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NCSA Mosaic ran on Windows 3.1 (with Win32s) (and later on Windows 95), X-Window and Mac. It was the first web browser I ever used (that was in 1994).

By today's standards it's a piece-of-crap, but back then it was quite a marvel.

It was not an editor, just a web browser. It's still around for historical purposes and if you can get it to work, you'll see just how far we've come.

Anything multimedia wise was handled by "helper" applications that would launch when you clicked on the applicable hyperlink.

Nothing was embedded in a web page (at first). HTML was in it's infancy, so web pages with ordinary fonts with no color and pages with plain backgrounds were the norm (till someone figured out how to make an image file into a web page background, that is - then everyone went nuts with it).

This and this are examples of what your typical web site looked like in 1995-1996.

And who can forget the famous and long-defunct "Trojan Room Coffee Machine"?

You're safe from keyloggers if you use Dasher.

Including those claiming that the New Testament was heavily edited, like by the Nicene Council. (To give a specific point so you know I wasn't vague because there aren't any specific examples

I was hoping for a specific example of an edit [ie, which words in which passage] so I could look it up and check the various views on it. (We're getting into the area where there is debate amongst scholars about what was or was note edited and when). But if you're genuinely looking to hear what the pro-Christian scholarly side of this debate is, maybe it'd be simpler for me to point you to resources such as http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Bocks_Historic alJesus.htm. This site http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/Doorway.htm at Cambridge University also has a large amount of material in this area.

I do mind when they get to the point where they say that what assumptions they have made about faith are right and mine are wrong...

To an extent everybody whether Christian or not necessarily does this part. Simply by saying "I believe X" you are saying you believe that someone who believes "not X" is wrong. Politeness tends to make us use the "I believe X" form, though ;-) The point I am wryly making is that tolerance isn't about saying everybody's beliefs are true (that'd be an odd sort of pluralism that logically doesn't work) but about saying that everybody has a social right to their beliefs whether or not they are true.

...and God is going to send me to hell to be tortured eternally because of it. Such a statement goes against everything that their faith teaches besides being mean, nasty, and irrational.

(The end of your sentence relates specifically to Christian beliefs, so I'm answering that bit separately). Some Christians are quite stark in their fire and brimstone warnings, that's true, and I don't think it's the best tactic for explaining the faith to non-Christians. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is against everything their faith teaches, however, because they are preaching from particular bible passages.

It scares me that something that affects peoples' lives so much (and on which they may base a majority of the important decisions in their life on) is something that they refuse to have questioned, question themselves, or consider alternate views for.

Hmm, I've got to say that's an unsubstantiated assertion on your part, and one I honestly suspect comes from your personal prejudices. I'm yet to meet any Christian anywhere who did not consider things very deeply on their journey to faith. They might not tell you all about their journey, but that does not mean they did not have one. And far from "refuse to have questioned", we tend to patiently answer any genuine questions you might have, as I am doing now. You're not likely to shake our faith or convince us we're wrong - we find Jesus's arguments much more compelling than yours (and it's a rare day when I come across a question

But good to see the mainstream press catching up to it. This chip is part of a larger effort by major software developers and hardware manufacturers to mostly stop piracy in all forms and control what you can do with your computer and when.

Read the TCPA FAQ, and take a look at Against TCPA, an anti-TCPA site if you're interested. For an alternate perspective, you can also view the official Trusted Computing Group site.

Personally, I hate it, I don't think it will succeed, and I will *never* buy a computer with such a module installed.

The Memorability and Security of Passwords - Some Empirical Results

Sully

And you could then run two Dashers at the same time!

It runs too slowly.

If you grab Dasher CVS right now and build it for a Maemo target (./configure --with-maemo), you'll get something that runs at a just-about usable speed. The floating point has all been removed from Dasher itself, which helps things a great deal (I got about an 8-times speedup from removing a small amount of floating point code - integer maths is pretty much good enough in this case)

The hildon-input-method dynamic library is closed-source

More of a problem. There's currently no API documentation for producing an input application in Maemo, which makes it difficult - ideally, Dasher would be integrated in the same way as the keyboard or handwriting recognition. The other issue is that Dasher makes much better use of vertical screen real-estate than horizontal. On a device like the 770, Dasher would work much better at the side of the screen than at the bottom - and that's something that the libraries just don't support at the moment.

