At least on the Linux side, I know they've had some sort of shim setup for running 64-bit FF with 32-bit Flash for a while now. I don't know the dirty details of how it works, and what, if any, unpleasant side effects it has.
Luckily, only newspaper publishers are controlled by corporations with vested interests, so readers of books are entirely safe...
The assertion that much of contemporary journalism is rubbish at best and propaganda at worst is hardly false; but it isn't as though the economics of other information-dissemination media, especially the ones with relatively high costs or natural-monopolies in infrastructure are any different.
If you hashed each character as it was entered, that would be a pretty serious issue(it would basically just reduce the whole thing to a computationally pathological substitution cipher, which would be pretty pointless); but if you re-hash the entire contents of the password field every time a character is added or removed, you merely(if one can use the word to describe such a gigantic loss...) suffer the loss of complexity from N^M guesses to N rounds of M guesses...
"Hash" the word doesn't imply much of anything; but any function with for which the set of legal inputs is larger than the set of possible outputs must be one-way in general(there may be a number, potentially a very large one, of special cases that are reversible; but it cannot be reversible in general). Most functions described as hash functions fall into that category. They may well have other problems, like making it quite easy to construct inputs that yield a desired output, or having a set of reversible special-cases that happens to overlap heavily with the set of inputs that humans consider relevant...
(Easy) compatibility with 64-bit plugins and not having to drag along a whole bloody system's worth of 32-bit libraries just to install the browser seem like the most evident reasons...
What confuses me is why they would be framing an address-length change in terms of additional features. With the specific exception of applications where the implementation of certain features requires easy access to gigantic slabs of memory, there isn't a whole lot of connection between 64-bitness and the feature list.
What's too bad is that the system is (comparatively) slow: having a new vash computed on the contents of (say) a password field after each keystroke would make entering passwords under error-prone conditions(such as touchscreen keyboards, or pitiful human weakness) much, much, easier without being nearly as insecure as the prevailing "show the last character entered until you enter the next one" scheme.
Since humans are pretty good at visual recognition, they'd pick up that the picture was 'wrong' after a typo almost immediately; but the shoulder-surfer would learn substantially less than they otherwise would.
Unless the name is grossly misleading, "hash" implies one way, by design.
With a suitably poorly designed hash algorithm, it may be possible to extract certain outputs; but that's a bug, not a feature(also, assuming the hash produces outputs of some limited size and accepts inputs of size bounded only by your computational resources and patience, as they tend to, it is easy to see that it cannot be reversible in general because the set of possible inputs is vastly larger than the set of possible outputs, so it must be the case that multiple inputs map to the same output, so there is no unambiguous "back" for that output...) .
While it sucks that they had to reverse on a bunch of people, there is the persistent problem of how deeply ugly things get when you let people be more important than process...
And you'd be surprised how well the older flavors have hung on: AT is a simple mechanical adapter away from working with PS/2, and there are plenty of desktops on the shelves today with PS/2 ports, and laptops on the shelves that, while the internal wiring is purely proprietary, still have PS/2 mice and keyboards at a protocol level.(even ADB made a surprisingly late last stand in laptops, only dying for good in 2005...)
Arguably, it depends on how the ethernet is being used:
Given the pathetic state of Internet connections, 10Mb ethernet would barely be noticed by a substantial proportion of households in the capacity of a basic internet connection sharing, possibly with a light side of network printing, mechanism. Heck, with the nicer contemporary serial chipsets, PPP would probably be enough, if harder to configure...
For fileserving, even GigE is merely OK. Not actively painful; but only cheap and nasty disks will make internal and networked storage functionally indistinguishable.
As some kind of 'fabric' that blurs the lines between internal busses and external busses, longer cables will always suffer from latency issues; but Ethernet is painfully inadequate(if a whole hell of a lot cheaper than infiniband or myranet). Since, outside of specialty applications, the software ecosystem for taking multiple computers connected by fast interconnects and treating them as a unified system is Definitely. Not. Fully. Baked. Yet. that one doesn't really hurt it much.
I'm guessing that cool toys like "Actual memory protection so that the stability of the system doesn't depend on every last scrap of code behaving itself", "Not having to use a 512x324 display", and "Not costing $2600" probably help dull the pain a bit...
