I spent 10 months traveling around the world and another ten driving across the US in a camper van. You can read about my trip at www.thewanderyonder.com (The picture gallery is probably more interesting) We had a pretty "interesting" trip to Everest base camp from the Tibet side.
Anyhow, don't bring a laptop. Seriously, its too much weight, even the macbook air. Take your camera and plenty of memory. There are fantastic internet cafes all over the world that you can burn cds and dvds from. We first burned our memory cards and then uploaded them to our hosting provider and mailed the cds/dvds home.
The important thing is to take notes on what you want to write about when you _do_ get the opportunity. And trust me, you actually _will_ want to spend a lot of time in a pleasant internet cafe uploading pictures and doing the real writing about your trip at the cafe. The note taking system I started using that really helped me caption my pictures and remember the highlights I wanted to write about is to review the pictures you take on your camera during the day and set the viewscreen so that you can see the image file name, then each night, or as close to it as possible, make a note associated with each filename on the camera. Include not only the contents of the picture, but the other things that were happening around the time you took the picture.
My biggest regret about my trip around the world was trying to figure out the ideal gadget kit beforehand, I went with a Palm TX with Bluetooth Stowaway keyboard and had that set up so I could do banking and upload pictures and blog. But it was such a pain compared to just using internet cafes that I wound up sending all of that home. Instead I wish that I had taken the time to research and buy a digital SLR camera and really figure out how to use it.
Make sure you bring an unlocked GSM phone, and if you are taking the train from Beijing to Lhasa Tibet, bring enough air sickness bags for everyone in close proximity to you.
Have a good trip, visit my website and email me from there if you have any specific questions, I'm happy to lend some advice to somebody else doing a trip like this. I'm glad to hear you're going to Namibia its a beautiful highly underrated country.
There are hundreds of languages that support loops, variable assignments, recursion, definition of subroutines and Joe knows what else.
Language constructs to support mp are bound to be just as numerous. I'm not normally one to be so dismissive of a post, but I think this one of the more pointless items ever shared with erudite little community.
In Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age" there is a bit where Nell, the owner of the "young lady's illustrated primer" has to escape from a castle that was run by robots programmed with ropes or chains, which were effectively Turing Machines. The odd thing is, the character of Stephenson's earlier book "Snow Crash" was named Hero. So my question, is this a new discovery? Or might the author have been inspired by these rope-bots?
I took: A Canon S50 5mp digital camera, an extra battery and a bunch of SD cards that fit into a CF type 2 adapter. A Palm TX (I shipped this home after 2 months) A Bluetooth folding keyboard for use with the Palm (shipped home with the palm) A Sony T68i unlocked mobile phone with a gloabal roaming SIM (with a UK phone #) that had voicemail A 60 GB Apple iPod half filled with music A camera connector so I could dump my photos to the iPod. A 40 Meter underwater case for the camera
I wound up buying an SLR in Dubai because I got so into photography on the trip. I wish I had brought this with me from the beginning and had taken a few photography courses. If you think you might be even remotely interested in Photography please please please get an SLR and take some courses before you go. If this is the trip of a lifetime for you like it was for me, I implore you to take this advice.
Conveniently, the SLR I bought used the same batteries as the Canon S50.
I also wound up buying 6 additional gigs of memory over the 6 gigs I oiginally brought with me becuase I wasn't able to spend enough time in internet locations in some areas to upload (or burn) all my pictures.
We wound up not using the global roaming SIM at all in favor of locally purchased SIMs and then we simply emailed our families the number (the pronouns are plural because I went with my wife). But the phone was absolutely the most useful piece of kit after the camera.
Despite all the camera gear I wound up having, I was otherwise travelling very light...
Here are some other items of low-tech that I found invaluable 1. a camp sink for washing in 2. at least a couple of pairs of silk, wool, or capilene boxers or boxer briefs 3. Colombia ROC pants with a zippered pocket. (Much more convenient than those stupid money belts) 4. Don't bring boots 5. Loosely packed stuff sacks are crucial. Don't ever fully pack a stuff sack though, because then they don't deform well enough and you'll waste space in your pack. 6. If there's two of you, each of you should take a 15-25 liter pack and a shared rugged wheeled duffel bag. 7. If its just you, don't get a bag larger than 55 liters. If you do, you will fill and hate yourself.
The important thing to realize is that most programmers out there have no idea how to actually code 99% of the types of software out there. Most coders get very involved in whatever pays the bills and very little else.
