The instruction set has an awful lot of bearing performance. The RISC ARM instruction set has only instructions that take exactly 1 cycle (last time I looked). This makes both efficiency and optimisation such as pipelining very effective. The CISC x86 instruction set has instructions that can last varying amounts of time. This makes things such as branch prediction misses expensive. To compensate for this x86 chips use a translator which turns the x86 into VLIW pseudo-RISC internally. Unfortunately this translator takes up most of the power and silicon real estate on the chip.
You can compare the instruction sets of ARM and x86. Writing assembler for the former is a dream, unlike the latter. Mhz for Mhz, ARM blows x86 away.
Incorrect. As DrYak says, no faith required. The people using the Hadron Collider don't have faith in hadrons, they have a theory that they exist and are using the Collider to either confirm or disprove that theory. The Big Bang theory has been refined over the years and various elements have either been supported or disproved, and even now some of the finer details are still debated. And evolution has been pretty comprehensively proved now.
And you don't have faith in your logic or observations, you have confidence in them.
Through innumerable people having faith in wildly random theories, inevitably through happenstance a small percentage of these will be right. Usually though they go nuts and/or bankrupt. This is because faith has no place in science.
SethJohnson brings up two excellent points: a) back up regularly. If you back up nightly then the most you can lose is a days worth of data. If you sync the backup directory (mysqldump cron job) to your local machine (I use lftp) then it's quicker than having to contact your hosting support. I disagree with H310iSe, just daily backups are fine. b) don't install anything you don't have to. Disable all plug-ins you aren't using. If using somebody else's code Google it to see what problems other people are having with it. And don't use PHPNuke or derivatives.
I don't see why cerberusss's comment didn't get modded up: c) put your source code in Subversion, and if in doubt get somebody else to go through and harden it. Not only will this protect you but by looking through the changes you will learn how to do it yourself.
My suggestion: d) develop a script that downloads the package dependencies you need (eg mysql, apache), or at least document well so that the code doesn't depend on something you've installed and forgotten about (eg ImageMagick).
I'm not too bothered if somebody hacks my site, or even gets root access. One click reimages my VPS with a fresh install of the operating system (3 mins), (d) means in under 5 minutes my OS is ready to go, (c) means I can instantly checkout my code (< 1 minute), and (a) means I can restore my database (< 1 minute).
Of course you will want to tar up all the log files before reformatting and so you can find out what went wrong, but at least for your customers there can only be a maximum down time of 15 minutes or so. Personally I have a second synced server so all I have to do is repoint the DNS, but for amateur sites you don't even need to do that. For most web sites 10-15 minutes down time each year or two isn't a great disaster.
"a great example of Microsoft's openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property"
I translate this as: "we bought this thing ages ago, we used it to drive somebody we didn't like out of business, it no longer provides us with any competitor advantage, and the code base is a mess anyway."
Isn't industry moving to SyncML? This guy was watching ActivSync creep up 3 years ago.
Had I had eBooks, I'd still have most of the those books instead of the $.50 each I got from them.
This is the great thing about the second-hand market. You can get exposed to books you'd never have been able to buy full price. I used to spend hours down at car boot sales and auctions buying second hand books and it opened my eyes to a lot of authors. Don't look on those books as your loss but as somebody else's gain! It's a shame the next generation of kids will be forced to use PirateBay and be branded criminals to get their literary fix.
I really wanted to play Eve but couldn't get the client to work (this was a while ago). Instead I got a good hit of nostalgia playing oolite, a copy of the old 8-bit Elite. I haven't tried out the crazy amount of expansion packs. If anybody knows anything similar or better please post below!
Well Microsoft did try. The concept of a file is not really archaic, it's a good metaphor when used correctly. A lot of storage these days does not map down onto a file system but onto a relational database. Even the config files for a number of applications use sqlite rather than a file.
Going back to parent post, people DO want to be able to save at certain stages. Being able to switch off and not lose data is somewhere that has gone backwards though. Even with a basic text processor, when I used to use vi I could just switch off and when I switched back on it recovered my file. None of the newer text editors seem to do this!
