The odds of them hacking an FBI laptop is pretty damn good considering:
1. FBI is probably investigating AntiSec 2. AntiSec knows that FBI are probably investigating them 3. New security hole for Java released, not patched 4. Lots of government'y stuff use Java
AntiSec could just make a page using that security hole and "accidentally" let it slip to the FBI, and pronto, one (or many) hacked FBI box(es) served right up.
So, the chance of them gaining access to a few FBI boxes are rather high, all considering. And the chance of them finding *something* interesting on one of them is also rather high IMHO (birthday paradox theory).
I found a python script online and hacked it a bit to work on a larger scale.
The script originally scanned a directory, found files with same size, and md5'ed them for comparison.
Among other things I added option to ignore files under a certain size, and to cache md5 in a sqlite db. I also think I did some changes to the script to handle large number of files better, and do more effective md5 (also added option to limit number of bytes to md5, but that didn't make much difference in performance for some reason). I also added option to hard link files that are the same.
With inodes in memory, and sqlite db already built, it takes about 1 second to "scan" 6TB of data. First scan will probably take a while, tho.
First of all, there are no variations to the hash. Either it fits perfectly, or not at all.
Secondly, finding the hash is like finding a specific sand particle.. That exist somewhere in the universe.
Since we know how it's generated, we can narrow it down to... somewhere in the Milky Way..
When the program runs, however, it only have a few options to try.. Something like the sand in a spoonful. This can be tested almost instantly.
If it's not the correct spoonful, it won't get the correct key, and it won't (can't, in fact) deploy the mystic payload.
What they're doing now is basically saying "We found this strange thing, we haven't found the correct sand particle in our tries.. Anyone have a good idea?" - Since it seems to only look at non-English program folders, it's likely that it targets some internal program at the intended target. If that is so, the target is probably the only ones in the world that can find the correct key and decode it.
Something like WoW or SWTOR, well, it depends. My SSD is certainly faster than my HDD. The question is, when it's about 2x the throughput is it more than 2x as fast due to latency reduction? And the answer is..... no. Those two are mostly throughput limited. So yes, a SSD at 400MB/s will completely blow away even a 5 disk RAID 5 setup, but it's not the latency making the difference.
Interesting example there, especially WoW. I have some experience with that program. Let's see what challenge that game actually has when it comes to disk access..
When I played, I, as most of the players, had my base in Dalaran. That was the hub of the whole world, for both sides. It was not uncommon to see hundreds of people there at busy times. Let's say I logged in at such a busy time..
First of all, the game has to load the static level assets, and GUI assets. These can reasonably be optimized for sequential reading. Then comes the player characters.. Each player can have different hair models and textures, skin textures, head models and textures. Then comes gear. There are 6 different rendered armor slots (head, torso, shoulders, legs, hands, feet), plus up to two weapons (and enchantment particle effects). I'll assume that each gear have 1 model + 1 texture, There will also be some overlap, but not much (mostly for models I guess). With 200 players, that's (7 * 2 * 200 / 2 ~> 7 * 200) around 1400 random reads for gear alone, allowing a very generous/2 overlap. Then comes characters themselves. Hard to guess, but on average 2-3 access per player maybe? Let's say 2. 1400 + 400 = 1800. Great, then comes the fluff. Mounts, pets, mini pets, and so on.. Sound assets for some of the items, too (especially mounts and minipets). I think we easily cross 2000 random reads on players alone. Then you got mods + mod assets + mod data (which has a braindead implentation). You also got spell icons, item icons, minimap symbols +++
Let's guesstimate a lowball of 2500 random reads required to load WoW Dalaran in rush hour (but could probably double that). Wikipedia gives a number of 9ms average seek time for a common desktop drive, so let's run with that (12-15ms for laptop drives). 9ms * 2500 = 22.5 seconds. That means that the disk will spend almost half a minute JUST on seeking, not including transferring the data. Compare that to an SSD, which Wikipedia says "Typical SSDs will have a seek time between 0.08 and 0.16 ms."
