And yet, if I ever bothered to learn any of those technologies, I would be doing my part to help a monopoly continue to exist and act the way it always has. No thank you. When they can act like a reasonable company for a year or 3 I may reconsider my position.
And, instead of extolling those products and addicting yourself to yet more proprietary garbage, why don't you file bug reports and get involved in usability for the Open Source projects that you feel aren't listening to their users? The biggest reason Open Source stuff tends to be so developer-centric is that not enough non-developer types get involved, and I suspect a lot of them don't even know how.
And addressing one point very specifically... I would not blindly use Apache in a performance critical application. There are many Open Source web servers out there, and I would evaluate them all for whether or not they met my needs before choosing one.
I would certainly not tie myself to a single source solution like IIS where I have to depend on Microsoft's continued good will to even function. No matter what the performance issues are, the costs are much, much greater, and most of those are hidden in my lack of freedom.
For all practical purposes doing C# development is hitching yourself to the Microsoft wagon. Their patent posturing alone is enough that it should scare anybody away from C#.
Additionally, who wants to lend their brain to a Microsoft technology of any kind? It's like filling it with images of goatse.
I agree with you, and the other people who are disagreeing with you are stretching the definition of treason in much the same way as the Megan Meier case stretches the definition of the computer abuse and fraud act.
So, are kids going to be put in chastity belts by the state now until they're 18? I saw a non-representative sample of about 50-60 people, but in that sample the average age of the first clearly consensual sexual encounter was easily 13 or 14 and the youngest was 6. I would imagine that in a more random sample you would discover the age to be around 15-17.
I don't think taking nude photos of yourself is an 'adult' activity either. Kids share all kinds of stuff with each other, and once they start being sexual, they are going to share sexual stuff, and they are going to use whatever medium is at hand, and I don't think that's wrong or 'inappropriate'.
What we need is to recognize that children are sexual beings and often capable of making their own decisions regarding their sexuality. We need to recognize that there are varying levels of competence in making those decisions in different children.
The blunt instrument of statutory rape and child porn laws need to be much more careful and refined in how they operate.
But, right now, our society is in a phase where we want to pretend that children have no genitalia or sexual feelings whatsoever until they're 18. Including, it seems, you.
Better yet, just claim that you have things set up so your camera automatically uploads all photos to the Internet and so deleting them will do no good.
Generate hydrogen and release the energy back using a fuel cell.
Though, I like the distributed storage system idea better. I think that will actually lead to better battery technology faster than almost any other system.
But as a word processor and a spreadsheet I find them irritating and clunky to use. I vastly prefer to use Abiword for anything where I don't care whether or not I can work with MS Office format files. And I prefer gnumeric for a spreadsheet.
I don't like Office. I don't like how it's all one big gigantic tool. I want separate tools that I can pull out and replace if something better comes along.
OpenDocument plus things like Abiword and gnumeric are what I want.
Yes, but not a major threat. Quantum computers allow the search time to be cut to the square root of the normal search time. This effectively halves the key length. A 256 bit key now takes only an average of 2^127 operations to find instead of 2^255.
This isn't nearly so much of a problem though as for public key encryption schemes. For RSA, for example, quantum computing changes the time from super-polynomial but sub-exponential to being polynomial with a very low exponent.
I would be really curious to see a study of the effect of quantum computing algorithms on one-way hash functions.
it's important beyond _belief_ that these one-way hash functions work, so much so that i was staggered that the question even had to be asked as part of the article-announcement.
Welcome to the world of cryptography where nitwits feel free to bandy about the most ridiculously stupid assertions because they don't actually understand what they're talking about.
I have a theory that many geeks are so threatened by knowledge they don't have and think might require a lot of effort to acquire that they will go through almost any mental contortion imaginable to be able to pretend it doesn't exist.
There is reversible and there's reversible. If you can conclude any interesting properties of the input message from the output that counts as being broken from the standpoint of being reversible. One example would be if you could conclude the input's last few bits must've contained an equivalent number of 0s and 1s, or the input was one of infinitely many prime numbers.
