Just looking at the quality of much Linux code and the vast variety of features implemented therein will tell you that this ain't some system thrown together by some idiots who still live with their parents.
Linux has grown up and had done so many years before most people who know about it now even knew that it existed. This is similar to how the Internet and email existed for decades before the general public knew anything about it.
Now, many companies, and even government organizations, have their hands in Linux because it provides real advantages over other systems.
The myth discussed in this article is really intended for a bunch of PHBs and people who aren't that technically inclined, who believe that Linux is a toy used by rogue hackers to break into peoples' Windoze boxes and steal their social security numbers... The kind of PHBs who wrote a book I recently read. Linux was mentioned only once, and that sentence stated something to the effect that, "Linux, a free software program available in the public domain..." Yeah. Even programmers know what the public domain is better than whatever PHB wrote that disgusting phrase.
Heh, why not also analyze traffic patterns and see exactly which roads get crowded and when, and by doing this over a period of several years, find patterns related to various things, like which day of the week it is, what time it is, what holidays are going on in various parts of the social, political, and religious world, and other such things. Then, combine all this information into a computer program that allows drivers to pick the best possible route for their drive, and continue adding realtime information from the satellite into the system on a daily basis. Cool.
I was just thinking how Microsoft could reduce the complexity of the next version of Windows, Longtooth, due in 2009.
Longtooth will include a tremendous amount of new features implemented in completely new code. Many, but not all, existing features would be reimplemented in VisualBasic.NET just for the heck of it, even if mature versions are already implemented in C or C++. Programmers making the new VisualBasic.NET code would not be allowed to look at the code that already exists, so that new ideas might be better implemented. The features will be chosen by random for reimplementation.
All Microsoft code would assume that any Microsoft code (the OS and any Microsoft applications) is secure. This code will always execute with no checks to make it run faster. All other code will be subject to Longtooth's new security system, dubbed Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003. This feature will give users more control over processes that execute in their computers. I will explain some of its features here:
To maximize security, Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003 will make certain assumptions about the user. For example, users who use Microsoft products are assumed to know what they are doing. However, users of 3rd party applications not made by Microsoft are always assumed to be complete idiots. Therefore, all user interface events occurring outside of Microsoft applications will trigger a safety mechanism.
For example, each time the user moves the mouse in an area not controlled by a Microsoft application, the user will see crosshairs moving across the screen to indicate where the mouse will be located. When the user stops moving the mouse, an authentication window will appear and state: "The user has requested that the mouse be moved to the location on the screen indicated by the crosshairs. This area of the screen is controlled by untrusted code that may cause damage to your computer, your documents, or your network. Do you wish to allow the mouse to move to this location?" Buttons for "yes", "no", "details", and "help" will be displayed.
Selecting "no" will cause the mouse cursor to remain at its previous location. Selecting "yes" will bring up another window, requesting the user's password to authenticate the movement of the mouse. If the user enters the correct password, the mouse cursor movement will be authenticated to that user and the cursor will be placed at the new location. Selecting "details" will display the X and Y coordinates of the new position, followed by warnings against using untrusted rogue code such as Linux.
For additional protection, clicks, keys pressed on the keyboard, items selected in a menu, or other input events will trigger similar security mechanisms. Since Microsoft code is considered secure, these checks will not occur in windows owned by Microsoft code. Also, the mouse may be used to click on the above buttons and fields during mouse movement authentication. If any such movement of the mouse takes place during the authentication process, the mouse will still be moved to the location indicated by the crosshairs, but a bug in Windows will cause the cursor to immediately "bounce" back to the location where it was last used during authentication. Microsoft will refuse to fix the bug unless Linux is outlawed in all countries, even those countries that have no computers.
Many other authentication checks will be made by Windows. I'll return to this topic in a moment. First, let me mention that Clippy, the talking paperclip, along with other Microsoft characters, will appear during this process to help the user make an informed decision. If the user is totally unsure, Clippy will provide several options to make a random choice. One option is to flip a virtual coin, which will come with cool animations and sounds. For additional fun, the user will even be able to choose from over 100 different contemporary and historical coins. Microsoft is also said to include an optional full-screen animation with cool 3D effects, which can be used
In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life.
We all know that the real origin of life, the universe, and everything is that God sneezed an enormous sneeze and the universe is the resulting snot that emerged from God's nose. Since a few seconds to God are trillions and trillions of millenia for us, we can expect, some several trillion years into the future, the great white handkerchief. In the meantime, we're all down here fighting and quarreling about the origins of life.
