or start forging addresses from the same domain as they're sending to
Okay, I'm an idiot. They're already doing this, obviously, as I pointed out in the first part of my comment. What I meant to say was 'or start correlating addresses they send to/forge from, so they'll be forging known-good addresses'.
I've seen a bunch that were very well-written (have one hanging on my wall, in fact--as a reminder), purporting to come from noreply@[ourdomain].com, management@[ourdomain].com, support@[ourdomain].com, etc. My users are pretty good, but I still worry that one day somebody will nail the spelling *and* grammar perfectly, or start forging addresses from the same domain as they're sending to, and all hell will break loose.
Intellectual property laws may be bad for business in general, but they are invaluable to big business. How else could they ensure that upstarts don't come in, undercut them, and take over the market?
Three words: Economies of scale
I think there's an interesting change happening around us, where folks are starting to rediscover that ideas aren't the be-all, end-all of a successful business. The key in business has always been in the execution. If you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc. you win. You don't get a guaranteed billion just for coming up with an idea and ambushing somebody with your patent 10 years after they make the business model work.
I'm drawing a bit from my artistic background here, and looking at it from a slightly different perspective. As an artist (dancer), I don't get paid if I don't work. That work can be teaching, it can be choreography, it can be performing. The simple fact is, however, that if I'm not constantly working, I don't get paid. I don't tell my students that they can't use the knowledge I've passed on to them. They can use it however they please.
The key works out to this: If you don't work, you don't eat. You can have all the inspiration you want, but if you can't translate that into something someone else wants, and do it consistently, you're going to be hurting. I'm not sure yet whether I like that idea or not, but it certainly seems fair enough.
Existing copyright laws are not the major problem. It's the 'over-enforcement' of copyrights
While I agree with the spirit of what I understand you to be saying here, I think it's important to note that a law which is only good when marginally enforced is a lousy law.
I certainly do not expect that framing a better law will be easy, but I think it's clear that settling for ones that are pretty-not-too-bad has largely contributed to the mess we're in right now. The blood, sweat, and tears should go into the framing of appropriate laws, not the decision of whether to enforce them.
If you ran for office, I'd vote for you. Your suggestions for health care and welfare reform are liberal enough to be an acceptable compromise for folks like me, and socialist enough to be popular. Congrats.:) (I'm a hard person to please)
That said, not *everyone* explicitly or implicitly depends on having a net. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
If I get into a car accident and sustain sufficiently-serious injuries, I expect that I'll die. Am I going to turn down the EMT's if they show up in time? No, of course not. I'll likely even say 'Thank you'.:) I'm not suggesting I'd refuse to accept help from others, nor that I'd refuse to give it. There's a pretty good chance as well that I'd ask for help if I found myself in need of it. The main difference for me may be semantic. I don't *expect* that anybody will help me. If they do, it's a bonus.
From my perspective, the government shouldn't legislate 'bonuses'. I'm not opposed to community-based cooperative medical/fire service, etc. I think those are truly fantastic examples of what community cooperation can accomplish, but does it have to be done by an organization with so much power? What I'm primarily bothered by is the excessive reach and size of our government. It seems that every time somebody thinks "oooh, this would be nice..", they make a law and have the government do it. I'm leery of any organization with so much power whose scope seems to be continually broadened.
I'm wandering a bit here, and should likely have waited until I had a few drinks in me to respond, but I hope the gist of what I'm trying to say comes across clearly enough. I'm not opposed to basic services. I'm opposed to people *expecting* them, and then insisting on a government with such broad powers to provide them. Can't we put each essential service in a chroot() jail and run them under a minimal UID? They don't all need to be backed by the might of UID 0. (military/police force)
You make some excellent points about how difficult it is to be happy and healthy in the real world.
I don't disagree with those points.
From my perspective, however, it's my responsibility to ensure my own health and happiness. I don't think it's anybody else's responsibility, and I sure as hell don't want their attempts to 'help' me to infringe upon my ability to help myself.
