Funny you should ask this, as I am working on one on Linux as we speak.
The link to www.towitoko.de is one you could look at. They have a Linux devleopers pack which has a reader and couple of smartcards (memory cards, not processor cards, though) as well as a CDRom with Linux drivers. This things works well. I have this past weekend hacked apart their test program to write some utlilities which I can happily send you. I have a writecard, readcard and hashcard util which writes stdin to a card, reads it or computes a hash of a card.
I use this to store a key with which (in conjunction with a password) I encrypt a filesystem. You need to stick the card in to mount the filesystem.
The site also has a link to a Linux-compatible port to PC/SC. I also think that Javacard works on Linux.
You could also look at ibutton.com They dfo smartcard stuff (very cool) but with a button form factor. Their development thingies also run on Linux AFAIK. In fact, there is a patch somewhere for GnuPG that allows you to have your private keys as well as the actual decryption routine, so the key never leaves the device, for a Java iButton somewhere. That runs on Linux.
If you need to know anything, mail me at yahoo.de AT netgrok (switch the name and domain). when I am finished I will post my stuff to freshmeat, but it is very rudimentary at the moment.
a) Life in a 2D universe has to expend much more energy to function due to all the constraints put on it that 3D life does not have. For instance the comlicated set of valves and thingies that one poster envisioned simply takes more effort, and therefore energy, to develop and to operate inside the lifeform. This may not preclude life but it may preclude very complicated life and would at the least make it more difficult to develop. Just as there is more life in the tropics than in the arctic because the conditions are better.
b) Many of the arguments made there deals with macroscopic features of such a universe (ie, on the scale where gravity is significant). However, if you turn the knob on the strong nuclear force things such as atoms or even protons cannot form. OR are unstable. This would probably preclude life.
However, considering the sheer complexity of the inside of a proton and the extreme difficulty in simulating the quantum chromodynamic interaction inside it one must admit the possibility of other sort of particles forming. Which will lead to a completely different sort of place. The inside of a proton, an (almost) fundamental particle is unbelievably complicated.
------------------ Anyways, a good book which deals in some depth with the subject of physical constraints on life itself is Barrow's "The artful Universe.." This is great read and raises many points to ponder.
http://www.addall.com/Browse/Detail/0316082422.h tm l
Btw, his book on the philosophy of mathematics, "Pie in the sky" is also good.
And a question, I've heard this higher dimensions do not allow orbits argument somewhere before. Does anyone have some kind of reference?
DES has always been slights tainted by the suggestion that in the 1970's the NSA instructed IBM to change some aspects ofthe algorithm and did not give a reason why. There was always som suspicionthat the NSA has some backdoor to DES which makes it easi(er) for them to crack it but not for anyone else. However later it turned out that they knew about differential crypto, but did not wish to release the details for fear of weakening some other systems.
Unfortunately, the suspicion still lingers, and the NSA being the NSA and a top secret governemnt agency, the suspicion will probably always linger.
Now DES's successor has finally been blessed by the NSA with an open competition, and the winner is a Belgian algorithm (and the runner-up, Serpent, a British one).
Now my question is, is there any suggestions of any impropriety, reasonably or not, of NSA interference in the selection process of the AES candidates? Or can we commoners actually trust the thing without fear that the US Government are reading everything behind our back? I do not know much about the selection process itself, btw.
Well, at least you did not do the Power/ENergy thing this time:)
Very cool argument though. I have never heard it before your previous posting. Just an interesting question: That number you used to indicate the minimum amount of energy to flip (or reset) a bit. Any references on that? I am not a big expert on Thermodynamics, but why is there a minimum energy involved?
Oh, and since you seem to be the resident expert, what is your opinion on the security of AES, in particular of Rijndael in comparison to Blowfish and Serpent?
There is a large difference between D/RNA and water. Water is an extremel simple molecule and acts as the carrier for the processes in life. Nucleic acids are extremely complicated molecules that are used to store information (used to encode proteins)
Now, it is quite possible to envision an organism which uses some non-nucleic acid information storage system. However, for the trivial carrier molecule there is not really that much choice.
There are only so many simple molecules out there.
