Uhhh... How bout the atmosphere? The kitchen sink burns up in reentry. Next!
not if it's ceramic or marble, like many sinks are. toilets too, while we're at it.
As far as all your other projectiles thrown from space... What's stopping the [sarcasm]evil[/sarcasm] military from doing that now?
not much. as far as i know, they could have a weapons platform up there right now with this capability. but if they were spending the money to put something up there, i'd bet they'd probably have opted for nuclear weapons. with a space elevator, there is a major shift in the economics of the situation. it now becomes trivial to get things up into space, and therefore you're more willing to use them more often and waste them on smaller targets. it becomes a much more "conventional" weapon.
now what's this bit about the "evil" military? i don't recall implying that the military (which military were we talking about?) is evil.
you're forgetting the big upside of the space elevator: the owners of the space elevator can drop shit on you from space! heavy things like big rocks, kitchen sinks, and 2000 pound gps-guided bombs. and let it be clear, there is no defence against kitchen sinks falling on you from space. we're talking afforable space based weapons platforms. the weapon of choice of the future may be raindrop-shaped ceramic projectiles with spent-uranium cores, raining unstoppably from above and smashing their way through tanks and into underground bunkers, or sinking an aircraft carrier battlegroup.
the military of the country that builds this wonderous weapons platform will let see to the safety of the tether, you can bet on that.
sorry, "nc" is netcat (or, if you prefer, gnu netcat). you have committed a namespace violation. your application will be ignored until you find a name that does not conflict with a currently maintained, widely used application.
If someone had come on slashdot 10 years ago and said that in 10 years there would be a consumer-targeted UNIX that could easily run whatever Linux/GNU software you threw at it in millions of homes, what would the reaction have been?
oh, you mean BeOS? by 1995, it was running on standard desktop powermacs and x86 machines, and targeted towards end-users. except for the networking stack (not bsd-sockets), and a few minor annoyances, your run-of-the-mill POSIX app would compile and run fine. you did have to install an x-server, but that's true for osx as well. and no, it's not really unix (for you nitpickers), but its posix layer was not bad, considering that they had so few engineers to work on the whole os.
So on big endian ppc's, which macs are, all those "ntos" macros, etc., expand to NOPs. Once you introduce little endian machines into the mix, they start doing real work to transform internal representations for the wire.
not quite. first, i think you mean "ntohs" (and ntohl and friends). second, they are not macros. they are, in fact, real functions (in glibc, bsd libc, and windows' winsock library). i'd imagine it's the same on macs. third, a macro that does nothing is not expanded to a NOP, it is simply removed by the preprocessor.
so, assuming the macs are conforming to bsd networking standards, ntohs is required to be a function, so there is still a function call per conversion (which is much more costly than doing the actual byteswap).
The real tragedy is when you have homogenously little endian machines; e.g., a network that only has PCs on it. An integer gets byteswapped twice to end up in exactly the same byte order it was all along.
a real high performance implementation (ie, the kernel) would not use ntohl, it would implement a similar byteswap macro. a byteswap can be done on x86 in one instruction, so it is fairly trivial to do.
the omnifi is quite a piece of junk (i know, i own one).
the best product i've seen so far is the phatbox. it's being sold by volkswagen and audi as optional equipment. the kenwood music keg is a derivative of the phatbox that only works with kenwood stereos, but you can buy a phatbox that works with many types of car stereos.
there are several other makers of in-car mp3 players. ssi neo, the omnifi, the now defunct empeg/riocar. none of these made any inroad with real manufacturers because of poor quality and terrible usability. after having used the phatbox SSA interface (it talks to you, so you can find your songs without ever having to look down at a display), i'm never buying another product without it.
