So you suggest that if the bank guards simply do a catch-and-release that it would have the same effect as catch-and-send-to-prison?
No, but I think the bank guards make it obvious they aren't going to get away with it.
Seriously, how many kids do you think, go home, get behind the computer, and before they fire up a hack script think "oh wait, but if i get caught i'll get 20 years in prison instead of just 1 getting butt-raped by large hairy men". For that matter how many Enron-esque ceo's think the same thing? Pretty much nobody commits a crime thinking they might get caught, no crime is worth the penalty. I wouldn't steal a million dollars if I thought I might go to jail for 1 year, the penalty is too severe for me.
Most people think of it as a game, something that doesn't really hurt anyone in a real way. If they don't consider the penalties before they act, then raising the penalties might make them think about it, but really most of the people on slashdot would do something everyone else wouldn't because we found it interesting and didn't really think it hurt anyone anyway.
Another problem is, normal people, people who didn't go to school to learn this, and haven't been exposed to any formal education about the ethics of computer hacking, etc are just as capable as the people who have. The real danger is that people are skilled without the normal constraints, ie years of college, steady jobs, raising a family, these things make people respect laws more because they understand even minor crimes would cost them their livelihood, how do you explain that to a kid who thinks they have nothing to lose?
These kind of laws will only punish young kids who don't understand why it's wrong in the first place, and if they don't apply against kids then they will further encourage kids to do these kind of crimes because they are edgy and dangerous.
Jesus, hollywood makes movies with 12 year olds somehow destroying entire alien fleets and saving the world by hacking computers shit like that, so perhaps, just perhaps we are sending the wrong message ourselves. Also, it's difficult to show a the victims of crime as real people when they kinda aren't. If a virus killed an old person in a hospital I guarantee people would think about the consequences, but all these crimes do is cost some money to businesses and consumers and cause hassle. I'm not trying to downplay the crime, but nobody is going to picture 50 ceo's in suits not being able to get their email and feel terrible remorse for their actions.
Really I'm against some 16 year-old kid getting in trouble and losing large tracts of his life because somebody wants to end the hassle's of hacking, and uses him as an example. Kids don't live in reality, which is the reason we don't hold them up to adult standards.
Raising the price is a worse solution that removing an already tiny and essentially psychological benefit. Kill the benefit, kill the crime.
This kind of crime could be largely stopped with a marketing campaign that's smaller than the one the gap uses to promote summer-shorts.
In other news, police, firefighters, the pope and natalie portman came out against senseless machete rampages against 2 year-old children today.
We are a society that encourages people to act in ways most beneficial to society. For the same reason our newscasters don't tell everyone to eat babies every night for the sweet, tender protein (drool), we all consciously or unconsciously encourage the values we identify as important to our culture. These values differ from country to country, and personally I judge the more pacifistic to be more civilized than those that encourage violence as a solution.
Neither is actually wrong, but different points of view, 3000 years ago, if someone stole your cow/goat and you didn't chase him down and brutally kill him you would be considered an idiot and a coward, and become a target for anyone else who wanted to take your property or life. Now we have police to perform that service independently, using widely accepted moral standards, and personal violence is frowned upon. Same result, but much more consistent and it allows society to function more smoothly.
We live in a much better world than our ancestors, and while they might have needed to perform violence on a daily basis to survive, for most of us, we can do better without. The cost of this better world is not being able to act as arbitrarily or intuitively as our ancestors, and needed to restrain our natural impulses. Imagine wall street if every time someone lost money they attacked the person they lost it to.
Course if someone fucks with you you can still kick their ass, which is cool.
This is cute, you actually believe that punishment is the right way to prevent inappropriate behavior.
Listen, if you tried to fly a plane in 1900 and it crashed and you died, the only person you have to blame is yourself. Likewise, computers haven't been perfected yet, and are being used on a scale that they are not nearly designed for. 10 years ago a network was 5 computers and a server, now it's 10 thousand, or 10 million, and the security functions haven't come close to catching up.
Most computer users live in houses with no locks, and some people choose to rob other people. Now that is definately a crime, but there is no justice in terrible punishments that are generally inflicted against the people who are most likely to commit them without a full understanding of what they're doing. When I was a kid I did shit like this all the time, cause I didn't see the problems they caused, it was a game.
