However at some point the Open Source marketplace will become oversaturated with projects. It will become more difficult to attract large amounts of attention to less popular projects.
Like when? A few years ago? Almost every project has more to do than people to do it...
OS development will get sloooow in many areas because there aren'y enough OS coders. But, due to its nature it will probably still turn out good products, just not in good time.
Well, this assumes that no money flows into the system to pay people to work on the parts that are needed to get done. No reason, in an opensource model, GM (or any other end-user) can't hire someone to improve the SCSI subsystem, for example, because they need faster SCSI. No reason IBM and SGI can't spend money paying people to make it run better on their hardware so they can sell more computers.
So closed source development may be able to be more efficient in terms of development time.
Almost by definition false. How is it more efficient in development time to have to re-write something someone else wrote that you need, because you don't have the source?
Also, CS can have better security due to obscurity. More security holes were found in Linux than NT in the same period. I'm willing to bet than NT has more holes total though. That means obscurity drastically reduced the numbers of holes that were found in NT. Obscurity is not the end all of security but it is a very useful extra layer that solves many simply problems.
NO! NO NO NO! WRONG!!!! Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
It is undeniable that Microsoft has had a positive effect on Computing. It is thru almost their exclusive effort that every serious business puts a PC on almost every desk.
Ummm... no?
I am perfectly willing (and, IMNSHO, able) to deny it.
MS got into business right around the beginning of the PC revolution, you had the Apple II, the TI 99, the Timex Sinclair, the various CP/M machines that predated them. Obviously, the time of the personal computer had come. What's been driving it since then? Moore's law... Computers (since before MS) have been doubling in speed every 18 months (or faster). As the power of the computer you can buy for a fixed price increases, the more people it's useful to at that price, and the more that will buy one. If Microsoft had flagged when the Mac came out, would we still have easy-to-use PC's on everyone's desk? What evidence do you have to the contrary?
What "innovations" (to steal a word) did Microsoft come up with that made "every serious business puts a PC on almost every desk"? Specifically, what did Microsoft do to bring this about, that was not independently developed elsewhere?
I will admit they've done a number of good things, but I can't think of anything so revolutionary that nobody else could have done it.
Certainly, the whole "ease of use" thing wasn't theirs, it's an Apple (Xerox) thing. Selling the OS separately from the hardware was a good idea, but IBM's (with some err... helpful suggestions from the.... wait for it... government). Some of their apps were pretty nice, but I can't see how this could have brought about the PC revolution exclusively...
Sorry, but this argument simply does not hold water.
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Professor Edsger Dijkstra at the ACN South Central Regional Conference Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 Novemver 1984/blockquote
Oh, for the love of god, what interpreted language these days *doesn't* do this? (Well, some have separate compilation steps, those that don't probably do something similar (ok,/bin/sh probably doesn't)) I wrote an inerpreter my somphore year in college that did that.
However, the internal form is still not the same as the machine's internal form, so you always lose some performance.
And what is "fast enough" anyway? You going to claim I can use perl for my week-long 1+GB computational chemistry runs? Sorry, but no way.
Fast enough to handle CGI scripts? sure, but so is/bin/sh (small ones, big ones I'll admit repeated invocations of awk might be.... unwise)
ahem sorry for the ranting, but this is out of hand.
So I was right, and you swapped dBm and dBi in your post... All I was checking.
Though if for each dBm of transmitter power, you can gain 6dbi of antenna gain, you could use a 1 milliwatt signal (0 dBm) and a 186dBi antenna, and get (for a really narrow beamwidth) an EIRP of 186 dBm which would be the equivalent of a 4 terawatt isotropic signal. 'course the existance of noise might make this imptactical:)
Ummm... I'm not a professional, but last time I checked, dBm was decibels relative to milliwatt, and dBi was decibels relative to isotropic antenna, so don't you mean: This EIRP number is calculated as a maximum of 30dBm with up to 6dBi of gain at this power. The nice catch is that for every dBm of power you subtract, you can add 6dBi of gain!! This power output can actually be equivalent to about 4W of legal power depending on your antenna gain... as long as your dBm output is less than 30dBm.
Which makes lots more sense to me, as 30dBm is 1 watt (3 powers of ten relative to a milliwatt) which strikes me as a pretty reasonable limit for a low-power antenna....
Well, he did say "OS" that crashes. X is a user-level application too.
Not that netscape doesn't suck. (though very rarely does it crash X on me).
