BXXP looks good, but while we're creating a new standard, might I suggest a few things?
What we really need is a protocol that can, upon receipt of a single authenticated request, determine the speed that the remote end is running at, and then rapidly chunk out an entire page in a single request - instead of a few images here, a few javascript files there, and don't forget the stylesheet in the LINK tag!
It is obvious we are quickly moving into a high-bandwidth network where consumers will routinely have access to multi-megabyte streams. The TCP protocol is, by design, limited to a mere 780kb/s. You cannot go faster due to network latency and the max size of the RWIN buffer. Therefore, it's obvious this protocol needs to be UDP.
Security is also a concern - we need some way to authenticate that the packet came from where it said it did before we blast out a chunk of data - as likely there won't be time for the remote host to respond before we've sent out most of the request to it by then.. so some form of secure handshake is needed. If you could make this handshake computationally expensive for the client but not the server, so much the better for defeating any DDoS attacks.
But really.. we need a reliable file transfer protocol that supports serialized queuing and higher speeds than we do now.. and that means either ditching TCP, or setting up parallel streams between each.. with all the overhead that goes with that solution.
BXXP doesn't do that, unfortunately.. and if we're going to define a new protocol, let's plan ahead?
these dimm slots are CLEARLY occupied by cards with memory chips on them
Sure, I guess you'd know the difference between a DIMM slot made for cpu cache vs. main memory. I don't know anything about macintosh hardware, for all I know those dimms were there for caching accesses to main memory.
Just recently I have read several reviews of 400W and 450W consumer power supplies.
And yet.. no link.
Don't be the hardware equivelent of one of those foolish people who protests against movies they havn't seen.
The bus between the memory and the CPU is usually the fastest one in the system for a reason... how does this overcome the inherent limitation in getting data from main memory? It seems to me like just sticking 4 CPUs on a PCI bus is a recipe for disaster - your harddrive's controller, be it SCSI or IDE, is most always on the PCI bus.. wouldn't this create a huge contention for bandwidth and slow I/O down by about a factor of, oh, a million?:(
Maybe they have a huge cache on the board? Also.. as another poster mentioned.. what are the power requirements? I have a 300W power supply, and 250 is already sucked by *just* the CPU + mobo. I know the G4 has low power requirements.. but can the mobo supply much more than it is now??
What with all the neat stuff we've seen IBM do lately, why do you assume that marketing got to it before the engineers were at least positive it was feasible?
See previous post.
You know-- they're the people who advertise on prime time TV to sell SERVICES.
Interesting you should go out and quote them on their hardware prices, then call them a service company. Me thinks perhaps one might get a better deal by purchasing memory from a dedicated reseller with lower overhead?
Hate to break it to you, but do you think that your pretty 1GHz Pentium IV is purely digital?
They're grouped into bytes of 8,16,32, and 64 bits. bits are digital, either one or zero, aka binary. I don't know what goes on in between, but what goes in and what comes out (also known as I/O) is digital.
Higher latency, yes, for the first word.
Erm, as I recall, memory was designed to be really fast so we didn't need to go to the drive all the time. Something about "caching" data for faster access... faster *random* access. I didn't know that in your world, memory was serial. But if it was, that model would work great!
You see, memory is designed around low latency - there's 'nuff bandwidth for PCs to meet today's needs, so we need to focus on latency. Larger latency means more time before the CPU can do something with the data. That means another few cycles for each chunk of memory that it needs to sit around idle and do nothing. Eh, atleast that's what I heard.. but I could always be wrong! Afterall, x86 just ain't what it used to be.
Thanks for quoting the FAQ, but you missed my entire point - memory has to be optimized for worst-case. Worst-case means if it tells my board it is a 256MB dimm, it must have the resources to deal with all 256MBs with no compression. If you don't do your numbers by worse-case scenario, then something like encrypting a large file (which makes use of massive amounts of entropy.. atleast we hope) or loading a pre-compressed file into memory.. like, say, an MP3 server with a RealAudio connection to the net might do.. then the system will tank as it has nowhere to put the extra RAM.
You can't push/pull data out of some mystery void.. it has to go somewhere.. and in a worst-case scenario, one bit takes up one bit of space. Sorry.
Strike 1: "IBM Memory eXpansion Technology" BiCapitalization is the first sign of bad tech - it means the marketing people got to it before engineering could get it out the door. It also boils down to yet another meaningless TLA to impress PHBs: MXT.