I find it interesting to see how widely diversified folks' perspectives are on this issue. Maybe it's because I'm somewhat accustomed to the feeling of working without a net, but I find it almost humourous to see so many people insist that someone other than they should be responsible to help them live their life. This strikes me as an artificial construct of modern civilization, and one which I am loath to depend upon.
Now, let's generously assume that each laptop is drawing half an amp at 110 volts. At 1200 laptops, that's 600 amps. The circuit breakers in my house trip at 15 amps, but I'll generously assume this facility has 50 amp wall circuits. That would still require 12 entire circuits, plus a safety factor, nevermind all my generous back-of-envelope assumptions.
600 amps is nothing for a place like this. I can get an 800 amp feed to my house, according to the nice folks at my local power company (and I'll be upgrading to that as part of my rewiring plan). 12 circuits is no big deal either. Think of the power requirements for holding concerts or any type of show, or just for lighting the place.
A place like that also probably has a house electrician on staff who knows the boards and how to get x amps from point A to point B. I doubt power is going to be the main issue holding them back on this.
Are they threatening prosecutions to everyone who touched the torrent or just saying "stop distributing right fucking now and we might let you live"?
The email I saw said three things:
1) Cease and desist distributing the thing
2) Delete any and all copies of it you may have in your possession
3) Tell Microsoft how you came to be in possession of it
It includes a reminder that you may be subject to severe civil and criminal penalties if you've downloaded and are distributing the code. It seems to imply that if you cooperate with them they won't hammer you, but like any good legalese, it doesn't actually *say* they won't. It's simply more worthwhile for them to focus on tracking down the original leak and make that person's life a living hell than it is for them to start nailing users all over--especially considering that the last thing Microsoft needs on top of the code leakage is another PR mess like the RIAA got when they started going after 12 year olds and grandparents.
Effectively, like everybody said all along, coming anywhere near this code is a really bad idea.
I spoke with a gent on the same network reporting the same experience (could be the same guy:) and read the email they sent him. The email was sent from Microsoft, not from the FBI or any law enforcement entity.
It's not FUD. The gent in question also mentioned that his torrent download jumped from about 100K/s to 600K/s at some point through the download, which would lead me to believe that somebody with fat pipes *cough*Microsoft*cough* jumped into the swarm, likely in order to start tracing IP addresses.
I do wonder a bit about that, however, because if Microsoft jumps into the torrent to start nabbing IP's, haven't they also contributed to the dissemination of the source code by participating in its distribution? I'd imagine that it's no more of a problem for them legally than it is to undercover police selling drugs in sting operations. I do wonder if it should be, however...especially considering that they're *not* a law enforcement agency.
The poster of this 'Ask Slashdot' probably makes 2-3 times what I make (if not 10x-20x in stock options alone) and yet he's willing to listen to my poorly informed ideas on such an important matter?! Truly hilarious!
Sometimes folks get promoted into positions of power and influence because they realize that the best answers aren't necessarily the ones you pay the most for. Indeed, isn't that one of the major selling points of OSS--that paying more does *not* always get you more?
A request for opinions is exactly that. You didn't really think he was going to use your opinion to supplant his own, did you?
Most security is based on secrets of one kind or another---that doesn't make it "obscurity."
I think that's the point the grandparent is making. The key to this is that folks around here aren't real clear on the difference between "obscurity" and "secrets". One is touted as being worthless by itself, the other is accepted as the cornerstone of electronic security in general (I posit that the cornerstone of physical security is violence).
the phrase "security through obscurity" means obscurity of system design.
This is an excellent point, and deserves to be modded up because *way* too many people both here and elsewhere miss this fundamental concept. In my opinion any method that makes accessible hosts look the same as unaccessible hosts to a port scan is a great idea, no matter what folks here choose to call it.
you mentioned compaq and i recalled my p100 machine from compaq and recoiled in horrror.
You're referring to your experience with consumer-grade kit from Compaq, where I believe the grandparent is referring to commercial-grade stuff.
