The shuttle is hideously unreliable, and using it for planned purposes is futile in the way that attempts to drive long distances in ancient cars are futile. The task it's carrying out is solely there to act as a purpose for the Shuttle, and the Shuttle is only kept going to carry out that task. NASA will continue the grim circus of getting an obsolescent collection of systems that no-one still working there actually understands flying, and every once in a while one of their diminishing stock of orbiters will explode. Eventually there won't be enough left to service the ISS, the ISS too will be abandoned as the utter waste of time and money that it is, and space science can get back to things that matter like the Hubble follow-on and robotic probes to planets. The shuttle is to space exploration what the World Wrestling Federation is sport, and the sooner it's abandoned the better for all parties concerned.
That may have been one source of bombes for the 4-wheel Enigma (Triton / Neptune). Doc Keen or British Tabulators also built extensions to the Turing Bombe to cope with the fourth wheel, by simple running the existing three rather faster and adding a fourth, slow wheel. The original design had been quite conservative with regard to the counter used to test for `drops', and given the experience of operation they could speed the whole design up fairly easily. It's documented in Strip's book of essays, `Codebreakers', at least.
I'm not sure it's entirely true, anyway. The claim's always made that the reason the British didn't reveal that they'd broken Enigma (in the way in which the Americans rapidly documented the breaks into Red and Purple as soon as the war was over) was that the British were selling Enigma to misguided European powers, advertising it as the German's finest, without revealing they'd broken into it. For this story to make sense, the British would have to have retained the ability to break into Enigma.
It's always rumoured that Collossi were in service at Cheltenham into the sixties, attacking various Fish-style machine baudot-code ciphers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a bombe or two were kept as well: with the use of the diagonal board, they were probably faster than an emulation in a computer would have been.
The Polish desert in question, and Rejewski's machine, is bomba or bomby, I forgot which. It was also consonant with the ticking noise the machine made. The Polish machine performed a different task to the British: to determine the implications of particular sets of indicators, in the original system with double-enciphered message messages. Turing and Welchman named their device the bombe in honour of the bomby (and in rather poor security, too). It performed a different task, but was still at heart an automated Enigma machine, able to step through settings rapidly.
No one with half an understanding underestimates Rejewski's contributions, but your article is somewhat wide of the mark. Firstly, Rejewski's work focussed on the attacks on the double-encipherment of the message setting in the indicators prior to about 1940. By use of the bomba he was able to produce tables of `males' and `females' which indicated the circumstances under which the double-encipherment of the indicator offered a route into the message settings. Rejewski's method didn't require any knowledge of the plain text, but did crucially depend on the structure of the indicators. His work was replicated in the UK in the construction of Jeffries Sheets.
However, although Turing/Welchman's bombe paid explicit homage to the Polish work in the choice of name, its task was fundamentally different. The bombe provided a means to look for message settings based on the cipher text and conjectured plain text. Its weakness was the requirement for plain text, which was a massive task to obtain through traffic analysis of sterotyped messages, `kisses' with broken systems such as the Dockyard Key, weather reports transmitted in other cipher systems and so on. Its strength was that it was independent of the indicator system, which was one of the easier things to change in the Enigma system.
The Polish contribution lay in the machines themselves, the analysis of the indicator systems and the bomba (bomby? spelling may be wrong): together they showed other people that Enigma could be attacked, and provided a plentiful supply of cribs. Had the Poles not succeeded, it's unlikely that the British could have got the resources for their work. But to claim that the Polish work was the basis for the Bletchley work subsequent to the changes in the indicator system is not right.
And, if we're being picky, there might have been the odd vacumn tube in the implementation of the diagonal board's ``all on or none on'' algorithm. But bombes were essentially mechanical devices. The four-rotor ones must have been amazing to be near...
As well as analysis of individuals' style of morse, fingerprinting of the characteristics of individual transmitters was done during WW2. By following both equipment and personnel around networks it provided additional data for traffic analysis, which is both useful in its own right and useful as a source of cribs. In the case of U boats, it offered the chance to follow individual U boats from HF/DF fix to fix. Ralph Erskine wrote about this in Cryptologia, January 1999.
Except young Swedish women aren't exactly queuing up to commit suicide via exploding aeroplane, just in case you haven't noticed.
Anne Murphy wasn't queuing up to commit suicide via exploding aeroplane, but would have absent El Al security having been on the ball. Look it up.