I'm glad this thing is available again. A couple of years ago, I really wanted to get one, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I ended up buying a Sony Clie, but I don't really like the OS and the software. Besides the coolness factor, I would like to hack on this thing and come up with specific business solutions for one of my manufacturing customers who expressed interest in such things a few years ago.
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I think a new digital signing algorithm needs to be invented that has a public key and multiple private keys.
However, these private keys would not be usable by themselves: You would need several, but not all, of the private key holders to put their keys together in order to sign something. The algorithm would somehow need to account for the number of private keys and how many of them are needed to enable a working signing operation.
So, for example, your loosely-knit organization that is dispersed all around the world might have ten different people who have these separate private keys. Suppose you decide that eight out of the ten people needs to include his portion in order for a signature to take place.
Such an algorithm would not necessarily be too difficult to create. Suppose you take the "normal" private/public key scheme and change it so that multiple private keys are created, each of which contains a portion of the complete private key. How much of the complete private key would depend on how many people need to sign; that is, the policy made up at the time the keys are created. The difficult part is making sure the algorithm remains one-way, and that no private key holder can deduce or compute the keys of the other private key holders.
Also, a software apparatus would need to be made which allows for distributed signing of a message without making the private key holders divulge their keys to each other. I'm a bit mixed on how this should be done.
Now suppose that something happens to one of the private key holders; the organization could decide to cancel those keys and generate new ones.
Here's a way to make some quick cash. Make up a fake theory that purports to explain how to find water on Mars. Publish only an abstract. Then, build a Mars rover with room inside for all kinds of special sensing equipment. At the last minute, just before it's launched, when nobody is looking, remove some of the sensing equipment and put a bottle of water in there. Once on Mars, the thing would drive up on the first day, spill the water on the ground, and take a picture, proving there is water on Mars. With proof that water can be found extremely quickly on Mars, offer to sell the complete written theory on how to do such a thing at a small price of only $100 Billion. When someone pays the money, they'll receive a one-page document explaining exactly what I explained above. Before they manage to file papers in court to sue for their money back, you'll already have bought an island somewhere in the pacific and put together a capable military with an army, navy, and air force.
Oh, and I forgot one thing... You'll have to find the money to send that thing to Mars, first.
Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?
You forget that most of the code to Slashdot is free software. If that ever happened on Slashdot, it will take about ten minutes for a new site called Slashpoint or something to pop up.
In the free software community, garbage like this will simply not be tolerated. Behold what happened to XFree86 when they thought they were too smart.
If the ACLU is against this, then I am for it! Look, it's a good idea to have different opposing viewpoints. How else are our young going to learn to choose what they believe is best? Truth is, this evolutionary theory, which you can claim has "time and time again" explained everything there is to know, is flawed. There are many holes and unexplained elements in this theory. Personally, I believe that evolution can and does exist, but as a component in a much more complex system created by (are you ready for this?) GOD! There is nothing wrong with teaching kids that: Some people think this; Some people think that; Some people think a combination of the two; You make up your own mind.
Oh yeah, and if you're in the United States and you get horrified when "church and state" get mixed, here's a pop quiz for you: Which amendment states: "The separation of church and state shall not be abridged." I bet nobody on Slashdot will be able to figure this one out.
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Answer: The first amendment is not the answer. It reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Note that Congress, not public schools, is the entity mentioned in this amendment. Also note that the rule is: no law respecting blah blah blah or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. So don't tell me that's what the almighty Constitition states, because it doesn't.
I'm a bit puzzled by this statement as the entire Star Trek series (except for Enterprise) has been released on DVD, TOS included. Even Enterprise has a few seasons out on DVD already.
Ooops... Either I've been living under a rock for a while or Paramount just isn't doing a very good job promoting products like this. TOS and TNG are enough for me... No need for the later series.:-)
Actually, I'm waiting for the original Mission Impossible and the new Mission Impossible series to get released on DVD. When that happens, price will not be taken into consideration!
You must have boatloads upon boatloads of bandwidth to be able to post something like that right on the front page of Slashdot.
I'll wait a few hours before hitting that link, but man, I wish there were a textual transcript of the same, because that would be easier to analyze, quote, and reference.
I reject the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA. In fact, the U.S. rejects my rejection of the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA, but that doesn't matter, because Canada rejects the U.S.'s rejection of my rejection of the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA.
