As long as the 'interrupted run' is not due to some moron switching off their workstation when an application of theirs hangs (in an university environment say), what you describe is under control of the person running the program. Also, in the case you describe, altering parameters during runtime seems quite common. Yet i wonder, why it isn't known in advance, when (after which iteration) someone might want to change the parameters (so you could make the program stop after that iteration and dump the data then).
Also a better idea might be to have the program look for new/changed parameters itself (by means of a special input file, and maybe sending a signal), or make it stop itself and write a dump by some mechanism controlled from outside (a signal or a 'stop'-file it looks for).
Then i wonder how writing a dump would produce a 100% overhead (that would mean, half the time the program is writing a dump, it should alternate between dump-files then, so there's at least one valid dump at any time), and be worth it. Usually, on large supercomputes handling numerically intense programs such as you describe, there are means of fast I/O too, which provide the necessary bandwith to dump that data fast, or at least nonblocking.
When updating packages rpm-style (especially something like KDE) it's really annoying that some of them are so large, while the change from the last version (that might still lie around on your platter somewhere) is probably less than a few percent of that.
It would heavily reduce bandwith, were it possible to grab just the diffs (and maybe an MD5 sum of the package complete with diffs), and not everyone has a T1 out there. With binaries that wouldn't make much sense (until one applied a very specialized diff), but with source-updates it would work well.
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More and more the control over the media we consume is wrested from the consumer. With the internet, with attempts at censoring and obnoxious advertising techniques, and here with TV, denying to choose when, how and how often one watches a show.
This remembers me of some science-fiction scenarios, where it was essentially forbidden to switch off the TV, and where everyone was subjected to the same Program, which was more or less unavoidable (installing TV in subways was already planned somewhere).
Advertising is one driving force behind this, and only because it's forbidden, they don't strap us to chairs, fixing our heads and clamping our eyes open while pumping drugs into us to make us even more responsive to their garbage (sorry, i watched "A Clockwork Orange" recently). Will they ever learn, that it would be easier just to make their crap entertaining?
Another driving force is content control by rights holders, who would prefer to bill us every time we watch/listen to anything. Now they want to control where, how and when we watch/listen, next time probably the size of the TV-screen, and the number of people in the audience will factor into the formula determining the price.
Then we have politicians and large corporations who want to control, what is said about them and their actions. Already the DMCA is used not only to suppress information about DRM-mechanisms, but also critcal remarks about a product (also see microsofts recently launched campaign to suppress information about security holes, especially if it isn't moderated by microsoft). Wars look like Videogames in the TV, and since 9/11 journalists seem to have forgotten about investigating for themselves and collectively follow the party line (yeah, mod me down, and demonstrate how it already works).
The point is, that there's far more money working for the control-freaks, than for those subject to their schemes. And they don't mind buying legislation with it, if they think, that will win them even more money. So maybe we'll soon live in a world, where you have the right of free speech, but noone can hear you in all the noise.
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Where does the energy go, and what takes part in lowering the energy state? Then you know where to search for the 'lost' angular momentum.
The question is, what is all part of your system, and where/in which form will the energy go, if you are refering to energy-loss due to tidal forces: while the tidal-forces the moon exerts on the earth are slowing down the earth rotation, earth and moon are in fact moving farther apart to account for the angular momentum. So as the moon takes part in slowing down earths rotation it takes up the angular momentum (and some of the energy).
If you imagine your system as some kind of ideal particles (like a hydrogen atom), then moving to a lower energy state can only happen by sending out radiation of some sort (in the Hydrogen-atom electromagnetic radiation). So you no longer have an isolated System, the radiation is carrying not only the energy, but also the angular momentum away.
It's really very basic: ensuring better security is costly, and handling the threat of liabilities too (for example by buying insurance to cover the risk). These are costs and risks a large corporation (like Microsoft) may be able to handle, but for small outfit, or small open source projects it's much harder. Something the size of mozilla, or the linux kernel can afford good QA and will find backers to handle the risks, but small projects would be forced under the cover of some larger organisation or the distributors. Also, in the case of open source projects, the sponsors would demand some say in the development process, or maybe even licensing of the software. But small software makers are in a similar position: To handle the risk of litigation they'd need a backer, they won't have the resources until their Software sells well.
By charging higher premiums to insure companies using software with a bad track record, there are already market forces in place: include that difference in premiums in the TCO-calculations microsoft is so fond of to prove that Windows is cheaper than any competition, and make management aware of it (and make them wonder why that insurance company wants higher premiums for insuring against damages from security holes in that software).
Legislation could hurt many a small software maker, and it would also be subject to heavy lobbying from Microsoft to see to it that their interests are hurt the least, a better idea would be an independant (that's the hard part) organisation providing certification of software. Once that is established there could be legislation demanding minimum standards for software used in certain critic areas.
