This is kind of an old wound for me. I'm a big LaTeX and TeX fan. I still think they are one of the best ways to produce beautiful documents, sure the built in styles with Word are nice looking and Quark and Ventura ninjas can make documents that would make Gutenburg cry, but for those of us who can appriciate a pretty document but aren't gifted enough to create them TeX and LaTeX is the best thing going. If I'm building a document, and documents will never die or be replaced by the web, I usually use LaTeX for it.
I used to think that the solution to the web was DVI. If you do any amount of HTML analysis you will see the things people do to make web pages look how they want them to look. The ways pictures are broken up, the stuff done with tables to align things just so, it's puzzling to me. HTML isn't about controlling the look but that's how it is used by anybody who is an "expert" at it. Further, picture and text go together and on many pages if you lose a picture or two the whole flow of the page can be screwed up. All the more reason why PDF or DVI should be how the web is rendered, when you request a page you get a compressed binary that contains that page and its layout, just one chunk, not 30 requests to produce one page. Further, the rendering environment is known and controlled, the producer can see the exact output ahead of time, none of this java script that detects which brower you're using so it can properly generate tricky HTML. I personally think this would be awesome, plus you'd get the benefits of PDF or DVI (really PDF anymore, pdflatex is the only way to fly) you'd get compressed documents, encryption and authentication, watermarking, etc..
Downside? Yes, unfortunately there are some. HTML is far more dynamic, there isn't a compile phase. This makes it much easier to generate it on the fly and to do interactive stuff. I also think there is an evolutionary aspect to the net that makes HTML more desirable for this kind of thing. Initially HTML was simple, there were really only a few tags in early versions of Cello and Mosaic. Then it grew more complex, it's finally reaching the level of complexity where something like LaTeX would have been the answer if we knew it was going to get this complex. LaTeX/TeX are nearly complete in an academic sense, they take a great number of factors in to account. HTML has added stuff when it was desired. HTML is quickly becoming an unwielding hydra but if you want you can use only a tiny and simple subset of it and keep it very simple, more importantly the general direction of HTML/XHTML is to make it is to something that humans don't generate but software does and it will evolve with that in mind. I still have yet to find a good software LaTeX generator that does anything more complicated than build a graphic or something. If HTML was to stay as a human used document production language then there is no question, we should use LaTeX and PDF and DVI because the problem is tough and one of the few real geniuses of our time put in 15 years solving it for us, but I don't think that's the case.
FWIW, there is idvi and acrobat and they both integrate nicely with browsers.
I did my part. At CMU in OS we worked on Yalnix, because "Y'All" is the plural or "You" and thus better. You can think of that as "Multi-nix" if you want, we just abbriviated it in to hick.
Then there was microYalnix but that was a different story.
Currently I'm working on a system that is named Hannibal because Hannibal is a cannibal and he eats people. I'm more concerned about a cannibal computer turning bad than one called multi-something.
How do you spell abriviated? That doesn't look right.
I think it's critical to pen an autobiography early in life as it will be a chapter in your real biography which will be written after your death or late in your life.
This will be the chapter where the world is first exposed to your true arrogance, your insecurities,your odd behaviorisms, and all that stuff you didn't want them to see initially. Just think about how they will react. Getting that monkey off your back has to be a taste of true freedom that will enable you do go that much farther next time. This is a critical step in character development for the character of you in the real biography.
I say that whoever signed this deal also extends one to Stallman. I know that cat has some stories to tell.
Here you go for the rack:
http://www.jwz.org/bookcase/cd.html
I've got a heafty CD collection as well, about 1000 discs, nobody has ever complained about them before, usually they want to borrow stuff. My solution have been to get some metal shelves from the hardware store and then I've cut pieces of wood about the same thinkness as a CD jewel case and as wide as the shelf and so I can stack them that way. The shop shelves have the structural integrity to support a couple thousand CDs, that has been the big problem with most racks I've seen, they need to support some weight.
only supporting 5? or 7? or however many registers they acutally have.
I think segmented memory should be listed again at least one more time but possibly twice. Including all those dman segment registers and index registers.
82xxx parts.
stack code
variable length instructions
x87
If you've ever written a boot loader before then you know half the stuff involved is black art that is barely documented. Thank you Intel.
On the other hand, I do give the mcreitd for ia64, it is a beautiful architecture. Now if they'd only drop IA32 support and make it run fast... They should have dropped x86 when they released the 386 and did IA32 the correct way, we'd already have 64bit desktops and it would have been a seemless transition.
GPS won't cut it though, there is no trust, you could pick a location at random, encrypt it and say you were there.. Now I can think of two ways to do this.
You could start building trusted GPS recievers than authenticate their results. When you read a location you are also given a signature from the machine.
I believe this is the proper way to do it in a military setting where you can serialize each device, hand create and install encrpytion and authentication keys. It's not entirely useful in the general sense because after you sell a million trusted GPS devices people could start doing fraudulent things like buying two, leaving one in a particular place, having their friend read the numbers off of it to you over the phone and then let you report that you're in a place where you're not. Plus you still have to hand create each GPS reciever to keep it trusted..
