back in days of yore you used to load the language by hand (say off of a tape, after toggling in the boot loader by hand) or had it pre-loaded on cd rom. then you wrote or loaded a program in the language that was the operating system.
any one remember PIP on the altair?
in any case when java came along I bet that one reason MS saw it as a threat was that between java and a browser you really did not need to have an OS at all. you just needed to have the computer wake up in java and then write the OS or load OS du jour written in java. applications would be simply forked java jobs. java would be doing all the system level connection.
you might say that well java was now the OS. that i'm just playing word games here. but if that were really true then why did you have to pay 200$ to microsoft for your Windows operating system but you got JAVA free? if you could replace the OS with java then well redmond is out of the OS bussiness.
not a pipe dream at all since that's how it all began way back when
every single one of my athalons (18) has had the power supply replaced twice. half of my p3 blades (150) have had their disk replaced. my 90 supermicor xeons are doing quite well thank you. my desk top linux Pcs have ahd various disk failures.
my xserves have never failed.
redundancy doesn't mean shit if the product isn;t good to begin with. I got lucky with super micro and in fact the latest 2000 cpu cluster at my company is super micro too. but frankly the other copanies on paper were actually better.
the only reason I dont buy more apple xserves is that as long as I can get lucjy the linux boxes are cheaper. but if I had to pay anybody the same as an apple i'd rather have an apple since I know it will work. you can have your redundant power supplies.
the key if finding a good vendor and sticky with them.
I've always been confused by this. How does this gain anything? that is, presumbaly no matter where you are home, work on the road you have a ISP somewhere. and you send e-mail via them. If you dont have an ISP then how does send mail know where it can send its packets too and have them accepted?
The apple DVD player does not decode the DOLBY DTS digital 5.1 sound. (It does permit the 2-channel emulation via dolby pro-logic available on all home theater systems or sonicas). The only multi-channel audio dvd player for mac osx is the VLC player and frankly its buggy as hell and without hardware acceleration (that the apple product uses), its video chatters.
the new G5 computers have optical outputs, perfect for multi-channel sound. So when is apple going to release a multi-channel aware dvd player app?? anyone heard any rumors?
I use a projection (dlp) video system. I can play my DVD movies either as DVI, VGA (RGB) or as S-video using my mac powerbook the s-video has the resolution of a VCR or ordinary television. But the VGA output is massively better, roughly 8 to 16 times the independent pixel density (4 X spatially and 2x in time and another 2x for truly independent pixels). Unfortunately I cant use the DVI out becaue my lowly projector does not have DVI input.
However even if it did I dont expect the result to be much superior than the analog RGB VGA output for the simple reason that the DVD disk doesn't have any more info than that.
for example if you try to play a dvd on an XGA or SXGA system it looks WORSE(!) than on the lower resoultion SVGA. the reason is very simple , the dvd has to interpolate the pixels and does a bad job when the image is changing quickly. SVGA is optimal for DVD , and XGA is optimal for HDTV.
huh? if it was 10$ average per person then that eoule mean 110 million users get refunds. I dont think half the population of the united states lives in cananda
As a pracitcal matter when people use numbers in passwords they usually put them at the beginning or at the end or tend to place them consecutively. When you do so you are actually decreasing the effective alphabet not increasing it. your doggy1 is a classic example.
furthermore in addition to getting your arithmatic wrong, you make the hideous assumption that the distribution over your enlarge alphabet is uniform. it is not at all. if you used half the characters twice as often in your enlarged alphabet then you would be much worse off than a completely random distribution over just the lowercase alpha. the latter being (almost) what the ms folks are suggesting (admittedly first and last letters are not uniformly distributed over the alphabet, however since adjacent letters will have almost no correlation there will be further gains here).
so the goal is to make the password as short as possible that is easy to remember and has the highest entropy over its component distribtuions. the MS scheme is very close to optimal I would bet.
