... in Manchester, UK, several weeks ago. Either it's not the same film (how many "Lords of the Rings" films are there out there on limited release in the UK right now?), or his opinion of it being complete crap is misguided.
... as the guy from Oldham, who has managed to get two other indivduals to stump up 250,000 GBP each (a married couple IIRC), and who is planning on taking them out up past the 58 mile boundary within a few months?
In the North Manchester (UK) area, there seem to be quite a few of these little projects knocking around.
I think wget in a tight loop might be good fun here.;-)
That's not the way it works.
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 1
I have a law - let's call is w2gy's law. It goes something like this:
The number of vulnerabilites and tools available to attack any given operating system or piece of software is directly proportional to the number of installations of that operating system or piece of software.
In other words, lots of people use Outlook Express, so virus writers write their warez to exploit it - they will put time and effort into it that nobody is prepared to really put into finding holes in mutt because there are more people running it. Similarly, a large number of lame websites run NT, so web defacers will spend time and effort investigating how to break NT/IIS. If a hacker wants to break into a Solaris box (where all the fun stuff is, apparently) they are going to try and break it - if there is nothing out there running Solaris, they won't try.
The opposite is also true - when was the last time you saw Plan9 or even QNX up on Bugtraq? Why? Because nobody runs it, nobody is interested. There is nobody out there who is going to come up with holes that they can never exploit in the real world.
So, as to whether OS X will get lots of new tools depends on how well it sells. It took NT a good year or so in the market place before people started taking interest and we started to see tools like Back Orifice.
I used to work for a large ISP in the UK that was spending a lot of time on putting people on 24/7 due to unreliable kit from manufacturers. The Director of Ops felt we might be "fixing" kit to make the most out of call-out pay (ISP being the lowest paying sector possible), so decided to swap the tables around.
For one of our customers, we had to be tested by an independent company to match to an SLA in terms of dial-up performance, speed of access, etc. so the scheme worked like this:
A pot of cash was put up - say $6,000/month. If we did far better than the SLA stated, the whole lot was up for grabs. If we got just inside, $4,000 was up for grabs. If we missed the SLA, no money was available.
What would then happen is that for every day a person did remote call-out they got a point. If they drove into work to fix something, they got an extra point. If they did a whole day at the weekend, they got an extra 2 points, etc.
At the end of the month, all the points were added up, and the amount available from the performance we had acheived was divided by this number of points, giving money per point. This was then awarded accordingly. I left after making about $10,000 on this scheme over 6 months, but I know one guy who still works there doubled his salary on this.
What's more, the network is in better shape too, as it has to meet high standards for the money to be paid out. Quite effective really.
A friend gave me this technique when doing his final-year project for his Masters at UMIST. You search the on-line journal for the paper. The paper is likely to be listed with the name of the author, and the title - put these into Google or Altavista and 9 times out of 10 you will find the author's homepage. It is likely that on this page you will find that the author has put his paper up himself there, free of charge, for the world to see.
As our unofficial company slogan goes - "There's ways round that" - (c) Wargames.;-)
What I'm curious about is the use of the word "many" in the sentence - what do all the other porn companies do if they're not making X-rated videos and popular erotic websites? Sell home-made cookies?
Whilst we're on the subject, I've been thinking about Asimov's laws recently and decided that they are complete crap. How the hell is a robot supposed to determine what is human or not. In addition how is it supposed to work out whether any action could indirectly harm a human? Give it a book on Chaos Theory and all of a sudden, picking up a can of Coke in Utah too quickly will cause an earthquake in China. All very silly.
The most important thing about selective censorship (which is what we are discussing here) is that you need to determine who decides what is offensive. You can not take a majority vote, as that can be corrupted easily via the use of propoganda itself. You can't choose one man as his descisions may not be unbiased. This is all far too spiritual if you ask me.
For example, I find scat very offensive (and if you don't know what it is, click on the link, but be warned - it's not nice - the name of the link when you hover over it should be a big enough clue). However, other people find it highly arousing. Should I deny consenting adults their right to indulge in whatever they wish to, or to share pictures with others? If they are both consenting and capable of making their own minds up, why should I have the right to censor them?