In the medium-complexity range, whould there we any other chemical structures which could replace proteins? I am not a biochemist...
I agree that we should not look for life just as ourselves. Alien life would probably not have DNA and might not have proteins. So we should not look for those.
However, they would probably be water based and therefore that is a good starting point.
AFAIK there is not many reasons to replace Carbon either, so they would probably be organic too. Another thing to look at.
Anyways, I am not an biochemist, again. Soany comments from the experts are welcome.
If you can run this gizmo in promiscuous mode without an IP stack it would not HAVE an IP address but would still be able to snag all the ethernet frames and perhaps filter them. OK, the bandwidth out of the serial lines would probably preclude this, but it would be semi-trivial to build a box about the size of, say a box of matches with one of these and an IBM CF microdrive to capture all the goodies. Such a thing would be bigger, but still would be easy to hide. For instance, plug it into a telephone case and connect the normal phone cable inside the phone to this thing and surreptiously plug the phone cord into the ethernet jack. Noone would notice (except perhaps that the phone is dead). You could even rig it so that you switch CF cards once per day through a small slot on the phone and analyze the stuff at your leisure.
All of this simply pushes further into the idea that perimiter security on networks just do not cut it anymore. Perimiter security is where you have a firewall that blocks from the outside and everything on the inside is free to do whatever it wants. Soon you will have to use edge security, where each edge in the internal network is explicity opened and configure and run IpSec inside the internal network too. See the new ACM Queue Mag (which has the inaugural issue online) for an article amout this. www.acmqueue.com
One our computers, which had a nagios/Openview like program on it that monitored and checked the other stuff was called edgar, named after J. Edgar Hoover.
With all due respect do you think that Israeli and US Thermonuclear weapons use the same arming protocol??!! Maybe they should publish it as an RFC!
Obviously the US would take the systems that arms nuclear weapons out of aircraft they sell to overseas customers for the simple reason that it might give them insigt in, well, one of the most classified pieces of information the US has.
Arming nukes is a very serious matter. Actually in the 1950's the systems they used were a glorified padlocck, but nowadays they self destruct on tampering rendering the weapon permanently inoperable.
The US also sell downgraded ECM systems which cannot apply ECM to US missiles or radars (or is not as effective).
Missile radar patterns is an interesting business. The pulses are sent out in a random sequence and the algorithm used to determine that sequence is very muh highly classified since if an ECM jammer knows it it can probably spoof the missile. One of the reasons of having things like the plane that flew close to China is to get their radars to lock onto the thing to analyze the pulse pattern of the radar (that, and to simply locate the radars of course). The Soviets and US flew recon planes close to each other's borders for years quite regurarly.
It think it was Bruce Schneider who once said that most security systems are like a 500 mile high fence that is only 2 meters wide that you can walk around.
Point is, most modern encryption algorithms ARE pretty much extremely difficult to crack, even for the NSA but that there are so many oher buffer overflows and such crap that it does not matter really.
Here on good ol slashdot was a posting about how the FBI whacked some terrorists or something who were using encryption. They took the good ol' approach of breaking in and installing a keylogger on the guy's laptop to get the passphrase on his encryption key. Much easier than using a Ten-Trillion-Teraflop Bad boy of a computer to brute force the thing. More elegant too:)
Programming languages revolve by restricting freedom. I have heard this argument from someone who said that that is why purely functional languages such as Haskell or SML (and to some degree, LISP) is so powerful: They even restrict you from using state. The ultimate restriction leads to the ultimate cool language.
Oh, one other thing. Burocracy in Germany is pretty heavy, but the burocrats are usually very efficient. They follow the rules rigidly but then, thats what burocracy is for.
Unlike in the States where there is less burocracy but the burocrats are inefficient dipshits.
Skip Oktoberfest in München. It is crowded horrible and bloody expensive.
Thing is, you can get the same Oktoberfest feeling and experience anytime in München by just going there and hanging around in any of the large beergardens OUTSIDE off the Oktoberfest time. Besides, the weather in end September sucks in comparison to say June or April.
Btw, if you DO go to the fest do NOT go on the roller coaster with your boss after drinking 2 liters of beer....
