Also, systems with unencrypted passwords in a VARCHAR(12) field.
Seriously people, it's not hard to use encryption, and if you run the password through a nice one-way hash, you get a fixed-length string. Doesn't matter if I use my ultra-secure 22-character password, half of which is non-alpha characters. You get the same length string as the guy using "password".
What's worse than limited space is limited characters. My bank doesn't allow any non-alphanumeric character in the password, and has a 10-character limit. I half-suspect it's case-insensitive.
So that's a password space of what, 62^10? 36^10 if case-insensitive? My calculator doesn't even turn that into scientific notation.
... did you actually read my post, or did you just see "he's kind of skeptical about some commonly-accepted scientific hypothesis, time to ridicule him?"
First off, I wasn't saying Dark Matter was like the luminiferous aether, some theoretical thing that was assumed to exist just to support current theories. I said it was like the cosmological constant - a modification made to otherwise-sound theories to avoid certain implications.
And what did I say after that? "Dark matter may exist". I just think it highly unlikely that there's a single (or handful of ) dark matter particle, where its only attributes are "interacts via gravity, but through every other method is may as well not exist".
Although dark matter seems more like a cosmological constant to me. A case of "the equation works, but we have to add this one thing to make the equation match our perception of reality". "Dark matter" may exist, in some form or another, but I highly doubt it's as clean and simple as "there are all these extra particles that you can't see, or detect in any way except gravity".
Groundbreaking science is not happening right now, but it is necessary for future expansions of science.
Right now, I feel like we're in the period between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Relativity. We're 99% sure of everything we know, but there's a last 1% that doesn't quite add up. Little oddities, like nobody having a good idea as to why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. And once some actual genius figures out the key, "breaks the ground" as it were, that 1% will bloom into entire new fields of science. To keep up the relativity metaphor, nobody in the 1890s had any concept of quantum physics, which is now a massive field with sub-branches that you can get a doctorate in.
Soon - probably within a few decades - someone will discover something groundbreaking, which in turn will trigger off more new discoveries. Science tends to work like that - once a critical mass of knowledge is reached in an area, it grows explosively until we near the limits of the field. Electricity is a great example. Dozens, even hundreds, of groundbreaking scientists and engineers, making their mark in electric science in a very short period of time. There were similar bursts for aeronautics, computer science, nearly any field.
As for what this groundbreaking new field of science will be? No idea. The sci-fi nerd in me would like it to be some sort of hyperspace, to let us explore the stars in reasonable timespans, but that's no likelier than any other thing.
Uh, did you actually read the article you linked to?
Not all 2^n-1 numbers (Mersenne numbers) are prime. For instance, if n is not prime, then 2^n-1 is not prime (so no, 2^57,885,162-1 is not prime). But even if n is prime, 2^n-1 is not prime - take n=23, where 2^n-1 (8388607) is divisible by 47 and 178481. In fact, only 48 Mersenne primes are currently known, as listed in the article you linked.
10.6.8, to be precise, although some introductory work was done in 10.6.6. Although by default TRIM is only used on Apple-sold SSDs, but there's a trivial work-around to enable it on commodity drives.
I think hard drives are more likely to grow "up" than to grow "out". Think 1-1.5" high 2.5" drives, or 2-2.5" high 3.5" drives.
Main reason would be speed. With SSDs becoming abundant, people will be wanting faster access even on discs. Adding more platters means more heads, and thus more raw I/O, while wider platters give higher seek times and generally slower rotation speeds as well.
1) You don't seem to have the same Mac Pro that I do - mine has no LEDs on the DIMM cards. So maybe they revised it in a later model, made it easier to maintain. But on the 2006 one, just removing the exhaust fan (so you can dust the other side) requires about 90 minutes of work, including removing the CPU heatsinks and the *front* fan assembly.
2) Prebuilt PCs tend to have really crappy cable management, because they care more about being able to assemble thousands of them than about airflow. On a nice custom build, with properly-routed cables and a modular PSU, dusting is pathetically easy.
