There are no equivalent-spec motherboards for P3 and P4, they use entirely different chipsets.
Equivalent spec doesn't mean identical. I'm sure you could find a P3 and a P4 motherboard that have approximately equal IO performance when you run a disk benchmark over them to the same disk. This would be good enough.
Probably not in the mpegs; the ASFs are a more likely carrier, as ASF supports scripting and is subject to the same script-related vulnerabilities as internet explorer.
If you switch away from Windows Media Player, you will find a number of players that don't execute the scripts in ASF files. There are also utilities that will recode your ASF files to AVI, which cannot have scripts in them.
With all due respect: This statement is bollocks. Windows has never graduated from the assumption that there's only one user on the computer and she is God.
Oh, come on. The Windows NT family has never been a single user system. It was designed from ground up with user separation as a core feature. Win95 et al are now just about dead, so it must be NT we're talking about.
The 'Run as...' feature is considered a Great New Thing, for crying out loud. That feature is only 20 years old in other operating systems.
Well, yeah, Windows only really caught up with the rest of the crowd four years ago. This only reflects negatively on previous versions, but doesn't say anything at all about current ones.
And just FYI, anybody who knows anything about security would not ever run normally as root - not at home, not anywhere. The admin/root account is for changing the state of the machine, and nothing else. There's no evidence more damning than this that Microsoft just doesn't get security.
No, I think Microsoft understands security just perfectly. They know that there is a tradeoff between ease of use and "perfect" security, and know that the average home user would _rather_ have a system that doesn't require them to switch their user accounts to perform an administrative action (which many home users do frequently, installing and trying out new software seems to be a hobby of the casual computer hobbyist). Obviously this isn't ideal, but that's what the market wants. Microsoft is in the business of selling operating systems, not dictating to its users how they should use their computers. If XP Home hadn't put users in the administrators group by default, it would not have taken off. Everyone would have said "I like XP, but things don't work right. I prefer ME."
Please, offer whatever opinion you like about OSes, but try to base them on something bearing a passing resemblance to fact.
Please don't ram your biased conclusions down my throat in such an insulting fashion. There is more to designing an operating system than just security.
The above isn't, in actual fact, funny. I moderated up a similar comment approximately 6 months ago and have not had mod points since then, despite my karma being "excellent" throughout the period.
I don't know whether those who moderated the warning as funny will see the not-so-funny side of it later, or not.
Calling printf without a prototype I'm not so sure about
An unprototyped function is assumed to have been declared 'int fn(...)', so I think using printf like this is OK. It doesn't quite match, but my understanding is that the string format parameter can be subsumed into the "..." without any incompatibilities. This is, in fact, the reason why this is the default for such functions -- it works in most cases, thus eliminating the need for prototyping most of the time.
I think that the dangers outweigh the advantages of using P2P for that. Some guy has been advertising this site http://www.foundonp2p.com/[foundonp2p.com] that shows private data that can be found on p2p networks.
We have an application that automatically encrypts the files we might want to transport using 3DES, and PGP e-mails the SHA1, randomised filename and key to the potential recipients before putting the file into a gnutella public directory. This seems secure to me.
I agree, if you don't know what you're doing with it, a P2P network can be dangerous.
For moving stuff back and forth from home, I'd think that you'd be better off having IT set up a secure FTP site than P2P.
That'd be useful, but the cost of upgrading our internet access to a static IP address is more than we can justify. We'd also have to upgrade our firewall to support it. P2P seemed the easiest solution to us. We tried rewritable CDs, but they quickly became a source of annoyance. Not to mention people not realising what they needed before they needed it.
Why windows users insists using admininstrator accounts, when they could use a limited account that prevents access to the system and program dirs?
It's standard practice on a Windows network not to allow users administrator access. The only system that MS has ever released that encourages users to use administrator is XP Home, which is designed for home use, where that is probably more appropriate.
I find it highly implausible that the company described in the article here allowed their users to access administrator accounts. But then, you don't need administrator access for a trojan to launch an attack over the network and break in to other computers on it. Not in Windows, nor Linux, nor any other OS I've used.
No reference at microsoft site about using a machine in limited mode to stop viruses/trojans.
Microsoft recommends adopting a policy that provides the fewest privileges possible to help minimize the impact of malware that relies on exploiting user privileges when it executes.
Note that the story was talking about removing infections from servers, not user desktops. Presumably they did just reimage the desktops, but the servers had to be handled with a little more subtlety (probably to minimise downtime).
