Re:Read between the lines
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Probably not that far off though. PS3 sales have lagged. PS2 is considered dated. The Wii has outsold all other consoles (and will probably continue to widen the gap), however; people who game on the Wii are a lot more diversified in their gaming tastes and there will probably be no single game on the Wii that almost all Wii owners will buy. In contrast Xbox360 owners are mostly the "gamer" demographic that games like Halo tend to target. So looking at Xbox360 sales being alright, and most Xbox360 owners being the sort who will buy Halo, this is probably the biggest console game this year.
Of course the reality is that World of Warcraft is still the biggest game of the year...
But unfortunately the real lesson that everyone who reads this story will learn is that you don't really have any rights, you should just shut up and comply with authority if you don't want to be punished.
You should thank him for that too. Believe me, when you end up severely fucked by the government it's always better not to get that lesson first hand. No one is going to stick up for you. No amount of logic will assist you. There is nothing you can do to fight the system because you're fighting the system WITHIN the system itself. It sucks that this is reality, but things could honestly be worse, so I suppose there is that much to be thankful for. If someone could have shown this guy that he would waste $7500 and his time for nothing, then perhaps he would appreciate that too. Not happily of course, but I'd rather be unhappy with an extra $7500.
A good excuse to stay at home and drink beer... why wouldn't the Aussies buy this?
Re:Well that's the beauty of Linux...
on
Fork the Linux Kernel?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Optimized in current terms of Linux is really all about tuning it for its intended role - which can have a significant difference in performance. The scheduler has gotten a lot of attention lately. There is also preemption which is typically opposite when considering server and desktop roles. Aside from that there is the internal kernel 'clock' (that might be the wrong term, I can't recall right now). Generally on servers you would probably want a lower 'tick' so more work is done, while desktops would want a higher tick count - which I may be wrong but I believe this reduces latency and improves perceived responsiveness.
And as others have said you don't need different versions of Linux, just different compiled kernels you can select. Wow, that was a lot harder than forking Linux wasn't it? Slow news day?
People in the west die of crazy shit all the time. But if there is any media attention it is typically a footnote in the local news. Generally I'm willing to bet someone in North America has already died of exhaustion here, it just wasn't highly publicized - most likely because every extreme gamer I've ever known or heard of was able to lock themselves in a room. I've never seen anyone do extreme sessions in an internet cafe in North America and I'm sure if someone did drop dead in front of 100 other people who happened to be there you would hear a lot more about it.
The best MP3 players in the world can barely manage 30 hours of playback. Anyone thats says they "need" to carry around 100GB of music is talking utter crap.
I'm willing to bet that most people with more than 30GB haven't listened to every song they own.
I've been accumulating music for a long time now and my collection grew to 14Gb about 3 years ago. With good cleaning and continual additions, it's stayed that size. And while I originally had this good concentrated metal collection, I started expanding into other genres (more files). Do I "need" all of this music with me? Well there's an interesting story why I even got a digital music player. See I used to use CDs and that was fine with me in the car. But then due to circumstances in my life had to drive to Canada on a regular basis. For a while I did this once a week. That's 6 hours up, and 6 hours down for me. I got sick of the CDs in my car in a month. I got frustrated with trying to burn CDs to listen to all the time. There are a LOT of times I sat in the car WISHING I could listen to something I didn't have with me because that was what I was in the mood to listen to.
I've also tended to run into situations (again in my car) where people would always be asking "don't you have something else to listen to?". Again my music collection grew. This time for some of my friends. So yeah there is a validity in having a good collection with you at all times. 100Gb? Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean at 14Gb I have a hard time really cycling through my collection on a regular basis.
Mainly because you're expected to "sync" your collection, not move the entire thing over at once. If you update 100 songs, assuming they're 10Mb a piece, that's 1Gb - which is about 1 minute in your USB benchmark. Generally that's acceptable to most people. Since the USB port is also now used for charging, it typically takes more than a minute to charge anyway so this point is moot for the way Apple intends for you to use it.
I'm not to thrilled myself however since I manually move my collection myself. I've got everything cut into directories that are about 2-4Gb a piece though, and I typically don't update more than one at a time.
Because of latency DDR2 is only faster than DDR if you have a CPU over 2Ghz clock speed. And pretty much all speed boosts are marginal now days. The only way you really notice the difference is aggregated marginal increases. Like CPU + mainboard + hard drive + RAM, etc. Typically you can't see much of a difference in changing out one part anymore.
