To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.
The surest path to atheism is open discussion of religion.
That's a cute platitude, but since you're apparently a rational, scientific-minded person, I'd like to see your evidence of this. It doesn't comport with my personal experience.
The method used by the Communists to reduce the power and influence of religions was to change the school curriculum to teach all religions equally, side-by-side, instead of just Christianity.
It's brutally effective.
Once the students can't tell the difference between one creation myth and another, and everything starts to blend into an ever more ridiculous set of children's stories, very few are left that can still take their "own" religion seriously any more.
I'm a consultant that gets to see into the IT world of over a hundred organisations, and I see one major failing that companies make that cost them later:
They fail to keep up with the times.
Nowhere is this more evident than the leviathan government organisations still running Novell and Lotus Notes, on barely patched versions of Windows, with the browser restricted to IE6. Every time I see that combination, the word "expensive" comes to mind.
Solutions that used to be the best are now simply redundant, outdated, incompatible, and expensive to maintain. Inevitably, the whole thing becomes so flaky that it will crash if you apply even security hotfixes, let alone major OS upgrades. This then makes everyone nervous about making any changes at all, which just exacerbates the problem, because by moving more slowly, the organisation falls even further behind the latest generation.
If you're a developer, than the analogy would be a software development organisation that doesn't keep up with the bug fixes until the code becomes so unstable that making any change to it is a gamble. This then means that even applying bug fixes is likely to just break more things, and then the whole thing snowballs until it's best to cleanse the source server with purifying fire. Or better yet, it's like a development company that never bothers to switch to newer versions of the Java SDK, eventually falling so far behind that it's too hard to make the huge leap required to catch up, instead of the many small steps that could have been taken.
The source of the mistake is short-sighted managers always choosing the easy thing instead of the correct thing. Taking small upgrade steps to keep up is critical, because large steps are very hard. A system that doesn't change for years is a temptation for lazy developers and administrators to bake in the peculiarities of the environment, instead of being forced to develop generic and supportable solutions that won't break after an upgrade of a related component.
The "Spec", as you call it, was developed before SQL Server was even created. The original Great Plains software ran on a variety of databases and back then there wasn't any encryption functions that you could call.
Obviously it was completely impossible for the GP developers to simply use any one of the dozens of free, public domain, or open source C implementation of 3DES or AES.
The very fabric of the universe itself must have shifted to prevent it, because there cannot possibly be any other excuse.
I hope so, since 3DES 128 or AES 256 is really not THAT strong.
Good attempt at a troll, but AES 256 is basically the maximum keysize, and is rated by the NSA as sufficient for "TOP SECRET" materials.
In other words, it's more than enough for some administrator password that's probably written down on a postit note conveniently stuck to the side of the monitor.
Now, if you have a margin account, you can freely buy and sell all day... as long as you have a HUGE amount of equity up front to invest (I think the minimum allowed is $50k or $100k). The SEC's rationale is that day traders are a net benefit to the market by providing liquidity, but requiring a huge amount of cash up front to be allowed to do it skims off 99% of the people who really can't afford to lose that much money (by virtue of not having that much money to begin with).
By "huge", you mean "pocket change", right? $100K is easily affordable for many individuals who want to day trade, and is what most banks spend on toilet paper. It's a tiny barrier to entry.
The issue is that the day trading elite, often banks, milk the small investors. It's cents on a dollar, but it's an overhead that's not necessary, and is basically theft. It's like the good old days when people used to shave gold coins. Imagine someone trying to argue that that is a service, because that's the BS the traders want you to believe. ("We're making the coins smooth and shiny for you!")
That's when things go well, but when there's a panic, the day traders magnify it until the market plummets like it's in free fall. Secondly, their rampant speculation artificially inflates the market, which causes bubbles and crashes.
Yay, another lesson in efficient markets. Slowing down the "rate of trade" does not change the valuation. In this contrived example Ford after 24 hours is worth 0 and so everybody gets to sell at 0. Prices don't converge in any way, they just jump around. $50 a share, then $0 a share. This is not how the real world works. Nobody wants this, not Ford, and certainly not investors. Why should the valuation of the company be $0 after a declared bankruptcy? Does the company have no cash flow? No Assets? Can it restructure? Can I pump cash into Ford as its falling because I value it differently than you do? Who should decide what the company is worth after 24 hours, you? The bank? The guy down the street? I have a novel idea. lets let the MARKET DECIDE.
How exactly do you think valuation works? What are the factors involved? How should we determine when Ford is worth $0. If you feel slighted you should have sold before it hit 0, which you most likely would have had plenty of time to do because of the liquidity provided by market makerts and fast intraday traders, but instead since we had to wait that 24 hours everybody got the new valuation of $0. Everybody gets screwed equally!
Ok, if 24 hours is too long, lets set it to 12 hours. Too long? Ok... 1 hour. Still too long? How about once every 15 minutes?
No? How about once a femtosecond? Is that a fine enough temporal division for you?
It sounds farcical, but it already has become an insane joke played with trillions of dollars. Day traders are renting space across the street from stock exchanges to reduce the delay introduced by the speed of light, because those extra microseconds matter.
In the real world, if trades occurred on 24 hour ticks, Ford's stock price would NOT fall to $0. It would be a lot like an auction, people would put in the range of prices at which they are willing to sell or buy, and the exchange would handle the deals. Even if 100% of existing investors decide to sell, many buyers would want to buy, at say, $5, because of the inherent value of the company's physical assets. Selling at $0 makes no sense, that's the equivalent of tearing up money! Even if for some reason Ford's total net value became negative (debts), then the $0 valuation is exactly what the share is worth. The investor made a bad decision, and was burned. Better luck next time! Why should some traders walk away with more than what the value of their share? That's just moving money from one pocket into another, and the source of that money is often small investors, while the destination is an elite group of day traders. Why do they deserve that money? What have they done to earn it?
