And don't forget that he was called in when they were already shooting. The original actor was cast "too young". Which if my calculations are correct, Aragorn is supposed to be at least in his 50s - going on the basis of the Story of Arwen and Aragorn (in the appendix). After being in NZ for two days he had to shoot Weathertop.
Well, that's the official line, yes. I believe in reality it had rather more to do with the original actor blowing up mailboxes in the neighborhood in Wellington he was staying in.
I have no problem having a great deal of faith in the technical capacity of what is on offer here. My point is simply that, to compete in a modern OS desktop market you need an attractive GUI. I hope that they have that in mind for future development.
These days much talk of GUI look and feel is bandied about. I don't know how the new Amiga GUI feels, but it looks awful. Maybe that's the last stage in their design and the whole thing is (hopefully) themeable - we can but hope.
Otherwise I'm afriad this just isn't going to sell. In the past the feel was the only part that counted because all GUIs were, let's face it, pretty damn ugly. These days however the look of a GUI (given the high powered graphics hardware sported by commodity machines) is actually rather important. Look how much attention OS X garnered solely on it's looks.
These days you can't afford to have an ugly GUI anymore - sure it can be an option for those people with no aesthetics - you need something that is attractive. I've never understood the people who deride attractive interfaces TBH - I spend 10+ hours a day staring at a computer screen, tell me again why I want it to be merely functional?!
Sure, if you're taking a serious performance hit for the graphics, then by all means turn them off (as linux kindly allows with it's myriad of window manager and desktop solutions), but these days you should b able to get quite a nice GUI for very little cost.
here's some snapshots of what my desktop sometimes looks like: screenshots
I agree that business needs certainly aren't that interested in desginer cases, but then again, surely there is a BIG ENOUGH market for home PCs to make a designer case market a viable one? You can sell different products to different market niches if you want.
Why is it that there is no serious commercial market for quality case design? The only company actually seriously doing any design work is Apple. Some of these cases are exceptional, and I know I'd pay decent money for them.
What's with all those companies out there? Why can't they get their act together and provide some decent case options? Anyone know?
There's is quite a good explanation of the mathematics involved (at least in the Cohomolgy case) here.
It is not the extremely low level garbage given in the article linked, but should be quite approachable as an introduction for anyone who hasn't done any serious advanced mathematics.
Makes me wonder if they have Theomathematics, Theochemistry, Theophysics and Theoengineering as well.
I remeber seeing a "Theological Engineering" paper once. It had such wonderful questions as: If 30ml of red wine is placed in the mouth of a devout catholic, and transubstantiation takes 3s, how many joules of energy are produced?
Hopefully the default install does the partitioning and encryption of the filesystem via rubberhose. I can't find mention on the site, but it seems a logical precaution, being the best filesystem encryption program I've encountered.
I believe they said that's why they did it. I think the second movie (3rd in trilogy) is already done, but it is not yet 'timely' to release it.
The second film isn't finished yet. All the filming for all three films was completed quite a while ago (the cast wrap party was near christmas 2000), but post production has been ongoing. The first film was through post production around August last year, and the second will be done around August this year.
There has been an effort to leave things as late as possible on post production (doing it a film at a time) to allow more advances in digital effects as they go.
Many kudos have to go to Weta Digital, the Peter Jackson owned New Zealand effects company that did all of this. Jackson managed to tell hollywood to piss off, and do it all his own way in New Zealand. Part of that is due to the quality of Weta Digital. They are, realistically, the NEW ILM.
I couldn't see how evil got any strength in Middle-Earth either since it very rarely won any conflicts, it was perpetually getting beaten! How can it be a threat if it never wins.
Well, Morgoth completely wrecked middle earth early it's creation, Morgoth and Ungoliant destroyed the two trees, and well, there's always the "Battle of Unnumbered Tears" for evil victories. Not to mention Sauron successfully getting Numenor destroyed, the shape of the world changed, and all that. That wasn't a bad effort really.
I'm from New Zealand, and in combinationn with education directions there, along with with my acceptance into honours programs at University I completed a Masters degree in Mathematics only taking 5 (small/short) courses that were not mathematics. All the other courses I took were physics courses (as I was contemplating doing physics honours at the time.
