Slashdot Mirror

Whenever there's a big event like this, practically all forty thousand
slashdot users submit the same story four or five times in hopes of getting
theirs on the front page. If you had thought a little before
complaining, you would realize that the admins can only post one, so
they pick a favorite and reject the other sixteen thousand redundant copies.

-JD

My queen has an uzi in her purse and slays all your pieces!

-JD

Probably not as much as our new "governor"...

-JD (A Minnesotan)

I seem to recall Dad and my Opa thinking of buildiing a hydraulic car, where the IC engines is running at a constant speed (that at which it has peak efficiency). When you brake, the motor compresses hydraulic chambers as you idle, and when you release the brake, all that pressure is immediately available for acceleration.

There were other details, such as that the traditional brake-accelerator set of pedals wouldn't work without some mechanical shenanigans. But the main thing is that the motor is constantly running at peak efficiency.

Related to this, I also remember hearing about a guy (perhaps someone else can remember his name) who developed a carbuerator that flash-vapourised gasoline instead of merely spraying droplets of gas into the chamber. This resulted in far less wasted fuel going out the exhaust pipe. I don't know what became of this idea (I think it was a 70s or 80s thing), but the main problem is the saftey hazard of using those highly volatile vapours.

(BTW, when did /. become 'news for grease monkeys'?)

-JD

Of course, your wonderful ecosystem of politcal parties hasn't done you a whole lot of good, and it won't prevent the inevitable.

;-)

-JD

(PS: *cough cough* joke *hrmm* *cough* ... i'm from duluth )

I honestly don't see how someone could hope to succeed at this. Let's say you get distributed.net to jump on the bandwagon. Great. Now what exactly are you going to do? You have arbitrary strings of numbers. This could be a fragment of a single text, parts of multiple texts, multiple complete texts, and so on. Sure, you could scan for patterns first and try to identify delimiters, but were I sending data through this, I wouldn't do you the favor of using a fixed separation string. I'd base it on conditions at the time of broadcast, or on some computation on the ciphertext, or some other thing that's not trivially detectable. In short, you don't know which decryption method to try. It's been pointed out that it's probably a one-time pad anyway.

Even if you can find an algorithm, how big are the keys? How will you know when you've got the plaintext? Something transmitted by the NSA is likely to be in highly obfuscated English at best. Like the handmade strong crypto challenge, the true plaintext might be very strange. How will you recognize that this is the correct decryption and not just a coincidental decryption into random gibberish?

Finally, while I agree that some numbers stations probably are espionage related, I'll bet they keep the noise very high. Many of them are probably reading right off the random number generator of the nearest computer. Did the challenge supervisors pick ones that are actual signal?

This is not to say it's impossible, but the benefit/difficulty ratio seems so high that anybody wizardly enough to succeed should probably be working on developing better algorithms for us instead.

I think the neatest things from this were links off the Altoid tin page, including the match-head sized web server, and the Altoid tin radio.


--Phil (And who doesn't like Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments?)

Somehow, someone leaked the location of the netscape-branded pre-beta builds of Mozilla/Netscape 6 on tuesday. Thanks to an alert friend, I got a copy before they pulled it, both of the Windows and Linux builds.

It looks pretty much the same as mozilla, except it has a really cool new Netscape animation in the upper right corner there (what is the standard nomenclature for that anyhow?). Also, the win32 builds have that annoying blotchy toolbar bug.

On a Pentium 300mhz with 64mb RAM, it seemed pretty responsive, more so than the mozilla nightly builds. The layout is a lot faster than Netscape 4.x.

Based on my experience with the Windows and Linux versions, I think this browser will be at least as fast as IE 5. I think, however, that if they had skipped the skinnable custom-widget idea, the browser would be faster and much more reliable. Personally, I'd like to see someone just yank the Gecko engine and put it in a simple, bare-bones browser.

-JD

Slightly off-topic...but someone mentioned porting GNOME to palmtop PDA devices. They proposed calling it Palm GNOME.

Think about how that would look. :-)

-JD