With open source, the developments in one OS are available to the others. You already see where BSD and Linux are very similar in the apps they can run, and the way they run them.
If apps can become similar, why wouldn't the OSes themselves converge?
I can't see anything bad about less OSes. Having multiple OSes means having apps for each one, and uses to which one is more suited than the other...
Some OSes don't seem like viable merge candidates. The toaster doesn't need to run Linux. But, I can't see why some unix core with a nice GUI should run 99.99% of PCs.
A monopoly is only 'bad' and regulated if it stifles any possible competition yet gouges consumers.
If AT&T had put their earnings into research on how to lower long distance rates, and had consistently dropped price, nobody would have tried to break them up.
If MS had made something like BeOS, small, fast, stable, pretty, and charged $45 for it, and published the APIs, etc, nobody would hate them.
The problem is that AT&T gouged consumers and user unfair trade practices to stop competitors. Much the same as Microsoft.
Even if Linux became a virtual monopoly, with it being hard to buy a PC without Linux installed, it wouldn't matter.
A company can't demand money for their distribution, so they can't hold companies at ransom with license fees. It doesn't cost the consumer any more to have Linux preinstalled. It would be done during testing anyways, at no cost.
Linux is served by being open, accessible... APIs are published and documented because they benefit from the same network effect as everything else.
Nobody would be harmed by Linux even if it was on 99.9% of new computers. Thus, nobody cares if it becomes a monopoly. Not only is there no central company to exploit it, but GNU/Linux (the GPL is important in this) can't be leveraged this way.
The only ones who could lose are Microsoft and other companies seeking to limit information.
Jesse isn't the person I'd have picked, if I was in his state (or country for that matter), but he's a lot closer than any of the other politicians.
Even if you only judge him by how corrupt he is, he's had a lot less time to be corrupted by big money advocates. He'll have just as many biases as the next person, but until he's in office for as many years as most politicians, he won't be bought on as many issues.
It's partly because he just got into politics (well, fairly recently) and partly because he's not from a rich family that would already have a lot of these connections.
And, I also think that having been a SEAL, he's less likely to support pointless wars and military operations, knowing what it's like to risk your life for some moron politician who's just vote pandering. Finally, a politician who didn't get a cushy National Guard position, or go straight into officer school and sit behind a desk during the war.
The programs aren't bad, the implementation is.
on
Waiting for the Knock
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· Score: 3
Yes, implementation is broken, but the basic idea is sound.
Welfare should have incentives to get people back to work. One incentive would be to pay much less cash, and issue the rent money directly to landlords (in the form of a check) and crack down on landlords who split these checks with the welfare client, who doesn't actually live there.
And incentives to get a job by adding the wages to the welfare for a few months. Switching jobs is a costly process and it's often impractical to buy a bus pass, work clothes, etc, out of what's barely enough money to live on in a normal month.
I'm always disgusted at how in Canada (dunno about the USA) it's easier to apply for welfare (one form, instant check) than UI (unemployment relief) which is multiple forms, a dismissal notice from your work, and three to five weeks...
The system is insane. But, if you reward people for paying out less benefits, you can't be suprised when they complicate the system to make it harder to collect.
A lot of the problems come from rewarding the wrong behaviour.
I see no reason why a government run agency can't be as efficient as a private one, if you're allowed to be as ruthless as a corporation would in cutting out useless jobs and firing people for incompotence.
But, I don't see much happening as long as we live in a representative democracy where we have to pick the least corrupt person to 'represent' us. When electronic voting becomes possible, if used right, it could remove a lot of corruption simply by removing the politicians who hire incompotent relatives, etc.
Actually, if you're looking for a well implemented third-person view game, Heretic II from Raven Software, using the Quake 2 engine is the best I've seen.
Tomb Raider's camera shakes around too much for an action game, making it hard to see where you're going. If you're running next to a wall for instance, and turn away from the wall, your viewpoint tried to maintain a constant distance from you, can't because of the wall, and shifts off to an awkward angle. In Heretic II, the camera is linked much more tightly the direction the character looks, and it always gives a usable view, even in the middle of jumping and fighting.
But, yes, an Avatar for something like a chat room would probably shift to third person view when you're talking, and to first if you were going to navigate the world.
The Tomb Raider engine isn't much of an example of anything except the power of pixelated tits to sell an obsolete engine with a repetetive game.
I've only played three N64 games, so I'm not experienced with the platform, but I didn't much like it.
The Super Mario racing was fun. For something with about the graphic horsepower of Stunts...