I learned everything I needed to know about how to do my job by going out and doing research myself. First, I did a lot of background research on how the sorts of problems I had to solve had been solved by others, and then did a lot of reading until I was ready to start implementing things. And then I kept reading. I would say that in my last job I spent 75% of my time reading, and maybe 25% doing actual technical work.
The work I do is on REALLY huge computers and involves keeping them maxed out thinking about things. One of my oldest friends does graphics programming, which absolutley mystifies me. But he has no grasp of how to work with the huge computing resources I use in my job.
The point is that you are going to come across a lot of technologies that seem to be simply magic to you until you really dig into them and teach them to yourself. Its a question of having the time and motivation (which usually means employment) to learn new things. Just don't rely on your education to be your entire background. You have to go out and figure out new things by yourself.
It sounds like what you really need is a basic IPTC editor. That way all the metadata you associate with the file stays with the file wherever it goes. If you're using a mac and have $300 you aren't terribly good friends with, you could buy Aperture. It has a really nice system for assigning IPTC fields in batches, and you can also set up hierarchies of IPTC keywords. (Think tags, but IPTC keywords have been in use a long time with the photo industry, and they call them IPTC keywords) Oh and Aperture does loads of other stuff. Its overkill if you don't shoot in RAW mode and do some post-processing. If you're talking about snapshots here, I would just find a simple tool for whatever you platform of choice is to let you edit IPTC headers. Get them all labeled first, then worry about management software in another year or so once you have finished all the labeling.
Oh and try not to take any pictures in the meantime. You'll only make more work for yourself. Say hi to the Granmas for me!
I don't know where you heard that the floaties in Kwak Pawel are chocolate, but they are most certainly not. They're hops. Kwak is dry-hopped, even in the bottle.
What on earth are you talking about? An online membership to the Apple Developer Connection is free and provides access to the download of developer tools. If you don't have the bandwidth to download the CD image, you can go to an Apple Store, go to the Genius Bar, explain your situation, and as long as you can show them that you can in fact log into ADC, they will probably help you download and burn the image. The ADC memberships that have a fee attatched give you support incidents and pre-release software.
We use OpenSSH and F-Secure ssh daemons on Solaris 7 and 8. Its easy to use, and we've never had a successful penetration. Their url is: http://www.fsecure.com
I agree with your position that GUIs are less dangerous while root than CLIs are because GUIs execute gestures which have zero chance of a wildcard typo error. If one examines most of the other arguments presented by slashdotters for not using root, they seem to have to do with chowns, and rms gone awry. There is certainly no risk of that in a GUI.
However, I think you have a misconception of "classic" mac users. I would argure that because in order to log in as root in the first place, the user had to go out of her way to enable root in netinfo, this implies a certain level of sophistication, or a least a desire to learn the ropes and gain a greater understanding of the system. The behavior could have been motivated by doing a lot of su commands that the user viewed as tedious and hence sought an alternative. Which implies command line use.
I think the important question is WHY on earth do these users find themselves requiring superuser privleges in the first place? Its probably because they want to tweak the system, which mac users are notorious for, so they may as well resign themselves to having to re-install the system at some point.
I think the problem lies in recommending root-running to others. The argument should be presented like this:
root is there as a layer of protection, to protect you from yourself, and to protect your system from things you might download that could do bad things to your system intentionally or not.
If you run as root, you lose that protection. Take it or leave it, but if you recommend that others also abandon the protection that root provides, please provide them with the coutesy of explaining roots purspose in protecting them from themselves.
Essentially Apple's OpenDoc was the same paradigm. Unfortunately due to business concerns OpenDoc was canned. The tools that were released were VERY useful though. For the short time it was around a was a great way to get work done. With the addition of the power in unix, this paradigm could be very powerful.
Blacksmiths, Cobblers, Architects, Database Engineers, Layout Designers, Stone Masons, Landscapers, and C programmers are all Artisans. All of the have Kung Fu (Skill through effort) that is used to create things.
While some think that only PURE art (Art created for expressive purposes only) is the only TRUE form of art, I think such people are nincompoops and I am entitled to my opinion. I am an engineer. I am an artisan. I create things that serve a purpose but they have beauty in their structure.
I might be wrong, but I think Solaris for Intel has good multilingual support and I believe StarOffice might be able to open multi-lingual Office docs. I know for a fact that it'll handle Excel spreadsheets really well. Its worth looking into.