Luckily, free will still makes perfect sense in a universe that(depending on the scale you are working with) appears to be either deterministic or probabilistic, so morality is definitely safe...
I am familiar with Wired as a glossy rag dedicated to fellating.coms and spilling endless ink about 'lifestyle' and how the print media is dead.
My expectations for anything resembling serious journalism are nil, roughly on par with my journalist expectations from HallMark cards. However, my past experience with them was always that they were insufferably fluffy and vacuous; in a useless; but more or less benign way. Their treatment of the Lamo/Manning transcripts, though, appears to be oozing pure evil and utter dishonesty from every pore.
As best I can tell, the parent poster was replying to TFS's question of "When will Nvidia change its ways?" with "Why change when their[Nvidia's] driver runs at 100% of it's speed?".
My response was that, ATI had apparently found some reasons to change, ie. start supporting an OSS driver effort, despite the fact that their[ATI's] proprietary driver, just as with Nvidia's, had always run at 100% of its own speed.
Presumably, something other than sheer performance considerations is behind the fact that Nvidia 'supports' OSS drivers in the sense that their cards function well enough in VGA mode that you can make it to Nvidia's website to download the proprietary ones, while ATI(or AMD) seem to be making real headway in encouraging OSS drivers of real-world utility.
What sort of craven spin does Wired have about why it left those particular bits of the transcript out?
Regardless of what you think about either Manning or Lamo, there would seem to be no journalistic logic behind leaving out what they did. There are redactions that make journalistic sense; but this one seems mendacious at best.
With that being so common, even the crankiest "this workload is single-threaded, and it really wants a server to itself" applications are likely to find themselves sharing a multicore processor with a bunch of other such workloads.
Given that AMD's server offerings have lately been pretty cheap compared to Intel's, have the advantage of hypertransport being a good interconnect, along with an on-die memory controller(less of an absolute advantage now that Intel has QPI and an on-die memory controller, rather than having to pretend that FSB was good enough; but still quite good for performance), they should do pretty well in VM boxes.
He might be one of those mysterious folks who means serious digital audio workstation stuff when he says "mixing audio"... That is, shall we say, slightly more intensive than just shoving around the pre-chewed stuff fast enough for glitchless output from the DAC.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of "NO! You are playing with the sandbox Wrong!" design that makes "sandbox" worse than just a reasonably well crafted linear game. The "So, here's a puzzle, how do I solve it?" gameplay is contrived; but the "So, here's a world of apparently infinite possibility, what did the developer want me to do?" is just plain annoying.
While I have nothing against Minecraft as a game, the level of world manipulation isn't just some incidental feature that the gaming industry Must Take Note Of.
The level of world manipulation is pretty much what makes the game what it is; but also makes the game weird and idiosyncratic in ways that wouldn't obviously transfer very well to other sorts of games. Anybody remember 'Red Faction', that old FPS with the zOMG Destructable Environments!!! It sucked. Faced with the fact that they'd either have to break environmental destructability at certain plot-points, or just have players nibbling in a straight line through the level, the environmental destructability was reduced to little more than window dressing.
Really, in any game that isn't largely about metagaming emergent behavior in the game's rules(y hello thar, Dwarf Fortress, we were just talking about your much shallower and more popular kid cousin...), being capriciously arbitrarily limited sucks("Why can I pick up some books and not others?" "Oh, because some books are 'Quest Items', and you need to collect 143 of them; but the art team couldn't be bothered to actually model the rest, so all non-quest bookshelves are just textured rectangles.") but world manipulability beyond a certain level is useful pretty much exclusively for breaking the game's mechanics(acceptable in singleplay, if not obviously worth the tradeoff in developer effort, pure death in multiplay, unless you are the griefer who is currently grinning in anticipation...)
With the ridiculously low data caps on today's mobile plans "4G" is basically just a convenient way to drain your battery and blow through your data plan faster than ever before...
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At least on the Linux side, I know they've had some sort of shim setup for running 64-bit FF with 32-bit Flash for a while now. I don't know the dirty details of how it works, and what, if any, unpleasant side effects it has.
