Maybe you just don't care about your sensitive data as much as I do: all my important textual data has been encrypted into a binary format according to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
That's right, Standard Code. This time-tested encryption codec converts my plaintext characters like 'A' and 'Z' into incomprehensible binary strings like '01000001' and '01011010', to keep them secure from the predations of evil hackers. Surely, any unauthorized device that would translate from this machine-dependent format into a human language, and even display the outputted stolen intellectual property to thieving computer hackers, would have to be illegal.
Okay, maybe all you Slashbots are just laughing at me right now, but can't you imagine one of us slipping this stuff past a judge?
why wouldnt saddam simply launch hundreds of fake warheads.
What do you think would be the most likely consequences of Saddam (or anyone) launching ICBMs at an NMD-equipped USA with "just kidding" warheads on them. Do you think we would wait for the forensic analysis of the shrapnel before counterattacking every missile silo and military installation we could target? A 90% effective NMD might convince us not to retaliate by nuking cities, but there would still be hundreds of thousands of military and unlucky civilian casualties. And, even when it was all over and someone discovered that those incoming warheads were fakes, do you think the scared-witless American public would shed any tears for those casualties?
Wanna give me some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how much liquid nitrogen it takes to eliminate the infrared signature of a reentry vehicle moving at Mach 15?
for many Fortune 1000 organizations, patching is a bad thing. They want stable systems and have a rigorous change control process to guard against problems.
Great. Do they have an artificially intelligent firewall, too? That's what it's going to take to allow people to run software with known security holes for very long.
Does anyone else remember the worms that were attacking unpatched Red Hat systems ~3 years ago? It was six months between the time the exploits were discovered/patched and the time that the worms started making their rounds. A more recent Red Hat attacking worm came out something like 3 months after the security holes it exploited were discovered. Now we've got an IIS security hole, with a worm exploiting it within a month.
Do you not see where this is going? We're at the point where virus/worm authors aren't just reusing each other's code, they're talking about writing modular hostile code in the first place! Take a "worm kernel", load in modules to install back door A, autonotification service B, and brand new exploit C, and send it off to the internet the same damn day you discover a new buffer overflow.
This is coming soon, and if you have computers hanging out on the internet, you need to be ready for it. Don't give me any BS about "rigorous change control". If you want to think of it in those terms, think about this: Running known exploitable, publically accessable software will cause your computer systems to undergo uncontrolled changes without your approval!
Throwing many MS OS/App patches into the mix without testing the effects of the patch on your systems environment is just as foolish as not installing the patch.
No, it really isn't. What's the worst that buggy MS patches can do to you, reformat your hard drive? Not installing the patch can result in your data being published to hostile destinations, your passwords being sniffed, other systems on your network being attacked by the compromised unpatched system, your network being flooded by the compromised system, and your business being brought to a halt for days while you explain to the feds why your computer was being used to try to crack *.fbi.gov. Oh, and for kicks, the attacker/worm might reformat your hard drive afterward anyway, to cover his tracks.
it would mean we might have to set up our own Jabber servers to really get the level of service we want
Frankly, that's absolutely, exactly what we should do. Can anyone imagine how half-assed electronic mail would be if every single person on the internet had to send their messages through one giant email.com datacenter? How about if every single web page on the internet was stored on the single petabyte server at "www.com"? Do you complain that your ISP has to run it's own mail server? Well, why shouldn't it run it's own instant messaging server too? Even if you have a clueless ISP, you can get a free jabber account elsewhere for now.
This whole "internet" thing was supposed to be a distributed network, you know. I understand why AOL and Microsoft (everyone@passport.com?) don't like that, but I expect even the average Slashdot reader to be a little more clued in.
If we are to seriously get into space, we need something better than current chemical rocket technology.
No, we don't. The chemical fuel required to put a pound of payload into orbit costs a few dollars. The rocket launch to put that pound into orbit costs a few thousand dollars. We're not being limited by chemical fuels here. Wanna take a quick guess as to what is being paid for?
