Indeed, remember how shoddy the first versions of IE were? Unfortunately microsoft gave up on trying to beat netscape on product quality, and instead opted for the "competition is no threat if the customers dont know they exist" approach.
Sites should be designed for standards compliance, or atleast designed and tested on mozilla, on the basis that pretty much everyone can run mozilla, regardless of their choice of os and/or hardware, and theres always the possibility to port it to a new platform. Altho i would much prefer all browsers to be standard and have absoloute freedom of choice as to what browser i use, there would inevitably be bugs in various browsers... But so long as the site displays in mozilla, then virtually everyone should be able to view it. Making someone install a freely downloadable piece of software to view a website is nowhere near as bad as forcing someone to buy a commercial os and/or hardware to run it on.
I would, but unfortunately that would make changes to a target computer without the owner`s consent, thus classifying my program as malicious... nice idea tho
Surely installing hidden files onto your machine without your consent amounts to a virus infection, and the authors of this should be prosecuted accordingly. Even moreso because the virus has a malicious payload (it prevents you from performing an action on your computer that you could do before you were infected) Does it prevent you reading other CD`s or just the ones with this stuff installed? What if you create your own audio CD`s, many people do, i sent a voice message to a friend of mine in the mail and i did so by recording it onto cd, this may prevent you from reading your own data from cd.
Autorun should ALWAYS be disabled anyway... Everyone has access to a cd writer nowadays, CD autorun viruses could be worse than bootsector viruses on floppies were back in the day.. All we need is for a monoculture to form on cd writing apps, once everyone uses the same app to write cd`s it will be easy for a virus to hack that app to propogate itself on every cd you create. As for me, every CD i create has a small executeable that pops up a dialog box saying "If this was a virus, then your system would be infected now. And a virus wouldn`t tell you it was installing"
Pretty much, if linux or *BSD was the dominant platform, and had been a few years back, then maybe PPC would have taken off like motorola hoped it would, or perhaps alpha would have taken off in a BIG way. Remember the early days of the alpha, when nothing else could come close to it in performance terms? and they were fairly inexpensive compared to the other 64bit architectures, the problem was compatibility with the software people were already using.. If people were already using opensource software, then it would have been ported fairly quickly
This has nothing to do with multi core cpus.. This is for running multiple OS`s simultaneously on a single machine, wether that machine has 1 or 512 processors. And yes, Intel do own the X86 ISA.. look at recent history... AMD tried to improve the x86 isa with 3dnow, intel didnt care... Intel added sse, AMD followed with their own implementation, intel created the x86 isa and amd have to remain compatible. And yes, Intel did create the basic architecture and they still dictate the development of it. AMD might change that with x86-64, but we`l have to wait and see there
The PPC/POWER architecture is particularly good at virtualization.. look at MacOnLinux, and i believe OSX has a "classic mode" for running older MacOS apps... I wonder what other processors have good support for such virtualization, i have a number of non x86 systems that i would like to partition and run multiple virtual servers on.. and these are mid range servers, not high end sun/dec kit that`s designed for virtualization.. the choice is between a whole rack of 1u servers, 1 customer on each, each of them 99% idle, consuming power, pumping out tons of heat, and with more chances of hardware failure, or a single quad cpu 4u server with redundant disks, regular backups, all the users in their own partitions, and overall moderate cpu load. This would be similar to how isp`s offer "burst bandwidth", server spends most of the time idle, but if occasionally a link finds its way to slashdot, the server is powerfull enough to cope with it.
There have been faster, cooler, better designed processors for years.. PPC/POWER, MIPS, SPARC, ALPHA, PA-RISC, ARM etc... in the case of alpha atleast, cleanly designed from the ground up as a 64bit chip, the others were all designed as 32bit chips with 64bit extensions added later, but the transition went smoother because 64bit extensions were always planned... Compare this to x86, which was originally designed as an 8bit architecture and noone in the original design team considered making a 32bit, let alone a 64bit design. Unfortunately, new innovative designs, while far superior, dont sell chips for a number of reasons, mostly compatibility and cost, chips dont become cheap until they can be mass produced, no company will mass produce chips unless theyre sure of selling them, people wont buy chips which won`t run the apps they need, and chips with few users wont recieve much or any commercial support from software vendors... If opensource were dominant nowadays, this would aid the development of new and innovative processors, since the porting of applications would be somewhat easier, and initially could be done by the processor designers. Unfortunately, commercial vendors release binaries which are tied to a particular processor architecture and third party software, and its not commercially viable for them to support anything until theres a userbase (and a userbase wont grow unless theres a software base) So, you have people tied to existing systems, most notably windows/x86, but in many companies theres legacy apps tied to solaris/sparc or various ibm or other old mainframe systems etc. And, vendors arent going to change this behavior any time soon, because lock-in suits them.. if people are forced to use their products no matter how crap they are, simply because they have no other choice... then the vendor doesn`t need to spend so much money making improvements.
