Whether you should be worried depends on what you use your internet connection for.
If you only use it for conventional client stuff you shouldn't worry too much, I would expect important services to remain available on IPV4 for a long time. On the other hand if you do stuff that relies on incoming connections you should be aware that at some point your IPV4 service may be put behind ISP level NAT to free up IPv4 addresses for more important uses (though comcast is in a better position than most on this because they are running some of their internal infrastructure on public IPv4 and planning to migrate it to IPv6 which will free up addresses to use for end users). You may get offered IPv6 service as well but it's far from certain and even if you do there is no guarantee that the people trying to connect to you will have IPV6.
AMD is the closest thing intel has to a competitor but they are still behind nahlem let alone sandy bridge. They have tried to get arround this by throwing cores at the problem but that is of limited usefulness for desktop users. So while embarrasing and expensive for intel I don't see this really changing the balance of power in the processor market much. Especially as intel has caught this early while the ammount of sandy bridge hardware in consumers hands is still relatively small.
AMD has the bottom two tiers in a fierce headlock. Really? care to cite some sources to back up that claim? most times i've done a comparison of similarlly performing chips (note that AMD don't get as high performance per clock as intel) the intel option has been more expensive but not hugely so.
Where intel does lose out is platform flexibility, you can put AMDs cheapest chips on a top end board or their most expensive on a low end board. With intel you have different platforms for different levels of price and performance so you can't mix and match.
As for sandy bridge VS AMD afaict the fastest quad core AMD offers is the Phenom II X4 970 BE which costs just under $200. The i5 2500 costs just over $200 and beats it in every test anandtech include in their charts and in most of them it does so by a wide margin. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=186 (note the 2500K is just a 2500 with an unlocked multiplier and some esoteric features disabled). IMO for the $500-$1000 desktop segment prior to this announcement there was* little reason to choose anything other than a 2500 or 2600 (add K suffix if you plan to overclock)
As for the AMD hex cores they may be marginally better than a 2500 in some (but not all) highly multithreaded tasks but I would definately have taken the 2500 over them for normal desktop use.
Someone else linked to a post that claims it only supports ports 2-5 (the 3Gbps ports) not ports 0-1 (the 6Gbps ports). Most systems won't be stressing ports 2-5 that heavilly.
Plus if this is indeed a gradual degredation issue it may be that most people simply haven't been using the systems long enough for it to become noticable yet.
but you say it's random (what is "semi-random?") Afaict it's determined by the order in which the interfaces are first seen, that in turn depends on the order the drivers were loaded in which in turn depends on details like the kernel/udev versions. So two identical servers installed with identical installation media used in exactly the same way will most likely (but still not gauranteed) come up with the ports in the same order but use different versions or types installation media and/or slightly different hardware and things are far from certain.
Why did they even include it originally The folllowing is from memory and may be off in some details but it represents what I read at the time.
Some of linux's biggest weaknesses for home use is you can't game on it, nor can you play DVDs on it out of the box (i'm not sure if there were any legal DVD options at all for linux at that time). A console with a linux option could in principle compete with the windows PC as a device that can be used for both gaming/movies and more serious stuff by using the closed system for gaming/movies and linux for other stuff.
They started this with a Linux kit for the PS2 and then announced that the PS3 would ship with Linux. They got cold feet on that just before release though and Linux installation became an option buried in the menus for which a third party linux disc was needed. Then with the slim they gave up on it completely for new consoles (citing financial reasons) and finally they removed the feature from existing consoles due to piarcy fears (which was probablly a huge own-goal).
I understood at the time that this attack on windows by sony was a big reason in MS pushing out the xbox though I dunno how true that is.
All the sources you mention have certain things in common, they transmit either continuously or frequently, they don't tend to move about much and they tend to stick to one frequency band. In other words they aren't even trying to hide.
A source that only pops up occasionally for short bursts is going to be much more time consuming/expensive to track because you have to listen for a long time to get each peice of information that takes you slightly closer.
IIRC from watching programs on discovery (can't remember which one exactly) they build barriers out of rocks and/or interlocking concrete peices (not sure what they used on what project) to protect their various coastline extension projects (which is what these projects are primerally about, coastline means beachfront property and beachfront property is what rich tourists/expats want).
