What I find amazing is how many services are enabled per default on these distributions. Why is there *any* network connectivity enabled by default? Consider the following: Redhat has stated multiple times that it is targetting the new-to-linux crowd and aims to have a simple installation procedure, etc. Given that, why would the average user need to have their X windows session remotely available, have a webserver, NFS, FTP, and an X Windows font server? When I first installed linux I was shocked at how many services were turned on by default. This is a cracker's dream - a neophyte user who has every service turned on. Uggghn.
I'd like to see an approach more on par with the *BSD crew - disable everything by default and/or make it the most restrictive. That way, if a user wants to learn to do something they'll read the man page or the manual and learn how to do it AS WELL AS what the risks are / how to properly configure it. This is much more in line for both neophyte and experienced users as you shouldn't be running something you don't know how to use on a public network like the internet.. you're just gagging for it then.:/ Just my $0.02.
You're one of those politically correct bleeding heart people aren't you? "personkind", complaining about feeding the hungry, etc., etc... it just smells like political correctness. Well cry me a river, build me a bridge, and then get over it!
If you feel so strongly about it, how about giving up internet access and donating the few dollars that you gain to charity? Sheesh...
Here we go again.. another group says because E.T. isn't communicating on the frequencies we're looking at, they must not be out there. And from this, we can deduce that there's less chance of aliens being out there. Wrong, all wrong.
There's alot of assumptions here. First, that an alien race would want to be found and/or communicate. Maybe they're sufficiently advanced (and have met other species - maybe hundreds of planets) that we're just not worth their time. Anyone who's been around a three year old can understand what I'm saying here. Second, who's to say the aliens use the EM spectrum the way we do? Maybe on their planet light was the best way of communicating due to magnetic interference. Or maybe they don't have the same materials to make the same kinds of electronics we do. If they make electronics at all. For all we know, they're using quantum subspace carrier band signals to phone home.
Oh, then there's the problem of language. How exactly are we going to be able to tell when something is trying to communicate with us if we don't know the language. Imagine getting a burst of static out of your speakers from your PC instead of a picture. Would you be able to decode it? Maybe they're using a different encoding scheme. Something unintelligible like Word 7.doc maybe.
Oh, and then there's the problem of signal propagation. Our EM signals probably don't reach far outside our solar system because they're not powerful enough to overcome all the natural noise out there. Maybe if we had a dedicated nuclear reactor and a transmitter we could push a strong signal out there. And who's to say there isn't a galaxy or three between them and us? Kinda hard to transmit through solid rock.. especially at the frequencies we use.
Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.. if someone was trying to talk to us, they'd want to be sure a galaxy wasn't in the way. We're scanning in.. what... the gigahertz range? Signals deteriorate muuuuch quicker when they're higher in frequency.
Hello, this is Signal 11's answering machine. If you are a friend please leave a message after the tone. If you are a bill collector or an advertiser, please leave your message *BEFORE* the tone. If you fail to comply, you will be charged $45 for unauthorized access into this computational device as provided under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which categorizes this device as a protected database of confidential information. Thank you.
They're already doing things to help create the shock wave in front of the craft. Basically it involves shooting a stream of plasma ahead of the cone. Plasma super-heats the air, causes a shockwave, shockwave creates a "hole" of low-pressure for the craft to pass through. Nose cone still critical though.:)
You don't know what you're talking about. I have a running 6 and 7 year experiment with electromigration, and guess what? This hasn't been a problem, period. I have a 486/66 and a Pentium 100, bother overclocked, that have been running overclocked the respective times, 24/7, barring power outages.
Electromigration doesn't take place until the chips reach about 170C. This is about 338 fahrenheight. Water boils at 212. Electromigration is a physical phenomenon DIRECTLY linked to heat - it CANNOT occur at low temperatures. It is also worth noting that at around those temperatures the soldering bonds of the PCB starts to break down. But you don't have to take my word for it, look it up for yourself.
One of my electrical engineering professors has a old transistor collection, and you can see a decay in Beta (B) of these devices, so the gain characteristics have changed a fair bit.
That's probably due more to the fact that old transistors only had a sealed metal top on them which due to vibration or over time can become loose (not loose enough for you to notice) and allow the atmosphere to leak in, oxidizing the silicon.
This is _much_ more of a problem in a analog transistor, where the preformance is supposed to be linear.
