In 1981, Barbara Blackburn, from Salem, achieved 150wpm for 50 minutes (yes, minutes) on a mechanical typewriter. It's in the Guinness Book of Records.
To me, it seems simple: people want to buy power off the companies. Companies want to sell power to make money. Why the heck can't they sort it out properly?
Anyway, a typical desktop uses, say 350 watts, which is 252 kwh/month.
An A/C, or heater (and let's face it, Californians are going to have those on 24/7/365, too) is going to use 4 kw, which is 2880kwh/month.
Hmm. Why not blame those lazy Californians for wanting a perfect 70 degrees year round, rather than blaming them for wanting deathmatch, year round;-)
At 10ghz, each stage of (say) a 5 stage pipline will take ~2 nanoseconds. Electricity can travel ~1 foot per nanosecond. So therefore, if the data required in (say) a cache fetch instruction stage was more than 1 foot away, or if the cache took a non-zero amount of time to look it up (which it will indeed) then you're going to have you a nice little pipeline stall.
Anyway, I think Intel has a bigger than 5 stage pipeline, which just reduces the distance we can "travel" during each stage.
It doesn't seem clear why these broadcasters should pay a premium over the normal on-air fees. The only reason I can think of is that, theoretically at least, they could have a much larger audience than your average crappy radio station.
Any thoughts? (Apart from the standard capitalist running dogs milking the pennies from the poorest, etc etc)
Why not also introduce more specific codes. In the UK, we have a lot of so-called non-geographic codes. In addition to premium and toll-free numbers, we have numbers billed as a local call wherever they're called from, and specific clusters dedicated to mobile phones and pagers (and since, in the UK, the callER pays all charges, not the callEE, this is even more useful).
It always confuses me when visiting the US why this isn't in place - it's really handy, and I think businesses would appreciate it too.
Despite what people will tell you, this is a great book - it has a good storyline, and brings up (and even deals with) a number of interesting issues.
My main objection is Heinlein's seriously outdated sexual stereotypes. I'm male, btw, but it still bothers me when Heinlein makes one of his female characters spout out the line "Nine times out of ten, when a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault". There are scatterings of these kind of gems throughout the book.
Looking beyond that, though, it's a genuinely great book, and if you haven't read it yet (why the hell not?) try and do so:-)
And finally. This isn't "News for Nerds". It might, perhaps, if you're feeling optimistic, be "stuff that matters". Hmm. Lack of news, methinks.
...is the free redirector service, www.isfuckingbrilliant.com. (I have http://andy.isfuckingbrilliant.com). They also have isfuckingshit.com, hadyourmom.com, etc etc. Check it out (blatant plug, and I don't even own it... terrible).
I have absolutely no idea how many win32 x86 executables there are out there, but I'm fairly sure that there are far more than Microsoft could ever certify, even if they only tried to certify newly released ones, let alone try certifying the old ones - and I think I'm correct in that Whistler will still run good ole x86 code.
So, far too much to certify. Without charging, anyway.
So, only allow executables to run if they've been certified AND the author has paid for that certification? Doesn't sound likely! Even if there WAS a paid scheme, there would be far too many executables for MS to certify on its own. It would have to outsource the certification to an external company.
So, what happens when this company certifies code which turns out to crash in an interesting way causing huge damage to someone? Someone's very very liable, because MS even said that it'd work safely. I don't see themselves setting up a legal tripfall like that.
And what about what is classed as an executable? Just EXE and COM files? Just Win32 EXE files? What happens, say, if someone certifies winword.exe as safe, and then I come along and insert some malicious DLL file which is then loaded (uncertified, but with full "privileges")? Oh, so they'll have to certify those too.
I'm sorry, but in the 2 minutes in which I've brainstormed (incompletely) I think I've noticed something.
Really weird behaviour on the part of the criminals. Did they find that the Enigma had no resale value, because of its uniqueness? If you go the trouble of stealing something, you do something with it. Duh.
Oh, and I'm the sixth cousin three times removed of Alan Turing (who broke the Enigma code):-) Genealogy freak in the house...
15 pounds gets you unlimited local calls OFFPEAK (6pm-8am, and all weekend).
