I just can't believe that 40% of MySpace visitors are 35 years old or older, as the original article states. I'm not sure how they are measuring this, but there's all kinds of possible errors in these methods.
Obviously publishing tools which script kiddies can use to attack people is not a good idea, that's not what we're talking about. Surely I should at least tell people that I have found a vulnerability and that the software in question is not, in my opinion, something that you should be using if you care about security.
But if the bad guys haven't found the problem at this point, they surely will after this kind of announcement. Moreover, changing running production software can be very difficult. In this age of huge software systems composed of many pieces, you may not even know which components are running under the hood. For example, the recent OpenSSL security advisory -- can you name all the executables in your network that run OpenSSL? Can you upgrade them all? Have you?
Since the dawn of time, the x86 FPU has been organized as a stack, which has been recognized as a mistake by modern computer architects. For one thing, it is hard to get a stack architecture to take advantage of multiple functional units. Only recently, with the development of SSE, 64 bit modes and other additions have we been able to move away from the stack on the x86.
While a sub one percent click through rate on banner ads may seem anemic, it is going to start looking a lot better once media folks realize how little their expensive TV ads are watched (and by whom). Too bad they can't count the ads that are not skipped, but not watched, either -- the only time I don't skip an ad is when I leave the room.
It would be better if software companies would break out Research from Development. Software ages so quickly that almost all software companies are continuously development new products. Research, however, is a different story. I'm guessing this 'R & D' for MSN is all 'D'.
No, the reason is that the source material (e.g. the photographs) have way more information than can be displayed on a standard def television screen. Panning around a zoomed image is one way to show all the detail that's there.
Netflix (and competitors, I assume) claim they will have HD-DVDs available when they are released. To the degree that people use these companies to rent media, instead of owning it, I wonder if that will speed adoption. Sure, HD-DVD and BlueRay players will be backward compatible with my existing DVDs, but if I've got a stack of plain-old DVDs next to the player, I think I'm less likely to upgrade.
The most surprising thing to me about this whole affair is that there are companies selling rootkits. Which makes me wonder -- who else is buying them? Who knew this was a legal commercial enterprise? Can we get a list of their other customers?
I have no affiliation with any of these companies, but try something like "render farm price Ghz". I see prices like 30 cents per ghz-cpu-hour, in volume, including use of rendering software (dunno if the software is open source, or not). 30 seconds of searching found three companies, so I assume there's a bunch more.
There was a lot of debate the last several times this was posted about Sun's $1/cpu-hour price, how TCO is a lot more than hardware cost, etc. Still, a google search reveals a bunch of other companies who lease out CPU farms (mainly intended for rendering), who charge less than $1/cpu-hour.
I'm sure that the scammers have tuned their art extensively, and know a thing or two about the human psyche. However, I always wondered why they promised such huge payoffs. If someone offers me $100 million dollars in easy money, all my scam detectors go off at once. On the other hand, if someone asked me to do that same thing for $20, I would probably be more willing to go along with it.
Seems like the main categories of potential users fall into two camps:
The high-energy physics folks, who generally get government and university subsidies for their high-performance computing needs, and so certainly get computation much cheaper than $1/cpu-hour.
Commercial folks, maybe in the financial services sector who are (rightfully) paranoid about security, and just aren't going to send their sensitive data from Wall Street to California, so matter how much SSL-this and triple-DES that happens on the way there.
Sadly, though, Vista is written in the MUMPS programming language, which is quite possibly the worst, commercially successful programming language evar. Some unique things about mumps:
MUMPS is line-oriented, like old-school BASIC
Evaluation is strictly left-to-right, so 3 + 4 * 5
Doesn't yield the result you think.
There are no local variables. Everything is global, except for "globals", which are persistent, and stored in a hierarchical file on disk.
2) Database. Its good to have contiguous large (> 2Gigs) of RAM on a process.
Yup.
Its good to have fast disk IO
Yup.
Its good to have high memory bandwidth.
Yup.
IA-64 does well enough in all these areas, but not well enough to justify the price differential. You can do just about as well in all three of these categories with x86_64, and Intels Iem64t cpus, for a lot less money.
Now that there are 64-bit commodity-class CPUs, ia-64 has to compete on more than 64-bitness.
While, the IA64 has always had great floating point performance, there's an awful lot of us out here that don't need fast FPUs -- e.g. code development, database, web serving, network i/o etc. Sure, IA64 is a winner for the teraflop oriented supercomputing community, but for the rest of us, integer performance matters more. And for price/performance, x86 and x86_64 beat ia64.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why I'd be surprised to seem the using MySpace.
