It's nice to see this posted. Various politicians keep trying to censor the Internet, demanding that bomb-making information be illegal. Dianne Feinstein is the most prominent offender. By contrast, back when I was a kid, our standard school fieldtrip was to go to the colonial-era duPont gunpowder mill museum and learn how they made gunpowder and ground flour using water wheels. (Hint: build your mill buildings with big heavy stone walls on three sides and a wimpy wood wall facing the river so that when it explodes, the explosion will blow over the river and not set the other mills on fire...)
When you talk about the First Amendment and the Internet and bombs, people like DiFi say "Oh, no, the First Amendment doesn't protect dangerous information, it's about things like pornography."
When you talk about the 1st, the Internet, and pornography, they say "Oh, no, it's not about that, it's about protecting non-obscene speech".
When you talk about tobacco advertising, they say "Oh, no, it's not about commercial speech, it's about protecting *political* speech."
But when you talk about campaign finance reform, they say "Oh, no, elections are *way* too important to let anybody actually fund the political speech they believe in, why that would let *money* corrupt politics."
And all that was just with liberals in charge - wonder what Ashcroft will come up with next.
Yes, there are Unix versions for them, but it's unlikely that many of them have hacked their date-bits usage to cause problems now, as opposed to waiting till 2038 to get in trouble.
I used to do similar things on Unix, years ago - no VBA, you'd just build text using whatever text tools you wanted, pipe it through your favorite combinations of grep/awk/sed/sh, and hand it to whatever output program you wanted. Sure, it was simpler-looking most of the time, and usually wasn't WSIWYG, but you could put in troff macros back then, or HTML tokens today, if you wanted things pretty-printed, and you could really accomplish most of the same things without needing to embed dangerous programming capabilities into word-processors. (or if you _wanted_ to do that, you could build in magic tags for vi or emacs anyway:-)
GPUs get to do lots of parallelism, because most graphics work is inherently parallel (do the same stuff to a whole bunch of pixels) and they're built to exploit it by using multiple sets of multiply/add units.
But beyond that, CPUs spend a lot of their time doing various kinds of I/O, handling interrupts, and talking to multiple coprocessors, while GPUs normally just get handed the stuff they want. Some of this work gets farmed out to other chipset members - NorthBridge memory controllers, Southbridge I/O controllers - but the CPU still ends up in charge of the process.
Also, the CPU gets to do operating system jobs like deciding which chunks of memory belong to which applications, while the GPU doesn't worry about that - everything's going to get drawn on the screen. Perhaps Trusted Computing Digital Ridiculousness Management will change this, and the graphics processors will need to start keeping track of who owns each pixel or vector so it can use the right decryption context, to prevent you from watching movies you haven't paid for, but for the moment it's ignorance and bliss.
Also, the real line is "Sorry, Kids, I need your Playstation 3 to find a cure for Grandma's cancer, go out and play soccer or something."
The AT&T DSP32 definitely rocked. In addition to doing 32-bit floating point multiply and accumulate, it could simultaneously do 24-bit integer calculations. The supercomputer cluster was up to 128 of them (I forget if they were 8 or 16 per board), with communications structured as a tree, which could give you 1 GFLOPS sustained and up to 2 GFLOPS if you could keep them busy doing multiply-and-accumulate. Not bad for a desktop in the late 80s, though of course you can get that for $49 today:-)
A typical application was to use a couple of the processors to do geometry while the rest crunched shading, or alternatively to do lots of FFTs for signal processing - the box was mainly designed for the Navy, and 32-bit floating point was more than enough precision given the A/D converters on sonar input.
Precision can be a problem, because GPUs and DSPs often run single-precision floating point, at least for the widest-parallelism parts like shaders. They may have some double-precision capability as well, but it's usually used for less-parallel activities like geometry crunching.
There's a cluster of Sony Playstations at UIUC (BBC) that's using the Emotion Engine to do numbercrunching and running Linux on the main processors to do communications and I/O. It's probably not strictly Beowulf, because it's using the Playstation version of Linux.
This cluster has 70 Playstations (one article said that they'd ordered 100, but only 70 are in the cluster... Obviously the others are being used for "research".)