Compaq makes some really nice servers, and some really nice managed-desktop stuff. It's solid, nice heavy metal cases, high-quality components, etc. Their business support has been excellent in my experience as well.
On the other hand, they make some really crappy consumer-grade stuff. If I ever touch another Presario it'll be too soon, and I haven't heard good things about their laptops either. Dell is definitely preferred in this market, although I still prefer IBM laptops.
I used to have the same impression as you regarding Compaq's consumer machines, but after working with their business systems, I was amazed. It's literally like they are two different companies.
I've had Firewalking listed in my 3-line Outside Interests section for some time now, and it invariably sparks conversation during the interviews. I'll grant that the HR folks don't generally notice it, but I have yet to see a hiring manager who didn't. That seems to be one of those resume tidbits that gets around the office before your first day, too, and in my mind anything that gets your name around the office without making you look like *too* much of an idiot is a good thing. =)
I'm fairly certain that used to be the case when *everybody* was running mainframe environments (not that lots of folks still aren't), but the key to the new version of this is that it'll be done over the network.
Look at it from IBM's perspective. You can have 8 extra processors on-site for each client for those few times when they need the extra CPU, or you can have massive datacenters all over the world with a pool of extra CPU's to draw from. The latter will lead to unprecedented economies of scale as you can reassign computrons dynamically between clients to whomever needs them most, while still maintaining a comfortable cushion. Those economies of scale likely mean both lower prices for the customers as well as increased profit for IBM, because it drastically increases the efficiency of their services.
I would be surprised if IBM was *not* working on a way to make applications portable across architectures also, and the push towards Linux on everything would seem to support this endeavour, irrespective of all the other reasons.
Imagine buying systems capabilities instead of machines. Let's say you need gobs of CPU but not so much I/O bandwidth. Your jobs are allocated to a Power-based compute node. Let's say you need gobs of I/O bandwidth but not so much CPU. Your jobs are allocated to a zSeries machine. Now things get *really* interesting when your job first needs lots of I/O, then lots of CPU, then settles down for a bit. Your job could get reallocated across the grid based on its needs at any given moment.
The technical end of making transfers of processes and datasets seamless is where the difficulty lays, and all of the 800lb gorillas are chomping at the bit to get it working first. The first one to do it right stands to make a fortune.
Kudos to you, sir, for your insightful commentary on societal decay. You're entirely correct about each generation's dismissal of their parents' comments about how much better things used to be, but I never thought to consider that perhaps these things are true, and that societal decay would be responsible.
I'm not entirely sure that I agree with all of your points, but your statements provoke thought, and I'd be a fool to try and debate the bit about apathy increasing with every generation. Bravo.:)
I found it interesting to note in the benchmark design that the Visual C++ compile used the "omit frame pointer" option, while gcc did not. It seems to be the consensus over at the Gentoo Forums that this flag makes a fairly noticable difference (if negatively impacting debug options), and I'd like to see the C piece re-run using this option. It's tough enough to compare apples to apples in tests such as these, but at least try to use the same compile flags where available..
In the real world, there really isn't a generic "Faraday Cage" that magically prevents all radio waves from entering or leaving. A Faraday cage is specific to the particular frequencies it's designed to shield against (although a simple fully-enclosed metal box shields most of 'em up to a very high frequency).
The simplified version of the story is that in order for something to be a functional Faraday cage, it must be a conductive shield, yada-yada, and mustn't have any openings large enough for the radio wave to fit through. Lower frequencies are "larger" than higher frequencies, so if you only want to block low frequencies, a large-ish wire mesh would be sufficient to create a Faraday cage for your purposes. As the frequencies you wish to shield increase, the wire mesh size would decrease, until eventually you hit the range where those radio waves are called light, and you'd want something pretty-darned-near a solid sheet of metal to block them.
Your car has some very large gaps in its protection, commonly referred to as "windows", which are sufficiently large to let in darned near any wave that's useful for personal communications.
