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Slashback: Moon Footage, KillerNic, ZFS Leopard
from the advised-individually dept.
Direct answers to Slashdot KillerNIC questions. Emptynest writes "A bit over a week ago, Slashdot linked a story on GDHardware.com and it was filled with a bunch of 'hard questions from the Slashdot Community" regarding Bigfoot Network's pending 'killer' Network card that promises to reduce in-game lag. It looks as if Bigfoot isn't backing down and has hand-picked several of the questions from the Slashdot Community and answered them in a new article."
Recap of stolen laptop identity theft. Kn10 writes to tell us Technibble has a brief recap of some of the major laptop thefts resulting in personal information being leaked from major organizations. From the article: "According to the FBI, laptop theft is the second most common computer crime and less than 2 percent of those stolen laptops are ever recovered. Four in five (81%) of US firms have had at least one laptop stolen containing sensitive information according to a recent study."
A victory for on PayPal user. Not-So-Anonymous Coward writes "According to his site, 'silic0nsilence', who was featured in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600, has won his long battle with PayPal Fraud. On August 15th, 2006 in Small Claims court, he was awarded $671.12 after almost a year-long war with PayPal and a user. He also successfully won a small claims suit against PayPal to commence in his case with the user."
Missing moon footage surfaces. denis-The-menace writes "Film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film. He had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimeter film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue"
Dell laptops unwelcome on Quatas flights. Thomas Henden writes "The Australian airline company Quantas, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, banned the in-flight use of Dell laptops on battery power. The security personnel even went so far as taping over the contacts in the batteries according to an agreement between Dell and Qantas. However the security is now somewhat relaxed — all you need to do now, is to get in touch with the personal aboard, and tell you want to use your Dell laptop, and then you will be 'advised individually.'"
More ZFS new from the Leopard front. nezmar writes "From the AppleInsider forum comes an interesting discovery about Sun's ZFS and Apple. A user who has the Leopard developer preview searched the system with Spotlight and found a mention of ZFS. He says: 'There is no file system bundle for it, nor is there a mount utility or any other one (no fsck, now newfs, etc.). There is, however, a changed vnode.h.' Looks like the story back in May might have some truth after all."
PayPal article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PayPal article (Score:4, Informative)
And the WMD thing is from an old meme [blueyonder.co.uk].
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From here, they fly North for the winter. And it's because they have magnets in their heads (this was proven before P.E.T.A found out).
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I didn't say anything about winter.
. . . it's because they have magnets in their heads. .
The magnet is the earth. Not all birds have the iron to make use of it for navigation; apparently relying on good ole VFR. N
KillerNIC responds (Score:5, Funny)
Re:KillerNIC responds (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux is not immune to worms, it all depends on the apps that are running in the background. If *their* code is crappy, then it can break down the Linux permissions, and voila, worm. And while users may have complete control to choose which FNApps run on their card... um... they already have that option on real PCs, yet things get run without them knowing. Spyware and Adware are things that work around issues such as "you choose what to run".
This is also neglecting the idea of a root kit, such that an app could hide itself from the user.
This can yield multi-millisecond benefits, even on the fastest of today's computers.
Ok, now granted this is a Mac to a Linux box, but:
23 packets transmitted, 23 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.169/0.230/0.416/0.074 ms
This is between two computers on a gigabit network through a switch. Now, please, explain to me how I'm supposed to be expecting these multi-millisecond benefits from bypassing the UDP stack? I mean, if he seriously would like to tax me on this, I suppose I could write a UDP ping program and prove that my network gets that sort of a response regularly even over UDP.
And as the perfect finale, their question number 1 was from me:
1) Seriously, who else but a marketing department would think that it's a good idea to trademark a name describing everything "new" that your product does? And the page is so full of TLAs (three letter acronyms) that you need a glossary to read it.
Bigfoot: Virtually all technology companies trademark their features, including Intel, AMD, nVidia, Razer, and us! But we understand you want to understand the technology, so check out Killer's new product page at our website. You will find that it is much more detail driven in terms of how the technology works. Also, you'll find plenty of meat in our FAQ here.
I'd like to point out that my issue was that they're trademarking EVERYTHING, not just NetBurst, or SSE, or AltiVec, etc, or any other of the individual names that companies have thrown out to describe their new products. But when I look at an ad for a product and there literally is nothing describing the card or product that doesn't have a little (tm) next to it, I get suspicious.
