I'm not 100% sure it's a good idea to have the application run in parallel to the analyzer in a production environment. Because the analyzer must have total access to the code and data spaces of the application, any bug in the analyzer could really ruin somebody's day.
However, inline analyzers have existed. Intel's VTune is clunky, limited in supported architectures but useful where it applies. Parallel developers might well use DAKOTA and KOJAK to do the same for MPI applications, which traditional analyzers can't handle at all. I also would not advise anyone to just use analyzers. You would be wise to monitor events - there are patches for Linux, such as evlog, which give you very flexible event logging. Linux also provides the ability to monitor all kinds of other statistics - either as standard or through patches such as Web100 (for the network) or LTT-ng (for profiling).
Does this mean I think Sun don't deserve the award? I've not used that tool, so I'm not in a position to say. It would have to do a lot in addition to basic analysis to earn the right to be innovative, never mind the title of "top technical innovation". If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux. If it can't, then all I can say is that the competition must've sucked this year.
The size of the singularity is fixed, but the size of the black hole is not. The size of the black hole is directly proportional to the mass and should be a function of the entropy. Hawking radiation is the stream of particles of quantum foam which switch from being virtual to being real when the opposite particle is captured by the black hole. For reasons I do not entirely understand, it is assumed that the majority of particles captured will be the anti-particle, thus adding a negative amount of mass to the black hole. The companion particle will then be observed as radiation that appears to come from the vicinity of the black hole.
There is an assumption in all of this, that the singularity is a point in space/time. This is how it is normally considered, but it is by no means the only interpretation that would be valid. Evaporation only applies within this assumption because entropy can only ever increase and the entropy of a physical point singularity that did not evaporate would be a constant. If a singularity does not exist as a point (there are other solutions, such as a "Kerr Ring Singularity") or doesn't actually exist as a physical entity at all (see below for a trivial theory where that would work), then all bets are off.
This is a "just for amusement" theory, for the sole purpose of illustrating a singularity that would not violate the second law of thermodynamics and still not evaporate. Let us say that a singularity does have infinite gravity at the point at which it "exists", and that the curvature of space/time is a direct function of gravity, then what we call a singularity would not actually exist as an object. At all. What you would have is a "well" of essentially zero diameter where the sides were orthogonal to space and along the axis of time in a negative direction. The notion that "space and time end at a singularity" would not be true to an observer within the Universe, as they would not experience the well as anything other than a continuation of space. However, space would then not be simply-connected and it would be mathematically possible to show that there were mathematically definable points within an otherwise well-defined region that could not be reached.
Now for the well itself. It cannot stop within the universe, because there are no forces along that axis. F=ma, so if F=0, then a=0. Nor can it continue forever, because it's going along the axis of time and time does not continue forever. There is exactly one place such a well could terminate, that being the moment of the Big Bang. (It stops there because there's nothing more to travel along.) It would be an express trip, there would be no possibility of getting off anywhere else. So it's just as well that, if this correct, anything that fell in would be crushed into quantum foam. Nothing else is going to fit in a well of zero diameter. Hawking's theory of imaginary time becoming real time would certainly fit this description.
This theory would require that (a) black holes can only ever expand, (b) hawking radiation would contain equal numbers of particles and anti-particles (which would explain why we have such trouble finding any), (c) the recently-proved Poincare hypothesis does NOT apply to space/time, as it is no longer simply-connected, and therefore the Universe is NOT topologically equivalent to a hypersphere (which is going to upset the Chinese and Russians no end), and (d) the Hubble constant absolutely must be below 1.
(That last one might not be obvious, so I'll explain. This theory recycles matter and energy through time to the big bang. Since you have a Universe's worth of matter/energy, you would not need inflation theory - which is "good" because inflation is an ugly hack whose chief benefit is that it works vastly better than every other mainstream theory in existance. But you can't guarantee that the whole Universe is recycled if the Universe is open. You can only guarantee 100% recycling if every possible photon and every possible particle is absolutely
Inks that were made from slowly sublimating crystals go back a very long way. The idea is that the colour is in the form of something like solid iodine in a medium that slows down the rate at which it turns to its gaseous state. The medium can't follow the writing, though, or the writing is still visible. So Xerox has discovered a better sublimation process. Sounds like basic chemistry, not rocket science.
