Windows is _the_ canonical example. I have no problem with "MS Windows" being a trademark, (MS Access, MS Excel, etc.), but when they chose that mark _they_ chose to use a common everyday word, priorly loaded with meaning. For them to claim that use of that word now infringes on their trademark is the ultimate in bogosity.
Lotus Notes is a curious one - in the context of software, lotus plants have no meaning, and therefore even though both lotus and notes are common words, I'd say they can have "Lotus Notes", the whole phrase, as a trademark. "Notes", however, they can't have - the word already has a prior meaning (which is one of the reasons why they adopted the term).
None of this is a legal statement, this is purely brainstem 'in my ideal world' think.
However, I like to think that my brainstem has more common sense than much that pertains to laws. (*cough* decss *cough*).
Whilst tecnically you might be right, if OSI and SPI think that they can restrict my juxtaposed use of two perfectly ordinary English words then, to be frank, they can simply go fuck themselves.
And given that the majority of the computational transistors on your CPU are in the FPU unit why the heck would you want to waste those transistors by not using them?
DeCSS was a simple shift-register-based stream cypher. Likewise DES, AES, RC4, MD5, and stuff like that are nothing to do with prime numbers.
RSA, Diffie-Hellman, El-Gamal - they are to do with prime numbers (i.e. they are based on number-theoretic properties of prime numbers).
Now a couple of years ago some loon who calls himself FatPhil decided to encode the DeCSS program as an archivable prime number, simply so that it could be officially archived somewhere. However, that was basically just a prank - hiding illegal programs in legal numbers.
There are equally fast tests for Generalised Fermat Numbers and Generalised Eisenstein Fermat Numbers. It's just that this was only realised 4 years ago (GFNs, by Yves Gallot), and 18 months ago (GEFNs, by me). Their popularity has yet to catch on, and GIMPS's Mersennes have an enormous head start and huge user-base. However, it's no longer a question of efficiency.
Yves Gallot's GFN (generalised Fermat Number) search, and my GEFN (generalised Eisenstein Fermat Number) search, are both as efficient when it comes to the primality tests. If anything, our tests might be more efficient, as our DWTs are simpler than Mersenne's IBDWT. Both of our forms are definitely more efficient than Mersennes, as we can _presieve_ ours to massively reduce the number of lengthy tests that we need to do.
The only reason GIMPS (great internet mersenne prime search) has the top ?4 primes at the moment is because they have 1000x as much CPU power as Yves' GFN search, and 10000x as much CPU as my GEFN search.
With Percival's generalised DWT algorithm, those searching for Proth/Riesel forms (k*2^n+/-1) with very small k also have a similarly efficient primality tests.
The age of Mersennes is only not over yet because of the fact that they have such a head start. They will be caught up with over time when other projects get similar quantities of CPU power.
It must be a lie, as the alleged "exploit" that it exploits is one which would have been detected by the monkey test (generation of random strings of semi-garbage html), which we know IE passed with flying colours only a few weeks back.
That's what I used to think. However, I've got used to it, and I find it quite useful now. I have one window with 8 tabs for various server status pages, another with a few tabs for/., the register, and bbc news, and a third window for general googling and opening up random URLs.
It's just a shame that Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and I have to shut it down once a week when its resident footprint reaches about 50% of my RAM.
It's also a shame that sometimes it stops responding to a subset of keypresses (so sometimes normal characters work so I can type URLs, but arrow keys/pgup/pgdn don't work; and other times arrow keys work, but I can't type in normal characters).
Hi Decio, things are fine, the ECM job is pulling factors out by the dozen daily, but it's an enormous task. You're invited to join in for a bit if you like.
Inasmuch as the 'sieves' are memory bound, then yes, the task don't benefit vastly from use of the FPU. However, everything else can. The FPU concretely helps me in my sieving tasks on <64 bit numbers (50% int, 50% FPU, twice the throughput), and also for medium-sized numbers too. Look at DJB's zmodexp, for example. How do you do your modular square roots in MPQS? Most of the time it's a modular exponentiation, in which case, I'd definitely be using the FPU a la zmodexp.
Anything that does arithmetic with integer maths can be done in FP too. My PIES project, like GIMPS and all the others, does integer maths almost entirely in the FPU units.
Logical operations, yup, they're out of scope, but addition and multiplication, which are the heart of all the arithmetic algorithms you mention, can all be hived off to the FPU.
How can something that says "this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys." and "that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined" get moderated to +5?
You're gibbering, sir. You say one thing and then the opposite.
No-one "brute forces" PGP keys, that's not how you crack them. Exactly how you crack them depends on what the underlying algorithm is, it's either GNFS factoring or discrete logarithm, but _neither_ is brute force. So your first point is wrong.