I personally have never had problems with virus's or spyware or much of anything, not because I know so much about security, or I go to great lengths to stop it, but because I take a few minor, common sense precautions. If instead of having to take them myself the OS did them automatically I doubt other people would have half the problems they have too.
Windows was designed for workgroups, to be as open and contactable by others as possible, with almost no thought for network security, and that's why putting it on an open connection is stupid. Also, it was designed with as few execution restrictions as possible so programming for it was flexible and easy, which applies for hackers as well as developers.
Want to stop hackers and virus's cold? Follow these simple tips:
1. Small linksys/etc firewall behind your internet connection, call this the front door lock.
2. Install Macromedia flash, then DISABLE ActiveX installs in IE, better yet, get rid of IE, but this will cover the biggest problems.
3. Don't use outlook. Thunderbird is fine, but whatever works.
That's it, that's all you need to do. Try not to install stupid programs given out for free (aka gator shit), but if you need to just fire up adaware.
Instead of raising the penalties (which is horribly unjust but fits a lot of people's "Only terrorists want to keep secrets" kind of thinking) which has lots of bad side-effects, especially since different countries have different laws, and when laws appear unjust, people lose respect for them, just make the crime harder to commit.
People don't rob banks because there are security cameras/devices and guards with guns, not because of the penalties. If that were the case nobody would've robbed banks or rustled cattle in the old west when the penalty was usually hanging.
My prediction is that hacking and virus's are a product of the incredibly fast ubiquity of computers and technology, and our complete lack to fully handle them properly yet. In 25 years expect computers to be largely hack/virus proof, once software has evolved to the point beyond "just try to get it to work".
Itanium was killed by intel's megahertz marketing. Why get an expensive 1.4Ghz itanium when you can get 2 3.0ghz xeons for less? The amd-intel 1Ghz race hit it even harder, since intel had to totally sell out itanium's higher ipc for the p3's higher frequency, and meant the p3 could be brute-forced to equal or greater performance as the new, non-mainstream itanium architecture.
In my opinion the p4 was the worst thing ever to come out of any microprocessor house in the last 20 years, as it not only comprimised microprocessor design for the horrible and blind-sighted goal of mainstream marketing, but essentially caused a large part of the current TDP crises the industry is in now, and reinforced our mentally handicapped reliance on single-threaded programming.
The humor in the itanic label has nothing to do with the chips, it has to do with intel trying to have it both ways: intel chips are the most powerful, with the only metric that matters, frequency, and ipc and design efficiency matter little, but also that "oh yeah and we have this amazing chip that is so powerful but runs at half the clock speed." It was a blatent contradiction in marketing messages.
For f*cks sake, they called their double-clocked alu "NetBurst"... seriously, why not add an onboard memory controller and claim it's "SuperBandwithMaker", which uses it's amazing technology to increase the speed of your dial-up connection...
Yes, if you market to customers by treating them as idiots, expect them to choose the stupid product, and ignore you when you claim to offer another product that "no really this is a good chip, not like that other one which we said was the fastest", which is actually better for you in the long run, because you can set a new foundation for improvement.
When amd came out with the opteron at 64-bit, and with surprisingly competitive performance while still running legacy apps at faster speeds, how do you compete with that?
Here's hoping they do manage to resurrect the alpha lines, Ibm even went a little over to the marketing darkside with the g5, trading frequency scaling for TDP, but they usually manage to rebalance the two after a few years of revisions.
not true, nvidia's solution has them creating profiles for popular games for them to function, though i believe you can sli awareness to a game to increase it's support.
my current release has at least a hundred games, and there aren't that many popular games that need this kind of graphics firepower out there.
It seems like next-generation video cards are already boasting the capability to out perform current generation dual card systems, with only ONE GPU. Wasting $1000+ to get a dual system today to find out a $500 video card 6 months from now outperforms it would be quite dissapointing.