But. After 60 minutes of the call, it starts charging. (You're "free" to hang up and dial again, says the literature, but that's no good if you're in the middle of downloading Mozilla).
I can see that unlimited registers would be a nice thing in that there would be no need to worry about running out. But - why? Coding, especially at THIS level, is about compactness and discipline, not about frivolous waste of resources. I can see that, because it's a virtual processor, there is less worry that addressing time will increase, and that makes sense. Obviously on a real processor, if you had a few thousand registers, their access time would be vastly varied. But this will surely just encourage laziness?
On top of that, most assembly language instructions actually executed, are those which have been generated by compilers. Which can quite happily get by on a lot less than unlimited amounts of registers. So it's a little wasteful.
On the other hand, so what - who's gonna use it anyway =)
As long as humans are designing software, it's going to reach a complexity where not all use-cases can be considered. Therefore, there is the highest chance that some flaw will creep in. And then, since the number of people trying to discover that flaw in order to abuse it is always going to exceed the number of people looking for flaws to fix, the situation will continue. We've had say, 20 years of cracking - no reason to assume it's going to stop now.
The article states that a quantum algorithm has been written that will reduce the number of steps required to break RSA from O(N) to O(N^1/2). (That's from big O of N, to big O of root N).
So that means it could break a 2^56 bit key in the time that normal algorithms take to break a 2^28 bit key. But what difference does that make? My (admittedly old) copy of PGP quite happily does keylengths up to 2^2048 - so this quantum algorithm would reduce that to 2^1024. This is still a HUGE key. Taking centuries to crack, even on some machine that tries trillions of keys a second.
Connect your computer to the internet. Allow it to accept any connection of any sort, ever, from anyone.
Congratulations. You're now at risk of being cracked.
All you can do now is neurotically, obsessively, try to think of every situation in which this cracking could happen, and try and cover it. Then ask all your friends, enemies, and family pets to tell you what you missed.
You're still going to get cracked one day, if enough people try, and enough people care. System administration is more about making this cracking difficult to the point of it not being worth it, rather than ruling it out altogether.
Hypothetical situation: If the City did absolutely nothing, and did not respond, wouldn't it be up to Microsoft to prove that the City held unlicensed copies of the software? Rather than the city having to cease all day to day operations in order to audit and discover a handful of "illegal" copies of Word, or whatever? But I suppose that MS would chase it to the death, rather than give up. I hate EULAs doing this kind of thing.
This kind of thing makes me grumpy. All the worse, because:
``It's the world we live in,'' Sullivan said. ``Microsoft has every right to ask us for the information.''
We've gotten no direct responses from either Gore or Bush
So what indirect responses have you got? This seems like something's being held back - if they, or their press office gave you some sort of answer (eg "We don't want to do it") that still merits a mention. I didn't think that Slashdot was in the business of editorial control. Maybe I was wrong.
This was confirmed by the adult site itself. When I emailed its representative, he claimed their ranking for more popular celebrities like Cindy Crawford and Pamela Anderson were way down the Google list: 22nd, 38th, and worse.
Is this claim hard to verify or something? I had this strange impression that Google was a public website, where we could all run searches. Oh. I get it. The writer was too lazy to check up on these ever-so-easy-to-verify claims.
Since the company name isn't provided, I can't check it myself. But if someone stands accused of something, of COURSE they're going to deny it.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1981, Barbara Blackburn, from Salem, achieved 150wpm for 50 minutes (yes, minutes) on a mechanical typewriter. It's in the Guinness Book of Records.
n .h tml
http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackbur
"...recent security problems". Compare NT vs Linux intrusions here.
To me, it seems simple: people want to buy power off the companies. Companies want to sell power to make money. Why the heck can't they sort it out properly?
;-)
Anyway, a typical desktop uses, say 350 watts, which is 252 kwh/month.
An A/C, or heater (and let's face it, Californians are going to have those on 24/7/365, too) is going to use 4 kw, which is 2880kwh/month.