In some ways this benefitted me greatly - it enabled me to complete a Masters' degree by the time I was 21, and thoroughally cover a wide variety of subjects within mathematics. In other ways I feel that I really did miss out.
I enrolled for courses in German literature, Poetry, and philosophy, but simply had to drop them very early due to course overload (I was doing 1.6 times a full load at the time). I would have loved to have had an opportunity to properly pusue those subjects. As it is I have simply done my best to do some self directed learning - but it would have been nice to have more direction etc. in the matter.
Fortunately I had friends who did take a wide variety of courses (and I'm widely read anyway) so that helped provide some direction for my extra studies.
So, having taken an extremely directed course of study, and having studied a diverse range of subjects outside of that field, here's my advice:
Ideally a directed course of study is best, but people should be encouraged to take a few courses that are well outside their fundamental area. I don't believe in mandating what those courses are. They should be alternate areas of interest for the student. For me it was poetry and literature. For others it may be film, biology, maths, or history. It is worth doing a little bit of something else though, and it should be encouraged.
I was a bit disappointed at how they moved the Star Trek franchise into the past. To me it was indistinguishable from Voyager except that they didn't have certain pieces of technology or knowledge. You can't get from Voyager to the original series just by removing knowledge and technology; there's more to it than that. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, and apparently neither could they.
My biggest fear is they'll do a Voyager and have this crew do all manner of revolutionary stuff. I could understand that happening in TOS, 'cause it was the Enterprise, the big, lets go and explore the universe ship, stocked with good people. In TNG it was acceptable because it was THE flagship. They legitimately had the BEST engineers in starfleet. With Voyager it was just a random ship - and yet they came up with more stunning Borg defeating technology from that miserable crew than any sane person could expect.
This ship in the new series is NOT famous (the downside of going backward in tiem to cast the series), so they better not do a "and if we revrse the flow of the... then we can accelerate up to warp 12!" sort of crap like they did on Voyager.
Okay, very simply, due to some other work by two people whose names I cannot recall immediately, it was demonstrated that if Taniyama-Shimura was true then Fermat was also true - this involved a proof by contradiction using the assumption that if Taniyama-Shimura didn't hold then there was a an elliptic curve which would then demonstrate that Fermat didn't hold. Wiles used this as leverage. His aim was to prove Fermat. Proving Taniyama-Shimura was just the best way to tackle it - that is, there were no other known ways to tackle Fermat. Of course proving Taniyama-Shimura is no mean feat in and of itself, but Wiles did manage it eventually (after roughly 7 years workign in isolation).
I don't trust ECC, even though the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture has been proven, because all of the good elliptic curves have been patented by Certicom and the remainder are either untrustworthy or too slow for practical use.
Randomly quoting vaguely related theorems should not earn you kudos or mod points. Taniyama-Shimura has very little to do with Elliptic curve cryptography. It was useful for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, and does relate to Elliptic curves (it essentially says there's a nice one to one relationship between slliptic curves and modular forms), but if anything, Taniyama-Shimura provides new opportunities to attack ECC.
For those who don't know, and don't want to get confused by the above fool, ECC relies upon the same principle as RSA, and Diffie-Hellman - that is the difficulty of solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem. The only difference between ECC and Diffie-Hellman is that ECC does it's computations in a different algebraic space (the group formed by the points on an Elliptic curve). The advantage is that the DLP is demonstrably more complicated to solve in the new space, and as such greater security can be achieved with smaller key sizes. Smaller key sizes means faster algorithms (in principle).
Personally, I tend to think that there are enough people working "outside the fence" on crypto that if a major established algorithm was broken, we'd all know shortly thereafter. (And imagine the chaos...)
Don't be so sure. Differential cryptanalysis, which pokes some nice big theoretical holes in a number of systems (which have generally been hardened against it now) was only developed in the mid 80's or so. There is eveidence to believe that the NSA was aware of it as early as the late 60's. Who knows what else they've come up with in the meantime. Be aware, the NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world.