On the plus side, porting Dasher and making it look and feel like a native Maemo application took about 3 hours, including setting up the Scratchbox build environment. Compared to developing for the Zaurus, the 770 is an absolute dream. I'd actually put it ahead of developing for PocketPC, too, despite the lack of a specialised IDE. It's a really nice device for developers, and (despite the occasional obvious lack of performance) it's a much better integrated device than any other small, portable ARM based machine that I've ever used.

So, there's certainly hope for Dasher on the 770 - it's just something that I don't have time to work on at the moment (I'm doing a PhD in genetics right now, so don't have anywhere near as much time to hack on stuff as I'd like to), and Chris has left for the US and h0t chixx0rs (well, possibly only the one). The current performance issues are primarily down to the amount of time taken to draw all the anti-aliased letters, and the simple optimisation of disabling anti-aliasing for them or using Xft directly rather than going through Pango would probably help greatly. Then somebody just has to spend enough time working with Nokia to deal with the input API, convince them to add support for vertical input widgets, rebuild it and things would work beautifully.

If anyone's interested in hacking on it, then check out http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/Develop. html and get on the mailing list (Yahoogroups, I'm afraid. Yes, I'm sorry). Someone with enough time could probably get it into a useful state in well under a week.

Hunt and peck typing on a simulated keyboard gives you over 30 words per minute? With the same degree of accuracy? Really?

From what I got from the conversation, it wasn't the graphics that was the problem. It was the extensive word and phrase prediction that drive dasher:

> [Me] Do you think the slowness problem comes from the smooth animation
> of the letters scrolling?

[Chris] No, I think it comes directly for the probability calculations needed to determine the size for each Dasher node. The CPU on the 770 really isn't that high-spec.

Here's a paper that Chris directed me to.

• It runs too slowly. We did some basic optimisation, but it's still too slow to feel good.
• The hildon-input-method dynamic library is closed-source, so we can't get it working as an input method. This pretty much removes any further motivation we had for spending our time on it; if you care, I suggest complaining to Nokia.

Two academic papers argue that markets/auctions for vulnerabilities provide a logical and useful way of measuring the security of a software product.

"Bug Auctions: Vulnerability Markets Reconsidered." Andy Ozment, 2004 [pdf]

"How to Buy Better Testing: using competition to get the most security and robustness for your dollar" Stuart E. Schechter, 2002 [pdf]

For users outside of the US and UK Live Local is the better one.

I live in Australia, and Google Maps zooms in close enough to just see my house and car. With Windows Live I can barely see my city. They are using different map services, so I guess it just depends where you live.

A Neurology journal article on the anatomy of Asperger's, as seen from fMRI scans

Another neurology article, on the anatomy of Autism, as seen from fMRI scans

The research at the Institute of Psychiatry, by Professor Declan Murphy is beginning to indicate that autism affects the frontal and mid-sections of the brain, whereas Aspergers appears to affect the frontal sections only. Nonetheless, other studies (not linked to here) have shown that those with asperger's have an elevated probability of having autistic children. In other words, there's good evidence they share mechanisms BUT there is also good evidence that autism outside of Asperger's involves additional mechanisms that are NOT present in Asperger's.

I asked the IoP about research on Asperger's and autism a while back, and they pointed me to the following lecture (which does not appear to be on the web anywhere):

Frith U. (2004) Emanuel Miller lecture: confusions and controversies about Asperger syndrome. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines. 45(4):672-86, 2004 May

I hope this information is useful, trivially interesting or even interestingly trivial, depending on perspective.

A catalyst is only one component of a future process.

From someone too busy doing science to have the time to create an account: rumour has it that Josephson's graduate student has just been passed by his examiners for a Ph.D. thesis on Quantum Coherence, so he must be doing something right. And anyway, shouldn't his earlier expertise in superconductivity make him at least as well qualified to judge subjects such as ESP and cold fusion as people who have spent less time than he has studying the literature relating to these topics? And can his vocal critics identify a genuine problem with his paper "Biological utilisation of quantum nonlocality", at

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/papers/bell.ht ml

which he claims is the same idea as one discovered independently by another physicist, Anthony Valentini, suggesting that it is not completely crazy?

