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TFAbstract says that WPA2 can be cracked with brute force search, and that long passwords are more secure than short ones. Looking up the home pages of these internationally renowned researchers http://www.brunel.ac.uk/bbs/pe... http://issel.ee.auth.gr/people... http://www.research.lancs.ac.u... reveals that these three claim no other security-focused publications. But perhaps I'm too quick to judge. Somebody pay the man and read their paper. Or is this the two-step get-rich-quick scheme?: - (1) Publish Paywalled Article Exposing Security Holes in Commonly-Used Security Protocol (2) Profit! (PPAESHiCUSP-P)

is very different to mine, where things like 3D modelling, photorealistic rendering, and large scale simulations are bread and butter. Does anyone write CAD programs or supercomputer-based weather modellers using Java?

Yes, they do.
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/cacm2005.html

"Java distributed components for numerical visualization in VisAD"

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~csstsjt/ssg/ssghome.html
Using JAVA to develop simulation models [Keynote]

"From a simulation perspective, Java may be regarded in one of two lights. The first is as yet another general purpose programming language in which computer simulation models may be developed."

and

"Distributed Simulation with Java"

It took just a few seconds with Google to find these... there must be many, many more.

The reason I mentioned Tomcat is that such application servers are used because the are so effective at running garbage collected applications multi-threaded without one program impacting the other, or locking up the system.

>> In addition the bill would "permit people to use technology to skip
>> objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films,
>> a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law,
>> skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited."
>
> Non-rhetorical stance:
> Really, what if there's an ad for say, Wonderbras, that I find explicit? Can
> I turn that off? This is insane. Who are they to say what I can and can't
> watch? Howabout turning off the TV to eat dinner when there's an ad on... is
> that okay? Do I have their permission for that at least? Ugh

Behold the only permitted way to watch content.

This has been done before: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/AI/alife/al-virus.ht m

Say you wanted to add an 8 bit field - bits 0-7, to another, bits 8-15, and store the result in a 9 bit field, 16-24.

Search as follows (CC Field is Carry):-

Bits: C 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Bits: C 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
Find: X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X # All rows
Writ: 0 0 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X # Clear output
Find: X X X X X X X X X 0 X X X X X X X 1 # 0+1=1
Writ: 0 1 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X # write 1
Find: X X X X X X X X X 1 X X X X X X X 0 # 1+0=1
Writ: 0 1 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X # write 1
Find: X X X X X X X X X 1 X X X X X X X 1 # 1+1=0 carry 1
Writ: 1 0 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X # write 0 carry 1

So there is a fixed processing time for parallel operations on all the data.

We still had to use two input lines to represent the Ternary value, but, remember, no address lines needed.

Content Addressable memory chips are also used for lookaside Cache memory in CPUs today.

Cheers, Andy!

The Rise Clock does what you want.

It's a research project, not a commercial product yet.

This sounds like Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Some stuff in the UK

• London : The Jubilee Line Extension
• Anything Brunel Did!
• The Millenium Dome (the exhibit was so-so - even if it was the biggest attraction in the UK whilst it was open -, but the Dome itself is excellent!)
• The London Eye

... and you should check out New Zealand south island's Manapouri Power Station too (no link, sorry!).

Gahd. If we put 1/3rd as much money into peace as we do war, there'd be no wars.

Of course not. If team A put all their marbles into peace, while all other teams invest into war, team A would be quickly turned to dust.

For that to work, you would need mutual trust and understandment between all teams. Anything else and it's the pandemonium. Read about the prisoner's dilemma. Welcome to the fascinating world of the complex systems into social science.

This article is interesting, however, because it moves the agents into the physical world where it isn't possible to obtain the same kind of idealized environments that are possible in silico.

As a letter writer to Salon points out, it seems that Wolfram thinks that he's discovered Complexity Theory all by himself. The Salon article certainly gives that impression -- not having read the book, I can't make my own judgment.

The Salon writer writes as if cellular automata were some silly mathematical curiosity (or worse, the writer thinks that CA is recent to computing) that Wolfram "rediscovered" and took seriously for the first time. Of course that's absurd.

The Santa Fe Institute was founded jointly around 1984 by the eminent Nobel Laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and several others. Stuart Kauffman has researched and written on complexity for many years.