Anyways, I live as an expat in Germany. DSL is trivial to get, try Deutsche Telekom although I do not not know if they are exactly the cheapest.
There is a website that contains a list of all the German DSL providers (there are loads) but it is in German. Google for it (try DSL Deutschland). 768/128 DSL is available almost anywhere, and some providers (yahoo) does 1500 as well.
As far a cellphones are concerned the service is very good, but do yourself a favour and get a contract from Viag Interkom (now O2). They are the best, especially with their Genion at Home thingie. That is quite cheap.
It is possible to dial fairly cheap. www.billigtelefonieren.de should give you all the details you want on that, again, in German. You usually dial with a prefix code to get the different providers.
If you do not want to go DSL, ISDN is very much more wide-spread and cheap than in the US and pay-per call may be mucho cheaper than a DSL, depending on how much you are online. Now that DSL is getting very popular you can get cheapo ISDN cards second hand. ISDN is pretty OK for most things anywa, and with it you can call for free on Sundays for a few Euros per month extra.
Telekom does take a few weeks to install DSL due to a serious demand-driven backlog (and the !"!"ers do NOT tell you that they have done it, you have to try to see if it works!) but ISDN install is fairly quick (2 days in my case)
Telekom has been banned as of last year to give away DSL modems for free (it was stifling competition) so now you have to pay, a small DSL box with a router with 4 ports that can do masquerading and set with a web box is available for about 70 Euros, and one with a wireless port as well for about 200 (At media markt). I picked up an old Pentium 100 for 25 euros and Linux it and put up a ethernet card and a hub to use as a DSL router behind Deutsche Telekom DSL, works fine but at that time the routers were still expensive so a crouter is probably the cheapets way to go.
You can also get a hosted server (a complete Linux box with full root control) for 39 Euros per month.
Computers are generally more expensive than in the states but not too much. You can pretty much find everything you need, try www.arlt.com to get a feel for prices. (I buy there, do not work for them).
If you wish to know more, drop my a line on my home page.
I am quite a heave XML user. I think XMl is good for two reasons:
a) I will NEVER write a parser again. That is already enough reason to use XML. Just eliminating all the string digging makes it worthwhile.
b) I think a move to tree structures as opposed to everything-is-a-table is a good idea in general.
That said, one thing about XML that is irritating is when it gets used for things where it not good.
XSLT is a good example of this. A programming language in XML sytax? Why for chrissakes??!!
The problem with XML in a PL context is that it is not possible to build trees with multiple branches without complicated syntax. For instance, the following sort of thing is not possible:
if x... elseif y... elseif z... else... endif
Simply because a tag in XML can only have a start and en end and NOTHING in between, which leads to things such as XSLT's stupid CHOOSE tag.
Also, an example such as
5">
is dumb when if (x >5) then is su much easier.
Using XML syntax for a language just because is just plain dumb. Syntax matters. This (sadly) is one of the prime reasons LISP is dead. All the LISPers chout that "Yeah, but its easy to learn once you get used to it". Bullsh*t.
(if not (> x 2) (+ 4 y))
is NOT easier to read than
if x > 2 then return 4 + y
And for the same reason XSLT is a pain in the butt. But I digress....
Re:Network wins over disk...
on
RAMdisk RAID?
·
· Score: 1
Just out of curiosity, what are the security implications of Myrinet? I mean, I ANYONE on the network can just dump a block of memory ANYWHERE in your RAM!
Not to mention the sort of pointer bugs that will drive anyone out of his mind.
Anyways, what does a Myrinet setup cost and how fast are these thins really anyways? (in Bps)
OK, here is a question. Both current IE32 archs are better than AI64 on specint but worse on SpecFP.
However, AFAIK (I could be and probably is, wrong) a large part of this is because the way the FP unit on IA32 works. The original spec was for the 386 with an EXTERNAL FPU unit, the 387. This mandated an instruction set design that forced all the FP data through an external pipe and an internal stack on the FPU. When the 486 had the FPU on board the same instruction set was used for backwards compatibility ad infinitum and we are still living with that legacy. So in theory, if Chipzilla and MD designs a better FPU instruction set for IA 32 it could be much better. The problem lies in the way programs address the FP unit which is not necessary.
