When you a search on irreducibly complex systems, I certainly hope you'll find this refutation of the primary proponent of the concept, Michael Behe.
Arguing against the reliability of evolution without proposing any (extremely detailed) alternative scenario is like arguing against the existence of DNA.
DNA IS JUST A THEORY.. GOD MIGHT BE MAKING ALL THOSE SCIENTISTS SEE DNA WHEN IT'S NOT REALLY THERE!!
Silly, right? Unfortunately, the DNA theory is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for evolutionary theory.
Sucky printing not X's fault? Java 2 example..
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Is X The Future?
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No, it's not entirely X's fault, but X doesn't lift a finger to help. Windows and Mac both have a common graphics model for printing and on-screen imaging, and it's silly that X has nothing similar. Yes, you can go up the chain to GTK for this, which is good enough, but it's silly that we've had to wait 12 years to get libraries that will allow on-screen display and printing.
It wouldn't hurt my feelings at all to have a display model based on PostScript or PDF or something sane, but junking X totally is not an option. If we depend on GTK for a high-quality imaging model, though, that means that a lot of the rendering decisions will be made on the wrong side of the client-server pipe. Java 2 does this, and it lets you have a nice and powerful and consistent rendering model cross-platform, but performance on X sucks beans because the X server is basically acting as a dumb framebuffer for pixel-level operations.
That just doesn't cut it. There should be a rich drawing model that can be effectively supported by the rendering server and which can be retargeted in library code to PostScript or any other printer imaging language.
I wouldn't mind seeing Java 2's imaging model made part of a next-generation X protocol, but I don't know whether everyone has enough experience with Java 2 and whether its Graphics2d model has stabilized enough to re-implement it with pixel-precision in C for a graphics system.
If Java2's Graphics2d model was stable enough, and if the ownership terms could be worked out, I'd love to see Java2's model supported on an X type server.. would speed Java code greatly, and would provide a rich and powerful (PostScript-level) imaging model.
What an excellent suggestion.. it seems like the best way to get to a better place would be to extend X to X12 and include a more rational color and font system, and to include audio, and retain X11 compatibility for existing apps (an absolute must, really.
No, this won't get rid of X bloat, but it will allow programs written to GTK/QT to have a better substrate to operate on. Of course, high-color displays and the sort of stuff coming in XFree86 4.0 is already going a long way towards a better tomorrow..
It's been 5 years since I've done any Xlib/Xt coding, but the biggest problem I remember is that the color model blows chunks on palletized displays.
With Windows, each app indicates what colors it wants, and all graphics operations are done using a handle to the color returned by the graphics system. If another window is in front, the windows rendering layer will automatically dither and/or approximate colors in the background app to maximize color fidelity using the common color map. A similar process is done on the Mac, I believe, with dithering and approximation done for the coder by the graphics layer.
X Windows is different. With X, a program on a palletized display allocates color cells which come straight out of the hardware palette. When a program asks for RGB FFF083, it will get back a simple integer, '5'. From that point on, all rendering done by the program is done using color 5. If the 256 colors are exhausted, the system may try to return color '16' if it is close enough to the requested color, but the system can't change how the program does its rendering behind the scene to give the front window a better color fidelity than the background windows.
This is why Netscape users on 8bit displays are stuck between either running into color starvation extremely rapidly, or forcing the Netscape window to use its own color map, causing horrendous false-color flashing when the window is selected or de-selected.
This problem may thankfully be a thing of the past with modern video cards, but it was always one of the big ugly achilles heels of X. The Athena widget set, font system, and Xt resource complexity were the others, but fortunately we're finally getting away from Xt and all that ilk.
I still maintain that the SETI@Home folks need to be doing a much better job of letting people know about how much work is going wasted, and what they can do about it, if anything.
A long time ago, they indicated that if they had enough people, they might try to increase the depth of analysis performed, or to add more frequency bands to their Areceibo receiver rig so that they'd have more data. I really hope they do this.. they have obviously proven that they can get an enormous amount of computer time for it. (And not 700 years like the 3dnow! article said.. more like 38,000 years so far).
On the positive side, they are increasing the amount of graphs and data available to track the project, but without the context of how much of that work is being repeated, it means nothing at all.