I myself have been following, as a layperson, complexity theory for about fifteen years. In 1991 I had the opportunity to be an undergraduate intern -- an opportunity I didn't follow up on because of my severe academic workload, but an opportunity I will always regret not taking advantage of. Undergraduate intern positions are much more competitive now. This eleven years has made the difference between "bleeding edge" and "cutting edge". Or perhaps complexity theory is even mainstream. I've noticed a burgeoning graduate school interest in complexity studies programs.

Complexity theory intersects many disciplines, and it involves several related ideas such as chaos theory, modeling, self-reference, artificial life, and others. It's evolved into a fairly rigorous discipline, and the more formalized idea of "complex adaptive systems" forms the core. For those who have read Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach, (a very influential book for many of us) published around '82, many of these ideas will be familiar.

Wolfram's quip that seems so risible is really only an overstatement of the central idea of complexity theory: that a limited number of "rules" can give rise to extremely complex behavior. This was the surprise of cellular automata, exemplified by Conway's "Life", invented in 1970. But the underlying idea goes as far back as John von Neumann. Wolfram has done some interesting work in CA. But it sure as hell isn't his idea. For many in the Slashdot community, this is all as familiar as the back of their hands. But apparently there's still a lot of people that should be aware of this stuff that are not.

Finally, many people here would probably be interested to know that SimCity's designer, and Maxis, have had some association with SFI. This makes sense because the emergent behaviors of complex systems are not (as a practical matter) deductively predictable -- their behavior must be studied. The techniques of systems modeling are requisite. SimCity was the general public's first accessible insight into just how fascinating and educational systems modeling can be.

IF you could get more storage into this thing, it might be interesting:

Drop in a 6GB IBM micro drive, and you've got a halfway decent small-bandwidth web server.

add some mp3's and a PCMCIA sound card, and have it play They Might Be Giants all day long.

NFS mount to another box and make it a really cool dumb terminal. (that's REALLY dumb, with no monitor...)

put a usb camera with it, apache, and a wireless network card -- instant portable voyeur-cam!

network a bunch of them together and make a beowul... er, never mind, bad idea.

paint it black/green, install an IRC server and use it to assimilate/control all of the windows CE versions of the cerfcube with IRC bots -- send it to Steve Gibson. Put it on a string and swing it around your head and make engine sounds--The borg cube lives! Resistance is mostly futile!

Plug 400 of them into your home network, and use them to DDoS your internet-enabled weather-forecasting toaster. (of course, only if it supposed to rain today)

Heh. You're thinking of the longest path problem, which is NP-complete. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes is easy - use a simple breadth-first search for an unweighted graph, or Dijkstra's algortihm for a weighted one.

To find the shortest path between all pairs of nodes, you can use the Floyd-Warsha ll algorithm, which runs in O(n^3) time. It can be done faster, but in this particular case we were guaranteed n is no more than 100, so this was quite reasonable.

wasnt even a processor powerful enough to make all the pretty widgets work.

The Lisa was based on the Xerox Alto (See here, here, here, and here) from the early 70's, so it was certainly doable, although perhaps not with the single-chip-CPU concept that seems to be the only thing the kids of today can conceive of.

And no, I don't have one in my collection. Yet.

Brunel University in West London runs Samba for all our NT workstations (several hundred on 4 campuses, hitting a thousand soon). We don't use the PDC function though. We run Samba and NIS on Sun Solaris and replace the NT Login GINA with something called NISGina, which uses NIS servers for user authenication. See: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~ccusrdt/win ntnisgina/

Samba's working well, a recent test had 344 users accessing 600+ shares on one Ultra 5 with 192MB RAM. The NISGina code still has one annoying bug with Service Pack 3, but SP4 & 5 seem to clear it up. One server crash in the past year, a new Ultra, which was suspected to a hardware problem.

Our biggest headaches are caused by MS products, getting MS Office 97 to run from a read-only network drive, getting NT workstation to only use DNS, dll versions, file & registry permssions.

If anyones interested Peter Polkinghorne, the Unix Systems guy who looks after Samba here, is giving a talk on Samba at the UK Unix User's Group Linux conference: http://www.linux.ukuug.org/linux99/