The whole point of the contest is to give all the candidates testing and scrutiny. Sure, I would currently choose one of the SHA-2 family (256, 384 or 512) for any current thing I was doing where it mattered. But I fully expect that in 2-5 years time I will instead choose one of the algorithms that was recently submitted to NIST.
I am disappointed though to not see Whirlpool in the list.
And MD5 is just plain out broken, and there are alternatives that are better in every respect. If I had my way the algorithm would be permanently erased from every single storage location on the planet. I can't understand why people use it at all anymore. People who defend it on any grounds I generally label complete idiots and dismiss anything they say about cryptography as utter nonsense.
But, you are right, SHA-1 is only sort of vaguely weakened against chosen pre-image attacks. And people are only uncomfortable with the SHA-2 because it uses the same design philosophy as SHA-1 and someone may discover a related vulnerability.
Then again, attacks only get better, not worse. I would count SHA-1's days as numbered.
A car is worth what you can do with it as well as its eventual 0 sale price.
I do think people way over-estimate how useful a car actually is. I've gotten by without one for my entire adult life, and I suspect most people who think they 'need' a car could do just as well without one.
But in order to accurately estimate whether or not a car loan is a good idea you have to look at how much money you're making with the car as well as how its resale value changes over time.
If you translate mass and force into electrical terms, ion drives have extremely high voltage and almost no amperage to speak of. This makes them poor for certain kinds of applications. But, the fact that they have no amperage (they move very little mass) also significantly reduces their reaction mass requirements. They are also electrically powered, and that means they can be 'fueled' from the ground by shipping up relatively massless electrons.
One interesting thing is that in the atmosphere their reaction mass is free. That only covers (I believe) the first 50-60 miles of the cable, but it is something.
Lastly, having the thruster affixed to the cable is an option, but so is having it affixed to the load being hauled up. That means the reaction mass can be in the load and with an ion thruster I'm guessing you could haul up several tons of load with only a few hundred pounds of reaction mass, which is still a huge improvement over a standard rocket which needs 10s or hundreds of pounds of reaction mass for every pound of load.
*chuckle* It's interesting and sad how our government has taken away the moral high-ground in stuff like this.:-( I still think you have more freedom to say what you want here than in the PRC though.
HSV I and HSV II (cold sores and herpes) are actually passed extremely easily by skin-to-skin contact. Condoms are not actually that great a way to protect against them. So they are very easy (well, cold sores anyway) to get from someone in your family even if you don't have sex with any of them.
It's estimated that between 60% and 80% of the US population has HSV I.
There is apparently also an additional genetic factor.
Hmm... But compilers already parallelize. All the instructions in a pipeline could be said to be executing in parallel. Compilers already do a bunch to manage that parallelism. The kind of parallelism you get from having multiple ALUs and instruction molecules seems a lot closer to the kind of parallelism that you get from a pipeline than the sort of parallelism that requires you to launch several threads.
Because it had a good solution to this problem. Basically it presented the compiler with the opportunity to launch several parallel operations.
That's where this problem should be solved. Convincing all the software people to change how they do things to make up for the inability of the hardware people to design good hardware isn't the way to solve the problem.
The Itanic (erm some people might call it the Itanium) had an architecture that was ostensibly designed to fix this. But in reality it was a horrible failure for a number of reasons that I think had more to do with Intel's hubris and temporary failure to realize that good marketing is no subsitute for good engineering in the 2002-2006 timeframe.
Though, I also think that a reason for its failure is that radical new chip architectures basically require Open Source software to succeed because otherwise you have to get too many proprietary software vendors on board to porting their software. For example, the port to the x86_64 architecture was essentially complete about 2.5 years ago for Linux and still isn't really done for Windows.
Yes, the problem is people who feel that I should let people steal my work and publish it for profit as their own proprietary work. I can do without those kinds of people in the world of software, and I wish they would just go away.
I got frustrated with problems that I could never get to the root of because the system that had them presented this mysterious front to me. I also became frustrated with software that wanted to do things behind my back.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, if I ever bothered to learn any of those technologies, I would be doing my part to help a monopoly continue to exist and act the way it always has. No thank you. When they can act like a reasonable company for a year or 3 I may reconsider my position.
