Posts by Brian Miller 1317 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007
Hitler is GONE! The Soviet Union is GONE! The terrorists *don't* bunch up into nice cluster-fucks! What battlefield you got, homey? You can write your software all you want for World War 2, but that's been over an done with for over 60 years!
If this crap is good, go and restore order to Somalia. Kick ass on the Taliban. Clean up Iraq.
Otherwise its a waste of money.
Better grab them now before they're all gone!
Right.
Could somebody clue them in for a moment of sanity? While someone may be daft enough to IP-enable kitchen appliances, will they be directly addressable on the web, or will it all go through your home's router? My guess is the router.
Do all the government computers need to be directly addressable from the Internet? My guess is not. From what I've read, it would be a really good idea to NAT all of them. (Hear that, Pentagon? This means you!)
Of course they are using envirogasm images to sell their products. Musicians and race car drivers get laid just for being themselves. Thus the only selling point for the new servers is that they use less power, and thus cost less to operate, maybe even on the power from a windmill. (The 95W four-core replaces the 95W single core, etc.) Now, in the back of an old Computer Shopper there was a sexy blonde babe labeled "Intel Inside" but don't expect to see that on IBM's (or Intel's) front page.
The moron horde of Redmond seems bent on devouring its prey. So Yahoo! gives Microsoft the finger, and battle lines are drawn. From what I understand, Microsoft wants to get a new board on Yahoo!, but what if the new board also wants Microsoft to walk the plank? Or how about this current board gets off its butt and does a hostile takeover of Microsoft? I'd love to see Microsoft taken over by Yahoo!. Maybe then we'll get better versions of Windows.
Let me guess: this is really an outgrowth of having a few of yesteryear's high-end gamers graphics cards lying about and wanting to put them to use. Yes, you can have ludicrous fun with 3D images. No, it doesn't mean that you have something radically new and useful.
This is what is being done on Windows all the time. To combat this, Microsoft has been releasing "obfuscated" patches where a simple "diff" will generate too much information to dig through.
If the hacker is supported by an organization (i.e., he has a budget) then of course he'll get the application, along with updates. The automated tools are applied to create something which will crash the app, which gives the hacker the quick toe-hold he needs to create something to compromise the app. When the app crashes, that means that it has executed something it wasn't supposed to. Then exploit code is written to not crash the app, but compromise it.
AC, your experiences are unfortunately par for the course. And the average user isn't lazy, its just that us geeks don't realize what geniuses we are.
An aunt of mine bought a PC in the days of MS-DOS. I helped her quite a bit, and it took a good bit of explaining that the files on the hard drive stayed the same, even though two different programs displayed them in different formats on the screen. Sure, its obvious to us. But it isn't obvious to them.
I recently bought a MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard. I installed CentOS, and I found that I needed ethernet drivers for the Realtek chip. Ok, off to find drivers. Compile drivers. Install drivers. Try to configure drivers and fight with GUI "helper" which overwrites my edits. Find out that said drivers are flaky and don't always pick up MAC address from the card. Finally installed old 10/100 Intel PCI NIC, and no more problems. And I also had to buy a video card which had Linux drivers for it. But after it was all said and done, I am running Vista in VMWare and scoring 4.9 for CPU and memory.
"... Vista customers have claimed that their USB mice and keyboards ... refuse to work ..."
Well, looks like this is Microsoft's way of recalling Vista, sort of. Just patch the OS so nobody can actually use it. Or maybe this is supposed to enable the "mental telepathy" device on your computer. Or maybe just make all the users go mental.
Matt, I presume you're talking about:
8 threads
2 instruction pipelines + 1 floating point unit + 1 stream processing unit (cryptographic)
8KB data cache + 16KB instruction cache
Right?
The Intel Dunnington has a 32Kb instruction cache, so I don't think the T2's smaller chache is really going to be a problem since its a different architecture and instruction set. Dunnington gives two threads per core, but I didn't find information on how many instruction pipelines it has, either.
It will be interesting to see what comes of all of this in the market, as that is the real evaluator of technology.
If the machine did not use water cooling, then it would use heat pipes with gargantuan fins to disipate the heat into the air. The fins for just one CPU would be enormous. The fins for *32* CPUs would mean that the case would either have to be huge, or else take another rack space behind it for the CPU fins.
