he's in the company of a lot of the most renowned physicists, and anyone who gets curious won't have a hard time finding truthful information about him.
Won't they? Really? I think not. You have to look pretty damn hard to find any reference of him--and who's going to be curious enough to look up someone they don't know exists? Did you ever go look up the name Pound in an encyclopedia to try and find the inventor of the pound? Speculate perhaps about the possible scientific career of Ezra Pound? No, of course not.
Wrong. I suppose most people have considerably less curiosity than I have, but I recently did look up "Watt", and it never crossed my mind to assume that it was not named after an inventor or physicist.
As for "having to look damn hard", Just type in "tesla" at Yahoo. He even has his own category there...
The token unit of measurement offered in Tesla's name is meaningless.
And who put you in charge of deciding what is meaningful and what isn't, Mr. Coward? Fact is, with the SI unit, Tesla's name is practically guaranteed to be remembered; he's in the company of a lot of the most renowned physicists, and anyone who gets curious won't have a hard time finding truthful information about him.
Edison and Marconi, on the other hand, do not have a unit named after them.
and get a fucking CLUE.
And I suggest that you get yourself some manners, Mr. Coward...
How much more "credited" can a physicist get than by having an SI unit named after him? Or do you Americans have your own units even for magnetic flux density?
Do you honestly believe that the military is staffed with golems which only strive to perform whatever task is set forth by commanders?
Think about that for a second. What you are basically positing here is that whenever you join the military you give up whatever identity you have.
Well, at least that's what the military leaders would like to have.
What it all boils down to is that the military is a job.
A job that consists mainly of training to kill people. Just swell.
Nothing more, nothing less. Having been in the Marines for 11 years I can honestly say that I never met any Marine who's sole goal was to kill defenseless women and children. I can also say that nearly all of the Marines I have ever known were moral and honorable people.
Guess what? I even believe you. It's possible and easy to be a nice, caring guy with morales and honors and be a soldier - if your chances of getting into a real combat situation are close to zero. The situation changes rather drastically when your life really is threatened. Then it will show how much your morales are really worth.
In a real war situation, you inevitable get something like My Lai - your "moral and honorable people" suddenly do kill defenseless women and children.
And this danger is infinitely magnified by technology, because now, you suddenly just have to push a little red button to condemn a million people to death, slow and gruesome for most of them. And all it takes for you is just a little vlountary shortsightedness.
Nobody will switch OS just so they can watch certain video clips.
Actually, that's exactly what I do. Whenever I want to watch any sort of video, I really can't do anything but switch to Windows. Of course, I switch back right after, but let's face it: the existing Video players for Linux suck.
This will not result in a performance increase. It has been shown that in general, you get better performance with simple chips and complicated compilers than with chips that try to include high-level concepts; It's this idea that stands behind the RISC concept, and *all* major CPU architectures are RISC (though some, like the x86 ones, disguise as CISC).
The point is: the guy didn't do anything illegal. He just created a program which could be used for something illegal. If he's arrested for copyright violation, then all manufacturers of any kind of weapons should be arrested for murder.
IMHO, it's a mistake to rely on a "proven solution" in preference to looking ahead.
With crptographic algorithms, older is better, because with an old algorithm, more people have had more time to find holes in it, and if they haven't then that means that the probability of someone finding a hole in the future is lower.
If anyone cracks the primes problem, RSA is dead in the water. Instantly. No matter how "robust" it's been.
There are many more ways in which one specific crypto algorithm can have weaknesses.
And if someone actually found a fast way to factorize large numbers, then not only is RSA "dead in the water" but also pretty much every single other widely-used crypto algorithm.
Can you realistically say that most advertising exists to inform consumers of a products' existence? I don't think so.
Oh, but they do. Even perfectly sane and intelligent people who are totally convinced that they don't let themselves be influenced by ads are much more inclined to buy something if they've heard about it before, and prefer it to the unknown brand. Amn is a creature of habit.
What I meant is that the operating system is no help at all in making a single program scale to 100 processors. Having 100 different processes run on 100 processors is still tricky but no fundamental problem.
A troll's aim is to get responses. Which he can't achieve when no-one reads his stuff because it's moderated down. Therefore, being a troll on/. is anything but easy...
No operating system simply "scales to 100 processors". All supercomputers can only be really used to their full potential by extraordinarily specialized tasks. Though the real supercomputers are usually a bit better in that regard because they allow faster communication between nodes.
Actually, many of the most powerful supercomputers are nothing but an array of x86 chips. IIRC, the currently leading supercomputer, the Intel-Sandia ASCI Option Red, uses Pentium-II CPUs
Actually no. I tried to do somthing that would qualify as hacking exactly once, and it didn't work. However, I'm a computer science student trying to specialize on networking. I hear lectures with titles like "secure computer systems"...
In general, to be a good hacker, you need knowledge (about the system you're trying to break in), not computation power.
Bullshit, pretty much. There is nothing in the way of hacking that you can do better with a "supercomputer" than with a cheap dime-a-dozen PC, except for password cracking, and thats not nearly as big a problems as you think.
