As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on.
Pretty much. Even if this was practical, doable, etc, it's a major step backwards.
Humans are historically bad at identifying anything actually good. Computers were good, major step forward in technological progress. Pocket calculators... not so good, on principle of use in schools (think Japanese Soroban up through Algebra 1.. Algebra 2 starts graphing, that is where you should start introducing calculators). Electric guitars, amplifiers, and radio were good. Television was good, but modern news broadcasting is horrible.
But then you get beyond "well we shouldn't give second graders calculators" and "the news media is a fear-mongering panic machine" to shit that's just a bad idea. Internet TV... oh sure, we love the idea of not keeping a library of our own around, but rather pulling things down in real-time, every access, to watch TV... never mind the huge bandwidth drain this causes. That can be fixed (lower resolution video/audio to stay below what the bandwidth can handle).
And then you get into straight out stupid shit like electric carving knives, wtf? A vibrating knife to cut chicken? What the hell is the point of that? Keureg machines are another good idea... a french press or drip cup brewer (some people hate french press coffee, apparently) makes coffee in a few minutes, while a Keureg instant coffee brewing machine consumes much more resources to make and run (instant heating of water) and to produce the K-cups... for "convenience." I'm sorry, but spending 30 seconds fresh-grinding coffee and 4 minutes brewing it with a pot of boiled water doesn't speak of "desperate need to get a computerized programmable device to make coffee much faster and with much less effort" to me.
We even screw up good tech. Look at washing machines. We have nice, low-water washing machines that don't expend a whole hell of a lot of energy to do their job now. They're pretty simple, so not incredibly complex and energy-hungry to manufacture. But we have this huge freaking electric dryer to deal with too! If you drop your clothes into a spin dryer, you can hang them and let them dry in an hour or so; or throw them in the electric dryer for 10 minutes. Spin dryers run at 3500-6000RPM, effectively squeezing the clothes against the outer hull and driving the water out. Spin cycle on your washing machine but a lot faster... it'd be nice to add this to washing machines, with a balance sensor to prevent spin out of control on an imbalanced machine. Overall energy usage to dry clothes would be a fraction of what we have now.
A lot of stuff is on "cool factor" and just horrible failure at differentiating "high tech" from "shiny."
Actually, proper accelerated graphics in X11 work rather well. VLC and Totem/gstreamer etc work, but Flash is still horrible trying to get SOUND right. I'll pull down Flash FLVs and play them in Totem locally better than Youtube can with Adobe's flash player.
What OS are you running? I have around 6 gigs of RAM and hardly ever swap, much less experience churn, actually I hardly ever hit 4 gigs utilized outside of having a large amount of browser windows open while processing a hefty RAW image in Photoshop.
Ubuntu Linux, Gnome, to desktop in about a gig (not counting cache/buffers), Thunderbird, Chromium, Rhythmbox, Xchat-Gnome, Pidgin, a terminal... usually I don't have OpenOffice.org open because holy crap.
I remember running Wingroove and having software MIDI wavetable emulation on 64MB of RAM and a 200MHz Pentium with MMX technology; and playing Quake a LOT on Windows 98. 64MB was HUGE.
I bought a shit Motorola Cliq and plugged my headphones into it, since I can carry a cell phone and not worry about the iPod and HOLY SHIT SOUND QUALITY! iPod is CRAP!
You mean like how back in the day you had 32 megs of RAM using Windows, with a 100MHz processor, and you could pile on a new program and the computer would swap 50 megs to disk, and tick along just fine mostly?
And nowadays we have 4 gigs of RAM, and the computer uses 500 megs of swap and every time you alt-tab you have to wait 4-5 seconds for everything to load back into RAM as windows slowly get redrawn, and everything runs slow... but wait! Developers are piling more and more on, since there's 4 gigs of RAM then EVERY program can use 2-3 gigs of RAM, and now... yes! 6 gigs of swap, and a computer that barely runs at all with 6 8 core processors!
Yes, it's like people believe we're playing a game of chess: you move your pieces to get into a new, better position, and eventually you checkmate your opponent and you win. They believe one day spam will go away, or that we can do something to eliminate it and that something is "broken" because there is still spam.
It's more of a game of Go. Occasionally your opponent makes inroads into your territory, and you block them off. Occasionally you make inroads into their territory. Sometimes they make life; other times you kill their invasion. The score and territorial control fluctuate up and down, but neither side is completely alive or completely dead until the game is over; and the Internet isn't anywhere near over.
As it stands, there is a lot of spam; but we've managed to wall a lot of it off and so most e-mail we see falls into spam buckets. The spammers have made small life in the corner and extended down the sides along the first line: they gain nothing and bother us significantly, but overall very little. They've made larger life along the opposite side, replying to Craigslist posts and spamming "adult" personals sites. You'd think trying to get sex off craigslist would get you hookers and spam for porn sites; but try selling a car or a guitar or looking for a Go club, you don't exactly get 3000 replies for adultsexhookups.com but you get 3 or 4... annoying.
My point is everyone responding when this was first posted had this idea that you can just "reconfigure your FPGA to be a new Intel CPU" by some magic, and it'll work better. This is a dumb and short-sighted idea; if you have reconfigurable hardware, you have the ability to ad-hoc create specialized gate hardware rather than run software on generic instruction set architectures.