It's funny to read Josephson this and Josephson that in the summary. Brian Josephson is of course a very famous Nobel prize winner, but he has become a pariah in the scientific community.

Look at his web page! He's pushing cold fusion, ESP and other paranormal powers, and all kinds of bizarre theories. He's gotten into fights with the highly respected archiv.org physics publication site over their habit of removing crackpot papers. In short Josephson is an embarrassment to the scientific community, someone who refuses to go along with the conventional wisdom and insists on using his reputation to attack conventional scientific beliefs.

I know what you really want to know: who's right? Josephson or the scientists? Here's a tip. Any time it's one guy against the scientific community, bet on the scientific community. You'll be right 99+% of the time. The fact that Josephson did good work back in the 1960s with his junction doesn't make him an expert on ESP and cold fusion. If there were any substance to those fields, the normal scientific process would have found it. That's the safe way to bet.

It's funny to read Josephson this and Josephson that in the summary. Brian Josephson is of course a very famous Nobel prize winner, but he has become a pariah in the scientific community.

Look at his web page! He's pushing cold fusion, ESP and other paranormal powers, and all kinds of bizarre theories. He's gotten into fights with the highly respected archiv.org physics publication site over their habit of removing crackpot papers. In short Josephson is an embarrassment to the scientific community, someone who refuses to go along with the conventional wisdom and insists on using his reputation to attack conventional scientific beliefs.

I know what you really want to know: who's right? Josephson or the scientists? Here's a tip. Any time it's one guy against the scientific community, bet on the scientific community. You'll be right 99+% of the time. The fact that Josephson did good work back in the 1960s with his junction doesn't make him an expert on ESP and cold fusion. If there were any substance to those fields, the normal scientific process would have found it. That's the safe way to bet.

- Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming"

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence at my university have been going on about stuff like this for a while. Personally I think it's all science fiction but hey...

Sure this post took me 10 minutes to type

That sounds like a perfect chance to reference Dasher, the swiftest new way to enter text with the mouse! Or an eye-tracker.

It's in Debian, as well as offering downloads for Windows, Mac OS X, Pocket PC and even Solaris. This is the sort of software that a slow typist could use to really improve their work! That and it looks really cool.

They have this quote in their website: "Dasher is like an arcade game: `Attack of the killer alphabets', perhaps."

I prefer using The Dasher it is way faster than the charmap approach.

Why do you people even bother arguing with me anymore?

Maybe because your post is not in touch with reality? You cannot "give them 10 out of 10 with fewer bugs" today, and it will be a long time before you can. I love open source, but there's no way in hell I'd recommend Linux to my parents.

If it works on even one distro it can work on any distro.

That's not the same as saying all hardware will work on all distros, as your original post said. Sad, but true.

[...] It will change as a larger percentage of users clue up.

You don't consider someone who has an MSc in CS, works full time porting Xen to 64 bit processors, and uses Gentoo for his work system "clued up"?! Or how about the other guy, who was administering several company Linux and Windows servers while still working on his MSc? What planet are you posting from?

Don't blame Linux if you lack Google-fu.

In this particular case, I found a driver on 3Com's pages which was so broken that I had to rename the files before make could even begin to complain properly, because the case didn't match! So don't try to tell me all drivers work out of the box.

http://stone.newton.cam.ac.uk/mirrors/IOCCC/www1.u s.ioccc.org/

of which lists:
            Antarctica
            none yet :-)

            Africa
            none

            Asia
            none

        * Asia Pacific and Australia www.au.ioccc.org - Sydney, Australia (34 0' S 151 0' E)

            Europe
        * www.es.ioccc.org - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)

            Extraterrestrial
            SETI is looking for some sites :-)

        * North America www0.us.ioccc.org - Sunnyvale California, US (37 22' N 122 02' W)
        * www1.us.ioccc.org - Saint Paul, Minnesota US (44 57' N 93 06' W)

            South America
            none

http://www.cstit.cl.cam.ac.uk/lms/pages/current/ho mepages/index.html.

Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology has to be the lamest course name in history but the course itself is very good with both computation and linguistics aspects, as you would expect from Cambridge...

