> will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks
Anything that doesn't keep, oh.. say a gigant computer the size of the solar system, busy for millions of years cracking my keys doesn't really impress me (encryption wise).
A few weeks by government supercomputers is crackable by distributed efforts in about the same timeframe today.
While calculators are obviously good, lets keep 'em out of school!
Nice contradiction.
But once you understand math, there's no reason why you shouldn't use calculators: they're quicker and don't make as many mistakes. Just don't use 'em for learning.
Using a calculator in school absolutly destroys the students abilities to *think*.
It's a good shortcut when you acctually know the math, but getting a calculator that will integrate (2x+1)/(1+x^2) (ok, that's easy, but you get the point) for you doesn't exactly encourage thinking. The problem with the superficial learning that you get from using calculators (especially symbolhandling) is that you can't really solve any problems. As soon as you go outside the boundaries of the calculator you're lost.
An analogy is that calculators is a bit like using windows: sure it's easy and nice, but you never gain understanding. While doing it by hand is more like unices: it's hard in the beginning, but all that is rewarded when you *understand* how it all fits together.
I have a ti-89, but i use it as little as possible. In my university no calculators are allowed during exams, and if you're stupid enough to use them in class you don't have much chance of passing the exam (simply because you wont understand)
While calculators are obviously good, lets keep 'em out of school!
The only way to guarantee that it will work, it will have to be able to compare the virus byte-for-byte with the FBI virus. For it to do that, it must quite literally have a copy of this virus buried internally in the virus definition file.
*sigh*
Just including a [insert-favorite-cryptographic-hash (md5, sha1?)] checksum would work equally well. There's absolutly no need to include the entire virus code. So no, they wouldn't bundle the virus.
You're missing the point - The reason to move to ATA133 isn't for the extra speed - i doubt many people care about it: ATA133's main benefit is that it gets around the 28bit addressing in the previous versions that only allowed harddrives to be max 137GB. Hopefully the petabytes offered by ATA133 will last a while.
The game cheats for the player at levels below prince, and against it at levels above. *At* prince difficulty there is no cheating. So there's probably where you want to play. Supposedly not even the firaxis people can beat the AI at Deity level.
Acctually, they are upfront about it. But i don't remember where they told you.:)
Multiplayer civilization isn't much fun - it simply takes too long. You spend 4/5ths of the time waiting for the other players to finish some damn time. Also, every single game doesn't *have* to have be multiplayer - i think it's refreshing to see a game that doesn't have multiplayer support for once.
I wrote a patch to filter the playlist of XMMS a while back - it's pretty simple: You start typing in the playlist and it filters out all the songs that doesnt match the string you wrote. Backspace deletes the last string you typed.
It's really convenient when you have a 2000 song playlist and just want to listen to a specific album.
However, it breaks the usual shortcuts (p for play, etc) in the playlist - you need to use the main window for that. There are lots of improvements that could be done - wildcard and substring matching are obvious ones. But it works well enough for me, and makes the XMMS playlist much more useful I like to have a large playlist and just filter out things i don't want to hear right now.
Anyway.. if anyone's interested it's available here
(I'm not sure it still patches cleanly, haven't tried in a while.)
You seem to think that moores law is somehow a fixed law of nature - if we just sit around doing nothing processor speed will still double every 18th month. Obviously this isn't true - it takes a lot of research to keep the speed doubling. This is one such thing. Hopefully there'll be more.
Give it up.. Me for one is sick of constantly hearing about the WTC every waking hour of the day. First of all, it's offtopic for slashdot - if you want to talk terrorists, go to cnn./. is precicely the place where posting links to monty python in lego is totally appropriate. Second, the WTC destruction has already been thouroghly discussed here. (also, killing thousands of human beings is obviously horrible, but it not like it doesn't happen every week. We don't stop our lives forever just because bad things happen)
-henrik "feeling like spending some karma" abelsson
Theories dont get proven, only disproven. (newton's gravity is an unproven theory. As is elecromagnetism). An unsubstansiated idea is called a "hypothesis" in science lingo, once sufficient tests have been made that doesnt disprove the idea the hypotheis is elevated to a theory. A theory is acctually the most "certain" form of a scientific knowledge, usually backed up with a lot of observations that agree with the theory and none that contradict it.
