In case you were wondering what kernel version 2.4.1-01 is and why the files/line numbers shown in the complaint are not there/all bogus: apply the RCU patch found here, bottom of page, to kernel 2.4.1.
I'm guessing that this is why they're goint to Europe... They're hoping that their name isn't completely trashed there (yet).
It is. Everybody knows all about it, it's been in the computer and business related media all over, no less than it was in the US. As a point of reference, try one of the recent articles at the Heise Newsticker, which a lot of Germans read. The link section at the end of the article refers to previous news articles on SCO by Heise, and should give a good impression on the extent of the coverage.
As for the faster-than-light communications, we could do that with tangled photons. Einstein was troubled by the fact that quantum entanglment causes an instantaneous change across a large distance. It's been used in a large number of sci-fi novels, including Orson Scott Cards Ender's Game series of books.
The problem with quantum teleportation is that you need to send classical information in order for the receiver to reconstruct the quantum state to be transmitted.
When Alice prepared her entangled quantum bit with \phi, the state that is to be transferred, Bob's (entangled) quantum bit is in a superposition of states that do not yet reveal any information on what \phi was. Alice needs to measure her \phi and entangled qubit and send that info to Bob, who can then apply some operators on this copy of the entagled qubit and that puts it into the state that \phi originally was in. So the speed of quantum teleportation is actually tied to the speed of classical information transfer, thus limited to the speed of light.
Specifically, they very likely used the NFS lattice siever written by Prof. Jens Franke, Thorsten Kleinjung and Friedrich Bahr. It's the fastest siever I know of, partially thanks to decend assembler optimization for different cpu types. Oh, and it's distributed under the GPL! The latest version is not on the net as far as I am aware, but an older version, and MPQS code, can be found at ftp://ftp.math.uni-bonn.de/people/franke/mpqs4linu x
And Franke has worked with the BSI before, the RSA-160 announcement here mentiones that the sieving was done at the BSI, while for RSA-576 apparantly only parts of the post-processing were (perhaps the linear algebra?)
This problem was solved efficiently at the biology department of a university I once visited (don't remember which one). The bathrooms were labelled "XX" and "XY" and you'd always see a person or two (presumably non-biologists) standing there and thinking hard which kind they were.
Why keep watching Hoolywood movies then? There's plenty more to choose from. Hollywood hardly spans the entire universe of cinema, it's really a very narrow view in style and language.
Try European movies. Or Australian. Or Japanese. The different styles will take a bit of getting used to, but after all it was something new you wanted. If, otoh, you buy a Hollywood movie ticked, don't be surprised if it's a Hollywood movie you get.
A vet student friend of mine told me that at her university, some tasks are assigned by gender. The girls job is to maturbate the bulls. The guys get to castrate pigs. It's not without a sense of humor..
Mars and earth currently are in opposition (which is why they are so close), meaning than mars, earth and sun lie on one straight line. If you were looking at earth from mars, your eyes would hurt, because you'd be staring right at the sun behind the earth.
in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...
For simplicity, let's first look at a case where the entire image moves at a constant speed during the exposure. Each point in the ideal image becomes a short line in the observed image, all the lines are then superpositioned. Mathematically this is a convolution where the short line that a point turns into is the convolution kernel. Nice thing about convolutions is that you can do them in Fourier space by pointwise multiplication of the Fourier transform elements of the image and of the kernel - and conversely, you can undo it by pointwise division, called deconvolution.
Unfortunately this process is VERY sensitive to noise in the observed image, this naive approach of deconvolution usually leaves you with nothing more than an image of pure noise. There are filters that take this noise amplification effect into account to do the deconvolution as accruately as possible while keeping noise down. The most popular is the Wiener filter.
In the case of the spinning Mars, things are a little more complicated yet as the convolution kernel is not constant over the entire image - near the poles, the linear velocity of Mars' surface is smaller than near the equator, therefore the lines that points on Mars' surface become on the observed image will have different lengths. With a spatially dependent kernel you can't do the deconvolution in Fourier space anymore, but there are other deconvolution methods to handle such a case. These are, however, more computationally expensive than division in Fourier space.
"I also reserve the right to mock you for paying $300 for an extra 200MHz." -- Scott Wasson, TechReport.
This remark is a little ignorant. If cpu time is the only resource your application needs, and it happens to be parallelizable, then you buy whatever gives you the most cpu throughput per buck.
If your application needs other resources as well, such as lots of memory and disk space, then the cpu cost accounts only for a small part of the total processing cost, but may still be the bottleneck for the job throughput you get.