And what's to stop me from strolling right in there and telling them that I'm from the future? After all, if I know about it and I go there, I'll be there when it takes place.
That's right... I'll tell them all about what the future is like... The United States has 85 states with the addition of Cuba following Castro's death, Mexico's 33 states following the Mexican Purchase, and Puerto Rico's conversion into a state.
The neverending mid-east tensions have been reduced with the joint purchase of Egypt's Sinai, which was split into two and given to Israel and the Palestinians so each have their own state. The economy of most Middle Eastern countries had all but collapsed following a major shift from oil to other forms of energy with simultaneous drilling in Alaska and increased oil production in Latin America, so after being bailed out by the United States, these countries now mass-produce superconductors for efficient delivery of electricity.
All highways are buried underground in tunnels to clean up the clutter in cities; In many areas, there are several levels of these highways. Nobody drives anymore; cars are driven by computer at speeds in excess of 150 miles per hour. A drive from Los Angeles to San Diego during rush hour takes roughly 30 minutes.
Microsoft? They make business software such as CRM, ERP, etc., but no operating systems, office suites, games, or other stuff. Had to sell it all because the alternatives kicked their ass. Longtooth was a big disappointment in light of huge advances made in Linux and the Mac.
There are two large cities on the moon, mostly used for production of cheap energy and medical drugs. There is an effort in place to build over 100 cities on Mars after discovery of large gold caches, Martian diamonds, silicon, and other materials needed for industrial and consumer use.
Chances are, they won't believe me, but I could bring pictures. Yes, I am actually from the future, but while here on a business trip (you know, dumping my stock in Microsoft and buying up tons of General Motors stock), I met the love of my life and had to move over here permanently.
SYSV.. bah. BSD-style is the way to go.
on
Does launchd Beat cron?
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I thought this was a replacement for the big messy SYSV-style init scripts.
Speaking of which, back in about 1995, I think it was, I installed my first Linux distro that I actually used on a daily basis. It was an early version of SuSE linux. Anyway, as I scratched deeper and deeper under the surface, I came to the conclusion that the init system was a mess... the entire system's functionality was implemented as piles upon piles of shell scripts, organized neatly into a whole bunch of directories, and activated according to their name and whatnot. This seemed kind of dumb, actually, because it meant that startup, shutdown, and switching runmodes were a lot less efficient than necessary, and also because you'd have to search through a zillion (that's a big number) scripts to find what you need.
A few years later, in 1999 or so, I tried FreeBSD for the first time. (Here it comes, I'm gonna be modded troll for starting another BSD- vs. SYSV-style init script war...) There, the functionality is still implemented in scripts, but there was a much more sane system. There is one script that is the same across all FreeBSD installs of that version. Then, there's the script you get to customize if you want. There's one more file, and that's where you simply give yes or no answers, or provide other data, in the form of environment variables that influence the running of those two scripts. It's so simple, and works quite quickly. Also, since you really only mess with one file, and two if you modify the script, it's much easier to find where things are. It's more efficient, from many standpoints.
So I don't blame Apple for getting rid of that SYSV stuff. It might have been cool back in the day, but it has lost its luster.
Who the fuck keeps moderating reasonable posts as "Troll" today?
You would think that someone would need a lot of points to do that, wouldn't you?
I wonder if the metamoderation system actually changes the score if someone clicks "unfair"... In other words, suppose I have 50% funny, 50% troll, and someone metamods the troll mod as unfair; what happens? Does the original troll modder get mod points less often?
I just love the foresight that goes into these things. Haven't people learned yet? This is getting ridiculous. Next thing you know, Adobe will release a program that offers 100% secure and unbreakable encryption. The program will work by placing all your secrets in a PDF file, with white text on a white background. Then, someone (let's for discussion purposes say that his name is something random, like Sklyarov or something like that) will point out that all you have to do is copy and paste. That person will be arrested and held in prison for a few years, before they release him with a "sorry dude." Of course, Adobe will receive no blame for this whatsoever.
I would say that it's not too wise to get random digits from pi anyway, because it's too obvious a source. It's also not too difficult, what with storage and whatnot nowadays, to store about ten billion digits and then, knowing a few digits in the sequence, perform a quick pattern match, find it in pi, and know the next digit in the sequence.
