So, when they starting making nano computers, will that be the end of building your own box?
I doubt entire computers will be built that way. It will probably be cheaper (in terms of engineering and energy efficiency) to hire some monkey to slap a card in a slot, like we do today. Nanotech will probably just be used to build the chips.
So you will be able to build your own computer from parts. You won't be able to build your own CPU and RAM, but who does that anyway?
Hmmm.....break up Bill into pieces. Cool. Unfortunately, that would mean up to 30% of the U.S. economy would be controlled by his various body parts. "Hey Jim, you still working at Lucent? I hear they just got bought out by Bill's left arm."
I would like to see them chop him up, but I don't think they have the legal power to do that. Except maybe if they were in Texas.
Most likely they would make one clone of Bill for each part of the company. That would just make things worse. Not only would we have multiple Bills (one is too many already!) they would all fight over who gets the only Steve Balmer. That would be a bloody battle and J. Random Consumer would get caught in the crossfire of "innovation".
By your logic, a 19 year old kid who might have spent the last 7 years working on Apache would be unqualified to be a web developer!
I agree with most of your post, but the above statement is interesting...
For there to be a 19 year old with 7 years working on Apache, she must have started as a 12 year old with 0 experience with Apache. Such a person was definately not a web developer at that time. It's an extreme example, but that may be where the original poster's bitterness about "undegreed" web developers comes from.
Check your named directory and see if there is a subdirectory named "ADMROCKS". If it's there then you are running a vulnerable BIND and have been owned. If it's not there then you are probably safe.
Really. It's that bad.
(If you don't know, "ADMROCKS" is the footprint left by a popular BIND exploit.)
Also, you can't tell what algorithm was used given a data stream and nothing else.
The Japanese diplomatic cipher "Purple" was broken with access only to the ciphertext. This was a far more spectacular feat than the breaking of Enigma because Purple was a lot more advanced as well as the algorithm being unknown. It hasn't gotten the same attention as Enigma though, probably because the impact on the war was not as great.
Determining what algorithm was used to produce a data stream is a problem in the same class as the halting problem. Such problems are not always unsolvable- there are many easy instances. In practice all algorithms get implemented on finite-state machines in which case the problem is never truely unsolvable, but can be intractable.
Some people have suggested that the human brain might use quantum effects, although I know of no evidence supporting this. But from what little I do know of AI many of the computational problems are of exponentially increasing complexity, exactly the sort of thing that quantum computers are supposed to be good at...
Could quantum computing be the key to finally realizing the sort of AI that's always been "10 years away"?
(Yes, I know quantum computing is another one of those things that will probably be "10 years away" for a long time, but I'm wondering if a fundamental change in the nature of computation may be what is needed for fast+cheap+good AI. (I also realize QC is not a "solve every problem instantly" thing like many Slashdotters seem to think.))
A dollar bill in some sort of plastic cover. By the time it's discovered $20 coins will be pocket change and a $1 bill will seem odd.
A bottle of hard stuff. Most booze gets better with age. Don't bother with wine as it will go bad unless it's really well bottled. Who knows, alcohol might even be illegal when it gets found (if history repeats).
Genetic material. No, not to clone yourself.:) Seeds and stuff. By the time they're found those plants may be extinct or re-engineered.
A computer mouse. Only because someone will probably pick it up like a microphone and say "hello computer":) [Star Trek IV reference].
This is retarded! Those are complaints about possible public policy (or the venders), not about the underling technology. [...] The solution to every one of your complaints is really fucking simple: only use open source software in your implants period. [...] this is a political / market.. only a moron would think it is a technology/science issue.
Technology and science don't exist in a vacuum. You can bet the human-altering genetic and technological development will be and is being done by corporate and military interests, not by some university student in Finland. Sure there are some guys at MIT and other places doing neat stuff with computer/human interface but it will be corporate and military funding that gets it into mass production. We're not talking about the sort of stuff you can just download and run through gcc.
if 83% of teenagers think it's "in" to be online, and this puts it on a par with dating and partying, then 17% of teenagers must not think that dating and partying are "in."
Most of the kids, who think dating and partying are "in", were simply too busy dating and partying to respond to the poll.
Several attacks are presented on the "sophisticated anti-hacker security" features of Cyber Patrol(R) 4
Congratulations! You are now eligible to become the next Digital Millenium Copyright Act martyr! You have bypassed a device that protects access to a copyrighted work (the blocklists).