Hopefully this gives you the proverbial tip of the iceberg; your local ham radio geeks can likely explain this to you at a level of detail much beyond what I've done here, and likely also much beyond the level you care to understand.:)
If the parent or grandparent had glanced at the PDF, they too would have noticed that GCC compatibility was one of the major points covered. There are a few pages devoted to what currently is compatible with GCC as well as what's planned. My bet is that they've had their own optimized compiler around since they first fab-ed one of these, to use for test purposes.
It would be foolish to scrap all of the work they'd already done, as well as the performance achieved (double the performance of GCC in some cases, from the PDF). There is mention of this compiler supporting SuSe Enterprise Edition however, but not enough detail to tell if it can compile SuSe or just compile *on* SuSe.
If there is a plan to integrate stuff from this compiler into GCC, my guess is that GCC compatibility would be the first step. It would be very difficult to try to integrate the two if they have fundamentally different structures and no common ground to speak of, not to mention that fact that chip manufacturers invariably keep the true capabilities of their hardware more or less secret until launch time, and putting code into GCC from the beginning may tip their hand to others before they're ready to do so.
Well, almost. Let's say I have a plane that can accomodate 100 people and does NY->London in 6 hours. My problem is that I have to move 1000 people from NY to London
But what kind of plane would you need if all 1,000 of those people were conjoined, and you couldn't surgically separate them?
I'd bet a plane that could move 1,000 people at a time would start to look a bit more interesting at that point. BTW, I'm leaving the seating arrangement as an exercise for the reader...:)
The DMCA does not apply when it is being used to protect illegal activity.
So you're saying that the DMCA is unique in the regard that it only applies to people *not* breaking the law? How 'bout your 5th Amendment right to not incriminate yourself? Does that *only* apply if you're found not guilty? How 'bout Miranda rights?
The laws apply to all parties equally, or at least they're supposed to...
Your best bet to get started is to sign up with one of the free IPv6 tunnel broker services (such as Hurricane Electric or Freenet6), which will allow you to get a boatload of addresses for your own use, as well as provide you with a tunnel to use them through. These services can provide you with over a BILLION publicly addressable IPv6 addresses for free.
The next step is to configure your home router/firewall box as a dual-stack machine, following the howtos for your particular OS. The one for Gentoo Linux is extremely straightforward, based on my experience with it a few nights ago.
The last step is to migrate the rest of your internal machines over to IPv6-only. They will use your dual-stack router for connections to IPv4-only sites (similar to the NAT you're probably already using).
The only real downside to this is that your IPv6-only machines will only be directly addressable from other IPv6 machines. You'd have to wait for your ISP to support IPv6 before you can get a fully IPv6 pipe, but upgrading your internal network now-ish sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
NOTE--If you're stuck behind a NAT box that you don't control, you'll have LOTS of problems getting a tunnel to work. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know; I failed miserably at this...:)
"I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book." -- Revelation 22:18-19
Are you comfortable with THAT license?:)
Hmm...I'm generally not a God-fearing person, but the wording there doesn't really leave much to the imagination. Isn't there a fair-use clause somewhere that will allow me to make modifications for the purpose of satire without suffering eternal damnation?
All I REALLY want to do is remove all the New Testament touchy-feely bits and rewrite the Old Testament to focus more on the battles, plagues, and Wrath of God[tm]. It'd turn out to be something like a well-written screenplay, I suppose, although to get funding to put it on the big screen I may have to fabricate a love pentagram between Mary Magdalene and several of the apostles... =)
Dan
PS Yes, I know that the appropriate upwards scaling of a love triangle would be a love pentagon, but a pentagram was just SO much more fun in this context...
Slashdot Mirror
or start forging addresses from the same domain as they're sending to
Okay, I'm an idiot. They're already doing this, obviously, as I pointed out in the first part of my comment. What I meant to say was 'or start correlating addresses they send to/forge from, so they'll be forging known-good addresses'.
Need...coffee.
