There are only one reason terrorists haven't detonated an atomic bomb and that is that they don't know how to do it.
That dear slashdot poster is Bullshit. Anyone with a background in physics could design one, but getting the parts (Weapons-grade plutonium, and/or uranium) would be very difficult.
On the other hand Russia is supposed to be missing between 30-100 small 'suitcase' nuclear weapons. Hope they aren't missing if you live in a large city. A single one of these would have (if used in place of the planes) leveled a very large portion of NY (depending on yield, which is unknown, but supposed to be in the lower k-ton range)
I have several graphing ti calcs, ranging from a 73 to an 89, and they are both good and bad.
I try to help with the development of tilp (a program to link linux computers (and other oses) with ti calcs.)
This is very sad, as I have a couple of (non-graphing) hps, one I got out after someone threw it away, because the battery had come unseated.
HPs can beat any other calculator, NO ti or casio currently planned or in existance will be able to equal an HP48gx. Period.
However, what is more sad is the reliance on calculators by people. I can still calculate most things in my head faster than people can pull out their calcs and get an answer. However, I have fallen massively in speed. When people used to try to type with their calc, I was faster, then I got a calculator. I relied on it, and that was bad, I first made darn sure I learned how to do something by hand and head first, then I would program it into a calc, but not use it. Taylor series, are fun to do.
Just the ramblings of someone who sees how pathetic most people are without tech, and is forcing himself to be able to do things without much tech (and yes, a pencil counts as tech).
The table is based upon the operating system's default only, and whatever os is running on it. In other words, my linux boxes which include alpha, sparc, m68k would count as x86 because Linux's 'native' processor is x86, and the BSDs too. The shares seem to represent the OSes that are only on that arch, eg OpenVMS, Tru64\DEC UNIX to alpha, (ingnoring the x86) Solaris to SPARC. etc. Mac to PPC, AIX to PPC, etc.
Basically, by counting this this way, x86 looks more dominant than it is.
I basically meant the posibility of 'blessed' binarys and such. (I don't think it will happen, there are just too many people against it, though)
In terms of keys, I believe 512-bit keys are no longer secure, as someone found all the primes needed to break any 512-bit pub/pri RSA key, and several others. I however can't remember the reference, so don't shoot me if I got something wrong.
The addition of crypto backdoors to the programs will create a security hole, and it would be HUGE. The hole would be there, and a single cracker who figured it out would have a security hole in everything. The fear of that vulnerability, EVEN IF NOT KNOWINGLY EXPLOITED WOULD CAUSE A LOSS IN CONFIDENCE ABOUT COMPUTER SECURITY. The secnarios are endless, from all 'secure' online purchases, security of propriatary code, finacial records, etc. If say amazon, paypal, and ebay got hacked, there would be a major problem in the USA. Especially now with the knee-jerk reactions, people have, and the sudden concerns about 'security'. The thing that kept the US economy up for so long was consumer confidence, and spending, and I believe that this will contribute to an unmeasureable but significant decline in each.
(This coming from a geek trying to put it in a language that many marketers, politicians, economists, etc could understand, who actually dislikes most businesses today.)
Write about cryptography and how important it is to the USA (and world). I recently wrote an English essay about it, and have told numberous people, and encouraged them to write people, and tell other people about how this would affect the world (and given our self-centered views) especially the USA.
The economy is hurting right now, what would having a potential security breach in all programs do to consumer confidence? I think it would be very bad, when you consider how much confidential business information is passed over the internet to reduce costs relative to leased lines, satelites etc (for the most part it is cheaper, not all cases).
The other big issue (Which I think is bigger than the economic aspects) is the privacy aspect. I also think that my views on the subject have been made numerous times on/., by me and by others who seem to have the same point, so I am not going into a whole longwinded speach about it.
Make people understand about it. Don't let them be ingnorant. Take away their excuses, and make them look at what is happening. Many a person has revised their opinion, based on exposure to what it means. I personally know of no technologially oriented person who approves of it. (this is excuding the/. people who are supposedly technologially oriented.)
