Major competitor? Questionable. There are a lot more Macs for sale at the local [fill in chain electronics retailer] than there are Linux machines. Don't use yourself or your nerd buddies to stand for real-world percentages. Linux is in there, to be sure, but let's not overstate the whole thing. What was the desktop percentage? 0.24%?
Microsoft is busy trying to acquire the same dominance in the server market as they have on the desktop, and Linux is their major competitor in/that/.
Sure, they already have that desktop market, but they 0wn it now, and MS cannot survive on mere ownership - it needs to grow, and keep on growing quickly, indefinitely. The only way they can do that is to move into new markets, and in those new markets they're finding themselves competing intensely with Linux. That's what people are talking about, and it's entirely true.
As for the lost sale thing,/any/ money that doesn't go into MS's pocket is considered a lost sale by them - they/have/ to think that way, or they'll stop growing, and die.
himi
Bye-bye tourism in the US . . .
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 2
If you/really/ want to be like that, then the rest of the world will just ignore you - you can go back to being the isolationist state that you were for many years, and the rest of the world will be happy to avoid you.
Interestingly enough, I believe most of AMD's processors are actually fabbed in Europe - Dresden, in fact.
Take a look at this and do the sums - most of AMD's fab's are outside the US.
The US really isn't the centre of the world, you know . ..
But it'd be a discovery at the same kind of level that/would/ win one in a field where a Nobel was offered. Which is what I meant - "Nobel Prize type stuff" doesn't mean it'd win a Nobel Prize, just that it's roughly equivalent.
That's the main thing about the Australian and New Zealand film industries, I believe - we're good at making quality stuff cheaply.
Which says a lot about Hollywood, I think, and why their output is generally so fucked up: the people actually making the movies are too busy demanding huge salaries to worry about the quality of what they're producing, and those salaries have no relation to the quality of the output . . .
You're smoking some/really/ bad crack there, my friend. You'd be about a hundred orders of magnitude better off in the Australian bush carrying the gun's weight in water than carrying the gun.
There might be some possible argument for carrying a long gun in the American wilds, but even then you're probably better off just being careful to avoid things like bears - shooting one and/not/ killing it is much more likely to get/you/ killed than improve your situation . ..
It doesn't speed up the factoring by a factor of three, it increases the keylength it can break by a factor of three . . . In other words, this version of the NFS algorithm runs in the cube root time of previous versions.
This is more significant than a simple three times speedup, but it still doesn't change the fact that it/doesn't/ break RSA, it merely speeds up the attack.
If it/did/ break RSA completely - ie, by indicating that factoring is in fact a P problem rather than NP complete - then it would have made infinitely more of a splash than it did. That kind of breakthrough is Nobel Prize type stuff.
128 bit keys almost always refers to a/symmetric/ algorithm - this is things like AES, Twofish, IDEA, etc. And for good symmetric ciphers, 128 bits of key is fairly secure - to brute force, you have to try out all 2^128 possible keys, which is a very hard problem (assuming, of course, that there aren't other problems with the cipher).
This article is referring to/assymetric/ ciphers - public key cryptosystems, and in particular RSA. RSA keys are made up of two large primes multiplied together (IIRC - it's been a while since I read this part of Applied Cryptography): finding the two primes breaks the key, and so its security is based on the difficulty of factoring really large numbers into prime constituents.
The research referred to here is a way to speed up the factoring of large numbers, apparently by a factor of about 3 - it doesn't break the algorithm, it just speeds up a brute force attack. If it took 3000 years to break a 2048 bit RSA key before, now it'd take 1000 years. Barring more such discoveries . . .
Don't panic is a very good response to this - it's a serioius discovery, and it changes the risk factors involved with using RSA crypto, but it doesn't throw everything out the window.
Finally, I'd really suggest reading at least the interesting bits of Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier. It explains a lot of this stuff, and gives you a good framework within which to put this kind of thing.
Asbestos is far from harmless . . . It's seriously carcinogenic. It's released from materials containing it in many ways, including just sitting out in the sunlight until the glue binding it together into fibre boards breaks down . ..
Getting rid of asbestos wasn't a "health nuts" thing, it was a perfectly sensible and sane decisions - it's hard to say, but it's possible that banning it's use has saved more lives than were lost in the WTC. Whatever the case, it's a really bad example.
That said, anything that will compile and run properly on ppc (big-endian) as well as x86 (little-endian) should be endian-clean, and hence should run fine on a mainframe.
