Technically, this is not a "bet". A wager requires that a potential direct consideration accrue to the winning party. Lessig more accurately labeled it a "guarantee", although it isn't clear how his resignation would be helpful to those who might harmed by ineffectiveness of his law.
I hope Larry doesn't have to resign: he doesn't seem to have much future as a professional gambler:-).
Geez, nice spoiler on the Pullman books. Notice that the premise you refer to isn't entirely central or clear until the 3rd book.
What is it with these books and spoilers? For those of you who haven't read His Dark Materials, I highly recommend skipping Terry Brooks' introduction: in a single paragraph, it manages to spoil about 4/5ths of the surprises of the series, including all the major characters and some plot...
Thanks for the reply, and especially for the convenient RFC links!
It appears that T/TCP is supposed to be backward-compatible (interesting), but also that a conforming T/TCP client implementation will have a CC or CC.NEW option in the SYN packet, and the server response will be a SYN-ACK with the CC.ECHO option. Thus, it should be a simple matter (if anyone can reproduce the behavior:-) to find out whether IE/IIS is attempting T/TCP, or just cheating...
What cracks me up about this dupe is that in the space of a few hours we've gone from "There's still hope: distributed computing can factor the public key" to "Only 2048 bits *cough*. Yeah, that's gonna work."
Pretty impressive flip, especially considering...wait for it...these
comments were both in articles posted by CmdrTaco. Yes, our beloved Cmdr actually duped himself!
The key being discussed here is a 2048 bit RSA key used to encrypt a hash of executable contents. The executable file will not be run by the Xbox unless the decrypted hash matches that of the file being run. The effect of this is that only people who hold the correct encryption key can 'sign' executables so that the Xbox will run them. If you take a signed executable and change even one bit, the decrypted hash will not match and it will not run.
Thus there are two obvious approaches: find the public key or find a hash collision. I am not an Xbox hacker, so I don't know: what hash function are they using, and in what mode? The public key signing is likely to be secure, but perhaps the hash function is not?
At the current state of the art, your best bet is to buy a new disk, and make sure that you never put any unencrypted bits on it: use a cryptographic filesystem such as CFS, and make sure your swap is encrypted also. As Gutmann notes, you may also want to take measures to make sure that sensitive data doesn't sit in RAM too long (!).
Once data is in clear on disk, there's really no way to be sure it's gone except to physically destroy the platter.
In fact, you could probably use the saved space for sound insulation around the drive: those drives are pretty low-power, and don't generate a ton of heat. OTOH, I'm not sure whether the access times are quite up to those of the larger disk, which could conceivably be an issue...
Star Wars is a reasonable example of a franchise that probably killed itself by ignoring its community. There's a reason why it is unlikely that there will be eps 7-9: it isn't that no one would like to make money off of them.
Red Hat participates quite actively in the OSS community: they fund OSS development projects and pay OSS developers, paricipate in OSS standards-setting, and provide leadership to the community through publicity, conference sponsorship, etc. Precisely the activities, in fact, that Microsoft participates in on behalf of the MS community. As you point out, companies don't do these things entirely because they are benevolent: they believe that in the long run, they will benefit the corporate bottom line.
What you don't seem to understand is that in the software business, one reasonable definition of the "best" product is the one that has the biggest "market share". By "community", I mean far more than juvenile "fans": I mean the full range of participants in the software; those that make money with it, use it as a tool, develop it, deploy it, etc.
But at any rate, your definition of the winning conditions is exactly that: many folks, including myself, define winning differently. I think that I win when my computer software is cheap, reliable, and useful. That's a pretty non-"commie" definition, and for me, it's one that leads to an OSS win.
Right now, MS is undoubtedly the market share leader, and cases can be made for the price/performance, reliability, and usability of its software. My point is that MS has been resting on these laurels for a long time: it will be interesting to see whether the relative growth of OSS in all of these areas continues.
Not all controllers have the Freudian Joystick Nature: check out the commercially failed Thrustmaster Fragmaster. I have a Fragmaster I got free after rebate at Fry's, and it turns out to work really well in some applications. Not too hard to figure out what killed it, though: it's exactly the wrong shape...
To handle something with the market share and pervasiveness of Windows would take an infrastructure the size of Microsoft.
By many measures, the OSS infrastructure is already far larger than Microsoft. Number of developers, or developer FTEs? Not even close. Number of lines of source? Again, not close.
The fair comparison, of course, isn't Microsoft and OSS: it's OSS and the Microsoft community. What even MS seems not to understand is that their monopoly-producing asset is the result of maybe the largest first-mover advantage in the history of the world. The biggest advantage of the first mover is that the community tends to form around them. As someone who bought one of the first IBM PCs off the line, I recall perfectly well the reasons why I bought PC-DOS for it rather than the obviously technically superior CPM/86: one of them was that it was clear that PC-DOS would win, and I wanted to be part of the PC community.
