Right, but for a full-clock cache to make a difference, the chip would have to be doing a cache access every instruction (since last I checked, the CISC chips were doing much in the way of parrallel instructions.) On chip might make some difference, but as far as the bus width, on or off chip is pretty irrelevant.
My original point with this was that
putting the cache on chip isn't a great improvement (IMO) because you'd have to do nothing but cache hits to feel the advantage, and all cache hits on a L2 cache is a pretty good indicator that your compiler developers have no clue what they're doing, and that, perhaps, your underlying architecture is flawed.
The only advantage to putting the cache on chip is that then you have to buy Intel's cache, on a hugely expensive chip, rather than being able to shop your cache RAM around. Sure, you might argue that I don't know what their L2 architecture looks like now, but I'd be surprised if it's really all that special.
It's just more silicon to heat up. As if the Intel chip family didn't already have power efficiency problems, do they really need a larger radiating surface?
Incidentally, I am acquainted with modern processor design, from a student of architecture's point of view. Enough to know that a cache doesn't always solve memory access issues. In fact, poorly used (like Intel seems to be prone to do) a cache can make things worse.
First, I found this article to be slightly more informative about the Xeon. I relaize the Intel cronies out there know a lot more about the Xeon line, but there are those of us who don't follow Intel quite so closely.
Then there's the issue of design and the media. Cnet is descibing the Xeon 700 as the biggest chip that Intel had ever made; last I checked more transistors wasn't necessarily a good thing, unless you were looking to cook breakfast on your motherboard.
And caches. Am I to understand that the biggest advance on the Xeon is the addtion of an on chip L2 cache? When Intel is so famous for using a cache well in the first place? Really, how much of a difference will it make to use a full-clock cache on chip over, say, a half-clock cache off-chip?
Finally, what about some metrics. Everything I've read says that the new Xeon is supposed to be fast, and that because server customers tend to be more hesitant about upgrading, testing and shipping will take longer, but I'd really like to see these chips compared to the Sun or Motorola top-of-line chips.
Yes, most congressmen are incredibly ignorant of anything beyond the monitor. But then, they're supposed to represent their constituants, who are, for the most part, incredibly ignorant of anything beyond the monitor.
There are two trends though that give me cause to be hopeful. First is the way that the judicial system has been behaving: responsibly, with eye toward self-education before ruling. Which is really supposed to be how it is. Congress spews out a whole lot of detrius, the President vetos the worst of it, and the really sneaky stuff gets cleaned up in the courts. The result is that the US winds up with vaguely reasonable laws.
The second is that our culture as a whole is becoming more techical as various aspects of information technology become more widespread. As a result, representives in the US and elsewhere will have to speak to a more technical constituent and therefore be more knowledgable. Result: less idiotic detrius.
I'd be fascinated to see early automotive legislation, as a comparison.
Why does the person who did it deserve to escape the consequences of that action?
What is this, the Code of Hammarabi? No, I as an individual probably won't forgive anyone who cuts off my finger, unless they had a really good reason. Would you be satisfied if we cut off is finger? Or, granted that he's probably insane, maybe the finger-eater ought to be put down like a wild dog.
None of this is relavent. What you're describing is psychotic behavior, while Mitnick was merely criminal. Now, maybe you want to attack our legal and penile system, but that's a different tack.
One thing that might make mobiles more widespread would be WLL, or a releated technolgy. Basically the idea is that you have mini-repeater in your home, that treats calls made through it as a local call. In terms of setting up mobile in a wired region, this makes a whole lot of sense, and in the US where local calls are billed at a flat rate it might make the transition happen a whole lot faster.
I personally believe that wireless is not only feasible, it's being delayed. I'm not sure why, or by whom, but the technology is there. Financially, everyone with the capitol is doing too well to be really pressured to alter things, but it seems to me that wires should be for power, period.
As far as cell modems being slow, there is a truth to that, but wireless ethernet isn't, and I don't really see any reason why it should be building by building; Lucent manufactures mile radius plus antennae for the stuff; I think there's a market for an ISP that sets up wireless ether and rents/sells WiFi cards to those without. I think there's a market for a WLL base that could be a one time purchase and would talk to your cell phone and put it on your local line. Combine that with a single-number service and you're in business.
I really do think that there's a whole realm of possibilities that a little real innovation and invention in the wireless device field might open up.
For instance, what about a device that set cell phones within it's range to vibrate or 'take a message' mode if available. Great for meeting rooms, and better for movie theatres. Granted, we aren't there yet, and the current billing schemes are insane (for instance, at the moment, I'll bet the service providers would charge you to have your phone silenced in the movies as well as charging the theatre), and there's room for abuse (some sort of authorization or some such to prevent people from buying a kill-box and shutting peoples phones down.) but consider the benifits of a technical society freed of wires and matured beyond the expectation that that means instant access to everyone.
Rambling summary: I certainly hope wireless can beat out wired. And I think it can.
The fact of the matter is that Mitnick did his time. He got a raw deal in sentencing, and probably did more and harder time than he deserved. Regardless, a judge appointed by the United States decided he was guilty and arrived at a punishment.
