>Not only would this be easy with completely open source clients, but there is motivation too: $10,000 if you manage to claim the prize yourself is a lot more than $2000.
Ummm, I thought that they had released all of the neat mathematics stuff that you'd need to write your own checker. All that's secret is the network/interface code. So the only motivation to send negative results to a known positive is to keep anybody at distributed.net from winning.
My boss at work has a Mac at home, and he keeps complaining about MacOS's shortcomings. He would switch to Linux, except that he mainly uses his machine for email, web-browsing, word processing, and Quicken. Linux has #1, 2, and 3, but not Quicken.
Really, Linux won't become immensly popular to Joe Average User until it can boast the same number of applications and games as Windows. The reason that the IBM PC took off in the first place was because IBM developed relatively large selection of good software. The reason that Wintel clone machines managed to outcompete Apple's products is that the system was open to allow anybody to develop software for, while Apple didn't encourage such development. Should Linux replace Wintel, it will be because of a better selection of better software than Wintel.
Legally prohibited from delivering first class mail???
Haven't you ever absolutely needed to get an important document somewhere at the last minute? FedEx may be expensive, but they'll take anything anywhere in very little time.
Although if it isn't extremely important, I'm for the USPS all the way.
The park service is just as well run as the USPS, and manages to stretch the money they get from Fee Areas to cover all of their costs and then some. Other than the IRS and SSA they take in more money for the government than any other agency. Sure, the accounting just puts their excess funds into general accounting, where they don't get official credit for it, but lets give credit where credit is due.
Usually I am dissapointed when a technically skilled person goes into the legal profession (US engineer/lawyer ratio is 1:10, japan's is 10:1) but I make an exection for anybody going into patent law.
The problem isn't that the patent office ppl are stupid, it's just that they usually don't have the necessary background to understand these new patents, and the few patent office ppl who do are overloaded with way too many applications.
If you really want to help prevent the issuance of overobvious patents, go back to school to learn about patent law and get a job at the patent office.
But part of my point is that nobody other than governments will be able to afford this for a long while.
Yeah, but some ppl. don't even seem to try
on
All Hail Bloatware
·
· Score: 1
I understand that it is hard to keep the bloat down, that you have to do it quickly, and that once a feature is added it can never be removed. But that still doesn't explain the sheer size of some programs.
PKLite and it's kin are a testament to the redundancy inheirant in today's software. A quick test to see if an executable is tightly written is to see how much it can be compressed. A really tight executable will be the same size or a little larger after being compressed. Sure, things like unrolled loops will give a few percent, but you get a performance boost from them. There's no exuse for having both poor performance and a large, reduntant product.
Great. We will shortly (20 yrs?) have quantum computers. But is this a good thing.
Yeah, it would be great for all sorts of things (just imagine the speed boost for things like ray-tracing, searching, and sorting) but it would also make a brute force attack on any encryption algorithm a simple matter, rather than a computational nightmare.
Now, it would be fair if everybody had their nondeterministic turing machines to chug out quantum encryption, but how much is this going to cost. I'm thinking that quantum computing, and all of it's benefits, will be the realm of governments and large corperations, at the expense of everybody else.
Yes, it is true that people are demanding more and more new features, and they also demand backwards compatibility, and these things do take more space.
But it is mostly the fault of the software companies.
Any large system becomes bloated. Just look any large burocracy. The problem is communication between all of the people who are writing the software. They don't coordinate, and they don't care about the system for the system's sake. They do thier job with the least amount of effort on thier part. If it's easier for them to make a new file format rather than stick with the old one, then we have a new format, and one more bit of old code for 'backwards compatibility'. Why bother coordinating this fancy feature with the one the guy down the hall is writing so that we don't suck up all of the processor. Why don't we write the same routine as ten other people because we didn't know somebody else had written it already for their own work? Why not assume that everybody who wants to run this program has a computer under 2 years old? Why not add in hard-coded limits to data sizes and whatnot just for the sake of convienience?
Why doesn't anybody put any effort into making their software elegant, internally coordinated, optimized, and expandible for the future?
It doesn't endanger the security of ppl. who use the more secure keys allowed by the faster encryptor, but it lessens the security of any older messages, or messages which are still using too-low keys.
Also, most common crypto is export legal, to avoid the hassle. The limits on export are set. You can't just increase your key size. Most people are stuck with what they have, and any advances in faster encryption reduces the amount of time a brute force attack will take.