But Zeld64 is what turned me off to the idea of cartridge based consoles. Euch. That game stunk.
They used a hub system which is a good indicator that they couldn't fit enough levels into it. Everything was low poly. And I mean, real low poly. The textures were, if they could be called such, flat. I think they were solid colors except for faces and such. The sound effects were marginal.
And then the fact that it had a camera system straight out of Tomb Raider...
That game could have been so much more if they'd used CDs, but their copy protection was worth more than making a good system.
Consoles are bad enough (lacking keyboards, HDs, etc) without crippling them by loading of a cartridge.
Actually, that wouldn't be a bad idea. AM radio, as many have said, transmits very well, and is easy. So we should keep it, but do we need as wide a space for it (not that AM radio is too wide, but...). Ditto with FM and TV...
Maybe space for some of AM, and a TV channel or two. Everything else would be better served, in metropolitan areas, by using copper or fiber to transmit that and freeing the airwaves for things that have to be wireless.
And with enough airspace, you could simply listen to streaming news reports via a cell-phone -> car stereo link, if you needed that. I don't think music stations, as the sole players of new music, will be around much longer with the ability to stream a custom choice of music, etc.
I see some great uses for widecasts, namely in the interior of British Columbia where I grew up, or the even less populated northern edge of the prarie provinces. But, in cities where cell phones do more good, I think we should be trying to reallocate space, move things aroung, and make more room for digital cells.
Sure, higher fidelity, but the signal degrades more easily. Does anyone use AM Stereo btw?
And, if we designed them today, we'd use compression and massive error correction, probably reducing the bandwidth both need as well as boosting the fidelity.
Basically the idea is to use crypto to help us crack crypto.
Sometimes this involves using hashes to show that you've checked the data you return.
This is appropriate for 'No' results in RC5/DES/CSC type contests, where there are so many 'No' answers that if you get caught when you lie about one, you're easily turfed from the project.
This would also work in SETI@Home because there shouldn't be a certain point at which you say 'Alien here'. You'll simply returned the processed data to SETI@Home and they'll look at the results to see which look promising. Thus you don't have the option of lying just about 'Yes' answers because all answers are varying degrees of 'Maybe'.
The problem is in key-finding, where there's exactly one needle in the whole haystack, and it's really obvious if you've found it. And by the nature of the thing, the key one away is dead wrong. So it's hard to do watch for this sort of thing.
In my description, I used a simply cypher, a straight alphabetic rotation that is trivially simple. But the premise might hold.
Some forms of encryption stack in different ways. For example, if you add 6 to every letter in an alphabetic rotation, and then reencrypt it by adding 3, you haven't made it more secure because the same thing could be achieved in one pass by adding 9.
DES Encryption on the other hand isn't this trivial. If you encrypt data once, and then again with a different key, it's more secure.
This doesn't mean that this won't ever work with complex encryptions, or even that it won't work with DES, but it does seem likely it's going to be hard.
It's not like we can add a constant to the cyphertext, and the plaintext, and have the same key work. For starters, DES (and most current cyphers) aren't mathematical. They don't multiply the character, then subtract something, etc. They rotate the bits and apply various logic operations to it.
A little more detail on why we need this.
You want to ensure that a key will be returned when found. This means you need to test the loyalty of the participants, see if they return news of their sucessful decryptions.
The problem is that the cypher text remains the same each time, as does the plaintext. So if you send them a different set, they'll know something is up and can behave temporarily, until the test is over.
So it's not enough to simply encrypt the plaintext with your own key and pass that keyblock to the participant, because they'll see the cyphertext has changed and they'll know you're testing them.
Any time you change one of the hardcoded parameters you'll have this problem. There isn't any simple way around it.
What needs to be done is send a different cyphertext each time, so the participant can't just watch for the odd different one.
But, a smart participant has looked at the contest themselves, and they know what the first part of the plaintext is, as well as the cyphertext. So any time it's different from the real one, they know to watch out. And, if you did send enough different ones to mask which was the real one for someone who couldn't find out, you'd waste so much time on fake cyphertexts that you might as well not bother.
So, we need a way to change the cyphertext so that it doesn't appear to be the same as the original. We also need to be able to predict what effect our change will have on the decrypted cyphertext and on the key.
In out alphabetic rotation cypher making a change to the cyphertext and the plaintext meant the same key would work. We could also make a different change to each, -3 (D becomes A) to the cyphertext and 4 (A becomes E) to the plaintext. This means the key would be seven off by 7. Still predicatable.