Hey, I'd love it if Microsoft's Vista was going to take out the Internet - it would discredit Microsoft on a near-permanent basis. However, even if that were to happen, it won't happen because of DNS or IPv6. IPv6 is not going to put any kind of significant load on anything. Now, it might put a teensy little bit of strain on ISC's BIND, because the reverse DNS record is written in a really crappy format, with a dot between each hex digit. That means that there's going to be a little more text processing involved in converting an address into a name. Forward searches - which are the bulk of them - act exactly as normal.
Sure, you might get a little extra latency, as the servers parse an IPv4 request prior to an IPv6 one, where the record type required is explicit. Such searches could double the time it takes to get a result. However, doubling a secong gives you two seconds, so I don't feel this is going to prove too stressful.
A bigger problem will be badly-written software that tries to open all connections over IPv4 and waits for a timeout before trying IPv6. This will hang the machine, though, not the Internet. No other user is going to notice or care.
There is one - and only one - way that there could be a problem, and that would be if Vista's IPv6 implementation is broken such that it assumes an absurdly small timeout and therefore floods whatever it is trying to talk with in an unintended DoS attack. Even then, most routers are designed to squelch over-active sources, so the impact of such a flood would be negligable.
The guy studies supernovae and black holes, and probably has user accounts on every particle accelerator out there - you think he'd lower himself to just firing someone?
It's probably not going to be easy to diagnose at this stage - not only because it likely advanced far beyond the point 99.9% of sufferers would be tested, making any kind of direct comparison impossible, but also because he has survived so long, and we therefore have no data whatsoever on what ALS would look like at this point, and also because the disease has not progressed significantly for some time - it stopped and even reversed a very little at one point. Sure, you can study the existing damage, but without an active element, there would be nothing to test for.
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to identify the illness, even from an armchair, for exactly the reasons I outlined. The number of neurologically degenerative diseases that actually spontaneously go into remission is not exactly high. That alone should eliminate the vast majority of ALS-like diseases to something much more manageable. We also have video footage from different stages. Horison did a documentary on Professor Hawking prior to him losing his speech to the trachea operation. We certainly have video footage of him since. Again, that should allow you to exclude certain possibilities. Finally, although a lot of his body has no motor control worth speaking of, his hands most evidently do as that is how he controls the chair and the voice synthesizer, although he's not exactly a speed demon on typing with it. His face also does - he doesn't lack the ability to show emotions.
Oh, that made me think of something else. Those are the same muscles he pushed the hardest from shortly before being diagnosed until he became a total invalid. He would swing on trees extensively, according to his mother in one documentary. It's suspected his heavy physical exercise regimen may have contributed to the disease slowing down and stopping later on in his life, but I believe it to be highly significant that the muscles he pushed the most suffered the least. Again, that can't possibly be characteristic of too many conditions.
From these well-documented and well-established facts, it should be easy to go through those conditions which Professor Hawking might have and discard those that simply don't behave in the way observed. (Or, to pull a Sherlock Holmes, reject the impossible and whatever is left - however improbable - must be correct. This doesn't work in practice for most things, but in this one case, there will be few enough possibilities that eliminating the impossible should be very doable indeed.)
...all three civilizations are extinct. In fact, every single civilization with a hair style that drew comments has become extinct! It's not the nanoparticles, it's the alien creatures that infect people's hair and eats their brains out from the scalp down!
I'm sure it was a National Semiconductor chip and I'm certain it was a 6502 (8-bit) processor, but as I can't find the reference to it, then either there was a short-lived I-generation that was so short-lived that very few people heard of it, OR I am not remembering correctly (never!:). I do know for a fact that NS made a 3GHz 6502 that was not one of the three you list above, and that this ultra-high-speed model is not listed on NS' website either. (Companies should have pages for discontinued products - it's not as if the pages would take much space.)
I think it's safe to say that anything written in arcem is a re-implementation, not a direct clone. I'm not sure if that makes it free of patent woes, but I've never heard of any associated with it. (Mind you, a University would want a little more assurance than that. Well, these days I would hope so. I know lecturers who wholesale pirated material so as to save themselves some effort. Got them into a little trouble, as I recall.)
MIPS is a consortium, as I understand it, that produces a specification for the sole purpose of having Broadcom ignore it. (I'm serious - the Broadcom SB1 core is a mishmash of a wide range of MIPS specifications, uses a HyperTransport bus that takes bits from three different versions, and has an ethernet controller that almost works at the rated speed.)
I believe the 6502 series is up to 65I02, and is still going strong. If I'm correct on this, it's one of the longest-lived series of microprocessor, as virtually everything else from back then has been abandoned.
