I doubt that they're inserted intentionally. If you insert an intentional backdoor, then there's a chance that it can be traced back to you. Pretty much any nontrivial program contains bugs, and if the program is written in C then a good fraction of those are exploitable. If you've got the resources to insert intentional vulnerabilities into open source code, then you've got the resources for the lower-risk strategy of auditing and fuzzing the code to finding some existing ones to exploit.
8GB is RAM was the minimum I was buying 4 years ago. Back then, it was because it was the sweet spot in price per GB. Unfortunately, in some machines it was the most that the board could support and so is now the thing making me ponder replacing the motherboards. Specifically, on my NAS box, because increasing the disks will increase the size of the deduplication tables, meaning that I'll need to increase the size of the RAM to get tolerable performance, meaning I'll need to replace the motherboard and CPU to be able to accommodate more RAM, meaning that I'll end up just keeping the case and optical drive - everything else is upgraded.
Swap out the hard disk for an SSD? The only machine I've bought in the past 6 years that wasn't SSD-only has been my NAS. The laptop I've just replaced had a 256GB SSD and it was replaced with one that has a 1TB SSD. Buying hard disks hasn't made sense for years unless you need a lot of storage that you rarely access (i.e. NAS / SAN uses), and even then adding an SSD for L2ARC makes sense (as long as you have enough RAM).
Upgrade the video card? I've not done anything that taxes the GPU in my old laptop, but then I'm not a gamer.
Not wanting to upgrade the CPU? You claim two bottlenecks. The first is disk to RAM. My laptop's SSD can do over 300MB/s sustained transfer and over 60MB/s on small random files. With a reasonable amount of RAM, the only limiting factor is the SSD write speed, because all of the working set lives in RAM. If you think that RAM to cache bandwidth is a bottleneck, then you're running some very unusual workloads. If you're doing the sorts of things where a 6-10 year old CPU is still fine, then you probably don't need to upgrade the machine at all: my mother was quite happily using a desktop of that sort of vintage, with no upgrades, until she replaced it with a laptop last year.
For reference, the machines I use when I need a bit more processing power than my laptop have dual (ZFS, mirrored) 3TB disks, 512GB SSDs split between log and cache device and 256GB of RAM. The large log devices speed up write performance, because you're almost always doing sustained linear writes to the spinning rust. The 256GB of RAM means that you very rarely even hit the SSD for loading files. They have 24 cores, and I can very easily saturate them all. If you gave me a 48 core machine, I'd use that instead, but currently the extra performance isn't worth the cost (doubling the number of cores roughly halves the time it takes for various things, but the linear gain is much smaller - going from one hour to half an hour was a big win, so was to quarter of an hour. Going from three minutes to one and a half minutes isn't that exciting).
I did this for my NAS, but it was more expensive than an HP microserver with a similar form factor. The only reason that I did it was that I wanted to be able to use the machine for XBMC so I wanted a slightly better GPU. The only bit that I'm likely to upgrade is the disks, and even then I had to make some compromises (the case has 4 removable disk bays and a slimline optical drive bay, but I couldn't find a motherboard that had everything I wanted and more than 4 SATA slots, so I can't use one of the disk bays).
I used to think desktop computers were upgradable, but it's not really true. Sure, you can bump the RAM and the disk easily, but by the time a new CPU is worth the bother, the socket and chipset have changed, so you need to buy a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a different kind of RAM. The hard disk might still work if you're lucky (although you may find that the interface type has changed) but it's probably going to be the bottleneck in the new system so you probably want to upgrade it too.
The last time I upgraded a desktop, I kept the case and optical drive (which I replaced a bit later). I kept the hard disk, but added a second one and eventually stopped using the smaller one. After the next upgrade, I had enough parts to build a completely new desktop. If two upgrade cycles means that you've replaced every single part, then it's simpler and easier to just lengthen the upgrade cycles a bit and by a completely new system.
That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink.
I guess you missed the huge amount of regulation that has come in regarding pollution in waterways in the last 50 or so years then? Or do you think that this prediction would still have been wrong if factories had been allowed to keep dumping waste into rivers? In fact, maybe you should just try visiting some of the parts of India and China where they've managed to build an industrial base without such regulation and see how the water tastes. The entire point of making such predictions is so that we can avoid them happening.