When you have to go to such great lengths to make something sound so totally rad, that's usually the biggest indication that something is wrong with it.
As a personal rule of thumb: the slimier the salesman, the more seriously you need to consider what he's trying to offer you.
If they feel that they have to trademark a word "MaxFPS(tm)" that provides absolutely no information about what it does, rather than just say "Network Process Offloading" be warry.
Oh, and then the creativity of all their new trademarks. I mean, they're just words squished together. It's not like you're getting a cool name like "NetBurst" or "AltiVec" or something new, no, you get "PingThrottle", and "GameFirst", or "UltimatePing". Who did they have working as the creative director on these names? Nim Chimpsky? They are so uninteresting, and bland, that it just smacks of "We didn't want to even try to be cool, because we didn't care."
Personally, I for one welcome our new NetworkOverlords(tm), with their NiftyTrademarks(tm), with their SuperCreativity(tm).
Tell you what Bigfoot, send me a KillerNIC to review, and we'll start talking about if any of your lame lame lame marketing is worth anything at all. Until then, I'll slam it anytime I can. With my patent pending HyperDis(tm) technology.
Re:KillerNIC responds (Score:4, Informative)
Describing the benefits of a TCP offload engine as the answer to a question about how they can claim reduced UDP latency is fluff. It's like the magician getting you to look at his assistant's chest while he moves a hidden card to the top of the deck.
Besides, TCP offload is a technology to increase throughput, not to reduce latency.
We are agreed that TCP is not UDP, right?
bigfoot networks (Score:2, Funny)
you think that's bad? (Score:5, Funny)
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WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
You may use it with a battery in it. OR you may use it with a power cord and no battery in it.
You may not use it with a power cord and a battery in it, i.e. no charging.
Still not buying the KillerNIC story. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the "network stack" is a bit more complex than you seem to be implying. I'm sure that most people here are familiar with the old OSI model:
Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical
Now, explain how those "hardware interrupts" substitute for the processing that needs to happen.
I'm not saying that the Windows TCP/IP stack could not stand some optimization. I'm sure that it could.
I just don't see how claiming "hardware interrupts" are the solution is an answer if you don't explain how those "hardware interrupts" handle the processing and where/when they are called.
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Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't avoid hardware interrupts- HOW do you let the OS know that you've sent the data or got it?
Optimizing the stack- optimizing WHAT? It's allegedly speeding up UDP traffic; there's little to "optimize" there.
I'd buy TCP Offload maybe needing to be done- for 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware. I should know;
I work with that sort of hardware for a client. UDP's not needing diddly at any lower speeds than that-
the offloads that make sense and work are scatter-gather DMA of the packet instead of needing an assembly
buffer and checksum calculation. Most modern cards worth their salt do this already.
They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the
problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're
allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be
but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.
Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story. (Score:5, Funny)
8: Operator
So many network problems I've had to troubleshoot have been tracked to layer 8.
Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.
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Actually, my favouite part was that he ignored the fact that clients and servers have vastly different requirements - namely that servers process much more network
Not much of a victory, and nought to do with paypa (Score:4, Insightful)
Qantas flights and Dell (Score:3, Informative)
ZFS Port (Score:3, Insightful)
* example only, I imagine these exist already.
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It does all three better than what Apple currently has. I agree about the complexity, but coming up with a good filesystem isn't as easy as it used to be.
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Actually, early released versions of OS X (10.0 for sure) ran on [apple.com] either HFS+ *or* UFS. UFS wasn't used so much and I think had some issues (case sensitivity & clas
ZFS on FreeBSD (Score:2, Informative)
The start of a port to FreeBSD has been started, and after ten days there has been demonstratable progress:
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That said, I hope ZFS makes it to Leopard. And FreeBSD.
Offloads the network stack? (Score:2)
(Yes, this was posted with Safari. I don't have as much as Solitaire on here.)
DRM (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA and copyright. (Score:4, Informative)
Some matierials produced by NASA may have copyrights. (For instance: movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere).
More a NASA web site [nasa.gov].
Dark Side of the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
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What are the sync points? Curious from a multimedia production pov.
Re:Dark Side of the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
Bigfoot nonanswers (Score:2)
No so fast (Score:3, Informative)
KillNIC?? (Score:5, Funny)
1. CONNECT DIRECTLY TO THE NET
2. TURN OFF YOUR ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Yeah I'm gonna get right on that.
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I also liked their amazingly intuitive suggestion that was doubtless the fruit of much in-depth research:
No kidding, professor!