Re:I know im going to be flamed out of my mind but
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Microsoft brought the computer to the masses, enhancing productivity and the usability of PCs
by copying the Macintosh user interface?
They actualy made it so EASY to use that even my 6 year old sister figured out how to use Win95 in a few hours. I doubt anyone can say that they prefer any pre-MS computers to a PC with Windows on it..
Like the macintosh? Not to say that I think the Mac is the be-all and end-all of UI design, but basically, win 3.1 was an attempt to be as mac-like as possible. surely if there were no MS, someone else would have stepped in to make a non-mac easy-to-use computer. It wasn't any terrific insight on microsoft's part, computing hardware had advanced to the point it was cheap enough you could run a nice GUI on a computer cheap enough sell to mass-market consumers.
About this browser thing.. imagine you were totally clueless about computers, and just booted to your OS. The first thing many in this age would want to do is hop on the Web.. but oh no! theres no browser! How many of your parents know enough about computers to configure a dialup and then FTP to get a working browser? Integrating IE to Windows is FAR from "abuse of their monopoly powers," just a way to help people out: TO HELP THE CONSUMER.
Now explain:
how the exclusionary contracts that prevented OEM's from shipping a MS OS with a netscape browser were to help the consumer
how you can surf the web without configuring a dialup. This is separate from the browser, if it's easy to do for the web, is easy to do for ftp:)
why, mysteriously, right after MS was told in court that it couldn't contractually tie the products to the OS, but could incorporate them into the OS for technical reasons, right then, they found technical reasons to incorporate IE into the OS.
why having the browser integrated into the OS rather than provided with the OS makes this easier. (the difference between the two being, of course, that if a browser is provided with the OS then OEM's can substitute another better, or possibly cheaper, or whatever browser).
Re:Why all the cheering for a break up?
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Basically what I'm saying here is that if MS were forced to document their APIs, file formats, and network protocols (completely and without omission), the playing field is even.
Where most of us, I think, have a problem with this is that "completely" bit... We don't trust MS to be complete, and it's much easier to catch OS/App collusion if they're separate companies. Otherwise the app people can:
learn about "new" OS "features" before the competition
make up the wish list for "new" OS "features"
"integrate" apps into the OS when there's a threat when they're sold separately
ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECLARED, that Microsoft has violated 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2,
and:
FURTHER ORDERED, that the Court shall, in accordance with the Conclusions of Law filed herein, enter an Order with respect to appropriate relief, including an award of costs and fees, following proceedings to be established by further Order of the Court.
but NOTHING should be done solely for punishment-- anything done should be done _only_ to effect change, in order to stop microsoft.
Personally, not sure I agree here. I'm inclined to say that if you break the law, that there should be some kind of disincentive built into the system, besides just making sure you just don't do it again. Breaking the law and getting caught should be worse than not breaking it in the first place, otherwise there's no reason not to break it, and hope you don't get caught.
Now admittedly, the line for antitrust is a little fuzzy, and we don't want to be lopping heads off for the slightest infractions, but is it a bad thing if firms are encouraged to err on the side of legality?
Likewise, people need software. Especially Microsoft software, since it's familiar to most people and it breaks everything else. Putting MS out of business would destroy the economy. So opening the source code is a no-no.
Just explain one thing, if the source code were wide open (think GPL or BSD license), and anyone who wanted could make "MS" software, how would putting MS out of business (assuming it did) cause there to be no more "MS" software?
Maybe MS couldn't turn a profit anymore, but you think compaq, dell, and/or IBM wouldn't pick up the pieces and just give away office/windows with every PC just to make them sell?
People need (MS) software. Opening the source code makes it easier for more people to provide it. How's this going to make the software less available?
Ok, suppose you and I both own and operate lemonade stands on the same street. We're both selling lemonade for $0.10 a glass. If I suddenly raise my price to $1.00, most, if not all, customers are going to just buy their lemonade from you. (We assume the lemonade's basically the same, the prestige of buying from either of us is the same too:) Since instead of getting the business of half the customers that walk down the streat, I'm getting less than 1 in 20, I'm making less money overall, because of decreased volume.
Now if I get my big brother to drag you off the street, I have a monopoly on lemonade! Now, anyone who wants to buy lemonade has to buy it from me, and instead of getting 50 customers at $0.10 a glass (with you getting the other 50), I get, maybe 15 at $1.00 a glass, (and the other 85 going thirsty) Whee! I make more money!.