Are you sure? I'm _fairly_ certain that LegitUserAlice cannot read packets sent by LegitUserBob without having to crack some encryption as described in the paper.
I was only replying to the parent post. He described putting up a packet sniffer and the way he described it, it didn't sound like he was using the methods described in the paper to crack WEP. It sounded more like they were sniffing packets that had already come back to transmission over wire.
Apple's AirPort traffic is encrypted. So if you're sniffing, you're doing it over copper, not from the airwaves. Granted Apple only uses a 40 bit cipher, but I imagine that its enough to keep even the most brilliant high school geek busy for months. On a side note... Packet sniffers sure are cool aren't they?
The very first reply to my original post points out the error in this sentence to which I replied that I had meant to say "... in terms of _mathematical_ functions..." instead of the word polynomial.
you're right, I misspoke. I meant to say "All algorithms that run on modern computers have runtimes that can be expressed in terms of mathematical functions" The rest of my post bears out this thinking. Sorry about the confusion.
All algorithms that run on modern computers have runtimes that can be described in terms of polynomial functions. Some examples of these are:
N,N^2,LogN,NLogN,N^N
The "N" in all of these describes in some fashion the size of the input. Generally when one discusses algorithm speed, the terminology O(N) or O(logN) is used as opposed to just stating the polynomial. You should read "O(N)" as "Big-Oh of N" or "Order N". There is also a "little-oh of N" which describes lower limits on the algorithms runtime and there is "Omega of N" which is a waste of time.
Now you may be asking what is the f*ing point... I know I did in my sophomore year of Computer Science classes...
Basically the point is only apparent when dealing with difficult problems. Before you go and code a solution to a difficult problem, you want to ensure that you wont be wasting your time. So you formalize your algorithm into polynomial form. (This can be difficult...) You can then tell by the form of the polynomial just how long the algorithm will take to run as the size of the input increases. So, if I formalize my Algorithm to be O(NLogN)... (Incidentally most sort algorithms are O(NLogN) in case you wanted an example...) Anyhow, I know my algorithm is O(NLogN) which means as N, or the size of the input, increases... my runtime increases according to this function.
In case you are wondering how the hell logarithms get into computer algorithms, its a by-product of recursion.
Back to the point. Any algorithm described as having the form O(x^N) is considered to be "NP" which stands for Non-Polynomial... which you can see is plainly the case. The "N" is in the exponent, and therefore the runtime grows exponentially, not polynomially.
Algorithms that have NP forms suck because they just take too damn long to with inputs above certain thresholds. NP alogorithms are grouped into two seperate groups that have differening properties. One is NP-complete, and the other is NP-hard. Lets leave it at: "NP-complete problems have better solutions that are more practical than NP hard problems". There are of course more formal definitions, but this should suffice for now.
Basically NP problems are some of the most infamous in computer science and were there polynomial solutions to these problems the world would be a better place. Some of these are: Minimum Spanning Trees, The Travelling Salesman Problem, Convex Hulls (Somebody check me on that one ???), and many more including decryption brute forcing and some of the problems that go with it such as large number factoring and prime-tests...
Some scientists believe that the set of NP-complete problems can all be mapped into polynomial algorithms, others do not. Some scientists believe that _some_ of the NP-complete problems can have a polynomial map and others don't and that therefore not all the algorithms that are considered to be NP complete actually are. Basically at this point the subject digresses into a bunch of academic hooey.
You should come away with this: There are some problems that people would like to solve that todays computers can't solve with practical input sizes in a million years. Computer Science has developed a formalism for working with these problems and it is of interest to some mathematically minded programmers to read about these things and play with the solutions. It helps programmers keep their minds sharp and usually helps us keep our own algorithms efficient.
I hope that I have sated your curiosity to some degree. I have glossed over and simplified some very complex subjects, partly because I would embarass myself and get thing s wrong if I went into more detail. I am a software engineer, not a theoretician. The difference is: theoreticians are smarter, but software engineers make more money.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Cable companies are required by law to allow you to rent cablecards for use with their service.
The point made in the post below is well taken however that the rental fee, while low, is exorbitant compared to the cost of the cards.
I spent 10 months traveling around the world and another ten driving across the US in a camper van. You can read about my trip at www.thewanderyonder.com (The picture gallery is probably more interesting) We had a pretty "interesting" trip to Everest base camp from the Tibet side.