That way each software maker could choose how much to invest in security and QA, and it would be more transparent for customers how secure a product really is, so they wouldn't have to rely on the software-makers advertising for that kind of information. In effect the insurance conditions and premiums for different kinds of software are already an indicator for its security, and the insurance companies probably have a high interest in accurately estimating the risks, so probably they should play some part in ensuring the proposed organisations independance.
modversions includes a versionnumber in the symbolnames, so in effect you can only use modules compiled for this kernel, combining kernel and modules with different kernelversions will result in symbols not found. AFAIR this is done by including a header-file in the command-line of the compile-command.
This mechanism can be switched off in the kernelconfig (something about versioning symbolnames, quite early), or you could compile the module with the correct command-line to do symbol-versioning (AFAIR the version-header-files are made during make dep), if you do a ls -a in some path, where you compiled modules, you'll find hidden files containing the command-line that was used, maybe a 'make xxx.o' will do the job too).
The article states, that people will start using effective strategies to prevent this from happening only after it has happened. The reactions of Microsoft in recent cases only seems to confirm that. So it is highly likely that we will see such a scenario at least once, and probably with a much more destructive damage routine than what we've seen until now (the sneaky data-corruption scenario is quite troubling, since once it started you can't trust any of your data anymore, even worse would be a virus (or a module piggybacking on it) that is stealthy enough to work unnoticed over the period of some backups).
Also the Article shows, that Virus scanners are not really a solution, since they can only react to known Virii. Also automatic updating/patching software is no solution, since that introduces other security holes and other problems, and in the end such a system also can only react. What we need to do is implementing basic concepts, and the named candidates (turning of unnecessary features, diversity, security by design, learning from the past (overflov exploits are still common), security audits, traffic control) are a very good starting point. But that costs money noone is going to spend before understanding that they have to. Very obviously it's not enough to read about such a scenario in a theoretical paper, to happen in some hazy virtual reality, it has to be in the news, and the billions of damage have to have already happened last night.
Well, the question is, how would this be implemented in legislation. Without question, liablity can only be expected within reasonable limits (though some US-lawsuits contradict that). You can't make a car, that won't ever break, even assuming reasonable driving style, at least not for a reasonable price, since one would have to triple check every part.
The same it is with software, we know, that you can't make bugfree software much more complex than "Hello World", at least not for a reasonable price (see the procedures for software driving nuclear plants). So the question is, what is reasonable to demand, and what will the legislation look like. One possibility would be, that the software underwent a certified QA-Process, and that would be possible with open Software too, see for example the mozilla-project, where a lot of effort is put to QA.
That does not make mozilla magically bug-free, but at least most bugs are known and dealt with, and when new bugs occur there are procedures to handle them. This kind of QA is also done for some linux-distros (at least i've seen it with mandrake), and in a less formal way in the mailing lists dedicated to OS-projects. Open Software could even have an advantage there, because its easy to implement a transparent and traceable QA-Process. Still, that would not be true for smaller projects in the same way as for smaller comercial Software-businesses. So maybe the real question here is, how to implement the legislation without killing small scale software-development.
What has this got to do with the subject at hand? (I would just love to see the diplomatic fallout if a chinese spy-plane was cruising the US coast, but i digress...).
The subject at hand is, that the US government is claiming to know what's best for all the World, effectively playing world police, following rules they themselves made. But it's becoming more and more obvious, that the paramount interests behind all this is big corporations and big money.
It's all very basic: the government of the USA is doing this, because it can (or at least they think so), not for higher ideals, or because it's in the moral right.
is, that the percentage of Linux-users they found visiting the sampled Websites is steady between.2 and.3 Percent since nearly three years. While the sample is obviously biased, the bias has less effect on overall trends, than on the actual percentages.
So apparently there is no overall trend to switch from Windows-Desktops to Linux-desktops, or to be more precise, there is no such trend among the visitors of the sampled sites (assuming they measured correctly) in the past 2.5 years.
Still the whole statistics only tells us something about a biased sample, about which we sadly don't know enough to put the numbers into some perspective.
Yup, reading a few answers here i'm already reading up on FEC (why didn't the EETimes mention this?). The nifty thing about this is, that it's also a nice way to store information in a distributed way (think freenet, gnutella,...) as far as i understand it. This opens a whole new perspective on the whole P2P theme, since a piece of information wouldn't be stored on one host alone, and also because of the implied redundancy, meaning that the information would still survive in that network until a critical number of hosts would be disconnected. Also netload would be distributed on the sending end, opening some interesting ways for congestion control.
Sorry, the whole article seems to make some magic mumbo-jumbo out of the process. Apparently the file is transformed, but how does that transformation help? The main difference between UDP and TCP in this case is, that TCP maintains the sequence of Packets, so after splitting a file up, sending it as TCP-Packets and combining it again, all parts (sent as Packets) are in the right place. UDP does no such thing, and also UDP doesn't check, if a packet really reached it's destination. This frees UDP of some overhead TCP has. But to send a large File (with a simple approach), now you have to label each UDP-Packet with a sequential number, and, at the end, check if all Packets arrived (and maybe request missing Packets again), then rearrange them according to the sequence numbers.
