For File and Print services, according to independent tests conducted by PC Week Labs, yadda yadda yadda...
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't said test result in an immediate identification of the TCP/IP stack bottleneck, and a fix in the current development kernel?
First: Windows NT 4.0 Outperforms Linux On Common Customer Workloads
Then, in a bullet point: Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0. The largest file size Linux supports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB RAM.
Ok.... I have a couple of problems with this. First off, if you talk about common customer workloads and then talk about 2GB ram limits and 2GB file size limits, you are speaking once from your mouth and once from your ass. I work for a major entertainment company in the online division. We have web servers up the wazoo, mostly solaris admittedly, but I have yet to see anything break the 1GB barrier, much less two. In my mind, for the average small business, you're going to be able to get by on much less.
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
OK... lets see some screenshots of the uptime counts of the machines at these places.
The Linux community likes to talk about Linux as a stable and reliable operating system, yet there is no real world data or metrics and very limited customer evidence to back up these claims.
FUD, pure and simple. "Here, look at this operating system that is just hitting the big time. There isn't much existing data on it, so it must suck. Of course when NT was brand new, it didn't suck even though there was an equal dearth of hard data on it."
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System. This means that in the event of a system failure, such as a power outage, data loss or corruption is possible.
Well, I'll grant them that. On the other hand I've watched NT servers lose data without a system failure or a power loss.
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide 99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers.
Again, this is basically saying that because Linux ISN'T a well established OS, that it SHOULDN'T be. That's bullshit.
The very definition of Linux as an Open Software effort means that commercial companies like Red Hat will make money by charging for services. Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
Yes, but on the other hand, the lack of a single authoritative source of data, there is now room for real competetion between people providing support for your OS. Don't like the quality or cost of MS support? Too bad. Don't like the quality or cost of Linux support, well it if becomes lucrative enough there will be plenty of places for you to go to.
Linux is a UNIX-like operating system and is therefore complex to configure and manage.
Kind of like many of the systems and features MS keeps touting to prove how much cooler NT is than Linux? Has anyone here played with ActiveDirectory? How about NT's very beta version of NAT back when it was still NT 5 and not Win@K
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
First, I think that this is kind of woefully narrow minded. It also completely ignores the functionality of setuid in using administrative tools. The unix security model is far more versatile than it seems at first appearance. And the NT model is far more cumbersome.
Linux system administrators must spend huge amounts of time understanding the latest Linux bugs and determining what to do about them.
Personally I find the buffer overflow bugs a lot easier to understand than some of the stuff I've seen in HOTFIX descriptions. Personally I don't care, I just want the bug fixed, which usually means a new RPM and no reboot.
This is made complex due to the fact that there isn't a central location for security issues to be reported and fixed. In contrast Microsoft provides a single security repository for notification and fixes of security related issues.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
I'm not even going to bother.
Myth: Linux can replace Windows on the desktop
I have to grant MS just about everything they say here. But again, the problem is not that linux isn't suited to the desktop, just that it hasn't reached the critical point of support and ease of use. Whose fault that is is something I leave open for others to debate. Certainly though I don't think MS is helping at all. I wonder how many engineers at MS would like to port DirectX to linux. Or certain MS apps? But that's simply not politcally possible.
Water also is a positive feedback loop for a reactor. As the water heats up it expanses and allows more high energy neutrons to escape which causes a slow down in the reaction which generates less heat which cause the water to cool down which moderate more neutrons which speed up the reaction which generates more heat...... Feedback. That's negative feedback. Postive feedback would be if heated water caused the reaction to grow stronger and would result in a completely runaway reaction. Negative feedback causes a system to stabilize at a given level. Unfortunately, in this case the level is still way too 'hot'. At any rate, water is used as a stabilizer precisely because of this behaviour. Its helpful in keeping a reaction from getting out of hand too easily.
I am sure that is incredibly effective against radiation
These are both actually reasonable precautions. Presumably the worst of the prompt effects (the radiation that generated the 'blue flash') are come and gone. What you have to worry about now is contaminents, radioactive dust, radioactive liquids and the like. Staying indoors limits exposure to such things.
