This chip isn't new, it's been out for a long time. I got mine about 6 months ago and it had been out for a few months then.
But it still does rock. You can do things right out of the box that normally take a lot of searching and downloading with other chips, e.g. format an enormous hard drive to FATX and copy over all the old partitions and information, all with one push of a button.
As a bonus it includes Cromwell in its own memory bank on the chip. This is the BIOS that's usually used to start linux distros. I use it for my MythTV XBOX. To tell the truth I've never even had to add an extra BIOS to it, because all I use the XBOX for is for MythTV and to VNC for Linux apps.
Oh, it's also really easy to turn off so you can use your XBOX for xbox-live, if that's your bag.
Many employers (the US Army being one of them) offer books of charities that you can donate to and have automatically deducted from your paycheck prior to taxes being calculated.
That's how I donate. I don't think I'm counted as a "member", but titles like that never really mattered much to me, or the hats or stickers.
I don't think I'm alone here; problems like this (although not this exact one) were how I learned about computers. It's during these agonizing multi-hour sessions that you really get a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtains.
I learned how to build and modify my own box after many agonizing sessions installing new hardware, much like the doctor in the Post story who couldn't get her printer working for love or money. When you go through all the troubleshooting procedures for figuring out why your new RAM, hard drive, or video card doesn't work you learn very quickly how it all goes together. The second or third time you do it is much easier.
I was never really all that interested in computer security until my first Linux box got rooted. Luckily for me I had it configured for a graphical login where all accounts were listed as icons, or I might never have noticed that there was an extra account. After that I became a computer security nut, getting updates from 5 different sites and configuring multi-tier systems. Being interested in security is also what got me into OpenBSD. The experience I got with OpenBSD was extremely useful for me in getting one of my first IT jobs; I think my broad experience with multiple Unices is what got me that job and allowed me to be successful there.
Troubleshooting problems like these, annoying and frivolous as they may seem at the time, is a great way to become the guy that people go to for their problems. Now whether or not *that's* desireable I'll leave up to you;-).
They see these "DualDiscs" as a next generation product that marries the booming market for DVDs with declining CDs.[emphasis added]
and then:
They have sold for about $18.99 in retail stores.
These things are not unrelated!! Why are DVDs doing so much better than CDs? Gee, could it be because I can get a feature length movie for much LESS than a 74 minute CD? Forget the whole problem of timebomb-popularity industry manufactured arists for just a moment, and think about price. Why is it that I can get Ghost Dog or Pulp Fiction at many movie stores for 10 bucks, but if I want to get the soundtrack it'll set me back 17 or 18? They're older albums, there is NO REASON for them to cost so much.
The problem with the music industry is that they don't remember the laws of supply and demand. If they lowered the prices of their music, more people would buy it. I have long ago ceased feeling sorry for them. They are digging their own graves by refusing to listen to the market. Here are some quick and dirty solutions...
People aren't buying CDs? Try lowering the price!! People still aren't buying your manufactured artists? Try signing artists with actual talent and promoting THEM over the plastic hype! People are downloading too many songs for free? (Hey let's sue elementary school kids! Great plan!) Try offering the songs EASILY and INEXPENSIVELY. If you had paid attention to this when we were all screaming at you 4 or 5 years ago this wouldn't be a problem now. Instead you opted for the head-in-the-sand technique and needed to be strongarmed by a computer hardware and software manufacturer.
Since we are still testing out-of-the-box Operating Systems, we did not compile our own binaries for lame 3.96. Instead, we relied on the RPMs bundled with each operating system. For Windows, we went with Mitok compilation (which, sadly, has no 64-bit counterpart).
They then go on to chart Windows performance in 32 AND 64 bit! They just told us that there was no windows 64 bit software! Also, the whole "out of the box" thing strikes me as just a tad bit lazy, being that this is an experimental platform on windows and a young one on linux. They do it again here:
Mental Ray is the crème of the crop as far as 3D rendering programs go. We only had access to a 32-bit version of the renderer for Linux and Windows, so we used that for this portion of the benchmark.