High end sun systems do it too, as do the high end SGI`s, infact pretty much every architecture does it, except x86... intel is just playing catch up as usual
Not to mention the kids (including adults who act like kids in 18+ movies) who are bored (because the movie sucks) and decide to throw their popcorn or other such items at random people in the cinema, plus the occasional fight when one of the said kids throw something at the wrong person
But i imagine a 1ghz intel box with a fast raid controller would load it much faster, a lot of program load time is spent waiting for disk io, that`s why its so much faster the 2nd time... because most of the program is cached
Also, comparing load time is more a benchmark of disk speed, and loading the second time would more than likely have pulled it straight from the disk cache, especially on a machine with 2gig ram..
A peak of 11355.107 KBytes/sec transfer over my 100mbit card and an average rate of over 10000 during the entire transfer, maybe not quite the full 100mbit speed, but its pretty close, and taking into account overheads etc.. This benchmark was taken from copying a file over NFS from a 250mhz IRIX machine to my linux workstation, both machines are connected to the same 100mbit switch in full duplex mode
Pity, Lightwave used to have versions for AmigaOS and IRIX, if not other unix flavors aswell, i doubt it would be hard for them to port it to Linux.. Also, the AmigaOS version was the first, and up until 4.0 i believe it was the only version
That`s exactly true, anyone who feels dissatisfied with a piece of software they have obtained, should have the right to a full refund, provided they delete all copies of the software and return the software to the place of purchase within 30 days. This is no different to any other item you may purchase from a shop. Free software is different because the author isnt trying (via advertising etc) to make you use his software, he simply makes it available should you want it, i doubt he would care wether you use it or not. And marketting is another area, you should be able to claim compensation if a piece of software fails to live up to its marketting claims, just like you would with any other item. It`s illegal to market a product as being something it`s not.
But cars are insured, if your car gets stolen its likely that your insurance will replace it. But if your computer gets hacked, who will compensate you for the data thats destroyed or stolen by the hacker? who will pay your bandwidth charges when your machine is used as a ddos zombie? who will pay the phonebill when your modem is hijacked and used to make outgoing calls to premium rate numbers? (yes people do hack machines and force them to dial premium rate, its very profitable) who compensates the victims when your machine is used as a platform for compromising others? who will compensate your time wasted removing the malware installed by the hacker? or worse, when your not capable of doing so yourself and have to pay someone else to do it?
But a closer analogy would be a flaw in the locking system of a vehicle, that allowed someone to easily bypass the security mechanisms and enter/drive away the vehicle at will. There wont be many people interested in blowing up random cars, and those who are, will use a can of gas and a match, rather than exploiting a design flaw in the vehicle. However, there are many people who would be interested in easier ways of stealing a vehicle, just like theres people interested in compromising computer systems.
AmigaOS was similarly fast, and for the same reasons, most of the OS is stored in ROM and it`s a fairly efficient and simplistic system. I guess RiscOS is still faster because its entirely rom based, whereas AmigaOS required a small program to be loaded from disk, which took a few seconds on a floppy.. but was instant from a ramdrive and very fast from a decent HD... My A4000 boots almost instantly from a scsi hd..
But a multithreaded startup can also be better in some respects, if something hangs, then the startup continues anyway, instead of it hanging the whole machine and leaving you with no input methods
I liked the original sourcemage, aka sourceror, which had just a simple single script for startup, no fancy init stuff... all i had in mine, was: ifconfig eth0 bla bla bla/usr/bin/iptables-script route add default bla/usr/sbin/sshd &
and it was to a login prompt pretty much instantly once the kernel had initialized, the system this story talks about could cut the kernel init time down, so now all we need is to speed up the bios post.
My Amiga used to take ages to boot, because of all the crap i had running.. i ended up using a multithreaded boot process, and it seemed slower, so eventually i cached all the boot files before loading them, this was much faster, since the machine had a lot of ram, by amiga standards anyway, and the disk was pretty slow.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, remember how shoddy the first versions of IE were?
Unfortunately microsoft gave up on trying to beat netscape on product quality, and instead opted for the "competition is no threat if the customers dont know they exist" approach.
