Didn't happen to me, but a number of people with the same Intel SSD reported that they booted up and the SSD claimed to be 8MB and required a secure wipe before it could be reused. Supposedly it's fixed in the new firmware, but I'm still crossing my fingers every time I reboot that machine.
They never fixed it, they just stopped responding to complaints about it. I bought one of these ticking time-bombs specifically because of all the noise that Intel makes about the high reliability of their drives, and now I'm sitting on a potential complete data loss. The worst part is that while Intel will eventually replace them when they fail, they'll give you another one of these lemons for the replacement, so there's no escape.
Don't worry, they've clearly learned... "Through this process we learned a great deal about current issues with code signing and the impact of the inappropriate use of a code signing certificate."
I know this makes for a great eyeball-rolling quote, but up until recently I think they genuinely didn't have anyone there who knew much about PKI and certificates. I've been involved in an Adobe-compatible PKI implementation and the impression I got from reading the contents of Adobe's spec was that it was some sort of cargo-cult cut&paste of bits and pieces from various actual standards by someone who'd read the introductory chapter of a book on PKI without really understanding any of it. In some cases the Adobe spec requires that you literally do the exact opposite of what the standards require, and in other cases it's just a garbled muddle of different bits of different standards. So when they say, in effect, "we've had to learn a great deal about PKI", then that's probably quite literally true.
I have built a working extension that provides 'window.mozCrypto', which does SHA2 hash, RSA keygen, public key crypto and RSA signature/verification,
No offence, but that's about a hundredth of what SSLeay (the thing that came before OpenSSL) was doing 15 years ago. That's a long, long way to go before you have a general-purpose crypto API usable by web developers.
... it's a bunch of random thoughts. Most of the current "draft" consists of "TBD" or "here are some ideas that need to be fleshed out". This looks like it's years from reality, at which point it'll have turned into another CDSA-sized monstrosity containing the union of every feature requested by every vendor ever.
I would be interested to have a reference to this law.
Google the magic phrase "it shall be no defence", there's a pile of laws on the books of various countries that explicitly exclude non-knowledge that something you've been charged with was wrong (and specifically that no matter how much care you take to not break the law, if you're later charged you can't claim that you did everything possible to make sure what you were doing was legal as a defence). Gah, convoluted wording there, it's late...
If someone abandons a car on your front lawn, you do not possess of it unless you take start treating it as your own, such as by using it to drive to work.
Depends on how your child-pron laws are written. In this country they were pushed through as part of a morals panic a decade or so back, and the law specifically says that there is no defence to being found with child pron. As a lawyer who criticized the law at the time it was passed pointed out, "if a pedophile fleeing from the police tosses a videotape of child porn over your fence, you're automatically guilty of possession". There were rumblings at the time of sending child pron to some of the politicians who passed it and then calling the police to see what would happen...
Pretty common practice to half-ass everything, they don't care about supporting the customers just getting their percentage off your transactions..
A friend of mine runs a networking services company who got called into a medium-sized payment processor a few months back to upgrade a server, about an afternoon's work. After several months of 10-12 hour days he's now got them up to the level where they're about quarter-arsed. With another few months' work they'll be at the level of half-arsed. When he described the original setup he found I thought he was making it up, it was just fail layered upon fail layered upon fail, like something a bunch of drunken geeks have invented as a joke to see how dysfunctional a collection of systems and networking you could make that would still appear to work most of the time.
Certainly blogs from some random schmo spouting stuff off the top of his head is not considered reliable.
Unless you're Wikipedia, in which case they're considered more reliable than the primary source. I've run into the same thing, according to Wikipedia I created X when in fact I created Y. Tried to get it fixed and they said I wasn't a reliable enough source on my own fscking work!. Eventually got a friend to mention it in passing in his blog (which has nothing to do with my work) and that was good enough for Wikipedia. Their "no original research" policy has been completely braindamaged ever since it was first created, and it's not getting any better over time.
When did it become correct to use the word "thin" to mean "thick"?
If that's right, then why isn't it "7.5 ounces light"?
Why mix imperial and metric units in the same sentence?
I found that pretty bizarre too, particularly the mixing of imperial and standard units. Perhaps it should have read "The device weighs 0.16 oka and is 0.3 attoparsecs thick". That's still imperial units for the first one, but a different empire.
instead of just getting lenses, I could actually go to Japan, pick them up, and do some shooting/tourism without spending an additional cent.
Back in the 1980s, the markup on Apple Macs in the country I live in was so outrageous that the cheapest way to get one was to buy a return air ticket to the US and buy one over there. Even with the added cost of the air ticket it was still cheaper than buying one locally.