I don't know if they still do it, but American Express used to offer one-use credit card numbers, that were linked to your regular account. You could use these for shopping with merchants that you didn't want to give your regular credit card number. I assume they still had the standard features of being able to do charge-backs if you were complaining about the merchandise.
Another approach is to get a small bank account with a debit card, and never put more money in it than you're willing to risk losing to fraudulent spammers.
Lots of states are making laws against spam, which let the legislators tell their constituents that they're Doing Something About It, which could theoretically lead to more votes if anybody got enough less spam to notice. In practice, almost all spamming is interstate commerce, and therefore the US Constitution puts it under Federal jurisdiction, not state. There are occasional places like California where a spammer based there might be annoying an email user in California to sell products from companies that are also based in California (mostly porn-website spammers), but it's rare.
State laws against spam usually make bogus attempts to claim that the spammer somehow is under that state's jurisdiction, and usually make bogus attempts to claim that the spammer should have known that the annoyed recipient is located in the state, but they're basically stretching most of the time. The main exception is for products that are sold by actual multi-state companies, e.g. if some Detroit car company marketing-critter were spamming about why you should by their product, they'd reasonably be under recipient-state jurisdiction because they've got dealers in the recipients' state, even if the message got emailed from Detroit or Korea.
It's way too easy for spammers, even under the new US Federal You-Can-Spam law, to generate cut-outs at the expense of a couple of disposable corporations. The corporations do contracts with each other absolutely guaranteeing not to ever ever spam, at the cost of not getting paid their commission, optionally with one of the corporations outside the US, and the worst penalty that happens is that if the direct spammer gets caught, John Ashcroft gets to burn their corporate charter papers at the stake but the real beneficiary has a nice paper trail indicating that they're perfectly innocent and they're shocked to find spamming going on in this establishment. And then they got spend another $50 for another disposable corporation and give them a contract requiring them to never ever spam again like their evil twin Zut did or they'll be spanked also. A typical cutout situation is that New Jersey-based FakeViagra Inc sells a dozen cases of product to Bahamas FakeViagraByMail, Mon, Ltd, which isn't a dealer, it's just a supplier to health food stores. You can bust them, but not very effectively, and they can disappear if they want.
You only need those if you accept inbound email and don't immediately auto-discard it all. It's not likely that humans actually read anything, as opposed to autorespondering that you should call a salesdroid.
Yes, the Mitnick/Shimomura thing was an ethical and professional atrocity. But except for that, John Markoff has been a consistently excellent writer - he actually understands technology, and has some reasonable clues about what the stuff means and what's important, and can do competent explanations to the public. He's a real contrast to a lot of the "technical" press, which too often is just regurgitating press releases.
Sure, on still pictures, this is plenty of space. But a DVD is ~4.7GB - is 2-3GB enough for good video recording, or will you also have to haul around an iPod to upload your pictures to?
OK, so the T-Cube story on Slashdot is from 6 hours ago, so this is _way_ out of date, and the things run TRON rather than Linux, so you'd need to do a bit of work to port Beowulf to them. At least they've got network interfaces...
The YOU-CAN-SPAM bill is really atrocious, for lots of ways that have been discussed elsewhere. A "Do Not Spam" list isn't as bad, because *you* don't have to put your email address on it if you think it's going to get you more spam, but you _can_ put your spambait email addresses on it to help your filters catch any spammer that's using the list. (Also, if you have a list that contains hashes of email addresses instead of addresses themselves, it's much harder to abuse.)
There are a couple of things the government can do which are useful, though. One of them is making some exceptions to the current computer crime laws to allow for self-defense. If somebody's sending your computer unfriendly bits that you don't want, like spam, you should be able to send them unfriendly bits that they don't want, like the Ping of Death. This has to be done carefully (Joe jobs are bad, and obviously forging a spam from someone shouldn't give you carte blanche to crackker their machine), but it can be done.
Also, a large fraction of spam is for things that are illegal, such as the various scams to get you to "invest" your money in dubious enterprises. Governments can help bust those people. That doesn't apply to spammers selling porn or other things that aren't illegal, but busting the illegal ones is a good start.
