What you're proposing as basic scientific technique is bad science. Gcc's backend is quite different for G5 and x86. Testing this way invalidates the results. It's almost like testing both a diesel truck and a Ferrari with diesel fuel on the pretense of fairness. The truck wins hands down, but have you really learned anything?
If you want to compare compilers, you run different compilers on the same hardware. If you want to know how fast the hardware is, you let the manufacturer hand-tweak the test as much as possible, which includes picking the compiler and its options.
If you want to know how fast the hardware is in the eyes of the user, you use standard configurations which the software vendors will use: GCC for G5 and MSVC or Intel for x86. Using an inferior compiler on x86 (the x86 backend of gcc isn't that great, in fact it is quite bad) doesn't mean squat to the user. Word/Excel/Photoshop isn't going to get compiled on gcc for x86 anytime soon.
I'm not at all convinced that expiration dates are "clearly" an indication of spam being the goal of this effort. Expiry dates are a simple and effective way of ensuring that future improved versions don't compete with the old one. If getting the highest threat rating from symantec is the goal, putting experimental versions in the wild and analysing comments and reactions is a great way to go.
Loading arbItrary code from somewhere is a great way to leave flexibility in the system and also demonstrate destructive capability without actually having to resort to it. What does that have to do with spam?
The worm does definItely not create open relays - it can be used to create them through the backdoor it presents. The same backdoor can be used to run seti (hmm, there's a thought), delete files or any other annoying activity.
Yes, the payload download feature could be used for anything, including spam, but I find that hardly likely that a spammer is behind this for the reasons listed in the grandparent.
Occam's Razor is telling me that this article and the ones referenced by it are most likely unintentional FUD written by people that benefit from it (symantec et al sell anti-virus protection, while journalists sell papers, magazines or page impressions). While I wouldn't put it past Symantec and peers to intentionally spread FUD, I don't see journalists doing anything other than repeating what Symantec is publicising. Don't ascribe to malice what you can explain with incompetence.:-)
Occam's Razor also indicates that you'll have better chances in life if you brush up on your spelling.:-)
Occam's Razor
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Come on boys and girls - I know it's fun to chat about conspiracies, but how likely do you think it is that some spammer creates a reasonably sophisticated worm like SoBig.[A-F] with the intent to create open relays when he can just as well use all the open relays out there instead?
Keep in mind that writing and releasing a virus/worm/trojan requires a bit of skill and time and has the nasty side-effect of carrying significant jail time. Spammers don't have skill (or they'd be engineers), spammers don't have time (they have to work around filters all the time) and several years of jail time might not be too appealing to spammers either. Piggybacking on SoBig's backdoor for the purpose of spamming is guaranteed to have some nice FBI folks knocking on your door, confiscating all your equipment and looking for evidence of virus creation. Just a matter of time until you're read your rights from there on.
I know people make a lot out of the fact that SoBig carries its own SMTP client engine. So what though? That feature enables SoBig to also use non-Outlook machines as staging areas. Simple.
Use Occam's Razor and some common sense and see SoBig as what it is: a plain old worm somebody wrote to show off to his friends that has nothing to do with spam. Somebody as skilled as the worm writer probably hates spam as much as the rest of us. Not that I'm justifying SoBig in any way, I just removed 570 copies of SoBig.F from my inbox.:-(
Participating in a Tae-Kwon-Do (any martial arts style will do) class four times a week is a wonderful enrichment of my life. It allows me to either eat what I want and not gain weight or eat what I used to before TKD and lose weight.
Find a local studio and check it out. Always changing excercise, great cardio, a sense of accomplishment, very nice for strengthening the back (no more annoying shoulder/neck/back pain after a day's work) and your physician will like your improved cholesterol numbers too.
Fortunately, the DMCA has no teeth in Austria where these guys seem to live. Note the reference to a Mr Kritsch working for MS Austria and the somewhat awkward choice of words, mediocre grammar and poor spelling.