Arguing the facts doesn't appear to work. Read the posts above yours. A number of them are full of assertions with no citations backing them, followed by responses citing data showing that they're wrong. In a world full of rational people wanting to have an informed debate, that would be the end. Now go back to the last story about climate change on Slashdot. You'll see the same assertions being made, by the same people, and being contradicted then too. At some point, you have to just accept that either these people have some vested interest in denying the evidence and so can't be convinced by more evidence.
It's more common in the sciences, where the convention is to provide a LaTeX stylesheet. In subjects where manuscripts are submitted in Word format, the typesetting by the authors tends to be so bad that you need to have a professional redo it.
Moore's law applies. The reason the Mac was so much cheaper than the Alto was that it was a decade later. The Alto was also heavily designed for experimentation. Programs were compiled to a bytecode with the bytecode interpreter implemented in CPU microcode. This made it very easy to change the instruction set and find one that was well suited to the requirements of the software, but for a commercial product you'd have wanted to sink a lot of that logic into the hardware.
No, this is what Slashdot has always been. I started regularly reading Slashdot around 2000, and back then there were posts just like yours decrying the state of Slashdot today, pining for some golden age. And yet, looking at the archives, not much had changed.
And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.
There are also costs associated with taking cash. Having to store large amounts of cash, having to audit tills more often, having to transport it to the bank, increased security needed as a result of being a much more attractive burglary target, and so on. For large stores, these tend to be more than the cost of accepting cards (next time you're in a supermarket, imagine if every transaction was cash. Think about how much they'd have on the premises by the end of the working day.
The difference is that the costs of accepting cash don't scale linearly, whereas credit card fees do. For a small shop with a low turnover, cash is often a better deal, but for a large shop it isn't. I came across a paper a few years ago that compared the two and was quite surprised by how much handling cash costs even small businesses.
They don't hate you, but you're probably not their favourite customer. The most profitable people are the ones that have high income and poor impulse control, who will buy an expensive thing periodically and then take a few months (at 10+% interest) to pay it off.
The people who put through a lot of purchases and pay promptly are the next best - they're charging the merchant 1-3% of the total purchase price to lend you the money for a month, which is a pretty good interest rate for the lender. I put a load of work expenses on my card and so last time I had an issue with a fee that I disputed, my card company immediately and without quibble cancelled the fee and added a good-will payment to my card, because the fee was about 5% of the profit that they make on me in a year.
For some card companies, the people who massively overspend are a good long-term investment. They get a (relatively cheap) court judgement against these people, which requires them to pay back a small amount each month for a very long term. It generally works out to 5-10% annual interest, but pretty much guaranteed over a 10-25 year period. The risk is very low and they're a steady stream of income for an up-front capital investment. This is why you get a lot of card companies advertising to students and other low-income groups.
While technically true, there are some corner cases. In the UK, Jeremy Clarkson discovered this when he tried to prove a point by posting his account number and sort code online. He then discovered that it's possible to set up a direct debit with just this and a signature. Anyone that accepts direct debit payments is bound by the code of conduct that requires them to return anything taken by that mechanism if it's disputed and they're easy to cancel, but he did end up being signed up to donate money to a few charities. You'll get the money back in the end, but there's a lot of inconvenience possible until you do.
I remember having a Quake directory that was 500MB, when the original game was about 50MB. 90% of it was user-generated content. This included a load of maps and a load of mods. I don't remember the names of all of the maps, but I do remember that almost all of the time we played was on third-party maps, not on ones that came with the game.
I don't know why you've been modded troll. The problem isn't binary files, it's complex files. All of your log files are binary, the difference is that you have a load of small tools that can work with the ASCII / UTF-8 text ones easily. As long as there's a small program that can be statically linked and run from a recovery medium to turn the log files into something that other tools can handle (or, ideally, can search them faster) then there's no issue. The problem is systems where you need the entire GUI and a big chunk of the userland applications stack working to be able to read logs.
Bennett has been posting these long ramblings since a very long time before Dice bought Slashdot. Unfortunately, I think that your complaints are not likely to be heard because Slashdot seems to have had a policy for a long time of not recruiting editors from people who regularly read the site...
