If you have adequate physical security in meatspace, then it's reasonable to assume your backups are not significantly more vulnerable over and above your main cubical farm.
It is also an reasonable initial assumption when setting up shop, that backups of any kind should be situated in a more bomb/fire/quake/flood/theft proof place than your main operation. That goes for external intrusions to your hot failover systems too.
Over time your entire footprint of your windows system, applications and files, gets spread out of a large footprint of the hard disk. This literally means your average access times go up, as your hard disk has to read from one end to the other of the disk.
Defragging doesn't fix this, as even if files aren't fragmented and reasonably well placed on the drive, files are simply not longer clustered in say, the first 10% of your hard drive.
Updates to Windows also mess up your system file layout and footprint.
To fix:
1. Split your HDD into two partitions, a first partition of perhaps (10gb min), and a second one of the rest of your HDD - you'll need to relocate user profile folders to this partition perhaps.
2. Perform clean install of Windows XP that has been nlite'd (www.nliteos.com) to include streamlined service packs + drivers + delete unnecessary crap (language packs, foreign keyboards, speech support, legacy drivers)
3.Reboot a few times so prefetch speeds up boot and placement. Defrag (yes even a clean install needs it).
4. Install a minimal set of applications she likes.
5. ????
6. Enjoy snappy new system.
Still rendering the frame on the client machine, and some gameplay logic, such that the user gets instant response to movements and inputs.
On the big iron servers process:
I've considered streaming the contents of my 2-gpu gaming PCs frame buffer over gigabit connection to my linux netbook. Even with a gigabit link you have the latency of rendering the frame quickly, compressing, transfering, decompressing, rendering to destination monitor. Usually, the 30-40ms between the movement of the mouse/keyboard and a frame being rendered to the screen is not a huge step over the 40ms it takes for your eye to see the light. Add another 100ms overhead and suddenly games like a FPS aren't fun anymore. Hell using a remote desktop for basic tasks through a laggy connection isn't fun.
OpenWRT is a linux based embedded operating system.
Surely this is a first. Sure nix boxes and devices get hacked all the time, but I assumed that such automated attacks were natively difficult on linux?
Video games are played by all but a minority of adolescents. Inevitably when there is some kind of violent incident involving young people, more likely than not they are at least very a casual gamer. This demonstrates causation that video games have spawned all violent crime which did not exist back in our day.
Nobody was ever shot before 1974, because our generation are perfect role models and our children have been subverted by mindless video games.
Therefore young people are to blame, the sooner we lock them all up the better.
IANAP, but something that bothers me, did they do controls with pure water or acetone for example? Could the results seen in their detector be the result of something like sololuminescence rather than genuine fusion products?
Even if the answer they get from their experiments is 'NO' it's still useful science. Any investigation at the edges of our understanding is automaticly worthwhile. The lay-person does not get this.
the marginally centrist-right National, and marginally centrist-left Labour,
Labour is not by any definition left wing, perhaps only if you look at a handful of policies they adopt to cozy up to unions and the Green party. They are very centre-right in practice. The NZ definition of 'left' is a strange one.
The politician who got this section slipped into the law, Judith Tizzard (Labour party MP), did so, right before an election and right before the end of her career. She retired.
Undoubtedly because it would have been the end of her political career in another way, if she was not retiring.
Scrap that, they picked someone on the way out to slip this in for them, it's an excellent way to find a fall guy, someone who won't be even be around to cop the backlash. The amendment was also made when it was clear Labour would not be getting re-elected. A party on it's way out so the new government could dodge some flak, if they had to can the legislation they can claim it's not their mess, and they get the brownie points for appearing to respond to the public backlash.
Does that sound like a shady mafRIAA backroom deal to you too?
You see, a government is expendable, if it pushes your dodgy legislation and becomes unpopular, it gets torn down at the next election, and the next batch of politicians are at your service, the one thing that remains constant is the players behind the scene you don't get to vote on.
Well back to the drawing board for the legislation. They've backed off, and will try again with something milder. Basically this kind of legislative push is intended to soften up the public and be more likely to accept whatever 'compromise' alternative law is offered.
What about the real time raytracing which people keep talking about for games?
Some tasks love parallelism. Personally I think the future is in FPGA chips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA. Where the architecture changes as needed.
