What would this or quantum cryptography be good for in practical terms?
Two offices, say, across town, that want to communicate very securely.
Somebody could simply cut the wire and thus forcing Alice and Bob to [...] not communicate at all.
When would that possibly be a problem? That would basically require some strange situation with a totalitarian government that wants to disrupt communications between two end points, but apparently doesn't actually want to get access to the unencrypted information itself.
If it's just some rival company trying to disrupt service, a line crew goes out, fixes the line, and they're back up and running before they even want/need to change the encryption key.
And what would be the point, since you could just as easily cut the other communications lines (eg. OC3s), the power lines, etc., etc.
The benefits of using standard 802.11 are things like wide compatibility, and the use of unlicensed frequencies... It sounds like neither is even a slight benefit in this case, as the units have to be modified (somehow) and the cost of licensed frequencies would probably be easily covered.
Of course, this story wasn't exactly heavy on the details.
So, re encoding the video or clipping 1 second from the length will render hashing useless.
"tree" hashes exist for just this purpose. Changes in one section of a video will only affect that chunk, all others will still match.
Also, hashing every frame is easy enough, and would also prevent this kind of simple digital manipulation. mplayer -vo md5sum will already do all this for you.
Of course, if they actually re-encode the video, it won't match. However, the next person who re-encodes from the same video with the same settings will match, so there's a fairly small pool of possibilities which will quickly be exhausted.
The workaround will probably be noise... Change a small number of bits in the each frame of the video by a random value, and they'll never be able to hash all possible variations. Also, shifting the chroma, luma, and contrast/brightness of the whole video should also work quite well.
It will be an extremely long time into the future before the kind of computing power needed to detect these changes becomes inexpensive enough for widespread use.
Right, wrong or otherwise the sane thing for an ISP is to comply, there's absolutely nothing for them to gain by becoming a party to any lawsuit.
I have to disagree with you on that point. The benefit for them is that they retain more of their valuable content. The secondary benefit is that word will get out, and companies will be careful not to send a bunch of illegal DMCA take-downs, since they know they will likely be sued by a well-paid army of lawyers from a company larger than themselves.
You're basically saying insurance companies should settle all frivolous lawsuits, because fighting them would be too expensive. Ignoring the fact that by doing so you're encouraging escalation of this bad behavior, which will eventually make settling more expensive than a few legal battles... Though, at that point, even if you do the right thing, you've gone too far, and it will cost even more to reverse the trend.
The output of a security camera has no author. That's the key here. Copyright must start with an author.
How about if an author mounts his camera on a tripod, and leaves it there, rolling? How is that legally different than someone installing security cameras? How long without human intervention before the output of a camera loses it's originality?
it's not realistic to expect that they could solve a problem that the Linux community has been just living with for years.
WTF?
AFAIK, there are only 2 major modem manufacturers who make ALL the softmodem chipsets you're ever likely to see, Conexant, and Lucent.
It's been many years now since Lucent released open source drivers. Smartlink/Conexant has offered a binary-only driver for Linux for a few years now as well. Not idea, but working. (See linuxant.com)
You're out-of-luck with older softmodems from manufacturers who essentially don't exist anymore, like USR Winmodems, but any modem installed in a new system should be easy to get working in Linux, if not other open source OSes.
A ton of people buy dells everyday and out of those, many are buying their first computer or are generally considered novice users.
Good. So they wont have a bunch of random bits of Windows software and games they will insist on using on their new computer. They won't already have an attachment to the Windows interface, and will probably be much happier that their computer JUST WORKS, without having to call tech support all the time about crashes, viruses, spyware, registry issues, etc., etc. and won't be told to re-install their system and apps.
getting the computer at home and then having the realization they just got what they paid for. They will not be happy.
Now that's just pure, 100% troll. There's nothing at all wrong with Ubuntu. There's nothing better about Windows, except compatibility with windows-specific apps. People aren't going to be unhappy about having a reliable system, already pre-loaded with most apps they could every need for day-to-day tasks, and with a huge library of other free software just a few clicks away.
Make it bootable, add drivers, fixpacks, and create an iso.
