This Intel paper on Larrabee (pdf) shows pretty good scaling (90% of linear with 48 processors, linear with 32) with shipping DirectX 9 games like Gears of War, F.E.A.R., and Half Life 2 Episode 2.
What's impressive is that the games are unmodified - the only change is in the graphics driver which tiles the rendering and allocates one core per tile.
You could easily imagine a CPU/GPU hybrid that would do this. And you could use the processing power in a server too - imagine a thread pool servicing requests, it's not just for games. Larrabee is x86, but not apparently PC compatible, but you could probably get x86 Windows to run on it with the right HAL.
You could also argue that it's not "adding" hardware, since all IEEE 488 (and many SCSI) hard drives used to be intelligent peripherals. Rather, all more modern hard drives are cut-down. It's like the Winmodem. Nobody argued that "full" modems were Winmodems + added hardware.
Actually Winmodems are a better example than the harddrive one. Microsoft developed software to run on the host CPU to emulate a modem. As far as I can see they turned the modem hardware itself into a soundcard - actually AMR cards were a winmodem and a soundcard. Then they had a proprietary standard where the winmodem manufacturers could write a driver to work in their environment to abstract away the hardward differences.
The laptop I'm writing this on has an Winmodem, a Motorolla SM56 on the HDAudio bus which seems to be a descendant of this sort of technology. What's clever from the Microsoft point of view is that you can make a cheap modem, if you're willing to make it Windows only.
Of course, these days modems are essentially obsolete, but Windmodems are so cheap that they were still putting them into laptops a year ago when I bought this machine. Now imagine if the same situation happened with hard drives where you could run windows on a dumb one that was cheap to make but Linux required a more expensive, smarter one. Laptops being cost sensitive and Windows being a common case you'd quickly find that most laptops came with the dumb drive and Linux would be unable to run on them. With a laptop it's not like you could change hard drive controller either.
That's true at the raw flash level. It's not true at the LBA level that filesystems operate. Since there are loads of filesystems that expect to be able to keep overwriting things, at the LBA level all flash disks do some kind of wear levelling.
As far as I know Intel flash drives use NCQ for this. The idea is that you can keep a bunch of requests pending until you either have one erase block's worth or you hit a timeout.
In fact waiting for a write buffer to fill up a bit before flushing it to disk is actually quite similar conceptually to the original justification for NCQ, that the drive can sort the requests using an elevator seek algorithm.
Even better I think it's done in a way that doesn't lose user data - presumably with something like NTFS the journal keeps track of a pending transation so it can be rolled back if the system fails before it is completed.
I have a password which is a nonsense phrase with a few of the letters changed to numbers and some punctuation. Each time I need to change it I increment one of the numbers.
E.g. IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@12, IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@13 and so on.
So, if someone gets a hold of your password, and then it auto-expires, they're defeated... unless they increment the last digit or two. You're right! That's so incredibly secure!
Well they don't know which of the digits in the password should be incremented. If there are more than three of them they will run out of guesses. To be able to crack this they'd need to know not just one of my passwords but two to spot the pattern.
But (and this is obvious if you'd thought about it) that doesn't matter, if they got hold of one password they could change it to whatever they wanted. Password expiry doesn't help at all in that case, the game is lost.
Nothing is 100% secure. Stopping people having their password set to madison or whatever their girlfriend's name (or better any word which could be dictionary attacked) is makes things more secure because it stops dictionary attacks. Making sure passwords are long and not all lower case letters makes things more secure because it makes brute force attacks take much longer. E.g. find a zip password brute forcer and compare how long it takes to crack a n character password with all the character classes in the Microsoft rule vs a n character password which is just lower case letters, for reasonable n. Even if you have local access to the zip file and can try combinations really quickly, you can quickly get to the point where unless you are the NSA you won't have enough machines to crack the password before it expires.
Well then they shouldn't choose passwords they can't remember.
I have a password which is a nonsense phrase with a few of the letters changed to numbers and some punctuation. Each time I need to change it I increment one of the numbers.
