> Third, having a bunch of useless 64-bit circuts
> in a consumer-bound chip is the definition of a
> marketing kludge.
No.
There are some people who need 64-bit addressing. Hammer is going to be the cheapest, fastest 64-bit CPU around. Some people are going to notice that and take advantage of it.
Also, the 64-bit "long mode" has advantages other than just providing 64-bit operations. It provides double the number of general purpose registers, and also a new "IP-relative" addressing mode that will make shared library code smaller and faster. Many apps should run faster in this mode even if they don't need a 64-bit address space. Some people are going to take advantage of that too.
Finally, it will take a while for stuff to get ported to long mode. Even if most people aren't using the mode, it's great to have it available to developers.
> It's also worth noting that a great deal of his
> charitable donations have taken the form of free
> licenses to Microsoft software. Net cost to BG,
> zero; net gain from faking out morons like you,
> incalculable.
This is actually a brilliant strategy. It achieves several things:
-- Since the marginal cost of the software is nearly zero, Microsoft can set the number of units donated to some arbitrary number, creating an arbitrary-sized tax deduction out of the charitable donations. Yum.
-- Microsoft is currently keeping its earnings growth up by increasing the price of their software. Normally this would create a danger of lower-cost competitors taking over where customers couldn't or wouldn't afford to pay Microsoft prices. But charitable software giveaways take care of this danger by locking up large chunks of the bottom end of the market. Better still, it's perfect market segmentation; there's no way for high-end customers to take advantage of the low-end price.
-- While achieving all these business goals, it still makes great PR.
-- It does all these things at practically no expense.
Apart from the fact that CMU does release plenty of BSD-style-licensed code, any talk about the IETF is totally irrelevant because AVES does not introduce any new standards or require any new infrastructural support. It can and is being deployed today with no cooperation from anybody.
It would be nice to have the DNS protocol changed a little bit so that forwarded requests contain the address of the original requestor. But that's a completely orthogonal issue and other people (e.g., Akamai) want that too.
> The fast clock is the real selling feature of this
> chip.
Read my post again, from the top. That's pretty much my point.
Note, BTW, that people have spotted Hammer #defines in Microsoft header files. Microsoft are obviously considering support for the chip. They certainly need to have that option, because they don't want a wave of people turning to Linux/*BSD to run cheap 64-bit servers on AMD's hardware.
The number one goal is to run 32-bit x86 applications fast. On top of that AMD adds a 64-bit mode that cleans up the instruction set somewhat, adds another 8 general purpose registers and of course 64-bit instructions and addressing, all designed to be fairly easy to target since it's just a variant of the x86 instruction set. The 64-bit mode is there for high-end servers or any OS that wants to use it --- the extra registers and IP-relative addressing should make it faster than regular x86 mode if you can recompile your code. But since the 64-bit and 32-bit code runs on the same core, it doesn't matter too much if people don't use the 64-bit stuff initially.
If AMD ships the Hammer processors according to schedule then Intel is going to be in a very bad position. IA64 performance simply *sucks* and it always will; static scheduling just does not work, and the smartest compilers in the world can't get around that. Intel gambled and lost on that one. Consequently IA64 will keep slipping and probably never ship in volume. There's just no market for a very expensive, very slow, incompatible CPU.
However, because of the investement and credibility, Intel can't just abandon the IA64. It'll be dragging them down for years. Meanwhile the best they can do is to keep revving the P4, which is already slower than the Athlon, and marketing it as hard as they can. That'll keep them going for a while but customers who want actual performance or a 64-bit architecture, not to mention value for money, will increasingly go to AMD.
The only bright spot for Intel is the rumoured SMT capabilities of the future P4 rev, Foster. That could give them a boost; we'll have to wait and see.
Both Mozilla and Konqueror are aggressively standards-compliant. Stick to the standards and your pages will work.
This is important. In the battle for mindshare of Web developers and an open Web, it's not "IE vs Mozilla vs Konqueror vs Opera vs...". It's "IE vs the rest". In fact, since MacIE is very standards-compliant too, it's actually "WinIE vs the rest".
> there are plenty of people even within/. that
> still want to believe in the tooth
> fairy/santa/god nonsense their parents fed them
> when they were kids
Most of the Christian students and grad students I happen to know around CMU are children of non-Christian parents. So don't jump to conclusions.
Your point of view is still too narrow. That's probably not your fault, since of course vocal, intolerant minorities get more coverage and tend to shape one's opinion.
