Dr. Lederman, Correct me if I am incorrect, but I've heard some talk amongst the various deans at Illinois Institute of Technology about you involvment with physics education. Where do you see physics education heading the future? How much physics should a person (not going into a phyiscs field, say an engineer or bilogy major) be taught and at what age should the concepts be taught to students? Thanks for your time, Patrick Wagstrom CpE student @ IIT
The opportunity to quiz a scientist of Prof. Lederman's stature doesn't come along every day.
Actually, some of us work at MIT...
Then again, some of us had Dr. Lederman for our freshman physics course. Of course he wasn't there that often, but still, I can say I had him as a professor.:-)
What intrigues me is the way it does desktop rendering. You'll notice that on the larger screenshot the menus are transparent to the windows beneath them, which is no big deal if its part of the application (this is in the quick time window and the image window) and the finder menu is semi-transparent to the desktop. But what is cool is that where the finder menu comes down and bonks on the quick time window.
This means that they must do rendering in layers. So why does this matter. IIRC, people were saying that it would be far to inefficient to render a desktop in layers, well obviously it isn't. However, how this works over X is still up in the air because X has the network export option and all.
I can say that I strongly believe that Chicago is a great place for a geek to be. First of all, there universities in Chicago are great (despite IIT being dissed in your post). They provide the local market with enough labor and then some.
Secondly you would be surprised at how many tech companies are in Chicago. Just go walk around downtown sometime and notice some of the companies down there. Unfortunately, we're lacking a lot of the really big ones that most grads seem to want to work for (I can't imagine working for a company of more than 50 people).
Bandwidth is pretty abundant. I live down in the south side by the projects and its pretty easy to get cable or DSL. Although I can also first hand attest to boneheaded Chicago ordinances like the one about ethernet in conduit (just heleped run around 4 miles of it for my office). This probably has something to do with the fact the city is corrupt, but you can deal with that.
There is always stuff to do in the city. This probably holds true for any city of over a million. But no matter what time of night there is someplace that you can get pizza or coffee.
Public transportation is pretty good. Despite the fact that the green line doesn't run 24/7 anymore, so I need to take my chances on the red line, it's only $1.50 and that can get you all over the place, up to Evanston or out to O'hare. Factor in the Metra and you it takes you out to Elgin or Wisconsin or deep in the heart of Indiana for minimal $$ (Although why anyone would go to Indiana is a bafflement).
I'm looking at graduation in may with a computer engineering degree and I can say that I will probably stay in the city of Chicago or the suburbs (maybe move to schaumburg and become dimly aware of a non schaumburg world) because there are pleanty of jobs here and pleanty to do.
I happen to be a network architect at a firm that uses a fair amount of VA hardware. Here is the main difference, with Dell you get okay hardware, Gateway and Micron you get mediocre. On our VA boxes they are PURE POWER. And they work 100% out of the box. From the time we get a new server to the time its operational and secure is usually about 3 hours for us now (got it down pretty well). Need a database server with 6 NICs in it? No problem, VA does it (might I add the damn thing looks like the sandcrawler from star wars). Need a bunch of high powered SCSI web servers with 3 nics in em? No problem there either (we have 4 of those, they're older 500's). Its not a case of being a desktop system. They aren't desktop systems. We have 1 va desktop system and it works well, but its not what they're designed for. If you can show me a dell or a gateway that can actually challenge one of these that I might agree. But VA boxes are simply awesome. Not to mention the support, they botched part of our config the first time and paid for the next day air to and from (lots of $$ for 4 servers). When I want a box that I need to tinker with I'll go for a cheap dell box (or some knockoff) when I need reliability at work we get VA.
I'm proud to say that at my work I have the liberty to use star wars names. Anyone who knows anything about star wars will soon understand why we chose some of the names.
For instance our web servers are Darth Maul and Darth Sidious because they are badass mofos. The development boxes are Kenobi and Skywalker because they were both developing Jedi's. Our switches are Anakin and Lando because they switch sides. Our racks are Mos Eisley and Coruscant because they are the places to go when you need stuff. Oh yeah, our development database is Padme because its a sexy VALinux box.:-)
Where I work I am fortunate enough to have access to one of these things. First of all, I should clarify, its an extra wide display, its not like a 50 inch monitor. Its maybe about 24 inches high or so and about 40 inches wide. (does that math work out somewhere close?)
Anyway, it still is really damn cool. Quake II was a little difficult to play because I wasn't used to how skewed everything was. I played with the FOV commands and it worked a little better. I haven't had a chance to try quake 3 yet because I don't have a 3d card in my box at work.
Anyway, these can actually be had for about $18000 if you look hard enough. Its only 10% less, but that extra $2000 can be put to good use on other toys.
The reason why this hasn't been that huge of a deal yet is because most people don't always view that as information as part of the address, or because most people didn't know.
I, for one, don't see how such information is going to help route packets that much. Other than allowing EVERY ETHERNIC ON EARTH TO BE ON THE SAME SUBNET. Do we really need this? There really isn't a purpose to that.