Is that significant? I'm just wondering because many of these things I've apparently accomplished in my day are apparently feats now. Like some people claiming that Ninja Gaiden 2 was near impossible to beat (I've beaten Ninja Gaiden 1,2 & 3 on one life). I'll never top some of the stuff people did with Asteroids, but apparently I'm not as bad at games as I think.
Totally different problem so this algorithm is irrelevant. The power of quantum computers is slightly more troubling than current super computer tech, but not overly so. Two or so years ago the claim of IDEA encryption was that it would take 1000 computers more than the lifetime of the universe to break it by brute force (or something to that effect). AES 256 is at least that strong. The problem with public key crypto is that its strength is indirectly proportional to how fast computers can do math.
Actually I really like that idea. However there is a sad fact that some of the management is extremely anal about doing ANYTHING on the web that isn't 100% work related. My mantra is if you do your job, and your work gets done - then I don't care if you mess around on the web for a few minutes a day - just no porn/gambling/viruses. In fact I'd hope people would reflect on the freedom they get from us and look on being employed here in a more positive light.
Where I work it would turn into a situation where the users wouldn't be any better than a proxy blocking everything. Sort of worse since they can't even trust the proxy to give them privacy when they look at things on break. So strange as this sounds I sort of keep this info to myself for the sake of my users. If only they knew how we sometimes act as good shepard's on their behalf.
Simply put, because it's an exclusive for a console. There isn't much to really discuss if it's on all consoles. Even if it's on one first, many if not MOST people have the patience to wait for a while. But it's different with an exclusive and a huge franchise one at that. The more you can get people hyped about it and talking and excited, the more buzz is generated around the console. Maybe those who got a PS3 are thinking that they'd like to play that awesome Halo game too. Perhaps thinking about buying a new console you'd consider a Xbox360 first since everyone is talking about Halo, and you only get that on the 360.
Honestly I think 10 million on such a campaign is ridiculous, but this is probably proof that gaming is big business now - with nearly as much weight as the movie and music industries.
What kind of soulless bastard needs a written code of ethics to know what's right and wrong? Who really thinks that snooping around other peoples' data is the right thing to do?
Most of us do. But then again a LOT of us have lapses and moments of weakness. I mean if you know there is some really good dirt being shot back and forth via email and you log all email it's really tempting to just snoop through it to kill some boredom. Sometimes just reading a piece of paper on the wall can help you keep your focus.
I'm an I.T. Manager and it's sort of tough sometimes. For me personally I'm having a bad time in my life and I have this vicious streak that emerges many times a day - and that isn't helping. I have the ability to see every website they visit, everything they do on their PC, and can see every email received and sent. I can also access pretty much every file on every machine in the company. That's a LOT of responsibility. And I honestly don't snoop through any of it - it's kept for security/legal reasons. Monthly I wrap it up an 256bit AES encryption on a DVD and that's it. I think most I.T. people are actually pretty honest as well as far as the ones I've met. I mean I'd hate to see what the assholes in sales would do if they had as much power over the company as I had. heh, I actually just cringed.
Metroid Prime is an exclusive though, so not necessarily 100% apples to apples. Having recently purchased Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, I think there is no comparison that the wimote is superior for such games. My wife rented RE4 for the PS2 and I played it for an hour or so. It's good game to be sure, but it was just so freaking clunky using a controller. On the Wii, after a slightly awkward start at figuring out how to move the character with the nunchuck while aiming with the wiimote I was blasting through stuff at a pretty furious pace - and I don't even like shooters.
And the controller having rumble AND making sounds is actually more ingenious then I expected when actually playing such a game. Like you can get an actual audio feedback that your weapon actually loaded when you're watching other things come at you.
It increases the space required to brute force the password. There are also statistical issues with where numbers are placed. For instance when you tell a person to use letters and numbers people almost always put the letters first and the numbers last. The vast majority will just use one number at the end. A few may actually put numbers in the beginning. If asked to use upper case letters, people automatically try to capitalize the first one. Using any non alphanumeric characters will make cracking far harder. The characters $ and @ are only more vulnerable when people use them in place of 'S' and 'A'.
Brute forcing isn't necessarily about going from aaa to zzz and such. You can improve cracking by orders of magnitude by utilizing statistical weaknesses in passwords. So that actually does make your password more secure. Assuming that you're in the range of passwords that is the %1 that takes 99% longer to crack, many people trying to crack your password may simply not find it worth the effort.
An interesting program to look through is John, I think it comes with tables of the most common things people try for passwords. A must read for anyone seriously looking at security I would think, but that strikes me as being way too geeky:)
You know, I was sort of worried about all of this stuff at first, but it's been well known that windows stores lanman hashes for a while now, and you can force NT hashes by using a long enough password. So I figured this is really all old news.