It is an unfortunate fact about fandom, whether it be gaming fandom, anime fandom, or Linux fandom that it goes through stages:
1. Stage One: A small group of people discover something that they like and think is fun and interesting. They form clubs based on it, talk to each other about references from it and generally enjoy themselves. Often, they will be persecuted by people who don't get it, "You're into that?!? How can you be into that?!?!" they'll sneer as they pass you in the street, at school or at work. This is also the evangelism phase, you try to convince people to become involved in the thing you are into. "The more the merrier" is what you think at this stage. In some ways, this is the best stage of fandom. There is a lot you have to do by yourself and normally a dearth of commercial support, but it is exciting.
2. Stage Two: Some charismatic people become interested in what you like, unfortunately, leading the people who were sneering at you to think, "Oh! He's into that? Oh, maybe I misjudged it then..." (You'll see why this is unfortunate soon enough.) More support becomes available, so you don't have to do everything yourself. Instead of third generation fan-subs, for instance, commercial tapes become available. Maybe not the ones you want, but still, maybe good in their own way.
3. Stage Three: This is the transitional phase, your hobby becomes well known enough that the mainstream media picks up on it, usually portraying it as a weird and evil sub-culture. Of course, this causes it to appeal to bored mainstreamers who want to appear cool by taking on the establishment (until they grow up to become corporate lawyers and/or investment bankers, natch.) These are the people who start showing up at your AD&D club meetings and when you suggest a game of Call of Cthuhlu for a change, mock you. They don't mock you because they know anything about CoC , but because "the name sounds goofy, man." You start feeling resentful as they try feeding your sixth level magic user to a gelatinous cube, and in my case you stop attending group meetings.
4. Stage Four: Congressmen start talking about the evils of the whatever-it-is that you like, of course making it more cool among mainstreamers . Although the thing you like is more readily available now from a variety of commercial sources, it has been rendered palatable for the mainstreamers . All the rough edges are sanded off, and you get accosted by people who don't know that you used to be really into the thing who try to tell you how cool their bland, pallid version of the thing you used to love is. The barbarians are at the gate! People are overunning your hobby with the same predjudices they had back when it wasn't cool. They accost you at conventions and say, "You are into that!?! How could you be into that?!? This new is so much cooler than that. I wouldn't be caught dead being into that." Note: As always, you are not trying to force your tastes on anyone. In fact, because the quality of people you are meeting has declined so much, you try to identify the bad ones and just "smile and nod" as they pass you by. You are just trying to "live and let live," but the mainstreamers only want to appear rebellious, even though by their very nature they are conformists. Because of this, they will seek you out and try to force conformity on you, basically forcing you to hide your interests within a hobby from them the same way you used to hide your interest in the hobby from them.
5. Stage Five: Everyone is into your hobby now... but it's become so palatable and mainstream that it isn't recognizable as the thing you used to love. You've since moved on to other things. Soon after this, it becomes uncool and people start dropping it. You still like the old things that got you into it in the first place, but you no longer mention it to
Personally, I'd like to see programmable hardware...Essentially an FPGA section on CPUs. Programs would provide the OS's scheduler with a circuit layout, and the scheduler would have the layout programmed in when needed.
sure... great idea. just like the idea of putting an array of dsps on the pci bus, to act as a generic accelerator unit.
of course, the problem with both of these is: who is going to program for these? some specialized high performance applications, perhaps (openssl, linux kernel, autocad,...). will "grep" or "apache" make use of these accelerators? can they be programmed in c? are they portable? do you have to be a "ibm power fpga programmer" to know how to use these, or can any programmer easily port their skills here? having programmed dual core risc+dsp chips, i will tell you, the complexity of splitting a task between the risc and the dsp is much much much much greater than doing in on the risc alone. when you distance yourself from general-purpose computing, you lose the support of just about everyone.
well, here were the options available to the discoverers of this bug:
1) tell a few trusted sources about this, let them patch and create patches for their users, and then reveal the exploit when they're ready.
