getting a free telnet account on a.mil account sounds like fun if a bit dangerous. lots of free disk space, a good connectivity, and if you use a password cracker on a thing that has any security they accuse the US military and you get on/.,.. I bet they all use their girlfriend's first name as password too. I know that is how it works in the french army. The sysop is a private, and when you are a private you do not want to tell an officer that 'barbara' is not a secure password. Not that the french army is connected to the net either but they lock their windows box so that nobody beats their Tetris hi-score. way too much fun! ---
Well this is a really nice idea. But you are talking technological innovation here. I do not think a marketing trained brain can go all that far. These people are not Steve Jobs, they won't introduce a shared net connection for a family sized network of computers. They will only change the colors when the airport gains market shares. Laurent ---
The marketing people claim they answer people's needs. So boys want to fantasize about driving fast cars( car accidents cause more death in the US yearly than the whole Vietnam war) and shooting others while girls want to fantasize about getting pink dresses, a cute house and a nice kitchen.
Maybe that is natural and marketing is only answering natural needs of the customers. I prefer thinking these are artificial needs created by the marketing people. Just my optimism? Laurent ---
It does indeed. But boys actually do not need an incentive to crave computers. Someone said it was positive to make computers that would attract girls. I do not think it is a good way to attract girls. ---
Nature? Is it nature that cause little girls to play with toy kitchen while little boys play with toy cars and toy guns? I would like an evidence of that.
You can excomunicate me because it is 'political corectness' but my opinion is it is culture rather than nature. I think destroying the myth that you need testicles in order to understand how a computer works is good for society as a whole. Technology is good when you can master it, and keeping 53% of the population with lower technological skills won't help. Laurent ---
Buying a special computer that is 'only for the girls' is acknwledging that girls can not use 'normal computers'. I do not think that is anywhere near a good idea. ---
well..for those who wondered why there are so few girls in the geeky side of computerland and thought there was a biological/neurological/ whatever cause, I think it shows who is operating the patriarchal gender formatting process. Laurent ---
The french journalists liked that news a lot: INTRODUCTION: -since the french revolution scientists worldwide use the metric system. But the anglo-saxon are weird. Some of them drive on the left side. And they still use inches and yards. ...here the guy takes two big rulers. One is yellow and one meter long and one red and one yard long MAIN COURSE: -as you see one yard is 9 centimeters shorter than one meter. NASA had two engineering teams one in california the other in......it required a lot of precision......a mistake that would not be tolerated from a primary school kid......350 millions lost... DESSERT -and so the NASA engineers were very unhappy, and they were red (showing the one yard ruler) with shame and confusion.
well france is as metric a country as you can be but when it comes to beer you can order a demi, which is half a pint, or a pinte which is a pint, or a ballon which is a quarter of pint aka 12.5 cl, which is a normal wine glass
what do you mean, I hope? the idea of an ether was really nice in teh first place, which is why people clinged to it so much, now if this turns out to be a new michelson and morley experiment that is a good opportunity for th eeinstein of the next century ---
France Telecom introduced the minitel network as early as 1985, and it was used for e-commerce from the very beginning..so that patent would surely not hold in France, which is in europe... Laurent ---
Allman, who is gay himself, places weight on the importance of protecting people's privacy while at the same time facilitating their ability to communicate. (He also told the Advocate earlier this year that he takes a "sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program.")
Perhaps he can be a positive gay role model. I have gotten tired of suggesting Hoover as a great gay American. Besides, he was a little rough around the edges. Allman (is he gay?) has done a lot of good without Hoover's obvious problems. I wonder why this post got moderated down. I guess there are homophobic/.ers, i wonder if they are christian too. Laurent PS:the gender ration among open source freaks being what it is, being gay would have its advantages. ---
Measuring complexity in terms of number of lines does not seem a good idea to me. Adding drivers make the number of lines increase significantly, but not necessarily its complexity, when different drivers are just variations of the same code to suit different hardware specs. On the other side leaving ext2fs for a journaling file system might not cause a spectacular increase in size of the code but it will increase the complexity dramatically.