Note: In cases where there isn't enough liquidity between individual investors, the exchange itself should step in and provide liquidity, at an estimated price (minus a commission to the exchange to cover their risk). This isn't even unusual, certain kinds of exchanges do this now at some level.
Um, the whole event that we are discussing happened because liquidity (buyers at a market price) disappeared for a few seconds. That sounds like liquidity might be pretty important.
To see this, consider for a second how you'd feel about your bank account, if you didn't know from day to day how much your $5000 was really worth. That is what liquidity is, and I'll bet your daily behavior suggests you value it highly.
It's not as liquid as you think!
My bank account only allows a maximum of AUD 20K electronic transfers per day, for anything else I'd have to got into a branch, which would take me over an hour, and even then, transfers between banks are batch processed once a day, during the night. Some transfers take several days to process.
Do you see the pattern emerging here?
Why is it that everybody is perfectly happy doing their banking, the most liquid of the ordinary assets most citizens have, on a daily basis, but for some reason corporations require their investment liquidity to be on a millisecond timescale?
No business model needs that, except for the day traders that want to generate profits at the expense of ordinary investors that aren't physically housed across the street from the Exchange data centre!
there is no way for traders to gain information on the underlying asset of a stock second-to-second. There is no public source of information that fast! No corporation gets updates internally that quickly
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and had to go through three courses on feedback systems and servomechanisms. What you are proposing may seem sensible, but that's not how nature works.
Feedback control systems can become unstable, but inserting delays into the feedback loop is about the *worst* thing you can do to destabilize them. If you want to stabilize a feedback system you should insert a "low pass" filter in the loop, not a delay.
A delay means that a lot of change will accumulate and suddenly be released. Putting a one day delay would mean that all the buy or sell orders would be stored hidden somewhere and then, all of a sudden, the market would become aware of that trend.
A low pass filter is, more or less, like a moving average. With a low pass filter, the market would get information on the average of the last X hours or days of transactions. That way everybody would be allowed to update instantly, to a microsecond precision if they wanted to, their estimates of the market trends, but those would not be instantaneous trends, they would be longer range.
Instead of limiting how fast market transactions can be done, it would be much better to limit the speed of the information on the system. Do not divulge *every* price for every transaction, but only the average of some period. This average can be updated every nanosecond if people want so, it will make no difference.
Thanks for that, that's brilliant, I was actually thinking about the same issue, but I didn't know what the solution was!
It's allowed because the current theory is that anybody who wants to do it, can. I think the best argument against that is it takes real estate close to the market computers in order to have a fast enough ping time to trade by the millisecond.
My fix for that situation would be to dumb down the market clocks to only timestamp to the second, and anything received in the same second gets the same priority, with randomness as the tiebreaker when needed. That should suck the life out of these vultures.
A second? How about once a day!
Explain to me just what a multi-billion company could do in under a second that would fundamentally change the value of their stock?
Think about it this way: there is no way for traders to gain information on the underlying asset of a stock second-to-second. There is no public source of information that fast! No corporation gets updates internally that quickly. Most of them only roll up their accounts for reporting daily, and some only get an internal update of their financial status monthly or even slower. Even if some huge announcement was made that suddenly changes the value of a corporation, what difference does it make if people get to sell their stock a second or a day later?
The whole concept of the stock market is to create a central point for people to invest in a corporation. How is buying and selling a stock in under a second anything at all like "investing"? It's pure gambling, milking the real investors of cents on every dollar, putting it into the pockets of traders that provide zero value to society. They produce nothing except market crashes.
Trades faster than a day should be simply outlawed, and it should not be possible to own a stock for a period of less than one day either. Real investors should investigate a company's fundamental value and invest for years, not sit there all day and shuffle money around like it's a game in a casino.
Consider this: if millisecond trades are possible, and make sense, then why not microsecond trades? Nanoseconds? Why should we stop there? Lets puts the exchange and the trader's computers on the same piece of silicon, and have them buy and sell stocks at gigahertz!
The ability to control external noise in real-world operating environments, at least to the degree necessary to mitigate this issue, would seem to represent a rather nasty challenge. This may be a severely constraining factor on the potential for practical usefulness of quantum cryptography, at least for the time being.
Can someone explain to me why anybody is even bothering with this technology?
Are existing cryptographic algorithms so untrustworthy that it's better to use an untested technology that a) makes the already very expensive line equipment significantly more expensive, b) may prevent the use of certain kinds of repeaters or active splices, c) is so insanely complex that nobody except a select few physicists understand the details.
Also, unlike current cryptographic techniques, quantum cryptography is strictly one hop instead of end-to-end, which is a big issue in many cases, like when one ISP tunnels their data over another ISP's link.
More importantly, it doesn't actually encrypt any of the data in the traditional sense. The data goes across the wire unencrypted, the quantum system just detects a man-in-the-middle attack. If someone comes up with a technique for reading the data without interference (like the article says), then you're screwed. With a traditional crypto solution, it might be sufficient to just increase the key size parameter in a config file somewhere!
I don't see how this can compete with standard crypto. If someone is that paranoid, it should be more than enough to just nest a couple of different algorithms together, and use the maximum keysizes for all of them. There's just no way anybody is breaking that at 2Tbps line rates any time soon, no matter what conspiracy theories you subscribe to about the NSA's capabilities!
Think about it this way: with traditional crypto, it's at least possible, in principle, for an end-user to use an open source software stack using an open, publicly tested algorithm, and completely verify the implementation. With quantum crypto, you get a black box with some physics in it that no IT administrator will understand and be able to test. It'll send data unencrypted across a wire that you now hope is hack proof. For all anybody knows, it'll be sending data as-is with no protection, and nobody will be able to even tell. If you were the NSA and wanted access to fibre optic links, wouldn't this be the best thing ever?
