So, looking through google news about Vonage, none of the stories I found actually said which patents were ruled to have been infringed upon. Does anyone know what techniques and technologies Vonage used that Sprint and/or Verizon own patents on?
Many programmers do not understand the importance of different rounding rules, and even think that add.5 then truncate is always correct.
Please to explain when adding.5 to a floating point number and truncating to an integer does not correctly round up. Is this going to be one of those platform-dependent problems like y = x; cos(x) != cos(y)? If this is a bad method of rounding up, what do you suggest?
Sorry, you failed to end the discussion. Quirk's Exception specifically states that any attempt to use Godwin's Law to end a thread will be unsuccessful.
Plus, calling someone "worse than Hitler" is very childish.
Didn't the RIAA say some years ago that they didn't have a problem with friends copying CDs? They said that that's not a threat and they're focusing on peer-to-peer as the end of the world. A quick, random browse through the internet archive didn't turn anything up, but I don't have the time right now to go all the way through it. Does anyone else remember this?
There are two related quotes that I've found to be insightful and have refined how I look at things.
The first is by Kelvin Throop III:
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.
If you absolutely need a complex config, use a shell script that sets environment variables.... I.e. the config is just a script that sets some variables. If you want, you can add some code in the script to do calculations or have other logic.... you can assume/bin/sh and basic Unix tools are present.
It is my understanding that environment variables can be bad for security reasons. A privileged or semi-privileged (set UID) program being called by an unprivileged user can't trust the user to configure some parts of it. The solution is to have a configuration file that the user can't touch, and perhaps not even see, but which the program can read and maybe write.
[The way things go (Der Lauf der Dinge)] is the true original.
Yes it is. It's very well done. I got it for Christmas, and about half of my extended family - maybe a dozen or so people - watched the whole thing in near silence.
They do, however, cheat a few times. They really like the foam step, because they're able to use it as a checkpoint - get from A to B, stop, set up B to C, restart the foam reaction, film from B to C, and so on. The Honda commercial is very well done because it's brief (some of the steps in The Way Things Go take as long as the entire Honda commercial), it's clear (there aren't any chemical reactions, for example; judge for yourself if that's good or bad), and the whole thing is done in one shot.
Honestly, the answer to the question of precisely why there are so few women in computer science, physics, math completely eludes me. I'd really like to know why. I can't find any one good reason why not, and nobody else seems to be able to agree on a reason either.
I remember an article a while back about how someone made a game-of-life simulation about interracial neighborhoods. One of the goals of each individual was to be next to at least one other individual of the same type. The emergant behavior was complete seperation, even though no single individual explicitly wanted complete seperation.
It's possible that there aren't many women in IT simply because there aren't many women in IT. It's rather intimidating to be entering a group composed wholly of Others, and no one like yourself.
If this is true, then the more women who successfully enter the field of IT, the easier it will be for women to enter.
It would seem as though even if SHA-1 were to fail, the two algorithms used together could bolster each other security-wise. This slows things down, of course, but would it not suffice for the time being?
Using two hashes in conjunction does not work as well as you would expect it to work. There are at least half a dozen posters here proposing this idea, so I will try to explain in some detail why it does not work.
In general an n-bit hash can be collided in 2^(n/2) time using the birthday paradox attack. When you concactenate two hashes of lengths n and m bits, you get a hash of length n+m bits. However, this (n+m)-bit hash can in fact be collided in m*2^(n/2) + 2^(m/2) time (assuming n is greater than or equal to m). This is only slightly more effort than it takes to collide both hashes separately. In the case of SHA-1 and MD5, n is 160 and m is 128, so colliding both hashes would take 128*2^80 + 2^64 = 2^87.00000017 effort versus 2^80 effort for SHA-1 alone.
It must be especially stressed that m*2^(n/2) + 2^(m/2) is considerably smaller than the attack time of 2^((n+m)/2) which you would normally expect from a well designed hash having n+m output bits.
So how does the attack on two hashes work, you ask? It exploits a curious property of the birthday attack which says that generating a multicollision (three or more messages all with the same hash) by brute force takes only marginally more effort than generating a single collision. Specifically, generating a 2^(m/2) way multicollision takes only m/2 times as much effort as generating a single collision. So what you do to collide two hash functions is: you generate a huge multicollision in the first hash function, and then from that set you look randomly for a pair that collides the second function. It seems very counterintuitive, but the point is you can break the hash functions one by one instead of having to break both of them at once. Strength in numbers doesn't apply here.
If one of the hash functions (say MD5) has a better than brute force attack, then that can be used to speed up the attack against both hash functions by the same factor. The only uncertainty is if both of the hash functions have better than brute force attacks; in this case it would depend on the particulars of the attacks as to whether one can make them interact in such a way as to break both. However, no matter what, the idea of concactenating two hash functions has such low security compared to designing a good hash function of the same length from scratch that it is unlikely that this concept will ever be useful from a pure cryptography standpoint.