Secondly, people only get really angry when they see something in use. Like the P3 security thing people knew about beforehand but didn't get pissed about till afterwards. Same thing with the win98 big brother thing.
Of course we could all take the view of Scott McNealy and just realize we have no privacy. I can take your names or email addresses and go buy tons of information from experian for 10 cents a head. I'd probably be more worried about that.
Besides, just get multiple nics then. You could easily just do something with the one nic, go buy a new one and voila, your info has changed and you can deny you ever had the old one.
Yes this is a very interesting read. 12uSecs is damn impressive I have to hand it to them. Even more impressive if you read the "Thermodynamic Limitations" section of Applied Cryptography (see page 157 of the second edition) where he talks about how if you were to build a dyson sphere around the sun you could still only count up to 2^192. So to brute force computers need be made of something other than matter and occupy something other than space. (go read it)
Anyway, lets look at something. Even with a 512 bit number, we can look at a 513 bit number and it should be twice as complex. A 520 bit number is 256 times as complex. It grows at a rate of 2^n. Which is basically useless from an algorithmic point of view, as most useful algorithms should be around n^k where K is a constant or some derivation thereof.
Let me show something. I use a 2048 bit gnupg key (I'm paranoid okay?). This comes out to be 2^1536 times more complex. Thus (courtesy of my handy Ti-85 calculator) it should take about 2.892x10^457 seconds to factor. This comes out to be roughly 9.17x10^449 years.
The only issues that come up are the following. What are the energy requirements for such a device. Do they grow linearly or exponentially? Also what with keyspace does it increase exponentially or linearly. If it is only a linear growth then yes my 2048 bit key is as good as swiss cheese against this and I better come up with a damn good one time pad system.
I couldn't tell from the article, but it sounds as though part of this is based of Shamir's idea on how to factor 512 bit numbers. I seem to remember there was some mathematical oddity that allowed them to be easier for some reason. Can someone fill me in?
I'm rather appalled at some of the opinions I have been seeing here. I would encourage all of you to take some critical looks at Evolution. While it seems plausible, is that because of what you know, or what you were taught.
I would recommend reading books on both sides of the issue so that way you can decide for yourself. I'm fairly sure I'm in the minority of slashdot readers as one who believes in creationism, but I wasn't always like that. In fact it was even christianity that convinced me of creationism, christianity was not a part of my life at that point in time.
As for the person who made the comment about the dogs interbreeding, umm hate to break it you einstein, but all dogs are the same species, just different breeds. Sorta like humans in that respect.
It could be true that they are doing external hosting, however when chosing an external host it is very easy to specify your platform. I mean its not hard to find a PHP enabled provider (coughMINDSPRINGcough) that doesn't rape you that bad. I still don't comprehend why some people will rely on a box that needs to be rebooted weekly for mission critical stuff.
First of all, I remember the big deal with all of the Multias a while ago (januaryish?) and apparenty some people got them to work and others turned them into paperweights. I noticed that they were selling tech support for $25 an hour...which is cheap as tech support goes, but you will probably need it.
Anyway, here is the thing that really bugs me. The Linux Store is selling linux boxes as its main product apparently. Makes me wonder why I get this:
[~]>telnet www.thelinuxstore.com 80 Trying 216.160.206.18... Connected to www.thelinuxstore.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Content-Location: http://216.160.206.18/index.htm Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 04:39:22 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 23:39:08 GMT ETag: "076d79aacafbe1:51c2" Content-Length: 1476
Hmm...I would be skeptical about their commitment to be honest. As a business, I wouldn't buy from someone who didn't run the product they sell, makes me question the quality of the product. Like when Microsoft didn't upgrade to IIS 3.0 on www.microsoft.com until 6 months after it came out.
First of all, hot swap, isn't nescessairly new. Lots of mylex controllers support this and you can buy boxes from VALinux that have this feature. I believe that the VARServer 3500 is one of them that comes with a raid 5.
As for SMP, it baffles me the comment about linux not having full SMP support. I run Oracle on 4x Xeon at work (with the parallel options installed of course) and it works wonderful. Giving queries the/*+ parallel */ hint makes them about 3 times faster or so. Starting multiple SQL*Loader sessions imports the data about 3 times as fast also. I'd imagine that its waiting on the disk in these cases as we unfortunately only have one disk controller in this system. In any case, odds are we'll have to upgrade out of linux sometime in the future if it doesn't get support for 8 or more processors and files larger than 2gig. Which according to Linus probably ain't gonna happen soon.
I'm pretty sure that 100 and 1000 watt radio stations are legal. In fact I believe the lowest allowable by law is 19.5 watts. Coincidentally thats also how much power my campus' radio station has, and I live two blocks from where its broadcast and can never pick it up.
I think that you might have misinterpreted what this article is about. It is merely an article about Bo2k and how the fact that IS open source will cause problems for people. Meanwhile, it eludes the somewhat minor problem of people writing patches for legitimate software that turns in into trojan like software.
However I did glean a few bits of interesting stuff. Mainly that Microsoft is saying that if its a real remote admin tool that it wouldn't hide from the administrator. Umm, excuse me, I have the displeasure of having an NT server box here at work that I'm pseudo responsible for and NT Server Manager hides.