In addition, if you tell somebody they can't do something or they can't believe something, they will actively persue those actions or thoughts in order to undermine you. What do you think neo-Nazism is all about? You really think that they're doing it because they really think Jews are bad people? No, it's because they know it pisses off the establishment they hate so much. Same thought processes that teenagers who don't get along with their parents smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and listen to heavy metal - it pisses off their parents and makes them belong to a group that is in the same position as them.
All in all, selective censorship is a very bad thing. any government minister who seeks to censor ideas, thoughts, or opinions is no better than Hitler himself. The reason why we as a society see ourselves as better than Hitler's society is that we allow that freedom of consenting adults who do not actively harm others, whilst protecting the innocent and those who can't protect themselves (i.e. children). To descend into this quagmire is unthinkable.
Everybody is always looking for The Next Big Thing. Over the last 7 years or so I've been hanging around the net, I've seen technologies come and go, some of which might make a resurgance yet (multicast, server-push, etc.) but the poster is right in that whenever somebody touts a technology as the next big thing, it promptly dies. Everybody thought Napster would be the next big thing, but Gnutella is chugging away building up bigger and bigger every day.
The problem with p2p is that it requires two things that many people don't have. The first is bandwidth which is a technical obstacle that will be overcome with time and/or search pattern algorithms becoming less bandwidth-sucking. The other alternative rather than pushing every search query over almost every node is to use a more hierarchical system, whereby core nodes handle that traffic. A cross between the Napster server model and the Gnutella distributed model if you like.
The second is more of a social problem - we as a species lack generosity. We don't want other people to be using our bandwidth to download stuff they want, and we want to keep as much of our property and territory to ourselves as possible. It's part of human nature - we want to be individuals with the ability to get people off our patch if we want.
The truly "sexy" thing about p2p, and why it might be so popular with geeks in particular is the notion of the collective sharing knowledge and information over a vast geographical area - it's the closest to becoming the Borg or getting into Star Trek any of us will ever come. It's a salient, beautiful idea that appeals to us all, and the only reason why we don't like the Borg as characters realistically is because they assimilate - coming back to the right of the individual to protect their individuality. The idea of sharing, or being forced to share, scares the middle classes of p2p as much as the Borg.
As to what defines p2p, or whether it is TNBT, nobody really knows. I suspect the next generation will be based on a large group of core servers that handle the searches and direct content that are connected to high-bandwidth pipes, and allow for small groups (say 20 at a time) of nodes to connect and use the functionality of p2p without having to use the bandwidth requirement. This would enable a very a strong community presence to develop, for p2p to prosper, and for bandwidth requirements to be centralised where they should be.
I also suspect that if p2p does become successful, it will be part of society as a whole becoming less selfish, or the fact that individuality becomes less important to us. Alternatively, all content could be copied to the peering server that a user connects to, thereby allowing for the user to become unaware of the part they have played in the transfer of material at no/little cost to themselves.
I think technical solutions are more likely than a population of 6 billion people deciding individuality is over-rated. Maybe I'm wrong....
Students would be able to view previous examinations, learn exactly what questions professors ask, and learn only those questions. This will lead to focused studying instead of the broad studying necessary for a real education.
You mean you were never given past papers at University? Wow. You must have some really unimaginiative and lazy professors and lecturers. I studied at UMIST Computation and all past papers for all courses including a large amount of the notes were freely available internally, both in paper and Word.doc format. No problems there because the papers were so different every time.
Professors will have extra work to do in keeping the web page up-to-date.
Ummm... what do you think they write their lecture notes and exam papers on? A typewriter? No, all this means is that Word and Powerpoint files just have to be linked to on a departmental web-site. If they want to convert to (bad) HTML, that's not really a problem in Office is it?
Students would grow mad at professors who do not keep their site up-to-date, leading to lawsuits pertaining to fair education, etc.
Only in America would somebody sue a professor for not keeping his course notes up to date. How brain dead are you people? It's your job to learn and to go and find information - if all you're going to do is read just the notes for the course the night before the exam, you can't really expect to be able to sue when you fail, can you?
