Not quite true - the US did supply a good number of the Bombes used for determing the steckers and wheel settings.
What made the Enigma easy to crack was that the signals through the rotors were reflected - which greatly limited the encoding space.
What the Poles did in cracking the Enigma was nothing compared to what Friedman did in cracking Japan's "Purple Code". The Poles knew how the Enigma was built, Friedman had to deduce how the "Purple" box worked.
The definition of a war crime varies widely from person to person.
And then some...
How much of a role does intent have in determining whether an action constituted a war crime? Or is it results?
WRT Dresden, one book indicated that the death toll was more like 130,000+ and also stated that there was no military purpose. If you look at the timing, te decision to destroy Dresden may have retaliation for the Battle of the Bulge.
WRT civilian deaths, the largest war related civilian death toll is the Influenze pandemic of 1918-1920 - somewhere between 50 to 100 million. The difference was the death toll was unintentional.
You can read our study results and find out if BSD is truly dead, here:
BSD may be invisible on the desktop, but I've had a lot more interaction with BSD (primarily through my former ISP) than any version of Mac OS. Then again, I also use Solaris (both Sparc and x86) on the desktop.
I wonder if some group could pull what Compaq did with their BIOS - have one group go through the BIOS listing for the IBM 5150 and document what everything did - then another group write code to perform the same function without having seen the original code.
Another possibility is to create instrumented binary executables that could be used to simplify the reverse engineering process.
Mr. Westinghouse didn't invent anything, or build anything with his own hands. He provided the money to make it possible.
Bullshit!
Westinghouse did invent many things on his own - most notably the airbrake - and he got into the electric power business when Tesla convinced Westinghouse that polyphase AC would be better than compressed air (think air brake) for transmitting the power from Niagra Falls.
the same type of appeasers that backstabbed Czechoslovakia and signed the Munich agreement
You're actually being too generous to the idiots that took part in the Munich agreement. Before that, the Nazi's didn't have a chance of making any moves in Europe due to the large numbers of Czech troops at the German border - afterwards they had access to Czech arms factories... Had the Europeans stood up to Hitler in early 1938, the European war and the millions of deaths would not have happened.
What most Europeans (and most post WWII Americans) don't realize was that the American public was overwhelmingly opposed to getting involved in Europe - due to the carnage of WWI. Probably safe to say that the US would have been better off had it stayed out of WWI.
Judging from the comments on the TOS - it sounds like something a Railroad Museum guy would write (with tongue deeply planted in cheek) - bear in mind that RR Museum types make the typical/. reader tame by comparison. I'll bet the guy had a grand time writing up that TOS.
This has been as much fun as reading all of the posts about Despair, Inc trademarking the "Frownie" and threatening several million e-mail users with trademark infringement.
The first time I was in a Tower Records store - LP's were on the order of $4 each, pre-recorded open reel tapes were a bit more and the selection was better than any record store I had ever seen before. That was -um- a few years ago.
Tower is doing the natural thing by trying to diversify into video - however that's done at the expense of diversity in music selection - my main reason for going to Tower was the wide seection - now I might as well buy from Amazon. And it certainly doesn't help having competition from Stuff*Mart and Worst Buy as well as from B&N and Borders.
On a related note - have you tried looking for a "Hi-Fi" store?
There's another radio analogy that's doable with amateur telescopes - diversity reception. This was (and is) used to overcome problems of fading and doesn't require that everything be matched to a fraction of a cycle.
OTOH, that still leaves the issues of maching grids and all that fun stuff.
There were a few -uh- interesting problems with the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (AKA Project Pluto).
#1 was how and where did you test it? After flying for even a few minutes, the thing would be highly radioactive.
#2 Cruising along at Mach 3, the vehicle was going to get warm. Apparently, no one could figure a way of keeping the HE on the physics packages from melting.
Then again, many thought the best way to use the thing in wartime was to have it fly patterns over the target cities - the combination of the sonic boom and radiation could do a lot of damage.
Too bad the ESA doesn't have the equivalent of a Titan-Centaur which was capable of sending the Voyagers directly to Jupiter. That would have shaved a few years off the trip. The ultimate would have been a Saturn V with a big-ass Centaur stage to replace the LEM, SM and CM.