Well yes but you forgot one littel thing.
on
Inkblot Passwords
·
· Score: 1
My original post was too short and I probably would have mentioned entropy had I thought people would read it. So I'me totally with you. But you and everyone else that has replied makes the same mistake.
namely you assume that distribution over the alphabet is uniform and its way not. people who put numbers in their passwords rarley put more than one and they are usually consecutive. putting in consecutive numbers DECREASES the effective alphabet size rather than increasing it.
Thus any scheme which has an high entropy of the distribution over alphabet is superior to a larger alphabet whose entropy is less. The Microsoft scheme which uses first and last letters (unlikely to be correlated) is such a high entropy scheme. Admittedly, the suggestions you made using dise wear and rad-64 do have high entropy over their components but they are also hard to remember.
hence my original statment that the best password is the longest one you can remember is essentially true, but should have been qualified to say the characters distribtuion has a high entropy.
GOOGLE CACHE OF ROCKET BIKE PAGE HERE
on
United Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. the strongest possible password is simply the longest string you can reliably comit to memory. It makes no difference if your alphabet is 50% larger.
Actually thats the recommended approach
on
Inkblot Passwords
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Blot number 10 would be "Bn": Batman having sex with Catwoman.
though your post was meant to be humorous it also jibes with convention security wisdom for recalling strong passwords.
I forget who it was that said it, but a widely recomended strategy for strong passwords is to think of a shockingly graphic sexual phrase then use the first letters.
The vividness and the link to sexual activity makes it memorable (at least in males). And also its not likely to be a phase you would blurt out or something anyone cold easily guess about you. e.g. "take this job and shove it" would NOT be a good pass phrase because its something that might well be an expression you would use in your writings or speech.
Oh and by the way that's actually me in the batman costume doing your wife. or Ge
All micorsoft operating systems are extremely compliant with RFC intrusion tolerance. Indeed they positively welcome intruders open arms and open legs. once in the intruder can pretty much do as they please. If that isn't intrusion tolerant I dont know what is.
I had a early pc version of Nextstep. rand on a 486Dx, 1 gig disk.
it was the freindliest unix at the time.
One reason the black hardware was so expensive was that it was all top of the line. THey had the first mega pixel displays for ordinary users (woo hoo, but then they were mind blowing). The screen was done in display postscript using a custom chip to make it possible. this gave all objects smooth reziability. at the time the competition for Windows was all bit map graphics so things were pretty jagged when you changed their sizes. Mathematica came with it. so did the collected works of shakespeare (which I actually used for a science project on entropy in text). it also came with renderMan, one of the early CG movie quality shaders.
It also came with a neat little program called Zilla which is the forerunner of todays grid computing. if you ran zilla then any time your computer was idle it donated its cycles to a master zilla project server. I've read several really interesting things were solved by zilla. apparently parts of the four color map theorem proof were done. as were some of the first hollywood cg effects.
the mail program was I thik the first to make mimetypes a standard hence you could send voice e-mails even way back then (its still hard!).
they were early adopters. Postscript printers were required (impact printers still ruled the market back then) and the very first black Nexts were based off of optical disks instead of hard disks. that was a terrible move in hindsight. and they quickly moved to large hard disks. but at the time they thought they would have to be distributing large software and large databases hence having the largest possible removable media had an appeal.
the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market.
marrying it to apple was thus a good fit. apple had the developer base. they had the OS.
Here's something I dont get. NFS is totally insecure to anyone who can jack into your network. Keeping physical security on a machine is easy and practical compared to keeping physical security on a network. most buildings have jacks all over, visitors come and go. Yet people need to mount NFS disks. Even with physcial security advanced techniques like ARP spoofing can sometimes get you in.
so why why why is anyone working on improving the FS until NFS is fixed or replaced with a decent security model. Ironically fixing NFS appears to be trivial--something like ssh to authenticate the client might do the job. But this might break a lot of systems in an imhogenous network. even so I dont see any movement here. Everyone's worried about layers over NFS but not NFS itself.