Sites should be designed for standards compliance, or atleast designed and tested on mozilla, on the basis that pretty much everyone can run mozilla, regardless of their choice of os and/or hardware, and theres always the possibility to port it to a new platform.
Altho i would much prefer all browsers to be standard and have absoloute freedom of choice as to what browser i use, there would inevitably be bugs in various browsers... But so long as the site displays in mozilla, then virtually everyone should be able to view it.
Making someone install a freely downloadable piece of software to view a website is nowhere near as bad as forcing someone to buy a commercial os and/or hardware to run it on.
I would, but unfortunately that would make changes to a target computer without the owner`s consent, thus classifying my program as malicious... nice idea tho
How about for packages which are inappropriate for i386? surely there are some architecture specific packages which don`t make sense on i386..
Surely installing hidden files onto your machine without your consent amounts to a virus infection, and the authors of this should be prosecuted accordingly. Even moreso because the virus has a malicious payload (it prevents you from performing an action on your computer that you could do before you were infected)
Does it prevent you reading other CD`s or just the ones with this stuff installed?
What if you create your own audio CD`s, many people do, i sent a voice message to a friend of mine in the mail and i did so by recording it onto cd, this may prevent you from reading your own data from cd.
Autorun should ALWAYS be disabled anyway...
Everyone has access to a cd writer nowadays, CD autorun viruses could be worse than bootsector viruses on floppies were back in the day..
All we need is for a monoculture to form on cd writing apps, once everyone uses the same app to write cd`s it will be easy for a virus to hack that app to propogate itself on every cd you create.
As for me, every CD i create has a small executeable that pops up a dialog box saying "If this was a virus, then your system would be infected now. And a virus wouldn`t tell you it was installing"
What happens if you try to rip this cd in a non windows system?
Pretty much, if linux or *BSD was the dominant platform, and had been a few years back, then maybe PPC would have taken off like motorola hoped it would, or perhaps alpha would have taken off in a BIG way. Remember the early days of the alpha, when nothing else could come close to it in performance terms? and they were fairly inexpensive compared to the other 64bit architectures, the problem was compatibility with the software people were already using.. If people were already using opensource software, then it would have been ported fairly quickly
This has nothing to do with multi core cpus.. This is for running multiple OS`s simultaneously on a single machine, wether that machine has 1 or 512 processors.
And yes, Intel do own the X86 ISA.. look at recent history...
AMD tried to improve the x86 isa with 3dnow, intel didnt care...
Intel added sse, AMD followed with their own implementation, intel created the x86 isa and amd have to remain compatible. And yes, Intel did create the basic architecture and they still dictate the development of it. AMD might change that with x86-64, but we`l have to wait and see there
The PPC/POWER architecture is particularly good at virtualization.. look at MacOnLinux, and i believe OSX has a "classic mode" for running older MacOS apps...
I wonder what other processors have good support for such virtualization, i have a number of non x86 systems that i would like to partition and run multiple virtual servers on.. and these are mid range servers, not high end sun/dec kit that`s designed for virtualization.. the choice is between a whole rack of 1u servers, 1 customer on each, each of them 99% idle, consuming power, pumping out tons of heat, and with more chances of hardware failure, or a single quad cpu 4u server with redundant disks, regular backups, all the users in their own partitions, and overall moderate cpu load. This would be similar to how isp`s offer "burst bandwidth", server spends most of the time idle, but if occasionally a link finds its way to slashdot, the server is powerfull enough to cope with it.
There have been faster, cooler, better designed processors for years.. PPC/POWER, MIPS, SPARC, ALPHA, PA-RISC, ARM etc... in the case of alpha atleast, cleanly designed from the ground up as a 64bit chip, the others were all designed as 32bit chips with 64bit extensions added later, but the transition went smoother because 64bit extensions were always planned... Compare this to x86, which was originally designed as an 8bit architecture and noone in the original design team considered making a 32bit, let alone a 64bit design.
Unfortunately, new innovative designs, while far superior, dont sell chips for a number of reasons, mostly compatibility and cost, chips dont become cheap until they can be mass produced, no company will mass produce chips unless theyre sure of selling them, people wont buy chips which won`t run the apps they need, and chips with few users wont recieve much or any commercial support from software vendors...
If opensource were dominant nowadays, this would aid the development of new and innovative processors, since the porting of applications would be somewhat easier, and initially could be done by the processor designers. Unfortunately, commercial vendors release binaries which are tied to a particular processor architecture and third party software, and its not commercially viable for them to support anything until theres a userbase (and a userbase wont grow unless theres a software base)
So, you have people tied to existing systems, most notably windows/x86, but in many companies theres legacy apps tied to solaris/sparc or various ibm or other old mainframe systems etc. And, vendors arent going to change this behavior any time soon, because lock-in suits them.. if people are forced to use their products no matter how crap they are, simply because they have no other choice... then the vendor doesn`t need to spend so much money making improvements.
