The article said he had this all figured out in 2007 - yet the details of this cypher are just now being published in July 2009.
What took so long - the quest to gain ITAR compliance?
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the slot for the ATT SIM Card (a more elegant solution than USB device by God!) kind of tilts the playing field in the direction of one vendor?
If I were to pay that much for a laptop I would want everything about it to be "general purpose" to the largest extent possible.
Several years ago we here at NASA replaced Solaris X86 with Red Hat Linux as the operating system for our PCS systems (Thinkpad laptops used as the crew interface in the Space Station's command and control systems)
We are currently in the process of rehosting again, this time to Scientific Linux, a CentOS-like rebuild of RHEL done by the good folks up at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Certainly cost was a factor, but not the deciding one. From our perspective it is golden not to have to track how many laptops each of the various development groups (many of which are international) have it loaded on.
Am I the only one that believes that the FSF and others benefit from the gray area surrounding the question âoewhat is a derivative workâ and would be disappointed if the courts came up with a hard and firm definition of what constitutes a derivative work?
The term derivative work seems to have a lot of "creep" in it, and seems to serve the goals of RMS and the FSF very well.
You are exactly right that the real problem is not the functionality of the memory chips, but rather the processor chips. For a number of reasons (but having said that it is very likely that a significant portion of the the problem of soft CPU chips is the on chip level one cache)
On a regular basis I participate in the "radiation testing" of laptops intended for use on both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. This testing is normally done at Indiana University's Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington, Indiana. This past fall we completed testing on a group of laptops which implemented Intel's dual core Centrino Pro processors. Testing is conducted by hitting each of the components in the laptop with a proton beam while monitoring for induced errors.
While the results of the testing varied by memory manufacturer, by far the softest component in the laptop was the CPU itself. That said, these processors actually did fairly well compared to some of the previous generations of CPU chips we have tested over the years.
The rule that the smaller the die size, the greater the error rate does not seem to apply. For example, a number of years ago we tested a number of laptops using the Intel Pentium 3 mobile chip. Performance was so dismal that the decision was made not to procure any system based on that chip.
Later testing of laptops based on the Pentium 4 mobile chip showed a dramatic turnaround - the Pentium 4 mobile chip, with its smaller die size actually out performed both the pentium3 mobile and the Pentium 2 chips then used for on-orbit operations. Our group does not do any analysis of "why" a failure occurred, only the collection of data to assist in the selection of suitable devices for use on the Shuttle and the ISS.
The bottom line - die size is only one of the factors which come into play in determining how a chip will perform when hit by ionizing radiation. (one of my favorite theories is the declining deltas between a 1 and a 0 - in days gone by it could have been as much a five volts but is commonly down to around 1 volt in todays modern processors - this could serve to bring any electrical disruption caused by a particle strike closer to the threshold of changing a one to a zero - but what do I know, I am just a software guy)
The concept of building a detector into chips is interesting, but not enough detail is provided to make a judgment on its feasibility. Single Event Upsets (SEUs or Bit-flips) are caused when a sub atomic particle such as a proton or a heavy ion slams into the silicon causing either an electrical disruption or damage to the silicon itself.
The key here is that these particles are so tiny compared to the circuit itself that, from my perspective, unless the "detector" somehow encapsulates the whole circuit it is unlikely even notice the passage of a proton or other particle. To make detection even more difficult you must remember that you are working in a three dimensional environment - you can not predict the direction of travel, its energy level, or the location of a "strike"
However, dealing with the effects of radiation on electronic components is something we are going to have to learn to deal with someday, so this research is both exciting and worthwhile.
You know, just to piss on the embers a little. How many here would object to someone at the Pirate Bay disclosing who was downloading torrent files in preparation for a little midnight P2P action?
We all know that at least a fraction of that activity is done with a disregard for legal standards.
At what point do we expect privacy, and at what point should shady acts be exposed to the light of day.
It seems that many get their panties an a wad when the privacy issue hits close to home but love it when someone else's laundry is hung out to dry.
Attack? How did any of the Mozilla devs attack Opera - from what I can see no public mention was ever made about Opera having the same issue.
Further, why would you encourage others to "attack MS in this way?" - that is stupid and unprofessional. I am a committed Linux user, in my free time I build and test each kernel snapshot as it is released. Why, because I love to get into the guts of the system.