They have already defined an AAAA record for IPv6 addresses in DNS. I'm not sure how they're going to do reverse DNS zones, though.. reverse DNS for IP addresses is much more challenging than the forward records are.
IPv6 is very interesting stuff.. I spent a few weeks writing code for Ganymede that can do the encoding/decoding of IPv6 addresses.. hopefully people will be able to use Ganymede for IPv6 DNS management when the time comes.
I have grown rather disenchanted with WiReD since the Conde' Naste buy-out.. if it's all about content, then why do I have to struggle through 8 pages of ads to get to the first table of contents page, then another 2-page ad spread, then the second?
It is now the rare exception to find a pair of WiReD pages facing each other in which neither is an ad. How very tiresome. They may still have some vague remembrance of interesting people like Bruce Sterling, but it's hard to tell or, in fact, to care much anymore.
I'm just glad we get to see those jamming cigarette ads, myself.. what says idealistic revolution like a hyper-garish ad for Camels? Mighty Tasty!
As much as I support SETI@Home, I have to say that their web site has not been the most forthcoming or interactive. Things like distributed.net go all out to keep everyone informed of what's going on, whereas the folks at SETI@Home would go weeks or months with no status updates or anything. How many times were those 115 initial work units processed by the 500,000 people who signed up and had their CPU's devoting time and heat to uselessly redundant processing?
I understand the difference in complexity between the rc5 stuff and what SETI@Home is doing, and the limited resources available to people working on a grant, but I think the folks there need to understand that you do something of this size on the net, you have to expect a rich interaction with the community, one way or the other. I view ALF as the community sort of reaching out and saying 'hi' to folks that haven't been as communicative as we're used to with other net projects.
And it was funny. I had completely forgotten that ALF ever existed. Too bad they didn't include a.wav of ALF ranting about something to be 'the message'.
Yup, right here.. TRS-80 Model I with 16k and Level II Basic. I've still got the beast in a public storage facility.. all of the cassette tapes for it have long since turned to dust, but you can find large archives of TRS-80 software on the net that you can use in an emulator.. some of the emulators even have the ability to write out the programs to tape using a SoundBlaster.
I always recommend that UNIX/Linux folk read the IDG book, 'The Unix-Hater's Handbook', for a scathing discussion of UNIX's security model. Lots and lots of the comments apply mainly to UNIX circa 1991 and are obviated by things like Perl, Ptyhon, and Java, but there's a lot there that will improve your perspective on things.
For all that Microsoft made mistakes in NT, and for all that NT has had less time to mature than UNIX has, and for all the times that Microsoft acts like the company that brought CP/M and single-user computing generally to the masses, elements of the NT security model are actually superior to the stock UNIX model in many ways, the lack of a necessarily all-powerful root account and setuid scripts/files being one of them.
The biggest protection Linux has from viruses is that it is not an effective monoculture the way that Windows/Office is, and that there isn't the rampant cross-application integration/incest that Windows depends on.
which analyst/columnist it was a month or so ago that issued a challenge looking for any mission-critical usage of Linux by a Fortune 500 company? I remember reading it on the web, some analyst going on about how no one was taking Linux seriously. Would love to be able to forward him this story.
One of the things that is interesting about the IA-64 is that the compiled code to be run on it is highly sensitive to the particular architecture of a given chip. Intel's docs say that the architecture is highly scalable, that they'll be able to add new execution units, etc., quite easily, but they don't mention that the choices an EPIC compiler would make would change quite a lot depending on the physical chip details.
As a consequence, we might see things like Just-In-Time compilers become more significant than they already are, since they could make those decisions when code is executed on a particular chip. Depending on how expensive the EPIC logic is to compile to, this might or might not be a big boost to Java, etc.
Oh, one more thing.. SETI@Home is searching a specific band of frequences around 1.4 GHz because that's an unusually quiet region of radio frequency due to various physical properties of the galaxy, etc. SETI@Home is listening for what would be a deliberately placed radio signal.
How will they know we're here in order to illuminate our solar system in particular? Oh, I know, they'll have been running their own SETI program for a few million years...
I was raised on too much science fiction (albeit the good stuff.. Heinlein, Clarke..), but it seems to me that having a low-level on-going SETI program should just be one of the things an advanced civilization does to while away the eons.
Excellent points all, but it sounds like we need a network of solar-system roaming monitors using ion drives than we do a bunch of earthly CPU cycles. Where do I send my check?