But thankfully you've managed to instill that paranoia back in me. Thanks dude =P
There was a (more) recent amendment to the entire Gutman paper which I believe was by Gutman although I can't say I'm 100% sure. I was researching exactly how secure Derik's Boot 'N Nuke was so I did a lot of research. Anyway in a nutshell the Gutman methods do not apply to modern (and I think this was years ago) hard drives. Basically with caching and spare sectors you can't be sure the hard drive is even writing the way you think it is, so the foundations of the paper in the techniques used aren't really trustworthy because you can't trust the drive. I think the general conclusion was that 4 writes of random data was probably the best you could do. The Gutman data wiping method does do such wipes but also does a lot of other stuff which is basically a waste of time. If such vooodoo wipes make you feel better, than there's no harm in using them. The method required by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also seems like it was a bit over thought, but better safe than sorry.
You could also ask those same questions about a machine that implements DES in hardware. Who would have reason? Who could do it? Who would if they could and you would never hear about it? The answer is... the government. I'd say it is to some extent "possible", however I have my doubts you could even be sure you could recover anything reliably if you did something as simple as zeroed the drive. Now people who "reformat" a drive or think they've deleted something with no way of verifying that something overwrote the bits, that's a different story - and typically that's where the entire "you can never really delete a file" myth comes from. With the new Vista (& MacOS) versioning thing it's probably going to be a whole new realm of files coming back from the dead.
Depends on what they do. In a windows environment that's nothing because each windows server application seems to demand it's own server - note that the article states the 15 or so mixed is down from 60 pure windows. Assuming no other software aside from windows server (not advanced server or anything) that's around $48k saved right there - before extra software. The big buzzword of the day is consolidation. Instead of having a billion servers and trying to manage security and updates on them all, keep it to a low number so it's easier to keep your eye on.
In an attempt to reduce dupes they are trying to get one editor to do everything since the rest of them can't be bothered to check slashdot. They used to have Zonk do this but he still tends to dupe himself.
Same here. And it looks like from most of the posts, anyone that has a problem is using ISC dhcpd on Linux. Perhaps FreeBSD is OK with the broadcast flag and it's actually the Linux TCP/IP stack causing the issue? I still find it hard to believe that no one would have noticed this issue in the Vista betas.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not that far off though. PS3 sales have lagged. PS2 is considered dated. The Wii has outsold all other consoles (and will probably continue to widen the gap), however; people who game on the Wii are a lot more diversified in their gaming tastes and there will probably be no single game on the Wii that almost all Wii owners will buy. In contrast Xbox360 owners are mostly the "gamer" demographic that games like Halo tend to target. So looking at Xbox360 sales being alright, and most Xbox360 owners being the sort who will buy Halo, this is probably the biggest console game this year.
Of course the reality is that World of Warcraft is still the biggest game of the year...
But unfortunately the real lesson that everyone who reads this story will learn is that you don't really have any rights, you should just shut up and comply with authority if you don't want to be punished.
You should thank him for that too. Believe me, when you end up severely fucked by the government it's always better not to get that lesson first hand. No one is going to stick up for you. No amount of logic will assist you. There is nothing you can do to fight the system because you're fighting the system WITHIN the system itself. It sucks that this is reality, but things could honestly be worse, so I suppose there is that much to be thankful for. If someone could have shown this guy that he would waste $7500 and his time for nothing, then perhaps he would appreciate that too. Not happily of course, but I'd rather be unhappy with an extra $7500.
A good excuse to stay at home and drink beer... why wouldn't the Aussies buy this?
Optimized in current terms of Linux is really all about tuning it for its intended role - which can have a significant difference in performance. The scheduler has gotten a lot of attention lately. There is also preemption which is typically opposite when considering server and desktop roles. Aside from that there is the internal kernel 'clock' (that might be the wrong term, I can't recall right now). Generally on servers you would probably want a lower 'tick' so more work is done, while desktops would want a higher tick count - which I may be wrong but I believe this reduces latency and improves perceived responsiveness.
And as others have said you don't need different versions of Linux, just different compiled kernels you can select. Wow, that was a lot harder than forking Linux wasn't it? Slow news day?
People in the west die of crazy shit all the time. But if there is any media attention it is typically a footnote in the local news. Generally I'm willing to bet someone in North America has already died of exhaustion here, it just wasn't highly publicized - most likely because every extreme gamer I've ever known or heard of was able to lock themselves in a room. I've never seen anyone do extreme sessions in an internet cafe in North America and I'm sure if someone did drop dead in front of 100 other people who happened to be there you would hear a lot more about it.