I was wondering, maybe not more than an hour ago, why not get a TV card and gather randomness from there? There are lots of channels on TV, and they have both a video and an audio component. You could set the thing up to change channels at random intervals, and gather things like the color of random pixels at random times, the frequency of random sounds, etc. Perhaps you could use a radio card to do something very similar with the radio. That, combined with entropy from the keyboard, mouse, the time between interrupts of various kinds, the contents of various processor registers or random memory locations, or whatever, should provide basically a random pool that is so random, you'll never have to worry about security problems with relation to them.
Speaking of which, there are ten digits used in our radix 10 notation; if you want to store a character string in a strange format, you could conceivably store two digits in one byte, because four bits are enough to describe all ten digits, leaving plenty of room for things like a decimal point or a negative sign. I'm saying this because it's not too terribly expensive these days to get a terabyte of storage. If you store, on this terabyte, nothing but digits from pi, in this space-saving format I'm describing, you could store 2,417,851,639,229,258,349,412,352 digits from pi. You'd need some kind of cluster, like PI@home, to compute all those digits. Once computed, who said you can't use pattern-matching algorithms to see if there isn't some kind of pattern? I still believe that somewhere in there, there is a pattern, though it is very large. Hell, who said you can't get an exabyte of storage and do this? If anything, it could become one component in a random number generator that simply never repeats itself.
This is the problem as I see it. I loved TOS. I loved TNG.
Then, DS9 came out. The first few episodes were interesting, because it was a "different" kind of Star Trek, but taking place in the same time period as TNG. Unfortunately, there were only a few really innovative episodes. DS9 got old fast because it degenerated into a political show based in a science fiction environment, but with hardly any good wholesome science fiction. Seemingly, every episode was about some political problem with the Cardassians and how it was going to be solved with various political maneuvering. If I had wanted to watch politics, I could have switch to Fox News and seen it there. Those politics get me worked up enough; why should I get any more worked up over nonexistant politics in a nonexistant place, with nonexistant people?
Nearly all TOS and TNG episodes had this interesting quality that no show was about one specific thing. In other words, there was always some overall plot, and then there were other things happening concurrently that complicated things. This was good because the overall plot was usually solved by pushing some button or reprogramming the scanner array or something, but the other things made the episode interesting and thought provoking. DS9 episodes didn't have that quality. There was usually just one thing going on, and personally, it didn't provoke any thought.
When Voyager came out, it once again seemed interesting. Here was yet another show taking place in about the same time period as TNG. Unfortunately, it quickly became quite boring as well. Here they are, 70 years from home, assuming they travel nonstop at maximum warp speed, right? How come everybody there speaks English? Am I supposed to believe that some universal translator exists that can immediately translate languages it never heard? Even the Klingons had their own language, for crying out loud, and they were much closer to home! Then, the question arised of why in the heck they would make so many stops if it will take so long to get home anyway? At this rate, they'll get there in 140 years! Once again, most episodes lacked that quality present in TOS and TNG episodes. It quickly lost its luster.
When Enterprise came out, I only saw the first episode, and I came to the conclusion that I just didn't care anymore. It didn't seem right for some reason. I had grown to know Star Trek as being a show with Kirk's crew or with Picard's crew. Those crews gave the shows some kind of feeling that all these other crews just tried to hard to mimic.
I hope they release a DVD boxed set of all TOS and TNG episodes; I'd buy it in a minute.
TOS = The Original Series TNG = The Next Generation DS9 = Deep Space Nine
I was excited when I first heard of SVG because bandwidth was much more limited back in those days. What did I have, a 56k modem that took forever to load up all but the simplest web pages? The idea that a simple text file could generate beautiful vector graphics was an indication that the web as a whole was about to change into a much richer environment.
Sadly, SVG really wasn't adopted. I hope that its inclusion in Opera and Firefox will change all of that, because many websites that currently use images for a lot of their content could make things look better and take up less space with things like CSS2 and SVG.
Saving bandwidth is still important in these days of broadband and whatnot, because the more you cut down the amount of unnecessary stuff zapping across the 'net, the more cool stuff that really requires the bandwidth (like movies, music, and all that stuff "they've" been promising us since the 80's with "convergence") will be able to get through.
Combine the powerful client-stuff you can do with all these standards with server-side dynamic generation and you end up with a system that should be able to display any type of content with no problem.
They only missed their quarterly projection by 1%. They brought in 9.6 billion dollars. Revenue is up by 5%. People are still obviously buying MS products in droves.
