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@Adam Williamson

Did so on the Debian boxes, all machines are updated regularly. We found the rootkit on a few up to date Redhat 5 boxes. I do not think the two are related.

@Richard Hebert

You probably want to download rkhunter and chkrootkit from the noted sites. There is no guarantee that any given distro is up to date or has not modified the package. I used the two programs built from source downloaded from the noted web sites. I did detect Phalanx successfully.

@Colin Wilson

Yes and no. Linux doesn't suffer from a registry, but there's no reason why a rootkit cannot be used to patch standard binaries. So maybe one uses tripwire or some such and can detect this. Problem is that no Linux distro that I've ever seen installs and runs tripwire by default.

@Peter Gathercole

Good rules and I in fact use them all. Linux being multi-user it's hard to enforce them across the board. Couple that with known exploits and something like a rootkit is going to succeed occaionally anyway.

"Lazy Admins"

1) I don't know that this is entirely fair, or at least not all the time. The RH5 boxes I found the rootkit on were fully patched, their admin had yum running update as a daily cron job. There was no "unpatched openssl or weak Debian keys" and the kernel was also current.

2) So, what should we do: regularly delete all the users' keys, force them to recreate the keys, and change the system's keys? Basically that would break so much functionality that they might as well use Windows. IMHO, that's not a vigilant admin that's a fascist admin.

3) Accounts will get compromised whether they are on a Windows, Mac or Linux box, offering an entry for the back hats. The means of subverting an account are numerous and not all involve software weaknesses - you'll have heard of social engineering and the ubiquitous sticky note?

Acronyms

That acronym - synapse - must have spent time in Abu Graib.

It's the UK, n/p

Doesn't the UK just give the data away, or sell it to streamline directed advertising? Where's the problem?

@Anonymous Coward

Well, actually there is a green case for nuclear: a while back researchers found a new(?) species of fungus growing inside the melted-down reactor chamber at Chernobyl. Radiation levels are high enough in the chamber to kill a mammal in a few minutes. The fungus is doing fine however.

Therefore not building reactors deprives the Chernobyl fungus of it's ecological niche.

Surveillence

Clearly the UK needs more cameras watchiong the public spaces in order to protect the state from squirrels.

Have seen this elsewhere too.

I have seen a few users machines catch a variant of this malware from infected email attachments and also from .exe's downloaded via bittorent.

In the cases I saw, running the attachment or d/l file just installed the exploit and ran the xpantivirus2008 automatically, popped up the viruses found message.

It installed an executable in \windows\system32, and this thing would run at start up - not from registry run keys, or the start menu start folder nor as a service. I assume it patched some standard system exe to launch itself?

MacAfee detected it but could not remove it. Booted into safe mode, I could not remove it manually. There were open handles to the file.

It also would periodically pop up a system modal dialog with a test entry field and an alphanumeric code, and then demand the user type the code into the text box and click OK. This had enormous annoyance value.

Alas I cannot remember what MacAfee called it right now.

Wireless Resonant Link

Was done by Nikola Tesla roughly one hundred years ago. This is described in so many textbooks and enthusiast magazine articles and places on the web that I am surprised Intel would try to rebrand it - also that the Reg did not see through the attempt immediately.

Prescription 3D glasses

I wear eye glasses. Will Intel's technology be available with custom ground lenses?

@Laurent_Z

Just run more instances side by side. That's much easier than learning posix threads.

@Matt Bryant

Great point!

What about a quad core CPU + 4 GPU cores and AMD's HPC GPU API stack? Some serious computational power!

A few points

-- "Real techies will probably want to install an alternative distro, like Ubuntu." - nooo.... I think real techies will not install Ubuntu.

-- 100 - odd minutes is awful. That really defeats the purpose of such a machine.

-- The HP 2133 has this thing beaten on all fronts, even comes with a 'standard' Linux: SuSE.

@John Bayly

"Arbitrary method naming, no variable declarations & no strict types."

Not sure what you mean by arbitrary method naming - not a C# user.

PHP 5 did add support for typed parameters to class methods. It's not required but it's there and I've found it useful.

I guess it took me quite some time after learning C & C++ to accept fairly typeless scripting languages, but I can't recall where PHP confused types and did the wrong thing.

Is C# as strongly typed as, say, C++ without casting and void* ?

Thought Crime

Yup, that's what it is. Pretty much exactly what it is.

I am the first

to comment on this article.

@Ashlee

I'm not offended by profanity per se, just gratuitous profanity. That said, this latest article is less gratuitous than the previous ones. So there is hope.

Patenting what?

