(3) Stations beyond 50 miles admittedly look like crap, but at least they're watchable in analog format. DTV displays nothing. I've lost channels 10,11,12,13,21,27,29,45,48,51. I used to be able to watch Ravens and Orioles games but no more. I lost my PBS station and my ABC station and a few independents that played movies or scifi shows.
Remind me again about how DTV is "superior" when I've lost more than I had before?
You're blaming "DTV" for transmission issues. I'm guessing that you live in PA, and the "45" you referred to is WBFF. That's one of the stations that will make major changes for the transition, boosting the signal strength considerably and using a higher tower. I can't get it at the moment either, but it was rock solid for a little while a couple of months ago (I suspect they were doing some testing). A lot of the smaller stations can't afford to broadcast multiple frequencies at full power, and have been sending only a weak signal for now. Unfortunately, "DTV" has been blamed for this and a lot of people have given up, even though the situation will improve for many of them next month (unless the transition is delayed).
No DTV stations are increasing power on February 18. At leaat none in the DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Harrisburg markets.
A number of stations are changing frequency, relocating transmitters, or otherwise making changes which will affect (generally, improve) reception. In DC, a quick glance shows only two of five major stations that aren't changing something.
Being at a higher frequency is a disadvantage because they break-up more easily, and can be blocked by trees or sheds. Lower frequencies pass right through the tree/shed as if it wasn't there.
Multiple stations in the DC area are switching from UHF to VHF at digital transition, which should greatly improve reception for a lot of people.
Overall, I expect that people will have a very different DTV experience in February than they'll have today.
That works fine, unless you have the typical issues for digital.
In my area, there are supposed to be 12 OTA digital stations (each running two feeds). I can see maybe 7 due to intervening buildings, even with a nice powered antenna on the roof.
Of course, many DTV reception issues are caused by the fact that many stations are operating on temporary frequencies, using temporary towers, and at reduced power. The analog shutdown can't happen soon enough, after which DTV reception will improve for many people as stations switch to their final configurations.
Yes, it's ironic that people are calling for a delay in shutting down the analog signals because of DTV reception issues caused by transmitting the analog signals.
That's just not how government works. You give a lot of money to the government, and you're not entitled to an itemized list showing that you get a particular service for each dollar paid. There are of intangibles like "functioning society" which the majority of people think are worth the money, and you don't get to opt out.
There is an unfortunate truth in that some people have sold the social security system as some sort of "trust fund" where you'll get back the money you put in, but that was never actually true. You can dislike that, you can curse the people who sold it that way, you can hold your breath until you turn blue, but you can't change the fact that the system can't continue to pretend that future retirees have a guaranteed income based on their contributions as opposed to what the country can afford to pay.
But I'm wondering if there isn't some intermediate ground between using commodity CPUs and custom architectures. Seems like some company ought to be able to license a design from Intel or AMD, and modify it to better meet the needs of high performance computing. You might not gain a lot on memory bandwidth (that seems deeply tied to the architecture), but you might be able to speed up floating point trig functions, extend vector processing from 128-bit to 256-bit or longer, improve SIMD support for double precision, maybe integrate some FPGA-like circuitry...things which aren't economical for mainstream CPUs, but don't require a major redesign. It seems to me that unlike general users, HPC would benefit greatly from improved floating point precision and speed.
No, because by the time your small team finishes that effort and gets it right, Intel is two generations ahead and their commodity part gets the same performance as yours, essentially for free (because the development was paid for by solitaire players). That's exactly the problem.
No, it's because the market has matured. Even Cray's final ideas hit an engineering brick wall (it happens). The R&D budget for the segment can't support as many dead ends as the R&D budget for the industry as a whole. Does that mean the end of R&D? No. But it does impact where you spend your money.
I'm talking about the scenario TFA proposes: that directions in technology cause supercomputing advancement to stall.
Well, if that's what you want to talk about I don't have much to say. I reject the premise that in the future the fastest computers won't be any to process things faster than the fastest computers today. If you think about the history of the industry the premise actually seems absurd. Is it impossible? No. Is the possibility worth agonizing over? Also no.
The way the market works is that commodity hardware vendors beat each other down until everybody is earning roughly similar normal profits. Then somebody comes a long with a set of ideas that could double the rate at which supercomputer power is increasing. If that person is credible, he is a standout investment, not just despite the fact that there is so much money being poured into commodity hardware, but because of that.