As for lard-cycles, somebody pointed out modern FPGAs clock at 1.5GHz; I'm more interested in what someone else said about the limited number of write cycles (reconfiguration on the fly breaks the chip?), which makes this seem like an extremely limited and not-very-useful idea at the moment. Perhaps if your arguments focused on actual problems and comparisons to actual novel or uncommon use cases instead of "well, we have a {GPU,FPU,AES extension} so we don't need that!" I'd care more about having a competent debate with you.
In short, there are issues to overcome. Clock speed apparently isn't one of them; durability is. Comparison with specialized architectures is okay because Intel doesn't yet have a {REGEX,Firewall,IP,MP3,Ogg Vorbis,Skein,MD5,SHA1,SHA2,SHA3,Blowfish,Twofish,AAC,H.264,MPEG2,gzip,bzip2} coprocessor built into the hardware architecture of the chip, although they do have AES and FPU and so no need to make those. There are some other things like data access path width and the speed of reconfiguring the chipset.
Your particular arguments are invalid and shortsighted. Other arguments exist that are valid.
The Content Connect product is designed to enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to deliver video content within the UK to their customers more cost effectively than it has been possible to do previously. This is achieved by connecting a Content Distribution & Delivery platform to the IPstream Connect and Wholesale Broadband Connect networks. The Content Distribution & Delivery platform will be placed in the broadband network so that content by-passes the ISPs backhaul. Content Connect gives the opportunity for the ISPs to have a commercial relationship with the Content Service Providers (CSPs).
The Content Connect Basic product is for the CSP market
The Content Connect Standard and Premium service is available to ISPs who have a commercial relationship with CSPs.
Content Connect Key Benefits
End Users benefit from the new Content Connect product:
TV video entertainment will be delivered to the home through a broadband line with the option of an enhanced experience including HD internet video on TV.
ISPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:
Brings ISPs into the content value chain and allows them to earn revenue from delivering internet video from CSPs .
CSPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:
CSPs can have their content delivered at a higher quality of service.
For further information please contact your Account Manager
I think I like this. It basically says hey, ISPs pay for back-haul bandwidth (i.e. Level 3 plugs into Qwest, NetFlix is on Level 3's side, Qwest lets you access NetFlix, Qwest pays for the ASSLOADS of bandwidth they ring up across their link to Level 3's network), so now ISPs have the option of entering a deal with NetFlix to coordinate between NetFlix, Qwest, and technical consultant BT to get NetFlix's data on Qwest's side of the fence. NetFlix doesn't move; it just puts a back-end link or a copy of their data (data warehouse) over in Qwest's playground so they can avoid pulling it down through Level 3, which is slower and more expensive.
If Qwest wants to pay Level 3 for bandwidth, they can pay Level 3. If Qwest wants to pay NetFlix to maintain content locally on the Qwest network, they can pay NetFlix. Anyone who isn't a Tier-1 provider will be paying an assload (for example, I think Comcast is a Level 3 customer, and their network is all on Level 3's back-end rather than just connected to it), and would similarly benefit both financially and performance-wise by dropping a NetFlix box in their network.
As long as they can't charge NetFlix for being on the other side of the fence and thus costing them money every time their users watch a movie, this is fine. If NetFlix wants to charge them to have hardware installed and maintained on their network, that's great; if not, too bad, you can't just shut NetFlix off because you don't like what your users are doing to your bandwidth bill.
Now you're just being ridiculous. Once you've reached a point where the only way to track this is "magic" or "tracking everything, all the time, continuously, non stop," it's pointless to take other measures; they just enlarge your exposure and make you look more suspicious.
AES is quite a bad example for FPGAs. The very latest AES extensions from Intel can compute a round of AES in under three clock cycles. Performing the full cipher takes less than twenty clock cycles (on a processor running in excess of 3Ghz). No FPGA in the world can keep up with that performance.
"AES Extensions" means that Intel put a dedicated instruction pipeline in the processor to compute AES. That means you now have a specialized purpose hardware encryption chipset built into your CPU, tada. Just like an FPU.
Try the same Intel CPU with IA-32 instructions implementing AES, you won't do the whole cipher in 20 cycles. If you implement the exact same instruction architecture on an FPGA, it'll run at the slower clock of the FPGA, but still do it in 20 cycles. This means when you want to run Blowfish, Twofish, DSA/ElGamal, MD5/SHA1/Skein hashing, etc, you need a new CPU with dedicated instructions added to even imagine keeping up with the FPGA.
In other words, it's like I said "a V8 engine won't make your car fly" and you pointed out that airplanes have been built that run on V8 engines. Wonderful. Not the point.
So here is the basic problem. If the target application is made of steps that exist as specialised circuits in the CPU then selecting which of those circuits to apply in sequence will be faster than a generic circuit because the specialised circuit uses the space on the die more effectively and is clocked at a much higher frequency.
If the target application is made of steps which are very unlike the circuits provided on the CPU then the generic design will win. For everything in-between it is a trade-off. Not as many things win as FPGA designs and there is ten years of literature showing marginal improvements.