Now i don't see, how a transformation of content helps here, instead of adding the information where in the file the packet goes (a kind of serial number), now you have to label, where in the equation it should go (a kind of coefficient index), so the receiving end knows, whether it has all information, and which information is still missing, and must be requested again.
Since they broke in and even modified data they should now be accused of cyber terrorism (or whatever it's called) and violating the DMCA. Can't the EFF fund such a case, just to show, how dangerous such laws are to anyone investigating security holes?
While i'm also against racism and see the good intentions, i think this legislation will be used to squash legitimate critics and opposition. Probably scientology, who are very much criticised all over the Web, and often from sites which rely on the protection of their countries to be safe from lawsuits is already drawing up threat letters. Scientology didn't have any scruples to liken their case to the Holocaust the Jews experienced in the 3rd Reich, when they were not recognized as a religion in Germany, but as a business organisation. Soon they'll probably have a field day threatening with lawsuits to get any 'hate speech' against their organisation off the net.
Well, ext3 is very easy to test out, and it will soon get a large Userbase. More users means it's getting more attention, which in turn means more development. The different journaling filesystems are not too different from each other considering performance (and that's what most people are concerned with), a while ago reiser was the best performer AFAIR, but with more development going into ext3 that might soon change. I think it makes sense to put your bets on the Filesystem where you expect the most development to happen.
Microsoft lawyers invoked a more-threatening world when they proposed inserting a security exemption in a different part of the settlement. The exemption applied to provisions that require the company to disclose the inner workings of Windows to competitors who want to make all sorts of software that works well with Windows. The company said it needed the exemption to guard against cyber-sabotage.
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Microsoft?s competitors and some of the states claim that these technologies are used so commonly that the provision could shield a number of Microsoft?s products from competition.
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James rejects these criticisms and says the decision to protect Microsoft?s security provisions was ?one of those ?duh? issues.? He continues: ?Microsoft has security protocols. Are we going to tell everyone how they work? Do you want people to get access to your credit-card information when you shop on line??
James (the Justice Department antitrust chief) either uses very cheap rhetorics here (to cover up how bad that deal is) or he really doesn't understand the issues (and i don't know what's worse, the DoJ in cahoots with MS, or them being too dumb to do their job). Microsofts argument is just plain ridiculous. Everyone knows. that good security protoclos don't rely on obscurity, but on good crypto and a good protocol. You can't rely on obscurity especially not for Software which is sold worldwide, and open for everyone to take apart and scan for holes (even if that costs some to wade through all that assembler).
Also there are open source implementations of secure protocols (openssh to name just one). By Microsofts argument they couldn't work at all. If the DoJ is incapable of understanding the issues, or at least ask someone who does, and just sitting there nodding their heads when anything comes up they don't understand, i can really understand, how that 'agreement' came to be. And the statement about such measures being necessary to protect credit-card information shows, that he doesn't know enough to make the deal that is needed to keep microsoft in line. That wouldn't be too bad, if at lest he would rely on some advice in such situations.
There are rpms for the Kernel-source out there (not to be confused with source rpms) which will put a linux-2.4.X-distZ directory or somesuch in a convenient place and let you compile (although i ran out of luck with some mandrake ones since it apparently mangles symbol versioning). That completely invalidates your argument about the necessity of hand-compiling a kernel, since you get to hand-compile the kernel with those. Also most distributors like to include their flavor of kernel-patches, for example supermount with mandrake, or ext3 with redhat (you can get that from the ac-patches too). Especially stuff relying on kernel-patches that didn't (yet) make it into the linus kernel (supermount, lm_sensors) will only work if you get the kernel-rpm, or apply the patches yourself (or compile the modules from a convenient package) and then you probably have to tell rpm to ignore some dependencies from kernelversions. Sometimes the rpms contain quite vital stuff, For example Debian (where it's.deb, and not.rpm) patching a hole in 2.2.xx (19 i think it was).
So there's some good reason for someone wanting to run a kernel compiled from a kernel-source-rpm, and if, for example, you use gcc3.0 as opposed to gcc2.96/gcc2.95, and also don't have those handy, you might even be better off using a precompiled version (most distris put out a server- and a desktop version) than compiling your own. The main reason why the original statement is funny, is asking for an rpm when the kernel is just out. The bashing was not appropriate, i think.
I'm quite confident, that Alan is not 'a puppet' of Red Hat, and i don't believe there are many people claiming that (if any). Sure there is mutual input, maybe Red-hat 'pushed' ext3, because AC suggested that. Alan Cox is far too valuable as a developer to waste his time by pushing him around and makim him do things he doesn't want to, it makes no sense. If red hat wants to take an influence on kernel development there is a simple way: submitting contributions that are too good to be ignored.
Then, why would it necessarily be bad, if Red-Hat took some interest in kernel-development (i'm sure they do), it's not as if red-hat wanted something bad for linux or so. Finally, by being more involved with the development of 2.5 from the start, AC has far more influence on the development of future Kernels, than by maintaining the stable tree.
Hell, I believe that Mr. Cox is pushed ( ever so gently ) in the Red Hat direction. He might not even know it.
Well, everyone is 'pushed gently' by his environment. That's what input is for. I think AC is able to judge for himself, which suggestions are worth considering and which are not. Also, judging from AC's bringing up the DMCA in his changelog, he's not the man to be pushed around, and if he let's himself be pushed around he probably does it for his own reasons.
Also AC has the talent and the influence, to be able to 'push around' Red Hat, like have an influence on their list of projects/priorities. Now does that make Red-Hat a puppet of Alan Cox? I think not. Neither is it the other way round.
I read the first article and was quite impressed by the P4's performance of just going on at a slower clockrate. I also found it quite informative, that an Athlon might not only fry itself, but also the motherboard or even start a fire. The point is quite valid, that the heatsink might fall off during transport (although i suppose one would hear the loose heatsink rattling in the case) and will take a little more care with present CPU/Mobo combinations.
Let's not forget, that the throttling technique got some critique when it became known, mainly because the user wouldn't know about it, and it seemed a cheap way for intel to resolve heat problems with the P4. Toms article showed, that the throttling is quite a good feature to have (it would be even better, if there was a way of notifying the user without counting clockticks). So the first thing i thought after reading Toms first article was: "will AMD something similar, and when?". Now the followup shows, that AMD is aware of the problem, and is willing to spend some effort to offer solutions.
While the Motherboard-solution is more like a quick hack useful enough for present boards and AMD-CPUs, i expect something built into the CPU next time (at least a sudden shutdown should be possible, altering clockspeed at runtime might be a different story, and probably takes some haggling about patented technology with intel).
In conclusion i think things are as they should be: the test has made AMD aware of the fact, that protecting the CPU from overheating is a feature customers want, and they set to work on it and offered a quick solution after a few weeks. Noone tried to ban the story from toms site and people actually got together and talked about the problem without shifting responsibility around.
I still think the Athlon has the better bang for the buck, but i won't mind shelling out a little more money for a mobo with overheat protection.
The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
I don't know if it's a good idea to use that argument unless that mediacontact is totally clueless. The one-time-pad is in itself close to useless for most application, because of the logistic problem of sharing a common one-time-pad without third parties getting their hands on it. So unless you want to mail millions of one-time-pad CDs (or whatever) through a trusted mail service, this form of cryptography in itself won't help you a bit.
I mean, who was writing that statement for SafeSurf? A six year old who cries about someone breaking their toys? Maybe they should've used this (warning, popupbanner) little toy to make their text look even better. But form follows content, and the content is even worse. They even dare to suggest someone might die because of MAPS' actions and proceed to construct a, however unlikely, scenario for this.
SafeSurf very obviously have it on their agenda to impose their will on anyone running a website all over the world, and their drivel about not wanting to censor, but only to enforce "correct labeling" of websites is just a heap of steaming bullshit, because after everything is labelled someone will start sorting out the 'bad' stuff, after all the effect is very obviously censoring, and all that nicely worded (in fact quite nauseating) writeup of theirs doesn't change that fact a bit.
So someone put the label 'spammer' over their block of ip addresses and as a consequence noone can hear them. Maybe that should give them a bit to think about. But no, when you're the only one, who knows what's best fore everyone else, you better don't think too much or you'll never get the job done.
I find it astonishing, how, without even wasting a thought about the ongoing trial accusing Microsoft of unfair busines practices, they go on and do just more of the same. Locking out folks from MSN (and just then when other Browsers start becoming a threat again), tieing updates of their products to Passport, banning javasupport from IE,...
Do the judges in the USA like to be made a fool of, is it active masochism on their side, is it just that Bush has decreed that Microsoft isn't to be harmed, or just that the consequences MS could face from the law are just completely outweighed by the advantages, that they so blatantly ignore any laws that might hinder their scheming?
The gist of the article: for quake the atidrivers apparently only use 16 bit textures (this makes the difference with the "100" on the first page) and simply use a lower mipmap-level for textures (that is, they only use the graphic detail of the texture that would be used if it were farther away (and thus smaller). But the detail level of surfaces contains information that is often vital: The detail depends on the distance of the surface, if a surface is very detailed it is nearer than a surface with less detail. If you only see a part of a surface (through a gap or window for example) the detail is the only hint how far that surface is away. Many gamers probably use this information automatically without thinking about it. With the 'quake-improved' drivers someone accustomed to the previous detail levels will probably estimate that objects are farther away now (since they are less detailed). Even after being accustomed with the new detail levels, it still makes a difference: the more detailed a texture is, the smaller is the piece of surface you need to see to estimate how far it is.
To apreciate the importance of textures and structured surfaces for depth perception try q3a with different texturesettins and see what a difference that makes in a map like q3dm19. In quake 1 you could even switch of all textures, then, staring at a plain wall, you couldn't tell if it was 10cm, 1m or 10m away.
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As long as the 'interrupted run' is not due to some moron switching off their workstation when an application of theirs hangs (in an university environment say), what you describe is under control of the person running the program. Also, in the case you describe, altering parameters during runtime seems quite common. Yet i wonder, why it isn't known in advance, when (after which iteration) someone might want to change the parameters (so you could make the program stop after that iteration and dump the data then).
Also a better idea might be to have the program look for new/changed parameters itself (by means of a special input file, and maybe sending a signal), or make it stop itself and write a dump by some mechanism controlled from outside (a signal or a 'stop'-file it looks for).
Then i wonder how writing a dump would produce a 100% overhead (that would mean, half the time the program is writing a dump, it should alternate between dump-files then, so there's at least one valid dump at any time), and be worth it. Usually, on large supercomputes handling numerically intense programs such as you describe, there are means of fast I/O too, which provide the necessary bandwith to dump that data fast, or at least nonblocking.
When updating packages rpm-style (especially something like KDE) it's really annoying that some of them are so large, while the change from the last version (that might still lie around on your platter somewhere) is probably less than a few percent of that.
It would heavily reduce bandwith, were it possible to grab just the diffs (and maybe an MD5 sum of the package complete with diffs), and not everyone has a T1 out there. With binaries that wouldn't make much sense (until one applied a very specialized diff), but with source-updates it would work well.
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More and more the control over the media we consume is wrested from the consumer. With the internet, with attempts at censoring and obnoxious advertising techniques, and here with TV, denying to choose when, how and how often one watches a show.
This remembers me of some science-fiction scenarios, where it was essentially forbidden to switch off the TV, and where everyone was subjected to the same Program, which was more or less unavoidable (installing TV in subways was already planned somewhere).
Advertising is one driving force behind this, and only because it's forbidden, they don't strap us to chairs, fixing our heads and clamping our eyes open while pumping drugs into us to make us even more responsive to their garbage (sorry, i watched "A Clockwork Orange" recently). Will they ever learn, that it would be easier just to make their crap entertaining?
Another driving force is content control by rights holders, who would prefer to bill us every time we watch/listen to anything. Now they want to control where, how and when we watch/listen, next time probably the size of the TV-screen, and the number of people in the audience will factor into the formula determining the price.
Then we have politicians and large corporations who want to control, what is said about them and their actions. Already the DMCA is used not only to suppress information about DRM-mechanisms, but also critcal remarks about a product (also see microsofts recently launched campaign to suppress information about security holes, especially if it isn't moderated by microsoft). Wars look like Videogames in the TV, and since 9/11 journalists seem to have forgotten about investigating for themselves and collectively follow the party line (yeah, mod me down, and demonstrate how it already works).
The point is, that there's far more money working for the control-freaks, than for those subject to their schemes. And they don't mind buying legislation with it, if they think, that will win them even more money. So maybe we'll soon live in a world, where you have the right of free speech, but noone can hear you in all the noise.
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Where does the energy go, and what takes part in lowering the energy state? Then you know where to search for the 'lost' angular momentum.
The question is, what is all part of your system, and where/in which form will the energy go, if you are refering to energy-loss due to tidal forces: while the tidal-forces the moon exerts on the earth are slowing down the earth rotation, earth and moon are in fact moving farther apart to account for the angular momentum. So as the moon takes part in slowing down earths rotation it takes up the angular momentum (and some of the energy).
If you imagine your system as some kind of ideal particles (like a hydrogen atom), then moving to a lower energy state can only happen by sending out radiation of some sort (in the Hydrogen-atom electromagnetic radiation). So you no longer have an isolated System, the radiation is carrying not only the energy, but also the angular momentum away.
It's really very basic: ensuring better security is costly, and handling the threat of liabilities too (for example by buying insurance to cover the risk). These are costs and risks a large corporation (like Microsoft) may be able to handle, but for small outfit, or small open source projects it's much harder. Something the size of mozilla, or the linux kernel can afford good QA and will find backers to handle the risks, but small projects would be forced under the cover of some larger organisation or the distributors. Also, in the case of open source projects, the sponsors would demand some say in the development process, or maybe even licensing of the software. But small software makers are in a similar position: To handle the risk of litigation they'd need a backer, they won't have the resources until their Software sells well.
By charging higher premiums to insure companies using software with a bad track record, there are already market forces in place: include that difference in premiums in the TCO-calculations microsoft is so fond of to prove that Windows is cheaper than any competition, and make management aware of it (and make them wonder why that insurance company wants higher premiums for insuring against damages from security holes in that software).
Legislation could hurt many a small software maker, and it would also be subject to heavy lobbying from Microsoft to see to it that their interests are hurt the least, a better idea would be an independant (that's the hard part) organisation providing certification of software. Once that is established there could be legislation demanding minimum standards for software used in certain critic areas.
That way each software maker could choose how much to invest in security and QA, and it would be more transparent for customers how secure a product really is, so they wouldn't have to rely on the software-makers advertising for that kind of information. In effect the insurance conditions and premiums for different kinds of software are already an indicator for its security, and the insurance companies probably have a high interest in accurately estimating the risks, so probably they should play some part in ensuring the proposed organisations independance.
modversions includes a versionnumber in the symbolnames, so in effect you can only use modules compiled for this kernel, combining kernel and modules with different kernelversions will result in symbols not found. AFAIR this is done by including a header-file in the command-line of the compile-command.
This mechanism can be switched off in the kernelconfig (something about versioning symbolnames, quite early), or you could compile the module with the correct command-line to do symbol-versioning (AFAIR the version-header-files are made during make dep), if you do a ls -a in some path, where you compiled modules, you'll find hidden files containing the command-line that was used, maybe a 'make xxx.o' will do the job too).
The article states, that people will start using effective strategies to prevent this from happening only after it has happened. The reactions of Microsoft in recent cases only seems to confirm that. So it is highly likely that we will see such a scenario at least once, and probably with a much more destructive damage routine than what we've seen until now (the sneaky data-corruption scenario is quite troubling, since once it started you can't trust any of your data anymore, even worse would be a virus (or a module piggybacking on it) that is stealthy enough to work unnoticed over the period of some backups).
Also the Article shows, that Virus scanners are not really a solution, since they can only react to known Virii. Also automatic updating/patching software is no solution, since that introduces other security holes and other problems, and in the end such a system also can only react. What we need to do is implementing basic concepts, and the named candidates (turning of unnecessary features, diversity, security by design, learning from the past (overflov exploits are still common), security audits, traffic control) are a very good starting point. But that costs money noone is going to spend before understanding that they have to. Very obviously it's not enough to read about such a scenario in a theoretical paper, to happen in some hazy virtual reality, it has to be in the news, and the billions of damage have to have already happened last night.
Well, the question is, how would this be implemented in legislation. Without question, liablity can only be expected within reasonable limits (though some US-lawsuits contradict that). You can't make a car, that won't ever break, even assuming reasonable driving style, at least not for a reasonable price, since one would have to triple check every part.
The same it is with software, we know, that you can't make bugfree software much more complex than "Hello World", at least not for a reasonable price (see the procedures for software driving nuclear plants). So the question is, what is reasonable to demand, and what will the legislation look like. One possibility would be, that the software underwent a certified QA-Process, and that would be possible with open Software too, see for example the mozilla-project, where a lot of effort is put to QA.
That does not make mozilla magically bug-free, but at least most bugs are known and dealt with, and when new bugs occur there are procedures to handle them. This kind of QA is also done for some linux-distros (at least i've seen it with mandrake), and in a less formal way in the mailing lists dedicated to OS-projects. Open Software could even have an advantage there, because its easy to implement a transparent and traceable QA-Process. Still, that would not be true for smaller projects in the same way as for smaller comercial Software-businesses. So maybe the real question here is, how to implement the legislation without killing small scale software-development.
What has this got to do with the subject at hand? (I would just love to see the diplomatic fallout if a chinese spy-plane was cruising the US coast, but i digress ...).
The subject at hand is, that the US government is claiming to know what's best for all the World, effectively playing world police, following rules they themselves made. But it's becoming more and more obvious, that the paramount interests behind all this is big corporations and big money.
It's all very basic: the government of the USA is doing this, because it can (or at least they think so), not for higher ideals, or because it's in the moral right.
is, that the percentage of Linux-users they found visiting the sampled Websites is steady between .2 and .3 Percent since nearly three years. While the sample is obviously biased, the bias has less effect on overall trends, than on the actual percentages.
So apparently there is no overall trend to switch from Windows-Desktops to Linux-desktops, or to be more precise, there is no such trend among the visitors of the sampled sites (assuming they measured correctly) in the past 2.5 years.
Still the whole statistics only tells us something about a biased sample, about which we sadly don't know enough to put the numbers into some perspective.
Yup, reading a few answers here i'm already reading up on FEC (why didn't the EETimes mention this?). The nifty thing about this is, that it's also a nice way to store information in a distributed way (think freenet, gnutella, ...) as far as i understand it. This opens a whole new perspective on the whole P2P theme, since a piece of information wouldn't be stored on one host alone, and also because of the implied redundancy, meaning that the information would still survive in that network until a critical number of hosts would be disconnected. Also netload would be distributed on the sending end, opening some interesting ways for congestion control.
Sorry, the whole article seems to make some magic mumbo-jumbo out of the process. Apparently the file is transformed, but how does that transformation help? The main difference between UDP and TCP in this case is, that TCP maintains the sequence of Packets, so after splitting a file up, sending it as TCP-Packets and combining it again, all parts (sent as Packets) are in the right place. UDP does no such thing, and also UDP doesn't check, if a packet really reached it's destination. This frees UDP of some overhead TCP has. But to send a large File (with a simple approach), now you have to label each UDP-Packet with a sequential number, and, at the end, check if all Packets arrived (and maybe request missing Packets again), then rearrange them according to the sequence numbers.
Now i don't see, how a transformation of content helps here, instead of adding the information where in the file the packet goes (a kind of serial number), now you have to label, where in the equation it should go (a kind of coefficient index), so the receiving end knows, whether it has all information, and which information is still missing, and must be requested again.
Since they broke in and even modified data they should now be accused of cyber terrorism (or whatever it's called) and violating the DMCA. Can't the EFF fund such a case, just to show, how dangerous such laws are to anyone investigating security holes?
While i'm also against racism and see the good intentions, i think this legislation will be used to squash legitimate critics and opposition. Probably scientology, who are very much criticised all over the Web, and often from sites which rely on the protection of their countries to be safe from lawsuits is already drawing up threat letters. Scientology didn't have any scruples to liken their case to the Holocaust the Jews experienced in the 3rd Reich, when they were not recognized as a religion in Germany, but as a business organisation. Soon they'll probably have a field day threatening with lawsuits to get any 'hate speech' against their organisation off the net.
Well, ext3 is very easy to test out, and it will soon get a large Userbase. More users means it's getting more attention, which in turn means more development. The different journaling filesystems are not too different from each other considering performance (and that's what most people are concerned with), a while ago reiser was the best performer AFAIR, but with more development going into ext3 that might soon change. I think it makes sense to put your bets on the Filesystem where you expect the most development to happen.
Microsoft lawyers invoked a more-threatening world when they proposed inserting a security exemption in a different part of the settlement. The exemption applied to provisions that require the company to disclose the inner workings of Windows to competitors who want to make all sorts of software that works well with Windows. The company said it needed the exemption to guard against cyber-sabotage. ...]
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Microsoft?s competitors and some of the states claim that these technologies are used so commonly that the provision could shield a number of Microsoft?s products from competition.
[...]
James rejects these criticisms and says the decision to protect Microsoft?s security provisions was ?one of those ?duh? issues.? He continues: ?Microsoft has security protocols. Are we going to tell everyone how they work? Do you want people to get access to your credit-card information when you shop on line??
James (the Justice Department antitrust chief) either uses very cheap rhetorics here (to cover up how bad that deal is) or he really doesn't understand the issues (and i don't know what's worse, the DoJ in cahoots with MS, or them being too dumb to do their job). Microsofts argument is just plain ridiculous. Everyone knows. that good security protoclos don't rely on obscurity, but on good crypto and a good protocol. You can't rely on obscurity especially not for Software which is sold worldwide, and open for everyone to take apart and scan for holes (even if that costs some to wade through all that assembler).
Also there are open source implementations of secure protocols (openssh to name just one). By Microsofts argument they couldn't work at all. If the DoJ is incapable of understanding the issues, or at least ask someone who does, and just sitting there nodding their heads when anything comes up they don't understand, i can really understand, how that 'agreement' came to be. And the statement about such measures being necessary to protect credit-card information shows, that he doesn't know enough to make the deal that is needed to keep microsoft in line. That wouldn't be too bad, if at lest he would rely on some advice in such situations.
There are rpms for the Kernel-source out there (not to be confused with source rpms) which will put a linux-2.4.X-distZ directory or somesuch in a convenient place and let you compile (although i ran out of luck with some mandrake ones since it apparently mangles symbol versioning). That completely invalidates your argument about the necessity of hand-compiling a kernel, since you get to hand-compile the kernel with those. Also most distributors like to include their flavor of kernel-patches, for example supermount with mandrake, or ext3 with redhat (you can get that from the ac-patches too). Especially stuff relying on kernel-patches that didn't (yet) make it into the linus kernel (supermount, lm_sensors) will only work if you get the kernel-rpm, or apply the patches yourself (or compile the modules from a convenient package) and then you probably have to tell rpm to ignore some dependencies from kernelversions. Sometimes the rpms contain quite vital stuff, For example Debian (where it's .deb, and not .rpm) patching a hole in 2.2.xx (19 i think it was).
So there's some good reason for someone wanting to run a kernel compiled from a kernel-source-rpm, and if, for example, you use gcc3.0 as opposed to gcc2.96/gcc2.95, and also don't have those handy, you might even be better off using a precompiled version (most distris put out a server- and a desktop version) than compiling your own. The main reason why the original statement is funny, is asking for an rpm when the kernel is just out. The bashing was not appropriate, i think.
I'm quite confident, that Alan is not 'a puppet' of Red Hat, and i don't believe there are many people claiming that (if any). Sure there is mutual input, maybe Red-hat 'pushed' ext3, because AC suggested that. Alan Cox is far too valuable as a developer to waste his time by pushing him around and makim him do things he doesn't want to, it makes no sense. If red hat wants to take an influence on kernel development there is a simple way: submitting contributions that are too good to be ignored.
Then, why would it necessarily be bad, if Red-Hat took some interest in kernel-development (i'm sure they do), it's not as if red-hat wanted something bad for linux or so. Finally, by being more involved with the development of 2.5 from the start, AC has far more influence on the development of future Kernels, than by maintaining the stable tree.
Hell, I believe that Mr. Cox is pushed ( ever so gently ) in the Red Hat direction. He might not even know it.
Well, everyone is 'pushed gently' by his environment. That's what input is for. I think AC is able to judge for himself, which suggestions are worth considering and which are not. Also, judging from AC's bringing up the DMCA in his changelog, he's not the man to be pushed around, and if he let's himself be pushed around he probably does it for his own reasons.
Also AC has the talent and the influence, to be able to 'push around' Red Hat, like have an influence on their list of projects/priorities. Now does that make Red-Hat a puppet of Alan Cox? I think not. Neither is it the other way round.
I read the first article and was quite impressed by the P4's performance of just going on at a slower clockrate. I also found it quite informative, that an Athlon might not only fry itself, but also the motherboard or even start a fire. The point is quite valid, that the heatsink might fall off during transport (although i suppose one would hear the loose heatsink rattling in the case) and will take a little more care with present CPU/Mobo combinations.
Let's not forget, that the throttling technique got some critique when it became known, mainly because the user wouldn't know about it, and it seemed a cheap way for intel to resolve heat problems with the P4. Toms article showed, that the throttling is quite a good feature to have (it would be even better, if there was a way of notifying the user without counting clockticks). So the first thing i thought after reading Toms first article was: "will AMD something similar, and when?". Now the followup shows, that AMD is aware of the problem, and is willing to spend some effort to offer solutions.
While the Motherboard-solution is more like a quick hack useful enough for present boards and AMD-CPUs, i expect something built into the CPU next time (at least a sudden shutdown should be possible, altering clockspeed at runtime might be a different story, and probably takes some haggling about patented technology with intel).
In conclusion i think things are as they should be: the test has made AMD aware of the fact, that protecting the CPU from overheating is a feature customers want, and they set to work on it and offered a quick solution after a few weeks. Noone tried to ban the story from toms site and people actually got together and talked about the problem without shifting responsibility around.
I still think the Athlon has the better bang for the buck, but i won't mind shelling out a little more money for a mobo with overheat protection.
The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
I don't know if it's a good idea to use that argument unless that mediacontact is totally clueless. The one-time-pad is in itself close to useless for most application, because of the logistic problem of sharing a common one-time-pad without third parties getting their hands on it. So unless you want to mail millions of one-time-pad CDs (or whatever) through a trusted mail service, this form of cryptography in itself won't help you a bit.
Does anyone read text emphasized like that ? !
I mean, who was writing that statement for SafeSurf? A six year old who cries about someone breaking their toys? Maybe they should've used this (warning, popupbanner) little toy to make their text look even better. But form follows content, and the content is even worse. They even dare to suggest someone might die because of MAPS' actions and proceed to construct a, however unlikely, scenario for this.
SafeSurf very obviously have it on their agenda to impose their will on anyone running a website all over the world, and their drivel about not wanting to censor, but only to enforce "correct labeling" of websites is just a heap of steaming bullshit, because after everything is labelled someone will start sorting out the 'bad' stuff, after all the effect is very obviously censoring, and all that nicely worded (in fact quite nauseating) writeup of theirs doesn't change that fact a bit.
So someone put the label 'spammer' over their block of ip addresses and as a consequence noone can hear them. Maybe that should give them a bit to think about. But no, when you're the only one, who knows what's best fore everyone else, you better don't think too much or you'll never get the job done.
I find it astonishing, how, without even wasting a thought about the ongoing trial accusing Microsoft of unfair busines practices, they go on and do just more of the same. Locking out folks from MSN (and just then when other Browsers start becoming a threat again), tieing updates of their products to Passport, banning javasupport from IE, ...
Do the judges in the USA like to be made a fool of, is it active masochism on their side, is it just that Bush has decreed that Microsoft isn't to be harmed, or just that the consequences MS could face from the law are just completely outweighed by the advantages, that they so blatantly ignore any laws that might hinder their scheming?
The gist of the article: for quake the atidrivers apparently only use 16 bit textures (this makes the difference with the "100" on the first page) and simply use a lower mipmap-level for textures (that is, they only use the graphic detail of the texture that would be used if it were farther away (and thus smaller). But the detail level of surfaces contains information that is often vital: The detail depends on the distance of the surface, if a surface is very detailed it is nearer than a surface with less detail. If you only see a part of a surface (through a gap or window for example) the detail is the only hint how far that surface is away. Many gamers probably use this information automatically without thinking about it. With the 'quake-improved' drivers someone accustomed to the previous detail levels will probably estimate that objects are farther away now (since they are less detailed). Even after being accustomed with the new detail levels, it still makes a difference: the more detailed a texture is, the smaller is the piece of surface you need to see to estimate how far it is.
To apreciate the importance of textures and structured surfaces for depth perception try q3a with different texturesettins and see what a difference that makes in a map like q3dm19. In quake 1 you could even switch of all textures, then, staring at a plain wall, you couldn't tell if it was 10cm, 1m or 10m away.
... not to mention that it comes as snail-mail