140 encoding characters? From what I can see of the encrypted message, there are roughly 600 characters in the entire message. Once you get to the point where the number of encoding characters reaches the number of message characters, isn't the entire information content transferred to the encryption key, and you the message itself becomes garbage?
Correct, but as you pointed out they didn't reach that point. Still, between the way Poe (if it was him) set up the cipher to mask letter frequency and the errors (intentional or not) in the cipher text it was obviously difficult to break. That's why it took so long to be broken.
Frankly, I'm amazed Gil Broza was able to solve something with so little information left!
He wasn't alone. Here is a log of another group's discussions over the solution they found. The plain text is very close to Gil's version, but different due to the error density.
Have a look at this one. These guys are really onto it. Note that they are saying that the P4 has great potential, not that it's a fantastic processor for anyone now. Truth is I wouldn't be suprised to see most review sites using many SSE2 optimized benchmarks in a years time and then the P4 will be looking damn good. Still won't be any good for me with my legacy software though.
And I believe Telstra carries a minority of traffic (given they're over 100% times more expensive than other bandwidth providers).
They are the largest ISP so they probably do carry the most traffic. For dialup I agree that they suck as a provider. For cable, however, (and since ADSL is pretty new here cable's the majority of the market) their prices are similar to Optus (their main competitor). IIRC they have greater coverage, and unlike Optus (at least when I last looked) they will put connections into apartment blocks.
There's a bit more to it than that. For a start they've been around for a lot longer than the Yahoo deal so I think it's safe to say they aren't relying on Yahoo. They also sell search capabilities to other sites (such as RedHat), and they sell licenses to use the technology in other applications.
Actually, other than Crowe (who has lived in Australia since he was about 6) the others (like Sam Neil, Anna Paquin, Crowded House, etc) probably don't seeing as the only reason to get Australian citizenship (if you're a Kiwi) is to vote. Conversely if you are an Australian citizen you have to vote.
In short, if this is what "open source" development can do, Netscape is rapidly going to be a has-been.
Linux and Apache (and numerous others) are examples of what Open Source development can do. Netscape 6.0 is an example of what a marketing driven design results in. It seems to me that most of gross stupidity in Mozilla is the result of decisions made by Netscape's marketing department.
You can always spend an extra month fixing bugs in any reasonably sized project. In the Open Source world you can usually say "You'll get it when it's ready", however Netscape has commerical pressures and had to set a firm date.
Also, there are very few parallels between Mozilla/Netscape6 and Linux 2.4, so don't try to make them. I wish people would stop saying 2.4 is late. It's not. Linus said he'd like a shorter development cycle, aimed at getting 2.4 out at the end of last year. That didn't prove to be achievable, but that doesn't make 2.4 late.
One of things people have to realise is that there was no hard target for functionality in 2.4 (other than to fix the performance problem the MindCraft benchmarks exploited). If 2.4 was shipped in Dec 99 it would have been with less additional functionality than the 2.4 which is likely to be released next month.
It's not even really a maze in the traditional sense - just a bunch of cubic spaces removed from a solid hypercube. Being randomly generated, and very small, makes it trivally easy. Make it a bit bigger and apply a "fog of war" effect and it would be a bit more challenging.
What's up with all you people thinking time is the 4th dimension? Who said that? Time can be treated as a dimension mathematically, yes. Did anyone say anything in the article or the web page of that being the case here? No.
That's a maze with 4 degrees of freedom, not a 4d maze. Remember the big thing about descent- it offered 6 degrees of freedom, but it wasn't a 6d game.... No I'm afraid this is simply a 3d maze.
No I'm afraid you're getting confused. Don't get degrees of freedom mixed up with dimensions. DFs include rotational and translation type movements. The 6 DFs in Decent are 3 axis of translational movement and 3 axis of rotation. In this case you have 4 axis of translational movement (left/right, up/down within a block, left/right, up/down between blocks). That requires 4 dimensions.
PalmOS devices are toys, whereas the iPaq is a useful computer:-)
Really, C++ has got nothing to do with why the iPaq is so powerful. Moore's Law has everything to do with it.
The article says that Dr Pendry has theorized that material with negative refractive index could make a perfect lens, but it hasn't been done. Materials having a negative refractive index do exist for microwaves and radio waves but no-one's made a perfect lens from them. Also there is, as yet, no know material with a negative refractive index for visible light. Thus, so far, they've pretty much not invented anything. The article's not quite as positive as the/. blurb.
Ok, lesson here is... if you can encrypt it, someone can break it. Plain and simple.
Yeah, and I think they've learned it too. This looks like a face saving exercise to me. I mean even SDMI insiders don't believe it. From the Salon article:
"There's skepticism inside my industry, because we weren't involved in these later phases of the testing," says one SDMI participant.
The same people who are saying that Netscape 6 shouldn't be released because it isn't standards compliant are the same people who just recently said that Netscape should've released an interim browser between 4.7x and 6.x that at least implemented some standards.
The complaints yesterday were about Netscape not including standards compliance bug fixes which are in Mozilla because NS6 is in the push to RTM (release to manufacturing). I don't think that criticism was entirely fair - NS have to draw the line somewhere or they'll be bug fixing for the next 3 years.