Encryption is a lot of things in CPU that are faster in hardware because it's a single clock cycle to do thing that are 30,000 clock cycles on the CPU.
Regex calculation, faster in a specialized hardware chip.
Codec decoding, we use an off-board CPU that has a microkernel and a small program; it benefits from just not running an OS and being a dedicated RISC processor, but in no other way.
GPU, specialized instruction set. Not dedicated to a specific task, but dedicated to a type of task. WAY faster than a regular CPU for that task.
An FPGA configured to run AES at 100MHz will operate faster than a computer calculating AES at 1000MHz if a single round of AES is 1/10 as many cycles on the FPGA as the CPU. This is not very far-fetched, since implementing AES in hardware is QUITE efficient.
You have to realize that a generic processor might, for example, spend 13 cycles doing DIV or MOD; it might spend 2000 cycles calculating a particular hash round because it has to do ADD, SHL, MOD, XOR, XCHG, MUL... on a specific set of data so wide. A specialized chipset might take 50, 100, 200 cycles... so if it's at the same clock rate it's 10, 20, 40 times as fast. That the FPGA may be slow doesn't much matter if it can implement an efficient gate logic that performs a task without any sort of instruction decoding or other overhead-- or really, with instructions such as "ADDSHLMULMODXORXCHMUL" that run in 6-8 cycles instead of 2-3 cycles for each of 6 separate instructions (i.e. 12-18 cycles, and note MOD and MUL are rather long 8-15 cycle operations on their own).
It's the same as how SSE is faster for specific data sets, or floating point instructions are faster, etc. You create highly specialized instructions that pipeline in stages... you could even make a circuit with a sequence of 16 "instructions" compromising one operation with 16 registers, so that rather than playing with registers in a pipeline you can actually, say, ADD, MUL, MOD, SHL, XCHG... and when you perform MUL, the ADD for the NEXT item in the data set begins in that pipeline. Some things on the CPU happen this way; other things simply cannot due to lack of internal storage or internal design; and in some cases the output relies on the input so this is simply not possible. To pipeline so efficiently, however, is to make the entire set of 300000000000 instructions to perform 1 step in a multi-step operation take however long the slowest single instruction takes (i.e. completely decode a full frame of MPEG video in the 13 cycles it takes to perform a single division operation), provided you have enough internal storage to run the pipeline on that much data.
Yes, my criteria is that a spook at every position along the wire physically cannot figure out who the hell you are, even if one is standing right next to you going, "Someone within range of the access point up there on that shelf is doing this... someone within a block and a half radius, in one of these 10 story buildings. Someone in that McDonalds, or that Panera, or up there on the second floor of Barnes & Noble, or in that Best Buy across the street, or one of the 2500 people in that office building." They would have to shake everyone down; find the device; and then examine it to see if it is indeed responsible for the connection being tracked (because maybe it's someone else's device running that connection, not yours, even though yours does have the relevant software... oh, you're just downloading MP3s, we're looking for the guy downloading nuclear secrets off a Russian site, let's shake down the guy over there instead...).
A programmable hardware platform would provide amazing computing power because of hardware specialization: rather than emulating a proper CPU, you would download core architecture into the FPGA to accelerate tasks such as REGEX processing or H.264 decoding. You could compile the entire logic of a program into a gate array with various logical operators and flip-flop circuits for unlimited (albeit slow) registers (L2 registers) as well as including standard registers and SRAM cache (L1).
Although the FPGA runs slower than a regular CPU, direct programming rather than instructional programming (that is logic blocks that perform programmatic functions, rather than logic blocks that interpret discrete instructions to follow programmatic functions) would shorten the overall hardware logic path. In short, the chip would follow fewer clock cycles and instead just "do things." The CPU would be slow, but optimized for your workload. The main performance bottleneck would be the context switch: replacing the logic gate configuration with a new program every time you switch. Other than that, dynamic program expansion could be utilized: inlining operations like multiplication, addition, etc, or breaking them out if space constraints make it hard to load the whole program onto the FPGA that way.
The obvious, major issue we see is, of course, a security issue. You can now reprogram the CPU. This makes it difficult to prevent a program from bypassing any and all hardware security measures. This is solved by implementing a completely new security design on the chip, by which the CPU itself (the FPGA) is under control of external security mechanisms (paging etc handled in the MMU, outside the FPGA space, would largely mitigate most of this); it's not impossible to deal with, it's just an issue that needs to be raised.
In short, this sucks for "download the new Intel CPU into your BIOS/bootloader." This sucks for whatever general purpose CPU you can think of. For an entirely new programmatic platform, however, this would provide some interesting performance possibilities, and some interesting challenges.
It should. However, they are wholly allowed to only accept payment by a major credit card. My insurance company will take my pay from a check or bank account + routing number, but I need to put down a major credit card as well.
Enough forensics will trace the connection back to where it came from, i.e. starbucks. Satellite... good luck getting free satellite, and they can ID the device somehow if you have a log-on (z3r0c00l did this...). I'm talking about something that traces back to a pinhole in reality and then vanishes. Oh shit, the attack came from nowhere; a wizard did it.
I don't know if it's correct. A cute girl in my class described herself that way, because her skin started to rot away when she went vegetarian and she almost died. What the hell?