The best MP3 players in the world can barely manage 30 hours of playback. Anyone thats says they "need" to carry around 100GB of music is talking utter crap.
I'm willing to bet that most people with more than 30GB haven't listened to every song they own.
I've been accumulating music for a long time now and my collection grew to 14Gb about 3 years ago. With good cleaning and continual additions, it's stayed that size. And while I originally had this good concentrated metal collection, I started expanding into other genres (more files). Do I "need" all of this music with me? Well there's an interesting story why I even got a digital music player. See I used to use CDs and that was fine with me in the car. But then due to circumstances in my life had to drive to Canada on a regular basis. For a while I did this once a week. That's 6 hours up, and 6 hours down for me. I got sick of the CDs in my car in a month. I got frustrated with trying to burn CDs to listen to all the time. There are a LOT of times I sat in the car WISHING I could listen to something I didn't have with me because that was what I was in the mood to listen to.
I've also tended to run into situations (again in my car) where people would always be asking "don't you have something else to listen to?". Again my music collection grew. This time for some of my friends. So yeah there is a validity in having a good collection with you at all times. 100Gb? Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean at 14Gb I have a hard time really cycling through my collection on a regular basis.
Mainly because you're expected to "sync" your collection, not move the entire thing over at once. If you update 100 songs, assuming they're 10Mb a piece, that's 1Gb - which is about 1 minute in your USB benchmark. Generally that's acceptable to most people. Since the USB port is also now used for charging, it typically takes more than a minute to charge anyway so this point is moot for the way Apple intends for you to use it.
I'm not to thrilled myself however since I manually move my collection myself. I've got everything cut into directories that are about 2-4Gb a piece though, and I typically don't update more than one at a time.
Because of latency DDR2 is only faster than DDR if you have a CPU over 2Ghz clock speed. And pretty much all speed boosts are marginal now days. The only way you really notice the difference is aggregated marginal increases. Like CPU + mainboard + hard drive + RAM, etc. Typically you can't see much of a difference in changing out one part anymore.
I've finished Battletoads
Is that significant? I'm just wondering because many of these things I've apparently accomplished in my day are apparently feats now. Like some people claiming that Ninja Gaiden 2 was near impossible to beat (I've beaten Ninja Gaiden 1,2 & 3 on one life). I'll never top some of the stuff people did with Asteroids, but apparently I'm not as bad at games as I think.
Totally different problem so this algorithm is irrelevant. The power of quantum computers is slightly more troubling than current super computer tech, but not overly so. Two or so years ago the claim of IDEA encryption was that it would take 1000 computers more than the lifetime of the universe to break it by brute force (or something to that effect). AES 256 is at least that strong. The problem with public key crypto is that its strength is indirectly proportional to how fast computers can do math.
Sorry to break this to you dude... you're dead.
We all have halos up here.
Actually I really like that idea. However there is a sad fact that some of the management is extremely anal about doing ANYTHING on the web that isn't 100% work related. My mantra is if you do your job, and your work gets done - then I don't care if you mess around on the web for a few minutes a day - just no porn/gambling/viruses. In fact I'd hope people would reflect on the freedom they get from us and look on being employed here in a more positive light.
Where I work it would turn into a situation where the users wouldn't be any better than a proxy blocking everything. Sort of worse since they can't even trust the proxy to give them privacy when they look at things on break. So strange as this sounds I sort of keep this info to myself for the sake of my users. If only they knew how we sometimes act as good shepard's on their behalf.
Simply put, because it's an exclusive for a console. There isn't much to really discuss if it's on all consoles. Even if it's on one first, many if not MOST people have the patience to wait for a while. But it's different with an exclusive and a huge franchise one at that. The more you can get people hyped about it and talking and excited, the more buzz is generated around the console. Maybe those who got a PS3 are thinking that they'd like to play that awesome Halo game too. Perhaps thinking about buying a new console you'd consider a Xbox360 first since everyone is talking about Halo, and you only get that on the 360.
Honestly I think 10 million on such a campaign is ridiculous, but this is probably proof that gaming is big business now - with nearly as much weight as the movie and music industries.
What kind of soulless bastard needs a written code of ethics to know what's right and wrong? Who really thinks that snooping around other peoples' data is the right thing to do?
Most of us do. But then again a LOT of us have lapses and moments of weakness. I mean if you know there is some really good dirt being shot back and forth via email and you log all email it's really tempting to just snoop through it to kill some boredom. Sometimes just reading a piece of paper on the wall can help you keep your focus.