Secondly it doesn't mention the fact that if NT were written worth a damn, then it wouldn't be POSSIBLE to do this sort of stuff to it. There was the comment about it preying on users and not administrators, which is partially true, but its really MSs fault in the first place.
There was only one other thing that I disagreed with. It said something about when virus writers switched to open source in 1996 (like it was some sort of heavenly revelation) that there was proliferation in macro viruses. This may be true. But its more likely due to the rise of people who are using IE and Outlook for their net browsing and email reading.
Oh well, if nothing else the cDc by releasing the source code will actually FORCE microsoft to patch the whole and release patches that detect the software.
Okay, I'm fortunate enough to be a geek in a position of moderate power when it comes to IT decisions in my company (yeah, like those boxes got star wars names on their own). Anyway, we are in the process if developing a very large scale application that will require gigabytes of data in the database. At first we discussed using MySQL, as it was the only development tool available for us. I had used MySQL in the past with good success for my personal site and some other semi-commercial sites that I developed.
Here are what I see as the advantages of each.
MySQL is REALLY fast and light on resources. I'm able to run MySQL on my personal web server with 24 megs of ram, 300 megs of hard disk and a pentium 63 processor. It runs at a very acceptable speed for the site it manages. However it is hindered by the fact that no database can contain more than two gigs of data. This is a limitation as a result of the linux file system. Also it is lacking some nice stuff like foreign keys, stored procedures, nested selects. In all reality it implements only basic SQL. But is fine for most people.
Oracle to be quite frank, rocks my world. I've installed it numerous times and it is a hefty beast to install (and was a challenge to get working on RH 6.0). Anyway, it supports databases of unlimited size and works much better on large amounts of data. We are currently testing a system with 30 million rows of data in it and oracle flys through this like one of the SGI's through Seti@Home blocks. Its provides much more flexibility in terms of setup of the database. You can spread the files across multiple disk controllers. Also oracles stored procedures are simply awesome.
Oracle also provides a wider range of tools to play with. Loading in 30 million rows of imported data would be hideously slow over Perl/MySQL, but with SQL*Loader and spreading the load across 4 processors oracle can do this in under an hour.
To sum it up, here is my view. If you are developing something enterprise level (millions of rows of data) kiss MySQL goodbye, because it can't handle it. If you need triggers or stored procedures, later MySQL. If you have a low budget, keep on hoping because I could buy my car like 12 times over for the price of this beast.
So, choose what you wish. Also, if you say you are using MySQL some clients balk at that. Say you are using oracle, and they are like "wow, thats pimp!".
Please note, these comments refer to oracle 8.0.5, I haven't had a chance to play with Oracle 8i yet.
I would be very much inclined to think this is a fraud and here is why. First of all, I believe that the E2k used its own intruction set, there is not E2k client.
Secondly when we last heard they hadn't even put the chip in silicon yet. I'm sorry, but even for large companies it takes several months to go from the final design to silicon.
It just doesn't seem feasible. Here is another thing, lets do some math. Slashdot did 1.55 billion keys yesterday. That is done with 912 people. Assuming only 1500 computers doing RC5 on slashdot that would be about 1000kkeys a second for each computer (seems high, my k6 only gets 330 or something). That would put this thing approximately 2700 times faster than the current cpus. I'm sorry, thats not true.
Okay, I'm not currently in industry doing stuff like this, however I have made enough machines with FPGAs and what not and even a reconfigurable machine, so I know what it involves.
Here is the first thing that makes me skeptical.
Eventually, reconfigurable computing [a term coined by Gilson, referring to the underlying technology behind the hypercomputer] will permeate all information systems, just because it's faster, cheaper, and better," Gilson predicts.
Does this bug anyone else who this guy supposedly coined the term "reconfigurable computing"? I read an article in EETimes (I believe) from 1996 that used this term. Hrmpf.
In addition it surprises me that he thinks his company can sell hundreds of the $26 million dollar boxes. I'm not entirely sure how many StarFire's SUN is able to sell each year, but I doubt its much more than that. I'm pretty sure its less. Sounds like just another start up trying to get noise about themselves.
While I do believe that reconfigurable computing is going to be one of the future trends, I don't think these guys can do it. People are skeptical to pick up on new technology, especially like this. Maybe if Sun or IBM was putting its weight behind it people would do it. But Star Bridge systems? It may work, but I doubt it.
I've been mucking around on a friend PowerBook G3 and Yellow Dog Champion Server 1.0 for a couple of weeks and for the life of me I can't get X to work (or networking for that matter).
Has anyone had success with a PBG3 and LinuxPPC? From the looks of most of the message lists this seems to be an elusive goal. Its really one of the only things keeping me from buying my own powerbook g3.
Here is my take on the movie. I went to see it thursday (at a sneak preview where it was showing on more screens than star wars).
Overall the movie was funny. Being as I live in chicago I also have some sort of perverse attachment to Jerry Springer, so the whole springer scene in the beginning and end was excellent. Definately gets you going.