The rate of evaporation from the oceans is about 400,000 cubic kilometers per year.
To increase that by just one percent would mean pumping 4,000 km^3 of water.
Just raising that much water to 3,000 feet would take approximately, oh let's see, carry the 0x100, about 1,651,445,966.51 horsepower. One Point Six BILLION horsepower.
Haha, I know you're joking, but I just worked this out: it would take just under 2 10^19 watts of continuous power, or about 20 billion gigawatts. For reference, a really big nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt!
the article does not say that it affects SSDs, but that it affects the SSD value proposition (aka, if you can spend little $$$ on carbon rack enclosures and get a significant seek performance increase, spending the large amount of $$$ to go full-ssd might not be as cost effective).
My over one year old SSD drive can do ~6,000 under a database workload, the next-gen consumer SSD drives are reaching 60,000 random IOPS, and there are enterprise drives that can do over 150,000 IOPS with streaming speeds over a gigabyte per second.
This is a little like saying that Hayes has released a new 56K modem that resists line noise 50% better than existing modems, which affects the value proposition of 1Gbps fibre.
There's also no need to go "Full SSD". The newer virtualizing SAN arrays can migrate individual blocks of data between tiers of storage to place everything on the appropriate storage depending on the need for performance.
Yeah, but if your goal is to race in next year's Formula 1 race, then building a "VW T2 Microbus" doesn't actually get you very far along towards that goal now, does it?
People forget that there's an enormous difference between "getting something up high" and getting into orbit. Making progress with technology that fundamentally just won't cut it doesn't actually get you anywhere. I just don't see how something so small that it can be dropped from a plane will ever have the delta-v to reach orbit with people on board. If Virgin Galactic plans on that, they'll have to scrap everything they've done up until now and start again from scratch with something more like a real rocket.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
The container ship would have to have a really good excuse for being anywhere near the group in the first place, and would then have to evade battleships on the way to the centre of the fleet where the carrier is, under the fire the whole way, and then the missile it launches will have to make it past the batteries of anti-missile systems like the Phalanx.
Err... no, this won't be taking down aircraft carriers any time soon.
What it could do however is allow the equivalent of guerrilla warfare on the high seas. Container ships could target cruise liners, merchant vessels, etc... and if nobody was around to see the attack, they might even make it away and claim innocence later. Even the survivors wouldn't see much, because it's fairly simple to attack "over the horizon".
Whenever I suggested that the new SP have IPv6 support, I was told "none of our customers is asking for this feature."
Haha... I've been running around as a consultant doing designs for various things at a wide range of corporations and government entities here in Australia and New Zealand, and I always ask the question: Is IPv6 something you do now, or plan on doing in the future?
The answer is always no.
Nobody has configured their routers, equipment, servers, or firewalls, or anything else for that matter. Most customers actually disable the IPv6 feature when it's on by default because it's perceived as a "security risk" or just a source of trouble.
The reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it isn't a big problem.
It's not like the Y2K bug, where stuff could blow up if it wasn't fixed before the clock struck midnight.
You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.
In other words, there is nothing to freak out about at all.
Seriously people, get a grip! We've known the solution to the problem since the early 90's, at least, and implementing it is trivial.
How the fuck is this '+5 informative'?
The state of the IPv6 migration is an unmitigated failure.
Saying "just use IPv6" is about as helpful as saying "just use IPX".
Sure, you'll have and address... that nobody else can connect to.
One of the main serious uses of computing, especially in the cold war, was solving partial differential equations. Whether these be for orbital calculations, stability analysis, EM simulation, etc..., solving partial differential equations is a critical part of any advanced engineering program.
The American approach really started in the 50s with the advent of programmable computers, and is very stereotypical: just find a decent approximation. Modern western engineering is all about using pretty advanced computers to find arbitrary numerical approximations to tricky PDEs. It's reached its culmination in modern engineering design, where most advanced products are designed and simulated in computers, and prototyping only occurs at the very end of the process.
The Soviets had computers.... some home built, some Western, but generally speaking they weren't very good. The Soviet approach was also very stereotypical: get an army of mathematicians and engineers to find exact analytic solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. You'd have armies of engineers and technicians designing things that in the west we'd give to a couple of engineers with some computer time.
The end result is that some Soviet engineering is stunningly brilliant. And a lot is absolute crap. One of the reasons the west won the cold war is that we were just much better at solving partial differential equations. This report is unsurprising... the Soviet approach just seems so stupid to any Western engineer unfamiliar with it, that you'd have to assume they had some magic trick up their sleeve. But nope, just a lot of brainpower misdirected into a lot of horribly inefficient pursuits.
I heard something similar from my older relatives who grew up in Communist countries.
Their take was that the Soviet computers were about 10x slower or even worse. For them, it was worthwhile writing software as "hand tuned assembler" to optimise it to the point that it would run 10x faster. However, this takes a lot more programmer time for the same amount of functionality.
"...but, in the end, the computer still is that magical logical machine. That's my view -- is it yours?"
No. At some point any sufficiently complex piece of deterministic logic becomes indistinguishable from randomness, and PCs are past that point for me. The beauty of the underlying logical machine is totally obscured by the apparent randomness of errors that go away after rebooting (or sometimes just issuing the same command again).
Some days my map prints perfectly, some days it comes out with extraneous pink lines all over Florida, some days it crashes the plotter so badly it needs a hard reset. Logically, I know the problem isn't "luck" or satanic printer gremlins, and that it must be some subtle, deterministic interaction between the source data, the GIS software, Windows, HP's print driver, and their plotter firmware, but damned if I have the time or the skill or the source code to track it down. It's easier to just mumble obscenities about wasting ink and paper and try again (faster, and more likely to result in a correct print, too).