Since it's possible for a company to do damage even when it has some competitors, the legal test for determining if something's a monopoly is to turn this around. If the firm just plain doesn't care what anyone else is charging, because it controls the market, it's a monopoly.
For example if I owned the lemonade concession on every street in the city but yours, I could probably still get away with selling lemonade at $1.00 a glass, because you can't handle the volume for the entire city, and people aren't going to cross town just to save money on lemonade. Since I could raise my price like that, I'd legally, have monoply power
Microsoft was found to be able to set the price of windows independent of what any "competing" products were priced at, and thus to be a monopoly.
No, they wouldn't. Because if they did, we would go to Wendys or Burger King or any one of a million other restaurants. Even though McDonalds is, by far, the largest restaurant chain.
Many less network effects in fast food. It's not like you can only put a McD French Fry in your McD stomach.
That's not what the Justice Department wants. It's no secret that they want some authority over what Microsoft adds to their next generation operating system. That is fact.
Yes, they want to prevent MS from illegally tying products by incorporating features in their OS just in order to drive competetors out of the marketplace. That degree of control, yes, they want. Is there something beyond that that you have evidence they have an agenda for?
And do you have any evidence that they want to mandate including features in the OS? After all, Judge Jackson found, in agreement with the DOJ, that MS caused harm to the consumer by depriving the consumer of the choice of not buying a browser. Yes, they wanted MS to provide netscape, but only if they were going to ship the OS with their browser. I can't see any evidence that a browserless OS would have upset the DOJ at all....
Linux may well be fragmented. It's only a matter of time until the kernel is forked. Then what? Sure, now we can say "No real Linux user would switch to the forked kernel." But what if the forked kernel was good? I mean Real good. You'd switch if there was something in it for you. A faster server or some such.
Offtopic, but if the forked kernel were Real Good (tm), Linus would incorporate the changes back into the main fork. It's GPL'ed, he could do that...
An OS without a browser out of the box is useless to almost everyone.... Nobody would be helped by removing the browser, and don't kid yourselves - nobody would switch to Linux just because it comes with a browser and Windows doesn't.
Pick one, either the OS is useless, and consumers, being not, on the whole, drooling zombies, would switch to one that isn't, OR nobody would switch to Linux (unless you're arguing they'd go Be, or Mac or something, which is at least arguable). Or consumers are drooling zombies, in which case we need the government regulating pickle widths 'cause they're too stupid to go to wendys.
Granted, I haven't read any of the court briefs or paid attention to much of the news regarding this case. If I have any facts wrong please don't hesitate to slap me with a trout and correct me.
slap
Microsoft does NOT have a frigging monopoly people. Get that through your heads. At any time people can install Linux, FreeBSD, Be or buy a Macintosh.
A total inavalability of alteritives is not required in order for a business to legally have monopoly power. All that is required is that they have enough control over the market that they can raise prices over what a competitive firm would offer, and not lose revenue through sales lost to the competition. The judge found that this was the case for Microsoft.
Also, the judge defined the market as "operating systems for intel compatible computers", which kind of rules out Macintosh. The other options sure aren't big in terms of market share... You might argue that this definition of the market is too narrow, but it falls back on the "can they raise prices and not lose income" definition, and the barrier to companies/individuals switching platforms is sufficiently high, that microsoft could charger a higher than competetive price.
Look back at previous monopolies of this size: the oil industry (there was a true monopoly, only one company controlled oil production and distribution), the phone industry (AT&T was the local and long distance carrier, period).
Actually, the AT&T case was brought because Sprint and MCI (non AT&T long distance carriers) complained about AT&T illegally tying it's monopoly position in local phone service to it's long distance service, and they wanted access...
The illegal tying Microsoft is accused of is actually very similar to that. As well as to the IBM antitrust case...
Do they really think breaking up the companies will stop Bill Gates from controlling them? Heh, for those of you who think yes you're naive.
a) he might be forced to divest from one of the companies (not sure) b) breaking MS up into multiple companies makes catching illegal behavior easier, as it involves collusion beteween two separate legal entities, each with their own offices, chain of command, etc... c) Bill Gates isn't the only stockholder, and the stockholders of the "internet applications" company gave away it's product below cost to keep the separate "operating systems" company's control of the OS market up...
