Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.
Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.
Note that this is only an 80% improvement. That means current transistors are over 100GHz. So why aren't processors this fast? Simple: The clock rate of a processor is the time it takes to do one step in the pipeline, not the time for a single transistor to operate. By breaking the pipeline into more steps, they can get the number of transistors that have to operate in sequence per step down. Based on the numbers here, it would look like we're at about 100 for a PIII, and less for a PIV.
So is Tux 2.0 really any more secure than other web servers, or is it just that since it doesn't amount to a noticable percentage of servers, crackers haven't been trying to break it?
Is there anything fundamental about the design of Tux that should make us feel secure?
When The Open Group was shutting down most of their US operations back in 1998, they canceled one of their insurance plans. This was fine; people under that plan were switched to one of the others. What was a problem is that the plan was self-funded. That means that the insurance company only acted as an administrator, and the bills were paid out of an account controlled by The Open Group. So when they canceled the plan, they closed that account. This meant that a bunch of people with outstanding claims were hosed, as the insurance company wouldn't pay them, and The Open Group was operating all the benefits out of their UK office, where the concept of private health insurance isn't quite the same, to say the least.
I never heard if anyone sued, though I wouldn't be surprised. I know one friend whose bill was only about $100 just paid it to avoid the hassle, but I think someone else had several thousand in pending claims.
No, the trick of the client being a remote X window is long gone. It's strictly client-server now. You can even get a Windows client. (And I haven't seen any problems with key repeat, so I think that's fixed, too.)
On a related note, Crossfire, a multi-player RPG just released it's 1.0.0 version. [Yes, it's GPLd.] It's been playable and in development for many years.
The big problem with non-commercial games is the lack of press.
The problem is the the Lone Gunmen show isn't at all like the scenes from the X Files with the Lone Gunmen.
In the X Files, the Lone Gunmen were cool geeks. Sure, they were exaggerated, but if you can believe the government/alien conspiracies, you can easily accept that.
I the Lone Gunmen show, the Lone Gunment were a geeky three stooges. Instead of being serious characters, they became funny. Humor is fine, but they went for forced sitcom humor. I don't want to watch a geek sitcom.
If you look at the image of the newspaper from 1961 that the story links to, you'll see a headline near the bottom of the page, "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died." Is that what you're talking about? I can't make out the text on the story.
You are correct that the reasoning in my statement, as I said it, was wrong.
However, I believe it to be true that, given a sequence of numbers (in any base), you can find a prime number that begins with that sequence. That there are an infinite number of primes suggests, but does not prove, that this is the case.
Likewise, that Pi and e are transendental does not prove that they contain any given finite sequence of digits somewhere, but I believe it is true. (It may, in fact, be a property of transendental numbers, but I couldn't find it in a quick Google scan of the topic.)
If you want to find something in a prime number, you figure out what you're looking for--in this case, the gziped code. You then search for prime numbers that start with those digits. Since there are an infinite number of prime numbers, you will always be able to find one (given enough time).
You could also find DeCSS gzipped in a section of Pi or e, based on similar ideas.
Actually, you can make ISO9660 CDs with 32-character filenames. The 8.3 convention is only for MS-DOS compatability.
I burn all my ISO9660 CDs with the long filenames, since my DVD player is happy with them and will display them when playing MP3s (otherwise I have to use some obscure Romeo extension). Of course, with Joilet and Rock Ridge, I never see the short 32-character names on my computer.
You could do raid on a single disk (or, presumably, disc, if you're using a CD). Since you're assuming that most of the media will be good, you simply treat the disc as a collection of, say, ten 70M regions, using nine (or eight) for data and the remaining one (or two) for parity, which would allow for reconstruction of any one (or or two) dammaged regions.
Of course, raid assumes that you errors are self-detecting, but I suspect that this is also true of CD media failure.
Now the trick is to implement it. You could encode it such that it looks like a normal ISO-9660 CD, except for special "garbage" written to the last 70M or so. You would need a special version of mkisofs, as well as special recovery tools.
