Unless this NSA thing really starts to get out of hand. There's nothing to distract the sheeple like live 24 hours coverage of USA military might on Fox.
Not to say that anything that comes out of the mouth of The Intelligence Committee (as they have publicly and repeatedly revealed that they are more than comfortable lying to the plebs of the public), this again focuses on the smear campaign, not the issues raised themselves.
What is fairly inarguable - government isn't really denying much (skirting around technicalities mostly), trying to argue that it's all kosher because secret court said so and doing their best to focus the attention on the messenger, not the message.
Now, I don't have problem with anyone spying on anyone, that's reality of the current world. What I do have fairly big problem is the cost of finding something to pin you down. As a simple example:
Imagine you are walking on the street, meet some lowly bureaucrat of the local town house and look at him 'all wrong'. Now, normally he would have to spend some time and effort if he felt pissed off and wanted to get you to a death row (well, or at least, suitably mess up your life). Look for probable cause, find some of your neighbours to agree that you are a menace to society and something should be done about you, all that kind of stuff.
Now he can just get back to the office, check in on your name, bring up, let's say, last 20 years of your communications, known associates, keyword tagged internet history and voila - you were in the same dorm in college as that very bad dude they found growing marijuana, you have been known to receive calls from somebody who has been receiving calls from somebody who has been to middle east and in October, 2018 you wrote on that Slashdot site that "all government officials are pigs and you would want to inflict physical harm to them in close and personal fashion". A SUSPECTED DOMESTIC TERRORIST ALERT!!!
(I hope I don't need to explain what happens when somebody writes a bash script to automate the example above or your chances of leading normal life when the FBI raids your home and workplace based on the probable cause provided above...)
You see, the problem is that none of the things 'revealed' are all that surprising. Security circles have been screaming at top of their lungs about this and much much worse (in example - with calls metadata collection, has it ever occurred to you that splicing a couple of fibres and collecting the raw feeds in transit just outside the operator network boundary is fairly trivial? It all has to travel over 'public' backbones these days. Metadata just helps to link the raw IP capture to a particular call afterwards), the challenge always has been to get the average Joe Blogs to understand why and why that might be a problem.
In short - average person can understand that somebody might be opening their mail in the post office (and are rightly pissed off and ready to fight). Computers are just damn too hard, so they tend to ignore or not understand the implications. Everything else is different levels of obfuscation by government and whistle-blowers.
I run annual benchmarks inside companies for Intel vs. AMD and have for over a decade. These benchmarks show real world performance of Unigraphics, CATIA, HyperMesh, MSC Patran, Ansys, and Muses. CATIA and Ansys are always the worst on AMD, as they have both been assimilated by DirectX over OpenGL with no option to force OpenGL. They still however slightly favor AMD over Intel.
I'm not sure how to parse this paragraph - you are saying that CATIA/Ansys are losing on AMD (unsure how that would be related to graphics pipeline used), yet you say that AMD is still favoured.
Assuming you can share some of your data, perhaps you can expand on where and by what margins you see specific advantages/disadvantages between Intel/AMD?
That is interesting. Are you in a position to go in more details?
(from my experience the game between amd and intel is a bit of a cat and mouse game. My previous system was AMD64x2 which was bounds and leaps above P4, since core2 came out AMD hasn't come even close to something that could match it on general performance/watt/price budget. Then again my primary machine is i5-760 which I find a plenty and my work stuff happens on top of the range xeons)
AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs.
It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.
You seem not to understand how the computers work and in particular where the bottlenecks around storage are. There is no reason for 'internal' raid controller to be 'much faster'. None.
Blame your phone battery on it too then - your sim card is more likely to run java than not (I'm not kidding, embedded java is actually fairly mature thing).
You know, if only there was a way for the government to clear this all up in a quick and efficient manner where public would trust their answers, none of this would have happened. Might be the chinese, might be not. The root of the problem is that you will be hard pressed to find a person that will trust anything that comes out of a mouth of government official (bush, obama, clinton, whatever).
At the other end of support contract you still only have hired bodies. They might be smart, they might be shit, when it comes to software nobody ever is going to give you a warranty that in case if you find a show-stopper bug it will be fixed within an hour (when it comes to hardware it's a bit easier - you are dealing with basic logistics, not the halting problem).