... for GAMING.
fyi, crossfire was originally designed for commercial opengl flight simulators.
however, as one of those customers with, as a good friend once told me, "more money than sense", sli is useful in that at 1920x1200 preferred res (hp 23" panel) i almost need both my 6800 ultras to handle 4xaa 16 aniso, but you are all perfectly free to laugh at my stupidity.
to top it off, i recently added a x2 4800 to my system, and then realized that the game i actually enjoy playing the most is starcraft.
hard drives are really not that loud anymore, my 2tb raid has 10 sata drives, and though you can hear them seeking sometimes when you listen close, the fans dwarf the drives in actual sound. the heat is pretty nasty though. consumer raid-5 is becoming more and more common nowadays though, i mean how do you realistically back up 500gb of hd space?
also, from my experience ati tends to have large variations between driver releases. their flagship driver releases are handled by a different team, and have made huge strides for reliability and consistency over the last 3 years, but even catalyst tends to not be as reliable and consistent (in my opinion) as nvidia's yet, though nvidia has had their black marks too.
having jumped between nvidia and ati a few times i'm staying with nvidia from here on out, ati's linux support is pretty damn pathetic (though i hear they finally switched to xorg-x11), but nvidia's is the best i've seen on linux, and tends to work with more esoteric kernels and configurations than ati's.
while matter-antimatter reactions release E=mc^2 energy, the reaction spectra of matter-antimatter interactions actually tends into neutrinos, muons, pions and gamma radiation, so while it wouldn't be something you want in the neighborhood, it likely wouldn't be that much worse than a low yield nuclear device.
I'm really sorry, I love the dream of space as much as the next 5 guys, but holy shit man, this is something humans shouldn't fuck with.
think about this: do you really, REALLY want governments, you know the ones who screw up taxes and cause silly wars for dumb, and usually misleading reasons, and which are generally ruled by an colorful balance of power between charismatic megalomaniacs, and a relatively disinformed electorate, to develop and maintain the ability to produce a substance, 5 grams of which could destroy the actual structure of the planet, kaboom gone.
no seriously, i love physics, but, barring a whole lot of psychologic evolution in the next couple millenia, no humans should not ever ever ever ever have this kind of power at our disposal.
i mean icbm's on 15 minute notice are enough for us to deal with at the moment, once the ability to produce it is developed everyone is going to say they need it for defense, ala nukes, and unlike nuclear weapons, these don't really have a shelf-life, you have to keep the anti-matter magnetically bottled forever, or boom again.
this whole idea just scares me stupid, i'd rather give schoolchildren 5kt nukes than let the military work out scenarios about force application with an infinitely powerful tactical device that can be carried in a briefcase.
oh yeah, and unlike fission bombs, if you have the knowledge to make antimatter, you don't need any fissionable material, so as technology gets better it will be easier for "insert bad guy here" to make this, just takes a good cyclotron, some magnetic containment, and time.
would be a great technology, but i don't want to die.
when i first heard about firewalls a decade ago i thought "heh, thats a cool name for a lazy hack". the need for firewalls comes from the crazy overdesign of operating systems. seriously, how many people use the rpc or dcom functions of windows? or use linux rpc for much more than nfs?
for me, a gentoo box that hasn't been around or played with long enough to have servers i don't remember running on it is easily safe enough to put up naked on the net. true, i will echo icmp and a few other in-kernel protocols, but how many script kiddies (and really thats what most of us are hiding from, maybe enterprises have targetted attacks, or that geek whose sister you hit on) will go any farther than "sh apache_vuln_109123_kit.sh" and sit back?
btw, if you are being cased by people who targetted you, this strategy won't cover you that well, but neither will a half-assed firewall.
the word "firewall" really sounds cool if you don't know what it means, but it's a lot smarter to just not bind insecure servers to your outbound interface. a firewall is basically saying "i have no clue whats running on this box, so ill just stop everything", which is fine, but for a serious production server thats not the right attitude to have.
for windows, or a specialized application that's hard to secure and/or uses a few ports, yeah it's the right solution. theoretically you could probably disable all the stupid services in windows to make a bulletproof box, but you'd still have patches and 0-day vulns to deal with.
do have to give this guy credit for the xenSE angle. someday when lizards rule the earth from their giant underground caves, and the mach kernel is usable natively for an os (i know osx, but thats more a hack), maybe we can have that kind of security in all computers without having to partition it into 5 different run-time images. i tend to say things like that about every 5 years, before i give up and get drunk instead.
