Off with the other 333MHz FSB chips on the rich kids' playground;) Seriously though, just because your MHz numbers match up with the 2600+ doesn't mean than it performs like one. Unless you're ALSO overclocking the poor chip's FSB as well... =)
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I believe that you're more or less right. What's interesting to me though is the fact that AMD has only been on a 333MHz FSB for about 6 months, and they're already bumping to 400Mhz. Remember that they spent, what, almost 2 years at 266MHz before that? Logically, my guess would be that the new Barton core is able to handle the higher bus speed easier than the older cores could. Again, I don't have any hard data, just trying to reason this out.
To me, this isn't really exciting so much because it's on the new 3200+ so much as it means that the Athlon 64 could quite likely ship with a memory controller set up to run at 400MHz instead of the 333MHz we've been expecting up to this point. Remember, the memory controller is built-in to the CPU on the Hammer chips, so the concept of FSB doesn't really apply apples-to-apples, but the idea is still to have the CPU and memory running at the same clock. This means faster memory, which means better performance still. x86-64 just keeps getting sexier all the time. =)
You won't have seen them because they're not. I'd agree that AMD's prorating can't be described as conservative, but it's generally in the right ballpark. I've never understood why people act shocked when a P4 does manage to beat a prorated AMD chip on a given benchmark -- the AMD chip is running considerably slower, it should be expected.
I've been a bit leery of the prorating system since AMD put it in place, and there have been times that they've had to tweak it because it's been obviously off. But I would certainly say that "3000+" certainly gives you a better idea of how the chip is going to perform in comparison to a P4 than it's true 2.17GHz speed is going to. (that number's offhand, don't shoot me if I'm a little off:)) I think people forget that people forget the whole prorating system is meant to be a rough guide, and this is probably because PR decided to spin it in their own special way.
And as I side note, I realize THG is a popular portal for hardware news/reviews, but personally, I just can't bring myself to trust any of the info that comes from it. There've been too many times I've seen his testing methods and conclusions vary quite badly from other reviewers' for me to take him seriously any more. Honestly, I didn't check the link, but skewing the test to favor a given side would be par for the course for THG.
If there isn't allready a spare pair running to each unit you can also look at phone-line networking.
Eh, I'd be rather hesitant about that personally. PNA setups are fine for home setups, with just a few machines on an unmetered broadband line, but when you go up to THAT many units, I could see some major problems. I had a couple of machines on HPNA here just to kind of play with for a while, and one thing I noticed was that the internal packet error rate between my router and the HPNA machines generally hovered somewhere around 1%.
A 1% rate really doesn't matter on an unmetered home broadband line with only a few systems, but when you're talking about 160+ systems on a T1 likely pushing hundreds of gigabytes of data per day where you're paying for your bandwidth based on usage, and suddenly a 1% internal error rate has the potential to bite you later in wasted bandwidth costs. A neat idea, but I think you'd end up losing more in extra bandwidth costs in the long run than you'd save in convenience in the here and now.
however i think that it pretty much irrelevant nowdays since games programmers seem to be having a hard time keeping up with the vast advances in computing power available to them.
I can think of one developer that certainly has no trouble keeping up with hardware right off the top of my head. Any way I can transport myself to your alternate reality? It'd be really nice not to have to upgrade my year old system to play Doom III.:)
hehe Wow. Thanks. I spent about a month trying to learn DX before I eventually decided it was too convulted and went back to OpenGL, and the type of thing in your post is just why.:)
Properly done, DOOMIII would run fine in.net. you might have to hand hold certian operations, but it an certianly be done and not need a huge processor and memory jump.
Except that Carmack is an OpenGL fan, so the whole.NET thing is kinda irellevant.;) In all seriousness, I really am hoping all of this does help drive developers back towards OpenGL. Open Standards == Good. And for the record, I've worked with both DX and OGL, and by far prefer OGL, so it's not just a blind/. pushing of standards, that's just an added bonus.