We need to be able to make a change that lets us predict what effect we'll have on the key. It wouldn't do us any good to send shrouded cyphertexts and plaintexts if the work cracking them didn't help the project.
Even if the same key wouldn't work, as long as it's relationship to the real key, for the real plaintext and cyphertext was determinable, that would be enough.
For instance, if we know that by changing the cyphertext in form X, an the plaintext in form Y, changed the key in form (XY-X), we could assign the same keyblock we were going to, shifted by XY-X, so that we were doing real, useful work, even while ensuring participants couldn't cheat.
So, someone gets a the keyblock, and a new cyphertext and plaintext, and they check the keys and lo and hehold, one works. They don't know if we sent them shrouded versions of the real information, or a pair that we made up. But it's much more likely that we're testing them, so to avoid being kicked out, they are again forced to behave.
The shrouding we use doesn't even have to be that strong. All we need to do is slow them down enough that they waste more time cheat than by doing it properly, which eliminates the main reason for dishonesty, the desire to see themselves crack more blocks.
The only problem is that I don't know if it's possible for all cyphers, let alone the specifics of the method you'd use.
Hope I was more clear this time.
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
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· Score: 1
What people with attitudes like yours don't understand is that the massive loyalty that he had is worth more than one movie of plastic crap. He killed the goose, just to get a couple of golden eggs. Nobody will line up for months to see the next one. He's not just another so-so director who makes so-so movies.
His fan base supported him when he didn't do anything, based on the quality of his old work. If he had made a movie for them, they'd have stayed loyal, still buying the novels, collectible plastic crap, etc. But he went for the fast buck. He didn't try to make an intelligent movie with a deep plot, as well as the action adventure. He just threw in a bunch of stuff based on how well it would look in an injection mold, or painted on a plastic cup.
Deal with it.
You know, you're a jerk. You're taking out your frustrations on other people for no reason. Life isn't an Ayn Rand novel and there is no need to step all over people and act like a prick to get ahead.
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
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· Score: 1
If a director relies on a fan base to keep making money between movies, then he owes it to that fan base to make movies for them, not dump them after getting their money and make a movie designed purely to sell plastic crap.
He has no contract which would force him to do this, and he's not dishonest for doing what he did, but it wasn't very considerate of his fans.
He could have made a similar movie to the one he did without 'selling out' by writing a standalone movie and making it clear that it wasn't part of the SW universe that the fans have, by now, via feedback to authors of novels, etc, helped shape almost as much as Lucas himself.
I don't see him as a great evil or anything. But, if I ever was a SW fan, I wouldn't be now.
Gaming is probably the place where this is least true. Carmack has spent years in perfecting a virtual world. It currently has limited forms of interaction, and is short on non-visual/audio feedback, but it's pretty good.
Now if he was to put his experience to work creating a game like Ultima Online, that would rock. All the crisp visuals and responsive controls we expect from Quake, in a persistant massively multiplayer environment.
It'd be interesting also, to be able to, in a virtual world, link the users gestures and facial expressions to their character. It wouldn't even have to look like you. But, wouldn't something like MS Comic chat be more interesting with high-poly nicely skinned avatars whose facial expressions mimicked those of the user (as seen via the camera on the computer) and whose lips matched the words they were 'saying'?
Many people might be more comfortable with the 'avatar' concept if it actually worked the way we're used to in the real world. Currently, an avatar in chat is just a picture that flashes next to your words. Big deal. But, if you were in something like a fancy lounge, with avatars that could sit down at couches, sip coffee, etc, and saw this 3d world through their eyes and had your words, either typed or spoken, said via the character...
Then instead of chat being nothing but a bunch of words scrolling down a page, you'd be able to wander around the room(s), hearing other people's words via 3d positional audio, when you were near them. You'd find interesting discussions by looking for large groups of people and listening in, or looking for people you recognize, etc.
It's not something *I* currently want, but I can see it being a killer app.
It's not legal for a warranty to forbid you opening a product with user servicable parts inside. That's why the parts are called user servicible. And that's why many products say "No user servicible parts inside." And I believe it's fraud if they say that without it being true (ie, if you can pop a fuse out with bare fingers, it's user servicible, if you have to desolder a component, it's not...)
So, you can freely pop open PCs, and remove and change parts, and your warranty won't change, except that it's only valid on the original parts, and of course they aren't liable for your mistakes.
But, if you buy a system, break the 'do not open' sticker, swap the video card for a TNT2, and a few months later the RAM dies but not because of you, the company has to replace that RAM.