Washing is in fact very important, because the last thing you want to have happen is have some piece of radioactive dust fall on you and lodge in your skin. Since's its continuously generating radioactivity, you're almost guaranteed to have cancer in very short order, and if its strong enough, you can get sick not just from genetic damage, but from just massive amounts of cell death and from chemically reactive materials (even if uranium and plutonium were not radioactive they would still be deadly poison, and as they are radioactive, most of the elements created by their breakdown is also poisonous).
Re:Why IP? Lets Invent a new Protocol...
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
And what would constitute "A new protocol" exactly? IPv6 isn't just an expansion of the address fields, Some fields in the protocol have been dropped, others added, and some renamed to have slight different functions.
How many more changes would it take to make it a new protocol in your opinion? Or is the name all you care about?
For what its worth, IP has served the internet very well for its lifetime. Completely scrapping it and going back to the drawing board without looking at IP for what made it so great would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And just because something is old doesn't mean its not good anymore. We have new demands that IP can't cope with, so IP needs to be modified. But on the other hand ethernet is something like 20 years old and serves its needs perfectly well, so its left alone.
Re:Trillions of pennies
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
First off, IPv6 notation is already well defined. The dot notation is dropped and replaced with hex notation, grouped into blocks of 16 bit words and seperated by colons.
For example: 3FFE:8060:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
Additionally, there will likely be lots of zero's in everone's address for some time to come. Consecutive zero's can be abbrviated with double colons (only once per address to prevent ambiguity). Also, leading zero's in any given block may be dropped.
For example:
3FFE:8060::1
This is the same as the above address.
Again, except for system admins, people will be dealing with DNS names, not numerics.
I'm seeing a ton of articles that are making statements with incorrect assumptions, and unfortunately on the main page all the incorrect assumptions seem to be moderated up.
Patrick Naughton was NOT arrested for chatting with a purported 13 year old. The man arranged to meet with her and traveled from Seattle, WA to Santa Monica, CA, with the stated intent of having sex with her. He also did not appear surprised when he met up with a very young looking FBI agent posing as said 13 year old. Now I don't have any transcripts of the chat sessions, now know how convicingly 13 the agent was, nor do I know what happened at the pier where he was arrested, but in my book, this qualifies as "Interstate travel with intent to have sex with a minor" which is exactly what the man is charged with.
Additionally, he has been charged, not convicted. If he want's to plead that it was all role-playing and that he didn't believe that she was really 13, that's fine. I doubt its true personally, but I'm not going to be on the jury.
At any rate, before you start hollering about censorship and freedom, check your facts. If you think that "Interstate travel... etc etc etc" should not be a crime, write your congressman, or start a campaign to repeal the law here on slashdot, but in this case, the government caught a man who appeared to be trying to do something very bad.
Not every crime is a soapbox to talk about freedom and opression. Some crimes are genuine crimes.
If you try to shoot someone and they happen to be wearing a bulletproof vest, you're still guilty of attempted murder, which is a crime.
The point is that you have to have laws making it illegal to try to do something, because otherwise the only way you can possibly prosecute someone is to actually let them do harm, in this case, sexually abuse a 13 year old.
Specifically, Mr. Naughton is charged with "Interstate travel with intenet to have sex with a minor". Big time felony. This is a 34 year old man who's life is over.
What kind of computer are YOU posting from? I don't know about you, but my video card can do some pretty nice stuff at 1024 x 768. And if there's new technology out there I can just plug it in.
The correct point to make to PC'er who lords his system over consoles is that the PC is MUCH more expensive. But with that cost comes capabilities and versatility that a console can only dream of. It's apples and oranges in the end. And its a shame that more game development companies don't realize that and keep trying to shove square pegs into round holes by porting their stuff to every last platform under the sun.
We're not talking about attacking crypt() here. We're talking about real encryption. As one of those 'security guys', you should have maybe read a little more.
