Each of the algorithms submitted for the AES competition was required to support key sizes of 128, 192 and 256 bits. For a 128-bit key size, there are approximately 340 undecillion (340 followed by 36 zeros) possible keys.
One of the perks of cryptography seems to be the chance to make up words for big numbers! 1 undecillion = 10^36... anyone know what other numbers have been defined?
10^3 = Thousand
10^6 = Million
10^9 = Billion
10^12 = Trillion
10^15 = Zillion(?)
...
I seem to remeber Douglas Adams invented a 'grillion' but don't know how big that was supposed to be:-)
After the field was narrowed down to five in April 1999, NIST asked for intensified attacks and scrutiny on the finalists.
Interesting that the US government was busy asking people to try to crack an encryption standard, while at the same time upholding a law to make breaking encryption illegal.
So, now that this encryption method is officially accepted, will it be illegal to try to crack it?
Looks like gnome development is going well now... along with Galeon 1.0 being released a week ago, some of the critical apps are starting to get 'solid'.
Whatever happened to the theory of supermassive black holes? These black holes, at the centre of each galaxy are supposed to be millions of times heavier than the sun.
So what's so great about a black hole only 14 times as heavy as the sun (which is also further away than the centre of our galaxy)?
Fair point... but surely you want as different as possible a system to provide the redundancy. Anything that takes out GPS is almost certain to take out the Euro-GPS (whopping great solar flare, meteorites).
Creating your own system just because 'we haven't got one' seems a bit pointless... but are there any proposals for upgrading GPS to improve it? If you can put up a better/more advanced system then it starts to make sense.
However, AFAIK the accuracy can't really be improved by improving the satellites - it's already at the point where the devices need to take into account relativistic effects to get their ~10m accuracy - and atmospherics probably impose this limit. So what could a new version achieve (apart from fighting the evil US plan for world domination)?
More satellites? Improve reception in built up areas
Stronger signal? Receive through trees/car roof/clothes
The only other thing I could think of was a system which automatically turns the signal off for any satellite over the US (Hah! That'll teach those pesky Americans not to mess with us by spending billions on a system then giving it away...)
This seems to be the underlying (black & white) assumption to this little rant. What about the power to help people? Or the freedom to hurt people?
Writing software gives you power (if it's good s/w...) - which is the reason that companies employ software developers. This power can be abused, but that doesn't make it bad...
Hmm. Your calculations assume that the mass of the Earth is a point mass at the centre - or that you're hovering about 9km above a perfectly spherical earth.
In fact, of course, the whole of Nepal/Tibet is several km above sea level, so you're standing with more mass 'underneath' you than at any other point on the globe - implying there should be more gravitational pull on you in Nepal than e.g. below sea level in the Netherlands.
So if you're on the top of Everest, the gravitational pull will be less, but probably not as little as you calculate.
Incidentally, you've only got about 1/3rd of an atmosphere air pressure pushing down on you, does this also affect your overall preceived weight?
You don't need to contact NSI directly to transfer your domain. What happened for me when I transfered from NSI to Gandi was the following:
I contacted the new registrar (Gandi), and asked/paid them to transfer my domain to them.
They (Gandi) contacted via email the three official contacts from the original registration: Administrative contact, Technical contact and Billing contact (visible via WHOIS) requesting official permission. You are probably the billing & admin contact, while the tech contact might be you, NSI, or whoever's providing your DNS.
Assuming they receive positive replies from the contacts (no response from 1 contact is fine), then they pass on the transfer request to the original registrar.
The registry entry gets updated with your new registrar. Both the old and the new registrars (should) then email you with the updated information. You're now fully transfered!
Note that I'm not sure which bits of this are ICANN policy, and which are policy of the registrar I used - but I assume the basics of the above are the same for any registrar. For me, it all happened in about a week - most of which was taken up with waiting for 5 days for responses from all three contacts (my tech contact didn't reply).
On a separate note, I can recommend Gandi. They were one of the cheapest when i was looking (just over a year ago), handled the transfer efficiently, and haven't caused me any problems.
Wouldn't it be better to put more effort into describing what a site IS about, rather than what it ISN'T?
After all, if you describe your site, a good search engines will use this information well (so you shouldn't get too many erroneous hits). However, if you list your non-words, a bad search engines will just see this list and treat them as keywords!