That's total bunk. Maybe if you had a thick enough marker you could plot it log-log, but "Real Transistors" are distinctly non-linear - see the graph half-way down the page over here. You'll note that the transistor has an area which is fairly linear, but saying that the output of a transistor is linear for any given input is false.
If you overclock, you up the clock rate of a CMOS process. Power consumption goes up correspondingly.
It can't, because the chip's resistance hasn't changed - you didn't increase voltage or current, nor did you reduce the total impedance in the chip (it's the same circuit!) How can power thus increase? Ohm's law doesn't change simply because you increase the frequency.
However, going from 2.2 to 2.4 volts will - assume it was consuming 50W of energy @ 2.2 volts. That means it needs 22 amps. so the chip has a total impedance of 0.1 ohms. Using Ohm's Law, we deduce that an increase to 2.4 volts will give us 24 amps of current - nearly 10% more current!
I'll give you a definitive "maybe". It just depends on your board, your CPU, and the phase of the moon. Stability is king here.. there's no point running at 733 instead of 700 if your Quake3 game sh*ts itself every 10 minutes. "YMMV" is the key acronym here.:)
why are you cheaping out and then risking not only your warranty (or blowing it altogether) but the life of your CPU?
Okay, first, you're talking about electromigration. Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips. As we shrink the die size of the CPUs down, we are moving the gates of each transistor closer and closer together. Now, silicon is just as suspeptible to expanding due to heat as any other chemical, and what happens is that as those gates expand, they start passing more current. More current = more heat. Now the more current that is passing, the more likely it is to "jump" the gate and short the adjacent gates - current is going where no current was expected. This results in (at the very least) a performance hit AND system instability. In the worst-case scenario, you blow your chip as the current spikes and the gates fuse.
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it.:)
Now, the risks are that every time you increase the voltage, you increase current. You increase current, you increase heat. Current is what causes heat, NOT voltage.. however ohm's law dictates that if you increase voltage and keep resistance constant.. you increase current. See above. It is worth mentioning that if you can get your chip to run stable at a higher clock speed without increasing the voltage, you're not going to damage the chip any more than normal operation, practically speaking. Yes, there will be a (slight) increase in heat production due to the higher frequencies.. but really it's not a Big Deal(tm).
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
So why the risk? Because a 550 MHz chip can sometimes be $100 less than a 600 MHz chip. It was also discovered that many chip foundries are having unusually good yields (especially the Celerons) so they had to mark the 600, or even 700 chip down to 550 to maintain their pricing structure. A glut of high quality chips would ruin their market.. so they just remarked them.
If you get one of these chips, it is a pretty safe bet you can overclock it AND save hundreds of dollars! Good deal, huh? But it's a crap shoot.. and there are no guarantees.
I've been having problems with my palm too - for starters it's not water-proof. You spill something on it once, and bzzzt, that's it. On the plus side, the original palm I have doesn't require batteries. Just turn the crank. Too bad it doesn't have a backlit display.. but that might draw alot of questions, especially considering the size of the crank.
Anyway, with new battery powered palms and a backlit display, I'm sure it'll be easier than ever to
It's the decision of the Slashdot staff what to post and when.
Just as it is the decision of Intel to release another processor. Likewise, I can hold an opinion on it (ie, the Pentium IV sucks because it lacks ${FEATURE}).
I'd rather ask the same question of you.. why are you sitting here berating me instead of posting something useful?
They've gotten burned several times for posting things without all the facts...
Yes, but I guess we can't complain about that, can we?
...I, for one, applaud them for waiting on this one and posting a number of good information sources within the post.
Slashdot isn't censoring the story.. everybody knows that. It's just that every time somebody submits the same story again, Rob delays posting it by 24 hours.
Go read the CFRs.. specifically the search for the words "semi-open forum" in regards to school conduct. You'll find that although public schools definately qualify as "public" areas, and hence protected by free speech, there are scores of laws on the books to limit its expression.
As a minor, I cannot vote, cannot bear arms, cannot testify in a court of law (and have it carry the same weight as an adult) and cannot excercise my freedom of speech when it offends an adult. Those are the rights we give minors. Being 20 now, I can excercise all the rights I mentioned above. I will never forget, nor forgive, this society for taking away my voice and silencing my protests saying it was "in my best interests". Not ever.