But I don't know any Protestant Christians who are uncomfortable applying to word "Protestant" to themselves. Very few of the Protestants I know would make a categorical claim that Catholics are not Christians. And most of the Christians I know, of any stripe, acknowledge that beyond a few core doctrines about the nature of Christ and salvation (and therefore what it means to be Christian), any disputes are dwarfed by our common bond of following Christ.
Now perhaps I'm among unusually enlighted Christians, but most of them are what you would call "fundamentalists".
By the time the Roman state got around to noticing the Christian church and decided to embrace it (after first trying to persecute it out of existence), most of the major disputes over what was to be considered "orthodox Christianity" had long been settled, including the Gnostic question.
This is Mozilla's (and Konqueror's) ace in the hole: developers not beholden to any company can make changes and produce distributions that truly cater to the needs of the customer, not the needs of the vendor.
Ah, but the great thing about Mozilla is that you can have different distributions. In fact, people are already working on Beonex, a distribution targeted more at corporate settings. Microsoft is doing a similiar thing by packaging the IE engine in different ways (IE 6.0, MSN Explorer, etc).
> I want to know when browsers like netscape will
> let a user create my own buttons and customize
> their actions.
If you don't mind hacking XML/Javascript it's dead easy to do this in Mozilla right now, without having to recompile anything. Take a peek inside the JAR files you downloaded. (They're just ZIP files by another name.)
> Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they
> had in IE
Since Galeon is entirely dependent on Mozilla for its browsing engine, and Mozilla was largely created by Netscape, I'm afraid you're not Netscape-free at all.
I'm right and so are you. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent brand dilution. But you have to do that consistently or you lose the trademark. Waiting until the "dilution" reaches what you consider to be "unacceptable" levels is NOT consistency and does not constitute protection of the trademark. You have to go after everyone who uses your trademark illegitimately.
> Having not defended his trademark for four
> years, Tatu will have trouble getting others to
> drop the name "SSH" or combinations thereof.
Yep...
> HOWEVER, this protects only existing uses of the
> name "SSH", not other individuals or
> companies using the name for future products.
I believe this is not the case under US trademark law. Other people have cited the case of "aspirin": Bayer failed to protect the trademark and so now it is in the public domain. New products can be called "aspirin".
> 3) This guy didn't care about the use of the
> name OpenSSH until his customers started > getting confused.
This is EXACTLY why they've lost the trademark. You have to defend trademarks, you can't just sit on your hands until you're worried about losing business.
> May I ask these posters what the reaction
> would've been had he done so initially? Exactly.
> Same negative reaction.
Not at all. It's much easier to change the name of your project when only a few people have heard of it.
> the attacks on ssh1 are of a difficulty roughly
> on par with stealing a TCP connection from a
> modern OS: the attack is possible, but extremely
> impractical.
This comment demands clarification.
"Blind spoofing" (when the attacker cannot sniff packets being sent between the target machines) against a modern operating system is indeed very difficult because it requires guessing of sequence numbers.
However, if the attacker can observe the traffic (e.g., they're sniffing the ethernet of one of the machines participating in the connection), then it is easy to hijack the connection.
You are wrong. The present exploit has everything to do with buffer overflows. In this case the "buffer" is a hash table; the exploit depends on writing data outside the bounds of the hash table, which would be caught by a safe language.
There is no definition of how tags are supposed to be rendered. That is explicitly left open by the HTML standard, and for good reason. CSS specifies more of that, but it's still not complete, and again, there are good reasons not to fully specify the rendering.
It is simply not true that the rest of the work is "a piece of cake", not when you're dealing with something as complex as the W3C standard definitions and all their interactions. If you don't believe it, try writing a browser yourself.
But the biggest problem is that despite the fact that HTML 3.2 and 4.0 are specified, it doesn't matter because Web page authors DO NOT stick to the standards. They write buggy pages which more or less render OK in the browser they happen to be using, and then they're done. There are almost no pages which adhere strictly to the W3C definitions, and that's why results vary from one browser to the next.
Slashdot Mirror
> Third, having a bunch of useless 64-bit circuts
> in a consumer-bound chip is the definition of a
> marketing kludge.
No.
There are some people who need 64-bit addressing. Hammer is going to be the cheapest, fastest 64-bit CPU around. Some people are going to notice that and take advantage of it.
Also, the 64-bit "long mode" has advantages other than just providing 64-bit operations. It provides double the number of general purpose registers, and also a new "IP-relative" addressing mode that will make shared library code smaller and faster. Many apps should run faster in this mode even if they don't need a 64-bit address space. Some people are going to take advantage of that too.