Well he carries a gun and wears a moustache. I am not sure that would make me want him to date my best friend, but I do not see how it matters when all you want is sending him bits and pieces of code
community grow exponentially (1+2+3+....+n-1) for n people. 1+2+3+....+n-1 is n(n-1)/2, which is quadratic, i.e. far from exponential. I do not see why the number of pair of persons would be related t the growth of a community. Exponential growth would be expected if each month, each coder would recruit two new coders. This is how epidemics spread, or algae in a pond. One reason it does not behave this way, as previously stated, is because fetchmail has a bounded ecological niche. I can see another reason: as far as i know you do not join an open source project because you know people in it but because you know about the project. So each month the project attracts a given number of developpers, which causes linear growth. Exponential growth happens when, as Bruce Perens states, the visibility of the project increases, for instance when a project gives birth to many sub-project.
There is a flaw in this: it would work if the population of potential developers was a constant. The number of Open Source users follows a pretty steep increase rate. what about the number of open source coders?
unless someone comes up with new algorithms, big vector computers won't crack all keys. The algorithms we know of are exponential. when you add 1 digit to the key it takes a computer that is K times faster to crack it.
some other things would profit much more of new supercomputers. what they are really good at is solving Partial Differential Equations either on really big domains (weather forecast) or with a high precision ( nuclear weapons simulation)..and i can understand why the US government might be interested in that.
you need to remember that all these assumptions on the hardness of cracking keys depend on the fact that NP-Hard problems are not tractable in polynomial time...
BK left france around 97..so no webcam with the arc de triomphe in the background and a royal cheese in the foreground..but the perfume shop 'sephora' has a few PCs in the shop with a net connection.
Slashdot Mirror
The name http://oget.nu/ is available and in french it means 'oget naked' which is a real cool site name. Well. If you are oget that is.
Laurent
---
getting a free telnet account on a .mil account sounds like fun if a bit dangerous. lots of free disk space, a good connectivity, and if you use a password cracker on a thing that has any security they accuse the US military and you get on /.,..
I bet they all use their girlfriend's first name as password too. I know that is how it works in the french army. The sysop is a private, and when you are a private you do not want to tell an officer that 'barbara' is not a secure password.
Not that the french army is connected to the net either but they lock their windows box so that nobody beats their Tetris hi-score.
way too much fun!
---
Well this is a really nice idea. But you are talking technological innovation here. I do not think a marketing trained brain can go all that far. These people are not Steve Jobs, they won't introduce a shared net connection for a family sized network of computers. They will only change the colors when the airport gains market shares.
Laurent
---
Yes. I noticed there is a 'hotwheels' computer.
The marketing people claim they answer people's needs. So boys want to fantasize about driving fast cars( car accidents cause more death in the US yearly than the whole Vietnam war) and shooting others while girls want to fantasize about getting pink dresses, a cute house and a nice kitchen.
Maybe that is natural and marketing is only answering natural needs of the customers. I prefer thinking these are artificial needs created by the marketing people. Just my optimism?
Laurent
---
It does indeed. But boys actually do not need an incentive to crave computers. Someone said it was positive to make computers that would attract girls. I do not think it is a good way to attract girls.
---
Nature?
Is it nature that cause little girls to play with toy kitchen while little boys play with toy cars and toy guns? I would like an evidence of that.
You can excomunicate me because it is 'political corectness' but my opinion is it is culture rather than nature.
I think destroying the myth that you need testicles in order to understand how a computer works is good for society as a whole. Technology is good when you can master it, and keeping 53% of the population with lower technological skills won't help.
Laurent
---
Buying a special computer that is 'only for the girls' is acknwledging that girls can not use 'normal computers'. I do not think that is anywhere near a good idea.
---
well..for those who wondered why there are so few girls in the geeky side of computerland and thought there was a biological/neurological/ whatever cause, I think it shows who is operating the patriarchal gender formatting process.