There is a third-party driver for Linux that'll allow you to connect to CBM64 peripherals such as hard drives and tape decks. You then use VICE to emulate the CBM64 on Linux and access the data normally. What's the big deal?
Linus had enough trouble debugging the kernel to get the last lot of malware working, and these virus writers aren't exactly playing fair and giving him the interface specs, or any cash to do the porting work. Sheesh! Virus writers must think those kernel guys are made of money or something.
You'd have thought so...
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Crypto Snake Oil
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· Score: 4, Informative
But I've worked as a contractor for Government sites where their central data server was:
Publicly accessible, outside of any firewall
Had.rhosts on it, for the specific purpose of avoiding having to write login code for scripts that copy data
Ok, I'll be fair - though God alone knows why, and I think even God gave up trying to figure out the tangled mess I call a brain some time ago. They did use DES - not triple DES, just plain DES - for the really really sensitive stuff. The encryption key was visible to anyone logged in on any account, however, as the DES they used required the key to be the first parameter and they made no effort to erase it. So it was technically encrypted. (Once the passkey has been broadcast to all and sundry, I do not regard the encryption as anything more than a technicality, and in the case of DES, I seriously doubt you could even claim that.)
I've heard that security has since improved. I say "heard", because it was some time AFTER security was said to have been improved that reports started coming out of a fileswapper using NASA storage machines as extra disk space - the very same organization and very same type of mass storage device I had serious doubts about many years prior to that.
But that's a Government institution! Yes, and they're the ones with a great many experts in such matters and a great many contracts with people who can not merely withdraw business but also guarantee a disaster in the next election. The bulk of private corporations out there have neither the skills to draw on OR the incentives to maintain some sort of standard. All they have to do is ROT13 and tell you it's got digital security. Enough suckers'll buy into it to keep the CEO in champaign, caviar and girls of commercially-negotiable virtue for life.
The problem is, there is no mandated minimum standard for security, so those who can WILL use the lowest standard possible that will deceive customers into thinking they're safe whilst staying a gnat's whisker (after being compressed by the forces of a neutron star) beyond what could be sued for in courts, assuming a technically ignorant judge.
IMHO, "snake oil" could be vastly reduced - not eliminated but reduced - by placing minimum standards for crypto, compression and other easily-manipulated areas of technology, and enforcing them. Not maximum - that's what the intelligence services want, and they want it to be zero. I'm strictly talking minimum. Your good, old-fashioned lemon law - does it fill the purpose for which it was sold to the customer? Yes or no.
In the case of cryptography, that would be rephrased as follows: would a reasonable person, aware of the strengths and deficits of the technique concerned, aware of any warnings published on the block crypto lounge, hashing function lounge, etc, aware of the Usenet Crypto FAQ (ie: aware of the "common knowledge" that exists on cryptography), and aware of the grade of security the user is demonstrably expecting, agree or disagree that the cryptographic system sold meets the grade expected or not?
If it does not, it is a lemon for the purpose for which it was sold. It might be perfectly good otherwise, but it doesn't, can't, and never will do what was expected of it.
This would be enforceable, as I said very clearly that I'm talking about weighing the "common knowledge" against the "personal expectation". Both are easy to define and even a non-expert should understand a skull-and-crossbones labelled "BROKEN, DO NOT USE" in a crypto lounge. They might not understand the fine nit-picking or the advanced maths, but that's why I'm sticking solely to what is commonly known and understood, not what is derivable from axiom 327 as applies to lemma 291 as described by Professor Branestawm's obscure paper entitled "techniques for splicing dormice genes into giraffe brai
Yeah, but which scores better in tests - zombies, ghouls, ghasts or skeletons? Personally, I'd have thought do better by performing a spirit transfer - minor demons would likely do well in a student body. It would fit the image better, too.
The writer of a LOT of truly superb Linux Weekly News articles on how the kernel works is Valerie Henson. Valerie works at Intel. This means that there's a 10% chance a corporation doing heavy, front-line R&D in Linux will have a chance to hire a brilliant mind. (Unfortunately, the place I work is two states away, so there's no hope here.)
MMORGs are OK on graphics - the effort it would take to improve the graphics to the point where it would substantially improve game quality and interest would be disproportionately high. If you were to improve graphics, it would be to use better line-of-sight rules, more in-betweening and better fine-grain controls.