There were some parts that you would rather not have to see, such as the Felicity and Fat Bastard scene.
I would have to agree that Mini-Me was one of the best parts of the movie. What could be cuter than a little midget giving the finger?
But it didn't seem like a movie. Just a conglomeration of skits put together that on their own were hilarious. Worth a viewing once, but I wouldn't say much more than that. I don't think it will have the staying power of other great comedy movies like Ghostbusters and Caddyshack because it dates itself too much to the 90's with the songs and the jokes etc.
For most of my expereince, the word "Hacker" can be equated to Coder in the majority of situations. But this leaves out the hackers who don't really code much, but still qualify as hackers (ie network hackers, admins etc). Perhaps this means that coder is a subset of hacker. which isn't nescesairly true as I've been so rudely reminded by people who are coders but say they are too elegant to be hackers.
Geek might work, but lets face it, most of don't want to be confused with half-life geeks. So although I can take pride in the fact that I am a geek, I don't want my business card to say geek on it, although hacker or coder would work well.
Also, despite the fact that most of us like having the word pimp in our names (code pimp, web pimp, system pimp, crypto pimp), I don't think it would be the best choice for a change. Could you imagine CNN referring to Linus Torvalds as a Kernel Pimp and Rasterman as a Desktop Pimp?
Wizard and Guru seem a little arrogant and will disturb the suits and subsuits that most of us are forced to work with. They seem to have a hard enough fact calling us geeks, calling us a name that makes us sound rightfully superior will crush their fragile egos.
The problem is that we are searching for an exact synonym where none exists. Thus loyal/. readers we are forced to come up with a new word to add the english language. Preferably it should be something not in other languages so it can be universal. My first thought was for Quizibou, but then I was reminded that according the Book of Groening (Season 2, Episode 3 I believe) that it is a big fat dumb bald North American Ape who is quick to anger.
My other choice for a hacker synonym would be "snergle" (which is the name of my junk variables while coding), however a friend quickly informed me that snergle sounds way to much like fraggle. And while the fragles were cool and jolly, we don't want to be confused with them. So I'm willing to take suggestions. I need to get business cards printed up soon and the head boss isn't thrilled about me wanting hacker on my cards (I didn't even ask about "k-r4d 3733+ haX0r"). Right now I'm leaning towards writing something in perl to put together phonics and see what that can come up with.
Okay, seeing as people were complaining about this, here is how you fix it. True you can install a bunch of RPMs that you probably don't need, or you can look at this page in RedHat's knowledge base.
hope this helps. Thats a pretty cool java applet I gotta admit. Also for some of you who are having problems, it might be because of an old version of netscape (or IE I suppose) that doesn't yet support Java 1.1 applets. In that case you gotta waste some bandwidth downloading a newer version.
Here is one of the interesting things which is why the article by Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant". If the architecture of the PSX is covered by a patent, then even if connectix was able to implement the same thing through different methods, they still are in violation of the patent. So thus it would be illegal. Thus why I don't like patents. But I'm not clear on what happened in the legalities of the SCEA vs Connectix case.
I'd assume the same would hold true for the N64 (I'm sure there are patents in there). So with that being true, why haven't they bothered to go after dextrose? As I'm sure most of the stuff there isn't licensed to use the patent. This brings me up to another question, if you need to have a license to make N64 (and I would assume PSX games) what about if you own a Yarooze system (blue playstation). Does that come with a license?
From a corporate view, this seems to make some sense. Corporations wish to protect all of their assets, and the technology of their video games is an asset, but here is what interests me from the reading of this FAQ.
Does Nintendo Think Emulation Companies Promote Piracy? Why?
Yes. The only purpose of video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet.
This is not true. Most of the time the emulator is started by an author who wishes not nescessairly to play "illegal copied games from the internet" but to figure out how the CPU works. I can speak from experience that if I had source code to a fully working N64 emulator my last CPU I had to design for class would have been easier; we had to implement a MIPS cpu with bonus points for new instructions, I only wish I knew what new instructions to add. Its also interesting because I never remember having to agree to a licensing agreement saying I wouldn't reverse engineer my N64 or any of my games.
Haven't the Copyrights for Old Games Expired?
U.S. copyright laws state that copyrights owned by corporations are valid for 75 years from the date of first publication. Because video games have been around for less than three decades, the copyrights of all video games will not expire for many decades to come.
Nintendo may want to check on this, there was a small caveat made in I believe 1993 for software that DOES deal with its commercial exploitability. I realize that most roms sites think the rule is the holy grail (which it isn't) but it does affect this situation. Unfortunately I don't have a link to it right now.
Can Websites and/or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) be Held Liable for Violation of Intellectual Property Rights if they are Only Providing Links to Illegal Software and/or Other Illegal Devices?
Yes. The websites and/or ISPs for sites which link to ROMs, emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.
Nintendo may want to check on this. A person with a web page can be held responsible. But I don't believe that an ISP can nescessarily be held responsible, after all we still have GeoCitites don't we and lord knows how many roms they house (aside: wouldn't it be fun just to browse their hard drive and see all the fun files?)
it might also be worth some time for people to review the article "anarchism triumphant" by Eben Moglen, as some of its principles can be applied to thinking about this area.