Will you spend an extra $300 on the cpu if that increases the throughput of a $10000 system by 6.7%? I guess I would.
I had the same story submitted, along with a cleaned up translation, but it was rejected.
Anyways, here's the corrected translation, hope it helps.
Alex
Munich City Hall's SPD decides in favour of Linux
In today's meeting, the SPD faction of the Munich City Hall spoke out in favour of using Linux on the PCs of the city's administration. Thus a preliminary decision has been made, spokesman Jürgen Bühl said. The Munich city administration migrates from Windows NT to Linux as the client operation system and to an office suite from the Open Source domain.
The transition to Linux guarantees greater independence of suppliers and greater "flexibility in the design of the future IT landscape of the city administration". Additionally considerably lower cost are created. Considering the tense budget situation in the states [Bavaria] capital, this is an aspect that "supplements the strategic-qualitative advantages," says the note from Munich.
Town councillor Christine Strobl, deputy leaders of the parliamentary group and SPD spokeswoman in the personal and administrative committee, states: "At the same time we provide for the further shaping of the technology location Munich. For development and support the city will purchase services. Thus we promote high-quality jobs in the region. In this context, the Technical University of Munich's support during the migration underlines the outstanding position of the science location Munich."
The migration of the 14,000 PC systems and Notebooks with over 16.000 users is to take place "gently". In particular departments with extensive specialized applications are to be able to plan on a long-term basis. The final decision will be made by the city council in the plenary assembly on May, 28th. For over one year SPD has held 35 of the 80 seats , the CSU 30, the Greens 8 and the FDP 3. The other parties account for the remaining four seats.
"We are fully conscious that our decision has a signal effect", says Strobl. "That's why we have investigated the matter intensively." The consulting firm Unilog initially rated the impoved offer from Microsoft as advantagous. But open questions had remained and finally a new offer of IBM was present.
The new total evaluation of capital value and qualitative-strategic criteria led to a draw between both solutions, continues the town councillor. As the combination of Linux and an Open Source office suite "qualitative-strategically clearly comes out in front, the SPD parliamentary group decided for this option as the long-term direction".
(Just as well, really: any energy we extracted from it would be orbital kinetic energy. Draining that is bad, since it would cause the orbit to decay and squish people.)
Not quite, the energy is from the relative angular speed of earth's rotation and of the moon's orbit around earth. The angular momentum of the orbiting moon is a good bit larger than that of the spinning earth, so in the end we'd slow down earth's rotation and speed up the moon in it's orbit a bit until eventually the angular velocity is the same, i.e. day and month are identical.
However the power density to be got from the tidal wave is not high enough to be extracted efficiently. There is a nice comparison of alternateive energy sources in "Gerthsen Physik", the conclusion is that only solar power, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion have enough fuel available and offer high enough power density to support man's growing energy demands.
Alternative sources like wind energy are great for local supply, especially in remote areas, but don't scale up enough to suport everyone.
Aaah, the Babelfish translation is horrible. Try this
At least one will not only have the different 64-bit Linux flavours to choose from at the targeted launch date. Microsoft has announced to officially release the Windows-XP-Server-2003-Version for AMD 64 bit cpus one day before their rollout, that is to say on the 21st of April.
Alex
Re:Even MORE vehement positions
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
A very relevant and insightful quote from Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials.
I, too, found this quote highly relevant and insightful, and also hautingly scary. The first thought is of course that this may be a fabricaed quote, as it almost seems to apply to the current situation too well to be historic. But a quick lookup at snopes.org confirms the quote, and has some info on it's background.
This makes me wonder inhowfar a similar choice of means can be takes as an indication of a similar choice of ends.
I'm pretty sure even SM-3 and PAC-3 can't hit targets above 100k feet. Furthermore, even if I am wrong and they could, who has such advanced SAMs other than the US and could deliver them to Texas?
Besides, missles that could reach 60km altitude would be large enough to clearly show on radar and have enough exhaust that they would leave a visible trail. The is no information that any object was detected approaching the Columbia. I think it's safe to say that SAMs are out of the question for the cause of this tragedy.
My sympathy to the families, friends and colleagues of the crew.
The TWIRL paper refers to Bernstein's "Circuits for integer factoizaion" which was later partially debunked by "Analysis of Bernstein's factoring circuit" by Lenstra, Shamir, Tomlinson and Tromer, however they agreed that mesh-routing for doing the linear algebra step (solving a huge matrix) was an extremely attractive and feasible idea.
TWIRL appears to be an improvement of the previous TWINKLE hardware, also by Shamir, which proposed using optoelectronics in the sieving step. I don't know if that was ever built.