In the case of the current allegations in Britain, at least one of the alleged bombers is a white convert, the son of a Tory party agent in High Wycombe (Tory == Republican of the less strident kind, agent == ward heeler or something). Richard Reid may have been a convert, but he didn't match the ethnic profile, nor did at least one of the 7/7 bombers. As in so many other regards, converts are often the most fervent. I didn't try this line of questioning at a Q&A with Richard Thompson recently...
And Hitler was never convinced that the war wasn't worth fighting. He finally became convinced that the German people had failed him and didn't deserve to live.
True, but not quite the point the AC was making, I suspect. The bombing campaign against Germany may not have altered Hitler's mind, but it certainly altered the German population's enthusiasm for military adventurism into Poland and the Alscace, which had been the narrative of German foreign policy since 1870. No one in France now seriously worries about Germany, and it's been a long time since that could be said. Yes, MacArthur in Japan (and, of course, the Marshall Plan in Europe) made a huge, huge difference as compared to the shambles after Versailles. But the basic iron fist / velvet glove policy --- destroy any and all capability to wage war, then treat the vanquished with grace and humility --- worked very well.
In passing, it's worth noting another lesson about mass destruction vs targetted bombing. In the case of Japan (and the source work here is `Japan's Longest Day', by the Pacific War Research Group, young Japanese historians writing in the early sixties) the first A-Bomb didn't affect the war cabinet's policy of war to the death, and after Nagasaki it took the Emperor's casting vote and the suppression of a well-resourced coup by senior officers to bring about a surrender. However, it's said by people who should know, and who were not in any way doves (R V Jones of British Air Intelligence and Donald Bennett of the Pathfinders, for example) that although area bombing was the only option in 1942 (because of the pauncity of navigation and target marking aids) by late 1944 the allies had Oboe, long-range bombers and air superiority and could probably have finished to war with attacks on oil refineries. Which would make for a different outcome in 1945: that year saw a huge proportion of the destruction of German cities.
Yes, but rot-N forms a group under composition (ie there exists a Z such that rot-X followed by rot-Y is equivalent to rot-Z). DES, for example, has been shown not to form a group, so there is no single key equivalent to the use of two distinct keys.
The story circulates in Broadcast Circles --- which may or may not be true --- of the occasion when the 1500m LW transmitter at Droitwich was found not to be producing the propagation pattern that was expected.
Droitwich operates on 198KHz (200KHz up until the standarisation of LW frequency allocations in the 1980s). It carried the Light Programme (later called Radio 2) until the 1970s, and since then has carried Radio 4 (nee The Home Service). Some claim that Radio 4 propagation is more important than other radio stations, acting as a dead man's handle for the nuclear deterrent: Trident submarines finding themselves out of contact with HQ are supposed to have orders to surface and tune to Radio 4. If aftersome suitable interval they can't get either The Today Programme (0600-0900) or The Archers (1900-1915, repeated 1400-1415) they are to nuke 'em til they glow (for some value of 'em). I'm dubious about this story as last week I couldn't get usable Radio 4 reception with an SW-100 near Brest, but I digress: Droitwich is rather more fun-sized in power than it used to be, in deference to some Polish station.
Anyway, the story goes that Investigation showed that someone living nearby had filled their loft with coils of copper. Some versions of the story go into details about where it was stolen from, to provide spurious verimisilitude. It's then claimed to power anything from lighting (which you could presumably do pretty-well direct) through to a stolen IBM 360/168 (I exagerate, but not by much).
I don't know how true the tale is (not very, I suspect) nor how practical this is (not very, I suspect). But it's a fun idea...
But key management in encrypted backup environments is tricky. Not impossible, but tricky. Who holds the decryption keys? Well, anyone who might be involved in recovery. And thereby hangs the tale.
Taking a quick look on Froogle, the tape drive alone will cost about $900, and 80gb tapes cost about $70 each.
If you have serious backup requirements, LTO-3 tape drives are about $6000, the tapes are about $80 each, and they hold (in our experience) close to 1TB with compression turned on. You'll need a fast machine to prevent shoe-shining the tape, as you want to drive ~40MBytes/sec into them for best performance. The tapes last for practical purposes indefinitely --- it's a close cousin of DLT, and I think we lost one tape (and that to a mechanical, rather than tape surface, failure) out of a cycle of about a thousand over five years. Many of those had been recycled (ie scratched and re-written) in excess of thirty times. With LTO the most used tape we have is 8 recyclings, but we've had no failures so far.