If the DMCA continues to be used to shut down what used to be considered fair use, we'll see more and more open source endeavors moving out of the US. Here's to fervently hoping the MPAA/RIAA doesn't manage to implement DMCA clones in all countries on this planet. They seem to be doing a pretty good job at it in Europe.
As a software engineering manager of a company that is occasionally hiring (we cherry-pick), I can tell you age is not the issue - smarts, flexibility and talent is. The brilliant, 20 year old CS freshman with demonstrated ability as a kernel hacker has a good chance of getting hired as does the 45 year old veteran who impresses us in an interview (we've hired both kinds). Age is not a consideration - I've seen a 50-year-old program circles around younger developers. Gender is not a consideration either, a surprising number of our coders are female. If you can't see past the cover of the book, you'll miss the nuggets.
We try very hard to hire the best and compensate accordingly - young or old. Experience is an asset but not a necessity. A college degree is an asset but not a necessity. The key to catching our eye and getting an interview is to have a resume that stands out in some way. The key to getting hired is to demonstrate flexibility (our market changes daily), fast learning ability (we move fast, gotta keep up), a clear understanding of the items on your resume (how can we expect you to learn what we do if you don't understand what you did?), reasonable communication skills (can't team-work without it) and good problem solving skills (gotta fix your own bugs). Does that mean a middle-aged greenhorn college grad will have an easy time? Of course not. Do something extraordinary outside the confines of your coursework and we'll take notice. Participate and contribute in a significant way to an open source project, write a complex and amazing piece of code and bring it with you, etc. Is that hard? Yes. Will it take a lot of time above and beyond your coursework? Yes, of course. Is that the only way in in this market? Yes, absolutely.
[shameless plug] We provide IPv6 ready testing tools for L2 through L7 testing that are seeing great interest and buyers in the market.
[/shameless plug]
Judging from the response we're seeing, IPv6 is quickly being implemented by the network equipment manufacutrers (NEMs) - though the rollout at ISPs and businesses is probably not as fast as one would hope due to the general market conditions and lack of rollout pressure due to IPv4 addresses still being available.
If we apply the lessons learned to the game market, we discover that men will continue to be the predominant buyers and users of computer games, while women will continue to form a much smaller market. There is a market for specialty games that cater specifically to women's needs (communication, socialization, etc) and MMORPGs could be a big part of that due to the social factor, but on the whole men's needs (sex, hunting, competition, 3d coordination) will drive game design in "their" larger segment of the market as the male segment is easier to address with a computer.
IMHO, this will only cease to be an issue when we genetically alter how the brain forms under influence of testosterone and other sex specific hormones. In other words, get used to it - as politically-incorrect as that sounds. You can't erase millions of years of evolution with wishful thinking.
Yes, I'm a guy. My wife has her own computer but rarely uses it for playing games. They just don't interest her. I don't touch her romance novels either. Yet we lead a happy marriage.
As a matter of fact, 16% is the rate for all goods and services in Germany already (with few exceptions like books and some basic foods). Not sure where the article's author got his data, he obviously didn't talk to a native German before writing it. This VAT on computers is not a new tax. I used to sell them in Germany before I hastily emigrated to the US to escape the growing socialism and subsequent economic decline, I should know.:-)
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is sadly not read a lot back there nor are the concepts understood. And if you don't know what I'm talkig about, go get it and read it. It is an eye-opener in its devastating clarity.
Obviously, you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing a real government monopoly, like the predecessor of the Deutsche Telekom, the Deutsche Bundespost. In the olden days, we'd wait six to eight weeks for phone service to be turned on and then get to pay 60 cents a minute for long distance and 10 cents a minute for local calls (1980 dollars). Flat rate? Forget it. Oh, and you were forced to rent the phone equipment and electrical modification of your own wiring was punishable by fine or prison.
That's a government regulated monopoly. What you are describing is a government regulated oligopoly.
Btw, I'll choose customer service from unregulated capitalist companies (IBM) over government regulated oligopolies (cable company) every day of the week
Perl is ugly to code in, and Perl OOP is obviously a hack.
