I'm with you.. I wish I could see MUCH more info on this.. and thusly I can't answer your first two questions because I want the answer myself.. but the third question is easy.. this won't be hot at all.. it's all optical.. it would require VERY little power because it doesn't seem to be doing any computational work.
Speculating on the first question, though, I don't think it would have to be that big.. I'm imagining MANY 2d metricies of optical channels on a board/chip/whatever, all of which would be very small and thin (you can put them very close together because they wont interfere with each other), with some given amount of channels per interface on the switch to deal with however many concurrent IP streams are going through the device. As long as the switching itself and the switch decision-making process is quick, which it seems like it would be since it is a simple optical interference function, you wouldn't need a huge amount of channels/interface.
All speculation... maybe we need an Ask Slashdot with these guys. I would love that.. I'm sure their NDAs wouldn't. though.
Routers have two components : a routing component and a switching component. The switching component takes input on an interface, moves it across the backplane to the routing component, and then and pushes it out another interface when the routing component is done with it. The routing component reads the destination from the IP header, compares it to it's routing table and decides whether it is routable, and if so, which interface it will go out. It seems to me that this technology would only take care of the level 2 (switching) layer of networking, which is not the major area of concern in networking right now.. With existing electrcal technology, we have backplanes that can push 160Gb/s of IP traffic. That, on one device, is enough to push 16 OC-192s. The problem is if a single device had to push 16 OC-192s at wire-rate (full speed, basically), the route processor would not be able to handle the IP lookups to feed the backplane. So this technology (if they can get it to work.. which it seems like they should be able to) _will_ be useful once we get a route processor that can keep up with it.
This tech looks like it could be separated from a router to be used in an ATM switch, but by the time it is viable, we probably will be using MPLS and POS more than ATM, but there will always be a need for fast layer 2 technologies.
I like the current trend in networking to move away from electrical processes in switching.. once we can get a fully fibre-based system we will be able to remove much of the inherent latency in telecommunications.. like the 100ms lag to go across the atlantic, or the 60ms lag to go across the United States. Once we have comparatively few electrical devices taking care of the routing and all optical devices doing the switching, the only thing that will cause lag will be processing and the speed of light.
...is a quote from the late Bill Hicks, probably the most revolutionary comedian of the 90s... I beleive it's off Rant in E Minor, but I'm not sure. and actually, now that I think about it it's a combination of two different parts.. "I'm sick of this whole back-slapping our humanity bullshit.. we're a virus with shoes, ladies and gentlemen".. and later "People suck, that's my contention, I can prove it on a scratch of paper and a pen, gimme a fuckin etch-a-sketch, I'll show my work, the proof, the fact, the factorum.."
..pisses me right the hell off. He makes the Thunderbird look worse by taking any chance at all, no matter how insignigicant, to point out anything this chip has against intel. Everywhere you look on thie review, the benchmark graphs show the coppermine on the new BX133 even to the Thunderbird or ahead of it, and all Tom can muster is 'Thunderbird is able to leave its predecessor as well as Intel's Coppermine behind it, as long as this processor does not run on the BX133-chipset' Yeah.. So the Thunderbird can run with the new Intel's, as long as your don't run it on the best motherboard. Now I'm as big of a fan of AMD as anyone else.. I'm about to buy an athlon in the next week or so, but Tom is totally biased against Intel and it shows in his articles. He shouldn't have to be making excuses for the Thunderbird not beating the Intel like it should, he should be showing us that it doesn't, and questioning why.
I click that damn link, go to another virtual desktop, then come back and see two slashdot windows up and think 'damn.. ns must have opened another window and not gone the the link.. guess I'd better click it again'..
..it must be fuckin monday morning. Bitchass trolls.
Maybe Carmack needs to get out of ID and start another gaming company.. am I the only one who thinks that ID has really lost it's lustre since Quake II?
I think this will be interesting to see how AOL is involved in this product.. I can see it going one of two ways.. one being that AOL is pushing this product to try and push netscape 6 onto the handheld/appliance (shudder) market so that this can be a totally wintel-free market.. the other being as a way to make AOL the only way to get the internet on these devices.. I wonder if they will tie this specifically to AOL's ISP service.. I certainly hope not. I don't want AOL to be fighting microsoft's monopoly just so it can replace it with one of their own..
