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High-quality 3D CAD programs *should* already be able to import the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES). IGES has absolutely been the de-facto standard for the past 10 years on data transfer between CAD packages. It handles surfaces, 2D drawings, 3D wireframe, as well as solids (although it didn't originally support solids). Unfortunately, some CAD software manufacturers *cough*AutoCAD*cough* force the consumer to buy an additional license to handle it. They want everyone to use their proprietary Drawing Exchange Format (DXF)

Some CAD packages had attempted to go to the solid model transfer format STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data), but few have been quick to adopt it. STEP works extremely well between CAD packages that do support the format. It'll even build assembly heirarchies for the user as necessary. Unfortunately, STEP doesn't handle parametric models (models driven by dimensions, instead of the other way around).

That said, there are still some downfalls of all flavors of the current intermediate transfer formats. I look forward to the day when I don't have to worry about what format a given CAD package uses, and how they interact with each other.

-Malfaetor

Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver.

No need for all that: Get it from NIST, may as well line your shit up with an atomic clock.

ECC-109 was not brute forced. They used a cycle finding algorithm to find a collision [blah blah read site].

The real "contribution" of this attack is that these cycle finding attacks are not just theoretical.

Against RC5/DES brute force was used and shown to be effective for small key lengths. Against ECC a new attack was used [and a newer attack will be required to really continue]. Similarly for RSA they wanted to show factoring was possible [e.g. QS, GNFS, etc...]

There is a point where continuing to work is pointless. E.g. RC5-72 is useless. people have learned and use 128-bit symmetric keys now as a "lower boundary". So even if they do break RC5-72 [which is likely to take a shitload of time] we'd already be ahead of the curve.

In the case of ECC-109 [over GF(p)], 163-bit [over GF(2)]] ECC curves are still "recommended" by NIST document.

A 163-bit key provides roughly 80-bits of security which is enough to not be insecure against most modest attacks but I doubt many cryptographers would recommend it with a straight face [personally I draw the line at 256-bit curves].

Point is showing all these theoretical attacks working is important cuz not one attack fits all.

They cannot comprehend how the Mac JDK runs faster than a Windows JDK.

That's a good thing, because it doesn't. I've tested the MAC JDK (latest one in OSX 10.3 on a dual 2.0 GHz G5) and just about every PC JDK (windows and linux) kick it's ass thouroughly. That's raw speed, mind you.

If you don't believe me, believe the scimark benchmark. (See the highest OSX entry at #20.)

There are multiple sources, read up on for example: this one.. There we're talking error rates in the percentages.

Like I said, biometrics work very well when you have few-few datasets like employees trying to get into a workplace with a database of a few thousands. Or ten suspects and one fingerprint. Or even ten suspects and a 100K database of prints.

It's when you have a 100K database of fingerprints and compare to millions of passengers that the laws of statistics play havoc with your accuracy rates. You dont even have to fool the systems, the builtin failure rate will cause huge numbers of false positives, and as the databases expand it will only get worse.

I dont think badly about the US; having lived there for an extended period, and visited many times and having many american friends I rather like it. I may not like the current direction of the country, nor the actions of the current administration, but that's not the country itself, and most definitely not the people.

But with this, when the chance to get detained, jailed, expelled, or whatever when you get misidentified is in the range of single digit percentages, the risk simply isnt worth it. While I hope the security people would go to some length to verify you're not who the system says you are, I wont depend on that. With the rates they say they're getting of 'people travelling under false identities' I'm wondering if they're always bothering to check. False identity or false positive?

The politicians have been sold snake oil by the biometrics industry. And innocent travellers will be paying the price for that.

I'll prefer not to take my chances. I'm saddened that that may mean I cant visit the US for a long time (until the requirement is removed or biometrics improve to the point that the chance gets significantly better, which will take decades). But there's not much I can do about it.

The content is rather small with only 1878 entries. The ICAT database, however, is mature with 6548 entries.

If you are looking for security checklists/hardening guides, NIST releases the combined NSA/DISA guidance here. Unfortunately, it is commercial OS centric, the Linux coverage woeful, the *BSD coverage nonexistent :(

Don't go to CI$ - they are basically repackaging DISA/NSA guidance, then charging for it!

The CVE is "A Dictionary, NOT a Database" of vulnerabilities. It appears you aren't familiar with the CVE

You would be better off to compare the OSVDB against the ICAT metabase

The ICAT has some serious shortcomings which makes my work a big PAIN! (try to cross reference a specific vulnerability that matches 10 vulnerabilities).