The casual claim that tapes are old, expensive technology is simply nonsense if you've got 20TBytes of data and you want to keep a weekly copy for three months and a monthly copy for several years. 20-odd tapes times perhaps 30 sets in circulation is 600 tapes, which might cost about $60000. That's $0.10 per gigabyte, at very conservative media costs. A decent six-drive, 72-slot robot might cost you $60000, so that's a further $0.10 per gigabyte amortised over the whole estate.
You can easily split those tapes between multiple firesafes in multiple locations, too.
It's also about 600TBytes: disk is indeed cheap, but if you can build 600TB on multiple arrays for $0.20/GByte you're doing pretty well, and absent some very funky power management that's going run rather hot (assuming that RAID5 is the bare minimum and you can tolerate say 6+1 raidgroups it's still well in excess of 100 spindles). A six drive robot will easily sink 250MBytes/sec, which is at the bleeding edge of very fast disk arrays (that's saturating multiple FC links, unless you're using 4G FC).
What's the benefit of tape? The marginal media costs are low, tapes don't break while they're quiescent, they don't consume power while they're quiescent and they're astoundingly fast.
At least none of the three American tour winners have died from drug abuse. Now in Italy...
[[ It's an unfair remark, of course. Pantani is one of the greatest tour riders of the modern era, and there's no evidence that he won while using drugs. On the other hand, his post-racing decline does have some of the signs. Sad, sad, loss. The TdF without il Pirate and Cippolini is a sadder place. ]]
ian
Formula 1's rules include several things at least as anti-technology as the UCI weight limit and recumbent ban (that Wired article is a lot of repetition, but a good advert for Cannondale, Giant et al). But people don't insist that the cars they buy retail have open wheels, even though that's a massive aero penalty and an artifical rule. More interesting in cycling are some of the silly minor rules, such as the tri-bar angle squabble that caught Landis out on the first c-l-m this year.
I saw a NASA lecture tour at the time, with amazing photographs. I would have been twelve or thirteen. I have a vague memory that Sagan did it, but that could be retcon.
Running windows in a virtualised environment is hardly a corner-case. Is there anyone whose business is larger than a few tens of machines who isn't doing consolidation into a VMware or similar pool?
just as the `mobile phone theft' epidemic was bogus. Reports of the theft of phones rose. But thefts of phones as reported via the British Crime Survey (which interviews a large number of people and asks them what crimes they've experienced) showed essentially no such rise. Conclusion? People who had lost their phone (often not insured, and if you're a child, liable to piss off your parents) or wanted a new one (clearly not insured) were reporting them stolen. Result? A massive rise in reported crime. But when you interview people in a survey, who at that point have no incentive to over-report, the `crime' goes away. It's like the purported rate of burglary (as seen through reported crime) doesn't match the surveyed results: because the police are unlikely to turn up and do a forensic job over the tidy break in that did no damage and just took some consumer durables, it's safe to report even if it didn't happen. Insurance fraud is the crime that even the middle-classes think is victimless.
Not really. There's no canonical edition of Shakespeare, and some of the plays (nlotably Hamlet) exist in radically different forms between Folio and Quarto. Every production of Shakespeare hinges on (a) deciding which of multiple conflicting texts to use and (b) deciding what to cut. It's very unusual to produce Hamlet from a `full' text, simply because of the length. So every `edition' of Shakespeare is tagged as the so-and-so edition.
But switching between Penguin and Arden doesn't get you a happy ending to Hamlet. Indeed, even in really radical mashups, such as Peter Hall's `The Wars of the Roses', which uses the guts of all the relevant histories to build a panoramic sweep (trivia point: I took Richard Stallman to see part of thew 1988 revival at Stratford), maintain the basic thrust. The issue here is that Bowdler wrote what was essentially a different play, of different intent, using the name, some of the text and the author's name. I suspect that were you at school in 1880, you wouldn't have known any different.
Hardcore rape scenes appropriate for a 5 year old? Gangbangs appropriate for an impressionable 11 year old? Graphic murder scenes appropriate for a kid whose grandparent just passed away?
I'm fairly restrictive of the media my children consume (and there's no video games in the house, because they're a pointless waste4 of time and artistically slipshod and morally horrible, all in one package). But those are mostly bad arguments. A five year old will not understand what the rape is. I'll give you the 11 year old argument. But it's not just kids whose grandparents die (my grandmothers didn't die until I was in my thirties).