And, instead of extolling those products and addicting yourself to yet more proprietary garbage, why don't you file bug reports and get involved in usability for the Open Source projects that you feel aren't listening to their users? The biggest reason Open Source stuff tends to be so developer-centric is that not enough non-developer types get involved, and I suspect a lot of them don't even know how.
And addressing one point very specifically... I would not blindly use Apache in a performance critical application. There are many Open Source web servers out there, and I would evaluate them all for whether or not they met my needs before choosing one.
I would certainly not tie myself to a single source solution like IIS where I have to depend on Microsoft's continued good will to even function. No matter what the performance issues are, the costs are much, much greater, and most of those are hidden in my lack of freedom.
For all practical purposes doing C# development is hitching yourself to the Microsoft wagon. Their patent posturing alone is enough that it should scare anybody away from C#.
Additionally, who wants to lend their brain to a Microsoft technology of any kind? It's like filling it with images of goatse.
I agree with you, and the other people who are disagreeing with you are stretching the definition of treason in much the same way as the Megan Meier case stretches the definition of the computer abuse and fraud act.
So, are kids going to be put in chastity belts by the state now until they're 18? I saw a non-representative sample of about 50-60 people, but in that sample the average age of the first clearly consensual sexual encounter was easily 13 or 14 and the youngest was 6. I would imagine that in a more random sample you would discover the age to be around 15-17.
I don't think taking nude photos of yourself is an 'adult' activity either. Kids share all kinds of stuff with each other, and once they start being sexual, they are going to share sexual stuff, and they are going to use whatever medium is at hand, and I don't think that's wrong or 'inappropriate'.
What we need is to recognize that children are sexual beings and often capable of making their own decisions regarding their sexuality. We need to recognize that there are varying levels of competence in making those decisions in different children.
The blunt instrument of statutory rape and child porn laws need to be much more careful and refined in how they operate.
But, right now, our society is in a phase where we want to pretend that children have no genitalia or sexual feelings whatsoever until they're 18. Including, it seems, you.
That is a good point.
If that's your issue, sue them for the lost time and lawyer fees.
Better yet, just claim that you have things set up so your camera automatically uploads all photos to the Internet and so deleting them will do no good.
Generate hydrogen and release the energy back using a fuel cell.
Though, I like the distributed storage system idea better. I think that will actually lead to better battery technology faster than almost any other system.
But as a word processor and a spreadsheet I find them irritating and clunky to use. I vastly prefer to use Abiword for anything where I don't care whether or not I can work with MS Office format files. And I prefer gnumeric for a spreadsheet.
I don't like Office. I don't like how it's all one big gigantic tool. I want separate tools that I can pull out and replace if something better comes along.
OpenDocument plus things like Abiword and gnumeric are what I want.
That explains so much. Thank you!
Yes, but not a major threat. Quantum computers allow the search time to be cut to the square root of the normal search time. This effectively halves the key length. A 256 bit key now takes only an average of 2^127 operations to find instead of 2^255.
This isn't nearly so much of a problem though as for public key encryption schemes. For RSA, for example, quantum computing changes the time from super-polynomial but sub-exponential to being polynomial with a very low exponent.
I would be really curious to see a study of the effect of quantum computing algorithms on one-way hash functions.
Welcome to the world of cryptography where nitwits feel free to bandy about the most ridiculously stupid assertions because they don't actually understand what they're talking about.
I have a theory that many geeks are so threatened by knowledge they don't have and think might require a lot of effort to acquire that they will go through almost any mental contortion imaginable to be able to pretend it doesn't exist.
I would like proofs of security to assume the availability of quantum computation. Do your proofs of security assume this?
There is reversible and there's reversible. If you can conclude any interesting properties of the input message from the output that counts as being broken from the standpoint of being reversible. One example would be if you could conclude the input's last few bits must've contained an equivalent number of 0s and 1s, or the input was one of infinitely many prime numbers.
