Yup, and maybe an alpha while I'm at it. I've been looking for an excuse to ignore the appalling price/performance advantage on commodity x86 gear, and get a really nice toy. Widespread adoption of DRM in hardware was the obvious one.
Still... it would be wierd to be left out of all the Moore's law fun, watching as my gigaflops machines get left further and further behind by ubiquitous DRM-crippled gear.
On a more useful note, what sort of features make sparc stand out from x86? Are they the sort of things that are visible through existing standards like pthreads, or would a good compiler use them properly, or is it more to do with the system as a whole?
Well, if we're talking theroretical, then unless you care -infinity (correct term?), then there's always a lesser value. And if you cared -infinity, why are you wasting your breath and energy formulating thoughts and words on the subject? Shouldn't you be dead? After all, who can care less than dead people?
Erm, I probably would have opted for speaking theoretically, but that would be pedantic, instead of just theoretical, wouldn't it?
But if we're going to spend too much time thinking about it (whee!), I would argue that care was just the (scalar) magnitude of the vector quantity, opinion.
Just like z = (r, theta), opinion = (caring, feeling), or something. I may care a great deal about two different things and still have wildly different opinions of both.
And, of course, it doesn't help to confuse smallest and least, either...
You're familiar with modern wind technology, correct? Large blades, turning slowly. Certainly some birds might smack into them (the same way they do to buildings and cars), but we're not talking about the little, fast-moving windmills of the 1970s and 80s.
Fair enough, but, fundamentally, wind farms are still basically trying to obstruct the movement of a fluid that is being driven, at some remove, by solar power.
Environmentalists get all worked up about hydro-electric and the fact that it fundamentally changes the river ecosystem, and then hold up wind as a better solution.
As far as I can see, the only real difference between hydro and wind is that hydro is better localized, more consistent, and easier to harness. How many hillsides do you have to cover with windmills to match the power generation of a Grand Coulee or a Hoover Dam? They plan to have basically run out of terrestrial sites by 2005, at only 2.5x their current capacity.
The energy consumption of a wealthy western population is huge. Attempts at renewable energy sources are laudable, but they pale by comparison to the volume of power generated by conventional means. The first page I found with actual numbers claims a goal of only 35% combined from all renewable sources by 2030, not 50% from wind alone, but that still seems optimistic to the point of hubris when compared to the existing renewable energy sources. Even their own numbers only give a duty factor of 20% (1200GWH per year on 600MW of capacity).
Attempts to migrate to renewable energy resources are laudable, but how long will it be before there's a backlash against the giant tracts of land being dedicated to unsightly wind farms?
You never submitted anything. Your crypto was done with trusted tools on a trusted OS on trusted hardware.
If they're behaving themselves, you're right. But I would argue that javascript downloaded from Joe Random's geocities page is not trusted code, and could thus easily be doing other things, in addition to generating an md5 hash for you.
So make that the random geocities site you may have unknowingly just submitted it to.
Now, find a javascript MD5 site... Type your master password in... and no one has your master password
Um, yeah, no one except the random geocities site you just submitted it to. Do your crypto locally, with trusted tools on a trusted OS on trusted hardware. Always.
An older board - the UP2000 - is a dual processor SDRAM (not DDR) based Alpha motherboard, which has 6 PCI slots, two of which are 64-bit.
The UP1500 is the successor to the UP1000/UP1100, both of which were also based on AMD chipsets. And don't be fooled by the DDR on the UP1500. Compared with the crossbar switches used on the "real" alpha motherboards (e.g. the UP2000), the memory subsystem of the amd761, nice as it is, can't hold a candle. If you're going to confine yourself to a PC's memory architecture, you might as well drop a couple of 1.6GHz Athlon MPs in it.
I'd go dig up the links (check www.alpha-processor.com and www.microway.com), but that would just make me want to drop $15k I don't have on a new toy...
IIRC, these folks are all using a tritium-deuterium reaction, which yields helium and a neutron. For one thing, it's a much easier reaction than, for instance, deuterium-deuterium, and, for another, the neutrons give you a way to extract the energy and manufacture tritium. Of course, the other thing the neutrons do is irradiate the structure of the reactor, which ends up leaving you with all sort of fun radioisotopes to dispose of later.
Of course, that probably pales by comparison to the amount of waste generated while refining fissile fuels, and you completely avoid the possibility of a meltdown, but still, I might not go so far as to claim it's 'pollution free.'
I mean to say what's the difference between 106 (what an odd number)...
Given the way other Sun boxen like the E3500 work, I expect that's the 15K has 18 boards, each of which takes 3 modules, either 2xCPU of 8GB RAM.
