Ubuntu is great for wireless in general (at least on all the hardware I've tried it on), but it doesn't (yet) automagically detect which interfaces are live and use those. I hear that's coming in Edgy Eft.
Still, Ubuntu sucks for WPA, or at least it did last year when I had to configure it (lots of wpasupplicant.conf crap to deal with).
On the other hand, Windows wireless support also sucks the big one. I've gotten into plenty of situations where it doesn't work. For example, sometimes I'm not connected, but the wireless panel has a "disconnect" button instead of a "connect" one, and I can't convince it that it's not connected and should connect.
The only OS I've seen that handles wireless very well is MacOS X. Click on the menu thingie, it shows you all the networks in range (although it would be cool if it would say which ones are open). It figures out what kind of crypto is necessary, prompts you the first time you join the network, and saves the password in your keychain. It knows when to use wired and when to use wireless. It has a "Create network" option right there in the menu.
Sure 'nuff. HCS gets hacked occasionally, usually because our users toss up insecure stuff and then don't patch it. Free Culture ought to know better though, they have a lot of computer geeks in there, including half the HCS board.
We'll get it patched at some point, probably in a few weeks when school starts. Right now we can't patch it because we're running an ancient MySQL, and we can't patch that because we'll have to migrate all the databases, and we're too lazy to do that (plus, if it fucks up there's nobody on site to kick the machines).
t seems to me that all the attacks on both of these hash systems (SHA-1 and MD5) involve different message sizes which is easily fixed by using both hash and message size as a verification. I honestly don't come close to understanding the math involved in these hashes, but I get the idea that the complexity involved in creating a hash using the exact same amount of data is far higher.
No, usually the attacks produce 2 files with the same size.
Maybe factoring in message size as part of the hash is the solution? I don't know. Again, the math is way above me. But you could certainly do it by adding on some extra bits to the hash itself. A bit costly in size, but seems like maybe it might be worthwhile.
Yeah, SHA-256 adds some bits onto the hash itself, as do longer versions like SHA-384 and SHA-512. But it's unclear how much that helps; sometimes cryptographic attacks don't get much harder if you increase the size of the data.
I would have thought this not such a big issue for software developers who aren't incompetent.
I don't know the details of this particular attack, but usually attacks on hashes like this produce two documents with the same file size. Certainly the MD5 collisions a couple years ago had the same file size.
There isn't a decent board for the Conroe that's under $250. Either they don't support DDR2800 (anything less is a waste), or they don't have SLI, or they're missing amenities like firewire or decent onboard sound.
If you aren't a hardcore gamer (but want instead a workstation or light-duty server), no reason to care about no SLI. And not that many people use Firewire (I have a Mac and even I haven't used it in quite a while).
It's Latin for "such" or "thus". If you quote something with an error or otherwise weird construction, you write "[sic]" to indicate that the quote appears that way in the text you're quoting.
That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.
Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?
This typed from a MacBook with 2GB: 200 active, 200 wired (half by the video "card"), 600 inactive (caches), 1GB free. If I run virtualized Windows or Linux, or start a really big compute or compile job, the RAM is quite useful, but I very rarely use all of it.
> "First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor" > Why?
Because relatively few tasks that most people currently perform on a laptop have large RAM requirements but not high CPU requirements. For instance, photoshop, CAD tools, video encoding, compile jobs, all these take as much processor as RAM. In some cases, database or web serving is limited by memory capacity, but these aren't things you're likely to do on a laptop. I suppose you might want to run virtual instances of multiple OSes, but that's about all I can think up at this hour of the night.
> "Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't." > And I'm certain that that will never, ever change.
Well, it will change, but probably not in the first generation of 64-bit laptops. Neither I nor GP claim that 64-bit laptops will never be useful, just that they wouldn't gain you that much now.
Bullshit. First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor and your laptop will obsolete in several other ways (battery won't hold a charge, video card will be obsolete, wireless will be obsolete, monitor will have faded). Second, since most [SO]DIMMs are at most 1GB, the chipset probably doesn't support more than 2GB per slot anyway. Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't.
I'd recommend increasing your defenses of your ports, specifically 137-139 and 445. A heavy chain and a few batteries of cannon should suffice, but to ward off more determined attackers you might need a garrison of veteran sailors.
Z80 is a rather messy CISC machine. The whole 16-bit double registers thing is pretty confusing, and don't get me started on LDIR and similar instructions.
I'd say PIC is an easier assembly, even if it's more verbose.
They don't do the same thing. Windows Previous Versions does it on your hard drive, and Time Machine does it on a backup device.
That said, I have no problem with Windows Previous Versions so long as you can control what gets versioned and who can read the versions. Not sure if you can do that, though.
I just hope they get around to copying window shading, window tabbing and focus on mouse as fast as possible.