TWIRL is both faster and cheaper than TWINKLE, for instance as it uses a common silicon process as opposed to GaAs, and the actual sieving process is more efficient as well. I have only skimmed over the paper so I don't know about details.
The previous papers were more or less theoretical, but this TWIRL device appears to be perfectly feasible to build today.
A lot of you are missing the point. $10 million isn't that much. They could build 100 such machines for a billion dollars, not an unreasonable sum for the NSA, especially if it is spread out over a few years.
They may not even have to. They'd use their own fab which will probably give them a better deal than that.
The NFS sieve step is only half the problem, you still have to invert a huge matrix and that requires a closely coupled machine.
The TWIRL paper describes all that. They propose using a mesh-routing algorithm for doing the matrix job, as described in the paper "Analysis of Bernstein's factorization circuit" by Lenstra, Shamir, Tomlinson and Tromer, which they estimate can be built to solve a matrix for a 1024 bit GNFS factorization for only $5000. This is a somewhat optimistic estimate, basically they have to get a 30cm custom designed silicon waver produced which will cost a bunch more than $5000 for a one-off job, but the design is still perfectly feasible.
In the new paper they describe how the previous TWINKLE sieving hardware can be improved to be both faster and cheaper, reducing the estimated cost to do the sieving for a 1024 bit GNFS factorizaion in a year to only $10M. This is amazing.
I doubt that was due to the impulse of the photons. I faintly remember reading about an experiment to measure the impulse of photons where somebody shot a huge laser pulse at a tiny little piece of very thin metal foil (in vacuum) and measured a displacement of a few nanometers or something like that.
I really doubt you could make a large gong sound with a common camera flash, by the impulse of the photons anyways. What I rather believe happened was that the gongs surface still absorbed enough of the flashes energy to heat up and the air in contact along with it, so that the rapidly expanding air was what sounded the gong.
Slashdot Mirror
Please keep idiotic flame baits out of this thread. Thank you.
Alex (a European, and a proud one today)
In /tmp/, I once wanted to delete all hidden files and tried (as root)
.*
rm -rf
Turned out to be a BAD idea, really bad.
Alex
In case you were wondering what kernel version 2.4.1-01 is and why the files/line numbers shown in the complaint are not there/all bogus: apply the RCU patch found here, bottom of page, to kernel 2.4.1.
Alex
Nice history on Times Roman and Times New Roman here
Alex
I'm guessing that this is why they're goint to Europe... They're hoping that their name isn't completely trashed there (yet).
It is. Everybody knows all about it, it's been in the computer and business related media all over, no less than it was in the US. As a point of reference, try one of the recent articles at the Heise Newsticker, which a lot of Germans read. The link section at the end of the article refers to previous news articles on SCO by Heise, and should give a good impression on the extent of the coverage.
Alex
As for the faster-than-light communications, we could do that with tangled photons. Einstein was troubled by the fact that quantum entanglment causes an instantaneous change across a large distance. It's been used in a large number of sci-fi novels, including Orson Scott Cards Ender's Game series of books.
The problem with quantum teleportation is that you need to send classical information in order for the receiver to reconstruct the quantum state to be transmitted.
When Alice prepared her entangled quantum bit with \phi, the state that is to be transferred, Bob's (entangled) quantum bit is in a superposition of states that do not yet reveal any information on what \phi was. Alice needs to measure her \phi and entangled qubit and send that info to Bob, who can then apply some operators on this copy of the entagled qubit and that puts it into the state that \phi originally was in. So the speed of quantum teleportation is actually tied to the speed of classical information transfer, thus limited to the speed of light.
Alex
Specifically, they very likely used the NFS lattice siever written by Prof. Jens Franke, Thorsten Kleinjung and Friedrich Bahr. It's the fastest siever I know of, partially thanks to decend assembler optimization for different cpu types. Oh, and it's distributed under the GPL! The latest version is not on the net as far as I am aware, but an older version, and MPQS code, can be found at ftp://ftp.math.uni-bonn.de/people/franke/mpqs4linu x
And Franke has worked with the BSI before, the RSA-160 announcement here
mentiones that the sieving was done at the BSI, while for RSA-576 apparantly only parts of the post-processing were (perhaps the linear algebra?)
Alex
RSA-576 2003 1881 C174=P87*P87 GNFS Bahr/Franke/Kleinjung/Montgomery/te Riele/Leclair/Leyland/Wackerworth
The last name should be Richard Wackerbarth I think, not Wackerworth.