Students with computers at home (i.e., financially stable students) will have access at all times, while others (minorities, etc) will not, leading to an even bigger gap between upper- and middle-class.
I think you'll find that the course notes will still be made available to the students on paper. If not, I'm sure there are some computer labs somewhere with printers.
This project is not about under-mining MIT. It's not about replacing notes with HTML. It's not about giving professors extra workload. It is however, about a 15-year old who has above average intelligence getting free access to professional materials that match his ability from anywhere in the world. You're just angry because you put yourself in debt going to college and seem to think that this proposal will replace a degree. It won't, but I suspect you don't have one anyway, huh?
I have to say, I think this is a great idea. I'm sure UMIST would do this at some point themselves, but I understand the main problem is with copyright retention and Universities stealing each other's materials. MIT is showing the rest of the world the way it should be done from now on.
I have to say, you're talking crap. Firstly, can I just ask exactly where Theo stated there were 7,000 users of OpenBSD? I can believe that only 7,000 CDs have shipped, but I know of one site in the UK running 100 installations alone. I also know that on one co-location site there is around 400 installations of FreeBSD, and seeing as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. all have a few hundred machines running FBSD, we're up to a thousand already. And you think there are only 36,400 FBSD users worldwide? Oh dear...
Secondly, FreeBSD never "went out of business" because it never was in business. Walnut Creek got bought up by BSDI for lots of other reasons, none of which to my knowledge were because they thought it was a good way to piss away money.
Redhat's marketing surveys may show BSD in decline, but I can't find any other mainstream that would suggest that is the case. It's growing. And quickly. The reason? Well, apart from having some tight code in there (even Linus admits the Linux kernel is only around now getting up to the performance of BSD), a cleaner and more secure base image and the fact that nearly every ISP in the world runs it (therefore admins are relatively cheap and knowledgeable), the community isn't full of morons who make up figures out of the air like you.:-)
There are many constructive tasks that robots could compete at, but instead, producers turn out endless streams of robot battle shows. Maybe the audience demand isn't there, but I haven't even seen a more constructive show tried.
The BBC runs a short series once a year called the "Robot Games" or somesuch. Done by the same production company as Robot Wars, the idea is that the robots compete in sort of Olympic-inspired athletics games. So, there is a competition for the robot that can jump the highest (with all energy being mechanically stored), go the fastest (without using wheels), etc. I seem to remember there is even a swimming contest.
It's kind of entertaining, but it was done in the style of the UK version of sportscast - robot pundits! I suspect that it will find it's way over to the US at some point soon. What suprises me is that the UK seems to be producing all of these shows like Robot Wars and Scrapheap Challenge that encourage scientific and engineering creativity that then get exported and renamed in the US.
The UK - home of the bedroom scientist and engineer, repressive IT laws and me.:-)
I don't know about you, but I sure as heck hope that this bit is someone's April Fool's joke that launched a little early.
That's a rather silly attitude. Firstly, do you honestly think that NASA would have a press release up on their site if this was the case? Secondly, don't you think if it were a hoax, by now somebody with an interest in the high-performance computing market would have piped up? Cray, Intel, IBM?
There is a lot of hype surrounding this and it's not helping. The point is, everybody who has a clue knows that standard CPUs suck - being able to do architecture emulation on an FPGA is a big step forward. It's not about being able to produce a 4-bit adder, or replacing ASICs necessarily. Just because you don't understand it and thought that your overclocked Celeron with neon lights all over it was the fastest PC in the world, doesn't mean that other people aren't going to try and beat you with alternative technology.:-)
When this was posted up I saw the words "Microsoft" and "Interoperability" in the same paragraph. I thought it was a typo and so when I came back to my screen 10 minutes later and it was still there, I decided to take a look.
One of the quotes on the page linked to here states "One of the great things about Windows 2000 is that it works so well in a mixed environment". Although Win2K might be better than previous versions, I'm having problems swallowing the attitude that is sitting behind the words on this page in a smugly ironic manner.
MSFT have evidently spent a great deal of time on making Win2K sit and play nicely in a non-MS environment. I ask myself, why didn't they just follow the standards tracks in the first place. Why did they feel they had to "add" to the RFCs? Why did they spend so much time money and effort in hiring developers that would produce software that would not interoperate with non-MS code?
