The problem is that FreeBSD doesn't update packages after a release. So you're installing ancient software with security holes if you use packages after awhile. If you care at all about security, you must use ports.
There are a few options coming down the pipe here. You can use PC-BSD with their PBI format which has a subset of FreeBSD packages. You could also wait for the next MidnightBSD release. We have a totally new package system written from scratch and we're based on FreeBSD 7.
Simple answer is that Redhat based distros did have their heyday. It was before Ubuntu existed. By the time Redhat 9 came out, people were already looking for options. Redhat decided to go pay only and then release a beta version (Fedora) to the general public rather than a stable distro. Now, Fedora can be very stable but it has a fast release cycle and by nature it's not meant for mature deployments.
Then there's CentOS. That has the inverse problem.. it tracks Redhat and has ancient versions of software. When it's first released, it's tolerable but by the end of the release cycle when you're on a really old version of PHP and Apache that doesn't work with new stuff.. it's a nightmare. It's not usable for development because it's too old. It's not good for servers because you can't run recent versions of any PHP app.
There's also usability... Ubuntu had better hardware support and better installation tools than Redhat for desktop/laptop use. It was easier to install. It's easier to use. It got a rep for being easy.
Finally, Redhat has made it clear they think Linux will never be ready for the desktop. They don't even try to do that anymore. It's as much a perception issue as a real one.
I know people that have setup their mom's with Ubuntu and Mint. I've never met anyone who set mom up with Redhat or Fedora.
A common approach is to make a long list based on a dictionary. Some software will generate the list and also add numbers to it. Then the hashes are computed for each word and tested against the hashed password. They don't actually need to match the word just something that hashes equivalently to it. So there's actually more than one "answer" that works.
The program is that you can generate a list in a few days and using modern graphics cards, crack quite a few things in a short amount of time. Some websites make it harder by combining something unique with each password before it's hashed. That way one table won't work for every password to test.
Performance. If you encrypt everything, you have to decrypt on every web page request to their forums. That is going to take a lot of CPU type if it's a decent algorithm. Most likely it wouldn't be in order to make it work at all.
Also, if you encrypt everything, it's impossible to search. You would have to decrypt ALL THE DATA to do a search or it would have to be stored unencrypted in an index. It just doesn't make sense.
Finally, as you pointed out the server would have to have the decryption key. If they root the web server, they can get access to the key and then use it to decrypt everything anyway.
I'm paying about $75 a month for it, but I don't have to worry about IP addresses changing and my wife doesn't complain anymore about her world of warcraft experience. For that alone, it's worth the money.
You could always get a business class account like I did. Then you get 5 static IPs allocated to you that never change. I've even moved and they ported the IPs with my account. Not to mention it's faster and you get more upstream bandwidth.
The problem with this is botnets and amazon cloud instances. I see a lot of spam coming from all over the place now. In the old days, blocking the bastards in sendmail or the firewall was enough. Now, they just come at you from a new IP address within hours.
You keep jumping back to literature. There are several types of English degrees. When you study technical writing, you must take a few literature courses, but most courses cover technical writing and technical editing. English majors learn how to make web pages, write content for the web, etc. In fact, I'd say that as far as learning HTML and CSS, my English course was much thorough and difficult that the computer science course which also covered PHP. I consider that a failure of the CS prof, but it's the truth. I already had professional experience designing and developing web applications, but many of my classmates needed tutoring.
Some English majors focus on literature, poetry or theater, but technical writers have to understand context of the subject matter they're writing about. I took 6 courses on writing as an English minor. Courses included "Writing, Style and Technology", "Writing in the Professional World", "Technical Writing", "Technical Editing", an intro course and an oddball journalism course. I also took two literature courses. This does not include the courses I had taken in community college.
My point is that I know how terrible science degrees can be, but some other types of degrees are not a picnic. Then there's business degrees.
This is not true. On my Mac OS X box, I've got Firefox, Chrome and Safari running. I just started Firefox and Chrome.
Firefox (8 beta) on startup is using 159.3MB of real memory and 166MB virtual with 22 threads running. Chrome (15.0.874.106) is using 50MB of real memory with 219.1MB virtual and 28 threads. Safari (latest on lion, which has been running for days and has 12 tabs running) is using 194.3MB of ram with 358.2 virtual and 13 threads.