The other idea I can think of that might be possible without making too many serious changes to the system would be to send encrypted and timestamped streams of GPS data from the satellites with random tokens added. Then when a person wants to claim that are at a given location they could sign/authenticate the data given by the GPS to show that they are who they say and that data could include the raw transmition from the satellite which was used to triangulate their location. Then if you know the what stream were transmitted or have access to a trusted third party who does (the DoD?) then you can verify that they are where they say and that the tokens they used to claim that location match the ones you broadcasted. Of course this only works if GPS is a closed system because I could still intercept the same satellite transmition streams from some other location and if I knew how to massage the data correctly I could string the streams together to make it look like I was in a different place. It may be mathematically possible to come up with a scheme this way that works.
I'm thinking that it would be partially realtime though. Like this. Billy claims he is at 40NX105W and send you a stream of bits sent to him by a set of satellites. Susie examines his signature and believes that he is Billy then she examines the data and it looks like he really is where he says. To be positive Susie talks to the set of satellites Billy is in contact with and causes them to send random tokens in a random order and since she knows the order and his location she can tell what order he should recieve them in. Then Billy has some small number of milliseconds to report the series of bits he sees in the correct order to verify his location, if he has too much time he could be in a different location, recieve all the streams, reassemble them as they should be and then transmit them back so we're talking about very very small timing tolerences. Maybe you need anonymous satellites to do this.. Right now GPS knows which satellites it is talking to and can tell the difference between them.
I have kind of thought that there might be something redeeming a bout a president who partied like a rock star in his youth and was honest about it, particularly considering the people in prison for drug posession.
I can't help but think this is a scare tactic. It's the oldest play in the book, take the voters fear and try to use it against somebody. Bush is treated like an idiot, despite his record and his education. Gore is treated like a brilliant man of the people, despite his record and his education. Bush is "of the right" and he's going to put nazis on the supreme court. And Gore is actually going to do something for a change, funny the Clinton/Gore ticket never banned racial profiling, or "don't ask, don't tell" or really did anything for the environment but now it's important and we're supposed to believe that Gore is going to do something now? his record suggests otherwise, you may not like that but it's the truth. It's all about FUD.
With abortion, in particular, a clear majority of the voters and people in this country support it. Even a substantial number of republicans support it. The anti-abortion people might make up 40% on a good day but are probably closer to the mid to low 30 range as a percentage of voters. The worst case would be that Roe v. Wade would be put on trial; keep in mind that this would mean passing a law through congress and the senate and then having a president sign off on it. Then the supremes could get involved, also assuming that a couple are replaced with "conservatives" then maybe it would be over turned. Should that happen then it would be up to the states and since there is a clear majority of pro-choice people, most states would keep it legal. And don't forget that Bush has gone on the record saying that he supports a woman's right to choose but that it is also an area that is open to regulation, such as parential consent for under age girls and so forth. Sure Wyoming, Montana and some others would outlaw it, some states may have to reverse existing legislature (Wiss. for example) but it would continue to be legal most places. Is this bad? Yes, but it's not the end of the world. It could even be a good thing for pro-lifers because it would solidify the movement again and pretty much lock a republican president and a lot of senators and reps out of office for years to come after the next election.
Personally, I don't see it as a large enough issue for them to try and push through and I'm doubtful it could get through if they tried, let alone passed and to the supremes. I don't think it is as much a hotbutton or as significant as it was 10-20 years ago. Thus, it is a fear tactic, funy how this wasn't used against Bush until it looked like Nader might cost Gore the election. This election has been in action for longer than ever before, the candidates were picked sooner than ever before, Bush and Gore were considered candidates for *years* before the actual election. If this was such a big deal then why wasn't it the heart of the Gore campaign for the last 18 months? Because they didn't think Gore was going to lose, they didn't think it was going to be close and they didn't give Nader the credit to take 5%. (Never mind the attention Johnny Mac and Bradley got.)
The truth is Bush and Gore might as well be the same person. It doesn't matter which one is elected because nothing will change and they aren't terribly far apart on any issues, let alone real issues, like big businesses and big money owning politicians and essentially having the capability to let minorities define important laws and issues (think abortion. If they were to over turn RvW then it would be a minority making law, not a democratic majority.)
Vote Nader if you care about issues other than the so called hot-button issues that they want you to worry about. It's fear that they are using to manipulate your vote. You're a fool if you let fear about abortion force you to vote for Gore, especially if Nader is fighting for issues you believe in, like campaign finance reform, big business owning politicians, and the environment. There is a lot at stake in this election but it doesn't have anything to do with abortion. A vote for Bush or Gore is a vote for the status quo, and as it stands now the power of your vote is being eroded. Nader and the greens don't agree with me on a lot of the issues but as far as integrity is concerned he is the only candidate in the race with any, he can't be bought, and he believes in what he says. Ask yourself, is it worth sacrificing the environment, campaign finance reform, social security, medicine, and numerous other issues because your told to fear Bush's supreme court picks and that they might over turn a law that a clear majority of the country (nearly enough to have a constitutional amendment!) supports? If you really fear that RvW then how do you feel about giving power to a tiny minority with lot's of money? A vote for Gore is a vote for giving lot's of power to that tiny minority and that's exactly how RvW would be over turned.