Am I a Windows lover? Not really, but I do bring up an XP image from time to time as a guest on my Linux system. I have an older IBook running OSX which is the central core of my music system.
I even have a system up and running IBM's MVS 3.8 for those days when I really miss the old days of mainframes punch cards.
Each of these systems has its good points and its bad points, I stick with Linux because I CAN get into the guts of the system. I keep my thumb on the pulse of all these Operating Systems because I love being close to the hardware.
That said I have NEVER seen any vendor come out and invite an attack on a rival OS by detailing a security hole in public. Balmer may be a fool with his rants on Microsoft's perceived superiority but even he doesn't come out and discuss the details of anyones security issues.
You know, maybe I am blind, or perhaps just a little slow today, but I looked at the actual advisory (did you?) and I see no mention of the fact that the same bug impacted the Opera browser.
What I seem to get from the article is that a problem was found with Firefox, a fix was developed, and sometime prior to wrapping things up and deploying the fix, someone at Mozilla cared enough about the Internet environment we all share to do a quick regression test of Opera and when a problem was discovered, they PRIVATELY notified the Opera team.
What more could you ask for in the way of good citizenship?
I wonder how long before the government will require some sort of security clearance or background check on telecommunications workers and sysadmins on the basis that setting up these taps and email filters makes them privy to at least some of the details of who is being watched and why.
What if any steps is the government taking to insure that the lowly sysadmin does not give the target of the investigation a heads up saying that they are being watched?
The technology sounds great, and if they come through with it I am sure it will lead to many innovations. However, am I the only one who feels a little uncomfortable with research done at a state university, funded by the public, and performed by unpaid or low-paid grad students being licensed by "Arizona States business spin off, Axon Technologies"
I know that type of arrangement may be common place today but I sure would like to follow the money trail.
Bogus arguement - if you have a legitimate rental and you show it to guests in your home I believe that you are well within the terms defining the authorized use of the CD. I could be wrong but that does not happen very often.
However, if you were to rent a CD and then show it in the waiting room of your local family planning clinic it would be considered commercial use and the industry would have every right to rip you a new arse over it.
Remember, no matter muck splattered the movie is it is still their property and that includes the right to distribrute it as they see fit. And I don't see how all these little wankers get the same rights just because their mum bought them a home computer.
Well maybe you should go into the sodding stealing vs. copying argument - after all what the suck-holes in the entertainment industry are selling are copies of their product.
So even though there is no loss incurred by the cost of producing the legitimate copies intended for sale, you are impacting their ability to sell the copies they produce.
Countless bad analogies? I think not, Maybe three, can you count that high?
One more bad analogy if you please - would it be acceptable for me to make copies of your Mom's wedding photos for me ad my mates because doing so would not cost you anything? Once again, stealing vs. copying.
What a crock of shit. If the tired old "I would not have bought it anyways..." tripe is the best logic you can come up with it is clear that you must have lost a bet with God and as a result, had to submit to a lobotomy. Clear and simple, you are pinching a service which you have not paid for.
Just because the jackasses in the entertainment industry are a bunch of slime maggots does not mean that you have the right to use whatever means you can find to circumvent their business model - the bottom line is that the movies and music you are stealing is their property, created at their expense, not yours. So of course they have the right to control the distribution of the fruits of their labors. No matter how screwed up they are.
If you were caught picking the lock on the back door of a concert hall in order to get into a concert for free would you expect the coppers to send you on your way after you explained that you really did not want to see the band anyways because their music sucks?
If you were caught jumping the door on a city bus to get a free ride would the judge turn you loose after you explained that there was no loss of profits because there were empty seats anyways? I think not.
How is this any different than taking your handi-cam into your local strip club and filming the goings on for your next "skanks gone wild" movie on the basis that the wench was going to be on the pole anyways?
All you are doing is making a lame attempt at justifying your lack of respect for the rights of others.
Back in the late 70's I worked with Marine Air Group 24 over at K-Bay, HI and the group's data center was contained in two big metal containers each about the size of a small semi-trailer - when they needed to move they popped them on a trailer, shoved them in the back of a plane, or whatever.
Each data center was made up of a Univac 1218 processor, an online card reader-punch unit, a drum printer, and a bunch of tape drives.
In this case freedom exported by the movie industry that while based in America, is largly owned by forign investors.
Quit trying to dry-hump Lady Liberty with your half-assed shots at America
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The article said he had this all figured out in 2007 - yet the details of this cypher are just now being published in July 2009. What took so long - the quest to gain ITAR compliance?