Slashdot Mirror
You can see NASA's press release on this at http://hubble.nasa.gov/updates/1- 24-00update.html
Dr. Lederman, Correct me if I am incorrect, but I've heard some talk amongst the various deans at Illinois Institute of Technology about you involvment with physics education. Where do you see physics education heading the future? How much physics should a person (not going into a phyiscs field, say an engineer or bilogy major) be taught and at what age should the concepts be taught to students? Thanks for your time, Patrick Wagstrom CpE student @ IIT
The opportunity to quiz a scientist of Prof. Lederman's stature doesn't come along every day.
:-)
Actually, some of us work at MIT...
Then again, some of us had Dr. Lederman for our freshman physics course. Of course he wasn't there that often, but still, I can say I had him as a professor.
What intrigues me is the way it does desktop rendering. You'll notice that on the larger screenshot the menus are transparent to the windows beneath them, which is no big deal if its part of the application (this is in the quick time window and the image window) and the finder menu is semi-transparent to the desktop. But what is cool is that where the finder menu comes down and bonks on the quick time window.
This means that they must do rendering in layers. So why does this matter. IIRC, people were saying that it would be far to inefficient to render a desktop in layers, well obviously it isn't. However, how this works over X is still up in the air because X has the network export option and all.
Hmm...I only wish I was up to X11 hacking.
I can say that I strongly believe that Chicago is a great place for a geek to be. First of all, there universities in Chicago are great (despite IIT being dissed in your post). They provide the local market with enough labor and then some.
Secondly you would be surprised at how many tech companies are in Chicago. Just go walk around downtown sometime and notice some of the companies down there. Unfortunately, we're lacking a lot of the really big ones that most grads seem to want to work for (I can't imagine working for a company of more than 50 people).
Bandwidth is pretty abundant. I live down in the south side by the projects and its pretty easy to get cable or DSL. Although I can also first hand attest to boneheaded Chicago ordinances like the one about ethernet in conduit (just heleped run around 4 miles of it for my office). This probably has something to do with the fact the city is corrupt, but you can deal with that.
There is always stuff to do in the city. This probably holds true for any city of over a million. But no matter what time of night there is someplace that you can get pizza or coffee.
Public transportation is pretty good. Despite the fact that the green line doesn't run 24/7 anymore, so I need to take my chances on the red line, it's only $1.50 and that can get you all over the place, up to Evanston or out to O'hare. Factor in the Metra and you it takes you out to Elgin or Wisconsin or deep in the heart of Indiana for minimal $$ (Although why anyone would go to Indiana is a bafflement).
I'm looking at graduation in may with a computer engineering degree and I can say that I will probably stay in the city of Chicago or the suburbs (maybe move to schaumburg and become dimly aware of a non schaumburg world) because there are pleanty of jobs here and pleanty to do.
I happen to be a network architect at a firm that uses a fair amount of VA hardware. Here is the main difference, with Dell you get okay hardware, Gateway and Micron you get mediocre. On our VA boxes they are PURE POWER. And they work 100% out of the box. From the time we get a new server to the time its operational and secure is usually about 3 hours for us now (got it down pretty well). Need a database server with 6 NICs in it? No problem, VA does it (might I add the damn thing looks like the sandcrawler from star wars). Need a bunch of high powered SCSI web servers with 3 nics in em? No problem there either (we have 4 of those, they're older 500's). Its not a case of being a desktop system. They aren't desktop systems. We have 1 va desktop system and it works well, but its not what they're designed for. If you can show me a dell or a gateway that can actually challenge one of these that I might agree. But VA boxes are simply awesome. Not to mention the support, they botched part of our config the first time and paid for the next day air to and from (lots of $$ for 4 servers). When I want a box that I need to tinker with I'll go for a cheap dell box (or some knockoff) when I need reliability at work we get VA.
I'm proud to say that at my work I have the liberty to use star wars names. Anyone who knows anything about star wars will soon understand why we chose some of the names.
:-)
For instance our web servers are Darth Maul and Darth Sidious because they are badass mofos. The development boxes are Kenobi and Skywalker because they were both developing Jedi's. Our switches are Anakin and Lando because they switch sides. Our racks are Mos Eisley and Coruscant because they are the places to go when you need stuff. Oh yeah, our development database is Padme because its a sexy VALinux box.
Where I work I am fortunate enough to have access to one of these things. First of all, I should clarify, its an extra wide display, its not like a 50 inch monitor. Its maybe about 24 inches high or so and about 40 inches wide. (does that math work out somewhere close?)
Anyway, it still is really damn cool. Quake II was a little difficult to play because I wasn't used to how skewed everything was. I played with the FOV commands and it worked a little better. I haven't had a chance to try quake 3 yet because I don't have a 3d card in my box at work.
Anyway, these can actually be had for about $18000 if you look hard enough. Its only 10% less, but that extra $2000 can be put to good use on other toys.