Having incarcerated him, and eventually released him, US citizens are required, I think, to treat him as another citizen. Otherwise prison is just another spiteful vengence nations take on their criminals. If it isn't, then the US has to treat Mitnick as reformed, and to do anything else is less than honest or fair.
The only real justifying analogy I can think of is to treat Mitnick like a sex offender, as if cracking were a compulsion that no one could be sure Mitnick would be able to control. Compell him to announce his conviction record publicly. Except there isn't a more famous felon in the IT field.
Yes, Mitnick was a criminal. But a nation that brands him for the rest of his life that way, cannot make any claims to a legitimate justice system.
Um, actually, the MAC is what finally filters an Ethernet packets to a specific machine. IP numbers are a handy way to be able to identify machines and all, and they do mean that TCP/IP and UDP != Ethernet, but once you start talking to another ethernet card over a wire, you need to find out what it's MAC is to address the packets.
Granted, so long as the MAC is unique on the network, this isn't a problem. But spoofing as someone else you know is therefore a bad idea, since the behavior is undefined.
The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address.
But if the card has it's address hardwired, wrapping that information with the driver will misreport it's MAC in IP->MAC queries and suchlike, and the card will then proceed to ignore packets directed at it. Like putting a "Hi, my name is Joe" sticker on Fred and expecting him to listen to people who call for Joe. Silly.
I thought this was News for Nerds, not Unsubstantiated Rumors that Matter. After several updates, BeOS might not be developed anymore because Microsoft owns the OS market. Or at least, so an out of context interview in an Austrian zine translated electronically seems to say. And Be Europe seems quite surprised than anyone would think that this was actually the case.
So now we have a non-issue reported as news after being rumored in a Be zine. For a while I've been a on Slashdot's side about "the editing sucks" type articles, but this is sort of the last straw. If you need to hire more editors, do it. If you need to extend Moderation to story selection, do it. But please, never again with the non-stories.
My UNIX programming experience is limited to a couple of college courses as well, by my understanding is this: any call you don't have code to that takes arguments of the form char[], or int [] or even char*.
The important concept is that of a buffer overflow, wherein an arbitrarily long argument runs over a fixed length buffer to overwrite code and execute arbitrary instructions. The system calls are convenient as having a predictable location near the kernel. So, unless you know that the strings you're passing to strcpy are of reasonable length, you're risking allowing a malicious user to take over control of your system.
Thus, you don't want to pass unchecked arrays into any system call you think might have a fixed buffer, which should be all of them that take arrays unless you know better.
Again, I'm mainly replying because no one else has, and I think it's sort of snotty that/. people have let an honest question go for two hours without answering it. My expertese probably includes at least one gap, and I'm sure someone will happily show me up.
I'd seen preliminary reports about this a couple years back in Time of all places, and more extensive stuff in a Pop. Mech. article even earlier. I suspect the PM article was just speculative, but the Time article purported to have some basis in fact. Especially interesting was Aliens-style video feeds from grunt helmets and rifles, better body-armor, HUDs in helmets etc. There was some speculation about FOF systems in the infantry weapon. The ideal would be solid state machines in a hard plastic coating, which would be very resiliant to damage, and predictably stable. The idea that they'd be using WinCE is ludicrous. I don't doubt it for a minute, granted. I worked as a coder for the Navy as an internship, and I know the sort of code they turn out. (We were folding 15 year old ForTran into new C routines. No one who could follow the math in the old routines was cleared to look at them.) Finally, it seems like the military brass are the ultimate PHBs. "Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter" - Yoda.
That's interesting, considering that Apple doesn't own those processor specs; the PowerPC chip design belongs to IBM--aside from the fact that Macs now contain them, what does Apple have to do with PPC? First of all, the ISA for PPC is open. It was originally developed by IBM, Motorola and Apple, IIRC. The design of the POWER chip is IBMs, but that's all the difference of Pentiums and Athalons: same ISA, different architecture. Furthermore, what the article (which relates almost everything in the previous paragraph) doesn't relate is that the current PPC chips in Apple machines are built by Motorola (mostly) as generational advances from their original addition to the IBM POWER architecture. But it isn't the CPU that's the issue. The instruction set is available to anybody. Otherwise you can't build a compiler. But the motherboard spec isn't available. And there's no writing drivers without that. And no OS, either. Apple is very much within their rights, and anyway, Motorola doesn't exactly have the biggest incentive to act outside of Apple's interests; they've been in bed together for some time now.
Absolutely so. Most of the time you want to detonate a nuclear warhead aboveground. The blast spreads better, fallout spreads farther, and more personnel damage gets inflicted. More non-combatants die horribly. In other words, for "soft" targets like civilian centers, (Hiroshima, for example) an air detonation is what you want, but the altitude is more like half a mile.
But, for more strategic nuking, like killing NORAD, White Mountain in Virginia, UN bunkers, the Politburo Defense Bunker, etc. you want to penetrate, and that takes impact and accuracy.
What can I say, I've got a morbid fascination with instruments of war.
Re:Why you should boycott this movie
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Battlefield Earth
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What sort of mind alterants are you on? Are totally ignorant of Scientology or are you just trolling?
Look, if it's the former, go read Clambake for an hour or two. You can call it a cult, a church, or whatever, but there's a lot to call evil in Scientology. From the relentless harvesting of the weak-willed to the Boat People segment, and raising of the children of Scientologists in creches away from their parents in substandard conditions.