My question then is this - has Microsoft come to the realisation that they don't own this industry and are going to have to start towing the RFC and standards track line, or will they continue to try and "innovate" and "expand" protocols, services and functions that the rest of the world do just fine?
This might read as a flame/troll, but I can assure you my intent is honest. I don't like what MS have done to a lot of things. The only good thing about NT that I ever liked was the TCP/IP stack, and that had been stolen from BSD 4.4 so I get rather ticked off when I'm told that there in an interoperability department at MSFT.
Data communications over power lines is nothing new. In the UK Norweb were trialling this back in about '98. A lot of urban legends were started back then about being able to snarf people's traffic from hanging around street lighting. It looked very promising at the time, and a lot of people got very excited.
Norweb got into bed with Nortel, seeked and received EU approval to trial the system and they started offering access to schools around Manchester as well as some homes. It was called DPL (Direct Power Line) and provided 1 megabit of data symmetrically. The project was cancelled after "unsatisfactory results" but I can find no reference on-line as what the precise nature was. I seem to recall seeing an article in New Scientist that suggested the amount of noise on the power lines caused huge problems when trying to get the signal across distances any greater than one side of a lab to another. In addition, back in 1999 BT had announced ADSL and was then talking about speeds of 10Mb/sec (which haven't materialised) and many suspected that was a major cause of the project being scrapped.
I've worked in Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, Perl and C for CGI applications. All have their place, and although I prefer PHP, I'm glad ASP is coming to BSD. I just wish it was free. I have quite a few customers who approach me with ASP scripts, and I simply have to try and convert them into PHP (not as hard as it sounds - JScript is actually quite close to PHP in a lot of respects). There is a market for this, so as far as I'm concerned, good stuff...
At the end of the day, this is going to be touted more of a success for FreeBSD (more commercial apps) than it is for Chilli. I'll just hope that it won't have all the problems that ASP had on IIS the last time I tried it. IIS sucks, ASP rules.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
... in Manchester, UK, several weeks ago. Either it's not the same film (how many "Lords of the Rings" films are there out there on limited release in the UK right now?), or his opinion of it being complete crap is misguided.
... as the guy from Oldham, who has managed to get two other indivduals to stump up 250,000 GBP each (a married couple IIRC), and who is planning on taking them out up past the 58 mile boundary within a few months?
In the North Manchester (UK) area, there seem to be quite a few of these little projects knocking around.
I think wget in a tight loop might be good fun here. ;-)
I have a law - let's call is w2gy's law. It goes something like this:
The number of vulnerabilites and tools available to attack any given operating system or piece of software is directly proportional to the number of installations of that operating system or piece of software.
In other words, lots of people use Outlook Express, so virus writers write their warez to exploit it - they will put time and effort into it that nobody is prepared to really put into finding holes in mutt because there are more people running it. Similarly, a large number of lame websites run NT, so web defacers will spend time and effort investigating how to break NT/IIS. If a hacker wants to break into a Solaris box (where all the fun stuff is, apparently) they are going to try and break it - if there is nothing out there running Solaris, they won't try.
The opposite is also true - when was the last time you saw Plan9 or even QNX up on Bugtraq? Why? Because nobody runs it, nobody is interested. There is nobody out there who is going to come up with holes that they can never exploit in the real world.
So, as to whether OS X will get lots of new tools depends on how well it sells. It took NT a good year or so in the market place before people started taking interest and we started to see tools like Back Orifice.
I used to work for a large ISP in the UK that was spending a lot of time on putting people on 24/7 due to unreliable kit from manufacturers. The Director of Ops felt we might be "fixing" kit to make the most out of call-out pay (ISP being the lowest paying sector possible), so decided to swap the tables around.
For one of our customers, we had to be tested by an independent company to match to an SLA in terms of dial-up performance, speed of access, etc. so the scheme worked like this:
A pot of cash was put up - say $6,000/month. If we did far better than the SLA stated, the whole lot was up for grabs. If we got just inside, $4,000 was up for grabs. If we missed the SLA, no money was available.
