...this one will be built of 60% duct tape and 40% bailing wire, instead of the 40/60 split Mir was made of.
Well, you know what that means. We're gonna need another Raygun and StarWars project to get it down from the orbit, since that Jeesus-tape that Obi-Wan so notoriously referes to as "it binds the universe together" _will last_...
First off, you're correct for the most part, but just to clarify this a bit for the other readers.
The whole separation of bonds into ionic and covalent bonds is a little like dividing daylight into night and day. There is difference, but it's _not_ a division. As with night and day, there's dusk, noon, evening and dawn and every shade in between.
The carbon compouds like the nanotubes and other amorphous carbon structures fall somewhere between ionic crystals and covalent molecules. For example substances like Titanium Carbide contain a whole bunch of indistinguishable bonds ranging all the way from fairly ionic to purely covalent.
The way covalent and ionic bonds are taught as exclusive alternatives, like two different types of bonds, gets torn apart after highschool when the bond gets looked at the way it should be. Roughly, as the relaxation of the electronic wave function around nearby atoms into a stable structure in the given temperature.
The division into covalent and ionic bonds may be a practical one (especially for people not at all interested in quantum/computational physics) for some compounds, but one shouldn't forget that there's a whole range of stuff between NaCl and Diamond.
Modern physics is quite embarrased that it has let the 1900's picture of litium become it's symbol, because for almost a century the physicists
haven't concidered electrons as orbiting balls.
Having used all 5.*, 6.* and 7.* (now 7.2beta mixed with Rawhide stuff) I have to say that for any new-2-linux guy, especially if we're set on RedHat, I'd absolutely go with 7.1 right now.
The following is a short list why :
Fantastic `up2date' tool that comes with it by default (can be installed to 6.2, too, but too much of a hastle for a newbie)
2.4 kernel (not that it makes any difference to a newbie, but still)
updating the rpm version 4 to 6.2 is
cumbersome, especially for a newbie,
and without it you're totally lost
pam.d, xinet.d, rc.* links in etc
7.1 + up2date seems stable to me
7.2 will be out really soon
(7.2beta "Roswell" came out last week)
One could argue that the 2.96 gcc can be a burden if you're a developer, but I cannot understand what kind of a developer wouldn't have a large variety of compilers anyway. Installing gcc 3.x (or 2.95.x) is a lot more fun than code documentation anyway.:)
Oh and one more thing. One really good thing about RedHat is the thick book you get with it if you buy it. I know it's a tad expensive, but if you're migrating from Windoze it's really worth it (atleast so I hear, few friends of mine have migrated and haven't needed my help there at all).
Interesting? What makes that comment interesting is that how can it get modded up to 5 without being called 'flamebait' or 'troll'.:) Anyway...
A distributed chess engine would probably be too slow for a real chess game
Complete bogus, chess prediction is extremely suitable for parallel computing due to exclusive branching of moves and would not be too slow to play a normal or even tournee blitz game.
Even a couple of seconds of latency between the task distributor and it's distributees wouldn't matter. Naturally it'd make it a less optimized approach than some super multiprocessor computer. Give it a 10000 pcs and you'll get plenty out, but that's what clusters are all about.
...finite...A distributed system could play every possible chess game...
Already well commented on this thread.
There's simply not enough silicon in the universe to make the chips necessary nor is there enough time left before the sun eats the earth.
And I'm not even going to arse my self about the memory requirements...
For a simpler comparison you might want to think about how long it might take to solve some 256bit encryption by brute force...
(hint: again, silicon and sun)
The java plugin that comes with Netscape 6.1 ...
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... crashed the Netscape on my well kept and up-to-date linux box. But simply by replacing the java plugin that came with Netscape 6.1 with
Sun's very own Java 1.3 plugin things changed.
And all I had to do to get that working was a simple symlink which was also well described in their
Quick Start guide for the average users aswell.
Now java applets work better than ever in Netscape...
A sufficiently powerful computer will always beat a human opponent, but creativity is important for the human if he is to have a chance.