High end sun systems do it too, as do the high end SGI`s, infact pretty much every architecture does it, except x86... intel is just playing catch up as usual
Not to mention the kids (including adults who act like kids in 18+ movies) who are bored (because the movie sucks) and decide to throw their popcorn or other such items at random people in the cinema, plus the occasional fight when one of the said kids throw something at the wrong person
But i imagine a 1ghz intel box with a fast raid controller would load it much faster, a lot of program load time is spent waiting for disk io, that`s why its so much faster the 2nd time... because most of the program is cached
Also, comparing load time is more a benchmark of disk speed, and loading the second time would more than likely have pulled it straight from the disk cache, especially on a machine with 2gig ram..
Interface Received(KBps) Transmit(KBps) Total(KBps)
eth0 10663.285 54.074 10717.359
max: 11355.107 58.747 11413.854
A peak of 11355.107 KBytes/sec transfer over my 100mbit card and an average rate of over 10000 during the entire transfer, maybe not quite the full 100mbit speed, but its pretty close, and taking into account overheads etc.. This benchmark was taken from copying a file over NFS from a 250mhz IRIX machine to my linux workstation, both machines are connected to the same 100mbit switch in full duplex mode
Pity, Lightwave used to have versions for AmigaOS and IRIX, if not other unix flavors aswell, i doubt it would be hard for them to port it to Linux..
Also, the AmigaOS version was the first, and up until 4.0 i believe it was the only version
That`s exactly true, anyone who feels dissatisfied with a piece of software they have obtained, should have the right to a full refund, provided they delete all copies of the software and return the software to the place of purchase within 30 days. This is no different to any other item you may purchase from a shop.
Free software is different because the author isnt trying (via advertising etc) to make you use his software, he simply makes it available should you want it, i doubt he would care wether you use it or not.
And marketting is another area, you should be able to claim compensation if a piece of software fails to live up to its marketting claims, just like you would with any other item. It`s illegal to market a product as being something it`s not.
But cars are insured, if your car gets stolen its likely that your insurance will replace it. But if your computer gets hacked,
who will compensate you for the data thats destroyed or stolen by the hacker?
who will pay your bandwidth charges when your machine is used as a ddos zombie?
who will pay the phonebill when your modem is hijacked and used to make outgoing calls to premium rate numbers? (yes people do hack machines and force them to dial premium rate, its very profitable)
who compensates the victims when your machine is used as a platform for compromising others?
who will compensate your time wasted removing the malware installed by the hacker? or worse, when your not capable of doing so yourself and have to pay someone else to do it?
But a closer analogy would be a flaw in the locking system of a vehicle, that allowed someone to easily bypass the security mechanisms and enter/drive away the vehicle at will.
There wont be many people interested in blowing up random cars, and those who are, will use a can of gas and a match, rather than exploiting a design flaw in the vehicle. However, there are many people who would be interested in easier ways of stealing a vehicle, just like theres people interested in compromising computer systems.
AmigaOS was similarly fast, and for the same reasons, most of the OS is stored in ROM and it`s a fairly efficient and simplistic system. I guess RiscOS is still faster because its entirely rom based, whereas AmigaOS required a small program to be loaded from disk, which took a few seconds on a floppy.. but was instant from a ramdrive and very fast from a decent HD...
My A4000 boots almost instantly from a scsi hd..
But a multithreaded startup can also be better in some respects, if something hangs, then the startup continues anyway, instead of it hanging the whole machine and leaving you with no input methods
I liked the original sourcemage, aka sourceror, which had just a simple single script for startup, no fancy init stuff... /usr/bin/iptables-script /usr/sbin/sshd &
all i had in mine, was:
ifconfig eth0 bla bla bla
route add default bla
and it was to a login prompt pretty much instantly once the kernel had initialized, the system this story talks about could cut the kernel init time down, so now all we need is to speed up the bios post.
Spacefrog ? spacefrog.demon.co.uk user from ircnet #worms/#amiga ?
My Amiga used to take ages to boot, because of all the crap i had running.. i ended up using a multithreaded boot process, and it seemed slower, so eventually i cached all the boot files before loading them, this was much faster, since the machine had a lot of ram, by amiga standards anyway, and the disk was pretty slow.