Sitting in a Starbucks is a low-risk method because it's hard to trace. Hell, you can load automated software onto a hand-held PDA (iPaq? I ran Linux on one...) to do all the raping and infecting. The packets can be tagged with a different MAC address than your real device, making it physically untraceable; it's all in your pocket, and can auto-connect to wifi and do whatever, so picking you out of a crowd is harder than "find the suspicious person" since you just carry it around and don't go out sniping.
This works for MP3s and child porn and whatever the hell else too, btw. Assuming you know where and what to search (I assume torrents for MP3s, who knows for kiddy porn), you could have an automated program do all the relevant searches and store the results. When you get home, pop the device out and browse through the cached results... pick what you want, and next time you're out it'll find those things and download them.
For the obvious flaw, you can ban your own Wifi network and your neighbors', or have the program automatically search for certain networks (yours, your neighbors', etc) and decide you're "too close to home" and shut down. You could even have a separate daemon that handles wifi, and when it sees you're "too close to home" it prevents any wifi connections at all.
There's a lot of "I can have this here with me, but never physically do anything while connected to the network, and never use my own network" that can be done to hide your online presence. The same can be done for chatting on forums, sending e-mail, etc. The only thing you can't hide that way is real-time chat like instant messaging or IRC, because you have to twiddle the device; but for answering a forums post or blogs, you can have a program smart enough to deal with phpBB and V-Bulletin and Wordpress... it could let you record what you want to post, who to reply to, which post ID to reply to, the works... then when you're out somewhere, post.
Basically you're interacting from an alternate reality, one where you're pulled out of the real world; that interaction is transferred into the real world physically somewhere, but you're not present at that point and there's no cable running from there to here to draw a path to you. You'd have to use an innocuous device (a PDA most likely, bought in cash) and download the software from a MAC-shifted device on a public link to have absolutely zero trail (i.e. no evidence that you're even capable of this), but it'd be doable. Completely. It'd make for some interesting shit... maybe I'll write a sci-fi novella about the idea.
Obama wanted to raise taxes on import goods a la tariff... Income tax was unconstitutional and we instead had a tariff system for imports. Why, our country threw down a 1% income tax and the government drew in 30 times more in taxes that year than it ever did in history; 1% should have been enough to run this country forever, with constant tax refunds to the people at the end of the year for the money we took but didn't use. How it ever got to the 25%-40% graduated system we have today I'll never know.
It's the same stuff, and always has been. The only difference is the label. There is no need for quality in "high-end designer stuff" because it will be out of fashion before the defects become evident.
Very true. Tommy Hilfiger, Ambercrombie, etc etc, "it has a name that makes me street-cool," that crap is all garbage with a huge premium for the name and "current style" to make you cool. Even The Gap does it.
What you want are the mid-range business/casual outfitters. Land's End, Polo, and the like, the people that nobody gives a shit about but that try to win you over with "quality and style." The so-called "style" is "not looking like shit" but it's not going to pretend to net you "street-cred." The price tag isn't $500 either, just a bit more expensive (we're talking $18 wal-mart crap shirts vs $25 Land's End shirts). It's enough for you to risk it casually, but if it turns out to be no better you go with another manufacturer; thus the burden of actually providing quality falls squarely on the manufacturer.
Personally I don't even know what the style is today, besides looking like a moron that can't figure out how to use a belt. I like the lines and simple form Land's End uses, and have a distaste for the visual style Polo and Doc Marten provide; but others may disagree with me and go with those, or others. I'm in no great need of Ambercombie or Old Navy $50 shirts.
One thing I can definitely say about good quality clothes, though: they survive the wash without frilling, fuzzing, or fading for YEARS; but they'll still tear on concrete, wear if you kick your shoes off (grind the hem on your pants away until it frays via the sole of your shoe), and don't believe anyone that tells you this shit won't stain. Land's End has "no-iron" pants that last 30 washes without needing ironing... it doesn't hurt, they do show a little wear after 5-10 washes but they don't really start needing a press until 30 or 40. "Quality" doesn't mean it's indestructible.
Right, which is why most users are overly concerned about "credit card theft" when most infections are about spamming the shit out of people; and a large number of people who succumb to identity theft are actually taken by malware that installs itself as an "anti-virus" program but secretly records your bank transactions.
It's like walking through Baltimore City alone at night. As much as people are terrified by it, not everyone is out to kill you; that said, if you walk through Baltimore City alone at night regularly, you'll meet someone who is out to kill you. Paranoia is when you think they're all out to get you; rational sense is when you realize, no, they're not, but there's a significant risk of encountering someone eventually and it only takes one knife to stop your heart.
Well, if you're in Panera Bread or Barnes & Noble, you're probably being targeted "specifically"... for some value of "specific" amounting to "the 5 people in that store dumb enough to use Wifi."
Is that the guy that wrote "Silence on the Wire"? That was a good book of not-likely attacks that are completely and utterly practical, at least in a lab environment consisting of "my living room and $10 of shit I bought off Mouser." Reading the blinking lights off modems, for example.
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As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on.
Pretty much. Even if this was practical, doable, etc, it's a major step backwards.