The reason why this hasn't been that huge of a deal yet is because most people don't always view that as information as part of the address, or because most people didn't know.
I, for one, don't see how such information is going to help route packets that much. Other than allowing EVERY ETHERNIC ON EARTH TO BE ON THE SAME SUBNET. Do we really need this? There really isn't a purpose to that.
Secondly, people only get really angry when they see something in use. Like the P3 security thing people knew about beforehand but didn't get pissed about till afterwards. Same thing with the win98 big brother thing.
Of course we could all take the view of Scott McNealy and just realize we have no privacy. I can take your names or email addresses and go buy tons of information from experian for 10 cents a head. I'd probably be more worried about that.
Besides, just get multiple nics then. You could easily just do something with the one nic, go buy a new one and voila, your info has changed and you can deny you ever had the old one.
Yes this is a very interesting read. 12uSecs is damn impressive I have to hand it to them. Even more impressive if you read the "Thermodynamic Limitations" section of Applied Cryptography (see page 157 of the second edition) where he talks about how if you were to build a dyson sphere around the sun you could still only count up to 2^192. So to brute force computers need be made of something other than matter and occupy something other than space. (go read it)
Anyway, lets look at something. Even with a 512 bit number, we can look at a 513 bit number and it should be twice as complex. A 520 bit number is 256 times as complex. It grows at a rate of 2^n. Which is basically useless from an algorithmic point of view, as most useful algorithms should be around n^k where K is a constant or some derivation thereof.
Let me show something. I use a 2048 bit gnupg key (I'm paranoid okay?). This comes out to be 2^1536 times more complex. Thus (courtesy of my handy Ti-85 calculator) it should take about 2.892x10^457 seconds to factor. This comes out to be roughly 9.17x10^449 years.
The only issues that come up are the following. What are the energy requirements for such a device. Do they grow linearly or exponentially? Also what with keyspace does it increase exponentially or linearly. If it is only a linear growth then yes my 2048 bit key is as good as swiss cheese against this and I better come up with a damn good one time pad system.
I couldn't tell from the article, but it sounds as though part of this is based of Shamir's idea on how to factor 512 bit numbers. I seem to remember there was some mathematical oddity that allowed them to be easier for some reason. Can someone fill me in?
I'm rather appalled at some of the opinions I have been seeing here. I would encourage all of you to take some critical looks at Evolution. While it seems plausible, is that because of what you know, or what you were taught.
I would recommend reading books on both sides of the issue so that way you can decide for yourself. I'm fairly sure I'm in the minority of slashdot readers as one who believes in creationism, but I wasn't always like that. In fact it was even christianity that convinced me of creationism, christianity was not a part of my life at that point in time.
As for the person who made the comment about the dogs interbreeding, umm hate to break it you einstein, but all dogs are the same species, just different breeds. Sorta like humans in that respect.
It could be true that they are doing external hosting, however when chosing an external host it is very easy to specify your platform. I mean its not hard to find a PHP enabled provider (coughMINDSPRINGcough) that doesn't rape you that bad. I still don't comprehend why some people will rely on a box that needs to be rebooted weekly for mission critical stuff.
First of all, I remember the big deal with all of the Multias a while ago (januaryish?) and apparenty some people got them to work and others turned them into paperweights. I noticed that they were selling tech support for $25 an hour...which is cheap as tech support goes, but you will probably need it.
Anyway, here is the thing that really bugs me. The Linux Store is selling linux boxes as its main product apparently. Makes me wonder why I get this:
[~]>telnet www.thelinuxstore.com 80
Trying 216.160.206.18...
Connected to www.thelinuxstore.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Location: http://216.160.206.18/index.htm
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 04:39:22 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 23:39:08 GMT
ETag: "076d79aacafbe1:51c2"
Content-Length: 1476
Hmm...I would be skeptical about their commitment to be honest. As a business, I wouldn't buy from someone who didn't run the product they sell, makes me question the quality of the product. Like when Microsoft didn't upgrade to IIS 3.0 on www.microsoft.com until 6 months after it came out.
First of all, hot swap, isn't nescessairly new. Lots of mylex controllers support this and you can buy boxes from VALinux that have this feature. I believe that the VARServer 3500 is one of them that comes with a raid 5.
/*+ parallel */ hint makes them about 3 times faster or so. Starting multiple SQL*Loader sessions imports the data about 3 times as fast also. I'd imagine that its waiting on the disk in these cases as we unfortunately only have one disk controller in this system. In any case, odds are we'll have to upgrade out of linux sometime in the future if it doesn't get support for 8 or more processors and files larger than 2gig. Which according to Linus probably ain't gonna happen soon.
As for SMP, it baffles me the comment about linux not having full SMP support. I run Oracle on 4x Xeon at work (with the parallel options installed of course) and it works wonderful. Giving queries the
I'm pretty sure that 100 and 1000 watt radio stations are legal. In fact I believe the lowest allowable by law is 19.5 watts. Coincidentally thats also how much power my campus' radio station has, and I live two blocks from where its broadcast and can never pick it up.