If the problem is random, you probably have bad memory, either in your PC or in your printer. With consumer grade equipment, it's more common than people think.
Download the bootable ISO image from http://www.memtest.org/ and run it. If it finds any errors at all, replace your memory until it doesn't. Unfortunately, the printer is harder to check.
If it really is a software bug, you should try different printer drivers. Most HP models can use either a PCL or a PostScript driver, and they're quite different internally, but print essentially identically, so can be used interchangeably. If there's some random bug in one, it's unlikely to also be in the other. Similarly, many models have both PCL5 and PCL6, try both.
Benchmarks have shown that in real-world scenarios, reading as little as 1MB in a strip puts HDDs very close to SSDs. Certainly close enough that 4+ of them in RAID would be faster and cost less. I'm guessing the sweet spot is around 4MB, since that's what Google uses.
Nobody cares if videos start streaming in 250ms or 1000ms, so it's fairly safe to say video streaming will be fine if handled by HDDs and RAM cache.
But you're right that more IOPS never hurts. We have L3 between L2 and RAM - SSD between HDD and RAM does makes sense, especially for comment pages and stuff. A few SSDs could manage the thousands of requests to comment pages with ease, but HDDs would be stopped dead in their tracks by all the seeking.
Congratulations, you've found a niche application in which the hard drive performance limitations don't matter. Tape drives are still popular for the same reason: if all you care about is streaming speeds and capacity per dollar, then SSDs clearly don't make sense.
However, for 99% of desktop users, an SSD makes perfect sense. Operating system and application IO is extremely random and made up of very small reads and writes, so latency matters.
My laptop used to take 15 minutes to go from "cold start" to "logged in, all applications started and usable". I timed it. I took the exact same installation across to an SSD using a ghost image, and that startup time is now 35 seconds, half of which is the BIOS POST sequence. I'm not talking about "login prompt" visible, which is bullshit, but Outlook, Visual Studio, and maybe a couple of other applications loaded and responsive, which takes a long, LONG time on a hard drive.
Installing an SSD cost me 1/3rd of what a new laptop would have cost, and made my computer infinitely more usable. I can now properly multitask without being driven crazy by the endless waiting for the crunching sounds to stop. I once noticed that my CPU fan was going a bit loud all day while I was developing with Visual Studio, and it was only late in the afternoon that I realised that I had accidentally left a long-running SQL query running in the background. It was doing 50MB/sec of IO, and I didn't even notice, other than the sound of the fan. That's just not possible with a hard drive.
Please stop repeating some gibberish you heard years ago about 1st gen drives. Moving from hard drives to SSDs is a bigger difference than what it was like moving from floppies in the 8086 days to hard drives. It's like VHS to DVD! Nobody who's used a decent SSD in their day-to-day computer talks about going back. I do hear them whining about how broken their "other" computers feel afterwards, however.
Sorry, not on the world below the Equator line. Here one SSD like you cited is "luxury", and with a price tag very, very very big for a PC storage (intel X25-M 160GB costs US$1000 here). The only good thing on SSDs acessible here is the access time, the rest is garbage at best.
And here, a PC needs to last much more than two years, someones are in use (and working well) for more than 10 years. No actual SSD can do this.
I'd debate that. You can get small (64GB) SSDs, you can buy them directly from the US and have them shipped, so the cost shouldn't be much higher anywhere in the world. You can buy the latest & greatest 3rd gen SSDs online, it's not like they're magically restricted to "north of the equator".
Secondly, it's more cost effective to buy a new PC with a slightly lower overall spec and spend the remaining money on an SSD, because it makes such a huge difference that even a relatively sluggish CPU will appear blazing fast.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
Great for forums and other database crap.
But not for file servers or video streaming.
Two words: RAM Cache.
Two words: price/performance.
RAM cache is much more expensive than an SSD per gigabyte. Secondly, cache does't help for "cold start" scenarios, random reads across data that's even slightly bigger than the available memory, and does nothing for write latency.
My point was that SSD performance vastly outstrips mechanical hard drives. I didn't say they were most cost effective storage per gigabyte if performance doesn't matter.
Are games themselves generally composed of art? Yes.
Does applying rules of games to the art in games negate the artistry? No.
Is Ebert being a curmudgeon again? Yeah.
The average first-rate game contain a good book worth of creative written material, galleries of fascinating and provocative artistic images, and a couple albums worth of creative sound. These things are art - they give the game rules context that creates a story the player enacts... they are a play with a branching script, performed with audience participation.
If that's not art, your definition is flawed.
Ryan Fenton
On top of that, some games seem to almost transcend the sum of their parts, as the player "explores" and "discovers" deeper meaning or nuances of the story or the game world. That is new to interactive media, and something that Roger Ebert has probably never experienced.
An example that comes to mind is Braid, which is not only art, but a masterpiece.
I agree. It is the main reason I avoid SSDs, besides the price: They are bad in important activities of an OS, such as keeping logs updated and hundreds of small writing that they are always doing (eg, update the date of last access of a file). And we can not ignore the problem of wear, which unlike a hard drive that can be written many many times, an SSD has a limit of write operations, and this is a small limit for an OS that writes things all the time during PC operation.
And of course, also have the problem of garbage SSDs sold in huge quantities (in my country is what most have), which even though they cost several times more than an HD equivalent, have worse performance than a HD.
Your info is out of date. The latest SSDs outperfom every hard drive ever manufactured in every performance metric, often by orders of magnitude, and last long enough that you'll have replaced your computer before they wear out.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
The hard disk is the last mechanical component commonly used for computation. It is way overdue to be replaced by solid state.
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To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.
The surest path to atheism is open discussion of religion.
That's a cute platitude, but since you're apparently a rational, scientific-minded person, I'd like to see your evidence of this. It doesn't comport with my personal experience.