From crypt()'s man page on linux (Red Hat 6.0):
The DES algorithm itself has a few quirks which make the use of the crypt(3) interface a very poor choice for anything other than password authentication. If you are planning on using the crypt(3) interface for a cryptography project, don't do it: get a good book on encryption and one of the widely available DES libraries.
And the man page on solaris I know will say something quite similar. So don't consider yourself a security guy because you can crack crypt() or know that user passwords should be expired on a regular basis. All you've got is enough knowledge to be dangerous. Read Applied Cryptography for some info on real cryptography.
First off, you're parroting what the original poster said, i.e. that a big enough beowulf cluster can break the encryption, but moving it further offtopic by saying a big enough cluster can do anything.
Second, you're dead wrong. Cryptography is based on functions that are easier to do in one direction than the other. Easier by many many orders of magnitude. That means that a computer will always be encrypt a message to such a degree that were all the matter in the entire solar system turned into a huge cluster of computers, it would not be able to break the encryption with a brute force attack. You're home computer can do this RIGHT NOW. So while beowulf clusters are neat and all, don't ascribe magical powers to them. Its a sign of linux zealotry and that's just as bad as any other kind (*cough* M$ zealotry *cough*).
Note that I did however only talk about brute force attacks. There is always the chance that a new algorithm or new kind of technology (read quantum computing) will be found that will render a cryptography function as easy in one direction as in the other.
Something that you could show your non-geek friends, or, even (gasp) your Mom, and have them understand the basics?
An easy description of what encryption and signing (don't forget signing, its an important concept) do can be provided by offering analogies to postal mail and signing of contracts.
However... the actual how and why of encryption and signing is not something that will easily fit into someone's head. The basic problem is that while its obvious to the lay person exactly how an envolope protects their letters from casual examination, understanding how encryption protects their documents either requires that they take some things on faith or that they understand the math. There is no physicality to the protection, nothing that can be seen, touched or obviously understood.
You can go a certain distance with the postulate that "some mathmatical functions are easier to do in one direction than the other" and from that get the basics of cryptography, both signing and encryption, but again, the layperson has to either understand why the postulate is true, or take it on faith. Even so, the simplest explanations leave out a lot of important details (leaving the explainee not knowing how to distinguish between good crypto and bad crypto, and thus giving them more stuff to take on faith). One of the most concise set of basics is in Schneier's E-Mail Security which goes over the juicy bits in chapters 1-5.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the MCSE?
It's not really on topic, but IPV6 will most likely make out of the box lans a little more real. On the other hand I cannot help but think of the multitude of problems people will encounter as a single wireless networking technology becomes popular. Network crosstalk in densly populated areas will become a problem as will the fact that it has NO security whatsoever
The reason why is no video game out there will support the huge amounts of triangles unless every card can handle them. The game would have to be practically rewritten from scratch for the higher triangle count. As a programmer I can't find any way around this because of the meshes have to be written from scratch and whole levels would have to be rewritten just for use on this card.
First off, I don't take this it as a given that just because you can't figure out a way to represent the meshes with variable levels of detail, that no one can. In fact, its my understanding that Quake 3 implements curves in a way that allows them to be retesselated to higher polygon counts depending on the graphics card and speed of the system. Second, even if a company didn't want to implement something like that in their engine, its not inconcievable that multiple environment resolutions could be placed on the game media. Many games already come with low and high quality sound samples to account for the wildly varying quality of sound cards out there.
With an admittedly less than complete understanding of the nature of the problem, I still have to say I suspect much of that has to do with compiler design. Could you perhaps go into more detail on what is information must be preserved that prevents such aggresive optimization. Without an full understanding of the problem I might continue to labor under my misapprehension that C++ is a better language than FORTRAN.
Additionally, I'm not going to scour the Kuck & Assoc website for these snippets. If you're going to reference external info please provde an actual URL.
>Yeah, it's that "knowing what you are doing" bit that gets me.
