There's tons of available software. Just dedicate a PC to the task and shove drives in it and wipe them with any of the many secure erase utilities out there that at minimum do the DoD standard patterns. Some of the utilities do a great deal more than the standard DoD patterns for better security, but they take longer.
If the drive is malfunctioning at all, don't trust the delete. And don't trust deguassers unless you've really done your homework on the theory (how much does it take to destroy your drive? it varies by drive. What distance does the device need to be from the platters to be effective? Can you leave the case on?). Even if you can answer those questions, I would feel better using physical destruction than degaussing.
Don't trust simplistic physical destruction either, like drilling holes, or whacking the whole drive with a hammer. People can and will extract data off of fragments of platter. Best bet would be to open up the drive, remove the platters, and melt them with thermite. Don't do it in your office though, do it outside on thick pavement or something - the stuff is very hot and very dangerous. Google for how to make the thermite yourself. Basic ingredients are essentially rust and finely powdered aluminum, and a magnesium strip to ignite it with. It'll melt/burn the platters.
You're wrong. I don't know where you got that idea from - perhaps your country is a socialist state full of stat-run non-profit companies or something?
Here in the US, the entire reason a publicly-held company exists is to make money. It is the end itself, not just the means. Stock markets and economics dictate this. Money is the sole purpose and sole driver of a public business in the US.
Sometimes they may appear to have loftier goals, but they only pursue those goals because they lead to money in some indirect fashion. For instance, when a corporation says, "I'm going to double the operating costs of my plants to make them more environmentally friendly", they're not being a friend of the environment, they're just realizing that by making such a move and publicizing it, more customers and investors will give them money.
Well, your timing has to be good to make money on this. Patents only last so long - if you want to make money by filing a predictive patent and then suing the eventual inventor, the invention needs to be on the market making money within 17 years or so. Teleporters are unlikely in that time-frame, but not outside the realm of gambling with how little it costs to file a patent.
I would contest your "never falsified" claim. As stated in TFA, black holes don't agree well with certain current best models of physics, creating problems at the event horizon which indicate either we need some changes to our models of physics, or we need a change in the explanation of what a black hole is and/or how it affects things.
If you read the article carefully (which is laced with marketing hype and was obviously written by someone only passingly familiar with the technologies involved), you will see that nobody's promising optical cpu's in 2006. In anticipation of future optical chips and other technologies, Intel has begun developing one of the stepping stones toward this technological era, which is an optical/electrical gateway of sorts which can be built on a standard electrical chip to allow it to interface with optical components. Think a modern cpu, with some low level optical/eletrical interface on the edge of it so that a row of optical "pins" can stick out one side in addition to the normal electrical pins on the bottom.
This little startup company is working on the same thing, and hopes to have it out soon. Their marketing article is trying to build hype so they can get more cash. Nobody will be selling anyone an all-optical cpu in 2006 (or 2007, or 2008, etc).
I would bet that less than 10 percent of all rebates ever given on any consumer product you buy in a retail store are ever redeemed. That's the beauty of rebates. It makes the price look lower, which helps convince you to buy it, even though you're not gonna bother sending in that rebate that made the price look lower.
At least here in Texas, we're an "at will" state, which means that generally employment is "at will" by both parties. You can quit or they can fire you, with no good reason, at any time. Two weeks notice on the employee's part is considered good manners and taste, much like severance or a few weeks pay in some form are usually good manners if you let someone go suddenly and they didn't do something bad to deserve it.
But it's all a matter of manners, not requirements. If they've screwed you over in general over the course of your time with them, and your opinion of them is low, I wouldn't feel obligated to do any more than the standard two weeks at all. If they're real abusive assholes, I'd just walk out with zero notice (done that once before in my career, it didn't affect anything down the road with other employers).
On the other hand if they've really been good to you, but the company just sucks and doesn't have the money to keep you, but you like the guys - then considering your crucial position there, I would give them a month's notice at least.
If it's true that they're only tracing triangles, then this isn't "real" raytracing to me. I'm sure it will be cool and useful, but there's a lot of things you can do with ray tracing that require more than triangles. Raytracing against solid objects with intersections and whatnot (ala Povray) can do a lot of things that this can't (like correctly render a crystal sphere with something behind it). I do hope hardware raytracing takes off though. The 3D we have to day is all an optimization hack, hence the unrealism. The path to photorealistic VR is so obviously Raytracing, we just aren't there yet in terms of speed.
gnuplot is kind in this domain. I don't know how you'd cleanly interface to it from inside a jvm other than spawning a native binary of gnuplot and feeding it text commands.