I've seen a bunch that were very well-written (have one hanging on my wall, in fact--as a reminder), purporting to come from noreply@[ourdomain].com, management@[ourdomain].com, support@[ourdomain].com, etc. My users are pretty good, but I still worry that one day somebody will nail the spelling *and* grammar perfectly, or start forging addresses from the same domain as they're sending to, and all hell will break loose.
Did I mention Exchange sucks as a mail server?
Dan
Intellectual property laws may be bad for business in general, but they are invaluable to big business. How else could they ensure that upstarts don't come in, undercut them, and take over the market?
;)
Three words: Economies of scale
I think there's an interesting change happening around us, where folks are starting to rediscover that ideas aren't the be-all, end-all of a successful business. The key in business has always been in the execution. If you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc. you win. You don't get a guaranteed billion just for coming up with an idea and ambushing somebody with your patent 10 years after they make the business model work.
I'm drawing a bit from my artistic background here, and looking at it from a slightly different perspective. As an artist (dancer), I don't get paid if I don't work. That work can be teaching, it can be choreography, it can be performing. The simple fact is, however, that if I'm not constantly working, I don't get paid. I don't tell my students that they can't use the knowledge I've passed on to them. They can use it however they please.
The key works out to this: If you don't work, you don't eat. You can have all the inspiration you want, but if you can't translate that into something someone else wants, and do it consistently, you're going to be hurting. I'm not sure yet whether I like that idea or not, but it certainly seems fair enough.
Then again, I may just be hallucinating....
Dan
Existing copyright laws are not the major problem. It's the 'over-enforcement' of copyrights
While I agree with the spirit of what I understand you to be saying here, I think it's important to note that a law which is only good when marginally enforced is a lousy law.
I certainly do not expect that framing a better law will be easy, but I think it's clear that settling for ones that are pretty-not-too-bad has largely contributed to the mess we're in right now. The blood, sweat, and tears should go into the framing of appropriate laws, not the decision of whether to enforce them.
Dan
If you ran for office, I'd vote for you. Your suggestions for health care and welfare reform are liberal enough to be an acceptable compromise for folks like me, and socialist enough to be popular. Congrats. :) (I'm a hard person to please)
:) I'm not suggesting I'd refuse to accept help from others, nor that I'd refuse to give it. There's a pretty good chance as well that I'd ask for help if I found myself in need of it. The main difference for me may be semantic. I don't *expect* that anybody will help me. If they do, it's a bonus.
That said, not *everyone* explicitly or implicitly depends on having a net. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
If I get into a car accident and sustain sufficiently-serious injuries, I expect that I'll die. Am I going to turn down the EMT's if they show up in time? No, of course not. I'll likely even say 'Thank you'.
From my perspective, the government shouldn't legislate 'bonuses'. I'm not opposed to community-based cooperative medical/fire service, etc. I think those are truly fantastic examples of what community cooperation can accomplish, but does it have to be done by an organization with so much power? What I'm primarily bothered by is the excessive reach and size of our government. It seems that every time somebody thinks "oooh, this would be nice..", they make a law and have the government do it. I'm leery of any organization with so much power whose scope seems to be continually broadened.
I'm wandering a bit here, and should likely have waited until I had a few drinks in me to respond, but I hope the gist of what I'm trying to say comes across clearly enough. I'm not opposed to basic services. I'm opposed to people *expecting* them, and then insisting on a government with such broad powers to provide them. Can't we put each essential service in a chroot() jail and run them under a minimal UID? They don't all need to be backed by the might of UID 0. (military/police force)
Dan
You make some excellent points about how difficult it is to be happy and healthy in the real world.
I don't disagree with those points.
From my perspective, however, it's my responsibility to ensure my own health and happiness. I don't think it's anybody else's responsibility, and I sure as hell don't want their attempts to 'help' me to infringe upon my ability to help myself.
I find it interesting to see how widely diversified folks' perspectives are on this issue. Maybe it's because I'm somewhat accustomed to the feeling of working without a net, but I find it almost humourous to see so many people insist that someone other than they should be responsible to help them live their life. This strikes me as an artificial construct of modern civilization, and one which I am loath to depend upon.