Finally, even if Scientology were just any old alternative religion, the comparison to Nazi Germany is flawed in two aspects: first, Scientologist aren't born, they're inducted; Judaism was defined as a race, and as such inescapeable. Second, the action taken is to boycott the productions of a group perceived to have power, not to report on them secretly, etc.
Basically, you want to make the comparison to the Inquisition, since were we to compell action of Scientologists, it would be that they recant, and that their church be destroyed. This is also flawed, since we aren't disagreeing over questions of faith. The motivation would not be that the Scientologists are heretics, but that their actions as a group are not acceptable to us as a culture.
As far as a dev environment goes, this is the only cross platform one that I know of, and, frankly, the IDE is transparent enough that I don't have to think about using it. Integrated debugging, brace-balancing and enough indenting tools to keep a shaking stick busy for a while.
The PC and Mac versions will cross compile to one another; I don't know about the Linux one. However, the projects are compatible between platforms, so you can migrate code with remarkable ease.
It still surprises me that JonKatz can write two pages that sound like high flown and insightful rhetoric without actually saying anything of note.
For instance, here he claims that we've been living in a world beyond Microsoft for about a decade now because we will soon have a choice of several alternative OS's and MS doesn't have their fingers in several examples of terrible violations of parrallelism. Call me heretical, but last I checked Open Source isn't really analogous to artificial intelligence or nanotechnology. As interesting, but hardly a technology, or investable.
And, sure, I know it's fashionable to trash Katz, and for that reason alone I usually avoid his column's like Creme d' Trout that's gone off, but this particular item pushes so many of my buttons, I'm just not sure where to begin. A sampling of my issues here:
Katz comes off as being as willing to let his biases bow to factual information as Berst is. This is an ongoing issue, and I always feeling like I'm biting a troll when I reply to his articles. In this case, I see no real evidence that Microsoft's actions are going to be checked either because the software giant (their AP epithet) is sated, or because the fanatical Open Source movement writes fanatastic code. Legal action has been overdue.
It might be reasonable to suspect that the remedies will be ineffective, if the effect you're looking for is MSFT -> $0. But that's a short sighted and childish result to hope for. If the Microsoft Embrace (& Extend) the World policies can be prevented, then maybe a lot of the innovations that have withered on the vine now might flourish in the future. Because Jobs and Meretsky were right; software can change the world.
The notion that the Sherman Act is poorly applicable to Microsoft business practices is silly. While Katz's allusion to the old saw about Windows (a 32 bit shell... that can't stand 1 bit of compition) was appreciated, but in reality, I'm impressed how good a fit Anti-trust law is to the Microsoft behaviors. And if you aren't happy with the way your government represents you, your recourse is either in the polls or in uprising. Complaining about the legal system being out of date fails to impress, since it was intended, IIRC, to be the least reactive branch of the US government.
As far as Slashdot, its readership, and their peers goes, this news is as old as Katz says it is. But for 90% of the planet, Bill Gates is an innovator who made good. I remember listening to the Sun suit last year and hearing the testimony of small software firm presidents praising Microsoft and its business practice. Bill Gates didn't put a gun in their backs; he didn't have to. Most small software firms put their development effort to supporting Windows without thinking about it. Windows is the OS, as much as O2 is the air we breathe. Whether that's the result of just and ethical action or not isn't a concern. So, finally, the rest of the world gets to hear that Microsoft is not the Judge of all the Earth, and hasn't exactly been doing right. This is no small apple, I think.
Finally, for all of his righteous outrage at the injustice of Microsoft, the anti-establishment Seatle riots coverage, the Orwellian horror at the Columbine fallout, I have yet to hear Katz actually raise any serious issues. I mean, sure this is slashdot, but for all that Katz seems to uphold essential human rights, I've never read him blasting the WorldBank, or the Inter-American Development Bank, for instance. Yes, Microsoft is crushing essential human liberties to the pusuit of happiness and the freedom of information, but I sometimes wonder if Katz would have overlooked National Socialism's treatment of German Jews to blast General Electric for monopolizing electric power.
The upshot? I think there will be definite effects from a real remedy against Microsoft monopoly. We still hear about predation from Microsoft, and I can't imagine not hearing about it without drastic governental action. And that overreaching stain on every sigificant software technology is the hallmark of any "Microsoft Age" you want to talk about.
This isn't going to get a whole lot of "Insightful" points, because I'm pretty sure that no one is going to take what I say as particularly unique, but:
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, Windows is a decent operating system. I have to take issue with this assertion. My work has been primarily in.*n*x and Mac, and my experience with Windows has been when friends need help, oddball jobs at work, etc. and I've grown to hate Windows on two levels:
User interface. Okay, this is the standard one. All of the complaints of a GUI, in that it restricts your options, controls what you do, and generally treats you like a child, without the benefits of clarity, since it proceeds to hide frequent commands in obscure places, being (for similarly frequent tasks) in a contextual menu, the start bar, or a control panel, usually buried in tabs with names only a VMS programmer could love. It seems to me that it's a dark day in a GUI design's life when Mac users have the same complaints about your GUI that CLI hacks have about the Mac.