The method used by the Communists to reduce the power and influence of religions was to change the school curriculum to teach all religions equally, side-by-side, instead of just Christianity.
It's brutally effective.
Once the students can't tell the difference between one creation myth and another, and everything starts to blend into an ever more ridiculous set of children's stories, very few are left that can still take their "own" religion seriously any more.
I'm a consultant that gets to see into the IT world of over a hundred organisations, and I see one major failing that companies make that cost them later:
They fail to keep up with the times.
Nowhere is this more evident than the leviathan government organisations still running Novell and Lotus Notes, on barely patched versions of Windows, with the browser restricted to IE6. Every time I see that combination, the word "expensive" comes to mind.
Solutions that used to be the best are now simply redundant, outdated, incompatible, and expensive to maintain. Inevitably, the whole thing becomes so flaky that it will crash if you apply even security hotfixes, let alone major OS upgrades. This then makes everyone nervous about making any changes at all, which just exacerbates the problem, because by moving more slowly, the organisation falls even further behind the latest generation.
If you're a developer, than the analogy would be a software development organisation that doesn't keep up with the bug fixes until the code becomes so unstable that making any change to it is a gamble. This then means that even applying bug fixes is likely to just break more things, and then the whole thing snowballs until it's best to cleanse the source server with purifying fire. Or better yet, it's like a development company that never bothers to switch to newer versions of the Java SDK, eventually falling so far behind that it's too hard to make the huge leap required to catch up, instead of the many small steps that could have been taken.
The source of the mistake is short-sighted managers always choosing the easy thing instead of the correct thing. Taking small upgrade steps to keep up is critical, because large steps are very hard. A system that doesn't change for years is a temptation for lazy developers and administrators to bake in the peculiarities of the environment, instead of being forced to develop generic and supportable solutions that won't break after an upgrade of a related component.
The "Spec", as you call it, was developed before SQL Server was even created. The original Great Plains software ran on a variety of databases and back then there wasn't any encryption functions that you could call.
Obviously it was completely impossible for the GP developers to simply use any one of the dozens of free, public domain, or open source C implementation of 3DES or AES.
The very fabric of the universe itself must have shifted to prevent it, because there cannot possibly be any other excuse.
I hope so, since 3DES 128 or AES 256 is really not THAT strong.
Good attempt at a troll, but AES 256 is basically the maximum keysize, and is rated by the NSA as sufficient for "TOP SECRET" materials.
In other words, it's more than enough for some administrator password that's probably written down on a postit note conveniently stuck to the side of the monitor.
Now, if you have a margin account, you can freely buy and sell all day... as long as you have a HUGE amount of equity up front to invest (I think the minimum allowed is $50k or $100k). The SEC's rationale is that day traders are a net benefit to the market by providing liquidity, but requiring a huge amount of cash up front to be allowed to do it skims off 99% of the people who really can't afford to lose that much money (by virtue of not having that much money to begin with).
By "huge", you mean "pocket change", right? $100K is easily affordable for many individuals who want to day trade, and is what most banks spend on toilet paper. It's a tiny barrier to entry.
The issue is that the day trading elite, often banks, milk the small investors. It's cents on a dollar, but it's an overhead that's not necessary, and is basically theft. It's like the good old days when people used to shave gold coins. Imagine someone trying to argue that that is a service, because that's the BS the traders want you to believe. ("We're making the coins smooth and shiny for you!")
That's when things go well, but when there's a panic, the day traders magnify it until the market plummets like it's in free fall. Secondly, their rampant speculation artificially inflates the market, which causes bubbles and crashes.
Valuable service my ass.
Yay, another lesson in efficient markets. Slowing down the "rate of trade" does not change the valuation. In this contrived example Ford after 24 hours is worth 0 and so everybody gets to sell at 0. Prices don't converge in any way, they just jump around. $50 a share, then $0 a share. This is not how the real world works. Nobody wants this, not Ford, and certainly not investors. Why should the valuation of the company be $0 after a declared bankruptcy? Does the company have no cash flow? No Assets? Can it restructure? Can I pump cash into Ford as its falling because I value it differently than you do? Who should decide what the company is worth after 24 hours, you? The bank? The guy down the street? I have a novel idea. lets let the MARKET DECIDE.
How exactly do you think valuation works? What are the factors involved? How should we determine when Ford is worth $0. If you feel slighted you should have sold before it hit 0, which you most likely would have had plenty of time to do because of the liquidity provided by market makerts and fast intraday traders, but instead since we had to wait that 24 hours everybody got the new valuation of $0. Everybody gets screwed equally!
Ok, if 24 hours is too long, lets set it to 12 hours. Too long? Ok... 1 hour. Still too long? How about once every 15 minutes?
No? How about once a femtosecond? Is that a fine enough temporal division for you?
It sounds farcical, but it already has become an insane joke played with trillions of dollars. Day traders are renting space across the street from stock exchanges to reduce the delay introduced by the speed of light, because those extra microseconds matter.
In the real world, if trades occurred on 24 hour ticks, Ford's stock price would NOT fall to $0. It would be a lot like an auction, people would put in the range of prices at which they are willing to sell or buy, and the exchange would handle the deals. Even if 100% of existing investors decide to sell, many buyers would want to buy, at say, $5, because of the inherent value of the company's physical assets. Selling at $0 makes no sense, that's the equivalent of tearing up money! Even if for some reason Ford's total net value became negative (debts), then the $0 valuation is exactly what the share is worth. The investor made a bad decision, and was burned. Better luck next time! Why should some traders walk away with more than what the value of their share? That's just moving money from one pocket into another, and the source of that money is often small investors, while the destination is an elite group of day traders. Why do they deserve that money? What have they done to earn it?
Note: In cases where there isn't enough liquidity between individual investors, the exchange itself should step in and provide liquidity, at an estimated price (minus a commission to the exchange to cover their risk). This isn't even unusual, certain kinds of exchanges do this now at some level.
