27 Sep
2012
27 Sep
'12
9:57 a.m.
On Thu, 27 Sep 2012, David Riley wrote:
On Sep 27, 2012, at 0:17, Tothwolf <tothwolf at
concentric.net> wrote:
Password cracking then?
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/passwords-under-assault/
There is just no way someone is going to spec a machine that large for
such a small task without some other background motive. A Socket 7 based
machine such as a 200MHz Pentium P54CS with 128MB of ram can even handle
serving out 1k hits a day of static content...while running modern
software (BSD or Linux and Apache). I'm not sure I'd try it today with a
486 based system due to latency and the bandwidth limitations of the ISA
bus (10Mb network cards), but any Pentium (or AMD) based computer dating
On Wed, 26 Sep 2012, David Griffith wrote:
Probably not, at least not if they're smart. There's no way that system
could keep up with even a very modest consumer GPU for bitcoin mining,
at which point any reason for a big CPU and gobs of RAM goes out the
window. On Wed, 26 Sep 2012, Paul Anderson wrote:
My money would be on bitcoin "mining"...at someone else's (great)
expense. A friend of mine admins a webserver. Serves
almost exclusively static
pages, max 1k hits per day. They are looking at moving to a rackmount
system. What does he spec? Eight core Xeon with 96 gigs of RAM...
Do they plan on using that system for things other than serving up
pages? from about mid '95 on could easily handle the
described task.
The only CPU I wouldn't give the task to would be an early Intel Pentium
4, which IMO is one of the worst things that ever came out of Intel. The
early P4 CPU is nothing more than an overgrown space heater. Northwood was
a major improvement, and Prescott might as well have not even been the
same processor, but had Intel not halted all development on the Pentium 3
(and made support chipsets unavailable) Willamette would have surely
flopped and the P4 would have never caught on in the market.