This test isn't fair to safari, but valid for the other two browsers. Before one blames firefox add ons, i only have firebug installed. I think that's fair since every other browser has those features built in.
This is incorrect. An English major must learn how to write effectively. That takes practice and learning new skills. If technical writing were easy, everyone could write a well written manual for their software.
A valid argument might be that engineers and scientists often have to take difficult, useless courses along with their major that slow them down. For example, I had to take physics and electrical engineering courses with my computer science degree. The EE courses were not too bad, but the physics courses were a nightmare. We couldn't take the normal courses that majors and others could take. Instead, we had accelerated courses. Now, the EE courses were helpful in understanding certain aspects of hardware that relate to my hobby, but I've yet to use the physics courses. In fact, the only use case I've seen for a physics course for a computer science major is if they are interested in game programming. At WMU, I didn't know anyone in CS that could get a degree in four years. Even taking summer classes and never screwing up, one had to go 5 years. There was just too much to take and availability problems.
Not all IT can be outsourced. Someone has to go onsite some times. As for programming, there are still quite a few jobs. You might be correct about long term viability but programming jobs are the only thing in demand in Michigan right now.
Yet, I do more searches on Bing than Google on my iPhone. The Bing app is actually really nice. Also, Microsoft has been doing a lot of promotional stuff to get their search numbers up. I use Bing for about 1/3 of my search traffic now. I still use Google the most, but there have been several cases where Bing has worked better. There are far less results on Bing, but I get a lot less of the garbage sites on there too. When I use google, i usually have to go through at least 2 pages of results to find a real site that has what i need now. When I use bing, it's usually the first page if it's going to be there at all.
The worst of all is expert exchange. Any time I do a reasonable computer related search it comes up. I think google should hit those sites occasionally with a different user agent string and not list sites with special catered content. They could still follow robots.txt rules and never index anything in the verification hits. (just prune)
Seriously, how are these people going to know what it is or how to use it? First, you've got to teach them to use the laptop. They might use it to hold something up or throw it away.
Let's face it, voice search is not for everyone. A few people will use siri all the time. A few more will use it occasionally. I can voice search on my iPhone using Bing right now. It's ok, but not great. I tried using the voice search feature on google the other day from my laptop (debian + chrome) and tried to search for "starcraft 2 linux" inferring I wanted to run wine to play starcraft. No matter how I said "linux", I got "lyrics"
Worst of all there are hits for "starcraft2 lyrics"
I think they've got a way to go on this whole voice search thing.
You must have worked at different places than I. I would agree that IT people are less likely to use office now, but most of my employers over the years have used at least one piece of Office obsessively. At one company (2 years back), everything was made in PowerPoint. I do mean everything. I got a 12 slide powerpoint with charts on how I "screwed up" a web application. The real problem was the Internet connectivity of the server which was not my fault. Anyway, the problem with getting rid of Office is that it's the common file format for business. Even if several internal departments switch, any customer facing department has to have Microsoft Office. The second you can't open a file or create one that looks bad in Word, you lose the account.
Office is what has kept the Windows monopoly all these years. It is their key product. If someone broke the Office monopoly, it could put the final blow to Windows. The Mac version of office is missing too much to pull users over. At one time, I had hoped it would be OpenOffice.org, but that ship has sailed. The best bet now is Google Docs or something like it.
I'll agree that focusing on Office for mobile devices is stupid. Microsoft needs to address that issue, but it's not an immediate need. Apple pushed on a mobile iWork fairly quickly after the iPad shipped. That's worked for quite a few people. It didn't stop the initial sales of iPads though.
Ballmer needs to take more risks; Microsoft just doesn't seem hip enough and their products are pale clones.
Some of those technologies require OS intervention as well. You're not really offloading it onto the processor. Also, those technologies are general features that are advertised to the OS. They're not specific to a chip family.
I can think of one benefit. On any platform that Firefox runs on, one can actually view a PDF. Adobe makes a reader for the big three platforms.. Windows, Mac, and Linux, but not for any others. There are certainly nice open source PDF viewers, but not all of them have a browser plugin. This also gives us a working PDF viewer on other architectures. Old PPC and Sparc boxes.. maybe new ARM and x86-64 systems.