According to IDC surveys of server operating systems, Linux is the only OS gaining marketshare, accounting for one in every four servers. According to the survey, NT is holding steady at 38%. All other operating systems have shown a steady decline in marketshare over the past 3 years of IDC's survey. When we look at the IDC marketshare numbers, the rationale behind the merger becomes clearer. Both FreeBSD and BSD/OS are competing for the same niche in that shrinking remaining segment. There just isn't enough of the pie to go around.
Your "not enough pie to go around" statement implies that FreeBSD/BSDI usage is shrinking. It may be that FreeBSD/BSDI's growth is not proportional to market growth, or it may be that FreeBSD/BSDI is simply not (yet) a large enough percentage to get out of a shrinking "other" category (sorry, don't have the IDC survey handy to check that).
I don't know about BSDI but I'm quite certain the FreeBSD usage is growing. FreeBSD's "piece of pie" is getting bigger regardless of whether or not it's getting bigger at the same rate as the whole pie. And FreeBSD's piece of pie is already large enough that nobody is going hungry.
Zsh has been my shell of choice for a few years now and I still haven't discovered all of the features. It is very cool and I'd recommend it to anyone, but there are a few things that bug me...
Mainly the completion control, spellchecking, and globbing seem to be related in functionality but not in code. For example, I have a "mp3" script that I use to play MP3s. It starts a background processs that changes to my MP3 directory and runs mpg123. This allows me to play MP3s without having to think about what my current directory is. I have a completion control like this:
compctl -g '*.mp3' + -f -W ~/mp3 mp3
(Yes, I'm using the old 3.0.x compctl even though I'm running 3.1.6. I haven't yet converted my completions to the new function-based system.)
That compctl allows my Tab button to complete files that are in my MP3 directory instead of the current directory when the command is "mp3". Very handy.
Unfortunately, spelling correction isn't smart enough to detect typos in this case. It doesn't know the filenames are in a different directory. The compctl only affects tab completion.
Even worse, globbing doesn't work at all here. If I type "mp3 Soundgarden/*" the globbing isn't smart enough to know that this is relative to my ~/mp3 directory. Depending on the globbing options I've set it'll report "zsh: no match" or just sends the literal "Soundgarden/*" to my script causing mpg123 to bomb (there is no filename "*"). I could press Tab to have it complete to all of those files and send the whole list to my script, but I prefer the "menucomplete" option. I can modify my script to re-expand the filename string after changing directories but that's an ugly hack- glob expansion is the shell's job.
Even with these issues Zsh is still very cool. Other shells avoid these problem by simply not providing the functionality (programmable completion).
If someone knows how to make globbing programmable-completion-aware I'd be very interested to hear about it.
One of the most missing features in pdksh is the FPATH variable. All my tested/debugged functions go into files that the FPATH points to. Then any script I write can use any of those functions by just calling them as if they were included in the script.
Zsh has fpath and supports most (all?) ksh syntax. Bunch of cool interactive features too.
Acually it's the other way round: any client can access W2K servers, but a W2K client will only work properly when communicating with a W2K kerberos server.
Does anyone else see the irony here? MS-Kerberos forces Win2k clients to use a Win2k server...
Kerberos keeps the damned in Hades. Film at eleven.
Where I live having 'paraphernalia' used to be legal. Then they made it so that it was legal until it was used (IE contained 'residue'). Now it is illegal to posess at all. Technically zig-zag type rolling papers and old-man type tobacco pipes are illegal under the current laws. Of course those items are sold openly at tobacco shops and drug stores, etc. Old geezers would never get bothered about possessing such things. The law isn't applied uniformly of course.
This is related to the right to be "presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law".
Technically, everyone is supposed to be presumed innocent. This is a major hassle for the state. Proving guilt is hard. It takes time and money and sometimes they have to see people walk even when they know they're guilty.
Since you can't send someone to jail simply because they're probably a criminal the state makes certain suspicious activity illegal. For example, possession of lockpicking tools, possession of "paraphernalia", possession of spraypaint, etc.
So a person can effectively be found "guilty of being a suspect". Technically this doesn't violate your right to presumed innocence. Technically you're being charged with a different crime that you are guilty of.
Where I live, possession of an unregistered handgun is punishable by up to 25 years in prison- the same as for certain degrees of murder. I doubt that's just a coincidence.
