I'm all for R&D into pure science, and I'm not bagging the concept of quantum cryptography, but why does this need to be a commercial product?
Is there really anyone out there paranoid enough to need/want this besides various three-letter agencies? Maybe this is proveably secure, we think, but what is more likely - Someone finds a loophole in the very weird world of quantum mechanics that makes quantum cryptography as we know it obsolite, or someone figures out a way to find prime factors of obsenely large numbers in a reasonable time.
This article is about how it may be possible have a quantum crypto setup with a bandwidth of maybe 1024kbps by spending only $20k-$50k on one component to the system. I bet there is a lot of other components. Compare this with a basic commodity PC, which can could encrypt 1024kbps using AES with ridiculous ease.
Cellphones and cellphone towers have been common for 20 years now. And back then with analog phones the radiated power was MUCH higher than it is now. The reason early cellphones struggled to get a day out of a battery charge wasn't just because the batteries were crap...
With the number of people who are exposed to cellphones and cellphone towers every day if there was a significant risk it would be a piece of cake to prove it.
They actually share a common graphics library - cards.dll (well pre-XP versions did, at least...) I wrote a little card game for my wife based on an unusual version of solitare she plays, and a little research on the web lead me to the API for cards.dll which made the project a doddle.
The windows kernel is crap, so they write a new one that is better and open(ish) call it the WRK so people can look and see how good it is. But the shipping windows kernel is still crap because they only used the clean new code for the purposes of having clean code to show people, and they never did anything else with the code.
As another poster mentioned, San Andreas WAS better on the PC and Xbox - these versions had higher poly counts, and higher res textures.
One thing that did suck was the draw distance - things faded into the fog when you were very close, so when you were flying a plane you sometimes couldn't even see the horizon when flying straight and level.
Fortunately some of the game files are plain ascii, and its possible to increase these draw levels TONS, even on the XBOX.
CO2 isn't a significant green house gas. why won't this sink into peoples heads? I have also been wondering if this is the case.
Don't get me wrong, I am well aware the climate is changing and the future doesn't look good.
About 15 years ago when I was at university one of my physics lecturers told us that the "greenhouse gas" theories that were starting to get more attention didn't add up.
As anyone with a bit of physics or chemistry knows greenhouse gasses work by letting high frequency light (direct sunlight) through the atmosphere, but the lower frequency IR light radiated by the earth's surface is strongly absorbed by these gasses. He said the problem is CO2 only absorbs IR in a fairly narrow band, and if you look at earth's IR spectrum from space this band is already nearly black - i.e. there is already nearly enough CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb all of the IR radiated by the surface. He said the ones to watch out for were methane and water vapour, as they absorb far more IR, and there isn't enough of them in the atmosphere to "saturate" this frequency.
Now once again I'm not a global warming skeptic, our climate is definitely changing and its a worry but it seems to be very difficult to have a rational argument about these things. Its like the debate over WMD in Iraq a few years back, "you are either with us or against us" and all that bullshit where any dissenters are shouted down.
Could be implemented in a way to defend against rocket\missle attacks? Possibly in a better way than Star Wars program. Yeah, all you'd need to do is mount an extremely hardy, remote-controled loudspeaker inside the combustion chamber of every rocket your enemy had.
That sounds WAY more easy than star wars, as long as you arrange it all before they launch.
Actually, maybe there isn't as much in it as I thought.
The fatal flaw of TFA is it is complete crap. The author doesn't know what he is talking about.
If Vista is slower its because of higher overheads caused by more eye candy and functionality.
I run vista on a decent system with 2gb of ram and I find it about the same as XP for most things, except when I have lots of stuff open and the OS is paging. Then vista leaves XP in its dust, no question. Situations that would have XP paging so furiously the mouse cursor wouldn't even move smoothly don't faze vista at all. At worst the app that is paging becomes unresponsive for a few seconds.
12 months ago now I brought a dell latitude D820, with Vista Business preinstalled. I was never happy with it, it seemed slow and bloated. With Outlook, 2x Visual Studio and SQL management studio open my memory usage was normally around 2.5gb and the machine was painful to use.