Is either team using a method where they don't crack whole blocks at once, and only those blocks?
It'd get messy to crack a block of keys, and about half as many again that were scattered across the keyspace, yet happened to be helped by using information from the cracking of the primary key block. So it seems likely that both projects sacrifice the theoretical gains you could get from running the project on one big computer, by only attempting keys in a linear block.
So, the specifics of their optimizations shouldn't prevent them from saying "We use blocks of N keys long, and we'll allocate from 0xffff... down and you allocate from 0x0000... up, and we'll meet in the middle..."
If you have specifics that show otherwise, I'd love to see them.
The timelimit doesn't matter. Assuming you're crunching keys as fast as possible, you're going to go through roughly the same number at either project. If the prize is five times higher with one project, then go with the one with the most prize money.
But, you know, they really should cooperate. Share the keyspace to avoid duplication, that way at least someone will get the money. They could just say 'We get 0x0000... to 0x7f00... and you get the rest. When one of us runs out, we'll split up the remainer.'
Sort of prisoner's dilema-ish. Help your opponent a little bit, risk being cheated, to reap greater rewards if you both cooperate.
Actually, most anyone who has taken university math or comp-sci courses.
They're using text-book methods for finding a signal in background noise.
Pretty well the only special thing about SETI@Home is that they're doing it as a distributed project instead of bumming mainframe cycles from someone.
And, as far as doing code review... This is a fairly simple, if time consuming job.
Don't forget, when you open source a project you don't ask people to send you the full source with all their modification. You ask them to send you the specific modifications and a reason why each should be implemented. This means you don't have to audit a different 50 thousand line application each time it's returned, you audit 5-50 lines of patch code usually.
It's like, if they were willing to make Quake twice as fast on your computer with only a software patch, would you look the at the gift horses tonsils?
Well, you can rely on the closed sourceness of it. Assume that the malicious types are too lazy to crack the client just for a ranking number. I know I'd have to have more incentive to stare at a debugger for a while.
Or, you could open it, get people with degrees in crypto to work on securing it, and they'd probably donate their time if they felt the project was for a good reason. And then instead of any bored programmer being able to crack it, only a bored PhD with a supercomputer (or distributed project) would be able to crack it.
And if it was secured, you'd have guarantees that it couldn't be forged with N hours of computer time, etc etc. Instead you just have to assume it's hard. It could take one NOP to tell it not to call the 'Success' routine, or it could take hours of work. Nobody knows.
You deserve a few moderation points on that message. It's a great discussion of why the newest greatest format isn't always the best to use even if it has some whiz-bang feature.
I'd prefer, in these days of cheap bandwidth, a text version of the writing, and black and white scans of the book so that a future person could add the illustrations into a rich version, but the book could still be read by the lowest common denominator.
If it can't be viewed properly in lynx, we've lost a good portion of our audience.
The blind have a right to read public domain books too.
Um genius. The subject assumes 'linguisticly challenged'. If you understand the spoken language you don't require subtitles OR dubbing.
I don't know what you learn from movies. Did you learn anything from watching Terminator? Did your GPA increase when you watched Star WarS?
And how is that information transmitted? Subtly encoded in Arnie's accent as he says "Ahl Be Bahk"? Hidden in complex puns?
Neither of those is going to impact you just because the movie has subtitles instead of dubbing.
You won't understand the words, and the subtitles are a translation, and thus lose any clever wordplay that was in the native version.
Or, are 'foreign' films automatically filled with incredible wisdom because of the non-english language the actors speak?
I highly doubt that the Anime is, when subtitles, a complex treatise on the human condition, with reference to the major philosophers of our time, and when dubbed, just a violent T&A fest.
And this assumes that one wants to learn from everything on TV. Not every show is a Discovery Channel program about quantum mechanics. People do watch for entertainment you know...
And having to sit and watch the television, not relying on hearing the dialogue to fill in while you grab a soda, or type a Slashdot message, gets annoying after a while.
btw, I don't know where you get the idea that I'm American. Even assuming you meant North American, not from the USA, that's still a big stretch. English is spoken in more than just the USA and Canada you know...
I actually get more use of subtitles with english films. If I miss something, or have to mute the TV while talking on the phone, I can follow along. And for that, subtitles are useful. But, for general viewing? Hell no.
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But, why not?
With open source, the developments in one OS are available to the others. You already see where BSD and Linux are very similar in the apps they can run, and the way they run them.
If apps can become similar, why wouldn't the OSes themselves converge?
I can't see anything bad about less OSes. Having multiple OSes means having apps for each one, and uses to which one is more suited than the other...