Anyhow, don't bring a laptop. Seriously, its too much weight, even the macbook air. Take your camera and plenty of memory. There are fantastic internet cafes all over the world that you can burn cds and dvds from. We first burned our memory cards and then uploaded them to our hosting provider and mailed the cds/dvds home.
The important thing is to take notes on what you want to write about when you _do_ get the opportunity. And trust me, you actually _will_ want to spend a lot of time in a pleasant internet cafe uploading pictures and doing the real writing about your trip at the cafe. The note taking system I started using that really helped me caption my pictures and remember the highlights I wanted to write about is to review the pictures you take on your camera during the day and set the viewscreen so that you can see the image file name, then each night, or as close to it as possible, make a note associated with each filename on the camera. Include not only the contents of the picture, but the other things that were happening around the time you took the picture.
My biggest regret about my trip around the world was trying to figure out the ideal gadget kit beforehand, I went with a Palm TX with Bluetooth Stowaway keyboard and had that set up so I could do banking and upload pictures and blog. But it was such a pain compared to just using internet cafes that I wound up sending all of that home. Instead I wish that I had taken the time to research and buy a digital SLR camera and really figure out how to use it.
Make sure you bring an unlocked GSM phone, and if you are taking the train from Beijing to Lhasa Tibet, bring enough air sickness bags for everyone in close proximity to you.
Have a good trip, visit my website and email me from there if you have any specific questions, I'm happy to lend some advice to somebody else doing a trip like this. I'm glad to hear you're going to Namibia its a beautiful highly underrated country.
There are hundreds of languages that support loops, variable assignments, recursion, definition of subroutines and Joe knows what else.
Language constructs to support mp are bound to be just as numerous. I'm not normally one to be so dismissive of a post, but I think this one of the more pointless items ever shared with erudite little community.
In Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age" there is a bit where Nell, the owner of the "young lady's illustrated primer" has to escape from a castle that was run by robots programmed with ropes or chains, which were effectively Turing Machines. The odd thing is, the character of Stephenson's earlier book "Snow Crash" was named Hero. So my question, is this a new discovery? Or might the author have been inspired by these rope-bots?
I took:
A Canon S50 5mp digital camera, an extra battery and a bunch of SD cards that fit into a CF type 2 adapter.
A Palm TX (I shipped this home after 2 months)
A Bluetooth folding keyboard for use with the Palm (shipped home with the palm)
A Sony T68i unlocked mobile phone with a gloabal roaming SIM (with a UK phone #) that had voicemail
A 60 GB Apple iPod half filled with music
A camera connector so I could dump my photos to the iPod.
A 40 Meter underwater case for the camera
I wound up buying an SLR in Dubai because I got so into photography on the trip. I wish I had brought this with me from the beginning and had taken a few photography courses. If you think you might be even remotely interested in Photography please please please get an SLR and take some courses before you go. If this is the trip of a lifetime for you like it was for me, I implore you to take this advice.
Conveniently, the SLR I bought used the same batteries as the Canon S50.
I also wound up buying 6 additional gigs of memory over the 6 gigs I oiginally brought with me becuase I wasn't able to spend enough time in internet locations in some areas to upload (or burn) all my pictures.
We wound up not using the global roaming SIM at all in favor of locally purchased SIMs and then we simply emailed our families the number (the pronouns are plural because I went with my wife). But the phone was absolutely the most useful piece of kit after the camera.
Despite all the camera gear I wound up having, I was otherwise travelling very light...
Here are some other items of low-tech that I found invaluable
1. a camp sink for washing in
2. at least a couple of pairs of silk, wool, or capilene boxers or boxer briefs
3. Colombia ROC pants with a zippered pocket. (Much more convenient than those stupid money belts)
4. Don't bring boots
5. Loosely packed stuff sacks are crucial. Don't ever fully pack a stuff sack though, because then they don't deform well enough and you'll waste space in your pack.
6. If there's two of you, each of you should take a 15-25 liter pack and a shared rugged wheeled duffel bag.
7. If its just you, don't get a bag larger than 55 liters. If you do, you will fill and hate yourself.
If you want to read about my trip, go to: http://www.thewanderyonder.com/
He's a conspiracy theory revisionist historian... Have a look at this: http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.h tm
Methinks ol' Gary may be at the very least, a tad paranoid.
The important thing to realize is that most programmers out there have no idea how to actually code 99% of the types of software out there. Most coders get very involved in whatever pays the bills and very little else.