Normally, I'd agree with you. There have been times here on Slashdot that I've asked questions that have seemingly simple answers because I knew it'd be easier to get a 1 or 2 sentence summary on it from a fellow geek rather than read a hundred pages of theory and try to decipher it for myself. However, your parent poster in this case has a valid point. I had problems with messenger spam myself, and the first thing I did was hit up Google in search of an answer. In literally less than 5 minutes, I had my computer's set up fixed, and have not dealt with it since.
The point is, it's all a matter of context - if the question can be answered extremely quickly with a cursory Google scan, isn't submitting a/. story a longer, far less efficient way of getting the answer? Especially when this is such a well known, well documented problem/fix.
Nobody can afford to buy anything? Does that mean your grocery shopping is done by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US Agency for International Development?
I believe you misunderstood the original poster. There's a difference between a subsistence economy and a healthy, first-world economy. In a subsistance economy, people are going to be struggling just to get by, barely having the money for food and other essentials. This doesn't mean that just because people are generally "getting by" doesn't really mean the economy is healthy either. In order for an economic system to continue to develop and grow, the people have to have surplus income to be able to purchase the goods, which in turn puts money back into the further growing the economy.
The point is, if people have enough money to get by, but little surplus income, the economy is NOT going to grow. Think supply and demand. As demand goes down, companies will reduce the supply since they're not going to produce goods that there's no demand for. Then workers that made those goods get laid off, and there's even less money to put back in. How viscious this cycle is depends on what drives the lack of surplus income in the first place and how many people are directly affected by that.
Not sure where I'm going with this, I just think you were a bit quick to jump on the original poster's case. No, we're not under an industrial revolution sweatshop system, but when surplus income is down, there's going to be a lull. We're in a lull now, so it would be logical to relate it to basic economic theory. Ok, I'll stop now.:)
Reagan's tax cuts added to the deficit, not subtracted.
Understatement of the week. When the senior Bush left office in 1992, the federal debt was over 4 times greater than it was when Reagan took office in 1980. Don't believe me? Check the CBO's data for yourself.
I loved where he blamed the $400 billion deficit on the war. The Iraq part supposedly cost $20 billion so far.
While I agree with you whole-heartedly that the current government spending plan is unsound, I think your numbers are a bit off. The war in Iraq has cost somewhere between $40 to $60 billion to date. Additionally, it will cost about $20 billion per month to keep US troops there, so I guess that's where you got that figure from. It's worth noting though, that the CBO was projecting a shortfall of over $300 billion in February - before any war spending had been added into the budget.
Working my way from the bottom of your post up, just to make things interesting for myself...
If someone else were in his place (and assuming other things such as the war still happened)
This assumption is, quite simply, mistaken. If anyone else had been in power, the current war would never have happened. Give me a solid, non-White House, non-US right source showing that Iraq was a definite, clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America, and I might start to consider otherwise. Until then, I consider the Iraq "crisis" a creation of the Bush administration.
Bush has tried to do this, but there is in fact very little that he can do to help
Yes, he has, but that doesn't mean what he's done has been benificial to the economy. The idea behind the tax cut was good - more money == more spending, right? The thing is, giving the people more money doesn't always encourage spending. The same can be said for any economic recovery tactic, true, but cutting taxes when it's known that the country isn't on solid economic ground isn't the wisest of moves, IMO.
also if you are a Bush-basher, keep in mind that if the Dems had their way they would only increase welfare and unemployment payments, which would most likely increase dependence on government handouts and make things worse in the long run
Also, if you're a liberal-basher, keep in mind that most left-leaning Americans do not believe in free hand outs. They believe in social assistance, which is simply helping someone out until they can get on their feet for themselves. The stereotype of a lazy bastard living off welfare for 20 years is plain and simple unrealistic, and it just doesn't happen - despite all the whining about "government handouts giving away my money to good-for-nothings" that might lead you to believe otherwise.