Some OSes don't seem like viable merge candidates. The toaster doesn't need to run Linux. But, I can't see why some unix core with a nice GUI should run 99.99% of PCs.
A monopoly is only 'bad' and regulated if it stifles any possible competition yet gouges consumers.
If AT&T had put their earnings into research on how to lower long distance rates, and had consistently dropped price, nobody would have tried to break them up.
If MS had made something like BeOS, small, fast, stable, pretty, and charged $45 for it, and published the APIs, etc, nobody would hate them.
The problem is that AT&T gouged consumers and user unfair trade practices to stop competitors. Much the same as Microsoft.
Even if Linux became a virtual monopoly, with it being hard to buy a PC without Linux installed, it wouldn't matter.
A company can't demand money for their distribution, so they can't hold companies at ransom with license fees. It doesn't cost the consumer any more to have Linux preinstalled. It would be done during testing anyways, at no cost.
Linux is served by being open, accessible... APIs are published and documented because they benefit from the same network effect as everything else.
Nobody would be harmed by Linux even if it was on 99.9% of new computers. Thus, nobody cares if it becomes a monopoly. Not only is there no central company to exploit it, but GNU/Linux (the GPL is important in this) can't be leveraged this way.
The only ones who could lose are Microsoft and other companies seeking to limit information.
Jesse isn't the person I'd have picked, if I was in his state (or country for that matter), but he's a lot closer than any of the other politicians.
Even if you only judge him by how corrupt he is, he's had a lot less time to be corrupted by big money advocates. He'll have just as many biases as the next person, but until he's in office for as many years as most politicians, he won't be bought on as many issues.
It's partly because he just got into politics (well, fairly recently) and partly because he's not from a rich family that would already have a lot of these connections.
And, I also think that having been a SEAL, he's less likely to support pointless wars and military operations, knowing what it's like to risk your life for some moron politician who's just vote pandering. Finally, a politician who didn't get a cushy National Guard position, or go straight into officer school and sit behind a desk during the war.
Yes, implementation is broken, but the basic idea is sound.
Welfare should have incentives to get people back to work. One incentive would be to pay much less cash, and issue the rent money directly to landlords (in the form of a check) and crack down on landlords who split these checks with the welfare client, who doesn't actually live there.
And incentives to get a job by adding the wages to the welfare for a few months. Switching jobs is a costly process and it's often impractical to buy a bus pass, work clothes, etc, out of what's barely enough money to live on in a normal month.
I'm always disgusted at how in Canada (dunno about the USA) it's easier to apply for welfare (one form, instant check) than UI (unemployment relief) which is multiple forms, a dismissal notice from your work, and three to five weeks...
The system is insane. But, if you reward people for paying out less benefits, you can't be suprised when they complicate the system to make it harder to collect.
A lot of the problems come from rewarding the wrong behaviour.
I see no reason why a government run agency can't be as efficient as a private one, if you're allowed to be as ruthless as a corporation would in cutting out useless jobs and firing people for incompotence.
But, I don't see much happening as long as we live in a representative democracy where we have to pick the least corrupt person to 'represent' us. When electronic voting becomes possible, if used right, it could remove a lot of corruption simply by removing the politicians who hire incompotent relatives, etc.
Actually, if you're looking for a well implemented third-person view game, Heretic II from Raven Software, using the Quake 2 engine is the best I've seen.
Tomb Raider's camera shakes around too much for an action game, making it hard to see where you're going. If you're running next to a wall for instance, and turn away from the wall, your viewpoint tried to maintain a constant distance from you, can't because of the wall, and shifts off to an awkward angle. In Heretic II, the camera is linked much more tightly the direction the character looks, and it always gives a usable view, even in the middle of jumping and fighting.
But, yes, an Avatar for something like a chat room would probably shift to third person view when you're talking, and to first if you were going to navigate the world.
The Tomb Raider engine isn't much of an example of anything except the power of pixelated tits to sell an obsolete engine with a repetetive game.
I've only played three N64 games, so I'm not experienced with the platform, but I didn't much like it.
The Super Mario racing was fun. For something with about the graphic horsepower of Stunts...
But Zeld64 is what turned me off to the idea of cartridge based consoles. Euch. That game stunk.
They used a hub system which is a good indicator that they couldn't fit enough levels into it. Everything was low poly. And I mean, real low poly. The textures were, if they could be called such, flat. I think they were solid colors except for faces and such. The sound effects were marginal.
And then the fact that it had a camera system straight out of Tomb Raider...