E.g. IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@12, IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@13 and so on.
Actually it's better that they have a password like 89fZ#9I$ on a postit than a password like madison. You could guess madison by looking at their resume, 89fZ#9I$ requires you have physical access to their desk.
That's a very interesting list. It shows you that it's worth enforcing some limits on passwords.
The classic NT restriction is that you need to have
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc875814.aspx * The password is at least six characters long. * The password contains characters from at least three of the following five categories: * English uppercase characters (A - Z) * English lowercase characters (a - z) * Base 10 digits (0 - 9) * Non-alphanumeric (For example: !, $, #, or %) * Unicode characters * The password does not contain three or more characters from the user's account name.
They recommend setting the maximum password age to 42 days too. And the default is to remember the last 24 passwords and stop people reusing them. It's clear the people that use their girlfriend or boyfriend's name as a password would be stopped by this and would thus be a much harder target for casual password guessers.
Actually storing a hash rather than the password would be helpful too, that way even if the list leaks someone would still have to find a password which generates the leaked hash.
People that disagree with Libertarianism should be arrested by the Secret Political Police and then sent off for Class IV Special Treatment at the Ministry of Free Expression. Freedom and democracy are under attack, and freedom and democracy must be defended.
No it doesn't. Rights in DRM are copyrights. A typical DRM scheme is to encrypt a music file and then try to make sure that only people who have paid for it are able to decrypt it. Or forcing people to activate software before using it. Essentially trying to use encryption and authentication to stop copyright infringement.
Expanding the term to cover things like a closed protocol allowing the remote on the headphone cord to control an MP3 player risks making it meaningless. Though actually I could accept it if the MP3 player authenticated the controller in the headphones before it allowed the controls to work on them.
I dunno. Calling this "DRM" irritates me. Then again Apple constantly finding ways to stop third party accessories working irritates me too, so terminology aside these stories do have a point.
Now I don't buy Apple stuff, but it's interesting from technical point of view how they manage to lock out third party stuff without adding much to the cost of the device.
NT 4.0 workstation supported x86, Mips, PPC and Alpha, just like the NT 4.0 server. If you look on the CD it included binaries for all supported architectures.
Windows users would be screwed royally since they would almost certainly have to relicense/repurchase all their apps, or run their old ones in emulation. But apple got away with it...
Apple gets away with a lot of things that would kill other companies.
Consoles are a special case though. They are sold at a loss and subsidised by the cost of the games.
Usually when a new generation console is introduced they have back compatibility by essentially including bits of the old console - i.e. the first PS3s, or by some hokey emulation code - the XBox360. The PS3 dropped the legacy hardware to cut prices and become profitable. The XBox360 could only play 13% of XBox games, which is actually quite an achievment considering how real time consoles are and that the CPU and GPU were totally different.
So manufacturers talk about back compatibility as a marketing bullet point. It's not really true though. I don't think it matters - people that care about old games will have the old console anyway and they can play them on that.
PCs are different to this - people have loads of software which they absolutely want to use when they buy a new machine. And compatibility break will cripple sales of a new OS.
New Mexico ($2) Obama Alaska ($1.87) McCain West Virginia ($1.83) McCain Mississippi ($1.77) McCain North Dakota ($1.73) McCain Alabama ($1.71) McCain Virginia ($1.66) Obama Montana ($1.58) McCain South Dakota ($1.49) McCain
Washngton ($0.88) Obama California ($0.79) Obama
Seems like Republican states do better from the Federal Government than Democrat ones, which is sort of ironic. Then again, I suppose you should look at governors to see if the Republicans are better at attracting Pork to their state
twitter: It's like the secretary in Hitler's bunker. She heard everything but never felt responsible. schestowitz: People are easy to program twitter: People want to believe their leaders and employers no matter how brutal and wrong they are. amd-linux: hmmm lets not compare MS with Hitler - as a German I have difficulties with that schestowitz: That's what makes us just high-class chimpanzees amd-linux: I mean MS is ruthless, but they did not kill 6 million people... schestowitz: More schestowitz: There are also the wars twitter: they push patent law and deprive the world of life saving drugs schestowitz: Some nations are still invading other countries schestowitz: And people are taught that they "Do the Right Thing" twitter: As an American, I have a lot to learn from people like Hitlerâ(TM)s secretary schestowitz: WT*? Look at this headlne: http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Microsoft_faces_long_⦠twitter: I am responsible for Iraq and Gaza.