Um, the whole event that we are discussing happened because liquidity (buyers at a market price) disappeared for a few seconds. That sounds like liquidity might be pretty important.
To see this, consider for a second how you'd feel about your bank account, if you didn't know from day to day how much your $5000 was really worth. That is what liquidity is, and I'll bet your daily behavior suggests you value it highly.
It's not as liquid as you think!
My bank account only allows a maximum of AUD 20K electronic transfers per day, for anything else I'd have to got into a branch,
which would take me over an hour, and even then, transfers between banks are batch processed once a day, during the night. Some transfers take several days to process.
Do you see the pattern emerging here?
Why is it that everybody is perfectly happy doing their banking, the most liquid of the ordinary assets most citizens have, on a daily basis, but for some reason corporations require their investment liquidity to be on a millisecond timescale?
No business model needs that, except for the day traders that want to generate profits at the expense of ordinary investors that aren't physically housed across the street from the Exchange data centre!
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and had to go through three courses on feedback systems and servomechanisms. What you are proposing may seem sensible, but that's not how nature works.
Feedback control systems can become unstable, but inserting delays into the feedback loop is about the *worst* thing you can do to destabilize them. If you want to stabilize a feedback system you should insert a "low pass" filter in the loop, not a delay.
A delay means that a lot of change will accumulate and suddenly be released. Putting a one day delay would mean that all the buy or sell orders would be stored hidden somewhere and then, all of a sudden, the market would become aware of that trend.
A low pass filter is, more or less, like a moving average. With a low pass filter, the market would get information on the average of the last X hours or days of transactions. That way everybody would be allowed to update instantly, to a microsecond precision if they wanted to, their estimates of the market trends, but those would not be instantaneous trends, they would be longer range.
Instead of limiting how fast market transactions can be done, it would be much better to limit the speed of the information on the system. Do not divulge *every* price for every transaction, but only the average of some period. This average can be updated every nanosecond if people want so, it will make no difference.
Thanks for that, that's brilliant, I was actually thinking about the same issue, but I didn't know what the solution was!
It's allowed because the current theory is that anybody who wants to do it, can. I think the best argument against that is it takes real estate close to the market computers in order to have a fast enough ping time to trade by the millisecond.
My fix for that situation would be to dumb down the market clocks to only timestamp to the second, and anything received in the same second gets the same priority, with randomness as the tiebreaker when needed. That should suck the life out of these vultures.
A second? How about once a day!
Explain to me just what a multi-billion company could do in under a second that would fundamentally change the value of their stock?
Think about it this way: there is no way for traders to gain information on the underlying asset of a stock second-to-second. There is no public source of information that fast! No corporation gets updates internally that quickly. Most of them only roll up their accounts for reporting daily, and some only get an internal update of their financial status monthly or even slower. Even if some huge announcement was made that suddenly changes the value of a corporation, what difference does it make if people get to sell their stock a second or a day later?
The whole concept of the stock market is to create a central point for people to invest in a corporation. How is buying and selling a stock in under a second anything at all like "investing"? It's pure gambling, milking the real investors of cents on every dollar, putting it into the pockets of traders that provide zero value to society. They produce nothing except market crashes.
Trades faster than a day should be simply outlawed, and it should not be possible to own a stock for a period of less than one day either. Real investors should investigate a company's fundamental value and invest for years, not sit there all day and shuffle money around like it's a game in a casino.
Consider this: if millisecond trades are possible, and make sense, then why not microsecond trades? Nanoseconds? Why should we stop there? Lets puts the exchange and the trader's computers on the same piece of silicon, and have them buy and sell stocks at gigahertz!
The ability to control external noise in real-world operating environments, at least to the degree necessary to mitigate this issue, would seem to represent a rather nasty challenge. This may be a severely constraining factor on the potential for practical usefulness of quantum cryptography, at least for the time being.
Can someone explain to me why anybody is even bothering with this technology?
Are existing cryptographic algorithms so untrustworthy that it's better to use an untested technology that a) makes the already very expensive line equipment significantly more expensive, b) may prevent the use of certain kinds of repeaters or active splices, c) is so insanely complex that nobody except a select few physicists understand the details.
Also, unlike current cryptographic techniques, quantum cryptography is strictly one hop instead of end-to-end, which is a big issue in many cases, like when one ISP tunnels their data over another ISP's link.
More importantly, it doesn't actually encrypt any of the data in the traditional sense. The data goes across the wire unencrypted, the quantum system just detects a man-in-the-middle attack. If someone comes up with a technique for reading the data without interference (like the article says), then you're screwed. With a traditional crypto solution, it might be sufficient to just increase the key size parameter in a config file somewhere!
I don't see how this can compete with standard crypto. If someone is that paranoid, it should be more than enough to just nest a couple of different algorithms together, and use the maximum keysizes for all of them. There's just no way anybody is breaking that at 2Tbps line rates any time soon, no matter what conspiracy theories you subscribe to about the NSA's capabilities!
Think about it this way: with traditional crypto, it's at least possible, in principle, for an end-user to use an open source software stack using an open, publicly tested algorithm, and completely verify the implementation. With quantum crypto, you get a black box with some physics in it that no IT administrator will understand and be able to test. It'll send data unencrypted across a wire that you now hope is hack proof. For all anybody knows, it'll be sending data as-is with no protection, and nobody will be able to even tell. If you were the NSA and wanted access to fibre optic links, wouldn't this be the best thing ever?
Is this a joke?
The rate of evaporation from the oceans is about 400,000 cubic kilometers per year.
To increase that by just one percent would mean pumping 4,000 km^3 of water.
Just raising that much water to 3,000 feet would take approximately, oh let's see, carry the 0x100,
about 1,651,445,966.51 horsepower. One Point Six BILLION horsepower.