In theory, you could have mkisofs figure out exactly how much extra space you have left on the CD and use it for parity of each previous block of that size. If you have more than some threshold of free space, it could use more than one parity block for multi-block failure recovery. Then if you cram the disc to within a meg or two of being full, you are still protected from failure, but only if the failure covers a small area.
This sounds like a good project for a data storage class.
I remember from my digital electronics class that in many ways, it makes the most sense to have tri-state (instead of binary) electronics. (In theory, e-state would be better, but since e isn't an integer, that's a little hard.) Of course, the problem is making the logic work, since your signals are low, medium, and high.
Well, what if the logic worked such that if any input was medium, the output was medium. Otherwise, the output was as it is now with binary logic. Then you could build a CPU that left units that weren't being used in the medium state. When an operation was performed, you would know when it was done as soon as the result didn't have medium bits.
Likewise, you could push this back on the memory and other subsystems.
Of course, now the question is whether adding the additional state is worth it in eliminating the clock.
Be sure that your objective statement is useful. Do not say you want a "software development" position. Especially if you're applying to a large company that has a wide variety of positions, you need to do everything you can to get your resume routed to the right groups.
Likewise, if you list familiarity with many languages, indicate one or two as favorites.
I would be that most of the systems work just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if they have weird software problems or something like that, but you should be installing the OS from scratch. Computers get filed away as "broken" for a number of reasons, such as the user wanted a new computer, or Windows was messed up and nobody had the time to figure out if it was software or hardware. Of course, the level of hardware problems will vary radically between donors, so who knows?
Whatever you do, you should get a bunch of students from the school to help you.
If you have permission to GPL your code, but you want to be sure that your employer keeps it strictly GPL, then the best approach is to be sure to incorporate someone else's GPL code into the project. That way, even though your employer owns the copyright on what you did, they don't own the copyright on the entire project, so they can't close-source it.
I was recently a judge at a high school science fair, and I saw very similar projects. Sure, they did more work and research, but they almost all had the same fundamental flaw: too few samples to base a solid conclusion on.
Back about eight or ten years ago at Dartmouth, we had a bunch of external Quantum SCSI disks that were purchased for use with Macs. Of course, several ended up on Unix systems (DEC 5000s). Unfortunately, there were firmware bugs in the drives that caused systems to fail to boot after a power failure until you re-power cycled the drives. (I might have the details of the bug wrong, it was a long time ago.) Anyway, I doubt that there is any company that hasn't had a bad product now and then.
They're taking your email, and encoding it to look like spam. Hence, evesdroppers will filter it out as junk instead of examining it. (Or evesdroppers will be forced to pay attention to spam.)
This is very similar to stenography--hiding information in a way that you can't prove that it's there unless you already know how to decrypt it.
Unfortunately for your argument, using a monopoly to gain a monopoly in a related market is illegal.
You missed my point entirely. They should have argued that it was not two different markets (OS and Browser) but only one market (User Interface).
That way they could tell the court they at least thought they were following the law, and regardless of whether the court bought the argument, since they were misinterpreting the law instead of arrogantly ignoring it, they wouldn't have been broken up.
This may be mildly off topic, but my take on why Microsoft lost is that they were, indeed, way too arrogant. Instead of disputing every charge, they should have been open about what they were doing, and then try to argue that it was legal. Instead of denying that they were trying to use Windows to crush Netscape, they should have said they were trying to do just that. They should have argued that it was perfectly reasonable to identify Netscape as competition for Windows (not just competition for IE), because the comsumer OS market is really a user interface market. Then the court battle would have been over defining where the lines between separate software markets lie. Then if Microsoft lost, they would have said, "Sorry, we didn't mean to break the law. The lines weren't clear, and we thought they were in a different place." Then the judge would have slapped them on the wrist with fines and not broken them up.
Slashdot Mirror
This Slashdot Poll shows that 3% of slashdot users use "password" as their password.
Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.
Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.