That doesn't solve any problems, it just makes it more expensive and shifts it in to the court system. If you buy microsoft.dot (to use Rob's TLD) and build a p0rn site out of it do you honestly think they are going to let that go without saying or doing something about it? They're going to sue you and make you spend money on lawyers. Yours is an argument for abolishing TLDs and just going to straight domains, not for thousands or unlimited TLDs. If unlimited TLDs is the seemless pathway there then I see it as a solution provided that the goal it to do away with modern 1990s and 2000s domains and shift the importance from microsoft.com to.microsoft. That still won't solve anything if I was to but.microsoft before they did, I'm going to get sued, and I should.
but what exactly are the civil liberties issues at stake here? Is this simply about getting additional TLDs? How is that a civil liberty? Or is the civil liberty issue one of something greater? The pro-"civil liberties" candidates seem to be pro-many-TLDs and anti-ICANN-policy. Maybe I'm totally missing the picture but if ICANN practiced just a tiny bit of policy then the TLD issue would be moot or at least a much smaller issue.
In 5 years are we going to be petitioning for meta-TLDs or "Even-higher-level-domains (EHLDs?) I don't fully understand what the problem is that more TLDs fixes because anyone who owns a.com/.net/.org group and has some kind of brand name to protect is going to prevent you from using it with any other TLD so the number of choices isn't really that much greater.
I agree. What it means to me is that we don't need TLDs anymore, just do away with them and register domain name like "microsoft" or "slashdot" The.org/.com/.net/.whatever doesn't matter anymore. IBM will still own IBM.* and Microsoft will still buy microsoft.* and sue anybody who was able to get a microsoft.anything as soon as it happened.
They don't even mean anything anymore..GOV and.EDU are the only correct TLDs anymore.
Plus, no modifications were allowed to the algorithms, so it's fairly unlikely that the NSA got their fingers into it. To give props to SecurityFocus, a representative questioned the involvement of the NSA and asked why we should trust the government.
And that's good? The NSA had their fingers in DES and from all accounts, including Coppersmith's, they made it stronger.
I personally get a kick out of all the alchoholism references when he blows a gasket and makes one of those posts at 1:30am about how Linux is trash and how MS is going to destory it.
I'm not sure where they come from and I honestly hope that it isn't true but he's blown up a few times and the idea that it is alchohol related seems to fit so well it's almost humorous. Kernel traffic always ignores the good stuff on the kernel list.
Amen. I've been pretty much TV free for about a year now. I work for a TV company and get to test products and what have you but for the most part I don't watch it any more.
Life is too short to watch TV
I excercise more, I read more, I code more, I do more things not related to computers, I date more women, I spend more time with my family and friends. Best part of all, I'm not contaminating my brain with the pointless garbage that fills up what we call TV, how many shows are on TV simply because of short skirts and breasts? Pro-wresting is one of the most popular shows on TV, it's fake violence. I woke up one day and I couldn't stomach the crap that I dedicated time to, the idea that I would setup the VCR to tape something because it was too important to miss makes me sick when you really look at it all. And then there are the commercials, it seems like they can't even put together a complex thought and communicate it to you anymore without a fricking commercial getting in the way.
What I want is an HDTV without the tuners, they are optional plug-ins anyway... I just want it to be a monitor for a digital VCR type device, be it HDVD or whatever and I don't care if I have to pay to view. I just want it to watch movies on occasion.. BTW, I go to more movies now, and yeah it costs more money but there is something about getting up, leaving the house and watching a movie with other people, it's probably a good thing for a lot of geeks to do more often.
As a competitive racer (read: bike geek, and there are hardcore geeks in the bike world) and a full-on computer geek I have mixed emotions on this stuff. You would not believe the kinds of money I and people like me have spent trying to make our bikes stronger, stiffer, and above all else lighter. A good racing bike doesn't have comforts, in fact they are usually aluminum or carbon and they are insanely stiff and you feel every little pebble in the road, minimum padding in the seat, cork on the bars is probably the biggest luxury on the ride.. Even mountain biking is moving away from soft long-travel full suspension style "luxury" bikes, only down hill experts ride those anymore, soft tails (very cool, pivotless rear suspension usually made out of space age carbon or Ti.. no pivot means no extra metal for the joints which means less weight) are where it's at because they are stiffer which means that less energy goes in to bounce and more energy goes in to make you go forward faster, there is just enough rear suspension to take the edge off. That's not to say it's not fun or enjoying to ride such a bike, the idea is to go fast and that's what they are designed to do, I probably wouldn't tour 500 miles on one though.