Gee, I wonder why the results are almost exactly the same?? Could it be because you used the exact same software on each platform?
They do this again for UT2K4 and a couple other pieces of software. I understand that the 32 bit versions of the software were running on 64 bit versions of the OS, but do you really think that makes much difference? That seems like only question the article seems to asnwer here; the answer is no, it doesn't seem to make one fig of difference.
Interestingly enough, there are many places where the 32 bit versions outshine the 64 bit ones. I wonder if that's due to poor optimization, or if it really means the 64 bit is overrated and only has an advantage due to increased memory addressing. I'd like to see benchmarks on software people think would benifit by using 64 bit.
I'd also like to see them do these benchmarks again, this time being less lazy and compiling 64 bit versions of the software used on each plaform. And if you can't find 64 bit software on one of the platforms, don't do tests in that software and find something that does have 64 bit to compare.
Unless I'm totally offbase (I'm going from memory here), the xnu module is just the mach kernel. The BSD portion is located in another module.
Such being the case, it would follow that there would be relatively few references to FreeBSD within xnu.
Looking at the linked documentation, OS X uses BSD for a large part of what is normally considered "kernel space", that being (from the site):
file systems
networking (except for the hardware device level)
UNIX security model
syscall support
the BSD process model, including process IDs and signals
FreeBSD kernel APIs
many of the POSIX APIs
kernel support for pthreads (POSIX threads)
The same documentation also states that these come from the BSD kernel.
Mach is a strange environment, where all the kernel really does is pass messages from other processes around. The Mach kernel doesn't do all the things we normally associate as kernel tasks.
It might cost less and be more wireless friendly to use a solar cell and a battery. It'd also require less maintenance. A lot of street lights and signs are powered this way.
Besides the obvious (and ridiculously awesome) nethack, one of the most important and continuously updated CLI programs I use daily is transcode.
It converts between video formats, and does so quickly and with very good quality. I use it to make XVID backups of my DVDs to play on the road or in my XBOX running MythTV. It's very scriptable, which is why I like it. It also has a great perl-gtk frontend called dvd::rip. You can crop and zoom, as well as browse the various video and audio tracks before you encode. It even supports subtitles.
I found out along with everyone else a couple days ago that Yahoo had upgraded their mail services, but the post doesn't mention the upgrade they made to those of us paying for services through them.
About a year ago I upgraded my Yahoo account to 25MB of storage for something like $20 a year. It was worth it to me because that was the email address I had used for years, and i wanted to be able to access every important message I had gotten in a few years from anywhere (I'm in the military). Yahoo had bumped up my inbox size a couple times before (I think new users got 4 MB but mine had gone up to 8 by that time). But I was running out of room and wanted to keep my messages.
So anyway, I logged on a couple days ago, and my mailbox had been upgraded to 2 GB. Damn.
It also turned out that they had implemented almost every feature I had wanted, and a few that I didn't know I wanted. I almost never get a spam mail, partly through discipline and partly through Yahoo's pretty decent spam filtering. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to search through all my mail. They put this in, and along with a few other features (like filtering rules and better spam protection), put in a feature which i had never actually wanted before, but that was only because I had never thought of it.
I think it's called something like "Address Guard", and it's a lot like what American Express is doing with its credit cards for online purchases. They realized that you can never stop ALL the spam, so they made it so you can make throwaway email addresses that link to your actual address. You give out your throwaway, and if you start getting spammed at it you can just delete it, and::poof::, all the spam starts bouncing. I think you can make as many as you'd like, one for each site where you feel it's necessary. That is way cool. (I know you can do this with your own private server as well, but that would cost a lot more and be less accessable).
The enormous mailbox limit has given rise to a new feature request. Now i wish they had a remote disk function, where I could back up part of my hard drive on their servers. A 200 MB PGP disk could hold just about all my sensitive files (including scans of all my military records) and make them accessable from anywhere. I know there are services (like.mac) that do this, but with a 2 GB space I could even keep multiple versions of the backup. As it is they have a 10 MB message size limit.