I really can't parse what you're trying to say. I'm guessing it's along the lines of "well, someone could have a radical idea and transform the supercomputer market". I won't preclude that. Until that happens, the market is what it is.
Suppose that you expected to have a certain maximum practical supercomputer capability in twenty years' time. Suppose you figure that once you have that capability you could predict a hurricane's track with several times the precision you could today.
Well, first, you'd have to be an idiot to make a prediction about the capabilities of computers in twenty years. Second, it's about leverage. Do you really think a small supercomputer-specific R&D expenditure will outperform the aggregate multibillion dollar generic computer R&D budget over decades? Smart money says you leverage that enormous budget and spend your money on tailoring the generic capabilities to maximize performance on your workload--which is how we ended up with clusters of commodity hardware. Yeah, yeah, maybe everything would be better if civilization spent an unbounded amount of money on R&D for task-specific supercomputers--but the reality is that the world is full of narrowly-focused geeks who want more money spent on their pet project and they can't all get it.
It's very simple. Intel & AMD spend about $6bn/year on R&D. The total supercomputing market is on the order of $35bn (out of a global IT market on the order of $1000bn) and a big chunk of that is spent on storage, people, software, etc., rather than processors. That market simply isn't large enough to support an R&D effort which will consistently outperform commodity hardware at a price people are willing to pay. Even if a company spent a huge amount of money developing a breakthrough architecture which dramatically outperformed existing hardware, the odds are that the commodity processors would catch up before that innovator recouped its development costs. Certainly they'd catch up before everyone rewrote their software to take advantage of the new architecture. The days when Seymour Cray could design a product which was cutting edge & saleable for a decade are long gone.
Umm, you need to go re-read that page. All of the described weaknesses are bias in the first few bytes, with the exception of the combinatorial problem, which doesn't really belong in the "weaknesses" section.
Ditto. The first weakness was in the first 2 output bytes. Then there was a weakness in the first 512 output bytes. Current thinking is to discard the first 3k or so. There's a trend there, which intersects at "discard all output bytes". I think it's disingenuous to paint a rosy picture of an encryption algorithm that's had practical attacks described on its output as long as you just dump that part of the output (because, presumably, the rest of the stream is fine?)
RC4 has issues if you use the first few bytes of the keystream (a fact that was well-known long before WEP was created), but in 20+ years of cryptanalytic attacks that is the only weakness that has been found, and given that it's THE most widely-used stream cipher, that's a pretty strong indication that, barring new cryptanalytic techniques, RC4 is not likely to be broken soon.
For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc4#Security which lists far more than the first few weak bits issue. After a point, enough "theoretical weaknesses" add up to a crypto system which is past the expiration date.
A weakness how? Michael's deficiencies might enable DoS attacks, or perhaps even random packet corruption, but it doesn't have any effect on the security of the encryption.
Because Michael is part of the TKIP strategy to prevent replay attacks. The mitigation for the weaknesses in Michael is to drop the session if there are more than two errors (which then leads to the DoS possibility, but note that the DoS was added to mitigate--not solve--problems with Michael).
So I guess the evaluation depends on your definitions. If you want to say that WPA is fine until someone invents a GUI for reading anything on the network, I guess it's fine. (Of course, so is WEP for many use cases in the real world.) I personally define "joke" security to be based on things that are known to be weak in the hope that nobody has put all the known weaknesses together into a simple exploit (as opposed to basing the security on the best available techniques). If you've got a risk assessment that says people are actively trying to break your security, WPA is not for you. If you've got regulatory requirements to use strong crypto, WPA is not for you. If you don't think crypto attacks are a risk and you have no requirements, why even have the conversation? Use WEP or plaintext and be happy. I think it's dangerous to imply that WPA is just as good as WPA2, and there's no need to change, because you're setting people up for a really bad day when WPA is finally broken and they have to scramble to deploy something they should have already deployed.