Ok, I basically do QM for a living, so I'll try and address your points:
Well, they are, inasmuch as anything else is. A body in motion will tend to stay in motion. Other than that, they aren't perpetual motion machines, in the sense that you cannot get energy out of them indefinately, sooner or later they drop into their lowest energy state, and you can't get any enegy out of them (even if theydo still have a non-vanishing momentum)
Not sure I see the diffrence. Every two particles with mass experiences an attractive force between them proportional to the product of the masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The force is towards the other particle, (this is easily demonstrated) so I'd guess you'd call it a "pull".
This isn't a QM question, it's a relativity question (so is the last one, I guess), but I'll give it a shot anyway. It is the speed of light (in vaccum) that's constant. Multiple experiments have demonstrated this. A consequence of the effects that make the speed of light constant is that nothing can travel faster than light (also well demonstrated).
This makes very little sense to me. Electrons are (mostly) conserved. (there are some processes that create/destroy electrons, but they all conserve charge, and/or other things related to charge). Why the universe has equal amounts of positive and negative charge is a somewhat open problem in science, but is a little deeper than your question goes...
I guess I'll be like the rest of the geeks and keep wishing that some one will find some way to get off this rock we call home before I die of old age.
heck me too, just this aint it. But the solar systems big 'nuff for my lifetime:)
This isn't really correct, you make two incorrect assumptions:
From an application-level standpoint, there's nothing to distinguish a quantum computer from an electronic one except for speed
IIRC, encryption speed scales linearly with key length while (brute force) decryption speed scales exponentially; this means that it will always be far more difficult to break a given key length than it is to encrypt that same key. Advances in technology help both sides of the equasion.
The advantage of quantum computers is not just that they're faster (in fact, they aren't), but that because of the way they work, they can solve some problems with a better asymptotic running time (that is, in fewer steps), than a conventional computer.
For example, RSA encryption assumes like you said that factoring a product of primes scales much worse than just multiplying numbers. This is true on a conventional computer, a quantum computer does not need exponential time to factor numbers, it can do it in polynomial time.
Even brute force quantum computers can do faster (but not a lot faster, just a factor of N^2 faster).
Actually, there is a quantum algorithm that is of use in symmetric crypto. A quantum computer can search a set of variables a factor of N^2 faster than a conventional one. So they could be faster for that alone.
Also, things like the MD5 digest might be invertable faster using a quantum computer than a conventional one. Also, if it turns out quantum computers can solve NP problems in polynomial time, a lot of fundamental assumptions in even symmetric cryptography are going out the window.
On the other hand, we'll always have one-time-pads. (assuming you use them right, the two time pad is a poor form of encryption)
I assume you mean "Look how long it's taken the HURD to approach usability", there have been a number of commercially successul mach-based unices. It's been used in MkLinux, it formed the core of OSF/1, which was deployed by DEC, HP, and IBM....
Well, one must remember that under linux (and unix) there are no drive letters. A linux system might partition the hard disk into 4 partitions, and mount each partition in a certain place in the filesystem. so the "root partition" is mounted in the directory/, and then the other partitions might be mounted under other directories in / like/usr,/var, and/home. But a sysadmin is free to mount whatever disks/partitions they want wherever in the filesystem they like. So/var might be on a completely different hard disk, and/usr might be a network drive. But once the mounting is done, the users don't need to know where stuff is. Thus since it's not obvious where a disk will appear in the file system, you need a command to mount it. Which is another action, but it simplifies the system after that.
Perhaps not necessary for floppy drives, but not something that's totally unnecessary. (and I've sure gotten plenty of milage out of being able to mount another machine's/usr on/usr when I accidentally deleted everything in/usr, and I can see doing the same with a CD-ROM.
Unless you're using a generational garbage collector, in which case it's usally just walking your most recently allocated data.
Many garbage collectors just collect before expanding the heap, so that's not so bad, and arguably better to page a bunch of stuff in all at once than paging something in on every call of free..
We are the only species that drinks the milk of another species (no, ants+aphids don't count), and we are the only ones that are never weaned away from it.
And the only ones to eat plants we grew (no, ants don't count here either). We are the only animals to cook or season their food...
I happen to like milk. Prolly drink too much, but that has nothing to do with what other animals do what.
"Modern medicine" still does not really understand the human body.
I'll buy that, but I'll posit that the biological/medical establishment understands it better than anyone else....
The set of people who can administer a linux machine is not a subset of the people who know registers and I/O and other computer internals. (but yes, the difference between disk space and ram they need to know.
That non-linux computers don't need administering. Lets face it, any network of more than 2 computers requires maintenance and/or administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
I am perfectly willing (and, IMNSHO, able) to deny it.
