There's been some discussion during the past week on our local newsgroup, clem.hubcap, regarding dialpad.com and napster. The fulltext of the most informative of the posts is at deja.com at this URL.
If your box is crashing every ten minutes, then there is something wrong with your box, not your browser.
I've been running Linux almost non-stop for a month now (as opposed to switching back and forth between OSes as I did before). From that, I think I've gathered a number of possibilities for why Netscape crashes:
1) Netscape is badly written junk (oh, sorry, I have a knack for being redundant).
2) More seriously, Netscape on Linux needs 64 megs of memory. If Linux can't swap Netscape in and out fast enough, Netscape gets impatient and dies.
3) Netscape seems to have a HUGE memory leak that causes it to eat up memory, especially on pages with lots of images (ahem!).
4) Netscape can bring the entire system down if a) your CPU overheats or b) your video card overheats.
5) Netscape can also bring the entire system down if by some random chance it happens to eat memory just as another process (syslog, etc.) tries to grab it, but for some reason Netscape wins the race. In this case, I've seen INIT panic and Ctrl-Alt-Del get disabled.
With a good OS, a bad application cannot and will not bring down your whole system.
A good OS should not allow any application to bring it down. This does NOT mean that it will not let an application do this. Even good programmers have bugs from time to time. And even good programmers are no match for buggy engineering (i.e. F00F).
I was thinking of the implications that this would have, and it SCARES me. Okay, I make a virtual clone of my brain. Now I'm inside the computer, right? No, I'm still inside my head -- the copy is in the computer.
I'd prefer to be the one inside the computer, I suppose. But there's really no guarantee that that's the one I would be. I might be the one outside, and the one inside is the other me. But really they are both me, so I can't avoid being the one outside. No matter how I cut it, one of me still has to experience death.
But that brings up another interesting idea. What happens if we scan the brain just before death? Would we get a glimpse of what death is like? Could we proceed to put the images of what the person saw onto a screen for all to see?
And what of all the sensations that would be lost? Maybe that's a good thing. I'll never have to sneeze again. But then I'll never have that "ahhh" feeling after I've sneezed.
Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with what the MPAA is doing. But I think it's important to see this from both sides.
My counter arguement to the "every pirating dvd's" arguement is the VCR. How many people do you know make bootleg copies of VCR tapes? Maybe 1, if that? Heck, how many people do you know that borrow cd's and burn a copy of it onto another cd? It doesn't happen as often as the MPAA wants you to think.
Actually, I know many people who make bootleg copies of VCR tapes. Additionally, there was a big news coverage of the bootleg movie copies in NYC a few months back. A few people I know picked up a copy of South Park just to see if it was for real -- and it was. I do grant that most of these are copies of the movie and not the tape.
Additionally, just because the VCR is capable of allowing copies isn't a good reason for keeping things the same way with DVD. DVD is supposed to be an up and coming format, something to lead us into the next great revolution in this area. If we aren't allowed to innovate and add new features, then what's the point? (Yes, I believe that copy protection is a feature).
The cost of writable DVD media makes piracy more expensive than actually purchasing DVDs.
I don't know how long this will actually be true. It was very expensive to copy CD's just a few years ago. Now it's commonplace! From what I've read, the folks who hacked the format were trying to build an OS player. Of course, it is possible to make use of the information gained for nefarious purposes, but I fail to see how anyone is harmed by my gaining the ability to play The Matrix on my *nix box. (Not that I have a DVD player yet.)
Like I said, I think this is the real reason why this is such a big issue. We (the open source community) want open source software to thrive. And if we can't have the same features (DVD playing being one of these) as commercial software, then we lose out.
Part of their business model is that they want to sell the same content to a single consumer multiple times. Why else would there be an interest in metered viewing and rentals?
Perhaps, just perhaps, for the same reasons Blockbuster or Hollywood Video have for renting VHS tapes. Many people don't want to pay full price for a movie they will only watch once or twice; in this situation, renting the movie makes sense. And being able to watch the movie a second time without going out again to rent it does make sense (though streaming seems to be the final solution, many years from now).
I'm a little afraid that the Linux-x86 community would sell out and accept a DVD-player binary and leave the rest of the minority platforms to rot.
Somehow my ideas didn't make their way entirely to the keyboard. What I'm envisioning is a hardware-based decoding scheme, which would have a documented interface, so open source software could play, but not copy, the DVD.
As for the backup issue, I agree that this is a valid concern. But DVD's are much less likely, in my opinion, to get damanged as VHS tapes or floppy discs. While this doesn't eliminate the problem, I think backups are much less of an issue than we are making them out to be.
In the last few months, there seems to be a lot of animosity on Slashdot against the MPAA. But is this animosity really deserved?
The MPAA is trying to protect their industry. An open-source DVD player means that a player that *copies* DVD's is trivial. This is what the MPAA doesn't want. I don't think any of us really want that, because if everyone goes and gets pirated DVD's, the movie industry takes a serious blow.