ps. someone should make a process audit call that allows you to restrict userspace processes to given interfaces or bind addresses, so those little apps that are written to bind to ANY_ADDRESS are forced to a programmed one instead. even a post-fork, pre-exec type call would be nice, so all shell children are restricted. you could even have outbound servers running on one intf, and other people using firefox or other clients on another interface with different routing.
owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too.
the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990, which was working well for it for a while, but when commodity gear just starts killing your performance and cost there comes a point where you have to move on to a new platform. this is like sun, except sun seems a little farther along and willing to keep pushing forward, while sgi just keep digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves.
sad, but the dot-com boom which fed these companies also birthed the commodity pc boom which killed them. i actually want to lump apple in that same catagory, but unlike the rest which stayed in their path and carved themselves farther and farther from the mainstream, apple kept pushing to keep their market position, and in pc's managed to keep their niche. surprising, but their success in the last few years had very little to do with their core pc business, and everything to do with i*'s keeping their brand warm.
just hope these same market forces end up killing the ms monopoly they created, an good open sourced os (not necc. linux) would make a lot of the hardware innovation that stopped post-lintel possible again.
yeah i gotta agree with this, acid-impaired, individual.
public private partnerships generally have the worst of both worlds, the ability to throw huge sums of money at vague objectives with little or no measurement of success, coupled with the ability to manipulate vague objectives to allow the consumption of huge sums of money, and not be held accountable for its success.
there have been a few (and i mean very few) large ppp's that have went well off the top of my head, but we do that a lot around boston, and tend to end up with things like time restrictions on public properties, and well, the big-dig.
nononononono. you got that backwards, g5 = p4, g4 = p3. g4 and p3 = higher ipc and higher perf/watt than the latter ones.
it would've been clearer but i hit submit with that damn "html formatted" choice up.
and youre right about the big iron note, but the changes give the g5 a higher dependency on a solid memory interface with good prefetches and high cache hits.
i also agree about the fact that the p4 kills at higher clockspeeds, and didn't come near it's prime till 800fsb and about 3.0Ghz, while the vanilla p3 has a much smoother scale up and actually loses some push around 900M without the pentium m changes.
simplification:
g5 is to g4 as p4 was to p3
better overall IPC, less picky about memory latency, less power, basically a great thing to quad core if you're looking for perf/watt, although that would require a different bus structure, etc.
both are great, in large data or media processing apps id go g5, but for more general purpose usage a g4 is a great overall solution.
good call, but if i'm stuck on an island with a bunch of geeks and unlimited alchohol, i think i'll be happy as long as they aren't "chicks with dicks".
Let this be a lesson for Londoners and the rest of the world that Americans can somehow use any horrible tragedy to steal the mic at the funeral and pitch whatever stupid foreign policy they want for alterior motives, while still playing up the other, more important tragedy that happened 4 years ago that they still haven't learned to deal with.
I am a citizen of the U.S. of A, our mascot is the drama queen.
I'm just blown away by the courage you have to deal with it rationally, it's been 4 years and half of washington d.c. still runs like crazed rats when the traffic-copter goes overhead.
england's ability to get over a terrorist attack without 50 celebrities doing dozens of tributes, having everyone buy tons of flags, and spending 4 years in group media-therapy makes me feel less proud to be an american...
jesus we have people in texas and alabama yelling about how badly we have to attack countries so they can finally "feel safe".
ahem... no, the rebellion would just quickly switch from "satan america & israel vs islam" to "shia vs sunni". Actually, it's already starting, see pakistan and iraq.
the entire structure of society is inherently unstable right now, too many young, disenfranchised, and uneducated men, and not enough things to keep the busy/dying. it's a horrible thing to say, but when families are based on the concept of a patriarch with up to 4 wives, the poorer, young males become so frustrated and angry, and that anger needs a target to be manipulated against.
mod me down as much as you like, because i almost see this as a flame, but i've seen it first hand, and it really tears me up to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but I think the bank guards make it obvious they aren't going to get away with it.
Seriously, how many kids do you think, go home, get behind the computer, and before they fire up a hack script think "oh wait, but if i get caught i'll get 20 years in prison instead of just 1 getting butt-raped by large hairy men". For that matter how many Enron-esque ceo's think the same thing? Pretty much nobody commits a crime thinking they might get caught, no crime is worth the penalty. I wouldn't steal a million dollars if I thought I might go to jail for 1 year, the penalty is too severe for me.