In the early days, say early 80s when the computers took their first steps
in being proper opponent for good chess players humans those computers one by one by useing their lack of brute force and/or intuition against them.
Boris Spasski whooped one computer beautyfully by sacrificing few king side pawns at point where even a moderate human chess player would've realized that by giving room to Spasski's rocks there'd be problems _in the horizon_.
The opposing computer those days naturally couldn't predict that and Spasski indeed launched a glorious attack and won.
That was just a good example how humans usually play against computers. And this is also what Gasparov tried against Deep Blue but in vain.
A nice example of where computers had gotten at that point was in one of the games, where Kasparov launched a really promising attack on the king side. It really was promising at that point and most likely any chess guru who was capable of spotting that offense opportunity would have seized it. BUT, at the decicive moment when deep blue had to decide wether to fall back and just try to minimize the damages or call the bluff it (DB) had calculated _every_ possible ending that attack could result in (and we're not talking about checking mates in 5 or 6, but serious amount of prediction) using nothing but brute force.
Thus the Deeb Blue took the pawn Kasparov had sacraficed and dealth with the attack to a point where Kasparov gave up.
The throne of chess has been lost for good.
There's little reason to suspect that Deep Fritz would loose unless it's significantly slower (or it runs M$ software) than Deep Blue. Garri Kasparov was by far good enough to represent our kind...
(every little detail in this comment may not be 100% accurate as I can't be arsed to check the references right now, but it's by far close enough)
Why don't I just put up a page of C++ source and tell people to "lynx -source http://code_url|gcc"?
Sure, whatever...
And get haunted late at night because of all the guilt you have for letting people see all the compiler errors for not piping it to g++ ?
Sure, why not...:)
Further, if you did have a distributed consciousness, what would the consequences of lag,
network outages, and outright crashes be? In that sense, it would be interesting to see if random/semi-random/genetic algorithms are capable of generating an intelligence
capable of coping with such noise
Well, in our head brain cells die left and right starting from the days when we're still inside the womb without really noticeable effects... no,wait! Could this explain the precidency of Bush?!
I'll tell you what I'm doing on my personal system. Every day, I type
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
I feel compelled to add something to this, since there must be loads of not-so-die-hard-RedHat-users out there. These days the same thing works brilliantly in RedHat, too. See 'man up2date'.
Especially for those ex-RH users that fell in love with apt-get and Debian I sincerely suggest atleast trying the up2date.
Being a user of both of them right now I really can't say which I like best. I'm just glad that the Deb vs RH decision doesn't have to made based on a mere package managing tool anymore.
It's amazing to think that something as orderly and perfect as a circle has this incredibly chaotic quality.
Circle has hardly anything to do with this "chaotic quality", since most of the real numbers also have this quality.
If we could just get enough of the message contained in Pi, maybe some order would magically appear.
Did you not understand the randomness in question?
That's exactly what will not happen, ever, since that's the essense in randomness. It's like saying that by throwin the dice more and more maybe you'll find a pattern. The thing with randomness is that these "patterns" cannot compress the sequence. (worth noting is that the sequence of Pi is anything but random in a information science sense, since it's well known and can be compressed to, say, "Pi")
If you could read a circle like a book, what would it say?
The expectation value of the position of any certain string of numbers is actually as long as that certain string. It might be easier to wait for some hwrandom() to produce Romeo and Juliet.
I don't know shit about OpenBSD. Do you really think I will be more secure if I were to use OpenBSD tomorrow rather than Debian that I know
pretty well? I don't think so either.
Well I most certainly do think that atleast you should feel more secure with OpenBSD.
I think the
comment on the www.openbsd.org site says it all "Four years without a remote hole in the default install!".
I feel pretty safe saying that there aren't any other major OS's that can say that...
Although I do admit that you're right about knowing the system at hand and keeping it updated,
but you really shouldn't undermine the security that OpenBSD can provide just because all the other vendors/distributors have kept failing over and over again.