And how would the OS know the workload ahead of time? It's not like there are hints in the binary that it's going to be doing floating point work or that it's going to be CPU bound.
Remember that the more complex we make scheduling, the slower it is. Schedulers have to be fast. There's only so much the OS can do to help out. As a programmer, we're taught that the hardware is a black box. We're supposed to assume it works correctly most of the time. There's a big difference between seeing a hyper threading flag (which describes behavior) and going oh this is an AMD Bulldozer cpu model blah and needs to do this and this to be fast. These are supposed to be general purpose machines. I don't think people would like windows updates or new linux kernels coming out every quarter just to hack around the latest chips and using the model to know how to perform. It's just not reasonable to ask for that.
It's not like hyper threading. For integer operations, the AMD chips are much better. What AMD doesn't have is two floating point units so that's what gets bogged down. There are two instruction decoders and two units to handle integer math, but one floating point unit per component.
AMD's approach is faster for some workloads. The problem is that they didn't design it around how most people currently write software.
I would have preferred AMD to implement hyper threading as it would have greatly simplified things for OS developers. It's getting to a point where kernels have to know about CPU families in order to get the performance they need. They also have to know the workload.
For instance, if i'm trying to save power in a laptop, it's best with the new AMD chips to give all the instructions to the first two logical cpus which are the same cores. Then the others can go into an enhanced sleep state. However, this is slower than distributing to different physical cores. I'm even having trouble with terminology with these chips.
With intel chips, it's best to keep the same processes on nearby cores to take advantage of cache (for those that are really 2 cpus on the same package) but to avoid scheduling them on two threads on the same core. Again the power issue comes into play with intel chips as other cores could go into C1E state or similar.
AMD did add special instructions to the bulldozer chips that speed up floating point, but compilers and applications have to take advantage of them. Microsoft's Visual Studio does not yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that FreeBSD doesn't update packages after a release. So you're installing ancient software with security holes if you use packages after awhile. If you care at all about security, you must use ports.
There are a few options coming down the pipe here. You can use PC-BSD with their PBI format which has a subset of FreeBSD packages. You could also wait for the next MidnightBSD release. We have a totally new package system written from scratch and we're based on FreeBSD 7.
Simple answer is that Redhat based distros did have their heyday. It was before Ubuntu existed. By the time Redhat 9 came out, people were already looking for options. Redhat decided to go pay only and then release a beta version (Fedora) to the general public rather than a stable distro. Now, Fedora can be very stable but it has a fast release cycle and by nature it's not meant for mature deployments.
Then there's CentOS. That has the inverse problem.. it tracks Redhat and has ancient versions of software. When it's first released, it's tolerable but by the end of the release cycle when you're on a really old version of PHP and Apache that doesn't work with new stuff.. it's a nightmare. It's not usable for development because it's too old. It's not good for servers because you can't run recent versions of any PHP app.
There's also usability... Ubuntu had better hardware support and better installation tools than Redhat for desktop/laptop use. It was easier to install. It's easier to use. It got a rep for being easy.
Finally, Redhat has made it clear they think Linux will never be ready for the desktop. They don't even try to do that anymore. It's as much a perception issue as a real one.
I know people that have setup their mom's with Ubuntu and Mint. I've never met anyone who set mom up with Redhat or Fedora.
A common approach is to make a long list based on a dictionary. Some software will generate the list and also add numbers to it. Then the hashes are computed for each word and tested against the hashed password. They don't actually need to match the word just something that hashes equivalently to it. So there's actually more than one "answer" that works.
The program is that you can generate a list in a few days and using modern graphics cards, crack quite a few things in a short amount of time. Some websites make it harder by combining something unique with each password before it's hashed. That way one table won't work for every password to test.
This comment makes absolutely no sense. Let's say it was SQL injection, then it would be a programmer's fault.
Performance. If you encrypt everything, you have to decrypt on every web page request to their forums. That is going to take a lot of CPU type if it's a decent algorithm. Most likely it wouldn't be in order to make it work at all.
Also, if you encrypt everything, it's impossible to search. You would have to decrypt ALL THE DATA to do a search or it would have to be stored unencrypted in an index. It just doesn't make sense.
Finally, as you pointed out the server would have to have the decryption key. If they root the web server, they can get access to the key and then use it to decrypt everything anyway.