I don't agree. Piracy has no place on corporate networks. Porn has no place on corporate networks. But, despite making up a very high percentage of the traffic on P2P networks, these two are not the only uses of such networks.
As a business user who frequently uses P2P networks to transfer large files between my office and home machines, I can assure you that there are legitimate uses, and that in many cases these are more convenient than the alternatives.
You need to learn a bit more about why caching works before making statements like that.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that main memory is 10 times slower than the slower cache, and that half the cache size means twice as many cache misses (the real figures are actually worse than this, but I don't know what they are exactly).
So, we have:
Main memory access time: 20 units Small cache access time: 1 unit Large cache access time: 2 units
Over the course of 100 memory access, lets say 10 of these are misses with the large cache, and based on our assumptions above 20 are misses with the small cache.
Small cache total time: 20*20 + 80*1 = 480 Large cache total time: 10*20 + 90*2 = 380
So, in this situation the large slow cache clearly performs better. In other situations, you might be able to make the small fast cache perform better (e.g. lower number of cache misses, presumably due to applications with smaller working set sizes, or faster main memory might help here).
The P4 architecture had two major problems; the cache size which has already been mentioned, and the lack of a shifter, making LEA and similar instructions many times slower than on the P3. LEA is a very useful instruction for performing text processing, and I would hazard a guess that it is used _a lot_ by gcc. It's probably not so heavily used in GUI code and during application startup, which is where you would naturally feel the difference.
True, but I would assume that for the sake of benchmarking that both machines are tested with equivalent spec hard drives and motherboards, so IO would become less of an issue.
Note also that disk cache behaviour would become critical. Tuning of 'swappiness' to the task at hand would probably have drastic affects on the time taken.
There have been interviews with the author all over the place. Apparently the marketing budget is quite large. The publishers think it's going to be very big.
A note to everyone who has given up writing a story because somebody else has published something with a similar idea:
Don't give up. In a few years time, the world will be ready for another story based on that idea. It is frequently said that in literature there are no new ideas. All stories come down, in the end, to a mixture of some 12 or so basic plot elements anyway. All you have to do is write them in your own way, and they will be different enough from anyone elses story for you to publish them, and maybe even be successful. Have faith in your work.
I find the comparisons with Neil Gaiman interesting, because according to an interview I read with the author a while back, Gaiman was instrumental in getting the book published -- IIRC, the author's writing instructor was a friend of his and sent him a copy, which he forwarded to his editor, who went on to buy it.
Join an online writer's community. They're great for giving you the motivation to sit down and write, which is essentially the hardest part of becoming a writer.
One I'm a member of is forward motion. They're good people.
Or, if you think you have enough time for it, give NaNoWriMo a try this November.
Second is to look for an agent once you've a letter of interest from a publisher.
Good advice, but times have changed. There are only a few publishers left who will even read your work unless you already have an agent. Tor and Baen are the only big names in the SF/Fantasy field, I think.
I've begun to wonder if the best thing is to at least get through the first draft of the whole book (1200 pages, I guesstimate) before peddling the edited, refined book one. Just in case I want to go back and change some things in book one. Once it's published, you can't really do that. Just talking out loud here, but suggestions welcome.
Definitely a good idea. Apart from anything else, I understand that most publishers don't like buying a series from a new author unless there's at least a first draft of everything. They just don't want to take the chance that you won't be able to finish it.
Another publisher worth considering ar Tor; they also read unagented slush. Although I know what you mean about Baen's philosophy. They're the only book publisher I know of that _prefer_ electronic submissions.
Just a quick query -- is your 1200 pages doublespaced courier 12pt, or what? 'Cause if it is, that's a monster of a book. And if it isn't, it's probably even bigger. How many volumes are you splitting it into?:)
Of course, if you withdraw your permission they ask for their car back.
Well, yeah, but what you do is take it back damaged, and when they say they're going to charge the damage to your card you tell them that you don't want them to do that, and could they send you a bill and you'll settle it with them in some other way.
Slashdot Mirror
Plutonium also has a very long half life. I assume you wouldn't eat it for breakfast.
Well, no. You'd probably die of heavy metal poisoning. Also, ~24,000 years is very different to ~14 million years.
There are no equivalent-spec motherboards for P3 and P4, they use entirely different chipsets.