What? Do you use the infinite monkeys with typewriters method of coding? You have to learn the language you're using.
In my experience C++ does not "hide" things from you, although depending on what environment you're coding in (VC++ with MFC [nudge nudge wink wink]) they you are going to find a lot of voodoo and black magic behind the scenes.
But the language itself and even the STL (if the implementation conforms to the performance requirements) does not do anything unexpected. You take a performance hit on virtual functions and sometimes on templates, mostly becuase of their extensive use of virtual functions (in my experience). If you're taking a performance hit on temporary variable initialization you're using a bad design. Most such temp vars occur on function call boundries and can be resolved with the effective use of const references in passed class paramaters and plain references in returned classes.
Anyone else know any other unavoidable performance hits in C++ that are language related as opposed to compiler related?
Anything expressible in C++ is expressible in C. This was an explicit design decision for C++. Therefore, C supports every feature C++ does, and if that's not enough to do OOP in C then it's not enough to do OOP in C++ either. Anything expressible C++ is also expressible in assembly. I don't think that the poster who said you can't code is OO in C was really talking about whether or not some or all OO features can be implemented in C, but rather whether they were implicit in the language. Virtual functions, for instance, would have to be layered on top of C with an entire application level framework to support it, and based on the arguments made in the C++ FAQS here, if you don't use or at least understand virtual functions, you're not working in OO, you're wanking.
>(d) Wouldn't it be nice if Windows gave you a *choice* of widget sets?
Hardly. I think that part of window's success it that as crappy as it is from a technical standpoint, its very standardized from a user interface point of view. You can write a book or talk on the phone with a user that needs help and not have to worry about what kind of widget set they are using. Contrast this with trying to work on the phone with someone trying to figure out a problem on a UNIX machine. I regularly have to give help to someone using CDE on an HP-UX machine and also using Linux on a machine I built for him and every time I have to tell him to get in a terminal and stay there so that I can work with command line because I don't have the time or inclination to learn every last GUI tool or widget set he might have.
Slashdot Mirror
For File and Print services, according to independent tests conducted by PC Week Labs, yadda yadda yadda...
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't said test result in an immediate identification of the TCP/IP stack bottleneck, and a fix in the current development kernel?
First: Windows NT 4.0 Outperforms Linux On Common Customer Workloads
Then, in a bullet point: Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0. The largest file size Linux supports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB RAM.
Ok.... I have a couple of problems with this. First off, if you talk about common customer workloads and then talk about 2GB ram limits and 2GB file size limits, you are speaking once from your mouth and once from your ass. I work for a major entertainment company in the online division. We have web servers up the wazoo, mostly solaris admittedly, but I have yet to see anything break the 1GB barrier, much less two. In my mind, for the average small business, you're going to be able to get by on much less.
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0.
OK... lets see some screenshots of the uptime counts of the machines at these places.
The Linux community likes to talk about Linux as a stable and reliable operating system, yet there is no real world data or metrics and very limited customer evidence to back up these claims.
FUD, pure and simple. "Here, look at this operating system that is just hitting the big time. There isn't much existing data on it, so it must suck. Of course when NT was brand new, it didn't suck even though there was an equal dearth of hard data on it."
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System. This means that in the event of a system failure, such as a power outage, data loss or corruption is possible.
Well, I'll grant them that. On the other hand I've watched NT servers lose data without a system failure or a power loss.
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide 99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers.
Again, this is basically saying that because Linux ISN'T a well established OS, that it SHOULDN'T be. That's bullshit.
The very definition of Linux as an Open Software effort means that commercial companies like Red Hat will make money by charging for services. Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
Yes, but on the other hand, the lack of a single authoritative source of data, there is now room for real competetion between people providing support for your OS. Don't like the quality or cost of MS support? Too bad. Don't like the quality or cost of Linux support, well it if becomes lucrative enough there will be plenty of places for you to go to.
Linux is a UNIX-like operating system and is therefore complex to configure and manage.