That means that 72 CPU / 288 GB memory is 18 boards, each with 2 2xCPU modules and one 18 GB memory module, and the box is full.
Since you always need some memory, the most CPUs you can get is 17 boards w/ 6 each and one with 4. Of course, that leaves you with 8GB of memory for your 106 CPUs.
The other end is (17 x 3 + 1 x 2) 8 GB memory modules for 424 GB on a pair of CPUs
Ashcroft's new proposals, though, go far beyond making computer-crime 'crime'. It already is. What he's doing is making it terrorism. People could be jailed for life for the electronic equivilent of graffitti.
The really spooky bit is that _helping_ a "terrorist" commit a computer crime is considered an act of terrorism.
step 1: discover and publish a security hole w/ sample exploit code.
step 2: watch in dismay as unpatched boxes are rooted and abused months afterward.
step 3: get on with your life for some arbitrarily long period of time.
step 4: annoy some suitably influential politician.
step 5: rot in prison for the terrorist act you committed years before.
I'm tempted to suggest Canada, but they're working on their own DMCA and would probably cheerfully extradite "terrorists" anyway.
I was horrified when I read the Post article. The idea that the man who created PGP could have actually been swayed by all the technophobe, anti-crypto hysteria was terrifying.
Of course, regardless of whether it's true or not, all the folks looking to restrict crypto will almost certainly pick this up and run with it. Even if the Post issues a retraction, what do you suppose the chances are that anybody will notice?
Cisco's done this. It's apparently basically a 386 with a sound card and ethernet. It uses dhcp and tftp to grab config info. One of its more abusable features is the fact that you can download wav files to it to replace the ring.
I never did quite get around to getting on the serial port and trying to netboot linux,tho...
Like everybody else, I'm seeing ferocious numbers of http attempts at my firewall, so I took a look at some of the originating IPs. I've only managed to get through to a couple of them, since the worm appears to keep the victims fairly busy:)
Having pulled down a couple of the readme.eml files from the infected boxen (mmm... Mozilla on Solaris on Sparc:), I noticed that they are not all the same. Suppose the folks behind this one realized that a monoculture is a Bad Idea, or is it likely harvesting some data while it propagates?
They can have my copies of (OpenSSL|OpenSSH|gpg|etc.) when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
That, and, as others have pointed out, the algorithms are known and not that difficult to implement. Any self-respecting terrorist would simply ignore encryption tools with backdoors built into them. It would (who am I kidding, will), generally speaking, only be the law-abiding folks who would (will) be injured by this.
And I continue to be amused by the way second amendment slogans seem so appropriate to the likes of DMCA, SSSCA, and crypto regulation...
If you can't sell a computer that's not security equipped, we who want to control our own technology will be like the people in a cyberpunk novel or in the Matrix, who have to cobble together their own technology apart from the mainstream.
The problem with that is that moderm computer hardware is fantastically complex, and requires massive infrastructure to manufacture.
Or, do we have to act as free people do under repression - keeping our very names and acts truly secret, building computers and writing in basements instead of at bright stores?
The most obvious analogy for me is to the second amendment. A single person, with access to reasonably affordable tools, can presumably build, albeit slowly, high quality firearms. Getting rifling right in your garage may be tricky, but pulling off.18 um (or really, any) photolithography is simply impossible. The obvious alternative would be stockpiling existing hardware... Think Waco, but stocked to the gills with Celerons, PIIIs, Athlon MPs, and even a couple of Alpha beowulf clusters.
Of course, there are other intriguing parallels as well, like prohibition. The image of Elliot Ness busting up a lan party speakeasy is fairly amusing.
And I can't even really decide on a tone for this. I am sincerely horrified by the prospect of the SSSCA (though, like many others here, I saw it coming), but at the same time, the ideas of Linux-Waco or lan party speakeasies just seem laughable.
Central role of language: Right now BeOS has a POSIX-compliant underbelly, which gives you the flexibility of a command-line interface alongside the normal GUI interface. The two are intermeshed practically seamlessly. While it doesn't have the fancy "interpreter" capabilities the Anti-Mac ideal proposes (like a spell-checker, which isn't such a bad idea) it IS a working CLI, so you have the strength of language alongside the ease of a GUI.
It seems to me that a lot of folks have overlooked the fact that tab-completion is a substantial step toward the 'dialogue' described in the original paper. They wanted the user to be able to give a rough idea of the desired transaction and then be asked to refine it.
s/hit tab/mutter you know what I mean/ and you're on your way. Both tcsh and bash will give you a list of potential matches to narrow things down, and, although I admittedly haven't taken the time to play with it, zsh will let you define arbitrary completion routines, so you could (I expect) work out a spell-check feature for the CLI. Granted, that's not the kind of thing the envisioned anti-mac user would set up, but once it had been done, it could be widely used.
