The state of multithreaded software outside of content manipulation seems to be abysmal. Gaming still seems to love two fast cores rather than more slower ones. Games seem to seem to be hardcoded to work best with a certain number of threads, and cannot adapt properly to four or six cores.
The super abundance of crappy console ports largely to blame I bet.
I used to laugh at AMDs triple core, but I now understand how smart that product was. Scaling 2-3 is more useful than 2-4, especially in gaming.
And even then, if I want to hack it, I'd go for a Palm or software in an [delete] Android. The processor and raphics in these things runs circles around calculators.
Agreed. So on the topic of infallibity, here's more criticism.
1. Linux is still vulnerable through software the user runs. Vulnerabilities in popular browsers are still exploitable (Chromium, Firefox, Opera) etc. This doesn't give you low level access to the users system, but there is a helluva lot you can do once you've taken over a browser's running instance. (But Chrome has done a lot of work around sandboxing to address this).
2. It's not necessary to have root to do a lot of damage - anything the user account can access is yours (keylogging, delete data, wreck havoc on network shares).
3. I've always been concerned that in most distributions the user enters a password for superuser functions - you only need to phish this and suddenly you have low level access to the system. Distros are frequently frivolous with the prompting for admin password, such that even a expert user may enter it like a reflex, especially if the dialog box is visually accurate.
It is not too difficult to imagine a number of easy ways to implement this:S which I won't go into, although it is reliant on user stupidity - which unfortunately is in abundance.
4. Complacency is the most dangerous security flaw, and Linux users have this in abundance also. Assuming security is the most dangerous thing you can do. Also dangerous is assumptions about the users competence.
4a. Security is not a one-time effort. Software is so complex these days there are ALWAYS flaws that can be exploited.
5. The assumption the if Windows was replaced with Desktop Linux, everything would be better. Fact is, it is still not tested in wide distribution accross tens of millions of machines with all kinds of users from all walks of life. There must be a lot of undiscovered flaws lurking. I would expect if you suddenly replaced all Windows installs worldwide with a single distro it wouldn't be long before the malware and shitware purveyors are back to business as usual. It would be no magic cure for malware.
6. Anyone who's had a Linux firewall and looked at the logs knows Linux systems are routinely attacked. Brute forcing SSH for example.
6a. I have friends who hack each others systems all the time like a sport. These are common distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.
7. This is/. where I will be modded troll, flamebait in 3...2...1..
http://10.197.19.1/ appears to have been slashdotted. All I get in firefox is:
The connection has timed out
The server at 10.197.19.1 is taking too long to respond.
* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
* A Coronal Mass Ejection or other such solar disturbance may be disrupting networks.
* The planet the host is on may have been demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass
* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
Your imagination is not going far enough. Imagine just merely placing wPCIe enabled PC components on a desk, getting power from an inductive pad even. Your rig is a cluster of bits with no connecting wires. wPCIe really means that your system southbridge chip is going to be a kind of wireless access point to whatever devices are a metre or two away.
wPCIe enabled hard drives will completely erase the need for both 'internal' and 'external' HDDs.
You'll have small flat box with a motherboard + CPU and Ram. You'll just have a pile of GPUs, HDDs, SSDs, and other add-in cards heaped up on your desk. That's your system. No technical expertise is needed to reconfigure a computer for whatever needs - anyone will be able to do it.
Much like my desk now, except it'll all be able to work at once.
Me: "Hey Dude could I borrow your nVidia card I just want to try SLI here?"
Dude: "Yeah here you go" *enables wireless*
Me: *wPCIe connected* "Sweet it's working."
So join me in thinking this is truely awesome. They say the PC is dying because of iPads, Netbooks, the alignment of the planets, but this kind of thing will bring desktop hardware back into relevancy.
Back in the early 1990s my Dad bought home a state of the art personal computer. I now have a career because of this.
