It is nice with another bugfix release, but what I'm really looking forward to is the release of PHP 5 with Zend Engine 2.0. Then the object model will finally be sane (private/protected member variables for example).
No, you probably don't have any use for Condor for home computers used for surfing etc. It does not work at all like an SMP machine. Condor is for running a bunch of compute-intensive batch jobs, i.e. jobs that are not interactive, such as scientific simulations. Also, you can never take a multithreaded ordinary program and automatically split its execution on multiple computers, because the computers have separate address spaces and too slow network to simulate a shared address space, so a single application can never be made to run faster unless specifically written to take advantage of running on multiple computers. If you do a lot of compiling you might want to take a look at distcc. Otherwise just use plain ssh to run different apps on the different machines you have to balance the load.
It more or less already exists, it's called Altnet and is installed together with Kazaa. Their website claims that the Altnet network has millions of computers.
For more serious applications I doubt that you want to send your confidential data for computation on some random stranger's computer, given the amount of viruses, trojans etc. that are in circulation today and how "good" ordinary users are at keeping their systems secure. Encryption won't help as long as the computer is under full control of the user. Something like DRM could probably solve that problem however.
There is a mature software project called Condor which allows you to do exactly that, build a compute pool out of workstations and optionally dedicated servers. It detects when workstations are idle and matches jobs to suitable resources (architecture, amount of memory and so on). It also handles restarting jobs that fail, migrating jobs when a workstation is no longer idle and so on. It is meant for high-throughput computing, i.e. running a lot of independent jobs, not for massively parallel jobs that do lots of intercommunication.
This can be great for researchers who never seem to get enough computing power or for things like rendering video.
how does the BIOS know where to look for the data? I dont keep it in the standard place..
How does this BIOS read NTFS? I thought MS hadnt licensed that tech..
How does the BIOS get around NTFS's ACL's? Isnt that against the DMCA?!
According to the article:
"... users will be able to select how much information they want to access, such as the number of contacts, a certain quantity of e-mail message or access to a certain period of the calendar records. This information will be saved to a special backup file that both the cME and Windows can access."
A solution like that seems reasonable. They avoid having to handle NTFS and locating the information and can instead use a simple format on a special disk partition for example. All the complexity of importing/exporting from Outlook would be handled by a program or Outlook plugin running under the normal OS.
By the way, getting around the ACL:s would be simple, just ignore them. The ACL:s are basically lists of which users and groups that are allowed to read/modify/... the files and which aren't. They depend on the OS to enforce them.
If the files are encrypted using the builtin EFS stuff in NTFS, it would be much more difficult. If I recall correctly, each file is protected by a file key which in turn is protected by a public/private key pair, where the private key is encrypted using the password you use to logon.
If people can walk into a secure mainframe room and steal mainframes, a determined person should be able to steal papers. Social engineering can be very powerful, just ask Kevin.
Why not turn on the built-in Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) in Windows XP before going on-line to download the updates? It should protect you while you download the updates. (Don't plug in the network cable before you have installed XP and turned on ICF).
Make sure you don't boot or shut down an unpatched system while connected to the 'net if you are using ICF, it does not work during startup or shutdown. That will apparently be fixed in SP2.
The problem is not the language but the interface to the kernel. The C language, which a lot of drivers are written in, is very portable but you still cannot easily take a driver from Windows XP and port it to Linux, because the driver has to provide and call different functions in Windows vs Linux. What would be required is a standardized API for device drivers but that is (IMHO) not likely to happen soon. There are some however some interesting wrappers for using Windows WLAN drivers under Linux, maybe it would be possible to extend that to other kinds of drivers.
Oddly enough, WSDL and SOAP are mentioned, but never really discussed. And the would be probably better suited than CORBA.
WSDL and SOAP are used in version 3 of the Globus Toolkit, which is a well-known open source grid toolkit. In that version, all grid services are Web Services.
3) set up mail redirection with Zoneedit, redirection.net etc. with a catchall to your new mailbox
I would rather not set up a catch-all, since spammers sometimes try brute-force or dictionary attacks (trying lots of common names for example). Unless you sign up for stuff really often it is better to create specific redirections or aliases for each thing you sign up for, and then remove the alias if it gets spam.