The thing is it's a difficult compromise, you don't want to shut out water movement completely because if you do that then the water will become dirty (and beachfront property on a dirty coastline isn't exactly attractive) but any water not shut out becomes a potential source of errosion.
disappearing a reporter for the NY Times would just invite more scrutiny.
So don't dissapear them, just ban them from the country. Those who decide to stay anyway and get caught can be "legitimately" thrown in prison for a long time.
There are at least a couple of satphone networks (irridium and inmarsat) offering "worldwide" coverage and both of them offer (very expensive) data services. I believe they have been pressured to shut off service in some countries though.
Well unless they have blocked international phone service you could probablly get online by dialling out to an ISP in another country. Would be a rather expensive and potentially rather slow (depending on how well/badly they have implmented international phone service) way to get online though.
My supervisor used to work for Boeing and apparently they had a rule that if you designed something for civilian aircraft you had to be on the flight when it was tested. Presumabbly for this reason.
Note that while the autogenerated persistent-net-rules identifies based on mac addresses you can customise the rules to match based on other stuff and afaict any custom rules will be left alone (only devices with no rule at all get an autogenerated rule).
So if you know the machines will only have one nic you can probablly write a rule that will match anything and have it work fine.
Afaict currently server memory generally has ECC and desktop memory doesn't.
However ECC is a game of probabilities and block sizes. Lets say your raw bitflip rate is one per 2^30 bits (I suspect in reality it's lower) and that the different bits of each word come from very different parts of the memory array. Your chance of an error in a 64-bit word is around one in 2^24 your chance of two errors in a 64-bit word is arround one in 2^48.
In other words an ECC scheme that works on a word level and can only correct single bit errors wins you a huge impromenent in reliability.
However increase the raw bitflip rate to say one in 2^10 bits. Suddenly even if you can correct single bitflips in a word you have a very real chance of running into uncorrectable errors. Afaict the only real way to get arround this without being hugely inefficiant in memory use is to increase the ECC block size and that means more latency.
Nobody Nobody except an orginisation specifically specialising in suing. By specialising in suing and not making (or even licening the making of) anything you make it extremely difficult to countersue.
The "multiple trusted CAs" model is only as secure as the least trustworthy CA. Browsers use this model and have a disturbingly long list of trusted CAs.
The reasonable assumption is that most significant governments have a "trusted" CA they can lean on to sign certificates for whatever domain they want. So if you want to secure stuff against them do not use browser based SSL.
There is also the issue someone else mentioned that most people go to the non-SSL site first, unless the person is paying a lot of attention they can be diverted to a different domain and/or kept on non-ssl with the original domain.
You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode. If you just want a laser to cause mayhem with then afaict the ones out of DVD burners are far nastier than even the powerfull end of laser pointers.
I guess the debian equivilent would be setting the debconf priority to low so you see every question.
But unlike the vendors of propietry software the debian developers usually choose defaults that are friendly to users rather than to corporate interests.
It depends what you want out of a mouse. If you only have a basic mouse with two buttons and a clickable wheel then I agree there isn't a whole lot of point installing the vendors software.
On the other hand if you have extra buttons (or even things like sideways rocking of the wheel) and want to actually use them in normal desktop use (most apps other than games don't natively understand extra buttons) then you need extra software.
The throretical bast case ping time to an earth based server for a GEO bidirectional system (that is user->satellite->server->sattelite->user) is just under 500ms.
However all the reports i've seen seem to indicate much higher round trip times than that in practice from both LEO and GEO systems. Is there any actual evidence that this new system will be better?
1: can they keep the latency down to a level that makes the service superior to conventiona GEO sattelite service. If not then IMO there will be little chance of them gaining much ground over existing services 2: can they find a price point that brings them enough revenue quickly enough to cover the massive cost of launching such a network.
Afaict all previous attempts to build LEO communications networks have failed to attract enough revenue quickly enough to pay the debt incurred and ended up in bankruptcy. IMO if you are investing in a new LEO satellite networks with the aim of making money* you are probablly a fool.
*If you are doing it because you want to improve the worlds communications
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you should be worried depends on what you use your internet connection for.
