The problem with travel methods that let you go huge distances (wormholes, whatever, jolly fast stuff anyhow) is that they miss all the stuff between you and your destination. Not to mention stretching you out to a few atoms thick during acceleration.:)
One day when our conciousness is uploadable to machines, then long distance travel might become possible. Transporting about these Earth-dependant squishy bags of meat is a little pointless - even if we survive the hard-radiation/fast moving debris in space, the native fauna/bacteria/viruses might just finish us off when we get there. I've read War of the Worlds, make sense the other way round too (us as the invaders).
Assuming, of course, they've not already sent anything out in our direction already - we have been radiating signals like crazy for more than the last 20 years.;)
If you wanted to deliver the unexciting version you might want to point out that superman doesn't exist
But then you'd be labelled a spoil-sport and various slashdotters would come and throw bricks of REAL KRYPTONITE through your windows (no Superman to save you now, eh?!)
Way back when, there used to be a real benefit to upgrading your 133MHz PC to 200MHz and it was easy to do so just by changing the CPU. Quite - though as a percentage that was a significant upgrade.
In the days when every MHz counted, we all clawed to be at the cutting edge because upgrading really made a noticeable difference (not just to games, but the speed of everyday activities). Now the effect is less noticeable except in games as a FPS increase or the ability to turn on extra effects.
I remember a lecturer at Uni asking us if we thought that the 200MHz CPU speeds of the time would increase, citing Moore's Law and questioning whether parallelism was the way forward. At the time it would've astonished all of us to even think of a processor with a core running at 2.4GHz. Give it ten years and what will we have? 256-core processors running with core clock speeds of 100GHz? I'm pretty sure it won't help my word processor live spell-check any quicker, but the Quake 3 framerates will be through the roof! (Not that that benchmark will be relevant when we've all got direct immersive links to our brain's perception centers).
But you can bet we'll go through a massive number of socket changes en-route and few of them will be compatible between competitive chipsets.:)
Ducks are Touring complete. They move across a (theoretically) infinite river in either direction. They have memory. In each step, they can catch fish, take a dump, or quack. This is the perfect example as to why standing next to an unshielded fusion reactor is Bad News(tm).
Personally I like the idea of starships powered by Bad News. As Douglas Adams points out, it is the only thing that travels faster than light - but wherever you go, you're unpopular when you get there.:)
Why try and force a 300W machine to sit at 50W when it only needs to run low load background tasks? That's not an optimal solution.
If you do need a machine to be on 24/7, there is another way.
In my example, I have the requirement to run a games server 24/7 serving 1.6Gb/day, and also play games on it/unrelated games. Obviously the games machine is always going to be something of a power hungry beast, so not optimal for long-term running as a server as well.
The solution - two machines. One expensive power-hungry beast for playing games (that can be switched off when not in use), and one cheap efficient machine for 24/7 serving.
For the server I use a SFF Compaq D500 (1.3GHz Celeron with 512Mb SDRAM) which can be picked up for next to nothing on eBay. It came as standard with a 50W supply because they never were that power hungry in the first place. Disconnecting the DVD drive and not having a keyboard and mouse plugged in brings its power consumption down even further, and with some of the links to Linux power saving configuration in the threads above it may even be possible to improve this.
It has happily served 1.6Gb of games traffic per day for a measly 35W for many months now.
Don't try and adjust your quart to fit into a pint pot.:)
Which is exactly how Snow Crash describes the arrangement, though Neil goes one step further and suggests that even avatars are processed locally (so if you have a low b/w connection, you're black and white or low on detail).
I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it. Oh yes! That game was cracking good fun. Used to take it in turns with a mate to see who could pull off the most outragous stunts, like touching the plane's belly in the sea without crashing, flying inverted under the bridges, or just taxiing it over a bridge.:)
Very well designed game for the time, and impressive to play.
http://www.metacritic.com/ is a fantastic site which does weighted averaging of scores from many reviews. I use it for games in particular - it's useful to check the reviews that give a high score against the reviews that give a low score to see what is good and what is not about a game before buying. The "averaged" score almost always corresponds with my experience of the games too, so the system seems to work.
So reviews do serve a purpose, but, as with many things in life, to get a balanced opinion you need to sample from a set great than 1.
imagine a Beow....ah, screw it. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of organically connected people imagining Beowulf clusters - I'd have Quake running on you at a squillian FPS in no time!
Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years!
(Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)
As with Ajax, your local machine will likely do the work by one method or another (Java? ActiveX plugins?). "Online" in just a web delivery mechanism for their software, with a possible remote server backend for storage and configuration.
Note that Debian users cannot endorse this wok technique because the wok isn't fully open source. If only you'd written "open sauce" I'd have modded you +1 Funny.;)
Unfortunately I know about this all too well, the hard way.
Take your eye off the ball and lose your server, it's as simple as that.
If you have a server with a lot of PHP applications running, you need to watch them all. I forgot about a CMS installation on my server that was being preserved for historical reasons (not even linked from the front page, but obviously visible to google), and sure enough, it got exploited via a remote inclusion attack and was used for nefarious perposes for a while without being noticing.
Checking the logs, the definite path of attack was a google for a known vunerable version of the CMS system, and then application of a perl script to perform the hack. Clearly the vunerable system goes into a database of known vunerable systems that gets shared, because to this day, despite the CMS system being backed up and taken offline, my server get attacks about once every 20 minutes from perl scripts targeting that CMS.
I also regularly see bots automatically filling in registration forms with spam, and wikis getting referrer comments added to them or even the content changed by bots.
Looking after even a smallish webserver has proven to be a royal pain in the proverbial.
Regarding PHPShell, I'd hope most people hash their password in the config file rather than leaving it plain-text, and also hide it away somewhere non-obvious (maybe behind another level of protection to keep the webcrawlers from spotting it). But even with hashed passwords, logging in still uses a plaintext password, and is thus equally vunerable to good old ftp and telnet password sniffing. The Joomla extension to provide a plugin PHPShell is a worrying development, and I'm sure will lead to more PHPShell discoveries on servers.
Really the only way to avoid being compromised if you have a semi-busy site, is to learn how to compromise websites yourself, and try it on your own site (and it also teachs you what to look out for in logs). This in combination with regular patching seems to be the best way to stay one step ahead.
And yes, keeping the evidence is good - it gets stupid kids kicked off their ISPs when you send them the proof.;) Now *that* is some satisfying karma.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to add this gallery to my "Gallery of Lamest Galleries Ever", but it stack overflowed when someone submitted it to itself.
One day when our conciousness is uploadable to machines, then long distance travel might become possible. Transporting about these Earth-dependant squishy bags of meat is a little pointless - even if we survive the hard-radiation/fast moving debris in space, the native fauna/bacteria/viruses might just finish us off when we get there. I've read War of the Worlds, make sense the other way round too (us as the invaders).
Assuming, of course, they've not already sent anything out in our direction already - we have been radiating signals like crazy for more than the last 20 years.
Started as fictional short story, then comics, then cartoons, then movies (although throw in TV series, broadway performances, radio shows).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1940s_cart
And:
http://anivair.justgotowned.com/
"Hope", "may" and "unfortunately" all in one article.
It's like reading about Duke Nukem Forever.
But then you'd be labelled a spoil-sport and various slashdotters would come and throw bricks of REAL KRYPTONITE through your windows (no Superman to save you now, eh?!)
Summary
Exciting: Contains same elements as described in fictional cartoon
Unexciting: Superman could use it as a paperweight without feeling like he's dying of man-flu
In the days when every MHz counted, we all clawed to be at the cutting edge because upgrading really made a noticeable difference (not just to games, but the speed of everyday activities). Now the effect is less noticeable except in games as a FPS increase or the ability to turn on extra effects.
I remember a lecturer at Uni asking us if we thought that the 200MHz CPU speeds of the time would increase, citing Moore's Law and questioning whether parallelism was the way forward. At the time it would've astonished all of us to even think of a processor with a core running at 2.4GHz. Give it ten years and what will we have? 256-core processors running with core clock speeds of 100GHz? I'm pretty sure it won't help my word processor live spell-check any quicker, but the Quake 3 framerates will be through the roof! (Not that that benchmark will be relevant when we've all got direct immersive links to our brain's perception centers).
But you can bet we'll go through a massive number of socket changes en-route and few of them will be compatible between competitive chipsets.
That's nothing, I got mine to boot off a remote ser
R Tape Loading Error, 0:1
Personally I like the idea of starships powered by Bad News. As Douglas Adams points out, it is the only thing that travels faster than light - but wherever you go, you're unpopular when you get there.
