They called out the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz by name, meaning they are *probably* targeting x86-64. It would truly be brain dead to back pedal to a 32-bit platform, but they have committed to an x86 family processor.
The main problem is that Mac frequently does this to their userbase.
They did the m68k to ppc migration, which was really rough, both for early adopters of the ppc platform and over time, those who bought m68k macs near end of the product life left out in the cold when new applications released.
Then, as the pain of that faded, they scrapped the also crappy classic OS9 for OSX, which caused essentially the same pain, but less so....
Now the pain of that migration is at and end and they are jumping processor architecture again, which is a really painful deal. They claim that their technology would be able to execute ppc code effectively, but they made similar claims at m68k to ppc time and that didn't work out either.
This time at least should be a pretty final step, if going to x86-64, since the architecture is a competitive one (AMD vs. Intel) and so much of the world runs on it, if it got screwed somehow, more than Apple would suffer. Picking m68k over x86 was a simple misprediction, picking ppc over x86 again was a mistake they are finally owning up to.
Hate to say it, but RedHat feels downright amatuerish next to SuSE, even before Novell came into things. They make bizarre decisions with respect to cutting-edge versus stability and their product, ending up frequently with stale versions and unstable features, providing piss-poor support and thinking they're the king of the freaking world.
I'm sorry, just in my dealings with SuSE and RedHat, I've had to deal with RedHat more because their stuff has been more broken, going so far as to point out one-line fixes to their enterprise kernel that have been part of vanilla linux for a year and have them reject them as not necessary, even though my systems were consistently kernel panicing because of that bug. They really have some issues. They have good people working there too, but the prevailing attitude is a very pompous and not conducive to good support. In essence, they frequently act like a monopoly that doesn't have to worry. Maybe it's because so many fanboys are drawn to them in applying for work and they have a hard time overcoming the signal to noise ratio in that regard when hiring.
SuSE has typically had a more solid product to begin with, but when problems have occurred, they have been far more professional and reasonable in helping to solve the problems.
Plasma and DLP are not particularly good options for computer displays in the common context.
Plasma, there simply isn't much point in and is too vulnerable to burn in for a computer display.
DLP is a reflective technology and therefore can only be used in projection systems with significant throw distances. Good for HTPC and presentations, but not for a desktop monitor.
OLED is what I'm looking forward to, if it lives up to hype.
The thing I really hate about at least LCD is the occurance of dead pixels. We keep getting fed bs about how one pixel is hardly noticable, but I sit here looking at a 6-month old 21" 1600x1200 LCD with only one dead pixel and it bugs the hell out of me. Other than that the display is the best I've seen, crisp, clear, black level is good, the pixel response time is noticably worse than CRT, but not bad.
Around #298 on the top500 list is on the order of a teraflop (a little more and looks like a 256-computer cluster (2-way). That would be a few racks and could be considered small-room sized.
Incidently, #1 on the list acheived ~70 teraflops, so 147 teraflops in 0.9mx1.5m is highly unlikely.
Keep in mind, when throwing around flops when talking HPC, you almost always talk about double-precision (64-bit) and all these game console makers and the like use single precision to get really high sounding numbers.
The whole point is supposedly the first disc remains copyable, but the copies of the 'original' are not copyable... I can't see how it works, but that is the intent.
Even if what you said were true, the quality would never diminish over time, that's the point of digital storage, that a perfect replica is possible without signal degradation.
I honestly wouldn't want to be in front of someone or next to someone who even *thinks* they know within 5cm (les than 2 freakin inches) how close they are, or park near someone who thinks they only need a 2cm (4/5 inch) margin of error while parallel parking/unparking, particularly to the car behind them.
It's the fact that so many people *think* they have that precise knowledge of where there car is that causes so many parking accidents.
Is it though? When driving your car, can you confidently say you know within a margin of error of 10 cm *exactly* where your car is, 1/3rd of a foot? You can bet pilots don't know within 10cm where there plane is relative to anything outside the plane. If any operation of such a large vehicle operated by a person required better than 10cm of precision to avoid damage, there would be serious problems..