That game could have been so much more if they'd used CDs, but their copy protection was worth more than making a good system.
Consoles are bad enough (lacking keyboards, HDs, etc) without crippling them by loading of a cartridge.
Duh, don't you know the difference? They *patented* goat urine as an additive, they've trademarked the phrase "Got Goat?"
:)
Actually, that wouldn't be a bad idea. AM radio, as many have said, transmits very well, and is easy. So we should keep it, but do we need as wide a space for it (not that AM radio is too wide, but...). Ditto with FM and TV...
Maybe space for some of AM, and a TV channel or two. Everything else would be better served, in metropolitan areas, by using copper or fiber to transmit that and freeing the airwaves for things that have to be wireless.
And with enough airspace, you could simply listen to streaming news reports via a cell-phone -> car stereo link, if you needed that. I don't think music stations, as the sole players of new music, will be around much longer with the ability to stream a custom choice of music, etc.
I see some great uses for widecasts, namely in the interior of British Columbia where I grew up, or the even less populated northern edge of the prarie provinces. But, in cities where cell phones do more good, I think we should be trying to reallocate space, move things aroung, and make more room for digital cells.
Sure, higher fidelity, but the signal degrades more easily. Does anyone use AM Stereo btw?
And, if we designed them today, we'd use compression and massive error correction, probably reducing the bandwidth both need as well as boosting the fidelity.
Sorry for the snarky tone I took.
Basically the idea is to use crypto to help us crack crypto.
Sometimes this involves using hashes to show that you've checked the data you return.
This is appropriate for 'No' results in RC5/DES/CSC type contests, where there are so many 'No' answers that if you get caught when you lie about one, you're easily turfed from the project.
This would also work in SETI@Home because there shouldn't be a certain point at which you say 'Alien here'. You'll simply returned the processed data to SETI@Home and they'll look at the results to see which look promising. Thus you don't have the option of lying just about 'Yes' answers because all answers are varying degrees of 'Maybe'.
The problem is in key-finding, where there's exactly one needle in the whole haystack, and it's really obvious if you've found it. And by the nature of the thing, the key one away is dead wrong. So it's hard to do watch for this sort of thing.
In my description, I used a simply cypher, a straight alphabetic rotation that is trivially simple. But the premise might hold.
Some forms of encryption stack in different ways. For example, if you add 6 to every letter in an alphabetic rotation, and then reencrypt it by adding 3, you haven't made it more secure because the same thing could be achieved in one pass by adding 9.
DES Encryption on the other hand isn't this trivial. If you encrypt data once, and then again with a different key, it's more secure.
This doesn't mean that this won't ever work with complex encryptions, or even that it won't work with DES, but it does seem likely it's going to be hard.
It's not like we can add a constant to the cyphertext, and the plaintext, and have the same key work. For starters, DES (and most current cyphers) aren't mathematical. They don't multiply the character, then subtract something, etc. They rotate the bits and apply various logic operations to it.
A little more detail on why we need this.
You want to ensure that a key will be returned when found. This means you need to test the loyalty of the participants, see if they return news of their sucessful decryptions.
The problem is that the cypher text remains the same each time, as does the plaintext. So if you send them a different set, they'll know something is up and can behave temporarily, until the test is over.
So it's not enough to simply encrypt the plaintext with your own key and pass that keyblock to the participant, because they'll see the cyphertext has changed and they'll know you're testing them.
Any time you change one of the hardcoded parameters you'll have this problem. There isn't any simple way around it.
What needs to be done is send a different cyphertext each time, so the participant can't just watch for the odd different one.
But, a smart participant has looked at the contest themselves, and they know what the first part of the plaintext is, as well as the cyphertext. So any time it's different from the real one, they know to watch out. And, if you did send enough different ones to mask which was the real one for someone who couldn't find out, you'd waste so much time on fake cyphertexts that you might as well not bother.
So, we need a way to change the cyphertext so that it doesn't appear to be the same as the original. We also need to be able to predict what effect our change will have on the decrypted cyphertext and on the key.
In out alphabetic rotation cypher making a change to the cyphertext and the plaintext meant the same key would work. We could also make a different change to each, -3 (D becomes A) to the cyphertext and 4 (A becomes E) to the plaintext. This means the key would be seven off by 7. Still predicatable.
We need to be able to make a change that lets us predict what effect we'll have on the key. It wouldn't do us any good to send shrouded cyphertexts and plaintexts if the work cracking them didn't help the project.