Kind of like many of the systems and features MS keeps touting to prove how much cooler NT is than Linux? Has anyone here played with ActiveDirectory? How about NT's very beta version of NAT back when it was still NT 5 and not Win@K
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
First, I think that this is kind of woefully narrow minded. It also completely ignores the functionality of setuid in using administrative tools. The unix security model is far more versatile than it seems at first appearance. And the NT model is far more cumbersome.
Linux system administrators must spend huge amounts of time understanding the latest Linux bugs and determining what to do about them.
Personally I find the buffer overflow bugs a lot easier to understand than some of the stuff I've seen in HOTFIX descriptions. Personally I don't care, I just want the bug fixed, which usually means a new RPM and no reboot.
This is made complex due to the fact that there isn't a central location for security issues to be reported and fixed. In contrast Microsoft provides a single security repository for notification and fixes of security related issues.
Ahem: RedHat does a pretty nice job for me.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
I'm not even going to bother.
Myth: Linux can replace Windows on the desktop
I have to grant MS just about everything they say here. But again, the problem is not that linux isn't suited to the desktop, just that it hasn't reached the critical point of support and ease of use. Whose fault that is is something I leave open for others to debate. Certainly though I don't think MS is helping at all. I wonder how many engineers at MS would like to port DirectX to linux. Or certain MS apps? But that's simply not politcally possible.
Water also is a positive feedback loop for a reactor. As the water heats up it expanses and allows more high energy neutrons to escape which causes a slow down in the reaction which generates less heat which cause the water to cool down which moderate more neutrons which speed up the reaction which generates more heat ...... Feedback. That's negative feedback. Postive feedback would be if heated water caused the reaction to grow stronger and would result in a completely runaway reaction. Negative feedback causes a system to stabilize at a given level. Unfortunately, in this case the level is still way too 'hot'. At any rate, water is used as a stabilizer precisely because of this behaviour. Its helpful in keeping a reaction from getting out of hand too easily.
These are both actually reasonable precautions. Presumably the worst of the prompt effects (the radiation that generated the 'blue flash') are come and gone. What you have to worry about now is contaminents, radioactive dust, radioactive liquids and the like. Staying indoors limits exposure to such things.
Washing is in fact very important, because the last thing you want to have happen is have some piece of radioactive dust fall on you and lodge in your skin. Since's its continuously generating radioactivity, you're almost guaranteed to have cancer in very short order, and if its strong enough, you can get sick not just from genetic damage, but from just massive amounts of cell death and from chemically reactive materials (even if uranium and plutonium were not radioactive they would still be deadly poison, and as they are radioactive, most of the elements created by their breakdown is also poisonous).
And what would constitute "A new protocol" exactly? IPv6 isn't just an expansion of the address fields, Some fields in the protocol have been dropped, others added, and some renamed to have slight different functions.
How many more changes would it take to make it a new protocol in your opinion? Or is the name all you care about?
For what its worth, IP has served the internet very well for its lifetime. Completely scrapping it and going back to the drawing board without looking at IP for what made it so great would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And just because something is old doesn't mean its not good anymore. We have new demands that IP can't cope with, so IP needs to be modified. But on the other hand ethernet is something like 20 years old and serves its needs perfectly well, so its left alone.
First off, IPv6 notation is already well defined. The dot notation is dropped and replaced with hex notation, grouped into blocks of 16 bit words and seperated by colons.
For example:
3FFE:8060:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
Additionally, there will likely be lots of zero's in everone's address for some time to come. Consecutive zero's can be abbrviated with double colons (only once per address to prevent ambiguity). Also, leading zero's in any given block may be dropped.
For example:
3FFE:8060::1
This is the same as the above address.
Again, except for system admins, people will be dealing with DNS names, not numerics.
I'm seeing a ton of articles that are making statements with incorrect assumptions, and unfortunately on the main page all the incorrect assumptions seem to be moderated up.