The other is the file system. What sort of idiot notion is it to not copy the invisible contents of a directory along with the directory itself? Based on screwy drive management that a> requires manufacurer software to maintain new drives and b> corrupts them faster than any other major OS I'm aware of.
So, process management is passable. (Although the phrase "process X is not responding" is less than encouraging). Driver handling is and (AFAICT) always will be atrocious, and I don't see how that's nitpicking: what use is your machine without perifrials?
So, of four basic purposes of an operating system, Windows is passable at one. (Note that I'm glossing security on the basis that a> it isn't essential to an OS and b> it doesn't help Windows' case). How is this a decent OS again?
As far as Office goes, Word works just fine. As a text editor. Once you ditch the paperclip.
Re:More money = better grade at the end?
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Laptop Exams?
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The parent of this post is underinformed. A number of universities are beginning programs in which students are given a laptop (out of their tuition) for their entire tenure or as a freshman and again as a junior. I suspect that the original author is a student at one of these institutions.
If this were not the case, I think the professor would be remiss in giving an exam on laptops, since he couldn't guarantee that everyone would have one, or that they would all be up to spec for his exam.
dEdT=h-bar - change in energy times change in time is less than or equal to h-bar (on the order of exp(10, -12)) But this doesn't respond accurately to the previous post concerning appearances being deceiving. While relativity does put an end to familiar concepts like simultaneaity (however that word is spelled), it doesn't let you get away with a violation of conservation of energy that is macroscopic, like several watts gone for seconds or minutes. Heisenburg uncertainty allows for electron volts gone for 10^-15 sec or so. (on the other hand, W-bosons are massive devils. But they only live for something like exp(10, -19) or so.)
If this story is news, and not just a bunch of legal malarky blown out of proportion, I'm beginning to confirm my opinion that Celera is my least favorite corporate species: those that intend to make money using litigation.
The HGI has been around for decades. It's common knowledge amongst anyone with half an ear for science news, (or who've played Civ II) and I can't believe that Celera's founders had never heard of it.
So, Celera is taking new technology and intends to finish the job faster. And probably cheaper. Which catechism insists rules out "better." But what they want to do is claim the arena. The Wired article describes Celera's attempt to collaborate with HGI in such a way that it would prevent the Genome's public release. And, I'm certain, their intention has been to manage this one way or another since their inception.
So, without actually doing anything new or useful, Celera intends to own the world market on the Human Genome for the life of their IP (rather than the estimated two year margin between their completion and the probably superior public release in 2003). And IP being what it is nowadays, that's likely to be much too long.
IMO, this is a key example of the Way Things Are failing We The People, and Us the Species. Between this and Palm Inc. expanding by 57.5 points on its first day (when 3Com is worth dirt in comparison, although they're the vast majority stockholder), I begin to wonder a> when the mainspring is going to snap and kill somebody and b> when and with what we can replace all this Victorian crap we have underpinning everything.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
I don't think I'm nitpicking if I point out that many universities make it nearly impossible to do this. If they don't forbid outside ISPs directly, many universities have residency requirements, and follow those with (in addition to the highest rent possible) the most stringent rules about the housing that you'll find, effectively preventing anything but dial-up access. One university I was associated with had a PBX set up in their dorms that was strange enough that it wouldn't talk to a normal phone, much less a modem.
They have reasons for these rules, and there are reasons for service restrictions, but the two together are fairly procrustean. Not that they're out of their rights to do so. But I think students always have the right to be outraged at the restrictions placed on them by administration. Part of the Student Experience tm.
What you are thinking of the intricate patterns being woven is probably a mis-quote, or someone told you wrong
Actually, the Jacquard Loom has been presented to me on a number of occasions as the first von Neumann machine. It fetched instructions from wooden cards, decoded them mechanically, and then performed operations on warp and weave. As far as actual implimentations of Turing machines go, von Neumanns are pretty much it.
The German V2 approached the edge of space,
The V2 reached the edge of orbit, but was never capable of putting anything in orbit. And as much as Werner von Braun was instrumental in the US spcae program, Cosmograd had Sputnik blipping along before we had anything in orbit.
Finally, every history I've read of DARPA and ARPAnet has related them initimately, usually suggesting that the military had been working on ARPANet for longer than they let on (big surprise) and that they'd asked the academics into it. Furthermore, part of ARPANet's mission was designed around having a headless communication network that would continue to transmit orders and intelligence around holes (like those created by nuclear strikes), which accounts for much of the research into modern packet switching. I suspect we may be at opposite sides of the elephant on this one, though.
As much as I love to hate the War Machine, I have to question the accuracy of your assertion. Can you document these, especially against these top-of-my-head alternatives:
Nitroglycerine: Military munitions. or construction demolitions, especially train tunnels.
Computers: Military codebreaking, artillery trajectory computation.I've always been taught that the earliest Von Neumann computer was desgined to weave intricate fabrics. And then there's the Pascal calculator.
Penicillin: Treating war wounds or any infection; this especially beg documentation
Space-capable rockets: Ballistic missiles. I always understood that the first Space-capable rocket put Sputnik in orbit, and that ICMBs follow much later.