Well, use a nice 1024-bit RSA system to give the other party your DES keys for a start. And if you are worried about a middleman attack, then just arrange to hand off the keys IRL on a floppy.
But you have to be pretty parinoid to worry about a middleman attack over the internet. If nothing else because it is so decentrilized that guaranteeing interception would be a pain.
The article says that the chip runs the data through a pipeline, rather than using the same circuit 16 times in a row. They also say that each block can be done with a different key, or switch from encryption to decryption. This implies that it can run at least 16 times faster for a brute force crack (even though checking each key would take the normal amount of time). And since its an asic, it should be cheaper to buy a lot of them and run them in parallel.
This thing looks like it can blow single-DES out of the water. triple-DES might still be a contender, though.
Re:Explanation of The Force is A Farce
on
Episode II Rumours
·
· Score: 1
I seem to remember someone saying in one of the books (or maybe the movie) that whatever it is they take a count of is how people tap into the force. And they weren't cells either, but some sort of symbiote. Like motochondria, except with the force.
Taxes are just plain bad anyway. Centralized economies have a tendancy not to work very well (see Communist Russia), and all taxation does is put money (the base economic unit) into the hands of a central authority. The reason that capitalism, and the internet itself, both work so well is that they are decentralized. The rules of supply and demand, followed by those motivated by greed, ensure a fair and balanced distribution of resources. The more you tax, the more you muck with the only economic system that has proven to be stable in the long run.
So even if a 1/3 tax is low, it is still *way* too high of a tax. You want money to build roads, charge a toll. Don't go taxing something else for it. You want money to improve the internet, then tax the internet. But if you're not buying routers and pipelines, leave the system alone.
1) Ernst Mayr's belief that SETI is pointless is questionable. There are hundreds of BILLIONS of stars in a galaxy, and hundreds of BILLIONS of galaxies (probably more galaxies in the universe than stars in a galaxy). So there are ~10^12 stars. Even if there are only habitable planets on a tiny fraction of these, and life on a tiny fraction of these, an empty universe is a far fetched thing. Besides, the sun is rather young compared to other stars, so there are many star systems with huge (3 billion year) head starts on getting intelligent life.
Also, SETI isn't necessarily looking for a message. It may be more likely that we pick up the equivilent of a TV broadcast. Recieving a purposely sent signal may be unlikely, but it ONLY took us ~6000 yrs. to go from recording our history (civ. in Japan) to radio. Ever since the first TV broadcast we've been spewing out carrier waves. Coherent signals. So, it's pretty darn likely that there is a signal out there waiting for us to hear.
2) There isn't much you can do at this time with free processer. There's cracking codes, looking for primes, and SETI. Rendering is out because nobody has set up the proper organization yet (I think). It would be a better use of tax dollars to give vaccinations or something than to look for alien life. But free computer cycles can't be used for much in the way of socially usefull things. So SETI@home is a good idea. Anyway, alien life is interesting (to the average luser). Mersenne primes are not. SETI@home will get the masses used to the idea of distributed computing. Until that happens, it won't be practically useful.
What's this bs about being able to crack unix passwords?!? Yeah, running the encryption algorithm on a list of common passwords can crack some of them, but thats *old*. And a fast machine isn't going to be able to directly crack them because UNIX uses a large salt value.
If you look at the course requirements for a ce degree and a cs degree, you see a lot of overlap. It's possible to get both without spending any extra time (at some schools), if you don't mind taking only engineering courses (mind? i want to!).
This is especially true if cs is an engineering degree, which is becoming more and more common.
I was eagerly awaiting the release of quest for glory 5, and now that it's out, I find that my 3-yr old box doesn't stand a snowball's chance of ever running it.
Even if I cleared *everything* off my hd except what I absolutley need, i'd still fall short.
And of course my old 486 boots faster than my pentium even though it has old, and supposedly inferior software.
At least linux can still run on a 286 from a floppy with just a few k of ram (special stripped kernel, of course):-)
Slashdot Mirror
We could build a dava haven like in Cryptonomicon.
How much do I have to pay for citizenship?
>Not only would this be easy with completely open source clients, but there is motivation too: $10,000 if you manage to claim the prize yourself is a lot more than $2000.