Note that this is only an 80% improvement. That means current transistors are over 100GHz. So why aren't processors this fast? Simple: The clock rate of a processor is the time it takes to do one step in the pipeline, not the time for a single transistor to operate. By breaking the pipeline into more steps, they can get the number of transistors that have to operate in sequence per step down. Based on the numbers here, it would look like we're at about 100 for a PIII, and less for a PIV.
So is Tux 2.0 really any more secure than other web servers, or is it just that since it doesn't amount to a noticable percentage of servers, crackers haven't been trying to break it?
Is there anything fundamental about the design of Tux that should make us feel secure?
X is not licensed under the GPL, so they don't have to release any changes they made there.
Of course, for Linux, if they release binaries, they must release source.
When The Open Group was shutting down most of their US operations back in 1998, they canceled one of their insurance plans. This was fine; people under that plan were switched to one of the others. What was a problem is that the plan was self-funded. That means that the insurance company only acted as an administrator, and the bills were paid out of an account controlled by The Open Group. So when they canceled the plan, they closed that account. This meant that a bunch of people with outstanding claims were hosed, as the insurance company wouldn't pay them, and The Open Group was operating all the benefits out of their UK office, where the concept of private health insurance isn't quite the same, to say the least.
I never heard if anyone sued, though I wouldn't be surprised. I know one friend whose bill was only about $100 just paid it to avoid the hassle, but I think someone else had several thousand in pending claims.
No, the trick of the client being a remote X window is long gone. It's strictly client-server now. You can even get a Windows client. (And I haven't seen any problems with key repeat, so I think that's fixed, too.)
The big problem with non-commercial games is the lack of press.
What other GPLd games are out there?
The problem is the the Lone Gunmen show isn't at all like the scenes from the X Files with the Lone Gunmen.
In the X Files, the Lone Gunmen were cool geeks. Sure, they were exaggerated, but if you can believe the government/alien conspiracies, you can easily accept that.
I the Lone Gunmen show, the Lone Gunment were a geeky three stooges. Instead of being serious characters, they became funny. Humor is fine, but they went for forced sitcom humor. I don't want to watch a geek sitcom.
If you look at the image of the newspaper from 1961 that the story links to, you'll see a headline near the bottom of the page, "Reds Deny Spacemen Have Died." Is that what you're talking about? I can't make out the text on the story.
You are correct that the reasoning in my statement, as I said it, was wrong.
However, I believe it to be true that, given a sequence of numbers (in any base), you can find a prime number that begins with that sequence. That there are an infinite number of primes suggests, but does not prove, that this is the case.
Likewise, that Pi and e are transendental does not prove that they contain any given finite sequence of digits somewhere, but I believe it is true. (It may, in fact, be a property of transendental numbers, but I couldn't find it in a quick Google scan of the topic.)
This is very easy.
If you want to find something in a prime number, you figure out what you're looking for--in this case, the gziped code. You then search for prime numbers that start with those digits. Since there are an infinite number of prime numbers, you will always be able to find one (given enough time).
You could also find DeCSS gzipped in a section of Pi or e, based on similar ideas.
Dartmouth College has announced the same thing. They hope to have it operational this fall.
I expect that in two years, having a wireless network for a campus will be as standard as ethernet in the dorms has become.
Actually, you can make ISO9660 CDs with 32-character filenames. The 8.3 convention is only for MS-DOS compatability.
I burn all my ISO9660 CDs with the long filenames, since my DVD player is happy with them and will display them when playing MP3s (otherwise I have to use some obscure Romeo extension). Of course, with Joilet and Rock Ridge, I never see the short 32-character names on my computer.
You could do raid on a single disk (or, presumably, disc, if you're using a CD). Since you're assuming that most of the media will be good, you simply treat the disc as a collection of, say, ten 70M regions, using nine (or eight) for data and the remaining one (or two) for parity, which would allow for reconstruction of any one (or or two) dammaged regions.
Of course, raid assumes that you errors are self-detecting, but I suspect that this is also true of CD media failure.