You might want to read some news from the last decade. Microsoft started paying dividends in 2003 and has paid them annually. When they started, investors were unhappy because it showed that they no longer thought that the best thing to do to increase value was to invest the money in the company.
You're a decade out. Microsoft's initial success was Microsoft BASIC, which was actually pretty good, back in the '70s. IBM wanted them to port BASIC to the PC and, when their negotiations for CP/M as the OS fell through, asked MS to write them an OS too. MS bought QDOS and rebranded it (and there was a lawsuit later about this, so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS). They also sold MS DOS to PC clone makers, which helped cement them in the market. At the time, there were a number of MS DOS clones that were better, but they made their other products depend on their own version to force others out of the market. By the '90s, with Windows 3.0 only running on MS DOS, they were getting pretty good at it...
That's generally how Amazon operates. Lose money to establish a dominant market position, then start working out how to make that profitable. People used to comment that their business was to lose money on each sale, but make up for it in volume. It was a facetious comment, but with a grain of truth: Amazon couldn't afford to sell books the way that they did until they were selling enough that they could own a lot of distribution infrastructure and amortise the costs.
Ballmer isn't in any place to complain. The XBox and Zune followed the same model when he was MS CEO. It didn't work so well for the Zune, but the XBox spent years losing money before it had a sufficiently large market share to be profitable.
But if he'd had a loaded gun, then after shooting him in the back with a shotgun then the attacker would have been able to upgrade his gun to something military issue (as we've all done in FPS games) and would have been a much more convincing threat when he got to Parliament. This omission has caused a lot of extra work for the PR folks trying to garner public support for removing more freedoms from the general public and so needs fixing before next time.
Indeed. People have been complaining about Bennett for about 10 years. The real complaint is that the editors keep posting his ramblings, not that he writes them in the first place.
In China if you say "The Communist Party are a bunch of cock smoking douchebags," you can expect trouble. In Mandarin.
Unless you are part of a protest group (organised or not) with more than about 25K members, you probably won't. The Party knows that people blowing off steam are not a threat, but are easy to turn into people who are a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that they're inserted intentionally. If you insert an intentional backdoor, then there's a chance that it can be traced back to you. Pretty much any nontrivial program contains bugs, and if the program is written in C then a good fraction of those are exploitable. If you've got the resources to insert intentional vulnerabilities into open source code, then you've got the resources for the lower-risk strategy of auditing and fuzzing the code to finding some existing ones to exploit.
8GB is RAM was the minimum I was buying 4 years ago. Back then, it was because it was the sweet spot in price per GB. Unfortunately, in some machines it was the most that the board could support and so is now the thing making me ponder replacing the motherboards. Specifically, on my NAS box, because increasing the disks will increase the size of the deduplication tables, meaning that I'll need to increase the size of the RAM to get tolerable performance, meaning I'll need to replace the motherboard and CPU to be able to accommodate more RAM, meaning that I'll end up just keeping the case and optical drive - everything else is upgraded.
Swap out the hard disk for an SSD? The only machine I've bought in the past 6 years that wasn't SSD-only has been my NAS. The laptop I've just replaced had a 256GB SSD and it was replaced with one that has a 1TB SSD. Buying hard disks hasn't made sense for years unless you need a lot of storage that you rarely access (i.e. NAS / SAN uses), and even then adding an SSD for L2ARC makes sense (as long as you have enough RAM).
Upgrade the video card? I've not done anything that taxes the GPU in my old laptop, but then I'm not a gamer.
Not wanting to upgrade the CPU? You claim two bottlenecks. The first is disk to RAM. My laptop's SSD can do over 300MB/s sustained transfer and over 60MB/s on small random files. With a reasonable amount of RAM, the only limiting factor is the SSD write speed, because all of the working set lives in RAM. If you think that RAM to cache bandwidth is a bottleneck, then you're running some very unusual workloads. If you're doing the sorts of things where a 6-10 year old CPU is still fine, then you probably don't need to upgrade the machine at all: my mother was quite happily using a desktop of that sort of vintage, with no upgrades, until she replaced it with a laptop last year.