OSVDB appears to better personify the open source paradigm in general, as such, I'd like to extend a warm welcome.

We expect great things from you.

Actually no, he's right. 1000Gb DOES == 1Tb. You probably have the decimal mutiples that hard drive manufacturers use mixed up with the binary multiples that everyone wishes they used. 1000 Gigabytes == 1 Terabyte. You're thinking of Mebibytes and Gibibytes. Try an RTFM here and here.

Actually no, he's right. 1000Gb DOES == 1Tb. You probably have the decimal mutiples that hard drive manufacturers use mixed up with the binary multiples that everyone wishes they used. 1000 Gigabytes == 1 Terabyte. You're thinking of Mebibytes and Gibibytes. Try an RTFM here and here.

Posting anonymously for fear of mod retaliation from those who still think the sun revolves around the earth. :) If you still want to argue, please answer these questions:

How many meters are in a kilometer?
How many grams are in a kilogram?
How many bytes are in a kilobyte?

Posting anonymously for fear of mod retaliation from those who still think the sun revolves around the earth. :) If you still want to argue, please answer these questions:

How many meters are in a kilometer?
How many grams are in a kilogram?
How many bytes are in a kilobyte?

In hardware design, the trend in the past 20 years has been just the opposite, going from large blueprints of gate and circuits, to a Hardware Description Language (HDL, like Verilog or VHLD) which is very similar to a programming language like C or Pascal!

Methinks the emperor has simply announced he wants a change of fashion, and all the trendy loyal subjects in the kingdom have to change their style to fit in.

There is no "12:00 AM". There is an 11:59 PM and a 12:01 AM. The proper term is "Midnight".

With no doubt, this must be the biggest security hole I have seen lately. 802.11g directly to the hard drive. Bravo. Is this an April Fool's joke posted prematurely or are they really out of their minds thinking that anyone would be so stupid to buy such a hard drive, which is basically asking to be cracked? I find it insulting. I hope script kiddies will have lots of fun.

OOGG WISH CORRECT STATEMENT ON IONIZING RADIATION.

ScrewMaster NOT REMEMBER PLANCK'S CONSTANT.

RADIATION TO "ionizing living tissue" MUST HAVE PHOTON ENERGY ENOUGH TO IONIZE. ATOMIC PHYSICS USE UNIT "Rydberg" IONIZING ENERGY FOR HYDROGEN ATOM.

ONE RYDBERG BE 13.6 electron volts. NOT ALL IONS REQUIRE SO MUCH, BUT CLEARLY ORDER OF VOLTS. THINK OF BATTERY; CHEMICAL BATTERIES PRODUCE VOLTS.

Planck's constant be equivalent to 3.28 10^15 Hz. Even 1 eV be 2.41 10^14 Hz, or ABOUT TEN THOUSAND TIMES HIGHER than 2.4 10^9 Hz = 2.4 GHz.

HANDY CAVEMAN RULE OF THUMB: GET CANCER FROM UV SUNLIGHT, NOT INFRARED FIRE. FIRE THERMAL BURN ONLY, NOT IONIZING.

No need to assume or insert anything. The Kelvin is the SI unit of temperature. It is perfectly correct to say that the temperature outside is 300 Kelvin, without throwing in the redundant word "degrees".

IAAC...

The correct name is "dihydrogen oxide". Theres no need to put the "mono" on the oxygen. If you dont believe me, you can look at NIST's chemistry webbook...

http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?Name=Dihydro gen+oxide&Units=SI

You mean this?

MB = Mega Byte, 10^6, base-10
MiB = Mega binary Byte, (2^10)^2, base-2
GB = Giga Byte, 10^9, base-10
GiB = Giga binary Byte, (2^10)^3, base-2

For more info, check the NIST standard

Programming is essentially a creative endeavor where beauty emerges from the harmonious implementation of function - i.e. a function (creation) in harmony with the object (material or imagined) which is the program's intention to model and with a given set of factors or rules (the API, language, instruction set.) This kind of creativity is in this sense more akin to that expressed in building architecture and industrial design than that expressed in the fine arts and philosophy.

Terming programming as a fine art is quite a stretch apart from the latter's primary concern - which is the creation of beautiful objects. Programming's primary concern is the creation of interactive models of objects in harmony with their material or imaginary counterparts and the boundaries that define the model space.

In this other sense, the aesthetic pleasure derived from programming or observing beautiful code is similar in nature to that derived from the construction or contemplation of philosophical concepts - both can recur to visual metaphors but are in essence invisible.