In fact, the collection of information on which the tab completion is based is done by agents. They are very simple, but that's not a problem. We shouldn't let ourselves get overcommitted to the 'agent' metaphor and expect them to have a face and interact with us directly, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and maybe an alpha while I'm at it. I've been looking for an excuse to ignore the appalling price/performance advantage on commodity x86 gear, and get a really nice toy. Widespread adoption of DRM in hardware was the obvious one.
Still... it would be wierd to be left out of all the Moore's law fun, watching as my gigaflops machines get left further and further behind by ubiquitous DRM-crippled gear.
On a more useful note, what sort of features make sparc stand out from x86? Are they the sort of things that are visible through existing standards like pthreads, or would a good compiler use them properly, or is it more to do with the system as a whole?
Erm, I probably would have opted for speaking theoretically, but that would be pedantic, instead of just theoretical, wouldn't it?
But if we're going to spend too much time thinking about it (whee!), I would argue that care was just the (scalar) magnitude of the vector quantity, opinion.
Just like z = (r, theta), opinion = (caring, feeling), or something. I may care a great deal about two different things and still have wildly different opinions of both.
And, of course, it doesn't help to confuse smallest and least, either...
Fair enough, but, fundamentally, wind farms are still basically trying to obstruct the movement of a fluid that is being driven, at some remove, by solar power.
Environmentalists get all worked up about hydro-electric and the fact that it fundamentally changes the river ecosystem, and then hold up wind as a better solution.
As far as I can see, the only real difference between hydro and wind is that hydro is better localized, more consistent, and easier to harness. How many hillsides do you have to cover with windmills to match the power generation of a Grand Coulee or a Hoover Dam? They plan to have basically run out of terrestrial sites by 2005, at only 2.5x their current capacity.
The energy consumption of a wealthy western population is huge. Attempts at renewable energy sources are laudable, but they pale by comparison to the volume of power generated by conventional means. The first page I found with actual numbers claims a goal of only 35% combined from all renewable sources by 2030, not 50% from wind alone, but that still seems optimistic to the point of hubris when compared to the existing renewable energy sources. Even their own numbers only give a duty factor of 20% (1200GWH per year on 600MW of capacity).
Attempts to migrate to renewable energy resources are laudable, but how long will it be before there's a backlash against the giant tracts of land being dedicated to unsightly wind farms?
If they're behaving themselves, you're right. But I would argue that javascript downloaded from Joe Random's geocities page is not trusted code, and could thus easily be doing other things, in addition to generating an md5 hash for you.
So make that the random geocities site you may have unknowingly just submitted it to.
*shrug*
Um, yeah, no one except the random geocities site you just submitted it to. Do your crypto locally, with trusted tools on a trusted OS on trusted hardware. Always.
The UP1500 is the successor to the UP1000/UP1100, both of which were also based on AMD chipsets. And don't be fooled by the DDR on the UP1500. Compared with the crossbar switches used on the "real" alpha motherboards (e.g. the UP2000), the memory subsystem of the amd761, nice as it is, can't hold a candle. If you're going to confine yourself to a PC's memory architecture, you might as well drop a couple of 1.6GHz Athlon MPs in it.
I'd go dig up the links (check www.alpha-processor.com and www.microway.com), but that would just make me want to drop $15k I don't have on a new toy...
Ugh. Not Hitler, Kaiser Bill. Hitler wasn't doing much of anything in nineteen-dickety-two...
And, yeah, something about Godwin...
Yes, but is a thriving Jedi population a sign of good or bad health?
The shameful misuse of the apostrophe is being fought by others as well.
Bob must be ... um ... more irate!
IIRC, these folks are all using a tritium-deuterium reaction, which yields helium and a neutron. For one thing, it's a much easier reaction than, for instance, deuterium-deuterium, and, for another, the neutrons give you a way to extract the energy and manufacture tritium. Of course, the other thing the neutrons do is irradiate the structure of the reactor, which ends up leaving you with all sort of fun radioisotopes to dispose of later.
Of course, that probably pales by comparison to the amount of waste generated while refining fissile fuels, and you completely avoid the possibility of a meltdown, but still, I might not go so far as to claim it's 'pollution free.'
Given the way other Sun boxen like the E3500 work, I expect that's the 15K has 18 boards, each of which takes 3 modules, either 2xCPU of 8GB RAM.