Finally, it will take a while for stuff to get ported to long mode. Even if most people aren't using the mode, it's great to have it available to developers.
> It's also worth noting that a great deal of his
> charitable donations have taken the form of free
> licenses to Microsoft software. Net cost to BG,
> zero; net gain from faking out morons like you,
> incalculable.
This is actually a brilliant strategy. It achieves several things:
-- Since the marginal cost of the software is nearly zero, Microsoft can set the number of units donated to some arbitrary number, creating an arbitrary-sized tax deduction out of the charitable donations. Yum.
-- Microsoft is currently keeping its earnings growth up by increasing the price of their software. Normally this would create a danger of lower-cost competitors taking over where customers couldn't or wouldn't afford to pay Microsoft prices. But charitable software giveaways take care of this danger by locking up large chunks of the bottom end of the market. Better still, it's perfect market segmentation; there's no way for high-end customers to take advantage of the low-end price.
-- While achieving all these business goals, it still makes great PR.
-- It does all these things at practically no expense.
Apart from the fact that CMU does release plenty of BSD-style-licensed code, any talk about the IETF is totally irrelevant because AVES does not introduce any new standards or require any new infrastructural support. It can and is being deployed today with no cooperation from anybody.
It would be nice to have the DNS protocol changed a little bit so that forwarded requests contain the address of the original requestor. But that's a completely orthogonal issue and other people (e.g., Akamai) want that too.
> The fast clock is the real selling feature of this
> chip.
Read my post again, from the top. That's pretty much my point.
Note, BTW, that people have spotted Hammer #defines in Microsoft header files. Microsoft are obviously considering support for the chip. They certainly need to have that option, because they don't want a wave of people turning to Linux/*BSD to run cheap 64-bit servers on AMD's hardware.
You are correct.
The number one goal is to run 32-bit x86 applications fast. On top of that AMD adds a 64-bit mode that cleans up the instruction set somewhat, adds another 8 general purpose registers and of course 64-bit instructions and addressing, all designed to be fairly easy to target since it's just a variant of the x86 instruction set. The 64-bit mode is there for high-end servers or any OS that wants to use it --- the extra registers and IP-relative addressing should make it faster than regular x86 mode if you can recompile your code. But since the 64-bit and 32-bit code runs on the same core, it doesn't matter too much if people don't use the 64-bit stuff initially.
If AMD ships the Hammer processors according to schedule then Intel is going to be in a very bad position. IA64 performance simply *sucks* and it always will; static scheduling just does not work, and the smartest compilers in the world can't get around that. Intel gambled and lost on that one. Consequently IA64 will keep slipping and probably never ship in volume. There's just no market for a very expensive, very slow, incompatible CPU.
However, because of the investement and credibility, Intel can't just abandon the IA64. It'll be dragging them down for years. Meanwhile the best they can do is to keep revving the P4, which is already slower than the Athlon, and marketing it as hard as they can. That'll keep them going for a while but customers who want actual performance or a 64-bit architecture, not to mention value for money, will increasingly go to AMD.
The only bright spot for Intel is the rumoured SMT capabilities of the future P4 rev, Foster. That could give them a boost; we'll have to wait and see.
Both Mozilla and Konqueror are aggressively standards-compliant. Stick to the standards and your pages will work.
...". It's "IE vs the rest". In fact, since MacIE is very standards-compliant too, it's actually "WinIE vs the rest".
This is important. In the battle for mindshare of Web developers and an open Web, it's not "IE vs Mozilla vs Konqueror vs Opera vs
> You can't beat ignorance with arrogance
/. that
But I guess it's still OK to try.
> there are plenty of people even within
> still want to believe in the tooth
> fairy/santa/god nonsense their parents fed them
> when they were kids
Most of the Christian students and grad students I happen to know around CMU are children of non-Christian parents. So don't jump to conclusions.
Your point of view is still too narrow. That's probably not your fault, since of course vocal, intolerant minorities get more coverage and tend to shape one's opinion.
But I don't know any Protestant Christians who are uncomfortable applying to word "Protestant" to themselves. Very few of the Protestants I know would make a categorical claim that Catholics are not Christians. And most of the Christians I know, of any stripe, acknowledge that beyond a few core doctrines about the nature of Christ and salvation (and therefore what it means to be Christian), any disputes are dwarfed by our common bond of following Christ.