Strike 2: fake numbers. "as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations" Er, gee, not only is that an absurdly large error margin, but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up. 40% of is $800. $800 of PC133 right now is about 640MB of RAM. Most systems in that price range have 256-384. Oops.
Strike 3: Stating the obvious "and millions of tiny transistors" Oh, and how else would you do it? An analog circuit, perhaps?!
Strike 4: Not promising: "The new technology is seamless to the end-user because the compressed data can be uncompressed in nanoseconds when needed." Call me a pessimist, but memory right now is around 6ns for PC133. Now, assuming a very conservative 2ns to decode the data, that's 8ns, which is a 25% performance hit. How many admins do you know that would take a 25% hit on performance on their servers to save a couple hundred bucks?
Compression CANNOT guarantee anything better than 1:1 ratio - it is ENTIRELY dependent on the data.
For data compression in memory to succeed, you MUST have an option to cache the "extra" memory to a swapfile incase the prediction logic fails and you run out of physical ram. If you do not, you will tank your system, bigtime.
Sorry, but I'm very leery of any "memory compression" - it requires OS support to function. Period. You aren't going to just plug in a miracle DIMM and make it work. I hope IBM is opening the spec (it looks like they are) and that OS development people quickly embrace this, or their hardware will take a nosedive in the market.
Hey, I take offense to this post - you're somehow saying that morality is some kind of absolute, with no regard to the circumstances?
How can you possibly draw a parallel between downloading mp3's and releasing secret information by the CIA on the names of their agents? How the f*ck are the two related? They're not! The information wants to be free crowd isn't a bunch of absolutists - we recognize that there must be limits. Some information shouldn't be free - you'll note I don't publish my root password.
By and far, this mandra is related to a subconscious counter-culture and anti-authoritarian attitude which has grown on us as a result of circumstances. Circumstances like watching our rights as "consumers" and citizens be systematically stripped away while calling it a "win in the battle for personal choice". We were taunted by our peers, ejected from our school system, for wanting to know how the system worked.
Yeah, there is some history here fella, and it would do you some good to talk to people on the other side of the fence before going off and trying to label everyone - something you'll find is usually met with freezing contempt amongst geeks.
Well I heard about it and decided that I would just grab a 60GB hdd from computergate and search for "a".. then "b".. then "c" and go right on down the line and download a few dozen gigs of mp3's. <p>Besides, the humorous part about Napster is that most music isn't shared by it - it is from college universities and mp3 servers in offices. The hardest part about mp3's is not in finding music, it's in finding a particular song. If it isn't popular (ie, the 18-25 group) you won't find it, unless it's techno.:(
Trust, defined: the level of reliability of a system. ie, you can trust that system X will not crash often.
WOOOOOSH!
That's the sound of my point going over your head. Open Source problems are fixed, fast. They tend to be less severe than other "secured" products on the whole. I use products that fix their bugs fast, and don't produce too many of them in shipping releases. Another "trusted" system - NT 3.51, I wouldn't trust to hold my porn, let alone classified government secrets. Yet, strangely enough, Microsoft managed to get it C2 certified.
Certification != trustworthiness. That's my point that Gene forgot, along with empirical evidence.
Well yes, and you're right - theory is different than reality. I was just complaining over the fact that these prices have been artificially inflated.. my bad if the wrong term was used.
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
As a consumer and a citizen of this country, I find this to be a failure in the capitalistic system. What happened to "equilibrium price" and competition to keep it down? It seemingly was thrown out. I blame it on government inaction, but others might blame it on government action - as this was caused directly by government intervention, specifically, a time-limited monopoly called a "patent" which prevents people from developing and purchasing alternatives at a lower price.
I look forward to the computer industry's UniCorp - a single massive company that owns everything, and you "lease" the products it produces and are subject entirely to its own bylaws and contracts. Competitors? No way. And all the while, our government officials and social elite will maintain that this was "the will of the market". No, it wasn't.. this isn't capitalism, this is facism with a different name!
Oh, really? I can make my system secure against physical theft using linux. It's simple. Follow the Loopback-Filesystem-HOWTO and recompile your kernel to support crypto. I prefer the serpent and idea algos, but YMMV.
Next, copy losetup, bash and your kernel to an unencrypted/boot partition. Encrypt everything else. Add an option to lilo specifying that/boot/myscript.sh is init. I disrecall if you need to specify boot as the root partition and remount it, so some experimentation may be necessary.
In the myscript.sh, there should be the set of commands to run losetup and prompt you for your passphrase(s) to mount your partitions. Enter them. Script should then remount root and exec the real init. System boots normally.
