I'm not trying to say anything against Philippines and its Open Source developer community, but if Microsoft even tried to make it look serious they would have created the lab in one of Open Source powerhouse countries or regions. Germany, Denmark, Estonia, even Russia and East Europe countries are more known for Open Source than Philippines.
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's some free advertizing for a fellow FreeBSD developer: TarSnap offers high-grade encryption over the wire and on the storage, incremental backups, and it also uses Amazon S3.
From the BSD camp (or at least one of the developers), there's TarSnap, which offers very high encryption and confidentiality, and also incremental backups (via snapshotting).
It's sloppy and doesn't excuse Futuremark but there is one theoretically "sane" (when viewed under a certain light) explanation for what's been noticed: they took a number of CPUs and measured which memory access instruction had the least latency in itself, for example to decode it, activate proper CPU paths, etc. - so for example a MMX instruction on CPU A took X cycles before even trying to access memory, and SSE took X+n cycles, so for this particular CPU MMX is better than SSE for measuring memory performance. Of course this is really lame since new CPUs are released constantly, and a little tweak in the hardware or the microcode can invalidate the data they gathered from such tests.
This is probable because when assembler was still popular it was "well known" that certain CPUs perform certain operations faster. For a time, while it was worth it, a good assembler programmer had to know this and insert microoptimizations that depend on CPU type. Unfortunately (or fortunately), those assumptions broke sometime in the late nineties, since a) the number of CPU models on the market became huge and b) even CPUs that were theoretically in the same family started having different characteristics. I remember seeing just this for Athlon and Athlon XP (or maybe even for "early" Athlon XP and its later versions) - it was obvious that assuming anything about the CPU itself without actually measuring it on the spot is useless. A good example of this is in the Linux kernel - the MD (RAID) driver will actually measure (when kernel is booting) which instruction combination for calculating parity (among "plain" instructions, "SSE", "MMX", etc.) is faster and use that one.
Hope there are no aircraft in the empty space accidentally covered by the laser beam
Just paint the shells blue. The trick isn't in making the projectile mirror back the laser, it's in making it stealthy enough not to be recognizable and trackable.
Any integrated distros or VMWare images with KDE 4.1 I can try? Yes, I could download the packages - build it from source even, but I'm sure some busy bees have it ready somewhere.
Asterisk+SIP+Ekiga is not a good replacement for Skype:
It's much harder to setup (you can't beat Skype's "start the exe, type in username and password and you're there" experience).
It's not encrypted - so all those people saying "Worried about big bad wolf listening to your Skype calls? Switch to SIP because it's open!" are actually making things worse.
Add to this that Skype has existed for a large number of years (5 years is "long" in "internet time") and it's not exactly known as a big medium for spreading viruses, hack attacks, etc. and you'll realize that security through obscurity actually can work. Of course, past trends are not indication of future behaviour, but you can't argue with results.
Cheap "embedded" devices like routers and NAS-es routinely have extremely bad hardware. The competition apparently is so fierce that cutting corners of everything, from basic motherboard-like functionality to network and disk controllers is ubiquitous.
I'm occasionally doing hardware reviews for a local IT magazine and it's unbelievable what you can actually buy today as a bona-fide good equipment even from "brand name" companies. CPUs are usually ARM or AMD GEODE (You think VIA is slow? Think again. - Not to say there isn't a place for slow CPUs, only that this isn't it.), network controllers are cheap Realtek's and I don't know what they use for disk controllers (probably parts of the CPUs "companion" chipset) but it sucks.
I've seen "gigabit" network controllers on NASes that actually negotiate gigabit speed, although they are connected to buses and CPUs that break a sweat even at 100Mbit/s speeds. NASes that accept 4 drives cannot service reads on even one drive at more than 15 MB/s - introducing RAID (especially RAID 5) into this setup slows things to a crawl.
Practically all of these devices use Linux, because it's free (as in beer). They usually (I'd say 90%) don't acknowledge or obey the GPL.
It's a sort-of reverse "best scenario" for Open systems (and Open source). The manufacturers have a choice between something like this:
They'll design special ASIC-like functionality which will do one thing only and do it fast and stable.
They'll use cheap off-the shelf hardware and software which is generic.
The first choice is represented by "truly" embedded devices like ordinary small, unmanaged Ethernet switches (with which I have suprisingly good experience), but apparently it's too expensive to scale it to "smart" devices that have to support many features so everyone opts for the second one. You can (and this is verified!) build yourself a small managed router or a NAS device like the ones sold at every el-cheapo computer shop with the same cheap generic components, and the resulting device will be just as sucky.