The answer is so obvious I'm almost embarrassed to be typing it: STOP THROWING AWAY THE ROCKETS! Would you ever leave your house, if every drive to the convenience store required you to buy a new car afterwards? And your car is mass-produced and cheap; space launches routinely throws away multimillion dollar rocket engines, not the piddling multithousand dollar thing under your hood.
Being able to put 45% mass into orbit instead of 10% is a vast improvement.
Not when the remaining 35% is all reactor and shielding. Nuclear engines are heavy. What's more, you've already lost sight of the goal. We don't have a space program hampered by the need to limit mass expenditure; it's cash expenditure that is keeping the human race grounded. And the cash cost of a rocket does not scale anywhere near linearly with it's gross liftoff weight.
As we now have good models for why CO2 should cause temperature change,
Do we? Those models aren't based on the greenhouse effect of CO2 (which is easy to predict, and which apparantly can't raise world temperatures by more than a fraction of a degree). They're based on an assumed positive feedback from the greenhouse effect of water vapor: the idea being that that fraction of a degree rise from CO2 will increase evaporation from the oceans, which will put more water vapor in the air to cause a *real* greenhouse effect.
Needless to say, this is a hard theory to quantify; hence the need for all the supercomputers.
but not the other way round,
And this is just wrong. Ever opened up a hot can of soda?
There are currently 720 billion tons of carbon in the air. Sound like a lot? It's nothing compared to the 39 trillion tons of carbon in the oceans. And when you heat up the oceans, what happens? Same thing as in your soda: the solubility of carbon dioxide changes, and CO2 is released into the air. If the temperature goes up, the ocean releases CO2. If the temperature goes down, the ocean absorbs it.
So which is happening? Do temperature changes cause CO2 level changes, or vice versa? Hell if I know. I used to believe the latter, now I'm leaning toward the former. The most convincing piece of evidence I've seen is a paper (published and presumably peer-reviewed by Science, although it's been quoted by quite a few more biased sources since then). Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the last Glacial Termination has another graph showing those scary CO2/temperature correlations over about 12000 years... but with some less scary conclusions. It seems in their ice cores, CO2 changes lagged temperature changes by 800+/-600 years.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
Secondly, YANAL: if I write program Foo that links against Microsoft code, and I GPL Foo, that doesn't mean squat to Microsoft, despite their current lying PR campaign. If the Microsoft code is part of their OS or compiler distribution, then my GPL'ing Foo means nothing. Otherwise, my GPL'ing Foo means that I am the only one allowed to redistribute Foo (because no one else could do so without violating the GPL). In neither case does anything "viral" happen.
I've never worked in one of the supercomputer-happy departments at Sandia, but here's a few applications I've talked with others about:
Nuclear simulation: This is the big one. With popular opinion and world politics the way it is, it's likely we won't set off another thermonuclear detonation for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have a few thousand warheads that are aging and decaying, and we want to be sure (and make everyone else sure) that our final deterrent isn't turning into duds under our noses. This is pretty much the sole official justification for the national labs' supercomputing programs.
More nuclear simulation: After New Mexico's devastating summer fires last year, they stepped up research on the effects of fire on stored warheads (no, they won't go nuclear, but cleanup could still be awful). Simulating something that turbulent isn't easy, but it'll be nice to know if there are any further precautions Los Alamos needs to take.
Computational Fluid Dynamics - refining supercomputer code to cut down on the need for even more expensive wind tunnel time. Military and civilian uses: the two I saw were hypersonic parachute unfolding for bombers and drag-reducing plastic attachments for big rig trucks.
Impact testing - this is one of the big commercial apps of supercomputers; I don't know how much of it they're doing at Sandia right now. You can make vehicles a lot more crash safe cheaply if you can virtually destroy them (and refine their frame designs) hundreds of times before actually mangling hardware.
As for crypto breaking... no. For example, the Teraflops has 9 or 10,000 processors (just upgraded to 3xx Mhz Xeons, I'm told, since those are the fastest things that could be massaged into the old PPro sockets) - That's on the order of how many distributed net computers brute forced 64 bit encryption... so for 128 bit encryption you'd just need 16 quintillion more Teraflops supercomputers. Your PGP key is infinitely more likely to be snagged by some hacker's trojan and keylogger than it is by a government supercomputer.