I have worked in datacenters where I had to wear ear muffs so I wouldn't be deafened by the fan noise. The datacenter at Microsoft which has two HP Superdome servers has cold air running through it like a wind tunnel. Nobody stayed in that room longer than they absolutely had to.
Now consider water cooling. Water is inexpensive, and easy to handle. Large HF transmitters are water cooled, with the tubes in direct contact with pure circulating water, and nobody gets electrocuted and the equipment runs fine. Fluorinert is horribly expensive, and water is, well, cheap as water. Yes, plumbing is a problem if your plumbers are incompetent.
From what it looks like, your position is that anything other than air cooling is a failure. Sorry, 'tain't so.
Once upon a time I wrote a small, effective Perl script to monitor network traffic. It captured activity for everything and printed out a nice little report. Took less than 50 lines to do it. I could see everything everyone did, and nothing could escape my notice.
Why aren't the companies monitoring their network traffic??
The hackers are going after the apps, and it doesn't matter if the app is produced by an outsourcing firm or not. Vista was hacked via Flash, and Mac was hacked via Safari. If a firm does not really give a flying ---- about security, then it opens the door to hackers. Duh.
When outsourcing the app, the origanization can't be asleep at the wheel. They are paying for the code, so they should be reviewing it. Design goes by the wayside time and again, and nobody ever seems to learn yesterday's lesson.
Even if the results get sold on eBay, and with much publicity.
"... an embrace of the Southern, food stamp culture your reporter shares with trailerized people."
The Register pays so little that Ashlee Vance subsists on food stamps? Or should we believe that Ashlee is transplanted to San Francisco from someplace in the American South? Or that trailer parks only exist in the South? Puzzling.
As a former resident of trailer parks (I lived in an 18ft 1967 Fireball), I can't imagine any tech reporter in San Francisco having something to do with us. And yes, I had three computers in my trailer.
While this is an oldie-but-goodie, it might be good to update the book. C++ has morphed a bit, and I'm sure that the author has some more experience and things have changed just a bit.
While the book addresses general practicality of large-scale projects with C++, the author's article is about Windows .DLLs and apparently porting from Unix. Most of the issues would seem to be addressed by some forward, thought, also known as "design."
It would have been nice if the author would have allowed more than one paragraph for the book, instead of focusing on Windows .DLL files.
The Register needs to get in motion and have a real interview with a "rogue" developer, like daniel_k. Let's find out how he went about developing the drivers, and what he will be doing next.
As for Creative, I have no idea what is going through their heads. They have Vista drivers, but the drivers don't work. Creative *intends* their hardware to function under Vista, so that is a target OS. daniel_k creates drivers which enable the function of their hardware for the intended OS. Creative then claims that the drivers enable their hardware to function on an OS where it was not intended to work.
So let me get this straight: Creative really *doesn't* want their hardware to work under Windows Vista.
Maybe they want to go out of business.
And Microsoft wonders why it has such a bad name when it comes to security. They know about the bugs. They don't fix the bugs. They don't tell about the bugs.
And now that world+dog knows about the bugs, they still wonder if they should bother to fix the bugs. Since Vista is OS-non-grata, maybe they should get off their butts and fix it.
Bunch of nutcases. How in the world can you "stop" vendor domination of a project when the vendor is the one investing 99% of the labor? If the vendor initiated the project, then basically its theirs. If the "community" wants to fork off, fine, let the community fork off and get a life.
"Changing the way software is developed - that's how we can become a defining software company, and that's working on the 90 per cent of software that's not for resale."
Load of crap. You want to define technology? Create something new! Make something neat and popular! It makes no sense whining that nobody is opening up their custom in-house software to others. Hello, its custom in-house software! The custom software in Nabisco probably has nothing in common with the custom software at Ben & Jerry's.
What these guys are talking about is not really "community" participation, but company-contributed resources for a common project. That's quite a bit different than Mozilla or Apache. Why should someone, in their off hours, want to contribute to a custom project for a few companies? So of course its the companies involved who would contribute to the project. Now, is the project something that would probably reveal too much about its trade secrets? Maybe, and maybe that's why the companies are spending their money to keep the in-house project in their house.
"He was not charged with espionage, according to prosecutors, because none of the information he lifted was actually classified."
It looks like the courts will buy just about anything if the prosecutor says so. If the information wasn't classsified, then that's the end of it. And since Linux is going to be used by the Army, that means that FOSS is of military value, and transporting a Ubuntu CD will be a crime.
