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No More Coding From Scratch? 323

Posted by Cliff from the digging-through-the-automation dept.
Susan Elliott Sim asks: "In the science fiction novel, 'A Deepness in the Sky,' Vernor Vinge described a future where software is created by 'programmer archaeologists' who search archives for existing pieces of code, contextualize them, and combine them into new applications. So much complexity and automation has been built into code that it is simply infeasible to build from scratch. While this seems like the ultimate code reuse fantasy (or nightmare), we think it's starting to happen with the availability of Open Source software. We have observed a number of projects where software development is driven by the identification, selection, and combination of working software systems. More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components. These parts are then made to interoperate through wrappers and glue code. We think this trend is a harbinger of things to come. What do you think? How prevalent is this approach to new software development? What do software developers think about their projects being used in such a way?"

PS3 8x More Power Hungry Than PS2 260

Posted by Zonk from the hungry-beast dept.
MonsieurCreosote writes "The Playstation 3 apparently demands eight times as much electricity as the Playstation 2, and more than twice as much as the Xbox 360. It also consumes much more power than a top-end PC gaming rig. It's not clear what's causing the massive drain, but Sony is now denying reports that the PS3 experienced overheating problems at the Tokyo Games Show last month. From the article: 'While an Intel Core 2 Duo PC with high-end graphics card chews politely on a 160 watt entré, the PlayStation 3 gorges itself on 380 watts... The extra power consumption of the PS3 over the PS2 suggests that we're not really getting much better at designing efficient systems, we're just pumping more 'fuel' into existing paradigms'. Are modern console hardware designers getting sloppy?"

HP Acquires VoodooPC 32

Posted by Zonk from the jumping-into-the-fray dept.
eldavojohn writes "HP has acquired VoodooPC, a high-end gaming PC provider who's former co-owner will now be the chief technologist of HP's newly formed gaming PC division. Back in May, we saw Dell acquire Alienware. Are gaming machines important options to consumers, or is it just plain profitable? Who will we see enter the gaming market next? Apple?"

Comment Re:md5 != bit-for-bit integrity (Score 1) 422

by whataboutMike (#13142044) Attached to: Online Backup Solutions?
md5 or other checksums do not guarantee bit-for-bit integrity. They are just a way to gain confidence about the integrity of files without resorting to a much slower bit-for-bit comparison.

This is wrong on so many levels... (ok, only two, but still...)

  • While there are known collision attacks against some hashing algorithms they are still considered the ideal way to ensure bit-for-bit file integrity. Try creating a file, create a md5 hash of it, change ONE BIT, create another md5 and see how they are not the same. The chances of having a file get corrupted and happen to retain the same md5 hash is nil.
  • Hashing a file is not faster than doing a bit-for-bit comparison. In order to create a hash of a file you must read every byte and apply a mathematical transform. You use hashing because a hash is vastly smaller than the file.

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