If I'm an idiot then I'm in good company. I know dozens of other sys admins and none of has a clue how to secure an NFS system against people who can jack in to the network.
ironically it gets even worse now that people use ssh and ssh-keys to log in. it makes the network less not more secure. its simpler to attack a client with remote mounted home directory using ssh keys than it is to sniff for telnet passwords!
The presentation of the system said it the g5 could support up to 8GB of memmory. Okay. can a 32 bit OS actually address 8GB of memory. Or rather can apple's OS and applications (like photoshop) acutally address 8GB? No that I plan to deck mine out just yet. but I'm just curious.
got physical access? good. then put in a install CD. boot it, and select change password from the menu. Ta Da.
Oh you dont want to change the password? well then boot in single user mode and you dont need one. Ta Da
Oh they left open firmware on?. open the case and remove one of the memory cards. reboot. ta da!
They greatly enhance my enjoyment
on
Sports Technology?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sports technology enhances my enjoyment but not in the way you think. I have a 12 year old bike that is noticably crusty. Its a perverse pleasure to crush a tech weenie with his high tech gear with by junk. Its a gulity pleasure.
part of the satisfaction is that that I too am an inner tech weenie. I used to lust after the gizmos. But slowly I stripped them off my bike. few really help you. and you spend more time worrying about your bike and tweaking it than riding it.
The other thing is that I found that light-weight does not mean its better. I break light weight gear. heavy may be better if its solid and reliable. Front shock ride less precicely over a rock garden. Back shocks give you less control too.
I've busted handlebars and could easily have gotten impaled on the fragments. Thus no more trick handle bar alloys for me, please--give me something that known not to metal fatigue or fail catastrophically before it bends.
I've broken al lsorts of parts in all sorts of places I did not want to have to walk out of. thus repairable stuff is good too. I carry lots of tools and people laugh at how heavy my bike is--but somehow I end up using them all and not just on my bike.
The keynote address was fairly long so I would guess most slashdot readers actually watched all of it. In it they did on stage examples of tests they did with real world apps.
They showed four top-shelf apps: Photoshop, Mathematica, Emagic, and one other I'm spacing on. In each case the apps were not demoed by mac but rather by someone from the app company. And the examples they gave were clearly practical ones not special cases noone would actually want to do. In the case of Photoshop it was actually a commerical product (movie poster) that was recreated by replaying the artists commands. In the case of the Emagic it was the compositing of the actual musical composition that the musician had done. In the case of mathematical it was the calcualtion of a fractal curve: theodore grey pointed out they had to dumb down the calculations so they xeon would not run out of memory.
in all cases the Apple ran more than 2X faster than the Xeon.
now you could try to say these were tweaked apps, but that wont wash. these are pro-sumer apps that these comanies sell for a living. you better believe that would optimize the heck out of both the wintel and Apple versions. Certianly, if there was any tewaking tobe done they had lots of time and no shortage of manpower and experts to do it on the intel instruction set. Another test they did not demo live was the 40% higher frame rate in Quake
If all they had shown was some single case like photshop or Quake I might have been less convinced. but here are five different genres of applications, in the most demanding fields of Imagery, music, (real world) numerical math, Gaming and others. Okay so your application--say MS word or web browsing--isn't so demanding. That's not the pointis it: you aren't doing things where the machine is the speed limit.
I think its pretty reasonable to assume that over time compilers for the new G5 will imporve more that those for the i86 instruction set since there's new things to exploit. Likewise relatively few compilers do a good job of taking fulladvantage of the Altivec extensions yet. And with the fat, independent pipes to disk, and memory apps will need to be re-written since many of the old bottlenecks they were designed to avoid aren't there anymore
So argue all you want about SPEC tests, but were taking shaving ten or 20 minutes per hour of real world usages. Its phenomenal. In my opinion the diveristy of tests clearly shows the mac is not only the fasest currently on-sale platform, but that there is not even any wiggle room to doubt that.
