Nice idea.. but now that beowulf clusters are available en masse and target the same market as Cray, I suspect that they weren't interested in Cray for the supercomputing side. Maybe they're planning on making systems which supercool conventional chips and package them for the home user? That's a HUGE untapped market if they can hit the right price point.
Jon, I understand where you're going with this, but please don't comment on technical issues if you don't understand them.
It is not a post-microsoft era. Reasons to follow:
Microsoft still has a monopoly on Operating Systems. If you want to release an app, you release it for MS platforms first unless it's a very specialized application (like CAD).
Microsoft has more capital than the GNP of many small countries.. combined.
Who the hell thinks MS won't just move to Canada when the ruling actually comes down? It's not like AT&T where their infrastructure is tied to location.. they can market and sell Windows just as well from across the border.
Microsoft still has lots of influence in, say, the IETF.. or a dozen other trade organizations. What Microsoft says is still influential, anti-trust or not.
If you want to play games, you use MS products. Yes, linux has a few games out there.. no, if you're serious you won't run them under linux. Netrek is one thing.. Red Alert is quite another.
Microsoft has features in it's OS which cannot interoperate with any other product. Duh. Try using server replication with linux.
In short, Microsoft isn't dead.. and even if they were broken up, categorically every single major brokerage has stated such a move would have a direct benefit on the stock-holders and bill gates would get richer. One need look no farther than the "post-AT&T" era to see how much your rates have increased... DESPITE free internet telephony tech being available.
Well, first off, my system performance improved alot more by shuffling off IDE and moving to a fast SCSI HDD than the jump from 350 to 700 MHz.
secondly, it has always been true that you need to properly spec your system based on what you plan to use it for. If it's going to be serving static webpages, you want lots of memory and a PCI architecture that can support multiple concurrent bus masters (to handle the high bandwidth). CPU speed is less important than cache size as well in this configuration.
If you're wanting to run Quake, you want a smaller amount of RAM but it needs to be low latency (say, 6ns) and have a high bandwidth (PC133). You'll want a fast processor and a faster video card. HDD is unimportant for quake, as is the bussing architecture (PCI, ISA - not the FSB).
But don't tell me there's a single metric for measuring system performance.. that's a lie, as much as saying that average access time for harddrives is "the" metric. I'd disagree, it's the track-to-track latency and aureal density that I happen to have used to spec my system. Not that it's "the" metric, but it's the two I used (as well as internal xfer rate, of course) which is directly proportional to the RPM the HDD is rated for!
Did you hear the news? Bill has a new book out. It's called "Being sued at the speed of business"...
Okay, the ruling is out. Microsoft was declared a monopoly (bad microsoft). Now what? Well, Microsoft will appeal. That'll take, oh, six months. Then you'll have another trial to determine whether the judge screwed up. Some technicalities will be brought up. More witnesses will be called in. Tax dollars will be spent. Press releases will be issued. Microsoft stock will continue to plummet. The ruling from the appeals judge will either overturn or affirm it.. upon which another appeal will be made to the Supreme Court. In the meantime Bill will get even richer off of the Windows monopoly.
But.. even if MS broke up, was dissolved, destroyed by a tactical nuke, or was sucked into a black hole by virtue of it's marketing department assuming a mass greater than our sun, look at it this way - Bill can still write a book about it and make billions more selling it to middle-management types.
That's right.. there's a secret illuminati of karma whores you don't know about... we have thousands of accounts on hundreds of servers.. and our soul purpose is to piss off the illustrious Anonymous Coward! Why? Because we all spend 16 hours a day just sucking up karma! Yes, that's right.. hundreds of us doing nothing but whoring karma! MY GOD, IT'S A CONSPIRACY!
He's found us out! NNNOOOOoooooooooo! Okay, did you e-mail rob like I asked? Okay then. He'll tell you that there are IP address filtering options in the slashcode to prevent people from the same IP addy from moderating their own comments.. regardless of who they logged in as. Yeesh..
I tried giving him a call. About the third sentence in I hung up. Of course, the sentence "the police are on their way over" might have made that happen quicker...