Now the trick is to implement it. You could encode it such that it looks like a normal ISO-9660 CD, except for special "garbage" written to the last 70M or so. You would need a special version of mkisofs, as well as special recovery tools.
In theory, you could have mkisofs figure out exactly how much extra space you have left on the CD and use it for parity of each previous block of that size. If you have more than some threshold of free space, it could use more than one parity block for multi-block failure recovery. Then if you cram the disc to within a meg or two of being full, you are still protected from failure, but only if the failure covers a small area.
This sounds like a good project for a data storage class.
Tri-state "bits?"
"Bit" is an abbreviation for "binary digit," so the correct terminology would be "trinary digit" or "tit."
I remember from my digital electronics class that in many ways, it makes the most sense to have tri-state (instead of binary) electronics. (In theory, e-state would be better, but since e isn't an integer, that's a little hard.) Of course, the problem is making the logic work, since your signals are low, medium, and high.
Well, what if the logic worked such that if any input was medium, the output was medium. Otherwise, the output was as it is now with binary logic. Then you could build a CPU that left units that weren't being used in the medium state. When an operation was performed, you would know when it was done as soon as the result didn't have medium bits.
Likewise, you could push this back on the memory and other subsystems.
Of course, now the question is whether adding the additional state is worth it in eliminating the clock.
Be sure that your objective statement is useful. Do not say you want a "software development" position. Especially if you're applying to a large company that has a wide variety of positions, you need to do everything you can to get your resume routed to the right groups.
Likewise, if you list familiarity with many languages, indicate one or two as favorites.
I would be that most of the systems work just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if they have weird software problems or something like that, but you should be installing the OS from scratch. Computers get filed away as "broken" for a number of reasons, such as the user wanted a new computer, or Windows was messed up and nobody had the time to figure out if it was software or hardware. Of course, the level of hardware problems will vary radically between donors, so who knows?
Whatever you do, you should get a bunch of students from the school to help you.
If you have permission to GPL your code, but you want to be sure that your employer keeps it strictly GPL, then the best approach is to be sure to incorporate someone else's GPL code into the project. That way, even though your employer owns the copyright on what you did, they don't own the copyright on the entire project, so they can't close-source it.
I was recently a judge at a high school science fair, and I saw very similar projects. Sure, they did more work and research, but they almost all had the same fundamental flaw: too few samples to base a solid conclusion on.
Back about eight or ten years ago at Dartmouth, we had a bunch of external Quantum SCSI disks that were purchased for use with Macs. Of course, several ended up on Unix systems (DEC 5000s). Unfortunately, there were firmware bugs in the drives that caused systems to fail to boot after a power failure until you re-power cycled the drives. (I might have the details of the bug wrong, it was a long time ago.) Anyway, I doubt that there is any company that hasn't had a bad product now and then.
This idea is essentially stenography.
They're taking your email, and encoding it to look like spam. Hence, evesdroppers will filter it out as junk instead of examining it. (Or evesdroppers will be forced to pay attention to spam.)
This is very similar to stenography--hiding information in a way that you can't prove that it's there unless you already know how to decrypt it.
You missed my point entirely. They should have argued that it was not two different markets (OS and Browser) but only one market (User Interface).
That way they could tell the court they at least thought they were following the law, and regardless of whether the court bought the argument, since they were misinterpreting the law instead of arrogantly ignoring it, they wouldn't have been broken up.
This may be mildly off topic, but my take on why Microsoft lost is that they were, indeed, way too arrogant. Instead of disputing every charge, they should have been open about what they were doing, and then try to argue that it was legal. Instead of denying that they were trying to use Windows to crush Netscape, they should have said they were trying to do just that. They should have argued that it was perfectly reasonable to identify Netscape as competition for Windows (not just competition for IE), because the comsumer OS market is really a user interface market. Then the court battle would have been over defining where the lines between separate software markets lie. Then if Microsoft lost, they would have said, "Sorry, we didn't mean to break the law. The lines weren't clear, and we thought they were in a different place." Then the judge would have slapped them on the wrist with fines and not broken them up.