What would then happen is that for every day a person did remote call-out they got a point. If they drove into work to fix something, they got an extra point. If they did a whole day at the weekend, they got an extra 2 points, etc.
At the end of the month, all the points were added up, and the amount available from the performance we had acheived was divided by this number of points, giving money per point. This was then awarded accordingly. I left after making about $10,000 on this scheme over 6 months, but I know one guy who still works there doubled his salary on this.
What's more, the network is in better shape too, as it has to meet high standards for the money to be paid out. Quite effective really.
A friend gave me this technique when doing his final-year project for his Masters at UMIST. You search the on-line journal for the paper. The paper is likely to be listed with the name of the author, and the title - put these into Google or Altavista and 9 times out of 10 you will find the author's homepage. It is likely that on this page you will find that the author has put his paper up himself there, free of charge, for the world to see.
;-)
As our unofficial company slogan goes - "There's ways round that" - (c) Wargames.
What I'm curious about is the use of the word "many" in the sentence - what do all the other porn companies do if they're not making X-rated videos and popular erotic websites? Sell home-made cookies?
You could always relive that spirit:
http://www.textfiles.com
Whilst we're on the subject, I've been thinking about Asimov's laws recently and decided that they are complete crap. How the hell is a robot supposed to determine what is human or not. In addition how is it supposed to work out whether any action could indirectly harm a human? Give it a book on Chaos Theory and all of a sudden, picking up a can of Coke in Utah too quickly will cause an earthquake in China. All very silly.
Just a thought. Whilst we were here.
The most important thing about selective censorship (which is what we are discussing here) is that you need to determine who decides what is offensive. You can not take a majority vote, as that can be corrupted easily via the use of propoganda itself. You can't choose one man as his descisions may not be unbiased. This is all far too spiritual if you ask me.
For example, I find scat very offensive (and if you don't know what it is, click on the link, but be warned - it's not nice - the name of the link when you hover over it should be a big enough clue). However, other people find it highly arousing. Should I deny consenting adults their right to indulge in whatever they wish to, or to share pictures with others? If they are both consenting and capable of making their own minds up, why should I have the right to censor them?
In addition, if you tell somebody they can't do something or they can't believe something, they will actively persue those actions or thoughts in order to undermine you. What do you think neo-Nazism is all about? You really think that they're doing it because they really think Jews are bad people? No, it's because they know it pisses off the establishment they hate so much. Same thought processes that teenagers who don't get along with their parents smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and listen to heavy metal - it pisses off their parents and makes them belong to a group that is in the same position as them.
All in all, selective censorship is a very bad thing. any government minister who seeks to censor ideas, thoughts, or opinions is no better than Hitler himself. The reason why we as a society see ourselves as better than Hitler's society is that we allow that freedom of consenting adults who do not actively harm others, whilst protecting the innocent and those who can't protect themselves (i.e. children). To descend into this quagmire is unthinkable.
Everybody is always looking for The Next Big Thing. Over the last 7 years or so I've been hanging around the net, I've seen technologies come and go, some of which might make a resurgance yet (multicast, server-push, etc.) but the poster is right in that whenever somebody touts a technology as the next big thing, it promptly dies. Everybody thought Napster would be the next big thing, but Gnutella is chugging away building up bigger and bigger every day.
The problem with p2p is that it requires two things that many people don't have. The first is bandwidth which is a technical obstacle that will be overcome with time and/or search pattern algorithms becoming less bandwidth-sucking. The other alternative rather than pushing every search query over almost every node is to use a more hierarchical system, whereby core nodes handle that traffic. A cross between the Napster server model and the Gnutella distributed model if you like.
The second is more of a social problem - we as a species lack generosity. We don't want other people to be using our bandwidth to download stuff they want, and we want to keep as much of our property and territory to ourselves as possible. It's part of human nature - we want to be individuals with the ability to get people off our patch if we want.
The truly "sexy" thing about p2p, and why it might be so popular with geeks in particular is the notion of the collective sharing knowledge and information over a vast geographical area - it's the closest to becoming the Borg or getting into Star Trek any of us will ever come. It's a salient, beautiful idea that appeals to us all, and the only reason why we don't like the Borg as characters realistically is because they assimilate - coming back to the right of the individual to protect their individuality. The idea of sharing, or being forced to share, scares the middle classes of p2p as much as the Borg.