(The other was price. folks forget that while both CPM/86 and PC-DOS were available for PCs in retail computer stores, CPM/86 was a lot more expensive. If DR hadn't priced themselves out of the market, they still might have won.)
In short, OSS vs MS is first and foremost a contest in community building and maintenance. The MS community began with an enormous headstart, but so far seem to have done a good job of squandering it. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues to hold.
You are correct: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no longer noticeably radioactive. The fact that the lifetime and power of a radioisotope are inversely proportional is probably a factor here as well as those cited.
OTOH, it seems unlikely that those around at the time could fail to tell an air-burst explosion from an underground one, so simple Geiger Counter testing of ground samples should quickly settle the Port Chicago issue: some fission products are extremely long-lived, yet powerful enough to be easy to spot.
What is this, wacko week on/.? Somebody should get this guy and the author of the UFO book review together, preferably in a padded room. For good measure, throw in the originators of the Nintendo 0wnz Sony piece, and it's a trifecta.
Oh well, at least the piece was grammar- and spelling-compatible with/....
"Five-eleven's your height, one-ninety your weight. You cash in your chips around
page eighty-eight." (Bromosel's fortune, as delivered in Riv'n'dell, from National Lampoon's Bored of the Rings)
That was cool! My thanks for attempting to ease the frequent pain experienced by those of us who have taken even a single undergraduate QM course, as a result of the spread of QATS among our friends and associates.
QATS is a strange disease; it inverts the normal parasite-host relationship by causing pain only in those exposed who are not susceptible.
Hopefully we will someday find a cure for QATS among the vector population. Failing that, I guess we can pinpoint their energy level so precisely that they disappear, or someth-Oh no! I've been infected! Someone please help me!!...
Re:My answer to what the record companies should d
on
Goodbye, Liquid Audio?
·
· Score: 2
Your professor was probably right. But I can't agree about your two "problems". Even including distribution costs, a CD costs about 20 cents to its producer, excluding the jewel case, fancy cover printing, etc. I see no good reason why music companies couldn't make plenty of cash selling "doubles" (remember, singles always had B sides) on mini-CDs with monochrome labels in paper envelopes for $2.00-3.00 each. Their margins would be only slightly lower than now...
No, the real problem is that consumers are willing to pay $18 for a product that has about $1.00 in per-unit cost: no sane government-imposed monopoly (c.f. copyright extensions, music licensing laws, attempts to make the folk music industry pay, etc.) would want to mess with a market like that (unless they were sufficiently not-evil).
Call me when Intel puts floating point in an ARM. Except that it's unlikely that they ever will: they're afraid it will compete with their x86 sales. In the meantime, XSCALE is way underpowered for FP-intensive applications...
I'm sick of this: which is it? I've seen both spellings used pretty consistently, but never in the head and body of the same article. Good reporting starts with getting the name spelled right: could someone clue me in?
Back in the pre-GPS days (remember those?), the LORAN salesman in our little coastal town used to do the blindfold demo: Pilot a boat from about 2 miles out across the bar and right up to the docks using nothing but LORAN. Today, LORAN units would be even simpler and more accurate, as they would contain fancy computerized calculations and built-in maps.
If the GPS satellites weren't already up anyhow for military reasons, it would have been much cheaper to improve the LORAN system than switch to GPS. The range was several hundred miles, and could likely be improved with better gear and more stations (e.g. automated ocean-going stations).
IMHO, if the magnetic poles leave/move, accurate navigation is likely to be the least of our worries...
"News": Well, Martin Gardner wrote about Poe's Eureka as cosmology in an article entitled "The Irrelevance Of Everything", reprinted in his excellent The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995. Maybe it was news 7 years ago...
"For Nerds": Real nerds don't click through links requiring "Free Registration" to get at pulpy science "news" articles. They are also conversant with the work of Martin Gardner.
"Stuff That Matters": Uh, yeah.
Look, fellows, if I want to read the NYT Science section, I'll subscribe to the NYT. Could we please quit recycling it all on/.?
Take a cubic box and put reflective partitions in it that cut it in half along all three axes. This yields a cubic box with 8 little cubic compartments in it.
Now take the walls off the outside of the box, and you have a corner reflector.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, this is not a "bet". A wager requires that a potential direct consideration accrue to the winning party. Lessig more accurately labeled it a "guarantee", although it isn't clear how his resignation would be helpful to those who might harmed by ineffectiveness of his law.