IBM's implementation of Java on Linux and Windows is a lot faster than Sun's own

This used to be the case, but I'd say these days the VM implementations are about equally matched, at least for number crunching.

In the Linux/UNIX world, we call "macros" scripts. They do automated tasks, just like macros do, and most of the time more efficient than their Windows counterparts. Expect is an excellent utility for creating "macros", in addition to the capabilities of Perl, etc, Expect allows you to redirect output and input better, in a more "friendly" way.

I dont think anyone can fairly answer your question without some specifics about why you would want to switch to Linux. I mean, I'm guessing "I love the command-line!" isnt high on the list.
This comment may never be seen, it depends on if it's seen first by the "He hates linux! Get him!" mods or the "He didnt jump to supporting various open-source projects, I have no idea what he's saying but it's probably insightful!" mods..

If this is the kind of tool you are used to using, I dont think Linux is the right solution for your "automated tasks". I guess that's just my opinion, but people who are used to using "Macros" which act like a user instead of "Scripts" which do their best to get the job done and tend not to be friendly to programs which dont know about them, I don't think they're ready for linux.
This isnt a "Linux isnt ready for them", thing, it just seems to me that Linux is a different way of thinking, seperate from these "Automating a task means having the computer repeat you" macro programs. (Yes, it's a simplification, but since the guy is talking about "Using these programs" instead of "programming in VBA", I'm guessing he's having the programs do most of the work for him)

Explain what it is that attracts you to linux, and you're likely to get an answer which comes closer to what you really want.
That said, check out "Expect" here

They don't really have an atomic clock in them. They work by getting radio signals from WWV. If you have BPL in your neighborhood, you can say goodbye to those clocks.

I'm serious. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html for all the groovy details. If anything, it's a move away from the hd manufacturers lingo.

If you turn off all non-essential services in Windows and do the same in Linux, keep your users with low privileges etc on both, and keep both systems up-to-date with patches, they're equally secure.

But break-ins don't happen through the OS-specific TCP/IP stack code, they happen through network services. You don't need to patch the OS that much - you need to patch the services.

And Apache is more secure than IIS, Sendmail more secure than Exchange (and Postfix or qmail even more secure than that). Then again IIS's ftp service is more secure than wu-ftpd, probably more secure than pro-ftpd but not as secure as OpenBSD's ftpd.

You can't judge security by OS - it all depends on the network services you choose to use. This of course explains why BSDs are at the top. The default services installed with, say OpenBSD, are more secure than the default services that come with a Fedora linux.

How can we measure how secure some software is? Well, their security history gives some pointers.

It gets worse. President Bush has just cut funding to the NIST's Advanced Technology Program. Where is the money going instead? Amongst other needy causes, The Department of Homeland Paranoia of course!

Here's the SciMark 2 benchmark scores for various platforms. This isn't an entirely relevant comparison for development as its comparing one aspect of CPU+JVM, eg I/O is neglible, but it gives you some idea of whats going available.

A dual G5 placed 15th in the list of submitted scores:
1. 554.92 Sun 1.4.2 WinXP 5.1 Sun. 1.4.2; IBM; P4 3GHz
[...]
15. 226.23 Apple 1.4.1_01 MacOSX 0.2.7 Apple Computer, Inc. 1.4.1_01; Apple G5; PowerPC 970 2x2Ghz

there's a lot of x86 ahead of PPC. I've got no axe to grind here, I have a powerbook myself and I find it a pretty decent working environment - partly I wanted one because I use wintel in work and wanted to get away from that when doing my own stuff.

Most ATMs contain IBM's super-whiz-bang secure processor (or an equivalent device certified to FIPS 140 per NIST,) complete with multiple levels of physical tamper detection. The action of opening the chassis - by an administrator or anyone else - should have immediately zeroized the keys stored internally. That's a pretty basic security element. Of course, it sounds like Diebold's position is "you're not supposed to do that." Note to Diebold - the bad guys don't play by your steenking rules. They're a lot smarter and more determined than you think. They probably won't attack a single machine in a public polling forum. I'd bet the aggregation server is a much more lucrative target. Better be prepared for "man in the middle" attacks.

It's probably worth mentioning that of course this is a redefinition of the traditional meanings and will probably irritate the same people who object to the phrase "Native American". But as in that case the traditional usage is entirely wrong. New standards are slowly being adopted. Although I rarely use them myself, I think using "mebi" etc. are preferable to coopting the SI prefixes. (Knuth doesn't like them).