And SETI@Home is more useful than rc5.. what's the prize if rc5-64 is cracked? $10,000 and rc5-72, which at the current keyburn rate would take on the order of 200 years to have a 50% chance of solving it. And if that is cracked, rc5-80.. bleah, no thanks. I can work out the geometric progression myself. I can't work out whether there might be radio signals coming from alien intelligences out in deep space myself.
Hm, I'd imagine everyone would pretty implicitly understand that the Drake equation has no scientific validity.. it's just a way of laying out various significant factors in the question of 'what are our odds?'.
I'd love to see a better one, but I'm guessing that to do any better would require a lot more data than we have.. like if we could somehow tap into the galactic Usenet a la 'A Fire Upon The Deep'.
Well, obviously if any of the terms of the Drake equation are unknown (random), then the result is unknown/random. The math isn't invalidated, though.. if you could somehow accurately quantify the terms, then multiplying the terms together would give you the right answer.
The Drake equation is intended to document the factors involved in figuring out how many radio civilizations might possibly be out there, which it does reasonably well. Actual numbers that anyone gives you for that number are indeed just guesses, although possibly bounded by at least plausible constraints on at least some of the terms.
Yeah, well, we don't know what alien civilizations might or might not be doing. Even if we spend hundreds of years doing continuous SETI-style radio monitoring and don't catch anything other than natural celestial signals, the endeavor will still be worthwhile, if only to have greater confidence in the unlikelihood of finding anything.;-)
But, unless you know of some alien physics that will make a supra-luminal communications system feasible, I don't think it's fair to compare radio monitoring to listening for distant drums. So far as we know, electro-mag is the only way to fly. Now, if we do find a signal, it may very well be something very difficult to understand or decode, but given the way that radio waves work, we should at least have a chance of detection.
You're right, though, there are a whole lot of scary constants in the Drake equation, and it's hard to believe that we'll hear anything from one planet out of a thousand with life on it. SETI has always been the ultimate long shot.
Um. Have you read the background materials at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu at all? The SETI@Home project is being carried out by a team at the same university that is doing the Serendip IV project, which is the main SETI project previously underway. They are funded, they have published (very interesting) technical details about their methodology, and they are every bit as much a 'part of' SETI as is anyone else.
Are you upset because Jodie Foster didn't use SETI@Home on her personal computer in Contact or something? Who do you imagine decides who is 'affiliated with' SETI?
According to the published papers on their site, SETI@Home will examine as many possible signals as the Serendip IV project. Yes, SETI@Home will process a smaller frequency range, but it will examine it in much greater detail, which much more expensive computational analysis thanks to your computer and mine.
Incidentally, I'd recommend taking a look at the scientific papers linked to the SETI@Home site.. what they are doing to perform reasonable data analysis on signals picked up by their piggy-back receivers while the Areceibo telescope is in use and even in motion for other projects doing direct observation for traditional radio astronomy is fascinating. No wonder it took them so much longer to get the SETI@Home client out than it took the distributed.net people to get their network running.
Remote loopback is a term used by some Ethernet card diagnostics for a network test in which one system sends out an ethernet packet and the receiving system immediately takes it and sends it back.. sort of a link-level ping test.
With a remote loopback, you get hardware testing, but it's probably not a great test for anything having to do with tcp/ip since it's not involved.
We have developed a server designed for maintaining and managing NIS and DNS information. It's not designed as a full-fledged object database, but the server does include logic for transactions, namespaces, and journalling, as well as a customizable schema.
It's been nearly 2 years that the rc5-64 challenge has been running, and distributed.net has only covered like 6% of the keyspace.. taking 10 years to exhaust a single 64 bit keyspace does nothing other than to demonstrate that key-cracking big keyspaces is really, really hard.
SETI@Home may have much worse odds, or it may have much better odds, we just don't know, and that makes it far more interesting. Attempt enough trillions of trillions of keys and you will crack it.. it's just counting, really.
Well, of course it does. I didn't literally mean 'compiler' in the sense of gcc, I meant all the bits that is required to get a new computer system able to reasonably support its own code development.
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When you a search on irreducibly complex systems, I certainly hope you'll find this refutation of the primary proponent of the concept, Michael Behe.