Dear sir, I humbly ask that you attempt to bypass the login: prompt and access my data on a system so configured. You may use any tool you like.
Someone's playing games with slashdot's name parsing code. I've already spoken with Cowboy Neal about this and it's a bug in the string-to-database parsing, which is how this guy has managed to overwrite the namespace for my name.
They're working on it though, don't worry.. you'll be back to flaming the original me in no time. (And sorry about forcing the +2 bonus, as I can't login, I can't control the default score)..
The problem with anonymity is that on a peer-to-peer network, it is impossible. ISPs have more or less been forced to log who signs on when, if not simply for billing purposes. Given that you can easily get the IP address of the person requesting the file(s) off your server, GNUella offers no more anonymity than a webserver.
If you want real anonymity, you have three options:
Proxy service
Illegal proxy service
broadcast network (ala MBone)
The first one can be had by anyone who will let you use their SOCKS5 server. With some servers, you may also be able to tunnel through an http proxy to obtain non-http service, however YMMV. Services exist online like Anonymizer.com or Freedom which will, for a small fee, happily remove all traces of your IP address from the request using one of their servers. Caveat emptor, however, as they likely need to keep logs as well to prevent absue.
Option #2, illegal proxying - crackers have known about this for a long time. Basically, grab yourself a copy of nmap and start scanning on ports 1080, 80, and 8080 and see how many proxies you can find. Scan for winproxies as well as they are often poorly configured.
Once you have your net of proxies up, or have compromised a bunch of computers and done the same, use those to relay your messages. Or just go down to a public terminal and install some proxy software.
Option 3, there is only one option here - MBone. It is basically an IP multicast network setup on top of IPv4 which allows one server to broadcast data to all other computers on the network.
I'd like to, at some point, start a project to create a self-healing mirroring network with crypto support do accomplish the same things GNUella does, but have it rely on multiple protocols and require no special software (ie, web servers, ftp servers, etc) for the clients to use to get information off the servers.
But I digress... in short, you have no privacy. Either do something illegal to get it back, or give up and accept it. No solutions exist at present to give you 100% anonymity. But.. there are projects in the works that aren't internet based that may be appearing in the not too distant future...
Considering it was an opinion yeah, I can see why you might have arrived at the conclusion you did.
The parent post is tripe. As are most (not all) of Signal 11's posts.
I could claim that's factually incorrect as it's obvious I get moderated up more often than not (indicating people disagree with you over that statement), but it would be too easy. How about we say that you're entitled to your opinion, just like me, and leave it at that?
Oh, great.. it was bad enough when they wanted to put a huge coca-cola sign in space which would be several thousand meters long and glow at night.. now what - are we going to put a billboard up in space that says "ATTENTION: We know you're out there. Come on over for the best chocolate in the solar system!" ??
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need is a protocol that can, upon receipt of a single authenticated request, determine the speed that the remote end is running at, and then rapidly chunk out an entire page in a single request - instead of a few images here, a few javascript files there, and don't forget the stylesheet in the LINK tag!
It is obvious we are quickly moving into a high-bandwidth network where consumers will routinely have access to multi-megabyte streams. The TCP protocol is, by design, limited to a mere 780kb/s. You cannot go faster due to network latency and the max size of the RWIN buffer. Therefore, it's obvious this protocol needs to be UDP.
Security is also a concern - we need some way to authenticate that the packet came from where it said it did before we blast out a chunk of data - as likely there won't be time for the remote host to respond before we've sent out most of the request to it by then.. so some form of secure handshake is needed. If you could make this handshake computationally expensive for the client but not the server, so much the better for defeating any DDoS attacks.
But really.. we need a reliable file transfer protocol that supports serialized queuing and higher speeds than we do now.. and that means either ditching TCP, or setting up parallel streams between each.. with all the overhead that goes with that solution.
BXXP doesn't do that, unfortunately.. and if we're going to define a new protocol, let's plan ahead?
these dimm slots are CLEARLY occupied by cards with memory chips on them
Sure, I guess you'd know the difference between a DIMM slot made for cpu cache vs. main memory. I don't know anything about macintosh hardware, for all I know those dimms were there for caching accesses to main memory.
Just recently I have read several reviews of 400W and 450W consumer power supplies.
And yet.. no link.
Don't be the hardware equivelent of one of those foolish people who protests against movies they havn't seen.
Practice what you preach.
Maybe they have a huge cache on the board? Also.. as another poster mentioned.. what are the power requirements? I have a 300W power supply, and 250 is already sucked by *just* the CPU + mobo. I know the G4 has low power requirements.. but can the mobo supply much more than it is now??