More like 3560 blades (maybe 1780) with 2Gb RAM per core and appx 100Gb disk per core. (I don't know if top500 counts processors as per-core, or per physical package)
Once its looked at that ways and you realize that its a pile of boxes, the oodles-of-RAM-and-disk is quite a bit less impressive.
Since the US government's networks are so wide open and prone to being hacked again and again, I don't see why the deal would be blocked because of TippingPoint. What the government nutters should do is dump TippingPoint and kick the NSA's ass into gear to provide real network security.
If we give the Chinese TippingPoint, then surely we can hack their networks like they hack ours.
"Gelsiinger said that the work needed to write software for new architectures is often measured 'in many years - sometimes decades.'"
Gelsinger, just because you have an entrenched feudal system of morons doesn't mean that the rest of the world is going to hang around for you to figure out your "strategy." Sorry, but IBM is a little bit ahead of you. Take a look at #441 on the November list, the SR11000-K2 by Hitachi. This uses 50 PowerPC chips. Only 50. How many of your Xeon chips does it take to get up to speed on the current list? Over 1,000. Bit of a difference, eh?
Then take a look at Nvidia. Gee whiz, they have put their chipset into the Tesla system and put out the Cuda SDK. People are using it right now. Nobody is waiting for Intel to save the day. Years or decades for software engineers to catch up? No, I don't think so because the hardware and the tools are already out there.
Intel's problem is that Intel isn't out there.
Too bad, Gelsinger.
The big problem with what Comcast is doing is that they are sending RST packets to computers that are not on their network. Actual traffic regulation would require sending NAK packets, and monitoring the bandwidth. What they are doing is killing the connection entirely by interfering with computers that are not on their network.
Isn't that some sort of vandalism?
I've been told that for a foreign worker to legally land a job in the U.S., that the sponsoring employer must swear that a U.S. worker absolutely, positively, cannot be found to be employed in the job. Sorry to say, that just isn't the case. I have seen multiple instances (practically a rule) that American workers are getting the short end of the stick. I have repeatedly seen foreign workers who could not type, possesed poor OS knowledge, and could not even hook up a KVM be hired while competent American workers were sent packing. Then the group can't get things done, and the managers bemoan the "lack" of qualified workers.
There is no shortage of tech workers. There is a shortage of good managers.
What Simon advocates is efficient use of computing vs energy, and I would not call them data smelters. A smelter produces a useful product. What comes out of a lot of these energy-to-bits conversion facilities is crap.
Microsoft is building data centers near Washington's Grand Coulee Dam for their power. And just who wants to use their services? Not enough people to justify their construction. Microsoft is good at wasting the money it makes from Windows and Office. MSN hasn't made a dime, and it probably never will.
Buffett needs to get an accountant to look at the return on investment for these money pits. Once he does some simple accounting, he will quickly see that Web 2.0 and fluffy-minded computing is not a good investment. Google makes its money from advertising. Can Microsoft take a chunk out of that? I'm not sure they can.
Google came up with a great solution to a sticky problem. Microsoft has done well with "me, too" but they aren't finding any real solutions to serious problems. Microsoft does not have an internal culture of innovation. Far from it, the culture works to stifle innovation and discourage success. Good people are motivated into leaving Microsoft. This is why Ballmer is trying to buy innovation, even if it is failing innovation (like Yahoo!).
Do your homework, Mr. Buffett, and keep your money in your pocket.
"An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour."
I don't think that even a goose could crap out a load that fast. Why is it that every one of these extremophiles is a Web 2.0 devotee? I suppose that if your product is fluff in the first place, then it has to be kept in the air continually or else it becomes a dust bunny and gets swept away.
You have been kidnapped by C++. You have become sympathetic to your captor, which is actually supposed to be your tool.
As for C++ spawning Java, that just isn't so. Java was supposed to be a platform-independent solution to web applications. As it really is, Java is about as platform-independent as any binary. If you have had to produce a Java product for HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows, you'll know exactly the pain that I've seen.
I think that the "popularity" of C++ is mainly due to the "popularity" of C, rather than the concept that C++ is better than other non-VM languages. C++ started out as a preprocessor hack, and a lot of the "power" and "versatility" of C++ is still in the C preprocessor.
No, really, Negroponte? Like that should be the real focus of education?