Creating a router or a NAS just like the above but with "proper" hardware (a Duron 800 MHz based system will be excellent) won't even cost you significantly more, but will deliver orders of magnitude better performance.
No platform that incorporates the need for the vendor (or someone equally expensive) to "bless" your application by signing it will ever, ever enjoy the wide-spread adoption that common PCs do.
Surprisingly little people know this, but to deploy an application in J2ME, Symbian or iPhone, that does anything outside the trivial ("hello, world"), the application needs to be digitally signed (think SSL certificates) by a company the phone firmware "trusts". If you're lucky, this is one of the big authorities like Thawte, if you're unlucky this means every single mobile provider that sells phones as a part of their contracts or service.
What this means in practice is a significant monetary barrier to entry, at least compared to the Windows and Linux platforms, because every company that wants to deploy mobile phone applications needs to buy expensive certificates every couple of years (because they expire). This is also the reason why the open-source and freeware smartphone applications are a) few and far between and b) mostly very simple and crappy since they can't use the advanced APIs.
The official reason for the signing requirement is to protect users from viruses, etc. - which is completely wrong since it's obviously a failure (as demonstrated by the appearance of anti-virus software for smartphones). The real reason is the greed of phone companies and manufacturers. In the very unlucky case, an application developer needs to have his application signed by every single operator on whose phones he wants to deploy the application.
I don't think the poster actually wants to *develop* something using a database, so all this replies like "use (sqlite|mysql|whatever)" are completely off. He probably doesn't want to have anything to do with SQL or just how the data looks like on the byte level!
As a reply to the poster: it's impossible to find a nice user-friendly F/OSS database that will mimic the ease of use of Access (and Access isn't really an overkill if you want something better than Notepad and less complicated than a "real" database). OpenOffice Base is the only reasonable contender (though it sucks worse then Access if you try doing advanced stuff in it) and it fits the requirements: works on Windows, file format is portable, and doesn't require Java (it *can* be used with Java but it doesn't require it).
Othen than that, just use Excel or OpenOffice Calc.
Well there you have it - you *cannot* have a quick, streamlined system that also has a modern, good looking desktop. That means no matter what you do, todays modern Linux distribution won't work as it was meant to work on a Pentium II.
Contrary to what early Linux supporters were bragging about, once you add the bling that makes the system easy to use and attractive to new users (and you *have* to add it to attract new and novice users so there's no escaping it), all that work invested in having a top-notch kernel just melts aways, and it all comes down to drivers and user interface.
Consider that Windows XP is now a *very* old operating system, but whose GUI is still the golden standard, and you'll see why geeking out on consoles with ridiculous number of columns and rows is so childish.
I've always been puzzled by these reports. How are they created? Why? Someone has to create them and get payed for it - who pays for them? I doubt it's just a matter of bored analysis sitting at their desks and saying "well, I might write something about... Windows... today".
Ah yes, but you see, working for your living instead of getting the money by playing the stock market or owning Dell is so Middle-ages, and people who depend on it should really move on or die off. By removing menial jobs from the country the Big Boys are actually helping people to transition to pure royalties-based industry, and get the money the way it's meant to be had - by sitting in leather armchairs and smoking Cuban cigars while reading the stock market reports, not something as vulgar as working in an office.
(If you don't see Alien-grade sarcasm dripping from the above words, get yourself new glasses.)
Anyone who hasn't yet read the "Orphanogenesis" chapter of the novel "Diaspora" by Greg Egan should do it right now: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html - it has an absolutely beautiful description of a birth of an AI mind, from non-sentient set of instruction to self-awareness and awareness of its surroundings.
Very, very nice scaling performance under PGSQL is evident in the PDF, and I've no reason to assume the benches aren't legit.
Oh they are legit. The guy who did them has a thing for proper benchmark procedure and statistical analysis and is a physicist in real life.
He isn't an expert in MySQL and PostgreSQL but if he did underoptimize them, you can be assured he uderoptimized them in exactly the same way on both OS-es:)
And woe to the journalists! The world before Internet was dark, smelly and covered with big nasty sharp spikes, so there was absolutely no way people could find out what was happening in another country! If only there was some way of transferring information that doesn't use expensive technology - like, like, walking! One can only dream...
Are you sure this is such a disaster? As far as I can tell this only means that executing "COMMIT" doesn't block (wait) until the commit has actually happened but returns immediately, and the actual operation is performed "later". The data still goes through the journal (WAL), is still fsynced when needed, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not trying to say anything against Philippines and its Open Source developer community, but if Microsoft even tried to make it look serious they would have created the lab in one of Open Source powerhouse countries or regions. Germany, Denmark, Estonia, even Russia and East Europe countries are more known for Open Source than Philippines.