To start with:
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/sacrobosco.html
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/sacrobooks.html
"The most famous of his works, De Sphaera, a basic account of the spherical geometry underpinning the mathematical astronomy of Ptolemy and his Arabic commentators, was composed c. 1230"
For you: it was a manual for the geocentric view in latin, nothing new, just a repetition of Ptolemios.
Stop spreading FUD!

For the second, it is just in the 20th century the "importance" of being the original idea that counts. Earlier it was an honour to develope and enchance ideas.
Copernicus almost sure had avatars, folowed by Kepler, Galilei, Newton and many others before, after and in-between. Scientific work is a cooperation - something that starts to be rare suppply :-( As Isaac Newton sade:If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoul ders_of_giants

I suggest you do some simple google on the subject before spewing words.

To start with:
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/sacrobosco.html
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/sacrobooks.html
"The most famous of his works, De Sphaera, a basic account of the spherical geometry underpinning the mathematical astronomy of Ptolemy and his Arabic commentators, was composed c. 1230"
For you: it was a manual for the geocentric view in latin, nothing new, just a repetition of Ptolemios.
Stop spreading FUD!

For the second, it is just in the 20th century the "importance" of being the original idea that counts. Earlier it was an honour to develope and enchance ideas.
Copernicus almost sure had avatars, folowed by Kepler, Galilei, Newton and many others before, after and in-between. Scientific work is a cooperation - something that starts to be rare suppply :-( As Isaac Newton sade:If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoul ders_of_giants

I suggest you do some simple google on the subject before spewing words.

I happen to have the good fortune to work on The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer. We're beginning construction very soon, and it is the successor to the COAST telescope in Cambridge.

The advantage of interferometers is that we can have the effective aperture of 400m (so obtaining high angular resolution) without the problem of building and maintaining a distortion-free enormous mirror. Of course, we don't get the sensitivity, but we do get the resolution.

Incidentally, COAST (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telsecope), which was built in the late '80s has a better angular resolution than Hubble (although we do have a lot of atmosphere in the way!), and has managed to sucessfully image detail on the surface of stars.

Another responder mentioned live migration being much harder - he's right. He's also right when he says this is also done, with some really, extremely, very cool results. You can migrate a Quake server from machine a to machine b iff you assume some SAN or NAS in 60ms downtime, PRESERVING NETWORK CONNECTIONS. That means if you're remotely logged into a virtual machine, and it migrates from machine a to b, you won't get logged out of the virtual machine!

This is ridiculously cool technology. Take note everyone. It seems like 80% of comments here are incorrect, however. Read the papers on the Xen site if you want to know how paravirtualization actually works. It takes time, but if you're interested, it's worth it.

Another responder mentioned live migration being much harder - he's right. He's also right when he says this is also done, with some really, extremely, very cool results. You can migrate a Quake server from machine a to machine b iff you assume some SAN or NAS in 60ms downtime, PRESERVING NETWORK CONNECTIONS. That means if you're remotely logged into a virtual machine, and it migrates from machine a to b, you won't get logged out of the virtual machine!

This is ridiculously cool technology. Take note everyone. It seems like 80% of comments here are incorrect, however. Read the papers on the Xen site if you want to know how paravirtualization actually works. It takes time, but if you're interested, it's worth it.

free as in beer. and as other people have pointed out, you cant really beat the performance that the xen approach gets.

The Xen demo CD is a live ISO CD running Debian Linux that enables you to try Xen on your system without installing it to the hard disk. It enables you to start other guests running Linux 2.4 and 2.6, NetBSD and FreeBSD. Xvnc is used to enable the graphical console of the domains to be viewed.

Obviously it's not particularly speedy when loading binaries off the CD, but it gives you an idea of the potential.

These guys(Xen) have all these companies donating money to them, but have been beaten to kernel inclusion by UML.

Being the first to the party doesn't always mean you're going to the best; see DevFS vs. udev.

Xen has much greater performance than UML and supports more operating systems. While UML is currently more mature and stable than Xen, it's only a matter of time before Xen surpasses UML as the preferred virtual server technology. Hell, even Linode, a strong proponent of UML technology and virtual server hosting provider is migrating to Xen.