The UK British civil service is well and truly in Microsoft's pocket, however. And the rot was there well before Blair. Back in the 80's the LEAs forced teachers to give up their beloved Acorn computers for Microsoft machines. Hence we went from producing a generation of IT experts to a generation of secretaries.
Regarding Antony's comment, I went to a public meeting where the minister for the DTI was present (regarding the government potentially offering a public key infrastructure) and the question was asked why they always went to the same large companies with a proven track record of using hugely expensive consultants that produced very little. The answer was simply that they went to the people they've heard of.
A web site with a list of all government tenders and papers being put together, with an open invite to participate, would really help both young innovative British firms and also the UK government.
Heh I know malevolentjelly is trolling, but he does raise the point that Microsoft will only issue fixes for certain customers. If you are not important enough, or use a version they no longer decide to support, then your security hole is open permanently. At least with open source you can patch problems on your own, even if the owner does not wish to or even goes out of business.
Remember that the majority of successfully hacked webservers are linux systems running apache
It's difficult to remember something that isn't true.
Not only are many of the Asian offices using pirated software, but are not running any antivirus software. I've routinely tracked down about 80% of all infections at my client offices to their e-mails with their overseas counterparts or from when they are traveling in Asia on business.
Just out of curiousity, why are your legit non-overseas clients getting infected? Especially via email if they are running antivirus software?
Also, much of the pirated versions of the software are riddled with trojans, spyware, and security holes galore. Allowing them to use that software further opens up your entire company up to a breach or leak of information.
Really? I've never heard of such a thing. Could you point to any sources for this information?
It's not a good analogy as homicide is a criminal offense and software piracy a civil offense. If you witness a homicide then you are under a legal obligation to report that directly to the police. If you see a fellow employee using a pirate copy of Photoshop you are not legally required to go to the police station and file a report on behalf of Adobe.
In this case it seems passing the buck is the best thing to do. He's obviously not authorised to pay for authentic copies otherwise he would have done so. The people that are able have no desire to do so. All he can do is protect his reputation should there be an investigation, which is to show he competently audited the software under his jurisdiction and informed the people above of any missing licenses.
Actually I've found that often the pirates provide a much better service than the original manufacturer. When reinstalling Windows on friend's machines I try and use a cracked version where available. They tend to contain all the latest security patches. Otherwise with an original install CD the machine is compromised before I can even download SP1. The pirate version also gives you a nice choice of themes, and one click install of useful software.
Actually all that is past tense now as I refuse to touch Windows, even for friends and family. Too much of a drain on my life. They either use Ubuntu or fix their own problems.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/apples_tablet_to_be_based_on_arm_cortex_architecture "While pretty close in speed, the ARM Cortex A8 absolutely kills the Intel Atom in power efficiency. We are talking Apples and Oranges here. Not double, but an order of magnitude better for ARM. Some ARM chips routinely use 10-20 times less power than Intel for similar operations. Battery usage with ARM chips in prospective netbooks could be measured in days, not hours - much like smartphones."
Don't try and compare MHz between a CISC x86 and a RISC ARM processor. The latter will blow the former out of the water per clock cycle.
Actually I remember having a 8MHz ARM computer with 2MB of RAM called the A3000. It ran a full windowing system, had FMV, as many browser windows open as you wanted, Java, IRC, etc. Ran Artworks, the precursor to Xara Xtreme. Fantastic PC.
I enjoy online Poker and the *only* poker client that works under Wine with Linux is Party Poker. And I've tried a lot of clients. So they get all my money! They are really missing a trick though as their download page doesn't mention this. They could get some geek cred and loyalty by putting a "Linux/Wine friendly" badge on the page.
Not being replaced is the key phrase. Possibly the magazine would be going strong if Douglas Adams had decided to serialise HHGTTG in there, or Ian M. Banks had decided to publish some of his short stories. Are the good SF authors of today turning their backs on the magazines or are the magazines not aggressively pursuing the talent? I don't think it's because of the lack of awe of what could happen. Ian Banks's Culture series hits the no.1 spot every time he releases a book.