2500 * 0.16ms = 0.4 seconds. A slow SSD does in half a second what a decent HDD would have to work half a minute on. And we haven't taken into consideration actually moving the data, NCQ, fragmentation, and other read / write requests from background tasks (antivirus, windows pagefile, windows logging, web browser, IM client, Skype, Steam, WoW logging +++) - remember, it does not have to generate any amount of data, we're just talking about seek's here. Writing or reading 1 byte is quite enough.
In one of the links from the post you answered on they show a comparison between a 2-disk HDD RAID0 and an SSD. You can see already on the 10 second mark that all the assets are loaded for the SSD, while the RAID is still struggling on the 40 second mark (and you see the last of the assets around him popping in around the 45sec mark). That is a bit beyond your 2x increase, and I suspect that even a 4-disk HDD raid0 would lose against the SSD there.
Random reads / writes are all but infrequent. Right now I have running :
* Chrome with a bazillion threads running various plugins
* Pidgin
* Skype
* Steam - updating a game
* VirtualBox Ubuntu dev box
* VirtualBox WinXP test box
* Dropbox
* Antivirus
Not to mention Windows itself, which are always touching and prodding files. Each on their own might just do a few reads / writes here and there, but put them together and you got a steady stream of random reads and writes going on. At the moment I have on average 100kB/s random disk chatter, occasionally spiking to a few MB/s.
As for RAM. I got 16gb of them. 1 GB is used only for Chrome. 1 GB for each VirtualBox. Each VBox instance got a 10GB disk. The WinXP test disk got snapshots, which generates more files, and more random reads / writes. Not to mention most of the games are in the 5-15GB range, and the MMO's I love to test are frequently in the 20-40GB range.
What's infrequent are in fact those times where a hard disk can, without interruption, read several MB's in a stream. Without having to detour to write some bytes here, or read a few bytes there. RAM is good, but it's not a golden bullet by far. I'd need over 32GB ram to have RAM cache be fully effective. If it was perfect, that is. It's not. For the price of 32 GB ram I could buy a decent 256GB SSD, which would be MUCH more handy. For going above 32GB ram, I'd probably need a very expensive motherboard with more than 4 ram slots, and then buy the actual RAM on top of that. For that kind of money you can buy a Fucking Big SSD (TM).
SSD's beautifully removes the modern computer's achilles heel, the HDD's extremely slow disk I/O. The last 10-15 years disk performance speed have just about doubled. A decent SSD quadruples streamed data speed, and when it comes to IOPS it goes from maybe 100-150 to ~50.000-100.000 - that's a mindblowingly huge difference! Not only does things start faster, but those small hiccups programs have when waiting for some I/O operation are just *poof* gone. Does not exist anymore. That small lag when clicking something and wondering if it actually registered, scrolling a document and see it stop for a second here and there.. Those small things.. Gone. So not only does it on average cut the time I sit waiting on the PC in half on the big stuff, all those small annoying time thieves have disappeared. It feels.. different. Hard to explain, really. The best I can explain it is the feeling you get, after having your foot damaged, and have had to go for months (well, in the PC case.. years) with the damage, you've gotten used to it so much that you hardly notice it anymore. You get slightly better as time goes by, but it's only minor improvements. Then suddenly one day, the foot is perfectly fine. You can walk normally again. It feels strange to do it. That's the feeling I get with a SSD compared to HDD system. At first it feels strange, almost like something missing, but then you get used to it. And now, going back to HDD is no longer an option anymore.
Oookay, that was a huge wall of text with what's probably nonsense for many. Nevertheless, maybe someone out there can understand.
I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much.
Well... No. A lot of programs have random read patterns, and seek times are incredibly important in those cases. You also got multitasking, which often involves several programs reading / writing on different parts of the disk.
For some tasks, SSD is just on a different planet compared to HDD. As long as the data can be read serially HDD is good enough, and RAID0 HDD's can approach a single SSD in performance. But when you need random reads (which happens when starting windows, starting apps, multitasking, and with not-so-greatly-written programs) SSD is a different beast entirely.
Why do people buy better CPU's and more RAM? Most do it to cut down on the time they have to sit and wait on the computer. SSD's can cut that a lot. Really a lot.
In some ways it's like comparing a P4 Willamette 2ghz with a modern Core i7 - yes, base clock speed is "just" ~1.5-2 times faster, but the better architecture, more cores, things like turbo and working HT makes it a completely different beast.