There was some guy posting to comp.arch by the name of Linus Torvalds saying that 10 MB was more like it for cache size to do what you're proposing. He was making noises about taking a break after 2.6 was released, starting work on 2.7 and needing an avenue to take out his aggressions.
The CDC-6600 had the equivalent of 1 MB of main core with maybe 10X that amount in extended core storage. Other examples of big iron from that era had similar sizes of main core and extended core storage.
Thanks for the link - remember reading the story in Analog m-a-n-y-y-y years ago - do remember the note that the first Bolo was a Model B due to Ford pre-empting Model A. Probably still have the issue stuffed somewhere in the rafters of my garage.
I suspect that a good part of the effort in porting Solaris to AMD-64 is porting Sun's C compiler to support AMD-64 - once that's done, porting Solaris should be mostly a simple re-compile - well and some writing of drivers (and if Sun was smart - they use that experience to support more hardware on the Sparc edition of Solaris).
Porting Solaris to AMD-64 may end up helping Sparc sales more than hurting - a bigger market for 64-bit Solaris apps will encourage more ISV's to write Solaris apps.
IIRC, you're looking for the medialib package - a collection of libraries that support VIS (Visual Instruction Set). I would guess that these libraries would link to Sun's compilers and not necessarily to gcc.
Sun could do a lot more to promote use of the VIS.
Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.
And the repositionings...
Besides the delay, the biggest mistake that Intel made with the Itanic was the idea that the Itanic was a server/workstation processor and not for the desktop. The whole reason that the x86 exists as a server processor is that it is cheap due to massive economies of scale and that a scheissload of software has been written for the x86. Because the Itanic is a niche processor, Intel will both lose out on economies of scale and will have a vastly reduced portfolio of applications written for it.
AMD has made a strong commitment to the desktop market with the Athlon 64 (and low-end Opterons), thus greatly increasing the market for AMD-64 software (which will need to include first rate compilers). They'll be able to spread development costs over a larger number of chips - which will result in less expensive chips.
IBM now has the Mac for expanding the market for the Power processors. Sun has the UltraSparc IIe and IIIi processors for the volume market.
Also remember that low cost 64 bit systems require low cost memory, especially in the larger sizes. Resonably priced 2 GB DIMM's have been available for maybe the last month, 4 GB DIMM's are still outrageously high price.
Converting C to F is simple: F = 1.8*C + 32
C = (F - 32)/1.8
Both units are based on an abritrary physical constant, the boiling point of water at what is supposed to be the atmospheric pressure at what is supposed to be sea level. Much better would be measuring temperature in either terms of electron-volts or (ahem) joules.
They need to take some responsibility for the system needed to maintain that, and the bureaucracy to manage a legitimate copyright management system (i.e. fees for copyright renewals fund the bureaucracy, and copyright management systems).
Hear, hear. I agree 100% with the idea that those who benefit from the long copyright terms bear the entire costs of enforcing the copyright laws.
I've also been thinking that since copyrighted material is called Intellectual Property that it be subject to property tax. Sure would help California out of the budget crisis.
Currently, the advertising claims the G5 can utilize "up to 8GB of RAM" - but this is apparently only because it's pretty tough getting ahold of a 2GB PC3200 DIMM right now; not because of a limitation of the motherboard.
Getting 2 GB PC2100 registered ECC DIMM's is easy - Crucial sells them for $899, 4 GB PC2100 registered ECC DIMM's are avialable for (gulp) $6999. You can stuff 16 GB per processor on a Sun US-IIIi box, but Sun only supports 4 GB (because they haven't qualified anything larger than 1 GB DIMM's).
The problem is that the PowerMac G5's use non-ECC memory and are about the only boxes that will use that type - the Opterons use ECC.
Think about it this way: you're mapping a file to memory to bypass all the relatively complex filesystem code - on something that is completely I/O-bound. Why bother?
Let's say you have a 16 GB file that you need to rummage through (e.g. a database). With a 32 bit system, you have to first figure where the chunk of data is in the file, read it and then have the application determine how to map the data.
With a 64 bit system, you make use of the virtual memory facilities of the OS and hardware - accessing a chunk of the file just involves the OS and not you application. The speed up comes from not duplicating the OS's job of figuring what part of the file can be stored in memory.