As to what defines p2p, or whether it is TNBT, nobody really knows. I suspect the next generation will be based on a large group of core servers that handle the searches and direct content that are connected to high-bandwidth pipes, and allow for small groups (say 20 at a time) of nodes to connect and use the functionality of p2p without having to use the bandwidth requirement. This would enable a very a strong community presence to develop, for p2p to prosper, and for bandwidth requirements to be centralised where they should be.
I also suspect that if p2p does become successful, it will be part of society as a whole becoming less selfish, or the fact that individuality becomes less important to us. Alternatively, all content could be copied to the peering server that a user connects to, thereby allowing for the user to become unaware of the part they have played in the transfer of material at no/little cost to themselves.
I think technical solutions are more likely than a population of 6 billion people deciding individuality is over-rated. Maybe I'm wrong....
Students would be able to view previous examinations, learn exactly what questions professors ask, and learn only those questions. This will lead to focused studying instead of the broad studying necessary for a real education.
.doc format. No problems there because the papers were so different every time.
You mean you were never given past papers at University? Wow. You must have some really unimaginiative and lazy professors and lecturers. I studied at UMIST Computation and all past papers for all courses including a large amount of the notes were freely available internally, both in paper and Word
Professors will have extra work to do in keeping the web page up-to-date.
Ummm... what do you think they write their lecture notes and exam papers on? A typewriter? No, all this means is that Word and Powerpoint files just have to be linked to on a departmental web-site. If they want to convert to (bad) HTML, that's not really a problem in Office is it?
Students would grow mad at professors who do not keep their site up-to-date, leading to lawsuits pertaining to fair education, etc.
Only in America would somebody sue a professor for not keeping his course notes up to date. How brain dead are you people? It's your job to learn and to go and find information - if all you're going to do is read just the notes for the course the night before the exam, you can't really expect to be able to sue when you fail, can you?
Students with computers at home (i.e., financially stable students) will have access at all times, while others (minorities, etc) will not, leading to an even bigger gap between upper- and middle-class.
I think you'll find that the course notes will still be made available to the students on paper. If not, I'm sure there are some computer labs somewhere with printers.
This project is not about under-mining MIT. It's not about replacing notes with HTML. It's not about giving professors extra workload. It is however, about a 15-year old who has above average intelligence getting free access to professional materials that match his ability from anywhere in the world. You're just angry because you put yourself in debt going to college and seem to think that this proposal will replace a degree. It won't, but I suspect you don't have one anyway, huh?
I have to say, I think this is a great idea. I'm sure UMIST would do this at some point themselves, but I understand the main problem is with copyright retention and Universities stealing each other's materials. MIT is showing the rest of the world the way it should be done from now on.
I have to say, you're talking crap. Firstly, can I just ask exactly where Theo stated there were 7,000 users of OpenBSD? I can believe that only 7,000 CDs have shipped, but I know of one site in the UK running 100 installations alone. I also know that on one co-location site there is around 400 installations of FreeBSD, and seeing as Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. all have a few hundred machines running FBSD, we're up to a thousand already. And you think there are only 36,400 FBSD users worldwide? Oh dear...
:-)
Secondly, FreeBSD never "went out of business" because it never was in business. Walnut Creek got bought up by BSDI for lots of other reasons, none of which to my knowledge were because they thought it was a good way to piss away money.
Redhat's marketing surveys may show BSD in decline, but I can't find any other mainstream that would suggest that is the case. It's growing. And quickly. The reason? Well, apart from having some tight code in there (even Linus admits the Linux kernel is only around now getting up to the performance of BSD), a cleaner and more secure base image and the fact that nearly every ISP in the world runs it (therefore admins are relatively cheap and knowledgeable), the community isn't full of morons who make up figures out of the air like you.
There are many constructive tasks that robots could compete at, but instead, producers turn out endless streams of robot battle shows. Maybe the audience demand isn't there, but I haven't even seen a more constructive show tried.