Aircraft and Submarines I'll grant. The DC-9 was a military transport far before it became a passenger craft, and submarines were a military fantasy long before anyone cared about laying cable or exploring the ocean floor. However, consider:
Bioengineering, a Johnny-come-lately in warefare
Internal combustion, which was on America's throughways long before the High Command would give up cavalry charges.
Lasers, which have military targetting applications, end of list. Their scientific applications have been myriad since their inception.
Photography, including movies, which wasn't used in warfare until it'd been around for decades. (More if you count the Camera Obscura.)
A whole host of specialized developements without military application. MRI, radiation therapy, Silly Putty, lay-flat binding, espresso. Wide ranging, not all practical exactly, but certainly not military.
And then the tech that the military wanted but couldn't put to a good use. You're looking at one of them. Hardly profound, but DARPAnet was originally a military project.
This may be ill-considered, but it seems to me that data's value diminishes with time far faster than it's quality.
Sure, poems and photo's for the grandkids. That's a hundred years, tops, and migration, translation and CDR covers it, fairly easily. As far as showing pictures to people who will have only vaguely heard of me? Or preserving the IRS tax code for four thousand years? Somewhere I'm sure is codified the idea that data is useless without context. If not, there it is, Nyarly's First Thought on information theory. I'm sure it is though...
But me noodlings with fiction, my code, my photos and graphics won't be any more useful without the cultural context they were created for than an arbitrary collection of 16 bits without a description. Is that a Float or a Fixed? Is that English or Spanish?
And if a modern creator does produce something of Eternal Meaning, there's precedent for it's propigation by those it has meaning for. Think of the Bible, or the Collected Works of Shakespeare. These continue to exist not because they were recorded perfectly on a perfect medium, but because people found them worthwhile enough to continue them.
What good would a perfect storage method be, anyway? If people forget it, or if they cease to care, a record could be painted in Liquid Unobtainium on God's backside, and it would be just as lost as if someone had scratched it in sand. Or on the base of a bronze statue. "Look on my works, ye mighty..."
Paper rots, stone erodes, metal corrodes. The only eternal medium is word of mouth. Anything else is just a memory aid.
The hit to perform a simple symetric encryption should not be huge. And any decent server OS would even allow for concurrent key changes, so that no human being would every need to know the key.
The quality metric of an encryption algorythm is the ratio of times that conversion from plaintext to cyphertext and back takes with and without the key. Frankly, we aren't talking about anything really high tech as far as the encryption requirement goes. You even have the advantage of a small, uniform-length plaintext, of which much of the crack-useful data can be stripped. (For instance, you could use 2-3 bits for the type of CC header, instead the actual 3-4 digits usually used.)
Also no expert, but with a little experience, your search algorythms will give you more efficiency issues.
There is also another fact that could make things more hot between EU and the US: The European Parliament subscribed Echelon report, which will be released on 22nd this month. If the EP really gets pissed, it can block future trade deals between US and EU. In addition to that the on-going competition cases could get more backing..
In summarum: The US is not 100% immune of what the poor idiot Europeans are doing.
Unfortunately, the US is probably only 2% short of being bulletproof though. There's very little that the States have to import. Plenty that they like to, but as far as food, clothes, electronics, cars, construction materials, and other Stuff of Life goes, the US pretty much has it's bases covered (irony intentional). Very little of the hot commodities are European, either.
Not to say I endorse the "poor idiot European" stance of the US. They've turtled quite effectively, and made good use of ridiculously abundant natural wealth. But I wonder if a time will come when there's too much water to roll off the American duck's back. And whether the duck will drown or conquer.
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My original point with this was that
- putting the cache on chip isn't a great improvement (IMO) because you'd have to do nothing but cache hits to feel the advantage, and all cache hits on a L2 cache is a pretty good indicator that your compiler developers have no clue what they're doing, and that, perhaps, your underlying architecture is flawed.
- The only advantage to putting the cache on chip is that then you have to buy Intel's cache, on a hugely expensive chip, rather than being able to shop your cache RAM around. Sure, you might argue that I don't know what their L2 architecture looks like now, but I'd be surprised if it's really all that special.
- It's just more silicon to heat up. As if the Intel chip family didn't already have power efficiency problems, do they really need a larger radiating surface?
Incidentally, I am acquainted with modern processor design, from a student of architecture's point of view. Enough to know that a cache doesn't always solve memory access issues. In fact, poorly used (like Intel seems to be prone to do) a cache can make things worse.Personally, I gave up on Intel a long time ago.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
There are two trends though that give me cause to be hopeful. First is the way that the judicial system has been behaving: responsibly, with eye toward self-education before ruling. Which is really supposed to be how it is. Congress spews out a whole lot of detrius, the President vetos the worst of it, and the really sneaky stuff gets cleaned up in the courts. The result is that the US winds up with vaguely reasonable laws.
The second is that our culture as a whole is becoming more techical as various aspects of information technology become more widespread. As a result, representives in the US and elsewhere will have to speak to a more technical constituent and therefore be more knowledgable. Result: less idiotic detrius.
I'd be fascinated to see early automotive legislation, as a comparison.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
What is this, the Code of Hammarabi? No, I as an individual probably won't forgive anyone who cuts off my finger, unless they had a really good reason. Would you be satisfied if we cut off is finger? Or, granted that he's probably insane, maybe the finger-eater ought to be put down like a wild dog.