I bought one of these XO laptops out of curiosity and to investigate software development for it. Wow! What a total clueless approach to a supposedly educational tool! The sofware development for it focused on their networking scheme, and not education. Hello, is someone missing a concept?
The XO is really an interesting exercise in producing a cheap Linux laptop, and not much more than that. It really hasn't been about education at all.
This is typical of the U.S. law-enforcement agencies. Everybody is trying to look good, so they are (and have been for some time) playing up every loser they can to make them look like super-terrorists. There was a case in Florida where a group of anti-government losers were manipulated by an FBI plant into planning a stupicide bombing of something. Of course once they agreed to everything the plant told them, they were arrested, tried, and convicted.
For sale: Secrets, dirt cheap!
This would have simply been a bit of a nuisance if the military personel would use encryption on their emails. Thus, no secrets would be divulged. So why aren't any military personel getting their hands slapped? Why aren't the military's admins getting off their worthless duffs and doing their jobs about keeping things secure?
A cousin of mine was in the military, and in his unit there was a "red" network and a "green" network. These were physically divided, with the "red" network being only accessible in one room in the building. Sensitive information was kept on the "green" network, and was not placed on the "red" network's machines. Good security has to be enforced, and that includes serious consequences.
These guys are normally paid to stand in line for lobbyists and other special interests. Looks like in this case Comcast tried to fill up the hall with people who wouldn't make a peep to keep out others who would complain about Comcast.
If you have enough money, you can do plenty to screw with good process.
I used to work for an OEM, you know, a real one with a fab line and pick and place machines. That isn't solder on the legs, its part of the chip's plastic packaging. Apparently that TI chip blew out its internal power and ground, thus the smoke. I saw something similar with Philips surface-mount capacitors. They would turn into ash when you weren't looking. Finally managed to catch one in the act, shut off the machine, and sent it back to Philips for analysis.
Quick math: $1,000,000 / 1500 = $666.66. Kind of cheap for an x86 server, eh? I don't think that I've seen anything that cheap and can be rack mounted. Of course that's what Google probably pays for their boxes, but they just buy what fell off the back of a truck and chuck them on a bench.
Right on, Dick Emery!
I bought some 1.2GHz Celeron (23W motherboard) systems for development test beds. More than fast enough for what I'm doing, and I think more than fast enough for SMB server applicaitons. Less than $80 for the base motherboard, and less than $250 for a complete system. Why should I complain?
The competing AMD motherboard is just under $200, and a Via system was $40 more. Where is a person going to spend their money? The cheapest seat available, which is Intel.
I think that a lot of us have stories of ancient Pentium systems chugging away in the back room. All of those could be replaced for a few hundred bucks with a new system that uses far less power and gives far greater performance. There's your "datacenter greening" for you.
Both Patterson and Torvalds have some good points. What it all really comes down to is what you want to accomplish.
Torvalds seems to be coming from the perspective of "what people want to do."
This does not seem to be the same thing as what a business entity or scientific organization want to do, but what individual users want to do with their computers. Certaintly, two cores are enough. (Just look at Intel's Skulltrail debacle!)
Patterson has the perspective that large organizations are going to be using CPUs with 100's of cores, and is trying to look forward to how to efficiently use 1000+ cores on a chip. Sun is putting eight cores on a chip with 64 thread capacity (T2), and Intel has produced a research CPU with 80 cores and 160 FPUs. That's exactly where things are headed.
What this boils down to is that Torvald's Linux isn't going to be running on a system with 100+ cores, and that's what cheeses Torvalds off.
I read Fielding's statement of resignation, and I'm just not impressed by him. OK, so he doesn't like who is controlling the swirls on the cake's frosting. So what? If you want to play in their sandbox, its their rules! That's all there is to it.
Fielding wants to hold his breath until he turns blue? OK, sign me up for pay-per-view!
Want the kiddies to not view pr0n? Lock down the computer with a physical key. The kid can only use the computer with the adult watching, and that's the way it'll be.
Otherwise, stop whining that someone else needs to be a parent to your own offspring and let them fill their minds with filth and garbage and hope they'll get a much-deserved Darwin award.
Yes, the idea is old, quite old. Does it mean that its a bad idea? No. The basic concept is to use a peer-to-peer model instead of a client-server model. We use plenty of peer-to-peer technology today. The main reason that update worms work poorly is because they have been designed with the model of an attacker, instead of the model of being a requested guest. Switch the model, solve the problem.
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