And you'd be surprised of the quality of the 'admins' you can hire on the market. Good ones (paid reasonable salary and looked after) will be more than happy to do a proper debug in case of issues and perhaps even pre-emptively go for the sources and verify the code paths that might be a problem in the future (here's one thinking of you, P.M. and A.I.;))
Well, maybe the admin in question got used to querying the/proc directly doing the maths in his head and simply never felt the need to look for the easy opt-out which doesn't really give all that much useful information in the first place?;)
If you are an organisation in charge of fairly personal details of the upcoming generation and you somehow decide to put in on a public web server in nice sequential HTML pages (not even attempting to add any kind of authentication), plus, miss the traffic spike by somebody downloading the hell out of it from small subset of IP's...
There used to be laws that protected people that pointed out large scale incompetence by organisations that really should know better. If I found 20 boxes containing the tax records of most senior government officials while working in landfill, I wouldn't be the guilty party. Whoever failed to secure them properly would be looking at end of his career if not a criminal liability though.
There is NO expectation of privacy once you put something on a public server. There is no such thing as *private* server if it is accessible by public. Your server authorises access to the information when it responds to an ordinary request with 'yup, here you go'.
Show me something comparable* to MacBook Air and I'll be more than happy to try it out.
*Price. Quality. Resale value. Longevity.
Apple have found a very interesting niche mass-producing high-end quality products. Nobody else has managed to come close quality wise and all that investment in taking a BSD kernel and sprucing it up for modern expectations has paid off quite nicely too. The cost is not absurd, in fact, for what I'm getting, I consider it surprisingly cheap.
Perhaps could have worded it better - as far as I'm concerned they have the hardware in question, they can help themselves to all they want to 'produce' the data whatever means they have at their disposal (and I'm sure NSA would be more than happy to oblige and disclose their true capabilities in public court).
Requiring/ordering anyone to provide their passwords is absurd and should be shot down with a big flamethrower outright. (irrespective of the particulars of this case or the obvious claims to think of the children, the terrorists and muslims coming shortly notwithstanding, the potential of abuse of such precedent in wide range of areas starting from journalism, activists and going all the way down to divorce cases or misdemeanours is... unbelievably large.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, at least they have got Internet Explorer!
We can only hope? That is a corporate PR exercise after all, whoever actually signs up is bound to be a tool.
Technically - microwave links have some of the lowest latency available. Much better than cable or DSL, on par with optical.
Seriously. Financial traders are using them as alternative to optical when they cannot get a straight enough fiber line.
Oh FFS - this isn't reddit!
Unless this NSA thing really starts to get out of hand. There's nothing to distract the sheeple like live 24 hours coverage of USA military might on Fox.
Who do you think will be the least untruthful?
Not to say that anything that comes out of the mouth of The Intelligence Committee (as they have publicly and repeatedly revealed that they are more than comfortable lying to the plebs of the public), this again focuses on the smear campaign, not the issues raised themselves.
What is fairly inarguable - government isn't really denying much (skirting around technicalities mostly), trying to argue that it's all kosher because secret court said so and doing their best to focus the attention on the messenger, not the message.
Now, I don't have problem with anyone spying on anyone, that's reality of the current world. What I do have fairly big problem is the cost of finding something to pin you down. As a simple example:
Imagine you are walking on the street, meet some lowly bureaucrat of the local town house and look at him 'all wrong'. Now, normally he would have to spend some time and effort if he felt pissed off and wanted to get you to a death row (well, or at least, suitably mess up your life). Look for probable cause, find some of your neighbours to agree that you are a menace to society and something should be done about you, all that kind of stuff.
Now he can just get back to the office, check in on your name, bring up, let's say, last 20 years of your communications, known associates, keyword tagged internet history and voila - you were in the same dorm in college as that very bad dude they found growing marijuana, you have been known to receive calls from somebody who has been receiving calls from somebody who has been to middle east and in October, 2018 you wrote on that Slashdot site that "all government officials are pigs and you would want to inflict physical harm to them in close and personal fashion". A SUSPECTED DOMESTIC TERRORIST ALERT!!!
(I hope I don't need to explain what happens when somebody writes a bash script to automate the example above or your chances of leading normal life when the FBI raids your home and workplace based on the probable cause provided above...)
You see, the problem is that none of the things 'revealed' are all that surprising. Security circles have been screaming at top of their lungs about this and much much worse (in example - with calls metadata collection, has it ever occurred to you that splicing a couple of fibres and collecting the raw feeds in transit just outside the operator network boundary is fairly trivial? It all has to travel over 'public' backbones these days. Metadata just helps to link the raw IP capture to a particular call afterwards), the challenge always has been to get the average Joe Blogs to understand why and why that might be a problem.
In short - average person can understand that somebody might be opening their mail in the post office (and are rightly pissed off and ready to fight). Computers are just damn too hard, so they tend to ignore or not understand the implications. Everything else is different levels of obfuscation by government and whistle-blowers.