Ummm, I thought that they had released all of the neat mathematics stuff that you'd need to write your own checker. All that's secret is the network/interface code. So the only motivation to send negative results to a known positive is to keep anybody at distributed.net from winning.
My boss at work has a Mac at home, and he keeps complaining about MacOS's shortcomings. He would switch to Linux, except that he mainly uses his machine for email, web-browsing, word processing, and Quicken. Linux has #1, 2, and 3, but not Quicken.
Really, Linux won't become immensly popular to Joe Average User until it can boast the same number of applications and games as Windows. The reason that the IBM PC took off in the first place was because IBM developed relatively large selection of good software. The reason that Wintel clone machines managed to outcompete Apple's products is that the system was open to allow anybody to develop software for, while Apple didn't encourage such development. Should Linux replace Wintel, it will be because of a better selection of better software than Wintel.
Fight for strong cryto. distributed.netA friend of mine who is trying to run Windows and Linux/Mandrake just asked me for help concerning problems with partitioning his hard drive.
Time to run screaming into the night.
Legally prohibited from delivering first class mail???
Haven't you ever absolutely needed to get an important document somewhere at the last minute? FedEx may be expensive, but they'll take anything anywhere in very little time.
Although if it isn't extremely important, I'm for the USPS all the way.
The park service is just as well run as the USPS, and manages to stretch the money they get from Fee Areas to cover all of their costs and then some. Other than the IRS and SSA they take in more money for the government than any other agency. Sure, the accounting just puts their excess funds into general accounting, where they don't get official credit for it, but lets give credit where credit is due.
Usually I am dissapointed when a technically skilled person goes into the legal profession (US engineer/lawyer ratio is 1:10, japan's is 10:1) but I make an exection for anybody going into patent law.
The problem isn't that the patent office ppl are stupid, it's just that they usually don't have the necessary background to understand these new patents, and the few patent office ppl who do are overloaded with way too many applications.
If you really want to help prevent the issuance of overobvious patents, go back to school to learn about patent law and get a job at the patent office.
The only thing I've used my pre-installed copy of IE for was to download Netscape.
Buy a $50 shrinkwrapped box and as a bonus get an OS -- FREE!!
Nuf said.
But part of my point is that nobody other than governments will be able to afford this for a long while.
I understand that it is hard to keep the bloat down, that you have to do it quickly, and that once a feature is added it can never be removed. But that still doesn't explain the sheer size of some programs.
PKLite and it's kin are a testament to the redundancy inheirant in today's software. A quick test to see if an executable is tightly written is to see how much it can be compressed. A really tight executable will be the same size or a little larger after being compressed. Sure, things like unrolled loops will give a few percent, but you get a performance boost from them. There's no exuse for having both poor performance and a large, reduntant product.
Great. We will shortly (20 yrs?) have quantum computers. But is this a good thing.
Yeah, it would be great for all sorts of things (just imagine the speed boost for things like ray-tracing, searching, and sorting) but it would also make a brute force attack on any encryption algorithm a simple matter, rather than a computational nightmare.
Now, it would be fair if everybody had their nondeterministic turing machines to chug out quantum encryption, but how much is this going to cost. I'm thinking that quantum computing, and all of it's benefits, will be the realm of governments and large corperations, at the expense of everybody else.
Bloat is not our friend.
Yes, it is true that people are demanding more and more new features, and they also demand backwards compatibility, and these things do take more space.
But it is mostly the fault of the software companies.
Any large system becomes bloated. Just look any large burocracy. The problem is communication between all of the people who are writing the software. They don't coordinate, and they don't care about the system for the system's sake. They do thier job with the least amount of effort on thier part. If it's easier for them to make a new file format rather than stick with the old one, then we have a new format, and one more bit of old code for 'backwards compatibility'. Why bother coordinating this fancy feature with the one the guy down the hall is writing so that we don't suck up all of the processor. Why don't we write the same routine as ten other people because we didn't know somebody else had written it already for their own work? Why not assume that everybody who wants to run this program has a computer under 2 years old? Why not add in hard-coded limits to data sizes and whatnot just for the sake of convienience?
Why doesn't anybody put any effort into making their software elegant, internally coordinated, optimized, and expandible for the future?
It doesn't endanger the security of ppl. who use the more secure keys allowed by the faster encryptor, but it lessens the security of any older messages, or messages which are still using too-low keys.