But Ford isn't. Microsoft essentially controlles the client Operating Systems (chassis). By forcing the OEMs to put various things on (Engene, etc) there are basically only 2 cars-A festiva and a taurus, both with the same engene (say a 4-cylender), same seats, wheels, etc. However, GM (Sun, ns, whatever) even if they have a better engene (6-cylender and 8-cylender) they can't have it included in the car, and the car's chassis (API) changes with every release, so the engene is too long, to wide, to whatever, but it doesn't work. However, it doesn't work because Ford didn't and doesn't have a very near monopoly to abuse, as Microsoft did.
US Constitution-Article 1, Section 8 "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Explain how this is promoting science or useful arts, please. I do not see the justification for this anywhere in the constitution. In fact:
Amendment IX-
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X-
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
"
These seem to indicate that trying to harm the progress of science is if any government's right, it is that of the states, not the federal government, and of promoting non-useful arts is the right of either people, or states.
Oops, I forget, the fscking copies given to potential reps by corps are abridged, and extended.
Just me being pissed off. I think I will go talk personally with my state rep (I know her), and write a snail mail letter to the us reps for the state.
HP/UX is not going to be a 'lucrative HP/UX hardware business', because HP's next generation hardware architecture is going to be IA-64, which was co-developed by Intel and HP. Of all the current *NIX the only propriatary UNIX that runs right-now on IA-64 is HP-UX, because IA-64 is supposed to be HP's upgrade path from HP-PARISC. From custom hardware to generic PC clones with HP logos.
HP-C cannot kill off VMS or tru64 because of gov contracts requiring support for something like 10 years. Plus, Tru64 is one of the best propriatary unicies around, and much more standard.
HP/C can't, even if they wanted to. Period. VMS and others (think tru64, and maybe hpux) have a government contract which requires them to support the systems for something like 10 years or more. Plus, many banks use VMS, and rely on Alphas. (No, geeks aren't the only ones who like them.) The problem hp-compaq-dec is going to have is that they are by contract forced to support these operating systems, whether they want to or not.
Yes, If you have a video card, use GATOS (seach freshmeat for both), or if like me, you have a ATT-TV Wonder(VE) use bttv (std one in most distros works fine for me.) The picture is actually clearer on a computer monitor.
modprobe tuner type=2
insmod bttv card=2
works fine for me.
Ever heard of TeX? or LaTeX? In the math department, LaTeX is *THE* format, whatever platform. xfig does well with figures. Plus, if you are fast at typing, *TeX is much faster for typing up papers, tests, asignments, silabii, and general usage.
None of these 'office suites' (linux, windows, or mac) come with nearly the features or control. It goes out to PostScript, and then print. (Several professors have a modified gvim, with menus and options (make dvi file, make ps file, print ps file, etc), and there might even be one of the unreformed who uses emacs. Of course lpr is easy enough for most people.
I personally think Lyx has gone the right way- make the best thing available to more people.
Suffice to say, office suites should be renamed 'business' office suites. Especially funny when someone (administration, etc) sends a word, excel, etc document, if you get to read some of the people's response letters, they are rather nasty.)
Stuff such as maple, mathmatica, and matlab (and yes, I know one of those doesn't, cant remember which one, tho.) run faster on linux.
As for interfaces, 'intuitve' depends on what you have seen- depends on YOUR experence. I think that say emacs is completely counter-intuative, *vi* doesn't seem that way to me, then again people say that *vi* isn't.
btw, yes, I do know what is going on. Look around, there are plenty of linux programs to do that, it has a (depending on the person) learning curve that is about the same (some take better to linux, some to windows), but the people who know linux can do stuff faster at about the same time (in learning).
Hey morons, If you don't want spam, don't post your email everywhere. (And if you have to, use filters)
They have the same rights to send email as you do. However, in this case (violation of terms of service) they should lose their net connection, because they violated the contract.
Seriously, get one of these universitys that go over the internet to make a department, then have them claim the DMCA interferes with science, their right to publish, and etc.
I would contribute $0.02 to it. (Oh, wait, I have.) Yes, this is a joke, if you can't tell.
And the Alpha fans. Of course, DEC's managing and marketing was very very bad. But in terms of engeneering, it was king. Too bad that that is what compaq chose to keep, and sold the good part-engeneering piece by piece (StrongARM, alphas now).