You mentioned yourself that the encryption is based on RC4 (and then talked about "potential new weaknesses", which is weird, because RC4 has already been attacked quite a bit and is deprecated for any new application). More importantly, the TKIP algorithm depends on an integrity check routine based on a home grown hash called Michael which is cool from a "wow, they managed to shove a lot into obsolete hardware" standpoint, but is a material weakness compared to the CCMP implemented in 802.11i. Look at it this way: for most intruders, WEP (hell, even ROT-13) would be sufficient to protect your network. If you think that your level of risk necessitates encryption, why would you be using a solution which has known weaknesses compared to another solution which uses the best available cryptography? (It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a unique opinion--the reason 802.11i looks like WPA2 instead of WPA is that, based off discussions I had with people involved in the process at least as far back as '02, there was no chance that it would be approved by IEEE without standardizing on strong cryptography.) WPAs stated goals (look it up, the docs are there although increasingly hard to find since WPA2 was announced) were to paper over the worst problems with WEP, to give a little more life to hardware which couldn't handle stronger algorithms, and to provide a bridge to full 802.11i by allowing people to start implementing 802.1x EAPs. Note that none of those goals are anything like "implement the strongest available cryptography" or "deploy long-term wireless security". At this point everything you can buy implements WPA2, so why would you even consider using WPA?
Because they all technically had the same class of encryption you'd find in a VPN
Not true. WEP had a lousy encryption scheme designed by electrical engineers rather than cryptographers. WPA was built on the same foundation, to try to buy more life for obsolete hardware. IEEE 802.11i (rebranded "WPA2" to be less scary for consumers and make "WPA" sound like an ancestor rather than a bastard stepchild) was designed by cryptographers, and is built on much more robust standards and is no more or less vulnerable to crypto attacks than a well-implemented VPN (assuming that you're not trying to use PSK, which the standard says not to use).
Umm, WPA is the Wi-Fi Alliance's name for WEP+TKIP. It's no toy.
No, the GP was right--WPA is a joke in terms of security, and any serious installation should be using WPA2. (Which is really IEEE 802.11i, a reasonably good international standard for wireless security. WPA is a stripped-down subset of 802.11i for manufacturers too cheap to implement the full standard [which requires them to implement a strong encryption algorithm].)
That was my reaction, the standard advice going back a long ways was use WEP, but for the love of god also use VPN between the devices. I can't imagine why WPA or WPA2 would make people think that you should be ditching the VPN.
Since WPA2 uses the same encryption that you'd find in a VPN, I wonder why you think it would be less secure?
I've noticed that often 'old-school' telco data centers often seem to be much more sparing with the AC running 70F-85F vs. the 'high-tech' data centers who tend to run 'freeze your ass off' data centers. Something has always told me they had something (whether it was just being cheap or not).
Yeah, what they have is lower density in their racks.
There is another really smart thing you can do too. When it is hot inside and not hot outside yu can open a window. That seems obvious but how many office building have openable windows? For some reason Architects like to cool office space with AC even if there is "free" cool air out doors.
The reasons are things like: liability issues, chimney effects, people leaving the windows open even with the heat or a/c on, people leaving the windows open in the rain, bugs in the building, increased maintenance costs for more complex windows, etc. It turns out that architects aren't actually idiots and have thought about this.
This is even easier with computers. The servers would be happy to run at 95F and much of the time even in the American SW the outside air is cooler than 95F.
Your desktop can run at 95F ambient. If it has a variable speed fan it's probably screaming like a banshee. The key is how much heat can be dissipated, and at 95F ambient you can't move enough air through a dense computer system to cool the components down to a safe temperature. Even at 68F ambient people are have a lot of trouble moving enough air through modern super-dense racks to keep computers from seeing increased failure rates.
Now, the CX1 really is Cray in name only. Don't make the mistake of thinking of Cray as a maker of itty bitty clusters. Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4, NERSC has an almost 20,000-core XT4, and of course Red Storm has over 26,000 cores.
Umm, that is Cray in name only. The real Cray (Seymour) designed from scratch computers which had performance as their only goal, and which shattered the performance standards of their peers. He did not cobble together existing parts in basically the same way a half dozen other companies do. Now, you can argue whether something like the old Cray is even possible anymore, let alone economically viable, but you shouldn't pretend that the current Cray is in the same league.
Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.
Well, you must be doing something wrong. I can assure you that disk IO is significantly faster, network IO is significantly faster, scalability is better (so you can actually take advantage of newer hardware). In addition to the fast servers, I still regularly use a 486-class machine, and even that is nicely responsive with a 2.6.25 kernel. If you feel that your system is slow, blame your apps.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
A 'car guy' is not necessarily good at running a business.