Then when the unsustainable business models that were propping up the economy ran out of fuel, it all fell apart.
I believe you're mixing up the tech market and the general economy. The failure of the dot-coms was an early precursor to the current downturn, but not the cause of it. Slow economies happen - you'll get no argument on that here. But claiming that a government's economic policies don't have a hand in shaping the economy is failing to see the forest for the trees.
Almost the entire difference between the surplus now and the budget then can be attributed to attempted economic assistance, post-Sep. 11th 'security', and the 'War on Terror' (which is part of the preceding security spending really).
Not quite. The budget surplus was on it's way out starting in Bush's first year. The current deficit can be attributed largely to lack of foresight and failure to realize that cutting income while simultaneously increasing spending is exactly what causes a deficit.
Firstly, you must keep in mind the war. Whatever your opinion on that is, you need to realize that wars are VERY expensive. This alone will account for some $180 billion or so last I heard.
Wrong. The $300 billion figure I quoted was a CBO projection from February, which did NOT take into account the cost of the current war on Iraq. I believe the estimated cost of the war to date was something like $60-80 billion, plus an additional $20 billion for every month that US troops remain in Iraq. Part of this will come from the normal defense budget, but a large part of it will also be drained from the general federal budget, leading to an even larger deficit than the CBO's $300 billion February estimate. In short, I was using a conservative estimate since no one's really sure exactly how much we're going to spend on it all at this point - but it's looking like the federal government could possibly lose as much as $500 billion this year alone, and even that may be a conservative estimate. Think about that. That's a half-trillion do
This has to be the most tired, rediculous argument I continue to hear on a regular basis. No, the results of economic policy don't occur overnight. However, in the 12 years covered by the Reagan and senior Bush administrations, there was a general economic lull and by time Bush left office in 1992, the federal debt was over FOUR TIMES what it was when Reagan entered office in 1980. While government spending does encourage private spending, letting the federal government bleed cash profuciously IS foolish in the long run.
When Bush entered office in Jan 2001, the federal government was running a $127 billion surplus. The projected figure for the 2003 fiscal year is a $300+ billion DEFICIT. Simply put, the federal government will lose more money this year than it payed back off under the 4 years of surplus combined. How is this wise economic policy? The downturn may have started before Bush, but he hasn't done anything of significance to reverse it. And of course, Clinton had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the economic prosperity of the mid 90's. All those silly trade deals and the callaborative work he did with other nations most certainly did nothing to help at all. International agreements, who needs'em?
Hm, cool link, thanks for the info. I may very well make use of this in the near future. I think I'm gonna go ahead and set up the proxy anyway though, just to fiddle with a server some. I do a lot of programming, but I've never really messed with much server set up type stuff, so it'll be good for a little diversion and learning.:)
If you're hiring him as a consultant to come in and help you improve network security, it's this skill that makes Mitnick perfect for the job. If you've read through some of Mitnick's own accounts of the things he's done, you'll find there's a definite thought process to the approach taken when he'd set out to crack into a system. Because he's inately familiar with this thought process, this actually makes him far more qualified to help in establishing company policies and guidelines on security.
Sure, a good Network Admin can often times trace back and figure out how a particular break in occured, but they will almost never be able to deduce all the things that were tried that didn't work, or perhaps more importantly, what the attacker would have tried next had the successful technique not cracked the system. This argument is equally applicable, if not more so, to the human side. Again, if you look at Mitnick's exploits, you'll find that often times, he was able to get in because someone was trying to be nice or helpful. It has to be driven home to the users and admins alike that, when it comes to network security, their job is NOT to be nice. Sure, a memo from the SysAdmin could make this same point, but there's just something about it coming from someone who has "been there, done that" that lends it a sense of legitimacy that makes it feel less like tin foil hat wearing, and more like a legitimate concern to the average person.