2) tell everyone about the exploit (and patch) at the same time.
the difference is that in case 1, the users of red hat, debian, gentoo, freebsd,... know that they can get a safe update from their vendor (who is already protected) asap. they don't have to wait for the vendor to verify whether their systems have been compromised before distributing the patch. both cases start a mad scramble for patches, but in case 2 the good guys are not a step ahead of the bad guys.
ah, you seem confused. bytes are not SI units, those would be octets (an octet is 8 bits). a kilo-octet is 1000 octets, and a peta-octet is equal to 1,000,000 giga-octets.
a byte is from the computing world. it's a computing term. it was invented for computers. before people were sending bits over networks and before hard-drives existed, a kilobyte had been defined as 1024 bytes. that's how it works in the computer world.
Isn't giving the government your encryption keys like testifying against yourself? And isn't that not required by the fifth amendment?
no. think of your encrypted data as a safe. when the police come to you with a warrant to search your stuff, you are obliged to open the safe for them. if you fail to do, they can put you in jail, indefinitely, without a trial, until such a time as you comply with the warrant (ie, give them the combo), or they manage to crack the safe without your help. and that time doesn't count towards time served when they finally do get your data.
now... there are some ways around this. if you had a safe the police didn't know about, you are not required to tell them that it exists. if your hard-drive is filled with what appears to be random garbage, but contains multiple encrypted slices (that cannot be detected without their respective magic keys), you can have plausible deniability to claim that some don't exist. there is an open source project that does this (i forget the name). it's still technically failing to comply with the warrant, but they can't hold you because they can't show that you are failing to comply.
but if you're going to be sitting around a prison cell waiting for them to crack your 1024bit key, you might as well give them the evidence. you might get out of jail faster after serving your sentence.
of course, ianal, ymmv, don't get your legal advice on slashdot.
The Y chromosome is a mutation of the X chromosome and contains much less information.
but you forget that males have both X and Y chromosomes. so, while 2 females (only X's) can only create female offspring, males can create both male (XY), female (XX).
Joe Bruin here, with a message to all you UCLA Bruins.
Write your administrators. Write the fuckheads at the STC, write the chancellor. Write the Daily Bruin, the LA Times, whatever socialist newspaper is circulating this month on campus. Tell them that copyright infringement is not a criminal offense (it is a civil matter between the copyright holder and the infringer). Tell them that watching your network activity (you pay for it with your tuition, remember) should not be permitted without a court order (much like telephone wire tapping or searching your room). Tell them that UCLA has taken a hostile position towards its students, and allows outside entities to censor free speech online (there are legitimate uses for p2p networks, you know).
Did you know the Internet was invented at UCLA? That's right. The Interface Message Processor (IMP) is a big, green, refrigerator-sized box that is now sitting in the library at Boelter Hall. This machine was the first node of the Internet (you can thank Leonard Kleinrock and Vint Cerf, if you run into them in the hall). Don't let retarded system-administrators ruin it.
Make a big stink. Make it clear that the next generation of applicants will choose to go to a different school, when they find out what is going on. Make the UCLA administrators ashamed of bowing to pressure from the MPAA and RIAA. Don't let them ruin your school.
back in my day, if you wanted to download porn, you had to wait until your roommate left for class, and then search for it on usenet. and if you got a single download that wasn't corrupt, you'd consider yourself lucky! nowadays with bittorrent and kazaa, life is so easy. if i had wireless access campus-wide, i might have spent alot more time in the classroom (my apartment had the four of us on a single dialup connection).
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh... How bout the atmosphere? The kitchen sink burns up in reentry. Next!
not if it's ceramic or marble, like many sinks are. toilets too, while we're at it.