With current algorithms, 1024 bits is completely out of reach. The algorithms are mostly "embarassingly parallel", and therefore there's little gain from a tighty-coupled supercomputer (except at the LA stage at the end, but that's a fraction of the total workload). So this machine is no greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. several thousand high speed processors). Such a setup cannot crack 1024-bit keys. So your second point is wrong.
""" 3. I am unsure about you, but I only buy a new phone every time my contract runs out, which is ~ every two years. The difference between a 1 and 2 year timeframe is significant, as in 1 year, technology hardly evolves much in phones """
The business model of all major cellphone manufacturers is for customers to buy a new phone every 18 months. (I have worked for a GSM consultancy, with tier-2 clients, and also for a tier-1 company in the last few years, for reference.)
You are entirely right - it's almost unbelievable that people do get persuaded to follow what the marketeers desire. This explains some of the unnecessaryfeaturitis that has afflicted mobile phones in the last few years. Yes, there's a brand new feature that you MUST HAVE, stop asking questions. Your mate bought a phone with the feature, didn't he? That means YOU SHOULD TOO.
Kerching.
From what I've seen, the marketeer's wet dream of 18 months really isn't that far away.
FP. (Still using a Nokia 5110 from 6 years ago, a gift from the company that I once worked for...)
"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East." -- George W. Bush, according to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, from minutes acquired by Haaretz from cease-fire negotiations between Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts (circa June, 2003), quoted from Arnon Regular, "'Road map is a life saver for us,' PM Abbas tells Hamas" (Haaretz.com:June 27, 2003)
"The very first act of the new Bush administration was to have a Protestant Evangelist minister officially dedicate the inauguration to Jesus Christ, whom he declared to be 'our savior.' Invoking 'the Father, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ' and 'the Holy Spirit,' Billy Graham's son, the man selected by President George W. Bush to bless his presidency, excluded the tens of millions of Americans who are Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, Unitarians, agnostics, and atheists from his blessing by his particularistic and parochial language.
"The plain message conveyed by the new administration is that George W. Bush's America is a Christian nation and that non-Christians are welcome into the tent so long as they agree to accept their status as a tolerated minority rather than as fully equal citizens. In effect, Bush is saying: 'This is our home, and in our home we pray to Jesus as our savior. If you want to be a guest in our home, you must accept the way we pray.'"
-- Alan M. Dershowitz, in "Bush Starts Off by Defying the the Constitution," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2001
"In the 19th century, there was "good science to suggest" that, given a strong enough rocket engine, objects can be accelerated to speeds bigger than 300000km/s."
THere was also good, better even, science to suggest that it was impossible. Newton and (Daniel, it's a big family) Bernoulli stitched that up, in the negative, over a century earlier.
THe teleportation guy's mentor is Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is one of the inventors of one of the schemes for faster than light travel.
So you'd better be going back to teh stone age pretty darn quick to impress that guy. Call it forward progress, and you'll have achieved a negative speed - that should impress him.
Whilst I frequently say anti-Apple and anti-Mac things (I just don't like them, I even bought one once, so it's not from ignorance that I build my opinion), I've always been prepared to admit that Apple's Mac UI guidelines were very well designed, after years of intensive study and usability testing , and left the user with very few surprises. Which is a good thing.
Many of the MS borrowings from Mac _broke_ the good design work by Apple by changing details that MS were too stupid to understand were fundamental to the reason why Mac adopted the correct and working version of the idea. E.g. the introduction of a dead pixel below the buttons in the start bar, violating the "the edge of the screen is infinite" principle. Apple got that right right from the start, to see MS fuck up so badly was an embarasment to everyone who knows anything about UI design.
I feel that more recently (last half decade) Apple have dropped the baton a bit, as the consistency has evaporated away. Everyone's introducing their own paradigms (this includes Apple itself), so you never know exactly how anything new is going to behave. Some of the old UI guidelines are now completely out of the window, which is a shame. (e.g. Do not model a program on a physical device unless the user is expected to already be familiar with such a physical device - violated by programs that look like physical devices that have never existed. e.g. various media players.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. The thread is now closed.
Right, on to the next story...
FP.
And then every spammer forges its source to be sourceforge.
Shit, pun not intended.
FP.
Absolutely.
Windows is _the_ canonical example. I have no problem with "MS Windows" being a trademark, (MS Access, MS Excel, etc.), but when they chose that mark _they_ chose to use a common everyday word, priorly loaded with meaning. For them to claim that use of that word now infringes on their trademark is the ultimate in bogosity.
Lotus Notes is a curious one - in the context of software, lotus plants have no meaning, and therefore even though both lotus and notes are common words, I'd say they can have "Lotus Notes", the whole phrase, as a trademark. "Notes", however, they can't have - the word already has a prior meaning (which is one of the reasons why they adopted the term).