This is a good idea. Dividing the site into the professional and amateur could work. The amateur site could work like Reddit (where anybody can vote as opposed to Slashdot moderators). People that like subgenres tend to be starved of reading material hence will be likely to subscribe to such a channel and rate submissions, meaning the best will float to the top for the general reader. Advertising on the amateur site will provide a little subsidy for the pro site, and also a source of new up and coming authors.
The real value Analog etc have is their stock of back issues. Get them all online! I buy "Best of Analog" off Amazon used lists... that's money that could be going into their pocket.
In a cheap PC you definitely want to use an ARM processor. It's not only a fraction of the price but has a fraction of power consumption. It's pure RISC so you don't have that large translator to cope with that dinosaur the x86 instruction set. I had a 8MHz ARM2 which ran windows fine under RiscOS, outperforming the 266MHz Intel chip out at the time. The latest ARM chip would go well with a cheap plastic OLED screen.
A lot of flaws are in the implementation rather than the algorithm, though there could be one in that too. Given track record, it is safe to say there will be a back door that enables the NSA to access it. I assume the hard drive manufacturers will have their firmware 'checked' for flaws, or in fact provided with a certified 'standard library', which will contain it. The question is whether it is computationally hard, meaning NSA resources to crack it. In which case it's still worth having against casual theft.
Encryption - the art of making accessing the material more expensive that the material being accessed is worth.
The parent post is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. First of all how can any company deny the rights to the material on your own drive? Or since it's whole disc encryption, the question should actually be: how can any company lock you out completely from your new hard drive? The MPAA would not be able to do this.
As for preferring software encryption over "encryption circuitry", it IS software encryption but put into firmware on the drive. The fact it's standardised means that Linux only needs to write one driver to an open spec for full Linux support.
With the encryption on the drive you are freeing up the CPU. You can add a second layer of software encryption onto your drive for especially sensitive material, but don't forget that the hardware encryption protects your swap partition which your software encryption probably doesn't.
billcopc, it is you spreading the FUD in this case. As AlecC points out above, the article clearly states this is NOT the case. FTA: IT departments will also be able to repurpose drives using the encryption standard by cryptographically erasing them with a few keystrokes.
Also there is nothing that indicates that the drive will be locked to any external device, the key is held on the drive itself. Hence you should be able to unplug and plug into any other machine without any problem.
MTBF is a highly inaccurate way to show how long you should expect a drive to live. The whole Seagate Fiasco is a prime example of why NOT to believe them.
Misuse of a statistical figure is a problem with those misinterpreting it. Obviously things have changed since schools taught the difference between the mean, the mode, the median, and the minimum. If I run an ISP then MTBF is useful for me to calculate costs, both in replacements and labour costs. It's not supposed to be a measurement for consumers though that will be buying single unit quantities.
Buying a hard drive is like buying a washing machine. If I'm lucky it will go on practically for ever. On the other hand if I'm unlucky it could die tomorrow. As Piranhaa says, there are too many variables. All I can go on is that if it comes with a garauntee of 3 years then I assume the manufacturers have designed it to mostly exceed that figure otherwise they would end up losing money on the product. I still have to ensure I have a contingency plan in case it breaks down.
I encode my stuff in Ogg as only I am going to listen to it. If I want to play it on an MP3 player I'll just buy a Samsung which are well priced and specced and play Ogg. I don't know of any popular Linux music player that doesn't play both MP3 (sometimes with extra download) and Ogg transparently. A "programming geek" doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. This is why he is superior to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The instruction set has an awful lot of bearing performance. The RISC ARM instruction set has only instructions that take exactly 1 cycle (last time I looked). This makes both efficiency and optimisation such as pipelining very effective. The CISC x86 instruction set has instructions that can last varying amounts of time. This makes things such as branch prediction misses expensive. To compensate for this x86 chips use a translator which turns the x86 into VLIW pseudo-RISC internally. Unfortunately this translator takes up most of the power and silicon real estate on the chip.