Technically, given a pure one time pad (used once only) with a TRULY random string to xor against the system is perfect and uncrackable. These systems are normally broken due to the pseudorandom nature of the "random" string.
Why is it uncrackable? Given a truly random string, used only once, then ANY decryption is equally valid, because any xor string is equally likely.
The reasons this is never used is (1) generating TRULY random strings is very hard. (2) more importantly, as you say, key distribution is an absolute bitch (and we're talking about an infinite key length here).
Read the article. This is NOT a centralised system like passport. It is a distributed system - you keep track of your own data. It's very vague, but it sounds as if this system simply provides standardised formats and protocols etc. for personal data.
A federated identity model will enable every business or user to manage their own data, and ensure that the use of critical personal information is managed and distributed by the appropriate parties, rather than a central authority.
seems pretty clear to me - you manage your own data, and it is authenticated in a distributed way, not maintained and authenticated in a centralised Microsoft database. Further:
In a federated view of the world, a person's online identity, their personal profile, personalized online configurations, buying habits and history, and shopping preferences are administered by users, yet securely shared with the organizations of their choosing.
Emphasis mine. You maintain your own data, and decide who you will alow it to be shared to.
Can someone please tell me how this is not (at this vague stage) the sort of thing that we've been wanting? A decentralised, distributed information management system...
I believe the benefits of small sats is that you can put several of them on a single launch vehicle, and reduce the launch costs that way. Of course you need a launch system capable of carrying a number of smaller payloads - which there aren't very many of right now.
As far as I know the best for doing that are not US built which is why Surrey Space over in England are making a killing right now in the nanosat category.
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel etc. declined to take on the ring because they thought they would be unable to resist the temptation to use it.
I was under the impression that Gandalf would not weidl it because, well, that wasn't what he was there to do. Gandalf was eventually shown to be Maiar, and an agent of the Valar. As such his job was to guide, not to do - ever notice that for all the impact that Gandalf has, he never actually does anything, but rather counsels others to act?
Come to NZ if you want to get close to cashless. Besides all the usual bits and pieces you mentioned New Zealand has an EXTREMELY widespread EFT-POS system (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale )which uses ATM systems to directly debit your account and transfer the cash. No having ETF-POS isn't new - you guys have it in the US (though I believe you may call it somethign else). The difference is that I can fully expect to drive out to a small town, population of 2000, walk into a random store, and have EFT-POS. The penetration of the system in incredible, you can ALWAYS expect to be able to pay by EFT_POS, cash is almost never required.
How about Freedom from ZeroKnowledge up in Canada? It's been a while since I looked at it properly, but it always looked like it was building into exactly what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's the official line, yes. I believe in reality it had rather more to do with the original actor blowing up mailboxes in the neighborhood in Wellington he was staying in.
Jedidiah
Come now, everyone know that to karma whore correctly one needs to provide a link. This was the closest I could find that showed any vague relevance.
Jedidiah
I have no problem having a great deal of faith in the technical capacity of what is on offer here. My point is simply that, to compete in a modern OS desktop market you need an attractive GUI. I hope that they have that in mind for future development.
That's all.
Jedidiah
These days much talk of GUI look and feel is bandied about. I don't know how the new Amiga GUI feels, but it looks awful. Maybe that's the last stage in their design and the whole thing is (hopefully) themeable - we can but hope.
Otherwise I'm afriad this just isn't going to sell. In the past the feel was the only part that counted because all GUIs were, let's face it, pretty damn ugly. These days however the look of a GUI (given the high powered graphics hardware sported by commodity machines) is actually rather important. Look how much attention OS X garnered solely on it's looks.
These days you can't afford to have an ugly GUI anymore - sure it can be an option for those people with no aesthetics - you need something that is attractive. I've never understood the people who deride attractive interfaces TBH - I spend 10+ hours a day staring at a computer screen, tell me again why I want it to be merely functional?!
Sure, if you're taking a serious performance hit for the graphics, then by all means turn them off (as linux kindly allows with it's myriad of window manager and desktop solutions), but these days you should b able to get quite a nice GUI for very little cost.
here's some snapshots of what my desktop sometimes looks like: screenshots
Jedidiah
I agree that business needs certainly aren't that interested in desginer cases, but then again, surely there is a BIG ENOUGH market for home PCs to make a designer case market a viable one? You can sell different products to different market niches if you want.