If you only use it for conventional client stuff you shouldn't worry too much, I would expect important services to remain available on IPV4 for a long time. On the other hand if you do stuff that relies on incoming connections you should be aware that at some point your IPV4 service may be put behind ISP level NAT to free up IPv4 addresses for more important uses (though comcast is in a better position than most on this because they are running some of their internal infrastructure on public IPv4 and planning to migrate it to IPv6 which will free up addresses to use for end users). You may get offered IPv6 service as well but it's far from certain and even if you do there is no guarantee that the people trying to connect to you will have IPV6.
AMD is the closest thing intel has to a competitor but they are still behind nahlem let alone sandy bridge. They have tried to get arround this by throwing cores at the problem but that is of limited usefulness for desktop users. So while embarrasing and expensive for intel I don't see this really changing the balance of power in the processor market much. Especially as intel has caught this early while the ammount of sandy bridge hardware in consumers hands is still relatively small.
AMD has the bottom two tiers in a fierce headlock.
Really? care to cite some sources to back up that claim? most times i've done a comparison of similarlly performing chips (note that AMD don't get as high performance per clock as intel) the intel option has been more expensive but not hugely so.
Where intel does lose out is platform flexibility, you can put AMDs cheapest chips on a top end board or their most expensive on a low end board. With intel you have different platforms for different levels of price and performance so you can't mix and match.
As for sandy bridge VS AMD afaict the fastest quad core AMD offers is the Phenom II X4 970 BE which costs just under $200. The i5 2500 costs just over $200 and beats it in every test anandtech include in their charts and in most of them it does so by a wide margin.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=186 (note the 2500K is just a 2500 with an unlocked multiplier and some esoteric features disabled). IMO for the $500-$1000 desktop segment prior to this announcement there was* little reason to choose anything other than a 2500 or 2600 (add K suffix if you plan to overclock)
As for the AMD hex cores they may be marginally better than a 2500 in some (but not all) highly multithreaded tasks but I would definately have taken the 2500 over them for normal desktop use.
* until todays announcement
That should have said only affects ports 2-5.
Someone else linked to a post that claims it only supports ports 2-5 (the 3Gbps ports) not ports 0-1 (the 6Gbps ports). Most systems won't be stressing ports 2-5 that heavilly.
Plus if this is indeed a gradual degredation issue it may be that most people simply haven't been using the systems long enough for it to become noticable yet.
after all, the phone should have been destroyed in the blast
The phone doesn't really matter, what matters is the sim and that is pretty small and therefore stands at least a chance of surviving.
With the SIM you can match up to the providers databases which will almost certainly have a record of what messages were received and from where.
but you say it's random (what is "semi-random?")
Afaict it's determined by the order in which the interfaces are first seen, that in turn depends on the order the drivers were loaded in which in turn depends on details like the kernel/udev versions. So two identical servers installed with identical installation media used in exactly the same way will most likely (but still not gauranteed) come up with the ports in the same order but use different versions or types installation media and/or slightly different hardware and things are far from certain.
Why did they even include it originally
The folllowing is from memory and may be off in some details but it represents what I read at the time.
Some of linux's biggest weaknesses for home use is you can't game on it, nor can you play DVDs on it out of the box (i'm not sure if there were any legal DVD options at all for linux at that time). A console with a linux option could in principle compete with the windows PC as a device that can be used for both gaming/movies and more serious stuff by using the closed system for gaming/movies and linux for other stuff.
They started this with a Linux kit for the PS2 and then announced that the PS3 would ship with Linux. They got cold feet on that just before release though and Linux installation became an option buried in the menus for which a third party linux disc was needed. Then with the slim they gave up on it completely for new consoles (citing financial reasons) and finally they removed the feature from existing consoles due to piarcy fears (which was probablly a huge own-goal).
I understood at the time that this attack on windows by sony was a big reason in MS pushing out the xbox though I dunno how true that is.
All the sources you mention have certain things in common, they transmit either continuously or frequently, they don't tend to move about much and they tend to stick to one frequency band. In other words they aren't even trying to hide.
A source that only pops up occasionally for short bursts is going to be much more time consuming/expensive to track because you have to listen for a long time to get each peice of information that takes you slightly closer.
IIRC from watching programs on discovery (can't remember which one exactly) they build barriers out of rocks and/or interlocking concrete peices (not sure what they used on what project) to protect their various coastline extension projects (which is what these projects are primerally about, coastline means beachfront property and beachfront property is what rich tourists/expats want).