My point is, for the type of job Mitnick is trying to get, he is FAR less of a danger to network security than the slightly clueless, but genuinely a nice person user that's on the network every day. On the human side of things, which is arguably the part he'd have the greatest impact on anyway, he'd never even have to touch a machine connected to the network to do his job. Mitnick's job is to come in and look for weaknesses, make suggestions, educate the employees, and hopefully leave his client in a more secure state than it was when he took on the job.
Nah, I don't agree completely with either side if you look at every issue. I do wish there were more parties, but as it is, the two majors have tended to be more middle of the road, hence their popularity. Just about every other party that's sprung up that I can think of has just been a more radical version of one side. Nader's Green party is a far more left-radical movement than most people are comfortable with. I wouldn't trust the Greens as long as Nader is in charge myself, but that's another story. Then there's the Reform party which... I'm still not sure what the hell they're actually supposed to be, I'm not sure anyone really is, but they've always seemed to have a far-right bent to their platform. Really, the only group that has a clear, well defined platform that doesn't fall to any extremes I can think of is the Libertarian party. They just run into the stumbling block of gaining enough support to actually accomplish much of anything, unfortunately.
I do think that if things continue on their current course however, you may get to see a 3rd party in the next decade. Unless the Republican party ceases their drift to a more and more extreme right as they have the past few years, they're going to alienate moderate-conservatives, and it wouldn't surprise me to see John McCain and like-minded individuals break away to form a new party, and chances are they'd take a lot of middle-right voters with them. Really, I believe getting corporate money out of politics is what would help the minor parties start to make an impact. Until there's real campaign finance reform and corporations can buy Congressional seats, realistically, we're stuck with the two party system.
hehe The difference is the Nvidias weren't in EVERY single OEM setup I had to deal with. Honestly, I never really saw many Nvidias until around the TNT2 era. Like I said, it's a crappy reason for bias, but dammit, I hated those cards.:)
I guess it all depends on your priorities.:) Personally, I don't really care a thing about luxury, I'd rather make a fast car go faster. Really, the US version of the STi is kind of an unknown right now. We know what it's going to come capable of doing stock, but that's about it. The only thing I can think of right now that might be a gauge of it is the Cobb Racing WRX, they transplanted one of the 2.5L Impreza RS engines into a WRX and last I remember reading, the output number on it were something like ~430 hp. But they also had to hack a lot of the parts for that themselves, but I guess it shows that the engine can handle it. It doesn't take all that money to push a WRX over 300hp as it stands now, and with the STi starting out with that much power output... well, we'll have to see:)
It's really kind of ironic that the Audi has a hard time off the asphalt, as that's where Audi picked up their reputation for performance, much like Subaru is doing today. Oh well, they've moved on to greener fields I guess.
I don't know. Personally I've got a metal/glass corner desk, and I've found that an old CD-R with all the reflective material scraped off works perfect for me. hell, it almost looks like it's part of the desk.:)
You sound a lot like me in that respect. I know a lot of people that'll hop right into a car and try to put it balls-to-the-walls, but I just can't do that. I give myself a little time to acclimate to it, and gradually push it harder until I find what I consider to be the inside part of the car's limits. There've been a couple of times I've pushed it a bit too far in my experiments, but fortunately, I'm good about doing my experimentations on wide, quiet roads, so I've never actually hurt anything.
I can definitely understand what it's like to really want a car - as soon as I can afford it, whatever the current high power version of the Subaru Impreza is at the time will be mine. (Currently the STi - 300hp, 300 lb-ft, 3000 lbs *drools*). It's just that Mustangs are one of those cars that the driver has to prove to me that they're not a moron before I'll take them seriously.:) Not to say I dislike them in general though. The coolest one I've ever gotten to see in person was a blue and white one I ran into by chance at McDonald's one morning and on my way out this guy pulled into a parking place. It's normally not like me to be outgoing, but when he killed the engine and I heard a turbo winding down, I had to stop and talk to him. You don't see such beasts around here too often.