You couldn't be more wrong, I love paying the few bucks to linux distributors, but
did you not read their Investor Page?
"Large sites who's revenue depends on sustained inbound web traffic
will be charged based on the amount of data that they submit into Grub's database, and on what placement they get in Grub's search
result sets."
The freeness of the client code is not the problem here, it's how they're planning to implement the search engine based on data that they receive.
And ofcourse the client code has to be open souce to get wind under it's wings, but to use the good impression the mere words "open source" give to promote their data selling/mangling schemes strikes a bit odd to me. Atleast it's the first such effort I've seen...
It's been proven over and over again that given the typical religious premise it cannot be attacked using _any_ scientific evidence or otherwise.
It is a lot like filosphical movement called scepticism which is also, logically speaking, closed, i.e. it cannot be attacked unless you can convince them to accept some other new premise.
But as long as the only solid premise they accept is "God is allmighty" it is theoretically impossible to run them down using any arguments possible, wether it's based on science/philosophy/logics.
Far better approach is to try to convince them that Kansas is the creationists' paradise and hope the rest of all these Darwin-haters will migrate there and let the rest of the world go on about it's business.
As far as I can remember this is pretty much the first real business effort that's really trying to ride the "open source" reputation.
Even their web site front page has:
"it's an open source, distributed internet crawler!"
What a load of crap, all I see is dollar signs are flashing in their eyes when they're just hoping to score big by selling those slots search result slots, open source or not.
A while ago it was multimedia this and interactive that, then it was everything starting with 'e' and now it seems to be the pure greed in "open source" / "GPL" disguise./. shouldn't fall for stuff like this.
I can't wait for M$ to release their Open Source GPL'd office200x with some copyrighted document formats for what you need to pay $1000 licence fees... I hope atleast then/. see thru the fog.
Very good points, althought I might add that the biggest problem with gasoline engine is not the traffic light effect, but a mere physical fact that a normal car engine simply cannot have kinetic efficiency beyond 15-20%
(governed by an approximation of an Otto cycle, which is what happens in a car engine). And ofcourse when the traffic light effect is included the efficiency drops even lower than that.
Moreover, having done some research on electric vehicles I can say that the energetic efficiency of them is beyond phenomenal compared to normal combustion engine, even costwise it's rougly 5-10 times better, _but_ the real problem right now is in battery technology. Their life-time is simply too short compared to their cost lifting the per-mile cost to about double that of a combustion engine based car.
I quite don't understand why people make such a big deal out of all this taken that most support the movie ratings. If one thinks about what's ahead of us in the near future, VR worlds of carnage, terror, sex and all the same stuff that nowadays make the movies rated, it should be trivial that they're gonna rate the games, too.
Moreover, what computer games will offer in the very near future, if not already, will be far deeper experience than movies, given the liberty of one's own actions and the sense that he's actually living in it rather than just watching it, while on the same also getting all the role model effect from others and from the game itself same as with movies.
Thus it's fairly pointless to argue against rating games without on the same arguing against movie ratings aswell. The gap between the depth of experience in movies and with computer games is already narrow enough to rule out most of the arguments that are solely against rating computer games.
Wether movies/games should be rated at all is another issue...
2.) How hard can it possibly be to generate a random number, even for a simple OS installed in a router? ...don't usually do the work needed to create an unguessable (secure) random number...
You're talking about pseudorandom numbers there. Random numbers simply cannot be "generated". Although there are several secure pseudorandom number generators, but one shouldn't mix them with real randomness. (Take the unix C random() for example, it's initialized with 32 bits and thus it's entropy can never exceed that. Same goes for famous stream cipher RC4 (the internal state is 256bytes but still) and all others aswell.
To create truly random numbers one needs an entropy source. Computerwise there are few handy ways to get real entropy into the pseudorandom number generators, here are few examples:
1) They sell hw cards that have cold radioactive sources and detectors in them. Radioactive decay after all is as random as it gets.
2) Unplugged line-in jack has static which has several random bits in it. When undisturbed, it can be concidered random.