At first I thought this might be a simple mechanical version of the classic Asian massage parlor, but I was quickly disbused by this quote:
Eventually, the lights turn off completely, the massage peters out...
Now I know it is just another version of the "happy ending"!! Admittedly, it is a tried and true method of putting people to sleep. But what will they do about females??
Look at how many commerical GPS units there are, and how many military ones.
The ratio will be at least 3:1. The military GPS units, in a word, suck. They are about as big as a small boombox and fail for various reasons every 5 minutes. Ask any soldier who's had to use one in a combat environment. They will tell you that anyone who actually cares about finding out where they are will buy a Garmin.
That's why the US stopped degrading the signal and won't do it again. Even in a war zone, most of the commercial GPSes in use are those ofUS soldiers.
It also makes password/keystream guessing that much easier. It's not hard to run tests to see if a given plaintext is a recognized file format or english text.
As I said, since the attack can be performed in fewer steps, it provides fewer bits of security.
Your point is valid, it *also* decreases the lifespan of the password.
I'm not a crypto expert either, but I've got a decent grasp on the subject.
After reading the paper, what they're talking about with key collisions is a fairly common problem with beginning cryptosystems.
When designing a cryptosystem, you try to get the same "bit level" of security throughout the system. The reason for this is that in most cases any system is only as strong as its weakest component (I know, duh, right). In a system using a 128 bit symmetrical block cypher (in this case AES) you are usually going for ~64 bits of "security". This basically means you can expect any successful attack to take 2^64 operations. The reason you don't get 128 bits is because of the "birthday attack"[a].
So generally if you're using AES 128 you are going for 64 bits of security. The problem with AE-2 (the system used in WinZip), at least according to the author, is that the key generation algorithm only gets ~32 bits of security. The article just says "the key derivation process is randomized"; it does not say what algorithm is used. My guess is that they used a 64 bit algorithm to randomize they keys generated from the password.
Since the CTR mode counter is always initially zero in this system, that means that there is no additional randomness added to the keystream (you get all your randomness from the password).
So that part is basically saying that the system is at most half as secure as one would expect for a (well designed) system using AES 128.
[a] The "birthday attack" is named after the "birthday paradox", which is the idea that if you have 23 people in the same room there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. Where N is the number of possible choices, sqrt(N) is approximately the number of random choices made before there is a %50 chance that two of them coincide. Since in encryption you are usually using values of 2^n, this means that the "birthday bound" is 2^(n/2), e.g. if you are using encryption which normally would take 2^128 steps to find a collision, the probability of a collision is greater than %50 if you take only 2^64 steps.
So here I am in western Louisiana, lying down in 6 inces of mud, motionless, waiting for a convoy of vehicles to come down the road. It's 40 degrees. It's raining. My "waterproof" gortex socks are only serving to keep cold muddy water inside my boots. I'm next to a tree that I hope is big enough to persuade a 100 ton main battle tank not to just run it (and me) over. The mosquitos are eating my soul; don't ask me how they are out in 40 degree weather because I don't know, but I'm in danger of being carried away. I can't slap them because someone might see me. I've been in this position for three days, but it's only been raining for two. I've been out in the woods for a couple weeks, and the smell of myself is about to knock myself out, all by myself.
Here come the vehicles. Shit, they've got Bradleys. The problem with Bradleys is that they have thermal optics and can shoot their 25mm cannons through anything I can hide behind. They also have another problem which I am about to encounter. I can't get a good shot off from this postition because the convoy is stopped just past a little rise. So I crawl forward through the mud a little ways, hoping that it serves to hide my thermal signature. Uh oh, the turret traverses toward me and they are running out the back hatch. Guess they spotted me. I get up on a knee and fire my RPG off, not seeing if it hits, and start booking it. These eight guys are the other problem with Bradleys. They get to ride around all day while you are humping through the woodline, so when they chase you they are fresh and you are smoked.