Then these guys come along, I read about Winnebiko in Dr. Dobbs a while back.. And they are bucking the nature of it all for me. Putting computers and crap on there is sweet. Shit, putting computers on just about everything is sweet, but this just doesn't seem right some how. Maybe I don't get the whole "touring" thing. All the computers and stuff make it more heavy which means you can't climb as fast and they make it less aerodynamic which means you're not going to hawl as much ass on the downhill side. Basically, it slows you down and that seems contradictory to the purpose.
This topic has come up a number of times over the last few weeks and I think it has almost been treated comically. I don't see how we can devote the amount of attention to the theft (err, "sharing") of music and the various legal activities surrounding it and then treat our own copyrights with contempt. I've read so much RMS bashing that it makes me sick. RMS is doing us a favor! The GPL will be tested in court, that is eminent. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's is very important. It may sound like RMS and the FSF are on a power trip or something, which is probably true to some small extent, but it is also critical that the GPL be followed, it not be watered down by being misused, the misuses are known and publicized, and that we take care of it. Spiritually, we're (the royal we, as in GNOME, GNU, KDE, Linux, free software) are all on the same page but those nasty details need to be worked out. The fact that there haven't been any lawsuits within the community show that we're together in spirit.
Something else which I'll bring up that hasn't been is that this is about leverage. Don't confuse it with anything else. It is about positive leverage for change. As the GPLed code base grows, being able to use it becomes more and more desirable. To use it you need to contribute to it, that's the leverage. It's reaching a critical point now, there is a lot of good software that is GPLed. That is how and why RMS designed it. It's also a good thing, the leverage is controlled by us, there isn't an IBM or Microsoft on the other end, it's us. The community, the programmers and the users. It's not an RMS thing either, ESR brings it up at the end of Magic Cauldron and in his eyes it is much much more than that because he believes that opensource has already won and that in 3 to 5 years when just about everything is opensourced that leverage can be applied outside of software; applied to laws? social causes? all sorts of things, we're talking about wholesale social change! This isn't a communism or socialism thing, it's about restoring power to the people, the people own GPLed software and the people need to police it and protect it.
KDE not complying is damn important, it undermines everything that does. Python doesn't? Well it should and it will. There will be countless others, as the GPL's importance grows so will the amount of attention given to products which go against it and I'm betting that there is a pretty fair number of them.
I don't know if Bruce Perens or ESR are reading but I suggest that an ammendment be made to the opensource definition. There needs to be a level of license interop that is supported. We've already seen the NPL fail to comply with GPL, the QPL fail to comply with the GPL, the CNRI license fail to comply with the GPL, interoperability is critical. I want to use KDE code in GPLed GNOME code! I want to use GPLed GNOME code within KDE! I want to use mozilla code with both! If the interop can't be worked out then what is the point really? It seems like a lot of the ideas and theories about opensource go out the window if interop isn't part of the deal.
What are the odds of that? You're supposed to pick k at random and if you have a half decent generator then that's just not going to happen.
If you're paranoid about it then keep a list of used Ks and don't reuse them. Really, it's not a problem though, you're far far more likely to pick a poor IDEA or 3DES key if you're using something like GPG or PGP.
To generate large random primes (or actually pseudoprimes since they don't fully test them) look up Miller's algorithm or the Miller-Rabin algorithm. It works like this:
if p is prime them for some a
You can prove that the reverse is usually true, if a**(p-1) mod p = 1 then p is prime "most, but not all of the time"
So you pick out 100 or 200 values for a. And if the second part is only 50% true (ie: if it equals one then there is a 50% chance the p is prime) then after doing this 100 or 200 times for a bunch of different values of a you end up with a pretty good odds that p is prime. 50% ** 100 (or 200) is your error and that's pretty small.
As for RSA being more secure than El Gamal, I believe is has been shown that ElGamal is at least as secure as RSA and a lot of people believe it to be more secure. DSA on the other hand is really just a way of applying ElGamal and so it has some key size restraints to comply with a standard. Don't use DSA if you're not happy with the key length, sign with ElGamal and pick as big a modulus as you want.
They underestimate the power of polar bear cubs. We had a pair here in Denver (actually I think the count is up to 4 in the last 6 years) Anyhow, they were called Klondike and Snow and their mom didn't want them and they almost died but zoo keepers stepped in and saved the day. So the zoo keepers and in spirit the whole city got strapped and ended up raising them, if you will. T-shirts, books, videos, stuffed animals/action figure, coloring books, posters, movies, news specials followed; there were regular news updates on the local stations and a couple of papers in the area ran regular columns on them. It was a really positive vibe for the city. Little kids would send them cards and drawings they made, zoo attendance went through the roof. They would take the little tadgers out on walks (yes, like you walk your dog) in the parks around the city and people would just got nuts over the cute little white bears. It sounds stupid but I'm glad it happened, it's the first time I've seen a big city rally around something positive that wasn't a sports team.