The brackets indicate that the contents of said brackets are seperate from the rest of the sentence - an addition, but not part of it. So the sentence actually reads: "You cannot include an additional operating system unless you have a seperate legal agreement with Microsoft."
That's unambiguous in my book, and I'd imagine the court would think so, too.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly on the PC desktop OS market (have you ever heard of an OS called Linux?) but even if they did there is nothing forcing PC makers from including an OS at all with their systems.
Nothing except the licensing scheme that said they had to pay a full license fee for Windows for every system that/could/ run Windows . . . MS' approach to defeating piracy: charge people for the OS even if they don't use it . . . ..
This may have been removed recently, but for a long time it was impossible to buy a clean box from an OEM manufacturer without paying for a Windows license anyway. This licensing scheme was accepted because the OEMs had no other option - they'd pay up, or lose the right to sell/any/ windows based machines.
MS really did have the OEMs by the balls with this - an OEM that couldn't sell windows, or had to pay significantly more for windows (ie, retail prices, rather than the OEM deals that other companies were getting), basically went out of business. They/had/ to accede to MS' demands. And that's why MS is screwed now that they've been judged to be a monopoly - suddenly, all those licensing schemes/scams are illegal, and people are actually piping up and saying "No, I'm not going to bend over for you". Be's suit is an example of this.
I'm talking about heat that is/radiated away/ from a body - this is typically how heat is removed from a CPU or the like, even when there's a fan.
Take a chunk of metal, paint it matt black, heat it to 100C, then sit it in air at 25C for 20 minutes. Do the same with an equal mass and density chunk of the same metal that has a mirrored finish. You'll find that the matt black chunk has cooled down a lot more than the mirrored one. The matt black surface radiates more energy than the mirrored one.
Look in any first-year university physics textbook for a discussion of black body radiation and related stuff . . .
A reflective surface radiates far less heat than a non-reflective surface - basically speaking, it radiates at the same rate that it absorbs.
As for your other arguments . . . Well, I'm afraid you really don't seem to understand what you're talking about - that simple bit of physics is a convenient example.
That option might make a difference with NVidia cards, but it's not going to make any difference to anyone who's using something else (except for making their Xserver fail to start, because of an unknown option in the config file).
The mem=nopentium option to the kernel works everywhere for this particular problem.
The problem with this analogy is that it looks at the wrong thing. The performance of a CPU isn't a matter of how quickly it can do one thing (ie, how fast it can finish a race), it's a matter of how much it can get done in a given period.
A much better analogy is water flowing through a pipe. You want to get some volume of water out the far end, so you have two choices: you can pump the water through a thin pipe really quickly (the P4), or you can pump the water at a slower speed, but through a much fatter pipe (the K7).
The K7 core can retire, on average, about 1.6 instructions per clock cycle. At 1.667GHz, that means that your XP1900+ can complete about 2.667 billion instructions per second.
Now, assuming the equivalent performance on benchmarks and the like indicates that the P4 2000 can complete about the same number of instructions (since it gets the same results at that clock speed (this is a/big/ assumption, but for the purposes of this argument it's reasonable)), that means the P4 is retiring about 1.33 instructions per clock cycle. (Note that the 1.6ipc figure for the K7 is from an old RealWorldTech article by Paul DeMone that I can't find right now - it's somewhere in the Silicon Insider archives . . . )
/That/ is the fundamental difference between the two chips: the K7 completes more instructions every time it's clock ticks. That's what people talk about when they talk about "brainiac" versus "speed demon" processors: the P4 gets it's performance because it completes lots and lots of clock cycles in a given period; the K7 gets it's performance because it does a lot in every clock cycle, even though it completes fewer cycles in the same period.
CPUs aren't a horse race - they're a production line, where what matters isn't how fast an individual thing is done, but how many things get done in a given time period.
It's rather hard to read non-existent documentation. This bug isn't listed in the AMD K7 errata, which is why it wasn't found - the only 'documentation' for this is the Win2k patch that AMD provided.
Linux and *BSD just do things differently: it's not a matter of one set of hackers being better than the other.
Could you point me at the official statistics that show this? Having seen the NRA stats (which were basically a complete misreading of some Australian Bureau of Statistics information, which the ABS considered to be of no statistical significance), I'm very leery of taking stats like that without references, and references pointing to/official/ stats.
If I had more time I'd go search around the ABS site and get some hard figures, but I don't . . .
As for shooting a police officer being good . . . I don't think shooting/anyone/ is good. It's one reason I support gun control.