So every XYZ.com is now going to register XYZ.biz as well, making the whole thing pointless... for example, even NeuLevel have exactly the same website as NeuLevel.
Incidentally, who are the 160,000 companies who have already registered? I've tried IBM, hp, microsoft, sony, slashdot - none of them seem to be available...
I know it's bad form to criticise someones writing on/. but it really is time for you to catch up with modern developments... Version 1.0 (codename cuneiform) has long been superceded by 2.0 (codename Heiroglyphics), 3.0 (greek), and 3.1 (latin).
While there is still some support for all sub-releases of version 3, I suggest you upgrade to the latest release (3.1.27 - 'joined up alphanumeric').
Of course there has been some criticism of the 'open source' nature of the writing project with claims that it leads to too many active branches (most notably with interoperability issues with the popular 'Chinese', 'Arabic' and 'Roman' branches).
When you're coding up ancient writing, you want to store much more information about each character or word than with normal text (colour, angle, depth etc.). XML is quite good at storing these attributes, so it makes sense to use it.
Taking a quote from the heiroglyphics link (can't comment on the cuneiform link as it's/.ed):
Let's illustrate these points. In the current MCD, data about an individual sign is scattered around it. Look for example at :
=A1\\r1 -i
It means "Sign Gardiner A1", as both grammatical and word ending, reversed, rotated. fine positional data, colour data, and more are hard to add. On the other hand, the current proposal would represent the same sequence as
Of course, as with any use of XML, you could do it with a 'homegrown' solution, but the point is that using XML gives you a well known (and well supported) framework which everyone can standardise on. (And yes I know the XML in the example is malformed...)
Is 1 petabyte 1000^5 or 1024^5? (i.e. is it 10^15 or 2^50)?)
If 1kB = 1024 Bytes, then I've always assumed that 1MB = 1024kB (instead of 1000kB), 1GB = 1024MB, and so on.
Normally this doesn't make that much difference, but when you consider the cost of a 16 (144-128) petabyte hard drive, then the difference is more important:-)
A good description of the process which results in the ozone hole can be found here.
Basically, the intense cold of an antarctic winter creates a vortex which isolates the air over the south pole, and allows build up of the CFCs. When the summer comes, the Chlorine from the CFCs acts as a catalyst to destroy the ozone.
It now seems to be well understood - but it's one of those things that nobody could have predicted before it happened.
To summarise the findings, it seems the density of Chlorine from CFCs has peaked, and it is expected the Ozone hole will gradually (i.e. over the next 50 years!) disappear.
It now seems to be an interesting case of us screwing up our environment, working out what we'd done, and fixing it. However, you could consider that we just 'got lucky':
The fact that it was concentrated in one spot meant that the problem was identified before we'd managed to strip the whole atmosphere of ozone.
It was concentrated over the least populated part of the globe. Compare the increase in awareness/incidence of skin cancer in Australia/New Zealand with what might have happened if it was concentrated around the equator.
The solution (banning CFCs) had relatively little economic impact making it easily implementable. It was also a universally accepted solution.
Compare this with the current situation re global warming, and this looks less like a successful victory and more like a warning shot across the bows...
So to sum up this article, if you add this at the top of your Perl programs:
use Symbol::Approx::Sub;
use Coy;
Then not only will your Perl be even less decipherable than normal Perl code (wow!), but the errors you get from it will be hidden in lines of poetry! No self-respecting programmer would have it any other way...
Now, it's back to debugging my program for me:
-----
Two old men encounter
beside a pond. A swallow
flying. Two trout.
-----
Lao Tse's commentary...
Execution of./new.pl aborted due to compilation errors.
The main feature of this ruling is that MS must open up some of the code for IE; this seems fair enough since the whole case was about the abuse of their monoply to push IE.
However, MSs strategy now for the internet is based around.NET. Is there any mention of this in the ruling? If there isn't, then the ruling is basically providing a 'level playing field' for last years battle...
Incidentally, what's the point of the bit about disallowing MS from stopping PC makers from bundling other peoples s/w? Surely this is illegal anyway, so ruling on it is a bit pointless?
It seems from the article that we now have 3 independent methods to calculate the mass of the universe. 2 of them agree, and the other is 10 times as big.