When the evil Sea World Florida won adoption rights for the larger adult versions of Klondike and Snow there was a serious campaign to keep them. They were big but you'd be amazed at the level of interest that was still there. Little kids and adults cried. Petitions were signed. I think the major and some other government people were brought in to make pleas to "save" the bears. (no shit, people called up their congress persons to make them ask the zoo to keep the bears!) Ultimiately Sea World took them way because our zoo already has a lot of polar bears and they have a tank full of cold water there with real salmons swimming around for them to eat and that's kind of cool. On occasion they still show an updates on the news, I guess that they learned how to catch the salmon despite being raised by humans, kind of interesting if you ask me, they had trouble at first and just snapped their teeth at the water missing the salmon..
When the cubs were born, nobody thought much of it but they turned into a passion for the whole city and probably quite a bit of the state. I suspect that the KDE guys feel that way about GNOME. I don't think it's all anger and debate, but GNOME needs KDE and KDE needs GNOME and GNOME Foundation will affect them. If GNOME foundation is serious and they actually put effort into it then GNOME could easily become the default desktop and the most full featured and funtional; it will take work, KDE is still ahead but there are some major players in the game now. Just dismissing it is foolish. They need to embrace the competition, both groups still need to work towards some interop. and they need to celebrate another victory for free software. Really, this should just be more pressure for TrollTech, it's making less and less sense to not GPL QT and from there start relicensing KDE.
They been sampling chips, there are prototype products made out of them and I still don't know anything real about it's performance. Their homepage has this odd ball performance/power consumption type benchmarking information.
If I was to buy a K6-II+ notebook and a Transmeta notebook (assuming that the transmeta didn't cost twice as much which is likely will, from what I hear) which one would be faster? If I buy a Sony VAIO with a Celeron or P3 in it and a Transmeta notebook, which will be faster? Are these supposed to be Cadillac notebook chips? Or "working man's" notebook chips?
Next, if I was to treat the Transmeta part like an embedded chip. How cheap can a wireless webpad with Linux and mozilla on it be? How long do the batteries last? Can I plug my Nokia PCS phone in to it? Yeah, these are all product specific questions. The big one is "how cheap?" I'm not going to buy a $1000 web pad when I will be able to buy a $1000 K6-II notebook ($800-$1200 is what they are aiming for with the k6-II+.) The TM chips are supposed to cost in the $70 range in quantity so I'm guessing you're not going to see many $300 TM based products.
There is a fair amount of information on the processor but I still feel like the important real world information is missing. I also feel like TM has been kind of deceptive with it, if they had a cheaper, lower power process that delivers the same performance they would be banging that gong to no end. They don't, it's either more expensive or it's slow, or both. It also kind of feels like they are moving slow. I know it's a first rev of their part but since that first press conference it has almost been long enough for rev 2 to be nearing the end of the pipeline. Something else that they should be hyping, especially if their first rev is an underachiever, that's expected but it's what you follow up with that makes or breaks you.
It's all very cool none the less, I hope they do well. More competition is better.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think that the solution to the web was DVI. If you do any amount of HTML analysis you will see the things people do to make web pages look how they want them to look. The ways pictures are broken up, the stuff done with tables to align things just so, it's puzzling to me. HTML isn't about controlling the look but that's how it is used by anybody who is an "expert" at it. Further, picture and text go together and on many pages if you lose a picture or two the whole flow of the page can be screwed up. All the more reason why PDF or DVI should be how the web is rendered, when you request a page you get a compressed binary that contains that page and its layout, just one chunk, not 30 requests to produce one page. Further, the rendering environment is known and controlled, the producer can see the exact output ahead of time, none of this java script that detects which brower you're using so it can properly generate tricky HTML. I personally think this would be awesome, plus you'd get the benefits of PDF or DVI (really PDF anymore, pdflatex is the only way to fly) you'd get compressed documents, encryption and authentication, watermarking, etc..
Downside? Yes, unfortunately there are some. HTML is far more dynamic, there isn't a compile phase. This makes it much easier to generate it on the fly and to do interactive stuff. I also think there is an evolutionary aspect to the net that makes HTML more desirable for this kind of thing. Initially HTML was simple, there were really only a few tags in early versions of Cello and Mosaic. Then it grew more complex, it's finally reaching the level of complexity where something like LaTeX would have been the answer if we knew it was going to get this complex. LaTeX/TeX are nearly complete in an academic sense, they take a great number of factors in to account. HTML has added stuff when it was desired. HTML is quickly becoming an unwielding hydra but if you want you can use only a tiny and simple subset of it and keep it very simple, more importantly the general direction of HTML/XHTML is to make it is to something that humans don't generate but software does and it will evolve with that in mind. I still have yet to find a good software LaTeX generator that does anything more complicated than build a graphic or something. If HTML was to stay as a human used document production language then there is no question, we should use LaTeX and PDF and DVI because the problem is tough and one of the few real geniuses of our time put in 15 years solving it for us, but I don't think that's the case.