So, the Internet at large is safe (at least as safe as before) until most computers are connected with gigabit links?
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's some free advertizing for a fellow FreeBSD developer: TarSnap offers high-grade encryption over the wire and on the storage, incremental backups, and it also uses Amazon S3.
From the BSD camp (or at least one of the developers), there's TarSnap, which offers very high encryption and confidentiality, and also incremental backups (via snapshotting).
It's sloppy and doesn't excuse Futuremark but there is one theoretically "sane" (when viewed under a certain light) explanation for what's been noticed: they took a number of CPUs and measured which memory access instruction had the least latency in itself, for example to decode it, activate proper CPU paths, etc. - so for example a MMX instruction on CPU A took X cycles before even trying to access memory, and SSE took X+n cycles, so for this particular CPU MMX is better than SSE for measuring memory performance. Of course this is really lame since new CPUs are released constantly, and a little tweak in the hardware or the microcode can invalidate the data they gathered from such tests.
This is probable because when assembler was still popular it was "well known" that certain CPUs perform certain operations faster. For a time, while it was worth it, a good assembler programmer had to know this and insert microoptimizations that depend on CPU type. Unfortunately (or fortunately), those assumptions broke sometime in the late nineties, since a) the number of CPU models on the market became huge and b) even CPUs that were theoretically in the same family started having different characteristics. I remember seeing just this for Athlon and Athlon XP (or maybe even for "early" Athlon XP and its later versions) - it was obvious that assuming anything about the CPU itself without actually measuring it on the spot is useless. A good example of this is in the Linux kernel - the MD (RAID) driver will actually measure (when kernel is booting) which instruction combination for calculating parity (among "plain" instructions, "SSE", "MMX", etc.) is faster and use that one.
I don't know why it's so fast in some areas (or alternatively, why is VMWare so slow) but VirtualBox is definitely faster.
Any integrated distros or VMWare images with KDE 4.1 I can try? Yes, I could download the packages - build it from source even, but I'm sure some busy bees have it ready somewhere.
Not widely known, but the RFC was actually implemented, at least once: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2003-April/001098.html :)
Asterisk+SIP+Ekiga is not a good replacement for Skype:
Add to this that Skype has existed for a large number of years (5 years is "long" in "internet time") and it's not exactly known as a big medium for spreading viruses, hack attacks, etc. and you'll realize that security through obscurity actually can work. Of course, past trends are not indication of future behaviour, but you can't argue with results.
Cheap "embedded" devices like routers and NAS-es routinely have extremely bad hardware. The competition apparently is so fierce that cutting corners of everything, from basic motherboard-like functionality to network and disk controllers is ubiquitous.
I'm occasionally doing hardware reviews for a local IT magazine and it's unbelievable what you can actually buy today as a bona-fide good equipment even from "brand name" companies. CPUs are usually ARM or AMD GEODE (You think VIA is slow? Think again. - Not to say there isn't a place for slow CPUs, only that this isn't it.), network controllers are cheap Realtek's and I don't know what they use for disk controllers (probably parts of the CPUs "companion" chipset) but it sucks.
I've seen "gigabit" network controllers on NASes that actually negotiate gigabit speed, although they are connected to buses and CPUs that break a sweat even at 100Mbit/s speeds. NASes that accept 4 drives cannot service reads on even one drive at more than 15 MB/s - introducing RAID (especially RAID 5) into this setup slows things to a crawl.
Practically all of these devices use Linux, because it's free (as in beer). They usually (I'd say 90%) don't acknowledge or obey the GPL.
It's a sort-of reverse "best scenario" for Open systems (and Open source). The manufacturers have a choice between something like this:
The first choice is represented by "truly" embedded devices like ordinary small, unmanaged Ethernet switches (with which I have suprisingly good experience), but apparently it's too expensive to scale it to "smart" devices that have to support many features so everyone opts for the second one. You can (and this is verified!) build yourself a small managed router or a NAS device like the ones sold at every el-cheapo computer shop with the same cheap generic components, and the resulting device will be just as sucky.
Creating a router or a NAS just like the above but with "proper" hardware (a Duron 800 MHz based system will be excellent) won't even cost you significantly more, but will deliver orders of magnitude better performance.
No platform that incorporates the need for the vendor (or someone equally expensive) to "bless" your application by signing it will ever, ever enjoy the wide-spread adoption that common PCs do.