You can compare the instruction sets of ARM and x86. Writing assembler for the former is a dream, unlike the latter. Mhz for Mhz, ARM blows x86 away.
Phillip.
Incorrect. As DrYak says, no faith required. The people using the Hadron Collider don't have faith in hadrons, they have a theory that they exist and are using the Collider to either confirm or disprove that theory. The Big Bang theory has been refined over the years and various elements have either been supported or disproved, and even now some of the finer details are still debated. And evolution has been pretty comprehensively proved now.
And you don't have faith in your logic or observations, you have confidence in them.
Through innumerable people having faith in wildly random theories, inevitably through happenstance a small percentage of these will be right. Usually though they go nuts and/or bankrupt. This is because faith has no place in science.
Phillip.
SethJohnson brings up two excellent points:
a) back up regularly. If you back up nightly then the most you can lose is a days worth of data. If you sync the backup directory (mysqldump cron job) to your local machine (I use lftp) then it's quicker than having to contact your hosting support. I disagree with H310iSe, just daily backups are fine.
b) don't install anything you don't have to. Disable all plug-ins you aren't using. If using somebody else's code Google it to see what problems other people are having with it. And don't use PHPNuke or derivatives.
I don't see why cerberusss's comment didn't get modded up:
c) put your source code in Subversion, and if in doubt get somebody else to go through and harden it. Not only will this protect you but by looking through the changes you will learn how to do it yourself.
My suggestion:
d) develop a script that downloads the package dependencies you need (eg mysql, apache), or at least document well so that the code doesn't depend on something you've installed and forgotten about (eg ImageMagick).
I'm not too bothered if somebody hacks my site, or even gets root access. One click reimages my VPS with a fresh install of the operating system (3 mins), (d) means in under 5 minutes my OS is ready to go, (c) means I can instantly checkout my code (< 1 minute), and (a) means I can restore my database (< 1 minute).
Of course you will want to tar up all the log files before reformatting and so you can find out what went wrong, but at least for your customers there can only be a maximum down time of 15 minutes or so. Personally I have a second synced server so all I have to do is repoint the DNS, but for amateur sites you don't even need to do that. For most web sites 10-15 minutes down time each year or two isn't a great disaster.
Phillip.
"a great example of Microsoft's openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property"
I translate this as: "we bought this thing ages ago, we used it to drive somebody we didn't like out of business, it no longer provides us with any competitor advantage, and the code base is a mess anyway."
Isn't industry moving to SyncML? This guy was watching ActivSync creep up 3 years ago.
Phillip.
Had I had eBooks, I'd still have most of the those books instead of the $.50 each I got from them.
This is the great thing about the second-hand market. You can get exposed to books you'd never have been able to buy full price. I used to spend hours down at car boot sales and auctions buying second hand books and it opened my eyes to a lot of authors. Don't look on those books as your loss but as somebody else's gain! It's a shame the next generation of kids will be forced to use PirateBay and be branded criminals to get their literary fix.
Phillip.
I really wanted to play Eve but couldn't get the client to work (this was a while ago). Instead I got a good hit of nostalgia playing oolite, a copy of the old 8-bit Elite. I haven't tried out the crazy amount of expansion packs. If anybody knows anything similar or better please post below!
Phillip.
Well Microsoft did try. The concept of a file is not really archaic, it's a good metaphor when used correctly. A lot of storage these days does not map down onto a file system but onto a relational database. Even the config files for a number of applications use sqlite rather than a file.
Going back to parent post, people DO want to be able to save at certain stages. Being able to switch off and not lose data is somewhere that has gone backwards though. Even with a basic text processor, when I used to use vi I could just switch off and when I switched back on it recovered my file. None of the newer text editors seem to do this!
Phillip.