Make that MiB.

Here's the original (and official in my book) article.
I read this yesterday and thought to myself "wow this would make a great /. article." Lo and behold it shows up here. Damn work for blocking non .gov addresses!!

If you think about it for more then a second, kb could mean a number of things. Some people actually mean kilobit. Some mean 1000 bytes. While others mean 1024 bytes. KiB makes it clear we're not dealing with the "normal" kilo, but with something else, something of a binary nature: a kibi. Sure, it sounds weird now, but it has the advantange of clearing up the matter one and for all.

Whenever somebody raises an eyebrow when I use KiB or MiB, it gives me an occasion to explain it. I'm certainly not about to stop - but thanks for your keen eye :)

"Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary."

The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.

As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.

"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"

The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.

The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.

"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"

Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.

The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."

At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.

"Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary."

The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.

As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.

"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"

The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.

The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.

"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"

Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.

The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."

At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.

The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a more detailed explanation of the American British, Imperial and Metric (SI) System in its Handbook 44 - Specifications, Tolerances, And Other Technical Requirements for Weighing and Measuring Devices. Appendix C to the Handbook gives detailed tables of conversion among the various systems, and Appendix B explains a good deal of the history of the systems. Section 2.3 of that appendix gives an explanation of US/UK differences:

2.3. . . After 1959, the U.S. and the British inch were defined identically . . . A similar situation existed for the U.S. and the British pound, and many relationships, such as 12 inches = 1 foot, . . . , were the same in both countries; but there were some very important differences.

In the first place, the U.S. customary bushel and the U.S. gallon, and their subdivisions differed from the corresponding British Imperial units. Also the British ton is 2240 pounds, whereas the ton generally used in the United States is the short ton of 2000 pounds. The American colonists adopted the English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches. The English of that period used this wine gallon and they also had another gallon, the ale gallon of 282 cubic inches. In 1824, the British abandoned these two gallons when they adopted the British Imperial gallon, which they defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water, at a temperature of 62 EF, which, by calculation, is equivalent to 277.42 cubic inches. At the same time, they redefined the bushel as 8 gallons.

In the customary British system the units of dry measure are the same as those of liquid measure. In the United States these two are not the same, the gallon and its subdivisions are used in the measurement of liquids; the bushel, with its subdivisions, is used in the measurement of certain dry commodities. The U.S. gallon is divided into four liquid quarts and the U.S. bushel into 32 dry quarts. All the units of capacity or volume mentioned thus far are larger in the customary British system than in the U.S. system. But the British fluid ounce is smaller than the U.S. fluid ounce, because the British quart is divided into 40 fluid ounces whereas the U.S. quart is divided into 32 fluid ounces. . . We can mention again the common use, for body weight, in England of the stone of 14 pounds, this being a unit now unused in the United States, although its influence was shown in the practice until World War II of selling flour by the barrel of 196 pounds (14 stone). . .

The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a more detailed explanation of the American British, Imperial and Metric (SI) System in its Handbook 44 - Specifications, Tolerances, And Other Technical Requirements for Weighing and Measuring Devices. Appendix C to the Handbook gives detailed tables of conversion among the various systems, and Appendix B explains a good deal of the history of the systems. Section 2.3 of that appendix gives an explanation of US/UK differences:

2.3. . . After 1959, the U.S. and the British inch were defined identically . . . A similar situation existed for the U.S. and the British pound, and many relationships, such as 12 inches = 1 foot, . . . , were the same in both countries; but there were some very important differences.

In the first place, the U.S. customary bushel and the U.S. gallon, and their subdivisions differed from the corresponding British Imperial units. Also the British ton is 2240 pounds, whereas the ton generally used in the United States is the short ton of 2000 pounds. The American colonists adopted the English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches. The English of that period used this wine gallon and they also had another gallon, the ale gallon of 282 cubic inches. In 1824, the British abandoned these two gallons when they adopted the British Imperial gallon, which they defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water, at a temperature of 62 EF, which, by calculation, is equivalent to 277.42 cubic inches. At the same time, they redefined the bushel as 8 gallons.

In the customary British system the units of dry measure are the same as those of liquid measure. In the United States these two are not the same, the gallon and its subdivisions are used in the measurement of liquids; the bushel, with its subdivisions, is used in the measurement of certain dry commodities. The U.S. gallon is divided into four liquid quarts and the U.S. bushel into 32 dry quarts. All the units of capacity or volume mentioned thus far are larger in the customary British system than in the U.S. system. But the British fluid ounce is smaller than the U.S. fluid ounce, because the British quart is divided into 40 fluid ounces whereas the U.S. quart is divided into 32 fluid ounces. . . We can mention again the common use, for body weight, in England of the stone of 14 pounds, this being a unit now unused in the United States, although its influence was shown in the practice until World War II of selling flour by the barrel of 196 pounds (14 stone). . .