Not necessarily. But he certainly can't be worse than the idiot finance & sales guys running the business now.
Be sure to watch the media over the next few days - you'll see pictures of dead and wounded, buildings destroyed, and many other realities of war. Now ask yourself why you don't see any of those images from Iraq. Ask why we saw silhouetted shots of helicopters and long views of nighttime explosions instead of what was really happening on the ground.
1. We did see such images from Iraq, just not many of them. Those we did see were generally stage managed (journalists were brought in by an opposition group) because...
2. It wasn't safe for journalists to wander freely in Iraq, either before or after the invasion. (Before the invasion you were liable to be arrested by Saddam's security services and after you were liable to be captured and beheaded by an insurgent group.)
3. Most of the images out of Iraq in the early stages came from reporters attached to US forces, and they tended to not take close-up pictures because US forces were not waging a close-up war.
If journalists are able to walk around freely in Georgia, it is a very different war. (If, on the other hand, they are only safe if escorted by Russian or Georgian troops, you should take the imagery with the same grain of salt you seem to apply to Iraq reporting.)
It was easy to be ignorant and happy with NTSC, and, let's face it, how could anybody have found VHS acceptable?
Because some people find the content to be more important than the specifications? I'd personally prefer a crappy VHS copy of a good movie to a really high def calibration image--but to each his own.
"You can be compelled to testify if the testimony is not self-incriminating."
Thanks for proving my point. Certainly proof that he knows the sole working password could incriminate him.
Please, explain how knowing a password he is expected to know would be in itself incriminating? And, as I said in the part that you neglected to quote, he could be granted immunity for evidence dependent on the password. The specifics of how that would work depend on the facts of the case (and the government might not be interested in pursuing the option), but it's definitely not the case that he can't be compelled to provide the password.
Slashdot Mirror
(3) Stations beyond 50 miles admittedly look like crap, but at least they're watchable in analog format. DTV displays nothing. I've lost channels 10,11,12,13,21,27,29,45,48,51. I used to be able to watch Ravens and Orioles games but no more. I lost my PBS station and my ABC station and a few independents that played movies or scifi shows.
Remind me again about how DTV is "superior" when I've lost more than I had before?
You're blaming "DTV" for transmission issues. I'm guessing that you live in PA, and the "45" you referred to is WBFF. That's one of the stations that will make major changes for the transition, boosting the signal strength considerably and using a higher tower. I can't get it at the moment either, but it was rock solid for a little while a couple of months ago (I suspect they were doing some testing). A lot of the smaller stations can't afford to broadcast multiple frequencies at full power, and have been sending only a weak signal for now. Unfortunately, "DTV" has been blamed for this and a lot of people have given up, even though the situation will improve for many of them next month (unless the transition is delayed).
No DTV stations are increasing power on February 18. At leaat none in the DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Harrisburg markets.
A number of stations are changing frequency, relocating transmitters, or otherwise making changes which will affect (generally, improve) reception. In DC, a quick glance shows only two of five major stations that aren't changing something.
Being at a higher frequency is a disadvantage because they break-up more easily, and can be blocked by trees or sheds. Lower frequencies pass right through the tree/shed as if it wasn't there.
Multiple stations in the DC area are switching from UHF to VHF at digital transition, which should greatly improve reception for a lot of people.
Overall, I expect that people will have a very different DTV experience in February than they'll have today.
That works fine, unless you have the typical issues for digital.
In my area, there are supposed to be 12 OTA digital stations (each running two feeds). I can see maybe 7 due to intervening buildings, even with a nice powered antenna on the roof.
Of course, many DTV reception issues are caused by the fact that many stations are operating on temporary frequencies, using temporary towers, and at reduced power. The analog shutdown can't happen soon enough, after which DTV reception will improve for many people as stations switch to their final configurations.
Yes, it's ironic that people are calling for a delay in shutting down the analog signals because of DTV reception issues caused by transmitting the analog signals.
Try once yourself to code conversion from "seconds since 1/1/1970 00:00:00" to any other user digestible presentation.
It's not as easy as it might seem.