Dan
Now, let's generously assume that each laptop is drawing half an amp at 110 volts. At 1200 laptops, that's 600 amps. The circuit breakers in my house trip at 15 amps, but I'll generously assume this facility has 50 amp wall circuits. That would still require 12 entire circuits, plus a safety factor, nevermind all my generous back-of-envelope assumptions.
600 amps is nothing for a place like this. I can get an 800 amp feed to my house, according to the nice folks at my local power company (and I'll be upgrading to that as part of my rewiring plan). 12 circuits is no big deal either. Think of the power requirements for holding concerts or any type of show, or just for lighting the place.
A place like that also probably has a house electrician on staff who knows the boards and how to get x amps from point A to point B. I doubt power is going to be the main issue holding them back on this.
Dan
Are they threatening prosecutions to everyone who touched the torrent or just saying "stop distributing right fucking now and we might let you live"?
The email I saw said three things:
1) Cease and desist distributing the thing
2) Delete any and all copies of it you may have in your possession
3) Tell Microsoft how you came to be in possession of it
It includes a reminder that you may be subject to severe civil and criminal penalties if you've downloaded and are distributing the code. It seems to imply that if you cooperate with them they won't hammer you, but like any good legalese, it doesn't actually *say* they won't. It's simply more worthwhile for them to focus on tracking down the original leak and make that person's life a living hell than it is for them to start nailing users all over--especially considering that the last thing Microsoft needs on top of the code leakage is another PR mess like the RIAA got when they started going after 12 year olds and grandparents.
Effectively, like everybody said all along, coming anywhere near this code is a really bad idea.
Dan
cough... cough... FUD...
:) and read the email they sent him. The email was sent from Microsoft, not from the FBI or any law enforcement entity.
I spoke with a gent on the same network reporting the same experience (could be the same guy
It's not FUD. The gent in question also mentioned that his torrent download jumped from about 100K/s to 600K/s at some point through the download, which would lead me to believe that somebody with fat pipes *cough*Microsoft*cough* jumped into the swarm, likely in order to start tracing IP addresses.
I do wonder a bit about that, however, because if Microsoft jumps into the torrent to start nabbing IP's, haven't they also contributed to the dissemination of the source code by participating in its distribution? I'd imagine that it's no more of a problem for them legally than it is to undercover police selling drugs in sting operations. I do wonder if it should be, however...especially considering that they're *not* a law enforcement agency.
Dan
The poster of this 'Ask Slashdot' probably makes 2-3 times what I make (if not 10x-20x in stock options alone) and yet he's willing to listen to my poorly informed ideas on such an important matter?! Truly hilarious!
Sometimes folks get promoted into positions of power and influence because they realize that the best answers aren't necessarily the ones you pay the most for. Indeed, isn't that one of the major selling points of OSS--that paying more does *not* always get you more?
A request for opinions is exactly that. You didn't really think he was going to use your opinion to supplant his own, did you?
Dan
Most security is based on secrets of one kind or another---that doesn't make it "obscurity."
I think that's the point the grandparent is making. The key to this is that folks around here aren't real clear on the difference between "obscurity" and "secrets". One is touted as being worthless by itself, the other is accepted as the cornerstone of electronic security in general (I posit that the cornerstone of physical security is violence).
the phrase "security through obscurity" means obscurity of system design.
This is an excellent point, and deserves to be modded up because *way* too many people both here and elsewhere miss this fundamental concept. In my opinion any method that makes accessible hosts look the same as unaccessible hosts to a port scan is a great idea, no matter what folks here choose to call it.
Dan
you mentioned compaq and i recalled my p100 machine from compaq and recoiled in horrror.
You're referring to your experience with consumer-grade kit from Compaq, where I believe the grandparent is referring to commercial-grade stuff.
Compaq makes some really nice servers, and some really nice managed-desktop stuff. It's solid, nice heavy metal cases, high-quality components, etc. Their business support has been excellent in my experience as well.