For more information on multicollisions and attacking concactenated hash functions, see A. Joux "Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions", Proceedings of Crypto 2004, LNCS 3152.
It's a copy of the data (or rather the alternate data stream is the copy), but I believe that that's what Windows 2000/XP reads, because a) they don't need to change any functionality to have it display in Explorer and b) Explorer doesn't have to open the file. If, in fact, Windows 95/98/ME shows the same information in Explorer, then it's an shell extension attached to the file type.
I have not played with Word very much, on 9x or NT, but I am fairly certain this is how it works based on my research of the summary tag and my understanding of how Windows and Explorer work.
For example, on my NTFS formatted system, a plain text document with one "a" in it is officially 4KB, even though there is onlt one byte of data in it.... right click on the file and select "Properties", there is a summary tab that displays all the info stored in that 19k.
Actually, that's not read out of the main file. NTFS supports multiple data streams (see Microsoft KB article 105763 and "Features Available on NTFS Volumes"). The summary information is kept in an unprintable named data stream ("\005SummaryInformation"), while the 20k of whatever is in the main, unnamed data stream. Word automatically fills it out, but you can add summary info to any file. FAT doesn't support multiple data streams, which is why that feature doesn't work on FAT volumes.
Besides, even if it was saved in the file, all those fields would take, at most, 1k, which still leaves 18k unaccounted for.
> for countless hours of entertainment? Let's be super optimistic, and say 720 hours (that is, 30 days). Yay, less than a penny an hour. But it's not the quantity that matters, it's the quality. What do you do when the game goes down? Or when your internet connection goes down?
Or, and this is the most important one, what do you do when the company decides not to run the game anymore and shuts it down? Then you're left with a worthless box with CDs, maybe a manual, and if you're lucky a map or some other goody, and you're out $50 + n * $15. As opposed to games that you might have bought 12 years ago and still play just fine.
> It's cheap as it gets. > Equals about 2.5 meals at McDonalds, $6 for a meal at McDonald's? Ugh
> 2 trips to the movies (some places not even that). Putting something which is expensive in terms of something else that is expensive doesn't say much. Or are you saying that $7.50 for two hours is reasonable?
Slashdot Mirror
So, looking through google news about Vonage, none of the stories I found actually said which patents were ruled to have been infringed upon. Does anyone know what techniques and technologies Vonage used that Sprint and/or Verizon own patents on?
Please to explain when adding .5 to a floating point number and truncating to an integer does not correctly round up. Is this going to be one of those platform-dependent problems like y = x; cos(x) != cos(y)? If this is a bad method of rounding up, what do you suggest?
Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/177/
Sorry, you failed to end the discussion. Quirk's Exception specifically states that any attempt to use Godwin's Law to end a thread will be unsuccessful.
Plus, calling someone "worse than Hitler" is very childish.
Something like WikiMapia?
Thank you, Simone.
...Fry?
I found Joel Spolsky's article on map-reduce ("Can Your Programming Language Do This?") very enlightening, much more so than the wikipedia article. Unfortunately, a google search for map reduce ranks it ninth.
A link to help people know if music they have or music they're considering buying was released by a member of the RIAA:
The RIAA Radar.
> Not me. I assumed it involved sadomasochism as soon as I read it.
E_TOO_MUCH_INFORMATION
You, as a WoW player, should know better than most that the internet is for porn.
Sudo means Simon Says.
This just in: Katamari Damacy players may be dangerous drivers.
Didn't the RIAA say some years ago that they didn't have a problem with friends copying CDs? They said that that's not a threat and they're focusing on peer-to-peer as the end of the world. A quick, random browse through the internet archive didn't turn anything up, but I don't have the time right now to go all the way through it. Does anyone else remember this?
There are two related quotes that I've found to be insightful and have refined how I look at things.
The first is by Kelvin Throop III:
The second, more succinct quote is by George Box:
It is my understanding that environment variables can be bad for security reasons. A privileged or semi-privileged (set UID) program being called by an unprivileged user can't trust the user to configure some parts of it. The solution is to have a configuration file that the user can't touch, and perhaps not even see, but which the program can read and maybe write.
Yes it is. It's very well done. I got it for Christmas, and about half of my extended family - maybe a dozen or so people - watched the whole thing in near silence.
They do, however, cheat a few times. They really like the foam step, because they're able to use it as a checkpoint - get from A to B, stop, set up B to C, restart the foam reaction, film from B to C, and so on. The Honda commercial is very well done because it's brief (some of the steps in The Way Things Go take as long as the entire Honda commercial), it's clear (there aren't any chemical reactions, for example; judge for yourself if that's good or bad), and the whole thing is done in one shot.
They're both good, just for different reasons.