I hope Larry doesn't have to resign: he doesn't seem to have much future as a professional gambler :-).
Geez, nice spoiler on the Pullman books. Notice that the premise you refer to isn't entirely central or clear until the 3rd book.
What is it with these books and spoilers? For those of you who haven't read His Dark Materials, I highly recommend skipping Terry Brooks' introduction: in a single paragraph, it manages to spoil about 4/5ths of the surprises of the series, including all the major characters and some plot...
Thanks for the reply, and especially for the convenient RFC links!
It appears that T/TCP is supposed to be backward-compatible (interesting), but also that a conforming T/TCP client implementation will have a CC or CC.NEW option in the SYN packet, and the server response will be a SYN-ACK with the CC.ECHO option. Thus, it should be a simple matter (if anyone can reproduce the behavior :-) to find out whether IE/IIS is attempting T/TCP, or just cheating...
AFAIK TCP, not T/TCP, is invoked by the HTTP standard. Am I confused here?
What cracks me up about this dupe is that in the space of a few hours we've gone from "There's still hope: distributed computing can factor the public key" to "Only 2048 bits *cough*. Yeah, that's gonna work."
Pretty impressive flip, especially considering...wait for it...these comments were both in articles posted by CmdrTaco. Yes, our beloved Cmdr actually duped himself!
Ah Slashdot: there's still hope.
The key being discussed here is a 2048 bit RSA key used to encrypt a hash of executable contents. The executable file will not be run by the Xbox unless the decrypted hash matches that of the file being run. The effect of this is that only people who hold the correct encryption key can 'sign' executables so that the Xbox will run them. If you take a signed executable and change even one bit, the decrypted hash will not match and it will not run.
Thus there are two obvious approaches: find the public key or find a hash collision. I am not an Xbox hacker, so I don't know: what hash function are they using, and in what mode? The public key signing is likely to be secure, but perhaps the hash function is not?
At the current state of the art, your best bet is to buy a new disk, and make sure that you never put any unencrypted bits on it: use a cryptographic filesystem such as CFS, and make sure your swap is encrypted also. As Gutmann notes, you may also want to take measures to make sure that sensitive data doesn't sit in RAM too long (!).
Once data is in clear on disk, there's really no way to be sure it's gone except to physically destroy the platter.
In fact, you could probably use the saved space for sound insulation around the drive: those drives are pretty low-power, and don't generate a ton of heat. OTOH, I'm not sure whether the access times are quite up to those of the larger disk, which could conceivably be an issue...
Nice troll. But hey, I'll bite.
Star Wars is a reasonable example of a franchise that probably killed itself by ignoring its community. There's a reason why it is unlikely that there will be eps 7-9: it isn't that no one would like to make money off of them.
Red Hat participates quite actively in the OSS community: they fund OSS development projects and pay OSS developers, paricipate in OSS standards-setting, and provide leadership to the community through publicity, conference sponsorship, etc. Precisely the activities, in fact, that Microsoft participates in on behalf of the MS community. As you point out, companies don't do these things entirely because they are benevolent: they believe that in the long run, they will benefit the corporate bottom line.
What you don't seem to understand is that in the software business, one reasonable definition of the "best" product is the one that has the biggest "market share". By "community", I mean far more than juvenile "fans": I mean the full range of participants in the software; those that make money with it, use it as a tool, develop it, deploy it, etc.
But at any rate, your definition of the winning conditions is exactly that: many folks, including myself, define winning differently. I think that I win when my computer software is cheap, reliable, and useful. That's a pretty non-"commie" definition, and for me, it's one that leads to an OSS win.
Right now, MS is undoubtedly the market share leader, and cases can be made for the price/performance, reliability, and usability of its software. My point is that MS has been resting on these laurels for a long time: it will be interesting to see whether the relative growth of OSS in all of these areas continues.
Not all controllers have the Freudian Joystick Nature: check out the commercially failed Thrustmaster Fragmaster. I have a Fragmaster I got free after rebate at Fry's, and it turns out to work really well in some applications. Not too hard to figure out what killed it, though: it's exactly the wrong shape...
To handle something with the market share and pervasiveness of Windows would take an infrastructure the size of Microsoft.
By many measures, the OSS infrastructure is already far larger than Microsoft. Number of developers, or developer FTEs? Not even close. Number of lines of source? Again, not close.
The fair comparison, of course, isn't Microsoft and OSS: it's OSS and the Microsoft community. What even MS seems not to understand is that their monopoly-producing asset is the result of maybe the largest first-mover advantage in the history of the world. The biggest advantage of the first mover is that the community tends to form around them. As someone who bought one of the first IBM PCs off the line, I recall perfectly well the reasons why I bought PC-DOS for it rather than the obviously technically superior CPM/86: one of them was that it was clear that PC-DOS would win, and I wanted to be part of the PC community.
