The actual top three hacks of all time are probably:
The Big Bang. As Martin Gardner says, the fact that there's something rather than nothing is truly the ultimate hack.
Life -- its origination from non-life and its subsequent evolution via natural selection. (Bonus points to nature for using materials that are only produced via supernovae.)
Intelligence -- sentience, consciousness, call it what you will.
One amazing thing about all these hacks is that they reflect intricate design, but no designer. Man's achievements still pale by comparison. Think about it.
Does it bother anyone else that Kelly McNeill's e-mail to Slashdot, which says "I lighted" is identical to the opening of the piece to which she refers, which is written by someone else?
Or that Kelly McNeill's e-mail address is webmaster@osopinion.com? Or that this amounts to nothing but a Shameless Plug (TM) for OSOpinion?
Just because lots of Linux people work with single CPU linux boxen in small companies doesn't mean that multi CPU machines are at all uncommon in larger companies.
As a software consultant who works with such companies, I can vouch for this. Linux fans may not like it, or think it's a good idea, but there are plenty of large companies running serious NT apps on SMP boxes. Two I can name from personal experience are Nasdaq and Sallie Mae.
5 Bytes is 40 bits, which means there are 2^40 possible keys.... I tend to think a good computer could probably sniff them all out in a matter of days.
Um, I don't think so. 2^40 is a little more than 10^12 (one trillion). Even testing at an unrealistically high rate of, say, 10^4 (ten thousand) keys a second would still take 10^8 (one hundred million) seconds, which is more than three years.
This is certainly useful information, but all you've shown is that no hydrocarbons were created in the first 10 seconds after the big bang. If, say, they were created starting at t+1 hour, I think that would still count as being "at" the Big Bang (at least for the purposes of a newspaper article).
So, at what time did hydrogen atoms begin to form? I'm not a scientist, but my guess would be around t+1 minute or so. Thus, it seems to me, the question here is whether heavier atoms such as oxygen and carbon were present in any significant quantity prior to the first supernova (at t+10^9 years or so).
In fact, background photons, detector noise and misalignment introduced an error rate of 1.6 per cent, but this isn't too serious. If Eve had been listening in, she would have caused an error rate more like 25 per cent, so Alice and Bob can still be confident that their key is secure.
Okay, let's say Alice and Bob are sure that Eve has not interfered. Nonetheless, Alice and Bob disagree about 16 out of every 1000 bits in "their key", right? Doesn't that seem like a bit of a problem? They could try to use some sort of redundancy check in their communication, but it still seems entirely possible that Bob will be unable to decrypt a message from Alice with certainty.
I'm no expert on this stuff. Am I missing something?
Folks, there are important differences between the APIs of the various versions of Windows. If you are a programmer who does not bother to account for these differences neither your binaries nor your source code will port very well. Probably the biggest example of this is the fact that the 9x API supports only ANSI (single-byte) text strings, while NT prefers Unicode (double-byte) text strings. Unicode progams written for NT become very unhappy under 9x. ANSI programs written for 9x merely run slow under NT (because NT will convert to Unicode on the fly). There are many other such gotchas as well, both small and large. Hopefully, Windows 2000 should help to alleviate this problem once it has replaced 9x/NT in a few years. 'Course that won't do anything about the CE problem, though... -- Brian
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
But it is not free to tell someone else what they can do with their lives
Sorry, but being free does not necessarily have to imply being 100% free. For example, America is a free country, it is the capital of the free world. Nonetheless, we have found that laws which restrict freedom are necessary in order to maintain freedom. The GPL seems to serve the same purpose -- I see no prevarication in this.
Which leaves Visual C++. However, MS has discovered that poor design has consequences that can't be patched over completely. It's sheer screaming agony to write those easy-to-use-from VB COM objects w/ Visual C++ -- all the wizards and templates in the universe can't change the fact that we are working with basically broken tools (COM and MFC and Win32 APIs, oh my). This difficulty is Bad News for MS; the more pain it takes to use Windows, the more likely people will look to alternatives.
Sorry, but this hasn't been true for years. No one writes COM servers with MFC anymore -- we use the Active Template Library (ATL) instead. With ATL you can write small, elegant, robust COM servers in C++ without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
Jefferson knew that education was indispensable to the health of the republic, true. But that does not mean that public education is the way to do it, and some people simply ignore that little fact as inconvenient.
I don't so much care whether it's the current "public education" system, but the fact remains that every citizen needs access to at least a high school education. If you're rich then running away to private schools may solve your short term problem, but it leaves the rest of the country in a mess -- one that will surely come back to haunt you or your kids.
Quit expecting us to buy a broken product, and quit complaining when we choose to buy one that isn't broken.
Thankfully it's a product you have pay for (usually via property taxes), even if you don't use it. Given that, don't you want your money's worth?
If sensible parents abandon the public schools, the deterioration you describe will only continue. Public education as an institution is critical to the long-term health of our democracy. Don't give up the Jeffersonian dream -- stick around and help fix the problems.