Games for the SPARC, G5, etc would probably run a bit slower when recompiled for 64 bits, but the Opteron would likely speed up a bit (more registers available in 64 bit mode).
Yosemite Valley 88 was pitched as an "eco-fiction" (more like and eco-fantasy) about how Yosemite could be made more in tune with nature. It does make mention of the YVRR (although not to the detail of Burgess's upcoming book) and explores replacing the roads in the park with solar electric powered railroads (one of the areas that came across more as fantasy than fiction).
One reason for bringing it up is that the book described a computer network running over fiber-optic lines and a displaying several people writing at once. Bear in mind that this was written in 1976-77 (this is when Dr Dobbs was published by the Peoples Computer Company).
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Not quite true - the US did supply a good number of the Bombes used for determing the steckers and wheel settings.
What made the Enigma easy to crack was that the signals through the rotors were reflected - which greatly limited the encoding space.
What the Poles did in cracking the Enigma was nothing compared to what Friedman did in cracking Japan's "Purple Code". The Poles knew how the Enigma was built, Friedman had to deduce how the "Purple" box worked.
And then some...
How much of a role does intent have in determining whether an action constituted a war crime? Or is it results?
WRT Dresden, one book indicated that the death toll was more like 130,000+ and also stated that there was no military purpose. If you look at the timing, te decision to destroy Dresden may have retaliation for the Battle of the Bulge.
WRT civilian deaths, the largest war related civilian death toll is the Influenze pandemic of 1918-1920 - somewhere between 50 to 100 million. The difference was the death toll was unintentional.
CNN is owned by AOL-Time-Warner - needless to say they are going to care more about the studio's interest than the public's interest.
BSD may be invisible on the desktop, but I've had a lot more interaction with BSD (primarily through my former ISP) than any version of Mac OS. Then again, I also use Solaris (both Sparc and x86) on the desktop.
I wonder if some group could pull what Compaq did with their BIOS - have one group go through the BIOS listing for the IBM 5150 and document what everything did - then another group write code to perform the same function without having seen the original code.
Another possibility is to create instrumented binary executables that could be used to simplify the reverse engineering process.
And remember, IANAL, nor do I play one on /.
Bullshit!
Westinghouse did invent many things on his own - most notably the airbrake - and he got into the electric power business when Tesla convinced Westinghouse that polyphase AC would be better than compressed air (think air brake) for transmitting the power from Niagra Falls.
You're actually being too generous to the idiots that took part in the Munich agreement. Before that, the Nazi's didn't have a chance of making any moves in Europe due to the large numbers of Czech troops at the German border - afterwards they had access to Czech arms factories... Had the Europeans stood up to Hitler in early 1938, the European war and the millions of deaths would not have happened.
What most Europeans (and most post WWII Americans) don't realize was that the American public was overwhelmingly opposed to getting involved in Europe - due to the carnage of WWI. Probably safe to say that the US would have been better off had it stayed out of WWI.
Maybe??? What's this "maybe" crap, sanity and RR museum membership are mutually exclusive... and especially so for Espee foamers.
Judging from the comments on the TOS - it sounds like something a Railroad Museum guy would write (with tongue deeply planted in cheek) - bear in mind that RR Museum types make the typical /. reader tame by comparison. I'll bet the guy had a grand time writing up that TOS.
This has been as much fun as reading all of the posts about Despair, Inc trademarking the "Frownie" and threatening several million e-mail users with trademark infringement.
The first time I was in a Tower Records store - LP's were on the order of $4 each, pre-recorded open reel tapes were a bit more and the selection was better than any record store I had ever seen before. That was -um- a few years ago.
Tower is doing the natural thing by trying to diversify into video - however that's done at the expense of diversity in music selection - my main reason for going to Tower was the wide seection - now I might as well buy from Amazon. And it certainly doesn't help having competition from Stuff*Mart and Worst Buy as well as from B&N and Borders.
On a related note - have you tried looking for a "Hi-Fi" store?
OTOH, that still leaves the issues of maching grids and all that fun stuff.
#1 was how and where did you test it? After flying for even a few minutes, the thing would be highly radioactive.