So the article shows that Win8 gets from the Windows logo to the desktop in 18 seconds. On a Core i7-3960X. With a Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD. This is regarded as fast.
I have Win7 running on a several-year-old netbook. It has the cheapest SSD I could find, a Corsair 32GB. Time from hitting the power button to desktop is about 20 seconds.
(That's with a very stripped-down Win7 install, courtesy of RT Se7en Lite. So far I haven't noticed any loss of functionality in this lite version).
So it looks like the way to make Windows "fast" is to bloat it up to such ridiculous levels that something that'd have rated as a supercomputer some years ago crawls under it, and then to remove some of the suckage in a later release to make it appear... well, less sucky.
All of our major standards organizations (IEEE, ANSI, IETF, etc.) have been taken over by bureaucratic-minded industry and government consultants
Sad but true. About a decade ago I was part of an IETF standards effort that was turning into crap fast, when someone finally decided to run an interop test on implementations the conclusion was "this protocol does not work". The working group chair's comment on this was "we'll push it through as a standard anyway and then someone will have to figure out how to make it work". My (private) reaction to this was "The IETF has now become the ISO / OSI". In other words it had become the very thing that it was created as a reaction against.
In terms of bureaucracy, there are standards groups in there whose composition is 95% conslutants feeding off the (mainly) US government like intestinal parasites and 5% academics trying to push their pet toy protocol, with 0% actual implementers providing input (in the abovementioned standards group, there hasn't been anyone who cuts code involved in the process for more than a decade). Occasionally some new guy will come along and ask why it's so hard to do X in whatever standards document exists to tell you how to do X, and has to be quietly informed that the "standard" for X is merely the document for some US Navy procurement contract dressed up as an RFC and not any real standard at all.
Twenty years ago we had the IETF come in to kill off OSI. Now that significant parts of the IETF have become what they were supposed to get rid of, we need something else to come in and play the role that the IETF originally played. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything out there...
Of course, if the W Series is just too wimpy for you, there is always the Eurocom Panther 3.0, available with 6-core Xeon processor and SLI or Crossfire dual GPU configuration... Having to use two 300watt power bricks for maximum performance is heavy; but surely you want the best?
Holy fscking s**t!. This thing has three times the power draw of my quad-core desktop and they call it "Extremely Energy Efficient".
Well, as long as you buy from the remaining duopoly of router manufacturers.
Maybe in Ruritania where you live, but here in Australia we have one to two dozen to choose from. I have a Draytek Vigor (fabulous gear) with an uptime of "since I first plugged it in several years ago". My Cisco-branded Linksys (free from my ISP) in contrast needs rebooting roughly every 1-2 weeks to restore functionality, and it fails in bizarre ways with random bits of functionality locking up while other aspects keep working. There's also my Cisco-branded PAP2 (ditto) which needs rebooting about once a month. My neighbour has a Cisco-branded Linksys WAG310 that's on a one-week preventive maintenance reboot schedule. They don't suck quite as much as DLink consumer-grade gear does (I think there are black holes that suck less than the likes of a 502T), but they're close.
you used SCL_DAX_ENABLE just for the entertainment value right?
It's been a long time since I looked at the specs, that's just some random fragments from here and there. Besides, ATI's lawyers would probably own my firstborn if I'd used a real name.
I think part of the problem is you get people who've written something like a NIC driver and say "Oh this driver writing isn't bad." The problem is most hardware is peanuts compared to a GPU.
That's an understatement. GPUs and baseband processors are some of the most hellishly complex programmable devices ever created (I'd say baseband processors are far worse than GPUs, for long and complex reasons that I couldn't be bothered typing up here). For example a typical ATI GPU several years ago had around 4,500 registers, many of which were documented with a single-line entry in a data sheet containing a name/description like SCL_DAX_ENABLE. Each functional unit had its own group of developers who knew it inside out and didn't meddle with any other functional unit. If you needed help, you picked up the phone and called the guy who'd done that part of the silicon. Two days later, the two of you had finally agreed on how a particular hardware feature was supposed to be used.
No matter how enthusiastic you are about OSS, you can't open-source that.
My point is mainly that the US government is trying to say "Hey, don't let these guys control the internet - they might be as bad or worse than we've already proved ourselves to be!"
It does actually remind me of Hosni Mubarak's "Support me or you might get the Muslim Brotherhood". Or Ali Abdullah Saleh's "Support me or you might get Al Qaeda". Or Ben Ali's "Support me or you might get the Taliban". In every case it was just a scarecrow used by an abusive regime to cling to power...