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the slot for the ATT SIM Card (a more elegant solution than USB device by God!) kind of tilts the playing field in the direction of one vendor? If I were to pay that much for a laptop I would want everything about it to be "general purpose" to the largest extent possible.
Several years ago we here at NASA replaced Solaris X86 with Red Hat Linux as the operating system for our PCS systems (Thinkpad laptops used as the crew interface in the Space Station's command and control systems) We are currently in the process of rehosting again, this time to Scientific Linux, a CentOS-like rebuild of RHEL done by the good folks up at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Certainly cost was a factor, but not the deciding one. From our perspective it is golden not to have to track how many laptops each of the various development groups (many of which are international) have it loaded on.
Am I the only one that believes that the FSF and others benefit from the gray area surrounding the question âoewhat is a derivative workâ and would be disappointed if the courts came up with a hard and firm definition of what constitutes a derivative work?
The term derivative work seems to have a lot of "creep" in it, and seems to serve the goals of RMS and the FSF very well.
You are exactly right that the real problem is not the functionality of the memory chips, but rather the processor chips. For a number of reasons (but having said that it is very likely that a significant portion of the the problem of soft CPU chips is the on chip level one cache)
On a regular basis I participate in the "radiation testing" of laptops intended for use on both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. This testing is normally done at Indiana University's Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington, Indiana. This past fall we completed testing on a group of laptops which implemented Intel's dual core Centrino Pro processors. Testing is conducted by hitting each of the components in the laptop with a proton beam while monitoring for induced errors.
While the results of the testing varied by memory manufacturer, by far the softest component in the laptop was the CPU itself. That said, these processors actually did fairly well compared to some of the previous generations of CPU chips we have tested over the years.
The rule that the smaller the die size, the greater the error rate does not seem to apply. For example, a number of years ago we tested a number of laptops using the Intel Pentium 3 mobile chip. Performance was so dismal that the decision was made not to procure any system based on that chip.
Later testing of laptops based on the Pentium 4 mobile chip showed a dramatic turnaround - the Pentium 4 mobile chip, with its smaller die size actually out performed both the pentium3 mobile and the Pentium 2 chips then used for on-orbit operations. Our group does not do any analysis of "why" a failure occurred, only the collection of data to assist in the selection of suitable devices for use on the Shuttle and the ISS.
The bottom line - die size is only one of the factors which come into play in determining how a chip will perform when hit by ionizing radiation. (one of my favorite theories is the declining deltas between a 1 and a 0 - in days gone by it could have been as much a five volts but is commonly down to around 1 volt in todays modern processors - this could serve to bring any electrical disruption caused by a particle strike closer to the threshold of changing a one to a zero - but what do I know, I am just a software guy)
The concept of building a detector into chips is interesting, but not enough detail is provided to make a judgment on its feasibility. Single Event Upsets (SEUs or Bit-flips) are caused when a sub atomic particle such as a proton or a heavy ion slams into the silicon causing either an electrical disruption or damage to the silicon itself.
The key here is that these particles are so tiny compared to the circuit itself that, from my perspective, unless the "detector" somehow encapsulates the whole circuit it is unlikely even notice the passage of a proton or other particle. To make detection even more difficult you must remember that you are working in a three dimensional environment - you can not predict the direction of travel, its energy level, or the location of a "strike"
However, dealing with the effects of radiation on electronic components is something we are going to have to learn to deal with someday, so this research is both exciting and worthwhile.
You know, just to piss on the embers a little. How many here would object to someone at the Pirate Bay disclosing who was downloading torrent files in preparation for a little midnight P2P action?
We all know that at least a fraction of that activity is done with a disregard for legal standards.
At what point do we expect privacy, and at what point should shady acts be exposed to the light of day.
It seems that many get their panties an a wad when the privacy issue hits close to home but love it when someone else's laundry is hung out to dry.
Attack? How did any of the Mozilla devs attack Opera - from what I can see no public mention was ever made about Opera having the same issue.
Further, why would you encourage others to "attack MS in this way?" - that is stupid and unprofessional. I am a committed Linux user, in my free time I build and test each kernel snapshot as it is released. Why, because I love to get into the guts of the system.
Am I a Windows lover? Not really, but I do bring up an XP image from time to time as a guest on my Linux system. I have an older IBook running OSX which is the central core of my music system.