None of this is relavent. What you're describing is psychotic behavior, while Mitnick was merely criminal. Now, maybe you want to attack our legal and penile system, but that's a different tack.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
I personally believe that wireless is not only feasible, it's being delayed. I'm not sure why, or by whom, but the technology is there. Financially, everyone with the capitol is doing too well to be really pressured to alter things, but it seems to me that wires should be for power, period.
As far as cell modems being slow, there is a truth to that, but wireless ethernet isn't, and I don't really see any reason why it should be building by building; Lucent manufactures mile radius plus antennae for the stuff; I think there's a market for an ISP that sets up wireless ether and rents/sells WiFi cards to those without. I think there's a market for a WLL base that could be a one time purchase and would talk to your cell phone and put it on your local line. Combine that with a single-number service and you're in business.
I really do think that there's a whole realm of possibilities that a little real innovation and invention in the wireless device field might open up.
For instance, what about a device that set cell phones within it's range to vibrate or 'take a message' mode if available. Great for meeting rooms, and better for movie theatres. Granted, we aren't there yet, and the current billing schemes are insane (for instance, at the moment, I'll bet the service providers would charge you to have your phone silenced in the movies as well as charging the theatre), and there's room for abuse (some sort of authorization or some such to prevent people from buying a kill-box and shutting peoples phones down.) but consider the benifits of a technical society freed of wires and matured beyond the expectation that that means instant access to everyone.
Rambling summary: I certainly hope wireless can beat out wired. And I think it can.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Having incarcerated him, and eventually released him, US citizens are required, I think, to treat him as another citizen. Otherwise prison is just another spiteful vengence nations take on their criminals. If it isn't, then the US has to treat Mitnick as reformed, and to do anything else is less than honest or fair.
The only real justifying analogy I can think of is to treat Mitnick like a sex offender, as if cracking were a compulsion that no one could be sure Mitnick would be able to control. Compell him to announce his conviction record publicly. Except there isn't a more famous felon in the IT field.
Yes, Mitnick was a criminal. But a nation that brands him for the rest of his life that way, cannot make any claims to a legitimate justice system.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Um, actually, the MAC is what finally filters an Ethernet packets to a specific machine. IP numbers are a handy way to be able to identify machines and all, and they do mean that TCP/IP and UDP != Ethernet, but once you start talking to another ethernet card over a wire, you need to find out what it's MAC is to address the packets.
Granted, so long as the MAC is unique on the network, this isn't a problem. But spoofing as someone else you know is therefore a bad idea, since the behavior is undefined.
The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address.
But if the card has it's address hardwired, wrapping that information with the driver will misreport it's MAC in IP->MAC queries and suchlike, and the card will then proceed to ignore packets directed at it. Like putting a "Hi, my name is Joe" sticker on Fred and expecting him to listen to people who call for Joe. Silly.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
So now we have a non-issue reported as news after being rumored in a Be zine. For a while I've been a on Slashdot's side about "the editing sucks" type articles, but this is sort of the last straw. If you need to hire more editors, do it. If you need to extend Moderation to story selection, do it. But please, never again with the non-stories.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
The important concept is that of a buffer overflow, wherein an arbitrarily long argument runs over a fixed length buffer to overwrite code and execute arbitrary instructions. The system calls are convenient as having a predictable location near the kernel. So, unless you know that the strings you're passing to strcpy are of reasonable length, you're risking allowing a malicious user to take over control of your system.
Thus, you don't want to pass unchecked arrays into any system call you think might have a fixed buffer, which should be all of them that take arrays unless you know better.
Again, I'm mainly replying because no one else has, and I think it's sort of snotty that /. people have let an honest question go for two hours without answering it. My expertese probably includes at least one gap, and I'm sure someone will happily show me up.
I'd seen preliminary reports about this a couple years back in Time of all places, and more extensive stuff in a Pop. Mech. article even earlier. I suspect the PM article was just speculative, but the Time article purported to have some basis in fact. Especially interesting was Aliens-style video feeds from grunt helmets and rifles, better body-armor, HUDs in helmets etc. There was some speculation about FOF systems in the infantry weapon. The ideal would be solid state machines in a hard plastic coating, which would be very resiliant to damage, and predictably stable. The idea that they'd be using WinCE is ludicrous. I don't doubt it for a minute, granted. I worked as a coder for the Navy as an internship, and I know the sort of code they turn out. (We were folding 15 year old ForTran into new C routines. No one who could follow the math in the old routines was cleared to look at them.) Finally, it seems like the military brass are the ultimate PHBs. "Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter" - Yoda.
That's interesting, considering that Apple doesn't own those processor specs; the PowerPC chip design belongs to IBM--aside from the fact that Macs now contain them, what does Apple have to do with PPC? First of all, the ISA for PPC is open. It was originally developed by IBM, Motorola and Apple, IIRC. The design of the POWER chip is IBMs, but that's all the difference of Pentiums and Athalons: same ISA, different architecture. Furthermore, what the article (which relates almost everything in the previous paragraph) doesn't relate is that the current PPC chips in Apple machines are built by Motorola (mostly) as generational advances from their original addition to the IBM POWER architecture. But it isn't the CPU that's the issue. The instruction set is available to anybody. Otherwise you can't build a compiler. But the motherboard spec isn't available. And there's no writing drivers without that. And no OS, either. Apple is very much within their rights, and anyway, Motorola doesn't exactly have the biggest incentive to act outside of Apple's interests; they've been in bed together for some time now.