Hmm. Why not blame those lazy Californians for wanting a perfect 70 degrees year round, rather than blaming them for wanting deathmatch, year round
Note how the original poster wrote
"due to different wire lengths"
At 10ghz, each stage of (say) a 5 stage pipline will take ~2 nanoseconds. Electricity can travel ~1 foot per nanosecond. So therefore, if the data required in (say) a cache fetch instruction stage was more than 1 foot away, or if the cache took a non-zero amount of time to look it up (which it will indeed) then you're going to have you a nice little pipeline stall.
Anyway, I think Intel has a bigger than 5 stage pipeline, which just reduces the distance we can "travel" during each stage.
Consider thyself corrected.
It doesn't seem clear why these broadcasters should pay a premium over the normal on-air fees. The only reason I can think of is that, theoretically at least, they could have a much larger audience than your average crappy radio station.
Any thoughts? (Apart from the standard capitalist running dogs milking the pennies from the poorest, etc etc)
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Why not also introduce more specific codes. In the UK, we have a lot of so-called non-geographic codes. In addition to premium and toll-free numbers, we have numbers billed as a local call wherever they're called from, and specific clusters dedicated to mobile phones and pagers (and since, in the UK, the callER pays all charges, not the callEE, this is even more useful).
It always confuses me when visiting the US why this isn't in place - it's really handy, and I think businesses would appreciate it too.
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Nope. It's a constitutional monarchy.
Effectively a democracy in all but name.
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Despite what people will tell you, this is a great book - it has a good storyline, and brings up (and even deals with) a number of interesting issues.
:-)
My main objection is Heinlein's seriously outdated sexual stereotypes. I'm male, btw, but it still bothers me when Heinlein makes one of his female characters spout out the line "Nine times out of ten, when a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault". There are scatterings of these kind of gems throughout the book.
Looking beyond that, though, it's a genuinely great book, and if you haven't read it yet (why the hell not?) try and do so
And finally. This isn't "News for Nerds". It might, perhaps, if you're feeling optimistic, be "stuff that matters". Hmm. Lack of news, methinks.
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...is the free redirector service, www.isfuckingbrilliant.com. (I have http://andy.isfuckingbrilliant.com). They also have isfuckingshit.com, hadyourmom.com, etc etc. Check it out (blatant plug, and I don't even own it... terrible).
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
I have absolutely no idea how many win32 x86 executables there are out there, but I'm fairly sure that there are far more than Microsoft could ever certify, even if they only tried to certify newly released ones, let alone try certifying the old ones - and I think I'm correct in that Whistler will still run good ole x86 code.
So, far too much to certify. Without charging, anyway.
So, only allow executables to run if they've been certified AND the author has paid for that certification? Doesn't sound likely! Even if there WAS a paid scheme, there would be far too many executables for MS to certify on its own. It would have to outsource the certification to an external company.
So, what happens when this company certifies code which turns out to crash in an interesting way causing huge damage to someone? Someone's very very liable, because MS even said that it'd work safely. I don't see themselves setting up a legal tripfall like that.
And what about what is classed as an executable? Just EXE and COM files? Just Win32 EXE files? What happens, say, if someone certifies winword.exe as safe, and then I come along and insert some malicious DLL file which is then loaded (uncertified, but with full "privileges")? Oh, so they'll have to certify those too.
I'm sorry, but in the 2 minutes in which I've brainstormed (incompletely) I think I've noticed something.
It's completely unworkable. What a surprise.
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Really weird behaviour on the part of the criminals. Did they find that the Enigma had no resale value, because of its uniqueness? If you go the trouble of stealing something, you do something with it. Duh.
:-) Genealogy freak in the house...
Oh, and I'm the sixth cousin three times removed of Alan Turing (who broke the Enigma code)
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Unless
:-)
a) They are a government agency with some sort of enforcement powers
or
b) They are mentioned explicitly in a company's site license, as an inspector to ensure software legitimacy
Otherwise they have no grounds to actually turn up and demand entrance.
Unless, of course, they claim that they are in "hot pursuit", attempting to make a citizen's arrest
IANAL(BMDI)
I Am Not A Lawyer (But My Dad Is)
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Hah! Always read the small print.
15 pounds gets you unlimited local calls OFFPEAK (6pm-8am, and all weekend).