Its 'QANTAS' - not 'Quantas' (Score:2, Redundant)
Meet Detective Bookman of the NASA Library (Score:5, Funny)
CLIFTON: Oh, I'm glad you're here, so we can get this all straightened out. Would you like a cup of tea?
BOOKMAN: You got any orange drink?
CLIFTON: Orange drink?
BOOKMAN: Yeah. Orange drink.
CLIFTON: No, I don't drink orange drink.
BOOKMAN: Yeah, you don't drink orange drink? How about instant orange drink?
CLIFTON: No, I don't...
BOOKMAN: You don't have any instant Tang?
CLIFTON: Well, I don't normally--
BOOKMAN: Who doesn't have instant Tang?
CLIFTON: I don't.
BOOKMAN: You buy a jar of Tang, you put it in the cupboard, you forget about it. Then later on when you need it, it's there. It lasts forever. It's freeze-dried. Freeze-dried orange drink.
CLIFTON: Really? I'll have to remember that.
BOOKMAN: You took the moon landing movie out in 1979.
CLIFTON: Yes, and I returned it in 1979.
BOOKMAN: Yeah, '79. That was my first year on the job. Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, the Betamax decision letting everybody steal movies. I don't judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the NASA Film Library, fella.
CLIFTON: Look, Mr. Bookman. I--I returned that movie. I remember it very specifically.
BOOKMAN: You're a Rock cinematographer, you entertain people, make them have fun.
CLIFTON: I try.
BOOKMAN: You think this is all big fun, don't you?
CLIFTON: No, I don't.
BOOKMAN: I saw your name in the credits once; I remembered your name--from my list. I looked it up. Sure enough, it checked out. You think because you're a celebrity that somehow the law doesn't apply to you, that you're above the law?
CLIFTON: Certainly not.
BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, music fun boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "NASA Film Library"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about old moon movies for? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid renting a movie, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding X rated porn taped over the middle of The Dark Crystal and Finding Nemo? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing movies, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to borrow a movie without getting his mind warped! Or: maybe that turns you on, Clifton; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over. Y'got seven days, Clifton. That is one week!
The REAL killer app for KillerNIC (Score:5, Insightful)
I especially like this part of one of their answers:
WTF? The ping program does use the network stack; how else would it talk with the network? ICMP is still a protocol that needs to be encapsulated with a header and traverse down through your stack to the wire...
The only people that will be using this card are losers that have more money than brains, and cheaters. Yes, that's right, once again, cheating is the REAL killer app for the KillerNIC. You see, after playing a lot of PvP on Guild Wars I realized one thing about lag: Game designers intentionally account for player lag and compensate for it in interesting ways. Guild Wars PvP becomes a very serious game about skill interruption. An enemy spell caster could be casting a spell that will take 1 second to cast and obliterate you when it lands. You have a skill that will interrupt their spell if you click the button fast enough, during that 1 second time period. Well, the server has to accomodate dialup users and those users that are on laggy connections, so there are times when I've casted a spell, had the progress bar go all the way to completion, and then half a second later, the spell is interrupted (after it was done casting on my end). This is because the person on the other end actually interrupted the spell in time according to their game client, but because of network lag (they're on a slow connection), the interrupt didn't get to the server for a while. The server still honored their interrupt, and eventually my spell failed. By increasing their lag, the server has to give them "extra time", which means their reaction time doesn't need to be as good to win. People will write custom FNapps or whatever they're called to do this.
I can foresee cheaters intentionally increasing in game lag just to trigger this kind of a cheating mechanism. If you could add 100-200 ms of latency to your line, you could actually gain an advantage in games like this. I'm thinking WoW PvP is probably the same, although I'm not sure if skill interruption is a big part of that or not. If I remember correctly, WoW has a lot of insta-cast spells.
ZFS Commands (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong (Score:2)
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why is it people who don't understand a saying scream about it not m
Re:Pedant es "thupid"... (Score:3, Informative)
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Laser, radar, scuba. . .
KFG
Queansland? (Score:2, Informative)
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Oh the Irony (Score:4, Funny)
What next, Nobby giving advice on hygiene? Rincewind talking about the virtues of a famous last stand?
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Re:Was all Apollo footage lost or just Apollo 11? (Score:4, Informative)