The performance and reliability updates helped, and I installed the release candidate of SP1 as soon as I could and that helped too but I was still dissapointed and tempted to go back to XP.
I decided to give vista another chance - I formatted and re-installed, installed SP1 immediately, then all my apps.
The difference is astounding. I don't know what the problem was with dell's vista installation, but my memory usage is now 0.5-1gb lower than it was under all circumstances. Before after a clean boot I never had less than 1.4gb of memory allocated. Now its 800-900mb. With 2xVS, Sql studio and outlook I am using less than 2gb. Dell's vista image seemed fairly clean... but there must have been something. This was the first time I had not immediately formatted and re-installed after getting a new machine, and it will be my last.
Overall my machine is much, much snappier and doesn't give me any grief. Vista no longer seems slow and bloated. My frame rates in FSX have also nearly doubled, which I'm at a loss to explain as I'm using the same drivers.
So, now I'm officially a vista convert. It makes me wonder how many people buy a new machines with a dodgy preinstalled vista image, they find it slow and bloated, so they re-install XP, find it much better and then go out and bag vista.
Firstly, they didn't have to release it at all, even in binary format. And there would be very little point in them releasing it in binary, because there isn't much you can do with it.
Secondly, if you FTFA you'll see they wrote their own C# compiler, in C#, which compiles directly to native code, no CIL.
Thirdly, even if they were releasing CIL images, if you decompile them yes you do get fairly close to the original code, but you lose variable names and comments. If they ran the binaries through an obscurfator first then the decompiled code is very different from the original as well.
Its morally no different from a mob with a fancy star-trek replicator going into the shop, duplicating whatever they wanted, then leaving orderly with the shop in a state 100% identical to what it was before they came.
Yep, true. But in 10+ years of working with NTFS I've never seen ntfs corruption, except in cases of hardware failure.
I'm not saying its the best filesystem out there or anything, but its not bad. Its one area that has changed very little since nt 3.51, its high time MS spent some time on it. I'd love to see ZFS for windows though.
>>> per process and per CPU throttling >> you have a point there, it would be nice...
>this became available in Windows Server 2003: Windows System Resource Manager
Ahh thanks for that:)
I thought there was something like that win win2k3, but I couldn't find any info.
I've just been reading about some of the win2k8 stuff, and Hyper-V. It looks like MS are tending towards high availability stuff by using multiple lightweight VMs in a cluster, rather than having fancy stuff like hot-patching the OS.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but windows has got a pretty good fine-grained sercurity system. The main problem is out of the box it is largely turned off, and by default users are administrators.
It has to support 16x more RAM
Really? 2TB isn't enough for you?
and an order of magnitude larger AD spaces.
Hmm I had never heard anyone complaining about any AD limits before so I did a quick search to find out what they were. I didn't find much, but I did see apparently korea.com has an AD implementation with 8 million accounts.
Its a good thing. Its Pre-JITing (creating NGEN binaries) some of the base class libraries. Earlier versions of.Net did this as well, but they didn't have a mechanism to update the ngen versions of these libraries when you installed a later version of the library.
So.Net has a service which does this, so if you install a new DLL that has been pre-JITed it automatically updates the pre-JITed version.
so 99.9% of the time this service does nothing. Its no big deal.
I quite often read e-books on my smartphone (symbian s60) and I find it very handy... I always have a few books available to read, without having to lug the damn things around. I use Mobipocket reader, mainly with a 1gb archive of sci-fi books I found a torrent of once. The Mobipocket app is completely free, and supports unprotected text, html and pdf files. No *requirement* to use DRM with content you add yourself.
However, they do use their own flavour of DRM on books downloaded from their store. I'm no fan of DRM, but I think their system is pretty painless. When Pandora's Star (Peter F Hamilton) came out 2-3 years ago it was available as an e-book in mobipocket's store before my local bookstore had it in stock, so I brought it. I downloaded it from their website via the webbrowser on my phone after giving them my email address and my credit card number, no tedious account opening procedure was required.