It was a general purpose computer that could game as well as it could do productive tasks, furthermore it was an infinitely hackable tweakable machine. With no digital locks of any kind.
Parents bringing home a xbox, a iPad, an iPhone these days cannot expect the same enabling effect of technology.
I for one, welcome our microbial overlords. We are walking colonies of our single celled ancestors. Nothing new, but most people don't realize there are ten times more cells living in your gut than there are in the rest of your body (due to bacteria being much smaller than many cells in our bodies, in particular fat cells are enormous). A sobering reminder of who really rules the planet.
I can't think how much new research keeps popping up about the role gut flora plays in health and disease. But one has to wonder, what level of control our little friends really have over us?
I believe this movie is one that is claimed to have done poorly due to piracy, and I do believe there is some truth to this although as always it's not the full story and piracy is not the sole reason why a movie fails to generate ticket sales. This movie went on to be heavily download, some say it set all time records as the most bittorrented movie.
Usually high box office takings has a strong link to high piracy. Indeed high demand and restricted supply means fans will take matters into their own hands and obtain content however they can. There is always the exception to the rule however, and I believe where a movie bombs at the box office but is widely pirated is where the genuine cases of creative works failing because of piracy lurk.
Now, consider The Hurt Locker, which was heavily downloaded to the point they are dishing out 5000 lawsuits, but has so far failed at the box office. This is not because of piracy, but because of demonstrable incompetence, because the movie was leaked a long long time before they actually even got around to getting this film distributed and then the release dates slowly trickled on around the world. Oh and releasing the DVD before putting your film in cinemas is not a good idea either. In fact they hardly seemed to have bothered to market it, despite being well recieved by critics and viewers.
TCOR received all the big budget hype and worldwide release. In fact everything was done right. It wasn't even THAT bad. So what went wrong? Is this a genuine failure due to piracy?
The movie was close enough to the level of being shit and not worth paying for, but probably worth a download. It also deliberately targeted the market of young male gamers who also happen to be the most heavily pirating demographic. Fail. It also completely failed to target the sweet milky teated cash cow of obsessive sci-fi/fantasy fans who will go see movie like Lord of The Rings or a Star Wars release three to four times over the opening weekend then continues on to run up the credit card on all the merchandise.
Current SSDs should outlive HDDs even at the most unlikely abuse level, and most likely outlive the controller circuitry (ie corroding RoHS compliant crap). On a paper I saw about five years ago current NAND was quoted at 3 million write cycles. OFTOMH I see various quotes of about 1 million up to 5 million.
At an unlikely 100mb/s rate it would take over 10 minutes to write to an entire 64gb SSD once. This puts the upper bound of life span at 57 years. Some cells would fail befor 3 million write cycles, some after, but this is what wear leveling is for. Presumably a good fraction of the 0.9 years per gigabyte is attainable.
I have few HDDs that survival much past 5-7 years.
So naturally I put my OS swap on my SSDs and never look back.
The Sun is among the other sources of radio waves streaming down to the surface of the earth. I would suggest that man made radio waves are not automatically the cause. Although we broadcast strongly on particular frequencies in most areas background radiation drowns out total human output but across a wider spectrum. Plants may be sensitive to changes in background radio sources, for example we're in a period of unusual solar activity. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate/
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean a flying tank?
The state of multithreaded software outside of content manipulation seems to be abysmal. Gaming still seems to love two fast cores rather than more slower ones. Games seem to seem to be hardcoded to work best with a certain number of threads, and cannot adapt properly to four or six cores.
The super abundance of crappy console ports largely to blame I bet.
I used to laugh at AMDs triple core, but I now understand how smart that product was. Scaling 2-3 is more useful than 2-4, especially in gaming.
The whole point of marketing is to prevent, as much as possible, the customer from realising what the product really is.
Intel gets this. AMD doesn't with it's honestly named Athlon/Phenom X4 X6 etc.