Are you so sure?:) I'm not too familiar with the S4, so I had to look up the specs myself. Manufacturer published 0-60 is 6.5, but it looks like the actual performance is somewhere closer to mid to high 5's from what I'm seeing from independent testers, which the WRX is right on par with. The S4 also weighs about 700 pounds more than the WRX for only about 20-30 more horsepower. The biggest advantage you have is the bigger, twin turbo V6, which should/does naturally generate a lot more torque. But looking at raw specs, they're a lot closer matched than you seem to think. An STi produces 50 horsepower more than the S4, with a little bit less torque, at about the same weight as the WRX. 0-60 times on it should be under 5 seconds when the mags starting getting test vehicles in the next month. Somehow, I get the feeling the STi could more than you give a run for your money.:) Oh, and just to avoid confusion, I'm reffering to the yet to be released American STi, not the European or Japanese spec versions. For once, the US is finally getting a faster version of a car than the rest of the world.:)
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Off with the other 333MHz FSB chips on the rich kids' playground ;) Seriously though, just because your MHz numbers match up with the 2600+ doesn't mean than it performs like one. Unless you're ALSO overclocking the poor chip's FSB as well... =)
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I believe that you're more or less right. What's interesting to me though is the fact that AMD has only been on a 333MHz FSB for about 6 months, and they're already bumping to 400Mhz. Remember that they spent, what, almost 2 years at 266MHz before that? Logically, my guess would be that the new Barton core is able to handle the higher bus speed easier than the older cores could. Again, I don't have any hard data, just trying to reason this out.
To me, this isn't really exciting so much because it's on the new 3200+ so much as it means that the Athlon 64 could quite likely ship with a memory controller set up to run at 400MHz instead of the 333MHz we've been expecting up to this point. Remember, the memory controller is built-in to the CPU on the Hammer chips, so the concept of FSB doesn't really apply apples-to-apples, but the idea is still to have the CPU and memory running at the same clock. This means faster memory, which means better performance still. x86-64 just keeps getting sexier all the time. =)
You won't have seen them because they're not. I'd agree that AMD's prorating can't be described as conservative, but it's generally in the right ballpark. I've never understood why people act shocked when a P4 does manage to beat a prorated AMD chip on a given benchmark -- the AMD chip is running considerably slower, it should be expected.
:)) I think people forget that people forget the whole prorating system is meant to be a rough guide, and this is probably because PR decided to spin it in their own special way.
I've been a bit leery of the prorating system since AMD put it in place, and there have been times that they've had to tweak it because it's been obviously off. But I would certainly say that "3000+" certainly gives you a better idea of how the chip is going to perform in comparison to a P4 than it's true 2.17GHz speed is going to. (that number's offhand, don't shoot me if I'm a little off
And as I side note, I realize THG is a popular portal for hardware news/reviews, but personally, I just can't bring myself to trust any of the info that comes from it. There've been too many times I've seen his testing methods and conclusions vary quite badly from other reviewers' for me to take him seriously any more. Honestly, I didn't check the link, but skewing the test to favor a given side would be par for the course for THG.
Eh, I'd be rather hesitant about that personally. PNA setups are fine for home setups, with just a few machines on an unmetered broadband line, but when you go up to THAT many units, I could see some major problems. I had a couple of machines on HPNA here just to kind of play with for a while, and one thing I noticed was that the internal packet error rate between my router and the HPNA machines generally hovered somewhere around 1%.
A 1% rate really doesn't matter on an unmetered home broadband line with only a few systems, but when you're talking about 160+ systems on a T1 likely pushing hundreds of gigabytes of data per day where you're paying for your bandwidth based on usage, and suddenly a 1% internal error rate has the potential to bite you later in wasted bandwidth costs. A neat idea, but I think you'd end up losing more in extra bandwidth costs in the long run than you'd save in convenience in the here and now.
hehe Wow. Thanks. I spent about a month trying to learn DX before I eventually decided it was too convulted and went back to OpenGL, and the type of thing in your post is just why. :)
It doesn't. SDL does. I'm usually not one for short posts, but there's really not much else to say.