The UK British civil service is well and truly in Microsoft's pocket, however. And the rot was there well before Blair. Back in the 80's the LEAs forced teachers to give up their beloved Acorn computers for Microsoft machines. Hence we went from producing a generation of IT experts to a generation of secretaries.
Regarding Antony's comment, I went to a public meeting where the minister for the DTI was present (regarding the government potentially offering a public key infrastructure) and the question was asked why they always went to the same large companies with a proven track record of using hugely expensive consultants that produced very little. The answer was simply that they went to the people they've heard of.
A web site with a list of all government tenders and papers being put together, with an open invite to participate, would really help both young innovative British firms and also the UK government.
Phillip.
Heh I know malevolentjelly is trolling, but he does raise the point that Microsoft will only issue fixes for certain customers. If you are not important enough, or use a version they no longer decide to support, then your security hole is open permanently. At least with open source you can patch problems on your own, even if the owner does not wish to or even goes out of business.
Remember that the majority of successfully hacked webservers are linux systems running apache
It's difficult to remember something that isn't true.
Phillip.
Not only are many of the Asian offices using pirated software, but are not running any antivirus software. I've routinely tracked down about 80% of all infections at my client offices to their e-mails with their overseas counterparts or from when they are traveling in Asia on business.
Just out of curiousity, why are your legit non-overseas clients getting infected? Especially via email if they are running antivirus software?
Also, much of the pirated versions of the software are riddled with trojans, spyware, and security holes galore. Allowing them to use that software further opens up your entire company up to a breach or leak of information.
Really? I've never heard of such a thing. Could you point to any sources for this information?
Phillip.
It's not a good analogy as homicide is a criminal offense and software piracy a civil offense. If you witness a homicide then you are under a legal obligation to report that directly to the police. If you see a fellow employee using a pirate copy of Photoshop you are not legally required to go to the police station and file a report on behalf of Adobe.
In this case it seems passing the buck is the best thing to do. He's obviously not authorised to pay for authentic copies otherwise he would have done so. The people that are able have no desire to do so. All he can do is protect his reputation should there be an investigation, which is to show he competently audited the software under his jurisdiction and informed the people above of any missing licenses.
Phillip.
Actually I've found that often the pirates provide a much better service than the original manufacturer. When reinstalling Windows on friend's machines I try and use a cracked version where available. They tend to contain all the latest security patches. Otherwise with an original install CD the machine is compromised before I can even download SP1. The pirate version also gives you a nice choice of themes, and one click install of useful software.
Actually all that is past tense now as I refuse to touch Windows, even for friends and family. Too much of a drain on my life. They either use Ubuntu or fix their own problems.
Phillip.
Read link I posted a couple above:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/apples_tablet_to_be_based_on_arm_cortex_architecture
Interesting read.
Phillip.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/apples_tablet_to_be_based_on_arm_cortex_architecture
"While pretty close in speed, the ARM Cortex A8 absolutely kills the Intel Atom in power efficiency. We are talking Apples and Oranges here. Not double, but an order of magnitude better for ARM. Some ARM chips routinely use 10-20 times less power than Intel for similar operations. Battery usage with ARM chips in prospective netbooks could be measured in days, not hours - much like smartphones."
Phillip.
Don't try and compare MHz between a CISC x86 and a RISC ARM processor. The latter will blow the former out of the water per clock cycle.
Actually I remember having a 8MHz ARM computer with 2MB of RAM called the A3000. It ran a full windowing system, had FMV, as many browser windows open as you wanted, Java, IRC, etc. Ran Artworks, the precursor to Xara Xtreme. Fantastic PC.
Phillip.
I enjoy online Poker and the *only* poker client that works under Wine with Linux is Party Poker. And I've tried a lot of clients. So they get all my money! They are really missing a trick though as their download page doesn't mention this. They could get some geek cred and loyalty by putting a "Linux/Wine friendly" badge on the page.
Phillip.