NPC gameplay is another area. At present, MMORGs suffer from the same problem a lot of MUDs do - many pre-scripted set pieces and very few dynamic scenarios. What's a dynamic scenario? That's where unexpected things can occur. Let's say you have two set pieces that are near each other. In a truly dynamic arena, those can merge into a single encounter from nothing more than normal movement, creating entirely new, unscripted encounters. NPC rules would also change with experience, so a monster that beats up players for a while would be tougher than a newbie monster. (This wouldn't just be in terms of hit points, it would include varying the weightings for actions, capturing items - and using them, learning what type of attack works best against what type of player - the sorts of things rules engines are very good at learning.)
Environmental gameplay is generally the biggest weakness, and therefore the area with the greatest potential for improvement. Have rivers drop (or fail) in droughts and burst their banks in downpours and cloudbursts. If there's an NPC factory making wooden items near a forest, you need to have clearings and new growth. In an earthquake, buildings can fall down, cliffs can collpase and escarpments will be terrifying nightmares. But whilst structures can be rebuilt, mountains can't. Not in any meaningful game time, at least. Overhunting an area should not only be possible, it should be frighteningly easy when populations get too high. Resources should be limited and living resources should only replenish if not driven away. Extinction should also be possible. The environment should have a major impact on what is visible - not mere hidden-line-removal, but realistic visibility constraints. For those into board wargaming, you may be familiar with Advanced Squad Leader, where the line-of-sight rules depended on so many factors that you could spend a week deciding if a shot was possible. That was not good for a boardgame, but is trivial for a modern PC.
R&D... Now, this is a really tough one. It should be possible for players to create their own objects, monsters, etc, if they acquire a high enough skill level, within certain limits. User creations should never unbalance the game (which is why it is so tough) but should be flexible enough that fresh content becomes essentially infinite. But as in the real world, where geeks generally do better in basements than exploring jungles filled with unknown dangers, it should be extremely hard to become highly skilled both in adventuring and inventing. Oh, and inventions should not always do what is expected - whether it is in fiction or fact, mad scientists rarely get the results they are looking for.
Art is a big thing, as well. One of the greatest triumphs of MUD-1 was the graveyard. Those who made the rank of wizard or witch got to write the script on a tombstone for the mortal remains of their character. This had two effects - firstly, it meant that the graveyard (which doubled as a maze) was forever growing bigger. Secondly, it gave people an outlet for their creative side. Designing buildings (a-la Virtual Worlds) is too crude to be really called artistry. You want to be able to make chalk horses on hillsides. It should be possible to plaster a city with wall murals in the largest exercise of virtual graffiti of all time. Oh, and to make it more interesting, a fantasy/historic MMORG should require you to assemble any colours from the raw materials.
Lastly, there's combat and experience. Most MMORGs use a very crude D&D-style hit point system. "Heroic" LARP systems (such as "Spirit of Adventure" - a truly superb game system) had different hit points in different locations, a
Oh, that is very true. For myself, I've written a few articles and have tried to provide references. Sometimes two or three sources to the information. I've also contributed to a bunch of articles. Where I am uncertain on the data or the relevence, however mildly, I put the suggestion in the discussion page and not the master page.
Have the articles I've written been subject to vandalism? Sure. The logs also show that fairly substantial vandalism was completely eliminated within a matter of days. That's not bad going for pages on some truly obscure, regional information. We're not talking about stuff likely to get a hundred visits an hour, I'd be amazed if the articles got a hundred visits a month. For readers to spend the time to undo damage, refine the page (there have been numerous truly wonderful additions to the articles) and contribute some excellent material is (to me) proof that the Wikipedia system works fine even for stuff that is rarely visited. (Those who contribute to the less-popular pages can consider themselves thanked. General knowledge can be found anywhere, so the true power of a system like Wikipedia is felt when more obscure material that would normally be scattered and incoherent - if it existed on the Internet at all - is readily available.)
I would like to see reference enforcement added to Wikipedia, but it is unclear how you'd go about doing that. You can check a link exists, but the book and paper references would be hard even to verify to that degree, and AI text analysis systems are not nearly advanced enough to tell if a reference has anything to do with the claims in the article, although it might be possible to eliminate some definitely invalid references. No automated validation of articles is possible at this time.
It might also be good if Wikipedia also provided a grammar checker. They are far from perfect, but it would be useful for catching some of the more basic errors. A spellchecker would be good too, for the same reason. Again, perfection isn't necessary, it merely has to reduce the number of uncaught errors to make it worthwhile. Requiring approval would catch very little outside of the specialist knowledge of the approver and the more general-knowledge stuff. (This is why journals use peer-review, where the reviewers are - by definition - peers in the same specialist field. It is also why newspapers - who tend to rely on sub-editors and editors who do not have specialist knowledge - are forever apologizing for article errors.