Problem with this model is while it almost always works, businesses structuring their IT around a solution usually require a concrete guarantee that if it breaks, they *will* be able to obtain support from a vendor on very short notice, preferably with some liability attached to the prospect of the vendor failing. Also, they want they vendor to be on very strong footing in terms of staying power. That means most independent linux consulting agencies are out (this applies to MS as well, few stable consulting companies are around that offer support). The few that are stable and do service arbitrary linux distros are prohibitively expensive. Again, same applies to MS folk.
So it comes down to the hardware and software vendor being the primary source of comfortable support for SMB. Unless you have a significantly large deployment, or could possibly have one (not a possibility for most SMBs), even the Tier I vendors will tell you to take a hike and take up a problem with your linux distribution vendor, while under MS they offer even to individual users first-level support, since they pretty much have to and economies of scale allow them to do this for the customer base drawn by this feature.
Now, putting the Tier one vendor's direct support of MS aside, it would come down to the cost of buying a linux distribution with reputable enterprise support, or MS. Currently, Red Hat and SuSE/Novell are essentially the only options there. SMBs would be comparing MS licensing/support costs to RedHat/SuSE/Novell costs and up front it at least appears MS provides better enterprise support than the linux distros, and so SMBs have little incentive to move.
Other details of the MS support structure vs RedHat/SuSE/Novell and the nature of the platform may change the true support cost picture, but few SMBs will ever have a good way of seeing anything but the up front costs.
I know more than a couple particularly large corporations have both technical implementations and strict policies about making it non-trivial to keep email. Currently, any email that sits in my mailbox for more than 90-days unless I back it up gets automatically deleted. This is not due to storage/budget constraints, but entirely due to some perceived decreased liability.
I wonder if this judgement will make them rethink their hopes that if they throw it away it can never come back to haunt anyone..
This exploit is severe enough to really worry about. I can't believe so many people are saying 'oh, no big deal, no worms are bothering to try to use this, so there's no problem'.
The problem is akin to the exploits with: https://phish.site/https://your.bank.access/ being displayed as simply 'your.bank.access', except worse, as an automated whilelist failed it's job before even having to fool a person, leaving the default install wide open for a time.
It is good to see the rapid response on the server, and I look forward to more robust, thorough update handling code, but the architecture is badly broken when you can hook malicious local-run code onto a widely accepted legit install package url. To be clear to folks: The whitelist *does not* protect against this, as so many have claimed, no one would be bitching if that were the case, the problem is that an attacker need only know a legit xpi url for the browser, and can use that to piggyback malicious code.
The only default-whitelisted sites now employ some random url generation to make it a moving target, so it is now much more difficult to exploit, but still needs patching badly...
So it does sound like, essentially, they likely didn't specifically how it was going to break, but simply had the mindset of 'it's old, something's going to break, we need to refresh this'. That would be dangerous thinking if it is true, it just happened to be the case this time.
The reaction most people are having is to say 'code is 20 years old, throw it out and redo it right!' which is a really bad philosophy for proven systems. In this case, for example, the prudent response is to examine the code and review all the unhandled limitations/wrap arounds of this nature, making them all more cleanly handled and if unable to address modern needs, conservatively work to up the limits. What you have is 20 years of proven reliability, code doesn't automatically age and become crap without being touched.
Their solution is probably the best short term solution, divide things up so that the limit is not hit, while preserving the proven reliability aspect of the code.
At a minimum, there should be some amount of work to make sure the value dosesn't wrap, and produces some more acceptable effect even if not incrementing the size of the data type.
(farming -> industry -> services -> whatever_is_next)
The problem here is that *no one* has ever been able to find something that they could use in that 'whatever_is_next' placeholder. I hear a lot of people say the job market is shifting elsewhere, and in addressing people losing their jobs to outsourcing telling them to 'retrain and find another job'. I hear no one say were we could possibly be shifting or what to retrain for. This is also ignoring that the jobs people are suffering the loss of nowadays took 4 or more years of college to train, and that training cost will now be a waste. Before, it was bad enough that people who didn't have to go to college before to earn their standard of living had to largely cough up the cash for one round of expensive training, now people are telling them that as soon as they figure out 'whatever_is_next', they will have to again pony up the cash for *another* degree to be competitive.