FYI, I'm currently running a Xen-based system with 15 virtual server instances for a system administration course at UC Berkeley on a server built with cheap off the shelf components (AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 1 GB RAM) and everything is quite snappy. It'd be difficult to even approach such usability with UML, and I'm using Xen 2.0.7. I can't see what Xen 3.0 will bring.

One big difference (from a user perspective) is performance. Check out the xen paper here . Xen performance is often 4x better (literally) than UML because it paravirtualizes, instead of fully virtualizes. Sorry I don't have time to get into technical detail, but that's one quick answer.

While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?

Perhaps because vservers lack some of the neat features of Xen, such as on-the-fly instance migration and full iptables support?

Furthermore, vservers is, for the foreseeable future, a Linux-only project. So far, NetBSD and Solaris have been ported to Xen, and basic support for FreeBSD as a guest host is available. Once Intel VT and AMD Pacifica are available, Xen will also support Windows XP SP2.

Given just these benefits (and Xen has many more), it's no surprise that Xen appeals to more people and applications.

Why not? What do you think people were using for writing operating systems before C and UNIX became popular with academics and a misguided generation of CS graduates?

You mean Lisp machines? That requires special hardware. All early operating systems were written in low-level languages, essentially assembler. C was among the first "portable assembly languages". Not the first, and perhaps not the best, but it clearly had some advantage if it won out over the rest.

The rest can be entirely done in a HLL other than C. Don't get me wrong: C was a neat hack and great fun on a PDP-11, but it has never been either a well-designed language or a high performance language.

C is barely a step up above assembler. You can't get higher performance than assembler. You can talk all you like about runtime profiling and optimizations, but the very nature of a microkernel means the code paths have already been highly tuned and minimized.

As for JITs and GC, both of them are bonuses from a performance point of view. A well-implemented JIT gives you cross-module optimization and inlining even in the presence of dynamic loading, something potentially quite useful in a kernel. And a GC is not only less error prone than manual storage management, it is also more efficient.

Perhaps you should re-read my post. From application-level programming perspectives, these features are well-motivated. From a microkernel perspective these features are ill-motivated, if feasible at all.

Additionally, any sort of runtime environment in the kernel itself, any sort of state even runtime modification, means the kernel is now vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. The point of reliability, security and fault isolation in microkernel designs is to minimize the attack surface, not expand it.

But that's what I'm talking about. I mean, who is going to work on CapROS and who is going to bother using it? If I want capabilities, I can get them in Linux or BSD.

No, you really can't. I hope you're not talking about so-called "POSIX capabilities". Those are nothing like real capabilities. I suggest you re-read that literature you said you've read, because capabilities and capability operating systems are far more powerful than anything you can ever do in Linux or BSD. The best you can do is implement Plan 9-style private namespaces, which get you part of the way there.

No matter how badly C and C-based monolithic kernels may suck, the path towards better OSes is likely going to be incremental, starting from Linux or BSD: permitting the loading of modules written in other languages, adding a JIT, adding capabilities, etc.

Or starting with a microkernel, and implementing a Linux/BSD compatibility layer. Like the one that existed for KeyKOS way back in the 80s which provided binary-compatibility with UNIX operating systems. Like L4Linux. Like Xen. Even drivers can theoretically have a Linux compatibility cradle, and I believe this is the direction CapROS will pursue.

And if you believe in microkernels, then the path to making it happen is likely to be adding microkernel-like facilities to the Linux kernel.

You can't. The best you can do is something like real-time linux, which is really a microkernel running an instance of linux as a personality. Just like L4Linux. If you're going to run a microkernel, why not just program against a native API to take advantage of the flexibility and performance?

If microkernel designs are so great, then people will naturally start using those new microkernel facilities to add new drivers, file systems, etc.

I guess we'll see.

When trains started coming, they said traveling above 30mph would probably kill a man. (Also recall - bilingual folkses, multitrack thinking at it's finest.)