For reference, the machines I use when I need a bit more processing power than my laptop have dual (ZFS, mirrored) 3TB disks, 512GB SSDs split between log and cache device and 256GB of RAM. The large log devices speed up write performance, because you're almost always doing sustained linear writes to the spinning rust. The 256GB of RAM means that you very rarely even hit the SSD for loading files. They have 24 cores, and I can very easily saturate them all. If you gave me a 48 core machine, I'd use that instead, but currently the extra performance isn't worth the cost (doubling the number of cores roughly halves the time it takes for various things, but the linear gain is much smaller - going from one hour to half an hour was a big win, so was to quarter of an hour. Going from three minutes to one and a half minutes isn't that exciting).
I did this for my NAS, but it was more expensive than an HP microserver with a similar form factor. The only reason that I did it was that I wanted to be able to use the machine for XBMC so I wanted a slightly better GPU. The only bit that I'm likely to upgrade is the disks, and even then I had to make some compromises (the case has 4 removable disk bays and a slimline optical drive bay, but I couldn't find a motherboard that had everything I wanted and more than 4 SATA slots, so I can't use one of the disk bays).
I used to think desktop computers were upgradable, but it's not really true. Sure, you can bump the RAM and the disk easily, but by the time a new CPU is worth the bother, the socket and chipset have changed, so you need to buy a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a different kind of RAM. The hard disk might still work if you're lucky (although you may find that the interface type has changed) but it's probably going to be the bottleneck in the new system so you probably want to upgrade it too.
The last time I upgraded a desktop, I kept the case and optical drive (which I replaced a bit later). I kept the hard disk, but added a second one and eventually stopped using the smaller one. After the next upgrade, I had enough parts to build a completely new desktop. If two upgrade cycles means that you've replaced every single part, then it's simpler and easier to just lengthen the upgrade cycles a bit and by a completely new system.
That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink.
I guess you missed the huge amount of regulation that has come in regarding pollution in waterways in the last 50 or so years then? Or do you think that this prediction would still have been wrong if factories had been allowed to keep dumping waste into rivers? In fact, maybe you should just try visiting some of the parts of India and China where they've managed to build an industrial base without such regulation and see how the water tastes. The entire point of making such predictions is so that we can avoid them happening.
Arguing the facts doesn't appear to work. Read the posts above yours. A number of them are full of assertions with no citations backing them, followed by responses citing data showing that they're wrong. In a world full of rational people wanting to have an informed debate, that would be the end. Now go back to the last story about climate change on Slashdot. You'll see the same assertions being made, by the same people, and being contradicted then too. At some point, you have to just accept that either these people have some vested interest in denying the evidence and so can't be convinced by more evidence.
It's more common in the sciences, where the convention is to provide a LaTeX stylesheet. In subjects where manuscripts are submitted in Word format, the typesetting by the authors tends to be so bad that you need to have a professional redo it.
Moore's law applies. The reason the Mac was so much cheaper than the Alto was that it was a decade later. The Alto was also heavily designed for experimentation. Programs were compiled to a bytecode with the bytecode interpreter implemented in CPU microcode. This made it very easy to change the instruction set and find one that was well suited to the requirements of the software, but for a commercial product you'd have wanted to sink a lot of that logic into the hardware.
Let me guess. You were reading at +2 back then?
So this is what Slashdot has become.
No, this is what Slashdot has always been. I started regularly reading Slashdot around 2000, and back then there were posts just like yours decrying the state of Slashdot today, pining for some golden age. And yet, looking at the archives, not much had changed.
And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.
There are also costs associated with taking cash. Having to store large amounts of cash, having to audit tills more often, having to transport it to the bank, increased security needed as a result of being a much more attractive burglary target, and so on. For large stores, these tend to be more than the cost of accepting cards (next time you're in a supermarket, imagine if every transaction was cash. Think about how much they'd have on the premises by the end of the working day.
The difference is that the costs of accepting cash don't scale linearly, whereas credit card fees do. For a small shop with a low turnover, cash is often a better deal, but for a large shop it isn't. I came across a paper a few years ago that compared the two and was quite surprised by how much handling cash costs even small businesses.
They don't hate you, but you're probably not their favourite customer. The most profitable people are the ones that have high income and poor impulse control, who will buy an expensive thing periodically and then take a few months (at 10+% interest) to pay it off.