Surprisingly little people know this, but to deploy an application in J2ME, Symbian or iPhone, that does anything outside the trivial ("hello, world"), the application needs to be digitally signed (think SSL certificates) by a company the phone firmware "trusts". If you're lucky, this is one of the big authorities like Thawte, if you're unlucky this means every single mobile provider that sells phones as a part of their contracts or service.
What this means in practice is a significant monetary barrier to entry, at least compared to the Windows and Linux platforms, because every company that wants to deploy mobile phone applications needs to buy expensive certificates every couple of years (because they expire). This is also the reason why the open-source and freeware smartphone applications are a) few and far between and b) mostly very simple and crappy since they can't use the advanced APIs.
The official reason for the signing requirement is to protect users from viruses, etc. - which is completely wrong since it's obviously a failure (as demonstrated by the appearance of anti-virus software for smartphones). The real reason is the greed of phone companies and manufacturers. In the very unlucky case, an application developer needs to have his application signed by every single operator on whose phones he wants to deploy the application.
References:
There's a large number of similar rants if you Google them.
I don't think the poster actually wants to *develop* something using a database, so all this replies like "use (sqlite|mysql|whatever)" are completely off. He probably doesn't want to have anything to do with SQL or just how the data looks like on the byte level!
As a reply to the poster: it's impossible to find a nice user-friendly F/OSS database that will mimic the ease of use of Access (and Access isn't really an overkill if you want something better than Notepad and less complicated than a "real" database). OpenOffice Base is the only reasonable contender (though it sucks worse then Access if you try doing advanced stuff in it) and it fits the requirements: works on Windows, file format is portable, and doesn't require Java (it *can* be used with Java but it doesn't require it).
Othen than that, just use Excel or OpenOffice Calc.
Well there you have it - you *cannot* have a quick, streamlined system that also has a modern, good looking desktop. That means no matter what you do, todays modern Linux distribution won't work as it was meant to work on a Pentium II.
Contrary to what early Linux supporters were bragging about, once you add the bling that makes the system easy to use and attractive to new users (and you *have* to add it to attract new and novice users so there's no escaping it), all that work invested in having a top-notch kernel just melts aways, and it all comes down to drivers and user interface.
Consider that Windows XP is now a *very* old operating system, but whose GUI is still the golden standard, and you'll see why geeking out on consoles with ridiculous number of columns and rows is so childish.
People need to be aware of this. So:
If it stays "news for the geeks", nothing will come from it.
I've always been puzzled by these reports. How are they created? Why? Someone has to create them and get payed for it - who pays for them? I doubt it's just a matter of bored analysis sitting at their desks and saying "well, I might write something about ... Windows... today".
Ah yes, but you see, working for your living instead of getting the money by playing the stock market or owning Dell is so Middle-ages, and people who depend on it should really move on or die off. By removing menial jobs from the country the Big Boys are actually helping people to transition to pure royalties-based industry, and get the money the way it's meant to be had - by sitting in leather armchairs and smoking Cuban cigars while reading the stock market reports, not something as vulgar as working in an office.
(If you don't see Alien-grade sarcasm dripping from the above words, get yourself new glasses.)
The only thing that's certain is that nothing is black-or-white. Even oxygen and water will poison you if you get too much of them.
What's it called, "Brawndo"? Is it full of electrolytes?
Anyone who hasn't yet read the "Orphanogenesis" chapter of the novel "Diaspora" by Greg Egan should do it right now: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html - it has an absolutely beautiful description of a birth of an AI mind, from non-sentient set of instruction to self-awareness and awareness of its surroundings.
The arms race continues: http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/17426.html#cutid1
Oh they are legit. The guy who did them has a thing for proper benchmark procedure and statistical analysis and is a physicist in real life.
He isn't an expert in MySQL and PostgreSQL but if he did underoptimize them, you can be assured he uderoptimized them in exactly the same way on both OS-es :)
I can't be the only one who thought of this: what if a virus took over the frames just to display the well known image on them, for amusement value? :)
And woe to the journalists! The world before Internet was dark, smelly and covered with big nasty sharp spikes, so there was absolutely no way people could find out what was happening in another country! If only there was some way of transferring information that doesn't use expensive technology - like, like, walking! One can only dream...
Are you sure this is such a disaster? As far as I can tell this only means that executing "COMMIT" doesn't block (wait) until the commit has actually happened but returns immediately, and the actual operation is performed "later". The data still goes through the journal (WAL), is still fsynced when needed, etc.