3) I have a backup PC - an old 2000-era Compaq, full of big IDE ribbon cables and every other thing that can impede cleaning. I have it packed with 2 DVD drives, two 3.5" hard drives, two floppy drives, and all the PCI cards I've got. It's got nearly as much kit in it as the Mac Pro, but in about half the volume. The only worse case I've seen are those weird clamshell-opening Dell cases. And you know what? It's still easier to dust than the Mac Pro.
It's a standard field effect transistor, except the gate can hold a magnetic charge on its own, with no voltage applied. You only need to apply a charge to change its state. It actually looks sort of like a flash cell, except as the gate of a transistor.
However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods. And I have to wonder what the switching times on it would be - if it can handle the multi-gigahertz frequencies in modern processors.
The whole "reconfigurable" bit is journalist bullshit. Pay no attention to it.
I've got an old 2006 Mac Pro, and it used to idle around 80C and, under a heavy workload, the fans would spin up to a full 2000RPM. I recently gave it a very, *very* thorough cleaning job, removing six years' of accumulated dust and reapplying thermal paste. Now it idles at 60C and even with Prime95 running full-blast I could not get the fans to go above 900RPM, and temperatures peaked at 82C.
The Mac Pros, or at least the 1,1 model, is not designed in a way that makes it easy to open up and dust it out. Seriously, it was a bloody nightmare trying to strip it down and put it back together, so I doubt many people would do this. Hell, I had been considering upgrading the processors, but now I think I won't, just because installing it will be such a PITA.
Invisible hand of the market: Bring out yer dead! Bring out yer dead! Consumers: Here's one! IHOTM: Ninepence. RIM: I'm not dead! IHOTM: What? Consumers: Nothing, here's your ninepence RIM: I'm not dead! IHOTM: Here, he says he's not dead. Consumers: Yes he is. RIM: I'm not! IHOTM: He's not. Consumers: Well, he will be soon, his products are rubbish RIM: They're getting better! Consumers: No they aren't, and your market share is crap. You'll be stone dead in a moment. IHOTM: Well I can't take him like that. It's against regulations*. RIM: I don't want to go to bankruptcy court. Consumers: Oh, don't be such a baby. IHOTM: I can't take him. Nobody wants to buy his trademarks, not even Samsung. RIM: I feel fine! Consumers: Oh, do us a favor. IHOTM: I can't! Consumers: Well, can you wait around a couple of quarters? He won't be long. IHOTM: No, I promised I'd be at Microsoft's, they've lost nine today. Consumers: Well, when's your next round? IHOTM: Q2 RIM: I think I'll pursue business customers instead of direct consumers Consumers: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you can do? RIM: I feel happy. I feel happy! *thump* Consumers: Ah, thank you very much IHOTM: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
* As an added joke, enjoy the irony of the physical avatar of capitalism caring about regulations
But the fastest ATI contemporary isn't still usable. Compare the Radeon X1950 XT, released just weeks later - roughly the same caliber of performance at launch, but the 8800 still supports almost every game, while the X1950 will flat-out refuse to run stuff that's too new. I know - I have an X1900 XT.
The main secret behind the 8800's longevity is that it was the first "modern" graphics card, which ironically enough means it doesn't, at the hardware level, do "graphics". It's all shader cores doing rendering in software. Whereas the X1900s were still trying to take a dedicated rendering pipeline and tack on as much configurability and programming as possible.
The 8600 or 8800 is still commonly listed under "minimum hardware requirements", because it acts much like a modern card, just slower and less efficient.
No, I have not studied philosophy with any serious effort, but if the scientific method cannot be used to prove itself, then perhaps it is lacking?
It's more a matter of logic.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the scientific method is flawed. Trying to test the scientific method could produce myriad results. Tests could show that it always fails. Tests could give random results. Or tests could correlate with some random thing - imagine if the scientific method only works with a waxing gibbous moon is ascendant in Leo. Or, and this case is significant, tests could always show that it does work (but it then fails when you try to test other theories).