Also, most common crypto is export legal, to avoid the hassle. The limits on export are set. You can't just increase your key size. Most people are stuck with what they have, and any advances in faster encryption reduces the amount of time a brute force attack will take.
Well, use a nice 1024-bit RSA system to give the other party your DES keys for a start. And if you are worried about a middleman attack, then just arrange to hand off the keys IRL on a floppy.
But you have to be pretty parinoid to worry about a middleman attack over the internet. If nothing else because it is so decentrilized that guaranteeing interception would be a pain.
The article says that the chip runs the data through a pipeline, rather than using the same circuit 16 times in a row. They also say that each block can be done with a different key, or switch from encryption to decryption. This implies that it can run at least 16 times faster for a brute force crack (even though checking each key would take the normal amount of time). And since its an asic, it should be cheaper to buy a lot of them and run them in parallel.
This thing looks like it can blow single-DES out of the water. triple-DES might still be a contender, though.
I seem to remember someone saying in one of the books (or maybe the movie) that whatever it is they take a count of is how people tap into the force. And they weren't cells either, but some sort of symbiote. Like motochondria, except with the force.
Taxes are just plain bad anyway. Centralized economies have a tendancy not to work very well (see Communist Russia), and all taxation does is put money (the base economic unit) into the hands of a central authority. The reason that capitalism, and the internet itself, both work so well is that they are decentralized. The rules of supply and demand, followed by those motivated by greed, ensure a fair and balanced distribution of resources. The more you tax, the more you muck with the only economic system that has proven to be stable in the long run.
So even if a 1/3 tax is low, it is still *way* too high of a tax. You want money to build roads, charge a toll. Don't go taxing something else for it. You want money to improve the internet, then tax the internet. But if you're not buying routers and pipelines, leave the system alone.
--TANSTAAFL
It's totally possible to code with very few comments and still remain readable. It's called 'self-documenting' code.
2 pts:
1)
Ernst Mayr's belief that SETI is pointless is questionable. There are hundreds of BILLIONS of stars in a galaxy, and hundreds of BILLIONS of galaxies (probably more galaxies in the universe than stars in a galaxy). So there are ~10^12 stars. Even if there are only habitable planets on a tiny fraction of these, and life on a tiny fraction of these, an empty universe is a far fetched thing. Besides, the sun is rather young compared to other stars, so there are many star systems with huge (3 billion year) head starts on getting intelligent life.
Also, SETI isn't necessarily looking for a message. It may be more likely that we pick up the equivilent of a TV broadcast. Recieving a purposely sent signal may be unlikely, but it ONLY took us ~6000 yrs. to go from recording our history (civ. in Japan) to radio. Ever since the first TV broadcast we've been spewing out carrier waves. Coherent signals. So, it's pretty darn likely that there is a signal out there waiting for us to hear.
2)
There isn't much you can do at this time with free processer. There's cracking codes, looking for primes, and SETI. Rendering is out because nobody has set up the proper organization yet (I think).
It would be a better use of tax dollars to give vaccinations or something than to look for alien life. But free computer cycles can't be used for much in the way of socially usefull things. So SETI@home is a good idea. Anyway, alien life is interesting (to the average luser). Mersenne primes are not. SETI@home will get the masses used to the idea of distributed computing. Until that happens, it won't be practically useful.
Besides, I'd give processer time to both.
(Sorry for the LONG comment)
Just make a faraday cage out of your walls. EM can't penetrate metal.
What's this bs about being able to crack unix passwords?!? Yeah, running the encryption algorithm on a list of common passwords can crack some of them, but thats *old*. And a fast machine isn't going to be able to directly crack them because UNIX uses a large salt value.
Why not just double major?
If you look at the course requirements for a ce degree and a cs degree, you see a lot of overlap. It's possible to get both without spending any extra time (at some schools), if you don't mind taking only engineering courses (mind? i want to!).
This is especially true if cs is an engineering degree, which is becoming more and more common.
I was eagerly awaiting the release of quest for glory 5, and now that it's out, I find that my 3-yr old box doesn't stand a snowball's chance of ever running it.
:-)
Even if I cleared *everything* off my hd except what I absolutley need, i'd still fall short.
And of course my old 486 boots faster than my pentium even though it has old, and supposedly inferior software.
At least linux can still run on a 286 from a floppy with just a few k of ram (special stripped kernel, of course)