What's going wrong with DMA on your system? I had an S1590 last year, and had UDMA/33 working fine. I remember having to patch the (2.2) kernel originally, but I thought MVP3 support got folded into the later 2.2 versions. Aside from turning on MVP3 support in the kernel and running "hdparm --make-go-fast" there wasn't anything to it.
What made me ditch the board was it's AGP slot that refused to supply AGP level power. Worked fine with a Millenium II, but crashed every two minutes (even in DOS or at the Linux console) with a GeForce 256.
As in Incorporated? Didn't anybody tell them that the time to blow your venture capital releasing goofy products with no real revenue potential ended last year?
Because without the CRV (Is it not officially canceled yet? Either way, don't hold your breath waiting to see one in orbit.) they'll be using two docked Soyuz capsules as the escape craft, and those hold 3 a piece.
Perhaps as more modules are added to the station they won't really need instant evacuation capability for every astronaut... but can you imagine the PR nightmare if something did happen? Or the morale torpedo of deciding before each crew exchange who would be the one to "go down with the ship"?
It's hard to argue airplanes are inherently dangerous to people
I think it would be really easy to argue, actually. Look up the accident statistics yourself. It's still safer than driving... but would we have known that (or believed it) before public air travel became popular?
But some of us feel that all this is irrelevant, that you shouldn't need to be sponsored by a noble cause (TM) to write or use a computer program!
Repeat after me: "My life is my own. I do not need to justify my life to others." You especially don't need to dredge up something like cancer research to justify the existance of an entire class of computer programs to, of all plaintiffs, the entertainment industry!!!
The new image cache, rendering code, whatever they stuck in after 0.8.1 has some serious bugs. Images getting scrambled, flickers of previous images appearing before the correct image gets rendered, images not getting rendered at all until you click on or click/drag over them, one-pixel-off placement errors with adjoining bars of color... Maybe it's faster, but "faster + incorrect" just doesn't cut it.
Maybe this is all just stuff happening on my system, but my system isn't too far off from standard RH7.1, for which I downloaded release RPMs directly from ftp.mozilla.org.
Don't get me wrong; most of the bugs that bothered me were gone by 0.8, and so it's good to see the developers turning their eyes to performance even at the cost of a little backsliding. But if you're new to Mozilla, and want to see how they've progressed, try 0.8.1 first!!
I would have insisted much more on the fact that DeCSS can -not- be used for mass duplication
But you would be wrong. Rent DVD, rip DVD, encode to DivX, rename, put "Movie-divx.avi.mp3" on napster. In the worst case, if you have a cable modem, (say, a 320 kb/sec upload speed), and if everyone who downloads from you shares the movie over their cable modem, then after a day ~8 copies of the movie exist, after two days ~64 copies exist...
I think it would have been very good to point out that the encription does not, in any way, prevent pirates from copying software, neither does DeCSS make it any easier.
This is better. Don't point out that DeCSS lets you get a perfect rip a DVD movie... point out that there has been software to perfectly rip DVDs (via automated screen capture type means) for something like a year before DeCSS came out. Point out that the hardcore pirates aren't going to bother decoding the movie at all, but will just make bit-for-bit copies to sell at $5 a pop.
Point out that even if DeCSS is a "digital crowbar" (digital screwdriver might be more accurate), crowbars are not illegal.
So I find myself suspicious of some of the claims in the parent post, and do a google search to see if I can find some benchmarks. What do I find instead? A nearly identical post, written by a different user, from last February. Would someone please moderate AntiBasic into deserved oblivion? Thank you.
Satellite transmission (over the airwaves) does not make us "less dependent on those airwaves". Nor does the internet, really; I look forward to the day when I can have high speed access without a cat 5 umbilical cord.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
You have hurt your throughput (HZ = 100 is a server-side optimization, really), but by how much? The default HZ used to be 1000 (or maybe 1024?) even on Intel processors; I forget exactly when they made the change, but I think it was during 2.1.xx. And that was during Pentium 100 days. I don't think you'll notice the extra scheduling cycles on a gigahertz Athlon.
please refrain from exposing what idiots we are and how much our encryption software sucks.