Re:six of one half a dozen of the other
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sir,
if you had read anything in the last week you would know that the only area the G5 is slow in is integeres. It dominates on floats. it's basically a tie on integers: in Single processor mode it loses by perhaps 10% on the SPEC tests and in Dual processor mode it beats the Dual xeons by a margin of maybe 20%.
I'm confused. Troll tech both sells Qt and gives Qt away under GPL. I'm guessing that Qt makes money by selling to developmers who dont want to GPL their own products.
but this raises a point that I've seen varied opinions on. Does linking against a GPL lib make your product GPL'd? Some say yes some say no. which is it?
After all you can system call to a GPL program without GPL'ing your own. SO its not quite clear where the line is
anyhow if one can call trolleck libs without GPLing your source why would anyone bother to purchase Qt.
This article in forbes discusses the canopy group and mentions that they once owned troll tech. Its unclear if they still do.
I hate to bring this up with trolltech doing such a public service. I suspect they must not fit the canopy group mold. But their technology is at such a base and hard to replace level one should be aware of who might own it.
The canopy group by the way has already sued MS and won and another company McBride used to work for and won. they know how to use their IP... as a war club.
Slashdot Mirror
PalmNeo might have been "the one"
any one remember PIP on the altair?
in any case when java came along I bet that one reason MS saw it as a threat was that between java and a browser you really did not need to have an OS at all. you just needed to have the computer wake up in java and then write the OS or load OS du jour written in java. applications would be simply forked java jobs. java would be doing all the system level connection.
you might say that well java was now the OS. that i'm just playing word games here. but if that were really true then why did you have to pay 200$ to microsoft for your Windows operating system but you got JAVA free? if you could replace the OS with java then well redmond is out of the OS bussiness.
not a pipe dream at all since that's how it all began way back when
my xserves have never failed. redundancy doesn't mean shit if the product isn;t good to begin with. I got lucky with super micro and in fact the latest 2000 cpu cluster at my company is super micro too. but frankly the other copanies on paper were actually better.
the only reason I dont buy more apple xserves is that as long as I can get lucjy the linux boxes are cheaper. but if I had to pay anybody the same as an apple i'd rather have an apple since I know it will work. you can have your redundant power supplies.
the key if finding a good vendor and sticky with them.
I've always been confused by this. How does this gain anything? that is, presumbaly no matter where you are home, work on the road you have a ISP somewhere. and you send e-mail via them. If you dont have an ISP then how does send mail know where it can send its packets too and have them accepted?
the new G5 computers have optical outputs, perfect for multi-channel sound. So when is apple going to release a multi-channel aware dvd player app?? anyone heard any rumors?
However even if it did I dont expect the result to be much superior than the analog RGB VGA output for the simple reason that the DVD disk doesn't have any more info than that.
for example if you try to play a dvd on an XGA or SXGA system it looks WORSE(!) than on the lower resoultion SVGA. the reason is very simple , the dvd has to interpolate the pixels and does a bad job when the image is changing quickly. SVGA is optimal for DVD , and XGA is optimal for HDTV.
huh? if it was 10$ average per person then that eoule mean 110 million users get refunds. I dont think half the population of the united states lives in cananda
furthermore in addition to getting your arithmatic wrong, you make the hideous assumption that the distribution over your enlarge alphabet is uniform. it is not at all. if you used half the characters twice as often in your enlarged alphabet then you would be much worse off than a completely random distribution over just the lowercase alpha. the latter being (almost) what the ms folks are suggesting (admittedly first and last letters are not uniformly distributed over the alphabet, however since adjacent letters will have almost no correlation there will be further gains here).
so the goal is to make the password as short as possible that is easy to remember and has the highest entropy over its component distribtuions. the MS scheme is very close to optimal I would bet.
namely you assume that distribution over the alphabet is uniform and its way not. people who put numbers in their passwords rarley put more than one and they are usually consecutive. putting in consecutive numbers DECREASES the effective alphabet size rather than increasing it.