Even if the same key wouldn't work, as long as it's relationship to the real key, for the real plaintext and cyphertext was determinable, that would be enough.
For instance, if we know that by changing the cyphertext in form X, an the plaintext in form Y, changed the key in form (XY-X), we could assign the same keyblock we were going to, shifted by XY-X, so that we were doing real, useful work, even while ensuring participants couldn't cheat.
So, someone gets a the keyblock, and a new cyphertext and plaintext, and they check the keys and lo and hehold, one works. They don't know if we sent them shrouded versions of the real information, or a pair that we made up. But it's much more likely that we're testing them, so to avoid being kicked out, they are again forced to behave.
The shrouding we use doesn't even have to be that strong. All we need to do is slow them down enough that they waste more time cheat than by doing it properly, which eliminates the main reason for dishonesty, the desire to see themselves crack more blocks.
The only problem is that I don't know if it's possible for all cyphers, let alone the specifics of the method you'd use.
Hope I was more clear this time.
What people with attitudes like yours don't understand is that the massive loyalty that he had is worth more than one movie of plastic crap. He killed the goose, just to get a couple of golden eggs. Nobody will line up for months to see the next one. He's not just another so-so director who makes so-so movies.
His fan base supported him when he didn't do anything, based on the quality of his old work. If he had made a movie for them, they'd have stayed loyal, still buying the novels, collectible plastic crap, etc. But he went for the fast buck. He didn't try to make an intelligent movie with a deep plot, as well as the action adventure. He just threw in a bunch of stuff based on how well it would look in an injection mold, or painted on a plastic cup.
Deal with it.
You know, you're a jerk. You're taking out your frustrations on other people for no reason. Life isn't an Ayn Rand novel and there is no need to step all over people and act like a prick to get ahead.
If a director relies on a fan base to keep making money between movies, then he owes it to that fan base to make movies for them, not dump them after getting their money and make a movie designed purely to sell plastic crap.
He has no contract which would force him to do this, and he's not dishonest for doing what he did, but it wasn't very considerate of his fans.
He could have made a similar movie to the one he did without 'selling out' by writing a standalone movie and making it clear that it wasn't part of the SW universe that the fans have, by now, via feedback to authors of novels, etc, helped shape almost as much as Lucas himself.
I don't see him as a great evil or anything. But, if I ever was a SW fan, I wouldn't be now.
Gaming is probably the place where this is least true. Carmack has spent years in perfecting a virtual world. It currently has limited forms of interaction, and is short on non-visual/audio feedback, but it's pretty good.
Now if he was to put his experience to work creating a game like Ultima Online, that would rock. All the crisp visuals and responsive controls we expect from Quake, in a persistant massively multiplayer environment.
It'd be interesting also, to be able to, in a virtual world, link the users gestures and facial expressions to their character. It wouldn't even have to look like you. But, wouldn't something like MS Comic chat be more interesting with high-poly nicely skinned avatars whose facial expressions mimicked those of the user (as seen via the camera on the computer) and whose lips matched the words they were 'saying'?
Many people might be more comfortable with the 'avatar' concept if it actually worked the way we're used to in the real world. Currently, an avatar in chat is just a picture that flashes next to your words. Big deal. But, if you were in something like a fancy lounge, with avatars that could sit down at couches, sip coffee, etc, and saw this 3d world through their eyes and had your words, either typed or spoken, said via the character...
Then instead of chat being nothing but a bunch of words scrolling down a page, you'd be able to wander around the room(s), hearing other people's words via 3d positional audio, when you were near them. You'd find interesting discussions by looking for large groups of people and listening in, or looking for people you recognize, etc.
It's not something *I* currently want, but I can see it being a killer app.
Maybe we could use the computing power to remove spelling Nazis (and typo Nazis) from the world.
That's a future I could be proud to live in.
It's not legal for a warranty to forbid you opening a product with user servicable parts inside. That's why the parts are called user servicible. And that's why many products say "No user servicible parts inside." And I believe it's fraud if they say that without it being true (ie, if you can pop a fuse out with bare fingers, it's user servicible, if you have to desolder a component, it's not...)
So, you can freely pop open PCs, and remove and change parts, and your warranty won't change, except that it's only valid on the original parts, and of course they aren't liable for your mistakes.
But, if you buy a system, break the 'do not open' sticker, swap the video card for a TNT2, and a few months later the RAM dies but not because of you, the company has to replace that RAM.
Is either team using a method where they don't crack whole blocks at once, and only those blocks?