(The other was price. folks forget that while both CPM/86 and PC-DOS were available for PCs in retail computer stores, CPM/86 was a lot more expensive. If DR hadn't priced themselves out of the market, they still might have won.)
In short, OSS vs MS is first and foremost a contest in community building and maintenance. The MS community began with an enormous headstart, but so far seem to have done a good job of squandering it. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues to hold.
You are correct: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no longer noticeably radioactive. The fact that the lifetime and power of a radioisotope are inversely proportional is probably a factor here as well as those cited.
OTOH, it seems unlikely that those around at the time could fail to tell an air-burst explosion from an underground one, so simple Geiger Counter testing of ground samples should quickly settle the Port Chicago issue: some fission products are extremely long-lived, yet powerful enough to be easy to spot.
What is this, wacko week on /.? Somebody should get this guy and the author of the UFO book review together, preferably in a padded room. For good measure, throw in the originators of the Nintendo 0wnz Sony piece, and it's a trifecta.
Oh well, at least the piece was grammar- and spelling-compatible with /. ...
"Five-eleven's your height, one-ninety your weight. You cash in your chips around page eighty-eight." (Bromosel's fortune, as delivered in Riv'n'dell, from National Lampoon's Bored of the Rings)
That was cool! My thanks for attempting to ease the frequent pain experienced by those of us who have taken even a single undergraduate QM course, as a result of the spread of QATS among our friends and associates.
QATS is a strange disease; it inverts the normal parasite-host relationship by causing pain only in those exposed who are not susceptible.
Hopefully we will someday find a cure for QATS among the vector population. Failing that, I guess we can pinpoint their energy level so precisely that they disappear, or someth-Oh no! I've been infected! Someone please help me!!...
Your professor was probably right. But I can't agree about your two "problems". Even including distribution costs, a CD costs about 20 cents to its producer, excluding the jewel case, fancy cover printing, etc. I see no good reason why music companies couldn't make plenty of cash selling "doubles" (remember, singles always had B sides) on mini-CDs with monochrome labels in paper envelopes for $2.00-3.00 each. Their margins would be only slightly lower than now...
No, the real problem is that consumers are willing to pay $18 for a product that has about $1.00 in per-unit cost: no sane government-imposed monopoly (c.f. copyright extensions, music licensing laws, attempts to make the folk music industry pay, etc.) would want to mess with a market like that (unless they were sufficiently not-evil).
If you love your PVR, the cable industry is not your friend.
If you have cable, the cable industry is not your friend. Duh.
Call me when Intel puts floating point in an ARM. Except that it's unlikely that they ever will: they're afraid it will compete with their x86 sales. In the meantime, XSCALE is way underpowered for FP-intensive applications...
I bow to your superior net-fu.
TrafficDodger uses existing highway sensors and fancy AI search techniques to suggest fast routes in traffic for the LA area. Free, at least for now.
I'm sick of this: which is it? I've seen both spellings used pretty consistently, but never in the head and body of the same article. Good reporting starts with getting the name spelled right: could someone clue me in?
I don't find it that hard. The bonus features are way cool, but at the end of the day, it comes down to this:
The TiVO marketers seem completely baffled by having the easiest job on the planet...
Back in the pre-GPS days (remember those?), the LORAN salesman in our little coastal town used to do the blindfold demo: Pilot a boat from about 2 miles out across the bar and right up to the docks using nothing but LORAN. Today, LORAN units would be even simpler and more accurate, as they would contain fancy computerized calculations and built-in maps.
If the GPS satellites weren't already up anyhow for military reasons, it would have been much cheaper to improve the LORAN system than switch to GPS. The range was several hundred miles, and could likely be improved with better gear and more stations (e.g. automated ocean-going stations).
IMHO, if the magnetic poles leave/move, accurate navigation is likely to be the least of our worries...
Hmm, how are we doing today?
"News": Well, Martin Gardner wrote about Poe's Eureka as cosmology in an article entitled "The Irrelevance Of Everything", reprinted in his excellent The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995 . Maybe it was news 7 years ago...
"For Nerds": Real nerds don't click through links requiring "Free Registration" to get at pulpy science "news" articles. They are also conversant with the work of Martin Gardner.
"Stuff That Matters": Uh, yeah.
Look, fellows, if I want to read the NYT Science section, I'll subscribe to the NYT. Could we please quit recycling it all on /.?
Take a cubic box and put reflective partitions in it that cut it in half along all three axes. This yields a cubic box with 8 little cubic compartments in it.
Now take the walls off the outside of the box, and you have a corner reflector.