Seems like every time I try to upgrade to Windows 8.x something horribly goes wrong. This time I had the upgrade continue all the way to "Applying PC Settings 86%" where it got stuck, and rebooting then had the install roll back with the error message:
Couldn't update to Windows 8.1
Sorry, we couldn't complete the update to Windows 8.1. We've restored your previous version of Windows to this PC.
0xC1900101 - 0x40017
I updated the Intel Chipset drivers, updated and patched all drivers installed in my system as well as applied all Windows updates. No change. I then tried the opposite - tried removing all drivers - no difference. Then I disabled all onboard devices in my system BIOS - no difference.
I have recently had to write an application that sends out emails with attachments. This is not a hard thing to do, as is evident from the multipart/mixed RFC. My initial attempts worked perfectly when receiving the email via Apple's Mail.app. However, on the iPhone and iPad these emails rendered with the body text:
This message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted. Ask the sender to send it again using a different format or email program. multipart/mixed
No body text and no attachments showed up. Naturally I tried to search for the issue to see if other people experienced the same problem. Some people did. However either there were no solutions to the questions or the responses were your typical non developer users who has no better recommendation than to "reboot the phone".
Most people have a specific association to the word server as it applies to information technology. They conjure up images of large, loud and fast machines that is designed to run 24/7 and handle server workloads. If asked whether servers tend to be faster than desktops and laptops 99% of people will most likely respond with an enthusiastic YES!
Unfortunately the past couple of years have seen a dramatic shift in processor performance. I am solely focussing on processor speed, not anything else. The recent trend has seen a proliferation of cores per CPU die as opposed to raw frequency bumps. We have hit 4GHz two years ago already, though even today Intel does not have a single CPU that can run at a base clock of 4GHz. Rather, we have 8-way systems that runs at 2.4GHz with each die containing up to 8 cores, for a total of 64 cores.
Now do not get me wrong - scaling up the amount of cores per server is a real way of increasing performance. Certain loads that are highly concurrent will most definitely see a dramatic increase in performance regardless of the clock speed. A simple (and naive) calculation shows that - all things being equal - a server with 64 x 2.4GHz CPU cores will complete a perfectly scalable task 32 times faster than a single core CPU running at 4.8GHz. But this is where things get murky. Most companies are not hosting a stock exchange database, or tries to render the next Avatar. Most businesses use servers for things like corporate databases, remote desktop servers, application servers, file servers etc.
I found this gem at the end of a recent business requirement document I received. Not sure if I need to explain.
ASSUMPTIONS
* System should be available 24/7
* Working 99.9% accurately
* No other system will be impacted
* Information supplied in the template to be 100% correct without errors.
The problem with today's society is that a single moronic statement can be perpetuated so quickly across the world via the internet that it becomes gospel. Take for example this beauty:
And a popular password-cracking tool available on the Internet was upgraded so it could decrypt up to 55-character passwords - so what protection do we really have?
Source
She is referring to Hashcat, who decided to add support for cracking passwords up to 55 characters in length in their GPU engine. What was NOT stated, is that