As long as this box.. (can I call it a box anymore? maybe not.. which means these aren't 80xx3n.. and p4d is just no fun at all.. trolls.. ruminate on 1337-5p33k|ng w38p4d for me and report back in a day or so) is ISP-independant, it could be a great thing for transmeta, linux, etcetcetc.. otherwise I won't buy one.
He is speaking of low power in terms of low electrical power consumption, not low computing power output, which is most definitely a good thing for webpads and other "appliances" which rely on batteries.. low wattage == high battery life. On a side note, why has internet appliance become such a buzzword? Appliance makes me think of a toaster over, not a computing device.. pretty soon they'll probably be calling them e-pliances.. oh no. I hope no marketing people see that...
I know everyone and their mother is going to post saying something along the lines of "oh no, congressional legislation is going to kill [anonymity/privacy/freedom/little puppies] on the web, we have to stop these uninformed lawmakers from making any laws about the internet before they destroy it"
OK.. that's valid, but it's not going to do anything to help. Lawmakers are in office because they want to do things to (in their eyes, and supposedly the eyes of their constituents) help, and they are fairly convinced, probably by the fact that they are elected officials, that they should be the ones to make changes to try to help. I don't think we're going to be able to pursuade them from that beleif, so yelling and screaming about how uninformed and non-technical politicians shouldn't be making technology laws isn't going to help anything. What WILL help is either a) educating the politicians so that they beleive themselves that keeping anonymity and privacy will be beneficial to the internet and to society as a whole or b) convince them that their constituents beleive this.
A is a tall order.. congressmen did not grow up in our generation, they do not understand the kinds of changes the internet is going to bring, so we should focus our efforts on B. Make yourself heard, and not just by writing your congressman (which is good as well), but also by telling people you know, your family and friends, people you meet, etc our point of view. If more people can be made to understand this the way it really is rather than having their views shaped by the equally ignorant and hype-prone media.
...is that they suck. Hopping the pond on either side of us incurrs 100ms of latency, and if you have to hop a sattelite link, you're looking at 500+ms. All the time. Internet around the world just isn't up to snuff compared to what we have in the US right now (at least connecting from the US->the rest of the world and vice versa). So be aware you're going to take a performance hit when you more offshore.
To move the slashdot severs to another country. We always say that that is a good way to circumvent american law when it creates censorship of ideas, maybe it is time we take our own advice.
Sting is set apart from other such tools by two characteristics. First, you should note that existing tools, like ping and traceroute rely on ICMP packets, which are increasingly deprioritized or filtered. (Just try pinging www.yahoo.com or www.aol.com if you don't believe this is happening).
If code replaces/takes some of the burden of laws in the near future as computer integration becomes more common, won't cracks/hacks such as deCSS, etc serve the purpose of a Social Commentary? They already do serve as an abstracted social commentary to people like us as we understand their implications, but I can envision the kind of hacking that is now considered criminal and mischeivous being viewed as constructive criticisms in the future, much in the way criticism of the government was at one time punishable by treason, and has now become the norm for any modern government.
RE: your routing questions... yes, routers create their routing tables based on some algorithm (which depends on which protocol you are using) to find the best route to a host. In this case, there would be only one route to get to the host (assuming that the customer is single-homed, which the guy who wrote this proposal did), so no best-match decision has to be made. There is just one route to the customer's network. You can, however, manually change the routing to improve the situation. In the case of a simple DOS attack (not DDoS), say from 123.123.123.1, you can just route packets with that source to null0 (just a bit-bucket address all routers have), so the router throws the packets away. In the case of a DDos attack, that won't work since there are several sources.. so you can route packets that have a protocol equal to ICMP and a dest. equal to the cst's server to null0.
The reason to do this is that access lists, packet filters, take up MUCH more router CPU than ip routes, so often if you put up an access list on a huge DoS attack, it will kill the router, and you'll be no better off.