None of this is a legal statement, this is purely brainstem 'in my ideal world' think.
However, I like to think that my brainstem has more common sense than much that pertains to laws. (*cough* decss *cough*).
FP.
Whilst tecnically you might be right, if OSI and SPI think that they can restrict my juxtaposed use of two perfectly ordinary English words then, to be frank, they can simply go fuck themselves.
Phrases like that shouldn't be trademarkable.
FP.
In that case, I propose the only suitable punishment -
death by 280 million paper cuts.
I've got an almost new ream of 120g/sm, and I'm prepared to share it.
FP.
Hahahah!
Yeah, I only kill it when I can hear the HD thrashing.
I should kill it every couple of days, but I'm lazy.
FP.
Your statement is false.
And given that the majority of the computational transistors on your CPU are in the FPU unit why the heck would you want to waste those transistors by not using them?
FP.
DeCSS has nothing to do with prime numbers.
DeCSS was a simple shift-register-based stream cypher.
Likewise DES, AES, RC4, MD5, and stuff like that are nothing to do with prime numbers.
RSA, Diffie-Hellman, El-Gamal - they are to do with prime numbers (i.e. they are based on number-theoretic properties of prime numbers).
Now a couple of years ago some loon who calls himself FatPhil decided to encode the DeCSS program as an archivable prime number, simply so that it could be officially archived somewhere. However, that was basically just a prank - hiding illegal programs in legal numbers.
FP.
There are equally fast tests for Generalised Fermat Numbers and Generalised Eisenstein Fermat Numbers. It's just that this was only realised 4 years ago (GFNs, by Yves Gallot), and 18 months ago (GEFNs, by me). Their popularity has yet to catch on, and GIMPS's Mersennes have an enormous head start and huge user-base. However, it's no longer a question of efficiency.
Yves Gallot's GFN (generalised Fermat Number) search, and my GEFN (generalised Eisenstein Fermat Number) search, are both as efficient when it comes to the primality tests. If anything, our tests might be more efficient, as our DWTs are simpler than Mersenne's IBDWT. Both of our forms are definitely more efficient than Mersennes, as we can _presieve_ ours to massively reduce the number of lengthy tests that we need to do.
The only reason GIMPS (great internet mersenne prime search) has the top ?4 primes at the moment is because they have 1000x as much CPU power as Yves' GFN search, and 10000x as much CPU as my GEFN search.
With Percival's generalised DWT algorithm, those searching for Proth/Riesel forms (k*2^n+/-1) with very small k also have a similarly efficient primality tests.
The age of Mersennes is only not over yet because of the fact that they have such a head start. They will be caught up with over time when other projects get similar quantities of CPU power.
FP.
So use dynamite instead. Duh!
Must be a lie, I tell you.
FP.
That's what I used to think. However, I've got used to it, and I find it quite useful now. I have one window with 8 tabs for various server status pages, another with a few tabs for /., the register, and bbc news, and a third window for general googling and opening up random URLs.
It's just a shame that Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and I have to shut it down once a week when its resident footprint reaches about 50% of my RAM.
It's also a shame that sometimes it stops responding to a subset of keypresses (so sometimes normal characters work so I can type URLs, but arrow keys/pgup/pgdn don't work; and other times arrow keys work, but I can't type in normal characters).
FP.
And it's not the fastest system in an academic institution either. The technical university of Catalonia's BSC is in the #4 slot.
Hi Decio, things are fine, the ECM job is pulling factors out by the dozen daily, but it's an enormous task. You're invited to join in for a bit if you like.
Inasmuch as the 'sieves' are memory bound, then yes, the task don't benefit vastly from use of the FPU. However, everything else can. The FPU concretely helps me in my sieving tasks on <64 bit numbers (50% int, 50% FPU, twice the throughput), and also for medium-sized numbers too. Look at DJB's zmodexp, for example. How do you do your modular square roots in MPQS? Most of the time it's a modular exponentiation, in which case, I'd definitely be using the FPU a la zmodexp.
Phil
Anything that does arithmetic with integer maths can be done in FP too. My PIES project, like GIMPS and all the others, does integer maths almost entirely in the FPU units.
Logical operations, yup, they're out of scope, but addition and multiplication, which are the heart of all the arithmetic algorithms you mention, can all be hived off to the FPU.
Phil
15 = 5*3
FP.
How can something that says "this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys." and "that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined" get moderated to +5?
You're gibbering, sir. You say one thing and then the opposite.
No-one "brute forces" PGP keys, that's not how you crack them. Exactly how you crack them depends on what the underlying algorithm is, it's either GNFS factoring or discrete logarithm, but _neither_ is brute force. So your first point is wrong.