Microsoft = Hitler. Microsoft employees are like Hitler's secretary. And oddly enough twitter is like her too, responsible for all the evils of the Bush admin.
Actually from a free market point of view it seems like this sort of thing should be a public/private arrangment. I.e. the companies should come to the Federal government and say "this is worth $X to us so we'll pay $X between us". If $X is less than what it costs, the power gets upgraded. If not they will continue to protect critical systems with a UPS.
Meh. On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, Microsoft probably brings in a teeny tiny bit of revenue for that community, and it's not uncommon for local governments to show their appreciation by funding projects like this.
They're going halfzies, I don't see anything wrong with it.
I dunno. If there's a media outcry about it Microsoft will probably just pay for the whole thing thing. Good PR for them - or at least less bad PR - and the government saves $18M - or more likely spends it on something else.
Everybody wins;-)
Except of course that the fundamental problem of the stimulus package, that the money and deadline came first and the projects came later isn't actually fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
All the people who did what Colbert told them should know that whether your part of an ironic cult or a normal cult, it's still a cult.
It's not just ray tracing
This Intel paper on Larrabee (pdf) shows pretty good scaling (90% of linear with 48 processors, linear with 32) with shipping DirectX 9 games like Gears of War, F.E.A.R., and Half Life 2 Episode 2.
What's impressive is that the games are unmodified - the only change is in the graphics driver which tiles the rendering and allocates one core per tile.
You could easily imagine a CPU/GPU hybrid that would do this. And you could use the processing power in a server too - imagine a thread pool servicing requests, it's not just for games. Larrabee is x86, but not apparently PC compatible, but you could probably get x86 Windows to run on it with the right HAL.
http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/mike/archive/2004/05/25/415.aspx
Q) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A) to To other side. get the
Q) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A) other to side. To the get
You could also argue that it's not "adding" hardware, since all IEEE 488 (and many SCSI) hard drives used to be intelligent peripherals. Rather, all more modern hard drives are cut-down. It's like the Winmodem. Nobody argued that "full" modems were Winmodems + added hardware.
Actually Winmodems are a better example than the harddrive one. Microsoft developed software to run on the host CPU to emulate a modem. As far as I can see they turned the modem hardware itself into a soundcard - actually AMR cards were a winmodem and a soundcard. Then they had a proprietary standard where the winmodem manufacturers could write a driver to work in their environment to abstract away the hardward differences.
The laptop I'm writing this on has an Winmodem, a Motorolla SM56 on the HDAudio bus which seems to be a descendant of this sort of technology. What's clever from the Microsoft point of view is that you can make a cheap modem, if you're willing to make it Windows only.
Of course, these days modems are essentially obsolete, but Windmodems are so cheap that they were still putting them into laptops a year ago when I bought this machine. Now imagine if the same situation happened with hard drives where you could run windows on a dumb one that was cheap to make but Linux required a more expensive, smarter one. Laptops being cost sensitive and Windows being a common case you'd quickly find that most laptops came with the dumb drive and Linux would be unable to run on them. With a laptop it's not like you could change hard drive controller either.
If you need extra hardware (drives with ultracapacitors or computers with a UPS) to run Linux, suddenly a Windows OEM license seems a lot cheaper.
Isn't it usually a bad idea to compensate for a lack of a file system feature by adding hardware though?
That's true at the raw flash level. It's not true at the LBA level that filesystems operate. Since there are loads of filesystems that expect to be able to keep overwriting things, at the LBA level all flash disks do some kind of wear levelling.
As far as I know Intel flash drives use NCQ for this. The idea is that you can keep a bunch of requests pending until you either have one erase block's worth or you hit a timeout.