I think the writing is on the wall pretty clearly here, the nation has incredible debt, very poor import/export circumstances, and still maintains a very high cost of living (executives suck up what would have been reduced prices and instead enjoy getting richer on fatter profit margins) while whittling away at pay rates and jobs. Something is going to break, and it seems like we might be close (the recession of the dot-bomb days has to this day not fully gone away, and some indicators show we are just going to dive right back down without ever getting our heads fully above water for that breath of air).
As a user of Linux/Firefox, and such, the more people that use the platform/applications, the more software publishers and web developers are willing to acknowledge and make efforts to support such paltforms and applications.
Easy example is the web. As more and more people use Firefox, fewer sites rely on proprietary ActiveX controls, etc, which improves the web experience with firefox.
Same with linux, particularly with commercial games. I'm not that interested in them, but some people are very motivated to have a larger group so that they will receive better support.
I actually explained that away as the ships slowing down intentionally, the reaver ship to test the reaction of the Serenity, and Serenity doing so in order to behave just as they need to in order show recognition that they had the proper amount of fear of the reavers.
Same might apply to why they were so close against all odds, the reaver ship diverting its course to screw with the people on Serenity's head for the hell of it.
Of course, it seems strange considering how instinctive the reavers were supposed to be and it seems too tame a pasttime for them to bother with...
All I have is a simple SDL (i.e. for X or framebuffer) file browser that can take keyboard, mouse, or joystick input to navigate a directory tree (with large text for TV out), and have a very basic xml-specified file association scheme (i.e. to say to use python module X to play *.[aA][vV][iI]) Wasn't written for general use and wanted to have a single joystick button configuration, so you have to have a python wrapper for your media player, which I wrote for zsnes and mplayer... In other words just generally crude code.
It was useful for me because my directory structure was logical and I didn't want to have a flat view or have to create a database to describe what I already categorized using filesystem structure. Also, file managers are not designed for TV-out/remote/joystick operation, and had more functionality than I wanted (i.e., the deletion, removing) when a file browser made more sense.
If this sounds relevant, I'll post the code to a sourceforge project and let you know in this thread.
So much for not getting caught up in a debate, that was pretty dismissive of Linux for a 'nothing is absolutely better' post.
Gaming, agreed, the driver support is there for fancy games and the commercial support is there for publishers, while at the same time nearly all good open-source games get ported to Windows. This is not a technical advantage, but an advantage of market penetration, and one that is a chicken and egg dilemma that may never get solved (gamers won't embrace linux until there are games, publishers won't embrace linux until gamers do).
Business applications, it really depends on which 'business apps' we are talking about. For many applications, you can essentially quote the previous paragraph. Quicken, MSOffice, and the incredible amount of one-off crap that can only afford to cater to one platform, and only one platform has a large enough market to sustain them....
However, a number of professional engineering applications can benefit greatly from running on Linux workstations. The business app argument is simply too broad, and ultimately this argument comes down to what applications are needed...
Enterprise servers, here is one field where I find it hard to believe anyone would automatically dismiss Linux and proclaim Windows the hands-down winner. To some extent, this too boils down to what administrative staff you can acquire and their experience, but if there is one profitable place where Linux shines it is making effective use of hardware resources in a robust, easily managed and reliable fashion. I will say for directory, maybe AD could be considered the better choice, Directory in general hasn't needed to be high performance, and ease of administration of AD is fairly high compared to OpenLDAP. However, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Apache, Samba, et. al. offer more flexibility than the MS-only counterparts, and even when the application can run under either platform, they are generally oriented toward linux-like behavior, feel more native in Linux, and greatly benefit from less-cruft found in Linux.
Streaming media to your TV? I would say MythTV hands down is *the* incredible platform of choice. I dislike their file browser for non-TV videos (it assumes encoded movies and a flat-view would be appropriate, even though series would be better represented by expandable entries), but I wrote my own and that really isn't the majority of people who would want that feature.
Slashdot Mirror
They called out the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz by name, meaning they are *probably* targeting x86-64. It would truly be brain dead to back pedal to a 32-bit platform, but they have committed to an x86 family processor.
The main problem is that Mac frequently does this to their userbase.
They did the m68k to ppc migration, which was really rough, both for early adopters of the ppc platform and over time, those who bought m68k macs near end of the product life left out in the cold when new applications released.
Then, as the pain of that faded, they scrapped the also crappy classic OS9 for OSX, which caused essentially the same pain, but less so....