Well, yes, but half of the point of these DDos attacks is that it doesn't matter if you find out one or two or ten of the IPs that are attacking, none of them are most likely owned by or associated with the attacker (if they are any good). It is much more important to stop the attacks then to track down who is responsible for them.. if the attacks themselves are harmless, there is no need to find out who is doing it.
and you're right, I don't think any of the current tools do constant DNS lookups, but anyone who isn't just a 5kr|p7 k|dd|3 can change their script to dynamically do DNS, and then release it to the k|dd|35.
Yeah.. I had originally thought to use hotname instead of IP, as that would be pretty easy, but wasn't sure if the kind of packet-spoofing they would have to use would be able to handle hostname resolution.
I think this guy is a prospective DDoser himself, because this 'solution' would make things worse rather than better.
A) You don't need the stub network. You can route 10.0.0.x to the bit bucket on the ISP's aggregate router, which would be better for the router's CPU utilization anyways B) What's to stop the haxx0rs from writing a small script that polls the dns servers every 5..10..30 seconds and changes all of the DDos boxen to the new IP instantly C) You don't have to call your ISP to reroute traffic, you can do that in a BGP advertisment, which customers control. D) Besides, if you're going to call your ISP, there are MUCH better ways to releive a DDos attack. Cisco is releasing/has released a slew of new tools such as reverse-path TCP acknowledgement (to deny spoofed return-path IPs automatically) and CAR (Committed Access Rate, which allows you to rate-limit certain TCP protocols much more easily, and to drop packets that are flooding without overutilizing a router. Note that you need a big scary Cisco box with 128meg of ram on each VIP slot to take care of this, but any real ISP should have that)
The point is that this should be taken care of at the ISP level, not at the customer level, as ISPs have the experience and infrastructure to deal with it. These little customer tricks to try to deal with DDos are easily defeatable.
Yeah, so this article wasn't too techie.. big deal.. there's no way an article this far ahead of the release could be very techie.. I don't think Intel and AMD are sharing all their secrets like good little children.
The article does make some good points.. and shows a way that AMD could really get some market share. I know all of you aren't going to like it, but it's a good idea. I'm talking about this part : Compaq has said that it will not support a 64-bit Windows for its Alpha servers, which leaves Microsoft looking for some way to get into the server marketplace. Enter the AMD Sledgehammer. Microsoft could develop a 32-bit extended version of Windows that it could, over time, turn into a native 64-bit OS. If AMD splits Microsoft and Intel over the 64-bit OS issue, it would do some damage to both Intel and Windows' collective solidarity. I know.. our little cinderella AMD would be getting in bed with big bad Microsoft, but we've got to take out Intel and Microsoft out seperately, not together. Competition, enter stage right..
props to AMD.. for making the next few years of CPUs a little more interesting than the last few years of Intel MHz leapfrogging with no real breakthroughs.
//Phizzy
afterthought : AMD.. I'm Still pissed I can't get a dual athlon, if you're listening.
While this may be considered cheating in the current academic climate, I think this kind of thing is going to be the porthole to a whole new way of thinking. What is tested in schools now is mostly the ability of a student to retain knowledge. While this is an inarguably useful trait, anyone can memorize a given sum of information with a certain amount of time on their hands. So as a result, school is easier for some students and much more frustrating for others. What if, instead of being tested on how much the brain can retain, we are tested on how fast the brain can use all of it's available resources to find the information it needs to complete a given problem. That tests creativity, adaptability and resourcefulness rather than just memorization. These traits are much more important in my eyes for life than memorization is. Now that we are entering the information age and so much information is being linked together in such a way that is can be easily associated with other relevant information, the information itself becomes less important than its meaning with respect to the information associated with it. For now, we will have to use laptops/cellmodems or workstations/ethernet, but eventually when we all have wireless implants, this kind of testing will be the only way to go since everyone will have instant access to all of the information they need and memorization will no longer be restricted to the unpredicatble nature of the human brain. at least I hope so...
From the article : His column tipped off the local Linux users group, TriLUG. Its members started e-mailing each other, making plans to conduct their own Expo.