...about the reactor having an "I feel lucky" button, but with a "Do you feel lucky, punk?" Navy twist to them.
Why try and force a 300W machine to sit at 50W when it only needs to run low load background tasks? That's not an optimal solution.
:)
If you do need a machine to be on 24/7, there is another way.
In my example, I have the requirement to run a games server 24/7 serving 1.6Gb/day, and also play games on it/unrelated games. Obviously the games machine is always going to be something of a power hungry beast, so not optimal for long-term running as a server as well.
The solution - two machines. One expensive power-hungry beast for playing games (that can be switched off when not in use), and one cheap efficient machine for 24/7 serving.
For the server I use a SFF Compaq D500 (1.3GHz Celeron with 512Mb SDRAM) which can be picked up for next to nothing on eBay. It came as standard with a 50W supply because they never were that power hungry in the first place. Disconnecting the DVD drive and not having a keyboard and mouse plugged in brings its power consumption down even further, and with some of the links to Linux power saving configuration in the threads above it may even be possible to improve this.
It has happily served 1.6Gb of games traffic per day for a measly 35W for many months now.
Don't try and adjust your quart to fit into a pint pot.
Which is exactly how Snow Crash describes the arrangement, though Neil goes one step further and suggests that even avatars are processed locally (so if you have a low b/w connection, you're black and white or low on detail).
Say what? Your reply appears to be empty. ;)
Very well designed game for the time, and impressive to play.
I can feel my life draining awaaaayyyyyyy.......
...but maybe not as individual reviews.
http://www.metacritic.com/ is a fantastic site which does weighted averaging of scores from many reviews. I use it for games in particular - it's useful to check the reviews that give a high score against the reviews that give a low score to see what is good and what is not about a game before buying. The "averaged" score almost always corresponds with my experience of the games too, so the system seems to work.
So reviews do serve a purpose, but, as with many things in life, to get a balanced opinion you need to sample from a set great than 1.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of organically connected people imagining Beowulf clusters - I'd have Quake running on you at a squillian FPS in no time!
Format is irrelevant - since these documents will contain legal-speak, they'll be unreadable anyway. ;)
Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years! (Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)
131 items in the UK, many of them crappy cards with only 32Mb memory for a few quid. This really does not warrant an Ask Slashdot.
Next, I'm going to Ask Slashdot how to pick my own nose, and possibly follow it up asking for techniques for sucking eggs.
As with Ajax, your local machine will likely do the work by one method or another (Java? ActiveX plugins?). "Online" in just a web delivery mechanism for their software, with a possible remote server backend for storage and configuration.
More to the point, why pay to watch "45 South" when I can, more cheaply, scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon from Honest Al's Hardware store.
Unfortunately I know about this all too well, the hard way.
;) Now *that* is some satisfying karma. :)
Take your eye off the ball and lose your server, it's as simple as that.
If you have a server with a lot of PHP applications running, you need to watch them all. I forgot about a CMS installation on my server that was being preserved for historical reasons (not even linked from the front page, but obviously visible to google), and sure enough, it got exploited via a remote inclusion attack and was used for nefarious perposes for a while without being noticing.
Checking the logs, the definite path of attack was a google for a known vunerable version of the CMS system, and then application of a perl script to perform the hack. Clearly the vunerable system goes into a database of known vunerable systems that gets shared, because to this day, despite the CMS system being backed up and taken offline, my server get attacks about once every 20 minutes from perl scripts targeting that CMS.
I also regularly see bots automatically filling in registration forms with spam, and wikis getting referrer comments added to them or even the content changed by bots.
Looking after even a smallish webserver has proven to be a royal pain in the proverbial.
Regarding PHPShell, I'd hope most people hash their password in the config file rather than leaving it plain-text, and also hide it away somewhere non-obvious (maybe behind another level of protection to keep the webcrawlers from spotting it). But even with hashed passwords, logging in still uses a plaintext password, and is thus equally vunerable to good old ftp and telnet password sniffing. The Joomla extension to provide a plugin PHPShell is a worrying development, and I'm sure will lead to more PHPShell discoveries on servers.
Really the only way to avoid being compromised if you have a semi-busy site, is to learn how to compromise websites yourself, and try it on your own site (and it also teachs you what to look out for in logs). This in combination with regular patching seems to be the best way to stay one step ahead.
And yes, keeping the evidence is good - it gets stupid kids kicked off their ISPs when you send them the proof.