So I'm running through the woodline and I fall in a hole. Did I mention I was in western Louisiana? This is the biggest hole you've ever seen, and it's full of water. Oh, I didn't mention that it's pitch black out and I can't see too damn far. So here I am with 40 pounds of equipment, one assault rifle and one RPG weighing me down, trying to climb out of a pitch black hole full of forty degree stagnant disease ridden "water". Then the guys from the Brad come up and wax my ass.
Well at least now that I've died I get to go home and take a shower. I work at JRTC at Fort Polk. I scoff at your complaints!
These are Chomskian linguists. When you think about it this way, it seems strangely similar to the Marxists you mentioned.... which would be a strange coincidence if they weren't already the same thing.
A better one for linguists:
Sociolinguistics: 40 million idiots can't be wrong!
This doesn't seem quite accurate. It looks like they just added up all the energy from the explosion and calculated how far the shock wave would reach in ideal conditions.
The problem is that the conditions were far from ideal for maximum damage to the city. The article mentions that the gunpowder was under the building, which means underground. When something explodes either buried or in a ditch it explodes up not out.
I have no doubt it would have demolished the building it was under, but I have sincere doubts that it would have done a lot of damage to buildings that were as far away as 1/3rd of a mile. They didn't seem to factor in the channeling effect of the XXXX tons of earth surrounding the explosive.
It's ironic that IBM, with its roots in the computer industry, doesn't supply the processors for the main portion of the personal computer industry. Intel does.
That's not ironic. It would be ironic if IBM declared the PC industry dead, and said that the embedded industry was all that was viable, made this processor for the embedded industry, and someone used it to revitalize the PC industry and put IBM back on top there. The fact that they are not on top of an industry that they helped start is interesting, but it's a far cry from ironic.
Not to pick nits, but misuse of the word "irony" is one of my pet peeves.
They really aren't going to be taken seriously in the DJ world until the release a product that is compatible with Macintosh laptops. I don't know a single DJ who uses a laptop running anything besides MacOS.
I know Mac OS X has trouble with 5.1 sound, but I would think you could get it without too much work by bypassing the normal soundcard. Hell, if it worked well enough DJs would use it instead of their soundcard for digital output. Plus if they had a Mac version they could do away with USB and the audio compression that is necessary to use that transfer method and go straight to firewire.
Slashdot Mirror
This chip isn't new, it's been out for a long time. I got mine about 6 months ago and it had been out for a few months then.
But it still does rock. You can do things right out of the box that normally take a lot of searching and downloading with other chips, e.g. format an enormous hard drive to FATX and copy over all the old partitions and information, all with one push of a button.
As a bonus it includes Cromwell in its own memory bank on the chip. This is the BIOS that's usually used to start linux distros. I use it for my MythTV XBOX. To tell the truth I've never even had to add an extra BIOS to it, because all I use the XBOX for is for MythTV and to VNC for Linux apps.
Oh, it's also really easy to turn off so you can use your XBOX for xbox-live, if that's your bag.
www.allofmp3.com
Not the same legal situation that you're talking about, but the same effect.
Many employers (the US Army being one of them) offer books of charities that you can donate to and have automatically deducted from your paycheck prior to taxes being calculated.
That's how I donate. I don't think I'm counted as a "member", but titles like that never really mattered much to me, or the hats or stickers.
I don't think I'm alone here; problems like this (although not this exact one) were how I learned about computers. It's during these agonizing multi-hour sessions that you really get a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtains.
;-).
I learned how to build and modify my own box after many agonizing sessions installing new hardware, much like the doctor in the Post story who couldn't get her printer working for love or money. When you go through all the troubleshooting procedures for figuring out why your new RAM, hard drive, or video card doesn't work you learn very quickly how it all goes together. The second or third time you do it is much easier.
I was never really all that interested in computer security until my first Linux box got rooted. Luckily for me I had it configured for a graphical login where all accounts were listed as icons, or I might never have noticed that there was an extra account. After that I became a computer security nut, getting updates from 5 different sites and configuring multi-tier systems. Being interested in security is also what got me into OpenBSD. The experience I got with OpenBSD was extremely useful for me in getting one of my first IT jobs; I think my broad experience with multiple Unices is what got me that job and allowed me to be successful there.