I've tried to use nLite extensively on multiple versions of Windows (2000, XP & 2003), and I strongly recomend NOT adding hotfixes, and only adding the minimum drivers required for your hardware.
Most commonly, I see strange things like "My Computer", "My Documents", "Network Neighborhood" etc., disappear from the desktop, and unable to be recovered by tools like TweakUI which otherwise can enable and disable their display.
Now, I stick to using nLite only for slipstreaming the most recent service packs, tweaking only the few most important/necessary options, and enabling automatic/OEM installs so I can boot-up, partition, and then completely leave for an hour, and come back to a fully installed system.
For the rest of the updates and tweaks, AutoPatcher does a good job, and works, unlike nLite, though admittedly you need more disc space to store Autopatcher.
Your motherboard has enough brains (somewhere) to bootstrap as far as BIOS config without a processor at all.
A processor is what runs code. Without a processor, code doesn't run. There is no exception.
To run without a main CPU, there would have to be a second processor on the board somewhere, which I can assure you there is not. The northbridge and southbridge chips are advanced these days, but they can't do any processing on their own.
when you screw up the processor overclock settings, it doesn't work, and you can start up and correct the problem usually.
Your BIOS bootstraps at an extremely early stage in the boot process, when your x86 PC is running in an 8-bit mode, and at the speed of an 8088. They simply put a "freeze" check early in the BIOS process, before it's been fully initalized, and use safe defaults to continue the POST process until video is initialized, and the user can be notified.
When you leave your lights on, the car _turns them off for you_ when you open the drivers door!
And when you leave your keys in the ignition, it deploys the built-in robotic arm to remove them, roll down the window, and skillfully catapult the keys directly into your pocket as you walk away.
how do you verify that a human agent correctly did the recognition? Just see if a bunch of other users type the same thing.
I'm not going to type in a captcha and just wait around on the page for an hour until X other people try to answer it... This system of yours gives priority to the answers of the first few people that see it, which may well be the OCR system of some spammers.
Even more, once you've got the first few answers, then it's just a typical captcha, as you already have had it entered, and know what it says.
And if you want some hybrid approach... Where the first word is known, and the second one isn't, you're making twice as much work for the people, with a captcha that is only half as dependable at catching spammers. In addition, I miss-type things like captchas all the time... If my typo is in the unknown word, this whole system is hosed.
If you want people to transcribe a book... just ask them to volunteer a few minutes their time. There's no shortage. If, however, you want to do a captcha, do it the normal, reliable, old fashioned way.
Yeah, that's how you explain the fact that I've had none of the problems you've had using Windows.
I explain it by the fact that you're simply lying through your teeth. Simple enough. Your denying well-known facts is not evidence, it's just bullshit.
You still haven't made your case that Windows doesn't rape and kill women.
Windows OEM is costing Dell like $30. Pre-installing stuff like Norton demos is easily worth like $5.
I don't believe Dell is getting Windows as low as $30, or that installing programs like Norton is worth as much as $5 a piece.
Only a tiny fraction of people end up sending money to Symantec, and even then it's only $30 for a year. There's no way their recouping the cost if they're paying out that much to OEMs.
And Dell gets great deals on OEM Windows, no question, but anecdotal figures put it around $50+.
The Nero trials and all the other stuff you either uninstall or wipe with your own installation of XP/what-have-you. *Those* are the sort of things that Dell gets kickbacks on.
There's absolutely, positively no chance the spyware and shareware crap like that pays them back more than they spend on the Windows license to begin with.
My XP box here at work and the 3 I have at home work just fine and have always worked just fine. So, how is it that we have such different experiences? Could it be that you have an agenda? Admit that and maybe I'll bother reading your next post.
You're either a lowsy troll, or perhaps just a bad Microsoft astroturfer. Either way...
I'm sorry, but the only point you made it that you have no clue about how to use Windows.
No. I only administered 100 Windows 2000 machines for several years. No idea how to use Windows at all. None.
You don't hear about Windows users going on and on like you linux fans do.
You don't hear Windows users going on because Windows is horrendous crap.
Also, I'm not a Linux fan by an stretch. I'm a BSDer. Linux has plenty of quirks and annoyances I dislike. And ports and pkgs are better than anything in Linux land. I'd be immensely happy to see it become popular. Either is a hell of an improvement over the flakiness of Windows.