In your recent article about the protests in DC over the copyright act you quoted the MPAA as saying that "linux DVD players were available". I am dissapointed that the reporter failed to ask what players were available and then communicate that information to the protesters. More importantly, I feel that by omitting the fact that no DVD players for linux are presently available commercially the article was biased towards the MPAA and portrayed the protesters in an unfair light. I suspect your readers (like myself) would have been interested to know that no linux DVD player exists (legally) as a direct effect of the MPAA suing everyone who has created one.
I would like to request that you publish an addendum to the article noting that no linux DVD players *presently* exist. If you would like additional information about the current state of DVD use under linux, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to provide you with as much information as I have on the issue of linux DVDs. Thanks.
I just rooted 1000 boxes. They are now all running webcrawlers on your website. You are a high-volume website such as amazon.com. Seperate the traffic being generated by the webcrawlers from your customer's traffic. You have 30 minutes. You may bring whatever supplies to the server room that you need. Begin.
I forgot to add a small footnote about the use of a 'stub' network. The underlying problem with a DDoS is that it uses up all of a necessary resource, such as CPU, memory, HDD, or bandwidth. Using up the entirety of any of the above resources will make the server unresponsive. This guy's example centers around diverting 'DDoS' traffic to a dummy-net while the 'regular' traffic got through. Unfortunately the paper makes one monumental oversight - how do you seperate the DDoS from the real traffic? Sure, it's pretty easy if they're all ping-flooding you, but what if you have 8000 hosts all running webcrawlers through, say, www.yahoo.com ? Try seperating the webcrawler traffic from your user traffic. You can't. My thought on marginalizing such a measure would be to employ traffic analysis - something crypto nuts are familiar with - find the machines that deviate from the normal traffic flow through that port by more than, say, 69% and then cut them off at the kneecaps. This only results in the l335 h4x0r needing to find more hosts, but it's better than nothing. However, the problem with my approach is still that it requires additional resources to impliment (ie, bigger CPUs in the routers, and more memory to track such things). In short, DDoS won't be solved anytime soon.. but we can marginalize it's effects through packet filtering and by taking proactive measures on the backbone to monitor these types of things.
The *best* solution, IMO, would be to use that Millenium computer center in DC to monitor backbone traffic in realtime and give those people access to the network to shut down these things dynamically and in real time. But, alas, that would require more political muscle than I have!
I'll admit up front that either I'm ignorant, or the professor is. I'll let you be the judge.
My understanding of routers is that for best performance you want the 'best' routes. What consitutes best is determined by the algorithm, but generally speaking it's the route with the lowest latency (OSPF, for example, uses this metric). So by changing the routes you'd be making things less optimal. The other problem is convergence, or how quickly routers adapt the new routes. Routers have special protocols to make sure that when a route goes down (or a new one comes up) that change propagates through the router 'network' and each router updates it's router table to keep track of which packets go where. Any change in routing on a network requires a finite period of time to propagate through the router network. Changing routes too often can severely impact performance - router loops come to mind as one possible Bad Thing. So, short of redesigning all existing router protocols or creating a new one which very rapidly updates all routers on a large network, I don't see changing routes as a solution - the cure is worse than the disease.
Lastly, even assuming all these issues were worked out, TCP/IP is designed to be fault tolerant - if your packet gets eaten it will be regenerated. If the routes change, the packet will be re-routed to get to it's destination. In short, if you DDoS over a TCP/IP connection.. or generate packets which require the remote end to maintain state (which TCP needs!), you're going to kill the remote host regardless of how the packet got there.
The best solution at this time is to impliment packet filtering on the router. This has it's own set of problems, and is hardly a pancea. And how can you derive whether a DDoS is really occurring? The slashdot effect comes to mind as a good example.
Well, was it released under an open source license? Yes. Is it a decent program? Yup. Sounds legitimate to me. Perhaps you could enlighten me on how much more legit one can make OSS software, 'cuz I'd sure like to make sure my open source program is 'legit' too. I'd like to make sure the SPA doesn't come and bash my door down for having illegitimate open source software on my harddrive...
I KNEW IT! The truth is finally revealed! Jon Katz is a martian who crash-landed on Earth after being made an outcast in his martian tribe! All this time, we thought columbine, those 'outcast' posts, and stuff were from his twisted childhood. Now we have proof! He's posting about URBAN LIFE - *martian* urban life! There's no other possible conclusion.. Earthlings know it's nothing like the description above...