Thus any scheme which has an high entropy of the distribution over alphabet is superior to a larger alphabet whose entropy is less. The Microsoft scheme which uses first and last letters (unlikely to be correlated) is such a high entropy scheme. Admittedly, the suggestions you made using dise wear and rad-64 do have high entropy over their components but they are also hard to remember.
hence my original statment that the best password is the longest one you can remember is essentially true, but should have been qualified to say the characters distribtuion has a high entropy.
dangerous products
and dont try this at home if your home is in iraq.
Wrong. the strongest possible password is simply the longest string you can reliably comit to memory. It makes no difference if your alphabet is 50% larger.
though your post was meant to be humorous it also jibes with convention security wisdom for recalling strong passwords.
I forget who it was that said it, but a widely recomended strategy for strong passwords is to think of a shockingly graphic sexual phrase then use the first letters.
The vividness and the link to sexual activity makes it memorable (at least in males). And also its not likely to be a phase you would blurt out or something anyone cold easily guess about you. e.g. "take this job and shove it" would NOT be a good pass phrase because its something that might well be an expression you would use in your writings or speech.
Oh and by the way that's actually me in the batman costume doing your wife. or Ge
All micorsoft operating systems are extremely compliant with RFC intrusion tolerance. Indeed they positively welcome intruders open arms and open legs. once in the intruder can pretty much do as they please. If that isn't intrusion tolerant I dont know what is.
it was the freindliest unix at the time.
One reason the black hardware was so expensive was that it was all top of the line. THey had the first mega pixel displays for ordinary users (woo hoo, but then they were mind blowing). The screen was done in display postscript using a custom chip to make it possible. this gave all objects smooth reziability. at the time the competition for Windows was all bit map graphics so things were pretty jagged when you changed their sizes. Mathematica came with it. so did the collected works of shakespeare (which I actually used for a science project on entropy in text). it also came with renderMan, one of the early CG movie quality shaders.
It also came with a neat little program called Zilla which is the forerunner of todays grid computing. if you ran zilla then any time your computer was idle it donated its cycles to a master zilla project server. I've read several really interesting things were solved by zilla. apparently parts of the four color map theorem proof were done. as were some of the first hollywood cg effects.
the mail program was I thik the first to make mimetypes a standard hence you could send voice e-mails even way back then (its still hard!).
they were early adopters. Postscript printers were required (impact printers still ruled the market back then) and the very first black Nexts were based off of optical disks instead of hard disks. that was a terrible move in hindsight. and they quickly moved to large hard disks. but at the time they thought they would have to be distributing large software and large databases hence having the largest possible removable media had an appeal.
the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market.
marrying it to apple was thus a good fit. apple had the developer base. they had the OS.
so why why why is anyone working on improving the FS until NFS is fixed or replaced with a decent security model. Ironically fixing NFS appears to be trivial--something like ssh to authenticate the client might do the job. But this might break a lot of systems in an imhogenous network. even so I dont see any movement here. Everyone's worried about layers over NFS but not NFS itself.
If I'm an idiot then I'm in good company. I know dozens of other sys admins and none of has a clue how to secure an NFS system against people who can jack in to the network.
ironically it gets even worse now that people use ssh and ssh-keys to log in. it makes the network less not more secure. its simpler to attack a client with remote mounted home directory using ssh keys than it is to sniff for telnet passwords!
The presentation of the system said it the g5 could support up to 8GB of memmory. Okay. can a 32 bit OS actually address 8GB of memory. Or rather can apple's OS and applications (like photoshop) acutally address 8GB? No that I plan to deck mine out just yet. but I'm just curious.
Oh you dont want to change the password? well then boot in single user mode and you dont need one. Ta Da
Oh they left open firmware on?. open the case and remove one of the memory cards. reboot. ta da!
part of the satisfaction is that that I too am an inner tech weenie. I used to lust after the gizmos. But slowly I stripped them off my bike. few really help you. and you spend more time worrying about your bike and tweaking it than riding it.