Wikipedia hasn't the resources to provide a full nth-degree cross-checking peer-review system. As such, changes to the submission process will really contribute little. Having validators for Wiki syntax, grammer and spelling would likely correct a far greater number of errors with far less effort. Validators would also add insignificant latency compared to full reviews. Yes, I understand that Wikipedia is in an unenviable position as a result of vandalism creating libellous content. However, Wikipedia has some grounds for claiming common carrier status at the moment, as it just carries the content and does nothing more. If it had a review process, it would lose any such defence, so any libel that DID slip through the cracks would be a far greater risk.
All in all, then, I think Wikipedia is reacting under intense pressure but is diving in entirely the wrong direction and may actually put itself more at risk with this idea.
Slashdot Mirror
However, inline analyzers have existed. Intel's VTune is clunky, limited in supported architectures but useful where it applies. Parallel developers might well use DAKOTA and KOJAK to do the same for MPI applications, which traditional analyzers can't handle at all. I also would not advise anyone to just use analyzers. You would be wise to monitor events - there are patches for Linux, such as evlog, which give you very flexible event logging. Linux also provides the ability to monitor all kinds of other statistics - either as standard or through patches such as Web100 (for the network) or LTT-ng (for profiling).
Does this mean I think Sun don't deserve the award? I've not used that tool, so I'm not in a position to say. It would have to do a lot in addition to basic analysis to earn the right to be innovative, never mind the title of "top technical innovation". If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux. If it can't, then all I can say is that the competition must've sucked this year.
You're perfectly correct, but I was hoping to sell some of the doom-sayers a Black Hole Escape Kit.
I have a reputation as a pontificating waffler to maintain, y'know. :) (And the answer is indeed "yes".)
There is an assumption in all of this, that the singularity is a point in space/time. This is how it is normally considered, but it is by no means the only interpretation that would be valid. Evaporation only applies within this assumption because entropy can only ever increase and the entropy of a physical point singularity that did not evaporate would be a constant. If a singularity does not exist as a point (there are other solutions, such as a "Kerr Ring Singularity") or doesn't actually exist as a physical entity at all (see below for a trivial theory where that would work), then all bets are off.
This is a "just for amusement" theory, for the sole purpose of illustrating a singularity that would not violate the second law of thermodynamics and still not evaporate. Let us say that a singularity does have infinite gravity at the point at which it "exists", and that the curvature of space/time is a direct function of gravity, then what we call a singularity would not actually exist as an object. At all. What you would have is a "well" of essentially zero diameter where the sides were orthogonal to space and along the axis of time in a negative direction. The notion that "space and time end at a singularity" would not be true to an observer within the Universe, as they would not experience the well as anything other than a continuation of space. However, space would then not be simply-connected and it would be mathematically possible to show that there were mathematically definable points within an otherwise well-defined region that could not be reached.
Now for the well itself. It cannot stop within the universe, because there are no forces along that axis. F=ma, so if F=0, then a=0. Nor can it continue forever, because it's going along the axis of time and time does not continue forever. There is exactly one place such a well could terminate, that being the moment of the Big Bang. (It stops there because there's nothing more to travel along.) It would be an express trip, there would be no possibility of getting off anywhere else. So it's just as well that, if this correct, anything that fell in would be crushed into quantum foam. Nothing else is going to fit in a well of zero diameter. Hawking's theory of imaginary time becoming real time would certainly fit this description.
This theory would require that (a) black holes can only ever expand, (b) hawking radiation would contain equal numbers of particles and anti-particles (which would explain why we have such trouble finding any), (c) the recently-proved Poincare hypothesis does NOT apply to space/time, as it is no longer simply-connected, and therefore the Universe is NOT topologically equivalent to a hypersphere (which is going to upset the Chinese and Russians no end), and (d) the Hubble constant absolutely must be below 1.
(That last one might not be obvious, so I'll explain. This theory recycles matter and energy through time to the big bang. Since you have a Universe's worth of matter/energy, you would not need inflation theory - which is "good" because inflation is an ugly hack whose chief benefit is that it works vastly better than every other mainstream theory in existance. But you can't guarantee that the whole Universe is recycled if the Universe is open. You can only guarantee 100% recycling if every possible photon and every possible particle is absolutely
I'm sure they'd send you a free MP if you offered the correct masonic handshake.
