The least useful yet most common question is "What's the difference between a router, switch, and hub?"
Damn, a sysadmin friend once told me "A router
is a device which is used to cut grooves into or out of wood, whereas a hub is something you screw onto a car's wheel", but he never told me what a switch was! Guess he was keeping some sysadmin secrets for himself!
Its much like the choice to support AMD's 3DNOW or Intel's SIMD instructions.
..which are converging. The Palomino Athlon core now supports Intel's SSE opcodes as well as 3DNow, and it is promised that the Hammer will also support SSE2. One can only hope that Nvidia and ATI's pixel shaders can also be comfortably converged into a common interface (sounds like they pretty much will be in DirectX 8.1, hopefully it won't be long until there's a common ARB extension for them in OpenGL too).
Some bleeding edge features are initially only supportible by writing specific code, but that is the exception.
And in the case of 3D hardware, the bleeding edge features are sure to be used for extra "flash", not vital functionality. A game might have phong-shaded bump-mapped objects on a Radeon2, but it will still run with slightly less exciting graphics on your elderly TNT2.
The Pixel Shader technology will be backwards compatable as far as the DirectX 8.0 API is concerned. Imagine that. Microsoft using an API to bring software developers together across various hardware choices.
Sadly the situation is not unified in OpenGL yet, with both Nvidia and ATI providing their own separate extensions for accessing pixel shaders. One can only hope that its not too long before we can get an ARB-approved extension that covers the capabilities of both cards.
Of course, since it will be quite a while before games publishers can rely on people having a GeForce3 or Radeon2, I expect pixel shaders will only be used for optional flash for quite some time. If people are doing bump mapping and phong shading and so on using them, they'll certainly have the option to run in a slightly less attractive mode for those with lamer hardware.
I remember something from my freshman English professor. She told us to avoid using the phrase "To be sure," in an article, because that meant you might as well say, "I'm full of bullshit, please believe me."
Worse still, it makes you sound like a jolly leprechaun, to be sure, to be sure!
Nice idea, but my single biggest source of spam is msn.com.
Are you sure? 95% of my spam is obviously sent using the same tool, and whatever this tool is always creates some random-garbage msn address in the From line (e.g. "4jceg@msn.com"), and identifies itself to the open relay as a machine in the msn domain (again with a random-garbage name, e.g. imldn.msn.com). But following the IP addresses in the Received lines, I've never yet found a single one of these actually coming from msn.
I'm seriously thinking of blocking the entire msn and hotmail domains from my inbox. I don't know anyone on msn, anyway.
That'd work, if the only mail you get that claims to be from msn is forged spam. Which is probably true..
Keep 2 seperate banks. Be it as simple as a 2nd savings account or something with your work or local credit union. Don't put all your eggs into one basket.
For added security, open the separate bank account using somebody else's name, birthdate and SSN.
On the desktop, sure, where you have to compare them to the frankenstein boxes that all us geeks love to build from parts.. but one of those new iBooks would be a fine, fine Linux laptop, if they could just get the audio working. But it's being worked on..
Wow. They should check out GOGO . It's originally based on LAME, with major portions of the code rewritten in assembly for speed. Granted, I don't know how well nasm would fair on a Mac (probably not at all), but it's a great tool for x86.
It'd be interesting to see what a talented PPC assembly hacker could make of GOGO. The blurb on the Freshmeat page says it takes advantage of MMX, 3D Now!, and SSE.. given that AltiVec is better than those (similar power to SSE, but with 32 SIMD registers instead of 8, and a wider range of instructions), it could be an absolute MP3-encoding monster. Of course PPC assembly hackers are probably a lot rarer than x86 ones.:-(
Quote from UCE: "Under U.S. Law (Bill s.1618 Title III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress) you are prohibited from considering this mail Spam because we include contact information and a link for removal from our mailing list.
Hilarious. Bill s.1618 was never passed into law. Here is the first thing Google popped up with when searching for it. Make sure you mention this when writing to the spammer's ISP to get their account yanked.
Slashdot Mirror
The least useful yet most common question is "What's the difference between a router, switch, and hub?"