Not being replaced is the key phrase. Possibly the magazine would be going strong if Douglas Adams had decided to serialise HHGTTG in there, or Ian M. Banks had decided to publish some of his short stories. Are the good SF authors of today turning their backs on the magazines or are the magazines not aggressively pursuing the talent? I don't think it's because of the lack of awe of what could happen. Ian Banks's Culture series hits the no.1 spot every time he releases a book.
Phillip.
This is a good idea. Dividing the site into the professional and amateur could work. The amateur site could work like Reddit (where anybody can vote as opposed to Slashdot moderators). People that like subgenres tend to be starved of reading material hence will be likely to subscribe to such a channel and rate submissions, meaning the best will float to the top for the general reader. Advertising on the amateur site will provide a little subsidy for the pro site, and also a source of new up and coming authors.
The real value Analog etc have is their stock of back issues. Get them all online! I buy "Best of Analog" off Amazon used lists... that's money that could be going into their pocket.
Phillip.
the quality will be laughable. Like I always say: cheap, quality, expandable: pick two.
At $10? The first two.
Phillip.
In a cheap PC you definitely want to use an ARM processor. It's not only a fraction of the price but has a fraction of power consumption. It's pure RISC so you don't have that large translator to cope with that dinosaur the x86 instruction set. I had a 8MHz ARM2 which ran windows fine under RiscOS, outperforming the 266MHz Intel chip out at the time. The latest ARM chip would go well with a cheap plastic OLED screen.
Phillip.
A lot of flaws are in the implementation rather than the algorithm, though there could be one in that too. Given track record, it is safe to say there will be a back door that enables the NSA to access it. I assume the hard drive manufacturers will have their firmware 'checked' for flaws, or in fact provided with a certified 'standard library', which will contain it. The question is whether it is computationally hard, meaning NSA resources to crack it. In which case it's still worth having against casual theft.
Encryption - the art of making accessing the material more expensive that the material being accessed is worth.
Phillip.
The parent post is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. First of all how can any company deny the rights to the material on your own drive? Or since it's whole disc encryption, the question should actually be: how can any company lock you out completely from your new hard drive? The MPAA would not be able to do this.
As for preferring software encryption over "encryption circuitry", it IS software encryption but put into firmware on the drive. The fact it's standardised means that Linux only needs to write one driver to an open spec for full Linux support.
With the encryption on the drive you are freeing up the CPU. You can add a second layer of software encryption onto your drive for especially sensitive material, but don't forget that the hardware encryption protects your swap partition which your software encryption probably doesn't.
Phillip.
billcopc, it is you spreading the FUD in this case. As AlecC points out above, the article clearly states this is NOT the case. FTA:
IT departments will also be able to repurpose drives using the encryption standard by cryptographically erasing them with a few keystrokes.
Also there is nothing that indicates that the drive will be locked to any external device, the key is held on the drive itself. Hence you should be able to unplug and plug into any other machine without any problem.
Phillip.
MTBF is a highly inaccurate way to show how long you should expect a drive to live. The whole Seagate Fiasco is a prime example of why NOT to believe them.
Misuse of a statistical figure is a problem with those misinterpreting it. Obviously things have changed since schools taught the difference between the mean, the mode, the median, and the minimum. If I run an ISP then MTBF is useful for me to calculate costs, both in replacements and labour costs. It's not supposed to be a measurement for consumers though that will be buying single unit quantities.
Buying a hard drive is like buying a washing machine. If I'm lucky it will go on practically for ever. On the other hand if I'm unlucky it could die tomorrow. As Piranhaa says, there are too many variables. All I can go on is that if it comes with a garauntee of 3 years then I assume the manufacturers have designed it to mostly exceed that figure otherwise they would end up losing money on the product. I still have to ensure I have a contingency plan in case it breaks down.
Phillip.
I encode my stuff in Ogg as only I am going to listen to it. If I want to play it on an MP3 player I'll just buy a Samsung which are well priced and specced and play Ogg. I don't know of any popular Linux music player that doesn't play both MP3 (sometimes with extra download) and Ogg transparently. A "programming geek" doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. This is why he is superior to you.
Phillip.