3) The already mentioned web cam pointed to a lava lamp.
4) On UNIX systems the process table can be concidered to have some randomness in it, but one shouldnt screw up with that one either. It has atmost 10-20 bits of randomness when also measured relatively seldom.
5) User key typing or mouse motion
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you know what that means. We're gonna need another Raygun and StarWars project to get it down from the orbit, since that Jeesus-tape that Obi-Wan so notoriously referes to as "it binds the universe together" _will last_
First off, you're correct for the most part, but just to clarify this a bit for the other readers.
The whole separation of bonds into ionic and covalent bonds is a little like dividing daylight into night and day. There is difference, but it's _not_ a division. As with night and day, there's dusk, noon, evening and dawn and every shade in between.
The carbon compouds like the nanotubes and other amorphous carbon structures fall somewhere between ionic crystals and covalent molecules. For example substances like Titanium Carbide contain a whole bunch of indistinguishable bonds ranging all the way from fairly ionic to purely covalent.
The way covalent and ionic bonds are taught as exclusive alternatives, like two different types of bonds, gets torn apart after highschool when the bond gets looked at the way it should be. Roughly, as the relaxation of the electronic wave function around nearby atoms into a stable structure in the given temperature.
The division into covalent and ionic bonds may be a practical one (especially for people not at all interested in quantum/computational physics) for some compounds, but one shouldn't forget that there's a whole range of stuff between NaCl and Diamond.
Modern physics is quite embarrased that it has let the 1900's picture of litium become it's symbol, because for almost a century the physicists
haven't concidered electrons as orbiting balls.
Weird... Perhaps I should head over to Mozilla bugzilla and inform them that my mozzy doesn't show this article under "Ask Slashdot?"
---
"A man alone in the forrest talking to himself. Is he still wrong?"
Having used all 5.*, 6.* and 7.* (now 7.2beta mixed with Rawhide stuff) I have to say that for any new-2-linux guy, especially if we're set on RedHat, I'd absolutely go with 7.1 right now. The following is a short list why :
One could argue that the 2.96 gcc can be a burden if you're a developer, but I cannot understand what kind of a developer wouldn't have a large variety of compilers anyway. Installing gcc 3.x (or 2.95.x) is a lot more fun than code documentation anyway.
Oh and one more thing. One really good thing about RedHat is the thick book you get with it if you buy it. I know it's a tad expensive, but if you're migrating from Windoze it's really worth it (atleast so I hear, few friends of mine have migrated and haven't needed my help there at all).
Interesting? What makes that comment interesting is that how can it get modded up to 5 without being called 'flamebait' or 'troll'. :) Anyway...
...finite...A distributed system could play every possible chess game...
A distributed chess engine would probably be too slow for a real chess game
Complete bogus, chess prediction is extremely suitable for parallel computing due to exclusive branching of moves and would not be too slow to play a normal or even tournee blitz game. Even a couple of seconds of latency between the task distributor and it's distributees wouldn't matter. Naturally it'd make it a less optimized approach than some super multiprocessor computer. Give it a 10000 pcs and you'll get plenty out, but that's what clusters are all about.
Already well commented on this thread. There's simply not enough silicon in the universe to make the chips necessary nor is there enough time left before the sun eats the earth. And I'm not even going to arse my self about the memory requirements...
For a simpler comparison you might want to think about how long it might take to solve some 256bit encryption by brute force... (hint: again, silicon and sun)
Now java applets work better than ever in Netscape...
---
... as the link in the post got ./ed pretty bad.
A sufficiently powerful computer will always beat a human opponent, but creativity is important for the human if he is to have a chance.
In the early days, say early 80s when the computers took their first steps in being proper opponent for good chess players humans those computers one by one by useing their lack of brute force and/or intuition against them. Boris Spasski whooped one computer beautyfully by sacrificing few king side pawns at point where even a moderate human chess player would've realized that by giving room to Spasski's rocks there'd be problems _in the horizon_. The opposing computer those days naturally couldn't predict that and Spasski indeed launched a glorious attack and won.