Finally, the violent crime rate in the UK is low because they simply have a peaceful society . . . Violence as a solution to problems is considred really bad form. It's similar here in Australia, too . . . I imagine it's the case in the US, as well - things are probably skewed seriously by the fact that it's so easy for those people who/don't/ see violence as bad form to make it everyone else's problems, since they're nicely armed.
That's something noted on the site I linked to: the murder rate with weapons other than guns is fairly constant around the world. Likewise the suicide rate (in Australia, 80% of firearms related deaths were due to suicide) - there's no evidence of people replacing guns with other things when they're doing their dirty deeds, and in fact evidence to the contrary.
The thing that sets the US apart is the availability of guns - the only other places where there are as many guns are there are people are places where there's recently been a war, or where armed conflict is part of life.
Go read the guncontrol.ca site - they have lots of good stuff.
As a number of other posters have said, Australians tend to ignore laws that they don't agree with. Unless there are people standing over us, we'll just live our lives however we feel happy and ignore the stupid laws. The good laws simply codify what the majority consider reasonable, so very few people have problems with them.
Another thing to note is that our constitution doesn't codify anything other than how the state governments relate to the federal government - we don't have any bill of rights saying that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, or anything like that. Rights like that are established through a combination of legislation, the actions of the courts, and public opinion about things. And, contrary to what a lot of Americans seem to think, this process actually/works/ - our rights aren't written down on paper, they're negotiated on a continual basis. This makes things very flexible, and means that our rights are always immediately apropriate to the current situation - we don't have things like the US's 2nd amendmant, which was a nice idea when it was made, but is kind of pointless in an age when there's a centrally controlled military force.
A large part of the reason this kind of legislation has come through is because of the work of one man, who just happened to hold the balance of power in the senate - basically, in order to pass bills, the government of the day needed to have his vote. So, parties would pander to his (very unrepresentative) views on things like morality, and support legislation like this in order to buy his support.
Australia/is/ a very free and fair society - it's consistently rated one of the most pleasant places to live in the world. Hiccoughs like this happen, but by and large they don't seriously affect things.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is busy trying to acquire the same dominance in the server market as they have on the desktop, and Linux is their major competitor in
Sure, they already have that desktop market, but they 0wn it now, and MS cannot survive on mere ownership - it needs to grow, and keep on growing quickly, indefinitely. The only way they can do that is to move into new markets, and in those new markets they're finding themselves competing intensely with Linux. That's what people are talking about, and it's entirely true.
As for the lost sale thing,
himi
If you /really/ want to be like that, then the rest of the world will just ignore you - you can go back to being the isolationist state that you were for many years, and the rest of the world will be happy to avoid you.
.
Interestingly enough, I believe most of AMD's processors are actually fabbed in Europe - Dresden, in fact.
Take a look at this and do the sums - most of AMD's fab's are outside the US.
The US really isn't the centre of the world, you know . .
himi
How ironic - the granddaddy of those weblogs is being trashed by the rats who decided it was cool enough to read . . .
Slashdot was a weblog almost before the idea had been invented - it's rather more now, and for the better, I think.
himi
But it'd be a discovery at the same kind of level that /would/ win one in a field where a Nobel was offered. Which is what I meant - "Nobel Prize type stuff" doesn't mean it'd win a Nobel Prize, just that it's roughly equivalent.
himi
That's the main thing about the Australian and New Zealand film industries, I believe - we're good at making quality stuff cheaply.
Which says a lot about Hollywood, I think, and why their output is generally so fucked up: the people actually making the movies are too busy demanding huge salaries to worry about the quality of what they're producing, and those salaries have no relation to the quality of the output . . .
himi
Just as much as any other.
himi
You're smoking some /really/ bad crack there, my friend. You'd be about a hundred orders of magnitude better off in the Australian bush carrying the gun's weight in water than carrying the gun.
/not/ killing it is much more likely to get /you/ killed than improve your situation . . .
There might be some possible argument for carrying a long gun in the American wilds, but even then you're probably better off just being careful to avoid things like bears - shooting one and
himi
It doesn't speed up the factoring by a factor of three, it increases the keylength it can break by a factor of three . . . In other words, this version of the NFS algorithm runs in the cube root time of previous versions.
/doesn't/ break RSA, it merely speeds up the attack.
This is more significant than a simple three times speedup, but it still doesn't change the fact that it
himi
All it does is speed up a brute force attack.