Humans are historically bad at identifying anything actually good. Computers were good, major step forward in technological progress. Pocket calculators... not so good, on principle of use in schools (think Japanese Soroban up through Algebra 1.. Algebra 2 starts graphing, that is where you should start introducing calculators). Electric guitars, amplifiers, and radio were good. Television was good, but modern news broadcasting is horrible.
But then you get beyond "well we shouldn't give second graders calculators" and "the news media is a fear-mongering panic machine" to shit that's just a bad idea. Internet TV... oh sure, we love the idea of not keeping a library of our own around, but rather pulling things down in real-time, every access, to watch TV ... never mind the huge bandwidth drain this causes. That can be fixed (lower resolution video/audio to stay below what the bandwidth can handle).
And then you get into straight out stupid shit like electric carving knives, wtf? A vibrating knife to cut chicken? What the hell is the point of that? Keureg machines are another good idea... a french press or drip cup brewer (some people hate french press coffee, apparently) makes coffee in a few minutes, while a Keureg instant coffee brewing machine consumes much more resources to make and run (instant heating of water) and to produce the K-cups... for "convenience." I'm sorry, but spending 30 seconds fresh-grinding coffee and 4 minutes brewing it with a pot of boiled water doesn't speak of "desperate need to get a computerized programmable device to make coffee much faster and with much less effort" to me.
We even screw up good tech. Look at washing machines. We have nice, low-water washing machines that don't expend a whole hell of a lot of energy to do their job now. They're pretty simple, so not incredibly complex and energy-hungry to manufacture. But we have this huge freaking electric dryer to deal with too! If you drop your clothes into a spin dryer, you can hang them and let them dry in an hour or so; or throw them in the electric dryer for 10 minutes. Spin dryers run at 3500-6000RPM, effectively squeezing the clothes against the outer hull and driving the water out. Spin cycle on your washing machine but a lot faster... it'd be nice to add this to washing machines, with a balance sensor to prevent spin out of control on an imbalanced machine. Overall energy usage to dry clothes would be a fraction of what we have now.
A lot of stuff is on "cool factor" and just horrible failure at differentiating "high tech" from "shiny."
Actually, proper accelerated graphics in X11 work rather well. VLC and Totem/gstreamer etc work, but Flash is still horrible trying to get SOUND right. I'll pull down Flash FLVs and play them in Totem locally better than Youtube can with Adobe's flash player.
What OS are you running? I have around 6 gigs of RAM and hardly ever swap, much less experience churn, actually I hardly ever hit 4 gigs utilized outside of having a large amount of browser windows open while processing a hefty RAW image in Photoshop.
Ubuntu Linux, Gnome, to desktop in about a gig (not counting cache/buffers), Thunderbird, Chromium, Rhythmbox, Xchat-Gnome, Pidgin, a terminal... usually I don't have OpenOffice.org open because holy crap.
I remember running Wingroove and having software MIDI wavetable emulation on 64MB of RAM and a 200MHz Pentium with MMX technology; and playing Quake a LOT on Windows 98. 64MB was HUGE.
I bought a shit Motorola Cliq and plugged my headphones into it, since I can carry a cell phone and not worry about the iPod and HOLY SHIT SOUND QUALITY! iPod is CRAP!
You mean like how back in the day you had 32 megs of RAM using Windows, with a 100MHz processor, and you could pile on a new program and the computer would swap 50 megs to disk, and tick along just fine mostly?
And nowadays we have 4 gigs of RAM, and the computer uses 500 megs of swap and every time you alt-tab you have to wait 4-5 seconds for everything to load back into RAM as windows slowly get redrawn, and everything runs slow... but wait! Developers are piling more and more on, since there's 4 gigs of RAM then EVERY program can use 2-3 gigs of RAM, and now... yes! 6 gigs of swap, and a computer that barely runs at all with 6 8 core processors!
Yes, it's like people believe we're playing a game of chess: you move your pieces to get into a new, better position, and eventually you checkmate your opponent and you win. They believe one day spam will go away, or that we can do something to eliminate it and that something is "broken" because there is still spam.
It's more of a game of Go. Occasionally your opponent makes inroads into your territory, and you block them off. Occasionally you make inroads into their territory. Sometimes they make life; other times you kill their invasion. The score and territorial control fluctuate up and down, but neither side is completely alive or completely dead until the game is over; and the Internet isn't anywhere near over.
As it stands, there is a lot of spam; but we've managed to wall a lot of it off and so most e-mail we see falls into spam buckets. The spammers have made small life in the corner and extended down the sides along the first line: they gain nothing and bother us significantly, but overall very little. They've made larger life along the opposite side, replying to Craigslist posts and spamming "adult" personals sites. You'd think trying to get sex off craigslist would get you hookers and spam for porn sites; but try selling a car or a guitar or looking for a Go club, you don't exactly get 3000 replies for adultsexhookups.com but you get 3 or 4 ... annoying.
My point is everyone responding when this was first posted had this idea that you can just "reconfigure your FPGA to be a new Intel CPU" by some magic, and it'll work better. This is a dumb and short-sighted idea; if you have reconfigurable hardware, you have the ability to ad-hoc create specialized gate hardware rather than run software on generic instruction set architectures.