Besides, lets be honest folks....who didn't know this kinda shit has been going on damned nearly constantly?
It's been going on for decades, although mostly by US companies. In one widely-publicised incident in 1994 for example, Intel secretly modified its Pentium CPU so that a certain floating-point divide instruction would produce incorrect results under some circumstances, thus ensuring that if it was used for missile guidance the projectiles would fall harmlessly into the pacific ocean instead of hitting the US. Intel initially denied there was a problem, but then under public pressure and with the OK of its secret government handlers declared it a "bug" and replaced the booby-trapped chips. That's just one example, this sort of thing has happened again and again and again in US and European-made devices, so it's not surprising the Chinese are getting in on the act as well.
The fact that two guys with somewhat abnormal personalities (and I mean that as a general observation rather than any criticism, more normal people wouldn't have taken this approach) obsessively worked on pencil-and-paper proofs isn't really an indication that this is a good way to do things. If you can do the same thing with less effort on a computer (and a prime example of this is the four-colour theorem) then do it on a computer. Use the right tool for the job, not pencil-and-paper because you don't trust computers.
(Oh gawd, please don't let this degenerate into a long thread about OCD and the like, I'm trying to point out that you need to use the right tool for the job, and if the right tool is a computer then go ahead and use it).
Software needs a mechanism like that IMHO. Pricing for licensing should be in proportion to the benefit added.
I tried that once. My algorithm was O( log n log log n ^ 4/3 ) more efficient than the existing one, but their lawyers argued that that was an upper bound. On the other hand I pointed out that their cost was amortised and so arguably even my typical case would be O( log log log n ^ 2 log n ^ 1.66666689 ) more efficient. They then counterclaimed that my proof wasn't rigorous because it used infinitesimals, and then the case had to be adjourned because the judge beat himself to death with his own gavel.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't happen to me, but a number of people with the same Intel SSD reported that they booted up and the SSD claimed to be 8MB and required a secure wipe before it could be reused. Supposedly it's fixed in the new firmware, but I'm still crossing my fingers every time I reboot that machine.
They never fixed it, they just stopped responding to complaints about it. I bought one of these ticking time-bombs specifically because of all the noise that Intel makes about the high reliability of their drives, and now I'm sitting on a potential complete data loss. The worst part is that while Intel will eventually replace them when they fail, they'll give you another one of these lemons for the replacement, so there's no escape.
Sumerians? A bunch of amateurs! If you want a great OS, you have to with a Hittite OS.
I'm sorry, we're Medes and we're lost in this desert of a web board. Could you direct us to the exit? And sorry about the arrows.
Don't worry, they've clearly learned... "Through this process we learned a great deal about current issues with code signing and the impact of the inappropriate use of a code signing certificate."
I know this makes for a great eyeball-rolling quote, but up until recently I think they genuinely didn't have anyone there who knew much about PKI and certificates. I've been involved in an Adobe-compatible PKI implementation and the impression I got from reading the contents of Adobe's spec was that it was some sort of cargo-cult cut&paste of bits and pieces from various actual standards by someone who'd read the introductory chapter of a book on PKI without really understanding any of it. In some cases the Adobe spec requires that you literally do the exact opposite of what the standards require, and in other cases it's just a garbled muddle of different bits of different standards. So when they say, in effect, "we've had to learn a great deal about PKI", then that's probably quite literally true.
I have built a working extension that provides 'window.mozCrypto', which does SHA2 hash, RSA keygen, public key crypto and RSA signature/verification,
No offence, but that's about a hundredth of what SSLeay (the thing that came before OpenSSL) was doing 15 years ago. That's a long, long way to go before you have a general-purpose crypto API usable by web developers.
... it's a bunch of random thoughts. Most of the current "draft" consists of "TBD" or "here are some ideas that need to be fleshed out". This looks like it's years from reality, at which point it'll have turned into another CDSA-sized monstrosity containing the union of every feature requested by every vendor ever.
I would be interested to have a reference to this law.
Google the magic phrase "it shall be no defence", there's a pile of laws on the books of various countries that explicitly exclude non-knowledge that something you've been charged with was wrong (and specifically that no matter how much care you take to not break the law, if you're later charged you can't claim that you did everything possible to make sure what you were doing was legal as a defence). Gah, convoluted wording there, it's late...
If someone abandons a car on your front lawn, you do not possess of it unless you take start treating it as your own, such as by using it to drive to work.