Besides, any computer like this one cant even be USED properly by standard software because of the massive parallelization involved. Basically, you have to custom-write your program from scratch to really make use of the hardware; so speaking of Qake framerates in this context is just plain ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really like to see that discount store....
Won't they? Really? I think not. You have to look pretty damn hard to find any reference of him--and who's going to be curious enough to look up someone they don't know exists? Did you ever go look up the name Pound in an encyclopedia to try and find the inventor of the pound? Speculate perhaps about the possible scientific career of Ezra Pound? No, of course not.
Wrong. I suppose most people have considerably less curiosity than I have, but I recently did look up "Watt", and it never crossed my mind to assume that it was not named after an inventor or physicist.
As for "having to look damn hard", Just type in "tesla" at Yahoo. He even has his own category there...
And who put you in charge of deciding what is meaningful and what isn't, Mr. Coward? Fact is, with the SI unit, Tesla's name is practically guaranteed to be remembered; he's in the company of a lot of the most renowned physicists, and anyone who gets curious won't have a hard time finding truthful information about him.
Edison and Marconi, on the other hand, do not have a unit named after them.
and get a fucking CLUE.
And I suggest that you get yourself some manners, Mr. Coward...
How much more "credited" can a physicist get than by having an SI unit named after him? Or do you Americans have your own units even for magnetic flux density?
Umm... Slashdot?
Nitpick: "Khan" is not a name, it's a title.
Think about that for a second. What you are basically positing here is that whenever you join the military you give up whatever identity you have.
Well, at least that's what the military leaders would like to have.
What it all boils down to is that the military is a job.
A job that consists mainly of training to kill people. Just swell.
Nothing more, nothing less. Having been in the Marines for 11 years I can honestly say that I never met any Marine who's sole goal was to kill defenseless women and children. I can also say that nearly all of the Marines I have ever known were moral and honorable people.
Guess what? I even believe you. It's possible and easy to be a nice, caring guy with morales and honors and be a soldier - if your chances of getting into a real combat situation are close to zero. The situation changes rather drastically when your life really is threatened. Then it will show how much your morales are really worth.
In a real war situation, you inevitable get something like My Lai - your "moral and honorable people" suddenly do kill defenseless women and children.
And this danger is infinitely magnified by technology, because now, you suddenly just have to push a little red button to condemn a million people to death, slow and gruesome for most of them. And all it takes for you is just a little vlountary shortsightedness.
Actually, that's exactly what I do. Whenever I want to watch any sort of video, I really can't do anything but switch to Windows. Of course, I switch back right after, but let's face it: the existing Video players for Linux suck.
Little nitpick: the is no Nobel prize in math...
Same problem here; I really wish Linux programmers weren't quite as keen about always using the newest libraries.
This will not result in a performance increase. It has been shown that in general, you get better performance with simple chips and complicated compilers than with chips that try to include high-level concepts; It's this idea that stands behind the RISC concept, and *all* major CPU architectures are RISC (though some, like the x86 ones, disguise as CISC).
Or, more generally: semiconductor technology.
Of course bullshit laws have a long and honorable tradition...
The point is: the guy didn't do anything illegal. He just created a program which could be used for something illegal. If he's arrested for copyright violation, then all manufacturers of any kind of weapons should be arrested for murder.
With crptographic algorithms, older is better, because with an old algorithm, more people have had more time to find holes in it, and if they haven't then that means that the probability of someone finding a hole in the future is lower.
If anyone cracks the primes problem, RSA is dead in the water. Instantly. No matter how "robust" it's been.
There are many more ways in which one specific crypto algorithm can have weaknesses.
And if someone actually found a fast way to factorize large numbers, then not only is RSA "dead in the water" but also pretty much every single other widely-used crypto algorithm.
Oh, but they do. Even perfectly sane and intelligent people who are totally convinced that they don't let themselves be influenced by ads are much more inclined to buy something if they've heard about it before, and prefer it to the unknown brand. Amn is a creature of habit.
Great, and then it'd only take you 20 Billion years to crack a 2048-bit RSA message instead of 100 Trillion...
What I meant is that the operating system is no help at all in making a single program scale to 100 processors. Having 100 different processes run on 100 processors is still tricky but no fundamental problem.
Someone who deliberately tries to provoke people into a flamewar.
A troll's aim is to get responses. Which he can't achieve when no-one reads his stuff because it's moderated down. Therefore, being a troll on /. is anything but easy...
No operating system simply "scales to 100 processors". All supercomputers can only be really used to their full potential by extraordinarily specialized tasks. Though the real supercomputers are usually a bit better in that regard because they allow faster communication between nodes.
The list is at http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/top500. html
Actually, many of the most powerful supercomputers are nothing but an array of x86 chips. IIRC, the currently leading supercomputer, the Intel-Sandia ASCI Option Red, uses Pentium-II CPUs
In general, to be a good hacker, you need knowledge (about the system you're trying to break in), not computation power.
Besides, any computer like this one cant even be USED properly by standard software because of the massive parallelization involved. Basically, you have to custom-write your program from scratch to really make use of the hardware; so speaking of Qake framerates in this context is just plain ridiculous.