Alex
This problem was solved efficiently at the biology department of a university I once visited (don't remember which one). The bathrooms were labelled "XX" and "XY" and you'd always see a person or two (presumably non-biologists) standing there and thinking hard which kind they were.
Alex
Why keep watching Hoolywood movies then? There's plenty more to choose from. Hollywood hardly spans the entire universe of cinema, it's really a very narrow view in style and language.
Try European movies. Or Australian. Or Japanese. The different styles will take a bit of getting used to, but after all it was something new you wanted. If, otoh, you buy a Hollywood movie ticked, don't be surprised if it's a Hollywood movie you get.
Alex
This sounds like almost literally out of Austin Powers...
The President: C'mon, let me nuke that bastard.
Commander Gilmour: You want to blow up the sun?
The President: Would you really miss it that much?
A vet student friend of mine told me that at her university, some tasks are assigned by gender. The girls job is to maturbate the bulls. The guys get to castrate pigs. It's not without a sense of humor..
Alex
Mars and earth currently are in opposition (which is why they are so close), meaning than mars, earth and sun lie on one straight line. If you were looking at earth from mars, your eyes would hurt, because you'd be staring right at the sun behind the earth.
Alex
in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...
For simplicity, let's first look at a case where the entire image moves at a constant speed during the exposure. Each point in the ideal image becomes a short line in the observed image, all the lines are then superpositioned. Mathematically this is a convolution where the short line that a point turns into is the convolution kernel. Nice thing about convolutions is that you can do them in Fourier space by pointwise multiplication of the Fourier transform elements of the image and of the kernel - and conversely, you can undo it by pointwise division, called deconvolution.
Unfortunately this process is VERY sensitive to noise in the observed image, this naive approach of deconvolution usually leaves you with nothing more than an image of pure noise. There are filters that take this noise amplification effect into account to do the deconvolution as accruately as possible while keeping noise down. The most popular is the Wiener filter.
In the case of the spinning Mars, things are a little more complicated yet as the convolution kernel is not constant over the entire image - near the poles, the linear velocity of Mars' surface is smaller than near the equator, therefore the lines that points on Mars' surface become on the observed image will have different lengths. With a spatially dependent kernel you can't do the deconvolution in Fourier space anymore, but there are other deconvolution methods to handle such a case. These are, however, more computationally expensive than division in Fourier space.
Alex
Leonhard Euler, one of the most brilliant and without doubt the most productive mathematican of all time. Thirteen children.
Alex
If your application needs other resources as well, such as lots of memory and disk space, then the cpu cost accounts only for a small part of the total processing cost, but may still be the bottleneck for the job throughput you get.
Will you spend an extra $300 on the cpu if that increases the throughput of a $10000 system by 6.7%? I guess I would.
Alex
I had the same story submitted, along with a cleaned up translation, but it was rejected.
Anyways, here's the corrected translation, hope it helps.
Alex
Munich City Hall's SPD decides in favour of Linux
In today's meeting, the SPD faction of the Munich City Hall spoke out in
favour of using Linux on the PCs of the city's administration. Thus a
preliminary decision has been made, spokesman Jürgen Bühl said. The Munich
city administration migrates from Windows NT to Linux as the client
operation system and to an office suite from the Open Source domain.
The transition to Linux guarantees greater independence of suppliers and
greater "flexibility in the design of the future IT landscape of the city
administration". Additionally considerably lower cost are created.
Considering the tense budget situation in the states [Bavaria] capital, this
is an aspect that "supplements the strategic-qualitative advantages," says
the note from Munich.
Town councillor Christine Strobl, deputy leaders of the parliamentary group
and SPD spokeswoman in the personal and administrative committee, states:
"At the same time we provide for the further shaping of the technology
location Munich. For development and support the city will purchase
services. Thus we promote high-quality jobs in the region. In this context,
the Technical University of Munich's support during the migration underlines
the outstanding position of the science location Munich."
The migration of the 14,000 PC systems and Notebooks with over 16.000 users
is to take place "gently". In particular departments with extensive
specialized applications are to be able to plan on a long-term basis. The
final decision will be made by the city council in the plenary assembly on
May, 28th. For over one year SPD has held 35 of the 80 seats , the CSU 30,
the Greens 8 and the FDP 3. The other parties account for the remaining four
seats.
"We are fully conscious that our decision has a signal effect", says Strobl.
"That's why we have investigated the matter intensively." The consulting
firm Unilog initially rated the impoved offer from Microsoft as advantagous.
But open questions had remained and finally a new offer of IBM was present.