MS got into business right around the beginning of the PC revolution, you had the Apple II, the TI 99, the Timex Sinclair, the various CP/M machines that predated them. Obviously, the time of the personal computer had come. What's been driving it since then? Moore's law... Computers (since before MS) have been doubling in speed every 18 months (or faster). As the power of the computer you can buy for a fixed price increases, the more people it's useful to at that price, and the more that will buy one. If Microsoft had flagged when the Mac came out, would we still have easy-to-use PC's on everyone's desk? What evidence do you have to the contrary?
What "innovations" (to steal a word) did Microsoft come up with that made "every serious business puts a PC on almost every desk"? Specifically, what did Microsoft do to bring this about, that was not independently developed elsewhere?
I will admit they've done a number of good things, but I can't think of anything so revolutionary that nobody else could have done it.
Certainly, the whole "ease of use" thing wasn't theirs, it's an Apple (Xerox) thing. Selling the OS separately from the hardware was a good idea, but IBM's (with some err... helpful suggestions from the.... wait for it... government). Some of their apps were pretty nice, but I can't see how this could have brought about the PC revolution exclusively...
Sorry, but this argument simply does not hold water.
However, the internal form is still not the same as the machine's internal form, so you always lose some performance.
And what is "fast enough" anyway? You going to claim I can use perl for my week-long 1+GB computational chemistry runs? Sorry, but no way.
Fast enough to handle CGI scripts? sure, but so is /bin/sh (small ones, big ones I'll admit repeated invocations of awk might be.... unwise)
ahem sorry for the ranting, but this is out of hand.
Summary:
Though if for each dBm of transmitter power, you can gain 6dbi of antenna gain, you could use a 1 milliwatt signal (0 dBm) and a 186dBi antenna, and get (for a really narrow beamwidth) an EIRP of 186 dBm which would be the equivalent of a 4 terawatt isotropic signal. 'course the existance of noise might make this imptactical :)
This EIRP number is calculated as a maximum of 30dBm with up to 6dBi of gain at this power. The nice catch is that for every dBm of power you subtract, you can add 6dBi of gain!! This power output can actually be equivalent to about 4W of legal power depending on your antenna gain... as long as your dBm output is less than 30dBm.
Which makes lots more sense to me, as 30dBm is 1 watt (3 powers of ten relative to a milliwatt) which strikes me as a pretty reasonable limit for a low-power antenna....
Not that netscape doesn't suck. (though very rarely does it crash X on me).
- learn about "new" OS "features" before the competition
- make up the wish list for "new" OS "features"
- "integrate" apps into the OS when there's a threat when they're sold separately
and the like...Now admittedly, the line for antitrust is a little fuzzy, and we don't want to be lopping heads off for the slightest infractions, but is it a bad thing if firms are encouraged to err on the side of legality?
Maybe MS couldn't turn a profit anymore, but you think compaq, dell, and/or IBM wouldn't pick up the pieces and just give away office/windows with every PC just to make them sell?
People need (MS) software. Opening the source code makes it easier for more people to provide it. How's this going to make the software less available?
Now if I get my big brother to drag you off the street, I have a monopoly on lemonade! Now, anyone who wants to buy lemonade has to buy it from me, and instead of getting 50 customers at $0.10 a glass (with you getting the other 50), I get, maybe 15 at $1.00 a glass, (and the other 85 going thirsty) Whee! I make more money!.
Since it's possible for a company to do damage even when it has some competitors, the legal test for determining if something's a monopoly is to turn this around. If the firm just plain doesn't care what anyone else is charging, because it controls the market, it's a monopoly.
For example if I owned the lemonade concession on every street in the city but yours, I could probably still get away with selling lemonade at $1.00 a glass, because you can't handle the volume for the entire city, and people aren't going to cross town just to save money on lemonade. Since I could raise my price like that, I'd legally, have monoply power
Microsoft was found to be able to set the price of windows independent of what any "competing" products were priced at, and thus to be a monopoly.
And do you have any evidence that they want to mandate including features in the OS? After all, Judge Jackson found, in agreement with the DOJ, that MS caused harm to the consumer by depriving the consumer of the choice of not buying a browser. Yes, they wanted MS to provide netscape, but only if they were going to ship the OS with their browser. I can't see any evidence that a browserless OS would have upset the DOJ at all....