They can't do focus follows mouse, because menubar isn't shared between applications. It would be really weird to have the menubar change as your went around the screen and refocused, but having it shadow the wrong application is also really bad.
Rape is always a tricky issue, because it often hinges on the existence of a verbal (or even implicit/nonverbal) consent between two drunk people. Of course, most of such (reported) cases were actually rape, but it is hard to distinguish them, particularly if the people involve were drunk enough not to remember clearly. It can easily come down to "he said, she said," or "what qualifies as consent" (cuz, you know, signing legal documents when you're drunk and horny, like, totally ruins the mood). Between alcohol and the next-morning shock/regret, it's easy to convince yourself that one thing or another happened, and parent poster's claim is that the support groups are doing too much to convince people that they were raped.
For quite a while I've been curious about a similar application of flash. Suppose someone builds an NVRAM card or drive, which is RAM with a battery backup; the battery holds enough power to save the RAM to flash should the power go out. Between the interface, battery, controller chip, flash and RAM it should cost on the order of $100-$150/GB, retail, if it became reasonably popular; if Dell put a half-gig chip in every outgoing workstation, it would probably cost them $20-$50. It could be in a PCI card for servers, or it could go into high-performance disks. Furthermore, if the controller were clever, it could improve price/performance by using flash as a clean cache for slowly-changing files, much as these hybrid drives do; if the power went out, this cache would be overwritten with the contents of the RAM, but that would merely cause a performance penalty on the next boot.
If such a chip became standard would revolutionize filesystem storage. In half a gig, you could cache the entire filesystem's metadata (locate would become obsolete), most of the boot sequence, a transaction log, and a cache of most recently accessed files. And since it would be writing to RAM first, it would be much, much faster than disk, and it wouldn't wear like flash (since the flash is only used when the power goes out, or when you shut down).
You would be able to build transaction-oriented filesystems much more easily can be done with disk alone. Write-anywhere filesystem layouts (ReiserFS, Netapp,...) would be more performant: writes could be batched without violating transaction semantics, and metadata could be updated in place. Writes in general would have much lower latency and higher burst bandwidth, as they could be made to NVRAM first. It would be easier to incorporate Sun's "RAID-Z" technology to improve performance for higher-levels of RAID, and because of the transaction log, RAID5 would no longer carry the corruption risk that it currently does.
Database designers currently use 10kRPM (and higher) disks for their transaction logs. Why can't they use NVRAM?
I'm sure someone has thought of this before, and I've heard of NVRAM cards in high-end servers, but why doesn't it go to the desktop or laptop market?
I've been considering going to Solaris (for a fileserver) largely because ZFS provides this same feature (along with a good RAID-5 implementation and live storage pool resizing). Of course, I'm not sure Windows is an ideal platform for a file server, particularly when the clients are likely to be Linux machines and Macs, but it gives me another option.
I have a MacBook. The lack of right mouse button is annoying, particularly when I'm running something other than OS X on it. Windows and Linux don't have double-tap-right-click drivers. Carrying around a mouse is annoying, as the MacBook is already quite heavy for its size (5.3 lbs or something for a 12-inch?).
I'm beginning to wonder if I should have gone with a ThinkPad. It wouldn't have run OS X, but it would have been lighter.
First of all, he gave a time frame. FTFA: Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs.
But ignoring that, you forget that even if several tasks are independent, they can be timesliced. That's how you can run multiple applications "at the same time" on a single-core machine. Sure, if you're worried about latency, you can move the real-time threads (GUI, for instance) onto another core, but batch processes like finding related content can be timesliced with absolutely no problem.
Of course, if you have 8 tasks that are capable of saturating a core, then you can use 8 cores, but you can also use 4 cores that are twice as fast.
There is absolutely 0% chance that my single vote will sway the Presidential election, because they can't even count within that margin of error, and if the vote is that close it comes down to procedural rulings anyways (as demonstrated in 2000).
Actually, this isn't true: your vote might decide whether it is close enough for a recount, whether it comes down to a judicial decision, and so on. Of course, it's a little fuzzier than that in real life, because counting the votes is probabilistic, but the conclusion is still correct unless the election is very lopsided.
Of course, in some states, the election is so lopsided that it is a virtual certainty who will win from the outset. There, your vote really doesn't count (or rather, the chances of it counting are very, very near 0), at least for who will get elected.
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Ubuntu is great for wireless in general (at least on all the hardware I've tried it on), but it doesn't (yet) automagically detect which interfaces are live and use those. I hear that's coming in Edgy Eft.
Still, Ubuntu sucks for WPA, or at least it did last year when I had to configure it (lots of wpasupplicant.conf crap to deal with).