Now the pain of that migration is at and end and they are jumping processor architecture again, which is a really painful deal. They claim that their technology would be able to execute ppc code effectively, but they made similar claims at m68k to ppc time and that didn't work out either.
This time at least should be a pretty final step, if going to x86-64, since the architecture is a competitive one (AMD vs. Intel) and so much of the world runs on it, if it got screwed somehow, more than Apple would suffer. Picking m68k over x86 was a simple misprediction, picking ppc over x86 again was a mistake they are finally owning up to.
Because they call out by name the Pentium 3.6 GHz as the platform for the associated development kit.
Xbox 360 is powerpc based
That's the combination to my luggage!
Wow, such a fanboy.
Hate to say it, but RedHat feels downright amatuerish next to SuSE, even before Novell came into things. They make bizarre decisions with respect to cutting-edge versus stability and their product, ending up frequently with stale versions and unstable features, providing piss-poor support and thinking they're the king of the freaking world.
I'm sorry, just in my dealings with SuSE and RedHat, I've had to deal with RedHat more because their stuff has been more broken, going so far as to point out one-line fixes to their enterprise kernel that have been part of vanilla linux for a year and have them reject them as not necessary, even though my systems were consistently kernel panicing because of that bug. They really have some issues. They have good people working there too, but the prevailing attitude is a very pompous and not conducive to good support. In essence, they frequently act like a monopoly that doesn't have to worry. Maybe it's because so many fanboys are drawn to them in applying for work and they have a hard time overcoming the signal to noise ratio in that regard when hiring.
SuSE has typically had a more solid product to begin with, but when problems have occurred, they have been far more professional and reasonable in helping to solve the problems.
Plasma and DLP are not particularly good options for computer displays in the common context.
Plasma, there simply isn't much point in and is too vulnerable to burn in for a computer display.
DLP is a reflective technology and therefore can only be used in projection systems with significant throw distances. Good for HTPC and presentations, but not for a desktop monitor.
OLED is what I'm looking forward to, if it lives up to hype.
The thing I really hate about at least LCD is the occurance of dead pixels. We keep getting fed bs about how one pixel is hardly noticable, but I sit here looking at a 6-month old 21" 1600x1200 LCD with only one dead pixel and it bugs the hell out of me. Other than that the display is the best I've seen, crisp, clear, black level is good, the pixel response time is noticably worse than CRT, but not bad.
Game consoles and video cards are measured by their single-precision floating-point performance (32-bit).
HPC generally requires more precision, and as such the standard for performance measure is double precision (64-bit).
Game consoles, video chip makers mean something different when they talk flops than HPC community.
Game consoles and video chips operate primarily in single precision (32 bit) mode, hence the high numbers.
HPC generally requires double precision (64-bit) and that is the number used when discussing systems with that application in mind.
Where on that page does that say 147 teraflops?
Around #298 on the top500 list is on the order of a teraflop (a little more and looks like a 256-computer cluster (2-way). That would be a few racks and could be considered small-room sized.
Incidently, #1 on the list acheived ~70 teraflops, so 147 teraflops in 0.9mx1.5m is highly unlikely.
Keep in mind, when throwing around flops when talking HPC, you almost always talk about double-precision (64-bit) and all these game console makers and the like use single precision to get really high sounding numbers.
> Actually, I bet that the "topless beaches in France" would become an immensely popular search...
Oh yeah, those pixels are slightly more flesh/nipple colored than similar pixels on other beaches, I'm really excited here...
I guess maybe it is exciting, since on the internet it is so hard to find detailed, close up pictures of topless or naked people....
The whole point is supposedly the first disc remains copyable, but the copies of the 'original' are not copyable... I can't see how it works, but that is the intent.
Even if what you said were true, the quality would never diminish over time, that's the point of digital storage, that a perfect replica is possible without signal degradation.
I honestly wouldn't want to be in front of someone or next to someone who even *thinks* they know within 5cm (les than 2 freakin inches) how close they are, or park near someone who thinks they only need a 2cm (4/5 inch) margin of error while parallel parking/unparking, particularly to the car behind them.
It's the fact that so many people *think* they have that precise knowledge of where there car is that causes so many parking accidents.