Of course, floating point numbers have more bits than 32 (64 or 80 as I recall) so the 64 bit data bus and processing ability may also make a difference.
Anyone care to elaborate? Or did I fall off the bus somewhere in the last 5 years. I last programmed FPU code for a 387:)
Purely out of curiosity, why are SSD's slower when the disk is fragmented? In normal HDD'Äs this is because the head has to move around but in a Solid State Disk there is no head? Does it have to do with some kind of cache?
1-0 = 0. Oh my God! I will definitely have to go to grade school again;(
Anyways, the whole point is that binary unsigned vs binary signed has to do with representation in memory. computers usually use 2s complement with a modulo of 128, 32768 or 2^31. But -1 is a valid binary number.
Whats up with the stupid car thingie on the planet??! That reminded me of the chase in Diamonds are Forever. I mean, a dune buggy with Picard and Worf riding shotgun (Ok, riding Phaser) is NOT what I'd expect from an ST movie, somehow. For one, why the hell did the Enterprise not just beam them up when they were under fire??!!
The problem with Nemesis is that the movie was directed by a action movie director who is not an Startrek fan (Stuart Baird) and he directed it like an action film. SO here goes to Paramount. THIS IS NOT JAMES BLOODY BOND!
In one scene my friend (who is not a St fan and do not know the chars) leaned over to me and said "Picard, Jean luc Picard". That said it all.
That said, the movie was not THAT bad. I really liked Shinzon's "I was lonely" line and of course, Deanna Troi in that skimpy little thing. Hmmmmm. I mean, this ST actually had an MPAA rating for "scene of sexual content". And its not Kirk porking aliens either.
Data singing was a little embarassing. No wonder they killed him off:)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you should ask this, as I am working on one on Linux as we speak.
The link to www.towitoko.de is one you could look at. They have a Linux devleopers pack which has a reader and couple of smartcards (memory cards, not processor cards, though) as well as a CDRom with Linux drivers. This things works well. I have this past weekend hacked apart their test program to write some utlilities which I can happily send you.
I have a writecard, readcard and hashcard util which writes stdin to a card, reads it or computes a hash of a card.
I use this to store a key with which (in conjunction with a password) I encrypt a filesystem. You need to stick the card in to mount the filesystem.
The site also has a link to a Linux-compatible port to PC/SC. I also think that Javacard works on Linux.
You could also look at ibutton.com They dfo smartcard stuff (very cool) but with a button form factor. Their development thingies also run on Linux AFAIK. In fact, there is a patch somewhere for GnuPG that allows you to have your private keys as well as the actual decryption routine, so the key never leaves the device, for a Java iButton somewhere. That runs on Linux.
If you need to know anything, mail me at yahoo.de AT netgrok (switch the name and domain). when I am finished I will post my stuff to freshmeat, but it is very rudimentary at the moment.
I do not want to comment too much, except for
h tm l
a) Life in a 2D universe has to expend much more energy to function due to all the constraints put on it that 3D life does not have. For instance the comlicated set of valves and thingies that one poster envisioned simply takes more effort, and therefore energy, to develop and to operate inside the lifeform. This may not preclude life but it may preclude very complicated life and would at the least make it more difficult to develop. Just as there is more life in the tropics than in the arctic because the conditions are better.
b) Many of the arguments made there deals with macroscopic features of such a universe (ie, on the scale where gravity is significant).
However, if you turn the knob on the strong nuclear force things such as atoms or even protons cannot form. OR are unstable. This would probably preclude life.
However, considering the sheer complexity of the inside of a proton and the extreme difficulty in simulating the quantum chromodynamic interaction inside it one must admit the possibility of other sort of particles forming. Which will lead to a completely different sort of place. The inside of a proton, an (almost) fundamental particle is unbelievably complicated.
------------------
Anyways, a good book which deals in some depth with the subject of physical constraints on life itself is Barrow's "The artful Universe.." This is great read and raises many points to ponder.
http://www.addall.com/Browse/Detail/0316082422.
Btw, his book on the philosophy of mathematics, "Pie in the sky" is also good.
And a question, I've heard this higher dimensions do not allow orbits argument somewhere before. Does anyone have some kind of reference?