The laws may be on the books, but that's not how they're enforced.
Maybe that headline ought to read: Slashdot discovers Apple Cube pictures are fraudulent, reports anyway
More seriously.. is slashdot becoming the national enquirer of the tech industry.. reporting on rumors and half-truths? I, for one, am still waiting for the headline Natalie Portman's pregnancy due to troll on famous nerds for news site, film at 11! Or maybe the headliner - Jon Katz beaten at subway station outside hacker convention in New York.. where Mr. Katz explains in an exclusive interview that this is how geeks typically welcome new people into the fold.. *insert mandatory columbine reference* and after the doctors figure out how to remove the 13 bullets he'll be back on slashdot reporting fast as ever...
Disclaimer: The above was satire. If it offends you, try decaffe.
Why? Because the constitution only applies to citizens. To be a citizen, you need to be 18 or older. Sad, but true. And so the "moral majority" decided that in the best interests of the children, they should shield them from all the nasty things like.. the real world.
Want to make a difference? Stand up for your kid, parents.
Close. I'm using initrd though, which means I don't need to worry about my "fake" root.. the remounting is taken care of by the kernel then. All I need to do is tell the kernel that/dev/loop0 is where it should mount root from.:)
That's the theory anyway.. the practice is that creating an initrd.gz image with SSH, login/authentication capabilities (via PAM) and the necessary tools to boot up a basic mandrake 7 system is about 20MB. Bloatware (ugh). All that needs to go into RAM. Even worse.. the linux kernel only defaults to creating 4MB of ramdisk.. so as soon as it accesses anything past 4MB.. *BOOM!* fscking piece of #$@! anyway.. I'll write up a HOWTO once it's done.
Bah, they already have a solution to this controversy: meta-suing - suing the people who sued you.
More seriously.. I say if you put a service on the internet, it is world-accessible. There is no way anyone can realistically be expected to see every legal mumbo-jumbo on each and every page they surf. It is an unreasonable burden to place on the viewer as there is no way of determining the validity of the "contract" (you don't even know what country it's in!).
I say that unless you use HTTP authentication or another form of validation.. anything you put on a webpage is public-accessible, copyright be damned. It is simply an unreasonable burden to ask otherwise.
I'm working on it via the loopback device. My current system is a two-stage bootloader. The initial stage gives you access to two accounts - root and stagetwo. Login to stagetwo, su to root, and losetup each drive. It uses initrd (initial ramdisk) to load a "fake" root filesystem. Once you've configured the kernel, lilo will then obliege and load up your loopback'd root filesystem. That's the theory anyway. So far I can do everything *but* the root filesystem. The reason is that the initrd docs are pretty vague.
But there are people working on things like this.. I'm one of 'em.
I know of a virus which would be much worse than any of the current crop of viruses: Make one that randomly changes bits in a database. Just think about it for alittle bit...
What I'm waiting for is them to open up restrictions enough to let these guys get their patches added to the main linux kernel tree. I think it's a shame that linux is lagging behind OpenBSD due to our country's legal hangups over crypto. This is good news.. I just hope it's enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see an approach more on par with the *BSD crew - disable everything by default and/or make it the most restrictive. That way, if a user wants to learn to do something they'll read the man page or the manual and learn how to do it AS WELL AS what the risks are / how to properly configure it. This is much more in line for both neophyte and experienced users as you shouldn't be running something you don't know how to use on a public network like the internet.. you're just gagging for it then. :/ Just my $0.02.
It's called Nightmare File System for a reason you know. =)
If you feel so strongly about it, how about giving up internet access and donating the few dollars that you gain to charity? Sheesh...
There's alot of assumptions here. First, that an alien race would want to be found and/or communicate. Maybe they're sufficiently advanced (and have met other species - maybe hundreds of planets) that we're just not worth their time. Anyone who's been around a three year old can understand what I'm saying here. Second, who's to say the aliens use the EM spectrum the way we do? Maybe on their planet light was the best way of communicating due to magnetic interference. Or maybe they don't have the same materials to make the same kinds of electronics we do. If they make electronics at all. For all we know, they're using quantum subspace carrier band signals to phone home.