Arguing against the reliability of evolution without proposing any (extremely detailed) alternative scenario is like arguing against the existence of DNA.
DNA IS JUST A THEORY.. GOD MIGHT BE MAKING ALL THOSE SCIENTISTS SEE DNA WHEN IT'S NOT REALLY THERE!!
Silly, right? Unfortunately, the DNA theory is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for evolutionary theory.
No, it's not entirely X's fault, but X doesn't lift a finger to help. Windows and Mac both have a common graphics model for printing and on-screen imaging, and it's silly that X has nothing similar. Yes, you can go up the chain to GTK for this, which is good enough, but it's silly that we've had to wait 12 years to get libraries that will allow on-screen display and printing.
It wouldn't hurt my feelings at all to have a display model based on PostScript or PDF or something sane, but junking X totally is not an option. If we depend on GTK for a high-quality imaging model, though, that means that a lot of the rendering decisions will be made on the wrong side of the client-server pipe. Java 2 does this, and it lets you have a nice and powerful and consistent rendering model cross-platform, but performance on X sucks beans because the X server is basically acting as a dumb framebuffer for pixel-level operations.
That just doesn't cut it. There should be a rich drawing model that can be effectively supported by the rendering server and which can be retargeted in library code to PostScript or any other printer imaging language.
I wouldn't mind seeing Java 2's imaging model made part of a next-generation X protocol, but I don't know whether everyone has enough experience with Java 2 and whether its Graphics2d model has stabilized enough to re-implement it with pixel-precision in C for a graphics system.
If Java2's Graphics2d model was stable enough, and if the ownership terms could be worked out, I'd love to see Java2's model supported on an X type server.. would speed Java code greatly, and would provide a rich and powerful (PostScript-level) imaging model.
What an excellent suggestion.. it seems like the best way to get to a better place would be to extend X to X12 and include a more rational color and font system, and to include audio, and retain X11 compatibility for existing apps (an absolute must, really.
No, this won't get rid of X bloat, but it will allow programs written to GTK/QT to have a better substrate to operate on. Of course, high-color displays and the sort of stuff coming in XFree86 4.0 is already going a long way towards a better tomorrow..
It's been 5 years since I've done any Xlib/Xt coding, but the biggest problem I remember is that the color model blows chunks on palletized displays.
With Windows, each app indicates what colors it wants, and all graphics operations are done using a handle to the color returned by the graphics system. If another window is in front, the windows rendering layer will automatically dither and/or approximate colors in the background app to maximize color fidelity using the common color map. A similar process is done on the Mac, I believe, with dithering and approximation done for the coder by the graphics layer.
X Windows is different. With X, a program on a palletized display allocates color cells which come straight out of the hardware palette. When a program asks for RGB FFF083, it will get back a simple integer, '5'. From that point on, all rendering done by the program is done using color 5. If the 256 colors are exhausted, the system may try to return color '16' if it is close enough to the requested color, but the system can't change how the program does its rendering behind the scene to give the front window a better color fidelity than the background windows.
This is why Netscape users on 8bit displays are stuck between either running into color starvation extremely rapidly, or forcing the Netscape window to use its own color map, causing horrendous false-color flashing when the window is selected or de-selected.
This problem may thankfully be a thing of the past with modern video cards, but it was always one of the big ugly achilles heels of X. The Athena widget set, font system, and Xt resource complexity were the others, but fortunately we're finally getting away from Xt and all that ilk.
I still maintain that the SETI@Home folks need to be doing a much better job of letting people know about how much work is going wasted, and what they can do about it, if anything.
A long time ago, they indicated that if they had enough people, they might try to increase the depth of analysis performed, or to add more frequency bands to their Areceibo receiver rig so that they'd have more data. I really hope they do this.. they have obviously proven that they can get an enormous amount of computer time for it. (And not 700 years like the 3dnow! article said.. more like 38,000 years so far).
On the positive side, they are increasing the amount of graphs and data available to track the project, but without the context of how much of that work is being repeated, it means nothing at all.
They have already defined an AAAA record for IPv6 addresses in DNS. I'm not sure how they're going to do reverse DNS zones, though.. reverse DNS for IP addresses is much more challenging than the forward records are.
