moon, he says, "I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[tepples]

Nefarious Wheel asked for the sync points between The Wizard of Oz and something else. Here they are.

No so fast

[plutonium83]

From what I remember, wasn't an entire COLLECTION of apollo footage missing? I'm glad they found at least one reel, but what about the others?

Re:No so fast

[unity]

Not so fast? If you had taken the time to RTFA and not posted so fast perhaps you would have come across this quote:

"It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist."

Re:Quantas?

[CaptainCarrot]

If they want it spelled right, they should stop pronouncing it as if there was a "u" in there. It should be "q" as in "Qatar".

KillNIC??

[Monoman]

So I read some of the KillerNIC stuff because it was news to me. I wound up on http://www.endlagnow.org/ELN/TakeAction_TopTips.as px and found it hilarious. Let's see some of their first two tips for reducing lag.

1. CONNECT DIRECTLY TO THE NET
2. TURN OFF YOUR ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

Yeah I'm gonna get right on that.

Re:KillNIC??

[Tim Browse]

I also liked their amazingly intuitive suggestion that was doubtless the fruit of much in-depth research:

6. CHOOSE THE SERVER WITH THE LOWEST PING

No kidding, professor!

Oh the Irony

[geekoid]

of "Captain Carrot" giving spelling corrections.

What next, Nobby giving advice on hygiene? Rincewind talking about the virtues of a famous last stand?

Re:Oh the Irony

[CaptainCarrot]

Im nawt korrexting the sppeling. Im korrrecting the pronunnseeashen.

ZFS on FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

porting ZFS to OSX is not a simple matter as, for example, porting UFS or EXT2 would be

The start of a port to FreeBSD has been started, and after ten days there has been demonstratable progress:

I can already mount ZFS-created file systems (with 'zfs create'
comman), create files/directories, change permissions/owner/etc., list
directories content, and perform few other minor operation.

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/ 2006-August/004609.html

Of course you're generally correct: ZFS goes into 'layers' that have been treated as separate parts, but given the resources Apple has, it's very possible it won't be too difficult, as it's a port and not actually creating it from scratch.

Meet Detective Bookman of the NASA Library

[craXORjack]

CLIFTON: Oh, I'm glad you're here, so we can get this all straightened out. Would you like a cup of tea?

BOOKMAN: You got any orange drink?

CLIFTON: Orange drink?

BOOKMAN: Yeah. Orange drink.

CLIFTON: No, I don't drink orange drink.

BOOKMAN: Yeah, you don't drink orange drink? How about instant orange drink?

CLIFTON: No, I don't...

BOOKMAN: You don't have any instant Tang?

CLIFTON: Well, I don't normally--

BOOKMAN: Who doesn't have instant Tang?

CLIFTON: I don't.

BOOKMAN: You buy a jar of Tang, you put it in the cupboard, you forget about it. Then later on when you need it, it's there. It lasts forever. It's freeze-dried. Freeze-dried orange drink.

CLIFTON: Really? I'll have to remember that.

BOOKMAN: You took the moon landing movie out in 1979.

CLIFTON: Yes, and I returned it in 1979.

BOOKMAN: Yeah, '79. That was my first year on the job. Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, the Betamax decision letting everybody steal movies. I don't judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the NASA Film Library, fella.

CLIFTON: Look, Mr. Bookman. I--I returned that movie. I remember it very specifically.

BOOKMAN: You're a Rock cinematographer, you entertain people, make them have fun.

CLIFTON: I try.

BOOKMAN: You think this is all big fun, don't you?

CLIFTON: No, I don't.

BOOKMAN: I saw your name in the credits once; I remembered your name--from my list. I looked it up. Sure enough, it checked out. You think because you're a celebrity that somehow the law doesn't apply to you, that you're above the law?

CLIFTON: Certainly not.

BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, music fun boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "NASA Film Library"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about old moon movies for? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid renting a movie, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding X rated porn taped over the middle of The Dark Crystal and Finding Nemo? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing movies, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to borrow a movie without getting his mind warped! Or: maybe that turns you on, Clifton; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over. Y'got seven days, Clifton. That is one week!

Re:Was all Apollo footage lost or just Apollo 11?

[Scutter]

I don't know about *high quality*, but you can access a WEALTH of moon landing information, including radio transmission transcripts, astronaut commentary, mission logs, photos, and tons of video from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

NASA and copyright.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

NASA imagery is normally copyright-free, as government documents produced at government expense.

Some matierials produced by NASA may have copyrights. (For instance: movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere).

More a NASA web site.

The REAL killer app for KillerNIC

[illumin8]

Ok, I'm in total agreement with everyone that the KillerNIC is smoke and mirrors. From my linux host, pinging my default gateway, I'm getting times of roughly 0.135ms... that's 135 micro-seconds. How in the hell is there any way to improve that? My Windows gaming box reports 1ms, but that's probably because it doesn't get any more granular than that. Even if they could reduce that latency to zero (impossible, because electricity/light doesn't travel that fast), no human can respond that fast anyway, so what's the use?

I especially like this part of one of their answers:

Simply running the 'ping' program is not sufficient, because it does not use your Network stack which can introduce tons of added latency.

WTF? The ping program does use the network stack; how else would it talk with the network? ICMP is still a protocol that needs to be encapsulated with a header and traverse down through your stack to the wire...

The only people that will be using this card are losers that have more money than brains, and cheaters. Yes, that's right, once again, cheating is the REAL killer app for the KillerNIC. You see, after playing a lot of PvP on Guild Wars I realized one thing about lag: Game designers intentionally account for player lag and compensate for it in interesting ways. Guild Wars PvP becomes a very serious game about skill interruption. An enemy spell caster could be casting a spell that will take 1 second to cast and obliterate you when it lands. You have a skill that will interrupt their spell if you click the button fast enough, during that 1 second time period. Well, the server has to accomodate dialup users and those users that are on laggy connections, so there are times when I've casted a spell, had the progress bar go all the way to completion, and then half a second later, the spell is interrupted (after it was done casting on my end). This is because the person on the other end actually interrupted the spell in time according to their game client, but because of network lag (they're on a slow connection), the interrupt didn't get to the server for a while. The server still honored their interrupt, and eventually my spell failed. By increasing their lag, the server has to give them "extra time", which means their reaction time doesn't need to be as good to win. People will write custom FNapps or whatever they're called to do this.

I can foresee cheaters intentionally increasing in game lag just to trigger this kind of a cheating mechanism. If you could add 100-200 ms of latency to your line, you could actually gain an advantage in games like this. I'm thinking WoW PvP is probably the same, although I'm not sure if skill interruption is a big part of that or not. If I remember correctly, WoW has a lot of insta-cast spells.

ZFS Commands

[allenw]

It isn't too surprising that there aren't zfs-specific commands for mount, newfs, fsck, etc., given that all that work is done by the zfs, zpool, and other commands under Solaris.

Re:Pedant es "thupid"...

[IBitOBear]

"all but", as in "all but forgotten", is not a mathematical expression. The domain is implicitly limited by the subject-object agreement. So in the case of "this guy all but drown", the guy didn't fully drown but he was clearly under watter and unable to extracate himself etc. There is no implication that the guy was beaten nor given the Nobel. So it doesn't mean "*anything* except" by any reasonable expectation, in the same way that if someone says they love icecream, we don't expect "well why don't you marry it" as a reasonable response.

In short, "all" is universally inclusive, but only within the included domain of its use.

Further, it _wasn't_ forgotten, it is rememberd, and disparaged, and ignored and god knows what else, but again, no Nobel etc... 8-)

The phrasing is fine. There is a difference between being pedantic and deliberatly ignoring the obvious. Try looking up "pedant" and "obtuse" and "deliberatly contradictory"... 8-)