I learned everything I needed to know about how to do my job by going out and doing research myself. First, I did a lot of background research on how the sorts of problems I had to solve had been solved by others, and then did a lot of reading until I was ready to start implementing things. And then I kept reading. I would say that in my last job I spent 75% of my time reading, and maybe 25% doing actual technical work.
The work I do is on REALLY huge computers and involves keeping them maxed out thinking about things. One of my oldest friends does graphics programming, which absolutley mystifies me. But he has no grasp of how to work with the huge computing resources I use in my job.
The point is that you are going to come across a lot of technologies that seem to be simply magic to you until you really dig into them and teach them to yourself. Its a question of having the time and motivation (which usually means employment) to learn new things. Just don't rely on your education to be your entire background. You have to go out and figure out new things by yourself.
fucking relax dude.
When I was six I "built" this bitchin' clock by sticking two metal thingies into an Idaho Russet.
Your Grandmother's names are Foo and Bar?!
That is so incredibly cool!
It sounds like what you really need is a basic IPTC editor. That way all the metadata you associate with the file stays with the file wherever it goes. If you're using a mac and have $300 you aren't terribly good friends with, you could buy Aperture. It has a really nice system for assigning IPTC fields in batches, and you can also set up hierarchies of IPTC keywords. (Think tags, but IPTC keywords have been in use a long time with the photo industry, and they call them IPTC keywords) Oh and Aperture does loads of other stuff. Its overkill if you don't shoot in RAW mode and do some post-processing. If you're talking about snapshots here, I would just find a simple tool for whatever you platform of choice is to let you edit IPTC headers. Get them all labeled first, then worry about management software in another year or so once you have finished all the labeling.
Oh and try not to take any pictures in the meantime. You'll only make more work for yourself. Say hi to the Granmas for me!
I don't know where you heard that the floaties in Kwak Pawel are chocolate, but they are most certainly not. They're hops. Kwak is dry-hopped, even in the bottle.
What on earth are you talking about? An online membership to the Apple Developer Connection is free and provides access to the download of developer tools. If you don't have the bandwidth to download the CD image, you can go to an Apple Store, go to the Genius Bar, explain your situation, and as long as you can show them that you can in fact log into ADC, they will probably help you download and burn the image. The ADC memberships that have a fee attatched give you support incidents and pre-release software.
We use OpenSSH and F-Secure ssh daemons on Solaris 7 and 8. Its easy to use, and we've never had a successful penetration. Their url is: http://www.fsecure.com
I agree with your position that GUIs are less dangerous while root than CLIs are because GUIs execute gestures which have zero chance of a wildcard typo error. If one examines most of the other arguments presented by slashdotters for not using root, they seem to have to do with chowns, and rms gone awry. There is certainly no risk of that in a GUI.
However, I think you have a misconception of "classic" mac users. I would argure that because in order to log in as root in the first place, the user had to go out of her way to enable root in netinfo, this implies a certain level of sophistication, or a least a desire to learn the ropes and gain a greater understanding of the system. The behavior could have been motivated by doing a lot of su commands that the user viewed as tedious and hence sought an alternative. Which implies command line use.
I think the important question is WHY on earth do these users find themselves requiring superuser privleges in the first place? Its probably because they want to tweak the system, which mac users are notorious for, so they may as well resign themselves to having to re-install the system at some point.
I think the problem lies in recommending root-running to others. The argument should be presented like this:
root is there as a layer of protection, to protect you from yourself, and to protect your system from things you might download that could do bad things to your system intentionally or not.
If you run as root, you lose that protection. Take it or leave it, but if you recommend that others also abandon the protection that root provides, please provide them with the coutesy of explaining roots purspose in protecting them from themselves.
I say again, if the subject line is funny in and of itslef, why do I have to fill out the comment box?
Essentially Apple's OpenDoc was the same paradigm. Unfortunately due to business concerns OpenDoc was canned. The tools that were released were VERY useful though. For the short time it was around a was a great way to get work done. With the addition of the power in unix, this paradigm could be very powerful.
Blacksmiths, Cobblers, Architects, Database Engineers, Layout Designers, Stone Masons, Landscapers, and C programmers are all Artisans. All of the have Kung Fu (Skill through effort) that is used to create things.
While some think that only PURE art (Art created for expressive purposes only) is the only TRUE form of art, I think such people are nincompoops and I am entitled to my opinion. I am an engineer. I am an artisan. I create things that serve a purpose but they have beauty in their structure.