I'm in the RDU area, I attended the Linux Expo two and three years ago, but not last year, and thought that it was getting a little too corporate in '98, but was still definitely worth attending. I wish I had gone last year, to see what it was like. I can see it getting to be more like all the other computer expos and less like LinuxExpo should be.
SO.. Redhat's not going to organise it this year.. Fsck 'em! I think it's in the true linux spirit to route around damage and create our own expo. I'm willing to help in any capacity I can. There are enough Linux/Unix businesses and people in RTP to get something going, and I'm sure quite a bit of the rest of you Slashdot people would attend an expo built to be what WE want it to be, not what the corpses want it to be. Email me if you're in RTP.. or even if you're not. Let's get something together!
The article does nothing to support the Judges findings. There is nothing in there that shows the arguments from the defense, or why the judge ruled in their favor. I'm guessing that the judge did not understand the case or the ramifications of the ruling very well. I dont see how "having them check an electronic registry of e-mail addresses to determine whether intended e-mail recipients were Washington residents and therefore protected by the law." is hindering interstate commerce. Maintaining such a database would be kind of a pain, but the government created the law, so they should have to go through the motions it entails. I'm sure this will be overturned.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you.. I wish I could see MUCH more info on this.. and thusly I can't answer your first two questions because I want the answer myself.. but the third question is easy.. this won't be hot at all.. it's all optical.. it would require VERY little power because it doesn't seem to be doing any computational work.
Speculating on the first question, though, I don't think it would have to be that big.. I'm imagining MANY 2d metricies of optical channels on a board/chip/whatever, all of which would be very small and thin (you can put them very close together because they wont interfere with each other), with some given amount of channels per interface on the switch to deal with however many concurrent IP streams are going through the device. As long as the switching itself and the switch decision-making process is quick, which it seems like it would be since it is a simple optical interference function, you wouldn't need a huge amount of channels/interface.
All speculation... maybe we need an Ask Slashdot with these guys. I would love that.. I'm sure their NDAs wouldn't. though.
//Phizzy
Routers have two components : a routing component and a switching component. The switching component takes input on an interface, moves it across the backplane to the routing component, and then and pushes it out another interface when the routing component is done with it. The routing component reads the destination from the IP header, compares it to it's routing table and decides whether it is routable, and if so, which interface it will go out. It seems to me that this technology would only take care of the level 2 (switching) layer of networking, which is not the major area of concern in networking right now.. With existing electrcal technology, we have backplanes that can push 160Gb/s of IP traffic. That, on one device, is enough to push 16 OC-192s. The problem is if a single device had to push 16 OC-192s at wire-rate (full speed, basically), the route processor would not be able to handle the IP lookups to feed the backplane. So this technology (if they can get it to work.. which it seems like they should be able to) _will_ be useful once we get a route processor that can keep up with it.
This tech looks like it could be separated from a router to be used in an ATM switch, but by the time it is viable, we probably will be using MPLS and POS more than ATM, but there will always be a need for fast layer 2 technologies.
I like the current trend in networking to move away from electrical processes in switching.. once we can get a fully fibre-based system we will be able to remove much of the inherent latency in telecommunications.. like the 100ms lag to go across the atlantic, or the 60ms lag to go across the United States. Once we have comparatively few electrical devices taking care of the routing and all optical devices doing the switching, the only thing that will cause lag will be processing and the speed of light.
//Phizzy
...is a quote from the late Bill Hicks, probably the most revolutionary comedian of the 90s... I beleive it's off Rant in E Minor, but I'm not sure. and actually, now that I think about it it's a combination of two different parts.. .. and later "People suck, that's my contention, I can prove it on a scratch of paper and a pen, gimme a fuckin etch-a-sketch, I'll show my work, the proof, the fact, the factorum.."
"I'm sick of this whole back-slapping our humanity bullshit.. we're a virus with shoes, ladies and gentlemen"
anyway.. check out Bill Hicks. He is brilliant.