We already all know what idiots they are (cat's out of the bag on that one!), and the first amendment still protects our right to tell others what idiots they are.
What seems to be illegal now is proving what idiots they are mathematically...
And, uh... doesn't Cisco make routers?
on
Buried in email?
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· Score: 1
Exactly what were they using their products for, if not electronic mail?
Paradox: Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster. Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics".
Answer: There is no Slashdot.
At least, not in the sense you mean. There are hundreds of thousands of readers here, tens of thousands of occasional posters. We do not agree on everything. Slashdot does not march in lockstep with libertarianism, communism, or whatever gestalt you think you have assembled from hundreds of people shouting at each other every day.
In this case in particular, a large number of Slashdot readers apparantly believe that copyright violation is wrong, but that copyright violators should be individually punished, not the authors, possessors (DeCSS), or providers (Napster) of tools they happen to use. I fall into this category, for example. On the other hand, there are a large number of Slashdot readers who believe that "intellectual property" isn't property, and that because copyright violation isn't theft it isn't wrong. "President of the US" may be in this group.
There is no hypocrisy here, because the two groups do not overlap.
It's been almost a decade since the last holdouts (Prodigy, MSN, AOL, etc... remember when they weren't just expensive ISPs?) figured out that making email for the entire world dependent on a single server farm might be a bad idea... or at least, at the time I'd assumed that they had figured it out. Now I realize that they were forced to accept internet email standards because no single one of them controlled a majority of the market, and each of them dreams of catching the next big technology and entrapping it on their own LAN. My email address is roystgnr@rice.edu; why should my instant messaging address be in a flat namespace (AIM, pre-internet AOL email), or god forbid even a flat numerical namespace (ICQ, pre-internet compuserve email)!?
Does managing a technical company kill your long term memory?
comes from Robert Heinlein's 1960 essay, "PRAVDA" means "TRUTH":
About noon on Sunday, May 15, we were walking downhill through the park surrounding the castle that dominates Vilno. We encountered a group of six or eight Red Army cadets. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Vilno. Almost no tourists go there. So they stopped and we chatted, myself through our guide and my wife directly, in Russian.
Shortly one of the cadets asked us what we thought of their new manned rocket. We answered that we had had no news lately -- what was it and when did it happen? He told us, with the other cadets listening and agreeing, that the rocket had gone up that very day, and at that very moment a Russian astronaut was in orbit around the earth -- and what did we think of that?
I congratulated them on this wonderous achievement but, privately, felt a dull sickness. The Soviet Union had beaten us to the punch again. But later that day our guide looked us up and carefully corrected the story: The cadet had been mistaken, the rocket was not manned.
That evening we tried to purchase Pravda. No copies were available in Vilno. Later we heard from other Americans that Pravda was not available in other cities in the USSR that evening -- this part is hearsay, of course. We tried also to listen to the Voice of America. It was jammed. We listened to some Soviet radio stations but heard no mention of the rocket.
This is the rocket the Soviets tried to recover and later admitted they had had some trouble with the retrojets; they had fired while the rocket was in the wrong attitude.
So what is the answer? Did that rocket contain only a dummy, as the pravda now claims? Or is there a dead Russian revolving in space? an Orwellian "unperson," once it was realized that he could not be recovered.
I am sure of this: At noon on May 15 a group of Red Army cadets were unanimously positive that the rocket was manned. That pravda did not change until later that afternoon.
I'm not sure what to think. Heinlein's opinion of the Soviet Union was unabashedly critical; but it's not like I'd be any more trusting of official 1960s USSR reports.