That was just a good example how humans usually play against computers. And this is also what Gasparov tried against Deep Blue but in vain. A nice example of where computers had gotten at that point was in one of the games, where Kasparov launched a really promising attack on the king side. It really was promising at that point and most likely any chess guru who was capable of spotting that offense opportunity would have seized it. BUT, at the decicive moment when deep blue had to decide wether to fall back and just try to minimize the damages or call the bluff it (DB) had calculated _every_ possible ending that attack could result in (and we're not talking about checking mates in 5 or 6, but serious amount of prediction) using nothing but brute force. Thus the Deeb Blue took the pawn Kasparov had sacraficed and dealth with the attack to a point where Kasparov gave up.
The throne of chess has been lost for good. There's little reason to suspect that Deep Fritz would loose unless it's significantly slower (or it runs M$ software) than Deep Blue. Garri Kasparov was by far good enough to represent our kind...
(every little detail in this comment may not be 100% accurate as I can't be arsed to check the references right now, but it's by far close enough)
-
Why don't I just put up a page of C++ source and tell people to "lynx -source http://code_url|gcc"?
:)
Sure, whatever...
And get haunted late at night because of all the guilt you have for letting people see all the compiler errors for not piping it to g++ ?
Sure, why not...
-
Further, if you did have a distributed consciousness, what would the consequences of lag, network outages, and outright crashes be? In that sense, it would be interesting to see if random/semi-random/genetic algorithms are capable of generating an intelligence capable of coping with such noise
Well, in our head brain cells die left and right starting from the days when we're still inside the womb without really noticeable effects... no,wait! Could this explain the precidency of Bush?!
-
I'll tell you what I'm doing on my personal system. Every day, I type
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
I feel compelled to add something to this, since there must be loads of not-so-die-hard-RedHat-users out there. These days the same thing works brilliantly in RedHat, too. See 'man up2date'.
Especially for those ex-RH users that fell in love with apt-get and Debian I sincerely suggest atleast trying the up2date.
Being a user of both of them right now I really can't say which I like best. I'm just glad that the Deb vs RH decision doesn't have to made based on a mere package managing tool anymore.
---
---
It's amazing to think that something as orderly and perfect as a circle has this incredibly chaotic quality.
Circle has hardly anything to do with this "chaotic quality", since most of the real numbers also have this quality.
If we could just get enough of the message contained in Pi, maybe some order would magically appear.
Did you not understand the randomness in question? That's exactly what will not happen, ever, since that's the essense in randomness. It's like saying that by throwin the dice more and more maybe you'll find a pattern. The thing with randomness is that these "patterns" cannot compress the sequence. (worth noting is that the sequence of Pi is anything but random in a information science sense, since it's well known and can be compressed to, say, "Pi")
If you could read a circle like a book, what would it say?
The expectation value of the position of any certain string of numbers is actually as long as that certain string. It might be easier to wait for some hwrandom() to produce Romeo and Juliet.
---
---
I don't know shit about OpenBSD. Do you really think I will be more secure if I were to use OpenBSD tomorrow rather than Debian that I know pretty well? I don't think so either.
Well I most certainly do think that atleast you should feel more secure with OpenBSD. I think the comment on the www.openbsd.org site says it all "Four years without a remote hole in the default install!". I feel pretty safe saying that there aren't any other major OS's that can say that...
Although I do admit that you're right about knowing the system at hand and keeping it updated, but you really shouldn't undermine the security that OpenBSD can provide just because all the other vendors/distributors have kept failing over and over again.
-
You couldn't be more wrong, I love paying the few bucks to linux distributors, but did you not read their Investor Page?
"Large sites who's revenue depends on sustained inbound web traffic will be charged based on the amount of data that they submit into Grub's database, and on what placement they get in Grub's search result sets."