Depends on how your child-pron laws are written. In this country they were pushed through as part of a morals panic a decade or so back, and the law specifically says that there is no defence to being found with child pron. As a lawyer who criticized the law at the time it was passed pointed out, "if a pedophile fleeing from the police tosses a videotape of child porn over your fence, you're automatically guilty of possession". There were rumblings at the time of sending child pron to some of the politicians who passed it and then calling the police to see what would happen...
Pretty common practice to half-ass everything, they don't care about supporting the customers just getting their percentage off your transactions..
A friend of mine runs a networking services company who got called into a medium-sized payment processor a few months back to upgrade a server, about an afternoon's work. After several months of 10-12 hour days he's now got them up to the level where they're about quarter-arsed. With another few months' work they'll be at the level of half-arsed. When he described the original setup he found I thought he was making it up, it was just fail layered upon fail layered upon fail, like something a bunch of drunken geeks have invented as a joke to see how dysfunctional a collection of systems and networking you could make that would still appear to work most of the time.
Certainly blogs from some random schmo spouting stuff off the top of his head is not considered reliable.
Unless you're Wikipedia, in which case they're considered more reliable than the primary source. I've run into the same thing, according to Wikipedia I created X when in fact I created Y. Tried to get it fixed and they said I wasn't a reliable enough source on my own fscking work!. Eventually got a friend to mention it in passing in his blog (which has nothing to do with my work) and that was good enough for Wikipedia. Their "no original research" policy has been completely braindamaged ever since it was first created, and it's not getting any better over time.
The device weighs 7.5 ounces and is 9.1mm thin
When did it become correct to use the word "thin" to mean "thick"? If that's right, then why isn't it "7.5 ounces light"? Why mix imperial and metric units in the same sentence?
I found that pretty bizarre too, particularly the mixing of imperial and standard units. Perhaps it should have read "The device weighs 0.16 oka and is 0.3 attoparsecs thick". That's still imperial units for the first one, but a different empire.
instead of just getting lenses, I could actually go to Japan, pick them up, and do some shooting/tourism without spending an additional cent.
Back in the 1980s, the markup on Apple Macs in the country I live in was so outrageous that the cheapest way to get one was to buy a return air ticket to the US and buy one over there. Even with the added cost of the air ticket it was still cheaper than buying one locally.
So the article shows that Win8 gets from the Windows logo to the desktop in 18 seconds. On a Core i7-3960X. With a Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD. This is regarded as fast.
I have Win7 running on a several-year-old netbook. It has the cheapest SSD I could find, a Corsair 32GB. Time from hitting the power button to desktop is about 20 seconds.
(That's with a very stripped-down Win7 install, courtesy of RT Se7en Lite. So far I haven't noticed any loss of functionality in this lite version).
So it looks like the way to make Windows "fast" is to bloat it up to such ridiculous levels that something that'd have rated as a supercomputer some years ago crawls under it, and then to remove some of the suckage in a later release to make it appear... well, less sucky.
All of our major standards organizations (IEEE, ANSI, IETF, etc.) have been taken over by bureaucratic-minded industry and government consultants
Sad but true. About a decade ago I was part of an IETF standards effort that was turning into crap fast, when someone finally decided to run an interop test on implementations the conclusion was "this protocol does not work". The working group chair's comment on this was "we'll push it through as a standard anyway and then someone will have to figure out how to make it work". My (private) reaction to this was "The IETF has now become the ISO / OSI". In other words it had become the very thing that it was created as a reaction against.
In terms of bureaucracy, there are standards groups in there whose composition is 95% conslutants feeding off the (mainly) US government like intestinal parasites and 5% academics trying to push their pet toy protocol, with 0% actual implementers providing input (in the abovementioned standards group, there hasn't been anyone who cuts code involved in the process for more than a decade). Occasionally some new guy will come along and ask why it's so hard to do X in whatever standards document exists to tell you how to do X, and has to be quietly informed that the "standard" for X is merely the document for some US Navy procurement contract dressed up as an RFC and not any real standard at all.
Twenty years ago we had the IETF come in to kill off OSI. Now that significant parts of the IETF have become what they were supposed to get rid of, we need something else to come in and play the role that the IETF originally played. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything out there...
Of course, if the W Series is just too wimpy for you, there is always the Eurocom Panther 3.0, available with 6-core Xeon processor and SLI or Crossfire dual GPU configuration... Having to use two 300watt power bricks for maximum performance is heavy; but surely you want the best?
Holy fscking s**t!. This thing has three times the power draw of my quad-core desktop and they call it "Extremely Energy Efficient".