Equivalent spec doesn't mean identical. I'm sure you could find a P3 and a P4 motherboard that have approximately equal IO performance when you run a disk benchmark over them to the same disk. This would be good enough.
Probably not in the mpegs; the ASFs are a more likely carrier, as ASF supports scripting and is subject to the same script-related vulnerabilities as internet explorer.
If you switch away from Windows Media Player, you will find a number of players that don't execute the scripts in ASF files. There are also utilities that will recode your ASF files to AVI, which cannot have scripts in them.
With all due respect: This statement is bollocks. Windows has never graduated from the assumption that there's only one user on the computer and she is God.
Oh, come on. The Windows NT family has never been a single user system. It was designed from ground up with user separation as a core feature. Win95 et al are now just about dead, so it must be NT we're talking about.
The 'Run as...' feature is considered a Great New Thing, for crying out loud. That feature is only 20 years old in other operating systems.
Well, yeah, Windows only really caught up with the rest of the crowd four years ago. This only reflects negatively on previous versions, but doesn't say anything at all about current ones.
And just FYI, anybody who knows anything about security would not ever run normally as root - not at home, not anywhere. The admin/root account is for changing the state of the machine, and nothing else. There's no evidence more damning than this that Microsoft just doesn't get security.
No, I think Microsoft understands security just perfectly. They know that there is a tradeoff between ease of use and "perfect" security, and know that the average home user would _rather_ have a system that doesn't require them to switch their user accounts to perform an administrative action (which many home users do frequently, installing and trying out new software seems to be a hobby of the casual computer hobbyist). Obviously this isn't ideal, but that's what the market wants. Microsoft is in the business of selling operating systems, not dictating to its users how they should use their computers. If XP Home hadn't put users in the administrators group by default, it would not have taken off. Everyone would have said "I like XP, but things don't work right. I prefer ME."
Please, offer whatever opinion you like about OSes, but try to base them on something bearing a passing resemblance to fact.
Please don't ram your biased conclusions down my throat in such an insulting fashion. There is more to designing an operating system than just security.
The above isn't, in actual fact, funny. I moderated up a similar comment approximately 6 months ago and have not had mod points since then, despite my karma being "excellent" throughout the period.
I don't know whether those who moderated the warning as funny will see the not-so-funny side of it later, or not.
No, but it doesn't have to. I think he meant ";" and typed it wrong. :)
Calling printf without a prototype I'm not so sure about
An unprototyped function is assumed to have been declared 'int fn(...)', so I think using printf like this is OK. It doesn't quite match, but my understanding is that the string format parameter can be subsumed into the "..." without any incompatibilities. This is, in fact, the reason why this is the default for such functions -- it works in most cases, thus eliminating the need for prototyping most of the time.
I think that the dangers outweigh the advantages of using P2P for that. Some guy has been advertising this site http://www.foundonp2p.com/[foundonp2p.com] that shows private data that can be found on p2p networks.
We have an application that automatically encrypts the files we might want to transport using 3DES, and PGP e-mails the SHA1, randomised filename and key to the potential recipients before putting the file into a gnutella public directory. This seems secure to me.
I agree, if you don't know what you're doing with it, a P2P network can be dangerous.
For moving stuff back and forth from home, I'd think that you'd be better off having IT set up a secure FTP site than P2P.
That'd be useful, but the cost of upgrading our internet access to a static IP address is more than we can justify. We'd also have to upgrade our firewall to support it. P2P seemed the easiest solution to us. We tried rewritable CDs, but they quickly became a source of annoyance. Not to mention people not realising what they needed before they needed it.
Why windows users insists using admininstrator accounts, when they could use a limited account that prevents access to the system and program dirs?
It's standard practice on a Windows network not to allow users administrator access. The only system that MS has ever released that encourages users to use administrator is XP Home, which is designed for home use, where that is probably more appropriate.
I find it highly implausible that the company described in the article here allowed their users to access administrator accounts. But then, you don't need administrator access for a trojan to launch an attack over the network and break in to other computers on it. Not in Windows, nor Linux, nor any other OS I've used.
No reference at microsoft site about using a machine in limited mode to stop viruses/trojans.
What, you mean like this one:
Microsoft recommends adopting a policy that provides the fewest privileges possible to help minimize the impact of malware that relies on exploiting user privileges when it executes.
Note that the story was talking about removing infections from servers, not user desktops. Presumably they did just reimage the desktops, but the servers had to be handled with a little more subtlety (probably to minimise downtime).