In fact waiting for a write buffer to fill up a bit before flushing it to disk is actually quite similar conceptually to the original justification for NCQ, that the drive can sort the requests using an elevator seek algorithm.
Even better I think it's done in a way that doesn't lose user data - presumably with something like NTFS the journal keeps track of a pending transation so it can be rolled back if the system fails before it is completed.
I have a password which is a nonsense phrase with a few of the letters changed to numbers and some punctuation. Each time I need to change it I increment one of the numbers.
E.g. IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@12, IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@13 and so on.
So, if someone gets a hold of your password, and then it auto-expires, they're defeated... unless they increment the last digit or two. You're right! That's so incredibly secure!
Well they don't know which of the digits in the password should be incremented. If there are more than three of them they will run out of guesses. To be able to crack this they'd need to know not just one of my passwords but two to spot the pattern.
But (and this is obvious if you'd thought about it) that doesn't matter, if they got hold of one password they could change it to whatever they wanted. Password expiry doesn't help at all in that case, the game is lost.
Nothing is 100% secure. Stopping people having their password set to madison or whatever their girlfriend's name (or better any word which could be dictionary attacked) is makes things more secure because it stops dictionary attacks. Making sure passwords are long and not all lower case letters makes things more secure because it makes brute force attacks take much longer. E.g. find a zip password brute forcer and compare how long it takes to crack a n character password with all the character classes in the Microsoft rule vs a n character password which is just lower case letters, for reasonable n. Even if you have local access to the zip file and can try combinations really quickly, you can quickly get to the point where unless you are the NSA you won't have enough machines to crack the password before it expires.
Well then they shouldn't choose passwords they can't remember.
I have a password which is a nonsense phrase with a few of the letters changed to numbers and some punctuation. Each time I need to change it I increment one of the numbers.
E.g. IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@12, IHeardYouL1ekFoob1es@13 and so on.
Actually it's better that they have a password like 89fZ#9I$ on a postit than a password like madison. You could guess madison by looking at their resume, 89fZ#9I$ requires you have physical access to their desk.
I shall notify the people who have critically weak passwords by email.
That's a very interesting list. It shows you that it's worth enforcing some limits on passwords.
The classic NT restriction is that you need to have
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc875814.aspx
* The password is at least six characters long.
* The password contains characters from at least three of the following five categories:
* English uppercase characters (A - Z)
* English lowercase characters (a - z)
* Base 10 digits (0 - 9)
* Non-alphanumeric (For example: !, $, #, or %)
* Unicode characters
* The password does not contain three or more characters from the user's account name.
They recommend setting the maximum password age to 42 days too. And the default is to remember the last 24 passwords and stop people reusing them. It's clear the people that use their girlfriend or boyfriend's name as a password would be stopped by this and would thus be a much harder target for casual password guessers.
Actually storing a hash rather than the password would be helpful too, that way even if the list leaks someone would still have to find a password which generates the leaked hash.
People that disagree with Libertarianism should be arrested by the Secret Political Police and then sent off for Class IV Special Treatment at the Ministry of Free Expression. Freedom and democracy are under attack, and freedom and democracy must be defended.
No it doesn't. Rights in DRM are copyrights. A typical DRM scheme is to encrypt a music file and then try to make sure that only people who have paid for it are able to decrypt it. Or forcing people to activate software before using it. Essentially trying to use encryption and authentication to stop copyright infringement.
Expanding the term to cover things like a closed protocol allowing the remote on the headphone cord to control an MP3 player risks making it meaningless. Though actually I could accept it if the MP3 player authenticated the controller in the headphones before it allowed the controls to work on them.
Has the key word for the new name: "Ownable." Guess they were having difficulty suing people over the use of the word SciFi
I think it's written pwnable now.
Yeah, why are they showing wrestling? They should concentrate on sci fi.
I dunno. Calling this "DRM" irritates me. Then again Apple constantly finding ways to stop third party accessories working irritates me too, so terminology aside these stories do have a point.