But my objection is not to these boundary cases. My objection is to the casual, low-level violence of a lot of `children's' media. In Pulp Fiction, or Reservoir Dogs, or Heat, or Apocalypse Now, or Once Upon a Time in the West, to name some of my favourite films, violence has a moral consequences. Being hit, shot etc hurts or kills, quite clearly, and the departure of Willis or Bronson or Kilmer or Sheen in those films clearly shows that their life has been devastated by the violence all around them.
Now look at deracinated children's violence. The hitting and shooting is still there, but the consequences aren't. I'm not necessarily with the critic who serious believes that Bambi is m ore harmful to children than Pulp Fiction, but I'm not entirely sure he's wrong, either.
Slashdot Mirror
``Shuttle Delayed'' is like ``Earth in Orbit Around Sun'' --- always true, to the point of redundancy. Has any Shuttle every launched on time?
ian
That may have been one source of bombes for the 4-wheel Enigma (Triton / Neptune). Doc Keen or British Tabulators also built extensions to the Turing Bombe to cope with the fourth wheel, by simple running the existing three rather faster and adding a fourth, slow wheel. The original design had been quite conservative with regard to the counter used to test for `drops', and given the experience of operation they could speed the whole design up fairly easily. It's documented in Strip's book of essays, `Codebreakers', at least.
It's always rumoured that Collossi were in service at Cheltenham into the sixties, attacking various Fish-style machine baudot-code ciphers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a bombe or two were kept as well: with the use of the diagonal board, they were probably faster than an emulation in a computer would have been.
ian
ian
However, although Turing/Welchman's bombe paid explicit homage to the Polish work in the choice of name, its task was fundamentally different. The bombe provided a means to look for message settings based on the cipher text and conjectured plain text. Its weakness was the requirement for plain text, which was a massive task to obtain through traffic analysis of sterotyped messages, `kisses' with broken systems such as the Dockyard Key, weather reports transmitted in other cipher systems and so on. Its strength was that it was independent of the indicator system, which was one of the easier things to change in the Enigma system.
The Polish contribution lay in the machines themselves, the analysis of the indicator systems and the bomba (bomby? spelling may be wrong): together they showed other people that Enigma could be attacked, and provided a plentiful supply of cribs. Had the Poles not succeeded, it's unlikely that the British could have got the resources for their work. But to claim that the Polish work was the basis for the Bletchley work subsequent to the changes in the indicator system is not right.
And, if we're being picky, there might have been the odd vacumn tube in the implementation of the diagonal board's ``all on or none on'' algorithm. But bombes were essentially mechanical devices. The four-rotor ones must have been amazing to be near...
ian
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5321034.stm
ian
ian
In the case of the current allegations in Britain, at least one of the alleged bombers is a white convert, the son of a Tory party agent in High Wycombe (Tory == Republican of the less strident kind, agent == ward heeler or something). Richard Reid may have been a convert, but he didn't match the ethnic profile, nor did at least one of the 7/7 bombers. As in so many other regards, converts are often the most fervent. I didn't try this line of questioning at a Q&A with Richard Thompson recently...
ian
True, but not quite the point the AC was making, I suspect. The bombing campaign against Germany may not have altered Hitler's mind, but it certainly altered the German population's enthusiasm for military adventurism into Poland and the Alscace, which had been the narrative of German foreign policy since 1870. No one in France now seriously worries about Germany, and it's been a long time since that could be said. Yes, MacArthur in Japan (and, of course, the Marshall Plan in Europe) made a huge, huge difference as compared to the shambles after Versailles. But the basic iron fist / velvet glove policy --- destroy any and all capability to wage war, then treat the vanquished with grace and humility --- worked very well.
In passing, it's worth noting another lesson about mass destruction vs targetted bombing. In the case of Japan (and the source work here is `Japan's Longest Day', by the Pacific War Research Group, young Japanese historians writing in the early sixties) the first A-Bomb didn't affect the war cabinet's policy of war to the death, and after Nagasaki it took the Emperor's casting vote and the suppression of a well-resourced coup by senior officers to bring about a surrender. However, it's said by people who should know, and who were not in any way doves (R V Jones of British Air Intelligence and Donald Bennett of the Pathfinders, for example) that although area bombing was the only option in 1942 (because of the pauncity of navigation and target marking aids) by late 1944 the allies had Oboe, long-range bombers and air superiority and could probably have finished to war with attacks on oil refineries. Which would make for a different outcome in 1945: that year saw a huge proportion of the destruction of German cities.