And even then, if I want to hack it, I'd go for a Palm or software in an [delete] Android. The processor and raphics in these things runs circles around calculators.
There fixed that for you.
USB is handled much more securely than floppies ever were :S
Agreed. So on the topic of infallibity, here's more criticism.
:S which I won't go into, although it is reliant on user stupidity - which unfortunately is in abundance.
/. where I will be modded troll, flamebait in 3...2...1..
1. Linux is still vulnerable through software the user runs. Vulnerabilities in popular browsers are still exploitable (Chromium, Firefox, Opera) etc. This doesn't give you low level access to the users system, but there is a helluva lot you can do once you've taken over a browser's running instance. (But Chrome has done a lot of work around sandboxing to address this).
2. It's not necessary to have root to do a lot of damage - anything the user account can access is yours (keylogging, delete data, wreck havoc on network shares).
3. I've always been concerned that in most distributions the user enters a password for superuser functions - you only need to phish this and suddenly you have low level access to the system. Distros are frequently frivolous with the prompting for admin password, such that even a expert user may enter it like a reflex, especially if the dialog box is visually accurate. It is not too difficult to imagine a number of easy ways to implement this
4. Complacency is the most dangerous security flaw, and Linux users have this in abundance also. Assuming security is the most dangerous thing you can do. Also dangerous is assumptions about the users competence.
4a. Security is not a one-time effort. Software is so complex these days there are ALWAYS flaws that can be exploited.
5. The assumption the if Windows was replaced with Desktop Linux, everything would be better. Fact is, it is still not tested in wide distribution accross tens of millions of machines with all kinds of users from all walks of life. There must be a lot of undiscovered flaws lurking. I would expect if you suddenly replaced all Windows installs worldwide with a single distro it wouldn't be long before the malware and shitware purveyors are back to business as usual. It would be no magic cure for malware.
6. Anyone who's had a Linux firewall and looked at the logs knows Linux systems are routinely attacked. Brute forcing SSH for example.
6a. I have friends who hack each others systems all the time like a sport. These are common distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.
7. This is
Much like the facebook movie?
http://10.197.19.1/ appears to have been slashdotted. All I get in firefox is:
The connection has timed out
The server at 10.197.19.1 is taking too long to respond.
* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
* A Coronal Mass Ejection or other such solar disturbance may be disrupting networks.
* The planet the host is on may have been demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass
* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
Fingerprints confirmed http://i.cmpnet.com/ddj/images/article/2010/1007/100715mtouch_f1.jpg
64000ms for comment response to think of something funny to say.
Finger? I find that an inadequate euphemism for my 11th digit.
The iPad can actually do 11 touches. Feel free to speculate on what part is the 11th finger :)
Don't touch my iPad with your 11th finger! hey! ok you can keep it now.
All chickens come from eggs, the first chicken egg would have been laid by the ancestor to the chicken.
Your imagination is not going far enough. Imagine just merely placing wPCIe enabled PC components on a desk, getting power from an inductive pad even. Your rig is a cluster of bits with no connecting wires. wPCIe really means that your system southbridge chip is going to be a kind of wireless access point to whatever devices are a metre or two away.
wPCIe enabled hard drives will completely erase the need for both 'internal' and 'external' HDDs.
You'll have small flat box with a motherboard + CPU and Ram. You'll just have a pile of GPUs, HDDs, SSDs, and other add-in cards heaped up on your desk. That's your system. No technical expertise is needed to reconfigure a computer for whatever needs - anyone will be able to do it.
Much like my desk now, except it'll all be able to work at once.
Me: "Hey Dude could I borrow your nVidia card I just want to try SLI here?"
Dude: "Yeah here you go" *enables wireless*
Me: *wPCIe connected* "Sweet it's working."
So join me in thinking this is truely awesome. They say the PC is dying because of iPads, Netbooks, the alignment of the planets, but this kind of thing will bring desktop hardware back into relevancy.