My opinion of the project is that they shouldn't have tried to do everything at once. They should've finished the browser before starting the mail reader, then once that was done move onto the composer, and so on. I also don't agree with their decision to write their own UI toolkit, rather than just an abstraction layer on top of the existing toolkits. (Apparently it was the only way they could sell marketing/management on supporting anything other than Windows).
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about parodies being shut down by Lucasfilm. That's just something that CmdrTaco assumed. If you don't use copyrighted material from the original movies they have no say. What this deal does is give the film makers the right to use (selected) Lucasfilm owned sounds.
Also note that the article doesn't say anything about taking royalties from the film makers, it only mentions advertising and sponsorship revenue.
... a deal between Lucas and Atom Films to allow Star Wars parodies to be distributed legally.
That's a bit of a disingenuous way of putting it. It's never been illegal of distribute a parody, unless you use actual material from the film (and quotes don't count).
This deal allows parody makers to use original (Lucasfilm owned) sounds, and it provides a method for the film makers to get a cut of the advertising and sponsorship revenue from the site. That sounds all good to me. Hopefully they'll assist the film makers to make high resolution versions available.
How long does it take to push that TB from one end of the building to the other? These guys will be needing obscene disk and network speed as well as capacity.
Brain Dead is the only movie I can remember seeing where people walked out due to being offended by the content (as opposed to being bored). It was a great movie - the lawnmower scene's a classic.
You've misunderstood. All it means is that instead of seeing 15 IE buttons in the taskbar, you'll see one. God knows how you're expected to choose which window you want - do they behave like the Start button and pop up a vertical menu?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought about submitting this a few weeks ago but figured someone else already would have and had been rejected by then.
But would you care if you were part of the 99% that crashed? What if /. didn't make it? Would the Net be worth having if that happened?
There's a bit more to it than that. For a start they've been around for a lot longer than the Yahoo deal so I think it's safe to say they aren't relying on Yahoo. They also sell search capabilities to other sites (such as RedHat), and they sell licenses to use the technology in other applications.
Thats the old measure. The number is so odd because they wanted to maintain backwards compatibility.
I don't know what crap ISP you're with then. I pay a flat rate for cable at 512kb down/128kb up.
Do you realise we are talking about Netscape 6.0 here? Not 4.73.
I can tell you that under Linux Gecko is much faster than IE5. Way more than twice as fast.
Also, there are very few parallels between Mozilla/Netscape6 and Linux 2.4, so don't try to make them. I wish people would stop saying 2.4 is late. It's not. Linus said he'd like a shorter development cycle, aimed at getting 2.4 out at the end of last year. That didn't prove to be achievable, but that doesn't make 2.4 late.
One of things people have to realise is that there was no hard target for functionality in 2.4 (other than to fix the performance problem the MindCraft benchmarks exploited). If 2.4 was shipped in Dec 99 it would have been with less additional functionality than the 2.4 which is likely to be released next month.
It's not even really a maze in the traditional sense - just a bunch of cubic spaces removed from a solid hypercube. Being randomly generated, and very small, makes it trivally easy. Make it a bit bigger and apply a "fog of war" effect and it would be a bit more challenging.
What's up with all you people thinking time is the 4th dimension? Who said that? Time can be treated as a dimension mathematically, yes. Did anyone say anything in the article or the web page of that being the case here? No.
PalmOS devices are toys, whereas the iPaq is a useful computer :-)
Really, C++ has got nothing to do with why the iPaq is so powerful. Moore's Law has everything to do with it.
The article says that Dr Pendry has theorized that material with negative refractive index could make a perfect lens, but it hasn't been done. Materials having a negative refractive index do exist for microwaves and radio waves but no-one's made a perfect lens from them. Also there is, as yet, no know material with a negative refractive index for visible light. Thus, so far, they've pretty much not invented anything. The article's not quite as positive as the /. blurb.
The complaints yesterday were about Netscape not including standards compliance bug fixes which are in Mozilla because NS6 is in the push to RTM (release to manufacturing). I don't think that criticism was entirely fair - NS have to draw the line somewhere or they'll be bug fixing for the next 3 years.
My opinion of the project is that they shouldn't have tried to do everything at once. They should've finished the browser before starting the mail reader, then once that was done move onto the composer, and so on. I also don't agree with their decision to write their own UI toolkit, rather than just an abstraction layer on top of the existing toolkits. (Apparently it was the only way they could sell marketing/management on supporting anything other than Windows).
Also note that the article doesn't say anything about taking royalties from the film makers, it only mentions advertising and sponsorship revenue.
This deal allows parody makers to use original (Lucasfilm owned) sounds, and it provides a method for the film makers to get a cut of the advertising and sponsorship revenue from the site. That sounds all good to me. Hopefully they'll assist the film makers to make high resolution versions available.
How long does it take to push that TB from one end of the building to the other? These guys will be needing obscene disk and network speed as well as capacity.
Brain Dead is the only movie I can remember seeing where people walked out due to being offended by the content (as opposed to being bored). It was a great movie - the lawnmower scene's a classic.
You've misunderstood. All it means is that instead of seeing 15 IE buttons in the taskbar, you'll see one. God knows how you're expected to choose which window you want - do they behave like the Start button and pop up a vertical menu?