On the other hand, Windows wireless support also sucks the big one. I've gotten into plenty of situations where it doesn't work. For example, sometimes I'm not connected, but the wireless panel has a "disconnect" button instead of a "connect" one, and I can't convince it that it's not connected and should connect.
The only OS I've seen that handles wireless very well is MacOS X. Click on the menu thingie, it shows you all the networks in range (although it would be cool if it would say which ones are open). It figures out what kind of crypto is necessary, prompts you the first time you join the network, and saves the password in your keychain. It knows when to use wired and when to use wireless. It has a "Create network" option right there in the menu.
Bah. They could have been slightly more subtle. I mean, three frames in a row? For Pete's sake, how stupid do they think we are?
Sure 'nuff. HCS gets hacked occasionally, usually because our users toss up insecure stuff and then don't patch it. Free Culture ought to know better though, they have a lot of computer geeks in there, including half the HCS board.
We'll get it patched at some point, probably in a few weeks when school starts. Right now we can't patch it because we're running an ancient MySQL, and we can't patch that because we'll have to migrate all the databases, and we're too lazy to do that (plus, if it fucks up there's nobody on site to kick the machines).
Hooray for laziness and good backups!
t seems to me that all the attacks on both of these hash systems (SHA-1 and MD5) involve different message sizes which is easily fixed by using both hash and message size as a verification. I honestly don't come close to understanding the math involved in these hashes, but I get the idea that the complexity involved in creating a hash using the exact same amount of data is far higher.
No, usually the attacks produce 2 files with the same size.
Maybe factoring in message size as part of the hash is the solution? I don't know. Again, the math is way above me. But you could certainly do it by adding on some extra bits to the hash itself. A bit costly in size, but seems like maybe it might be worthwhile.
Yeah, SHA-256 adds some bits onto the hash itself, as do longer versions like SHA-384 and SHA-512. But it's unclear how much that helps; sometimes cryptographic attacks don't get much harder if you increase the size of the data.
I would have thought this not such a big issue for software developers who aren't incompetent.
I don't know the details of this particular attack, but usually attacks on hashes like this produce two documents with the same file size. Certainly the MD5 collisions a couple years ago had the same file size.
There isn't a decent board for the Conroe that's under $250. Either they don't support DDR2800 (anything less is a waste), or they don't have SLI, or they're missing amenities like firewire or decent onboard sound.
If you aren't a hardcore gamer (but want instead a workstation or light-duty server), no reason to care about no SLI. And not that many people use Firewire (I have a Mac and even I haven't used it in quite a while).
It's Latin for "such" or "thus". If you quote something with an error or otherwise weird construction, you write "[sic]" to indicate that the quote appears that way in the text you're quoting.
A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years.
That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.
Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?
This typed from a MacBook with 2GB: 200 active, 200 wired (half by the video "card"), 600 inactive (caches), 1GB free. If I run virtualized Windows or Linux, or start a really big compute or compile job, the RAM is quite useful, but I very rarely use all of it.
[ pointless sarcastic attacks removed ]
> "First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor"
> Why?
Because relatively few tasks that most people currently perform on a laptop have large RAM requirements but not high CPU requirements. For instance, photoshop, CAD tools, video encoding, compile jobs, all these take as much processor as RAM. In some cases, database or web serving is limited by memory capacity, but these aren't things you're likely to do on a laptop. I suppose you might want to run virtual instances of multiple OSes, but that's about all I can think up at this hour of the night.
> "Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't."
> And I'm certain that that will never, ever change.
Well, it will change, but probably not in the first generation of 64-bit laptops. Neither I nor GP claim that 64-bit laptops will never be useful, just that they wouldn't gain you that much now.
Bullshit. First, by the time you need more than 4GB of RAM, you'll also need a faster processor and your laptop will obsolete in several other ways (battery won't hold a charge, video card will be obsolete, wireless will be obsolete, monitor will have faded). Second, since most [SO]DIMMs are at most 1GB, the chipset probably doesn't support more than 2GB per slot anyway. Most laptops only have 2 slots, so even if you did want to put more than 4GB in it, you couldn't.
I'd recommend increasing your defenses of your ports, specifically 137-139 and 445. A heavy chain and a few batteries of cannon should suffice, but to ward off more determined attackers you might need a garrison of veteran sailors.
Z80 is a rather messy CISC machine. The whole 16-bit double registers thing is pretty confusing, and don't get me started on LDIR and similar instructions.
I'd say PIC is an easier assembly, even if it's more verbose.
They don't do the same thing. Windows Previous Versions does it on your hard drive, and Time Machine does it on a backup device.
That said, I have no problem with Windows Previous Versions so long as you can control what gets versioned and who can read the versions. Not sure if you can do that, though.
I don't think TimeMachine is a versioning FS. I think it's just a pretty GUI over incremental backups.