Haha, I know you're joking, but I just worked this out: it would take just under 2 10^19 watts of continuous power, or about 20 billion gigawatts. For reference, a really big nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt!
Assuming my maths is correct!
Stop hurting the English language! What has it ever done to you?
the article does not say that it affects SSDs, but that it affects the SSD value proposition (aka, if you can spend little $$$ on carbon rack enclosures and get a significant seek performance increase, spending the large amount of $$$ to go full-ssd might not be as cost effective).
My over one year old SSD drive can do ~6,000 under a database workload, the next-gen consumer SSD drives are reaching 60,000 random IOPS, and there are enterprise drives that can do over 150,000 IOPS with streaming speeds over a gigabyte per second.
This is a little like saying that Hayes has released a new 56K modem that resists line noise 50% better than existing modems, which affects the value proposition of 1Gbps fibre.
There's also no need to go "Full SSD". The newer virtualizing SAN arrays can migrate individual blocks of data between tiers of storage to place everything on the appropriate storage depending on the need for performance.
You have to start somewhere.
Yeah, but if your goal is to race in next year's Formula 1 race, then building a "VW T2 Microbus" doesn't actually get you very far along towards that goal now, does it?
People forget that there's an enormous difference between "getting something up high" and getting into orbit. Making progress with technology that fundamentally just won't cut it doesn't actually get you anywhere. I just don't see how something so small that it can be dropped from a plane will ever have the delta-v to reach orbit with people on board. If Virgin Galactic plans on that, they'll have to scrap everything they've done up until now and start again from scratch with something more like a real rocket.
I hardly type anything in to my HTC Incredible. Google's voice recognition, which is enabled on every textbox works just about perfectly.
Seriously, get an Android phone, try out the speech recognition text entry, and then tell me speech recognition is dead.
I've tried Google voice recognition, but I found that it just detected gibberish unless I spoke with a fake American accent.
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Precisely.
First of all, carriers are escored by... carrier battle groups!
The container ship would have to have a really good excuse for being anywhere near the group in the first place, and would then have to evade battleships on the way to the centre of the fleet where the carrier is, under the fire the whole way, and then the missile it launches will have to make it past the batteries of anti-missile systems like the Phalanx.
Err... no, this won't be taking down aircraft carriers any time soon.
What it could do however is allow the equivalent of guerrilla warfare on the high seas. Container ships could target cruise liners, merchant vessels, etc... and if nobody was around to see the attack, they might even make it away and claim innocence later. Even the survivors wouldn't see much, because it's fairly simple to attack "over the horizon".
Whenever I suggested that the new SP have IPv6 support, I was told "none of our customers is asking for this feature."
Haha... I've been running around as a consultant doing designs for various things at a wide range of corporations and government entities here in Australia and New Zealand, and I always ask the question: Is IPv6 something you do now, or plan on doing in the future?
The answer is always no.
Nobody has configured their routers, equipment, servers, or firewalls, or anything else for that matter. Most customers actually disable the IPv6 feature when it's on by default because it's perceived as a "security risk" or just a source of trouble.
The reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it isn't a big problem.
It's not like the Y2K bug, where stuff could blow up if it wasn't fixed before the clock struck midnight.
You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.
In other words, there is nothing to freak out about at all.
Seriously people, get a grip! We've known the solution to the problem since the early 90's, at least, and implementing it is trivial.
How the fuck is this '+5 informative'?
The state of the IPv6 migration is an unmitigated failure.
Saying "just use IPv6" is about as helpful as saying "just use IPX".
Sure, you'll have and address... that nobody else can connect to.
One of the main serious uses of computing, especially in the cold war, was solving partial differential equations. Whether these be for orbital calculations, stability analysis, EM simulation, etc..., solving partial differential equations is a critical part of any advanced engineering program.
The American approach really started in the 50s with the advent of programmable computers, and is very stereotypical: just find a decent approximation. Modern western engineering is all about using pretty advanced computers to find arbitrary numerical approximations to tricky PDEs. It's reached its culmination in modern engineering design, where most advanced products are designed and simulated in computers, and prototyping only occurs at the very end of the process.
The Soviets had computers.... some home built, some Western, but generally speaking they weren't very good. The Soviet approach was also very stereotypical: get an army of mathematicians and engineers to find exact analytic solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. You'd have armies of engineers and technicians designing things that in the west we'd give to a couple of engineers with some computer time.
The end result is that some Soviet engineering is stunningly brilliant. And a lot is absolute crap. One of the reasons the west won the cold war is that we were just much better at solving partial differential equations. This report is unsurprising... the Soviet approach just seems so stupid to any Western engineer unfamiliar with it, that you'd have to assume they had some magic trick up their sleeve. But nope, just a lot of brainpower misdirected into a lot of horribly inefficient pursuits.
I heard something similar from my older relatives who grew up in Communist countries.
Their take was that the Soviet computers were about 10x slower or even worse. For them, it was worthwhile writing software as "hand tuned assembler" to optimise it to the point that it would run 10x faster. However, this takes a lot more programmer time for the same amount of functionality.
"...but, in the end, the computer still is that magical logical machine. That's my view -- is it yours?"
No. At some point any sufficiently complex piece of deterministic logic becomes indistinguishable from randomness, and PCs are past that point for me. The beauty of the underlying logical machine is totally obscured by the apparent randomness of errors that go away after rebooting (or sometimes just issuing the same command again).
Some days my map prints perfectly, some days it comes out with extraneous pink lines all over Florida, some days it crashes the plotter so badly it needs a hard reset. Logically, I know the problem isn't "luck" or satanic printer gremlins, and that it must be some subtle, deterministic interaction between the source data, the GIS software, Windows, HP's print driver, and their plotter firmware, but damned if I have the time or the skill or the source code to track it down. It's easier to just mumble obscenities about wasting ink and paper and try again (faster, and more likely to result in a correct print, too).