Oh, then there's the problem of language. How exactly are we going to be able to tell when something is trying to communicate with us if we don't know the language. Imagine getting a burst of static out of your speakers from your PC instead of a picture. Would you be able to decode it? Maybe they're using a different encoding scheme. Something unintelligible like Word 7 .doc maybe.
Oh, and then there's the problem of signal propagation. Our EM signals probably don't reach far outside our solar system because they're not powerful enough to overcome all the natural noise out there. Maybe if we had a dedicated nuclear reactor and a transmitter we could push a strong signal out there. And who's to say there isn't a galaxy or three between them and us? Kinda hard to transmit through solid rock.. especially at the frequencies we use.
Here's another thought - try looking at ULTRA-LOW FREQUENCIES.. if someone was trying to talk to us, they'd want to be sure a galaxy wasn't in the way. We're scanning in.. what... the gigahertz range? Signals deteriorate muuuuch quicker when they're higher in frequency.
Just a few thoughts.
I guess they'd better bring me in on charges.. I've been hanging up on solicitors for the past 3 years without saying a word...
Hello, this is Signal 11's answering machine. If you are a friend please leave a message after the tone. If you are a bill collector or an advertiser, please leave your message *BEFORE* the tone. If you fail to comply, you will be charged $45 for unauthorized access into this computational device as provided under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which categorizes this device as a protected database of confidential information. Thank you.
They're already doing things to help create the shock wave in front of the craft. Basically it involves shooting a stream of plasma ahead of the cone. Plasma super-heats the air, causes a shockwave, shockwave creates a "hole" of low-pressure for the craft to pass through. Nose cone still critical though. :)
Electromigration doesn't take place until the chips reach about 170C. This is about 338 fahrenheight. Water boils at 212. Electromigration is a physical phenomenon DIRECTLY linked to heat - it CANNOT occur at low temperatures. It is also worth noting that at around those temperatures the soldering bonds of the PCB starts to break down. But you don't have to take my word for it, look it up for yourself.
One of my electrical engineering professors has a old transistor collection, and you can see a decay in Beta (B) of these devices, so the gain characteristics have changed a fair bit.
That's probably due more to the fact that old transistors only had a sealed metal top on them which due to vibration or over time can become loose (not loose enough for you to notice) and allow the atmosphere to leak in, oxidizing the silicon.
This is _much_ more of a problem in a analog transistor, where the preformance is supposed to be linear.
That's total bunk. Maybe if you had a thick enough marker you could plot it log-log, but "Real Transistors" are distinctly non-linear - see the graph half-way down the page over here. You'll note that the transistor has an area which is fairly linear, but saying that the output of a transistor is linear for any given input is false.
If you overclock, you up the clock rate of a CMOS process. Power consumption goes up correspondingly.
It can't, because the chip's resistance hasn't changed - you didn't increase voltage or current, nor did you reduce the total impedance in the chip (it's the same circuit!) How can power thus increase? Ohm's law doesn't change simply because you increase the frequency.
However, going from 2.2 to 2.4 volts will - assume it was consuming 50W of energy @ 2.2 volts. That means it needs 22 amps. so the chip has a total impedance of 0.1 ohms. Using Ohm's Law, we deduce that an increase to 2.4 volts will give us 24 amps of current - nearly 10% more current!
But is the performance gain really worth it?
I'll give you a definitive "maybe". It just depends on your board, your CPU, and the phase of the moon. Stability is king here.. there's no point running at 733 instead of 700 if your Quake3 game sh*ts itself every 10 minutes. "YMMV" is the key acronym here. :)
why are you cheaping out and then risking not only your warranty (or blowing it altogether) but the life of your CPU?
Okay, first, you're talking about electromigration. Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips. As we shrink the die size of the CPUs down, we are moving the gates of each transistor closer and closer together. Now, silicon is just as suspeptible to expanding due to heat as any other chemical, and what happens is that as those gates expand, they start passing more current. More current = more heat. Now the more current that is passing, the more likely it is to "jump" the gate and short the adjacent gates - current is going where no current was expected. This results in (at the very least) a performance hit AND system instability. In the worst-case scenario, you blow your chip as the current spikes and the gates fuse.
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it. :)
Now, the risks are that every time you increase the voltage, you increase current. You increase current, you increase heat. Current is what causes heat, NOT voltage.. however ohm's law dictates that if you increase voltage and keep resistance constant.. you increase current. See above. It is worth mentioning that if you can get your chip to run stable at a higher clock speed without increasing the voltage, you're not going to damage the chip any more than normal operation, practically speaking. Yes, there will be a (slight) increase in heat production due to the higher frequencies.. but really it's not a Big Deal(tm).