The freeness of the client code is not the problem here, it's how they're planning to implement the search engine based on data that they receive. And ofcourse the client code has to be open souce to get wind under it's wings, but to use the good impression the mere words "open source" give to promote their data selling/mangling schemes strikes a bit odd to me. Atleast it's the first such effort I've seen...
--
It's been proven over and over again that given the typical religious premise it cannot be attacked using _any_ scientific evidence or otherwise.
It is a lot like filosphical movement called scepticism which is also, logically speaking, closed, i.e. it cannot be attacked unless you can convince them to accept some other new premise.
But as long as the only solid premise they accept is "God is allmighty" it is theoretically impossible to run them down using any arguments possible, wether it's based on science/philosophy/logics.
Far better approach is to try to convince them that Kansas is the creationists' paradise and hope the rest of all these Darwin-haters will migrate there and let the rest of the world go on about it's business.
--
This is an excellent project.
:
/. shouldn't fall for stuff like this.
/. see thru the fog.
As far as I can remember this is pretty much the first real business effort that's really trying to ride the "open source" reputation.
Even their web site front page has
"it's an open source, distributed internet crawler!"
What a load of crap, all I see is dollar signs are flashing in their eyes when they're just hoping to score big by selling those slots search result slots, open source or not.
A while ago it was multimedia this and interactive that, then it was everything starting with 'e' and now it seems to be the pure greed in "open source" / "GPL" disguise.
I can't wait for M$ to release their Open Source GPL'd office200x with some copyrighted document formats for what you need to pay $1000 licence fees... I hope atleast then
--
Very good points, althought I might add that the biggest problem with gasoline engine is not the traffic light effect, but a mere physical fact that a normal car engine simply cannot have kinetic efficiency beyond 15-20% (governed by an approximation of an Otto cycle, which is what happens in a car engine). And ofcourse when the traffic light effect is included the efficiency drops even lower than that. Moreover, having done some research on electric vehicles I can say that the energetic efficiency of them is beyond phenomenal compared to normal combustion engine, even costwise it's rougly 5-10 times better, _but_ the real problem right now is in battery technology. Their life-time is simply too short compared to their cost lifting the per-mile cost to about double that of a combustion engine based car.
I quite don't understand why people make such a big deal out of all this taken that most support the movie ratings. If one thinks about what's ahead of us in the near future, VR worlds of carnage, terror, sex and all the same stuff that nowadays make the movies rated, it should be trivial that they're gonna rate the games, too.
Moreover, what computer games will offer in the very near future, if not already, will be far deeper experience than movies, given the liberty of one's own actions and the sense that he's actually living in it rather than just watching it, while on the same also getting all the role model effect from others and from the game itself same as with movies.
Thus it's fairly pointless to argue against rating games without on the same arguing against movie ratings aswell. The gap between the depth of experience in movies and with computer games is already narrow enough to rule out most of the arguments that are solely against rating computer games.
Wether movies/games should be rated at all is another issue...
2.) How hard can it possibly be to generate a random number, even for a simple OS installed in a router?
...don't usually do the work needed to create an unguessable (secure) random number...
:
You're talking about pseudorandom numbers there. Random numbers simply cannot be "generated". Although there are several secure pseudorandom number generators, but one shouldn't mix them with real randomness. (Take the unix C random() for example, it's initialized with 32 bits and thus it's entropy can never exceed that. Same goes for famous stream cipher RC4 (the internal state is 256bytes but still) and all others aswell.
To create truly random numbers one needs an entropy source. Computerwise there are few handy ways to get real entropy into the pseudorandom number generators, here are few examples
1) They sell hw cards that have cold radioactive sources and detectors in them. Radioactive decay after all is as random as it gets.
2) Unplugged line-in jack has static which has several random bits in it. When undisturbed, it can be concidered random.
3) The already mentioned web cam pointed to a lava lamp.
4) On UNIX systems the process table can be concidered to have some randomness in it, but one shouldnt screw up with that one either. It has atmost 10-20 bits of randomness when also measured relatively seldom.
5) User key typing or mouse motion