The downside of this is of course that you don't get mails with mistyped addresses.
The Cygwin *nix-emulation layer for Windows does a pretty decent job of mapping
NT file permissions for *nix programs run under it. Of course, it would probably be pretty difficult to read out the users and groups from the SAM database when Windows is not running, but for many it would probably be quite acceptable to run a program under Windows once which exports a few files with the necessary information (mapping from security identifiers to user/group names etc). This information should rarely change, so that shouldn't be a big problem.
Slashdot Mirror
It is nice with another bugfix release, but what I'm really looking forward to is the release of PHP 5 with Zend Engine 2.0. Then the object model will finally be sane (private/protected member variables for example).
No, you probably don't have any use for Condor for home computers used for surfing etc. It does not work at all like an SMP machine. Condor is for running a bunch of compute-intensive batch jobs, i.e. jobs that are not interactive, such as scientific simulations. Also, you can never take a multithreaded ordinary program and automatically split its execution on multiple computers, because the computers have separate address spaces and too slow network to simulate a shared address space, so a single application can never be made to run faster unless specifically written to take advantage of running on multiple computers. If you do a lot of compiling you might want to take a look at distcc. Otherwise just use plain ssh to run different apps on the different machines you have to balance the load.
For more serious applications I doubt that you want to send your confidential data for computation on some random stranger's computer, given the amount of viruses, trojans etc. that are in circulation today and how "good" ordinary users are at keeping their systems secure. Encryption won't help as long as the computer is under full control of the user. Something like DRM could probably solve that problem however.
This can be great for researchers who never seem to get enough computing power or for things like rendering video.
According to the article:
A solution like that seems reasonable. They avoid having to handle NTFS and locating the information and can instead use a simple format on a special disk partition for example. All the complexity of importing/exporting from Outlook would be handled by a program or Outlook plugin running under the normal OS.
By the way, getting around the ACL:s would be simple, just ignore them. The ACL:s are basically lists of which users and groups that are allowed to read/modify/... the files and which aren't. They depend on the OS to enforce them. If the files are encrypted using the builtin EFS stuff in NTFS, it would be much more difficult. If I recall correctly, each file is protected by a file key which in turn is protected by a public/private key pair, where the private key is encrypted using the password you use to logon.
If people can walk into a secure mainframe room and steal mainframes, a determined person should be able to steal papers. Social engineering can be very powerful, just ask Kevin.
Make sure you don't boot or shut down an unpatched system while connected to the 'net if you are using ICF, it does not work during startup or shutdown. That will apparently be fixed in SP2.
The problem is not the language but the interface to the kernel. The C language, which a lot of drivers are written in, is very portable but you still cannot easily take a driver from Windows XP and port it to Linux, because the driver has to provide and call different functions in Windows vs Linux. What would be required is a standardized API for device drivers but that is (IMHO) not likely to happen soon. There are some however some interesting wrappers for using Windows WLAN drivers under Linux, maybe it would be possible to extend that to other kinds of drivers.
Oddly enough, WSDL and SOAP are mentioned, but never really discussed. And the would be probably better suited than CORBA.
WSDL and SOAP are used in version 3 of the Globus Toolkit, which is a well-known open source grid toolkit. In that version, all grid services are Web Services.
3) set up mail redirection with Zoneedit, redirection.net etc. with a catchall to your new mailbox
I would rather not set up a catch-all, since spammers sometimes try brute-force or dictionary attacks (trying lots of common names for example). Unless you sign up for stuff really often it is better to create specific redirections or aliases for each thing you sign up for, and then remove the alias if it gets spam.
The downside of this is of course that you don't get mails with mistyped addresses.
The Cygwin *nix-emulation layer for Windows does a pretty decent job of mapping NT file permissions for *nix programs run under it. Of course, it would probably be pretty difficult to read out the users and groups from the SAM database when Windows is not running, but for many it would probably be quite acceptable to run a program under Windows once which exports a few files with the necessary information (mapping from security identifiers to user/group names etc). This information should rarely change, so that shouldn't be a big problem.