FWIW, there is idvi and acrobat and they both integrate nicely with browsers.
Then there was microYalnix but that was a different story.
Currently I'm working on a system that is named Hannibal because Hannibal is a cannibal and he eats people. I'm more concerned about a cannibal computer turning bad than one called multi-something.
How do you spell abriviated? That doesn't look right.
This will be the chapter where the world is first exposed to your true arrogance, your insecurities,your odd behaviorisms, and all that stuff you didn't want them to see initially. Just think about how they will react. Getting that monkey off your back has to be a taste of true freedom that will enable you do go that much farther next time. This is a critical step in character development for the character of you in the real biography.
I say that whoever signed this deal also extends one to Stallman. I know that cat has some stories to tell.
Completely failed to even admit that other linux distributions exist.
I like Redhat, I want them to do well but I don't think this bodes well for them.
Here you go for the rack: http://www.jwz.org/bookcase/cd.html
I've got a heafty CD collection as well, about 1000 discs, nobody has ever complained about them before, usually they want to borrow stuff. My solution have been to get some metal shelves from the hardware store and then I've cut pieces of wood about the same thinkness as a CD jewel case and as wide as the shelf and so I can stack them that way. The shop shelves have the structural integrity to support a couple thousand CDs, that has been the big problem with most racks I've seen, they need to support some weight.
Let me add:
On the other hand, I do give the mcreitd for ia64, it is a beautiful architecture. Now if they'd only drop IA32 support and make it run fast... They should have dropped x86 when they released the 386 and did IA32 the correct way, we'd already have 64bit desktops and it would have been a seemless transition.
I believe this is the proper way to do it in a military setting where you can serialize each device, hand create and install encrpytion and authentication keys. It's not entirely useful in the general sense because after you sell a million trusted GPS devices people could start doing fraudulent things like buying two, leaving one in a particular place, having their friend read the numbers off of it to you over the phone and then let you report that you're in a place where you're not. Plus you still have to hand create each GPS reciever to keep it trusted..
I'm thinking that it would be partially realtime though. Like this. Billy claims he is at 40NX105W and send you a stream of bits sent to him by a set of satellites. Susie examines his signature and believes that he is Billy then she examines the data and it looks like he really is where he says. To be positive Susie talks to the set of satellites Billy is in contact with and causes them to send random tokens in a random order and since she knows the order and his location she can tell what order he should recieve them in. Then Billy has some small number of milliseconds to report the series of bits he sees in the correct order to verify his location, if he has too much time he could be in a different location, recieve all the streams, reassemble them as they should be and then transmit them back so we're talking about very very small timing tolerences. Maybe you need anonymous satellites to do this.. Right now GPS knows which satellites it is talking to and can tell the difference between them.
I guess I was wrong.
With abortion, in particular, a clear majority of the voters and people in this country support it. Even a substantial number of republicans support it. The anti-abortion people might make up 40% on a good day but are probably closer to the mid to low 30 range as a percentage of voters. The worst case would be that Roe v. Wade would be put on trial; keep in mind that this would mean passing a law through congress and the senate and then having a president sign off on it. Then the supremes could get involved, also assuming that a couple are replaced with "conservatives" then maybe it would be over turned. Should that happen then it would be up to the states and since there is a clear majority of pro-choice people, most states would keep it legal. And don't forget that Bush has gone on the record saying that he supports a woman's right to choose but that it is also an area that is open to regulation, such as parential consent for under age girls and so forth. Sure Wyoming, Montana and some others would outlaw it, some states may have to reverse existing legislature (Wiss. for example) but it would continue to be legal most places. Is this bad? Yes, but it's not the end of the world. It could even be a good thing for pro-lifers because it would solidify the movement again and pretty much lock a republican president and a lot of senators and reps out of office for years to come after the next election.
Personally, I don't see it as a large enough issue for them to try and push through and I'm doubtful it could get through if they tried, let alone passed and to the supremes. I don't think it is as much a hotbutton or as significant as it was 10-20 years ago. Thus, it is a fear tactic, funy how this wasn't used against Bush until it looked like Nader might cost Gore the election. This election has been in action for longer than ever before, the candidates were picked sooner than ever before, Bush and Gore were considered candidates for *years* before the actual election. If this was such a big deal then why wasn't it the heart of the Gore campaign for the last 18 months? Because they didn't think Gore was going to lose, they didn't think it was going to be close and they didn't give Nader the credit to take 5%. (Never mind the attention Johnny Mac and Bradley got.)
The truth is Bush and Gore might as well be the same person. It doesn't matter which one is elected because nothing will change and they aren't terribly far apart on any issues, let alone real issues, like big businesses and big money owning politicians and essentially having the capability to let minorities define important laws and issues (think abortion. If they were to over turn RvW then it would be a minority making law, not a democratic majority.)