Take a look at Python. It is as powerful as Perl, if not more so, and excels where Perl is lacking: syntactical clarity. I often wish C++ was as clear as Python.
Recently I was faced with a little programming job: Recursively parse a directory tree, examine all the files in said tree and do a complex search and replace operation that required some smarts that couldn't be implemented easily with regular expressions. I dreaded to hack that up in C. Even though I had programmed some perl a while back, the syntax was so convoluted that I couldn't remember any of it. Fortunately, I had recently bought a couple books on Python (but hadn't looked at them yet). After one hour of reading and coding, I was done with the little project! Granted, the code did not utilize a lot of powerful features, but it worked like a charm and got the job done. Since then, I've been using Python with ever increasing pleasure.
The only issue with Python is the "grouping of statements by indentation" which may take you about 10 minutes to get used to unless you hate it so much that you can't get over it. But before you condemm it, read Guido van Rossum's comments on the matter.
An interesting comparison of the major scripting languages with C++ and Java can be found here.
IMHO, one of the major factors of increased programming productivity is the spreading use of powerful, interpreted languages like perl, python and Ruby.
I agree. Up until pretty recently, you'd get noticeably improved performance from hardware upgrades. Think back a bit, going from 8088 to 80286 was great. So was the step up to the 80386 and the 80486. The Pentium was a bit marginal over the 80486DX. The Pentium II brought another nice step up. But from there, the only thing you really needed to upgrade is memory, hard drive and your graphics board.
I have both a dual P4 Xeon 1.7GHz and a Pentium II 400MHz with ample memory each. Other than my largish hour long compiler runs and some higher end games, I notice very little difference between the two. Other than memory, hard drive and graphics board upgrades, my P2 400 runs essentially unchanged from its 1998 configuration.
You make the invalid generalization that people can learn. History shows and my experience indicates that only a devastatingly small fraction of the poplulation is willing and able to learn about computers. Even smart people don't necessarily want to learn about "technical stuff." Try to educate your doctor (a presumably smart person) about computer virii next time you visit him or her.:-)
Sadly, GUIs have a place in this world. If we want to improve the situation, we have to make software easier to use and eliminate the obvious pitfalls that millions of users trip over every day. You will not eliminate users clicking on every email they get with education. You have to provide them with an email client where clicking on an email or its attachments is an inherently benign action. In fact, you have to provide them with a computer system where any action (including connecting to the internet and pulling the plug) is inherently benign, unless a root password is entered. Not impossible to achieve, just very hard.
Hate to rain on your parade, but there is ample evidence to suggest that quality has to be designed in rather than tested into the product later in the process. If your design is flawed, testing won't help a bit. If your implementation is riddled with bugs, testing will find 95% of them, but Murphy will ensure that you get bitten by the rest at the worst possible moment.
In this business, it's a tradeoff between quality and time to market. Up until recently, software purchasing decisions haven't been based on quality very much so the software producers have given the customer what he wants: Buggy product now.
Is it just me or is this an obvious misuse of taxpayer money? Sure, this may have artistic value to some minority - but where is the scientific relevance of this endeavor that would justify spending your tax dollars on it?
As long as we haven't covered the more important aspects of governmental responsibilities, like health insurance and flying to Mars, I'm deeply troubled by this - especially in view of the re-started deficit spending of the US.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the place where I spent a significant portion of my life, Germany, has had pencil and paper voting with manual counting for ages and it works like a charm. The counting procedure is simple: All political parties get together in a room in each voting district and count until they are mutually (un)happy with the result. The results are then forwarded to a central office.
Since Germany isn't significantly less populated than the US (at least in terms of order of magnitude) I don't quite see why this isn't possible here. Perhaps this whole mess is merely a case of someone violating Donald Knuth's oh so true statement: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." How about giving good old manual labor a chance?
Sadly, you've lost your credibility with me in your subject line: It's sentence, not "sentance.":-)
To get back on topic... Good email programs like Pegasus don't execute external links when you view the mail. Not so with Lookout^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook.