Laurent
---
The french journalists liked that news a lot:
...here the guy takes two big rulers. One is yellow and one meter long and one red and one yard long ...it required a lot of precision... ...a mistake that would not be tolerated from a primary school kid... ...350 millions lost...
INTRODUCTION:
-since the french revolution scientists worldwide use the metric system. But the anglo-saxon are weird. Some of them drive on the left side. And they still use inches and yards.
MAIN COURSE:
-as you see one yard is 9 centimeters shorter than one meter. NASA had two engineering teams one in california the other in...
DESSERT
-and so the NASA engineers were very unhappy, and they were red (showing the one yard ruler) with shame and confusion.
BIG LAUGH
---
---
well france is as metric a country as you can be but when it comes to beer you can order a demi, which is half a pint, or a pinte which is a pint, or a ballon which is a quarter of pint aka 12.5 cl, which is a normal wine glass
---
what do you mean, I hope? the idea of an ether was really nice in teh first place, which is why people clinged to it so much, now if this turns out to be a new michelson and morley experiment that is a good opportunity for th eeinstein of the next century
---
France Telecom introduced the minitel network as early as 1985, and it was used for e-commerce from the very beginning..so that patent would surely not hold in France, which is in europe...
Laurent
---
---
Perhaps he can be a positive gay role model. I have gotten tired of suggesting Hoover as a great gay American. Besides, he was a little rough around the edges. Allman (is he gay?) has done a lot of good without Hoover's obvious problems. /.ers, i wonder if they are christian too.
I wonder why this post got moderated down. I guess there are homophobic
Laurent
PS:the gender ration among open source freaks being what it is, being gay would have its advantages.
---
Measuring complexity in terms of number of lines does not seem a good idea to me. Adding drivers make the number of lines increase significantly, but not necessarily its complexity, when different drivers are just variations of the same code to suit different hardware specs.
On the other side leaving ext2fs for a journaling file system might not cause a spectacular increase in size of the code but it will increase the complexity dramatically.
---
Well he carries a gun and wears a moustache. I am not sure that would make me want him to date my best friend, but I do not see how it matters when all you want is sending him bits and pieces of code
---
1+2+3+....+n-1 is n(n-1)/2, which is quadratic, i.e. far from exponential. I do not see why the number of pair of persons would be related t the growth of a community.
Exponential growth would be expected if each month, each coder would recruit two new coders. This is how epidemics spread, or algae in a pond.
One reason it does not behave this way, as previously stated, is because fetchmail has a bounded ecological niche.
I can see another reason: as far as i know you do not join an open source project because you know people in it but because you know about the project. So each month the project attracts a given number of developpers, which causes linear growth. Exponential growth happens when, as Bruce Perens states, the visibility of the project increases, for instance when a project gives birth to many sub-project.
There is a flaw in this: it would work if the population of potential developers was a constant. The number of Open Source users follows a pretty steep increase rate. what about the number of open source coders?
laurent
---
unless someone comes up with new algorithms, big vector computers won't crack all keys. The algorithms we know of are exponential. when you add 1 digit to the key it takes a computer that is K times faster to crack it.
some other things would profit much more of new supercomputers. what they are really good at is solving Partial Differential Equations either on really big domains (weather forecast) or with a high precision ( nuclear weapons simulation)..and i can understand why the US government might be interested in that.
Laurent
---
you need to remember that all these assumptions on the hardness of cracking keys depend on the fact that NP-Hard problems are not tractable in polynomial time...
this is only a conjecture as for now.
laurent
---
well i did not know that..but i guess the SSH/telnet/whatever does not work either..
i am not a lawyer, but using telnet to write crypto programs on an european computer seems to qualify as 'working on crypto outside the US'
laurent
another way to do it would be to spend some time in europe and fiddle with us bearded european math wizzes.
it takes more time than SSH but you get to have some real food instead of american genetically engineered hormone grown hamburgers..
laurent
BK left france around 97..so no webcam with the arc de triomphe in the background and a royal cheese in the foreground..but the perfume shop 'sephora' has a few PCs in the shop with a net connection.