Are items 202 and 214 patented as well? If so does the patent specify that 202 & 214 are *my* head, *your* head, or just he person down the streets' head?

Good Lord and Adam Smith and King Edward

Dint that Torsvald fellow work for Transmeta? Before the alter of win32 I swear, I herd lately that even Intel and AMD have been decieved into supporting that Linux thing! Godless commies, anti-profit-motive theeves, destroying good Amerikan corporations! How will we save the Iraqis in the face of this double dealing!?!

Jesus would weep.

Qt Good

Qt is a good UI toolkit and it does a very good job on a variety of platforms. The signal/slot thing is a pleasure to work with, the Qt class hierarchy is pretty rational.

Nevertheless, and even in the strength of Qt, I'd advise Trolltech to avoid providing garish default icons that Redmond cannot deal with. MS might just buy Nokia in order to retain control of the desktop!

@Mark

A wippet with tits!

I'm in mind of a minx. Or a ferret.

Makes it look so much bigger going in!

Naysayers

Judge the product on it's merits not Intel's past mistakes.

Even if it does not crack the high end GPU market I expect it will be successful in the HPC market. It looks pretty neat.

@Gerhardt

Sure. Some people use MPI on multicore chips.

But, LOL, there will still be some people that will complain that MPI is too hard!

Dogma

"...that the most efficient method of rationing something is price."

This may be true, or it may not. Price, however, is not the sole component in a rational decision.

Would the author drive a nuclear powered car that was cheaper than gas but had no radiation protection?

Questions

1: Why is it "white trash"?

2: Will one of these cubes get me over 120 FPS in Crysis with full eye candy? If so where can I pick one up?

Hot Air

Library is not especially valuable unless the programmer knows what & how to thread in the first place. In which case pthreads / winthreads are perfectly useful.

@Steve Mann

Good point. Historically - since end of WW2 - USA protected Middle East oil sources to ensure energy supplies to Europe and Japan, speedy reconstruction of which were considered important in inhibiting the spread of Soviet influence. Presumably the USA having it's hands on the throats of the countries supplying it's allies helped improve diplomatic relations between the USA and it's allies also.

Most of the output of the Middle East has always gone to Europe and Japan.

@Josh Holman

Nope. I had no idea.

Makes even less sense in that case.

Wanna bet

the people at Google used LEX to generate their parser?

I just read over http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html and I dunno quite what to say. Every couple of years we to see some gee-whiz system mapping classes onto 'generic' text descriptions stirred in with rehashed RPC. If the mapping comes from an egghead in a university nobody much gives a damn. If it comes from Google it is news. If it comes from Microsoft it's less news but it gets used a lot.

Thus the power of money I suppose.

@pctechxp

Well, yes. Did you think all those pins for memory would fit in 775?

Maybe

they should have tried Peoplesoft instead. LOL!

re Why

16 of these +3ware 9650 16 port controller in raid 6 config with a hot spare == backup solution for moderate sized servers. I trust a raid array more than a tape. I may also be mad.

Injections

I can certainly understand that Sun's products need vim. But is vigor a vi variant I've not seen?

@Charlie van Becelaere

I slipstreamed SP3 into an XP install point (is that the correct name?), then made a custom install CD from that. Have used the CD on a variety of AMD and Intel boxes (From Dell and HP to generic beige boxes to machines built from individually bought parts) with no trouble.

@Andy Livingstone

Republican back room boys say so.

Pohl

Generally when some great writer's notes or incomplete books are 'finished' by someone else the results are anything from crap to execrable - I give you Brian Herbert as an example of the worse end of the spectrum.

However, Pohl is an accomplished writer who seems to understand that if a thing can be said in 10 words then it is better not to use 100. So I look forward to the book.

@Glenn

"I was kicked out of 2 year college after my first year ..."

Well then, you'll be an expert. eh?

Price is out of line

Obviously an attempt o build a namespace landgrab bubble. I assume the revenues will accrue to the same org that creates the bubble - ICANN?

There is no good reason for the price to be so high.

Perhaps there is a Bush or Cheney involved in this behind the scenes?

I keep seeing 'Likud' not 'Lukid'.

Can't imagine why though.

No Go: Market Segmentation

It is a very pretty little board and the CPU is sexy, but Intel is clearly trying to control the market. PCIe on full size expensive boards for expensive CPUs, no PCIe and attendant crappy video on these small systems.

This CPU can drive an add in video card to make a very tiny workstation with fair 3D capability; if the board is used in a server as one fellow has done it would be nice to have the option of using an add-in RAID card.

Via's upcoming solution in this market is better, with it's x8 (or x16?) PCIe slot.