Now I don't buy Apple stuff, but it's interesting from technical point of view how they manage to lock out third party stuff without adding much to the cost of the device.
NT 4.0 workstation supported x86, Mips, PPC and Alpha, just like the NT 4.0 server. If you look on the CD it included binaries for all supported architectures.
That's not true. Windows NT has run on Mips, i860, Alpha, PPC and Itanium. None of them ever had even 1% of the market.
Windows users would be screwed royally since they would almost certainly have to relicense/repurchase all their apps, or run their old ones in emulation. But apple got away with it...
Apple gets away with a lot of things that would kill other companies.
Consoles are a special case though. They are sold at a loss and subsidised by the cost of the games.
Usually when a new generation console is introduced they have back compatibility by essentially including bits of the old console - i.e. the first PS3s, or by some hokey emulation code - the XBox360. The PS3 dropped the legacy hardware to cut prices and become profitable. The XBox360 could only play 13% of XBox games, which is actually quite an achievment considering how real time consoles are and that the CPU and GPU were totally different.
So manufacturers talk about back compatibility as a marketing bullet point. It's not really true though. I don't think it matters - people that care about old games will have the old console anyway and they can play them on that.
PCs are different to this - people have loads of software which they absolutely want to use when they buy a new machine. And compatibility break will cripple sales of a new OS.
It's interesting if you correlate those numbers with how people voted in the last Presidential election
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/3383903/US-election-2008-State-by-state-breakdown-of-electoral-votes.html
New Mexico ($2) Obama
Alaska ($1.87) McCain
West Virginia ($1.83) McCain
Mississippi ($1.77) McCain
North Dakota ($1.73) McCain
Alabama ($1.71) McCain
Virginia ($1.66) Obama
Montana ($1.58) McCain
South Dakota ($1.49) McCain
Washngton ($0.88) Obama
California ($0.79) Obama
Seems like Republican states do better from the Federal Government than Democrat ones, which is sort of ironic. Then again, I suppose you should look at governors to see if the Republicans are better at attracting Pork to their state
You're right. That boycott novell site is so batshit is kind of funny
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/01/18/irc-log-17012009/#tJan%2017%2021:09:00
twitter: It's like the secretary in Hitler's bunker. She heard everything but never felt responsible.
schestowitz: People are easy to program
twitter: People want to believe their leaders and employers no matter how brutal and wrong they are.
amd-linux: hmmm lets not compare MS with Hitler - as a German I have difficulties with that
schestowitz: That's what makes us just high-class chimpanzees
amd-linux: I mean MS is ruthless, but they did not kill 6 million people...
schestowitz: More
schestowitz: There are also the wars
twitter: they push patent law and deprive the world of life saving drugs
schestowitz: Some nations are still invading other countries
schestowitz: And people are taught that they "Do the Right Thing"
twitter: As an American, I have a lot to learn from people like Hitlerâ(TM)s secretary
schestowitz: WT*? Look at this headlne: http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Microsoft_faces_long_â¦
twitter: I am responsible for Iraq and Gaza.
Microsoft = Hitler. Microsoft employees are like Hitler's secretary. And oddly enough twitter is like her too, responsible for all the evils of the Bush admin.
I wonder if they will do something about power outages -
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/09/19/471240.aspx
Actually from a free market point of view it seems like this sort of thing should be a public/private arrangment. I.e. the companies should come to the Federal government and say "this is worth $X to us so we'll pay $X between us". If $X is less than what it costs, the power gets upgraded. If not they will continue to protect critical systems with a UPS.
Meh. On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, Microsoft probably brings in a teeny tiny bit of revenue for that community, and it's not uncommon for local governments to show their appreciation by funding projects like this.
They're going halfzies, I don't see anything wrong with it.
I dunno. If there's a media outcry about it Microsoft will probably just pay for the whole thing thing. Good PR for them - or at least less bad PR - and the government saves $18M - or more likely spends it on something else.
Everybody wins ;-)
Except of course that the fundamental problem of the stimulus package, that the money and deadline came first and the projects came later isn't actually fixed.