Did you have to shatter all of my hopes and dreams in one fell swoop?:-)
This is either a knee-jerk reaction to their missed projections for the quarter, or this is an April Fool's joke 29 days late. Well, it goes right in line with what I posted in another story about Microsoft:
It's not a surprise at all that Microsoft missed their quarterly revenue projection. After all, the company is very accustomed to basically controlling the marketplace and dictating their terms upon their customers. The quarterly projections must have accounted for nearly everybody still using prior versions of Windows to be using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. They expected tons of sales of the newest Microsoft Office. However, many sysadmins and IT departments are wary of further "upgrades" due to the problems posed by them. Many users who have Office 2000 continue to use it because newer versions, despite their glossy advertisements, really offer nothing new for this type of work. Other users, such as most employees at this company that used to use MS Office, are discovering OpenOffice.org and discovering, for various reasons, that they actually like it better. Essentially, many companies are slowly migrating away from Windows and Office, finding that other software out there is quite capable of doing the job without all the hoopla.
In our organization, spending on software has declined almost to nothing. We no longer buy MS Office products because OpenOffice.org has eliminated the need to do so; all of our critical infrastructure runs on Linux and FreeBSD; and the desktops and workstations that run Windows continue to run the same versions of Windows that originally came on those workstations. Therefore, we use Windows 98, Me, and XP Personal, which came on several eMachines we bought for office use. And the funniest thing is that while the Linux and FreeBSD boxes continue to use the latest stable and release versions of the OS and software, the Windows boxes have not been upgraded, and there are no plans to do so. It would only be costly, and would offer us nothing in exchange. And I believe the same applies to countless organizations the world over. People will simply not continue to upgrade hardware and software forever.
That, my friends, is why Microsoft missed its quarterly revenue projection.
I'd say that pretty much sums it up. Microsoft has finally realized, after I don't know how many years, that it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits.
Who said VMware would run on Windows? I would run it on Linux. In fact, what I forgot to mention is that I'd like to try running that on a blade server in the locked, protected server room, put Linux on the actual workstations, and let them use Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and whatever other "replacement" software I can find, on the computer natively; VMware would not physically run on the same computer, but though the built-in networking capabilities of X, I'd display it through gigabit ethernet. This might be fast enough to run those programs that keep us stuck with Windows. Retail, this would cost about half of your figure, and if it worked, we could use the desktop computers until they literally blow up, and then replace them with any $300 box that can run Linux. Or even Macs, if we want to make the office look cool...
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Linux has grown up and had done so many years before most people who know about it now even knew that it existed. This is similar to how the Internet and email existed for decades before the general public knew anything about it.
Now, many companies, and even government organizations, have their hands in Linux because it provides real advantages over other systems.
The myth discussed in this article is really intended for a bunch of PHBs and people who aren't that technically inclined, who believe that Linux is a toy used by rogue hackers to break into peoples' Windoze boxes and steal their social security numbers... The kind of PHBs who wrote a book I recently read. Linux was mentioned only once, and that sentence stated something to the effect that, "Linux, a free software program available in the public domain..." Yeah. Even programmers know what the public domain is better than whatever PHB wrote that disgusting phrase.
Heh, why not also analyze traffic patterns and see exactly which roads get crowded and when, and by doing this over a period of several years, find patterns related to various things, like which day of the week it is, what time it is, what holidays are going on in various parts of the social, political, and religious world, and other such things. Then, combine all this information into a computer program that allows drivers to pick the best possible route for their drive, and continue adding realtime information from the satellite into the system on a daily basis. Cool.
Longtooth will include a tremendous amount of new features implemented in completely new code. Many, but not all, existing features would be reimplemented in VisualBasic.NET just for the heck of it, even if mature versions are already implemented in C or C++. Programmers making the new VisualBasic.NET code would not be allowed to look at the code that already exists, so that new ideas might be better implemented. The features will be chosen by random for reimplementation.
All Microsoft code would assume that any Microsoft code (the OS and any Microsoft applications) is secure. This code will always execute with no checks to make it run faster. All other code will be subject to Longtooth's new security system, dubbed Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003. This feature will give users more control over processes that execute in their computers. I will explain some of its features here:
To maximize security, Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003 will make certain assumptions about the user. For example, users who use Microsoft products are assumed to know what they are doing. However, users of 3rd party applications not made by Microsoft are always assumed to be complete idiots. Therefore, all user interface events occurring outside of Microsoft applications will trigger a safety mechanism.