The Encyclopedia Astronauticaconfirms that a Vostok program (the first Russian manned spaceflight) launch did occur on that day, and that it was pushed into a higher orbit when its retrorockets were fired at an incorrect attitude. The Astronautica claims that the launch was intended to test the spacecraft systems, that it was unmanned, and that it was unrecoverable because the heat shield had not been installed. If it lacked a heat shield, then it certainly wasn't a manned flight. But if they were testing reentry by firing the retrorockets, I don't understand why they wouldn't install the heat shield on the vehicle.
I think the "military cadets didn't know what they were talking about" theory is much more likely than the alternative "Heinlein made up some anti-Soviet propaganda" or "the Soviets killed a man, then tried launching dogs for a year until they felt confident to try a manned launch again" theories... but there's nothing quite so entertaining as a good conspiracy theory, is there? And the spacecraft components eventually did reenter, at a random attitude where they would burn up with or without heat shielding, so we'll never really know...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you just don't care about your sensitive data as much as I do: all my important textual data has been encrypted into a binary format according to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
That's right, Standard Code. This time-tested encryption codec converts my plaintext characters like 'A' and 'Z' into incomprehensible binary strings like '01000001' and '01011010', to keep them secure from the predations of evil hackers. Surely, any unauthorized device that would translate from this machine-dependent format into a human language, and even display the outputted stolen intellectual property to thieving computer hackers, would have to be illegal.
Okay, maybe all you Slashbots are just laughing at me right now, but can't you imagine one of us slipping this stuff past a judge?
why wouldnt saddam simply launch hundreds of fake warheads.
What do you think would be the most likely consequences of Saddam (or anyone) launching ICBMs at an NMD-equipped USA with "just kidding" warheads on them. Do you think we would wait for the forensic analysis of the shrapnel before counterattacking every missile silo and military installation we could target? A 90% effective NMD might convince us not to retaliate by nuking cities, but there would still be hundreds of thousands of military and unlucky civilian casualties. And, even when it was all over and someone discovered that those incoming warheads were fakes, do you think the scared-witless American public would shed any tears for those casualties?
Wanna give me some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how much liquid nitrogen it takes to eliminate the infrared signature of a reentry vehicle moving at Mach 15?
for many Fortune 1000 organizations, patching is a bad thing. They want stable systems and have a rigorous change control process to guard against problems.
Great. Do they have an artificially intelligent firewall, too? That's what it's going to take to allow people to run software with known security holes for very long.
Does anyone else remember the worms that were attacking unpatched Red Hat systems ~3 years ago? It was six months between the time the exploits were discovered/patched and the time that the worms started making their rounds. A more recent Red Hat attacking worm came out something like 3 months after the security holes it exploited were discovered. Now we've got an IIS security hole, with a worm exploiting it within a month.
Do you not see where this is going? We're at the point where virus/worm authors aren't just reusing each other's code, they're talking about writing modular hostile code in the first place! Take a "worm kernel", load in modules to install back door A, autonotification service B, and brand new exploit C, and send it off to the internet the same damn day you discover a new buffer overflow.
This is coming soon, and if you have computers hanging out on the internet, you need to be ready for it. Don't give me any BS about "rigorous change control". If you want to think of it in those terms, think about this: Running known exploitable, publically accessable software will cause your computer systems to undergo uncontrolled changes without your approval!
Throwing many MS OS/App patches into the mix without testing the effects of the patch on your systems environment is just as foolish as not installing the patch.
No, it really isn't. What's the worst that buggy MS patches can do to you, reformat your hard drive? Not installing the patch can result in your data being published to hostile destinations, your passwords being sniffed, other systems on your network being attacked by the compromised unpatched system, your network being flooded by the compromised system, and your business being brought to a halt for days while you explain to the feds why your computer was being used to try to crack *.fbi.gov. Oh, and for kicks, the attacker/worm might reformat your hard drive afterward anyway, to cover his tracks.
it would mean we might have to set up our own Jabber servers to really get the level of service we want
Frankly, that's absolutely, exactly what we should do. Can anyone imagine how half-assed electronic mail would be if every single person on the internet had to send their messages through one giant email.com datacenter? How about if every single web page on the internet was stored on the single petabyte server at "www.com"? Do you complain that your ISP has to run it's own mail server? Well, why shouldn't it run it's own instant messaging server too? Even if you have a clueless ISP, you can get a free jabber account elsewhere for now.