As far as all your other projectiles thrown from space... What's stopping the [sarcasm]evil[/sarcasm] military from doing that now?
not much. as far as i know, they could have a weapons platform up there right now with this capability. but if they were spending the money to put something up there, i'd bet they'd probably have opted for nuclear weapons. with a space elevator, there is a major shift in the economics of the situation. it now becomes trivial to get things up into space, and therefore you're more willing to use them more often and waste them on smaller targets. it becomes a much more "conventional" weapon.
now what's this bit about the "evil" military? i don't recall implying that the military (which military were we talking about?) is evil.
you're forgetting the big upside of the space elevator: the owners of the space elevator can drop shit on you from space! heavy things like big rocks, kitchen sinks, and 2000 pound gps-guided bombs. and let it be clear, there is no defence against kitchen sinks falling on you from space. we're talking afforable space based weapons platforms. the weapon of choice of the future may be raindrop-shaped ceramic projectiles with spent-uranium cores, raining unstoppably from above and smashing their way through tanks and into underground bunkers, or sinking an aircraft carrier battlegroup.
the military of the country that builds this wonderous weapons platform will let see to the safety of the tether, you can bet on that.
sorry, "nc" is netcat (or, if you prefer, gnu netcat). you have committed a namespace violation. your application will be ignored until you find a name that does not conflict with a currently maintained, widely used application.
regards,
the management
If someone had come on slashdot 10 years ago and said that in 10 years there would be a consumer-targeted UNIX that could easily run whatever Linux/GNU software you threw at it in millions of homes, what would the reaction have been?
oh, you mean BeOS? by 1995, it was running on standard desktop powermacs and x86 machines, and targeted towards end-users. except for the networking stack (not bsd-sockets), and a few minor annoyances, your run-of-the-mill POSIX app would compile and run fine. you did have to install an x-server, but that's true for osx as well. and no, it's not really unix (for you nitpickers), but its posix layer was not bad, considering that they had so few engineers to work on the whole os.
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
PLAY
SYNTAX ERROR
READY.
PLAY *.MP3
SYNTAX ERROR
READY.
LOAD *,8,1
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
So on big endian ppc's, which macs are, all those "ntos" macros, etc., expand to NOPs. Once you introduce little endian machines into the mix, they start doing real work to transform internal representations for the wire.
not quite.
first, i think you mean "ntohs" (and ntohl and friends).
second, they are not macros. they are, in fact, real functions (in glibc, bsd libc, and windows' winsock library). i'd imagine it's the same on macs.
third, a macro that does nothing is not expanded to a NOP, it is simply removed by the preprocessor.
so, assuming the macs are conforming to bsd networking standards, ntohs is required to be a function, so there is still a function call per conversion (which is much more costly than doing the actual byteswap).
The real tragedy is when you have homogenously little endian machines; e.g., a network that only has PCs on it. An integer gets byteswapped twice to end up in exactly the same byte order it was all along.
a real high performance implementation (ie, the kernel) would not use ntohl, it would implement a similar byteswap macro. a byteswap can be done on x86 in one instruction, so it is fairly trivial to do.
pfft, useless.
it won't convert miles per gallon into rods per hogshead
go ahead, try it
but why 1556. It seems like a rather odd number
1556 = 1024 + 512 + 20 hot spares.
i almost thought you knew what you were talking about, until you got to the Van Halen belt.
the omnifi is quite a piece of junk (i know, i own one).
the best product i've seen so far is the phatbox. it's being sold by volkswagen and audi as optional equipment. the kenwood music keg is a derivative of the phatbox that only works with kenwood stereos, but you can buy a phatbox that works with many types of car stereos.
there are several other makers of in-car mp3 players. ssi neo, the omnifi, the now defunct empeg/riocar. none of these made any inroad with real manufacturers because of poor quality and terrible usability. after having used the phatbox SSA interface (it talks to you, so you can find your songs without ever having to look down at a display), i'm never buying another product without it.