...if they released the software they were doing the simulations with under an Open Source license.
Inks that were made from slowly sublimating crystals go back a very long way. The idea is that the colour is in the form of something like solid iodine in a medium that slows down the rate at which it turns to its gaseous state. The medium can't follow the writing, though, or the writing is still visible. So Xerox has discovered a better sublimation process. Sounds like basic chemistry, not rocket science.
Microsoft sets DRM patch hole speed record
Sure, you might get a little extra latency, as the servers parse an IPv4 request prior to an IPv6 one, where the record type required is explicit. Such searches could double the time it takes to get a result. However, doubling a secong gives you two seconds, so I don't feel this is going to prove too stressful.
A bigger problem will be badly-written software that tries to open all connections over IPv4 and waits for a timeout before trying IPv6. This will hang the machine, though, not the Internet. No other user is going to notice or care.
There is one - and only one - way that there could be a problem, and that would be if Vista's IPv6 implementation is broken such that it assumes an absurdly small timeout and therefore floods whatever it is trying to talk with in an unintended DoS attack. Even then, most routers are designed to squelch over-active sources, so the impact of such a flood would be negligable.
The guy studies supernovae and black holes, and probably has user accounts on every particle accelerator out there - you think he'd lower himself to just firing someone?
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to identify the illness, even from an armchair, for exactly the reasons I outlined. The number of neurologically degenerative diseases that actually spontaneously go into remission is not exactly high. That alone should eliminate the vast majority of ALS-like diseases to something much more manageable. We also have video footage from different stages. Horison did a documentary on Professor Hawking prior to him losing his speech to the trachea operation. We certainly have video footage of him since. Again, that should allow you to exclude certain possibilities. Finally, although a lot of his body has no motor control worth speaking of, his hands most evidently do as that is how he controls the chair and the voice synthesizer, although he's not exactly a speed demon on typing with it. His face also does - he doesn't lack the ability to show emotions.
Oh, that made me think of something else. Those are the same muscles he pushed the hardest from shortly before being diagnosed until he became a total invalid. He would swing on trees extensively, according to his mother in one documentary. It's suspected his heavy physical exercise regimen may have contributed to the disease slowing down and stopping later on in his life, but I believe it to be highly significant that the muscles he pushed the most suffered the least. Again, that can't possibly be characteristic of too many conditions.
From these well-documented and well-established facts, it should be easy to go through those conditions which Professor Hawking might have and discard those that simply don't behave in the way observed. (Or, to pull a Sherlock Holmes, reject the impossible and whatever is left - however improbable - must be correct. This doesn't work in practice for most things, but in this one case, there will be few enough possibilities that eliminating the impossible should be very doable indeed.)
...all three civilizations are extinct. In fact, every single civilization with a hair style that drew comments has become extinct! It's not the nanoparticles, it's the alien creatures that infect people's hair and eats their brains out from the scalp down!
I'm sure it was a National Semiconductor chip and I'm certain it was a 6502 (8-bit) processor, but as I can't find the reference to it, then either there was a short-lived I-generation that was so short-lived that very few people heard of it, OR I am not remembering correctly (never! :). I do know for a fact that NS made a 3GHz 6502 that was not one of the three you list above, and that this ultra-high-speed model is not listed on NS' website either. (Companies should have pages for discontinued products - it's not as if the pages would take much space.)
I think it's safe to say that anything written in arcem is a re-implementation, not a direct clone. I'm not sure if that makes it free of patent woes, but I've never heard of any associated with it. (Mind you, a University would want a little more assurance than that. Well, these days I would hope so. I know lecturers who wholesale pirated material so as to save themselves some effort. Got them into a little trouble, as I recall.)
MIPS is a consortium, as I understand it, that produces a specification for the sole purpose of having Broadcom ignore it. (I'm serious - the Broadcom SB1 core is a mishmash of a wide range of MIPS specifications, uses a HyperTransport bus that takes bits from three different versions, and has an ethernet controller that almost works at the rated speed.)
I believe the 6502 series is up to 65I02, and is still going strong. If I'm correct on this, it's one of the longest-lived series of microprocessor, as virtually everything else from back then has been abandoned.
You can't confirm that! You're not Netcraft! :)
ARM? (arcem isn't maintained, from the looks of it, but it's a neat pure-hardware-level ARM platform simulator.)
Ah! I know. Cops don't do VICE...!