The whole point of the contest is to give all the candidates testing and scrutiny. Sure, I would currently choose one of the SHA-2 family (256, 384 or 512) for any current thing I was doing where it mattered. But I fully expect that in 2-5 years time I will instead choose one of the algorithms that was recently submitted to NIST.
I am disappointed though to not see Whirlpool in the list.
And MD5 is just plain out broken, and there are alternatives that are better in every respect. If I had my way the algorithm would be permanently erased from every single storage location on the planet. I can't understand why people use it at all anymore. People who defend it on any grounds I generally label complete idiots and dismiss anything they say about cryptography as utter nonsense.
But, you are right, SHA-1 is only sort of vaguely weakened against chosen pre-image attacks. And people are only uncomfortable with the SHA-2 because it uses the same design philosophy as SHA-1 and someone may discover a related vulnerability.
Then again, attacks only get better, not worse. I would count SHA-1's days as numbered.
A car is worth what you can do with it as well as its eventual 0 sale price.
I do think people way over-estimate how useful a car actually is. I've gotten by without one for my entire adult life, and I suspect most people who think they 'need' a car could do just as well without one.
But in order to accurately estimate whether or not a car loan is a good idea you have to look at how much money you're making with the car as well as how its resale value changes over time.
If you translate mass and force into electrical terms, ion drives have extremely high voltage and almost no amperage to speak of. This makes them poor for certain kinds of applications. But, the fact that they have no amperage (they move very little mass) also significantly reduces their reaction mass requirements. They are also electrically powered, and that means they can be 'fueled' from the ground by shipping up relatively massless electrons.
One interesting thing is that in the atmosphere their reaction mass is free. That only covers (I believe) the first 50-60 miles of the cable, but it is something.
Lastly, having the thruster affixed to the cable is an option, but so is having it affixed to the load being hauled up. That means the reaction mass can be in the load and with an ion thruster I'm guessing you could haul up several tons of load with only a few hundred pounds of reaction mass, which is still a huge improvement over a standard rocket which needs 10s or hundreds of pounds of reaction mass for every pound of load.
*chuckle* It's interesting and sad how our government has taken away the moral high-ground in stuff like this. :-( I still think you have more freedom to say what you want here than in the PRC though.
Well, I don't believe that would appreciably increase your chances. So, it would depend more on whether or not they had it if you had sex or not.
HSV I and HSV II (cold sores and herpes) are actually passed extremely easily by skin-to-skin contact. Condoms are not actually that great a way to protect against them. So they are very easy (well, cold sores anyway) to get from someone in your family even if you don't have sex with any of them.
It's estimated that between 60% and 80% of the US population has HSV I.
There is apparently also an additional genetic factor.
Hmm... But compilers already parallelize. All the instructions in a pipeline could be said to be executing in parallel. Compilers already do a bunch to manage that parallelism. The kind of parallelism you get from having multiple ALUs and instruction molecules seems a lot closer to the kind of parallelism that you get from a pipeline than the sort of parallelism that requires you to launch several threads.
Am I wrong?
Because it had a good solution to this problem. Basically it presented the compiler with the opportunity to launch several parallel operations.
That's where this problem should be solved. Convincing all the software people to change how they do things to make up for the inability of the hardware people to design good hardware isn't the way to solve the problem.
The Itanic (erm some people might call it the Itanium) had an architecture that was ostensibly designed to fix this. But in reality it was a horrible failure for a number of reasons that I think had more to do with Intel's hubris and temporary failure to realize that good marketing is no subsitute for good engineering in the 2002-2006 timeframe.
Though, I also think that a reason for its failure is that radical new chip architectures basically require Open Source software to succeed because otherwise you have to get too many proprietary software vendors on board to porting their software. For example, the port to the x86_64 architecture was essentially complete about 2.5 years ago for Linux and still isn't really done for Windows.
Yes, the problem is people who feel that I should let people steal my work and publish it for profit as their own proprietary work. I can do without those kinds of people in the world of software, and I wish they would just go away.
I got frustrated with problems that I could never get to the root of because the system that had them presented this mysterious front to me. I also became frustrated with software that wanted to do things behind my back.
Read the other replies to the post you replied to and follow those threads.