Most people think of it as a game, something that doesn't really hurt anyone in a real way. If they don't consider the penalties before they act, then raising the penalties might make them think about it, but really most of the people on slashdot would do something everyone else wouldn't because we found it interesting and didn't really think it hurt anyone anyway.
Another problem is, normal people, people who didn't go to school to learn this, and haven't been exposed to any formal education about the ethics of computer hacking, etc are just as capable as the people who have. The real danger is that people are skilled without the normal constraints, ie years of college, steady jobs, raising a family, these things make people respect laws more because they understand even minor crimes would cost them their livelihood, how do you explain that to a kid who thinks they have nothing to lose?
These kind of laws will only punish young kids who don't understand why it's wrong in the first place, and if they don't apply against kids then they will further encourage kids to do these kind of crimes because they are edgy and dangerous.
Jesus, hollywood makes movies with 12 year olds somehow destroying entire alien fleets and saving the world by hacking computers shit like that, so perhaps, just perhaps we are sending the wrong message ourselves. Also, it's difficult to show a the victims of crime as real people when they kinda aren't. If a virus killed an old person in a hospital I guarantee people would think about the consequences, but all these crimes do is cost some money to businesses and consumers and cause hassle. I'm not trying to downplay the crime, but nobody is going to picture 50 ceo's in suits not being able to get their email and feel terrible remorse for their actions.
Really I'm against some 16 year-old kid getting in trouble and losing large tracts of his life because somebody wants to end the hassle's of hacking, and uses him as an example. Kids don't live in reality, which is the reason we don't hold them up to adult standards.
Raising the price is a worse solution that removing an already tiny and essentially psychological benefit. Kill the benefit, kill the crime.
This kind of crime could be largely stopped with a marketing campaign that's smaller than the one the gap uses to promote summer-shorts.
In other news, police, firefighters, the pope and natalie portman came out against senseless machete rampages against 2 year-old children today.
We are a society that encourages people to act in ways most beneficial to society. For the same reason our newscasters don't tell everyone to eat babies every night for the sweet, tender protein (drool), we all consciously or unconsciously encourage the values we identify as important to our culture. These values differ from country to country, and personally I judge the more pacifistic to be more civilized than those that encourage violence as a solution.
Neither is actually wrong, but different points of view, 3000 years ago, if someone stole your cow/goat and you didn't chase him down and brutally kill him you would be considered an idiot and a coward, and become a target for anyone else who wanted to take your property or life. Now we have police to perform that service independently, using widely accepted moral standards, and personal violence is frowned upon. Same result, but much more consistent and it allows society to function more smoothly.
We live in a much better world than our ancestors, and while they might have needed to perform violence on a daily basis to survive, for most of us, we can do better without. The cost of this better world is not being able to act as arbitrarily or intuitively as our ancestors, and needed to restrain our natural impulses. Imagine wall street if every time someone lost money they attacked the person they lost it to.
Course if someone fucks with you you can still kick their ass, which is cool.
This is cute, you actually believe that punishment is the right way to prevent inappropriate behavior.
Listen, if you tried to fly a plane in 1900 and it crashed and you died, the only person you have to blame is yourself. Likewise, computers haven't been perfected yet, and are being used on a scale that they are not nearly designed for. 10 years ago a network was 5 computers and a server, now it's 10 thousand, or 10 million, and the security functions haven't come close to catching up.
Most computer users live in houses with no locks, and some people choose to rob other people. Now that is definately a crime, but there is no justice in terrible punishments that are generally inflicted against the people who are most likely to commit them without a full understanding of what they're doing. When I was a kid I did shit like this all the time, cause I didn't see the problems they caused, it was a game.
I personally have never had problems with virus's or spyware or much of anything, not because I know so much about security, or I go to great lengths to stop it, but because I take a few minor, common sense precautions. If instead of having to take them myself the OS did them automatically I doubt other people would have half the problems they have too.
Windows was designed for workgroups, to be as open and contactable by others as possible, with almost no thought for network security, and that's why putting it on an open connection is stupid. Also, it was designed with as few execution restrictions as possible so programming for it was flexible and easy, which applies for hackers as well as developers.