Luckily, only newspaper publishers are controlled by corporations with vested interests, so readers of books are entirely safe...
The assertion that much of contemporary journalism is rubbish at best and propaganda at worst is hardly false; but it isn't as though the economics of other information-dissemination media, especially the ones with relatively high costs or natural-monopolies in infrastructure are any different.
If you hashed each character as it was entered, that would be a pretty serious issue(it would basically just reduce the whole thing to a computationally pathological substitution cipher, which would be pretty pointless); but if you re-hash the entire contents of the password field every time a character is added or removed, you merely(if one can use the word to describe such a gigantic loss...) suffer the loss of complexity from N^M guesses to N rounds of M guesses...
"Hash" the word doesn't imply much of anything; but any function with for which the set of legal inputs is larger than the set of possible outputs must be one-way in general(there may be a number, potentially a very large one, of special cases that are reversible; but it cannot be reversible in general). Most functions described as hash functions fall into that category. They may well have other problems, like making it quite easy to construct inputs that yield a desired output, or having a set of reversible special-cases that happens to overlap heavily with the set of inputs that humans consider relevant...
(Easy) compatibility with 64-bit plugins and not having to drag along a whole bloody system's worth of 32-bit libraries just to install the browser seem like the most evident reasons...
What confuses me is why they would be framing an address-length change in terms of additional features. With the specific exception of applications where the implementation of certain features requires easy access to gigantic slabs of memory, there isn't a whole lot of connection between 64-bitness and the feature list.
And they call this progress?
What's too bad is that the system is (comparatively) slow: having a new vash computed on the contents of (say) a password field after each keystroke would make entering passwords under error-prone conditions(such as touchscreen keyboards, or pitiful human weakness) much, much, easier without being nearly as insecure as the prevailing "show the last character entered until you enter the next one" scheme.
Since humans are pretty good at visual recognition, they'd pick up that the picture was 'wrong' after a typo almost immediately; but the shoulder-surfer would learn substantially less than they otherwise would.
Unless the name is grossly misleading, "hash" implies one way, by design.
With a suitably poorly designed hash algorithm, it may be possible to extract certain outputs; but that's a bug, not a feature(also, assuming the hash produces outputs of some limited size and accepts inputs of size bounded only by your computational resources and patience, as they tend to, it is easy to see that it cannot be reversible in general because the set of possible inputs is vastly larger than the set of possible outputs, so it must be the case that multiple inputs map to the same output, so there is no unambiguous "back" for that output...) .
Bruce Schneier just replaced his copy of Photoshop with /dev/random and a copy of Vash...
Should I be warming up the ovens for those aphasic scum?
While it sucks that they had to reverse on a bunch of people, there is the persistent problem of how deeply ugly things get when you let people be more important than process...
Heck, the (quite definitely still extant) 1/4inch TRS jack was developed in 1878 for telephone exchange patch panels...
And you'd be surprised how well the older flavors have hung on: AT is a simple mechanical adapter away from working with PS/2, and there are plenty of desktops on the shelves today with PS/2 ports, and laptops on the shelves that, while the internal wiring is purely proprietary, still have PS/2 mice and keyboards at a protocol level.(even ADB made a surprisingly late last stand in laptops, only dying for good in 2005...)
Arguably, it depends on how the ethernet is being used:
Given the pathetic state of Internet connections, 10Mb ethernet would barely be noticed by a substantial proportion of households in the capacity of a basic internet connection sharing, possibly with a light side of network printing, mechanism. Heck, with the nicer contemporary serial chipsets, PPP would probably be enough, if harder to configure...
For fileserving, even GigE is merely OK. Not actively painful; but only cheap and nasty disks will make internal and networked storage functionally indistinguishable.
As some kind of 'fabric' that blurs the lines between internal busses and external busses, longer cables will always suffer from latency issues; but Ethernet is painfully inadequate(if a whole hell of a lot cheaper than infiniband or myranet). Since, outside of specialty applications, the software ecosystem for taking multiple computers connected by fast interconnects and treating them as a unified system is Definitely. Not. Fully. Baked. Yet. that one doesn't really hurt it much.