On the whole, users aren't all that dissatisfied with Windows
Yes they are. They just don't know the "operating system" or "Windows" is to blame. It's all "the computer" to them. "Computers" are too much work. "Computers" have too many problems. "Computers" don't do what they want. Tell someone that you can make the "computer" faster, simpler, safer, cheaper, and no longer need to virus scan, defrag, etc., and they'll be quite interested.
Wintel's 90%+ market share has made it such that people don't know there is anything else. They don't know what the hell Linux is, other than perhaps that it's something about a computer.
2 - Too many distros
Does someone put a menu of distros in-front of Windows users and tell them they must pick on they're going to use for the rest of their life? No? I sure don't. I don't tell someone to download a distro, I tell them to download Ubuntu and try it out. No complex choices necessary.
People want certainty that hardware and software will work
You won't get that with Windows anyhow. Buggy drivers and a buggy operating system cause things to go incredibly wrong. It tries to install the wrong driver... It can't see one card unless you remove all others... It can't detect that you have new hardware, etc.
I know my digital camera works infinitely better with GPhoto than the Windows software... It's buggy crap, that requires un-plugging and re-plugging the USB cable before it detects there's something there, and then still might cut off suddenly, or just have absolutely puzzling difficulties communicating with it.
4 - As far as most people are concerned, the command line has gone the way of the dinosaur
And? You shouldn't need it for anything these days. Back in the RedHat 6 days, the GUI configuration software was incomplete and buggy, but everything should be working provided you don't have very special needs.
Linux is still too geeky
No explanation of what this even means. No real examples. etc.
IMHO, Windows is still too tall and lumpy, all over the place. Microsoft should use their software until they find all the lumps.
Photoshop. You have an idea what that's for. Internet Explorer. Same thing - I probably use it to explore the internet. Those are good names.
Outlook Express... Clearly a program to give you the weather forecast.
AIM... That's what you do when you want to shoot something.
The programs you're listing are the exceptions, not the rules. Not to mention that in KDE/Gnome/XFce, GIMP and Xine is under "Multimedia", as opposed to the completely flat and unorganized menu system for Windows that people use.
you can't seriously be complaining about a problem fixed 2 years ago. there are always some cases of bugs like that, it's the way any kind of software development works.
I bet you haven't installed Windows Vista yet. You are therefore no longer allow to complain or otherwise criticize Windows.
I had no reason to believe the problem was fixed... That "bug" existed for a VERY LONG time without any improvements happening.
Also, it really doesn't qualify as a bug. The software just couldn't deal with changes to hardware without restarting, that's an architectural limitation, and one there seemed to be no interest in fixing when I last gave up.
Slashdot Mirror
Two offices, say, across town, that want to communicate very securely.
When would that possibly be a problem? That would basically require some strange situation with a totalitarian government that wants to disrupt communications between two end points, but apparently doesn't actually want to get access to the unencrypted information itself.
If it's just some rival company trying to disrupt service, a line crew goes out, fixes the line, and they're back up and running before they even want/need to change the encryption key.
And what would be the point, since you could just as easily cut the other communications lines (eg. OC3s), the power lines, etc., etc.
If some other site has "censored" videos that Youtube doesn't, they lose money. It's less direct of a loss, but it's still a loss.
They also directly pay staff to handle the flood of DMCA take-down notices, which could be reduced.
The benefits of using standard 802.11 are things like wide compatibility, and the use of unlicensed frequencies... It sounds like neither is even a slight benefit in this case, as the units have to be modified (somehow) and the cost of licensed frequencies would probably be easily covered.
Of course, this story wasn't exactly heavy on the details.
"tree" hashes exist for just this purpose. Changes in one section of a video will only affect that chunk, all others will still match.
Also, hashing every frame is easy enough, and would also prevent this kind of simple digital manipulation. mplayer -vo md5sum will already do all this for you.
Of course, if they actually re-encode the video, it won't match. However, the next person who re-encodes from the same video with the same settings will match, so there's a fairly small pool of possibilities which will quickly be exhausted.