The only crucial prerequisite for VMs is having enough extra RAM for the overhead of the host OS to run nicely. The host OS should use spare ram over and above that to cache disk access, which boosts VM performance.
The second rule of thumb is don't blow money on top spec hardware.
DDR2 RAM is cheap, load it up. This is the only real fun killer if you don't have enough, all other advice here is non-essential, any non-dinosaur box is fine for fiddling with VMs.
An interesting note a discrete graphics card (any cheap or old with 128mb buffer) will lift overall system performance. Otherwise some bus bandwidth is sacrificed for onboard graphics. 5-10% overall performance maybe.
As a tip, I find VMs love CPU clock speed, more so than extra cores, so a dual-core is good VM experimentation stuff. It depends on what your doing of course, quad cores are a benefit if you want to run mutliple VMs or some heavyweight multi-threaded tasks in your guest OS.
When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life
Not true. I live in a country with publicly funded healthcare. It seems statements such as yours are FUD and rhetoric from the private healthcare industry since it clearly not how things actually work out. Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work. The advantage of of public healthcare is everybody has access to it, and are get care based on need, not on wealth class or race, which is what inevitably happens with an private insurance based system.
So presumably, you trust big corporates more than a government?
Don't get me wrong though, public healtcare has problems, especially in terms of limited resources in the UK, various EU members, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. But somehow these nations rank much higher in health standards that the USA.
For-profit health care is beholden to a financial bottom line, not a democratic government mandated to measure performance on care, not revenue. So in private vs public the latter is the lesser of two evils.
Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
There is a implication there that the alternative McCain/Palin administration wouldn't have been tools of the RIAA.
Whoever is in government is a tool of big industry. Its the fundamental natural of capitalist democracy.
I've often thought religion is more an attempt to prosetylise in response to cognitive dissonance from the one of a number of psychological blows as we develop mentally, the most interesting one being where we first we realise our own mortality.
Vista offers a XP SP2 compatibility mode and other settings, selectable for each executable binary, which will resolve a huge ammount of issues with old applications in Vista.
For along time two golden rules for windows application development were:
1. Assume your windows system may be multi-user
2. Assume the user man not have admin rights.
And it's been that way long before the XP era.
I certainly had it drummed into my head, yet somehow a good fraction of the Windows ecosystem misses these basic tenets and then it's no wonder that these applications broke on Vista. If it's a crap app it'll break on Vista, but why would you want to run applications like these anyway? The risk to your system is too great!
CPUs are now good enough for encryption, a few cores gives you hundreds of mb/s on AES for example. It's not as simple as that, with the added overheads on a server, but in outright costs it's not that huge.
INAE: I'm not an engineer but hydraulic drives can be made pretty efficient, indeed they are pretty well developed and widely used in many applications. Where the efficiency can be found in hydraulics the relatively ease with which you can recover and reuse energy. These generally make electric energy recovery systems look pretty inefficient.
Many of the most promising biofuel crop plants do not compete with food crops, as they grow in conditions that nothing else grows in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha_oil
The plant yields more than four times as much fuel per hectare as soybean, and more than ten times that of maize (corn). A hectare of jatropha produces 1,892 litres of fuel.
This is actually a good thing for the 3rd world as they tend to have most of the worst non-arible land.
Biofuels will only impact food supply initially as farms of maize etc enjoy temporarily inflated prices as the craze gets underway, but ultimately biofuels from these kind of crops will out-compete food based sources.
Human behavior is naturally variable, for example, a pro basketballer can still and will miss a hoop. Likewise this variability allows amateurs to have some luck. Indeed an elite gamer will occasionally have their ass handed to them by a complete noobcakes. We don't see this in game AI, which is ruthlessly consistent.
It's interesting that in order to create better AI, we need to create Artificial Stupidity. Some would argue that is already all around us.
In outright atheism one may find oblivion appealing rather than a compulsory eternal life, one may also treasure the finite term of consciousness a little more and when you're done you're done, there's not a sodding thing you can do about it. That's not what I think myself, but thats possibly the point of view of many non-pious, they've already found their peace in life and fear nothing.
Would like to see more indie developers be more open about their business model in this way. A very interseting read. But disappointing the developer takes a snipe at pirates (Can't blame him for being bitter of course)but doesn't really discuss/acknowledge the role of non-paying customers nor provides detail of actual piracy rates and how it has actually effected the business. That's what we really want to see.