I think that you might have misinterpreted what this article is about. It is merely an article about Bo2k and how the fact that IS open source will cause problems for people. Meanwhile, it eludes the somewhat minor problem of people writing patches for legitimate software that turns in into trojan like software.
However I did glean a few bits of interesting stuff. Mainly that Microsoft is saying that if its a real remote admin tool that it wouldn't hide from the administrator. Umm, excuse me, I have the displeasure of having an NT server box here at work that I'm pseudo responsible for and NT Server Manager hides.
Secondly it doesn't mention the fact that if NT were written worth a damn, then it wouldn't be POSSIBLE to do this sort of stuff to it. There was the comment about it preying on users and not administrators, which is partially true, but its really MSs fault in the first place.
There was only one other thing that I disagreed with. It said something about when virus writers switched to open source in 1996 (like it was some sort of heavenly revelation) that there was proliferation in macro viruses. This may be true. But its more likely due to the rise of people who are using IE and Outlook for their net browsing and email reading.
Oh well, if nothing else the cDc by releasing the source code will actually FORCE microsoft to patch the whole and release patches that detect the software.
Here are what I see as the advantages of each.
MySQL is REALLY fast and light on resources. I'm able to run MySQL on my personal web server with 24 megs of ram, 300 megs of hard disk and a pentium 63 processor. It runs at a very acceptable speed for the site it manages. However it is hindered by the fact that no database can contain more than two gigs of data. This is a limitation as a result of the linux file system. Also it is lacking some nice stuff like foreign keys, stored procedures, nested selects. In all reality it implements only basic SQL. But is fine for most people.
Oracle to be quite frank, rocks my world. I've installed it numerous times and it is a hefty beast to install (and was a challenge to get working on RH 6.0). Anyway, it supports databases of unlimited size and works much better on large amounts of data. We are currently testing a system with 30 million rows of data in it and oracle flys through this like one of the SGI's through Seti@Home blocks. Its provides much more flexibility in terms of setup of the database. You can spread the files across multiple disk controllers. Also oracles stored procedures are simply awesome.
Oracle also provides a wider range of tools to play with. Loading in 30 million rows of imported data would be hideously slow over Perl/MySQL, but with SQL*Loader and spreading the load across 4 processors oracle can do this in under an hour.
To sum it up, here is my view. If you are developing something enterprise level (millions of rows of data) kiss MySQL goodbye, because it can't handle it. If you need triggers or stored procedures, later MySQL. If you have a low budget, keep on hoping because I could buy my car like 12 times over for the price of this beast.
So, choose what you wish. Also, if you say you are using MySQL some clients balk at that. Say you are using oracle, and they are like "wow, thats pimp!".
Please note, these comments refer to oracle 8.0.5, I haven't had a chance to play with Oracle 8i yet.
I would be very much inclined to think this is a fraud and here is why. First of all, I believe that the E2k used its own intruction set, there is not E2k client.
Secondly when we last heard they hadn't even put the chip in silicon yet. I'm sorry, but even for large companies it takes several months to go from the final design to silicon.
It just doesn't seem feasible. Here is another thing, lets do some math. Slashdot did 1.55 billion keys yesterday. That is done with 912 people. Assuming only 1500 computers doing RC5 on slashdot that would be about 1000kkeys a second for each computer (seems high, my k6 only gets 330 or something). That would put this thing approximately 2700 times faster than the current cpus. I'm sorry, thats not true.
Okay, I'm not currently in industry doing stuff like this, however I have made enough machines with FPGAs and what not and even a reconfigurable machine, so I know what it involves.
Here is the first thing that makes me skeptical.
Eventually, reconfigurable computing [a term coined by Gilson, referring to the underlying technology behind the hypercomputer] will permeate all information systems, just because it's faster, cheaper, and better," Gilson predicts.
Does this bug anyone else who this guy supposedly coined the term "reconfigurable computing"? I read an article in EETimes (I believe) from 1996 that used this term. Hrmpf.
In addition it surprises me that he thinks his company can sell hundreds of the $26 million dollar boxes. I'm not entirely sure how many StarFire's SUN is able to sell each year, but I doubt its much more than that. I'm pretty sure its less. Sounds like just another start up trying to get noise about themselves.
While I do believe that reconfigurable computing is going to be one of the future trends, I don't think these guys can do it. People are skeptical to pick up on new technology, especially like this. Maybe if Sun or IBM was putting its weight behind it people would do it. But Star Bridge systems? It may work, but I doubt it.
I've been mucking around on a friend PowerBook G3 and Yellow Dog Champion Server 1.0 for a couple of weeks and for the life of me I can't get X to work (or networking for that matter).
Has anyone had success with a PBG3 and LinuxPPC? From the looks of most of the message lists this seems to be an elusive goal. Its really one of the only things keeping me from buying my own powerbook g3.
Here is my take on the movie. I went to see it thursday (at a sneak preview where it was showing on more screens than star wars).
Overall the movie was funny. Being as I live in chicago I also have some sort of perverse attachment to Jerry Springer, so the whole springer scene in the beginning and end was excellent. Definately gets you going.
There were some parts that you would rather not have to see, such as the Felicity and Fat Bastard scene.