But, for more strategic nuking, like killing NORAD, White Mountain in Virginia, UN bunkers, the Politburo Defense Bunker, etc. you want to penetrate, and that takes impact and accuracy.
What can I say, I've got a morbid fascination with instruments of war.
Look, if it's the former, go read Clambake for an hour or two. You can call it a cult, a church, or whatever, but there's a lot to call evil in Scientology. From the relentless harvesting of the weak-willed to the Boat People segment, and raising of the children of Scientologists in creches away from their parents in substandard conditions.
Finally, even if Scientology were just any old alternative religion, the comparison to Nazi Germany is flawed in two aspects: first, Scientologist aren't born, they're inducted; Judaism was defined as a race, and as such inescapeable. Second, the action taken is to boycott the productions of a group perceived to have power, not to report on them secretly, etc.
Basically, you want to make the comparison to the Inquisition, since were we to compell action of Scientologists, it would be that they recant, and that their church be destroyed. This is also flawed, since we aren't disagreeing over questions of faith. The motivation would not be that the Scientologists are heretics, but that their actions as a group are not acceptable to us as a culture.
The PC and Mac versions will cross compile to one another; I don't know about the Linux one. However, the projects are compatible between platforms, so you can migrate code with remarkable ease.
For instance, here he claims that we've been living in a world beyond Microsoft for about a decade now because we will soon have a choice of several alternative OS's and MS doesn't have their fingers in several examples of terrible violations of parrallelism. Call me heretical, but last I checked Open Source isn't really analogous to artificial intelligence or nanotechnology. As interesting, but hardly a technology, or investable.
And, sure, I know it's fashionable to trash Katz, and for that reason alone I usually avoid his column's like Creme d' Trout that's gone off, but this particular item pushes so many of my buttons, I'm just not sure where to begin. A sampling of my issues here:
Finally, for all of his righteous outrage at the injustice of Microsoft, the anti-establishment Seatle riots coverage, the Orwellian horror at the Columbine fallout, I have yet to hear Katz actually raise any serious issues. I mean, sure this is slashdot, but for all that Katz seems to uphold essential human rights, I've never read him blasting the WorldBank, or the Inter-American Development Bank, for instance. Yes, Microsoft is crushing essential human liberties to the pusuit of happiness and the freedom of information, but I sometimes wonder if Katz would have overlooked National Socialism's treatment of German Jews to blast General Electric for monopolizing electric power.
The upshot? I think there will be definite effects from a real remedy against Microsoft monopoly. We still hear about predation from Microsoft, and I can't imagine not hearing about it without drastic governental action. And that overreaching stain on every sigificant software technology is the hallmark of any "Microsoft Age" you want to talk about.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, Windows is a decent operating system. I have to take issue with this assertion. My work has been primarily in .*n*x and Mac, and my experience with Windows has been when friends need help, oddball jobs at work, etc. and I've grown to hate Windows on two levels:
User interface. Okay, this is the standard one. All of the complaints of a GUI, in that it restricts your options, controls what you do, and generally treats you like a child, without the benefits of clarity, since it proceeds to hide frequent commands in obscure places, being (for similarly frequent tasks) in a contextual menu, the start bar, or a control panel, usually buried in tabs with names only a VMS programmer could love. It seems to me that it's a dark day in a GUI design's life when Mac users have the same complaints about your GUI that CLI hacks have about the Mac.
The other is the file system. What sort of idiot notion is it to not copy the invisible contents of a directory along with the directory itself? Based on screwy drive management that a> requires manufacurer software to maintain new drives and b> corrupts them faster than any other major OS I'm aware of.
So, process management is passable. (Although the phrase "process X is not responding" is less than encouraging). Driver handling is and (AFAICT) always will be atrocious, and I don't see how that's nitpicking: what use is your machine without perifrials?
So, of four basic purposes of an operating system, Windows is passable at one. (Note that I'm glossing security on the basis that a> it isn't essential to an OS and b> it doesn't help Windows' case). How is this a decent OS again?
As far as Office goes, Word works just fine. As a text editor. Once you ditch the paperclip.
If this were not the case, I think the professor would be remiss in giving an exam on laptops, since he couldn't guarantee that everyone would have one, or that they would all be up to spec for his exam.
dEdT=h-bar - change in energy times change in time is less than or equal to h-bar (on the order of exp(10, -12)) But this doesn't respond accurately to the previous post concerning appearances being deceiving. While relativity does put an end to familiar concepts like simultaneaity (however that word is spelled), it doesn't let you get away with a violation of conservation of energy that is macroscopic, like several watts gone for seconds or minutes. Heisenburg uncertainty allows for electron volts gone for 10^-15 sec or so. (on the other hand, W-bosons are massive devils. But they only live for something like exp(10, -19) or so.)