What with all the neat stuff we've seen IBM do lately, why do you assume that marketing got to it before the engineers were at least positive it was feasible?
See previous post.
You know-- they're the people who advertise on prime time TV to sell SERVICES.
Interesting you should go out and quote them on their hardware prices, then call them a service company. Me thinks perhaps one might get a better deal by purchasing memory from a dedicated reseller with lower overhead?
Hate to break it to you, but do you think that your pretty 1GHz Pentium IV is purely digital?
They're grouped into bytes of 8,16,32, and 64 bits. bits are digital, either one or zero, aka binary. I don't know what goes on in between, but what goes in and what comes out (also known as I/O) is digital.
Higher latency, yes, for the first word.
Erm, as I recall, memory was designed to be really fast so we didn't need to go to the drive all the time. Something about "caching" data for faster access... faster *random* access. I didn't know that in your world, memory was serial. But if it was, that model would work great!
You see, memory is designed around low latency - there's 'nuff bandwidth for PCs to meet today's needs, so we need to focus on latency. Larger latency means more time before the CPU can do something with the data. That means another few cycles for each chunk of memory that it needs to sit around idle and do nothing. Eh, atleast that's what I heard.. but I could always be wrong! Afterall, x86 just ain't what it used to be.
You can't push/pull data out of some mystery void.. it has to go somewhere.. and in a worst-case scenario, one bit takes up one bit of space. Sorry.
Strike 1: "IBM Memory eXpansion Technology" BiCapitalization is the first sign of bad tech - it means the marketing people got to it before engineering could get it out the door. It also boils down to yet another meaningless TLA to impress PHBs: MXT.
Strike 2: fake numbers. "as memory comprises 40 to 70 percent of the cost of most NT-based server configurations" Er, gee, not only is that an absurdly large error margin, but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up. 40% of is $800. $800 of PC133 right now is about 640MB of RAM. Most systems in that price range have 256-384. Oops.
Strike 3: Stating the obvious "and millions of tiny transistors" Oh, and how else would you do it? An analog circuit, perhaps?!
Strike 4: Not promising: "The new technology is seamless to the end-user because the compressed data can be uncompressed in nanoseconds when needed." Call me a pessimist, but memory right now is around 6ns for PC133. Now, assuming a very conservative 2ns to decode the data, that's 8ns, which is a 25% performance hit. How many admins do you know that would take a 25% hit on performance on their servers to save a couple hundred bucks?
In short, this new tech is gonna tank.
Compression CANNOT guarantee anything better than 1:1 ratio - it is ENTIRELY dependent on the data.
For data compression in memory to succeed, you MUST have an option to cache the "extra" memory to a swapfile incase the prediction logic fails and you run out of physical ram. If you do not, you will tank your system, bigtime.
Sorry, but I'm very leery of any "memory compression" - it requires OS support to function. Period. You aren't going to just plug in a miracle DIMM and make it work. I hope IBM is opening the spec (it looks like they are) and that OS development people quickly embrace this, or their hardware will take a nosedive in the market.
How can you possibly draw a parallel between downloading mp3's and releasing secret information by the CIA on the names of their agents? How the f*ck are the two related? They're not! The information wants to be free crowd isn't a bunch of absolutists - we recognize that there must be limits. Some information shouldn't be free - you'll note I don't publish my root password.
By and far, this mandra is related to a subconscious counter-culture and anti-authoritarian attitude which has grown on us as a result of circumstances. Circumstances like watching our rights as "consumers" and citizens be systematically stripped away while calling it a "win in the battle for personal choice". We were taunted by our peers, ejected from our school system, for wanting to know how the system worked.
Yeah, there is some history here fella, and it would do you some good to talk to people on the other side of the fence before going off and trying to label everyone - something you'll find is usually met with freezing contempt amongst geeks.
Well I heard about it and decided that I would just grab a 60GB hdd from computergate and search for "a".. then "b".. then "c" and go right on down the line and download a few dozen gigs of mp3's. :(
<p>Besides, the humorous part about Napster is that most music isn't shared by it - it is from college universities and mp3 servers in offices.
The hardest part about mp3's is not in finding music, it's in finding a particular song. If it isn't popular (ie, the 18-25 group) you won't find it, unless it's techno.
WOOOOOSH!