#2 Cruising along at Mach 3, the vehicle was going to get warm. Apparently, no one could figure a way of keeping the HE on the physics packages from melting.
Then again, many thought the best way to use the thing in wartime was to have it fly patterns over the target cities - the combination of the sonic boom and radiation could do a lot of damage.
The proposed core was tested successfully.
Too bad the ESA doesn't have the equivalent of a Titan-Centaur which was capable of sending the Voyagers directly to Jupiter. That would have shaved a few years off the trip. The ultimate would have been a Saturn V with a big-ass Centaur stage to replace the LEM, SM and CM.
The CDC-6600 had the equivalent of 1 MB of main core with maybe 10X that amount in extended core storage. Other examples of big iron from that era had similar sizes of main core and extended core storage.
Thanks for the link - remember reading the story in Analog m-a-n-y-y-y years ago - do remember the note that the first Bolo was a Model B due to Ford pre-empting Model A. Probably still have the issue stuffed somewhere in the rafters of my garage.
Porting Solaris to AMD-64 may end up helping Sparc sales more than hurting - a bigger market for 64-bit Solaris apps will encourage more ISV's to write Solaris apps.
Sun could do a lot more to promote use of the VIS.
Sun used to (and may still do) claim that their compiler produced better code than GCC.
Sun's FORTRAN compiler is much more complete than g77/g95 - no offense intended to either Craig Burley or Toon Moene.
And the repositionings...
Besides the delay, the biggest mistake that Intel made with the Itanic was the idea that the Itanic was a server/workstation processor and not for the desktop. The whole reason that the x86 exists as a server processor is that it is cheap due to massive economies of scale and that a scheissload of software has been written for the x86. Because the Itanic is a niche processor, Intel will both lose out on economies of scale and will have a vastly reduced portfolio of applications written for it.
AMD has made a strong commitment to the desktop market with the Athlon 64 (and low-end Opterons), thus greatly increasing the market for AMD-64 software (which will need to include first rate compilers). They'll be able to spread development costs over a larger number of chips - which will result in less expensive chips.
IBM now has the Mac for expanding the market for the Power processors. Sun has the UltraSparc IIe and IIIi processors for the volume market.
Also remember that low cost 64 bit systems require low cost memory, especially in the larger sizes. Resonably priced 2 GB DIMM's have been available for maybe the last month, 4 GB DIMM's are still outrageously high price.
Converting C to F is simple: F = 1.8*C + 32
C = (F - 32)/1.8
Both units are based on an abritrary physical constant, the boiling point of water at what is supposed to be the atmospheric pressure at what is supposed to be sea level. Much better would be measuring temperature in either terms of electron-volts or (ahem) joules.
Hear, hear. I agree 100% with the idea that those who benefit from the long copyright terms bear the entire costs of enforcing the copyright laws.
I've also been thinking that since copyrighted material is called Intellectual Property that it be subject to property tax. Sure would help California out of the budget crisis.
Getting 2 GB PC2100 registered ECC DIMM's is easy - Crucial sells them for $899, 4 GB PC2100 registered ECC DIMM's are avialable for (gulp) $6999. You can stuff 16 GB per processor on a Sun US-IIIi box, but Sun only supports 4 GB (because they haven't qualified anything larger than 1 GB DIMM's).
The problem is that the PowerMac G5's use non-ECC memory and are about the only boxes that will use that type - the Opterons use ECC.
Let's say you have a 16 GB file that you need to rummage through (e.g. a database). With a 32 bit system, you have to first figure where the chunk of data is in the file, read it and then have the application determine how to map the data.
With a 64 bit system, you make use of the virtual memory facilities of the OS and hardware - accessing a chunk of the file just involves the OS and not you application. The speed up comes from not duplicating the OS's job of figuring what part of the file can be stored in memory.
Games for the SPARC, G5, etc would probably run a bit slower when recompiled for 64 bits, but the Opteron would likely speed up a bit (more registers available in 64 bit mode).
One reason for bringing it up is that the book described a computer network running over fiber-optic lines and a displaying several people writing at once. Bear in mind that this was written in 1976-77 (this is when Dr Dobbs was published by the Peoples Computer Company).