For example, each time the user moves the mouse in an area not controlled by a Microsoft application, the user will see crosshairs moving across the screen to indicate where the mouse will be located. When the user stops moving the mouse, an authentication window will appear and state: "The user has requested that the mouse be moved to the location on the screen indicated by the crosshairs. This area of the screen is controlled by untrusted code that may cause damage to your computer, your documents, or your network. Do you wish to allow the mouse to move to this location?" Buttons for "yes", "no", "details", and "help" will be displayed.
Selecting "no" will cause the mouse cursor to remain at its previous location. Selecting "yes" will bring up another window, requesting the user's password to authenticate the movement of the mouse. If the user enters the correct password, the mouse cursor movement will be authenticated to that user and the cursor will be placed at the new location. Selecting "details" will display the X and Y coordinates of the new position, followed by warnings against using untrusted rogue code such as Linux.
For additional protection, clicks, keys pressed on the keyboard, items selected in a menu, or other input events will trigger similar security mechanisms. Since Microsoft code is considered secure, these checks will not occur in windows owned by Microsoft code. Also, the mouse may be used to click on the above buttons and fields during mouse movement authentication. If any such movement of the mouse takes place during the authentication process, the mouse will still be moved to the location indicated by the crosshairs, but a bug in Windows will cause the cursor to immediately "bounce" back to the location where it was last used during authentication. Microsoft will refuse to fix the bug unless Linux is outlawed in all countries, even those countries that have no computers.
Many other authentication checks will be made by Windows. I'll return to this topic in a moment. First, let me mention that Clippy, the talking paperclip, along with other Microsoft characters, will appear during this process to help the user make an informed decision. If the user is totally unsure, Clippy will provide several options to make a random choice. One option is to flip a virtual coin, which will come with cool animations and sounds. For additional fun, the user will even be able to choose from over 100 different contemporary and historical coins. Microsoft is also said to include an optional full-screen animation with cool 3D effects, which can be used
We all know that the real origin of life, the universe, and everything is that God sneezed an enormous sneeze and the universe is the resulting snot that emerged from God's nose. Since a few seconds to God are trillions and trillions of millenia for us, we can expect, some several trillion years into the future, the great white handkerchief. In the meantime, we're all down here fighting and quarreling about the origins of life.
Bless you, God.
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However, these private keys would not be usable by themselves: You would need several, but not all, of the private key holders to put their keys together in order to sign something. The algorithm would somehow need to account for the number of private keys and how many of them are needed to enable a working signing operation.
So, for example, your loosely-knit organization that is dispersed all around the world might have ten different people who have these separate private keys. Suppose you decide that eight out of the ten people needs to include his portion in order for a signature to take place.
Such an algorithm would not necessarily be too difficult to create. Suppose you take the "normal" private/public key scheme and change it so that multiple private keys are created, each of which contains a portion of the complete private key. How much of the complete private key would depend on how many people need to sign; that is, the policy made up at the time the keys are created. The difficult part is making sure the algorithm remains one-way, and that no private key holder can deduce or compute the keys of the other private key holders.
Also, a software apparatus would need to be made which allows for distributed signing of a message without making the private key holders divulge their keys to each other. I'm a bit mixed on how this should be done.
Now suppose that something happens to one of the private key holders; the organization could decide to cancel those keys and generate new ones.
Oh, and I forgot one thing... You'll have to find the money to send that thing to Mars, first.
No, and no. Four questions left.
But I've only asked five questions so far!
Is this a business plot? Is it a ploy to make some quick cash? Those are separate questions.
Oh, wait... that still might happen. :-)
It's no matter, though. Since it can easily be proved that free software sells at various prices, this argument is a big crock of bullfeces.
You forget that most of the code to Slashdot is free software. If that ever happened on Slashdot, it will take about ten minutes for a new site called Slashpoint or something to pop up.
In the free software community, garbage like this will simply not be tolerated. Behold what happened to XFree86 when they thought they were too smart.
Oh yeah, and if you're in the United States and you get horrified when "church and state" get mixed, here's a pop quiz for you: Which amendment states: "The separation of church and state shall not be abridged." I bet nobody on Slashdot will be able to figure this one out.
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Answer: The first amendment is not the answer. It reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Note that Congress, not public schools, is the entity mentioned in this amendment. Also note that the rule is: no law respecting blah blah blah or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. So don't tell me that's what the almighty Constitition states, because it doesn't.