Linus had enough trouble debugging the kernel to get the last lot of malware working, and these virus writers aren't exactly playing fair and giving him the interface specs, or any cash to do the porting work. Sheesh! Virus writers must think those kernel guys are made of money or something.
Ok, I'll be fair - though God alone knows why, and I think even God gave up trying to figure out the tangled mess I call a brain some time ago. They did use DES - not triple DES, just plain DES - for the really really sensitive stuff. The encryption key was visible to anyone logged in on any account, however, as the DES they used required the key to be the first parameter and they made no effort to erase it. So it was technically encrypted. (Once the passkey has been broadcast to all and sundry, I do not regard the encryption as anything more than a technicality, and in the case of DES, I seriously doubt you could even claim that.)
I've heard that security has since improved. I say "heard", because it was some time AFTER security was said to have been improved that reports started coming out of a fileswapper using NASA storage machines as extra disk space - the very same organization and very same type of mass storage device I had serious doubts about many years prior to that.
But that's a Government institution! Yes, and they're the ones with a great many experts in such matters and a great many contracts with people who can not merely withdraw business but also guarantee a disaster in the next election. The bulk of private corporations out there have neither the skills to draw on OR the incentives to maintain some sort of standard. All they have to do is ROT13 and tell you it's got digital security. Enough suckers'll buy into it to keep the CEO in champaign, caviar and girls of commercially-negotiable virtue for life.
The problem is, there is no mandated minimum standard for security, so those who can WILL use the lowest standard possible that will deceive customers into thinking they're safe whilst staying a gnat's whisker (after being compressed by the forces of a neutron star) beyond what could be sued for in courts, assuming a technically ignorant judge.
IMHO, "snake oil" could be vastly reduced - not eliminated but reduced - by placing minimum standards for crypto, compression and other easily-manipulated areas of technology, and enforcing them. Not maximum - that's what the intelligence services want, and they want it to be zero. I'm strictly talking minimum. Your good, old-fashioned lemon law - does it fill the purpose for which it was sold to the customer? Yes or no.
In the case of cryptography, that would be rephrased as follows: would a reasonable person, aware of the strengths and deficits of the technique concerned, aware of any warnings published on the block crypto lounge, hashing function lounge, etc, aware of the Usenet Crypto FAQ (ie: aware of the "common knowledge" that exists on cryptography), and aware of the grade of security the user is demonstrably expecting, agree or disagree that the cryptographic system sold meets the grade expected or not?
If it does not, it is a lemon for the purpose for which it was sold. It might be perfectly good otherwise, but it doesn't, can't, and never will do what was expected of it.
This would be enforceable, as I said very clearly that I'm talking about weighing the "common knowledge" against the "personal expectation". Both are easy to define and even a non-expert should understand a skull-and-crossbones labelled "BROKEN, DO NOT USE" in a crypto lounge. They might not understand the fine nit-picking or the advanced maths, but that's why I'm sticking solely to what is commonly known and understood, not what is derivable from axiom 327 as applies to lemma 291 as described by Professor Branestawm's obscure paper entitled "techniques for splicing dormice genes into giraffe brai
Yeah, but which scores better in tests - zombies, ghouls, ghasts or skeletons? Personally, I'd have thought do better by performing a spirit transfer - minor demons would likely do well in a student body. It would fit the image better, too.
The writer of a LOT of truly superb Linux Weekly News articles on how the kernel works is Valerie Henson. Valerie works at Intel. This means that there's a 10% chance a corporation doing heavy, front-line R&D in Linux will have a chance to hire a brilliant mind. (Unfortunately, the place I work is two states away, so there's no hope here.)
NPC gameplay is another area. At present, MMORGs suffer from the same problem a lot of MUDs do - many pre-scripted set pieces and very few dynamic scenarios. What's a dynamic scenario? That's where unexpected things can occur. Let's say you have two set pieces that are near each other. In a truly dynamic arena, those can merge into a single encounter from nothing more than normal movement, creating entirely new, unscripted encounters. NPC rules would also change with experience, so a monster that beats up players for a while would be tougher than a newbie monster. (This wouldn't just be in terms of hit points, it would include varying the weightings for actions, capturing items - and using them, learning what type of attack works best against what type of player - the sorts of things rules engines are very good at learning.)