Recently I upgraded my phone, and transferred over my data, including the e-book. No surprises, it wouldn't open. Damn DRM!
Curious to see if there was a way around this, I went to their website, entered my email address and got them to send me a new password. I logged on and pandora's star was listed under my books. I had to go through some process to register a new device (it was so simple I can't remember exactly what was required) and I was able to re-download the e-book.
Now of course if the company had changed their DRM system and didn't support their old system, or had gone under completely then I would be screwed. But with something that would be as simple to copy as a text file I can understand authors and publishers wanting some protection. Ideally the authors wouldn't need publishers and they could sell direct to their readers for such a low price that DRM wouldn't be required but we aren't there yet.
In the meantime I found their DRM very unobtrusive and I trouble free. I'll happily buy stuff from their store again.
Maybe it's pre-caching application libraries or not loading certain OS code until the user requires it.
You can do a lot to improve apparent performance by building a detailed profile of what the user typically does. It won't make the processor run faster, but can improve the wait time to do stuff.
Thats exactly what vista does. Its called SuperFetch, and it works out patterns of disk usage to try and pre-fetch stuff into the disk cache. Apparently its smart enough to recognise different patterns of applications/files are accessed in the weekend compared to the week but I'm not sure how well that works...
One place I worked had the most riduculous email filtering. They bounced all inbound emails that contained the word "spam".
The sheer forehead-slapping genius staggered me. Just think, if every ISP had such insightful thinkers working for them the spam problem would have been dead and buried, long ago.
They also filterd all inbound and outbound mail that countained the word "joke". And also anything containing "blonde". Presumeably because it was a joke about blondes.
I also worked at another place that blocked access to all domains that had an "X" in them. Because this was clearly porn.
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I'm all for R&D into pure science, and I'm not bagging the concept of quantum cryptography, but why does this need to be a commercial product?
Is there really anyone out there paranoid enough to need/want this besides various three-letter agencies? Maybe this is proveably secure, we think, but what is more likely - Someone finds a loophole in the very weird world of quantum mechanics that makes quantum cryptography as we know it obsolite, or someone figures out a way to find prime factors of obsenely large numbers in a reasonable time.
This article is about how it may be possible have a quantum crypto setup with a bandwidth of maybe 1024kbps by spending only $20k-$50k on one component to the system. I bet there is a lot of other components.
Compare this with a basic commodity PC, which can could encrypt 1024kbps using AES with ridiculous ease.
Cellphones and cellphone towers have been common for 20 years now. And back then with analog phones the radiated power was MUCH higher than it is now. The reason early cellphones struggled to get a day out of a battery charge wasn't just because the batteries were crap...
With the number of people who are exposed to cellphones and cellphone towers every day if there was a significant risk it would be a piece of cake to prove it.
They did on Vista. My wife wants to use my work laptop all the time, just to play mahjong.
Infact all the windows games have been re-written using WPF and look very sweet.
They actually share a common graphics library - cards.dll (well pre-XP versions did, at least...)
I wrote a little card game for my wife based on an unusual version of solitare she plays, and a little research on the web lead me to the API for cards.dll which made the project a doddle.
Yeah, thats a real likely scenario:
The windows kernel is crap, so they write a new one that is better and open(ish) call it the WRK so people can look and see how good it is. But the shipping windows kernel is still crap because they only used the clean new code for the purposes of having clean code to show people, and they never did anything else with the code.
Yeah, that must have been it.
As another poster mentioned, San Andreas WAS better on the PC and Xbox - these versions had higher poly counts, and higher res textures.
One thing that did suck was the draw distance - things faded into the fog when you were very close, so when you were flying a plane you sometimes couldn't even see the horizon when flying straight and level.
Fortunately some of the game files are plain ascii, and its possible to increase these draw levels TONS, even on the XBOX.
why won't this sink into peoples heads? I have also been wondering if this is the case.
Don't get me wrong, I am well aware the climate is changing and the future doesn't look good.
About 15 years ago when I was at university one of my physics lecturers told us that the "greenhouse gas" theories that were starting to get more attention didn't add up.