I added a 3 TB HDD and backed up all my steam games to it. Now if i want to play something I load it up from the backup in minutes.
Fancy. I usually just click on the "Play game" button;)
But, on a more serious note. You can set up Intel SRT for 18gb (or 64gb - aka Intel's "full drive" option) of your SSD, and only use that part to accelerate the HDD. You still got the rest for "Data" - which can also be used to install and run Windows from. I know, I set that exact solution up less than a week ago:)
It's a bit tricky, and might require some reinstall though, so maybe not a practical solution for you.
Basically the steps are : 1. Set Intel disk controller to raid in bios 2. Set up Cache on SSD - this have to be done from a Windows installation, but that windows can not be run from the SSD 3. The part of the SSD which isn't configured as Cache is set up as a Data partition. Which can be used to install Windows on.
When I got my new Z77 board last week, I managed to slice my 120gb SSD into two parts. 18gb for Intel's cache system, and rest for "Data" - aka Windows install.
I configured the SSD to cache my 2tb spinney a bit, and it generally worked as expected. Performance ranged from clean SSD speed some places, to in worst case old HDD speed.
In other words, worst-case scenario was same as not having cache, and best-case scenario made it look like a 2TB SSD at no extra cost:)
I've currently disabled it, since currently I'm re-installing my steam games (over 300 in total..), but will re-enable it when the data is a bit more static again.
So far I consider the experiment a huge success, even though it complicated the install somewhat (SSD cache can only be configured from Windows, and only if the SSD is not running the OS).
From what I've heard, they front loaded the content a lot, so when endgame came it was nothing to do. It also had claustrophobic maps..
Most I have talked to agreed that it's nice game on the leveling, for the first characters. Almost like a single player game. But after that, no point continue playing.
Since you would have indented it anyway, what's the point of enforcing it?
Let me turn that around:
Since you would have indented it anyway, what's the point of braces?
Also, when you're pushing enter at the end of the line anyway, what's the point of ; ? Yet, almost no one complains about that missing for some reason..
It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
Why have something that isn't needed? Why say the same thing twice? It'll just add to what can go wrong.
Inconsistence between bracing and indentation leads to confusion. Confusion leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Python also has no idea of public and private in its classes. The closest it comes is the double-underscore prefix which mangles names, but not to the point that clashes are impossible. Python has the trite saying that "we are all adults" (or something similar), implying that we just shouldn't poke around at things that start with an underscore. However, the lack of public/private essentially means that a large advantage of classes (the ability to keep a stable public API while completely changing how the backend works) is removed: if I create a subclass, since there's no such thing as private, I just have to cross my fingers and hope the superclass author doesn't choose names that clash with mine. Basically, if you're subclassing, you have namespace global to all classes.
And for public API, if you poke around with _variables and __variables in someone else's class, you should EXPECT things to go to hell in the future. _ and __ basically says "this is not meant for you. Any usage is on your head" - it's still there, so you can if you have to. But you shouldn't, and you're making a deliberate choice when you do. That's what the "we're adults" saying points out. You're not a kid, so we won't lock away things. It's your responsibility to use it properly.
And for the third, if you're subclassing and want to make sure your variables don't clash, use __mynewmodulename_variable format. Simple:)
As he (and many other comments here explain), most of the "issues" people think Python have (like the significant whitespace part) aren't even noticeable after a short while.
And as he points out, it's a language that's well designed and easy to both learn and work with.
IMHO, with it's modular approach it's very structured and self-similar. And the duck typing approach makes the modularity even stronger.
I mean, it's still gimmicky, but it looks like an improvement. But for me it's not gonna be practical until it support my language, Norwegian. How useful is it when it can't understand the norwegian names on my contacts? Or street names? Or store names?
They'll just claim the innovation was the gestalt of putting it all together, not the individual parts.
This have already happened in many discussions I've been in. After methodically refuting every "innovation" they then get to that part. At which point I try to tell them that the market was already moving in that direction (LG Prada, Samsung F700 for example), and that the concept of touch phones is ages old (IBM Simon).