Done:
$ perl -MHTTP::Date -e 'print time2str(1230796800)';
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT
I see your perl and raise you one coreutils:
> date -d @1230796800
Thu Jan 1 03:00:00 EST 2009
That's just not how government works. You give a lot of money to the government, and you're not entitled to an itemized list showing that you get a particular service for each dollar paid. There are of intangibles like "functioning society" which the majority of people think are worth the money, and you don't get to opt out.
There is an unfortunate truth in that some people have sold the social security system as some sort of "trust fund" where you'll get back the money you put in, but that was never actually true. You can dislike that, you can curse the people who sold it that way, you can hold your breath until you turn blue, but you can't change the fact that the system can't continue to pretend that future retirees have a guaranteed income based on their contributions as opposed to what the country can afford to pay.
But I'm wondering if there isn't some intermediate ground between using commodity CPUs and custom architectures. Seems like some company ought to be able to license a design from Intel or AMD, and modify it to better meet the needs of high performance computing. You might not gain a lot on memory bandwidth (that seems deeply tied to the architecture), but you might be able to speed up floating point trig functions, extend vector processing from 128-bit to 256-bit or longer, improve SIMD support for double precision, maybe integrate some FPGA-like circuitry...things which aren't economical for mainstream CPUs, but don't require a major redesign. It seems to me that unlike general users, HPC would benefit greatly from improved floating point precision and speed.
No, because by the time your small team finishes that effort and gets it right, Intel is two generations ahead and their commodity part gets the same performance as yours, essentially for free (because the development was paid for by solitaire players). That's exactly the problem.
No, it's because the market has matured. Even Cray's final ideas hit an engineering brick wall (it happens). The R&D budget for the segment can't support as many dead ends as the R&D budget for the industry as a whole. Does that mean the end of R&D? No. But it does impact where you spend your money.
I'm talking about the scenario TFA proposes: that directions in technology cause supercomputing advancement to stall.
Well, if that's what you want to talk about I don't have much to say. I reject the premise that in the future the fastest computers won't be any to process things faster than the fastest computers today. If you think about the history of the industry the premise actually seems absurd. Is it impossible? No. Is the possibility worth agonizing over? Also no.
The way the market works is that commodity hardware vendors beat each other down until everybody is earning roughly similar normal profits. Then somebody comes a long with a set of ideas that could double the rate at which supercomputer power is increasing. If that person is credible, he is a standout investment, not just despite the fact that there is so much money being poured into commodity hardware, but because of that.
I really can't parse what you're trying to say. I'm guessing it's along the lines of "well, someone could have a radical idea and transform the supercomputer market". I won't preclude that. Until that happens, the market is what it is.
Suppose that you expected to have a certain maximum practical supercomputer capability in twenty years' time. Suppose you figure that once you have that capability you could predict a hurricane's track with several times the precision you could today.
Well, first, you'd have to be an idiot to make a prediction about the capabilities of computers in twenty years. Second, it's about leverage. Do you really think a small supercomputer-specific R&D expenditure will outperform the aggregate multibillion dollar generic computer R&D budget over decades? Smart money says you leverage that enormous budget and spend your money on tailoring the generic capabilities to maximize performance on your workload--which is how we ended up with clusters of commodity hardware. Yeah, yeah, maybe everything would be better if civilization spent an unbounded amount of money on R&D for task-specific supercomputers--but the reality is that the world is full of narrowly-focused geeks who want more money spent on their pet project and they can't all get it.
It's very simple. Intel & AMD spend about $6bn/year on R&D. The total supercomputing market is on the order of $35bn (out of a global IT market on the order of $1000bn) and a big chunk of that is spent on storage, people, software, etc., rather than processors. That market simply isn't large enough to support an R&D effort which will consistently outperform commodity hardware at a price people are willing to pay. Even if a company spent a huge amount of money developing a breakthrough architecture which dramatically outperformed existing hardware, the odds are that the commodity processors would catch up before that innovator recouped its development costs. Certainly they'd catch up before everyone rewrote their software to take advantage of the new architecture. The days when Seymour Cray could design a product which was cutting edge & saleable for a decade are long gone.
Umm, you need to go re-read that page. All of the described weaknesses are bias in the first few bytes, with the exception of the combinatorial problem, which doesn't really belong in the "weaknesses" section.