I run annual benchmarks inside companies for Intel vs. AMD and have for over a decade. These benchmarks show real world performance of Unigraphics, CATIA, HyperMesh, MSC Patran, Ansys, and Muses. CATIA and Ansys are always the worst on AMD, as they have both been assimilated by DirectX over OpenGL with no option to force OpenGL. They still however slightly favor AMD over Intel.
I'm not sure how to parse this paragraph - you are saying that CATIA/Ansys are losing on AMD (unsure how that would be related to graphics pipeline used), yet you say that AMD is still favoured.
Assuming you can share some of your data, perhaps you can expand on where and by what margins you see specific advantages/disadvantages between Intel/AMD?
That is interesting. Are you in a position to go in more details?
(from my experience the game between amd and intel is a bit of a cat and mouse game. My previous system was AMD64x2 which was bounds and leaps above P4, since core2 came out AMD hasn't come even close to something that could match it on general performance/watt/price budget. Then again my primary machine is i5-760 which I find a plenty and my work stuff happens on top of the range xeons)
AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs.
It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.
You seem not to understand how the computers work and in particular where the bottlenecks around storage are. There is no reason for 'internal' raid controller to be 'much faster'. None.
Blame your phone battery on it too then - your sim card is more likely to run java than not (I'm not kidding, embedded java is actually fairly mature thing).
You know, if only there was a way for the government to clear this all up in a quick and efficient manner where public would trust their answers, none of this would have happened. Might be the chinese, might be not. The root of the problem is that you will be hard pressed to find a person that will trust anything that comes out of a mouth of government official (bush, obama, clinton, whatever).
I give you $100 a month for 10 years.
You suddenly decide you want to be nice and decide to give it all back.
You give me $100 and then another $100 next month. And announce that you are even.
Simple enough for you?
Sounds like a pretty good improvement on the existing track record!
Gnome is not the problem. X11 is.
You have never actually used MS SQL Server, haven't you?
At the other end of support contract you still only have hired bodies. They might be smart, they might be shit, when it comes to software nobody ever is going to give you a warranty that in case if you find a show-stopper bug it will be fixed within an hour (when it comes to hardware it's a bit easier - you are dealing with basic logistics, not the halting problem).
And you'd be surprised of the quality of the 'admins' you can hire on the market. Good ones (paid reasonable salary and looked after) will be more than happy to do a proper debug in case of issues and perhaps even pre-emptively go for the sources and verify the code paths that might be a problem in the future (here's one thinking of you, P.M. and A.I. ;))
They could try copying ribbon?
Well, maybe the admin in question got used to querying the /proc directly doing the maths in his head and simply never felt the need to look for the easy opt-out which doesn't really give all that much useful information in the first place? ;)
If you are an organisation in charge of fairly personal details of the upcoming generation and you somehow decide to put in on a public web server in nice sequential HTML pages (not even attempting to add any kind of authentication), plus, miss the traffic spike by somebody downloading the hell out of it from small subset of IP's...
There used to be laws that protected people that pointed out large scale incompetence by organisations that really should know better. If I found 20 boxes containing the tax records of most senior government officials while working in landfill, I wouldn't be the guilty party. Whoever failed to secure them properly would be looking at end of his career if not a criminal liability though.
There is NO expectation of privacy once you put something on a public server. There is no such thing as *private* server if it is accessible by public. Your server authorises access to the information when it responds to an ordinary request with 'yup, here you go'.
Stop mixing OSS with "source available" software...
Show me something comparable* to MacBook Air and I'll be more than happy to try it out.
*Price. Quality. Resale value. Longevity.
Apple have found a very interesting niche mass-producing high-end quality products. Nobody else has managed to come close quality wise and all that investment in taking a BSD kernel and sprucing it up for modern expectations has paid off quite nicely too. The cost is not absurd, in fact, for what I'm getting, I consider it surprisingly cheap.
Perhaps could have worded it better - as far as I'm concerned they have the hardware in question, they can help themselves to all they want to 'produce' the data whatever means they have at their disposal (and I'm sure NSA would be more than happy to oblige and disclose their true capabilities in public court).
Requiring/ordering anyone to provide their passwords is absurd and should be shot down with a big flamethrower outright. (irrespective of the particulars of this case or the obvious claims to think of the children, the terrorists and muslims coming shortly notwithstanding, the potential of abuse of such precedent in wide range of areas starting from journalism, activists and going all the way down to divorce cases or misdemeanours is ... unbelievably large.)