As for lard-cycles, somebody pointed out modern FPGAs clock at 1.5GHz; I'm more interested in what someone else said about the limited number of write cycles (reconfiguration on the fly breaks the chip?), which makes this seem like an extremely limited and not-very-useful idea at the moment. Perhaps if your arguments focused on actual problems and comparisons to actual novel or uncommon use cases instead of "well, we have a {GPU,FPU,AES extension} so we don't need that!" I'd care more about having a competent debate with you.
In short, there are issues to overcome. Clock speed apparently isn't one of them; durability is. Comparison with specialized architectures is okay because Intel doesn't yet have a {REGEX,Firewall,IP,MP3,Ogg Vorbis,Skein,MD5,SHA1,SHA2,SHA3,Blowfish,Twofish,AAC,H.264,MPEG2,gzip,bzip2} coprocessor built into the hardware architecture of the chip, although they do have AES and FPU and so no need to make those. There are some other things like data access path width and the speed of reconfiguring the chipset.
Your particular arguments are invalid and shortsighted. Other arguments exist that are valid.
What is Content Connect
The Content Connect product is designed to enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to deliver video content within the UK to their customers more cost effectively than it has been possible to do previously. This is achieved by connecting a Content Distribution & Delivery platform to the IPstream Connect and Wholesale Broadband Connect networks. The Content Distribution & Delivery platform will be placed in the broadband network so that content by-passes the ISPs backhaul. Content Connect gives the opportunity for the ISPs to have a commercial relationship with the Content Service Providers (CSPs).
The Content Connect Basic product is for the CSP market
The Content Connect Standard and Premium service is available to ISPs who have a commercial relationship with CSPs.
Content Connect Key Benefits
End Users benefit from the new Content Connect product:
TV video entertainment will be delivered to the home through a broadband line with the option of an enhanced experience including HD internet video on TV.
ISPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:
Brings ISPs into the content value chain and allows them to earn revenue from delivering internet video from CSPs .
CSPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:
CSPs can have their content delivered at a higher quality of service.
For further information please contact your Account Manager
I think I like this. It basically says hey, ISPs pay for back-haul bandwidth (i.e. Level 3 plugs into Qwest, NetFlix is on Level 3's side, Qwest lets you access NetFlix, Qwest pays for the ASSLOADS of bandwidth they ring up across their link to Level 3's network), so now ISPs have the option of entering a deal with NetFlix to coordinate between NetFlix, Qwest, and technical consultant BT to get NetFlix's data on Qwest's side of the fence. NetFlix doesn't move; it just puts a back-end link or a copy of their data (data warehouse) over in Qwest's playground so they can avoid pulling it down through Level 3, which is slower and more expensive.
If Qwest wants to pay Level 3 for bandwidth, they can pay Level 3. If Qwest wants to pay NetFlix to maintain content locally on the Qwest network, they can pay NetFlix. Anyone who isn't a Tier-1 provider will be paying an assload (for example, I think Comcast is a Level 3 customer, and their network is all on Level 3's back-end rather than just connected to it), and would similarly benefit both financially and performance-wise by dropping a NetFlix box in their network.
As long as they can't charge NetFlix for being on the other side of the fence and thus costing them money every time their users watch a movie, this is fine. If NetFlix wants to charge them to have hardware installed and maintained on their network, that's great; if not, too bad, you can't just shut NetFlix off because you don't like what your users are doing to your bandwidth bill.
Now you're just being ridiculous. Once you've reached a point where the only way to track this is "magic" or "tracking everything, all the time, continuously, non stop," it's pointless to take other measures; they just enlarge your exposure and make you look more suspicious.
AES is quite a bad example for FPGAs. The very latest AES extensions from Intel can compute a round of AES in under three clock cycles. Performing the full cipher takes less than twenty clock cycles (on a processor running in excess of 3Ghz). No FPGA in the world can keep up with that performance.
"AES Extensions" means that Intel put a dedicated instruction pipeline in the processor to compute AES. That means you now have a specialized purpose hardware encryption chipset built into your CPU, tada. Just like an FPU.
Try the same Intel CPU with IA-32 instructions implementing AES, you won't do the whole cipher in 20 cycles. If you implement the exact same instruction architecture on an FPGA, it'll run at the slower clock of the FPGA, but still do it in 20 cycles. This means when you want to run Blowfish, Twofish, DSA/ElGamal, MD5/SHA1/Skein hashing, etc, you need a new CPU with dedicated instructions added to even imagine keeping up with the FPGA.
In other words, it's like I said "a V8 engine won't make your car fly" and you pointed out that airplanes have been built that run on V8 engines. Wonderful. Not the point.
Thanks, I've never heard the term pescatarian.
So here is the basic problem. If the target application is made of steps that exist as specialised circuits in the CPU then selecting which of those circuits to apply in sequence will be faster than a generic circuit because the specialised circuit uses the space on the die more effectively and is clocked at a much higher frequency.
If the target application is made of steps which are very unlike the circuits provided on the CPU then the generic design will win. For everything in-between it is a trade-off. Not as many things win as FPGA designs and there is ten years of literature showing marginal improvements.
Encryption is a lot of things in CPU that are faster in hardware because it's a single clock cycle to do thing that are 30,000 clock cycles on the CPU.