The HGI has been around for decades. It's common knowledge amongst anyone with half an ear for science news, (or who've played Civ II) and I can't believe that Celera's founders had never heard of it.
So, Celera is taking new technology and intends to finish the job faster. And probably cheaper. Which catechism insists rules out "better." But what they want to do is claim the arena. The Wired article describes Celera's attempt to collaborate with HGI in such a way that it would prevent the Genome's public release. And, I'm certain, their intention has been to manage this one way or another since their inception.
So, without actually doing anything new or useful, Celera intends to own the world market on the Human Genome for the life of their IP (rather than the estimated two year margin between their completion and the probably superior public release in 2003). And IP being what it is nowadays, that's likely to be much too long.
IMO, this is a key example of the Way Things Are failing We The People, and Us the Species. Between this and Palm Inc. expanding by 57.5 points on its first day (when 3Com is worth dirt in comparison, although they're the vast majority stockholder), I begin to wonder a> when the mainspring is going to snap and kill somebody and b> when and with what we can replace all this Victorian crap we have underpinning everything.
I don't think I'm nitpicking if I point out that many universities make it nearly impossible to do this. If they don't forbid outside ISPs directly, many universities have residency requirements, and follow those with (in addition to the highest rent possible) the most stringent rules about the housing that you'll find, effectively preventing anything but dial-up access. One university I was associated with had a PBX set up in their dorms that was strange enough that it wouldn't talk to a normal phone, much less a modem.
They have reasons for these rules, and there are reasons for service restrictions, but the two together are fairly procrustean. Not that they're out of their rights to do so. But I think students always have the right to be outraged at the restrictions placed on them by administration. Part of the Student Experience tm.
Actually, the Jacquard Loom has been presented to me on a number of occasions as the first von Neumann machine. It fetched instructions from wooden cards, decoded them mechanically, and then performed operations on warp and weave. As far as actual implimentations of Turing machines go, von Neumanns are pretty much it.
The German V2 approached the edge of space,
The V2 reached the edge of orbit, but was never capable of putting anything in orbit. And as much as Werner von Braun was instrumental in the US spcae program, Cosmograd had Sputnik blipping along before we had anything in orbit.
Finally, every history I've read of DARPA and ARPAnet has related them initimately, usually suggesting that the military had been working on ARPANet for longer than they let on (big surprise) and that they'd asked the academics into it. Furthermore, part of ARPANet's mission was designed around having a headless communication network that would continue to transmit orders and intelligence around holes (like those created by nuclear strikes), which accounts for much of the research into modern packet switching. I suspect we may be at opposite sides of the elephant on this one, though.
As much as I love to hate the War Machine, I have to question the accuracy of your assertion. Can you document these, especially against these top-of-my-head alternatives:
Aircraft and Submarines I'll grant. The DC-9 was a military transport far before it became a passenger craft, and submarines were a military fantasy long before anyone cared about laying cable or exploring the ocean floor. However, consider:
Sure, poems and photo's for the grandkids. That's a hundred years, tops, and migration, translation and CDR covers it, fairly easily. As far as showing pictures to people who will have only vaguely heard of me? Or preserving the IRS tax code for four thousand years? Somewhere I'm sure is codified the idea that data is useless without context. If not, there it is, Nyarly's First Thought on information theory. I'm sure it is though...
But me noodlings with fiction, my code, my photos and graphics won't be any more useful without the cultural context they were created for than an arbitrary collection of 16 bits without a description. Is that a Float or a Fixed? Is that English or Spanish?
And if a modern creator does produce something of Eternal Meaning, there's precedent for it's propigation by those it has meaning for. Think of the Bible, or the Collected Works of Shakespeare. These continue to exist not because they were recorded perfectly on a perfect medium, but because people found them worthwhile enough to continue them.
What good would a perfect storage method be, anyway? If people forget it, or if they cease to care, a record could be painted in Liquid Unobtainium on God's backside, and it would be just as lost as if someone had scratched it in sand. Or on the base of a bronze statue. "Look on my works, ye mighty..."
Paper rots, stone erodes, metal corrodes. The only eternal medium is word of mouth. Anything else is just a memory aid.
The quality metric of an encryption algorythm is the ratio of times that conversion from plaintext to cyphertext and back takes with and without the key. Frankly, we aren't talking about anything really high tech as far as the encryption requirement goes. You even have the advantage of a small, uniform-length plaintext, of which much of the crack-useful data can be stripped. (For instance, you could use 2-3 bits for the type of CC header, instead the actual 3-4 digits usually used.)
Also no expert, but with a little experience, your search algorythms will give you more efficiency issues.
In summarum: The US is not 100% immune of what the poor idiot Europeans are doing.
Unfortunately, the US is probably only 2% short of being bulletproof though. There's very little that the States have to import. Plenty that they like to, but as far as food, clothes, electronics, cars, construction materials, and other Stuff of Life goes, the US pretty much has it's bases covered (irony intentional). Very little of the hot commodities are European, either.
Not to say I endorse the "poor idiot European" stance of the US. They've turtled quite effectively, and made good use of ridiculously abundant natural wealth. But I wonder if a time will come when there's too much water to roll off the American duck's back. And whether the duck will drown or conquer.
Hrm.