Vote Nader if you care about issues other than the so called hot-button issues that they want you to worry about. It's fear that they are using to manipulate your vote. You're a fool if you let fear about abortion force you to vote for Gore, especially if Nader is fighting for issues you believe in, like campaign finance reform, big business owning politicians, and the environment. There is a lot at stake in this election but it doesn't have anything to do with abortion. A vote for Bush or Gore is a vote for the status quo, and as it stands now the power of your vote is being eroded. Nader and the greens don't agree with me on a lot of the issues but as far as integrity is concerned he is the only candidate in the race with any, he can't be bought, and he believes in what he says. Ask yourself, is it worth sacrificing the environment, campaign finance reform, social security, medicine, and numerous other issues because your told to fear Bush's supreme court picks and that they might over turn a law that a clear majority of the country (nearly enough to have a constitutional amendment!) supports? If you really fear that RvW then how do you feel about giving power to a tiny minority with lot's of money? A vote for Gore is a vote for giving lot's of power to that tiny minority and that's exactly how RvW would be over turned.
That doesn't solve any problems, it just makes it more expensive and shifts it in to the court system. If you buy microsoft.dot (to use Rob's TLD) and build a p0rn site out of it do you honestly think they are going to let that go without saying or doing something about it? They're going to sue you and make you spend money on lawyers. Yours is an argument for abolishing TLDs and just going to straight domains, not for thousands or unlimited TLDs. If unlimited TLDs is the seemless pathway there then I see it as a solution provided that the goal it to do away with modern 1990s and 2000s domains and shift the importance from microsoft.com to .microsoft. That still won't solve anything if I was to but .microsoft before they did, I'm going to get sued, and I should.
In 5 years are we going to be petitioning for meta-TLDs or "Even-higher-level-domains (EHLDs?) I don't fully understand what the problem is that more TLDs fixes because anyone who owns a .com/.net/.org group and has some kind of brand name to protect is going to prevent you from using it with any other TLD so the number of choices isn't really that much greater.
They don't even mean anything anymore. .GOV and .EDU are the only correct TLDs anymore.
I have got to have one of those.
Plus, no modifications were allowed to the algorithms, so it's fairly unlikely that the NSA got their fingers into it. To give props to SecurityFocus, a representative questioned the involvement of the NSA and asked why we should trust the government. And that's good? The NSA had their fingers in DES and from all accounts, including Coppersmith's, they made it stronger.
I'm not sure where they come from and I honestly hope that it isn't true but he's blown up a few times and the idea that it is alchohol related seems to fit so well it's almost humorous. Kernel traffic always ignores the good stuff on the kernel list.
Life is too short to watch TV
I excercise more, I read more, I code more, I do more things not related to computers, I date more women, I spend more time with my family and friends. Best part of all, I'm not contaminating my brain with the pointless garbage that fills up what we call TV, how many shows are on TV simply because of short skirts and breasts? Pro-wresting is one of the most popular shows on TV, it's fake violence. I woke up one day and I couldn't stomach the crap that I dedicated time to, the idea that I would setup the VCR to tape something because it was too important to miss makes me sick when you really look at it all. And then there are the commercials, it seems like they can't even put together a complex thought and communicate it to you anymore without a fricking commercial getting in the way.
What I want is an HDTV without the tuners, they are optional plug-ins anyway... I just want it to be a monitor for a digital VCR type device, be it HDVD or whatever and I don't care if I have to pay to view. I just want it to watch movies on occasion.. BTW, I go to more movies now, and yeah it costs more money but there is something about getting up, leaving the house and watching a movie with other people, it's probably a good thing for a lot of geeks to do more often.
If they change that then I'm screwed. It's burned in.
Then these guys come along, I read about Winnebiko in Dr. Dobbs a while back.. And they are bucking the nature of it all for me. Putting computers and crap on there is sweet. Shit, putting computers on just about everything is sweet, but this just doesn't seem right some how. Maybe I don't get the whole "touring" thing. All the computers and stuff make it more heavy which means you can't climb as fast and they make it less aerodynamic which means you're not going to hawl as much ass on the downhill side. Basically, it slows you down and that seems contradictory to the purpose.
Something else which I'll bring up that hasn't been is that this is about leverage. Don't confuse it with anything else. It is about positive leverage for change. As the GPLed code base grows, being able to use it becomes more and more desirable. To use it you need to contribute to it, that's the leverage. It's reaching a critical point now, there is a lot of good software that is GPLed. That is how and why RMS designed it. It's also a good thing, the leverage is controlled by us, there isn't an IBM or Microsoft on the other end, it's us. The community, the programmers and the users. It's not an RMS thing either, ESR brings it up at the end of Magic Cauldron and in his eyes it is much much more than that because he believes that opensource has already won and that in 3 to 5 years when just about everything is opensourced that leverage can be applied outside of software; applied to laws? social causes? all sorts of things, we're talking about wholesale social change! This isn't a communism or socialism thing, it's about restoring power to the people, the people own GPLed software and the people need to police it and protect it.