Now perhaps I'm among unusually enlighted Christians, but most of them are what you would call "fundamentalists".
By the time the Roman state got around to noticing the Christian church and decided to embrace it (after first trying to persecute it out of existence), most of the major disputes over what was to be considered "orthodox Christianity" had long been settled, including the Gnostic question.
> Does not crash, no memory leaks, fast, simple
> interface, etc
Nonstandard/buggy rendering, runs only on Windows*, all kinds of security problems, etc.
* MacIE is a completely separate code base.
The closed-source Netscape 4 was complete garbage internally and they had to throw it away. It's taken a few years to recover from that.
Mozilla's Unix versions depend on Gtk+. But Mozilla also runs on Win32, MacOS, OS/2, and BeOS. Have you got Konqueror running on all these?
BTW, I think Konqueror is an excellent browser.
Netscape/AOL pays the devlopers who are mostly responsible for BUILDING that great browser. Cut them some slack.
This is Mozilla's (and Konqueror's) ace in the hole: developers not beholden to any company can make changes and produce distributions that truly cater to the needs of the customer, not the needs of the vendor.
Ah, but the great thing about Mozilla is that you can have different distributions. In fact, people are already working on Beonex, a distribution targeted more at corporate settings. Microsoft is doing a similiar thing by packaging the IE engine in different ways (IE 6.0, MSN Explorer, etc).
... and needless to say, so does Mozilla.
> I want to know when browsers like netscape will
... "View | Text Size".
> let a user create my own buttons and customize
> their actions.
If you don't mind hacking XML/Javascript it's dead easy to do this in Mozilla right now, without having to recompile anything. Take a peek inside the JAR files you downloaded. (They're just ZIP files by another name.)
> Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they
> had in IE
There's a menu item
Since Galeon is entirely dependent on Mozilla for its browsing engine, and Mozilla was largely created by Netscape, I'm afraid you're not Netscape-free at all.
I'm right and so are you. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent brand dilution. But you have to do that consistently or you lose the trademark. Waiting until the "dilution" reaches what you consider to be "unacceptable" levels is NOT consistency and does not constitute protection of the trademark. You have to go after everyone who uses your trademark illegitimately.
OK, so Bayer's not a good example, but what I said is still true :-).
Well, just for the record, TTSSH didn't have any of these bugs either.
> Having not defended his trademark for four
> years, Tatu will have trouble getting others to
> drop the name "SSH" or combinations thereof.
Yep...
> HOWEVER, this protects only existing uses of the
> name "SSH", not other individuals or
> companies using the name for future products.
I believe this is not the case under US trademark law. Other people have cited the case of "aspirin": Bayer failed to protect the trademark and so now it is in the public domain. New products can be called "aspirin".
> 3) This guy didn't care about the use of the
> name OpenSSH until his customers started > getting confused.
This is EXACTLY why they've lost the trademark. You have to defend trademarks, you can't just sit on your hands until you're worried about losing business.
> May I ask these posters what the reaction
> would've been had he done so initially? Exactly.
> Same negative reaction.
Not at all. It's much easier to change the name of your project when only a few people have heard of it.
> the attacks on ssh1 are of a difficulty roughly
> on par with stealing a TCP connection from a
> modern OS: the attack is possible, but extremely
> impractical.
This comment demands clarification.
"Blind spoofing" (when the attacker cannot sniff packets being sent between the target machines) against a modern operating system is indeed very difficult because it requires guessing of sequence numbers.
However, if the attacker can observe the traffic (e.g., they're sniffing the ethernet of one of the machines participating in the connection), then it is easy to hijack the connection.
You are wrong. The present exploit has everything to do with buffer overflows. In this case the "buffer" is a hash table; the exploit depends on writing data outside the bounds of the hash table, which would be caught by a safe language.
You're wrong for a number of reasons.
There is no definition of how tags are supposed to be rendered. That is explicitly left open by the HTML standard, and for good reason. CSS specifies more of that, but it's still not complete, and again, there are good reasons not to fully specify the rendering.
It is simply not true that the rest of the work is "a piece of cake", not when you're dealing with something as complex as the W3C standard definitions and all their interactions. If you don't believe it, try writing a browser yourself.
But the biggest problem is that despite the fact that HTML 3.2 and 4.0 are specified, it doesn't matter because Web page authors DO NOT stick to the standards. They write buggy pages which more or less render OK in the browser they happen to be using, and then they're done. There are almost no pages which adhere strictly to the W3C definitions, and that's why results vary from one browser to the next.