P2P has not place on corporate networks
I don't agree. Piracy has no place on corporate networks. Porn has no place on corporate networks. But, despite making up a very high percentage of the traffic on P2P networks, these two are not the only uses of such networks.
As a business user who frequently uses P2P networks to transfer large files between my office and home machines, I can assure you that there are legitimate uses, and that in many cases these are more convenient than the alternatives.
a sphere with a radius of 30cm is a large heatsink for a processor.
Well, yes, but it's a lot easier to engineer than a LN2 cooling system.
You need to learn a bit more about why caching works before making statements like that.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that main memory is 10 times slower than the slower cache, and that half the cache size means twice as many cache misses (the real figures are actually worse than this, but I don't know what they are exactly).
So, we have:
Main memory access time: 20 units
Small cache access time: 1 unit
Large cache access time: 2 units
Over the course of 100 memory access, lets say 10 of these are misses with the large cache, and based on our assumptions above 20 are misses with the small cache.
Small cache total time: 20*20 + 80*1 = 480
Large cache total time: 10*20 + 90*2 = 380
So, in this situation the large slow cache clearly performs better. In other situations, you might be able to make the small fast cache perform better (e.g. lower number of cache misses, presumably due to applications with smaller working set sizes, or faster main memory might help here).
The P4 architecture had two major problems; the cache size which has already been mentioned, and the lack of a shifter, making LEA and similar instructions many times slower than on the P3. LEA is a very useful instruction for performing text processing, and I would hazard a guess that it is used _a lot_ by gcc. It's probably not so heavily used in GUI code and during application startup, which is where you would naturally feel the difference.
True, but I would assume that for the sake of benchmarking that both machines are tested with equivalent spec hard drives and motherboards, so IO would become less of an issue.
Note also that disk cache behaviour would become critical. Tuning of 'swappiness' to the task at hand would probably have drastic affects on the time taken.
????
I've never seen a troll post his own suggestion to mod his posts down before.
There have been interviews with the author all over the place. Apparently the marketing budget is quite large. The publishers think it's going to be very big.
A note to everyone who has given up writing a story because somebody else has published something with a similar idea:
Don't give up. In a few years time, the world will be ready for another story based on that idea. It is frequently said that in literature there are no new ideas. All stories come down, in the end, to a mixture of some 12 or so basic plot elements anyway. All you have to do is write them in your own way, and they will be different enough from anyone elses story for you to publish them, and maybe even be successful. Have faith in your work.
In that case, your story isn't even approximately like Andromeda. ;)
I find the comparisons with Neil Gaiman interesting, because according to an interview I read with the author a while back, Gaiman was instrumental in getting the book published -- IIRC, the author's writing instructor was a friend of his and sent him a copy, which he forwarded to his editor, who went on to buy it.
Join an online writer's community. They're great for giving you the motivation to sit down and write, which is essentially the hardest part of becoming a writer.
One I'm a member of is forward motion. They're good people.
Or, if you think you have enough time for it, give NaNoWriMo a try this November.
Second is to look for an agent once you've a letter of interest from a publisher.
Good advice, but times have changed. There are only a few publishers left who will even read your work unless you already have an agent. Tor and Baen are the only big names in the SF/Fantasy field, I think.
I've begun to wonder if the best thing is to at least get through the first draft of the whole book (1200 pages, I guesstimate) before peddling the edited, refined book one. Just in case I want to go back and change some things in book one. Once it's published, you can't really do that. Just talking out loud here, but suggestions welcome.
:)
Definitely a good idea. Apart from anything else, I understand that most publishers don't like buying a series from a new author unless there's at least a first draft of everything. They just don't want to take the chance that you won't be able to finish it.
Another publisher worth considering ar Tor; they also read unagented slush. Although I know what you mean about Baen's philosophy. They're the only book publisher I know of that _prefer_ electronic submissions.
Just a quick query -- is your 1200 pages doublespaced courier 12pt, or what? 'Cause if it is, that's a monster of a book. And if it isn't, it's probably even bigger. How many volumes are you splitting it into?
I'd guess the same applies. Of course, if you withdraw your permission, they'll probably withdraw your membership and blacklist you.
Of course, if you withdraw your permission they ask for their car back.
Well, yeah, but what you do is take it back damaged, and when they say they're going to charge the damage to your card you tell them that you don't want them to do that, and could they send you a bill and you'll settle it with them in some other way.