Patrick Naughton was NOT arrested for chatting with a purported 13 year old. The man arranged to meet with her and traveled from Seattle, WA to Santa Monica, CA, with the stated intent of having sex with her. He also did not appear surprised when he met up with a very young looking FBI agent posing as said 13 year old. Now I don't have any transcripts of the chat sessions, now know how convicingly 13 the agent was, nor do I know what happened at the pier where he was arrested, but in my book, this qualifies as "Interstate travel with intent to have sex with a minor" which is exactly what the man is charged with.
Additionally, he has been charged, not convicted. If he want's to plead that it was all role-playing and that he didn't believe that she was really 13, that's fine. I doubt its true personally, but I'm not going to be on the jury.
At any rate, before you start hollering about censorship and freedom, check your facts. If you think that "Interstate travel... etc etc etc" should not be a crime, write your congressman, or start a campaign to repeal the law here on slashdot, but in this case, the government caught a man who appeared to be trying to do something very bad.
Not every crime is a soapbox to talk about freedom and opression. Some crimes are genuine crimes.
If you try to shoot someone and they happen to be wearing a bulletproof vest, you're still guilty of attempted murder, which is a crime.
The point is that you have to have laws making it illegal to try to do something, because otherwise the only way you can possibly prosecute someone is to actually let them do harm, in this case, sexually abuse a 13 year old.
Specifically, Mr. Naughton is charged with "Interstate travel with intenet to have sex with a minor". Big time felony. This is a 34 year old man who's life is over.
Where did you hear this? Sound's like hearsay to me.
What kind of computer are YOU posting from? I don't know about you, but my video card can do some pretty nice stuff at 1024 x 768. And if there's new technology out there I can just plug it in.
The correct point to make to PC'er who lords his system over consoles is that the PC is MUCH more expensive. But with that cost comes capabilities and versatility that a console can only dream of. It's apples and oranges in the end. And its a shame that more game development companies don't realize that and keep trying to shove square pegs into round holes by porting their stuff to every last platform under the sun.
From crypt()'s man page on linux (Red Hat 6.0):
The DES algorithm itself has a few quirks which make the use of the crypt(3) interface a very poor choice for anything other than password authentication. If you are planning on using the crypt(3) interface for a cryptography project, don't do it: get a good book on encryption and one of the widely available DES libraries.
And the man page on solaris I know will say something quite similar. So don't consider yourself a security guy because you can crack crypt() or know that user passwords should be expired on a regular basis. All you've got is enough knowledge to be dangerous. Read Applied Cryptography for some info on real cryptography.
First off, you're parroting what the original poster said, i.e. that a big enough beowulf cluster can break the encryption, but moving it further offtopic by saying a big enough cluster can do anything.
Second, you're dead wrong. Cryptography is based on functions that are easier to do in one direction than the other. Easier by many many orders of magnitude. That means that a computer will always be encrypt a message to such a degree that were all the matter in the entire solar system turned into a huge cluster of computers, it would not be able to break the encryption with a brute force attack. You're home computer can do this RIGHT NOW. So while beowulf clusters are neat and all, don't ascribe magical powers to them. Its a sign of linux zealotry and that's just as bad as any other kind (*cough* M$ zealotry *cough*).
Note that I did however only talk about brute force attacks. There is always the chance that a new algorithm or new kind of technology (read quantum computing) will be found that will render a cryptography function as easy in one direction as in the other.
Jherico
An easy description of what encryption and signing (don't forget signing, its an important concept) do can be provided by offering analogies to postal mail and signing of contracts.
However... the actual how and why of encryption and signing is not something that will easily fit into someone's head. The basic problem is that while its obvious to the lay person exactly how an envolope protects their letters from casual examination, understanding how encryption protects their documents either requires that they take some things on faith or that they understand the math. There is no physicality to the protection, nothing that can be seen, touched or obviously understood.
You can go a certain distance with the postulate that "some mathmatical functions are easier to do in one direction than the other" and from that get the basics of cryptography, both signing and encryption, but again, the layperson has to either understand why the postulate is true, or take it on faith. Even so, the simplest explanations leave out a lot of important details (leaving the explainee not knowing how to distinguish between good crypto and bad crypto, and thus giving them more stuff to take on faith). One of the most concise set of basics is in Schneier's E-Mail Security which goes over the juicy bits in chapters 1-5.