But. After 60 minutes of the call, it starts charging. (You're "free" to hang up and dial again, says the literature, but that's no good if you're in the middle of downloading Mozilla).
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
I can see that unlimited registers would be a nice thing in that there would be no need to worry about running out. But - why? Coding, especially at THIS level, is about compactness and discipline, not about frivolous waste of resources. I can see that, because it's a virtual processor, there is less worry that addressing time will increase, and that makes sense. Obviously on a real processor, if you had a few thousand registers, their access time would be vastly varied. But this will surely just encourage laziness?
On top of that, most assembly language instructions actually executed, are those which have been generated by compilers. Which can quite happily get by on a lot less than unlimited amounts of registers. So it's a little wasteful.
On the other hand, so what - who's gonna use it anyway =)
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
As long as humans are designing software, it's going to reach a complexity where not all use-cases can be considered. Therefore, there is the highest chance that some flaw will creep in. And then, since the number of people trying to discover that flaw in order to abuse it is always going to exceed the number of people looking for flaws to fix, the situation will continue. We've had say, 20 years of cracking - no reason to assume it's going to stop now.
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You got me. It's been a long day, doh.
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The article states that a quantum algorithm has been written that will reduce the number of steps required to break RSA from O(N) to O(N^1/2). (That's from big O of N, to big O of root N).
:-)
So that means it could break a 2^56 bit key in the time that normal algorithms take to break a 2^28 bit key. But what difference does that make? My (admittedly old) copy of PGP quite happily does keylengths up to 2^2048 - so this quantum algorithm would reduce that to 2^1024. This is still a HUGE key. Taking centuries to crack, even on some machine that tries trillions of keys a second.
Or am I missing something? Let me know
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...is at risk of being cracked.
Connect your computer to the internet. Allow it to accept any connection of any sort, ever, from anyone.
Congratulations. You're now at risk of being cracked.
All you can do now is neurotically, obsessively, try to think of every situation in which this cracking could happen, and try and cover it. Then ask all your friends, enemies, and family pets to tell you what you missed.
You're still going to get cracked one day, if enough people try, and enough people care. System administration is more about making this cracking difficult to the point of it not being worth it, rather than ruling it out altogether.
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pretty much a total rumor with no evidence at all.
What? Not at all like these TOTALLY un-rumorlike posts: Sega is getting out of hardware altogether and nothing to do with shift[ing] their focus to software development
Good ole Slashdot. Where would I be without my rumours.
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Hypothetical situation: If the City did absolutely nothing, and did not respond, wouldn't it be up to Microsoft to prove that the City held unlicensed copies of the software? Rather than the city having to cease all day to day operations in order to audit and discover a handful of "illegal" copies of Word, or whatever? But I suppose that MS would chase it to the death, rather than give up. I hate EULAs doing this kind of thing.
This kind of thing makes me grumpy. All the worse, because:
``It's the world we live in,'' Sullivan said. ``Microsoft has every right to ask us for the information.''
Ugh.
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...but I was predicting this very thing, more than a year ago, in the pub.
;-)
Mind you, when I'm in the pub, I predict quite a lot of things, and I wouldn't be proud to admit to many of them on Slashdot
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We've gotten no direct responses from either Gore or Bush
So what indirect responses have you got? This seems like something's being held back - if they, or their press office gave you some sort of answer (eg "We don't want to do it") that still merits a mention. I didn't think that Slashdot was in the business of editorial control. Maybe I was wrong.
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Almost certainly not you, Joe Public. More likely Jim BigCo, or Jon RichClient.
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But strangely, Google turns up http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Artifici al_Life/ as it's very first link.
Perhaps some human indexer thought to throw that in. Weird.
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This was confirmed by the adult site itself. When I emailed its representative, he claimed their ranking for more popular celebrities like Cindy Crawford and Pamela Anderson were way down the Google list: 22nd, 38th, and worse.
Is this claim hard to verify or something? I had this strange impression that Google was a public website, where we could all run searches. Oh. I get it. The writer was too lazy to check up on these ever-so-easy-to-verify claims.
Since the company name isn't provided, I can't check it myself. But if someone stands accused of something, of COURSE they're going to deny it.
like, *duh*.
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