Instead of saying "there may be something wrong with the theory that gives the big answer", the scientist invent 'dark matter'. Seems a bit of a cop out to me...
I'm just off down to the personnel department to get them to factor in my 'dark salary':-)
So, Negroponte doesn't like 3G? Has he got any good reasons for this, or is
he just jumping on the "I hate 3G" bandwagon and hoping to get a bit of
publicity? The man's logic is so deranged, it's a bit hard to tell...
Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.
3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G
being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market
collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do
with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.
It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.
An auction isn't a way to market something?
Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to
make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to
boost a developing technology... the method? Auction off N licenses when you
know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a
license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process,
so the prices spiral.
It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this?
Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog"... profound insight!
With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog)
the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does*
like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.
3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).
Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going
to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about
the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it
actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?
The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk
it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.
3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people
find enough uses for it...
Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.
3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.
I (and I assume a lot of other people) have lost track of exactly which versions of which standards each of the main (IE/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera/Konquerer/Lynx/...) browsers support. Anyone care to summarise the current status?
Incidentally, they said they were blocking
"...browsers that we know don't support (W3C) standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer." Note the
'or'... so they're not precluding blocking a fully standards compliant browser they don't like (e.g. one not using WindowsXP)?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the perks of cryptography seems to be the chance to make up words for big numbers! 1 undecillion = 10^36
10^3 = Thousand
10^6 = Million
10^9 = Billion
10^12 = Trillion
10^15 = Zillion(?)
...
I seem to remeber Douglas Adams invented a 'grillion' but don't know how big that was supposed to be
Interesting that the US government was busy asking people to try to crack an encryption standard, while at the same time upholding a law to make breaking encryption illegal.
So, now that this encryption method is officially accepted, will it be illegal to try to crack it?
Looks like gnome development is going well now ... along with Galeon 1.0 being released a week ago, some of the critical apps are starting to get 'solid'.
Another twist in the KDE vs. Gnome fight?
Whatever happened to the theory of supermassive black holes? These black holes, at the centre of each galaxy are supposed to be millions of times heavier than the sun.
So what's so great about a black hole only 14 times as heavy as the sun (which is also further away than the centre of our galaxy)?
Fair point ... but surely you want as different as possible a system to provide the redundancy. Anything that takes out GPS is almost certain to take out the Euro-GPS (whopping great solar flare, meteorites).
However, AFAIK the accuracy can't really be improved by improving the satellites - it's already at the point where the devices need to take into account relativistic effects to get their ~10m accuracy - and atmospherics probably impose this limit. So what could a new version achieve (apart from fighting the evil US plan for world domination)?
The only other thing I could think of was a system which automatically turns the signal off for any satellite over the US (Hah! That'll teach those pesky Americans not to mess with us by spending billions on a system then giving it away
So, this would be a version which when a new kernel is released, pauses all the low-priority task, upgrades the kernel, then happily continues?
:-)
Kinda useful given the number of releases
This seems to be the underlying (black & white) assumption to this little rant. What about the power to help people? Or the freedom to hurt people?
...) - which is the reason that companies employ software developers. This power can be abused, but that doesn't make it bad ...
Writing software gives you power (if it's good s/w
Hmm. Your calculations assume that the mass of the Earth is a point mass at the centre - or that you're hovering about 9km above a perfectly spherical earth.
In fact, of course, the whole of Nepal/Tibet is several km above sea level, so you're standing with more mass 'underneath' you than at any other point on the globe - implying there should be more gravitational pull on you in Nepal than e.g. below sea level in the Netherlands.
So if you're on the top of Everest, the gravitational pull will be less, but probably not as little as you calculate.
Incidentally, you've only got about 1/3rd of an atmosphere air pressure pushing down on you, does this also affect your overall preceived weight?
Note that I'm not sure which bits of this are ICANN policy, and which are policy of the registrar I used - but I assume the basics of the above are the same for any registrar. For me, it all happened in about a week - most of which was taken up with waiting for 5 days for responses from all three contacts (my tech contact didn't reply).
On a separate note, I can recommend Gandi. They were one of the cheapest when i was looking (just over a year ago), handled the transfer efficiently, and haven't caused me any problems.
Wouldn't it be better to put more effort into describing what a site IS about, rather than what it ISN'T?
