With the abolishment of mainboard bottlenecks, who needs cache anymore? It'll be just as fast to pull data from main memory every time you need it.
Uhm? Everyone?
The reason for caches isn't that the CPU <-> memory interconnect is slow, it's that the memory itself is very, very slow compared to the insane rates at which modern CPUs process data.
...virus writers, black or white hatted, should never do the work that every experienced sysadmin should do.
<video style="imaginary">
Looks left.
Looks right.
Looks back.
</video>
Hmm... There doesn't seem to be a competent Windows sysadm in my apartment. Nor, I would guess, in 99.9% of homes in the world.
Now, what I would like to see is a white hat worm that breaks into vulnerable systems, downloads the "virus", then asks if it may run.
There should be a web link to see exactly what the problem is, and what the worm is going to do. SHA fingerprints, and of course the full source included.
And of course the program should be signed (self-signed I guess) in the usual Windows fashion. "Do you want to install and run 'Anti-Virus'..."
The terminally clueless will click "OK", giving the desired effect. The only half-witted will press "Cancel", their loss. The clue-full will realize their system is hackable, and correct the situation.
I saw a very nicea idea for a Mercury colony in a story once. What you do is to lay a railroad track around the equator. On the track is, well, a city. The city is pushed around the track by thermal expansion of the rails, so it doesn't even need power.
...how we could design texts/monuments that will let our descendents 10,000 years from now that *something really bad* is underneath this pile of rock...
How about we encase the waste in a huge conspicious pyramid? No-one would ever try to break into that!
Seriously, the Yucca monument idea is totally misguided. Suppose we bury our dangerous nuclear waste deep underground. Next, here are two alternatives for you:
Leave a huge, scary, monument on top of the dump. Bury increasingly scarier warnings, leading future excavators right to the hot waste (current proposal).
Fill up the hole, leave no signs.
Now, which site do you think a power hungry Mad Max-style warlord would dig up in search of ancient technology?
But what would be the problem with doing so? Is it a matter of dangers of rocket failure (e.g. huge atmospheric dirty-bomb), or is it also quantity of waste to be disposed of and the cost?
I4... I10... I2... Bingo!
Triple bingo in this case.
Cancer rate increase from (very) occasional booster failures would be acceptable, but try telling Greenpeace or even the general public that.
Cost and weight, however, are the real show-stoppers. We have no boosters capable of sending serious amounts of material into a solar orbit. The Saturn V might have done it, at $billion a pop or so (which is still way to much), but we don't have that any more.
<rant style="old">We had the effing solar system in our hands, and the bastards dismantled all that capability. Now we can barely get out of the atmosphere. NASA, funding, Shuttle, station, blah blah. </rant>
Re:I do wish
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
...your ISP doesn't have to support IPv6, it can be encapsulated in IPv4. There are plenty of gateways out there...
I keep hearing this claim. Let me get this straight, once and for all. I have a 16/16Mb connection, and I use it. How could a free, underpowered relay in Farawayistan ever handle that?!
Also, what about my el-cheapo Zyxel POS firewall, what will it think about IPv6?
Does/anyone/ semi-normal (i.e., not a techno-geek, or a rights-geek) use Freenet, and if they do, has anything significant ever been published on it?
Oh yes! Child porn. Vast amounts of child porn. One could go so far as to say that Freenet is one of the main, if not THE main mechanism for distributing pedophile pornography.
FN was designed for distributing files with maximum anonymity, no matter the performance penalty (speed is horrible). So, it is used only by people who know that their neck would be in the noose if they were caught sharing the file.
My current job is to go through a BIG bunch of HP/UX machines and determine what they do, if anything. On one of them I found a/opt/microsoft directory, under which was the subdirectories ie/ and oe/.
Yes, that's right. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for HP/UX.
This was a very "far out" moment for me. I started experimenting and both programs worked very nicely indeed in a standard X environment.
Then a bystander (one of the real admins) quietly remarked "You are are running IE... On our critical HP server... as root?!?!"
^C^C^C^C!!!!!
Re:Obligatory Gentoo
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Take a good look at the parents list of previous owners of the brand. The Amiga curse; to bankrupt or at least marginalize every company that owns the trademark.