Being the first out in a race does not mean you invented running:p
But at that point, it's really a lost cause, since they then just vaguely argue that the iPhone is somehow magically different than all those, but seemingly unable to tell why. If I feel particularly bored or spiteful, I start arguing that technically, the iPhone shouldn't even be counted as a smartphone until the App Store was opened mid-2008. For some reason, this really push some of those people over the edge.
In PHP, ALL of these statements are evaluated as true (fetched from one of the articles):
NULL < -1 NULL == 0
"foo" == TRUE "foo" == 0 TRUE != 0
123 == "123foo" "123" != "123foo"
Scared yet? You can use === for comparison to fix some of those, except... < > does not have such an alternative. And for objects:
=== compares values and type... except with objects, where === is only true if both operands are actually the same object! For objects, == compares both value (of every attribute) and type, which is what === does for every other type.
Writing code in PHP is sometimes akin to using an unicycle to traverse a minefield.. And if you're not damn paranoid about reading docs and testing things in real life, or have years and years of experience with that crap.. You're doing it blindfolded.
I agree with number 2, that have annoyed me a few times, too... For the rest, I haven't really been in a situation for that to be a problem.
7. Well, you got the dict solution / hack. Not exactly the same, but does well enough for most situations, and can be a lot more flexible.
8. This is mostly a CPython problem (as you noted), and in many cases the multiprocessing module can be a very nice workaround.
10. Kinda agree with you on this, need to keep a clear head on working with that. Python 3 have apparantly done some changes on those things, hopefully for the better (I haven't looked much at python3 yet)
While python is not perfect, it is the best language I know well, followed by *gasp* JavaScript (which is a really neat little language if you take the time to learn it), and a bit of C# or Java for some tasks (I like C# better than java, but sometimes it's Java or nothing.. And those languages are pretty similar for the most part).
When that's said.. Just about every language I've worked with have some cool qualities and nifty stuff, except for PHP. That language is just an unholy mess. I can still code in it, but I really prefer not to.
Yep, it's much better in the real world, where you can only swing a sword or shoot a gun if it will hit a target.
The fact that your char will still do the attack (but if nothing is in range do no damage) even with out of range target or no targets.... That's actually lovely. And helps making the game harder, in fact. When you got 15 second cooldown on your only slow spell, and miss with it because you were too far away just then.. And mobs can kill you in 5-10 seconds...
Also, it lets you do and react to things without targeting first. That can buy you some valuable time:) Like a warrior ability that takes 0.5 seconds to "get going", but rape everything in front of you.. When the mob comes running, start it just before he's in range. Then he'll arrive just in time to feel the pain:D
And to the weapons.. Most weapons have a specific goal. For warrior..
2handers: Greatsword = Mobility, multiple targets Hammer = Control, single target Rifle = Single target ranged Longbow = AOE ranged
In my recent experience, it's completely 180 now. Had huge problems with nvidia, both getting 3d to work and dual screen.. In the end, since this is work pc, switched to an amd card, it came right up, and it has worked perfectly since.
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Hi, I'm from the rabid Android fanclub, and you can have the GP. He talked obvious nonsense about retina crap to make our tablets look bad!
He's clearly a crazy Apple fanboy that just tries to lull us into a false sense of security in the first part of his post.
The odds of them hacking an FBI laptop is pretty damn good considering:
1. FBI is probably investigating AntiSec
2. AntiSec knows that FBI are probably investigating them
3. New security hole for Java released, not patched
4. Lots of government'y stuff use Java
AntiSec could just make a page using that security hole and "accidentally" let it slip to the FBI, and pronto, one (or many) hacked FBI box(es) served right up.
So, the chance of them gaining access to a few FBI boxes are rather high, all considering. And the chance of them finding *something* interesting on one of them is also rather high IMHO (birthday paradox theory).
I found a python script online and hacked it a bit to work on a larger scale.
The script originally scanned a directory, found files with same size, and md5'ed them for comparison.
Among other things I added option to ignore files under a certain size, and to cache md5 in a sqlite db. I also think I did some changes to the script to handle large number of files better, and do more effective md5 (also added option to limit number of bytes to md5, but that didn't make much difference in performance for some reason). I also added option to hard link files that are the same.