With current algorithms, 1024 bits is completely out of reach. The algorithms are mostly "embarassingly parallel", and therefore there's little gain from a tighty-coupled supercomputer (except at the LA stage at the end, but that's a fraction of the total workload). So this machine is no greater than the sum of its parts (i.e. several thousand high speed processors). Such a setup cannot crack 1024-bit keys. So your second point is wrong.
FP.
"""
3. I am unsure about you, but I only buy a new phone every time my contract runs out, which is ~ every two years. The difference between a 1 and 2 year timeframe is significant, as in 1 year, technology hardly evolves much in phones
"""
The business model of all major cellphone manufacturers is for customers to buy a new phone every 18 months.
(I have worked for a GSM consultancy, with tier-2 clients, and also for a tier-1 company in the last few years, for reference.)
You are entirely right - it's almost unbelievable that people do get persuaded to follow what the marketeers desire. This explains some of the unnecessaryfeaturitis
that has afflicted mobile phones in the last few years.
Yes, there's a brand new feature that you MUST HAVE, stop asking questions. Your mate bought a phone with the feature, didn't he? That means YOU SHOULD TOO.
Kerching.
From what I've seen, the marketeer's wet dream of 18 months really isn't that far away.
FP.
(Still using a Nokia 5110 from 6 years ago, a gift from the company that I once worked for...)
"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
-- George W. Bush, according to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, from minutes acquired by Haaretz from cease-fire negotiations between Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts (circa June, 2003), quoted from Arnon Regular, "'Road map is a life saver for us,' PM Abbas tells Hamas" (Haaretz.com:June 27, 2003)
"The very first act of the new Bush administration was to have a Protestant Evangelist minister officially dedicate the inauguration to Jesus Christ, whom he declared to be 'our savior.' Invoking 'the Father, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ' and 'the Holy Spirit,' Billy Graham's son, the man selected by President George W. Bush to bless his presidency, excluded the tens of millions of Americans who are Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, Unitarians, agnostics, and atheists from his blessing by his particularistic and parochial language.
"The plain message conveyed by the new administration is that George W. Bush's America is a Christian nation and that non-Christians are welcome into the tent so long as they agree to accept their status as a tolerated minority rather than as fully equal citizens. In effect, Bush is saying: 'This is our home, and in our home we pray to Jesus as our savior. If you want to be a guest in our home, you must accept the way we pray.'"
-- Alan M. Dershowitz, in "Bush Starts Off by Defying the the Constitution," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2001
"In the 19th century, there was "good science to suggest" that, given a strong enough rocket engine, objects can be accelerated to speeds bigger than 300000km/s."
THere was also good, better even, science to suggest that it was impossible. Newton and (Daniel, it's a big family) Bernoulli stitched that up, in the negative, over a century earlier.
FP.
THe teleportation guy's mentor is Hal Puthoff.
Puthoff is one of the inventors of one of the schemes for faster than light travel.
So you'd better be going back to teh stone age pretty darn quick to impress that guy. Call it forward progress, and you'll have achieved a negative speed - that should impress him.
FP.
The same phenominon as remote viewing - namely the phenomenon of sucking US taxpayers money.
Google for the following things for more info:
Hal Puthoff, Russel Targ, Ingo Swann, Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Debunkings courtesy of Martin Gardner, and occasionally James Randi.
In paper form "Science: good, bad, bogus" by Gardner.
Look on the bright side - with the US dollar plummetting, eventually this wasted expenditure will have almost no value at all!
FP.
Agreed.
Whilst I frequently say anti-Apple and anti-Mac things (I just don't like them, I even bought one once, so it's not from ignorance that I build my opinion), I've always been prepared to admit that Apple's Mac UI guidelines were very well designed, after years of intensive study and usability testing , and left the user with very few surprises. Which is a good thing.
Many of the MS borrowings from Mac _broke_ the good design work by Apple by changing details that MS were too stupid to understand were fundamental to the reason why Mac adopted the correct and working version of the idea. E.g. the introduction of a dead pixel below the buttons in the start bar, violating the "the edge of the screen is infinite" principle. Apple got that right right from the start, to see MS fuck up so badly was an embarasment to everyone who knows anything about UI design.
I feel that more recently (last half decade) Apple have dropped the baton a bit, as the consistency has evaporated away. Everyone's introducing their own paradigms (this includes Apple itself), so you never know exactly how anything new is going to behave. Some of the old UI guidelines are now completely out of the window, which is a shame. (e.g. Do not model a program on a physical device unless the user is expected to already be familiar with such a physical device - violated by programs that look like physical devices that have never existed. e.g. various media players.)
FP.