Offtopic, but if the forked kernel were Real Good (tm), Linus would incorporate the changes back into the main fork. It's GPL'ed, he could do that... Pick one, either the OS is useless, and consumers, being not, on the whole, drooling zombies, would switch to one that isn't, OR nobody would switch to Linux (unless you're arguing they'd go Be, or Mac or something, which is at least arguable). Or consumers are drooling zombies, in which case we need the government regulating pickle widths 'cause they're too stupid to go to wendys.Also, the judge defined the market as "operating systems for intel compatible computers", which kind of rules out Macintosh. The other options sure aren't big in terms of market share... You might argue that this definition of the market is too narrow, but it falls back on the "can they raise prices and not lose income" definition, and the barrier to companies/individuals switching platforms is sufficiently high, that microsoft could charger a higher than competetive price.
Actually, the AT&T case was brought because Sprint and MCI (non AT&T long distance carriers) complained about AT&T illegally tying it's monopoly position in local phone service to it's long distance service, and they wanted access...The illegal tying Microsoft is accused of is actually very similar to that. As well as to the IBM antitrust case...
a) he might be forced to divest from one of the companies (not sure) b) breaking MS up into multiple companies makes catching illegal behavior easier, as it involves collusion beteween two separate legal entities, each with their own offices, chain of command, etc... c) Bill Gates isn't the only stockholder, and the stockholders of the "internet applications" company gave away it's product below cost to keep the separate "operating systems" company's control of the OS market up...- Well, they are, inasmuch as anything else is. A body in motion will tend to stay in motion. Other than that, they aren't perpetual motion machines, in the sense that you cannot get energy out of them indefinately, sooner or later they drop into their lowest energy state, and you can't get any enegy out of them (even if theydo still have a non-vanishing momentum)
- Not sure I see the diffrence. Every two particles with mass experiences an attractive force between them proportional to the product of the masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The force is towards the other particle, (this is easily demonstrated) so I'd guess you'd call it a "pull".
- This isn't a QM question, it's a relativity question (so is the last one, I guess), but I'll give it a shot anyway. It is the speed of light (in vaccum) that's constant. Multiple experiments have demonstrated this. A consequence of the effects that make the speed of light constant is that nothing can travel faster than light (also well demonstrated).
- This makes very little sense to me. Electrons are (mostly) conserved. (there are some processes that create/destroy electrons, but they all conserve charge, and/or other things related to charge). Why the universe has equal amounts of positive and negative charge is a somewhat open problem in science, but is a little deeper than your question goes...
heck me too, just this aint it. But the solar systems big 'nuff for my lifetime- From an application-level standpoint, there's nothing to distinguish a quantum computer from an electronic one except for speed
- IIRC, encryption speed scales linearly with key length while (brute force) decryption speed scales exponentially; this means that it will always be far more difficult to break a given key length than it is to encrypt that same key. Advances in technology help both sides of the equasion.
The advantage of quantum computers is not just that they're faster (in fact, they aren't), but that because of the way they work, they can solve some problems with a better asymptotic running time (that is, in fewer steps), than a conventional computer.For example, RSA encryption assumes like you said that factoring a product of primes scales much worse than just multiplying numbers. This is true on a conventional computer, a quantum computer does not need exponential time to factor numbers, it can do it in polynomial time.
Even brute force quantum computers can do faster (but not a lot faster, just a factor of N^2 faster).
Also, things like the MD5 digest might be invertable faster using a quantum computer than a conventional one. Also, if it turns out quantum computers can solve NP problems in polynomial time, a lot of fundamental assumptions in even symmetric cryptography are going out the window.
On the other hand, we'll always have one-time-pads. (assuming you use them right, the two time pad is a poor form of encryption)
RSBAC has most of this functionality now, really. There's some other patches that do similar things...
I assume you mean "Look how long it's taken the HURD to approach usability", there have been a number of commercially successul mach-based unices. It's been used in MkLinux, it formed the core of OSF/1, which was deployed by DEC, HP, and IBM....
Perhaps not necessary for floppy drives, but not something that's totally unnecessary. (and I've sure gotten plenty of milage out of being able to mount another machine's /usr on /usr when I accidentally deleted everything in /usr, and I can see doing the same with a CD-ROM.
gmc IIRC is going to be re-written from scratch (or a written from scratch file manager substituted for it)
Many garbage collectors just collect before expanding the heap, so that's not so bad, and arguably better to page a bunch of stuff in all at once than paging something in on every call of free..
I happen to like milk. Prolly drink too much, but that has nothing to do with what other animals do what.
I'll buy that, but I'll posit that the biological/medical establishment understands it better than anyone else....