It would be trivial for the spyware which is rampant on the average user's wintel PC to alter their network settings to point the user at custom DNS servers run by the spyware companies. These could act as dns caching proxies for the most part, but then selectively fail to resolve sites the spyware companies don't want you to see, selectively redirect your queries to the webservers they do want you to see, and in the hands of the nefarious, spoof your bank site too. Until the massive gaping holes in the average user's wintel PC are closed, complex infrastructure exploits are really a waste of time. It's so much easier just to seize their PC and have your way with it.
I won't argue the point, as he does a better job than I could, but I whole heartedly agree with his take on the matter. Especially that paragraph in the "new" essay (2nd one of the 3 in the linked page) that makes the analogy about doctors in discussing the "Less Able Programmer" problem.
You can buy true RNG sources based on quantum-level effects that are pretty compact and output a digital stream of truly random numbers to your serial port. It's not outside the realm of possibility for a modern computer (or iPod) to contain a compact true RNG, although I doubt that Apple would do so just because nobody cares about their shuffle order that much (I hope).
In-band = information transmitted the same way your data (or voice in this case) is. In an analog phone network, in-band signalling and control is done with things like audible tones and voltage changes.
Out-of-band = signalling and control that happens by some other means outside your data (voice) link. For instance with an ISDN line, the out-of-band signalling is on the D channel, whereas the voice/data are on the B channels.
CLI/ANI info, posted from the first hit of a google search:
CLI , ANI
Calling Line Identification , Automatic Number Identification
CLI = ANI: A service available on digital phone networks that tells the person being called which number is calling them. The central office equipment identifies the phone number of the caller, enabling information about the caller to be sent along with the call itself. (Osicom) The providing of the Directory Number from which a terminating call has originated ( NI ) A service available on digital phone networks that tells the person being called which number is calling them. The central office equipment identifies the phone number of the caller, enabling information about the caller to be sent along with the call itself. ( WorldCom ) At a minimum, the calling line identification includes a single calling party number; it may also include a second calling party number, a calling party subaddress, and redirecting number information. Calling line identification may not include any calling party number due to interworking, or because of an interaction with the CLIR supplementary service. ( TG )
Buy an SMP opteron box, they'll support all the memory you want and then some. Most of the Opteron motherboards I've seen in use have 4 memory slots per cpu socket. So for instance with a quad opteron boards you could stick 16x 4G sticks in it for 64G of ram. Incidentally, it's not that only linux supports "64-bit addressing". The memory addressability is a function of the processor and/or memory controller (which is integrated in the processor in the case of the Opteron). There is no processor I know that can actually physically address 64 bits of memory (which would require something on the order of 65,536x 256Terabyte sticks to fill). IIRC correctly, the Opteron memory controller can physically address 40 bits of physical memory, which puts the theoretical limit for it at 1TB of RAM.
RISC processors always have more cache than CISC processors, it's part of the design tradeoff. RISC takes less silicon to implement the core than CISC, which leaves more room to dedicate to the cache. Also the same complex operation requires more instructions on a RISC than a CISC, thus you need more L2 to keep the same amount of functional code in cache.
It would also be limited by his I/O speed. I'm fairly positive that people like this man are in fact calculating very rapidly and unconsciously, as opposed to understanding some property of numbers that we do not. I'm also inclined to believe that the shape/color mnemonics he sees in his head are just part of his consciousness' attempt to rationalize the near-instantaneous calculation (that happened elsewhere in his brain automatically) as a conscious and controlled process. (See the 2003 BBC Reith Lecture with Ramachandran for what makes me think in these general directions).
At least in the world I play in, logarithmic cross-section bandwidth is nowhere near sufficient. The interconnect design and technology is still very critical for us, as is storage.