Fandom: The Barbarians at the Gate
- or -
Yes, I still like Ranma 1/2
(blantantly stolen without permission from here)
It is an unfortunate fact about fandom, whether it be gaming fandom, anime fandom, or Linux fandom that it goes through stages:
1. Stage One: A small group of people discover something that they like and think is fun and interesting. They form clubs based on it, talk to each other about references from it and generally enjoy themselves. Often, they will be persecuted by people who don't get it, "You're into that?!? How can you be into that?!?!" they'll sneer as they pass you in the street, at school or at work. This is also the evangelism phase, you try to convince people to become involved in the thing you are into. "The more the merrier" is what you think at this stage. In some ways, this is the best stage of fandom. There is a lot you have to do by yourself and normally a dearth of commercial support, but it is exciting.
2. Stage Two: Some charismatic people become interested in what you like, unfortunately, leading the people who were sneering at you to think, "Oh! He's into that? Oh, maybe I misjudged it then..." (You'll see why this is unfortunate soon enough.) More support becomes available, so you don't have to do everything yourself. Instead of third generation fan-subs, for instance, commercial tapes become available. Maybe not the ones you want, but still, maybe good in their own way.
3. Stage Three: This is the transitional phase, your hobby becomes well known enough that the mainstream media picks up on it, usually portraying it as a weird and evil sub-culture. Of course, this causes it to appeal to bored mainstreamers who want to appear cool by taking on the establishment (until they grow up to become corporate lawyers and/or investment bankers, natch.) These are the people who start showing up at your AD&D club meetings and when you suggest a game of Call of Cthuhlu for a change, mock you. They don't mock you because they know anything about CoC , but because "the name sounds goofy, man." You start feeling resentful as they try feeding your sixth level magic user to a gelatinous cube, and in my case you stop attending group meetings.
4. Stage Four: Congressmen start talking about the evils of the whatever-it-is that you like, of course making it more cool among mainstreamers . Although the thing you like is more readily available now from a variety of commercial sources, it has been rendered palatable for the mainstreamers . All the rough edges are sanded off, and you get accosted by people who don't know that you used to be really into the thing who try to tell you how cool their bland, pallid version of the thing you used to love is. The barbarians are at the gate! People are overunning your hobby with the same predjudices they had back when it wasn't cool. They accost you at conventions and say, "You are into that!?! How could you be into that?!? This new is so much cooler than that. I wouldn't be caught dead being into that." Note: As always, you are not trying to force your tastes on anyone. In fact, because the quality of people you are meeting has declined so much, you try to identify the bad ones and just "smile and nod" as they pass you by. You are just trying to "live and let live," but the mainstreamers only want to appear rebellious, even though by their very nature they are conformists. Because of this, they will seek you out and try to force conformity on you, basically forcing you to hide your interests within a hobby from them the same way you used to hide your interest in the hobby from them.
5. Stage Five: Everyone is into your hobby now... but it's become so palatable and mainstream that it isn't recognizable as the thing you used to love. You've since moved on to other things. Soon after this, it becomes uncool and people start dropping it. You still like the old things that got you into it in the first place, but you no longer mention it to
Personally, I'd like to see programmable hardware...Essentially an FPGA section on CPUs. Programs would provide the OS's scheduler with a circuit layout, and the scheduler would have the layout programmed in when needed.
...). will "grep" or "apache" make use of these accelerators? can they be programmed in c? are they portable? do you have to be a "ibm power fpga programmer" to know how to use these, or can any programmer easily port their skills here? having programmed dual core risc+dsp chips, i will tell you, the complexity of splitting a task between the risc and the dsp is much much much much greater than doing in on the risc alone. when you distance yourself from general-purpose computing, you lose the support of just about everyone.
sure... great idea. just like the idea of putting an array of dsps on the pci bus, to act as a generic accelerator unit.
of course, the problem with both of these is: who is going to program for these? some specialized high performance applications, perhaps (openssl, linux kernel, autocad,
or internal server error, whichever.
[rms@gnuhurd ~]$ /gbin/gnu_rm --recursive --forthwith --no-emacs "/home/rms/My_Documents/Secret_IBM_Plot/"
well, here were the options available to the discoverers of this bug:
... know that they can get a safe update from their vendor (who is already protected) asap. they don't have to wait for the vendor to verify whether their systems have been compromised before distributing the patch. both cases start a mad scramble for patches, but in case 2 the good guys are not a step ahead of the bad guys.