I'm paying about $75 a month for it, but I don't have to worry about IP addresses changing and my wife doesn't complain anymore about her world of warcraft experience. For that alone, it's worth the money.
You could always get a business class account like I did. Then you get 5 static IPs allocated to you that never change. I've even moved and they ported the IPs with my account. Not to mention it's faster and you get more upstream bandwidth.
The problem with this is botnets and amazon cloud instances. I see a lot of spam coming from all over the place now. In the old days, blocking the bastards in sendmail or the firewall was enough. Now, they just come at you from a new IP address within hours.
You keep jumping back to literature. There are several types of English degrees. When you study technical writing, you must take a few literature courses, but most courses cover technical writing and technical editing. English majors learn how to make web pages, write content for the web, etc. In fact, I'd say that as far as learning HTML and CSS, my English course was much thorough and difficult that the computer science course which also covered PHP. I consider that a failure of the CS prof, but it's the truth. I already had professional experience designing and developing web applications, but many of my classmates needed tutoring.
Some English majors focus on literature, poetry or theater, but technical writers have to understand context of the subject matter they're writing about. I took 6 courses on writing as an English minor. Courses included "Writing, Style and Technology", "Writing in the Professional World", "Technical Writing", "Technical Editing", an intro course and an oddball journalism course. I also took two literature courses. This does not include the courses I had taken in community college.
My point is that I know how terrible science degrees can be, but some other types of degrees are not a picnic. Then there's business degrees.
Ah good point. New test of chrome shows two processes with 63.5MB + 42.4MB real memory, 32 threads total and 229.1MB + 118.9MB virtual memory.
As for safari, it's still running and shows 600MB + 198.4MB real with 649.1MB + 359.8MB virtual.
This is not true. On my Mac OS X box, I've got Firefox, Chrome and Safari running. I just started Firefox and Chrome.
Firefox (8 beta) on startup is using 159.3MB of real memory and 166MB virtual with 22 threads running. Chrome (15.0.874.106) is using 50MB of real memory with 219.1MB virtual and 28 threads. Safari (latest on lion, which has been running for days and has 12 tabs running) is using 194.3MB of ram with 358.2 virtual and 13 threads.
This test isn't fair to safari, but valid for the other two browsers. Before one blames firefox add ons, i only have firebug installed. I think that's fair since every other browser has those features built in.
This is incorrect. An English major must learn how to write effectively. That takes practice and learning new skills. If technical writing were easy, everyone could write a well written manual for their software.
A valid argument might be that engineers and scientists often have to take difficult, useless courses along with their major that slow them down. For example, I had to take physics and electrical engineering courses with my computer science degree. The EE courses were not too bad, but the physics courses were a nightmare. We couldn't take the normal courses that majors and others could take. Instead, we had accelerated courses. Now, the EE courses were helpful in understanding certain aspects of hardware that relate to my hobby, but I've yet to use the physics courses. In fact, the only use case I've seen for a physics course for a computer science major is if they are interested in game programming. At WMU, I didn't know anyone in CS that could get a degree in four years. Even taking summer classes and never screwing up, one had to go 5 years. There was just too much to take and availability problems.
Not all IT can be outsourced. Someone has to go onsite some times. As for programming, there are still quite a few jobs. You might be correct about long term viability but programming jobs are the only thing in demand in Michigan right now.
Yet, I do more searches on Bing than Google on my iPhone. The Bing app is actually really nice. Also, Microsoft has been doing a lot of promotional stuff to get their search numbers up. I use Bing for about 1/3 of my search traffic now. I still use Google the most, but there have been several cases where Bing has worked better. There are far less results on Bing, but I get a lot less of the garbage sites on there too. When I use google, i usually have to go through at least 2 pages of results to find a real site that has what i need now. When I use bing, it's usually the first page if it's going to be there at all.
The worst of all is expert exchange. Any time I do a reasonable computer related search it comes up. I think google should hit those sites occasionally with a different user agent string and not list sites with special catered content. They could still follow robots.txt rules and never index anything in the verification hits. (just prune)
This would get rid of this garbage.
You saved me the trouble..
"The humanity"
Seriously, how are these people going to know what it is or how to use it? First, you've got to teach them to use the laptop. They might use it to hold something up or throw it away.