I have to disagree with most people here and say that reiserFS is damn stable for my uses. I have 4 HDDs all running ReiserFS on my server, and it's also running on my workstation. Just for shits and giggles, I powered it up and down, up and down, several times during a kernel compile. Well, the.o files were (as expected) mangled - some were 0 bytes, others were.. well, half-baked. That, and/tmp was a mess. But the filesystem survived. I did that six times. Then I got ambitious and crashed the system during a journal replay. This time I got some more, uhh, interesting errors, but everything mounted OK and AFAIK everything was intact.
Now, compare this with the 'stable' ext2. Try doing the above with that. I'll tell you what happened - the metadata got corrupt and I lost entire directory trees. So please don't tell me that ext2 is somehow 'more stable' than reiserfs. For filesystem integrity, they got ext2 beat. Benchmarking is always a point of contention, so I'll skip it (I believe the best benchmark is lifting a machine 2 meters off the ground, dropping it, and noting how big of a dent it leaves).
That being said, I find it interesting that people here dismiss out of hand the possibility that politics play a part in what goes into the kernel and what doesn't. As if OSS developers were somehow immune to human emotion...
Now, I really wish someone would figure out a way to filter out stupidity. You know, where the StupidaGoggles... like what Zaphoid Beeblebrox had, except these filter out stupid things instead of dangerous things. See a warm beer out? *ZAP* Instantly filtered. Now you're not tempted to drink warm beer.
Well, first we have to determine whether the window exists, or is simply a figment of the baseball receiver's imagination. Certain quantum theories also suggest that the glass really never broke in an alternate multiverse, hence there is no need to worry about who designed it because, having not broken, you have not yet noticed (observed) it, as it were.
t's much more likely that the baseball has always been traveling and, through a series of random events and natural forces on the ball has happened to smash through the window.
Which is consistent with my theory. Afterall, something had to set it in motion.
I'm pretty sure the fossil record supports me on this if baseballs could fossilize.
Unfortunately, it does not, so conjecture will not do us much good at this point.
Considering those particles are a few nano-meters away from the detection apparatus, while planets are a few billion light-years away, no.
Do you notice the baseball that just landed in your lap first, or the kid at the end of the block that put it through your window? Okay then, that's why we detect particles first. God is, of course, the brat kid that broke your window in this analogy.
Q3 00: Release faster processor. Trumpet it as 'great for internet'. Maybe call it the iCPU? Leave prices for current CPUs untouched, continue to make 50MHz improvements cost $200 over previous models.
Q4 00: AMD is at it again. Squish them, and pay off the FTC. Athlon really heating up. Engage in mudslinging campaign. Switch to smaller micron process to decrease die size. Ignore Transmeta's protests that their CPU has lower power consumption. Power is good. Suck lots of it.
Q1 01: Caught modifying CPU to make SPECint run faster. Damn. Use PIII ID feature to track down creators of SPECint and issue corrective measures. e-commerce is starting to wind down, start investing in hardware companies again.
Q2 01: Bunny suits aren't having the impact we want in the market. Find a pop rock band and rip off a new song - show competitor's CPU on fire.
Q3 01: Get posted to slashdot. Site crashes. Rob Malda mysteriously disappears
Q4 01: Can't do any marketing, Microsoft trial finally ended and DOJ needs a reason to keep their budget up. License out some worthless tech to competitors, later sue them for contract violations.
Q4 02: New SPECint benchmarks show our chips as fourteen times faster than the competition.
Q1 03: Another revolutionary new processor is created. Trumpet it as being Windows 2001 compatible (which was just released last week).
Q2 03: Bah, this far out, who the hell cares what we're planning on doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice idea.. but now that beowulf clusters are available en masse and target the same market as Cray, I suspect that they weren't interested in Cray for the supercomputing side. Maybe they're planning on making systems which supercool conventional chips and package them for the home user? That's a HUGE untapped market if they can hit the right price point.
It is not a post-microsoft era. Reasons to follow:
In short, Microsoft isn't dead.. and even if they were broken up, categorically every single major brokerage has stated such a move would have a direct benefit on the stock-holders and bill gates would get richer. One need look no farther than the "post-AT&T" era to see how much your rates have increased... DESPITE free internet telephony tech being available.
I rest my case, your honor.
secondly, it has always been true that you need to properly spec your system based on what you plan to use it for. If it's going to be serving static webpages, you want lots of memory and a PCI architecture that can support multiple concurrent bus masters (to handle the high bandwidth). CPU speed is less important than cache size as well in this configuration.