Want to stop hackers and virus's cold? Follow these simple tips:
1. Small linksys/etc firewall behind your internet connection, call this the front door lock.
2. Install Macromedia flash, then DISABLE ActiveX installs in IE, better yet, get rid of IE, but this will cover the biggest problems.
3. Don't use outlook. Thunderbird is fine, but whatever works.
That's it, that's all you need to do. Try not to install stupid programs given out for free (aka gator shit), but if you need to just fire up adaware.
Instead of raising the penalties (which is horribly unjust but fits a lot of people's "Only terrorists want to keep secrets" kind of thinking) which has lots of bad side-effects, especially since different countries have different laws, and when laws appear unjust, people lose respect for them, just make the crime harder to commit.
People don't rob banks because there are security cameras/devices and guards with guns, not because of the penalties. If that were the case nobody would've robbed banks or rustled cattle in the old west when the penalty was usually hanging.
My prediction is that hacking and virus's are a product of the incredibly fast ubiquity of computers and technology, and our complete lack to fully handle them properly yet. In 25 years expect computers to be largely hack/virus proof, once software has evolved to the point beyond "just try to get it to work".
To the young impressionable kids in the audience, let this be a lesson to you:
If you're thinking about hacking computers, don't, it's not worth it, just rape some nuns instead.
Think of the economy.
Thank you.
Itanium was killed by intel's megahertz marketing. Why get an expensive 1.4Ghz itanium when you can get 2 3.0ghz xeons for less? The amd-intel 1Ghz race hit it even harder, since intel had to totally sell out itanium's higher ipc for the p3's higher frequency, and meant the p3 could be brute-forced to equal or greater performance as the new, non-mainstream itanium architecture.
In my opinion the p4 was the worst thing ever to come out of any microprocessor house in the last 20 years, as it not only comprimised microprocessor design for the horrible and blind-sighted goal of mainstream marketing, but essentially caused a large part of the current TDP crises the industry is in now, and reinforced our mentally handicapped reliance on single-threaded programming.
The humor in the itanic label has nothing to do with the chips, it has to do with intel trying to have it both ways: intel chips are the most powerful, with the only metric that matters, frequency, and ipc and design efficiency matter little, but also that "oh yeah and we have this amazing chip that is so powerful but runs at half the clock speed." It was a blatent contradiction in marketing messages.
For f*cks sake, they called their double-clocked alu "NetBurst"... seriously, why not add an onboard memory controller and claim it's "SuperBandwithMaker", which uses it's amazing technology to increase the speed of your dial-up connection...
Yes, if you market to customers by treating them as idiots, expect them to choose the stupid product, and ignore you when you claim to offer another product that "no really this is a good chip, not like that other one which we said was the fastest", which is actually better for you in the long run, because you can set a new foundation for improvement.
When amd came out with the opteron at 64-bit, and with surprisingly competitive performance while still running legacy apps at faster speeds, how do you compete with that?
Here's hoping they do manage to resurrect the alpha lines, Ibm even went a little over to the marketing darkside with the g5, trading frequency scaling for TDP, but they usually manage to rebalance the two after a few years of revisions.
not true, nvidia's solution has them creating profiles for popular games for them to function, though i believe you can sli awareness to a game to increase it's support.
my current release has at least a hundred games, and there aren't that many popular games that need this kind of graphics firepower out there.
fyi, crossfire was originally designed for commercial opengl flight simulators.
however, as one of those customers with, as a good friend once told me, "more money than sense", sli is useful in that at 1920x1200 preferred res (hp 23" panel) i almost need both my 6800 ultras to handle 4xaa 16 aniso, but you are all perfectly free to laugh at my stupidity.
to top it off, i recently added a x2 4800 to my system, and then realized that the game i actually enjoy playing the most is starcraft.
hope you all have a good laugh.
hard drives are really not that loud anymore, my 2tb raid has 10 sata drives, and though you can hear them seeking sometimes when you listen close, the fans dwarf the drives in actual sound. the heat is pretty nasty though. consumer raid-5 is becoming more and more common nowadays though, i mean how do you realistically back up 500gb of hd space?