So if the scientific method is flawed, any experiments to determine its validity rely on flawed methodology, and are thus untrustworthy.
Now let us assume that the scientific method works. Attempting to test this leads to only one conclusion: that the scientific method works.
Now let us live in the real world for a moment. We do not "know" if the scientific method works or not. And when we run an experiment to test the scientific method, it gives us a result "true".
However, how can we distinguish the case of "the experiment shows 'true' because the scientific method works" from the case of "the experiment shows 'true' because the scientific method does not work, but it does not work in such a way that it produces false results when asked to test itself"? You cannot, at least when you only use the scientific method.
That is not too dissimilar to other fields. You cannot prove that parallel lines do not intersect purely by using geometry. You cannot prove 1+1=2 using math. The former is treated as an axiom, a statement that is intuitively assumed to be true in further proofs. The latter is a definition of terms - given what 1, 2, addition and equality are defined as, the statement is true.
So, even though the scientific method cannot prove itself, it can still be completely correct. Or, at the very least, statistically correct.
They are testing whether scientific papers meet the scientific method (ie. the results are reproducible). They are not testing the validity of the scientific method itself (myself, I cannot see how one could test the scientific method without using it, thus bringing the results into question).
The danger does not decrease simply because it hasn't happened yet, just as the odds of rolling a '1' next round are not affected by the four '20's you just rolled.
Slashdot Mirror
No Goatse.
Often they took the pictures.
No, you're thinking of the TSA.
Also, systems with unencrypted passwords in a VARCHAR(12) field.
Seriously people, it's not hard to use encryption, and if you run the password through a nice one-way hash, you get a fixed-length string. Doesn't matter if I use my ultra-secure 22-character password, half of which is non-alpha characters. You get the same length string as the guy using "password".
What's worse than limited space is limited characters. My bank doesn't allow any non-alphanumeric character in the password, and has a 10-character limit. I half-suspect it's case-insensitive.
So that's a password space of what, 62^10? 36^10 if case-insensitive? My calculator doesn't even turn that into scientific notation.
... did you actually read my post, or did you just see "he's kind of skeptical about some commonly-accepted scientific hypothesis, time to ridicule him?"
First off, I wasn't saying Dark Matter was like the luminiferous aether, some theoretical thing that was assumed to exist just to support current theories. I said it was like the cosmological constant - a modification made to otherwise-sound theories to avoid certain implications.
And what did I say after that? "Dark matter may exist". I just think it highly unlikely that there's a single (or handful of ) dark matter particle, where its only attributes are "interacts via gravity, but through every other method is may as well not exist".
Good point.
Although dark matter seems more like a cosmological constant to me. A case of "the equation works, but we have to add this one thing to make the equation match our perception of reality". "Dark matter" may exist, in some form or another, but I highly doubt it's as clean and simple as "there are all these extra particles that you can't see, or detect in any way except gravity".
Groundbreaking science is not happening right now, but it is necessary for future expansions of science.
Right now, I feel like we're in the period between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Relativity. We're 99% sure of everything we know, but there's a last 1% that doesn't quite add up. Little oddities, like nobody having a good idea as to why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. And once some actual genius figures out the key, "breaks the ground" as it were, that 1% will bloom into entire new fields of science. To keep up the relativity metaphor, nobody in the 1890s had any concept of quantum physics, which is now a massive field with sub-branches that you can get a doctorate in.
Soon - probably within a few decades - someone will discover something groundbreaking, which in turn will trigger off more new discoveries. Science tends to work like that - once a critical mass of knowledge is reached in an area, it grows explosively until we near the limits of the field. Electricity is a great example. Dozens, even hundreds, of groundbreaking scientists and engineers, making their mark in electric science in a very short period of time. There were similar bursts for aeronautics, computer science, nearly any field.
As for what this groundbreaking new field of science will be? No idea. The sci-fi nerd in me would like it to be some sort of hyperspace, to let us explore the stars in reasonable timespans, but that's no likelier than any other thing.