Environmental gameplay is generally the biggest weakness, and therefore the area with the greatest potential for improvement. Have rivers drop (or fail) in droughts and burst their banks in downpours and cloudbursts. If there's an NPC factory making wooden items near a forest, you need to have clearings and new growth. In an earthquake, buildings can fall down, cliffs can collpase and escarpments will be terrifying nightmares. But whilst structures can be rebuilt, mountains can't. Not in any meaningful game time, at least. Overhunting an area should not only be possible, it should be frighteningly easy when populations get too high. Resources should be limited and living resources should only replenish if not driven away. Extinction should also be possible. The environment should have a major impact on what is visible - not mere hidden-line-removal, but realistic visibility constraints. For those into board wargaming, you may be familiar with Advanced Squad Leader, where the line-of-sight rules depended on so many factors that you could spend a week deciding if a shot was possible. That was not good for a boardgame, but is trivial for a modern PC.
R&D... Now, this is a really tough one. It should be possible for players to create their own objects, monsters, etc, if they acquire a high enough skill level, within certain limits. User creations should never unbalance the game (which is why it is so tough) but should be flexible enough that fresh content becomes essentially infinite. But as in the real world, where geeks generally do better in basements than exploring jungles filled with unknown dangers, it should be extremely hard to become highly skilled both in adventuring and inventing. Oh, and inventions should not always do what is expected - whether it is in fiction or fact, mad scientists rarely get the results they are looking for.
Art is a big thing, as well. One of the greatest triumphs of MUD-1 was the graveyard. Those who made the rank of wizard or witch got to write the script on a tombstone for the mortal remains of their character. This had two effects - firstly, it meant that the graveyard (which doubled as a maze) was forever growing bigger. Secondly, it gave people an outlet for their creative side. Designing buildings (a-la Virtual Worlds) is too crude to be really called artistry. You want to be able to make chalk horses on hillsides. It should be possible to plaster a city with wall murals in the largest exercise of virtual graffiti of all time. Oh, and to make it more interesting, a fantasy/historic MMORG should require you to assemble any colours from the raw materials.
Lastly, there's combat and experience. Most MMORGs use a very crude D&D-style hit point system. "Heroic" LARP systems (such as "Spirit of Adventure" - a truly superb game system) had different hit points in different locations, a
Have the articles I've written been subject to vandalism? Sure. The logs also show that fairly substantial vandalism was completely eliminated within a matter of days. That's not bad going for pages on some truly obscure, regional information. We're not talking about stuff likely to get a hundred visits an hour, I'd be amazed if the articles got a hundred visits a month. For readers to spend the time to undo damage, refine the page (there have been numerous truly wonderful additions to the articles) and contribute some excellent material is (to me) proof that the Wikipedia system works fine even for stuff that is rarely visited. (Those who contribute to the less-popular pages can consider themselves thanked. General knowledge can be found anywhere, so the true power of a system like Wikipedia is felt when more obscure material that would normally be scattered and incoherent - if it existed on the Internet at all - is readily available.)
I would like to see reference enforcement added to Wikipedia, but it is unclear how you'd go about doing that. You can check a link exists, but the book and paper references would be hard even to verify to that degree, and AI text analysis systems are not nearly advanced enough to tell if a reference has anything to do with the claims in the article, although it might be possible to eliminate some definitely invalid references. No automated validation of articles is possible at this time.
It might also be good if Wikipedia also provided a grammar checker. They are far from perfect, but it would be useful for catching some of the more basic errors. A spellchecker would be good too, for the same reason. Again, perfection isn't necessary, it merely has to reduce the number of uncaught errors to make it worthwhile. Requiring approval would catch very little outside of the specialist knowledge of the approver and the more general-knowledge stuff. (This is why journals use peer-review, where the reviewers are - by definition - peers in the same specialist field. It is also why newspapers - who tend to rely on sub-editors and editors who do not have specialist knowledge - are forever apologizing for article errors.
Wikipedia hasn't the resources to provide a full nth-degree cross-checking peer-review system. As such, changes to the submission process will really contribute little. Having validators for Wiki syntax, grammer and spelling would likely correct a far greater number of errors with far less effort. Validators would also add insignificant latency compared to full reviews. Yes, I understand that Wikipedia is in an unenviable position as a result of vandalism creating libellous content. However, Wikipedia has some grounds for claiming common carrier status at the moment, as it just carries the content and does nothing more. If it had a review process, it would lose any such defence, so any libel that DID slip through the cracks would be a far greater risk.
All in all, then, I think Wikipedia is reacting under intense pressure but is diving in entirely the wrong direction and may actually put itself more at risk with this idea.