I think if they want to do a versioning FS they'll go to ZFS.
I just hope they get around to copying window shading, window tabbing and focus on mouse as fast as possible.
They can't do focus follows mouse, because menubar isn't shared between applications. It would be really weird to have the menubar change as your went around the screen and refocused, but having it shadow the wrong application is also really bad.
Read it in toto before modding it. Thanks.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
--Groucho Marx
So why are people fighting over land in that part of the world?
They want the part that isn't infested with 4-inch long yellow scorpions.
The NSA is the largest single employer of mathematicians in the world. ... Or you could do finance.
Rape is always a tricky issue, because it often hinges on the existence of a verbal (or even implicit/nonverbal) consent between two drunk people. Of course, most of such (reported) cases were actually rape, but it is hard to distinguish them, particularly if the people involve were drunk enough not to remember clearly. It can easily come down to "he said, she said," or "what qualifies as consent" (cuz, you know, signing legal documents when you're drunk and horny, like, totally ruins the mood). Between alcohol and the next-morning shock/regret, it's easy to convince yourself that one thing or another happened, and parent poster's claim is that the support groups are doing too much to convince people that they were raped.
For quite a while I've been curious about a similar application of flash. Suppose someone builds an NVRAM card or drive, which is RAM with a battery backup; the battery holds enough power to save the RAM to flash should the power go out. Between the interface, battery, controller chip, flash and RAM it should cost on the order of $100-$150/GB, retail, if it became reasonably popular; if Dell put a half-gig chip in every outgoing workstation, it would probably cost them $20-$50. It could be in a PCI card for servers, or it could go into high-performance disks. Furthermore, if the controller were clever, it could improve price/performance by using flash as a clean cache for slowly-changing files, much as these hybrid drives do; if the power went out, this cache would be overwritten with the contents of the RAM, but that would merely cause a performance penalty on the next boot.
...) would be more performant: writes could be batched without violating transaction semantics, and metadata could be updated in place. Writes in general would have much lower latency and higher burst bandwidth, as they could be made to NVRAM first. It would be easier to incorporate Sun's "RAID-Z" technology to improve performance for higher-levels of RAID, and because of the transaction log, RAID5 would no longer carry the corruption risk that it currently does.
If such a chip became standard would revolutionize filesystem storage. In half a gig, you could cache the entire filesystem's metadata (locate would become obsolete), most of the boot sequence, a transaction log, and a cache of most recently accessed files. And since it would be writing to RAM first, it would be much, much faster than disk, and it wouldn't wear like flash (since the flash is only used when the power goes out, or when you shut down).
You would be able to build transaction-oriented filesystems much more easily can be done with disk alone. Write-anywhere filesystem layouts (ReiserFS, Netapp,
Database designers currently use 10kRPM (and higher) disks for their transaction logs. Why can't they use NVRAM?
I'm sure someone has thought of this before, and I've heard of NVRAM cards in high-end servers, but why doesn't it go to the desktop or laptop market?
I've been considering going to Solaris (for a fileserver) largely because ZFS provides this same feature (along with a good RAID-5 implementation and live storage pool resizing). Of course, I'm not sure Windows is an ideal platform for a file server, particularly when the clients are likely to be Linux machines and Macs, but it gives me another option.
I have a MacBook. The lack of right mouse button is annoying, particularly when I'm running something other than OS X on it. Windows and Linux don't have double-tap-right-click drivers. Carrying around a mouse is annoying, as the MacBook is already quite heavy for its size (5.3 lbs or something for a 12-inch?).
I'm beginning to wonder if I should have gone with a ThinkPad. It wouldn't have run OS X, but it would have been lighter.
First of all, he gave a time frame. FTFA: Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs.
But ignoring that, you forget that even if several tasks are independent, they can be timesliced. That's how you can run multiple applications "at the same time" on a single-core machine. Sure, if you're worried about latency, you can move the real-time threads (GUI, for instance) onto another core, but batch processes like finding related content can be timesliced with absolutely no problem.
Of course, if you have 8 tasks that are capable of saturating a core, then you can use 8 cores, but you can also use 4 cores that are twice as fast.
O la la... c'est un tas de porn.
There is absolutely 0% chance that my single vote will sway the Presidential election, because they can't even count within that margin of error, and if the vote is that close it comes down to procedural rulings anyways (as demonstrated in 2000).
Actually, this isn't true: your vote might decide whether it is close enough for a recount, whether it comes down to a judicial decision, and so on. Of course, it's a little fuzzier than that in real life, because counting the votes is probabilistic, but the conclusion is still correct unless the election is very lopsided.
Of course, in some states, the election is so lopsided that it is a virtual certainty who will win from the outset. There, your vote really doesn't count (or rather, the chances of it counting are very, very near 0), at least for who will get elected.