Well, as long as you buy from the remaining duopoly of router manufacturers.
Maybe in Ruritania where you live, but here in Australia we have one to two dozen to choose from. I have a Draytek Vigor (fabulous gear) with an uptime of "since I first plugged it in several years ago". My Cisco-branded Linksys (free from my ISP) in contrast needs rebooting roughly every 1-2 weeks to restore functionality, and it fails in bizarre ways with random bits of functionality locking up while other aspects keep working. There's also my Cisco-branded PAP2 (ditto) which needs rebooting about once a month. My neighbour has a Cisco-branded Linksys WAG310 that's on a one-week preventive maintenance reboot schedule. They don't suck quite as much as DLink consumer-grade gear does (I think there are black holes that suck less than the likes of a 502T), but they're close.
Kinnts es deppn ned a English ren wia jeda nuamale mensch?
The fuck does SAP stand for? The website doesn't even say. Fucking terrible OP.
Not sure about the 'A' and the 'P' but the 'S' can only stand for "Satanic".
you used SCL_DAX_ENABLE just for the entertainment value right?
It's been a long time since I looked at the specs, that's just some random fragments from here and there. Besides, ATI's lawyers would probably own my firstborn if I'd used a real name.
That's an understatement. GPUs and baseband processors are some of the most hellishly complex programmable devices ever created (I'd say baseband processors are far worse than GPUs, for long and complex reasons that I couldn't be bothered typing up here). For example a typical ATI GPU several years ago had around 4,500 registers, many of which were documented with a single-line entry in a data sheet containing a name/description like SCL_DAX_ENABLE. Each functional unit had its own group of developers who knew it inside out and didn't meddle with any other functional unit. If you needed help, you picked up the phone and called the guy who'd done that part of the silicon. Two days later, the two of you had finally agreed on how a particular hardware feature was supposed to be used.
No matter how enthusiastic you are about OSS, you can't open-source that.
Geeze, and these guys call themselves scientists.
I call bullshit. Cite your sources.
Whoosh.
(Well OK, if you really need a reference, here's one).
My point is mainly that the US government is trying to say "Hey, don't let these guys control the internet - they might be as bad or worse than we've already proved ourselves to be!"
It does actually remind me of Hosni Mubarak's "Support me or you might get the Muslim Brotherhood". Or Ali Abdullah Saleh's "Support me or you might get Al Qaeda". Or Ben Ali's "Support me or you might get the Taliban". In every case it was just a scarecrow used by an abusive regime to cling to power...
Besides, lets be honest folks....who didn't know this kinda shit has been going on damned nearly constantly?
It's been going on for decades, although mostly by US companies. In one widely-publicised incident in 1994 for example, Intel secretly modified its Pentium CPU so that a certain floating-point divide instruction would produce incorrect results under some circumstances, thus ensuring that if it was used for missile guidance the projectiles would fall harmlessly into the pacific ocean instead of hitting the US. Intel initially denied there was a problem, but then under public pressure and with the OK of its secret government handlers declared it a "bug" and replaced the booby-trapped chips. That's just one example, this sort of thing has happened again and again and again in US and European-made devices, so it's not surprising the Chinese are getting in on the act as well.
Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorm with paper only, as he despised the use of computers in writing mathematical Proofs. Another famous example is Grigori Perelman who solved the Poincaré Conjecture - with hundreds and hundreds of pages of mind-numbingly dense mathematics vs computer search.
The fact that two guys with somewhat abnormal personalities (and I mean that as a general observation rather than any criticism, more normal people wouldn't have taken this approach) obsessively worked on pencil-and-paper proofs isn't really an indication that this is a good way to do things. If you can do the same thing with less effort on a computer (and a prime example of this is the four-colour theorem) then do it on a computer. Use the right tool for the job, not pencil-and-paper because you don't trust computers.
(Oh gawd, please don't let this degenerate into a long thread about OCD and the like, I'm trying to point out that you need to use the right tool for the job, and if the right tool is a computer then go ahead and use it).
Software needs a mechanism like that IMHO. Pricing for licensing should be in proportion to the benefit added.
I tried that once. My algorithm was O( log n log log n ^ 4/3 ) more efficient than the existing one, but their lawyers argued that that was an upper bound. On the other hand I pointed out that their cost was amortised and so arguably even my typical case would be O( log log log n ^ 2 log n ^ 1.66666689 ) more efficient. They then counterclaimed that my proof wasn't rigorous because it used infinitesimals, and then the case had to be adjourned because the judge beat himself to death with his own gavel.