Ooops... Either I've been living under a rock for a while or Paramount just isn't doing a very good job promoting products like this. TOS and TNG are enough for me... No need for the later series. :-)
Actually, I'm waiting for the original Mission Impossible and the new Mission Impossible series to get released on DVD. When that happens, price will not be taken into consideration!
I'll wait a few hours before hitting that link, but man, I wish there were a textual transcript of the same, because that would be easier to analyze, quote, and reference.
I reject the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA. In fact, the U.S. rejects my rejection of the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA, but that doesn't matter, because Canada rejects the U.S.'s rejection of my rejection of the U.S.'s rejection of Canada's rejection of the DMCA.
That's right... I'll tell them all about what the future is like... The United States has 85 states with the addition of Cuba following Castro's death, Mexico's 33 states following the Mexican Purchase, and Puerto Rico's conversion into a state.
The neverending mid-east tensions have been reduced with the joint purchase of Egypt's Sinai, which was split into two and given to Israel and the Palestinians so each have their own state. The economy of most Middle Eastern countries had all but collapsed following a major shift from oil to other forms of energy with simultaneous drilling in Alaska and increased oil production in Latin America, so after being bailed out by the United States, these countries now mass-produce superconductors for efficient delivery of electricity.
All highways are buried underground in tunnels to clean up the clutter in cities; In many areas, there are several levels of these highways. Nobody drives anymore; cars are driven by computer at speeds in excess of 150 miles per hour. A drive from Los Angeles to San Diego during rush hour takes roughly 30 minutes.
Microsoft? They make business software such as CRM, ERP, etc., but no operating systems, office suites, games, or other stuff. Had to sell it all because the alternatives kicked their ass. Longtooth was a big disappointment in light of huge advances made in Linux and the Mac.
There are two large cities on the moon, mostly used for production of cheap energy and medical drugs. There is an effort in place to build over 100 cities on Mars after discovery of large gold caches, Martian diamonds, silicon, and other materials needed for industrial and consumer use.
Chances are, they won't believe me, but I could bring pictures. Yes, I am actually from the future, but while here on a business trip (you know, dumping my stock in Microsoft and buying up tons of General Motors stock), I met the love of my life and had to move over here permanently.
Speaking of which, back in about 1995, I think it was, I installed my first Linux distro that I actually used on a daily basis. It was an early version of SuSE linux. Anyway, as I scratched deeper and deeper under the surface, I came to the conclusion that the init system was a mess... the entire system's functionality was implemented as piles upon piles of shell scripts, organized neatly into a whole bunch of directories, and activated according to their name and whatnot. This seemed kind of dumb, actually, because it meant that startup, shutdown, and switching runmodes were a lot less efficient than necessary, and also because you'd have to search through a zillion (that's a big number) scripts to find what you need.
A few years later, in 1999 or so, I tried FreeBSD for the first time. (Here it comes, I'm gonna be modded troll for starting another BSD- vs. SYSV-style init script war...) There, the functionality is still implemented in scripts, but there was a much more sane system. There is one script that is the same across all FreeBSD installs of that version. Then, there's the script you get to customize if you want. There's one more file, and that's where you simply give yes or no answers, or provide other data, in the form of environment variables that influence the running of those two scripts. It's so simple, and works quite quickly. Also, since you really only mess with one file, and two if you modify the script, it's much easier to find where things are. It's more efficient, from many standpoints.
So I don't blame Apple for getting rid of that SYSV stuff. It might have been cool back in the day, but it has lost its luster.
You would think that someone would need a lot of points to do that, wouldn't you?
I wonder if the metamoderation system actually changes the score if someone clicks "unfair"... In other words, suppose I have 50% funny, 50% troll, and someone metamods the troll mod as unfair; what happens? Does the original troll modder get mod points less often?
I just love the foresight that goes into these things. Haven't people learned yet? This is getting ridiculous. Next thing you know, Adobe will release a program that offers 100% secure and unbreakable encryption. The program will work by placing all your secrets in a PDF file, with white text on a white background. Then, someone (let's for discussion purposes say that his name is something random, like Sklyarov or something like that) will point out that all you have to do is copy and paste. That person will be arrested and held in prison for a few years, before they release him with a "sorry dude." Of course, Adobe will receive no blame for this whatsoever.
I was wondering, maybe not more than an hour ago, why not get a TV card and gather randomness from there? There are lots of channels on TV, and they have both a video and an audio component. You could set the thing up to change channels at random intervals, and gather things like the color of random pixels at random times, the frequency of random sounds, etc. Perhaps you could use a radio card to do something very similar with the radio. That, combined with entropy from the keyboard, mouse, the time between interrupts of various kinds, the contents of various processor registers or random memory locations, or whatever, should provide basically a random pool that is so random, you'll never have to worry about security problems with relation to them.