If you've ever wondered why there are so many "victimless crimes" this is one of the reasons.
Is someone actually reading our mail? With terrorists, hostile governments, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, does the government really care about anything you say?
No, but we should not be so naive as to think that they aren't interested in interfering with the politicians who do have an impact on our lives.
Remember J. Edgar Hoover? He ran the FBI for half a century until he finally died. The general public thought of him and his "G-Men" as heros of law and order. After he died the truth came out- he was able to stay in power for so long by illegally using his surveillance capabilities to get dirt on his political enemies. He had blackmail material on the vast majority of the federal elected representatives and used that to influence policy.
Ever wonder why a democratically elected and accountable government would use our hard-earned tax dollars for things that the voters would never approve of (like Echelon)?
What really, _really_ gets me pissed off is that when the report was released, the censors censored out the report, filing it into every category: sex, hate speech, etc.
I'm no lawyer, but can't most of these wrongly blocked sites sue for defamation/libel?
There's damage to the reputation (calling them a pr0n/hate/criminal site when they aren't) and probably monetary damages as well (by blocking access to their web site).
One or two class-action lawsuits would probably make these filter programs go away, or at least wise-up and be more careful about what they filter.
I can just see the filter companies filing countersuits though... "Our blocklists are encrypted. If they know that they are on our blocklists then that encryption must have been bypassed, in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act." Ugh!!!
Very easy: First, find out what time is. Second, make it go backwards.
This is something that I just haven't been able to make sense of. How can time go "backwards"? Isn't the whole concept of "backwards" relative to time?
That is, you'd need some concept of "time" outside of our time by which the flow of our time could be viewed as "backwards". Or would you?
One, the moron thinks CSS is a copyright protection scheme,
If you read the transcript of the preliminary injunction hearing on the 2600 website, you'll see that the defendant's lawyers are also morons. This is not good!
THE COURT: [...] Now, is there any doubt that CSS protects access to a copyrighted work? Is there any at all?
...is how much faster this thing will run if it's not emulating an x86. It looks pretty hot under the hood, and if, instead of using standard guess-aheads, you can tell it which branch to use as default or even tell it about branches ahead of time (which you often know well before the actual conditional looping operation) so it's not guessing at all.
It seems a lot of posters are thinking the same thing. But...
You could say the same about a Celeron/P-III/Athlon/Whatever.
"I wonder how much faster my Athlon would go if I could rip out the silicon that does the intruction decoding / reordering / branch prediction / etc and code directly for the execution units."
It probably wouldn't go much faster (I'd guess that silicon does it's job pretty well) but by ripping out all those transistors you could significantly reduce power consumption.
In fact, if you think it through for five years or so you'll probably wake up one day and find you've re-invented Crusoe. Of course it'll be old news by then.
1999 Advisory Analysis Vendor - Total Days of Hacker Recess - Total Advisories - Days of Recess per Advisory Red Hat - 348 - 31 - 11.23 Microsoft - 982 - 61 - 16.10 Sun - 716 - 8 - 89.50
Interesting that Red Hat comes out better overall than both of the others, even though Red Hat is generally considered least secure distribution of Linux available.
Analogue recording and duplication always results a loss of quality. Their excuse for holding such things back is that suddenly you can make infinite perfect copies of the material. (Of course, MP3 is far from perfect itself. Then again, the RIAA doesn't care, doesn't it?)
MP3 may be a lossy format, but because the.mp3 files are stored on a digital medium, they can be copied infinitely.
The fact that MP3 is lossy doesn't really matter: the process of getting a sound from the source into the recording equipment is lossy, and the process of getting it out and to your ears is lossy. What matters is that you can make a copy of a copy of a copy [...] of an MP3 file without it sounding like shit.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt entire computers will be built that way. It will probably be cheaper (in terms of engineering and energy efficiency) to hire some monkey to slap a card in a slot, like we do today. Nanotech will probably just be used to build the chips.
So you will be able to build your own computer from parts. You won't be able to build your own CPU and RAM, but who does that anyway?
I would like to see them chop him up, but I don't think they have the legal power to do that. Except maybe if they were in Texas.
Most likely they would make one clone of Bill for each part of the company. That would just make things worse. Not only would we have multiple Bills (one is too many already!) they would all fight over who gets the only Steve Balmer. That would be a bloody battle and J. Random Consumer would get caught in the crossfire of "innovation".