It takes a bit more

Never driven on a busy highway listening to music and planning your day, notice the traffic and plan a completely different route without missing a beat or forgetting to pick up the wife's dry cleaning?

than a decade of intense schooling

Case in point - my little sister (hands off "sexy rexy"), 3-5 gaim conversations, a couple of browser windows, the telephone, "hey did you do your homework/ left book in the locker" " be ovr 10min" I know you can handle this. --* so how many phone conversations, missed assignments, early mornings and teachers that you've had a crush on ran through your head? I know you didn't think about my sister! *--

to train our minds to think linearly.

Remember?

Took me about 15 minutes to pull all this nonsense together, though so far as my brain was concerned it was written about 2 seconds after I read your comment. Pity that tekkie guy doesn't know any decent visual artists.

If you liked this article and are interested in some technical background, you might also like Ross Anderson's essay: Why Cryptosystems Fail, which discusses some of the poor engineering that contributed to this situation.

from the Xen site:

A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions.

Work on Xen has been supported by UK EPSRC grant GR/S01894, Intel Research, HP Labs, Microsoft Research, Network Appliance, and XenSource Inc.

Every time I hear about a mechanical / atomic clock to be supremely accurate, I have to wonder, what about daylight savings time? what about leap years? leap seconds?

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05210/545823.stm

http://www.leaphour.com/

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/

unless either:

1) The world (not just the US) completely and finally breaks ther link between astronomical events and time, or
2) Atomic clocks are programmed to comprehend astronomical events such as sunrise / sunset, variances in the length in solar years, and others,

Then the next finder of this wonder may be as lost as to its real function and meaning as we are about stonehinge.

One may assume that civilization constantly marches forward technologically, but that one must explain why the ancient Romans had flush toilets when the American settlers did not.

This is the best news I've heard all day - I can't even get Xen 3.0 from Xen, so I guess they've thrown in TimeTravel 1.0 as well.

It's a real struggle between the typical programmer's desire to loosely specify what they want in quick-and-dirty code, vs the operating system's desire to enforce this moving "security" target we keep talking about. And all sandwiched around the limitations of current hardware. Researchers wanting to play in the hardware space have it tough as well; the hardware/software co-design needed (to hack the FPGA breadboards together, get kernels booting, figure out why the VHDL compiler is segfaulting on valid code, user-space gcc hacks to emit new instructions, etc) are pretty demanding.

There's been huge amount of work on the rigorous software theory side in the last few decades, which eliminates the need for hardware to dynamically enforce things that can be statically proven away. Peter Sewell and his team recently successfully formally specified the socket API and machine-proved it. Projects like Microsoft's Singularity, or Cornell's Typed Assembly Language are looking at making practical, high-performance type-safe operating systems. I'd expect that, in the next few years at least, we'll see one of these approaches come to fruition before fine-grained hardware enforcement. And as a long-term goal, isn't it more desirable to have higher quality software than more paranoid hardware?

Agreed. All these concerns about people living longer or eternally are false, poorly reasoned, and/or overinflated. The benefits of curing aging far, far outweigh any conceivable drawbacks.

Futurist/biotechnologist Aubrey DeGrey has an excellent deconstruction of all the usual arguments on his website. I could repeat them, but not better than the original:

http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/concerns.htm

Take a look at Dasher

the words just sort of flow in from the right of the screen and you pick the letter that you want... it makes guesses at what word you want next, and those letters appear bigger making it easier to catch them...
it sounds strange but it's really amazingly easy to use.

Take a look at Dasher

That's not any less secure than a real CRC32 function in terms of how hard it is to fake.

In both cases, if you modfy the data you just need to change a couple of bytes to fix up the
checksum. Admittedly you only need to change 1 byte in this algorithm versus 4 for a CRC32,
but either way it is a couple of minutes work.
It is worse at spotting errors - notably that you could swap a couple of bytes and it
wouldn't notice, unlike CRC32.

Mind you, in a underpowered embedded system (clock speed speed to slow to use the non table CRC
in real time, not enough ram for the CRC tables), a checksum like this is probably better than nothing
and cheaper than a CRC computationally. Imagine a microcontroller USB bootloader for example. Compared
to no checksum, this would catch errors like broken RAM or a bad uart, both of which tend to completely
destroy data, but it can still receive as fast as the host can send, whereas a real CRC would be
a bottleneck limiting speed somewhat.