"Writing Solid Code", by Steve Maguire is an outstanding book on good coding practices, even if a bit aged. Ironically, it is also riddled with stories about how Microsoft doesn't follow those rules. Page 173: "Unless a bug crashes the system or holds up the testing group, don't worry about fixing it. We'll have plenty of time to fix bugs later, after we complete the scheduled features." The result was a version of Excel that had 1742 bugs at the end of the development cycle and got shipped with a major portion of those bugs due to management pressure.
The author claims that current Microsoft coding practices are different. But it doesn't matter much, of course. Microsoft is still using plenty of code from that era as is evidenced by a rendering bug on Windows 98ME (GDI StretchBlt) I ran in to a while ago. It turned out the bug dates back to Windows 3.0 if memory serves.
Sounds like you want an IP67 type (Definition of IEC enclosure types.
) enclosure for your machine. These enclosure types are commonly used in industrial applications. Not sure you'll get away with $2000 though.
But the Xeon is very similar to the standard P4, with the exception of perhaps cache. I don't think that'll make that much of a difference in a raytracing application.
I wonder if these guys are actually getting the most bang for the buck. Sure, they are buying the fastest machines, but I sure wonder if a cluster of 300 Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or even Athlon 1900+ wouldn't be faster. According to mwave, the Athlon MP 1900+ currently sells for $192, while the P4 Xeon 2.2 sells for $304. Everything else being the same, that's $100 per box saved.
Assuming a base platform cost (without processor) of $400 for MoBo, memory etc., the P4 Xeon would have to be 17% faster than the Athlon to justify the premium. According to the benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, Intel would have a hard time attaining that.
... and the same unscientific method you can prove that PCs are the choice of the intelligent computer user:
If you were to poll the population of IQ 120 and higher for what computer they use, you'd invariably find that 90% use PCs and 10% use Macs. From which we can then conclude that the PC is the choice of the smart person - 9 out of 10.
And while we're at it, we can postulate that a commonly accepted higher incidence of insanity at higher IQs leads to the somewhat higher purchase ratio of Macs in that segment of the population.:-)
I personally believe Macs would have a much higher purchase rate in the lower IQ segment if they were comparable to PCs in price and performance.
I also second the opinion of mwave. I've bought a couple computers through them and a number of friends have as well. No issues whatsoever, never needed to send anything back. I just had to fix a defective ATI video board one time. One of the filters on the video out was open. How that got past QA is a mystery to me. There was no green to be had at all before I shorted the filter.
What is really great is the speed with which mwave gets your stuff out. Order today, enjoy tomorrow - if you happen to live in southern Cal, that is.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to compare compilers, you run different compilers on the same hardware. If you want to know how fast the hardware is, you let the manufacturer hand-tweak the test as much as possible, which includes picking the compiler and its options.
If you want to know how fast the hardware is in the eyes of the user, you use standard configurations which the software vendors will use: GCC for G5 and MSVC or Intel for x86. Using an inferior compiler on x86 (the x86 backend of gcc isn't that great, in fact it is quite bad) doesn't mean squat to the user. Word/Excel/Photoshop isn't going to get compiled on gcc for x86 anytime soon.
Loading arbItrary code from somewhere is a great way to leave flexibility in the system and also demonstrate destructive capability without actually having to resort to it. What does that have to do with spam?
The worm does definItely not create open relays - it can be used to create them through the backdoor it presents. The same backdoor can be used to run seti (hmm, there's a thought), delete files or any other annoying activity.
Yes, the payload download feature could be used for anything, including spam, but I find that hardly likely that a spammer is behind this for the reasons listed in the grandparent.