IPv6 is very interesting stuff.. I spent a few weeks writing code for Ganymede that can do the encoding/decoding of IPv6 addresses.. hopefully people will be able to use Ganymede for IPv6 DNS management when the time comes.
I have grown rather disenchanted with WiReD since the Conde' Naste buy-out.. if it's all about content, then why do I have to struggle through 8 pages of ads to get to the first table of contents page, then another 2-page ad spread, then the second?
It is now the rare exception to find a pair of WiReD pages facing each other in which neither is an ad. How very tiresome. They may still have some vague remembrance of interesting people like Bruce Sterling, but it's hard to tell or, in fact, to care much anymore.
I'm just glad we get to see those jamming cigarette ads, myself.. what says idealistic revolution like a hyper-garish ad for Camels? Mighty Tasty!
As much as I support SETI@Home, I have to say that their web site has not been the most forthcoming or interactive. Things like distributed.net go all out to keep everyone informed of what's going on, whereas the folks at SETI@Home would go weeks or months with no status updates or anything. How many times were those 115 initial work units processed by the 500,000 people who signed up and had their CPU's devoting time and heat to uselessly redundant processing?
I understand the difference in complexity between the rc5 stuff and what SETI@Home is doing, and the limited resources available to people working on a grant, but I think the folks there need to understand that you do something of this size on the net, you have to expect a rich interaction with the community, one way or the other. I view ALF as the community sort of reaching out and saying 'hi' to folks that haven't been as communicative as we're used to with other net projects.
And it was funny. I had completely forgotten that ALF ever existed. Too bad they didn't include a .wav of ALF ranting about something to be 'the message'.
Yup, right here.. TRS-80 Model I with 16k and Level II Basic. I've still got the beast in a public storage facility.. all of the cassette tapes for it have long since turned to dust, but you can find large archives of TRS-80 software on the net that you can use in an emulator.. some of the emulators even have the ability to write out the programs to tape using a SoundBlaster.
Gotta love that 500 baud tape squeal. ;-)
Drop by http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/ and visit the archives. They have all their programs for the last several years online in Real Audio.
I always recommend that UNIX/Linux folk read the IDG book, 'The Unix-Hater's Handbook', for a scathing discussion of UNIX's security model. Lots and lots of the comments apply mainly to UNIX circa 1991 and are obviated by things like Perl, Ptyhon, and Java, but there's a lot there that will improve your perspective on things.
For all that Microsoft made mistakes in NT, and for all that NT has had less time to mature than UNIX has, and for all the times that Microsoft acts like the company that brought CP/M and single-user computing generally to the masses, elements of the NT security model are actually superior to the stock UNIX model in many ways, the lack of a necessarily all-powerful root account and setuid scripts/files being one of them.
The biggest protection Linux has from viruses is that it is not an effective monoculture the way that Windows/Office is, and that there isn't the rampant cross-application integration/incest that Windows depends on.
which analyst/columnist it was a month or so ago that issued a challenge looking for any mission-critical usage of Linux by a Fortune 500 company? I remember reading it on the web, some analyst going on about how no one was taking Linux seriously. Would love to be able to forward him this story.
Just another rabid Linux evangelist.
One of the things that is interesting about the IA-64 is that the compiled code to be run on it is highly sensitive to the particular architecture of a given chip. Intel's docs say that the architecture is highly scalable, that they'll be able to add new execution units, etc., quite easily, but they don't mention that the choices an EPIC compiler would make would change quite a lot depending on the physical chip details.
As a consequence, we might see things like Just-In-Time compilers become more significant than they already are, since they could make those decisions when code is executed on a particular chip. Depending on how expensive the EPIC logic is to compile to, this might or might not be a big boost to Java, etc.
Oh, one more thing.. SETI@Home is searching a specific band of frequences around 1.4 GHz because that's an unusually quiet region of radio frequency due to various physical properties of the galaxy, etc. SETI@Home is listening for what would be a deliberately placed radio signal.
How will they know we're here in order to illuminate our solar system in particular? Oh, I know, they'll have been running their own SETI program for a few million years...
I was raised on too much science fiction (albeit the good stuff.. Heinlein, Clarke..), but it seems to me that having a low-level on-going SETI program should just be one of the things an advanced civilization does to while away the eons.
No time like the present to get started.
Correction: that would be on the order of 2,500 years at the current keyburn rate for rc5-72. No thanks.