On the other hand, they make some really crappy consumer-grade stuff. If I ever touch another Presario it'll be too soon, and I haven't heard good things about their laptops either. Dell is definitely preferred in this market, although I still prefer IBM laptops.
I used to have the same impression as you regarding Compaq's consumer machines, but after working with their business systems, I was amazed. It's literally like they are two different companies.
Dan
Nobody gives a crap about your hobbies
I've had Firewalking listed in my 3-line Outside Interests section for some time now, and it invariably sparks conversation during the interviews. I'll grant that the HR folks don't generally notice it, but I have yet to see a hiring manager who didn't. That seems to be one of those resume tidbits that gets around the office before your first day, too, and in my mind anything that gets your name around the office without making you look like *too* much of an idiot is a good thing. =)
Dan
I'm fairly certain that used to be the case when *everybody* was running mainframe environments (not that lots of folks still aren't), but the key to the new version of this is that it'll be done over the network.
Look at it from IBM's perspective. You can have 8 extra processors on-site for each client for those few times when they need the extra CPU, or you can have massive datacenters all over the world with a pool of extra CPU's to draw from. The latter will lead to unprecedented economies of scale as you can reassign computrons dynamically between clients to whomever needs them most, while still maintaining a comfortable cushion. Those economies of scale likely mean both lower prices for the customers as well as increased profit for IBM, because it drastically increases the efficiency of their services.
I would be surprised if IBM was *not* working on a way to make applications portable across architectures also, and the push towards Linux on everything would seem to support this endeavour, irrespective of all the other reasons.
Imagine buying systems capabilities instead of machines. Let's say you need gobs of CPU but not so much I/O bandwidth. Your jobs are allocated to a Power-based compute node. Let's say you need gobs of I/O bandwidth but not so much CPU. Your jobs are allocated to a zSeries machine. Now things get *really* interesting when your job first needs lots of I/O, then lots of CPU, then settles down for a bit. Your job could get reallocated across the grid based on its needs at any given moment.
The technical end of making transfers of processes and datasets seamless is where the difficulty lays, and all of the 800lb gorillas are chomping at the bit to get it working first. The first one to do it right stands to make a fortune.
Dan
Kudos to you, sir, for your insightful commentary on societal decay. You're entirely correct about each generation's dismissal of their parents' comments about how much better things used to be, but I never thought to consider that perhaps these things are true, and that societal decay would be responsible.
:)
I'm not entirely sure that I agree with all of your points, but your statements provoke thought, and I'd be a fool to try and debate the bit about apathy increasing with every generation. Bravo.
Dan
I found it interesting to note in the benchmark design that the Visual C++ compile used the "omit frame pointer" option, while gcc did not. It seems to be the consensus over at the Gentoo Forums that this flag makes a fairly noticable difference (if negatively impacting debug options), and I'd like to see the C piece re-run using this option. It's tough enough to compare apples to apples in tests such as these, but at least try to use the same compile flags where available..
Dan
There is a reason that The Book Of Four Rings and The Art Of War are recommended reading for any entrepeneur: the fundamentals never change.
.
I believe the first title you're referring to is Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings
Dan
Aren't cars Faraday cages?
:)
:)
No.
Okay...well, kinda.
In the real world, there really isn't a generic "Faraday Cage" that magically prevents all radio waves from entering or leaving. A Faraday cage is specific to the particular frequencies it's designed to shield against (although a simple fully-enclosed metal box shields most of 'em up to a very high frequency).
The simplified version of the story is that in order for something to be a functional Faraday cage, it must be a conductive shield, yada-yada, and mustn't have any openings large enough for the radio wave to fit through. Lower frequencies are "larger" than higher frequencies, so if you only want to block low frequencies, a large-ish wire mesh would be sufficient to create a Faraday cage for your purposes. As the frequencies you wish to shield increase, the wire mesh size would decrease, until eventually you hit the range where those radio waves are called light, and you'd want something pretty-darned-near a solid sheet of metal to block them.