Occam's Razor is telling me that this article and the ones referenced by it are most likely unintentional FUD written by people that benefit from it (symantec et al sell anti-virus protection, while journalists sell papers, magazines or page impressions). While I wouldn't put it past Symantec and peers to intentionally spread FUD, I don't see journalists doing anything other than repeating what Symantec is publicising. Don't ascribe to malice what you can explain with incompetence. :-)
Occam's Razor also indicates that you'll have better chances in life if you brush up on your spelling. :-)
Keep in mind that writing and releasing a virus/worm/trojan requires a bit of skill and time and has the nasty side-effect of carrying significant jail time. Spammers don't have skill (or they'd be engineers), spammers don't have time (they have to work around filters all the time) and several years of jail time might not be too appealing to spammers either. Piggybacking on SoBig's backdoor for the purpose of spamming is guaranteed to have some nice FBI folks knocking on your door, confiscating all your equipment and looking for evidence of virus creation. Just a matter of time until you're read your rights from there on.
I know people make a lot out of the fact that SoBig carries its own SMTP client engine. So what though? That feature enables SoBig to also use non-Outlook machines as staging areas. Simple.
Use Occam's Razor and some common sense and see SoBig as what it is: a plain old worm somebody wrote to show off to his friends that has nothing to do with spam. Somebody as skilled as the worm writer probably hates spam as much as the rest of us. Not that I'm justifying SoBig in any way, I just removed 570 copies of SoBig.F from my inbox. :-(
Find a local studio and check it out. Always changing excercise, great cardio, a sense of accomplishment, very nice for strengthening the back (no more annoying shoulder/neck/back pain after a day's work) and your physician will like your improved cholesterol numbers too.
The FBI is not allowed to operate outside the US.
If the DMCA continues to be used to shut down what used to be considered fair use, we'll see more and more open source endeavors moving out of the US. Here's to fervently hoping the MPAA/RIAA doesn't manage to implement DMCA clones in all countries on this planet. They seem to be doing a pretty good job at it in Europe.
We try very hard to hire the best and compensate accordingly - young or old. Experience is an asset but not a necessity. A college degree is an asset but not a necessity. The key to catching our eye and getting an interview is to have a resume that stands out in some way. The key to getting hired is to demonstrate flexibility (our market changes daily), fast learning ability (we move fast, gotta keep up), a clear understanding of the items on your resume (how can we expect you to learn what we do if you don't understand what you did?), reasonable communication skills (can't team-work without it) and good problem solving skills (gotta fix your own bugs). Does that mean a middle-aged greenhorn college grad will have an easy time? Of course not. Do something extraordinary outside the confines of your coursework and we'll take notice. Participate and contribute in a significant way to an open source project, write a complex and amazing piece of code and bring it with you, etc. Is that hard? Yes. Will it take a lot of time above and beyond your coursework? Yes, of course. Is that the only way in in this market? Yes, absolutely.
[shameless plug]
We provide IPv6 ready testing tools for L2 through L7 testing that are seeing great interest and buyers in the market.
[/shameless plug]
Judging from the response we're seeing, IPv6 is quickly being implemented by the network equipment manufacutrers (NEMs) - though the rollout at ISPs and businesses is probably not as fast as one would hope due to the general market conditions and lack of rollout pressure due to IPv4 addresses still being available.
If we apply the lessons learned to the game market, we discover that men will continue to be the predominant buyers and users of computer games, while women will continue to form a much smaller market. There is a market for specialty games that cater specifically to women's needs (communication, socialization, etc) and MMORPGs could be a big part of that due to the social factor, but on the whole men's needs (sex, hunting, competition, 3d coordination) will drive game design in "their" larger segment of the market as the male segment is easier to address with a computer.
IMHO, this will only cease to be an issue when we genetically alter how the brain forms under influence of testosterone and other sex specific hormones. In other words, get used to it - as politically-incorrect as that sounds. You can't erase millions of years of evolution with wishful thinking.
Yes, I'm a guy. My wife has her own computer but rarely uses it for playing games. They just don't interest her. I don't touch her romance novels either. Yet we lead a happy marriage.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is sadly not read a lot back there nor are the concepts understood. And if you don't know what I'm talkig about, go get it and read it. It is an eye-opener in its devastating clarity.
That's a government regulated monopoly. What you are describing is a government regulated oligopoly.