1) tell a few trusted sources about this, let them patch and create patches for their users, and then reveal the exploit when they're ready.
2) tell everyone about the exploit (and patch) at the same time.
the difference is that in case 1, the users of red hat, debian, gentoo, freebsd,
ah, you seem confused. bytes are not SI units, those would be octets (an octet is 8 bits). a kilo-octet is 1000 octets, and a peta-octet is equal to 1,000,000 giga-octets.
a byte is from the computing world. it's a computing term. it was invented for computers. before people were sending bits over networks and before hard-drives existed, a kilobyte had been defined as 1024 bytes. that's how it works in the computer world.
now we can all run .exe files on our linux machines.
was this a step forward?
Isn't giving the government your encryption keys like testifying against yourself? And isn't that not required by the fifth amendment?
no. think of your encrypted data as a safe. when the police come to you with a warrant to search your stuff, you are obliged to open the safe for them. if you fail to do, they can put you in jail, indefinitely, without a trial, until such a time as you comply with the warrant (ie, give them the combo), or they manage to crack the safe without your help. and that time doesn't count towards time served when they finally do get your data.
now... there are some ways around this.
if you had a safe the police didn't know about, you are not required to tell them that it exists. if your hard-drive is filled with what appears to be random garbage, but contains multiple encrypted slices (that cannot be detected without their respective magic keys), you can have plausible deniability to claim that some don't exist. there is an open source project that does this (i forget the name). it's still technically failing to comply with the warrant, but they can't hold you because they can't show that you are failing to comply.
but if you're going to be sitting around a prison cell waiting for them to crack your 1024bit key, you might as well give them the evidence. you might get out of jail faster after serving your sentence.
of course, ianal, ymmv, don't get your legal advice on slashdot.
offtopic? maybe redundant. i've verified the contents of this file, and it is good. i wonder if the mods did so before modding down.
The Y chromosome is a mutation of the X chromosome and contains much less information.
but you forget that males have both X and Y chromosomes. so, while 2 females (only X's) can only create female offspring, males can create both male (XY), female (XX).
Joe Bruin here, with a message to all you UCLA Bruins.
Write your administrators. Write the fuckheads at the STC, write the chancellor. Write the Daily Bruin, the LA Times, whatever socialist newspaper is circulating this month on campus. Tell them that copyright infringement is not a criminal offense (it is a civil matter between the copyright holder and the infringer). Tell them that watching your network activity (you pay for it with your tuition, remember) should not be permitted without a court order (much like telephone wire tapping or searching your room). Tell them that UCLA has taken a hostile position towards its students, and allows outside entities to censor free speech online (there are legitimate uses for p2p networks, you know).
Did you know the Internet was invented at UCLA? That's right. The Interface Message Processor (IMP) is a big, green, refrigerator-sized box that is now sitting in the library at Boelter Hall. This machine was the first node of the Internet (you can thank Leonard Kleinrock and Vint Cerf, if you run into them in the hall). Don't let retarded system-administrators ruin it.
Make a big stink. Make it clear that the next generation of applicants will choose to go to a different school, when they find out what is going on. Make the UCLA administrators ashamed of bowing to pressure from the MPAA and RIAA. Don't let them ruin your school.
Go #1 Bruins
Joe
"The No. 2s are so far behind already. Why would we want to work with No. 2?"
funny, that's why we say when people ask us to port our software to MacOS.
you kids these days have it all.
back in my day, if you wanted to download porn, you had to wait until your roommate left for class, and then search for it on usenet. and if you got a single download that wasn't corrupt, you'd consider yourself lucky! nowadays with bittorrent and kazaa, life is so easy. if i had wireless access campus-wide, i might have spent alot more time in the classroom (my apartment had the four of us on a single dialup connection).
frost!