Damn, a sysadmin friend once told me "A router is a device which is used to cut grooves into or out of wood, whereas a hub is something you screw onto a car's wheel", but he never told me what a switch was! Guess he was keeping some sysadmin secrets for himself!
Its much like the choice to support AMD's 3DNOW or Intel's SIMD instructions.
..which are converging. The Palomino Athlon core now supports Intel's SSE opcodes as well as 3DNow, and it is promised that the Hammer will also support SSE2. One can only hope that Nvidia and ATI's pixel shaders can also be comfortably converged into a common interface (sounds like they pretty much will be in DirectX 8.1, hopefully it won't be long until there's a common ARB extension for them in OpenGL too).
Some bleeding edge features are initially only supportible by writing specific code, but that is the exception.
And in the case of 3D hardware, the bleeding edge features are sure to be used for extra "flash", not vital functionality. A game might have phong-shaded bump-mapped objects on a Radeon2, but it will still run with slightly less exciting graphics on your elderly TNT2.
The Pixel Shader technology will be backwards compatable as far as the DirectX 8.0 API is concerned. Imagine that. Microsoft using an API to bring software developers together across various hardware choices.
Sadly the situation is not unified in OpenGL yet, with both Nvidia and ATI providing their own separate extensions for accessing pixel shaders. One can only hope that its not too long before we can get an ARB-approved extension that covers the capabilities of both cards.
Of course, since it will be quite a while before games publishers can rely on people having a GeForce3 or Radeon2, I expect pixel shaders will only be used for optional flash for quite some time. If people are doing bump mapping and phong shading and so on using them, they'll certainly have the option to run in a slightly less attractive mode for those with lamer hardware.
I remember something from my freshman English professor. She told us to avoid using the phrase "To be sure," in an article, because that meant you might as well say, "I'm full of bullshit, please believe me."
Worse still, it makes you sound like a jolly leprechaun, to be sure, to be sure!
Nice idea, but my single biggest source of spam is msn.com.
Are you sure? 95% of my spam is obviously sent using the same tool, and whatever this tool is always creates some random-garbage msn address in the From line (e.g. "4jceg@msn.com"), and identifies itself to the open relay as a machine in the msn domain (again with a random-garbage name, e.g. imldn.msn.com). But following the IP addresses in the Received lines, I've never yet found a single one of these actually coming from msn.
I'm seriously thinking of blocking the entire msn and hotmail domains from my inbox. I don't know anyone on msn, anyway.
That'd work, if the only mail you get that claims to be from msn is forged spam. Which is probably true..
It's Heidi! Where's Shoeboy?
Keep 2 seperate banks. Be it as simple as a 2nd savings account or something with your work or local credit union. Don't put all your eggs into one basket.
For added security, open the separate bank account using somebody else's name, birthdate and SSN.
Too bad the Mac's are so expensive
On the desktop, sure, where you have to compare them to the frankenstein boxes that all us geeks love to build from parts.. but one of those new iBooks would be a fine, fine Linux laptop, if they could just get the audio working. But it's being worked on..
Wow. They should check out GOGO . It's originally based on LAME, with major portions of the code rewritten in assembly for speed. Granted, I don't know how well nasm would fair on a Mac (probably not at all), but it's a great tool for x86.
It'd be interesting to see what a talented PPC assembly hacker could make of GOGO. The blurb on the Freshmeat page says it takes advantage of MMX, 3D Now!, and SSE.. given that AltiVec is better than those (similar power to SSE, but with 32 SIMD registers instead of 8, and a wider range of instructions), it could be an absolute MP3-encoding monster. Of course PPC assembly hackers are probably a lot rarer than x86 ones. :-(
Quote from UCE: "Under U.S. Law (Bill s.1618 Title III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress) you are prohibited from considering this mail Spam because we include contact information and a link for removal from our mailing list.
Hilarious. Bill s.1618 was never passed into law. Here is the first thing Google popped up with when searching for it. Make sure you mention this when writing to the spammer's ISP to get their account yanked.