The workaround will probably be noise... Change a small number of bits in the each frame of the video by a random value, and they'll never be able to hash all possible variations. Also, shifting the chroma, luma, and contrast/brightness of the whole video should also work quite well.
It will be an extremely long time into the future before the kind of computing power needed to detect these changes becomes inexpensive enough for widespread use.
I have to disagree with you on that point. The benefit for them is that they retain more of their valuable content. The secondary benefit is that word will get out, and companies will be careful not to send a bunch of illegal DMCA take-downs, since they know they will likely be sued by a well-paid army of lawyers from a company larger than themselves.
You're basically saying insurance companies should settle all frivolous lawsuits, because fighting them would be too expensive. Ignoring the fact that by doing so you're encouraging escalation of this bad behavior, which will eventually make settling more expensive than a few legal battles... Though, at that point, even if you do the right thing, you've gone too far, and it will cost even more to reverse the trend.
How about if an author mounts his camera on a tripod, and leaves it there, rolling? How is that legally different than someone installing security cameras? How long without human intervention before the output of a camera loses it's originality?
Same for VIA's S3 Savage and some other integrated chipsets, which DO support AMD processors.
WTF?
AFAIK, there are only 2 major modem manufacturers who make ALL the softmodem chipsets you're ever likely to see, Conexant, and Lucent.
It's been many years now since Lucent released open source drivers.
Smartlink/Conexant has offered a binary-only driver for Linux for a few years now as well. Not idea, but working. (See linuxant.com)
You're out-of-luck with older softmodems from manufacturers who essentially don't exist anymore, like USR Winmodems, but any modem installed in a new system should be easy to get working in Linux, if not other open source OSes.
Good. So they wont have a bunch of random bits of Windows software and games they will insist on using on their new computer. They won't already have an attachment to the Windows interface, and will probably be much happier that their computer JUST WORKS, without having to call tech support all the time about crashes, viruses, spyware, registry issues, etc., etc. and won't be told to re-install their system and apps.
Now that's just pure, 100% troll. There's nothing at all wrong with Ubuntu. There's nothing better about Windows, except compatibility with windows-specific apps. People aren't going to be unhappy about having a reliable system, already pre-loaded with most apps they could every need for day-to-day tasks, and with a huge library of other free software just a few clicks away.
I've tried to use nLite extensively on multiple versions of Windows (2000, XP & 2003), and I strongly recomend NOT adding hotfixes, and only adding the minimum drivers required for your hardware.
Most commonly, I see strange things like "My Computer", "My Documents", "Network Neighborhood" etc., disappear from the desktop, and unable to be recovered by tools like TweakUI which otherwise can enable and disable their display.
Now, I stick to using nLite only for slipstreaming the most recent service packs, tweaking only the few most important/necessary options, and enabling automatic/OEM installs so I can boot-up, partition, and then completely leave for an hour, and come back to a fully installed system.
For the rest of the updates and tweaks, AutoPatcher does a good job, and works, unlike nLite, though admittedly you need more disc space to store Autopatcher.
GOOD GOD! 65W per minute! That can only mean 3,900 watts per hour.
A processor is what runs code. Without a processor, code doesn't run. There is no exception.
To run without a main CPU, there would have to be a second processor on the board somewhere, which I can assure you there is not. The northbridge and southbridge chips are advanced these days, but they can't do any processing on their own.
Your BIOS bootstraps at an extremely early stage in the boot process, when your x86 PC is running in an 8-bit mode, and at the speed of an 8088. They simply put a "freeze" check early in the BIOS process, before it's been fully initalized, and use safe defaults to continue the POST process until video is initialized, and the user can be notified.
And when you leave your keys in the ignition, it deploys the built-in robotic arm to remove them, roll down the window, and skillfully catapult the keys directly into your pocket as you walk away.
Seatbelt not fastened? Door ajar? Robotic arm!
I'll be here all week!
I'm not going to type in a captcha and just wait around on the page for an hour until X other people try to answer it... This system of yours gives priority to the answers of the first few people that see it, which may well be the OCR system of some spammers.
Even more, once you've got the first few answers, then it's just a typical captcha, as you already have had it entered, and know what it says.