I'm guessing that cool toys like "Actual memory protection so that the stability of the system doesn't depend on every last scrap of code behaving itself", "Not having to use a 512x324 display", and "Not costing $2600" probably help dull the pain a bit...
Luckily, free will still makes perfect sense in a universe that(depending on the scale you are working with) appears to be either deterministic or probabilistic, so morality is definitely safe...
I am familiar with Wired as a glossy rag dedicated to fellating .coms and spilling endless ink about 'lifestyle' and how the print media is dead.
My expectations for anything resembling serious journalism are nil, roughly on par with my journalist expectations from HallMark cards. However, my past experience with them was always that they were insufferably fluffy and vacuous; in a useless; but more or less benign way. Their treatment of the Lamo/Manning transcripts, though, appears to be oozing pure evil and utter dishonesty from every pore.
As best I can tell, the parent poster was replying to TFS's question of "When will Nvidia change its ways?" with "Why change when their[Nvidia's] driver runs at 100% of it's speed?".
My response was that, ATI had apparently found some reasons to change, ie. start supporting an OSS driver effort, despite the fact that their[ATI's] proprietary driver, just as with Nvidia's, had always run at 100% of its own speed.
Presumably, something other than sheer performance considerations is behind the fact that Nvidia 'supports' OSS drivers in the sense that their cards function well enough in VGA mode that you can make it to Nvidia's website to download the proprietary ones, while ATI(or AMD) seem to be making real headway in encouraging OSS drivers of real-world utility.
Given that ATI's proprietary driver also runs at 100% of its own speed, there are apparently motives that apply in spite of that...
What sort of craven spin does Wired have about why it left those particular bits of the transcript out?
Regardless of what you think about either Manning or Lamo, there would seem to be no journalistic logic behind leaving out what they did. There are redactions that make journalistic sense; but this one seems mendacious at best.
Not to mention virtualization:
With that being so common, even the crankiest "this workload is single-threaded, and it really wants a server to itself" applications are likely to find themselves sharing a multicore processor with a bunch of other such workloads.
Given that AMD's server offerings have lately been pretty cheap compared to Intel's, have the advantage of hypertransport being a good interconnect, along with an on-die memory controller(less of an absolute advantage now that Intel has QPI and an on-die memory controller, rather than having to pretend that FSB was good enough; but still quite good for performance), they should do pretty well in VM boxes.
He might be one of those mysterious folks who means serious digital audio workstation stuff when he says "mixing audio"... That is, shall we say, slightly more intensive than just shoving around the pre-chewed stuff fast enough for glitchless output from the DAC.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of "NO! You are playing with the sandbox Wrong!" design that makes "sandbox" worse than just a reasonably well crafted linear game. The "So, here's a puzzle, how do I solve it?" gameplay is contrived; but the "So, here's a world of apparently infinite possibility, what did the developer want me to do?" is just plain annoying.
While I have nothing against Minecraft as a game, the level of world manipulation isn't just some incidental feature that the gaming industry Must Take Note Of.
The level of world manipulation is pretty much what makes the game what it is; but also makes the game weird and idiosyncratic in ways that wouldn't obviously transfer very well to other sorts of games. Anybody remember 'Red Faction', that old FPS with the zOMG Destructable Environments!!! It sucked. Faced with the fact that they'd either have to break environmental destructability at certain plot-points, or just have players nibbling in a straight line through the level, the environmental destructability was reduced to little more than window dressing.
Really, in any game that isn't largely about metagaming emergent behavior in the game's rules(y hello thar, Dwarf Fortress, we were just talking about your much shallower and more popular kid cousin...), being capriciously arbitrarily limited sucks("Why can I pick up some books and not others?" "Oh, because some books are 'Quest Items', and you need to collect 143 of them; but the art team couldn't be bothered to actually model the rest, so all non-quest bookshelves are just textured rectangles.") but world manipulability beyond a certain level is useful pretty much exclusively for breaking the game's mechanics(acceptable in singleplay, if not obviously worth the tradeoff in developer effort, pure death in multiplay, unless you are the griefer who is currently grinning in anticipation...)
With the ridiculously low data caps on today's mobile plans "4G" is basically just a convenient way to drain your battery and blow through your data plan faster than ever before...