With inodes in memory, and sqlite db already built, it takes about 1 second to "scan" 6TB of data. First scan will probably take a while, tho.
Script here - It's only tested on Linux.
Even if it's not perfect, it might be a good starting point :)
* Unofficial Skyrim Patch
* Unofficial Obilivion Patch
* Unofficial Morrowind Patch
* Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch
Starting to see a pattern here? And that's just what was "easily" fixable by the modding tools.
(Brown Flush of Death)
Sorry, but the kebab masters already have a patent on that.
First of all, there are no variations to the hash. Either it fits perfectly, or not at all.
Secondly, finding the hash is like finding a specific sand particle.. That exist somewhere in the universe.
Since we know how it's generated, we can narrow it down to ... somewhere in the Milky Way..
When the program runs, however, it only have a few options to try.. Something like the sand in a spoonful. This can be tested almost instantly.
If it's not the correct spoonful, it won't get the correct key, and it won't (can't, in fact) deploy the mystic payload.
What they're doing now is basically saying "We found this strange thing, we haven't found the correct sand particle in our tries.. Anyone have a good idea?" - Since it seems to only look at non-English program folders, it's likely that it targets some internal program at the intended target. If that is so, the target is probably the only ones in the world that can find the correct key and decode it.
Something like WoW or SWTOR, well, it depends. My SSD is certainly faster than my HDD. The question is, when it's about 2x the throughput is it more than 2x as fast due to latency reduction? And the answer is..... no. Those two are mostly throughput limited. So yes, a SSD at 400MB/s will completely blow away even a 5 disk RAID 5 setup, but it's not the latency making the difference.
Interesting example there, especially WoW. I have some experience with that program. Let's see what challenge that game actually has when it comes to disk access..
When I played, I, as most of the players, had my base in Dalaran. That was the hub of the whole world, for both sides. It was not uncommon to see hundreds of people there at busy times. Let's say I logged in at such a busy time..
First of all, the game has to load the static level assets, and GUI assets. These can reasonably be optimized for sequential reading. Then comes the player characters.. Each player can have different hair models and textures, skin textures, head models and textures. Then comes gear. There are 6 different rendered armor slots (head, torso, shoulders, legs, hands, feet), plus up to two weapons (and enchantment particle effects). I'll assume that each gear have 1 model + 1 texture, There will also be some overlap, but not much (mostly for models I guess). With 200 players, that's (7 * 2 * 200 / 2 ~> 7 * 200) around 1400 random reads for gear alone, allowing a very generous /2 overlap. Then comes characters themselves. Hard to guess, but on average 2-3 access per player maybe? Let's say 2. 1400 + 400 = 1800. Great, then comes the fluff. Mounts, pets, mini pets, and so on.. Sound assets for some of the items, too (especially mounts and minipets). I think we easily cross 2000 random reads on players alone. Then you got mods + mod assets + mod data (which has a braindead implentation). You also got spell icons, item icons, minimap symbols +++
Let's guesstimate a lowball of 2500 random reads required to load WoW Dalaran in rush hour (but could probably double that). Wikipedia gives a number of 9ms average seek time for a common desktop drive, so let's run with that (12-15ms for laptop drives). 9ms * 2500 = 22.5 seconds. That means that the disk will spend almost half a minute JUST on seeking, not including transferring the data. Compare that to an SSD, which Wikipedia says "Typical SSDs will have a seek time between 0.08 and 0.16 ms."
2500 * 0.16ms = 0.4 seconds. A slow SSD does in half a second what a decent HDD would have to work half a minute on. And we haven't taken into consideration actually moving the data, NCQ, fragmentation, and other read / write requests from background tasks (antivirus, windows pagefile, windows logging, web browser, IM client, Skype, Steam, WoW logging +++) - remember, it does not have to generate any amount of data, we're just talking about seek's here. Writing or reading 1 byte is quite enough.
In one of the links from the post you answered on they show a comparison between a 2-disk HDD RAID0 and an SSD. You can see already on the 10 second mark that all the assets are loaded for the SSD, while the RAID is still struggling on the 40 second mark (and you see the last of the assets around him popping in around the 45sec mark). That is a bit beyond your 2x increase, and I suspect that even a 4-disk HDD raid0 would lose against the SSD there.