I would have to agree that Mini-Me was one of the best parts of the movie. What could be cuter than a little midget giving the finger?
But it didn't seem like a movie. Just a conglomeration of skits put together that on their own were hilarious. Worth a viewing once, but I wouldn't say much more than that. I don't think it will have the staying power of other great comedy movies like Ghostbusters and Caddyshack because it dates itself too much to the 90's with the songs and the jokes etc.
For most of my expereince, the word "Hacker" can be equated to Coder in the majority of situations. But this leaves out the hackers who don't really code much, but still qualify as hackers (ie network hackers, admins etc). Perhaps this means that coder is a subset of hacker. which isn't nescesairly true as I've been so rudely reminded by people who are coders but say they are too elegant to be hackers.
/. readers we are forced to come up with a new word to add the english language. Preferably it should be something not in other languages so it can be universal. My first thought was for Quizibou, but then I was reminded that according the Book of Groening (Season 2, Episode 3 I believe) that it is a big fat dumb bald North American Ape who is quick to anger.
Geek might work, but lets face it, most of don't want to be confused with half-life geeks. So although I can take pride in the fact that I am a geek, I don't want my business card to say geek on it, although hacker or coder would work well.
Also, despite the fact that most of us like having the word pimp in our names (code pimp, web pimp, system pimp, crypto pimp), I don't think it would be the best choice for a change. Could you imagine CNN referring to Linus Torvalds as a Kernel Pimp and Rasterman as a Desktop Pimp?
Wizard and Guru seem a little arrogant and will disturb the suits and subsuits that most of us are forced to work with. They seem to have a hard enough fact calling us geeks, calling us a name that makes us sound rightfully superior will crush their fragile egos.
The problem is that we are searching for an exact synonym where none exists. Thus loyal
My other choice for a hacker synonym would be "snergle" (which is the name of my junk variables while coding), however a friend quickly informed me that snergle sounds way to much like fraggle. And while the fragles were cool and jolly, we don't want to be confused with them. So I'm willing to take suggestions. I need to get business cards printed up soon and the head boss isn't thrilled about me wanting hacker on my cards (I didn't even ask about "k-r4d 3733+ haX0r"). Right now I'm leaning towards writing something in perl to put together phonics and see what that can come up with.
Here is a summary, type the following as root:
/usr/sbin/chkfontpath --add /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
hope this helps. Thats a pretty cool java applet I gotta admit. Also for some of you who are having problems, it might be because of an old version of netscape (or IE I suppose) that doesn't yet support Java 1.1 applets. In that case you gotta waste some bandwidth downloading a newer version.
Here is one of the interesting things which is why the article by Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant". If the architecture of the PSX is covered by a patent, then even if connectix was able to implement the same thing through different methods, they still are in violation of the patent. So thus it would be illegal. Thus why I don't like patents. But I'm not clear on what happened in the legalities of the SCEA vs Connectix case.
I'd assume the same would hold true for the N64 (I'm sure there are patents in there). So with that being true, why haven't they bothered to go after dextrose? As I'm sure most of the stuff there isn't licensed to use the patent. This brings me up to another question, if you need to have a license to make N64 (and I would assume PSX games) what about if you own a Yarooze system (blue playstation). Does that come with a license?
From a corporate view, this seems to make some sense. Corporations wish to protect all of their assets, and the technology of their video games is an asset, but here is what interests me from the reading of this FAQ.
Does Nintendo Think Emulation Companies Promote Piracy? Why?
Yes. The only purpose of video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet.
This is not true. Most of the time the emulator is started by an author who wishes not nescessairly to play "illegal copied games from the internet" but to figure out how the CPU works. I can speak from experience that if I had source code to a fully working N64 emulator my last CPU I had to design for class would have been easier; we had to implement a MIPS cpu with bonus points for new instructions, I only wish I knew what new instructions to add. Its also interesting because I never remember having to agree to a licensing agreement saying I wouldn't reverse engineer my N64 or any of my games.
Haven't the Copyrights for Old Games Expired?
U.S. copyright laws state that copyrights owned by corporations are valid for 75 years from the date of first publication. Because video games have been around for less than three decades, the copyrights of all video games will not expire for many decades to come.
Nintendo may want to check on this, there was a small caveat made in I believe 1993 for software that DOES deal with its commercial exploitability. I realize that most roms sites think the rule is the holy grail (which it isn't) but it does affect this situation. Unfortunately I don't have a link to it right now.
Can Websites and/or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) be Held Liable for Violation of Intellectual Property Rights if they are Only Providing Links to Illegal Software and/or Other Illegal Devices?
Yes. The websites and/or ISPs for sites which link to ROMs, emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.
Nintendo may want to check on this. A person with a web page can be held responsible. But I don't believe that an ISP can nescessarily be held responsible, after all we still have GeoCitites don't we and lord knows how many roms they house (aside: wouldn't it be fun just to browse their hard drive and see all the fun files?)
it might also be worth some time for people to review the article "anarchism triumphant" by Eben Moglen, as some of its principles can be applied to thinking about this area.