Btw, 1 GHz alphas are out, and have regained the specint title! (which was only lost once since alphas came out- to a 1.7 GHz processor, when we were still @ 833 MHz. SpecFP has never been lost.)
The thing is that G4s are very good on specialized stuff (using altivec, but are not much faster than even same clockspeed athlons without it (3% I heard)) Now we won't know, if ppc will ever be as good as a top of the line alpha.:(
However, AMD hired away many alpha designers, and even used the same slot, arch (in some ways chip-wise). So, even with this, the best general purpose tech is still in their hands.
The program that is trying to do what OS X does for OS 9 programs is called WINE. Seriously, the idea is essentially the same. However, Apple had the source to OS 9 and if there were any undocumented things, they had what it did, and could replicate it.
Yes, Apple has so far done it better, but what they don't have is a corperation they are trying to emulate trying to make sure they don't succede.
Anything from pre-95 that I have tried works fine, and most things later work to a certain extent, sometimes even better than Windows itself.
Why not follow that? Set IPv4 addresses to all be a class c ipv6 address. Forexample current (random) 182.34.5.13 would go to say 1.1.182.34.5.13. Allowing IPv4 to stay around on systems that don't support IPv6 (majority of clients-win mac).
The problem with the 'adoption rate' comment is that if we do switch over, there is going to be a huge problem with ipv4 holdouts, because suddenly everyone will be on ipv6, essentially no bw tv stations at all. Either they can handle it or will not work, unless something like the above is implemented.
seti@home
(hope this is an error)
Intel Pentium 4
37 hr 07 min 51.2 sec
22) AMD K7 Thunderbird
4 hr 29 min 36.4 sec
Alpha
0 hr 59 min 25.3 sec
sparcv9
8 hr 08 min 30.1 sec
mips4
3 hr 13 min 22.9 sec
Note: above are what looked like the best times from each test and processor. (I didn't check every single one, but usually they arent too far off. P4 seti time was the only specific p4 time.)
The P4 should be able to easily beat the k7 (athlon is too long). however it doesn't in the real world. Given that a p4 has about the same time as a k7 in the seti (I think the 37 hours was an error, otherwise, intel is really screwed up.) It still gets creamed on the (fpu intensive) seti@home, and has even slightly better specint scores than an alpha (running @ 800 MHz slower). However, these tests (spec) are basically only of the CPU, as is seti for the most part, and not the RAM, HD, etc. So Theoretically yes, the P4 is nearly as good as an alpha, or anything else. However, Intel's design and marketing decisions appear to have crippled it.
Of course, the 3rd computer in the specint one would cream all the others in the real world, if this were a real world test. Then again a single 1GHz alpha would be alot easier to beat than 32 1GHz alphas.
Same reason they forgot to remove the debugging symbols in that service pack for nt. Knowing this, someone also determined that it was present in 98, 98sr, NT3.51, and NT4.0 (I think). This was before 2000, me. (may have been on/.)
Most Linux users are more competent than windows users. (There are some of both in each camp but lets face it, linux has a higher average group.) BSDs and other lesser known OSes in general have even better groups of competent users, because there aren't that many people to help. (Macs are more of the exception to this though.)
Which means they are more likely to know something about security. Or that their sysadmin does, and a competent admin can (a) protect the system. eg You could mess up/home/$USER but nothing else (software wise).
(b) Backup the system, incase $USER doesn't follow the rules.
(c) Pass on knowledge of what to do and what not to do. (Which sometimes is real pain in the butt, depending on the person!)
ANY sysadmin should do this, as should every user (at least b and c). In my experence, Windows Sysadmins are not as likely to do the above as Linux Sysadmins.
GCC is great for many things. It has reasonable speed, and works on many archs. However this also means some drawbacks.
Because it needs to support everything between 8-bit computers and 64-bit computers, it can't use some of the super prediction for register usage, etc for any specific computer (It does some, but not super great for any type of computer.)
Something like intel's or DEC's (Compaq's) C Compiler can be made specific to the computer, and doesn't have to worry about other archs, hence producing more efficient compilers for that processor. Speed gains of 10x are not unheard of for CCC vs GCC.