Random reads / writes are all but infrequent. Right now I have running :
* Chrome with a bazillion threads running various plugins
* Pidgin
* Skype
* Steam - updating a game
* VirtualBox Ubuntu dev box
* VirtualBox WinXP test box
* Dropbox
* Antivirus
Not to mention Windows itself, which are always touching and prodding files. Each on their own might just do a few reads / writes here and there, but put them together and you got a steady stream of random reads and writes going on. At the moment I have on average 100kB/s random disk chatter, occasionally spiking to a few MB/s.
As for RAM. I got 16gb of them. 1 GB is used only for Chrome. 1 GB for each VirtualBox. Each VBox instance got a 10GB disk. The WinXP test disk got snapshots, which generates more files, and more random reads / writes. Not to mention most of the games are in the 5-15GB range, and the MMO's I love to test are frequently in the 20-40GB range.
What's infrequent are in fact those times where a hard disk can, without interruption, read several MB's in a stream. Without having to detour to write some bytes here, or read a few bytes there. RAM is good, but it's not a golden bullet by far. I'd need over 32GB ram to have RAM cache be fully effective. If it was perfect, that is. It's not. For the price of 32 GB ram I could buy a decent 256GB SSD, which would be MUCH more handy. For going above 32GB ram, I'd probably need a very expensive motherboard with more than 4 ram slots, and then buy the actual RAM on top of that. For that kind of money you can buy a Fucking Big SSD (TM).
SSD's beautifully removes the modern computer's achilles heel, the HDD's extremely slow disk I/O. The last 10-15 years disk performance speed have just about doubled. A decent SSD quadruples streamed data speed, and when it comes to IOPS it goes from maybe 100-150 to ~50.000-100.000 - that's a mindblowingly huge difference! Not only does things start faster, but those small hiccups programs have when waiting for some I/O operation are just *poof* gone. Does not exist anymore. That small lag when clicking something and wondering if it actually registered, scrolling a document and see it stop for a second here and there.. Those small things.. Gone. So not only does it on average cut the time I sit waiting on the PC in half on the big stuff, all those small annoying time thieves have disappeared. It feels .. different. Hard to explain, really. The best I can explain it is the feeling you get, after having your foot damaged, and have had to go for months (well, in the PC case.. years) with the damage, you've gotten used to it so much that you hardly notice it anymore. You get slightly better as time goes by, but it's only minor improvements. Then suddenly one day, the foot is perfectly fine. You can walk normally again. It feels strange to do it. That's the feeling I get with a SSD compared to HDD system. At first it feels strange, almost like something missing, but then you get used to it. And now, going back to HDD is no longer an option anymore.
Oookay, that was a huge wall of text with what's probably nonsense for many. Nevertheless, maybe someone out there can understand.
I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much.
Well... No. A lot of programs have random read patterns, and seek times are incredibly important in those cases. You also got multitasking, which often involves several programs reading / writing on different parts of the disk.
Here are some comparisons I found on YT:
* Some game loading times comparison - Varies from 10-20% to almost 3 times as fast.
* More game load times
* A rather extreme comparison between standard 5400rpm laptop disk and a SSD
* Cold boot + starting of a bunch of apps
And here you have some videos of starting World of Warcraft, widely known for its random access when loading:
* SSD vs RAID0
* SSD vs HDD
For some tasks, SSD is just on a different planet compared to HDD. As long as the data can be read serially HDD is good enough, and RAID0 HDD's can approach a single SSD in performance. But when you need random reads (which happens when starting windows, starting apps, multitasking, and with not-so-greatly-written programs) SSD is a different beast entirely.
Why do people buy better CPU's and more RAM? Most do it to cut down on the time they have to sit and wait on the computer. SSD's can cut that a lot. Really a lot.
In some ways it's like comparing a P4 Willamette 2ghz with a modern Core i7 - yes, base clock speed is "just" ~1.5-2 times faster, but the better architecture, more cores, things like turbo and working HT makes it a completely different beast.
I added a 3 TB HDD and backed up all my steam games to it. Now if i want to play something I load it up from the backup in minutes.