Ditto. The first weakness was in the first 2 output bytes. Then there was a weakness in the first 512 output bytes. Current thinking is to discard the first 3k or so. There's a trend there, which intersects at "discard all output bytes". I think it's disingenuous to paint a rosy picture of an encryption algorithm that's had practical attacks described on its output as long as you just dump that part of the output (because, presumably, the rest of the stream is fine?)
RC4 has issues if you use the first few bytes of the keystream (a fact that was well-known long before WEP was created), but in 20+ years of cryptanalytic attacks that is the only weakness that has been found, and given that it's THE most widely-used stream cipher, that's a pretty strong indication that, barring new cryptanalytic techniques, RC4 is not likely to be broken soon.
For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc4#Security
which lists far more than the first few weak bits issue. After a point, enough "theoretical weaknesses" add up to a crypto system which is past the expiration date.
A weakness how? Michael's deficiencies might enable DoS attacks, or perhaps even random packet corruption, but it doesn't have any effect on the security of the encryption.
Because Michael is part of the TKIP strategy to prevent replay attacks. The mitigation for the weaknesses in Michael is to drop the session if there are more than two errors (which then leads to the DoS possibility, but note that the DoS was added to mitigate--not solve--problems with Michael).
So I guess the evaluation depends on your definitions. If you want to say that WPA is fine until someone invents a GUI for reading anything on the network, I guess it's fine. (Of course, so is WEP for many use cases in the real world.) I personally define "joke" security to be based on things that are known to be weak in the hope that nobody has put all the known weaknesses together into a simple exploit (as opposed to basing the security on the best available techniques). If you've got a risk assessment that says people are actively trying to break your security, WPA is not for you. If you've got regulatory requirements to use strong crypto, WPA is not for you. If you don't think crypto attacks are a risk and you have no requirements, why even have the conversation? Use WEP or plaintext and be happy. I think it's dangerous to imply that WPA is just as good as WPA2, and there's no need to change, because you're setting people up for a really bad day when WPA is finally broken and they have to scramble to deploy something they should have already deployed.
You mentioned yourself that the encryption is based on RC4 (and then talked about "potential new weaknesses", which is weird, because RC4 has already been attacked quite a bit and is deprecated for any new application). More importantly, the TKIP algorithm depends on an integrity check routine based on a home grown hash called Michael which is cool from a "wow, they managed to shove a lot into obsolete hardware" standpoint, but is a material weakness compared to the CCMP implemented in 802.11i. Look at it this way: for most intruders, WEP (hell, even ROT-13) would be sufficient to protect your network. If you think that your level of risk necessitates encryption, why would you be using a solution which has known weaknesses compared to another solution which uses the best available cryptography? (It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a unique opinion--the reason 802.11i looks like WPA2 instead of WPA is that, based off discussions I had with people involved in the process at least as far back as '02, there was no chance that it would be approved by IEEE without standardizing on strong cryptography.) WPAs stated goals (look it up, the docs are there although increasingly hard to find since WPA2 was announced) were to paper over the worst problems with WEP, to give a little more life to hardware which couldn't handle stronger algorithms, and to provide a bridge to full 802.11i by allowing people to start implementing 802.1x EAPs. Note that none of those goals are anything like "implement the strongest available cryptography" or "deploy long-term wireless security". At this point everything you can buy implements WPA2, so why would you even consider using WPA?
Because they all technically had the same class of encryption you'd find in a VPN
Not true. WEP had a lousy encryption scheme designed by electrical engineers rather than cryptographers. WPA was built on the same foundation, to try to buy more life for obsolete hardware. IEEE 802.11i (rebranded "WPA2" to be less scary for consumers and make "WPA" sound like an ancestor rather than a bastard stepchild) was designed by cryptographers, and is built on much more robust standards and is no more or less vulnerable to crypto attacks than a well-implemented VPN (assuming that you're not trying to use PSK, which the standard says not to use).
Umm, WPA is the Wi-Fi Alliance's name for WEP+TKIP. It's no toy.
No, the GP was right--WPA is a joke in terms of security, and any serious installation should be using WPA2. (Which is really IEEE 802.11i, a reasonably good international standard for wireless security. WPA is a stripped-down subset of 802.11i for manufacturers too cheap to implement the full standard [which requires them to implement a strong encryption algorithm].)