also, from my experience ati tends to have large variations between driver releases. their flagship driver releases are handled by a different team, and have made huge strides for reliability and consistency over the last 3 years, but even catalyst tends to not be as reliable and consistent (in my opinion) as nvidia's yet, though nvidia has had their black marks too.
having jumped between nvidia and ati a few times i'm staying with nvidia from here on out, ati's linux support is pretty damn pathetic (though i hear they finally switched to xorg-x11), but nvidia's is the best i've seen on linux, and tends to work with more esoteric kernels and configurations than ati's.
my 2c
err... i take that back.
my information was apparently rather old.
while matter-antimatter reactions release E=mc^2 energy, the reaction spectra of matter-antimatter interactions actually tends into neutrinos, muons, pions and gamma radiation, so while it wouldn't be something you want in the neighborhood, it likely wouldn't be that much worse than a low yield nuclear device.
so... we're sorry, our bad.
I'm really sorry, I love the dream of space as much as the next 5 guys, but holy shit man, this is something humans shouldn't fuck with.
think about this:
do you really, REALLY want governments, you know the ones who screw up taxes and cause silly wars for dumb, and usually misleading reasons, and which are generally ruled by an colorful balance of power between charismatic megalomaniacs, and a relatively disinformed electorate, to develop and maintain the ability to produce a substance, 5 grams of which could destroy the actual structure of the planet, kaboom gone.
no seriously, i love physics, but, barring a whole lot of psychologic evolution in the next couple millenia, no humans should not ever ever ever ever have this kind of power at our disposal.
i mean icbm's on 15 minute notice are enough for us to deal with at the moment, once the ability to produce it is developed everyone is going to say they need it for defense, ala nukes, and unlike nuclear weapons, these don't really have a shelf-life, you have to keep the anti-matter magnetically bottled forever, or boom again.
this whole idea just scares me stupid, i'd rather give schoolchildren 5kt nukes than let the military work out scenarios about force application with an infinitely powerful tactical device that can be carried in a briefcase.
oh yeah, and unlike fission bombs, if you have the knowledge to make antimatter, you don't need any fissionable material, so as technology gets better it will be easier for "insert bad guy here" to make this, just takes a good cyclotron, some magnetic containment, and time.
would be a great technology, but i don't want to die.
Hear, Hear!
192.168.42.0/24.
if you really want to check my root password is "hotdog"
Let my packets go!!!
when i first heard about firewalls a decade ago i thought "heh, thats a cool name for a lazy hack". the need for firewalls comes from the crazy overdesign of operating systems. seriously, how many people use the rpc or dcom functions of windows? or use linux rpc for much more than nfs?
for me, a gentoo box that hasn't been around or played with long enough to have servers i don't remember running on it is easily safe enough to put up naked on the net. true, i will echo icmp and a few other in-kernel protocols, but how many script kiddies (and really thats what most of us are hiding from, maybe enterprises have targetted attacks, or that geek whose sister you hit on) will go any farther than "sh apache_vuln_109123_kit.sh" and sit back?
btw, if you are being cased by people who targetted you, this strategy won't cover you that well, but neither will a half-assed firewall.
the word "firewall" really sounds cool if you don't know what it means, but it's a lot smarter to just not bind insecure servers to your outbound interface. a firewall is basically saying "i have no clue whats running on this box, so ill just stop everything", which is fine, but for a serious production server thats not the right attitude to have.
for windows, or a specialized application that's hard to secure and/or uses a few ports, yeah it's the right solution. theoretically you could probably disable all the stupid services in windows to make a bulletproof box, but you'd still have patches and 0-day vulns to deal with.
do have to give this guy credit for the xenSE angle. someday when lizards rule the earth from their giant underground caves, and the mach kernel is usable natively for an os (i know osx, but thats more a hack), maybe we can have that kind of security in all computers without having to partition it into 5 different run-time images. i tend to say things like that about every 5 years, before i give up and get drunk instead.
ps. someone should make a process audit call that allows you to restrict userspace processes to given interfaces or bind addresses, so those little apps that are written to bind to ANY_ADDRESS are forced to a programmed one instead. even a post-fork, pre-exec type call would be nice, so all shell children are restricted. you could even have outbound servers running on one intf, and other people using firefox or other clients on another interface with different routing.
owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too.
the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990, which was working well for it for a while, but when commodity gear just starts killing your performance and cost there comes a point where you have to move on to a new platform. this is like sun, except sun seems a little farther along and willing to keep pushing forward, while sgi just keep digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves.
sad, but the dot-com boom which fed these companies also birthed the commodity pc boom which killed them. i actually want to lump apple in that same catagory, but unlike the rest which stayed in their path and carved themselves farther and farther from the mainstream, apple kept pushing to keep their market position, and in pc's managed to keep their niche. surprising, but their success in the last few years had very little to do with their core pc business, and everything to do with i*'s keeping their brand warm.
just hope these same market forces end up killing the ms monopoly they created, an good open sourced os (not necc. linux) would make a lot of the hardware innovation that stopped post-lintel possible again.
"so in berkeley you can sleep with a hooker, but if you kill her, the party's over"
speaking about the passage of 2 laws in california, 1 legalizing prostitution in berkeley, the other criminalizing necrophilia.
art imitates life, it's cool!
yeah i gotta agree with this, acid-impaired, individual.
public private partnerships generally have the worst of both worlds, the ability to throw huge sums of money at vague objectives with little or no measurement of success, coupled with the ability to manipulate vague objectives to allow the consumption of huge sums of money, and not be held accountable for its success.
there have been a few (and i mean very few) large ppp's that have went well off the top of my head, but we do that a lot around boston, and tend to end up with things like time restrictions on public properties, and well, the big-dig.
but then again, $800b can't be all wrong.
umm, we should measure more things in kilogirls.
nononononono.
you got that backwards, g5 = p4, g4 = p3.
g4 and p3 = higher ipc and higher perf/watt than the latter ones.
it would've been clearer but i hit submit with that damn "html formatted" choice up.
and youre right about the big iron note, but the changes give the g5 a higher dependency on a solid memory interface with good prefetches and high cache hits.
i also agree about the fact that the p4 kills at higher clockspeeds, and didn't come near it's prime till 800fsb and about 3.0Ghz, while the vanilla p3 has a much smoother scale up and actually loses some push around 900M without the pentium m changes.
simplification: g5 is to g4 as p4 was to p3 better overall IPC, less picky about memory latency, less power, basically a great thing to quad core if you're looking for perf/watt, although that would require a different bus structure, etc. both are great, in large data or media processing apps id go g5, but for more general purpose usage a g4 is a great overall solution.
good call, but if i'm stuck on an island with a bunch of geeks and unlimited alchohol, i think i'll be happy as long as they aren't "chicks with dicks".
damn, that makes me a dork huh?
Let this be a lesson for Londoners and the rest of the world that Americans can somehow use any horrible tragedy to steal the mic at the funeral and pitch whatever stupid foreign policy they want for alterior motives, while still playing up the other, more important tragedy that happened 4 years ago that they still haven't learned to deal with.
I am a citizen of the U.S. of A, our mascot is the drama queen.
Why do you think they shut off the phones? Opened the first SMS after and my ringtone became
"ANNIHILATE!"
bit tired for a good dalek joke, ask me tomorrow when i've found my plunger-o-doom.
I'm just blown away by the courage you have to deal with it rationally, it's been 4 years and half of washington d.c. still runs like crazed rats when the traffic-copter goes overhead.
england's ability to get over a terrorist attack without 50 celebrities doing dozens of tributes, having everyone buy tons of flags, and spending 4 years in group media-therapy makes me feel less proud to be an american...
jesus we have people in texas and alabama yelling about how badly we have to attack countries so they can finally "feel safe".
ahem... no, the rebellion would just quickly switch from "satan america & israel vs islam" to "shia vs sunni". Actually, it's already starting, see pakistan and iraq.
the entire structure of society is inherently unstable right now, too many young, disenfranchised, and uneducated men, and not enough things to keep the busy/dying. it's a horrible thing to say, but when families are based on the concept of a patriarch with up to 4 wives, the poorer, young males become so frustrated and angry, and that anger needs a target to be manipulated against.
mod me down as much as you like, because i almost see this as a flame, but i've seen it first hand, and it really tears me up to watch.