/did/ break RSA completely - ie, by indicating that factoring is in fact a P problem rather than NP complete - then it would have made infinitely more of a splash than it did. That kind of breakthrough is Nobel Prize type stuff.
If it
himi
128 bit keys almost always refers to a /symmetric/ algorithm - this is things like AES, Twofish, IDEA, etc. And for good symmetric ciphers, 128 bits of key is fairly secure - to brute force, you have to try out all 2^128 possible keys, which is a very hard problem (assuming, of course, that there aren't other problems with the cipher).
/assymetric/ ciphers - public key cryptosystems, and in particular RSA. RSA keys are made up of two large primes multiplied together (IIRC - it's been a while since I read this part of Applied Cryptography): finding the two primes breaks the key, and so its security is based on the difficulty of factoring really large numbers into prime constituents.
This article is referring to
The research referred to here is a way to speed up the factoring of large numbers, apparently by a factor of about 3 - it doesn't break the algorithm, it just speeds up a brute force attack. If it took 3000 years to break a 2048 bit RSA key before, now it'd take 1000 years. Barring more such discoveries . . .
Don't panic is a very good response to this - it's a serioius discovery, and it changes the risk factors involved with using RSA crypto, but it doesn't throw everything out the window.
Finally, I'd really suggest reading at least the interesting bits of Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier. It explains a lot of this stuff, and gives you a good framework within which to put this kind of thing.
himi
Asbestos is far from harmless . . . It's seriously carcinogenic. It's released from materials containing it in many ways, including just sitting out in the sunlight until the glue binding it together into fibre boards breaks down . . .
Getting rid of asbestos wasn't a "health nuts" thing, it was a perfectly sensible and sane decisions - it's hard to say, but it's possible that banning it's use has saved more lives than were lost in the WTC. Whatever the case, it's a really bad example.
himi
That said, anything that will compile and run properly on ppc (big-endian) as well as x86 (little-endian) should be endian-clean, and hence should run fine on a mainframe.
himi
They don't sell gaming boards, they well professional boards - they're competing with NVidia's Quadro cards, not with the GeForce cards.
3DLabs are actually (I believe) the best selling make of professional graphics cards - they're not a wannabe by any stretch of the imagination.
himi
The brackets indicate that the contents of said brackets are seperate from the rest of the sentence - an addition, but not part of it. So the sentence actually reads: "You cannot include an additional operating system unless you have a seperate legal agreement with Microsoft."
That's unambiguous in my book, and I'd imagine the court would think so, too.
himi
Nothing except the licensing scheme that said they had to pay a full license fee for Windows for every system that /could/ run Windows . . . MS' approach to defeating piracy: charge people for the OS even if they don't use it . . . . .
This may have been removed recently, but for a long time it was impossible to buy a clean box from an OEM manufacturer without paying for a Windows license anyway. This licensing scheme was accepted because the OEMs had no other option - they'd pay up, or lose the right to sell /any/ windows based machines.
MS really did have the OEMs by the balls with this - an OEM that couldn't sell windows, or had to pay significantly more for windows (ie, retail prices, rather than the OEM deals that other companies were getting), basically went out of business. They /had/ to accede to MS' demands. And that's why MS is screwed now that they've been judged to be a monopoly - suddenly, all those licensing schemes/scams are illegal, and people are actually piping up and saying "No, I'm not going to bend over for you". Be's suit is an example of this.
himi
I'm talking about heat that is /radiated away/ from a body - this is typically how heat is removed from a CPU or the like, even when there's a fan.
Take a chunk of metal, paint it matt black, heat it to 100C, then sit it in air at 25C for 20 minutes. Do the same with an equal mass and density chunk of the same metal that has a mirrored finish. You'll find that the matt black chunk has cooled down a lot more than the mirrored one. The matt black surface radiates more energy than the mirrored one.
Look in any first-year university physics textbook for a discussion of black body radiation and related stuff . . .
himi
A reflective surface radiates far less heat than a non-reflective surface - basically speaking, it radiates at the same rate that it absorbs.
As for your other arguments . . . Well, I'm afraid you really don't seem to understand what you're talking about - that simple bit of physics is a convenient example.
himi
I believe that's the currently proposed fix - it may change as people understand the details more, but I think that's the basic idea.
himi
That option might make a difference with NVidia cards, but it's not going to make any difference to anyone who's using something else (except for making their Xserver fail to start, because of an unknown option in the config file).