If you're wanting to run Quake, you want a smaller amount of RAM but it needs to be low latency (say, 6ns) and have a high bandwidth (PC133). You'll want a fast processor and a faster video card. HDD is unimportant for quake, as is the bussing architecture (PCI, ISA - not the FSB).
But don't tell me there's a single metric for measuring system performance.. that's a lie, as much as saying that average access time for harddrives is "the" metric. I'd disagree, it's the track-to-track latency and aureal density that I happen to have used to spec my system. Not that it's "the" metric, but it's the two I used (as well as internal xfer rate, of course) which is directly proportional to the RPM the HDD is rated for!
Did you hear the news? Bill has a new book out. It's called "Being sued at the speed of business"...
Okay, the ruling is out. Microsoft was declared a monopoly (bad microsoft). Now what? Well, Microsoft will appeal. That'll take, oh, six months. Then you'll have another trial to determine whether the judge screwed up. Some technicalities will be brought up. More witnesses will be called in. Tax dollars will be spent. Press releases will be issued. Microsoft stock will continue to plummet. The ruling from the appeals judge will either overturn or affirm it.. upon which another appeal will be made to the Supreme Court. In the meantime Bill will get even richer off of the Windows monopoly.
But.. even if MS broke up, was dissolved, destroyed by a tactical nuke, or was sucked into a black hole by virtue of it's marketing department assuming a mass greater than our sun, look at it this way - Bill can still write a book about it and make billions more selling it to middle-management types.
He's found us out! NNNOOOOoooooooooo! Okay, did you e-mail rob like I asked? Okay then. He'll tell you that there are IP address filtering options in the slashcode to prevent people from the same IP addy from moderating their own comments.. regardless of who they logged in as. Yeesh..
Moderating yourself isn't possible. Go bug Rob if you don't believe me.
I tried giving him a call. About the third sentence in I hung up. Of course, the sentence "the police are on their way over" might have made that happen quicker...
In your recent article about the protests in DC over the copyright act you quoted the MPAA as saying that "linux DVD players were available". I am dissapointed that the reporter failed to ask what players were available and then communicate that information to the protesters. More importantly, I feel that by omitting the fact that no DVD players for linux are presently available commercially the article was biased towards the MPAA and portrayed the protesters in an unfair light. I suspect your readers (like myself) would have been interested to know that no linux DVD player exists (legally) as a direct effect of the MPAA suing everyone who has created one.
I would like to request that you publish an addendum to the article noting that no linux DVD players *presently* exist. If you would like additional information about the current state of DVD use under linux, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to provide you with as much information as I have on the issue of linux DVDs. Thanks.
I just rooted 1000 boxes. They are now all running webcrawlers on your website. You are a high-volume website such as amazon.com. Seperate the traffic being generated by the webcrawlers from your customer's traffic. You have 30 minutes. You may bring whatever supplies to the server room that you need. Begin.
The *best* solution, IMO, would be to use that Millenium computer center in DC to monitor backbone traffic in realtime and give those people access to the network to shut down these things dynamically and in real time. But, alas, that would require more political muscle than I have!
My understanding of routers is that for best performance you want the 'best' routes. What consitutes best is determined by the algorithm, but generally speaking it's the route with the lowest latency (OSPF, for example, uses this metric). So by changing the routes you'd be making things less optimal. The other problem is convergence, or how quickly routers adapt the new routes. Routers have special protocols to make sure that when a route goes down (or a new one comes up) that change propagates through the router 'network' and each router updates it's router table to keep track of which packets go where. Any change in routing on a network requires a finite period of time to propagate through the router network. Changing routes too often can severely impact performance - router loops come to mind as one possible Bad Thing. So, short of redesigning all existing router protocols or creating a new one which very rapidly updates all routers on a large network, I don't see changing routes as a solution - the cure is worse than the disease.
Lastly, even assuming all these issues were worked out, TCP/IP is designed to be fault tolerant - if your packet gets eaten it will be regenerated. If the routes change, the packet will be re-routed to get to it's destination. In short, if you DDoS over a TCP/IP connection.. or generate packets which require the remote end to maintain state (which TCP needs!), you're going to kill the remote host regardless of how the packet got there.