The new total evaluation of capital value and qualitative-strategic criteria
led to a draw between both solutions, continues the town councillor. As the
combination of Linux and an Open Source office suite
"qualitative-strategically clearly comes out in front, the SPD parliamentary
group decided for this option as the long-term direction".
(Just as well, really: any energy we extracted from it would be orbital kinetic energy. Draining that is bad, since it would cause the orbit to decay and squish people.)
Not quite, the energy is from the relative angular speed of earth's rotation and of the moon's orbit around earth. The angular momentum of the orbiting moon is a good bit larger than that of the spinning earth, so in the end we'd slow down earth's rotation and speed up the moon in it's orbit a bit until eventually the angular velocity is the same, i.e. day and month are identical.
However the power density to be got from the tidal wave is not high enough to be extracted efficiently. There is a nice comparison of alternateive energy sources in "Gerthsen Physik", the conclusion is that only solar power, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion have enough fuel available and offer high enough power density to support man's growing energy demands.
Alternative sources like wind energy are great for local supply, especially in remote areas, but don't scale up enough to suport everyone.
Alex
Aaah, the Babelfish translation is horrible. Try this
At least one will not only have the different 64-bit Linux flavours to choose from at the targeted launch date. Microsoft has announced to officially release the Windows-XP-Server-2003-Version for AMD 64 bit cpus one day before their rollout, that is to say on the 21st of April.
Alex
I, too, found this quote highly relevant and insightful, and also hautingly scary. The first thought is of course that this may be a fabricaed quote, as it almost seems to apply to the current situation too well to be historic. But a quick lookup at snopes.org confirms the quote, and has some info on it's background.
This makes me wonder inhowfar a similar choice of means can be takes as an indication of a similar choice of ends.
Alex
I'm pretty sure even SM-3 and PAC-3 can't hit targets above 100k feet. Furthermore, even if I am wrong and they could, who has such advanced SAMs other than the US and could deliver them to Texas?
Besides, missles that could reach 60km altitude would be large enough to clearly show on radar and have enough exhaust that they would leave a visible trail. The is no information that any object was detected approaching the Columbia. I think it's safe to say that SAMs are out of the question for the cause of this tragedy.
My sympathy to the families, friends and colleagues of the crew.
Alex
The TWIRL paper refers to Bernstein's "Circuits for integer factoizaion" which was later partially debunked by "Analysis of Bernstein's factoring circuit" by Lenstra, Shamir, Tomlinson and Tromer, however they agreed that mesh-routing for doing the linear algebra step (solving a huge matrix) was an extremely attractive and feasible idea.
TWIRL appears to be an improvement of the previous TWINKLE hardware, also by Shamir, which proposed using optoelectronics in the sieving step. I don't know if that was ever built.
TWIRL is both faster and cheaper than TWINKLE, for instance as it uses a common silicon process as opposed to GaAs, and the actual sieving process is more efficient as well. I have only skimmed over the paper so I don't know about details.
The previous papers were more or less theoretical, but this TWIRL device appears to be perfectly feasible to build today.
Alex
A lot of you are missing the point. $10 million isn't that much. They could build 100 such machines for a billion dollars, not an unreasonable sum for the NSA, especially if it is spread out over a few years.
They may not even have to. They'd use their own fab which will probably give them a better deal than that.
Alex
The NFS sieve step is only half the problem, you still have to invert a huge matrix and that requires a closely coupled machine.
The TWIRL paper describes all that. They propose using a mesh-routing algorithm for doing the matrix job, as described in the paper "Analysis of Bernstein's factorization circuit" by Lenstra, Shamir, Tomlinson and Tromer, which they estimate can be built to solve a matrix for a 1024 bit GNFS factorization for only $5000. This is a somewhat optimistic estimate, basically they have to get a 30cm custom designed silicon waver produced which will cost a bunch more than $5000 for a one-off job, but the design is still perfectly feasible.
In the new paper they describe how the previous TWINKLE sieving hardware can be improved to be both faster and cheaper, reducing the estimated cost to do the sieving for a 1024 bit GNFS factorizaion in a year to only $10M. This is amazing.
Alex
I doubt that was due to the impulse of the photons. I faintly remember reading about an experiment to measure the impulse of photons where somebody shot a huge laser pulse at a tiny little piece of very thin metal foil (in vacuum) and measured a displacement of a few nanometers or something like that.
I really doubt you could make a large gong sound with a common camera flash, by the impulse of the photons anyways. What I rather believe happened was that the gongs surface still absorbed enough of the flashes energy to heat up and the air in contact along with it, so that the rapidly expanding air was what sounded the gong.
Alex