If the problem is random, you probably have bad memory, either in your PC or in your printer. With consumer grade equipment, it's more common than people think.
Download the bootable ISO image from http://www.memtest.org/ and run it. If it finds any errors at all, replace your memory until it doesn't. Unfortunately, the printer is harder to check.
If it really is a software bug, you should try different printer drivers. Most HP models can use either a PCL or a PostScript driver, and they're quite different internally, but print essentially identically, so can be used interchangeably. If there's some random bug in one, it's unlikely to also be in the other. Similarly, many models have both PCL5 and PCL6, try both.
Benchmarks have shown that in real-world scenarios, reading as little as 1MB in a strip puts HDDs very close to SSDs. Certainly close enough that 4+ of them in RAID would be faster and cost less. I'm guessing the sweet spot is around 4MB, since that's what Google uses.
Nobody cares if videos start streaming in 250ms or 1000ms, so it's fairly safe to say video streaming will be fine if handled by HDDs and RAM cache.
But you're right that more IOPS never hurts. We have L3 between L2 and RAM - SSD between HDD and RAM does makes sense, especially for comment pages and stuff. A few SSDs could manage the thousands of requests to comment pages with ease, but HDDs would be stopped dead in their tracks by all the seeking.
Congratulations, you've found a niche application in which the hard drive performance limitations don't matter. Tape drives are still popular for the same reason: if all you care about is streaming speeds and capacity per dollar, then SSDs clearly don't make sense.
However, for 99% of desktop users, an SSD makes perfect sense. Operating system and application IO is extremely random and made up of very small reads and writes, so latency matters.
My laptop used to take 15 minutes to go from "cold start" to "logged in, all applications started and usable". I timed it. I took the exact same installation across to an SSD using a ghost image, and that startup time is now 35 seconds, half of which is the BIOS POST sequence. I'm not talking about "login prompt" visible, which is bullshit, but Outlook, Visual Studio, and maybe a couple of other applications loaded and responsive, which takes a long, LONG time on a hard drive.
Installing an SSD cost me 1/3rd of what a new laptop would have cost, and made my computer infinitely more usable. I can now properly multitask without being driven crazy by the endless waiting for the crunching sounds to stop. I once noticed that my CPU fan was going a bit loud all day while I was developing with Visual Studio, and it was only late in the afternoon that I realised that I had accidentally left a long-running SQL query running in the background. It was doing 50MB/sec of IO, and I didn't even notice, other than the sound of the fan. That's just not possible with a hard drive.
Please stop repeating some gibberish you heard years ago about 1st gen drives. Moving from hard drives to SSDs is a bigger difference than what it was like moving from floppies in the 8086 days to hard drives. It's like VHS to DVD! Nobody who's used a decent SSD in their day-to-day computer talks about going back. I do hear them whining about how broken their "other" computers feel afterwards, however.
Sorry, not on the world below the Equator line. Here one SSD like you cited is "luxury", and with a price tag very, very very big for a PC storage (intel X25-M 160GB costs US$1000 here). The only good thing on SSDs acessible here is the access time, the rest is garbage at best.
And here, a PC needs to last much more than two years, someones are in use (and working well) for more than 10 years. No actual SSD can do this.
I'd debate that. You can get small (64GB) SSDs, you can buy them directly from the US and have them shipped, so the cost shouldn't be much higher anywhere in the world. You can buy the latest & greatest 3rd gen SSDs online, it's not like they're magically restricted to "north of the equator".
Secondly, it's more cost effective to buy a new PC with a slightly lower overall spec and spend the remaining money on an SSD, because it makes such a huge difference that even a relatively sluggish CPU will appear blazing fast.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
Great for forums and other database crap.
But not for file servers or video streaming.
Two words: RAM Cache.
Two words: price/performance.
RAM cache is much more expensive than an SSD per gigabyte. Secondly, cache does't help for "cold start" scenarios, random reads across data that's even slightly bigger than the available memory, and does nothing for write latency.
My point was that SSD performance vastly outstrips mechanical hard drives. I didn't say they were most cost effective storage per gigabyte if performance doesn't matter.
Are the rules of games art? Perhaps not.
Are games themselves generally composed of art? Yes.
Does applying rules of games to the art in games negate the artistry? No.
Is Ebert being a curmudgeon again? Yeah.
The average first-rate game contain a good book worth of creative written material, galleries of fascinating and provocative artistic images, and a couple albums worth of creative sound. These things are art - they give the game rules context that creates a story the player enacts... they are a play with a branching script, performed with audience participation.
If that's not art, your definition is flawed.
Ryan Fenton
On top of that, some games seem to almost transcend the sum of their parts, as the player "explores" and "discovers" deeper meaning or nuances of the story or the game world. That is new to interactive media, and something that Roger Ebert has probably never experienced.
An example that comes to mind is Braid, which is not only art, but a masterpiece.
I agree. It is the main reason I avoid SSDs, besides the price: They are bad in important activities of an OS, such as keeping logs updated and hundreds of small writing that they are always doing (eg, update the date of last access of a file). And we can not ignore the problem of wear, which unlike a hard drive that can be written many many times, an SSD has a limit of write operations, and this is a small limit for an OS that writes things all the time during PC operation.
And of course, also have the problem of garbage SSDs sold in huge quantities (in my country is what most have), which even though they cost several times more than an HD equivalent, have worse performance than a HD.
Your info is out of date. The latest SSDs outperfom every hard drive ever manufactured in every performance metric, often by orders of magnitude, and last long enough that you'll have replaced your computer before they wear out.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
The hard disk is the last mechanical component commonly used for computation. It is way overdue to be replaced by solid state.