Fancy. I usually just click on the "Play game" button ;)
But, on a more serious note. You can set up Intel SRT for 18gb (or 64gb - aka Intel's "full drive" option) of your SSD, and only use that part to accelerate the HDD. You still got the rest for "Data" - which can also be used to install and run Windows from. I know, I set that exact solution up less than a week ago :)
It's a bit tricky, and might require some reinstall though, so maybe not a practical solution for you.
Basically the steps are :
1. Set Intel disk controller to raid in bios
2. Set up Cache on SSD - this have to be done from a Windows installation, but that windows can not be run from the SSD
3. The part of the SSD which isn't configured as Cache is set up as a Data partition. Which can be used to install Windows on.
When I got my new Z77 board last week, I managed to slice my 120gb SSD into two parts. 18gb for Intel's cache system, and rest for "Data" - aka Windows install.
I configured the SSD to cache my 2tb spinney a bit, and it generally worked as expected. Performance ranged from clean SSD speed some places, to in worst case old HDD speed.
In other words, worst-case scenario was same as not having cache, and best-case scenario made it look like a 2TB SSD at no extra cost :)
I've currently disabled it, since currently I'm re-installing my steam games (over 300 in total..), but will re-enable it when the data is a bit more static again.
So far I consider the experiment a huge success, even though it complicated the install somewhat (SSD cache can only be configured from Windows, and only if the SSD is not running the OS).
As far as I could tell, they don't verify the number. I had no problems setting it to a landline instead of my mobile phone.
When I last configured it I got the "10 burn codes" and an option for a phone number, where a robot would dial and read up some numbers.
So app on my phone, plus that piece of paper hidden away, plus a stable landline to someone I trust.
LG Prada?
IBM Simon?
O2 XDA series?
Palm Pilot?
Compaq iPaq?
Qtek s100?
From what I've heard, they front loaded the content a lot, so when endgame came it was nothing to do. It also had claustrophobic maps..
Most I have talked to agreed that it's nice game on the leveling, for the first characters. Almost like a single player game. But after that, no point continue playing.
Since you would have indented it anyway, what's the point of enforcing it?
Let me turn that around:
Since you would have indented it anyway, what's the point of braces?
Also, when you're pushing enter at the end of the line anyway, what's the point of ; ? Yet, almost no one complains about that missing for some reason..
It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
Why have something that isn't needed? Why say the same thing twice? It'll just add to what can go wrong.
Inconsistence between bracing and indentation leads to confusion. Confusion leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
*sad Yoda face*
Python also has no idea of public and private in its classes. The closest it comes is the double-underscore prefix which mangles names, but not to the point that clashes are impossible. Python has the trite saying that "we are all adults" (or something similar), implying that we just shouldn't poke around at things that start with an underscore. However, the lack of public/private essentially means that a large advantage of classes (the ability to keep a stable public API while completely changing how the backend works) is removed: if I create a subclass, since there's no such thing as private, I just have to cross my fingers and hope the superclass author doesn't choose names that clash with mine. Basically, if you're subclassing, you have namespace global to all classes.
First of all, python have good support for later adding setters / getters if needed.
And for public API, if you poke around with _variables and __variables in someone else's class, you should EXPECT things to go to hell in the future. _ and __ basically says "this is not meant for you. Any usage is on your head" - it's still there, so you can if you have to. But you shouldn't, and you're making a deliberate choice when you do. That's what the "we're adults" saying points out. You're not a kid, so we won't lock away things. It's your responsibility to use it properly.
And for the third, if you're subclassing and want to make sure your variables don't clash, use __mynewmodulename_variable format. Simple :)
Eric S. Raymond's answer
As he (and many other comments here explain), most of the "issues" people think Python have (like the significant whitespace part) aren't even noticeable after a short while.
And as he points out, it's a language that's well designed and easy to both learn and work with.
IMHO, with it's modular approach it's very structured and self-similar. And the duck typing approach makes the modularity even stronger.
Hey, just wanted to inform you that the Ubuntu 12.04 Unity does in fact stay at the side, and does not disappear by itself.
They have also made a lot more small improvements to it. I suggest you try it out before complaining more :)
Oh, and the search / extended menu comes up if you push the Windows button.
That is one of the things I think looks really interesting.