Specifically in my design (I still have the code around and may pick the project back up), the data was stored on the master server in simple text flatfiles, although there's no reason I couldn't upgrade that to something like DBM. All the communications are secure (SSL, servers have signed keys, clients have a root pubkey installed on them so they can tell if the server is legit). The clients actually cache the entire database locally on disk, thus eliminating naming/auth service hangs when server goes down or unreachable (I know this sounds silly at first, but open your mind and think it through - even at a large environment with 10,000 users, a unix/etc/passwd file for that many is so damn small in terms of modern network speeds and disk space). The only operation that required the servers to be up and available was changing your password. Already did the PAM and NSS hookups in both linux and solaris for it too.
Perhaps I'll start looking into it again. My currently empty homepage is at www.dtmf.com - if I start getting this working again I'd probably post the code there, but don't keep your hopes up, I'm a very lazy bastard.
That's because LDAP sucks, hardcore. I don't mean that the developers of things like OpenLDAP suck, what I mean is that the specification and the protocols and whatnot suck. LDAP shares with it's predecessor X.500 the very serious flaw of over-generalization. They picked a very broad design that attempts to do everything for everyone, which means every little thing in LDAP has to be subclassable, extensible, flexible, etc. Then you have all these schemas that try to tie down common usages, but different vendors use different schema variations. Then you have the hacks to bring the varying schemas into synch on a single dataset....
What most people want, and get, out of LDAP is a relatively simple thing, and LDAP's complexity is a huge cost for the simple results most seek. Wintel integration is really the only advantage it has going for it. Within a pure *nix world, what would be better than LDAP would be something with the essential structure and data complexity of NIS, but with a more modern and secure design. I actually got about 33% through writing such a thing, and it isn't that hard. Secure, flexible, interoperates between *nixes (well, Linux and Solaris was all I was coding for, but modern AIX looked like it had the right hooks for it, so did HPUX), hooks into PAM and NSS, doesn't hang lookups with the servers are down/unreachable, etc. I'm sure there are 10,000 other coders out there who could do the same. Someone just needs to make an official standard based on the idea.
And once we have that working, someone can always write a drop-in DLL for Wintel boxes to do auth/directory services against it or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Training? C'mon, maybe for manufacturer pop acts. What about real artists, who just use the company for recording, PR, and distribution purposes?
There's tons of available software. Just dedicate a PC to the task and shove drives in it and wipe them with any of the many secure erase utilities out there that at minimum do the DoD standard patterns. Some of the utilities do a great deal more than the standard DoD patterns for better security, but they take longer.
If the drive is malfunctioning at all, don't trust the delete. And don't trust deguassers unless you've really done your homework on the theory (how much does it take to destroy your drive? it varies by drive. What distance does the device need to be from the platters to be effective? Can you leave the case on?). Even if you can answer those questions, I would feel better using physical destruction than degaussing.
Don't trust simplistic physical destruction either, like drilling holes, or whacking the whole drive with a hammer. People can and will extract data off of fragments of platter. Best bet would be to open up the drive, remove the platters, and melt them with thermite. Don't do it in your office though, do it outside on thick pavement or something - the stuff is very hot and very dangerous. Google for how to make the thermite yourself. Basic ingredients are essentially rust and finely powdered aluminum, and a magnesium strip to ignite it with. It'll melt/burn the platters.
You're wrong. I don't know where you got that idea from - perhaps your country is a socialist state full of stat-run non-profit companies or something?
Here in the US, the entire reason a publicly-held company exists is to make money. It is the end itself, not just the means. Stock markets and economics dictate this. Money is the sole purpose and sole driver of a public business in the US.
Sometimes they may appear to have loftier goals, but they only pursue those goals because they lead to money in some indirect fashion. For instance, when a corporation says, "I'm going to double the operating costs of my plants to make them more environmentally friendly", they're not being a friend of the environment, they're just realizing that by making such a move and publicizing it, more customers and investors will give them money.
When will the world learn to stop using BIND?
Well, your timing has to be good to make money on this. Patents only last so long - if you want to make money by filing a predictive patent and then suing the eventual inventor, the invention needs to be on the market making money within 17 years or so. Teleporters are unlikely in that time-frame, but not outside the realm of gambling with how little it costs to file a patent.
I would contest your "never falsified" claim. As stated in TFA, black holes don't agree well with certain current best models of physics, creating problems at the event horizon which indicate either we need some changes to our models of physics, or we need a change in the explanation of what a black hole is and/or how it affects things.