I might be wrong, but I think Solaris for Intel has good multilingual support and I believe StarOffice might be able to open multi-lingual Office docs. I know for a fact that it'll handle Excel spreadsheets really well. Its worth looking into.
Are you sure? I'm _fairly_ certain that LegitUserAlice cannot read packets sent by LegitUserBob without having to crack some encryption as described in the paper.
I was only replying to the parent post. He described putting up a packet sniffer and the way he described it, it didn't sound like he was using the methods described in the paper to crack WEP. It sounded more like they were sniffing packets that had already come back to transmission over wire.
Apple's AirPort traffic is encrypted. So if you're sniffing, you're doing it over copper, not from the airwaves. Granted Apple only uses a 40 bit cipher, but I imagine that its enough to keep even the most brilliant high school geek busy for months. On a side note... Packet sniffers sure are cool aren't they?
The very first reply to my original post points out the error in this sentence to which I replied that I had meant to say "... in terms of _mathematical_ functions..." instead of the word polynomial.
you're right, I misspoke. I meant to say "All algorithms that run on modern computers have runtimes that can be expressed in terms of mathematical functions" The rest of my post bears out this thinking. Sorry about the confusion.
All algorithms that run on modern computers have runtimes that can be described in terms of polynomial functions. Some examples of these are:
... (Incidentally most sort algorithms are O(NLogN) in case you wanted an example...) Anyhow, I know my algorithm is O(NLogN) which means as N, or the size of the input, increases... my runtime increases according to this function.
:-)
N,N^2,LogN,NLogN,N^N
The "N" in all of these describes in some fashion the size of the input. Generally when one discusses algorithm speed, the terminology O(N) or O(logN) is used as opposed to just stating the polynomial. You should read "O(N)" as "Big-Oh of N" or "Order N". There is also a "little-oh of N" which describes lower limits on the algorithms runtime and there is "Omega of N" which is a waste of time.
Now you may be asking what is the f*ing point... I know I did in my sophomore year of Computer Science classes...
Basically the point is only apparent when dealing with difficult problems. Before you go and code a solution to a difficult problem, you want to ensure that you wont be wasting your time. So you formalize your algorithm into polynomial form. (This can be difficult...) You can then tell by the form of the polynomial just how long the algorithm will take to run as the size of the input increases. So, if I formalize my Algorithm to be O(NLogN)
In case you are wondering how the hell logarithms get into computer algorithms, its a by-product of recursion.
Back to the point. Any algorithm described as having the form O(x^N) is considered to be "NP" which stands for Non-Polynomial... which you can see is plainly the case. The "N" is in the exponent, and therefore the runtime grows exponentially, not polynomially.
Algorithms that have NP forms suck because they just take too damn long to with inputs above certain thresholds. NP alogorithms are grouped into two seperate groups that have differening properties. One is NP-complete, and the other is NP-hard. Lets leave it at: "NP-complete problems have better solutions that are more practical than NP hard problems". There are of course more formal definitions, but this should suffice for now.
Basically NP problems are some of the most infamous in computer science and were there polynomial solutions to these problems the world would be a better place. Some of these are: Minimum Spanning Trees, The Travelling Salesman Problem, Convex Hulls (Somebody check me on that one ???), and many more including decryption brute forcing and some of the problems that go with it such as large number factoring and prime-tests...
Some scientists believe that the set of NP-complete problems can all be mapped into polynomial algorithms, others do not. Some scientists believe that _some_ of the NP-complete problems can have a polynomial map and others don't and that therefore not all the algorithms that are considered to be NP complete actually are. Basically at this point the subject digresses into a bunch of academic hooey.
You should come away with this: There are some problems that people would like to solve that todays computers can't solve with practical input sizes in a million years. Computer Science has developed a formalism for working with these problems and it is of interest to some mathematically minded programmers to read about these things and play with the solutions. It helps programmers keep their minds sharp and usually helps us keep our own algorithms efficient.
I hope that I have sated your curiosity to some degree. I have glossed over and simplified some very complex subjects, partly because I would embarass myself and get thing s wrong if I went into more detail. I am a software engineer, not a theoretician. The difference is: theoreticians are smarter, but software engineers make more money.
I can't believe that this discussion didn't start out with someone mentioning Amoeba. See "Modern Operating Systems" - Andrew Tanenbaum
Amoeba is to distributed OS as Mach is to microkernel OS.