//Phizzy
..pisses me right the hell off. He makes the Thunderbird look worse by taking any chance at all, no matter how insignigicant, to point out anything this chip has against intel. Everywhere you look on thie review, the benchmark graphs show the coppermine on the new BX133 even to the Thunderbird or ahead of it, and all Tom can muster is 'Thunderbird is able to leave its predecessor as well as Intel's Coppermine behind it, as long as this processor does not run on the BX133-chipset' Yeah.. So the Thunderbird can run with the new Intel's, as long as your don't run it on the best motherboard. Now I'm as big of a fan of AMD as anyone else.. I'm about to buy an athlon in the next week or so, but Tom is totally biased against Intel and it shows in his articles. He shouldn't have to be making excuses for the Thunderbird not beating the Intel like it should, he should be showing us that it doesn't, and questioning why.
Fscking benchmarkers.
//Phizzy
I click that damn link, go to another virtual desktop, then come back and see two slashdot windows up and think 'damn.. ns must have opened another window and not gone the the link.. guess I'd better click it again'..
..it must be fuckin monday morning. Bitchass trolls.
//phizzy
Maybe Carmack needs to get out of ID and start another gaming company.. am I the only one who thinks that ID has really lost it's lustre since Quake II?
//Phizzy
I think this will be interesting to see how AOL is involved in this product.. I can see it going one of two ways.. one being that AOL is pushing this product to try and push netscape 6 onto the handheld/appliance (shudder) market so that this can be a totally wintel-free market.. the other being as a way to make AOL the only way to get the internet on these devices.. I wonder if they will tie this specifically to AOL's ISP service.. I certainly hope not. I don't want AOL to be fighting microsoft's monopoly just so it can replace it with one of their own..
As long as this box.. (can I call it a box anymore? maybe not.. which means these aren't 80xx3n.. and p4d is just no fun at all.. trolls.. ruminate on 1337-5p33k|ng w38p4d for me and report back in a day or so) is ISP-independant, it could be a great thing for transmeta, linux, etcetcetc.. otherwise I won't buy one.
//Phizzy
He is speaking of low power in terms of low electrical power consumption, not low computing power output, which is most definitely a good thing for webpads and other "appliances" which rely on batteries.. low wattage == high battery life. On a side note, why has internet appliance become such a buzzword? Appliance makes me think of a toaster over, not a computing device.. pretty soon they'll probably be calling them e-pliances.. oh no. I hope no marketing people see that...
//Phizzy
I know everyone and their mother is going to post saying something along the lines of "oh no, congressional legislation is going to kill [anonymity/privacy/freedom/little puppies] on the web, we have to stop these uninformed lawmakers from making any laws about the internet before they destroy it"
OK.. that's valid, but it's not going to do anything to help. Lawmakers are in office because they want to do things to (in their eyes, and supposedly the eyes of their constituents) help, and they are fairly convinced, probably by the fact that they are elected officials, that they should be the ones to make changes to try to help. I don't think we're going to be able to pursuade them from that beleif, so yelling and screaming about how uninformed and non-technical politicians shouldn't be making technology laws isn't going to help anything. What WILL help is either a) educating the politicians so that they beleive themselves that keeping anonymity and privacy will be beneficial to the internet and to society as a whole or b) convince them that their constituents beleive this.
A is a tall order.. congressmen did not grow up in our generation, they do not understand the kinds of changes the internet is going to bring, so we should focus our efforts on B. Make yourself heard, and not just by writing your congressman (which is good as well), but also by telling people you know, your family and friends, people you meet, etc our point of view. If more people can be made to understand this the way it really is rather than having their views shaped by the equally ignorant and hype-prone media.
Spread the word!
//Phizzy
...is that they suck. Hopping the pond on either side of us incurrs 100ms of latency, and if you have to hop a sattelite link, you're looking at 500+ms. All the time. Internet around the world just isn't up to snuff compared to what we have in the US right now (at least connecting from the US->the rest of the world and vice versa). So be aware you're going to take a performance hit when you more offshore.
//Phizzy
To move the slashdot severs to another country. We always say that that is a good way to circumvent american law when it creates censorship of ideas, maybe it is time we take our own advice.