Your car has some very large gaps in its protection, commonly referred to as "windows", which are sufficiently large to let in darned near any wave that's useful for personal communications.
Hopefully this gives you the proverbial tip of the iceberg; your local ham radio geeks can likely explain this to you at a level of detail much beyond what I've done here, and likely also much beyond the level you care to understand.
Dan
If the parent or grandparent had glanced at the PDF, they too would have noticed that GCC compatibility was one of the major points covered. There are a few pages devoted to what currently is compatible with GCC as well as what's planned. My bet is that they've had their own optimized compiler around since they first fab-ed one of these, to use for test purposes.
It would be foolish to scrap all of the work they'd already done, as well as the performance achieved (double the performance of GCC in some cases, from the PDF). There is mention of this compiler supporting SuSe Enterprise Edition however, but not enough detail to tell if it can compile SuSe or just compile *on* SuSe.
If there is a plan to integrate stuff from this compiler into GCC, my guess is that GCC compatibility would be the first step. It would be very difficult to try to integrate the two if they have fundamentally different structures and no common ground to speak of, not to mention that fact that chip manufacturers invariably keep the true capabilities of their hardware more or less secret until launch time, and putting code into GCC from the beginning may tip their hand to others before they're ready to do so.
obDisclaimer: IANACompilerGuru
I run a SuSE server and an XP box. Both have been up the same length of time without a crash.
You live in New York, right?
*rimshot*
Uh, hey mods! The parent isn't informative, it's FICTION!!!
Well, almost. Let's say I have a plane that can accomodate 100 people and does NY->London in 6 hours.
:)
My problem is that I have to move 1000 people from NY to London
But what kind of plane would you need if all 1,000 of those people were conjoined, and you couldn't surgically separate them?
I'd bet a plane that could move 1,000 people at a time would start to look a bit more interesting at that point. BTW, I'm leaving the seating arrangement as an exercise for the reader...
The DMCA does not apply when it is being used to protect illegal activity.
So you're saying that the DMCA is unique in the regard that it only applies to people *not* breaking the law? How 'bout your 5th Amendment right to not incriminate yourself? Does that *only* apply if you're found not guilty? How 'bout Miranda rights?
The laws apply to all parties equally, or at least they're supposed to...
Your best bet to get started is to sign up with one of the free IPv6 tunnel broker services (such as Hurricane Electric or Freenet6), which will allow you to get a boatload of addresses for your own use, as well as provide you with a tunnel to use them through. These services can provide you with over a BILLION publicly addressable IPv6 addresses for free.
:)
The next step is to configure your home router/firewall box as a dual-stack machine, following the howtos for your particular OS. The one for Gentoo Linux is extremely straightforward, based on my experience with it a few nights ago.
The last step is to migrate the rest of your internal machines over to IPv6-only. They will use your dual-stack router for connections to IPv4-only sites (similar to the NAT you're probably already using).
The only real downside to this is that your IPv6-only machines will only be directly addressable from other IPv6 machines. You'd have to wait for your ISP to support IPv6 before you can get a fully IPv6 pipe, but upgrading your internal network now-ish sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
NOTE--If you're stuck behind a NAT box that you don't control, you'll have LOTS of problems getting a tunnel to work. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know; I failed miserably at this...
"I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book." -- Revelation 22:18-19
:)
Are you comfortable with THAT license?
Hmm...I'm generally not a God-fearing person, but the wording there doesn't really leave much to the imagination. Isn't there a fair-use clause somewhere that will allow me to make modifications for the purpose of satire without suffering eternal damnation?
All I REALLY want to do is remove all the New Testament touchy-feely bits and rewrite the Old Testament to focus more on the battles, plagues, and Wrath of God[tm]. It'd turn out to be something like a well-written screenplay, I suppose, although to get funding to put it on the big screen I may have to fabricate a love pentagram between Mary Magdalene and several of the apostles... =)
Dan
PS Yes, I know that the appropriate upwards scaling of a love triangle would be a love pentagon, but a pentagram was just SO much more fun in this context...