That was my reaction, the standard advice going back a long ways was use WEP, but for the love of god also use VPN between the devices. I can't imagine why WPA or WPA2 would make people think that you should be ditching the VPN.
Since WPA2 uses the same encryption that you'd find in a VPN, I wonder why you think it would be less secure?
I've noticed that often 'old-school' telco data centers often seem to be much more sparing with the AC running 70F-85F vs. the 'high-tech' data centers who tend to run 'freeze your ass off' data centers. Something has always told me they had something (whether it was just being cheap or not).
Yeah, what they have is lower density in their racks.
There is another really smart thing you can do too. When it is hot inside and not hot outside yu can open a window. That seems obvious but how many office building have openable windows? For some reason Architects like to cool office space with AC even if there is "free" cool air out doors.
The reasons are things like: liability issues, chimney effects, people leaving the windows open even with the heat or a/c on, people leaving the windows open in the rain, bugs in the building, increased maintenance costs for more complex windows, etc. It turns out that architects aren't actually idiots and have thought about this.
This is even easier with computers. The servers would be happy to run at 95F and much of the time even in the American SW the outside air is cooler than 95F.
Your desktop can run at 95F ambient. If it has a variable speed fan it's probably screaming like a banshee. The key is how much heat can be dissipated, and at 95F ambient you can't move enough air through a dense computer system to cool the components down to a safe temperature. Even at 68F ambient people are have a lot of trouble moving enough air through modern super-dense racks to keep computers from seeing increased failure rates.
Now, the CX1 really is Cray in name only. Don't make the mistake of thinking of Cray as a maker of itty bitty clusters. Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4, NERSC has an almost 20,000-core XT4, and of course Red Storm has over 26,000 cores.
Umm, that is Cray in name only. The real Cray (Seymour) designed from scratch computers which had performance as their only goal, and which shattered the performance standards of their peers. He did not cobble together existing parts in basically the same way a half dozen other companies do. Now, you can argue whether something like the old Cray is even possible anymore, let alone economically viable, but you shouldn't pretend that the current Cray is in the same league.
Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.
Well, you must be doing something wrong. I can assure you that disk IO is significantly faster, network IO is significantly faster, scalability is better (so you can actually take advantage of newer hardware). In addition to the fast servers, I still regularly use a 486-class machine, and even that is nicely responsive with a 2.6.25 kernel. If you feel that your system is slow, blame your apps.
A 'car guy' is not necessarily good at running a business.
Not necessarily. But he certainly can't be worse than the idiot finance & sales guys running the business now.
I assume the "shrink" requirement is to preclude discussion of the most viable alternatives.
Be sure to watch the media over the next few days - you'll see pictures of dead and wounded, buildings destroyed, and many other realities of war. Now ask yourself why you don't see any of those images from Iraq. Ask why we saw silhouetted shots of helicopters and long views of nighttime explosions instead of what was really happening on the ground.
1. We did see such images from Iraq, just not many of them. Those we did see were generally stage managed (journalists were brought in by an opposition group) because...
2. It wasn't safe for journalists to wander freely in Iraq, either before or after the invasion. (Before the invasion you were liable to be arrested by Saddam's security services and after you were liable to be captured and beheaded by an insurgent group.)
3. Most of the images out of Iraq in the early stages came from reporters attached to US forces, and they tended to not take close-up pictures because US forces were not waging a close-up war.
If journalists are able to walk around freely in Georgia, it is a very different war. (If, on the other hand, they are only safe if escorted by Russian or Georgian troops, you should take the imagery with the same grain of salt you seem to apply to Iraq reporting.)
It was easy to be ignorant and happy with NTSC, and, let's face it, how could anybody have found VHS acceptable?
Because some people find the content to be more important than the specifications? I'd personally prefer a crappy VHS copy of a good movie to a really high def calibration image--but to each his own.
"You can be compelled to testify if the testimony is not self-incriminating."
Thanks for proving my point. Certainly proof that he knows the sole working password could incriminate him.
Please, explain how knowing a password he is expected to know would be in itself incriminating? And, as I said in the part that you neglected to quote, he could be granted immunity for evidence dependent on the password. The specifics of how that would work depend on the facts of the case (and the government might not be interested in pursuing the option), but it's definitely not the case that he can't be compelled to provide the password.