The other thing is that I found that light-weight does not mean its better. I break light weight gear. heavy may be better if its solid and reliable. Front shock ride less precicely over a rock garden. Back shocks give you less control too.
I've busted handlebars and could easily have gotten impaled on the fragments. Thus no more trick handle bar alloys for me, please--give me something that known not to metal fatigue or fail catastrophically before it bends.
I've broken al lsorts of parts in all sorts of places I did not want to have to walk out of. thus repairable stuff is good too. I carry lots of tools and people laugh at how heavy my bike is--but somehow I end up using them all and not just on my bike.
They showed four top-shelf apps: Photoshop, Mathematica, Emagic, and one other I'm spacing on. In each case the apps were not demoed by mac but rather by someone from the app company. And the examples they gave were clearly practical ones not special cases noone would actually want to do. In the case of Photoshop it was actually a commerical product (movie poster) that was recreated by replaying the artists commands. In the case of the Emagic it was the compositing of the actual musical composition that the musician had done. In the case of mathematical it was the calcualtion of a fractal curve: theodore grey pointed out they had to dumb down the calculations so they xeon would not run out of memory.
in all cases the Apple ran more than 2X faster than the Xeon.
now you could try to say these were tweaked apps, but that wont wash. these are pro-sumer apps that these comanies sell for a living. you better believe that would optimize the heck out of both the wintel and Apple versions. Certianly, if there was any tewaking tobe done they had lots of time and no shortage of manpower and experts to do it on the intel instruction set. Another test they did not demo live was the 40% higher frame rate in Quake
If all they had shown was some single case like photshop or Quake I might have been less convinced. but here are five different genres of applications, in the most demanding fields of Imagery, music, (real world) numerical math, Gaming and others. Okay so your application--say MS word or web browsing--isn't so demanding. That's not the pointis it: you aren't doing things where the machine is the speed limit.
I think its pretty reasonable to assume that over time compilers for the new G5 will imporve more that those for the i86 instruction set since there's new things to exploit. Likewise relatively few compilers do a good job of taking fulladvantage of the Altivec extensions yet. And with the fat, independent pipes to disk, and memory apps will need to be re-written since many of the old bottlenecks they were designed to avoid aren't there anymore
So argue all you want about SPEC tests, but were taking shaving ten or 20 minutes per hour of real world usages. Its phenomenal. In my opinion the diveristy of tests clearly shows the mac is not only the fasest currently on-sale platform, but that there is not even any wiggle room to doubt that.
if you had read anything in the last week you would know that the only area the G5 is slow in is integeres. It dominates on floats. it's basically a tie on integers: in Single processor mode it loses by perhaps 10% on the SPEC tests and in Dual processor mode it beats the Dual xeons by a margin of maybe 20%.
but this raises a point that I've seen varied opinions on. Does linking against a GPL lib make your product GPL'd? Some say yes some say no. which is it?
After all you can system call to a GPL program without GPL'ing your own. SO its not quite clear where the line is
anyhow if one can call trolleck libs without GPLing your source why would anyone bother to purchase Qt.
I hate to bring this up with trolltech doing such a public service. I suspect they must not fit the canopy group mold. But their technology is at such a base and hard to replace level one should be aware of who might own it.
The canopy group by the way has already sued MS and won and another company McBride used to work for and won. they know how to use their IP... as a war club.
Here are some anagrams. or maybe its just poetry
Great Info, Nod Wink
A NOW INDIGENT FORK
No Farking Tie On
I no twin dong freak
NEON DWARF KING ITO
I Got Neon Dwarf Kin
Knot Fearing Windo
Newton Irk A Fin God
Farking Do Not Wine
Fink To Anger Windo
A Neon Dog Wink Rift
FREAK DINGO IN TOWN
Finn Great Windo Ok