It also seem to have improved vastly over not only the old version, but also over Apple's Siri.
Some videos of the new function:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLyuWEWqYqQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw-RzN4xYyE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHkhp6BwnGo
I mean, it's still gimmicky, but it looks like an improvement. But for me it's not gonna be practical until it support my language, Norwegian. How useful is it when it can't understand the norwegian names on my contacts? Or street names? Or store names?
Still, it looks like a really fun toy... *wants*
They'll just claim the innovation was the gestalt of putting it all together, not the individual parts.
This have already happened in many discussions I've been in. After methodically refuting every "innovation" they then get to that part. At which point I try to tell them that the market was already moving in that direction (LG Prada, Samsung F700 for example), and that the concept of touch phones is ages old (IBM Simon).
Being the first out in a race does not mean you invented running :p
But at that point, it's really a lost cause, since they then just vaguely argue that the iPhone is somehow magically different than all those, but seemingly unable to tell why. If I feel particularly bored or spiteful, I start arguing that technically, the iPhone shouldn't even be counted as a smartphone until the App Store was opened mid-2008. For some reason, this really push some of those people over the edge.
That's brilliant! Thank you!
Perfect explanation. PHP is the Excel of the web programming world. Explains everything.
In PHP, ALL of these statements are evaluated as true (fetched from one of the articles):
NULL < -1
NULL == 0
"foo" == TRUE
"foo" == 0
TRUE != 0
123 == "123foo"
"123" != "123foo"
Scared yet? You can use === for comparison to fix some of those, except... < > does not have such an alternative. And for objects:
=== compares values and type... except with objects, where === is only true if both operands are actually the same object!
For objects, == compares both value (of every attribute) and type, which is what === does for every other type.
Writing code in PHP is sometimes akin to using an unicycle to traverse a minefield.. And if you're not damn paranoid about reading docs and testing things in real life, or have years and years of experience with that crap.. You're doing it blindfolded.
I agree with number 2, that have annoyed me a few times, too... For the rest, I haven't really been in a situation for that to be a problem.
7. Well, you got the dict solution / hack. Not exactly the same, but does well enough for most situations, and can be a lot more flexible.
8. This is mostly a CPython problem (as you noted), and in many cases the multiprocessing module can be a very nice workaround.
10. Kinda agree with you on this, need to keep a clear head on working with that. Python 3 have apparantly done some changes on those things, hopefully for the better (I haven't looked much at python3 yet)
While python is not perfect, it is the best language I know well, followed by *gasp* JavaScript (which is a really neat little language if you take the time to learn it), and a bit of C# or Java for some tasks (I like C# better than java, but sometimes it's Java or nothing.. And those languages are pretty similar for the most part).
When that's said.. Just about every language I've worked with have some cool qualities and nifty stuff, except for PHP. That language is just an unholy mess. I can still code in it, but I really prefer not to.
Yep, it's much better in the real world, where you can only swing a sword or shoot a gun if it will hit a target.
The fact that your char will still do the attack (but if nothing is in range do no damage) even with out of range target or no targets.... That's actually lovely. And helps making the game harder, in fact. When you got 15 second cooldown on your only slow spell, and miss with it because you were too far away just then.. And mobs can kill you in 5-10 seconds...
Also, it lets you do and react to things without targeting first. That can buy you some valuable time :) Like a warrior ability that takes 0.5 seconds to "get going", but rape everything in front of you.. When the mob comes running, start it just before he's in range. Then he'll arrive just in time to feel the pain :D
And to the weapons.. Most weapons have a specific goal. For warrior..
2handers:
Greatsword = Mobility, multiple targets
Hammer = Control, single target
Rifle = Single target ranged
Longbow = AOE ranged
1handers:
Sword = Bleed, counter/interrupt
Mace = Stun, counter/interrupt
Shield = Block, stun
Warhorn = Buffs/Debuffs
Axe = AOE, vulnerability
Which one of these is the One True Weapon? Depends a lot on what you're going to do, and your personal play style, if you ask me.
In my recent experience, it's completely 180 now. Had huge problems with nvidia, both getting 3d to work and dual screen.. In the end, since this is work pc, switched to an amd card, it came right up, and it has worked perfectly since.