The list:
"A"miga
"C"ommodore
"E"scom
"G"ateway 2000
Amiga, "I"nc (weak, I know)
"K"MOS
Every second letter in the alphabet. After KMOS is ruined, it's time for "M"... Let's hope M stands for Microsoft!
Clippy: Microsoft's way of telling you you're stupid and need help.
Clippy is way more sinister than that. He is Microsofts way of saying that because you are stupid, here is someone obviously smarter than you to give you advice.
Try getting to an online IQ test, then feed the questions into clippy. He will probably respond "It looks as if you're trying to make a list, do you want some help with that?"
What is clippy's IQ? Less than a monkey, obviously. Less than a rodent. Less than a nematode.
Microsoft thinks you are less intelligent than a nematode worm.
... and I guess they may be right if you haven't removed clippy from you computer yet:-)
That doesn't matter at all. Does the 150,000NOK have the same purchasing power in Norway as 20,000USD has in the states? If not, the comparison is completely worthless.
Unfortunately, prices in Norway are extremely high, mostly because of all that oil money causing inflation. This more than offsets the current weakness of the USD.
The reason that the amount is so low is quite another; in Norway damages are strictly based on the actual money lost (well, and to a lesser amount things like emotional damage). If you asked for american-style amounts ("I'm suing for $300.000.000!"), you would be laughed out of court.
Jon used a public defender, so his costs weren't that high.
My ISP (BoStream) has just made a new service available, here's the current prices (american dollars per month).
iStream, 0.5 Mb, $42
xStream, 2.5 Mb, $63
Scream, 26 (!) Mb, $56
Yes, you read that right. More than ten times the performance for less money. Since I'm a xStream customer I am switching right now!
Note to USAians: if those prices seem high it's only because the dollar has plummeted. $56 per month is more than affordable for me, or any reasonably well paid Swede.
MySQL has always had an expansion framework for adding you own functions to the SQL, it's just that traditionally you had to have a compilable language to do that. Now, you can use Java methods as well. (Still not a bright idea IMHO, but...)
Bill Frost in 1896. This Welsh carpenter constructed a hydrogen assisted muscle-propelled triplane which allegedly flew 500 yards before crashing into a tree.
I may be mistaken, but I thought crypt() used 56 bit DES encryption. They can brute-force 207e9 hashes per 80 minutes, but the total key space is about 72e15 (2^56).
This means that the key space will be exhausted in
((2^56/207e9)*80)/60/24/365.24 years, which is about 52 years.
I do agree that this is still a little too close for comfort. Fortunately no-one I know is still using classic crypt() for password protection.
What I can't figure is, I had a copper bars program that depended on changing colors during horizontal retrace, and it worked perfectly on the LCD panel of a laptop. Are the LCD panels designed to act like a computer monitor complete with a little pause after drawing each line?
If you have a passive matrix LCD, yes. Active matrix supossedly only flip pixels as needed.
Text mode is 16 colors (8 primaries + half bright). 6 bits per channel is probably some misplaced memories from EGA days. The page you cited is all about VGA.
The last time this competition came up, I got to wondering what's to stop you from doing "bitmapped" text mode? Standard 80x25 text mode is 30 KHz ie. 30,000 lines per second, each 640 pixels wide. That's about 24 million pixels per second. These day we have multi giga-op processors, and interrupt hardware can't be far behind (?).
Simply set the screen to 80x25 space characters then trigger interrupts a bit before each pixel and change the background color. Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode. Then use temporal anti-aliasing to yield even more colors. Kudos to the first person who makes a X driver for this mode.
Sure, this will eat a lot of CPU time, but that's what this sort of competition is all about.
The guy was wandering the campus with a digital camera taking pictures of non-public areas. Wouldn't that make you a bit suspicious if you were in corporate security? Wouldn't you wonder how many other pictures he had taken and who he had given them to?
I'm sorry, I just can't parse those few sentences. Let's do a slo-mo:
The guy was wandering the campus with a digital camera
One employee owned a digital camera, and happened to have it with him for work, stuffed in his bag.
taking pictures of non-public areas.
Taking a single picture of a public area, the door, making every effort to conceal the nature of the building (and admittedly ruining this by stating the nature of the building in the text).
Wouldn't that make you a bit suspicious if you were in corporate security?
Eh, no? An employee owning a camera, and using it outside of work? Shock horror!
Why should Microsoft take a chance on some temp when there are hundreds of others lined up at their doors begging for jobs?