It'd get messy to crack a block of keys, and about half as many again that were scattered across the keyspace, yet happened to be helped by using information from the cracking of the primary key block. So it seems likely that both projects sacrifice the theoretical gains you could get from running the project on one big computer, by only attempting keys in a linear block.
So, the specifics of their optimizations shouldn't prevent them from saying "We use blocks of N keys long, and we'll allocate from 0xffff... down and you allocate from 0x0000... up, and we'll meet in the middle..."
If you have specifics that show otherwise, I'd love to see them.
The timelimit doesn't matter. Assuming you're crunching keys as fast as possible, you're going to go through roughly the same number at either project. If the prize is five times higher with one project, then go with the one with the most prize money.
But, you know, they really should cooperate. Share the keyspace to avoid duplication, that way at least someone will get the money. They could just say 'We get 0x0000... to 0x7f00... and you get the rest. When one of us runs out, we'll split up the remainer.'
Sort of prisoner's dilema-ish. Help your opponent a little bit, risk being cheated, to reap greater rewards if you both cooperate.
Actually, most anyone who has taken university math or comp-sci courses.
They're using text-book methods for finding a signal in background noise.
Pretty well the only special thing about SETI@Home is that they're doing it as a distributed project instead of bumming mainframe cycles from someone.
And, as far as doing code review... This is a fairly simple, if time consuming job.
Don't forget, when you open source a project you don't ask people to send you the full source with all their modification. You ask them to send you the specific modifications and a reason why each should be implemented. This means you don't have to audit a different 50 thousand line application each time it's returned, you audit 5-50 lines of patch code usually.
Who cares why?
It's like, if they were willing to make Quake twice as fast on your computer with only a software patch, would you look the at the gift horses tonsils?
Thanks for the comment. I've talked with d.net about this and they've asked me to wait, but said they would like to work on this eventually.
I'll check my mail and talk to you there.
Well, you can rely on the closed sourceness of it. Assume that the malicious types are too lazy to crack the client just for a ranking number. I know I'd have to have more incentive to stare at a debugger for a while.
Or, you could open it, get people with degrees in crypto to work on securing it, and they'd probably donate their time if they felt the project was for a good reason. And then instead of any bored programmer being able to crack it, only a bored PhD with a supercomputer (or distributed project) would be able to crack it.
And if it was secured, you'd have guarantees that it couldn't be forged with N hours of computer time, etc etc. Instead you just have to assume it's hard. It could take one NOP to tell it not to call the 'Success' routine, or it could take hours of work. Nobody knows.
You deserve a few moderation points on that message. It's a great discussion of why the newest greatest format isn't always the best to use even if it has some whiz-bang feature.
I'd prefer, in these days of cheap bandwidth, a text version of the writing, and black and white scans of the book so that a future person could add the illustrations into a rich version, but the book could still be read by the lowest common denominator.
If it can't be viewed properly in lynx, we've lost a good portion of our audience.
The blind have a right to read public domain books too.
Um genius. The subject assumes 'linguisticly challenged'. If you understand the spoken language you don't require subtitles OR dubbing.
I don't know what you learn from movies. Did you learn anything from watching Terminator? Did your GPA increase when you watched Star WarS?
And how is that information transmitted? Subtly encoded in Arnie's accent as he says "Ahl Be Bahk"? Hidden in complex puns?
Neither of those is going to impact you just because the movie has subtitles instead of dubbing.
You won't understand the words, and the subtitles are a translation, and thus lose any clever wordplay that was in the native version.
Or, are 'foreign' films automatically filled with incredible wisdom because of the non-english language the actors speak?
I highly doubt that the Anime is, when subtitles, a complex treatise on the human condition, with reference to the major philosophers of our time, and when dubbed, just a violent T&A fest.
And this assumes that one wants to learn from everything on TV. Not every show is a Discovery Channel program about quantum mechanics. People do watch for entertainment you know...
And having to sit and watch the television, not relying on hearing the dialogue to fill in while you grab a soda, or type a Slashdot message, gets annoying after a while.
btw, I don't know where you get the idea that I'm American. Even assuming you meant North American, not from the USA, that's still a big stretch. English is spoken in more than just the USA and Canada you know...
I actually get more use of subtitles with english films. If I miss something, or have to mute the TV while talking on the phone, I can follow along. And for that, subtitles are useful. But, for general viewing? Hell no.
You'd rather that there be a false sense of security.
The clients have been reverse engineered, and unscrupulous people have already done that.
Wow, it's a good thing that binaries can never be cracked. Otherwise someone unscrupulous could be faking results even now. [/SARCASM]