As anyone with a bit of physics or chemistry knows greenhouse gasses work by letting high frequency light (direct sunlight) through the atmosphere, but the lower frequency IR light radiated by the earth's surface is strongly absorbed by these gasses.
He said the problem is CO2 only absorbs IR in a fairly narrow band, and if you look at earth's IR spectrum from space this band is already nearly black - i.e. there is already nearly enough CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb all of the IR radiated by the surface.
He said the ones to watch out for were methane and water vapour, as they absorb far more IR, and there isn't enough of them in the atmosphere to "saturate" this frequency.
Now once again I'm not a global warming skeptic, our climate is definitely changing and its a worry but it seems to be very difficult to have a rational argument about these things. Its like the debate over WMD in Iraq a few years back, "you are either with us or against us" and all that bullshit where any dissenters are shouted down.
Can anyone else comment on this?
That sounds WAY more easy than star wars, as long as you arrange it all before they launch.
Actually, maybe there isn't as much in it as I thought.
nothing to see here, this reply is just to remove an incorrect mod.
They are already doing exactly that with their server virtualization strategy on 2008.
One of the windows 2008 editions is "core" which doesn't even have a full gui.
About all it is good for is a VM host.
The fatal flaw of TFA is it is complete crap. The author doesn't know what he is talking about.
If Vista is slower its because of higher overheads caused by more eye candy and functionality.
I run vista on a decent system with 2gb of ram and I find it about the same as XP for most things, except when I have lots of stuff open and the OS is paging. Then vista leaves XP in its dust, no question. Situations that would have XP paging so furiously the mouse cursor wouldn't even move smoothly don't faze vista at all. At worst the app that is paging becomes unresponsive for a few seconds.
12 months ago now I brought a dell latitude D820, with Vista Business preinstalled. I was never happy with it, it seemed slow and bloated. With Outlook, 2x Visual Studio and SQL management studio open my memory usage was normally around 2.5gb and the machine was painful to use.
The performance and reliability updates helped, and I installed the release candidate of SP1 as soon as I could and that helped too but I was still dissapointed and tempted to go back to XP.
I decided to give vista another chance - I formatted and re-installed, installed SP1 immediately, then all my apps.
The difference is astounding. I don't know what the problem was with dell's vista installation, but my memory usage is now 0.5-1gb lower than it was under all circumstances. Before after a clean boot I never had less than 1.4gb of memory allocated. Now its 800-900mb. With 2xVS, Sql studio and outlook I am using less than 2gb. Dell's vista image seemed fairly clean... but there must have been something. This was the first time I had not immediately formatted and re-installed after getting a new machine, and it will be my last.
Overall my machine is much, much snappier and doesn't give me any grief. Vista no longer seems slow and bloated. My frame rates in FSX have also nearly doubled, which I'm at a loss to explain as I'm using the same drivers.
So, now I'm officially a vista convert. It makes me wonder how many people buy a new machines with a dodgy preinstalled vista image, they find it slow and bloated, so they re-install XP, find it much better and then go out and bag vista.
Bollox.
Firstly, they didn't have to release it at all, even in binary format. And there would be very little point in them releasing it in binary, because there isn't much you can do with it.
Secondly, if you FTFA you'll see they wrote their own C# compiler, in C#, which compiles directly to native code, no CIL.
Thirdly, even if they were releasing CIL images, if you decompile them yes you do get fairly close to the original code, but you lose variable names and comments. If they ran the binaries through an obscurfator first then the decompiled code is very different from the original as well.
Yeah, I agree, pathetic sig.
Its morally no different from a mob with a fancy star-trek replicator going into the shop, duplicating whatever they wanted, then leaving orderly with the shop in a state 100% identical to what it was before they came.
Yep, true. But in 10+ years of working with NTFS I've never seen ntfs corruption, except in cases of hardware failure.
I'm not saying its the best filesystem out there or anything, but its not bad. Its one area that has changed very little since nt 3.51, its high time MS spent some time on it. I'd love to see ZFS for windows though.
