Installing OS's isn't trivial. Fortunately for a lay-user, most computers come with an OS pre-installed. I think that Linux pre-installed systems will become popular over the next two years.
If your grandma Can install MacOS onto an otherwise-dead mac, my guess is that she could install Red Hat 6.1... I was pretty impressed.
I've seen much better prices on old Sparc boxes... not that that would be faster (it wouldn't), just cheaper. Not to mention old PPC macs...
In any case, most modern intel chips are RISC at heart... they re-construct x86 CISC instructions into smaller instructions. PPro and up does this, I think.
And RISC isn't inherently superior, just different. As it turns out, it's easier to implement a lot of things if a nice RISC-y architecture is used, but RISC itself isn't special.
Why on earth would a merciful God, who (remember) is in control of *everything* want/anyone/ to suffer in the pits of hell forever? Believer or not?
Why would a just God, who (remember) is in control of everything, allow anyone to get into heaven? You have to be perfect to earn your way into heaven...
I don't think God wants people to be destroyed, but if you don't ask for Grace then you get what you deserve, and I think that God will respect your descision to be judged.
If I truly believed that the majority of mankind, including most of my friends, were going to hell, I'd never stay sane.
matrix("What you've got to realize is that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged")
Christ says: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it."
But enough with the religious debate. I hate to see anyone die for such reasons as suicide. And my hart cries for her family and loved ones.
Installing a bludot on her WebTV won't be so hard when she uses the USB MediBluDot that comes out if the iButton was selected for the purpose... just a little device that plugs in to the usb port isn't so hard...
You can force users to have good passwords, but if you do they'll end up writing them down... also most users are very susceptible to trojans that might grab keystrokes...
I still think you need an external key source such as an ibutton or a securid card...
Yes, good passwords are sufficient combined with SSL.
No, passwords are not sufficient.
The reason is that most passwords that people pick are not good passwords. Most users will select "12345" or "bird4me" instead of "7yhX%^I]w." Also, many people are not very security-aware, and so will be installing various trojans that could capture keystrokes.
My suggestion is to use a password and an iButton. Put an iButton on a serial device and have that as additional authentication. All iButtons have a unique serial number. iButtons are from Dallas Semiconductor and lots of information can be found at www.ibutton.com.
SCO CEO Doug Michels was deeply critical of Linux: "Companies like Red Hat... take Linux technology with a lot less value added, and they package it up and say, `Hey, this is better than SCO.' Well, it isn't. And very few customers are buying that story."
Hmm... I've used SCO before...
I think that for most people SCO is inferior to Red Hat. Look at how much extra stuff Red Hat puts into their product, and how well it works with other stuff... Red Hat also does an amazing job of detecting hardware nowadays.
Not to say that SCO doesn't have lots of interesting things in it... there are some very nifty security model aspects that SCO has, for instance. But for people who want a web server or an smtp/pop server or a workstation, for cheap, with lots of power, I think that Red Hat provides a better solution. And I think that many customers are realizing that.
Altivec helps with all types of math, starting with integer and moving right up to complex integrational math.
This is untrue. AltiVec only helps when you are dealing with several pieces of data that you want to do the same operation on. It would not help to figure out the subnet rule, as you're not dealing with that many instructions using the same operation (two ANDs with 0xFFFFFF00 and a subtract, on PPC, iirc, this can be done with 5 instructions total which is less than the setup overhead for the AltiVec Unit). Malloc doesn't involve that many repetitive calculations, either. And a lot of the instructions have dependencies... which would prohibit the use of SIMD. 3D Vector math is also rather trivial... algorithms for finding intersecting lines in 3D are rather trivial and would not benefit from AltiVec.
Where AltiVec helps are when you want to do things like: I have 300,000 points in 3D, and I want to rotate them about a point. I'm going to be running the same damn operation on every point, and no point affects the other one. So I can run the same instruction on multiple pieces of data at the same time... load up, say, 4 32bit FP numbers and 4 more 32 bit angles, and run A*sin(B) or something.
Actually, your missile problem could be done with fixed point on a 1Mhz 8 bit PIC microcontroller with time to spare -- I know, I just did that sort of thing in lab.
Plainly, this is wrong. Altivec _IS_NOT_ MMX or 3DNow or SSE. Its performace benefits are not limited to graphics. Altivec (now known as the Velocity engine) is a Single Instruction Multiple Data unit.
MMX is not limited to graphics, either. For instance, one of the RAID drivers in the linux kernel uses MMX instructions for speed. MMX, 3DNow, and SSE are all SIMD units, just like AltiVec, which is what I said. AltiVec has some interesting features in it, yes, but for general purpose computing it provides little to no benefit. For 3D, yes. For large matrix manipulation, yes. But for booting your computer, no.
There is a large difference between what marketoids say things are for and what they're really designed for.
AltiVec helps a very few things. It ends up that a lot of the instructions are like a lot of other SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instrcutions that have abbreviations we know and love... MMX, 3DNow, SSE... as it tuns out, it can help some things, such as graphical processing, but isn't so useful for general-purpose stuff.
So, AltiVec might be able to improve a certain 3D render or a certain photoshop transform by xxx%, but as far as doing a compile or booting your operating system AltiVec (and MMX and 3DNow and SSE) don't help that much.
As noted elsewhere, this is a popular textbook (I see CMU, and we use it here at GaTech). It is fairly nice, and I found it quite up-to-date. _Computer Organization and Design_ by Patterson and Hennesy is another good one that we use.
Contemporary Logic Design is a good this-is-what-gates do book, but _COD_ is great for learning datapaths. You basically learn MIPS assembly and then design a processor to run the assembly. You must, of course, know the basics of gates (what a mux does, what a NAND does, etc) before you start _COD_. Everything from branch prediction to cache architectures. Yummy.
I guess I'm just more interested in the architecture end than the gate end. I'm certainly not interested in the chemistry/physics end, but alas, that is a required course, that I am taking this semester... and need to get back to work on.
I disagree. Many projects at MS are carefully crafted to destroy the competition, and to lock the competition into using other MS products.
Not that this is an unusual practice. Just that I find your claim that every project at MS is independant is a fallacy.
Here's an interesting thought (and perhaps not related to the post, just in general): Even if one corporation isn't managed by a single person making most of the decisions, is there a certain ``mentality'' that will steer everyone in a similar direction? Do general MS employees make decisions that would usually fit in with commands from higher-ups? Can we generalize this to other big companies? Is there an (Oracle|IBM|Sun|SGI) ``mindset''?
Since when has Microsoft been interested in locking vendors into a single platform? Since when have Nuns been Catholic?
It's silly to think that Microsoft would want you to be able to choose something besides NT to do your serving or something besides NT or 9x to do your desktop work. They haven't ever done this -- ever. How many MS SQL servers run on Solaris? How many Exchange servers run on Irix? How many BSD machines run IIS? Even things like Word and Excel tend to be ported to MacOS with as little effort as possible... and MacOS is the only other platform.
Microsoft has most of their business exactly because vendors are locked into a single, proprietary operating system. Compatable alternatives tend to not come along easily because their ``open'' APIs are incomplete or wrong -- just ask the WINE team -- or add ``features'' which break open protocols. People who get conned into using Exchange or IIS or MS SQL are forever tied into using Microsoft products.
Or maybe you haven't seen (A) the number of WMs and (B) gone to.themes.org.
Kaleidascope looked like changing colors and pixmaps for the buttons. That's not too difficult. Now, show me a Kalidescope theme that puts the min/max/kill buttons on the right of the window, moves the scroll bar to the left, allows you to use a keyboard combination to switch your mouse to window-resize mode or window-move mode, has multiple virtual desktops, and adds a ``next'' button which will switch your focus to the next window and bring it to the top of the stack? Doesn't sound nearly as configurable as E with a GTK theme, does it?
/bin/false and/bin/true can also be *proven* to be bug free.
But, an even bigger group of applications, there are lots of companies that spend lots of money making sure their programs are bug-free. Like people that make telecom equipment. Like the software that runs your car. It is just that MS Windows can get away with it, whereas if you're driving fast in heavy traffic and your car's microcontroller crashes, your manufacturer can get sued big-time.
I say look at the atom bomb, Einstein really thought it would only be used for good. If we look into it, hasn't Nuclear Power brought us more bad things than good. Okay, what bad thing has Nuclear Power done?
Please excuse me whilst I get on my soapbox
Nuclear power is the cleanest[1] safest[2] form of power we have on land, and on the sea it's so much nicer than having to store tons of fuel, and for a submarine it means you don't have to surface.
But mainly you were referring to the atom bomb. The A-Bomb saved lives, both Japanese and Allied. Think about the price both of Allied lives and of Japanese if we would have had to do an invasion.
I understand that the Revisionists have probably gotten to you, though... America always is the evil force in the universe. The A-Bomb was wrong, because it was powerful.
Why do the revisionists screw with history so? Why is the US the bad guy and Japan the good guy? Do we remember which country shot first? That little thing called Perl Harbor? You know, when the countries wern't at war?
I'm not saying that the US government is always right, or that we have always done the moral thing, but please, don't believe everything you're tought in schools.
[1] Nuclear waste is pretty small volume-wise and, unlike chemical (oil, coal) power facilities it turns into non-toxic stuff with time. And it doesn't destroy nearly so much land as hydroelectric... although after everything gets flooded Hydro power is pretty good...
[2] When was the last time you saw a nuclear disaster that hurt or killed people in the US? Then compare to the number of explosions and fires and such with other types of power.
I love by Gerber multi-purpose tool. All the blades lock, I can open the pliers with a flick of my wrist, and Gerber's slogan, ``legendary blades,'' isn't for nothing. Both of the bades are extremely sharp and extremely nice.
Re:Christian Hackers? Let your light shine!
on
Jesux is a Bad Pun
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· Score: 2
The Christian Ministry I'm with here at Georgia Tech has a lot of strong Christians and a lot of big geeks, and most of us run Linux most of the time. We've found that we can use geekiness as a means of evangelism and ministry to non-Christians. And we have also found that we can further a good product (Linux) to people who would otherwise not have it (random Christian friends).
This is not to say that our ministry is based on our deep-seated love for Linux, just that computing is a very important part of academics at GaTech and so it is a topic everyone is aware of...
And, when you're not fiddling with re-installing your OS or restoring from a crash, you have more time to pray and discuss the love of Christ.
In short, according to the Word of God as accepted by Christians, looking at one nudie pic for the erotic thrill is as equally deserving/undeserving of the death penalty as murdering someone by slow torture.
10As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one;11there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. 12All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one." 13"Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit." "The poison of vipers is on their lips." 14"Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness." 15"Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16ruin and misery mark their ways, 17and the way of peace they do not know." 18"There is no fear of God before their eyes." 19Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. 21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference,
23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
That, in a nutshell, is Christianity. Nobody is perfect, and God requires Perfection for someone to earn their way into Heaven. It is only by God's grace that those who have faith in Christ will be saved.
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Mine can't.
Installing OS's isn't trivial. Fortunately for a lay-user, most computers come with an OS pre-installed. I think that Linux pre-installed systems will become popular over the next two years.
If your grandma Can install MacOS onto an otherwise-dead mac, my guess is that she could install Red Hat 6.1... I was pretty impressed.
In any case, most modern intel chips are RISC at heart... they re-construct x86 CISC instructions into smaller instructions. PPro and up does this, I think.
And RISC isn't inherently superior, just different. As it turns out, it's easier to implement a lot of things if a nice RISC-y architecture is used, but RISC itself isn't special.
Why would a just God, who (remember) is in control of everything, allow anyone to get into heaven? You have to be perfect to earn your way into heaven...
I don't think God wants people to be destroyed, but if you don't ask for Grace then you get what you deserve, and I think that God will respect your descision to be judged.
If I truly believed that the majority of mankind, including most of my friends, were going to hell, I'd never stay sane.
matrix("What you've got to realize is that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged")
Christ says: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it."
But enough with the religious debate. I hate to see anyone die for such reasons as suicide. And my hart cries for her family and loved ones.
Installing a bludot on her WebTV won't be so hard when she uses the USB MediBluDot that comes out if the iButton was selected for the purpose... just a little device that plugs in to the usb port isn't so hard...
I still think you need an external key source such as an ibutton or a securid card...
No, passwords are not sufficient.
The reason is that most passwords that people pick are not good passwords. Most users will select "12345" or "bird4me" instead of "7yhX%^I]w." Also, many people are not very security-aware, and so will be installing various trojans that could capture keystrokes.
My suggestion is to use a password and an iButton. Put an iButton on a serial device and have that as additional authentication. All iButtons have a unique serial number. iButtons are from Dallas Semiconductor and lots of information can be found at www.ibutton.com.
... it gives a whole new meaning to the term mobile home!
Hmm... I've used SCO before...
I think that for most people SCO is inferior to Red Hat. Look at how much extra stuff Red Hat puts into their product, and how well it works with other stuff... Red Hat also does an amazing job of detecting hardware nowadays.
Not to say that SCO doesn't have lots of interesting things in it... there are some very nifty security model aspects that SCO has, for instance. But for people who want a web server or an smtp/pop server or a workstation, for cheap, with lots of power, I think that Red Hat provides a better solution. And I think that many customers are realizing that.
Not to mention a cooler name. :-)
This is untrue. AltiVec only helps when you are dealing with several pieces of data that you want to do the same operation on. It would not help to figure out the subnet rule, as you're not dealing with that many instructions using the same operation (two ANDs with 0xFFFFFF00 and a subtract, on PPC, iirc, this can be done with 5 instructions total which is less than the setup overhead for the AltiVec Unit). Malloc doesn't involve that many repetitive calculations, either. And a lot of the instructions have dependencies... which would prohibit the use of SIMD. 3D Vector math is also rather trivial... algorithms for finding intersecting lines in 3D are rather trivial and would not benefit from AltiVec.
Where AltiVec helps are when you want to do things like: I have 300,000 points in 3D, and I want to rotate them about a point. I'm going to be running the same damn operation on every point, and no point affects the other one. So I can run the same instruction on multiple pieces of data at the same time... load up, say, 4 32bit FP numbers and 4 more 32 bit angles, and run A*sin(B) or something.
Actually, your missile problem could be done with fixed point on a 1Mhz 8 bit PIC microcontroller with time to spare -- I know, I just did that sort of thing in lab.
MMX is not limited to graphics, either. For instance, one of the RAID drivers in the linux kernel uses MMX instructions for speed. MMX, 3DNow, and SSE are all SIMD units, just like AltiVec, which is what I said. AltiVec has some interesting features in it, yes, but for general purpose computing it provides little to no benefit. For 3D, yes. For large matrix manipulation, yes. But for booting your computer, no.
AltiVec helps a very few things. It ends up that a lot of the instructions are like a lot of other SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instrcutions that have abbreviations we know and love... MMX, 3DNow, SSE... as it tuns out, it can help some things, such as graphical processing, but isn't so useful for general-purpose stuff.
So, AltiVec might be able to improve a certain 3D render or a certain photoshop transform by xxx%, but as far as doing a compile or booting your operating system AltiVec (and MMX and 3DNow and SSE) don't help that much.
Contemporary Logic Design is a good this-is-what-gates do book, but _COD_ is great for learning datapaths. You basically learn MIPS assembly and then design a processor to run the assembly. You must, of course, know the basics of gates (what a mux does, what a NAND does, etc) before you start _COD_. Everything from branch prediction to cache architectures. Yummy.
I guess I'm just more interested in the architecture end than the gate end. I'm certainly not interested in the chemistry/physics end, but alas, that is a required course, that I am taking this semester... and need to get back to work on.
The page that a poster suggested said that it can't work with 3COM rom files because the 3COM rom files are missing the first 32K.
I don't have windows, and have been extremely happy with both gpilotd and pilot-xfer, FWIW.
Not that this is an unusual practice. Just that I find your claim that every project at MS is independant is a fallacy.
Here's an interesting thought (and perhaps not related to the post, just in general): Even if one corporation isn't managed by a single person making most of the decisions, is there a certain ``mentality'' that will steer everyone in a similar direction? Do general MS employees make decisions that would usually fit in with commands from higher-ups? Can we generalize this to other big companies? Is there an (Oracle|IBM|Sun|SGI) ``mindset''?
It's silly to think that Microsoft would want you to be able to choose something besides NT to do your serving or something besides NT or 9x to do your desktop work. They haven't ever done this -- ever. How many MS SQL servers run on Solaris? How many Exchange servers run on Irix? How many BSD machines run IIS? Even things like Word and Excel tend to be ported to MacOS with as little effort as possible... and MacOS is the only other platform.
Microsoft has most of their business exactly because vendors are locked into a single, proprietary operating system. Compatable alternatives tend to not come along easily because their ``open'' APIs are incomplete or wrong -- just ask the WINE team -- or add ``features'' which break open protocols. People who get conned into using Exchange or IIS or MS SQL are forever tied into using Microsoft products.
Kaleidascope looked like changing colors and pixmaps for the buttons. That's not too difficult. Now, show me a Kalidescope theme that puts the min/max/kill buttons on the right of the window, moves the scroll bar to the left, allows you to use a keyboard combination to switch your mouse to window-resize mode or window-move mode, has multiple virtual desktops, and adds a ``next'' button which will switch your focus to the next window and bring it to the top of the stack? Doesn't sound nearly as configurable as E with a GTK theme, does it?
Time to start munchin' on my cases of Penguin Peppermints that just came in the mail... mmm... minty caffinated goodness...
But, an even bigger group of applications, there are lots of companies that spend lots of money making sure their programs are bug-free. Like people that make telecom equipment. Like the software that runs your car. It is just that MS Windows can get away with it, whereas if you're driving fast in heavy traffic and your car's microcontroller crashes, your manufacturer can get sued big-time.
Please excuse me whilst I get on my soapbox
Nuclear power is the cleanest[1] safest[2] form of power we have on land, and on the sea it's so much nicer than having to store tons of fuel, and for a submarine it means you don't have to surface.
But mainly you were referring to the atom bomb. The A-Bomb saved lives, both Japanese and Allied. Think about the price both of Allied lives and of Japanese if we would have had to do an invasion.
I understand that the Revisionists have probably gotten to you, though... America always is the evil force in the universe. The A-Bomb was wrong, because it was powerful.
Why do the revisionists screw with history so? Why is the US the bad guy and Japan the good guy? Do we remember which country shot first? That little thing called Perl Harbor? You know, when the countries wern't at war?
I'm not saying that the US government is always right, or that we have always done the moral thing, but please, don't believe everything you're tought in schools.
[1] Nuclear waste is pretty small volume-wise and, unlike chemical (oil, coal) power facilities it turns into non-toxic stuff with time. And it doesn't destroy nearly so much land as hydroelectric... although after everything gets flooded Hydro power is pretty good...
[2] When was the last time you saw a nuclear disaster that hurt or killed people in the US? Then compare to the number of explosions and fires and such with other types of power.
I love by Gerber multi-purpose tool. All the blades lock, I can open the pliers with a flick of my wrist, and Gerber's slogan, ``legendary blades,'' isn't for nothing. Both of the bades are extremely sharp and extremely nice.
Right. I was just elaborating. :-)
This is not to say that our ministry is based on our deep-seated love for Linux, just that computing is a very important part of academics at GaTech and so it is a topic everyone is aware of...
And, when you're not fiddling with re-installing your OS or restoring from a crash, you have more time to pray and discuss the love of Christ.
Yup.
Romans 3:10-26 (bold by me) :
That, in a nutshell, is Christianity. Nobody is perfect, and God requires Perfection for someone to earn their way into Heaven. It is only by God's grace that those who have faith in Christ will be saved.
The Voyager probes had some nice things that the mars probes don't... huge budgets and nuclear reactors, especially.