Who in the 90's writes a language where whitespace has meaning???
If you read the article carefully (which is laced with marketing hype and was obviously written by someone only passingly familiar with the technologies involved), you will see that nobody's promising optical cpu's in 2006. In anticipation of future optical chips and other technologies, Intel has begun developing one of the stepping stones toward this technological era, which is an optical/electrical gateway of sorts which can be built on a standard electrical chip to allow it to interface with optical components. Think a modern cpu, with some low level optical/eletrical interface on the edge of it so that a row of optical "pins" can stick out one side in addition to the normal electrical pins on the bottom.
This little startup company is working on the same thing, and hopes to have it out soon. Their marketing article is trying to build hype so they can get more cash. Nobody will be selling anyone an all-optical cpu in 2006 (or 2007, or 2008, etc).
I would bet that less than 10 percent of all rebates ever given on any consumer product you buy in a retail store are ever redeemed. That's the beauty of rebates. It makes the price look lower, which helps convince you to buy it, even though you're not gonna bother sending in that rebate that made the price look lower.
At least here in Texas, we're an "at will" state, which means that generally employment is "at will" by both parties. You can quit or they can fire you, with no good reason, at any time. Two weeks notice on the employee's part is considered good manners and taste, much like severance or a few weeks pay in some form are usually good manners if you let someone go suddenly and they didn't do something bad to deserve it.
But it's all a matter of manners, not requirements. If they've screwed you over in general over the course of your time with them, and your opinion of them is low, I wouldn't feel obligated to do any more than the standard two weeks at all. If they're real abusive assholes, I'd just walk out with zero notice (done that once before in my career, it didn't affect anything down the road with other employers).
On the other hand if they've really been good to you, but the company just sucks and doesn't have the money to keep you, but you like the guys - then considering your crucial position there, I would give them a month's notice at least.
No discussion of regex books is complete without mentioning the ebst one out there: O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions".
If it's true that they're only tracing triangles, then this isn't "real" raytracing to me. I'm sure it will be cool and useful, but there's a lot of things you can do with ray tracing that require more than triangles. Raytracing against solid objects with intersections and whatnot (ala Povray) can do a lot of things that this can't (like correctly render a crystal sphere with something behind it). I do hope hardware raytracing takes off though. The 3D we have to day is all an optimization hack, hence the unrealism. The path to photorealistic VR is so obviously Raytracing, we just aren't there yet in terms of speed.
gnuplot is kind in this domain. I don't know how you'd cleanly interface to it from inside a jvm other than spawning a native binary of gnuplot and feeding it text commands.
It would be trivial for the spyware which is rampant on the average user's wintel PC to alter their network settings to point the user at custom DNS servers run by the spyware companies. These could act as dns caching proxies for the most part, but then selectively fail to resolve sites the spyware companies don't want you to see, selectively redirect your queries to the webservers they do want you to see, and in the hands of the nefarious, spoof your bank site too. Until the massive gaping holes in the average user's wintel PC are closed, complex infrastructure exploits are really a waste of time. It's so much easier just to seize their PC and have your way with it.
I won't argue the point, as he does a better job than I could, but I whole heartedly agree with his take on the matter. Especially that paragraph in the "new" essay (2nd one of the 3 in the linked page) that makes the analogy about doctors in discussing the "Less Able Programmer" problem.
You can buy true RNG sources based on quantum-level effects that are pretty compact and output a digital stream of truly random numbers to your serial port. It's not outside the realm of possibility for a modern computer (or iPod) to contain a compact true RNG, although I doubt that Apple would do so just because nobody cares about their shuffle order that much (I hope).
No signature needed for under $25, works from a few inches away?
I forsee myself building a better antenna for my visa charging device and running through a crowded area charging everyone 24.99 as I pass by.
In-band = information transmitted the same way your data (or voice in this case) is. In an analog phone network, in-band signalling and control is done with things like audible tones and voltage changes.
Out-of-band = signalling and control that happens by some other means outside your data (voice) link. For instance with an ISDN line, the out-of-band signalling is on the D channel, whereas the voice/data are on the B channels.
CLI/ANI info, posted from the first hit of a google search:
CLI , ANI
Calling Line Identification , Automatic Number Identification
CLI = ANI
A service available on digital phone networks that tells the person being called which number is calling them.