DES has always been slights tainted by the suggestion that in the 1970's the NSA instructed IBM to change some aspects ofthe algorithm and did not give a reason why. There was always som suspicionthat the NSA has some backdoor to DES which makes it easi(er) for them to crack it but not for anyone else. However later it turned out that they knew about differential crypto, but did not wish to release the details for fear of weakening some other systems.
Unfortunately, the suspicion still lingers, and the NSA being the NSA and a top secret governemnt agency, the suspicion will probably always linger.
Now DES's successor has finally been blessed by the NSA with an open competition, and the winner is a Belgian algorithm (and the runner-up, Serpent, a British one).
Now my question is, is there any suggestions of any impropriety, reasonably or not, of NSA interference in the selection process of the AES candidates? Or can we commoners actually trust the thing without fear that the US Government are reading everything behind our back? I do not know much about the selection process itself, btw.
Well, at least you did not do the Power/ENergy thing this time :)
Very cool argument though. I have never heard it before your previous posting. Just an interesting question: That number you used to indicate the minimum amount of energy to flip (or reset) a bit. Any references on that? I am not a big expert on Thermodynamics, but why is there a minimum energy involved?
Oh, and since you seem to be the resident expert, what is your opinion on the security of AES, in particular of Rijndael in comparison to Blowfish and Serpent?
There is a large difference between D/RNA and water. Water is an extremel simple molecule and acts as the carrier for the processes in life. Nucleic acids are
extremely complicated molecules that are used to store information (used to encode proteins)
Now, it is quite possible to envision an organism which uses some non-nucleic acid information storage system. However, for the trivial carrier molecule there is not really that much choice.
There are only so many simple molecules out there.
In the medium-complexity range, whould there we any other chemical structures which could replace proteins? I am not a biochemist...
I agree that we should not look for life just as ourselves. Alien life would probably not have DNA and might not have proteins. So we should not look for those.
However, they would probably be water based and therefore that is a good starting point.
AFAIK there is not many reasons to replace Carbon either, so they would probably be organic too. Another thing to look at.
Anyways, I am not an biochemist, again. Soany comments from the experts are welcome.
If you can run this gizmo in promiscuous mode without an IP stack it would not HAVE an IP address but would still be able to snag all the ethernet frames and perhaps filter them. OK, the bandwidth out of the serial lines would probably preclude this, but it would be semi-trivial to build a box about the size of, say a box of matches with one of these and an IBM CF microdrive to capture all the goodies. Such a thing would be bigger, but still would be easy to hide. For instance, plug it into a telephone case and connect the normal phone cable inside the phone to this thing and surreptiously plug the phone cord into the ethernet jack. Noone would notice (except perhaps that the phone is dead). You could even rig it so that you switch CF cards once per day through a small slot on the phone and analyze the stuff at your leisure.
All of this simply pushes further into the idea that perimiter security on networks just do not cut it anymore. Perimiter security is where you have a firewall that blocks from the outside and everything on the inside is free to do whatever it wants. Soon you will have to use edge security, where each edge in the internal network is explicity opened and configure and run IpSec inside the internal network too. See the new ACM Queue Mag (which has the inaugural issue online) for an article amout this. www.acmqueue.com
One our computers, which had a nagios/Openview like program on it that monitored and checked the other stuff was called edgar, named after J. Edgar Hoover.
Not a program, I know but...
With all due respect do you think that Israeli and US Thermonuclear weapons use the same arming protocol??!! Maybe they should publish it as an RFC!
Obviously the US would take the systems that arms nuclear weapons out of aircraft they sell to overseas customers for the simple reason that it might give them insigt in, well, one of the most classified pieces of information the US has.
Arming nukes is a very serious matter. Actually in the 1950's the systems they used were a glorified padlocck, but nowadays they self destruct on tampering rendering the weapon permanently inoperable.
The US also sell downgraded ECM systems which cannot apply ECM to US missiles or radars (or is not as effective).