Back in the early 1990s my Dad bought home a state of the art personal computer. I now have a career because of this.
It was a general purpose computer that could game as well as it could do productive tasks, furthermore it was an infinitely hackable tweakable machine. With no digital locks of any kind.
Parents bringing home a xbox, a iPad, an iPhone these days cannot expect the same enabling effect of technology.
Yes I was actually dead serious. :S
I for one, welcome our microbial overlords. We are walking colonies of our single celled ancestors. Nothing new, but most people don't realize there are ten times more cells living in your gut than there are in the rest of your body (due to bacteria being much smaller than many cells in our bodies, in particular fat cells are enormous). A sobering reminder of who really rules the planet.
I can't think how much new research keeps popping up about the role gut flora plays in health and disease. But one has to wonder, what level of control our little friends really have over us?
I tried to cut down, now it's the C2H5OH that's killing me.
Is "Monkey Soldier"a too literal translation of a Chinese term?
My expertise is heavy weapons, demolition, hand to hand combat, and grooming for lice.
Everything today is "tamper proof", so it's not possible to open the devices, and if you are able to do it - there is nothing to learn.
Thanks to devices like the iPad the next generation won't even have root access to their devices.
I believe this movie is one that is claimed to have done poorly due to piracy, and I do believe there is some truth to this although as always it's not the full story and piracy is not the sole reason why a movie fails to generate ticket sales. This movie went on to be heavily download, some say it set all time records as the most bittorrented movie.
Usually high box office takings has a strong link to high piracy. Indeed high demand and restricted supply means fans will take matters into their own hands and obtain content however they can. There is always the exception to the rule however, and I believe where a movie bombs at the box office but is widely pirated is where the genuine cases of creative works failing because of piracy lurk.
Now, consider The Hurt Locker, which was heavily downloaded to the point they are dishing out 5000 lawsuits, but has so far failed at the box office. This is not because of piracy, but because of demonstrable incompetence, because the movie was leaked a long long time before they actually even got around to getting this film distributed and then the release dates slowly trickled on around the world. Oh and releasing the DVD before putting your film in cinemas is not a good idea either. In fact they hardly seemed to have bothered to market it, despite being well recieved by critics and viewers.
TCOR received all the big budget hype and worldwide release. In fact everything was done right. It wasn't even THAT bad. So what went wrong? Is this a genuine failure due to piracy?
The movie was close enough to the level of being shit and not worth paying for, but probably worth a download. It also deliberately targeted the market of young male gamers who also happen to be the most heavily pirating demographic. Fail. It also completely failed to target the sweet milky teated cash cow of obsessive sci-fi/fantasy fans who will go see movie like Lord of The Rings or a Star Wars release three to four times over the opening weekend then continues on to run up the credit card on all the merchandise.
Current SSDs should outlive HDDs even at the most unlikely abuse level, and most likely outlive the controller circuitry (ie corroding RoHS compliant crap). On a paper I saw about five years ago current NAND was quoted at 3 million write cycles. OFTOMH I see various quotes of about 1 million up to 5 million.
At an unlikely 100mb/s rate it would take over 10 minutes to write to an entire 64gb SSD once. This puts the upper bound of life span at 57 years. Some cells would fail befor 3 million write cycles, some after, but this is what wear leveling is for. Presumably a good fraction of the 0.9 years per gigabyte is attainable.
I have few HDDs that survival much past 5-7 years.
So naturally I put my OS swap on my SSDs and never look back.
So if I wrap myself in tin foil, I have an exciting weekend ahead with no consequences?
The Sun is among the other sources of radio waves streaming down to the surface of the earth. I would suggest that man made radio waves are not automatically the cause. Although we broadcast strongly on particular frequencies in most areas background radiation drowns out total human output but across a wider spectrum. Plants may be sensitive to changes in background radio sources, for example we're in a period of unusual solar activity. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate/