1) Convert FPGA to ASIC - 2x speed increase. (Guessing here. may be more, may be less.)
2) I could not find out WHICH FPGA they are using. But it should be possible to incorporate between 2x to 10x as many units on an ASIC. Let's assume 6 times as many units. If ATI or nVidia tried, they could certainly do this. Radeons and GeForce chips hae a LOT of transistors.
So far, we have a 12X increase, if my assumptions are correct. But these are ball-park figures. The actual speedup could be 5X or 50X. Without more details, it is impossible to know.
But the point is this: if a big manufacturer (ATI, nVidia, IBM, Motorols) wanted to work on this, it will completely surpass even the fastes CPUs.
If the page looks right and behaves properly, how many people will notice they have been redirected to www.nat1onalbank.com
That has nothing do to with this exploit.
I could be wrong, but here is my take on what is happening.
1) www.badguy.com re-directs their page to slashdot.org for a month or two. Slashdot.org page is filled with useless drivel, but there are occasional posts from this brilliant Harrkev guy, so it rises in the page rankings;) Www.badguy.com looks like slashdot.org, so it too rises.
2) Now that www.badguy.com has risen in the rankings, it can show whatever it wants and gets extra hits. This can be ads for member enlargers, or re-directs to other pages (use your imagination).
3) Profit!
Of course, www.badguy.com could do such sneaky things like directing search engines to one page, and regualar users to another. This can keep it near the top of the lists.
To summarize, this is simply a way to artificially rise on search engine rankings by hiding your true content. If I wanted to go to the Nations Bank website, I would just type it in. I would not need to Google my own bank!
Of course, I could have completely mis-read the article. If my take is inaccurate, plese reply with your corrections.
But not to the same scale that e-mail has it. Snail mail costs real dollars to send, plus the cost of printing, addressing, etc. That makes this self-limiting. If you send out out 1,000,000 ads for member enlargement pills at $0.15 a pop, that is still $150,000. You will quickly be out of business.
This machine was air cooled. I do not know whether todys beetle is air cooled too.
For the new version, they wanted to overclock it, so air-cooling was not up to the job.
Water-cooling was then tried, but they found that the pabst fan was not up to the job. They even tried a panaflow, but no good. Even the Vantec Tornado was not enough. The crazy guys at VW heard about the "radiator fan" thingy and gave it a shot -- and it worked!
Expect to see phase-change cooling next year, when the bump up the speeds again.
Audio and video codecs do not create an archive, and I think that the point is to have a general process, without having a bunch of exceptions based on file type.
BTW: all audio and video codecs (except FLAC) are lossy. Data out != data in.
One problem with this is that it is not a common format. For limited use (one-time distribution, short-term backup), this is OK. But what about long-term archives.
If you want to de-compress this stuff in 10 or 20 years, will you be able to find software then that can handle it? Epspecially if the new cell processors somehow become popular, will Windows BOHICA 2025 edition be able to run 20-year-old binaries in order to read this thing?
If the source is available, the job is easier in Linux, but if the format is not actively maintained, it may take a lot of work to modify the program to run whatever Linux looks like in 20 years.
My experience with Knoppix and distros based off of it are that they ONLY play nicely when inserted into the FIRST CD-Rom drive. I have three optical drives installed (CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, CD-RW). Obviously, if I have to boot from the first drive, that one can't write...
Can anybody tell me why this "first drive only" limitation exists? Is it inherent to the way that you boot from a CD, or is it a peculiarity of Knoppix?
I did the same thing. I was getting wrist pain, so I started using my left hand for the mouse. Now, it seems 2nd nature to me. So my workstation uses a left-handed mouse, but I am a right-handed mouser at home, because it is one of those "ergo" mice that just does not fit the other hand. I think of it as "RSI Load Balancing."
BTW: That is called "ambimousterous." Google that term.
A note to anybody else who wants to do this. It feels strange for the first day. After two days or so, it is functional, but slower. After a couple of weeks, you are back to 100%.
Keep reading. It gets better! One cell can store a byte! Soooooo. Either one cell has 256 discernable levels, or they have defined "cell" in a funny way.
But let's assume that the article was not written by a 4th grader. What good is this? How could you possibly have something this fine be able to be read without breaking?
All modern media is 2D. Floppy, CD, DVD, HD all store data on the surface of a disc. Tape units store data in a 2D at little stripes recorded on the surface of a tape. This means that you can make the tapes and discs thick enough not to break.
What do you do for something that can probably be broken by dropping a piece of paper on it?
Hmmmm. On second thought, the idea of "data velcro" sounds neat. How about data velvet? "My painting of Elvis is also a 12GB mass storage unt."
Data underwear? "Caution. Unrecoverable skid-mark error. Please launder and try again."
And how STUPID of Queen Isabella to fund that goofy Columbus guy when Spain had other, more pressing concerns. And don't even get me STARTED on Lewis & Clark.
Maybe so, but XP=current. 2000=legacy. 2003 looks a whole lot like XP. So, this is to be expected, unless you freeze all progress. At some point, you cut your losses and do not design new software to run old older OS. How many people still advertise software as being "Windows 3.1 compatable?"
RedHat=current. Debian=current. Let's assume that Adobe decides to sell Photoshop under Linux. They then have to support these two different platforms. And even if you set up Debian and RedHat systems to have the exact same package list, they would still be different in where they stick things.
You can't have your freedom (and all the benefits it provides) and eat it too.
Nobody says that text files have to be in ASCII format. You could certainly feel free to use EBCDIC. So why don't you? Because everybody agreed a long time ago that ASCII was the way to go. So now, if you want to open a simple text file, you do not have to worry about which code to use. And when computers grew up and wanted multi-language capability, there are standards for that too!
I guess that the point is that there could be a "gentlemen's agreement" on where things to and how things should work. LSB is certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact that people are still talking about this sort of thing means that it is not enough.
And don't get started on "restrictive licenses" and "binary only" programs. THESE ARE NECESSARY! OS is a great model at making things that LOTS of people need. But, in some cases, there are programs that do not have enough of a demand to make a pile of geeks want to make it for free. In this case, you need to buy something. And if you need X, and only one company makes a program that does X, then you don't have much choice. But if X won't work on 1/2 of the distros out there, then that one company may just decide that Linux is too much trouble, and just make X for Windows.
This is one of the most ergonomic pointing devices that I have ever used. It is sort of like a trackball, and it uses your fingertips. But you can use your thumb too, if you want to. Lots of buttons.
Tragicly, Logitech stopped making them. They are PS/2 (no USB), and are not detected as a scroll mouse from Linux. Very comfortable, though.
I doubt that the number is that accurate. In the article, they tracked the machines is ONE COMPUTER LAB. That is not even in the hundreds.
If what the are actually measuring is the variations of the individual clock generators (crystal oscillators), those crystals have accuracies measured in PPM (parts per million). So there is not a lot of variation to measure. And the latencies would likely not be able to measured in sub-nanosecond resolution, which is what you would need in order to determine this sort of thing with the type of accuracy that you are describing.
I would imagine that it is like trying to measure the thickness of a penny with a cheap wooden ruler. Yes, you can get a number out of it. But don't expect 5 digits of resolution.
And don't forget that crystal oscillators also have variations that depend on temperature. So your computer could have one skew spec when idling, and another when you are doing some hard gaming.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. The article did not have quite enough details. I am making some somewhat-educated guesses here.
Don't misunderstand me though. This is cool stuff. When combined with a tool like nmap, this would give another data point. But somehow I doubt that this is the super "computer fingerprint that is made out to be. And I doubt that it could be used as evidence in a criminal trial.
The application might be insightful, but to me it seems almost useless. From my reading of the article, it seems that they get ONE number -- a skew value. ONE NUMBER - that's it! This might be useful in proving that a particular machine is NOT the one that you are looking for, but it will likely suffer from a high false-positive rate.
Let me put it this way. It is like measuring just height. If you are looking for a suspect who is 6'2", you can rule out the people who are 5'6". But if you find somebody who is 6'2", this does not make them automatically the perpetrator.
You can combine this with other techniques (line nmap). But this would be like saying "the criminal has blond hair and blue eyes, and is 6'2". This would rule out 95% or more of the population, but the false positive rate would still be high.
And now that people know about this, I bet that it would be easy to put in some type of change in the linux kernal to randomize the timing values just a little. Then, you could swamp the signal with noise. Then, you are back to where you were having just nmap.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see here...
1) Convert FPGA to ASIC - 2x speed increase. (Guessing here. may be more, may be less.)
2) I could not find out WHICH FPGA they are using. But it should be possible to incorporate between 2x to 10x as many units on an ASIC. Let's assume 6 times as many units. If ATI or nVidia tried, they could certainly do this. Radeons and GeForce chips hae a LOT of transistors.
So far, we have a 12X increase, if my assumptions are correct. But these are ball-park figures. The actual speedup could be 5X or 50X. Without more details, it is impossible to know.
But the point is this: if a big manufacturer (ATI, nVidia, IBM, Motorols) wanted to work on this, it will completely surpass even the fastes CPUs.
I could be wrong, but here is my take on what is happening.
1) www.badguy.com re-directs their page to slashdot.org for a month or two. Slashdot.org page is filled with useless drivel, but there are occasional posts from this brilliant Harrkev guy, so it rises in the page rankings
2) Now that www.badguy.com has risen in the rankings, it can show whatever it wants and gets extra hits. This can be ads for member enlargers, or re-directs to other pages (use your imagination).
3) Profit!
Of course, www.badguy.com could do such sneaky things like directing search engines to one page, and regualar users to another. This can keep it near the top of the lists.
To summarize, this is simply a way to artificially rise on search engine rankings by hiding your true content. If I wanted to go to the Nations Bank website, I would just type it in. I would not need to Google my own bank!
Of course, I could have completely mis-read the article. If my take is inaccurate, plese reply with your corrections.
Spam works because e-mail costs almost nothing.
For the new version, they wanted to overclock it, so air-cooling was not up to the job.
Water-cooling was then tried, but they found that the pabst fan was not up to the job. They even tried a panaflow, but no good. Even the Vantec Tornado was not enough. The crazy guys at VW heard about the "radiator fan" thingy and gave it a shot -- and it worked!
Expect to see phase-change cooling next year, when the bump up the speeds again.
Of course, if you owe, then there is absolutely no reason to e-file.
And you can always download the basic version of TaxAct for free!. Not for linux, but maybe Wine will work.
I think the point is this:
(lotsa files) -> compress -> (one archive) -> de-compress -> (lotsa files)
Audio and video codecs do not create an archive, and I think that the point is to have a general process, without having a bunch of exceptions based on file type.
BTW: all audio and video codecs (except FLAC) are lossy. Data out != data in.
One problem with this is that it is not a common format. For limited use (one-time distribution, short-term backup), this is OK. But what about long-term archives.
If you want to de-compress this stuff in 10 or 20 years, will you be able to find software then that can handle it? Epspecially if the new cell processors somehow become popular, will Windows BOHICA 2025 edition be able to run 20-year-old binaries in order to read this thing?
If the source is available, the job is easier in Linux, but if the format is not actively maintained, it may take a lot of work to modify the program to run whatever Linux looks like in 20 years.
I have a thought...
My experience with Knoppix and distros based off of it are that they ONLY play nicely when inserted into the FIRST CD-Rom drive. I have three optical drives installed (CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, CD-RW). Obviously, if I have to boot from the first drive, that one can't write...
Can anybody tell me why this "first drive only" limitation exists? Is it inherent to the way that you boot from a CD, or is it a peculiarity of Knoppix?
TIA
This still won't protect you if your hosts files is hosed.
All you do is tell Windows that you are left-handed. Then it swaps the left and right button.
I did the same thing. I was getting wrist pain, so I started using my left hand for the mouse. Now, it seems 2nd nature to me. So my workstation uses a left-handed mouse, but I am a right-handed mouser at home, because it is one of those "ergo" mice that just does not fit the other hand. I think of it as "RSI Load Balancing."
BTW: That is called "ambimousterous." Google that term.
A note to anybody else who wants to do this. It feels strange for the first day. After two days or so, it is functional, but slower. After a couple of weeks, you are back to 100%.
And yet your link points to a site which questions the very existence of this substabce. Facinating, Captain.
Keep reading. It gets better! One cell can store a byte! Soooooo. Either one cell has 256 discernable levels, or they have defined "cell" in a funny way.
But let's assume that the article was not written by a 4th grader. What good is this? How could you possibly have something this fine be able to be read without breaking?
All modern media is 2D. Floppy, CD, DVD, HD all store data on the surface of a disc. Tape units store data in a 2D at little stripes recorded on the surface of a tape. This means that you can make the tapes and discs thick enough not to break.
What do you do for something that can probably be broken by dropping a piece of paper on it?
Hmmmm. On second thought, the idea of "data velcro" sounds neat. How about data velvet? "My painting of Elvis is also a 12GB mass storage unt."
Data underwear? "Caution. Unrecoverable skid-mark error. Please launder and try again."
And how STUPID of Queen Isabella to fund that goofy Columbus guy when Spain had other, more pressing concerns. And don't even get me STARTED on Lewis & Clark.
I hear that India and China are hiring. ;)
According to the Village People, the Navy usually has some back doors.
Maybe so, but XP=current. 2000=legacy. 2003 looks a whole lot like XP. So, this is to be expected, unless you freeze all progress. At some point, you cut your losses and do not design new software to run old older OS. How many people still advertise software as being "Windows 3.1 compatable?"
RedHat=current. Debian=current. Let's assume that Adobe decides to sell Photoshop under Linux. They then have to support these two different platforms. And even if you set up Debian and RedHat systems to have the exact same package list, they would still be different in where they stick things.
I have. I had an old Print Shop Publisher version that ran great on 98SE. Locks up solid under XP, even in compatibility mode.
And I was looking for an XP port of Xroaches. I found a couple of old versions for 3.1 and NT. They do not work under XP.
Anybody know of a good XP version of Xroaches???
I guess that the point is that there could be a "gentlemen's agreement" on where things to and how things should work. LSB is certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact that people are still talking about this sort of thing means that it is not enough.
And don't get started on "restrictive licenses" and "binary only" programs. THESE ARE NECESSARY! OS is a great model at making things that LOTS of people need. But, in some cases, there are programs that do not have enough of a demand to make a pile of geeks want to make it for free. In this case, you need to buy something. And if you need X, and only one company makes a program that does X, then you don't have much choice. But if X won't work on 1/2 of the distros out there, then that one company may just decide that Linux is too much trouble, and just make X for Windows.
I used to LOVE this one...
Link to eBay.
This is one of the most ergonomic pointing devices that I have ever used. It is sort of like a trackball, and it uses your fingertips. But you can use your thumb too, if you want to. Lots of buttons.
Tragicly, Logitech stopped making them. They are PS/2 (no USB), and are not detected as a scroll mouse from Linux. Very comfortable, though.
And they were optical before optical was cool.
I doubt that the number is that accurate. In the article, they tracked the machines is ONE COMPUTER LAB. That is not even in the hundreds.
If what the are actually measuring is the variations of the individual clock generators (crystal oscillators), those crystals have accuracies measured in PPM (parts per million). So there is not a lot of variation to measure. And the latencies would likely not be able to measured in sub-nanosecond resolution, which is what you would need in order to determine this sort of thing with the type of accuracy that you are describing.
I would imagine that it is like trying to measure the thickness of a penny with a cheap wooden ruler. Yes, you can get a number out of it. But don't expect 5 digits of resolution.
And don't forget that crystal oscillators also have variations that depend on temperature. So your computer could have one skew spec when idling, and another when you are doing some hard gaming.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. The article did not have quite enough details. I am making some somewhat-educated guesses here.
Don't misunderstand me though. This is cool stuff. When combined with a tool like nmap, this would give another data point. But somehow I doubt that this is the super "computer fingerprint that is made out to be. And I doubt that it could be used as evidence in a criminal trial.
The application might be insightful, but to me it seems almost useless. From my reading of the article, it seems that they get ONE number -- a skew value. ONE NUMBER - that's it! This might be useful in proving that a particular machine is NOT the one that you are looking for, but it will likely suffer from a high false-positive rate.
Let me put it this way. It is like measuring just height. If you are looking for a suspect who is 6'2", you can rule out the people who are 5'6". But if you find somebody who is 6'2", this does not make them automatically the perpetrator.
You can combine this with other techniques (line nmap). But this would be like saying "the criminal has blond hair and blue eyes, and is 6'2". This would rule out 95% or more of the population, but the false positive rate would still be high.
And now that people know about this, I bet that it would be easy to put in some type of change in the linux kernal to randomize the timing values just a little. Then, you could swamp the signal with noise. Then, you are back to where you were having just nmap.
Exactly what I was thinking (amazing how great minds think alike). That is why I said that it was not doable for under $100.
Thanks for the link to Meci. I have never heard of them before. Another great place to check out: www.mpja.com.
I have seen DC-DC for around $10 each in some surplus stores (for around 1A or so).