Uh, did you actually read the article you linked to?
Not all 2^n-1 numbers (Mersenne numbers) are prime. For instance, if n is not prime, then 2^n-1 is not prime (so no, 2^57,885,162-1 is not prime). But even if n is prime, 2^n-1 is not prime - take n=23, where 2^n-1 (8388607) is divisible by 47 and 178481. In fact, only 48 Mersenne primes are currently known, as listed in the article you linked.
10.6.8, to be precise, although some introductory work was done in 10.6.6. Although by default TRIM is only used on Apple-sold SSDs, but there's a trivial work-around to enable it on commodity drives.
I think hard drives are more likely to grow "up" than to grow "out". Think 1-1.5" high 2.5" drives, or 2-2.5" high 3.5" drives.
Main reason would be speed. With SSDs becoming abundant, people will be wanting faster access even on discs. Adding more platters means more heads, and thus more raw I/O, while wider platters give higher seek times and generally slower rotation speeds as well.
Still, your guess is as good as mine.
1) You don't seem to have the same Mac Pro that I do - mine has no LEDs on the DIMM cards. So maybe they revised it in a later model, made it easier to maintain. But on the 2006 one, just removing the exhaust fan (so you can dust the other side) requires about 90 minutes of work, including removing the CPU heatsinks and the *front* fan assembly.
2) Prebuilt PCs tend to have really crappy cable management, because they care more about being able to assemble thousands of them than about airflow. On a nice custom build, with properly-routed cables and a modular PSU, dusting is pathetically easy.
3) I have a backup PC - an old 2000-era Compaq, full of big IDE ribbon cables and every other thing that can impede cleaning. I have it packed with 2 DVD drives, two 3.5" hard drives, two floppy drives, and all the PCI cards I've got. It's got nearly as much kit in it as the Mac Pro, but in about half the volume. The only worse case I've seen are those weird clamshell-opening Dell cases. And you know what? It's still easier to dust than the Mac Pro.
It's a standard field effect transistor, except the gate can hold a magnetic charge on its own, with no voltage applied. You only need to apply a charge to change its state. It actually looks sort of like a flash cell, except as the gate of a transistor.
However, it's made with indium antimonide, which apparently doesn't work well with existing fabrication methods. And I have to wonder what the switching times on it would be - if it can handle the multi-gigahertz frequencies in modern processors.
The whole "reconfigurable" bit is journalist bullshit. Pay no attention to it.
Either that, or just dust buildup.
I've got an old 2006 Mac Pro, and it used to idle around 80C and, under a heavy workload, the fans would spin up to a full 2000RPM. I recently gave it a very, *very* thorough cleaning job, removing six years' of accumulated dust and reapplying thermal paste. Now it idles at 60C and even with Prime95 running full-blast I could not get the fans to go above 900RPM, and temperatures peaked at 82C.
The Mac Pros, or at least the 1,1 model, is not designed in a way that makes it easy to open up and dust it out. Seriously, it was a bloody nightmare trying to strip it down and put it back together, so I doubt many people would do this. Hell, I had been considering upgrading the processors, but now I think I won't, just because installing it will be such a PITA.
What are you talking about? We've had like eleven September 11ths since then! And we'll have another one again this year!
I'm more worried about the early models that had only one pedal...
Needs more social security numbers.
When I was in middle school, I had a laptop with a 6GB hard drive.
I dual-booted on it. Windows XP will work fine in 3GB, as long as you're careful.
(This was before SP3, though, and I may have had to skip SP2 as well. Can't remember.)
Invisible hand of the market: Bring out yer dead! Bring out yer dead!
Consumers: Here's one!
IHOTM: Ninepence.
RIM: I'm not dead!
IHOTM: What?
Consumers: Nothing, here's your ninepence
RIM: I'm not dead!
IHOTM: Here, he says he's not dead.
Consumers: Yes he is.
RIM: I'm not!