I even have a system up and running IBM's MVS 3.8 for those days when I really miss the old days of mainframes punch cards.
Each of these systems has its good points and its bad points, I stick with Linux because I CAN get into the guts of the system. I keep my thumb on the pulse of all these Operating Systems because I love being close to the hardware.
That said I have NEVER seen any vendor come out and invite an attack on a rival OS by detailing a security hole in public. Balmer may be a fool with his rants on Microsoft's perceived superiority but even he doesn't come out and discuss the details of anyones security issues.
So why would you encourage it?
You know, maybe I am blind, or perhaps just a little slow today, but I looked at the actual advisory (did you?) and I see no mention of the fact that the same bug impacted the Opera browser.
What I seem to get from the article is that a problem was found with Firefox, a fix was developed, and sometime prior to wrapping things up and deploying the fix, someone at Mozilla cared enough about the Internet environment we all share to do a quick regression test of Opera and when a problem was discovered, they PRIVATELY notified the Opera team.
What more could you ask for in the way of good citizenship?
I wonder how long before the government will require some sort of security clearance or background check on telecommunications workers and sysadmins on the basis that setting up these taps and email filters makes them privy to at least some of the details of who is being watched and why. What if any steps is the government taking to insure that the lowly sysadmin does not give the target of the investigation a heads up saying that they are being watched?
The technology sounds great, and if they come through with it I am sure it will lead to many innovations. However, am I the only one who feels a little uncomfortable with research done at a state university, funded by the public, and performed by unpaid or low-paid grad students being licensed by "Arizona States business spin off, Axon Technologies"
I know that type of arrangement may be common place today but I sure would like to follow the money trail.
Bogus arguement - if you have a legitimate rental and you show it to guests in your home I believe that you are well within the terms defining the authorized use of the CD. I could be wrong but that does not happen very often. However, if you were to rent a CD and then show it in the waiting room of your local family planning clinic it would be considered commercial use and the industry would have every right to rip you a new arse over it. Remember, no matter muck splattered the movie is it is still their property and that includes the right to distribrute it as they see fit. And I don't see how all these little wankers get the same rights just because their mum bought them a home computer.
Well maybe you should go into the sodding stealing vs. copying argument - after all what the suck-holes in the entertainment industry are selling are copies of their product. So even though there is no loss incurred by the cost of producing the legitimate copies intended for sale, you are impacting their ability to sell the copies they produce. Countless bad analogies? I think not, Maybe three, can you count that high? One more bad analogy if you please - would it be acceptable for me to make copies of your Mom's wedding photos for me ad my mates because doing so would not cost you anything? Once again, stealing vs. copying.
What a crock of shit. If the tired old "I would not have bought it anyways ..." tripe is the best logic you can come up with it is clear that you must have lost a bet with God and as a result, had to submit to a lobotomy. Clear and simple, you are pinching a service which you have not paid for.
Just because the jackasses in the entertainment industry are a bunch of slime maggots does not mean that you have the right to use whatever means you can find to circumvent their business model - the bottom line is that the movies and music you are stealing is their property, created at their expense, not yours. So of course they have the right to control the distribution of the fruits of their labors. No matter how screwed up they are.
If you were caught picking the lock on the back door of a concert hall in order to get into a concert for free would you expect the coppers to send you on your way after you explained that you really did not want to see the band anyways because their music sucks?
If you were caught jumping the door on a city bus to get a free ride would the judge turn you loose after you explained that there was no loss of profits because there were empty seats anyways? I think not.
How is this any different than taking your handi-cam into your local strip club and filming the goings on for your next "skanks gone wild" movie on the basis that the wench was going to be on the pole anyways?
All you are doing is making a lame attempt at justifying your lack of respect for the rights of others.
No actually, the second container was the maintenance shop - where I spent many a blissful hour sacked out in air conditioned comfort.
Back in the late 70's I worked with Marine Air Group 24 over at K-Bay, HI and the group's data center was contained in two big metal containers each about the size of a small semi-trailer - when they needed to move they popped them on a trailer, shoved them in the back of a plane, or whatever.
Each data center was made up of a Univac 1218 processor, an online card reader-punch unit, a drum printer, and a bunch of tape drives.
Seems like the same concept to me.
In this case freedom exported by the movie industry that while based in America, is largly owned by forign investors. Quit trying to dry-hump Lady Liberty with your half-assed shots at America