Troubleshooting problems like these, annoying and frivolous as they may seem at the time, is a great way to become the guy that people go to for their problems. Now whether or not *that's* desireable I'll leave up to you
Here's the url:
p y. wmv
http://www.mattkruse.com/humor/DontCopyThatFlop
Floppy Copy!!!
This video is hilarious!!
Okay, maybe it's not a great name for a money grubbing weasel. I mean moral leader.
and then:
These things are not unrelated!! Why are DVDs doing so much better than CDs? Gee, could it be because I can get a feature length movie for much LESS than a 74 minute CD? Forget the whole problem of timebomb-popularity industry manufactured arists for just a moment, and think about price. Why is it that I can get Ghost Dog or Pulp Fiction at many movie stores for 10 bucks, but if I want to get the soundtrack it'll set me back 17 or 18? They're older albums, there is NO REASON for them to cost so much.
The problem with the music industry is that they don't remember the laws of supply and demand. If they lowered the prices of their music, more people would buy it. I have long ago ceased feeling sorry for them. They are digging their own graves by refusing to listen to the market. Here are some quick and dirty solutions...
People aren't buying CDs? Try lowering the price!! People still aren't buying your manufactured artists? Try signing artists with actual talent and promoting THEM over the plastic hype! People are downloading too many songs for free? (Hey let's sue elementary school kids! Great plan!) Try offering the songs EASILY and INEXPENSIVELY. If you had paid attention to this when we were all screaming at you 4 or 5 years ago this wouldn't be a problem now. Instead you opted for the head-in-the-sand technique and needed to be strongarmed by a computer hardware and software manufacturer.
Who rode around the University of New Hampshire campus on a unicycle all the time.
He wore a t-shirt that said, "Unicycling is not a crime."
That guy was awesome.
They then go on to chart Windows performance in 32 AND 64 bit! They just told us that there was no windows 64 bit software! Also, the whole "out of the box" thing strikes me as just a tad bit lazy, being that this is an experimental platform on windows and a young one on linux. They do it again here:
Gee, I wonder why the results are almost exactly the same?? Could it be because you used the exact same software on each platform?
They do this again for UT2K4 and a couple other pieces of software. I understand that the 32 bit versions of the software were running on 64 bit versions of the OS, but do you really think that makes much difference? That seems like only question the article seems to asnwer here; the answer is no, it doesn't seem to make one fig of difference.
Interestingly enough, there are many places where the 32 bit versions outshine the 64 bit ones. I wonder if that's due to poor optimization, or if it really means the 64 bit is overrated and only has an advantage due to increased memory addressing. I'd like to see benchmarks on software people think would benifit by using 64 bit.
I'd also like to see them do these benchmarks again, this time being less lazy and compiling 64 bit versions of the software used on each plaform. And if you can't find 64 bit software on one of the platforms, don't do tests in that software and find something that does have 64 bit to compare.
It just makes it directional. It's like the reflectors behind the bulb on a flashlight.
Such being the case, it would follow that there would be relatively few references to FreeBSD within xnu.
Looking at the linked documentation, OS X uses BSD for a large part of what is normally considered "kernel space", that being (from the site):
The same documentation also states that these come from the BSD kernel.
Mach is a strange environment, where all the kernel really does is pass messages from other processes around. The Mach kernel doesn't do all the things we normally associate as kernel tasks.
It might cost less and be more wireless friendly to use a solar cell and a battery. It'd also require less maintenance. A lot of street lights and signs are powered this way.
Umm, Yahoo has searching now, at least for the subscriber email (19.99 a year).
Besides the obvious (and ridiculously awesome) nethack, one of the most important and continuously updated CLI programs I use daily is transcode.
It converts between video formats, and does so quickly and with very good quality. I use it to make XVID backups of my DVDs to play on the road or in my XBOX running MythTV. It's very scriptable, which is why I like it. It also has a great perl-gtk frontend called dvd::rip. You can crop and zoom, as well as browse the various video and audio tracks before you encode. It even supports subtitles.