Jedidiah
Why is it that there is no serious commercial market for quality case design? The only company actually seriously doing any design work is Apple. Some of these cases are exceptional, and I know I'd pay decent money for them.
What's with all those companies out there? Why can't they get their act together and provide some decent case options? Anyone know?
Jedidiah
It is not the extremely low level garbage given in the article linked, but should be quite approachable as an introduction for anyone who hasn't done any serious advanced mathematics.
Jedidiah
The designer of Aliens TC is now working for Valve software on the next Half Life! :-)
Jedidiah
I remeber seeing a "Theological Engineering" paper once. It had such wonderful questions as: If 30ml of red wine is placed in the mouth of a devout catholic, and transubstantiation takes 3s, how many joules of energy are produced?
Jedidiah
Jedidiah
--
The second film isn't finished yet. All the filming for all three films was completed quite a while ago (the cast wrap party was near christmas 2000), but post production has been ongoing. The first film was through post production around August last year, and the second will be done around August this year.
There has been an effort to leave things as late as possible on post production (doing it a film at a time) to allow more advances in digital effects as they go.
Many kudos have to go to Weta Digital, the Peter Jackson owned New Zealand effects company that did all of this. Jackson managed to tell hollywood to piss off, and do it all his own way in New Zealand. Part of that is due to the quality of Weta Digital. They are, realistically, the NEW ILM.
Jedidiah
--
Well, Morgoth completely wrecked middle earth early it's creation, Morgoth and Ungoliant destroyed the two trees, and well, there's always the "Battle of Unnumbered Tears" for evil victories. Not to mention Sauron successfully getting Numenor destroyed, the shape of the world changed, and all that. That wasn't a bad effort really.
Jedidiah
Have they finally added cygwin support, or do I have to keep using Xemacs a while longer?
Jedidiah
I'm from New Zealand, and in combinationn with education directions there, along with with my acceptance into honours programs at University I completed a Masters degree in Mathematics only taking 5 (small/short) courses that were not mathematics. All the other courses I took were physics courses (as I was contemplating doing physics honours at the time.
In some ways this benefitted me greatly - it enabled me to complete a Masters' degree by the time I was 21, and thoroughally cover a wide variety of subjects within mathematics. In other ways I feel that I really did miss out.
I enrolled for courses in German literature, Poetry, and philosophy, but simply had to drop them very early due to course overload (I was doing 1.6 times a full load at the time). I would have loved to have had an opportunity to properly pusue those subjects. As it is I have simply done my best to do some self directed learning - but it would have been nice to have more direction etc. in the matter.
Fortunately I had friends who did take a wide variety of courses (and I'm widely read anyway) so that helped provide some direction for my extra studies.
So, having taken an extremely directed course of study, and having studied a diverse range of subjects outside of that field, here's my advice:
Ideally a directed course of study is best, but people should be encouraged to take a few courses that are well outside their fundamental area. I don't believe in mandating what those courses are. They should be alternate areas of interest for the student. For me it was poetry and literature. For others it may be film, biology, maths, or history. It is worth doing a little bit of something else though, and it should be encouraged.
Jedidiah
--
Fortunately
My biggest fear is they'll do a Voyager and have this crew do all manner of revolutionary stuff. I could understand that happening in TOS, 'cause it was the Enterprise, the big, lets go and explore the universe ship, stocked with good people. In TNG it was acceptable because it was THE flagship. They legitimately had the BEST engineers in starfleet. With Voyager it was just a random ship - and yet they came up with more stunning Borg defeating technology from that miserable crew than any sane person could expect.
This ship in the new series is NOT famous (the downside of going backward in tiem to cast the series), so they better not do a "and if we revrse the flow of the ... then we can accelerate up to warp 12!" sort of crap like they did on Voyager.