Part of the problem with comparing DirectX and OpenGL is that too many people forget there are ways of handling input, audio, etc other than DirectX.
Javascript in C#? For some reason, I find that thought rather amusing. =)
Normally, I'd agree with you. There have been times here on Slashdot that I've asked questions that have seemingly simple answers because I knew it'd be easier to get a 1 or 2 sentence summary on it from a fellow geek rather than read a hundred pages of theory and try to decipher it for myself. However, your parent poster in this case has a valid point. I had problems with messenger spam myself, and the first thing I did was hit up Google in search of an answer. In literally less than 5 minutes, I had my computer's set up fixed, and have not dealt with it since.
/. story a longer, far less efficient way of getting the answer? Especially when this is such a well known, well documented problem/fix.
The point is, it's all a matter of context - if the question can be answered extremely quickly with a cursory Google scan, isn't submitting a
The point is, if people have enough money to get by, but little surplus income, the economy is NOT going to grow. Think supply and demand. As demand goes down, companies will reduce the supply since they're not going to produce goods that there's no demand for. Then workers that made those goods get laid off, and there's even less money to put back in. How viscious this cycle is depends on what drives the lack of surplus income in the first place and how many people are directly affected by that.
Not sure where I'm going with this, I just think you were a bit quick to jump on the original poster's case. No, we're not under an industrial revolution sweatshop system, but when surplus income is down, there's going to be a lull. We're in a lull now, so it would be logical to relate it to basic economic theory. Ok, I'll stop now.
While I agree with you whole-heartedly that the current government spending plan is unsound, I think your numbers are a bit off. The war in Iraq has cost somewhere between $40 to $60 billion to date. Additionally, it will cost about $20 billion per month to keep US troops there, so I guess that's where you got that figure from. It's worth noting though, that the CBO was projecting a shortfall of over $300 billion in February - before any war spending had been added into the budget.
This assumption is, quite simply, mistaken. If anyone else had been in power, the current war would never have happened. Give me a solid, non-White House, non-US right source showing that Iraq was a definite, clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America, and I might start to consider otherwise. Until then, I consider the Iraq "crisis" a creation of the Bush administration.
Yes, he has, but that doesn't mean what he's done has been benificial to the economy. The idea behind the tax cut was good - more money == more spending, right? The thing is, giving the people more money doesn't always encourage spending. The same can be said for any economic recovery tactic, true, but cutting taxes when it's known that the country isn't on solid economic ground isn't the wisest of moves, IMO.
Also, if you're a liberal-basher, keep in mind that most left-leaning Americans do not believe in free hand outs. They believe in social assistance, which is simply helping someone out until they can get on their feet for themselves. The stereotype of a lazy bastard living off welfare for 20 years is plain and simple unrealistic, and it just doesn't happen - despite all the whining about "government handouts giving away my money to good-for-nothings" that might lead you to believe otherwise.
I believe you're mixing up the tech market and the general economy. The failure of the dot-coms was an early precursor to the current downturn, but not the cause of it. Slow economies happen - you'll get no argument on that here. But claiming that a government's economic policies don't have a hand in shaping the economy is failing to see the forest for the trees.
Not quite. The budget surplus was on it's way out starting in Bush's first year. The current deficit can be attributed largely to lack of foresight and failure to realize that cutting income while simultaneously increasing spending is exactly what causes a deficit.