If you've got a DNS server you're willing to hack on, you could have it check whether the requests are coming from known open proxies or open relays. If they are, or if they're requesting information on your spammer-bait domains, or searching for too many non-existent subdomains in your real domains, you can give them more interesting IP addresses.
127.0.0.3 is always good, or 255.255.255.255, or 192.168.255.255, or 169.254.255.255. If you've got a BGP feed, so you can figure out their upstream provider, you could always hand them that provider's main mail server.
If they're an open relay, though, an obvious IP address to hand them is the address of another open relay. So it'll send the mail there, and that relay will try to send it - so it'll look up your-fake-domain.com, which you'll respond to with the address of another open relay... I realize that open relays are passe, and all the cool spammers use open proxies these days, but you can still have fun letting misconfigured Korean relays bounce the spam around each other, and you'll only have to do the occasional DNS lookup until they get the addresses cached.
Most big ISPs have gotten the clue that being known for harboring spammers is bad for their business - especially if the spammers are spamming their customers. AGIS was one of the early ISPs that did business with Spamford Wallace, and was pretty much run out of business by the public reaction to their practices.
But most of these spammers _are_ breaking laws. Flo may not sell fake viagra pills, and I don't know if she deals with other real or fake medicine sellers, but she complained in the article about getting stiffed out of $7K by one of her customers, who was promoting the ability for suckers to get a 48% return on investment if they invested $5K or more. That says that she either knows her customers are thieves, or is so blazingly stupid that she can't figure it out, so she needs to be put on notice about it. You don't have to be a Nigerian cybercafe to profit from customers who run criminal scams.
She complained about getting stiffed out of a $7K payment by somebody who was promising suckers 48% return on $5K investment. She's dealing with thieves and scammers. She's not murdering people, and she's mostly not promoting porn, but she's promoting greed and theft and lies. Leave aside the fact that she's ripping off people's mail servers to relay her spam, and ripping off the bandwidth of ISPs, and disrespecting the people she's sending spam to, her customers alone make what she's doing reprehensible.
She says she doesn't deal with Viagra or porn. She's pretty strictly into scams and fraud and theft, and maybe the occasional vacation scam. The guy she complained about stiffing her on a $7K payment was offering suckers 48% returns if they invested $5K.
Yeah, she was making $4K during a good week and $2K during an OK week during the early spam profit boom, but it sounds like now she doesn't have a lot of $2K weeks, much less $4K weeks. Now she's having to scrape by, abusing Korean remailers because she can't get away with directly delivering spam from her T1 lines.
Also, since she's not selling drugs and porn, that means she's mostly selling scams and fraud. That guy who stiffed her for $7K that she's so burned about was promising 48% return on investments of $5K - she couldn't figure out that he was a thief? I feel _so_ sad for her that she got ripped off.....
Casablanca looks a lot like Marseilles or Miami, and it's a relatively modern city. Marrakesh is the old red trading fort down in the desert area, and while it's poor, it's not that bad, and it's way cool, or was 15 years ago. (I haven't been to Tangiers.)
I've only tried Moroccan hash in Denmark, so I can't comment on what it's like if you get it locally:-)
Morocco has a wide mixture of cultures - Semitic Arabs, black Berbers, French bureaucrats in Casablanca, Spaniards in Tangiers, dazzling Arabic architecture in Rabat, bandits in the highlands, leftover hippies from the 60s in Marrakesh. It's a culture that's heavily into trading and interacting with each other, and I'll second mindstrm's recommendation about visiting there.
To the extent that they have violence, it's down in the Spanish Sahara, a culturally different area south of Morocco that the last few Kings of Morocco want to rule because of the mining resources, while the local Polisario guerillas don't want the kings.
Slashdot Mirror
And I seem to be running a version that doesn't have a working Talkback widget to tell the Mozilla Firebird 0.7 people what the bug was....
- When you talk about the First Amendment and the Internet and bombs, people like DiFi say "Oh, no, the First Amendment doesn't protect dangerous information, it's about things like pornography."