The intel compiler will suffer from the same drawbacks as ccc with regards to the linux kernel, as Linux uses GCC specific extensions of C.
GCC is a great general machine compiler, and probably the best in the world, but speed isn't it's strong point.
Refunds to people who do not agree to MS's licence
on
Code Red Refunds?
·
· Score: 1
If someone uses MS on a computer, in their EULA, MS has no liability (based on a contract, so if there is a law about it the law supercedes that.) Which basically means people who use windows can't do anything to microsoft. However, we have a (horrible in most situations) nice little law about cybercrime. It refers to 'hacking' (morons). And attempting to breach security.
Could Microsoft be sued for being an accessory to the breaking of computer security, and possibly false advertising (I remember secure being used in several advertisments for windows 2000 and nt)
(responding to all the 'i don't need this' and 'usb/firewire is fine')
USB and firewire might be ok for some things, but show me a USB/FW device that does the same thing and is physically smaller than a PCMCIA card. IF you managed to meet that challenge, compare the reduced portibility (with chords and such hanging off) of the ibook without PCMCIA vs a laptop with PCMCIA. Plus, you usually need a case to hold that whereas with pcmcia, if you have a good runtime, you don't need a case. Plus all laptops newer than the first pentiums\ppc have usb.
I will stick with my PCMCIA based stuff thank you very much.
Plus, I really dislike mac zealots saying that their stuff is fastest. 1ghz alphas = 1 very faster processor than motorola or amd or intel.
Slashdot Mirror
That dear slashdot poster is Bullshit. Anyone with a background in physics could design one, but getting the parts (Weapons-grade plutonium, and/or uranium) would be very difficult.
On the other hand Russia is supposed to be missing between 30-100 small 'suitcase' nuclear weapons. Hope they aren't missing if you live in a large city. A single one of these would have (if used in place of the planes) leveled a very large portion of NY (depending on yield, which is unknown, but supposed to be in the lower k-ton range)
I try to help with the development of tilp (a program to link linux computers (and other oses) with ti calcs.)
This is very sad, as I have a couple of (non-graphing) hps, one I got out after someone threw it away, because the battery had come unseated. HPs can beat any other calculator, NO ti or casio currently planned or in existance will be able to equal an HP48gx. Period. However, what is more sad is the reliance on calculators by people. I can still calculate most things in my head faster than people can pull out their calcs and get an answer. However, I have fallen massively in speed. When people used to try to type with their calc, I was faster, then I got a calculator. I relied on it, and that was bad, I first made darn sure I learned how to do something by hand and head first, then I would program it into a calc, but not use it. Taylor series, are fun to do.
Just the ramblings of someone who sees how pathetic most people are without tech, and is forcing himself to be able to do things without much tech (and yes, a pencil counts as tech).
Basically, by counting this this way, x86 looks more dominant than it is.
In terms of keys, I believe 512-bit keys are no longer secure, as someone found all the primes needed to break any 512-bit pub/pri RSA key, and several others. I however can't remember the reference, so don't shoot me if I got something wrong.
(This coming from a geek trying to put it in a language that many marketers, politicians, economists, etc could understand, who actually dislikes most businesses today.)
The economy is hurting right now, what would having a potential security breach in all programs do to consumer confidence? I think it would be very bad, when you consider how much confidential business information is passed over the internet to reduce costs relative to leased lines, satelites etc (for the most part it is cheaper, not all cases).
The other big issue (Which I think is bigger than the economic aspects) is the privacy aspect. I also think that my views on the subject have been made numerous times on /., by me and by others who seem to have the same point, so I am not going into a whole longwinded speach about it.
Make people understand about it. Don't let them be ingnorant. Take away their excuses, and make them look at what is happening. Many a person has revised their opinion, based on exposure to what it means. I personally know of no technologially oriented person who approves of it. (this is excuding the /. people who are supposedly technologially oriented.)
(Not quite 100% what I meant, but close enough)
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Explain how this is promoting science or useful arts, please. I do not see the justification for this anywhere in the constitution. In fact:
Amendment IX-
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X-
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. "
These seem to indicate that trying to harm the progress of science is if any government's right, it is that of the states, not the federal government, and of promoting non-useful arts is the right of either people, or states.