It's been cracked aplenty
Says he. Of course, Indie games have a lower piracy rate than big titles.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes is fictional.
If you have adequate physical security in meatspace, then it's reasonable to assume your backups are not significantly more vulnerable over and above your main cubical farm.
It is also an reasonable initial assumption when setting up shop, that backups of any kind should be situated in a more bomb/fire/quake/flood/theft proof place than your main operation. That goes for external intrusions to your hot failover systems too.
Over time your entire footprint of your windows system, applications and files, gets spread out of a large footprint of the hard disk. This literally means your average access times go up, as your hard disk has to read from one end to the other of the disk.
Defragging doesn't fix this, as even if files aren't fragmented and reasonably well placed on the drive, files are simply not longer clustered in say, the first 10% of your hard drive.
Updates to Windows also mess up your system file layout and footprint.
To fix: 1. Split your HDD into two partitions, a first partition of perhaps (10gb min), and a second one of the rest of your HDD - you'll need to relocate user profile folders to this partition perhaps.
2. Perform clean install of Windows XP that has been nlite'd (www.nliteos.com) to include streamlined service packs + drivers + delete unnecessary crap (language packs, foreign keyboards, speech support, legacy drivers)
3.Reboot a few times so prefetch speeds up boot and placement. Defrag (yes even a clean install needs it).
4. Install a minimal set of applications she likes.
5. ????
6. Enjoy snappy new system.
Still rendering the frame on the client machine, and some gameplay logic, such that the user gets instant response to movements and inputs. On the big iron servers process:
Ultra-real global illumination.
Complicated physics for environment.
Advanced game AI, for game actors.
Streaming sound/music.
I've considered streaming the contents of my 2-gpu gaming PCs frame buffer over gigabit connection to my linux netbook. Even with a gigabit link you have the latency of rendering the frame quickly, compressing, transfering, decompressing, rendering to destination monitor. Usually, the 30-40ms between the movement of the mouse/keyboard and a frame being rendered to the screen is not a huge step over the 40ms it takes for your eye to see the light. Add another 100ms overhead and suddenly games like a FPS aren't fun anymore. Hell using a remote desktop for basic tasks through a laggy connection isn't fun.
Non one else is amazed to learn that something other than mass interacts with gravity... ?
OpenWRT is a linux based embedded operating system.
Surely this is a first. Sure nix boxes and devices get hacked all the time, but I assumed that such automated attacks were natively difficult on linux?
Video games are played by all but a minority of adolescents. Inevitably when there is some kind of violent incident involving young people, more likely than not they are at least very a casual gamer. This demonstrates causation that video games have spawned all violent crime which did not exist back in our day.
Nobody was ever shot before 1974, because our generation are perfect role models and our children have been subverted by mindless video games.
Therefore young people are to blame, the sooner we lock them all up the better.
} sarcasm;
IANAP, but something that bothers me, did they do controls with pure water or acetone for example? Could the results seen in their detector be the result of something like sololuminescence rather than genuine fusion products?
Even if the answer they get from their experiments is 'NO' it's still useful science. Any investigation at the edges of our understanding is automaticly worthwhile. The lay-person does not get this.
the marginally centrist-right National, and marginally centrist-left Labour,
Labour is not by any definition left wing, perhaps only if you look at a handful of policies they adopt to cozy up to unions and the Green party. They are very centre-right in practice. The NZ definition of 'left' is a strange one.
The politician who got this section slipped into the law, Judith Tizzard (Labour party MP), did so, right before an election and right before the end of her career. She retired.
Undoubtedly because it would have been the end of her political career in another way, if she was not retiring.
Scrap that, they picked someone on the way out to slip this in for them, it's an excellent way to find a fall guy, someone who won't be even be around to cop the backlash. The amendment was also made when it was clear Labour would not be getting re-elected. A party on it's way out so the new government could dodge some flak, if they had to can the legislation they can claim it's not their mess, and they get the brownie points for appearing to respond to the public backlash.
Does that sound like a shady mafRIAA backroom deal to you too?
You see, a government is expendable, if it pushes your dodgy legislation and becomes unpopular, it gets torn down at the next election, and the next batch of politicians are at your service, the one thing that remains constant is the players behind the scene you don't get to vote on.