It's not really on topic, but IPV6 will most likely make out of the box lans a little more real. On the other hand I cannot help but think of the multitude of problems people will encounter as a single wireless networking technology becomes popular. Network crosstalk in densly populated areas will become a problem as will the fact that it has NO security whatsoever
Biotech is a very specialized field, whereas computers are a tool, that can be applied to many fields..... Isn't this what people used to think about computers? Specialized field, few applications? Wasn't it some bigwig at IBM who predicted a world market for maybe 5 computers? Read some Greg Egan, particularly stuff like or Distress or Diaspora and you'll see that biotech can be just as good, if not a better general purpose tool as silicon. Think of it this way. CS allows us to process information in a well defined way. Mature biotech (or nanotech, but I think bio is more likely) will allow us to do the same thing with matter. Jherico
First off, I don't take this it as a given that just because you can't figure out a way to represent the meshes with variable levels of detail, that no one can. In fact, its my understanding that Quake 3 implements curves in a way that allows them to be retesselated to higher polygon counts depending on the graphics card and speed of the system. Second, even if a company didn't want to implement something like that in their engine, its not inconcievable that multiple environment resolutions could be placed on the game media. Many games already come with low and high quality sound samples to account for the wildly varying quality of sound cards out there.
With an admittedly less than complete understanding of the nature of the problem, I still have to say I suspect much of that has to do with compiler design. Could you perhaps go into more detail on what is information must be preserved that prevents such aggresive optimization. Without an full understanding of the problem I might continue to labor under my misapprehension that C++ is a better language than FORTRAN.
Additionally, I'm not going to scour the Kuck & Assoc website for these snippets. If you're going to reference external info please provde an actual URL.
>Yeah, it's that "knowing what you are doing" bit that gets me.
What? Do you use the infinite monkeys with typewriters method of coding? You have to learn the language you're using.
In my experience C++ does not "hide" things from you, although depending on what environment you're coding in (VC++ with MFC [nudge nudge wink wink]) they you are going to find a lot of voodoo and black magic behind the scenes.
But the language itself and even the STL (if the implementation conforms to the performance requirements) does not do anything unexpected. You take a performance hit on virtual functions and sometimes on templates, mostly becuase of their extensive use of virtual functions (in my experience). If you're taking a performance hit on temporary variable initialization you're using a bad design. Most such temp vars occur on function call boundries and can be resolved with the effective use of const references in passed class paramaters and plain references in returned classes.
Anyone else know any other unavoidable performance hits in C++ that are language related as opposed to compiler related?
Anything expressible in C++ is expressible in C. This was an explicit design decision for C++. Therefore, C supports every feature C++ does, and if that's not enough to do OOP in C then it's not enough to do OOP in C++ either. Anything expressible C++ is also expressible in assembly. I don't think that the poster who said you can't code is OO in C was really talking about whether or not some or all OO features can be implemented in C, but rather whether they were implicit in the language. Virtual functions, for instance, would have to be layered on top of C with an entire application level framework to support it, and based on the arguments made in the C++ FAQS here, if you don't use or at least understand virtual functions, you're not working in OO, you're wanking.
>(d) Wouldn't it be nice if Windows gave you a *choice* of widget sets?
Hardly. I think that part of window's success it that as crappy as it is from a technical standpoint, its very standardized from a user interface point of view. You can write a book or talk on the phone with a user that needs help and not have to worry about what kind of widget set they are using. Contrast this with trying to work on the phone with someone trying to figure out a problem on a UNIX machine. I regularly have to give help to someone using CDE on an HP-UX machine and also using Linux on a machine I built for him and every time I have to tell him to get in a terminal and stay there so that I can work with command line because I don't have the time or inclination to learn every last GUI tool or widget set he might have.