Speaking of which, there are ten digits used in our radix 10 notation; if you want to store a character string in a strange format, you could conceivably store two digits in one byte, because four bits are enough to describe all ten digits, leaving plenty of room for things like a decimal point or a negative sign. I'm saying this because it's not too terribly expensive these days to get a terabyte of storage. If you store, on this terabyte, nothing but digits from pi, in this space-saving format I'm describing, you could store 2,417,851,639,229,258,349,412,352 digits from pi. You'd need some kind of cluster, like PI@home, to compute all those digits. Once computed, who said you can't use pattern-matching algorithms to see if there isn't some kind of pattern? I still believe that somewhere in there, there is a pattern, though it is very large. Hell, who said you can't get an exabyte of storage and do this? If anything, it could become one component in a random number generator that simply never repeats itself.
Then, DS9 came out. The first few episodes were interesting, because it was a "different" kind of Star Trek, but taking place in the same time period as TNG. Unfortunately, there were only a few really innovative episodes. DS9 got old fast because it degenerated into a political show based in a science fiction environment, but with hardly any good wholesome science fiction. Seemingly, every episode was about some political problem with the Cardassians and how it was going to be solved with various political maneuvering. If I had wanted to watch politics, I could have switch to Fox News and seen it there. Those politics get me worked up enough; why should I get any more worked up over nonexistant politics in a nonexistant place, with nonexistant people?
Nearly all TOS and TNG episodes had this interesting quality that no show was about one specific thing. In other words, there was always some overall plot, and then there were other things happening concurrently that complicated things. This was good because the overall plot was usually solved by pushing some button or reprogramming the scanner array or something, but the other things made the episode interesting and thought provoking. DS9 episodes didn't have that quality. There was usually just one thing going on, and personally, it didn't provoke any thought.
When Voyager came out, it once again seemed interesting. Here was yet another show taking place in about the same time period as TNG. Unfortunately, it quickly became quite boring as well. Here they are, 70 years from home, assuming they travel nonstop at maximum warp speed, right? How come everybody there speaks English? Am I supposed to believe that some universal translator exists that can immediately translate languages it never heard? Even the Klingons had their own language, for crying out loud, and they were much closer to home! Then, the question arised of why in the heck they would make so many stops if it will take so long to get home anyway? At this rate, they'll get there in 140 years! Once again, most episodes lacked that quality present in TOS and TNG episodes. It quickly lost its luster.
When Enterprise came out, I only saw the first episode, and I came to the conclusion that I just didn't care anymore. It didn't seem right for some reason. I had grown to know Star Trek as being a show with Kirk's crew or with Picard's crew. Those crews gave the shows some kind of feeling that all these other crews just tried to hard to mimic.
I hope they release a DVD boxed set of all TOS and TNG episodes; I'd buy it in a minute.
TOS = The Original Series
TNG = The Next Generation
DS9 = Deep Space Nine
Sadly, SVG really wasn't adopted. I hope that its inclusion in Opera and Firefox will change all of that, because many websites that currently use images for a lot of their content could make things look better and take up less space with things like CSS2 and SVG.
Saving bandwidth is still important in these days of broadband and whatnot, because the more you cut down the amount of unnecessary stuff zapping across the 'net, the more cool stuff that really requires the bandwidth (like movies, music, and all that stuff "they've" been promising us since the 80's with "convergence") will be able to get through.
Combine the powerful client-stuff you can do with all these standards with server-side dynamic generation and you end up with a system that should be able to display any type of content with no problem.
Did you have to shatter all of my hopes and dreams in one fell swoop? :-)
Who said VMware would run on Windows? I would run it on Linux. In fact, what I forgot to mention is that I'd like to try running that on a blade server in the locked, protected server room, put Linux on the actual workstations, and let them use Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and whatever other "replacement" software I can find, on the computer natively; VMware would not physically run on the same computer, but though the built-in networking capabilities of X, I'd display it through gigabit ethernet. This might be fast enough to run those programs that keep us stuck with Windows. Retail, this would cost about half of your figure, and if it worked, we could use the desktop computers until they literally blow up, and then replace them with any $300 box that can run Linux. Or even Macs, if we want to make the office look cool...