I remember an article a while back about how someone made a game-of-life simulation about interracial neighborhoods. One of the goals of each individual was to be next to at least one other individual of the same type. The emergant behavior was complete seperation, even though no single individual explicitly wanted complete seperation.
It's possible that there aren't many women in IT simply because there aren't many women in IT. It's rather intimidating to be entering a group composed wholly of Others, and no one like yourself.
If this is true, then the more women who successfully enter the field of IT, the easier it will be for women to enter.
Sweet!
In other news, there is no god. Disassembly output follows:
As CABAL said in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun,
"The systems are impenetrable. There are no weak points. The technology is without flaw. The Human element, as always, is riddled with imperfection."
Really? Invisibility could be used for tasks requiring stealth? No way, that's crazy talk.
Copy'n'paste from an anonymous coward in a previous discussion:
It would seem as though even if SHA-1 were to fail, the two algorithms used together could bolster each other security-wise. This slows things down, of course, but would it not suffice for the time being?
Using two hashes in conjunction does not work as well as you would expect it to work. There are at least half a dozen posters here proposing this idea, so I will try to explain in some detail why it does not work.
In general an n-bit hash can be collided in 2^(n/2) time using the birthday paradox attack. When you concactenate two hashes of lengths n and m bits, you get a hash of length n+m bits. However, this (n+m)-bit hash can in fact be collided in m*2^(n/2) + 2^(m/2) time (assuming n is greater than or equal to m). This is only slightly more effort than it takes to collide both hashes separately. In the case of SHA-1 and MD5, n is 160 and m is 128, so colliding both hashes would take 128*2^80 + 2^64 = 2^87.00000017 effort versus 2^80 effort for SHA-1 alone.
It must be especially stressed that m*2^(n/2) + 2^(m/2) is considerably smaller than the attack time of 2^((n+m)/2) which you would normally expect from a well designed hash having n+m output bits.
So how does the attack on two hashes work, you ask? It exploits a curious property of the birthday attack which says that generating a multicollision (three or more messages all with the same hash) by brute force takes only marginally more effort than generating a single collision. Specifically, generating a 2^(m/2) way multicollision takes only m/2 times as much effort as generating a single collision. So what you do to collide two hash functions is: you generate a huge multicollision in the first hash function, and then from that set you look randomly for a pair that collides the second function. It seems very counterintuitive, but the point is you can break the hash functions one by one instead of having to break both of them at once. Strength in numbers doesn't apply here.
If one of the hash functions (say MD5) has a better than brute force attack, then that can be used to speed up the attack against both hash functions by the same factor. The only uncertainty is if both of the hash functions have better than brute force attacks; in this case it would depend on the particulars of the attacks as to whether one can make them interact in such a way as to break both. However, no matter what, the idea of concactenating two hash functions has such low security compared to designing a good hash function of the same length from scratch that it is unlikely that this concept will ever be useful from a pure cryptography standpoint.
For more information on multicollisions and attacking concactenated hash functions, see A. Joux "Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions", Proceedings of Crypto 2004, LNCS 3152.
It's a copy of the data (or rather the alternate data stream is the copy), but I believe that that's what Windows 2000/XP reads, because a) they don't need to change any functionality to have it display in Explorer and b) Explorer doesn't have to open the file. If, in fact, Windows 95/98/ME shows the same information in Explorer, then it's an shell extension attached to the file type.
I have not played with Word very much, on 9x or NT, but I am fairly certain this is how it works based on my research of the summary tag and my understanding of how Windows and Explorer work.
Actually, that's not read out of the main file. NTFS supports multiple data streams (see Microsoft KB article 105763 and "Features Available on NTFS Volumes"). The summary information is kept in an unprintable named data stream ("\005SummaryInformation"), while the 20k of whatever is in the main, unnamed data stream. Word automatically fills it out, but you can add summary info to any file. FAT doesn't support multiple data streams, which is why that feature doesn't work on FAT volumes.
Besides, even if it was saved in the file, all those fields would take, at most, 1k, which still leaves 18k unaccounted for.
Congratulations, you're under arrest.
> 15$ a month
Plus about $50 for the first month.
> for countless hours of entertainment?
Let's be super optimistic, and say 720 hours (that is, 30 days). Yay, less than a penny an hour. But it's not the quantity that matters, it's the quality. What do you do when the game goes down? Or when your internet connection goes down?
Or, and this is the most important one, what do you do when the company decides not to run the game anymore and shuts it down? Then you're left with a worthless box with CDs, maybe a manual, and if you're lucky a map or some other goody, and you're out $50 + n * $15. As opposed to games that you might have bought 12 years ago and still play just fine.
> It's cheap as it gets.
> Equals about 2.5 meals at McDonalds,
$6 for a meal at McDonald's? Ugh
> 2 trips to the movies (some places not even that).
Putting something which is expensive in terms of something else that is expensive doesn't say much. Or are you saying that $7.50 for two hours is reasonable?