This incident (although caused by a transition TO the metric system) leads us to the question how many more years until we finally get rid of the imperial system. The US standard bureau has a page that describes their effort in the conversion. They quote the metric conversion act of 1975, but i don't know how much has happened since then. How many years do I have to buy US stuff here in Europe that is half metric and half imperial? For god sake, even the UK has switched! Does anybody know a real time-table for the transition??

Obligatory Pulp Fiction quote:

Vincent:
And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules:
They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
Vincent:
No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules:
And what'd they call it?
Vincent:
They call it Royale with Cheese.

I'm going to spell perspex "perpsex" from now on. It seems more fitting, particularly in reference to lame case mods!

True geeks prefer watches with a far niftier feature. Sure, you might be able to pay for gas with your watch, but mine's about as accurate as my GPS receiver!

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

All of the Python core team (including Guido until recently) live in DC. Granted, it's better if the conference was held in Vegas, on a cruise ship or in Monaco parhaps, but you're forgetting that the organizers of it are volunteers and do not get paid. The days when you could get a sponsor to shell out a few hundred grand to fly everyone to Vegas are gone.

DC is home to places like NASA, NIST, NIH... Quite a few well known open source folk live out this way.

I don't get out much these days, but before the .com craze, there were quite a few interesting places for programmers to meet. The DCLUG (past meetings) was one of them. I don't know what the status of the DCLUG is these days, but I remember Linus's talk in 95, this is way before most people even heard of Linux.

giga: SI prefix meaning 10^9 NIST (that's a govt website, but I'm assuming you might accept it as a valid source.)

ton: non-SI metric unit meaning 1000 kg ref
Non-SI metric units are commonly used in the scientific community. The SI itself is restricted to a very small set of units, and everything else is derived from those. Even common metric units like the liter aren't part of the SI.

So anyway, a gigaton is a perfectly valid and commonly used unit of mass.

Here's the NIST link for spelling of SI units. According to this document, the only SI units that use irregular plurals in English are lux, hertz, and siemens, which are unchanged in the plural. All other plurals are to be formed using the standard rules of English pluralization. So the plural of kelvin is kelvins, and one would spell out a temperature as "300 kelvins", although NIST recommends using the symbol for scientific communication to reduce ambiguity.

become authoratative on the DNS record for the KNOWN popup blocking sites, and just redirect it to some non-sensical ip address (255.255.255.255 only is used for DHCP protocols) problem solved. If you block all popups from the ISP level, there is no way to determine that the person "Clicked" on it, or the popup asked for it. (assuming dns lookup) CONNECT http://www.gator.com/some/stupid/piece/of/crap.htm l HTTP/1.0 However, you KNOW that gator has crap for tools. There are alternatives, most of which are free (ad free and cost free) (e.g. Date and time alternative (windows)(unix has simple ntp)) telnet weather windows scheduler anyone?

(gator only works with windows and WINE ) (VMWARE is windows due to the fact you NEED windows to run it on vmware)

people like that just make it either easy or frustratingly annoying and wasteful of bandwidth to do that. I lean toward annoying.

And even saying something like 'hey nice day out, btw. did you know the hyperfine transition for H is 1.4GHz' would be mostly meaningless since Hz depends upon the definition of seconds which is a measure of time we just dreamed up anyway. In order for it to have any meaning you'd have to say something like "oh did you know that the hyperfine transition of H emits EM radiation at a frequency of 1.4 billion cycles every 9,192,631,770 periods of the EM radiation emitted by the hyperfine transition of Cesium-133?". And to an advanced civilization all you're really going to be saying is "hey did you know the sky's blue?", not a very exciting conversation...

You might want to take a look at the Neutral Message Language, NML. Developed at the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Instute of Standards and Technology is was intended from the start for use in real-time/time critical situations. I know that it currently has support cor C, C++ and Java.

Of course, one can still speculate as to why the rate of slowing down has slowed down.

A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond.

For more about this phenomenon, you should read this overview, based on a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) news release. In addition, you'll see pictures of two atomic clocks used to officially measure time since 1971. The first one dates back from 1949, while the second one, based on cesium and built in 1999, is still in use.