>>> per process and per CPU throttling
:)
>> you have a point there, it would be nice...
>this became available in Windows Server 2003: Windows System Resource Manager
Ahh thanks for that
I thought there was something like that win win2k3, but I couldn't find any info.
I've just been reading about some of the win2k8 stuff, and Hyper-V. It looks like MS are tending towards high availability stuff by using multiple lightweight VMs in a cluster, rather than having fancy stuff like hot-patching the OS.
you have a point there, it would be nice...
see volume shadow copy
See encrypting file system, or bitlocker.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but windows has got a pretty good fine-grained sercurity system. The main problem is out of the box it is largely turned off, and by default users are administrators.
Really? 2TB isn't enough for you?
Hmm I had never heard anyone complaining about any AD limits before so I did a quick search to find out what they were. I didn't find much, but I did see apparently korea.com has an AD implementation with 8 million accounts.
Yep, you are right, that would be nice.
See NTFS. Its only been around for 10+ years,
See DFS.
Go for it. 19k isn't really much money for how much work you've put into this, these guys should be sued into the ground.
Its a good thing. Its Pre-JITing (creating NGEN binaries) some of the base class libraries. Earlier versions of .Net did this as well, but they didn't have a mechanism to update the ngen versions of these libraries when you installed a later version of the library.
.Net has a service which does this, so if you install a new DLL that has been pre-JITed it automatically updates the pre-JITed version.
So
so 99.9% of the time this service does nothing. Its no big deal.
Nice, I like it.
You've obviously done a lot more thinking about the whole Dr-Evil thing than me!
This development is clearly useless until the system is miniturised to the point it can be mounted on a shark.
I quite often read e-books on my smartphone (symbian s60) and I find it very handy... I always have a few books available to read, without having to lug the damn things around. I use Mobipocket reader, mainly with a 1gb archive of sci-fi books I found a torrent of once. The Mobipocket app is completely free, and supports unprotected text, html and pdf files. No *requirement* to use DRM with content you add yourself.
However, they do use their own flavour of DRM on books downloaded from their store. I'm no fan of DRM, but I think their system is pretty painless. When Pandora's Star (Peter F Hamilton) came out 2-3 years ago it was available as an e-book in mobipocket's store before my local bookstore had it in stock, so I brought it. I downloaded it from their website via the webbrowser on my phone after giving them my email address and my credit card number, no tedious account opening procedure was required.
Recently I upgraded my phone, and transferred over my data, including the e-book. No surprises, it wouldn't open. Damn DRM!
Curious to see if there was a way around this, I went to their website, entered my email address and got them to send me a new password. I logged on and pandora's star was listed under my books. I had to go through some process to register a new device (it was so simple I can't remember exactly what was required) and I was able to re-download the e-book.
Now of course if the company had changed their DRM system and didn't support their old system, or had gone under completely then I would be screwed. But with something that would be as simple to copy as a text file I can understand authors and publishers wanting some protection. Ideally the authors wouldn't need publishers and they could sell direct to their readers for such a low price that DRM wouldn't be required but we aren't there yet.
In the meantime I found their DRM very unobtrusive and I trouble free. I'll happily buy stuff from their store again.
If they are ditching the data, that indicates they have changed the algorithm which gathers the data... making the existing data invalid.
As they say in the article it will only take a few days usage to rebuild the data.
Thats exactly what vista does. Its called SuperFetch, and it works out patterns of disk usage to try and pre-fetch stuff into the disk cache. Apparently its smart enough to recognise different patterns of applications/files are accessed in the weekend compared to the week but I'm not sure how well that works...
One place I worked had the most riduculous email filtering. They bounced all inbound emails that contained the word "spam".
The sheer forehead-slapping genius staggered me. Just think, if every ISP had such insightful thinkers working for them the spam problem would have been dead and buried, long ago.
They also filterd all inbound and outbound mail that countained the word "joke". And also anything containing "blonde". Presumeably because it was a joke about blondes.
I also worked at another place that blocked access to all domains that had an "X" in them. Because this was clearly porn.