I found out along with everyone else a couple days ago that Yahoo had upgraded their mail services, but the post doesn't mention the upgrade they made to those of us paying for services through them.
::poof::, all the spam starts bouncing. I think you can make as many as you'd like, one for each site where you feel it's necessary. That is way cool. (I know you can do this with your own private server as well, but that would cost a lot more and be less accessable).
.mac) that do this, but with a 2 GB space I could even keep multiple versions of the backup. As it is they have a 10 MB message size limit.
About a year ago I upgraded my Yahoo account to 25MB of storage for something like $20 a year. It was worth it to me because that was the email address I had used for years, and i wanted to be able to access every important message I had gotten in a few years from anywhere (I'm in the military). Yahoo had bumped up my inbox size a couple times before (I think new users got 4 MB but mine had gone up to 8 by that time). But I was running out of room and wanted to keep my messages.
So anyway, I logged on a couple days ago, and my mailbox had been upgraded to 2 GB. Damn.
It also turned out that they had implemented almost every feature I had wanted, and a few that I didn't know I wanted. I almost never get a spam mail, partly through discipline and partly through Yahoo's pretty decent spam filtering. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to search through all my mail. They put this in, and along with a few other features (like filtering rules and better spam protection), put in a feature which i had never actually wanted before, but that was only because I had never thought of it.
I think it's called something like "Address Guard", and it's a lot like what American Express is doing with its credit cards for online purchases. They realized that you can never stop ALL the spam, so they made it so you can make throwaway email addresses that link to your actual address. You give out your throwaway, and if you start getting spammed at it you can just delete it, and
The enormous mailbox limit has given rise to a new feature request. Now i wish they had a remote disk function, where I could back up part of my hard drive on their servers. A 200 MB PGP disk could hold just about all my sensitive files (including scans of all my military records) and make them accessable from anywhere. I know there are services (like
At first I thought this might be a simple mechanical version of the classic Asian massage parlor, but I was quickly disbused by this quote:
Eventually, the lights turn off completely, the massage peters out...
Now I know it is just another version of the "happy ending"!! Admittedly, it is a tried and true method of putting people to sleep. But what will they do about females??
Go to any Army unit on the ground.
Look at how many commerical GPS units there are, and how many military ones.
The ratio will be at least 3:1. The military GPS units, in a word, suck. They are about as big as a small boombox and fail for various reasons every 5 minutes. Ask any soldier who's had to use one in a combat environment. They will tell you that anyone who actually cares about finding out where they are will buy a Garmin.
That's why the US stopped degrading the signal and won't do it again. Even in a war zone, most of the commercial GPSes in use are those ofUS soldiers.
It also makes password/keystream guessing that much easier. It's not hard to run tests to see if a given plaintext is a recognized file format or english text.
As I said, since the attack can be performed in fewer steps, it provides fewer bits of security.
Your point is valid, it *also* decreases the lifespan of the password.
I'm not a crypto expert either, but I've got a decent grasp on the subject.
After reading the paper, what they're talking about with key collisions is a fairly common problem with beginning cryptosystems.
When designing a cryptosystem, you try to get the same "bit level" of security throughout the system. The reason for this is that in most cases any system is only as strong as its weakest component (I know, duh, right). In a system using a 128 bit symmetrical block cypher (in this case AES) you are usually going for ~64 bits of "security". This basically means you can expect any successful attack to take 2^64 operations. The reason you don't get 128 bits is because of the "birthday attack"[a].
So generally if you're using AES 128 you are going for 64 bits of security. The problem with AE-2 (the system used in WinZip), at least according to the author, is that the key generation algorithm only gets ~32 bits of security. The article just says "the key derivation process is randomized"; it does not say what algorithm is used. My guess is that they used a 64 bit algorithm to randomize they keys generated from the password.
Since the CTR mode counter is always initially zero in this system, that means that there is no additional randomness added to the keystream (you get all your randomness from the password).
So that part is basically saying that the system is at most half as secure as one would expect for a (well designed) system using AES 128.