The mem=nopentium option to the kernel works everywhere for this particular problem.
himi
"Pay us this money so that we can do this development, and when we're done we'll make it publically available"
That's not extortion by even the broadest definition imaginable.
himi
The problem with this analogy is that it looks at the wrong thing. The performance of a CPU isn't a matter of how quickly it can do one thing (ie, how fast it can finish a race), it's a matter of how much it can get done in a given period.
/big/ assumption, but for the purposes of this argument it's reasonable)), that means the P4 is retiring about 1.33 instructions per clock cycle. (Note that the 1.6ipc figure for the K7 is from an old RealWorldTech article by Paul DeMone that I can't find right now - it's somewhere in the Silicon Insider archives . . . )
A much better analogy is water flowing through a pipe. You want to get some volume of water out the far end, so you have two choices: you can pump the water through a thin pipe really quickly (the P4), or you can pump the water at a slower speed, but through a much fatter pipe (the K7).
The K7 core can retire, on average, about 1.6 instructions per clock cycle. At 1.667GHz, that means that your XP1900+ can complete about 2.667 billion instructions per second.
Now, assuming the equivalent performance on benchmarks and the like indicates that the P4 2000 can complete about the same number of instructions (since it gets the same results at that clock speed (this is a
/That/ is the fundamental difference between the two chips: the K7 completes more instructions every time it's clock ticks. That's what people talk about when they talk about "brainiac" versus "speed demon" processors: the P4 gets it's performance because it completes lots and lots of clock cycles in a given period; the K7 gets it's performance because it does a lot in every clock cycle, even though it completes fewer cycles in the same period.
CPUs aren't a horse race - they're a production line, where what matters isn't how fast an individual thing is done, but how many things get done in a given time period.
himi
It's rather hard to read non-existent documentation. This bug isn't listed in the AMD K7 errata, which is why it wasn't found - the only 'documentation' for this is the Win2k patch that AMD provided.
Linux and *BSD just do things differently: it's not a matter of one set of hackers being better than the other.
himi
Could you point me at the official statistics that show this? Having seen the NRA stats (which were basically a complete misreading of some Australian Bureau of Statistics information, which the ABS considered to be of no statistical significance), I'm very leery of taking stats like that without references, and references pointing to /official/ stats.
/anyone/ is good. It's one reason I support gun control.
/don't/ see violence as bad form to make it everyone else's problems, since they're nicely armed.
If I had more time I'd go search around the ABS site and get some hard figures, but I don't . . .
As for shooting a police officer being good . . . I don't think shooting
Finally, the violent crime rate in the UK is low because they simply have a peaceful society . . . Violence as a solution to problems is considred really bad form. It's similar here in Australia, too . . . I imagine it's the case in the US, as well - things are probably skewed seriously by the fact that it's so easy for those people who
himi
That's something noted on the site I linked to: the murder rate with weapons other than guns is fairly constant around the world. Likewise the suicide rate (in Australia, 80% of firearms related deaths were due to suicide) - there's no evidence of people replacing guns with other things when they're doing their dirty deeds, and in fact evidence to the contrary.
The thing that sets the US apart is the availability of guns - the only other places where there are as many guns are there are people are places where there's recently been a war, or where armed conflict is part of life.
Go read the guncontrol.ca site - they have lots of good stuff.
himi
As a number of other posters have said, Australians tend to ignore laws that they don't agree with. Unless there are people standing over us, we'll just live our lives however we feel happy and ignore the stupid laws. The good laws simply codify what the majority consider reasonable, so very few people have problems with them.
/works/ - our rights aren't written down on paper, they're negotiated on a continual basis. This makes things very flexible, and means that our rights are always immediately apropriate to the current situation - we don't have things like the US's 2nd amendmant, which was a nice idea when it was made, but is kind of pointless in an age when there's a centrally controlled military force.
/is/ a very free and fair society - it's consistently rated one of the most pleasant places to live in the world. Hiccoughs like this happen, but by and large they don't seriously affect things.
Another thing to note is that our constitution doesn't codify anything other than how the state governments relate to the federal government - we don't have any bill of rights saying that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, or anything like that. Rights like that are established through a combination of legislation, the actions of the courts, and public opinion about things. And, contrary to what a lot of Americans seem to think, this process actually
A large part of the reason this kind of legislation has come through is because of the work of one man, who just happened to hold the balance of power in the senate - basically, in order to pass bills, the government of the day needed to have his vote. So, parties would pander to his (very unrepresentative) views on things like morality, and support legislation like this in order to buy his support.
Australia
himi