Jedidiah
Okay, very simply, due to some other work by two people whose names I cannot recall immediately, it was demonstrated that if Taniyama-Shimura was true then Fermat was also true - this involved a proof by contradiction using the assumption that if Taniyama-Shimura didn't hold then there was a an elliptic curve which would then demonstrate that Fermat didn't hold. Wiles used this as leverage. His aim was to prove Fermat. Proving Taniyama-Shimura was just the best way to tackle it - that is, there were no other known ways to tackle Fermat. Of course proving Taniyama-Shimura is no mean feat in and of itself, but Wiles did manage it eventually (after roughly 7 years workign in isolation).
Does that clear it up?
Jedidiah
Randomly quoting vaguely related theorems should not earn you kudos or mod points. Taniyama-Shimura has very little to do with Elliptic curve cryptography. It was useful for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, and does relate to Elliptic curves (it essentially says there's a nice one to one relationship between slliptic curves and modular forms), but if anything, Taniyama-Shimura provides new opportunities to attack ECC.
For those who don't know, and don't want to get confused by the above fool, ECC relies upon the same principle as RSA, and Diffie-Hellman - that is the difficulty of solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem. The only difference between ECC and Diffie-Hellman is that ECC does it's computations in a different algebraic space (the group formed by the points on an Elliptic curve). The advantage is that the DLP is demonstrably more complicated to solve in the new space, and as such greater security can be achieved with smaller key sizes. Smaller key sizes means faster algorithms (in principle).
HTH
Jedidiah
Don't be so sure. Differential cryptanalysis, which pokes some nice big theoretical holes in a number of systems (which have generally been hardened against it now) was only developed in the mid 80's or so. There is eveidence to believe that the NSA was aware of it as early as the late 60's. Who knows what else they've come up with in the meantime. Be aware, the NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world.
Jedidiah
Technically, given a pure one time pad (used once only) with a TRULY random string to xor against the system is perfect and uncrackable. These systems are normally broken due to the pseudorandom nature of the "random" string.
Why is it uncrackable? Given a truly random string, used only once, then ANY decryption is equally valid, because any xor string is equally likely.
The reasons this is never used is (1) generating TRULY random strings is very hard. (2) more importantly, as you say, key distribution is an absolute bitch (and we're talking about an infinite key length here).
Jedidiah
A federated identity model will enable every business or user to manage their own data, and ensure that the use of critical personal information is managed and distributed by the appropriate parties, rather than a central authority.
seems pretty clear to me - you manage your own data, and it is authenticated in a distributed way, not maintained and authenticated in a centralised Microsoft database. Further:
In a federated view of the world, a person's online identity, their personal profile, personalized online configurations, buying habits and history, and shopping preferences are administered by users, yet securely shared with the organizations of their choosing.
Emphasis mine. You maintain your own data, and decide who you will alow it to be shared to.
Can someone please tell me how this is not (at this vague stage) the sort of thing that we've been wanting? A decentralised, distributed information management system...
Jedidiah
I believe the benefits of small sats is that you can put several of them on a single launch vehicle, and reduce the launch costs that way. Of course you need a launch system capable of carrying a number of smaller payloads - which there aren't very many of right now.
As far as I know the best for doing that are not US built which is why Surrey Space over in England are making a killing right now in the nanosat category.
Jedidiah
I was under the impression that Gandalf would not weidl it because, well, that wasn't what he was there to do. Gandalf was eventually shown to be Maiar, and an agent of the Valar. As such his job was to guide, not to do - ever notice that for all the impact that Gandalf has, he never actually does anything, but rather counsels others to act?
Jedidiah
Come to NZ if you want to get close to cashless. Besides all the usual bits and pieces you mentioned New Zealand has an EXTREMELY widespread EFT-POS system (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale )which uses ATM systems to directly debit your account and transfer the cash. No having ETF-POS isn't new - you guys have it in the US (though I believe you may call it somethign else). The difference is that I can fully expect to drive out to a small town, population of 2000, walk into a random store, and have EFT-POS. The penetration of the system in incredible, you can ALWAYS expect to be able to pay by EFT_POS, cash is almost never required.
Jedidiah
Jedidiah
So what's the bet that it's simply because they didn't manage to get the latest layer of candy coated plastic onto Jobs' latest little weird idea?
Jedidiah