[a] The "birthday attack" is named after the "birthday paradox", which is the idea that if you have 23 people in the same room there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. Where N is the number of possible choices, sqrt(N) is approximately the number of random choices made before there is a %50 chance that two of them coincide. Since in encryption you are usually using values of 2^n, this means that the "birthday bound" is 2^(n/2), e.g. if you are using encryption which normally would take 2^128 steps to find a collision, the probability of a collision is greater than %50 if you take only 2^64 steps.
Last Friday, Windows enthusiast Alper Coskun posted something ...
So here I am in western Louisiana, lying down in 6 inces of mud, motionless, waiting for a convoy of vehicles to come down the road. It's 40 degrees. It's raining. My "waterproof" gortex socks are only serving to keep cold muddy water inside my boots. I'm next to a tree that I hope is big enough to persuade a 100 ton main battle tank not to just run it (and me) over. The mosquitos are eating my soul; don't ask me how they are out in 40 degree weather because I don't know, but I'm in danger of being carried away. I can't slap them because someone might see me. I've been in this position for three days, but it's only been raining for two. I've been out in the woods for a couple weeks, and the smell of myself is about to knock myself out, all by myself.
Here come the vehicles. Shit, they've got Bradleys. The problem with Bradleys is that they have thermal optics and can shoot their 25mm cannons through anything I can hide behind. They also have another problem which I am about to encounter. I can't get a good shot off from this postition because the convoy is stopped just past a little rise. So I crawl forward through the mud a little ways, hoping that it serves to hide my thermal signature. Uh oh, the turret traverses toward me and they are running out the back hatch. Guess they spotted me. I get up on a knee and fire my RPG off, not seeing if it hits, and start booking it. These eight guys are the other problem with Bradleys. They get to ride around all day while you are humping through the woodline, so when they chase you they are fresh and you are smoked.
So I'm running through the woodline and I fall in a hole. Did I mention I was in western Louisiana? This is the biggest hole you've ever seen, and it's full of water. Oh, I didn't mention that it's pitch black out and I can't see too damn far. So here I am with 40 pounds of equipment, one assault rifle and one RPG weighing me down, trying to climb out of a pitch black hole full of forty degree stagnant disease ridden "water". Then the guys from the Brad come up and wax my ass.
Well at least now that I've died I get to go home and take a shower. I work at JRTC at Fort Polk. I scoff at your complaints!
A better one for linguists:
Sociolinguistics: 40 million idiots can't be wrong!
This doesn't seem quite accurate. It looks like they just added up all the energy from the explosion and calculated how far the shock wave would reach in ideal conditions.
The problem is that the conditions were far from ideal for maximum damage to the city. The article mentions that the gunpowder was under the building, which means underground. When something explodes either buried or in a ditch it explodes up not out.
I have no doubt it would have demolished the building it was under, but I have sincere doubts that it would have done a lot of damage to buildings that were as far away as 1/3rd of a mile. They didn't seem to factor in the channeling effect of the XXXX tons of earth surrounding the explosive.
It's ironic that IBM, with its roots in the computer industry, doesn't supply the processors for the main portion of the personal computer industry. Intel does.
That's not ironic. It would be ironic if IBM declared the PC industry dead, and said that the embedded industry was all that was viable, made this processor for the embedded industry, and someone used it to revitalize the PC industry and put IBM back on top there. The fact that they are not on top of an industry that they helped start is interesting, but it's a far cry from ironic.
Not to pick nits, but misuse of the word "irony" is one of my pet peeves.
They don't do Mac?!?!?
They really aren't going to be taken seriously in the DJ world until the release a product that is compatible with Macintosh laptops. I don't know a single DJ who uses a laptop running anything besides MacOS.
I know Mac OS X has trouble with 5.1 sound, but I would think you could get it without too much work by bypassing the normal soundcard. Hell, if it worked well enough DJs would use it instead of their soundcard for digital output. Plus if they had a Mac version they could do away with USB and the audio compression that is necessary to use that transfer method and go straight to firewire.