Actually, the VCR point was not a good one, because the VCR is analog technology. The audio equivalent of the VCR is the trusty old tape deck -- which has hardly been driven to extinction by the RIAA. The RIAA is frightened by digital technology because of the prospect of perfect copying. And so is the video industry (witness DIVX or whatever it's called).
Slashdot Mirror
The actual top three hacks of all time are probably:
One amazing thing about all these hacks is that they reflect intricate design, but no designer. Man's achievements still pale by comparison. Think about it.
--Brian
Does it bother anyone else that Kelly McNeill's e-mail to Slashdot, which says "I lighted" is identical to the opening of the piece to which she refers, which is written by someone else?
Or that Kelly McNeill's e-mail address is webmaster@osopinion.com? Or that this amounts to nothing but a Shameless Plug (TM) for OSOpinion?
-- Brian
Just because lots of Linux people work with single CPU linux boxen in small companies doesn't mean that multi CPU machines are at all uncommon in larger companies.
As a software consultant who works with such companies, I can vouch for this. Linux fans may not like it, or think it's a good idea, but there are plenty of large companies running serious NT apps on SMP boxes. Two I can name from personal experience are Nasdaq and Sallie Mae.
-- Brian
5 Bytes is 40 bits, which means there are 2^40 possible keys. ... I tend to think a good computer could probably sniff them all out in a matter of days.
Um, I don't think so. 2^40 is a little more than 10^12 (one trillion). Even testing at an unrealistically high rate of, say, 10^4 (ten thousand) keys a second would still take 10^8 (one hundred million) seconds, which is more than three years.
-- Brian
Note that space between "A" and "nonymous" -- s/he's not a real AC. Here's his/her user info.
This is certainly useful information, but all you've shown is that no hydrocarbons were created in the first 10 seconds after the big bang. If, say, they were created starting at t+1 hour, I think that would still count as being "at" the Big Bang (at least for the purposes of a newspaper article).
So, at what time did hydrogen atoms begin to form? I'm not a scientist, but my guess would be around t+1 minute or so. Thus, it seems to me, the question here is whether heavier atoms such as oxygen and carbon were present in any significant quantity prior to the first supernova (at t+10^9 years or so).
The article sez:
Okay, let's say Alice and Bob are sure that Eve has not interfered. Nonetheless, Alice and Bob disagree about 16 out of every 1000 bits in "their key", right? Doesn't that seem like a bit of a problem? They could try to use some sort of redundancy check in their communication, but it still seems entirely possible that Bob will be unable to decrypt a message from Alice with certainty.
I'm no expert on this stuff. Am I missing something?
-- Brian
Folks, there are important differences between the APIs of the various versions of Windows. If you are a programmer who does not bother to account for these differences neither your binaries nor your source code will port very well. Probably the biggest example of this is the fact that the 9x API supports only ANSI (single-byte) text strings, while NT prefers Unicode (double-byte) text strings. Unicode progams written for NT become very unhappy under 9x. ANSI programs written for 9x merely run slow under NT (because NT will convert to Unicode on the fly). There are many other such gotchas as well, both small and large. Hopefully, Windows 2000 should help to alleviate this problem once it has replaced 9x/NT in a few years. 'Course that won't do anything about the CE problem, though... -- Brian
But it is not free to tell someone else what they can do with their lives
Sorry, but being free does not necessarily have to imply being 100% free. For example, America is a free country, it is the capital of the free world. Nonetheless, we have found that laws which restrict freedom are necessary in order to maintain freedom. The GPL seems to serve the same purpose -- I see no prevarication in this.
Sorry, but this hasn't been true for years. No one writes COM servers with MFC anymore -- we use the Active Template Library (ATL) instead. With ATL you can write small, elegant, robust COM servers in C++ without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
Jefferson knew that education was indispensable to the health of the republic, true. But that does not mean that public education is the way to do it, and some people simply ignore that little fact as inconvenient.
I don't so much care whether it's the current "public education" system, but the fact remains that every citizen needs access to at least a high school education. If you're rich then running away to private schools may solve your short term problem, but it leaves the rest of the country in a mess -- one that will surely come back to haunt you or your kids.
Quit expecting us to buy a broken product, and quit complaining when we choose to buy one that isn't broken.
Thankfully it's a product you have pay for (usually via property taxes), even if you don't use it. Given that, don't you want your money's worth?
If sensible parents abandon the public schools, the deterioration you describe will only continue. Public education as an institution is critical to the long-term health of our democracy. Don't give up the Jeffersonian dream -- stick around and help fix the problems.
Actually, the VCR point was not a good one, because the VCR is analog technology. The audio equivalent of the VCR is the trusty old tape deck -- which has hardly been driven to extinction by the RIAA. The RIAA is frightened by digital technology because of the prospect of perfect copying. And so is the video industry (witness DIVX or whatever it's called).
Please. If Gates had such a bad year, why did MS stock more than double in that time?