And if you want some hybrid approach... Where the first word is known, and the second one isn't, you're making twice as much work for the people, with a captcha that is only half as dependable at catching spammers. In addition, I miss-type things like captchas all the time... If my typo is in the unknown word, this whole system is hosed.
If you want people to transcribe a book... just ask them to volunteer a few minutes their time. There's no shortage. If, however, you want to do a captcha, do it the normal, reliable, old fashioned way.
I explain it by the fact that you're simply lying through your teeth. Simple enough. Your denying well-known facts is not evidence, it's just bullshit.
You still haven't made your case that Windows doesn't rape and kill women.
Your comments page says: you.
Goodbye.
I don't believe Dell is getting Windows as low as $30, or that installing programs like Norton is worth as much as $5 a piece.
Only a tiny fraction of people end up sending money to Symantec, and even then it's only $30 for a year. There's no way their recouping the cost if they're paying out that much to OEMs.
And Dell gets great deals on OEM Windows, no question, but anecdotal figures put it around $50+.
There's absolutely, positively no chance the spyware and shareware crap like that pays them back more than they spend on the Windows license to begin with.
Sometimes you hit it out of the park, sometimes you miss the mark and look stupid... Oh well.
You're either a lowsy troll, or perhaps just a bad Microsoft astroturfer. Either way...
Big islands in the Pacific around Asia. No big difference. At least their geography was good enough that they got the general area correct.
No. I only administered 100 Windows 2000 machines for several years. No idea how to use Windows at all. None.
You don't hear Windows users going on because Windows is horrendous crap.
Also, I'm not a Linux fan by an stretch. I'm a BSDer. Linux has plenty of quirks and annoyances I dislike. And ports and pkgs are better than anything in Linux land. I'd be immensely happy to see it become popular. Either is a hell of an improvement over the flakiness of Windows.
Yes they are. They just don't know the "operating system" or "Windows" is to blame. It's all "the computer" to them. "Computers" are too much work. "Computers" have too many problems. "Computers" don't do what they want. Tell someone that you can make the "computer" faster, simpler, safer, cheaper, and no longer need to virus scan, defrag, etc., and they'll be quite interested.
Wintel's 90%+ market share has made it such that people don't know there is anything else. They don't know what the hell Linux is, other than perhaps that it's something about a computer.
Does someone put a menu of distros in-front of Windows users and tell them they must pick on they're going to use for the rest of their life? No? I sure don't. I don't tell someone to download a distro, I tell them to download Ubuntu and try it out. No complex choices necessary.
You won't get that with Windows anyhow. Buggy drivers and a buggy operating system cause things to go incredibly wrong. It tries to install the wrong driver... It can't see one card unless you remove all others... It can't detect that you have new hardware, etc.
I know my digital camera works infinitely better with GPhoto than the Windows software... It's buggy crap, that requires un-plugging and re-plugging the USB cable before it detects there's something there, and then still might cut off suddenly, or just have absolutely puzzling difficulties communicating with it.
And? You shouldn't need it for anything these days. Back in the RedHat 6 days, the GUI configuration software was incomplete and buggy, but everything should be working provided you don't have very special needs.
No explanation of what this even means. No real examples. etc.
IMHO, Windows is still too tall and lumpy, all over the place. Microsoft should use their software until they find all the lumps.
Outlook Express... Clearly a program to give you the weather forecast.
AIM... That's what you do when you want to shoot something.
The programs you're listing are the exceptions, not the rules. Not to mention that in KDE/Gnome/XFce, GIMP and Xine is under "Multimedia", as opposed to the completely flat and unorganized menu system for Windows that people use.
I bet you haven't installed Windows Vista yet. You are therefore no longer allow to complain or otherwise criticize Windows.
I had no reason to believe the problem was fixed... That "bug" existed for a VERY LONG time without any improvements happening.
Also, it really doesn't qualify as a bug. The software just couldn't deal with changes to hardware without restarting, that's an architectural limitation, and one there seemed to be no interest in fixing when I last gave up.
I'm not trolling, and it's not bullshit. Quite the opposite.
From the replies, I'm glad to hear this problem has been fixed, but approx. 2 years ago, it was a very well-known limitation of CUPS.