//Phizzy
Sting is set apart from other such tools by two characteristics. First, you should note that existing tools, like ping and traceroute rely on ICMP packets, which are increasingly deprioritized or filtered. (Just try pinging www.yahoo.com or www.aol.com if you don't believe this is happening).
enichols [~] oxygen >ping www.yahoo.com
PING www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=0 ttl=243 time=82.7 ms.
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=1 ttl=243 time=82.4 ms.
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=2 ttl=243 time=77.7 ms.
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=3 ttl=243 time=76.6 ms.
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=4 ttl=243 time=77.6 ms.
64 bytes from www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74): seq=5 ttl=243 time=80.6 ms.
^C
---- www9.yahoo.com (204.71.200.74) PING Statistics ----
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 76.6/79.6/82.7 (std = 2.42)
//Phizzy
To save everyone the time :
Article Moved:
Do to the HUGE response to this article, we have had to move it to a different server. We are currently making arrangements and will notify ASAP.
Update: It is now available/mirrored @ http://ocworkbench.com/hardware/athlon/athlon.htm
Kind Regards,
Lucien Wells.
//Phizzy
It can't eat you!
The end of this sentence is a fnord. Just like the end of this post..
just what are you trying to say about apple?
//Phizzy
So now I can finally say "Damn.. I left my 80x3n in my other 80xxor5."
Beautiful.
//Phizzy
If code replaces/takes some of the burden of laws in the near future as computer integration becomes more common, won't cracks/hacks such as deCSS, etc serve the purpose of a Social Commentary? They already do serve as an abstracted social commentary to people like us as we understand their implications, but I can envision the kind of hacking that is now considered criminal and mischeivous being viewed as constructive criticisms in the future, much in the way criticism of the government was at one time punishable by treason, and has now become the norm for any modern government.
Maybe I'm too optimistic this morning..
//Phizzy
RE: your routing questions... yes, routers create their routing tables based on some algorithm (which depends on which protocol you are using) to find the best route to a host. In this case, there would be only one route to get to the host (assuming that the customer is single-homed, which the guy who wrote this proposal did), so no best-match decision has to be made. There is just one route to the customer's network. You can, however, manually change the routing to improve the situation. In the case of a simple DOS attack (not DDoS), say from 123.123.123.1, you can just route packets with that source to null0 (just a bit-bucket address all routers have), so the router throws the packets away. In the case of a DDos attack, that won't work since there are several sources.. so you can route packets that have a protocol equal to ICMP and a dest. equal to the cst's server to null0.
The reason to do this is that access lists, packet filters, take up MUCH more router CPU than ip routes, so often if you put up an access list on a huge DoS attack, it will kill the router, and you'll be no better off.
//Phizzy
Well, yes, but half of the point of these DDos attacks is that it doesn't matter if you find out one or two or ten of the IPs that are attacking, none of them are most likely owned by or associated with the attacker (if they are any good). It is much more important to stop the attacks then to track down who is responsible for them.. if the attacks themselves are harmless, there is no need to find out who is doing it.
and you're right, I don't think any of the current tools do constant DNS lookups, but anyone who isn't just a 5kr|p7 k|dd|3 can change their script to dynamically do DNS, and then release it to the k|dd|35.
//Phizzy
Yeah.. I had originally thought to use hotname instead of IP, as that would be pretty easy, but wasn't sure if the kind of packet-spoofing they would have to use would be able to handle hostname resolution.
I think this guy is a prospective DDoser himself, because this 'solution' would make things worse rather than better.
//Phizzy
alright.. let's begin with my problems with this.
A) You don't need the stub network. You can route 10.0.0.x to the bit bucket on the ISP's aggregate router, which would be better for the router's CPU utilization anyways
B) What's to stop the haxx0rs from writing a small script that polls the dns servers every 5..10..30 seconds and changes all of the DDos boxen to the new IP instantly
C) You don't have to call your ISP to reroute traffic, you can do that in a BGP advertisment, which customers control.