Good page on CRC's - you can usually use either the non table version - fast CPU, no much RAM,
or the table one - slow CPU clock, at least 1K of Ram or Rom available.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/bluebook/21/c rc/node6.html#SECTION00060000000000000000

the data shows co2 concentration in hard lockstep with average global temperature for the last 160 thousand years. Including the last 50 years. hmmmm.

Apparantly it already has been tested and found working: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~gh275/relay.pdf

I found the link thanks to this post by gaetan-g.

There are chimeras such as the chimeric mice that we create and use in the laboratory on a regular basis.

The basics of how chimeras are made

again, it may have been that particular flavour of suse, in which case please feel free to reccomend a distro that doesnt involve such trials and tribulations, i really do want to know, i really really do want a linux server, i'd love to be able to plaster linux all over my CV alongside my MS based qualifications, really!

Since SuSE 6x I havent had to hand edit anything other than modules.conf to disable ipv6.

but instead i had to undergo aforementioned weeks of google groups and editing obscure config files in obscure places JUST TO SET THE IP ADDRESS OF THE MACHINE. that's right i had to set the ip address, gateway, domain/workgroup, computer name, etc. in about 8 programs and config files. are you seriously telling me that that's "just the way we like it"? that the magic bullet against the windows-registry is to have every single program that uses a network card to have to be told precisely how?

SuSE/Yast prompts for this information during the install (right after the packages you selected are installed). How did you manage to bypass it?


1. install linux os, boot into GUI
2. install apache
3. run apache config program, tick checkbox that says "start on boot (inc non GUI boots)
4. run os network config, press button to install "windows compatible file sharing" (samba etc.)
5. find linux box onto network, find my new httpd shared directory, drag and drop website files
6. done


1 & 2) Boot SuSE CD, select base install. Next select detailed package installation and from the list select Networking. Apache will be listed, select the server modules you want. Select Samba client/server from the list as well.

3 & 4) After installation/login run Yast2, select Network Services from the list then Network Services (inetd). Click advanced settings, and then setup your apache and Samba options. Close the dialog box, select Samba from the list of icons and configure.

5) Bonus setup option, select 'System' from the list on the left. Select sysconfig editor. This is the GUI front end for most of the files in /etc.

done.

If you bought the boxed Pro version the well written admin manual explains how to do all this. The online manual is here: Suse Linux 9.3

Enjoy,

I was involved (VERY slightly) in an effort called the "Distributed Internet Crack" to brute-force the keyspace of 48-bit RC5 in February 1997.

The project was the brainchild of Germano Caronni, a member of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zuerich.

The Distributed Internet Crack would be an immediate predecessor to DESCHALL, which started only 8 days after DIC successfully cracked 48-bit RC5.

The possibility of cracking DES is mentioned in the Distributed Internet Crack FAQ: "Paul Foley estimates that DES would be approximately 70 times more difficult to solve than 48-bit RC5". DIC solved 48-bit RC5 in about 13.5 days whereas DESCHALL took about 120 days (obviously with many more computers involved).

My impression at the time is that DIC and it's immediate predecessor, which involved much the same team and cracked 40-bit RC5 in 3.5 days, were among the first to use this sort of distributed computing (involving volunteered computer time, coordinated via the internet) on such a large scale. I'd be very interested in learning about any predecessors of these projects.

Reading over the FAQ for the Distributed Internet Crack is actually quite interesting after all these years. You can still see it here:

Distributed Internet Crack FAQ

Also a press release on the project's successful conclusion:

Press Release

Some quotes from the FAQ:

Solution: 74 a3 53 cc 0b 19
Time: from start of contest until Mon Feb 10 18:52:23 1997 (a little over 13 days)
Method: again, massive distributed coordinated keysearch

The Distributed Internet Crack is harnessing the power of thousands of computers over the internet to crack an encryption challenge offered by RSA Laboratories. The group first attacked the 40-bit RC5 Challenge, cracking it in about 3.5 hours

The Distributed Internet Crack broke new ground in several areas:

• The most machines ever working together on a single, public, project: over 5000 at once, at probably over 10,000 altogether (machines often drop in and out over the course of the crack).
• The most keys per second ever solved in a public project: 440 million keys per second at peak, 140 million keys per second over the course of the project.