Of course temp isn't "temp" at MS. But I think I see why I just can't grasp your mentality.
In your world, employees have no rights what so ever and can be put on the unemployment line with a twitch of the corporate finger.
Reminds me of "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. There was a bit in there where a future super computer was hooked up to a pipe delivering ice. As the batch runs, ice is sucked through the computer at amazing speeds, passed straight through the CPU. and boiling water is delivered (in large quantites) at the bottom. Not what I would like for me home PC:-) Still, should make water cooled systems much more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm? Everyone?
The reason for caches isn't that the CPU <-> memory interconnect is slow, it's that the memory itself is very, very slow compared to the insane rates at which modern CPUs process data.
<video style="imaginary">
Looks left.
Looks right.
Looks back.
</video>
Hmm... There doesn't seem to be a competent Windows sysadm in my apartment. Nor, I would guess, in 99.9% of homes in the world.
Now, what I would like to see is a white hat worm that breaks into vulnerable systems, downloads the "virus", then asks if it may run.
There should be a web link to see exactly what the problem is, and what the worm is going to do. SHA fingerprints, and of course the full source included.
And of course the program should be signed (self-signed I guess) in the usual Windows fashion. "Do you want to install and run 'Anti-Virus' ..."
The terminally clueless will click "OK", giving the desired effect. The only half-witted will press "Cancel", their loss. The clue-full will realize their system is hackable, and correct the situation.
I saw a very nicea idea for a Mercury colony in a story once. What you do is to lay a railroad track around the equator. On the track is, well, a city. The city is pushed around the track by thermal expansion of the rails, so it doesn't even need power.
Medium long phone call, 1 MB.
Minor text essay, 1kB.
Why are you suprised?
How about we encase the waste in a huge conspicious pyramid? No-one would ever try to break into that!
Seriously, the Yucca monument idea is totally misguided. Suppose we bury our dangerous nuclear waste deep underground. Next, here are two alternatives for you:
Now, which site do you think a power hungry Mad Max-style warlord would dig up in search of ancient technology?
I4... I10... I2... Bingo!
Triple bingo in this case.
Cancer rate increase from (very) occasional booster failures would be acceptable, but try telling Greenpeace or even the general public that.
Cost and weight, however, are the real show-stoppers. We have no boosters capable of sending serious amounts of material into a solar orbit. The Saturn V might have done it, at $billion a pop or so (which is still way to much), but we don't have that any more.
<rant style="old">We had the effing solar system in our hands, and the bastards dismantled all that capability. Now we can barely get out of the atmosphere. NASA, funding, Shuttle, station, blah blah. </rant>
I keep hearing this claim. Let me get this straight, once and for all. I have a 16/16Mb connection, and I use it. How could a free, underpowered relay in Farawayistan ever handle that?!
Also, what about my el-cheapo Zyxel POS firewall, what will it think about IPv6?
Oh yes! Child porn. Vast amounts of child porn. One could go so far as to say that Freenet is one of the main, if not THE main mechanism for distributing pedophile pornography.
FN was designed for distributing files with maximum anonymity, no matter the performance penalty (speed is horrible). So, it is used only by people who know that their neck would be in the noose if they were caught sharing the file.
My current job is to go through a BIG bunch of HP/UX machines and determine what they do, if anything. On one of them I found a /opt/microsoft directory, under which was the subdirectories ie/ and oe/.
Yes, that's right. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for HP/UX.
This was a very "far out" moment for me. I started experimenting and both programs worked very nicely indeed in a standard X environment.
Then a bystander (one of the real admins) quietly remarked "You are are running IE... On our critical HP server... as root?!?!"
^C^C^C^C!!!!!
$ emerge unmerge saddam done $ emerge --pretend interim-govt problems were found $ emerge unmerge us-army failed $ init 0 failed
Take a good look at the parents list of previous owners of the brand. The Amiga curse; to bankrupt or at least marginalize every company that owns the trademark.
The list:
- "A"miga
- "C"ommodore
- "E"scom
- "G"ateway 2000
- Amiga, "I"nc (weak, I know)
- "K"MOS
Every second letter in the alphabet. After KMOS is ruined, it's time for "M"... Let's hope M stands for Microsoft!Clippy is way more sinister than that. He is Microsofts way of saying that because you are stupid, here is someone obviously smarter than you to give you advice.