The people who put through a lot of purchases and pay promptly are the next best - they're charging the merchant 1-3% of the total purchase price to lend you the money for a month, which is a pretty good interest rate for the lender. I put a load of work expenses on my card and so last time I had an issue with a fee that I disputed, my card company immediately and without quibble cancelled the fee and added a good-will payment to my card, because the fee was about 5% of the profit that they make on me in a year.
For some card companies, the people who massively overspend are a good long-term investment. They get a (relatively cheap) court judgement against these people, which requires them to pay back a small amount each month for a very long term. It generally works out to 5-10% annual interest, but pretty much guaranteed over a 10-25 year period. The risk is very low and they're a steady stream of income for an up-front capital investment. This is why you get a lot of card companies advertising to students and other low-income groups.
While technically true, there are some corner cases. In the UK, Jeremy Clarkson discovered this when he tried to prove a point by posting his account number and sort code online. He then discovered that it's possible to set up a direct debit with just this and a signature. Anyone that accepts direct debit payments is bound by the code of conduct that requires them to return anything taken by that mechanism if it's disputed and they're easy to cancel, but he did end up being signed up to donate money to a few charities. You'll get the money back in the end, but there's a lot of inconvenience possible until you do.
I know it's hard to remember the first statement in a post by the time you get to the end, but I'd recommend trying before you write a snide reply.
I remember having a Quake directory that was 500MB, when the original game was about 50MB. 90% of it was user-generated content. This included a load of maps and a load of mods. I don't remember the names of all of the maps, but I do remember that almost all of the time we played was on third-party maps, not on ones that came with the game.
If your system uptime relies on individual nodes having high uptime, then you're doing it wrong.
I don't know why you've been modded troll. The problem isn't binary files, it's complex files. All of your log files are binary, the difference is that you have a load of small tools that can work with the ASCII / UTF-8 text ones easily. As long as there's a small program that can be statically linked and run from a recovery medium to turn the log files into something that other tools can handle (or, ideally, can search them faster) then there's no issue. The problem is systems where you need the entire GUI and a big chunk of the userland applications stack working to be able to read logs.
Bennett has been posting these long ramblings since a very long time before Dice bought Slashdot. Unfortunately, I think that your complaints are not likely to be heard because Slashdot seems to have had a policy for a long time of not recruiting editors from people who regularly read the site...
You might want to read some news from the last decade. Microsoft started paying dividends in 2003 and has paid them annually. When they started, investors were unhappy because it showed that they no longer thought that the best thing to do to increase value was to invest the money in the company.
You're a decade out. Microsoft's initial success was Microsoft BASIC, which was actually pretty good, back in the '70s. IBM wanted them to port BASIC to the PC and, when their negotiations for CP/M as the OS fell through, asked MS to write them an OS too. MS bought QDOS and rebranded it (and there was a lawsuit later about this, so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS). They also sold MS DOS to PC clone makers, which helped cement them in the market. At the time, there were a number of MS DOS clones that were better, but they made their other products depend on their own version to force others out of the market. By the '90s, with Windows 3.0 only running on MS DOS, they were getting pretty good at it...
That's generally how Amazon operates. Lose money to establish a dominant market position, then start working out how to make that profitable. People used to comment that their business was to lose money on each sale, but make up for it in volume. It was a facetious comment, but with a grain of truth: Amazon couldn't afford to sell books the way that they did until they were selling enough that they could own a lot of distribution infrastructure and amortise the costs.
Ballmer isn't in any place to complain. The XBox and Zune followed the same model when he was MS CEO. It didn't work so well for the Zune, but the XBox spent years losing money before it had a sufficiently large market share to be profitable.
But if he'd had a loaded gun, then after shooting him in the back with a shotgun then the attacker would have been able to upgrade his gun to something military issue (as we've all done in FPS games) and would have been a much more convincing threat when he got to Parliament. This omission has caused a lot of extra work for the PR folks trying to garner public support for removing more freedoms from the general public and so needs fixing before next time.
Indeed. People have been complaining about Bennett for about 10 years. The real complaint is that the editors keep posting his ramblings, not that he writes them in the first place.
In China if you say "The Communist Party are a bunch of cock smoking douchebags," you can expect trouble. In Mandarin.
Unless you are part of a protest group (organised or not) with more than about 25K members, you probably won't. The Party knows that people blowing off steam are not a threat, but are easy to turn into people who are a threat.