Excellent points all, but it sounds like we need a network of solar-system roaming monitors using ion drives than we do a bunch of earthly CPU cycles. Where do I send my check?
And SETI@Home is more useful than rc5.. what's the prize if rc5-64 is cracked? $10,000 and rc5-72, which at the current keyburn rate would take on the order of 200 years to have a 50% chance of solving it. And if that is cracked, rc5-80.. bleah, no thanks. I can work out the geometric progression myself. I can't work out whether there might be radio signals coming from alien intelligences out in deep space myself.
Hm, I'd imagine everyone would pretty implicitly understand that the Drake equation has no scientific validity.. it's just a way of laying out various significant factors in the question of 'what are our odds?'.
I'd love to see a better one, but I'm guessing that to do any better would require a lot more data than we have.. like if we could somehow tap into the galactic Usenet a la 'A Fire Upon The Deep'.
.Well, obviously if any of the terms of the Drake equation are unknown (random), then the result is unknown/random. The math isn't invalidated, though.. if you could somehow accurately quantify the terms, then multiplying the terms together would give you the right answer.
The Drake equation is intended to document the factors involved in figuring out how many radio civilizations might possibly be out there, which it does reasonably well. Actual numbers that anyone gives you for that number are indeed just guesses, although possibly bounded by at least plausible constraints on at least some of the terms.
Yeah, well, we don't know what alien civilizations might or might not be doing. Even if we spend hundreds of years doing continuous SETI-style radio monitoring and don't catch anything other than natural celestial signals, the endeavor will still be worthwhile, if only to have greater confidence in the unlikelihood of finding anything. ;-)
But, unless you know of some alien physics that will make a supra-luminal communications system feasible, I don't think it's fair to compare radio monitoring to listening for distant drums. So far as we know, electro-mag is the only way to fly. Now, if we do find a signal, it may very well be something very difficult to understand or decode, but given the way that radio waves work, we should at least have a chance of detection.
You're right, though, there are a whole lot of scary constants in the Drake equation, and it's hard to believe that we'll hear anything from one planet out of a thousand with life on it. SETI has always been the ultimate long shot.
Um. Have you read the background materials at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu at all? The SETI@Home project is being carried out by a team at the same university that is doing the Serendip IV project, which is the main SETI project previously underway. They are funded, they have published (very interesting) technical details about their methodology, and they are every bit as much a 'part of' SETI as is anyone else.
Are you upset because Jodie Foster didn't use SETI@Home on her personal computer in Contact or something? Who do you imagine decides who is 'affiliated with' SETI?
According to the published papers on their site, SETI@Home will examine as many possible signals as the Serendip IV project. Yes, SETI@Home will process a smaller frequency range, but it will examine it in much greater detail, which much more expensive computational analysis thanks to your computer and mine.
Incidentally, I'd recommend taking a look at the scientific papers linked to the SETI@Home site.. what they are doing to perform reasonable data analysis on signals picked up by their piggy-back receivers while the Areceibo telescope is in use and even in motion for other projects doing direct observation for traditional radio astronomy is fascinating. No wonder it took them so much longer to get the SETI@Home client out than it took the distributed.net people to get their network running.
Remote loopback is a term used by some Ethernet card diagnostics for a network test in which one system sends out an ethernet packet and the receiving system immediately takes it and sends it back.. sort of a link-level ping test.
With a remote loopback, you get hardware testing, but it's probably not a great test for anything having to do with tcp/ip since it's not involved.
We have developed a server designed for maintaining and managing NIS and DNS information. It's not designed as a full-fledged object database, but the server does include logic for transactions, namespaces, and journalling, as well as a customizable schema.
The URL is http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2
It's been nearly 2 years that the rc5-64 challenge has been running, and distributed.net has only covered like 6% of the keyspace.. taking 10 years to exhaust a single 64 bit keyspace does nothing other than to demonstrate that key-cracking big keyspaces is really, really hard.
SETI@Home may have much worse odds, or it may have much better odds, we just don't know, and that makes it far more interesting. Attempt enough trillions of trillions of keys and you will crack it.. it's just counting, really.
Well, of course it does. I didn't literally mean
'compiler' in the sense of gcc, I meant all the bits that is required to get a new computer system able to reasonably support its own code development.