- When you talk about the 1st, the Internet, and pornography, they say "Oh, no, it's not about that, it's about protecting non-obscene speech".
- When you talk about tobacco advertising, they say "Oh, no, it's not about commercial speech, it's about protecting *political* speech."
- But when you talk about campaign finance reform, they say "Oh, no, elections are *way* too important to let anybody actually fund the political speech they believe in, why that would let *money* corrupt politics."
And all that was just with liberals in charge - wonder what Ashcroft will come up with next.Yes, there are Unix versions for them, but it's unlikely that many of them have hacked their date-bits usage to cause problems now, as opposed to waiting till 2038 to get in trouble.
Well, duh, of course you don't like them, you're a troll, and you rockheads never did like how Tolkien treated you :-)
I used to do similar things on Unix, years ago - no VBA, you'd just build text using whatever text tools you wanted, pipe it through your favorite combinations of grep/awk/sed/sh, and hand it to whatever output program you wanted. Sure, it was simpler-looking most of the time, and usually wasn't WSIWYG, but you could put in troff macros back then, or HTML tokens today, if you wanted things pretty-printed, and you could really accomplish most of the same things without needing to embed dangerous programming capabilities into word-processors. (or if you _wanted_ to do that, you could build in magic tags for vi or emacs anyway :-)
But beyond that, CPUs spend a lot of their time doing various kinds of I/O, handling interrupts, and talking to multiple coprocessors, while GPUs normally just get handed the stuff they want. Some of this work gets farmed out to other chipset members - NorthBridge memory controllers, Southbridge I/O controllers - but the CPU still ends up in charge of the process.
Also, the CPU gets to do operating system jobs like deciding which chunks of memory belong to which applications, while the GPU doesn't worry about that - everything's going to get drawn on the screen. Perhaps Trusted Computing Digital Ridiculousness Management will change this, and the graphics processors will need to start keeping track of who owns each pixel or vector so it can use the right decryption context, to prevent you from watching movies you haven't paid for, but for the moment it's ignorance and bliss.
Also, the real line is "Sorry, Kids, I need your Playstation 3 to find a cure for Grandma's cancer, go out and play soccer or something."
A typical application was to use a couple of the processors to do geometry while the rest crunched shading, or alternatively to do lots of FFTs for signal processing - the box was mainly designed for the Navy, and 32-bit floating point was more than enough precision given the A/D converters on sonar input.
Precision can be a problem, because GPUs and DSPs often run single-precision floating point, at least for the widest-parallelism parts like shaders. They may have some double-precision capability as well, but it's usually used for less-parallel activities like geometry crunching.
This cluster has 70 Playstations (one article said that they'd ordered 100, but only 70 are in the cluster... Obviously the others are being used for "research".)
Maybe he's just claiming that Brightmail doesn't block 127.0.0.1 ?
Another approach is to get a small bank account with a debit card, and never put more money in it than you're willing to risk losing to fraudulent spammers.
State laws against spam usually make bogus attempts to claim that the spammer somehow is under that state's jurisdiction, and usually make bogus attempts to claim that the spammer should have known that the annoyed recipient is located in the state, but they're basically stretching most of the time. The main exception is for products that are sold by actual multi-state companies, e.g. if some Detroit car company marketing-critter were spamming about why you should by their product, they'd reasonably be under recipient-state jurisdiction because they've got dealers in the recipients' state, even if the message got emailed from Detroit or Korea.
It's way too easy for spammers, even under the new US Federal You-Can-Spam law, to generate cut-outs at the expense of a couple of disposable corporations. The corporations do contracts with each other absolutely guaranteeing not to ever ever spam, at the cost of not getting paid their commission, optionally with one of the corporations outside the US, and the worst penalty that happens is that if the direct spammer gets caught, John Ashcroft gets to burn their corporate charter papers at the stake but the real beneficiary has a nice paper trail indicating that they're perfectly innocent and they're shocked to find spamming going on in this establishment. And then they got spend another $50 for another disposable corporation and give them a contract requiring them to never ever spam again like their evil twin Zut did or they'll be spanked also.