Unfortunately, many people mistake the word "theory" as meaning a "wild idea" and request that "the theory is proven" before they do anything. Repeat after me: Nothing is ever proven in science, only disproven. A scientific theory is backed up by loads of evidence and has next to nothing to do with the every day meaning of the word. Or, from a dictionary: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena"
Erasing data is harder than you think. Even dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda probably doesn't erase all data beyond recovery. For maximum effect you need to do several rounds of erasing with certain bit patterns designed to maximise the effect on the magnetic patterns on the storage media as well as several rounds of cryptographically secure random numbers.
Securly erasing magnetic media beyond any hope of recovery without destroying the media is *hard*.
For a full account of the problems involved, read this.
Frankly I'm not all that interested in what Mr. Mundie or anyone else at Microsoft does. I'm going to keep on using Linux when it's the appropriate tool for the job and keep on coding on my humble pet projects. Nothing what Microsoft or anyone else does changes that for me. Do i care if linux has a 5% or a 25% market share? Not really.. Free software has existed for a long time, and will continue to exist long after microsoft is gone. I use windows occationally - for the tasks it's better at than linux. I'm not a religious free software fanatic, i just use it because it's better.
A large part of why free software is "better" is because i *know* i can fix things that annoy me. Case point: i thought XMMs playlist handling sucked for a playlist of a few thousand songs, so i implemented playlist filtering (start typing in the playlist area and it filters out all songs that doesnt match). The XMMS maintainers weren't interested in accepting the patch, because it broke the keyboard shortcuts in the playlist. That's fine with me, they wrote it and can accept or reject patches as they please - but i never use those shortcuts so i didn't care about breaking them.
End result: I'm running a version of XMMS that works the way *I* want, and the maintainers are distributing a version they like. *That* is the power of free software. (and if you happen to be interested in the playlist filtering patch, just mail me)
Acctually, i made a reset cable from an old electrical wire and a switch - connected it to the right pins on the MB. So i just flip the switch and it reboots.
mind you, i spend 98% of my time in linux - just happened to be in windows when i shot the pictures.
Funnily enough i can post exactly the same comment twice in one day and still be on topic:)
See http://abelsson.com/tystdator . Comments are in swedish, but it's the pictures that are interesting in any case.
Dont worry about not understanding the comments on that page, you're not
missing much. I originally wrote it for a swedish friend of mine..
The basic idea was just that i wanted a quiet computer - and i had a spare
room behind where i had my computer. So.. i just a few drilled holes in the wall and put the computer on the other side.
It works extremely well. Best part is that my box is *completely* quiet. It's exactly like having a fanless box. I've almost started to get annoyed by the noise my monitor makes.:)
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not. this page says it's 40 bit DES. Scheez. People still use that?
> will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks
Anything that doesn't keep, oh.. say a gigant computer the size of the solar system, busy for millions of years cracking my keys doesn't really impress me (encryption wise).
A few weeks by government supercomputers is crackable by distributed efforts in about the same timeframe today.
..isn't that an oxymoron.
I would like to hear of a more successful system anywhere in the world.
The Scandinavian countries.
It talks about *console* version only being for the xbox and even says: "It'd still come out on the PC, of course."
Hey, I got a novel idea: How about if the editors acctually read the linked article before they post stories?
Ever heard of irony?
.. Sony Ericsson P800: Cell Phone - check. MP3 Player - check. PDA - check Digital Camera - check. I seriously want one of those :)
Since when is Ericsson Finnish? :-)
It's a good shortcut when you acctually know the math, but getting a calculator that will integrate (2x+1)/(1+x^2) (ok, that's easy, but you get the point) for you doesn't exactly encourage thinking. The problem with the superficial learning that you get from using calculators (especially symbolhandling) is that you can't really solve any problems. As soon as you go outside the boundaries of the calculator you're lost.