The central office equipment identifies the phone number of the caller, enabling information about the caller to be sent along with the call itself. (Osicom)
The providing of the Directory Number from which a terminating call has originated ( NI )
A service available on digital phone networks that tells the person being called which number is calling them.
The central office equipment identifies the phone number of the caller, enabling information about the caller to be sent along with the call itself. ( WorldCom )
At a minimum, the calling line identification includes a single calling party number; it may also include a second calling party number, a calling party subaddress, and redirecting number information.
Calling line identification may not include any calling party number due to interworking, or because of an interaction with the CLIR supplementary service. ( TG )
Buy an SMP opteron box, they'll support all the memory you want and then some. Most of the Opteron motherboards I've seen in use have 4 memory slots per cpu socket. So for instance with a quad opteron boards you could stick 16x 4G sticks in it for 64G of ram. Incidentally, it's not that only linux supports "64-bit addressing". The memory addressability is a function of the processor and/or memory controller (which is integrated in the processor in the case of the Opteron). There is no processor I know that can actually physically address 64 bits of memory (which would require something on the order of 65,536x 256Terabyte sticks to fill). IIRC correctly, the Opteron memory controller can physically address 40 bits of physical memory, which puts the theoretical limit for it at 1TB of RAM.
RISC processors always have more cache than CISC processors, it's part of the design tradeoff. RISC takes less silicon to implement the core than CISC, which leaves more room to dedicate to the cache. Also the same complex operation requires more instructions on a RISC than a CISC, thus you need more L2 to keep the same amount of functional code in cache.
It would also be limited by his I/O speed. I'm fairly positive that people like this man are in fact calculating very rapidly and unconsciously, as opposed to understanding some property of numbers that we do not. I'm also inclined to believe that the shape/color mnemonics he sees in his head are just part of his consciousness' attempt to rationalize the near-instantaneous calculation (that happened elsewhere in his brain automatically) as a conscious and controlled process. (See the 2003 BBC Reith Lecture with Ramachandran for what makes me think in these general directions).
Flamebait? Fucking morons. Try arguing the point, I have data to back me up, you clearly don't or you'd at least counter.
At least in the world I play in, logarithmic cross-section bandwidth is nowhere near sufficient. The interconnect design and technology is still very critical for us, as is storage.
Specifically in my design (I still have the code around and may pick the project back up), the data was stored on the master server in simple text flatfiles, although there's no reason I couldn't upgrade that to something like DBM. All the communications are secure (SSL, servers have signed keys, clients have a root pubkey installed on them so they can tell if the server is legit). The clients actually cache the entire database locally on disk, thus eliminating naming/auth service hangs when server goes down or unreachable (I know this sounds silly at first, but open your mind and think it through - even at a large environment with 10,000 users, a unix
Perhaps I'll start looking into it again. My currently empty homepage is at www.dtmf.com - if I start getting this working again I'd probably post the code there, but don't keep your hopes up, I'm a very lazy bastard.
That's because LDAP sucks, hardcore. I don't mean that the developers of things like OpenLDAP suck, what I mean is that the specification and the protocols and whatnot suck. LDAP shares with it's predecessor X.500 the very serious flaw of over-generalization. They picked a very broad design that attempts to do everything for everyone, which means every little thing in LDAP has to be subclassable, extensible, flexible, etc. Then you have all these schemas that try to tie down common usages, but different vendors use different schema variations. Then you have the hacks to bring the varying schemas into synch on a single dataset....
What most people want, and get, out of LDAP is a relatively simple thing, and LDAP's complexity is a huge cost for the simple results most seek. Wintel integration is really the only advantage it has going for it. Within a pure *nix world, what would be better than LDAP would be something with the essential structure and data complexity of NIS, but with a more modern and secure design. I actually got about 33% through writing such a thing, and it isn't that hard. Secure, flexible, interoperates between *nixes (well, Linux and Solaris was all I was coding for, but modern AIX looked like it had the right hooks for it, so did HPUX), hooks into PAM and NSS, doesn't hang lookups with the servers are down/unreachable, etc. I'm sure there are 10,000 other coders out there who could do the same. Someone just needs to make an official standard based on the idea.
And once we have that working, someone can always write a drop-in DLL for Wintel boxes to do auth/directory services against it or something.