Regex calculation, faster in a specialized hardware chip.
Codec decoding, we use an off-board CPU that has a microkernel and a small program; it benefits from just not running an OS and being a dedicated RISC processor, but in no other way.
GPU, specialized instruction set. Not dedicated to a specific task, but dedicated to a type of task. WAY faster than a regular CPU for that task.
An FPGA configured to run AES at 100MHz will operate faster than a computer calculating AES at 1000MHz if a single round of AES is 1/10 as many cycles on the FPGA as the CPU. This is not very far-fetched, since implementing AES in hardware is QUITE efficient.
You have to realize that a generic processor might, for example, spend 13 cycles doing DIV or MOD; it might spend 2000 cycles calculating a particular hash round because it has to do ADD, SHL, MOD, XOR, XCHG, MUL... on a specific set of data so wide. A specialized chipset might take 50, 100, 200 cycles... so if it's at the same clock rate it's 10, 20, 40 times as fast. That the FPGA may be slow doesn't much matter if it can implement an efficient gate logic that performs a task without any sort of instruction decoding or other overhead-- or really, with instructions such as "ADDSHLMULMODXORXCHMUL" that run in 6-8 cycles instead of 2-3 cycles for each of 6 separate instructions (i.e. 12-18 cycles, and note MOD and MUL are rather long 8-15 cycle operations on their own).
It's the same as how SSE is faster for specific data sets, or floating point instructions are faster, etc. You create highly specialized instructions that pipeline in stages... you could even make a circuit with a sequence of 16 "instructions" compromising one operation with 16 registers, so that rather than playing with registers in a pipeline you can actually, say, ADD, MUL, MOD, SHL, XCHG... and when you perform MUL, the ADD for the NEXT item in the data set begins in that pipeline. Some things on the CPU happen this way; other things simply cannot due to lack of internal storage or internal design; and in some cases the output relies on the input so this is simply not possible. To pipeline so efficiently, however, is to make the entire set of 300000000000 instructions to perform 1 step in a multi-step operation take however long the slowest single instruction takes (i.e. completely decode a full frame of MPEG video in the 13 cycles it takes to perform a single division operation), provided you have enough internal storage to run the pipeline on that much data.
Yes, my criteria is that a spook at every position along the wire physically cannot figure out who the hell you are, even if one is standing right next to you going, "Someone within range of the access point up there on that shelf is doing this... someone within a block and a half radius, in one of these 10 story buildings. Someone in that McDonalds, or that Panera, or up there on the second floor of Barnes & Noble, or in that Best Buy across the street, or one of the 2500 people in that office building." They would have to shake everyone down; find the device; and then examine it to see if it is indeed responsible for the connection being tracked (because maybe it's someone else's device running that connection, not yours, even though yours does have the relevant software... oh, you're just downloading MP3s, we're looking for the guy downloading nuclear secrets off a Russian site, let's shake down the guy over there instead...).
Penny Arcade reference?
A programmable hardware platform would provide amazing computing power because of hardware specialization: rather than emulating a proper CPU, you would download core architecture into the FPGA to accelerate tasks such as REGEX processing or H.264 decoding. You could compile the entire logic of a program into a gate array with various logical operators and flip-flop circuits for unlimited (albeit slow) registers (L2 registers) as well as including standard registers and SRAM cache (L1).
Although the FPGA runs slower than a regular CPU, direct programming rather than instructional programming (that is logic blocks that perform programmatic functions, rather than logic blocks that interpret discrete instructions to follow programmatic functions) would shorten the overall hardware logic path. In short, the chip would follow fewer clock cycles and instead just "do things." The CPU would be slow, but optimized for your workload. The main performance bottleneck would be the context switch: replacing the logic gate configuration with a new program every time you switch. Other than that, dynamic program expansion could be utilized: inlining operations like multiplication, addition, etc, or breaking them out if space constraints make it hard to load the whole program onto the FPGA that way.
The obvious, major issue we see is, of course, a security issue. You can now reprogram the CPU. This makes it difficult to prevent a program from bypassing any and all hardware security measures. This is solved by implementing a completely new security design on the chip, by which the CPU itself (the FPGA) is under control of external security mechanisms (paging etc handled in the MMU, outside the FPGA space, would largely mitigate most of this); it's not impossible to deal with, it's just an issue that needs to be raised.
In short, this sucks for "download the new Intel CPU into your BIOS/bootloader." This sucks for whatever general purpose CPU you can think of. For an entirely new programmatic platform, however, this would provide some interesting performance possibilities, and some interesting challenges.
It should. However, they are wholly allowed to only accept payment by a major credit card. My insurance company will take my pay from a check or bank account + routing number, but I need to put down a major credit card as well.
Enough forensics will trace the connection back to where it came from, i.e. starbucks. Satellite... good luck getting free satellite, and they can ID the device somehow if you have a log-on (z3r0c00l did this...). I'm talking about something that traces back to a pinhole in reality and then vanishes. Oh shit, the attack came from nowhere; a wizard did it.
I don't know if it's correct. A cute girl in my class described herself that way, because her skin started to rot away when she went vegetarian and she almost died. What the hell?