Is it though? When driving your car, can you confidently say you know within a margin of error of 10 cm *exactly* where your car is, 1/3rd of a foot? You can bet pilots don't know within 10cm where there plane is relative to anything outside the plane. If any operation of such a large vehicle operated by a person required better than 10cm of precision to avoid damage, there would be serious problems..
Problem with this model is while it almost always works, businesses structuring their IT around a solution usually require a concrete guarantee that if it breaks, they *will* be able to obtain support from a vendor on very short notice, preferably with some liability attached to the prospect of the vendor failing. Also, they want they vendor to be on very strong footing in terms of staying power. That means most independent linux consulting agencies are out (this applies to MS as well, few stable consulting companies are around that offer support). The few that are stable and do service arbitrary linux distros are prohibitively expensive. Again, same applies to MS folk.
So it comes down to the hardware and software vendor being the primary source of comfortable support for SMB. Unless you have a significantly large deployment, or could possibly have one (not a possibility for most SMBs), even the Tier I vendors will tell you to take a hike and take up a problem with your linux distribution vendor, while under MS they offer even to individual users first-level support, since they pretty much have to and economies of scale allow them to do this for the customer base drawn by this feature.
Now, putting the Tier one vendor's direct support of MS aside, it would come down to the cost of buying a linux distribution with reputable enterprise support, or MS. Currently, Red Hat and SuSE/Novell are essentially the only options there. SMBs would be comparing MS licensing/support costs to RedHat/SuSE/Novell costs and up front it at least appears MS provides better enterprise support than the linux distros, and so SMBs have little incentive to move.
Other details of the MS support structure vs RedHat/SuSE/Novell and the nature of the platform may change the true support cost picture, but few SMBs will ever have a good way of seeing anything but the up front costs.
I know more than a couple particularly large corporations have both technical implementations and strict policies about making it non-trivial to keep email. Currently, any email that sits in my mailbox for more than 90-days unless I back it up gets automatically deleted. This is not due to storage/budget constraints, but entirely due to some perceived decreased liability.
I wonder if this judgement will make them rethink their hopes that if they throw it away it can never come back to haunt anyone..
Would tha be considered 'Informative'....
This exploit is severe enough to really worry about. I can't believe so many people are saying 'oh, no big deal, no worms are bothering to try to use this, so there's no problem'.
The problem is akin to the exploits with:
https://phish.site/https://your.bank.access/ being displayed as simply 'your.bank.access', except worse, as an automated whilelist failed it's job before even having to fool a person, leaving the default install wide open for a time.
It is good to see the rapid response on the server, and I look forward to more robust, thorough update handling code, but the architecture is badly broken when you can hook malicious local-run code onto a widely accepted legit install package url. To be clear to folks: The whitelist *does not* protect against this, as so many have claimed, no one would be bitching if that were the case, the problem is that an attacker need only know a legit xpi url for the browser, and can use that to piggyback malicious code.
The only default-whitelisted sites now employ some random url generation to make it a moving target, so it is now much more difficult to exploit, but still needs patching badly...
So it does sound like, essentially, they likely didn't specifically how it was going to break, but simply had the mindset of 'it's old, something's going to break, we need to refresh this'. That would be dangerous thinking if it is true, it just happened to be the case this time.
The reaction most people are having is to say 'code is 20 years old, throw it out and redo it right!' which is a really bad philosophy for proven systems. In this case, for example, the prudent response is to examine the code and review all the unhandled limitations/wrap arounds of this nature, making them all more cleanly handled and if unable to address modern needs, conservatively work to up the limits. What you have is 20 years of proven reliability, code doesn't automatically age and become crap without being touched.
Their solution is probably the best short term solution, divide things up so that the limit is not hit, while preserving the proven reliability aspect of the code.
At a minimum, there should be some amount of work to make sure the value dosesn't wrap, and produces some more acceptable effect even if not incrementing the size of the data type.
(farming -> industry -> services -> whatever_is_next)
The problem here is that *no one* has ever been able to find something that they could use in that 'whatever_is_next' placeholder. I hear a lot of people say the job market is shifting elsewhere, and in addressing people losing their jobs to outsourcing telling them to 'retrain and find another job'. I hear no one say were we could possibly be shifting or what to retrain for. This is also ignoring that the jobs people are suffering the loss of nowadays took 4 or more years of college to train, and that training cost will now be a waste. Before, it was bad enough that people who didn't have to go to college before to earn their standard of living had to largely cough up the cash for one round of expensive training, now people are telling them that as soon as they figure out 'whatever_is_next', they will have to again pony up the cash for *another* degree to be competitive.
I think the writing is on the wall pretty clearly here, the nation has incredible debt, very poor import/export circumstances, and still maintains a very high cost of living (executives suck up what would have been reduced prices and instead enjoy getting richer on fatter profit margins) while whittling away at pay rates and jobs. Something is going to break, and it seems like we might be close (the recession of the dot-bomb days has to this day not fully gone away, and some indicators show we are just going to dive right back down without ever getting our heads fully above water for that breath of air).
As a user of Linux/Firefox, and such, the more people that use the platform/applications, the more software publishers and web developers are willing to acknowledge and make efforts to support such paltforms and applications.
Easy example is the web. As more and more people use Firefox, fewer sites rely on proprietary ActiveX controls, etc, which improves the web experience with firefox.
Same with linux, particularly with commercial games. I'm not that interested in them, but some people are very motivated to have a larger group so that they will receive better support.
I actually explained that away as the ships slowing down intentionally, the reaver ship to test the reaction of the Serenity, and Serenity doing so in order to behave just as they need to in order show recognition that they had the proper amount of fear of the reavers.
Same might apply to why they were so close against all odds, the reaver ship diverting its course to screw with the people on Serenity's head for the hell of it.
Of course, it seems strange considering how instinctive the reavers were supposed to be and it seems too tame a pasttime for them to bother with...
All I have is a simple SDL (i.e. for X or framebuffer) file browser that can take keyboard, mouse, or joystick input to navigate a directory tree (with large text for TV out), and have a very basic xml-specified file association scheme (i.e. to say to use python module X to play *.[aA][vV][iI]) Wasn't written for general use and wanted to have a single joystick button configuration, so you have to have a python wrapper for your media player, which I wrote for zsnes and mplayer... In other words just generally crude code.
It was useful for me because my directory structure was logical and I didn't want to have a flat view or have to create a database to describe what I already categorized using filesystem structure. Also, file managers are not designed for TV-out/remote/joystick operation, and had more functionality than I wanted (i.e., the deletion, removing) when a file browser made more sense.
If this sounds relevant, I'll post the code to a sourceforge project and let you know in this thread.
So much for not getting caught up in a debate, that was pretty dismissive of Linux for a 'nothing is absolutely better' post.
Gaming, agreed, the driver support is there for fancy games and the commercial support is there for publishers, while at the same time nearly all good open-source games get ported to Windows. This is not a technical advantage, but an advantage of market penetration, and one that is a chicken and egg dilemma that may never get solved (gamers won't embrace linux until there are games, publishers won't embrace linux until gamers do).
Business applications, it really depends on which 'business apps' we are talking about. For many applications, you can essentially quote the previous paragraph. Quicken, MSOffice, and the incredible amount of one-off crap that can only afford to cater to one platform, and only one platform has a large enough market to sustain them....
However, a number of professional engineering applications can benefit greatly from running on Linux workstations. The business app argument is simply too broad, and ultimately this argument comes down to what applications are needed...
Enterprise servers, here is one field where I find it hard to believe anyone would automatically dismiss Linux and proclaim Windows the hands-down winner. To some extent, this too boils down to what administrative staff you can acquire and their experience, but if there is one profitable place where Linux shines it is making effective use of hardware resources in a robust, easily managed and reliable fashion. I will say for directory, maybe AD could be considered the better choice, Directory in general hasn't needed to be high performance, and ease of administration of AD is fairly high compared to OpenLDAP. However, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Apache, Samba, et. al. offer more flexibility than the MS-only counterparts, and even when the application can run under either platform, they are generally oriented toward linux-like behavior, feel more native in Linux, and greatly benefit from less-cruft found in Linux.
Streaming media to your TV? I would say MythTV hands down is *the* incredible platform of choice. I dislike their file browser for non-TV videos (it assumes encoded movies and a flat-view would be appropriate, even though series would be better represented by expandable entries), but I wrote my own and that really isn't the majority of people who would want that feature.
I think I have a new sig...