The best solution at this time is to impliment packet filtering on the router. This has it's own set of problems, and is hardly a pancea. And how can you derive whether a DDoS is really occurring? The slashdot effect comes to mind as a good example.
Well, was it released under an open source license? Yes. Is it a decent program? Yup. Sounds legitimate to me. Perhaps you could enlighten me on how much more legit one can make OSS software, 'cuz I'd sure like to make sure my open source program is 'legit' too. I'd like to make sure the SPA doesn't come and bash my door down for having illegitimate open source software on my harddrive...
Thanks for the 411, I wasn't aware of that.
Jon Katz is a geek martian!
Scaling mountains too tame for you? Basejumping or parachuting boring? Own four SUVs? Then you should take the MIR CHALLENGE.
For a mere $600,000 a day, you can experience the terror of in-space collisions, failing power systems, and catastrophic decompressions!
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Warning: slight risk of death on the MiR Challenge. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Okay everyone, if we think hard enough about it, the news will return.
News for nerds... News for nerds... News for nerds. News for nerds...
Urge to kill (malda)... rising....
If I killed Rob, would it make the front page of slashdot?
erster Pfosten!
ENOUGH dammit, or I start singing VOGON POETRY!
Now, compare this with the 'stable' ext2. Try doing the above with that. I'll tell you what happened - the metadata got corrupt and I lost entire directory trees. So please don't tell me that ext2 is somehow 'more stable' than reiserfs. For filesystem integrity, they got ext2 beat. Benchmarking is always a point of contention, so I'll skip it (I believe the best benchmark is lifting a machine 2 meters off the ground, dropping it, and noting how big of a dent it leaves).
That being said, I find it interesting that people here dismiss out of hand the possibility that politics play a part in what goes into the kernel and what doesn't. As if OSS developers were somehow immune to human emotion...
Now, I really wish someone would figure out a way to filter out stupidity. You know, where the StupidaGoggles... like what Zaphoid Beeblebrox had, except these filter out stupid things instead of dangerous things. See a warm beer out? *ZAP* Instantly filtered. Now you're not tempted to drink warm beer.
Well, first we have to determine whether the window exists, or is simply a figment of the baseball receiver's imagination. Certain quantum theories also suggest that the glass really never broke in an alternate multiverse, hence there is no need to worry about who designed it because, having not broken, you have not yet noticed (observed) it, as it were.
t's much more likely that the baseball has always been traveling and, through a series of random events and natural forces on the ball has happened to smash through the window.
Which is consistent with my theory. Afterall, something had to set it in motion.
I'm pretty sure the fossil record supports me on this if baseballs could fossilize.
Unfortunately, it does not, so conjecture will not do us much good at this point.
Do you notice the baseball that just landed in your lap first, or the kid at the end of the block that put it through your window? Okay then, that's why we detect particles first. God is, of course, the brat kid that broke your window in this analogy.
Why do you think they had a "chat" with the SPECint people? :)
Q3 00: Release faster processor. Trumpet it as 'great for internet'. Maybe call it the iCPU? Leave prices for current CPUs untouched, continue to make 50MHz improvements cost $200 over previous models.
Q4 00: AMD is at it again. Squish them, and pay off the FTC. Athlon really heating up. Engage in mudslinging campaign. Switch to smaller micron process to decrease die size. Ignore Transmeta's protests that their CPU has lower power consumption. Power is good. Suck lots of it.
Q1 01: Caught modifying CPU to make SPECint run faster. Damn. Use PIII ID feature to track down creators of SPECint and issue corrective measures. e-commerce is starting to wind down, start investing in hardware companies again.
Q2 01: Bunny suits aren't having the impact we want in the market. Find a pop rock band and rip off a new song - show competitor's CPU on fire.
Q3 01: Get posted to slashdot. Site crashes. Rob Malda mysteriously disappears
Q4 01: Can't do any marketing, Microsoft trial finally ended and DOJ needs a reason to keep their budget up. License out some worthless tech to competitors, later sue them for contract violations.
Q4 02: New SPECint benchmarks show our chips as fourteen times faster than the competition.
Q1 03: Another revolutionary new processor is created. Trumpet it as being Windows 2001 compatible (which was just released last week).
Q2 03: Bah, this far out, who the hell cares what we're planning on doing?
Thanks for the link. =)