Try getting to an online IQ test, then feed the questions into clippy. He will probably respond "It looks as if you're trying to make a list, do you want some help with that?"
What is clippy's IQ? Less than a monkey, obviously. Less than a rodent. Less than a nematode.
Microsoft thinks you are less intelligent than a nematode worm.
... and I guess they may be right if you haven't removed clippy from you computer yet :-)
Let's NOT forget the scene where Max can't take the insights, flashes, math any more, and decides to put a rusty drill to his fore-brain.
I nearly puked. Do NOT watch this movie unless you feel at ease with every geniuses right to perform ad-hoc auto-brain-surgery with dirty motor tools.
Thanks man, you made my day.
Unfortunately, prices in Norway are extremely high, mostly because of all that oil money causing inflation. This more than offsets the current weakness of the USD.
The reason that the amount is so low is quite another; in Norway damages are strictly based on the actual money lost (well, and to a lesser amount things like emotional damage). If you asked for american-style amounts ("I'm suing for $300.000.000!"), you would be laughed out of court.
Jon used a public defender, so his costs weren't that high.
My ISP (BoStream) has just made a new service available, here's the current prices (american dollars per month).
- iStream, 0.5 Mb, $42
- xStream, 2.5 Mb, $63
- Scream, 26 (!) Mb, $56
Yes, you read that right. More than ten times the performance for less money. Since I'm a xStream customer I am switching right now!Note to USAians: if those prices seem high it's only because the dollar has plummeted. $56 per month is more than affordable for me, or any reasonably well paid Swede.
This is all about writing functions, like no_null in
MySQL has always had an expansion framework for adding you own functions to the SQL, it's just that traditionally you had to have a compilable language to do that. Now, you can use Java methods as well. (Still not a bright idea IMHO, but...)
Bill Frost in 1896. This Welsh carpenter constructed a hydrogen assisted muscle-propelled triplane which allegedly flew 500 yards before crashing into a tree.
I may be mistaken, but I thought crypt() used 56 bit DES encryption. They can brute-force 207e9 hashes per 80 minutes, but the total key space is about 72e15 (2^56).
This means that the key space will be exhausted in ((2^56/207e9)*80)/60/24/365.24 years, which is about 52 years.
I do agree that this is still a little too close for comfort. Fortunately no-one I know is still using classic crypt() for password protection.
If you have a passive matrix LCD, yes. Active matrix supossedly only flip pixels as needed.
Please snort less cocaine.
Text mode is 16 colors (8 primaries + half bright). 6 bits per channel is probably some misplaced memories from EGA days. The page you cited is all about VGA.
The last time this competition came up, I got to wondering what's to stop you from doing "bitmapped" text mode? Standard 80x25 text mode is 30 KHz ie. 30,000 lines per second, each 640 pixels wide. That's about 24 million pixels per second. These day we have multi giga-op processors, and interrupt hardware can't be far behind (?).
Simply set the screen to 80x25 space characters then trigger interrupts a bit before each pixel and change the background color. Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode. Then use temporal anti-aliasing to yield even more colors. Kudos to the first person who makes a X driver for this mode.
Sure, this will eat a lot of CPU time, but that's what this sort of competition is all about.
I'm sorry, I just can't parse those few sentences. Let's do a slo-mo:
One employee owned a digital camera, and happened to have it with him for work, stuffed in his bag.
Taking a single picture of a public area, the door, making every effort to conceal the nature of the building (and admittedly ruining this by stating the nature of the building in the text).
Eh, no? An employee owning a camera, and using it outside of work? Shock horror!
Of course temp isn't "temp" at MS. But I think I see why I just can't grasp your mentality.
In your world, employees have no rights what so ever and can be put on the unemployment line with a twitch of the corporate finger.
In my world, an employee can be fired for
Which world is better? I'm undecided.
I'm not sure I would trust insta-coffee in the working fluid of my wc system. But who knows, maybe the CPU will perk up a little extra.
Reminds me of "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. There was a bit in there where a future super computer was hooked up to a pipe delivering ice. As the batch runs, ice is sucked through the computer at amazing speeds, passed straight through the CPU. and boiling water is delivered (in large quantites) at the bottom. Not what I would like for me home PC :-) Still, should make water cooled systems much more efficient.