He may not have had any reason to kill himself. It may simply be that he didn't have a reason to live.
Sometimes people just don't care whether they live or die.
I agree with most of your post, but the above statement is interesting...
For there to be a 19 year old with 7 years working on Apache, she must have started as a 12 year old with 0 experience with Apache. Such a person was definately not a web developer at that time. It's an extreme example, but that may be where the original poster's bitterness about "undegreed" web developers comes from.
Check your named directory and see if there is a subdirectory named "ADMROCKS". If it's there then you are running a vulnerable BIND and have been owned. If it's not there then you are probably safe.
Really. It's that bad.
(If you don't know, "ADMROCKS" is the footprint left by a popular BIND exploit.)
The Japanese diplomatic cipher "Purple" was broken with access only to the ciphertext. This was a far more spectacular feat than the breaking of Enigma because Purple was a lot more advanced as well as the algorithm being unknown. It hasn't gotten the same attention as Enigma though, probably because the impact on the war was not as great.
Determining what algorithm was used to produce a data stream is a problem in the same class as the halting problem. Such problems are not always unsolvable- there are many easy instances. In practice all algorithms get implemented on finite-state machines in which case the problem is never truely unsolvable, but can be intractable.
Some people have suggested that the human brain might use quantum effects, although I know of no evidence supporting this. But from what little I do know of AI many of the computational problems are of exponentially increasing complexity, exactly the sort of thing that quantum computers are supposed to be good at...
Could quantum computing be the key to finally realizing the sort of AI that's always been "10 years away"?
(Yes, I know quantum computing is another one of those things that will probably be "10 years away" for a long time, but I'm wondering if a fundamental change in the nature of computation may be what is needed for fast+cheap+good AI. (I also realize QC is not a "solve every problem instantly" thing like many Slashdotters seem to think.))
Some stuff...
And other things I can't think of right now.
Technology and science don't exist in a vacuum. You can bet the human-altering genetic and technological development will be and is being done by corporate and military interests, not by some university student in Finland. Sure there are some guys at MIT and other places doing neat stuff with computer/human interface but it will be corporate and military funding that gets it into mass production. We're not talking about the sort of stuff you can just download and run through gcc.
Most of the kids, who think dating and partying are "in", were simply too busy dating and partying to respond to the poll.
Polls suck. Vote Hemos.
Congratulations! You are now eligible to become the next Digital Millenium Copyright Act martyr! You have bypassed a device that protects access to a copyrighted work (the blocklists).
Ain't life grand?
Your "not enough pie to go around" statement implies that FreeBSD/BSDI usage is shrinking. It may be that FreeBSD/BSDI's growth is not proportional to market growth, or it may be that FreeBSD/BSDI is simply not (yet) a large enough percentage to get out of a shrinking "other" category (sorry, don't have the IDC survey handy to check that).
I don't know about BSDI but I'm quite certain the FreeBSD usage is growing. FreeBSD's "piece of pie" is getting bigger regardless of whether or not it's getting bigger at the same rate as the whole pie. And FreeBSD's piece of pie is already large enough that nobody is going hungry.
Zsh has been my shell of choice for a few years now and I still haven't discovered all of the features. It is very cool and I'd recommend it to anyone, but there are a few things that bug me...
Mainly the completion control, spellchecking, and globbing seem to be related in functionality but not in code. For example, I have a "mp3" script that I use to play MP3s. It starts a background processs that changes to my MP3 directory and runs mpg123. This allows me to play MP3s without having to think about what my current directory is. I have a completion control like this:
compctl -g '*.mp3' + -f -W ~/mp3 mp3
(Yes, I'm using the old 3.0.x compctl even though I'm running 3.1.6. I haven't yet converted my completions to the new function-based system.)
That compctl allows my Tab button to complete files that are in my MP3 directory instead of the current directory when the command is "mp3". Very handy.
Unfortunately, spelling correction isn't smart enough to detect typos in this case. It doesn't know the filenames are in a different directory. The compctl only affects tab completion.
Even worse, globbing doesn't work at all here. If I type "mp3 Soundgarden/*" the globbing isn't smart enough to know that this is relative to my ~/mp3 directory. Depending on the globbing options I've set it'll report "zsh: no match" or just sends the literal "Soundgarden/*" to my script causing mpg123 to bomb (there is no filename "*"). I could press Tab to have it complete to all of those files and send the whole list to my script, but I prefer the "menucomplete" option. I can modify my script to re-expand the filename string after changing directories but that's an ugly hack- glob expansion is the shell's job.