That means that 72 CPU / 288 GB memory is 18 boards, each with 2 2xCPU modules and one 18 GB memory module, and the box is full.
Since you always need some memory, the most CPUs you can get is 17 boards w/ 6 each and one with 4. Of course, that leaves you with 8GB of memory for your 106 CPUs.
The other end is (17 x 3 + 1 x 2) 8 GB memory modules for 424 GB on a pair of CPUs
But that's just a guess...
The really spooky bit is that _helping_ a "terrorist" commit a computer crime is considered an act of terrorism.
step 1: discover and publish a security hole w/ sample exploit code.
step 2: watch in dismay as unpatched boxes are rooted and abused months afterward.
step 3: get on with your life for some arbitrarily long period of time.
step 4: annoy some suitably influential politician.
step 5: rot in prison for the terrorist act you committed years before.
I'm tempted to suggest Canada, but they're working on their own DMCA and would probably cheerfully extradite "terrorists" anyway.
*nod*
I was horrified when I read the Post article. The idea that the man who created PGP could have actually been swayed by all the technophobe, anti-crypto hysteria was terrifying.
Of course, regardless of whether it's true or not, all the folks looking to restrict crypto will almost certainly pick this up and run with it. Even if the Post issues a retraction, what do you suppose the chances are that anybody will notice?
Cisco's done this. It's apparently basically a 386 with a sound card and ethernet. It uses dhcp and tftp to grab config info. One of its more abusable features is the fact that you can download wav files to it to replace the ring.
I never did quite get around to getting on the serial port and trying to netboot linux,tho...
Like everybody else, I'm seeing ferocious numbers of http attempts at my firewall, so I took a look at some of the originating IPs. I've only managed to get through to a couple of them, since the worm appears to keep the victims fairly busy :)
Having pulled down a couple of the readme.eml files from the infected boxen (mmm... Mozilla on Solaris on Sparc :), I noticed that they are not all the same. Suppose the folks behind this one realized that a monoculture is a Bad Idea, or is it likely harvesting some data while it propagates?
I'm crystal clear on this one.
They can have my copies of (OpenSSL|OpenSSH|gpg|etc.) when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
That, and, as others have pointed out, the algorithms are known and not that difficult to implement. Any self-respecting terrorist would simply ignore encryption tools with backdoors built into them. It would (who am I kidding, will), generally speaking, only be the law-abiding folks who would (will) be injured by this.
And I continue to be amused by the way second amendment slogans seem so appropriate to the likes of DMCA, SSSCA, and crypto regulation...
The problem with that is that moderm computer hardware is fantastically complex, and requires massive infrastructure to manufacture.
The most obvious analogy for me is to the second amendment. A single person, with access to reasonably affordable tools, can presumably build, albeit slowly, high quality firearms. Getting rifling right in your garage may be tricky, but pulling off .18 um (or really, any) photolithography is simply impossible. The obvious alternative would be stockpiling existing hardware... Think Waco, but stocked to the gills with Celerons, PIIIs, Athlon MPs, and even a couple of Alpha beowulf clusters.
Of course, there are other intriguing parallels as well, like prohibition. The image of Elliot Ness busting up a lan party speakeasy is fairly amusing.
And I can't even really decide on a tone for this. I am sincerely horrified by the prospect of the SSSCA (though, like many others here, I saw it coming), but at the same time, the ideas of Linux-Waco or lan party speakeasies just seem laughable.
Central role of language: Right now BeOS has a POSIX-compliant underbelly, which gives you the flexibility of a command-line interface alongside the normal GUI interface. The two are intermeshed practically seamlessly. While it doesn't have the fancy "interpreter" capabilities the Anti-Mac ideal proposes (like a spell-checker, which isn't such a bad idea) it IS a working CLI, so you have the strength of language alongside the ease of a GUI.
It seems to me that a lot of folks have overlooked the fact that tab-completion is a substantial step toward the 'dialogue' described in the original paper. They wanted the user to be able to give a rough idea of the desired transaction and then be asked to refine it.
s/hit tab/mutter you know what I mean/ and you're on your way. Both tcsh and bash will give you a list of potential matches to narrow things down, and, although I admittedly haven't taken the time to play with it, zsh will let you define arbitrary completion routines, so you could (I expect) work out a spell-check feature for the CLI. Granted, that's not the kind of thing the envisioned anti-mac user would set up, but once it had been done, it could be widely used.
In fact, the collection of information on which the tab completion is based is done by agents. They are very simple, but that's not a problem. We shouldn't let ourselves get overcommitted to the 'agent' metaphor and expect them to have a face and interact with us directly, right?