After all, if you describe your site, a good search engines will use this information well (so you shouldn't get too many erroneous hits). However, if you list your non-words, a bad search engines will just see this list and treat them as keywords!
- Bluetooth
- WAP
- HSCSD (up to about 40k bandwidth)
- Java
- Snake!
They're only mentioned deep in the spec.And of course, no mention of how much it'll cost or when it'll really become available
So every XYZ.com is now going to register XYZ.biz as well, making the whole thing pointless ... for example, even NeuLevel have exactly the same website as NeuLevel.
...
Incidentally, who are the 160,000 companies who have already registered? I've tried IBM, hp, microsoft, sony, slashdot - none of them seem to be available
I know it's bad form to criticise someones writing on /. but it really is time for you to catch up with modern developments ... Version 1.0 (codename cuneiform) has long been superceded by 2.0 (codename Heiroglyphics), 3.0 (greek), and 3.1 (latin).
While there is still some support for all sub-releases of version 3, I suggest you upgrade to the latest release (3.1.27 - 'joined up alphanumeric').
Of course there has been some criticism of the 'open source' nature of the writing project with claims that it leads to too many active branches (most notably with interoperability issues with the popular 'Chinese', 'Arabic' and 'Roman' branches).
Taking a quote from the heiroglyphics link (can't comment on the cuneiform link as it's
Of course, as with any use of XML, you could do it with a 'homegrown' solution, but the point is that using XML gives you a well known (and well supported) framework which everyone can standardise on. (And yes I know the XML in the example is malformed
Is 1 petabyte 1000^5 or 1024^5? (i.e. is it 10^15 or 2^50)?)
:-)
If 1kB = 1024 Bytes, then I've always assumed that 1MB = 1024kB (instead of 1000kB), 1GB = 1024MB, and so on.
Normally this doesn't make that much difference, but when you consider the cost of a 16 (144-128) petabyte hard drive, then the difference is more important
A good description of the process which results in the ozone hole can be found here.
Basically, the intense cold of an antarctic winter creates a vortex which isolates the air over the south pole, and allows build up of the CFCs. When the summer comes, the Chlorine from the CFCs acts as a catalyst to destroy the ozone.
It now seems to be well understood - but it's one of those things that nobody could have predicted before it happened.
To summarise the findings, it seems the density of Chlorine from CFCs has peaked, and it is expected the Ozone hole will gradually (i.e. over the next 50 years!) disappear.
It now seems to be an interesting case of us screwing up our environment, working out what we'd done, and fixing it. However, you could consider that we just 'got lucky':
Compare this with the current situation re global warming, and this looks less like a successful victory and more like a warning shot across the bows
Now, it's back to debugging my program for me:
The main feature of this ruling is that MS must open up some of the code for IE; this seems fair enough since the whole case was about the abuse of their monoply to push IE.
.NET. Is there any mention of this in the ruling? If there isn't, then the ruling is basically providing a 'level playing field' for last years battle ...
However, MSs strategy now for the internet is based around
Incidentally, what's the point of the bit about disallowing MS from stopping PC makers from bundling other peoples s/w? Surely this is illegal anyway, so ruling on it is a bit pointless?
And I bet he's a bit pissed that his users are only bothering to use 10% of the features he implemented ...
It seems from the article that we now have 3 independent methods to calculate the mass of the universe. 2 of them agree, and the other is 10 times as big.
...
:-)
Instead of saying "there may be something wrong with the theory that gives the big answer", the scientist invent 'dark matter'. Seems a bit of a cop out to me
I'm just off down to the personnel department to get them to factor in my 'dark salary'
Either voyeurism has reached a new level, or it's just the players and their proud(?) mums downloading this.
Then again, I guess it's not a bad screensaver!
Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.
3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.
It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.
An auction isn't a way to market something? ... the method? Auction off N licenses when you
know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a
license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process,
so the prices spiral.
Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to boost a developing technology
It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this? Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog" ... profound insight!
With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog) the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does* like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.
3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).
Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?
The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.
3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people find enough uses for it ...
Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.
3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.
Incidentally, they said they were blocking "...browsers that we know don't support (W3C) standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer." Note the 'or' ... so they're not precluding blocking a fully standards compliant browser they don't like (e.g. one not using WindowsXP)?