ian
ian
The story circulates in Broadcast Circles --- which may or may not be true --- of the occasion when the 1500m LW transmitter at Droitwich was found not to be producing the propagation pattern that was expected. Droitwich operates on 198KHz (200KHz up until the standarisation of LW frequency allocations in the 1980s). It carried the Light Programme (later called Radio 2) until the 1970s, and since then has carried Radio 4 (nee The Home Service). Some claim that Radio 4 propagation is more important than other radio stations, acting as a dead man's handle for the nuclear deterrent: Trident submarines finding themselves out of contact with HQ are supposed to have orders to surface and tune to Radio 4. If aftersome suitable interval they can't get either The Today Programme (0600-0900) or The Archers (1900-1915, repeated 1400-1415) they are to nuke 'em til they glow (for some value of 'em). I'm dubious about this story as last week I couldn't get usable Radio 4 reception with an SW-100 near Brest, but I digress: Droitwich is rather more fun-sized in power than it used to be, in deference to some Polish station. Anyway, the story goes that Investigation showed that someone living nearby had filled their loft with coils of copper. Some versions of the story go into details about where it was stolen from, to provide spurious verimisilitude. It's then claimed to power anything from lighting (which you could presumably do pretty-well direct) through to a stolen IBM 360/168 (I exagerate, but not by much). I don't know how true the tale is (not very, I suspect) nor how practical this is (not very, I suspect). But it's a fun idea...
But key management in encrypted backup environments is tricky. Not impossible, but tricky. Who holds the decryption keys? Well, anyone who might be involved in recovery. And thereby hangs the tale.
The casual claim that tapes are old, expensive technology is simply nonsense if you've got 20TBytes of data and you want to keep a weekly copy for three months and a monthly copy for several years. 20-odd tapes times perhaps 30 sets in circulation is 600 tapes, which might cost about $60000. That's $0.10 per gigabyte, at very conservative media costs. A decent six-drive, 72-slot robot might cost you $60000, so that's a further $0.10 per gigabyte amortised over the whole estate.
You can easily split those tapes between multiple firesafes in multiple locations, too.
It's also about 600TBytes: disk is indeed cheap, but if you can build 600TB on multiple arrays for $0.20/GByte you're doing pretty well, and absent some very funky power management that's going run rather hot (assuming that RAID5 is the bare minimum and you can tolerate say 6+1 raidgroups it's still well in excess of 100 spindles). A six drive robot will easily sink 250MBytes/sec, which is at the bleeding edge of very fast disk arrays (that's saturating multiple FC links, unless you're using 4G FC).
What's the benefit of tape? The marginal media costs are low, tapes don't break while they're quiescent, they don't consume power while they're quiescent and they're astoundingly fast.
At least none of the three American tour winners have died from drug abuse. Now in Italy... [[ It's an unfair remark, of course. Pantani is one of the greatest tour riders of the modern era, and there's no evidence that he won while using drugs. On the other hand, his post-racing decline does have some of the signs. Sad, sad, loss. The TdF without il Pirate and Cippolini is a sadder place. ]] ian
ian
...cried out in vague angsty alarm, and suddenly were silenced.
ian
ian
ian
But switching between Penguin and Arden doesn't get you a happy ending to Hamlet. Indeed, even in really radical mashups, such as Peter Hall's `The Wars of the Roses', which uses the guts of all the relevant histories to build a panoramic sweep (trivia point: I took Richard Stallman to see part of thew 1988 revival at Stratford), maintain the basic thrust. The issue here is that Bowdler wrote what was essentially a different play, of different intent, using the name, some of the text and the author's name. I suspect that were you at school in 1880, you wouldn't have known any different.
ian
ian
But my objection is not to these boundary cases. My objection is to the casual, low-level violence of a lot of `children's' media. In Pulp Fiction, or Reservoir Dogs, or Heat, or Apocalypse Now, or Once Upon a Time in the West, to name some of my favourite films, violence has a moral consequences. Being hit, shot etc hurts or kills, quite clearly, and the departure of Willis or Bronson or Kilmer or Sheen in those films clearly shows that their life has been devastated by the violence all around them.
Now look at deracinated children's violence. The hitting and shooting is still there, but the consequences aren't. I'm not necessarily with the critic who serious believes that Bambi is m ore harmful to children than Pulp Fiction, but I'm not entirely sure he's wrong, either.
ian