Btw, I'll choose customer service from unregulated capitalist companies (IBM) over government regulated oligopolies (cable company) every day of the week
Take a look at Python. It is as powerful as Perl, if not more so, and excels where Perl is lacking: syntactical clarity. I often wish C++ was as clear as Python.
Recently I was faced with a little programming job: Recursively parse a directory tree, examine all the files in said tree and do a complex search and replace operation that required some smarts that couldn't be implemented easily with regular expressions. I dreaded to hack that up in C. Even though I had programmed some perl a while back, the syntax was so convoluted that I couldn't remember any of it. Fortunately, I had recently bought a couple books on Python (but hadn't looked at them yet). After one hour of reading and coding, I was done with the little project! Granted, the code did not utilize a lot of powerful features, but it worked like a charm and got the job done. Since then, I've been using Python with ever increasing pleasure.
The only issue with Python is the "grouping of statements by indentation" which may take you about 10 minutes to get used to unless you hate it so much that you can't get over it. But before you condemm it, read Guido van Rossum's comments on the matter.
An interesting comparison of the major scripting languages with C++ and Java can be found here.
IMHO, one of the major factors of increased programming productivity is the spreading use of powerful, interpreted languages like perl, python and Ruby.
I have both a dual P4 Xeon 1.7GHz and a Pentium II 400MHz with ample memory each. Other than my largish hour long compiler runs and some higher end games, I notice very little difference between the two. Other than memory, hard drive and graphics board upgrades, my P2 400 runs essentially unchanged from its 1998 configuration.
Btw: It is spelled 'equivalent'.
The price for XP in a competitive market would be around $20.
What you call an honest living, a federal judge and a federal appeals court called criminal activity.
Sadly, GUIs have a place in this world. If we want to improve the situation, we have to make software easier to use and eliminate the obvious pitfalls that millions of users trip over every day. You will not eliminate users clicking on every email they get with education. You have to provide them with an email client where clicking on an email or its attachments is an inherently benign action. In fact, you have to provide them with a computer system where any action (including connecting to the internet and pulling the plug) is inherently benign, unless a root password is entered. Not impossible to achieve, just very hard.
In this business, it's a tradeoff between quality and time to market. Up until recently, software purchasing decisions haven't been based on quality very much so the software producers have given the customer what he wants: Buggy product now.
As long as we haven't covered the more important aspects of governmental responsibilities, like health insurance and flying to Mars, I'm deeply troubled by this - especially in view of the re-started deficit spending of the US.
Since Germany isn't significantly less populated than the US (at least in terms of order of magnitude) I don't quite see why this isn't possible here. Perhaps this whole mess is merely a case of someone violating Donald Knuth's oh so true statement: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." How about giving good old manual labor a chance?
To get back on topic... Good email programs like Pegasus don't execute external links when you view the mail. Not so with Lookout^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook.
The author claims that current Microsoft coding practices are different. But it doesn't matter much, of course. Microsoft is still using plenty of code from that era as is evidenced by a rendering bug on Windows 98ME (GDI StretchBlt) I ran in to a while ago. It turned out the bug dates back to Windows 3.0 if memory serves.
But the Xeon is very similar to the standard P4, with the exception of perhaps cache. I don't think that'll make that much of a difference in a raytracing application.
Assuming a base platform cost (without processor) of $400 for MoBo, memory etc., the P4 Xeon would have to be 17% faster than the Athlon to justify the premium. According to the benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, Intel would have a hard time attaining that.
Jan
If you were to poll the population of IQ 120 and higher for what computer they use, you'd invariably find that 90% use PCs and 10% use Macs. From which we can then conclude that the PC is the choice of the smart person - 9 out of 10.
And while we're at it, we can postulate that a commonly accepted higher incidence of insanity at higher IQs leads to the somewhat higher purchase ratio of Macs in that segment of the population. :-)
I personally believe Macs would have a much higher purchase rate in the lower IQ segment if they were comparable to PCs in price and performance.
What is really great is the speed with which mwave gets your stuff out. Order today, enjoy tomorrow - if you happen to live in southern Cal, that is. :-)