This whole "internet" thing was supposed to be a distributed network, you know. I understand why AOL and Microsoft (everyone@passport.com?) don't like that, but I expect even the average Slashdot reader to be a little more clued in.
If we are to seriously get into space, we need something better than current chemical rocket technology.
No, we don't. The chemical fuel required to put a pound of payload into orbit costs a few dollars. The rocket launch to put that pound into orbit costs a few thousand dollars. We're not being limited by chemical fuels here. Wanna take a quick guess as to what is being paid for?
The answer is so obvious I'm almost embarrassed to be typing it: STOP THROWING AWAY THE ROCKETS! Would you ever leave your house, if every drive to the convenience store required you to buy a new car afterwards? And your car is mass-produced and cheap; space launches routinely throws away multimillion dollar rocket engines, not the piddling multithousand dollar thing under your hood.
Being able to put 45% mass into orbit instead of 10% is a vast improvement.
Not when the remaining 35% is all reactor and shielding. Nuclear engines are heavy. What's more, you've already lost sight of the goal. We don't have a space program hampered by the need to limit mass expenditure; it's cash expenditure that is keeping the human race grounded. And the cash cost of a rocket does not scale anywhere near linearly with it's gross liftoff weight.
As we now have good models for why CO2 should cause temperature change,
Do we? Those models aren't based on the greenhouse effect of CO2 (which is easy to predict, and which apparantly can't raise world temperatures by more than a fraction of a degree). They're based on an assumed positive feedback from the greenhouse effect of water vapor: the idea being that that fraction of a degree rise from CO2 will increase evaporation from the oceans, which will put more water vapor in the air to cause a *real* greenhouse effect.
Needless to say, this is a hard theory to quantify; hence the need for all the supercomputers.
but not the other way round,
And this is just wrong. Ever opened up a hot can of soda?
There are currently 720 billion tons of carbon in the air. Sound like a lot? It's nothing compared to the 39 trillion tons of carbon in the oceans. And when you heat up the oceans, what happens? Same thing as in your soda: the solubility of carbon dioxide changes, and CO2 is released into the air. If the temperature goes up, the ocean releases CO2. If the temperature goes down, the ocean absorbs it.
So which is happening? Do temperature changes cause CO2 level changes, or vice versa? Hell if I know. I used to believe the latter, now I'm leaning toward the former. The most convincing piece of evidence I've seen is a paper (published and presumably peer-reviewed by Science, although it's been quoted by quite a few more biased sources since then). Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the last Glacial Termination has another graph showing those scary CO2/temperature correlations over about 12000 years... but with some less scary conclusions. It seems in their ice cores, CO2 changes lagged temperature changes by 800+/-600 years.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
Secondly, YANAL: if I write program Foo that links against Microsoft code, and I GPL Foo, that doesn't mean squat to Microsoft, despite their current lying PR campaign. If the Microsoft code is part of their OS or compiler distribution, then my GPL'ing Foo means nothing. Otherwise, my GPL'ing Foo means that I am the only one allowed to redistribute Foo (because no one else could do so without violating the GPL). In neither case does anything "viral" happen.
I've never worked in one of the supercomputer-happy departments at Sandia, but here's a few applications I've talked with others about:
Nuclear simulation: This is the big one. With popular opinion and world politics the way it is, it's likely we won't set off another thermonuclear detonation for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have a few thousand warheads that are aging and decaying, and we want to be sure (and make everyone else sure) that our final deterrent isn't turning into duds under our noses. This is pretty much the sole official justification for the national labs' supercomputing programs.
More nuclear simulation: After New Mexico's devastating summer fires last year, they stepped up research on the effects of fire on stored warheads (no, they won't go nuclear, but cleanup could still be awful). Simulating something that turbulent isn't easy, but it'll be nice to know if there are any further precautions Los Alamos needs to take.