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
So why the risk? Because a 550 MHz chip can sometimes be $100 less than a 600 MHz chip. It was also discovered that many chip foundries are having unusually good yields (especially the Celerons) so they had to mark the 600, or even 700 chip down to 550 to maintain their pricing structure. A glut of high quality chips would ruin their market.. so they just remarked them.
If you get one of these chips, it is a pretty safe bet you can overclock it AND save hundreds of dollars! Good deal, huh? But it's a crap shoot.. and there are no guarantees.
Hope this helps!
It's the K7V not, A7V.
Anyway, with new battery powered palms and a backlit display, I'm sure it'll be easier than ever to
*click*
(Score: -1, inciteful)
You really want [this] link. Be prepared to wait - it is not only slashdotted, but I think all the people who heard the rumors are over there now too.
"are em space dash eff capital arr space slash enter."
~ The BOFH
Lay off.
You berated the staff first.
Satire not your strong point?
And, of course, you're the web police. Get on with it.
If I was, you'd be thrown in jail for resisting arrest.
Just as it is the decision of Intel to release another processor. Likewise, I can hold an opinion on it (ie, the Pentium IV sucks because it lacks ${FEATURE}).
I'd rather ask the same question of you.. why are you sitting here berating me instead of posting something useful?
They've gotten burned several times for posting things without all the facts...
Yes, but I guess we can't complain about that, can we?
Yes, after every other weblog on the planet did.
As a minor, I cannot vote, cannot bear arms, cannot testify in a court of law (and have it carry the same weight as an adult) and cannot excercise my freedom of speech when it offends an adult. Those are the rights we give minors. Being 20 now, I can excercise all the rights I mentioned above. I will never forget, nor forgive, this society for taking away my voice and silencing my protests saying it was "in my best interests". Not ever.
The laws may be on the books, but that's not how they're enforced.
More seriously.. is slashdot becoming the national enquirer of the tech industry.. reporting on rumors and half-truths? I, for one, am still waiting for the headline Natalie Portman's pregnancy due to troll on famous nerds for news site, film at 11! Or maybe the headliner - Jon Katz beaten at subway station outside hacker convention in New York.. where Mr. Katz explains in an exclusive interview that this is how geeks typically welcome new people into the fold.. *insert mandatory columbine reference* and after the doctors figure out how to remove the 13 bullets he'll be back on slashdot reporting fast as ever...
Disclaimer: The above was satire. If it offends you, try decaffe.
Why? Because the constitution only applies to citizens. To be a citizen, you need to be 18 or older. Sad, but true. And so the "moral majority" decided that in the best interests of the children, they should shield them from all the nasty things like.. the real world.
Want to make a difference? Stand up for your kid, parents.
That's the theory anyway.. the practice is that creating an initrd.gz image with SSH, login/authentication capabilities (via PAM) and the necessary tools to boot up a basic mandrake 7 system is about 20MB. Bloatware (ugh). All that needs to go into RAM. Even worse.. the linux kernel only defaults to creating 4MB of ramdisk.. so as soon as it accesses anything past 4MB.. *BOOM!* fscking piece of #$@! anyway.. I'll write up a HOWTO once it's done.
More seriously .. I say if you put a service on the internet, it is world-accessible. There is no way anyone can realistically be expected to see every legal mumbo-jumbo on each and every page they surf. It is an unreasonable burden to place on the viewer as there is no way of determining the validity of the "contract" (you don't even know what country it's in!).
I say that unless you use HTTP authentication or another form of validation.. anything you put on a webpage is public-accessible, copyright be damned. It is simply an unreasonable burden to ask otherwise.
But there are people working on things like this.. I'm one of 'em.
Cheers,
~ Signal 11
I know of a virus which would be much worse than any of the current crop of viruses: Make one that randomly changes bits in a database. Just think about it for alittle bit...
What I'm waiting for is them to open up restrictions enough to let these guys get their patches added to the main linux kernel tree. I think it's a shame that linux is lagging behind OpenBSD due to our country's legal hangups over crypto. This is good news.. I just hope it's enough.