Wrong. The $300 billion figure I quoted was a CBO projection from February, which did NOT take into account the cost of the current war on Iraq. I believe the estimated cost of the war to date was something like $60-80 billion, plus an additional $20 billion for every month that US troops remain in Iraq. Part of this will come from the normal defense budget, but a large part of it will also be drained from the general federal budget, leading to an even larger deficit than the CBO's $300 billion February estimate. In short, I was using a conservative estimate since no one's really sure exactly how much we're going to spend on it all at this point - but it's looking like the federal government could possibly lose as much as $500 billion this year alone, and even that may be a conservative estimate. Think about that. That's a half-trillion do
You mean this one coming out next week?
This has to be the most tired, rediculous argument I continue to hear on a regular basis. No, the results of economic policy don't occur overnight. However, in the 12 years covered by the Reagan and senior Bush administrations, there was a general economic lull and by time Bush left office in 1992, the federal debt was over FOUR TIMES what it was when Reagan entered office in 1980. While government spending does encourage private spending, letting the federal government bleed cash profuciously IS foolish in the long run.
When Bush entered office in Jan 2001, the federal government was running a $127 billion surplus. The projected figure for the 2003 fiscal year is a $300+ billion DEFICIT. Simply put, the federal government will lose more money this year than it payed back off under the 4 years of surplus combined. How is this wise economic policy? The downturn may have started before Bush, but he hasn't done anything of significance to reverse it. And of course, Clinton had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the economic prosperity of the mid 90's. All those silly trade deals and the callaborative work he did with other nations most certainly did nothing to help at all. International agreements, who needs'em?
Hm, cool link, thanks for the info. I may very well make use of this in the near future. I think I'm gonna go ahead and set up the proxy anyway though, just to fiddle with a server some. I do a lot of programming, but I've never really messed with much server set up type stuff, so it'll be good for a little diversion and learning. :)
If you're hiring him as a consultant to come in and help you improve network security, it's this skill that makes Mitnick perfect for the job. If you've read through some of Mitnick's own accounts of the things he's done, you'll find there's a definite thought process to the approach taken when he'd set out to crack into a system. Because he's inately familiar with this thought process, this actually makes him far more qualified to help in establishing company policies and guidelines on security.
Sure, a good Network Admin can often times trace back and figure out how a particular break in occured, but they will almost never be able to deduce all the things that were tried that didn't work, or perhaps more importantly, what the attacker would have tried next had the successful technique not cracked the system. This argument is equally applicable, if not more so, to the human side. Again, if you look at Mitnick's exploits, you'll find that often times, he was able to get in because someone was trying to be nice or helpful. It has to be driven home to the users and admins alike that, when it comes to network security, their job is NOT to be nice. Sure, a memo from the SysAdmin could make this same point, but there's just something about it coming from someone who has "been there, done that" that lends it a sense of legitimacy that makes it feel less like tin foil hat wearing, and more like a legitimate concern to the average person.
My point is, for the type of job Mitnick is trying to get, he is FAR less of a danger to network security than the slightly clueless, but genuinely a nice person user that's on the network every day. On the human side of things, which is arguably the part he'd have the greatest impact on anyway, he'd never even have to touch a machine connected to the network to do his job. Mitnick's job is to come in and look for weaknesses, make suggestions, educate the employees, and hopefully leave his client in a more secure state than it was when he took on the job.
Nah, I don't agree completely with either side if you look at every issue. I do wish there were more parties, but as it is, the two majors have tended to be more middle of the road, hence their popularity. Just about every other party that's sprung up that I can think of has just been a more radical version of one side. Nader's Green party is a far more left-radical movement than most people are comfortable with. I wouldn't trust the Greens as long as Nader is in charge myself, but that's another story. Then there's the Reform party which... I'm still not sure what the hell they're actually supposed to be, I'm not sure anyone really is, but they've always seemed to have a far-right bent to their platform. Really, the only group that has a clear, well defined platform that doesn't fall to any extremes I can think of is the Libertarian party. They just run into the stumbling block of gaining enough support to actually accomplish much of anything, unfortunately.