The thing is it's a difficult compromise, you don't want to shut out water movement completely because if you do that then the water will become dirty (and beachfront property on a dirty coastline isn't exactly attractive) but any water not shut out becomes a potential source of errosion.
disappearing a reporter for the NY Times would just invite more scrutiny.
So don't dissapear them, just ban them from the country. Those who decide to stay anyway and get caught can be "legitimately" thrown in prison for a long time.
There are at least a couple of satphone networks (irridium and inmarsat) offering "worldwide" coverage and both of them offer (very expensive) data services. I believe they have been pressured to shut off service in some countries though.
Well unless they have blocked international phone service you could probablly get online by dialling out to an ISP in another country. Would be a rather expensive and potentially rather slow (depending on how well/badly they have implmented international phone service) way to get online though.
My supervisor used to work for Boeing and apparently they had a rule that if you designed something for civilian aircraft you had to be on the flight when it was tested. Presumabbly for this reason.
Note that while the autogenerated persistent-net-rules identifies based on mac addresses you can customise the rules to match based on other stuff and afaict any custom rules will be left alone (only devices with no rule at all get an autogenerated rule).
So if you know the machines will only have one nic you can probablly write a rule that will match anything and have it work fine.
What if I would do this in my slashdot signature
I don't think /. allows javascript in signatures.
Afaict currently server memory generally has ECC and desktop memory doesn't.
However ECC is a game of probabilities and block sizes. Lets say your raw bitflip rate is one per 2^30 bits (I suspect in reality it's lower) and that the different bits of each word come from very different parts of the memory array. Your chance of an error in a 64-bit word is around one in 2^24 your chance of two errors in a 64-bit word is arround one in 2^48.
In other words an ECC scheme that works on a word level and can only correct single bit errors wins you a huge impromenent in reliability.
However increase the raw bitflip rate to say one in 2^10 bits. Suddenly even if you can correct single bitflips in a word you have a very real chance of running into uncorrectable errors. Afaict the only real way to get arround this without being hugely inefficiant in memory use is to increase the ECC block size and that means more latency.
Nobody
Nobody except an orginisation specifically specialising in suing. By specialising in suing and not making (or even licening the making of) anything you make it extremely difficult to countersue.
Or just find a CA that is either sympathetic to your cause or subject to your coercion.
read and weep. A list this long and spread through so many different countries is not the way to run a tight ship security wise.
The "multiple trusted CAs" model is only as secure as the least trustworthy CA. Browsers use this model and have a disturbingly long list of trusted CAs.
The reasonable assumption is that most significant governments have a "trusted" CA they can lean on to sign certificates for whatever domain they want. So if you want to secure stuff against them do not use browser based SSL.
There is also the issue someone else mentioned that most people go to the non-SSL site first, unless the person is paying a lot of attention they can be diverted to a different domain and/or kept on non-ssl with the original domain.
You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode.
If you just want a laser to cause mayhem with then afaict the ones out of DVD burners are far nastier than even the powerfull end of laser pointers.
I guess the debian equivilent would be setting the debconf priority to low so you see every question.
But unlike the vendors of propietry software the debian developers usually choose defaults that are friendly to users rather than to corporate interests.
It depends what you want out of a mouse. If you only have a basic mouse with two buttons and a clickable wheel then I agree there isn't a whole lot of point installing the vendors software.
On the other hand if you have extra buttons (or even things like sideways rocking of the wheel) and want to actually use them in normal desktop use (most apps other than games don't natively understand extra buttons) then you need extra software.
The throretical bast case ping time to an earth based server for a GEO bidirectional system (that is user->satellite->server->sattelite->user) is just under 500ms.
However all the reports i've seen seem to indicate much higher round trip times than that in practice from both LEO and GEO systems. Is there any actual evidence that this new system will be better?
IMO The real questions are
1: can they keep the latency down to a level that makes the service superior to conventiona GEO sattelite service. If not then IMO there will be little chance of them gaining much ground over existing services
2: can they find a price point that brings them enough revenue quickly enough to cover the massive cost of launching such a network.
Afaict all previous attempts to build LEO communications networks have failed to attract enough revenue quickly enough to pay the debt incurred and ended up in bankruptcy. IMO if you are investing in a new LEO satellite networks with the aim of making money* you are probablly a fool.
*If you are doing it because you want to improve the worlds communications