Missile radar patterns is an interesting business. The pulses are sent out in a random sequence and the algorithm used to determine that sequence is very muh highly classified since if an ECM jammer knows it it can probably spoof the missile. One of the reasons of having things like the plane that flew close to China is to get their radars to lock onto the thing to analyze the pulse pattern of the radar (that, and to simply locate the radars of course). The Soviets and US flew recon planes close to each other's borders for years quite regurarly.
It think it was Bruce Schneider who once said that most security systems are like a 500 mile high fence that is only 2 meters wide that you can walk around.
:)
Point is, most modern encryption algorithms ARE pretty much extremely difficult to crack, even for the NSA but that there are so many oher buffer overflows and such crap that it does not matter really.
Here on good ol slashdot was a posting about how the FBI whacked some terrorists or something who were using encryption. They took the good ol' approach of breaking in and installing a keylogger on the guy's laptop to get the passphrase on his encryption key. Much easier than using a Ten-Trillion-Teraflop Bad boy of a computer to brute force the thing. More elegant too
Yes, yes, yes.
Programming languages revolve by restricting freedom. I have heard this argument from someone who said that that is why purely functional languages such as Haskell or SML (and to some degree, LISP) is so powerful: They even restrict you from using state. The ultimate restriction leads to the ultimate cool language.
Oh, one other thing. Burocracy in Germany is pretty heavy, but the burocrats are usually very efficient. They follow the rules rigidly but then, thats what burocracy is for.
Unlike in the States where there is less burocracy but the burocrats are inefficient dipshits.
Skip Oktoberfest in München. It is crowded horrible and bloody expensive.
Thing is, you can get the same Oktoberfest feeling and experience anytime in München by just going there and hanging around in any of the large beergardens OUTSIDE off the Oktoberfest time. Besides, the weather in end September sucks in comparison to say June or April.
Btw, if you DO go to the fest do NOT go on the roller coaster with your boss after drinking 2 liters of beer....
Geez Louise,
This thread is really getting on me ninnies...
Anyways, I live as an expat in Germany. DSL is trivial to get, try Deutsche Telekom although I do not not know if they are exactly the cheapest.
There is a website that contains a list of all the
German DSL providers (there are loads) but it is in German. Google for it (try DSL Deutschland). 768/128 DSL is available almost anywhere, and some providers (yahoo) does 1500 as well.
As far a cellphones are concerned the service is very good, but do yourself a favour and get a contract from Viag Interkom (now O2). They are the best, especially with their Genion at Home thingie. That is quite cheap.
It is possible to dial fairly cheap. www.billigtelefonieren.de should give you all the details you want on that, again, in German. You usually dial with a prefix code to get the different providers.
If you do not want to go DSL, ISDN is very much more wide-spread and cheap than in the US and pay-per call may be mucho cheaper than a DSL, depending on how much you are online. Now that DSL is getting very popular you can get cheapo ISDN cards second hand. ISDN is pretty OK for most things anywa, and with it you can call for free on Sundays for a few Euros per month extra.
Telekom does take a few weeks to install DSL due to a serious demand-driven backlog (and the !"!"ers do NOT tell you that they have done it, you have to try to see if it works!) but ISDN install is fairly quick (2 days in my case)
Telekom has been banned as of last year to give away DSL modems for free (it was stifling competition) so now you have to pay, a small DSL box with a router with 4 ports that can do masquerading and set with a web box is available for about 70 Euros, and one with a wireless port as well for about 200 (At media markt). I picked up an old Pentium 100 for 25 euros and Linux it and put up a ethernet card and a hub to use as a DSL router behind Deutsche Telekom DSL, works fine but at that time the routers were still expensive so a crouter is probably the cheapets way to go.
You can also get a hosted server (a complete Linux box with full root control) for 39 Euros per month.
Computers are generally more expensive than in the states but not too much. You can pretty much find everything you need, try www.arlt.com to get a feel for prices. (I buy there, do not work for them).
If you wish to know more, drop my a line on my home page.
I am quite a heave XML user. I think XMl is good for two reasons:
... ... ... ...
a) I will NEVER write a parser again. That is already enough reason to use XML. Just eliminating all the string digging makes it worthwhile.
b) I think a move to tree structures as opposed to everything-is-a-table is a good idea in general.
That said, one thing about XML that is irritating is when it gets used for things where it not good.