KDE not complying is damn important, it undermines everything that does. Python doesn't? Well it should and it will. There will be countless others, as the GPL's importance grows so will the amount of attention given to products which go against it and I'm betting that there is a pretty fair number of them.
I don't know if Bruce Perens or ESR are reading but I suggest that an ammendment be made to the opensource definition. There needs to be a level of license interop that is supported. We've already seen the NPL fail to comply with GPL, the QPL fail to comply with the GPL, the CNRI license fail to comply with the GPL, interoperability is critical. I want to use KDE code in GPLed GNOME code! I want to use GPLed GNOME code within KDE! I want to use mozilla code with both! If the interop can't be worked out then what is the point really? It seems like a lot of the ideas and theories about opensource go out the window if interop isn't part of the deal.
It misses Carmicheal numbers. It does work correctly for Mersenne numbers, you should avoid those for other obvious reasons though.
If you're paranoid about it then keep a list of used Ks and don't reuse them. Really, it's not a problem though, you're far far more likely to pick a poor IDEA or 3DES key if you're using something like GPG or PGP.
if p is prime them for some a You can prove that the reverse is usually true, if a**(p-1) mod p = 1 then p is prime "most, but not all of the time"
So you pick out 100 or 200 values for a. And if the second part is only 50% true (ie: if it equals one then there is a 50% chance the p is prime) then after doing this 100 or 200 times for a bunch of different values of a you end up with a pretty good odds that p is prime. 50% ** 100 (or 200) is your error and that's pretty small.
As for RSA being more secure than El Gamal, I believe is has been shown that ElGamal is at least as secure as RSA and a lot of people believe it to be more secure. DSA on the other hand is really just a way of applying ElGamal and so it has some key size restraints to comply with a standard. Don't use DSA if you're not happy with the key length, sign with ElGamal and pick as big a modulus as you want.
When the evil Sea World Florida won adoption rights for the larger adult versions of Klondike and Snow there was a serious campaign to keep them. They were big but you'd be amazed at the level of interest that was still there. Little kids and adults cried. Petitions were signed. I think the major and some other government people were brought in to make pleas to "save" the bears. (no shit, people called up their congress persons to make them ask the zoo to keep the bears!) Ultimiately Sea World took them way because our zoo already has a lot of polar bears and they have a tank full of cold water there with real salmons swimming around for them to eat and that's kind of cool. On occasion they still show an updates on the news, I guess that they learned how to catch the salmon despite being raised by humans, kind of interesting if you ask me, they had trouble at first and just snapped their teeth at the water missing the salmon..
When the cubs were born, nobody thought much of it but they turned into a passion for the whole city and probably quite a bit of the state. I suspect that the KDE guys feel that way about GNOME. I don't think it's all anger and debate, but GNOME needs KDE and KDE needs GNOME and GNOME Foundation will affect them. If GNOME foundation is serious and they actually put effort into it then GNOME could easily become the default desktop and the most full featured and funtional; it will take work, KDE is still ahead but there are some major players in the game now. Just dismissing it is foolish. They need to embrace the competition, both groups still need to work towards some interop. and they need to celebrate another victory for free software. Really, this should just be more pressure for TrollTech, it's making less and less sense to not GPL QT and from there start relicensing KDE.
It seems logical to me. If the knowledge is "owned" by somebody then they can probably control what I do with it, right?
If I was to buy a K6-II+ notebook and a Transmeta notebook (assuming that the transmeta didn't cost twice as much which is likely will, from what I hear) which one would be faster? If I buy a Sony VAIO with a Celeron or P3 in it and a Transmeta notebook, which will be faster? Are these supposed to be Cadillac notebook chips? Or "working man's" notebook chips?
Next, if I was to treat the Transmeta part like an embedded chip. How cheap can a wireless webpad with Linux and mozilla on it be? How long do the batteries last? Can I plug my Nokia PCS phone in to it? Yeah, these are all product specific questions. The big one is "how cheap?" I'm not going to buy a $1000 web pad when I will be able to buy a $1000 K6-II notebook ($800-$1200 is what they are aiming for with the k6-II+.) The TM chips are supposed to cost in the $70 range in quantity so I'm guessing you're not going to see many $300 TM based products.
There is a fair amount of information on the processor but I still feel like the important real world information is missing. I also feel like TM has been kind of deceptive with it, if they had a cheaper, lower power process that delivers the same performance they would be banging that gong to no end. They don't, it's either more expensive or it's slow, or both. It also kind of feels like they are moving slow. I know it's a first rev of their part but since that first press conference it has almost been long enough for rev 2 to be nearing the end of the pipeline. Something else that they should be hyping, especially if their first rev is an underachiever, that's expected but it's what you follow up with that makes or breaks you.
It's all very cool none the less, I hope they do well. More competition is better.