An analogy is that calculators is a bit like using windows: sure it's easy and nice, but you never gain understanding. While doing it by hand is more like unices: it's hard in the beginning, but all that is rewarded when you *understand* how it all fits together.
I have a ti-89, but i use it as little as possible. In my university no calculators are allowed during exams, and if you're stupid enough to use them in class you don't have much chance of passing the exam (simply because you wont understand)
While calculators are obviously good, lets keep 'em out of school!
40 km ethernet cable.
15 km electical wiring.
6 000 chairs.
2 km tables.
1.5 Megawatts of power.
40 000 cans of Jolt cola.
-henrik
thus illustrating the point why funny should be 0 or -1.
Acctually, they are upfront about it. But i don't remember where they told you. :)
-henrik
-henrik
What makes you think they aren't capable of coming up with their own ideas without any outside help?
-henrik
It's really convenient when you have a 2000 song playlist and just want to listen to a specific album.
However, it breaks the usual shortcuts (p for play, etc) in the playlist - you need to use the main window for that. There are lots of improvements that could be done - wildcard and substring matching are obvious ones. But it works well enough for me, and makes the XMMS playlist much more useful I like to have a large playlist and just filter out things i don't want to hear right now.
Anyway.. if anyone's interested it's available here (I'm not sure it still patches cleanly, haven't tried in a while.)
-henrik
-henrik
Give it up.. Me for one is sick of constantly hearing about the WTC every waking hour of the day. First of all, it's offtopic for slashdot - if you want to talk terrorists, go to cnn. /. is precicely the place where posting links to monty python in lego is totally appropriate. Second, the WTC destruction has already been thouroghly discussed here. (also, killing thousands of human beings is obviously horrible, but it not like it doesn't happen every week. We don't stop our lives forever just because bad things happen)
-henrik "feeling like spending some karma" abelsson
Theories dont get proven, only disproven. (newton's gravity is an unproven theory. As is elecromagnetism). An unsubstansiated idea is called a "hypothesis" in science lingo, once sufficient tests have been made that doesnt disprove the idea the hypotheis is elevated to a theory. A theory is acctually the most "certain" form of a scientific knowledge, usually backed up with a lot of observations that agree with the theory and none that contradict it.
Unfortunately, many people mistake the word "theory" as meaning a "wild idea" and request that "the theory is proven" before they do anything. Repeat after me: Nothing is ever proven in science, only disproven. A scientific theory is backed up by loads of evidence and has next to nothing to do with the every day meaning of the word. Or, from a dictionary: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena"
-henrik
Securly erasing magnetic media beyond any hope of recovery without destroying the media is *hard*.
For a full account of the problems involved, read this.
-henrik
A large part of why free software is "better" is because i *know* i can fix things that annoy me. Case point: i thought XMMs playlist handling sucked for a playlist of a few thousand songs, so i implemented playlist filtering (start typing in the playlist area and it filters out all songs that doesnt match). The XMMS maintainers weren't interested in accepting the patch, because it broke the keyboard shortcuts in the playlist. That's fine with me, they wrote it and can accept or reject patches as they please - but i never use those shortcuts so i didn't care about breaking them.
End result: I'm running a version of XMMS that works the way *I* want, and the maintainers are distributing a version they like. *That* is the power of free software. (and if you happen to be interested in the playlist filtering patch, just mail me)
-henrik
mind you, i spend 98% of my time in linux - just happened to be in windows when i shot the pictures.
-henrik
See http://abelsson.com/tystdator . Comments are in swedish, but it's the pictures that are interesting in any case. Dont worry about not understanding the comments on that page, you're not missing much. I originally wrote it for a swedish friend of mine..
The basic idea was just that i wanted a quiet computer - and i had a spare room behind where i had my computer. So.. i just a few drilled holes in the wall and put the computer on the other side.
It works extremely well. Best part is that my box is *completely* quiet. It's exactly like having a fanless box. I've almost started to get annoyed by the noise my monitor makes. :)
It looks pretty cool too.
-henrik