XSLT is a good example of this. A programming language in XML sytax? Why for chrissakes??!!
The problem with XML in a PL context is that it is not possible to build trees with multiple branches without complicated syntax. For instance, the following sort of thing is not possible:
if x
elseif y
elseif z
else
endif
Simply because a tag in XML can only have a start and en end and NOTHING in between, which leads to things such as XSLT's stupid CHOOSE tag.
Also, an example such as
5">
is dumb when if (x >5) then is su much easier.
Using XML syntax for a language just because is just plain dumb. Syntax matters. This (sadly) is one of the prime reasons LISP is dead. All the LISPers chout that "Yeah, but its easy to learn once you get used to it". Bullsh*t.
(if not (> x 2) (+ 4 y))
is NOT easier to read than
if x > 2 then return 4 + y
And for the same reason XSLT is a pain in the butt. But I digress....
Just out of curiosity, what are the security implications of Myrinet? I mean, I ANYONE on the network can just dump a block of memory ANYWHERE in your RAM!
Not to mention the sort of pointer bugs that will drive anyone out of his mind.
Anyways, what does a Myrinet setup cost and how fast are these thins really anyways? (in Bps)
OK, here is a question. Both current IE32 archs are better than AI64 on specint but worse on SpecFP.
:)
However, AFAIK (I could be and probably is, wrong) a large part of this is because the way the FP unit on IA32 works. The original spec was for the 386 with an EXTERNAL FPU unit, the 387. This mandated an instruction set design that forced all the FP data through an external pipe and an internal stack on the FPU. When the 486 had the FPU on board the same instruction set was used for backwards compatibility ad infinitum and we are still living with that legacy. So in theory, if Chipzilla and MD designs a better FPU instruction set for IA 32 it could be much better. The problem lies in the way programs address the FP unit which is not necessary.
Of course, floating point numbers have more bits than 32 (64 or 80 as I recall) so the 64 bit data bus and processing ability may also make a difference.
Anyone care to elaborate? Or did I fall off the bus somewhere in the last 5 years. I last programmed FPU code for a 387
Purely out of curiosity, why are SSD's slower when the disk is fragmented? In normal HDD'Äs this is because the head has to move around but in a Solid State Disk there is no head? Does it have to do with some kind of cache?
Coke does not have horsepiss in it, it has batshit in it. Actually, one of the components that used to be in it was made from guano.
From the Unix Haters Handbook (yeah, yeah, I know this is /.)
"C++ is to C what Lung Cancer is to Lung"
And Microsoft would love to be known as
Samba:Nemesis
This is the funniest quote I have seen on Slashdot. Ever.
1-0 = 0. Oh my God! I will definitely have to go to grade school again ;(
Anyways, the whole point is that binary unsigned vs binary signed has to do with representation in memory. computers usually use 2s complement with a modulo of 128, 32768 or 2^31. But -1 is a valid binary number.
Hey, in the ST Universe with that replicator thing you can do whatevber you want!
Instead of "Computer, Earl Grey, Hot", think "Computer, DD Rack, hot"
In binary addition and substraction are not the friggin same??!! 1-0 = 0 0-1 = -1 Spot the difference!
Whats up with the stupid car thingie on the planet??! That reminded me of the chase in Diamonds are Forever. I mean, a dune buggy with Picard and Worf riding shotgun (Ok, riding Phaser) is NOT what I'd expect from an ST movie, somehow. For one, why the hell did the Enterprise not just beam them up when they were under fire??!!
:)
The problem with Nemesis is that the movie was directed by a action movie director who is not an Startrek fan (Stuart Baird) and he directed it like an action film. SO here goes to Paramount. THIS IS NOT JAMES BLOODY BOND!
In one scene my friend (who is not a St fan and do not know the chars) leaned over to me and said "Picard, Jean luc Picard". That said it all.
That said, the movie was not THAT bad. I really liked Shinzon's "I was lonely" line and of course, Deanna Troi in that skimpy little thing. Hmmmmm. I mean, this ST actually had an MPAA rating for "scene of sexual content". And its not Kirk porking aliens either.
Data singing was a little embarassing. No wonder they killed him off