Oops, I forget, the fscking copies given to potential reps by corps are abridged, and extended.
Just me being pissed off. I think I will go talk personally with my state rep (I know her), and write a snail mail letter to the us reps for the state.
HP/UX is not going to be a 'lucrative HP/UX hardware business', because HP's next generation hardware architecture is going to be IA-64, which was co-developed by Intel and HP. Of all the current *NIX the only propriatary UNIX that runs right-now on IA-64 is HP-UX, because IA-64 is supposed to be HP's upgrade path from HP-PARISC. From custom hardware to generic PC clones with HP logos.
HP-C cannot kill off VMS or tru64 because of gov contracts requiring support for something like 10 years. Plus, Tru64 is one of the best propriatary unicies around, and much more standard.
HP/C can't, even if they wanted to. Period. VMS and others (think tru64, and maybe hpux) have a government contract which requires them to support the systems for something like 10 years or more. Plus, many banks use VMS, and rely on Alphas. (No, geeks aren't the only ones who like them.) The problem hp-compaq-dec is going to have is that they are by contract forced to support these operating systems, whether they want to or not.
Yes, If you have a video card, use GATOS (seach freshmeat for both), or if like me, you have a ATT-TV Wonder(VE) use bttv (std one in most distros works fine for me.) The picture is actually clearer on a computer monitor.
modprobe tuner type=2
insmod bttv card=2
works fine for me.
Ever heard of TeX? or LaTeX? In the math department, LaTeX is *THE* format, whatever platform. xfig does well with figures. Plus, if you are fast at typing, *TeX is much faster for typing up papers, tests, asignments, silabii, and general usage.
None of these 'office suites' (linux, windows, or mac) come with nearly the features or control. It goes out to PostScript, and then print. (Several professors have a modified gvim, with menus and options (make dvi file, make ps file, print ps file, etc), and there might even be one of the unreformed who uses emacs. Of course lpr is easy enough for most people.
I personally think Lyx has gone the right way- make the best thing available to more people.
Suffice to say, office suites should be renamed 'business' office suites. Especially funny when someone (administration, etc) sends a word, excel, etc document, if you get to read some of the people's response letters, they are rather nasty.)
Stuff such as maple, mathmatica, and matlab (and yes, I know one of those doesn't, cant remember which one, tho.) run faster on linux.
As for interfaces, 'intuitve' depends on what you have seen- depends on YOUR experence. I think that say emacs is completely counter-intuative, *vi* doesn't seem that way to me, then again people say that *vi* isn't.
btw, yes, I do know what is going on. Look around, there are plenty of linux programs to do that, it has a (depending on the person) learning curve that is about the same (some take better to linux, some to windows), but the people who know linux can do stuff faster at about the same time (in learning).
Please excuse my rambling on.
Hey morons, If you don't want spam, don't post your email everywhere. (And if you have to, use filters)
They have the same rights to send email as you do. However, in this case (violation of terms of service) they should lose their net connection, because they violated the contract.
Hmmm... The Science of Cracking.
Seriously, get one of these universitys that go over the internet to make a department, then have them claim the DMCA interferes with science, their right to publish, and etc.
I would contribute $0.02 to it. (Oh, wait, I have.) Yes, this is a joke, if you can't tell.
Btw, 1 GHz alphas are out, and have regained the specint title! (which was only lost once since alphas came out- to a 1.7 GHz processor, when we were still @ 833 MHz. SpecFP has never been lost.)
The thing is that G4s are very good on specialized stuff (using altivec, but are not much faster than even same clockspeed athlons without it (3% I heard)) Now we won't know, if ppc will ever be as good as a top of the line alpha. :(
However, AMD hired away many alpha designers, and even used the same slot, arch (in some ways chip-wise). So, even with this, the best general purpose tech is still in their hands.
Yes, Apple has so far done it better, but what they don't have is a corperation they are trying to emulate trying to make sure they don't succede.
Anything from pre-95 that I have tried works fine, and most things later work to a certain extent, sometimes even better than Windows itself.
The problem with the 'adoption rate' comment is that if we do switch over, there is going to be a huge problem with ipv4 holdouts, because suddenly everyone will be on ipv6, essentially no bw tv stations at all. Either they can handle it or will not work, unless something like the above is implemented.