:-)
The BBC runs a short series once a year called the "Robot Games" or somesuch. Done by the same production company as Robot Wars, the idea is that the robots compete in sort of Olympic-inspired athletics games. So, there is a competition for the robot that can jump the highest (with all energy being mechanically stored), go the fastest (without using wheels), etc. I seem to remember there is even a swimming contest.
It's kind of entertaining, but it was done in the style of the UK version of sportscast - robot pundits! I suspect that it will find it's way over to the US at some point soon. What suprises me is that the UK seems to be producing all of these shows like Robot Wars and Scrapheap Challenge that encourage scientific and engineering creativity that then get exported and renamed in the US.
The UK - home of the bedroom scientist and engineer, repressive IT laws and me.
I don't know about you, but I sure as heck hope that this bit is someone's April Fool's joke that launched a little early.
:-)
That's a rather silly attitude. Firstly, do you honestly think that NASA would have a press release up on their site if this was the case? Secondly, don't you think if it were a hoax, by now somebody with an interest in the high-performance computing market would have piped up? Cray, Intel, IBM?
There is a lot of hype surrounding this and it's not helping. The point is, everybody who has a clue knows that standard CPUs suck - being able to do architecture emulation on an FPGA is a big step forward. It's not about being able to produce a 4-bit adder, or replacing ASICs necessarily. Just because you don't understand it and thought that your overclocked Celeron with neon lights all over it was the fastest PC in the world, doesn't mean that other people aren't going to try and beat you with alternative technology.
When this was posted up I saw the words "Microsoft" and "Interoperability" in the same paragraph. I thought it was a typo and so when I came back to my screen 10 minutes later and it was still there, I decided to take a look.
One of the quotes on the page linked to here states "One of the great things about Windows 2000 is that it works so well in a mixed environment". Although Win2K might be better than previous versions, I'm having problems swallowing the attitude that is sitting behind the words on this page in a smugly ironic manner.
MSFT have evidently spent a great deal of time on making Win2K sit and play nicely in a non-MS environment. I ask myself, why didn't they just follow the standards tracks in the first place. Why did they feel they had to "add" to the RFCs? Why did they spend so much time money and effort in hiring developers that would produce software that would not interoperate with non-MS code?
My question then is this - has Microsoft come to the realisation that they don't own this industry and are going to have to start towing the RFC and standards track line, or will they continue to try and "innovate" and "expand" protocols, services and functions that the rest of the world do just fine?
This might read as a flame/troll, but I can assure you my intent is honest. I don't like what MS have done to a lot of things. The only good thing about NT that I ever liked was the TCP/IP stack, and that had been stolen from BSD 4.4 so I get rather ticked off when I'm told that there in an interoperability department at MSFT.
Data communications over power lines is nothing new. In the UK Norweb were trialling this back in about '98. A lot of urban legends were started back then about being able to snarf people's traffic from hanging around street lighting. It looked very promising at the time, and a lot of people got very excited.
Norweb got into bed with Nortel, seeked and received EU approval to trial the system and they started offering access to schools around Manchester as well as some homes. It was called DPL (Direct Power Line) and provided 1 megabit of data symmetrically. The project was cancelled after "unsatisfactory results" but I can find no reference on-line as what the precise nature was. I seem to recall seeing an article in New Scientist that suggested the amount of noise on the power lines caused huge problems when trying to get the signal across distances any greater than one side of a lab to another. In addition, back in 1999 BT had announced ADSL and was then talking about speeds of 10Mb/sec (which haven't materialised) and many suspected that was a major cause of the project being scrapped.
I've worked in Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, Perl and C for CGI applications. All have their place, and although I prefer PHP, I'm glad ASP is coming to BSD. I just wish it was free. I have quite a few customers who approach me with ASP scripts, and I simply have to try and convert them into PHP (not as hard as it sounds - JScript is actually quite close to PHP in a lot of respects). There is a market for this, so as far as I'm concerned, good stuff...
:-)
At the end of the day, this is going to be touted more of a success for FreeBSD (more commercial apps) than it is for Chilli. I'll just hope that it won't have all the problems that ASP had on IIS the last time I tried it. IIS sucks, ASP rules.