A typical cutout situation is that New Jersey-based FakeViagra Inc sells a dozen cases of product to Bahamas FakeViagraByMail, Mon, Ltd, which isn't a dealer, it's just a supplier to health food stores. You can bust them, but not very effectively, and they can disappear if they want.
You only need those if you accept inbound email and don't immediately auto-discard it all. It's not likely that humans actually read anything, as opposed to autorespondering that you should call a salesdroid.
Yes, the Mitnick/Shimomura thing was an ethical and professional atrocity. But except for that, John Markoff has been a consistently excellent writer - he actually understands technology, and has some reasonable clues about what the stuff means and what's important, and can do competent explanations to the public. He's a real contrast to a lot of the "technical" press, which too often is just regurgitating press releases.
Sure, on still pictures, this is plenty of space. But a DVD is ~4.7GB - is 2-3GB enough for good video recording, or will you also have to haul around an iPod to upload your pictures to?
OK, so the T-Cube story on Slashdot is from 6 hours ago, so this is _way_ out of date, and the things run TRON rather than Linux, so you'd need to do a bit of work to port Beowulf to them. At least they've got network interfaces...
There are a couple of things the government can do which are useful, though. One of them is making some exceptions to the current computer crime laws to allow for self-defense. If somebody's sending your computer unfriendly bits that you don't want, like spam, you should be able to send them unfriendly bits that they don't want, like the Ping of Death. This has to be done carefully (Joe jobs are bad, and obviously forging a spam from someone shouldn't give you carte blanche to crackker their machine), but it can be done.
Also, a large fraction of spam is for things that are illegal, such as the various scams to get you to "invest" your money in dubious enterprises. Governments can help bust those people. That doesn't apply to spammers selling porn or other things that aren't illegal, but busting the illegal ones is a good start.
127.0.0.3 is always good, or 255.255.255.255, or 192.168.255.255, or 169.254.255.255. If you've got a BGP feed, so you can figure out their upstream provider, you could always hand them that provider's main mail server.
If they're an open relay, though, an obvious IP address to hand them is the address of another open relay. So it'll send the mail there, and that relay will try to send it - so it'll look up your-fake-domain.com, which you'll respond to with the address of another open relay... I realize that open relays are passe, and all the cool spammers use open proxies these days, but you can still have fun letting misconfigured Korean relays bounce the spam around each other, and you'll only have to do the occasional DNS lookup until they get the addresses cached.
She doesn't even pass the "What would Scooby Do?" test, much less WWJD....
But most of these spammers _are_ breaking laws. Flo may not sell fake viagra pills, and I don't know if she deals with other real or fake medicine sellers, but she complained in the article about getting stiffed out of $7K by one of her customers, who was promoting the ability for suckers to get a 48% return on investment if they invested $5K or more. That says that she either knows her customers are thieves, or is so blazingly stupid that she can't figure it out, so she needs to be put on notice about it. You don't have to be a Nigerian cybercafe to profit from customers who run criminal scams.
She complained about getting stiffed out of a $7K payment by somebody who was promising suckers 48% return on $5K investment. She's dealing with thieves and scammers. She's not murdering people, and she's mostly not promoting porn, but she's promoting greed and theft and lies. Leave aside the fact that she's ripping off people's mail servers to relay her spam, and ripping off the bandwidth of ISPs, and disrespecting the people she's sending spam to, her customers alone make what she's doing reprehensible.
She says she doesn't deal with Viagra or porn. She's pretty strictly into scams and fraud and theft, and maybe the occasional vacation scam. The guy she complained about stiffing her on a $7K payment was offering suckers 48% returns if they invested $5K.
Also, since she's not selling drugs and porn, that means she's mostly selling scams and fraud. That guy who stiffed her for $7K that she's so burned about was promising 48% return on investments of $5K - she couldn't figure out that he was a thief? I feel _so_ sad for her that she got ripped off.....
I've only tried Moroccan hash in Denmark, so I can't comment on what it's like if you get it locally :-)
To the extent that they have violence, it's down in the Spanish Sahara, a culturally different area south of Morocco that the last few Kings of Morocco want to rule because of the mining resources, while the local Polisario guerillas don't want the kings.