Computational Fluid Dynamics - refining supercomputer code to cut down on the need for even more expensive wind tunnel time. Military and civilian uses: the two I saw were hypersonic parachute unfolding for bombers and drag-reducing plastic attachments for big rig trucks.
Impact testing - this is one of the big commercial apps of supercomputers; I don't know how much of it they're doing at Sandia right now. You can make vehicles a lot more crash safe cheaply if you can virtually destroy them (and refine their frame designs) hundreds of times before actually mangling hardware.
As for crypto breaking... no. For example, the Teraflops has 9 or 10,000 processors (just upgraded to 3xx Mhz Xeons, I'm told, since those are the fastest things that could be massaged into the old PPro sockets) - That's on the order of how many distributed net computers brute forced 64 bit encryption... so for 128 bit encryption you'd just need 16 quintillion more Teraflops supercomputers. Your PGP key is infinitely more likely to be snagged by some hacker's trojan and keylogger than it is by a government supercomputer.
What's going wrong with DMA on your system? I had an S1590 last year, and had UDMA/33 working fine. I remember having to patch the (2.2) kernel originally, but I thought MVP3 support got folded into the later 2.2 versions. Aside from turning on MVP3 support in the kernel and running "hdparm --make-go-fast" there wasn't anything to it.
What made me ditch the board was it's AGP slot that refused to supply AGP level power. Worked fine with a Millenium II, but crashed every two minutes (even in DOS or at the Linux console) with a GeForce 256.
As in Incorporated? Didn't anybody tell them that the time to blow your venture capital releasing goofy products with no real revenue potential ended last year?
Because without the CRV (Is it not officially canceled yet? Either way, don't hold your breath waiting to see one in orbit.) they'll be using two docked Soyuz capsules as the escape craft, and those hold 3 a piece.
Perhaps as more modules are added to the station they won't really need instant evacuation capability for every astronaut... but can you imagine the PR nightmare if something did happen? Or the morale torpedo of deciding before each crew exchange who would be the one to "go down with the ship"?
It's hard to argue airplanes are inherently dangerous to people
I think it would be really easy to argue, actually. Look up the accident statistics yourself. It's still safer than driving... but would we have known that (or believed it) before public air travel became popular?
But some of us feel that all this is irrelevant, that you shouldn't need to be sponsored by a noble cause (TM) to write or use a computer program!
Repeat after me: "My life is my own. I do not need to justify my life to others." You especially don't need to dredge up something like cancer research to justify the existance of an entire class of computer programs to, of all plaintiffs, the entertainment industry!!!
And I say this as a Mozilla advocate since M18!
The new image cache, rendering code, whatever they stuck in after 0.8.1 has some serious bugs. Images getting scrambled, flickers of previous images appearing before the correct image gets rendered, images not getting rendered at all until you click on or click/drag over them, one-pixel-off placement errors with adjoining bars of color... Maybe it's faster, but "faster + incorrect" just doesn't cut it.
Maybe this is all just stuff happening on my system, but my system isn't too far off from standard RH7.1, for which I downloaded release RPMs directly from ftp.mozilla.org.
Don't get me wrong; most of the bugs that bothered me were gone by 0.8, and so it's good to see the developers turning their eyes to performance even at the cost of a little backsliding. But if you're new to Mozilla, and want to see how they've progressed, try 0.8.1 first!!
I would have insisted much more on the fact that DeCSS can -not- be used for mass duplication
But you would be wrong. Rent DVD, rip DVD, encode to DivX, rename, put "Movie-divx.avi.mp3" on napster. In the worst case, if you have a cable modem, (say, a 320 kb/sec upload speed), and if everyone who downloads from you shares the movie over their cable modem, then after a day ~8 copies of the movie exist, after two days ~64 copies exist...
I think it would have been very good to point out that the encription does not, in any way, prevent pirates from copying software, neither does DeCSS make it any easier.
This is better. Don't point out that DeCSS lets you get a perfect rip a DVD movie... point out that there has been software to perfectly rip DVDs (via automated screen capture type means) for something like a year before DeCSS came out. Point out that the hardcore pirates aren't going to bother decoding the movie at all, but will just make bit-for-bit copies to sell at $5 a pop.