I just can't believe that 40% of MySpace visitors are 35 years old or older, as the original article states. I'm not sure how they are measuring this, but there's all kinds of possible errors in these methods.
But if the bad guys haven't found the problem at this point, they surely will after this kind of announcement. Moreover, changing running production software can be very difficult. In this age of huge software systems composed of many pieces, you may not even know which components are running under the hood. For example, the recent OpenSSL security advisory -- can you name all the executables in your network that run OpenSSL? Can you upgrade them all? Have you?
Since the dawn of time, the x86 FPU has been organized as a stack, which has been recognized as a mistake by modern computer architects. For one thing, it is hard to get a stack architecture to take advantage of multiple functional units. Only recently, with the development of SSE, 64 bit modes and other additions have we been able to move away from the stack on the x86.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the bus driver is usually the only one wearing a seatbelt?
While a sub one percent click through rate on banner ads may seem anemic, it is going to start looking a lot better once media folks realize how little their expensive TV ads are watched (and by whom). Too bad they can't count the ads that are not skipped, but not watched, either -- the only time I don't skip an ad is when I leave the room.
I'm sorry, but this is an unlicensed thought. Please change your mind or pay up.
It would be better if software companies would break out Research from Development. Software ages so quickly that almost all software companies are continuously development new products. Research, however, is a different story. I'm guessing this 'R & D' for MSN is all 'D'.
No, the reason is that the source material (e.g. the photographs) have way more information than can be displayed on a standard def television screen. Panning around a zoomed image is one way to show all the detail that's there.
Netflix (and competitors, I assume) claim they will have HD-DVDs available when they are released. To the degree that people use these companies to rent media, instead of owning it, I wonder if that will speed adoption. Sure, HD-DVD and BlueRay players will be backward compatible with my existing DVDs, but if I've got a stack of plain-old DVDs next to the player, I think I'm less likely to upgrade.
Most of the author's problems with web design are solved by reading the New York Times via RSS.
If the FTC wants to go after DNC list violators in number-of-complaints-received order, that's fine by me.
The most surprising thing to me about this whole affair is that there are companies selling rootkits. Which makes me wonder -- who else is buying them? Who knew this was a legal commercial enterprise? Can we get a list of their other customers?
You want to check that math again?
I have no affiliation with any of these companies, but try something like "render farm price Ghz". I see prices like 30 cents per ghz-cpu-hour, in volume, including use of rendering software (dunno if the software is open source, or not). 30 seconds of searching found three companies, so I assume there's a bunch more.
There was a lot of debate the last several times this was posted about Sun's $1/cpu-hour price, how TCO is a lot more than hardware cost, etc. Still, a google search reveals a bunch of other companies who lease out CPU farms (mainly intended for rendering), who charge less than $1/cpu-hour.
I'm sure that the scammers have tuned their art extensively, and know a thing or two about the human psyche. However, I always wondered why they promised such huge payoffs. If someone offers me $100 million dollars in easy money, all my scam detectors go off at once. On the other hand, if someone asked me to do that same thing for $20, I would probably be more willing to go along with it.
Paper and pencil are nice, but for some things, the big-ass whiteboard is really handy.
The high-energy physics folks, who generally get government and university subsidies for their high-performance computing needs, and so certainly get computation much cheaper than $1/cpu-hour.
Commercial folks, maybe in the financial services sector who are (rightfully) paranoid about security, and just aren't going to send their sensitive data from Wall Street to California, so matter how much SSL-this and triple-DES that happens on the way there.
IDC predicts Linux revenues at $35bn worldwide within the next three years.
I wonder how much "Linux revenues" google has contributed to? How many Linux licenses have they purchased for their 100k machine farm?
I read today that Hollywood will produce 40 movies this year that are derived from old TV shows. And that doesn't count movie sequels.
MUMPS is line-oriented, like old-school BASIC
Evaluation is strictly left-to-right, so 3 + 4 * 5 Doesn't yield the result you think.
There are no local variables. Everything is global, except for "globals", which are persistent, and stored in a hierarchical file on disk.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yup.
Its good to have fast disk IO
Yup.
Its good to have high memory bandwidth.
Yup.
IA-64 does well enough in all these areas, but not well enough to justify the price differential. You can do just about as well in all three of these categories with x86_64, and Intels Iem64t cpus, for a lot less money.
Now that there are 64-bit commodity-class CPUs, ia-64 has to compete on more than 64-bitness.
While, the IA64 has always had great floating point performance, there's an awful lot of us out here that don't need fast FPUs -- e.g. code development, database, web serving, network i/o etc. Sure, IA64 is a winner for the teraflop oriented supercomputing community, but for the rest of us, integer performance matters more. And for price/performance, x86 and x86_64 beat ia64.