IHOTM: He's not.
Consumers: Well, he will be soon, his products are rubbish
RIM: They're getting better!
Consumers: No they aren't, and your market share is crap. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
IHOTM: Well I can't take him like that. It's against regulations*.
RIM: I don't want to go to bankruptcy court.
Consumers: Oh, don't be such a baby.
IHOTM: I can't take him. Nobody wants to buy his trademarks, not even Samsung.
RIM: I feel fine!
Consumers: Oh, do us a favor.
IHOTM: I can't!
Consumers: Well, can you wait around a couple of quarters? He won't be long.
IHOTM: No, I promised I'd be at Microsoft's, they've lost nine today.
Consumers: Well, when's your next round?
IHOTM: Q2
RIM: I think I'll pursue business customers instead of direct consumers
Consumers: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you can do?
RIM: I feel happy. I feel happy!
*thump*
Consumers: Ah, thank you very much
IHOTM: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
* As an added joke, enjoy the irony of the physical avatar of capitalism caring about regulations
But the fastest ATI contemporary isn't still usable. Compare the Radeon X1950 XT, released just weeks later - roughly the same caliber of performance at launch, but the 8800 still supports almost every game, while the X1950 will flat-out refuse to run stuff that's too new. I know - I have an X1900 XT.
The main secret behind the 8800's longevity is that it was the first "modern" graphics card, which ironically enough means it doesn't, at the hardware level, do "graphics". It's all shader cores doing rendering in software. Whereas the X1900s were still trying to take a dedicated rendering pipeline and tack on as much configurability and programming as possible.
The 8600 or 8800 is still commonly listed under "minimum hardware requirements", because it acts much like a modern card, just slower and less efficient.
More lasers.
No, I have not studied philosophy with any serious effort, but if the scientific method cannot be used to prove itself, then perhaps it is lacking?
It's more a matter of logic.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the scientific method is flawed. Trying to test the scientific method could produce myriad results. Tests could show that it always fails. Tests could give random results. Or tests could correlate with some random thing - imagine if the scientific method only works with a waxing gibbous moon is ascendant in Leo. Or, and this case is significant, tests could always show that it does work (but it then fails when you try to test other theories).
So if the scientific method is flawed, any experiments to determine its validity rely on flawed methodology, and are thus untrustworthy.
Now let us assume that the scientific method works. Attempting to test this leads to only one conclusion: that the scientific method works.
Now let us live in the real world for a moment. We do not "know" if the scientific method works or not. And when we run an experiment to test the scientific method, it gives us a result "true".
However, how can we distinguish the case of "the experiment shows 'true' because the scientific method works" from the case of "the experiment shows 'true' because the scientific method does not work, but it does not work in such a way that it produces false results when asked to test itself"? You cannot, at least when you only use the scientific method.
That is not too dissimilar to other fields. You cannot prove that parallel lines do not intersect purely by using geometry. You cannot prove 1+1=2 using math. The former is treated as an axiom, a statement that is intuitively assumed to be true in further proofs. The latter is a definition of terms - given what 1, 2, addition and equality are defined as, the statement is true.
So, even though the scientific method cannot prove itself, it can still be completely correct. Or, at the very least, statistically correct.
They are testing whether scientific papers meet the scientific method (ie. the results are reproducible). They are not testing the validity of the scientific method itself (myself, I cannot see how one could test the scientific method without using it, thus bringing the results into question).
That is the point GP was attempting to make.
That would be quite hypocritical of him, since he himself once played the part of God. And even came back for the sequel.
Can't we just agree that both points are valid?
You should not be punished for thinking something. Period. No exceptions.
You should not be punished for "insulting" or "disrespecting" the king, or any other public figure. Period. No exceptions.
Well, there's that Star Wars/Indiana Jones crossover comic... it's officially non-canon, but several elements were referenced in later, canonical works.
The danger does not decrease simply because it hasn't happened yet, just as the odds of rolling a '1' next round are not affected by the four '20's you just rolled.