D) Besides, if you're going to call your ISP, there are MUCH better ways to releive a DDos attack. Cisco is releasing/has released a slew of new tools such as reverse-path TCP acknowledgement (to deny spoofed return-path IPs automatically) and CAR (Committed Access Rate, which allows you to rate-limit certain TCP protocols much more easily, and to drop packets that are flooding without overutilizing a router. Note that you need a big scary Cisco box with 128meg of ram on each VIP slot to take care of this, but any real ISP should have that)
The point is that this should be taken care of at the ISP level, not at the customer level, as ISPs have the experience and infrastructure to deal with it. These little customer tricks to try to deal with DDos are easily defeatable.
//Phizzy
I am the KeyMaster!
XUL!!!
just couldn't resist...
//Phizzy
Yeah, so this article wasn't too techie.. big deal.. there's no way an article this far ahead of the release could be very techie.. I don't think Intel and AMD are sharing all their secrets like good little children.
The article does make some good points.. and shows a way that AMD could really get some market share. I know all of you aren't going to like it, but it's a good idea. I'm talking about this part : Compaq has said that it will not support a 64-bit Windows for its Alpha servers, which leaves Microsoft looking for some way to get into the server marketplace. Enter the AMD Sledgehammer. Microsoft could develop a 32-bit extended version of Windows that it could, over time, turn into a native 64-bit OS. If AMD splits Microsoft and Intel over the 64-bit OS issue, it would do some damage to both Intel and Windows' collective solidarity. I know.. our little cinderella AMD would be getting in bed with big bad Microsoft, but we've got to take out Intel and Microsoft out seperately, not together. Competition, enter stage right..
props to AMD.. for making the next few years of CPUs a little more interesting than the last few years of Intel MHz leapfrogging with no real breakthroughs.
//Phizzy
afterthought : AMD.. I'm Still pissed I can't get a dual athlon, if you're listening.
While this may be considered cheating in the current academic climate, I think this kind of thing is going to be the porthole to a whole new way of thinking. What is tested in schools now is mostly the ability of a student to retain knowledge. While this is an inarguably useful trait, anyone can memorize a given sum of information with a certain amount of time on their hands. So as a result, school is easier for some students and much more frustrating for others.
What if, instead of being tested on how much the brain can retain, we are tested on how fast the brain can use all of it's available resources to find the information it needs to complete a given problem. That tests creativity, adaptability and resourcefulness rather than just memorization. These traits are much more important in my eyes for life than memorization is.
Now that we are entering the information age and so much information is being linked together in such a way that is can be easily associated with other relevant information, the information itself becomes less important than its meaning with respect to the information associated with it.
For now, we will have to use laptops/cellmodems or workstations/ethernet, but eventually when we all have wireless implants, this kind of testing will be the only way to go since everyone will have instant access to all of the information they need and memorization will no longer be restricted to the unpredicatble nature of the human brain. at least I hope so...
//Phizzy
From the article : His column tipped off the local Linux users group, TriLUG. Its members started e-mailing each other, making plans to conduct their own Expo.
I'm in the RDU area, I attended the Linux Expo two and three years ago, but not last year, and thought that it was getting a little too corporate in '98, but was still definitely worth attending. I wish I had gone last year, to see what it was like. I can see it getting to be more like all the other computer expos and less like LinuxExpo should be.
SO.. Redhat's not going to organise it this year.. Fsck 'em! I think it's in the true linux spirit to route around damage and create our own expo. I'm willing to help in any capacity I can. There are enough Linux/Unix businesses and people in RTP to get something going, and I'm sure quite a bit of the rest of you Slashdot people would attend an expo built to be what WE want it to be, not what the corpses want it to be. Email me if you're in RTP.. or even if you're not. Let's get something together!
//Phizzy
The article does nothing to support the Judges findings. There is nothing in there that shows the arguments from the defense, or why the judge ruled in their favor. I'm guessing that the judge did not understand the case or the ramifications of the ruling very well. I dont see how "having them check an electronic registry of e-mail addresses to determine whether intended e-mail recipients were Washington residents and therefore protected by the law." is hindering interstate commerce. Maintaining such a database would be kind of a pain, but the government created the law, so they should have to go through the motions it entails. I'm sure this will be overturned.
Here's a link to the actual law
//Phizzy