Point out that even if DeCSS is a "digital crowbar" (digital screwdriver might be more accurate), crowbars are not illegal.
So I find myself suspicious of some of the claims in the parent post, and do a google search to see if I can find some benchmarks. What do I find instead? A nearly identical post, written by a different user, from last February. Would someone please moderate AntiBasic into deserved oblivion? Thank you.
Really long cables, perhaps?
Satellite transmission (over the airwaves) does not make us "less dependent on those airwaves". Nor does the internet, really; I look forward to the day when I can have high speed access without a cat 5 umbilical cord.
I thought Ximian had stopped helix-update service after releasing Red Carpet to replace it.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
You have hurt your throughput (HZ = 100 is a server-side optimization, really), but by how much? The default HZ used to be 1000 (or maybe 1024?) even on Intel processors; I forget exactly when they made the change, but I think it was during 2.1.xx. And that was during Pentium 100 days. I don't think you'll notice the extra scheduling cycles on a gigahertz Athlon.
please refrain from exposing what idiots we are and how much our encryption software sucks.
We already all know what idiots they are (cat's out of the bag on that one!), and the first amendment still protects our right to tell others what idiots they are.
What seems to be illegal now is proving what idiots they are mathematically...
Exactly what were they using their products for, if not electronic mail?
Hypothesis: God wants us to use 64 bit processors.
Corollary: Every IA-64 delay makes it more likely that Intel executives will burn in hell.
Paradox: Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster. Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics".
Answer: There is no Slashdot.
At least, not in the sense you mean. There are hundreds of thousands of readers here, tens of thousands of occasional posters. We do not agree on everything. Slashdot does not march in lockstep with libertarianism, communism, or whatever gestalt you think you have assembled from hundreds of people shouting at each other every day.
In this case in particular, a large number of Slashdot readers apparantly believe that copyright violation is wrong, but that copyright violators should be individually punished, not the authors, possessors (DeCSS), or providers (Napster) of tools they happen to use. I fall into this category, for example. On the other hand, there are a large number of Slashdot readers who believe that "intellectual property" isn't property, and that because copyright violation isn't theft it isn't wrong. "President of the US" may be in this group.
There is no hypocrisy here, because the two groups do not overlap.
It's been almost a decade since the last holdouts (Prodigy, MSN, AOL, etc... remember when they weren't just expensive ISPs?) figured out that making email for the entire world dependent on a single server farm might be a bad idea... or at least, at the time I'd assumed that they had figured it out. Now I realize that they were forced to accept internet email standards because no single one of them controlled a majority of the market, and each of them dreams of catching the next big technology and entrapping it on their own LAN. My email address is roystgnr@rice.edu; why should my instant messaging address be in a flat namespace (AIM, pre-internet AOL email), or god forbid even a flat numerical namespace (ICQ, pre-internet compuserve email)!?
Does managing a technical company kill your long term memory?
I'm not sure what to think. Heinlein's opinion of the Soviet Union was unabashedly critical; but it's not like I'd be any more trusting of official 1960s USSR reports.
The Encyclopedia Astronautica confirms that a Vostok program (the first Russian manned spaceflight) launch did occur on that day, and that it was pushed into a higher orbit when its retrorockets were fired at an incorrect attitude. The Astronautica claims that the launch was intended to test the spacecraft systems, that it was unmanned, and that it was unrecoverable because the heat shield had not been installed. If it lacked a heat shield, then it certainly wasn't a manned flight. But if they were testing reentry by firing the retrorockets, I don't understand why they wouldn't install the heat shield on the vehicle.
I think the "military cadets didn't know what they were talking about" theory is much more likely than the alternative "Heinlein made up some anti-Soviet propaganda" or "the Soviets killed a man, then tried launching dogs for a year until they felt confident to try a manned launch again" theories... but there's nothing quite so entertaining as a good conspiracy theory, is there? And the spacecraft components eventually did reenter, at a random attitude where they would burn up with or without heat shielding, so we'll never really know...