I believe none on NYSE is run by NT, and the only SE that is run with NT is Nazdac (sp?) via a custom deal with MS.
In the article, it said, they are using solaris.
Specfp2000
Intel D850GB motherboard(1.8 GHz, Pe 1 618 628
Gigabyte GA-7DX Motherboard, 1.4GHz 1 426 458
AlphaServer DS20E Model 68/833 1 643 784
Sun Blade 1000 Model 1900 1 438 467
Specint2000
Precision WorkStation 330 (1.80 GHz 1 599 619
Gigabyte GA-7DX Motherboard, 1.4GHz 1 495 554
AlphaServer GS320 Model 32 68/1001 1 561 621
seti@home
(hope this is an error) Intel Pentium 4 37 hr 07 min 51.2 sec
22) AMD K7 Thunderbird 4 hr 29 min 36.4 sec
Alpha 0 hr 59 min 25.3 sec
sparcv9 8 hr 08 min 30.1 sec
mips4 3 hr 13 min 22.9 sec
Note: above are what looked like the best times from each test and processor. (I didn't check every single one, but usually they arent too far off. P4 seti time was the only specific p4 time.)
The P4 should be able to easily beat the k7 (athlon is too long). however it doesn't in the real world. Given that a p4 has about the same time as a k7 in the seti (I think the 37 hours was an error, otherwise, intel is really screwed up.) It still gets creamed on the (fpu intensive) seti@home, and has even slightly better specint scores than an alpha (running @ 800 MHz slower). However, these tests (spec) are basically only of the CPU, as is seti for the most part, and not the RAM, HD, etc. So Theoretically yes, the P4 is nearly as good as an alpha, or anything else. However, Intel's design and marketing decisions appear to have crippled it.
Of course, the 3rd computer in the specint one would cream all the others in the real world, if this were a real world test. Then again a single 1GHz alpha would be alot easier to beat than 32 1GHz alphas.
Same reason they forgot to remove the debugging symbols in that service pack for nt. Knowing this, someone also determined that it was present in 98, 98sr, NT3.51, and NT4.0 (I think). This was before 2000, me. (may have been on /.)
Which means they are more likely to know something about security. Or that their sysadmin does, and a competent admin can /home/$USER but nothing else (software wise).
(a) protect the system. eg You could mess up
(b) Backup the system, incase $USER doesn't follow the rules.
(c) Pass on knowledge of what to do and what not to do. (Which sometimes is real pain in the butt, depending on the person!)
ANY sysadmin should do this, as should every user (at least b and c). In my experence, Windows Sysadmins are not as likely to do the above as Linux Sysadmins.
Because it needs to support everything between 8-bit computers and 64-bit computers, it can't use some of the super prediction for register usage, etc for any specific computer (It does some, but not super great for any type of computer.)
Something like intel's or DEC's (Compaq's) C Compiler can be made specific to the computer, and doesn't have to worry about other archs, hence producing more efficient compilers for that processor. Speed gains of 10x are not unheard of for CCC vs GCC.
The intel compiler will suffer from the same drawbacks as ccc with regards to the linux kernel, as Linux uses GCC specific extensions of C.
GCC is a great general machine compiler, and probably the best in the world, but speed isn't it's strong point.
Could Microsoft be sued for being an accessory to the breaking of computer security, and possibly false advertising (I remember secure being used in several advertisments for windows 2000 and nt)
Just my rambling
(responding to all the 'i don't need this' and 'usb/firewire is fine')
USB and firewire might be ok for some things, but show me a USB/FW device that does the same thing and is physically smaller than a PCMCIA card. IF you managed to meet that challenge, compare the reduced portibility (with chords and such hanging off) of the ibook without PCMCIA vs a laptop with PCMCIA. Plus, you usually need a case to hold that whereas with pcmcia, if you have a good runtime, you don't need a case. Plus all laptops newer than the first pentiums\ppc have usb.
I will stick with my PCMCIA based stuff thank you very much.
Plus, I really dislike mac zealots saying that their stuff is fastest. 1ghz alphas = 1 very faster processor than motorola or amd or intel.