I'm an I.T. Manager and it's sort of tough sometimes. For me personally I'm having a bad time in my life and I have this vicious streak that emerges many times a day - and that isn't helping. I have the ability to see every website they visit, everything they do on their PC, and can see every email received and sent. I can also access pretty much every file on every machine in the company. That's a LOT of responsibility. And I honestly don't snoop through any of it - it's kept for security/legal reasons. Monthly I wrap it up an 256bit AES encryption on a DVD and that's it. I think most I.T. people are actually pretty honest as well as far as the ones I've met. I mean I'd hate to see what the assholes in sales would do if they had as much power over the company as I had. heh, I actually just cringed.
Been doing that for so long that my trash is still certified for windows 98 :)
Metroid Prime is an exclusive though, so not necessarily 100% apples to apples. Having recently purchased Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, I think there is no comparison that the wimote is superior for such games. My wife rented RE4 for the PS2 and I played it for an hour or so. It's good game to be sure, but it was just so freaking clunky using a controller. On the Wii, after a slightly awkward start at figuring out how to move the character with the nunchuck while aiming with the wiimote I was blasting through stuff at a pretty furious pace - and I don't even like shooters.
And the controller having rumble AND making sounds is actually more ingenious then I expected when actually playing such a game. Like you can get an actual audio feedback that your weapon actually loaded when you're watching other things come at you.
It increases the space required to brute force the password. There are also statistical issues with where numbers are placed. For instance when you tell a person to use letters and numbers people almost always put the letters first and the numbers last. The vast majority will just use one number at the end. A few may actually put numbers in the beginning. If asked to use upper case letters, people automatically try to capitalize the first one. Using any non alphanumeric characters will make cracking far harder. The characters $ and @ are only more vulnerable when people use them in place of 'S' and 'A'.
:)
Brute forcing isn't necessarily about going from aaa to zzz and such. You can improve cracking by orders of magnitude by utilizing statistical weaknesses in passwords. So that actually does make your password more secure. Assuming that you're in the range of passwords that is the %1 that takes 99% longer to crack, many people trying to crack your password may simply not find it worth the effort.
An interesting program to look through is John, I think it comes with tables of the most common things people try for passwords. A must read for anyone seriously looking at security I would think, but that strikes me as being way too geeky
You know, I was sort of worried about all of this stuff at first, but it's been well known that windows stores lanman hashes for a while now, and you can force NT hashes by using a long enough password. So I figured this is really all old news.
But thankfully you've managed to instill that paranoia back in me. Thanks dude =P
Megadeth claims prior art.
There was a (more) recent amendment to the entire Gutman paper which I believe was by Gutman although I can't say I'm 100% sure. I was researching exactly how secure Derik's Boot 'N Nuke was so I did a lot of research. Anyway in a nutshell the Gutman methods do not apply to modern (and I think this was years ago) hard drives. Basically with caching and spare sectors you can't be sure the hard drive is even writing the way you think it is, so the foundations of the paper in the techniques used aren't really trustworthy because you can't trust the drive. I think the general conclusion was that 4 writes of random data was probably the best you could do. The Gutman data wiping method does do such wipes but also does a lot of other stuff which is basically a waste of time. If such vooodoo wipes make you feel better, than there's no harm in using them. The method required by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also seems like it was a bit over thought, but better safe than sorry.
You could also ask those same questions about a machine that implements DES in hardware. Who would have reason? Who could do it? Who would if they could and you would never hear about it? The answer is... the government. I'd say it is to some extent "possible", however I have my doubts you could even be sure you could recover anything reliably if you did something as simple as zeroed the drive. Now people who "reformat" a drive or think they've deleted something with no way of verifying that something overwrote the bits, that's a different story - and typically that's where the entire "you can never really delete a file" myth comes from. With the new Vista (& MacOS) versioning thing it's probably going to be a whole new realm of files coming back from the dead.
Depends on what they do. In a windows environment that's nothing because each windows server application seems to demand it's own server - note that the article states the 15 or so mixed is down from 60 pure windows. Assuming no other software aside from windows server (not advanced server or anything) that's around $48k saved right there - before extra software. The big buzzword of the day is consolidation. Instead of having a billion servers and trying to manage security and updates on them all, keep it to a low number so it's easier to keep your eye on.
In an attempt to reduce dupes they are trying to get one editor to do everything since the rest of them can't be bothered to check slashdot. They used to have Zonk do this but he still tends to dupe himself.
and more importantly, can you divide by partial zero?
Same here. And it looks like from most of the posts, anyone that has a problem is using ISC dhcpd on Linux. Perhaps FreeBSD is OK with the broadcast flag and it's actually the Linux TCP/IP stack causing the issue? I still find it hard to believe that no one would have noticed this issue in the Vista betas.