Even with these issues Zsh is still very cool. Other shells avoid these problem by simply not providing the functionality (programmable completion).
If someone knows how to make globbing programmable-completion-aware I'd be very interested to hear about it.
Zsh has fpath and supports most (all?) ksh syntax. Bunch of cool interactive features too.
Does anyone else see the irony here? MS-Kerberos forces Win2k clients to use a Win2k server...
Kerberos keeps the damned in Hades. Film at eleven.
This is related to the right to be "presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law".
Technically, everyone is supposed to be presumed innocent. This is a major hassle for the state. Proving guilt is hard. It takes time and money and sometimes they have to see people walk even when they know they're guilty.
Since you can't send someone to jail simply because they're probably a criminal the state makes certain suspicious activity illegal. For example, possession of lockpicking tools, possession of "paraphernalia", possession of spraypaint, etc.
So a person can effectively be found "guilty of being a suspect". Technically this doesn't violate your right to presumed innocence. Technically you're being charged with a different crime that you are guilty of.
Where I live, possession of an unregistered handgun is punishable by up to 25 years in prison- the same as for certain degrees of murder. I doubt that's just a coincidence.
If you've ever wondered why there are so many "victimless crimes" this is one of the reasons.
No, but we should not be so naive as to think that they aren't interested in interfering with the politicians who do have an impact on our lives.
Remember J. Edgar Hoover? He ran the FBI for half a century until he finally died. The general public thought of him and his "G-Men" as heros of law and order. After he died the truth came out- he was able to stay in power for so long by illegally using his surveillance capabilities to get dirt on his political enemies. He had blackmail material on the vast majority of the federal elected representatives and used that to influence policy.
Ever wonder why a democratically elected and accountable government would use our hard-earned tax dollars for things that the voters would never approve of (like Echelon)?
I'm no lawyer, but can't most of these wrongly blocked sites sue for defamation/libel?
There's damage to the reputation (calling them a pr0n/hate/criminal site when they aren't) and probably monetary damages as well (by blocking access to their web site).
One or two class-action lawsuits would probably make these filter programs go away, or at least wise-up and be more careful about what they filter.
I can just see the filter companies filing countersuits though... "Our blocklists are encrypted. If they know that they are on our blocklists then that encryption must have been bypassed, in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act." Ugh!!!
Do you have any idea of what's involved in seizing the equipment of another nation's military base?!?
Hint: It usually involves blowing things up.
This is something that I just haven't been able to make sense of. How can time go "backwards"? Isn't the whole concept of "backwards" relative to time?
That is, you'd need some concept of "time" outside of our time by which the flow of our time could be viewed as "backwards". Or would you?
Am I making any sense here?
If you read the transcript of the preliminary injunction hearing on the 2600 website, you'll see that the defendant's lawyers are also morons. This is not good!
I believe NAT (network address translation) performs this function. Also, the userland PPP daemon has a -alias switch for that.
I'm certain you can do it, though I've never tried.
It seems a lot of posters are thinking the same thing. But...
You could say the same about a Celeron/P-III/Athlon/Whatever.
"I wonder how much faster my Athlon would go if I could rip out the silicon that does the intruction decoding / reordering / branch prediction / etc and code directly for the execution units."
It probably wouldn't go much faster (I'd guess that silicon does it's job pretty well) but by ripping out all those transistors you could significantly reduce power consumption.
In fact, if you think it through for five years or so you'll probably wake up one day and find you've re-invented Crusoe. Of course it'll be old news by then.
From the web page. Apologies for the formatting.
1999 Advisory Analysis
Vendor - Total Days of Hacker Recess - Total Advisories - Days of Recess per Advisory
Red Hat - 348 - 31 - 11.23
Microsoft - 982 - 61 - 16.10
Sun - 716 - 8 - 89.50
Interesting that Red Hat comes out better overall than both of the others, even though Red Hat is generally considered least secure distribution of Linux available.
MP3 may be a lossy format, but because the .mp3 files are stored on a digital medium, they can be copied infinitely.
The fact that MP3 is lossy doesn't really matter: the process of getting a sound from the source into the recording equipment is lossy, and the process of getting it out and to your ears is lossy. What matters is that you can make a copy of a copy of a copy [...] of an MP3 file without it sounding like shit.