I do think that if things continue on their current course however, you may get to see a 3rd party in the next decade. Unless the Republican party ceases their drift to a more and more extreme right as they have the past few years, they're going to alienate moderate-conservatives, and it wouldn't surprise me to see John McCain and like-minded individuals break away to form a new party, and chances are they'd take a lot of middle-right voters with them. Really, I believe getting corporate money out of politics is what would help the minor parties start to make an impact. Until there's real campaign finance reform and corporations can buy Congressional seats, realistically, we're stuck with the two party system.
hehe The difference is the Nvidias weren't in EVERY single OEM setup I had to deal with. Honestly, I never really saw many Nvidias until around the TNT2 era. Like I said, it's a crappy reason for bias, but dammit, I hated those cards. :)
Wow, that's great to hear. I'm glad I could help man. See, Slashdot is good for something other than flaming. :)
I guess it all depends on your priorities. :) Personally, I don't really care a thing about luxury, I'd rather make a fast car go faster. Really, the US version of the STi is kind of an unknown right now. We know what it's going to come capable of doing stock, but that's about it. The only thing I can think of right now that might be a gauge of it is the Cobb Racing WRX, they transplanted one of the 2.5L Impreza RS engines into a WRX and last I remember reading, the output number on it were something like ~430 hp. But they also had to hack a lot of the parts for that themselves, but I guess it shows that the engine can handle it. It doesn't take all that money to push a WRX over 300hp as it stands now, and with the STi starting out with that much power output... well, we'll have to see :)
It's really kind of ironic that the Audi has a hard time off the asphalt, as that's where Audi picked up their reputation for performance, much like Subaru is doing today. Oh well, they've moved on to greener fields I guess.
I don't know. Personally I've got a metal/glass corner desk, and I've found that an old CD-R with all the reflective material scraped off works perfect for me. hell, it almost looks like it's part of the desk. :)
You sound a lot like me in that respect. I know a lot of people that'll hop right into a car and try to put it balls-to-the-walls, but I just can't do that. I give myself a little time to acclimate to it, and gradually push it harder until I find what I consider to be the inside part of the car's limits. There've been a couple of times I've pushed it a bit too far in my experiments, but fortunately, I'm good about doing my experimentations on wide, quiet roads, so I've never actually hurt anything.
:) Not to say I dislike them in general though. The coolest one I've ever gotten to see in person was a blue and white one I ran into by chance at McDonald's one morning and on my way out this guy pulled into a parking place. It's normally not like me to be outgoing, but when he killed the engine and I heard a turbo winding down, I had to stop and talk to him. You don't see such beasts around here too often.
I can definitely understand what it's like to really want a car - as soon as I can afford it, whatever the current high power version of the Subaru Impreza is at the time will be mine. (Currently the STi - 300hp, 300 lb-ft, 3000 lbs *drools*). It's just that Mustangs are one of those cars that the driver has to prove to me that they're not a moron before I'll take them seriously.
Are you so sure? :) I'm not too familiar with the S4, so I had to look up the specs myself. Manufacturer published 0-60 is 6.5, but it looks like the actual performance is somewhere closer to mid to high 5's from what I'm seeing from independent testers, which the WRX is right on par with. The S4 also weighs about 700 pounds more than the WRX for only about 20-30 more horsepower. The biggest advantage you have is the bigger, twin turbo V6, which should/does naturally generate a lot more torque. But looking at raw specs, they're a lot closer matched than you seem to think. An STi produces 50 horsepower more than the S4, with a little bit less torque, at about the same weight as the WRX. 0-60 times on it should be under 5 seconds when the mags starting getting test vehicles in the next month. Somehow, I get the feeling the STi could more than you give a run for your money. :) Oh, and just to avoid confusion, I'm reffering to the yet to be released American STi, not the European or Japanese spec versions. For once, the US is finally getting a faster version of a car than the rest of the world. :)