Let's face it, voice search is not for everyone. A few people will use siri all the time. A few more will use it occasionally. I can voice search on my iPhone using Bing right now. It's ok, but not great. I tried using the voice search feature on google the other day from my laptop (debian + chrome) and tried to search for "starcraft 2 linux" inferring I wanted to run wine to play starcraft. No matter how I said "linux", I got "lyrics"
Worst of all there are hits for "starcraft2 lyrics"
I think they've got a way to go on this whole voice search thing.
You must have worked at different places than I. I would agree that IT people are less likely to use office now, but most of my employers over the years have used at least one piece of Office obsessively. At one company (2 years back), everything was made in PowerPoint. I do mean everything. I got a 12 slide powerpoint with charts on how I "screwed up" a web application. The real problem was the Internet connectivity of the server which was not my fault. Anyway, the problem with getting rid of Office is that it's the common file format for business. Even if several internal departments switch, any customer facing department has to have Microsoft Office. The second you can't open a file or create one that looks bad in Word, you lose the account.
Office is what has kept the Windows monopoly all these years. It is their key product. If someone broke the Office monopoly, it could put the final blow to Windows. The Mac version of office is missing too much to pull users over. At one time, I had hoped it would be OpenOffice.org, but that ship has sailed. The best bet now is Google Docs or something like it.
I'll agree that focusing on Office for mobile devices is stupid. Microsoft needs to address that issue, but it's not an immediate need. Apple pushed on a mobile iWork fairly quickly after the iPad shipped. That's worked for quite a few people. It didn't stop the initial sales of iPads though.
Ballmer needs to take more risks; Microsoft just doesn't seem hip enough and their products are pale clones.
Some of those technologies require OS intervention as well. You're not really offloading it onto the processor. Also, those technologies are general features that are advertised to the OS. They're not specific to a chip family.
I can think of one benefit. On any platform that Firefox runs on, one can actually view a PDF. Adobe makes a reader for the big three platforms.. Windows, Mac, and Linux, but not for any others. There are certainly nice open source PDF viewers, but not all of them have a browser plugin. This also gives us a working PDF viewer on other architectures. Old PPC and Sparc boxes.. maybe new ARM and x86-64 systems.
And how would the OS know the workload ahead of time? It's not like there are hints in the binary that it's going to be doing floating point work or that it's going to be CPU bound.
Remember that the more complex we make scheduling, the slower it is. Schedulers have to be fast. There's only so much the OS can do to help out. As a programmer, we're taught that the hardware is a black box. We're supposed to assume it works correctly most of the time. There's a big difference between seeing a hyper threading flag (which describes behavior) and going oh this is an AMD Bulldozer cpu model blah and needs to do this and this to be fast. These are supposed to be general purpose machines. I don't think people would like windows updates or new linux kernels coming out every quarter just to hack around the latest chips and using the model to know how to perform. It's just not reasonable to ask for that.
The earlier article i read must have been way off then.
Here's a set of graphics displaying the actual architecture.
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/754#7
You mean integer based instructions. Floating point is still not as good with the AMD chips (unless using the new instructions)
It's not like hyper threading. For integer operations, the AMD chips are much better. What AMD doesn't have is two floating point units so that's what gets bogged down. There are two instruction decoders and two units to handle integer math, but one floating point unit per component.
AMD's approach is faster for some workloads. The problem is that they didn't design it around how most people currently write software.
I would have preferred AMD to implement hyper threading as it would have greatly simplified things for OS developers. It's getting to a point where kernels have to know about CPU families in order to get the performance they need. They also have to know the workload.
For instance, if i'm trying to save power in a laptop, it's best with the new AMD chips to give all the instructions to the first two logical cpus which are the same cores. Then the others can go into an enhanced sleep state. However, this is slower than distributing to different physical cores. I'm even having trouble with terminology with these chips.
With intel chips, it's best to keep the same processes on nearby cores to take advantage of cache (for those that are really 2 cpus on the same package) but to avoid scheduling them on two threads on the same core. Again the power issue comes into play with intel chips as other cores could go into C1E state or similar.
AMD did add special instructions to the bulldozer chips that speed up floating point, but compilers and applications have to take advantage of them. Microsoft's Visual Studio does not yet.