Slashback: Moon Footage, KillerNic, ZFS Leopard 207
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."
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not much of a victory, and nought to do with paypa (Score:4, Insightful)
ZFS Port (Score:3, Insightful)
* example only, I imagine these exist already.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
You can use the battery, or use the cord, but you can't use both.
DRM (Score:2, Insightful)
As an aside - is this footage in the public domain? If it isn't, this would be a unique opportunity to have the footage placed there. Original licencing agreements with NASA last century really don't matter anymore if you have to only copy of the footage. (This from a very pragmatic perspective, not a legal one).
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.
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.
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:2, Insightful)
You will actually find that TOE frequently refers to TCP/IP Offload Engine, which includes the IP packet checksum. If this is quick enough, it would indeed also improve the latency, as less (slower) code has to be run in the OS IP stack (although I certainly agree with you that this would most likely not be noticable in a gaming environment).
TCP is indeed not UDP, however the IP checksum falls under TCP/IP.