That's the sound of my point going over your head. Open Source problems are fixed, fast. They tend to be less severe than other "secured" products on the whole. I use products that fix their bugs fast, and don't produce too many of them in shipping releases. Another "trusted" system - NT 3.51, I wouldn't trust to hold my porn, let alone classified government secrets. Yet, strangely enough, Microsoft managed to get it C2 certified.
Certification != trustworthiness. That's my point that Gene forgot, along with empirical evidence.
No amount of money can make people adopt a BAD technology.
<p>CP/M anyone?
Well yes, and you're right - theory is different than reality. I was just complaining over the fact that these prices have been artificially inflated.. my bad if the wrong term was used.
Seems to be working fairly well without it. These aren't supercomputers you know.
Worse yet, none of these damn things have parity on control word inputs.
Uhh, that wasn't an accident - PCs don't need parity as it would only increase bandwidth requirements on an already tight channel.
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
As a consumer and a citizen of this country, I find this to be a failure in the capitalistic system. What happened to "equilibrium price" and competition to keep it down? It seemingly was thrown out. I blame it on government inaction, but others might blame it on government action - as this was caused directly by government intervention, specifically, a time-limited monopoly called a "patent" which prevents people from developing and purchasing alternatives at a lower price.
I look forward to the computer industry's UniCorp - a single massive company that owns everything, and you "lease" the products it produces and are subject entirely to its own bylaws and contracts. Competitors? No way. And all the while, our government officials and social elite will maintain that this was "the will of the market". No, it wasn't.. this isn't capitalism, this is facism with a different name!
And what do you call the New York Times cyberlaw section? First? Hrmph.
Next, copy losetup, bash and your kernel to an unencrypted /boot partition. Encrypt everything else. Add an option to lilo specifying that /boot/myscript.sh is init. I disrecall if you need to specify boot as the root partition and remount it, so some experimentation may be necessary.
In the myscript.sh, there should be the set of commands to run losetup and prompt you for your passphrase(s) to mount your partitions. Enter them. Script should then remount root and exec the real init. System boots normally.
Dear sir, I humbly ask that you attempt to bypass the login: prompt and access my data on a system so configured. You may use any tool you like.
Open Source not secure my arse...
Not if you're not logged in when you go to post!
They're working on it though, don't worry.. you'll be back to flaming the original me in no time. (And sorry about forcing the +2 bonus, as I can't login, I can't control the default score)..
If you want real anonymity, you have three options:
The first one can be had by anyone who will let you use their SOCKS5 server. With some servers, you may also be able to tunnel through an http proxy to obtain non-http service, however YMMV. Services exist online like Anonymizer.com or Freedom which will, for a small fee, happily remove all traces of your IP address from the request using one of their servers. Caveat emptor, however, as they likely need to keep logs as well to prevent absue.
Option #2, illegal proxying - crackers have known about this for a long time. Basically, grab yourself a copy of nmap and start scanning on ports 1080, 80, and 8080 and see how many proxies you can find. Scan for winproxies as well as they are often poorly configured.
Once you have your net of proxies up, or have compromised a bunch of computers and done the same, use those to relay your messages. Or just go down to a public terminal and install some proxy software.
Option 3, there is only one option here - MBone. It is basically an IP multicast network setup on top of IPv4 which allows one server to broadcast data to all other computers on the network.
I'd like to, at some point, start a project to create a self-healing mirroring network with crypto support do accomplish the same things GNUella does, but have it rely on multiple protocols and require no special software (ie, web servers, ftp servers, etc) for the clients to use to get information off the servers.
But I digress... in short, you have no privacy. Either do something illegal to get it back, or give up and accept it. No solutions exist at present to give you 100% anonymity. But.. there are projects in the works that aren't internet based that may be appearing in the not too distant future...
10. Annoying the RIAA for fun and profit.
Sorry, there was a "2" missing in there, it's 20% or so percent ( I double checked ) although I had wanted to say 25.
Considering it was an opinion yeah, I can see why you might have arrived at the conclusion you did.
The parent post is tripe. As are most (not all) of Signal 11's posts.
I could claim that's factually incorrect as it's obvious I get moderated up more often than not (indicating people disagree with you over that statement), but it would be too easy. How about we say that you're entitled to your opinion, just like me, and leave it at that?
Oh, great.. it was bad enough when they wanted to put a huge coca-cola sign in space which would be several thousand meters long and glow at night.. now what - are we going to put a billboard up in space that says "ATTENTION: We know you're out there. Come on over for the best chocolate in the solar system!" ??
No, that's when they get off wo... oh.. I see what you mean..
Sorry dude, I got a patent on all three of them. Good luck!