Well back to the drawing board for the legislation. They've backed off, and will try again with something milder. Basically this kind of legislative push is intended to soften up the public and be more likely to accept whatever 'compromise' alternative law is offered.
What about the real time raytracing which people keep talking about for games?
Some tasks love parallelism. Personally I think the future is in FPGA chips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA. Where the architecture changes as needed.
The only crucial prerequisite for VMs is having enough extra RAM for the overhead of the host OS to run nicely. The host OS should use spare ram over and above that to cache disk access, which boosts VM performance.
The second rule of thumb is don't blow money on top spec hardware.
DDR2 RAM is cheap, load it up. This is the only real fun killer if you don't have enough, all other advice here is non-essential, any non-dinosaur box is fine for fiddling with VMs.
An interesting note a discrete graphics card (any cheap or old with 128mb buffer) will lift overall system performance. Otherwise some bus bandwidth is sacrificed for onboard graphics. 5-10% overall performance maybe.
As a tip, I find VMs love CPU clock speed, more so than extra cores, so a dual-core is good VM experimentation stuff. It depends on what your doing of course, quad cores are a benefit if you want to run mutliple VMs or some heavyweight multi-threaded tasks in your guest OS.
When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life
Not true. I live in a country with publicly funded healthcare. It seems statements such as yours are FUD and rhetoric from the private healthcare industry since it clearly not how things actually work out. Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work. The advantage of of public healthcare is everybody has access to it, and are get care based on need, not on wealth class or race, which is what inevitably happens with an private insurance based system.
So presumably, you trust big corporates more than a government?
Don't get me wrong though, public healtcare has problems, especially in terms of limited resources in the UK, various EU members, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. But somehow these nations rank much higher in health standards that the USA.
For-profit health care is beholden to a financial bottom line, not a democratic government mandated to measure performance on care, not revenue. So in private vs public the latter is the lesser of two evils.
Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
There is a implication there that the alternative McCain/Palin administration wouldn't have been tools of the RIAA. Whoever is in government is a tool of big industry. Its the fundamental natural of capitalist democracy.
I've often thought religion is more an attempt to prosetylise in response to cognitive dissonance from the one of a number of psychological blows as we develop mentally, the most interesting one being where we first we realise our own mortality.
Vista offers a XP SP2 compatibility mode and other settings, selectable for each executable binary, which will resolve a huge ammount of issues with old applications in Vista.
For along time two golden rules for windows application development were:
1. Assume your windows system may be multi-user
2. Assume the user man not have admin rights.
And it's been that way long before the XP era.
I certainly had it drummed into my head, yet somehow a good fraction of the Windows ecosystem misses these basic tenets and then it's no wonder that these applications broke on Vista. If it's a crap app it'll break on Vista, but why would you want to run applications like these anyway? The risk to your system is too great!
CPUs are now good enough for encryption, a few cores gives you hundreds of mb/s on AES for example. It's not as simple as that, with the added overheads on a server, but in outright costs it's not that huge.
INAE: I'm not an engineer but hydraulic drives can be made pretty efficient, indeed they are pretty well developed and widely used in many applications. Where the efficiency can be found in hydraulics the relatively ease with which you can recover and reuse energy. These generally make electric energy recovery systems look pretty inefficient.
The plant yields more than four times as much fuel per hectare as soybean, and more than ten times that of maize (corn). A hectare of jatropha produces 1,892 litres of fuel.
This is actually a good thing for the 3rd world as they tend to have most of the worst non-arible land.
Biofuels will only impact food supply initially as farms of maize etc enjoy temporarily inflated prices as the craze gets underway, but ultimately biofuels from these kind of crops will out-compete food based sources.
Human behavior is naturally variable, for example, a pro basketballer can still and will miss a hoop. Likewise this variability allows amateurs to have some luck. Indeed an elite gamer will occasionally have their ass handed to them by a complete noobcakes. We don't see this in game AI, which is ruthlessly consistent.
It's interesting that in order to create better AI, we need to create Artificial Stupidity. Some would argue that is already all around us.
In outright atheism one may find oblivion appealing rather than a compulsory eternal life, one may also treasure the finite term of consciousness a little more and when you're done you're done, there's not a sodding thing you can do about it. That's not what I think myself, but thats possibly the point of view of many non-pious, they've already found their peace in life and fear nothing.
It's been cracked aplenty
Says he. Of course, Indie games have a lower piracy rate than big titles.