This forums post pops up: http://www.thrashunlimited.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=155519&sid=6de3a40271f6c89a108e0224842a0d0c#p155519
As for "Correct," I don't know.
Sitting in a Starbucks is a low-risk method because it's hard to trace. Hell, you can load automated software onto a hand-held PDA (iPaq? I ran Linux on one...) to do all the raping and infecting. The packets can be tagged with a different MAC address than your real device, making it physically untraceable; it's all in your pocket, and can auto-connect to wifi and do whatever, so picking you out of a crowd is harder than "find the suspicious person" since you just carry it around and don't go out sniping.
This works for MP3s and child porn and whatever the hell else too, btw. Assuming you know where and what to search (I assume torrents for MP3s, who knows for kiddy porn), you could have an automated program do all the relevant searches and store the results. When you get home, pop the device out and browse through the cached results... pick what you want, and next time you're out it'll find those things and download them.
For the obvious flaw, you can ban your own Wifi network and your neighbors', or have the program automatically search for certain networks (yours, your neighbors', etc) and decide you're "too close to home" and shut down. You could even have a separate daemon that handles wifi, and when it sees you're "too close to home" it prevents any wifi connections at all.
There's a lot of "I can have this here with me, but never physically do anything while connected to the network, and never use my own network" that can be done to hide your online presence. The same can be done for chatting on forums, sending e-mail, etc. The only thing you can't hide that way is real-time chat like instant messaging or IRC, because you have to twiddle the device; but for answering a forums post or blogs, you can have a program smart enough to deal with phpBB and V-Bulletin and Wordpress... it could let you record what you want to post, who to reply to, which post ID to reply to, the works... then when you're out somewhere, post.
Basically you're interacting from an alternate reality, one where you're pulled out of the real world; that interaction is transferred into the real world physically somewhere, but you're not present at that point and there's no cable running from there to here to draw a path to you. You'd have to use an innocuous device (a PDA most likely, bought in cash) and download the software from a MAC-shifted device on a public link to have absolutely zero trail (i.e. no evidence that you're even capable of this), but it'd be doable. Completely. It'd make for some interesting shit... maybe I'll write a sci-fi novella about the idea.
Obama wanted to raise taxes on import goods a la tariff ... Income tax was unconstitutional and we instead had a tariff system for imports. Why, our country threw down a 1% income tax and the government drew in 30 times more in taxes that year than it ever did in history; 1% should have been enough to run this country forever, with constant tax refunds to the people at the end of the year for the money we took but didn't use. How it ever got to the 25%-40% graduated system we have today I'll never know.
It's the same stuff, and always has been. The only difference is the label. There is no need for quality in "high-end designer stuff" because it will be out of fashion before the defects become evident.
Very true. Tommy Hilfiger, Ambercrombie, etc etc, "it has a name that makes me street-cool," that crap is all garbage with a huge premium for the name and "current style" to make you cool. Even The Gap does it.
What you want are the mid-range business/casual outfitters. Land's End, Polo, and the like, the people that nobody gives a shit about but that try to win you over with "quality and style." The so-called "style" is "not looking like shit" but it's not going to pretend to net you "street-cred." The price tag isn't $500 either, just a bit more expensive (we're talking $18 wal-mart crap shirts vs $25 Land's End shirts). It's enough for you to risk it casually, but if it turns out to be no better you go with another manufacturer; thus the burden of actually providing quality falls squarely on the manufacturer.
Personally I don't even know what the style is today, besides looking like a moron that can't figure out how to use a belt. I like the lines and simple form Land's End uses, and have a distaste for the visual style Polo and Doc Marten provide; but others may disagree with me and go with those, or others. I'm in no great need of Ambercombie or Old Navy $50 shirts.
One thing I can definitely say about good quality clothes, though: they survive the wash without frilling, fuzzing, or fading for YEARS; but they'll still tear on concrete, wear if you kick your shoes off (grind the hem on your pants away until it frays via the sole of your shoe), and don't believe anyone that tells you this shit won't stain. Land's End has "no-iron" pants that last 30 washes without needing ironing... it doesn't hurt, they do show a little wear after 5-10 washes but they don't really start needing a press until 30 or 40. "Quality" doesn't mean it's indestructible.
Right, which is why most users are overly concerned about "credit card theft" when most infections are about spamming the shit out of people; and a large number of people who succumb to identity theft are actually taken by malware that installs itself as an "anti-virus" program but secretly records your bank transactions.
It's like walking through Baltimore City alone at night. As much as people are terrified by it, not everyone is out to kill you; that said, if you walk through Baltimore City alone at night regularly, you'll meet someone who is out to kill you. Paranoia is when you think they're all out to get you; rational sense is when you realize, no, they're not, but there's a significant risk of encountering someone eventually and it only takes one knife to stop your heart.
Well, if you're in Panera Bread or Barnes & Noble, you're probably being targeted "specifically" ... for some value of "specific" amounting to "the 5 people in that store dumb enough to use Wifi."
Is that the guy that wrote "Silence on the Wire"? That was a good book of not-likely attacks that are completely and utterly practical, at least in a lab environment consisting of "my living room and $10 of shit I bought off Mouser." Reading the blinking lights off modems, for example.