So what is the MPAA to do? Are they to just stand back and watch as their domain gets trampled on by the likes of us? No, they are doing the only logical thing at the moment -- they are standing up for themselves. Okay, granted, they don't have much of a case here. But that isn't the point. The point is that they can make their stand on the issue clear, that they will not stand for piracy. I think almost anyone would do the same thing in their position.
Of course, the real solution is to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better DVD, one that is more difficult to crack, this time. Then provide Linux/FreeBSD software so the Linux community won't be reduced to having to figure it out for themselves. Would any of this really be much of an issue if it weren't for that?
Yes, 1 is not prime. However, 11:59:59 19/11/1999 contains four distinct primes: 11 19 59 1999 which makes it a prime timestamp. I think we are using two different standards here. For odd/even timestamps, we look at the individual digits. For prime timestamps, we look at the numbers between the separators.
I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that the products Microsoft has developed have hurt consumers; in fact, Windows 9x, Microsoft Office, and other products have actually been influential in bringing the market to where it is today.
HOWEVER, the business tactics that Microsoft has used in marketing these products has hurt consumers. It is because Microsoft has used unfair business practices that there never were any serious contenders to Microsofts' products. A list of all of these is beyond the scope of this post, but a few include: purposely creating bugs in software in order to make competitors' products unstable and increase development time of competitors' products, undocumented Microsoft API calls that only Microsoft knows about and is allowed to use (remember Stacker?), and bundling other products with their own in order to increase market share of their products (not just IE, remember MS-DOS 5 and 6?).
Additionally, it is because competitors' products were so quickly extinguished that we have had to live with UAE's, BSOD's, GPF's, and annoying paper clips that won't go away. If it were not for the misuse of Microsoft's size and position, the market might be much further along than it is today.
I've been waiting for a court case like this for years, and I'm glad the public is finally starting to realize what's truly going on.
If the courts are the best place to decide, I wonder where they get their power of decision from? They can't just make up laws; they can only re-interpret what the legislative branch gives them. So the only way to deal with this IS by making a law. Now whether this is the right bill or not is a question.
...Jam Echelon Day did do something? I doubt it would bring their computers to a halt, but it might give their human analysts a bit too much to work with.
And let's say this did happen. And this other really-bad-oraganization knew it would happen, and took advantage of it. The article mentions that we might possibly find out what effect Jam Echelon Day had, say 10 years from now. What if 10 years from now, as a result of Jam Echelon Day, the world as we now know it is no more, all because we couldn't differentiate between a real message and all these fake messages.
It's not a question of whether we would regret what was done, it's a question of how much.
Yes, this is very true. DC may have a lot of people with internet connections, but these are 28k and 56k modem connections. Much of the area isn't set up for DSL or cable modems, and ISDN is around $300 a month (I know, I looked into it). On the other hand, it isn't surprising that people have modem connections, since those run $10 a month from Erols.
Claiming that an area which has a lot of people with modems doesn't make it any more "wired" than a place where everyone owns a telephone.
Tchaikovsky is great. Especially the 1812 Overture and Swan Lake. Can be distracting though, it's that good. Orbital and other ambient music can be soothing, drowns out those pesky little noises outside, and really gets me in the mood. I think those are the characteristics that any good coding music should have.
...but it never takes Linux down with it. Actually, X just crashed on me just 10 minutes ago, but I was still able to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a virtual terminal. The issue is not whether the operating system comes down with X; rather, the issue is whether X should come down in the first place. If we use statements like "when the X server falls over" instead of "if the X server falls over" we are admitting that there is an integral piece of the system that is not functioning properly, perhaps as poorly as *cough cough* Windows.
State changes as a measurement of time
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
Okay, someone go right ahead and correct me if I simply misunderstand what is being said in the article.
But if I do understand, it seems to me as if there is still some basis for measuring time. The author mentions that the universe is simply the transition from one state to another, and history is the record in the present state of what has happened.
But we still have time -- I can look at my watch, and find how long it takes for me to get from point A to point B. Could it be that under this theory we are simply measuring time as a number of state changes? That is, an event that takes twice as many state changes takes twice as long to occur.
If so, what's the difference between this and current theories? If not, I fail to understand how the author can explain stopwatches.
Netscape 5 never really had a chance. People have lost hope in Netscape. It has so many outstanding bugs, and if they are actually addressed in Netscape 5, I'm sure the Netscape programmers could find some other little nuance to annoy users.
In fact, I really think that's what the browser war is over. It's who can come up with the most annoying little nuances. What's with IE's "ftp server returned extended information?" And what's with that desktop integration? It's a ploy to make 486's obsolete, that's what it is.
My response to this? Until someone comes along and fixes this situation, I'm going back to gopher (except for reading/., of course).
I read somewhere that the QWERTY keyboard is designed the way it is because typewriter salesmen could type the word "typewriter" using only the letters on the first row of the keyboard. Is there any truth to this?
It's not giant Beawulf clusters that did it, it was a giant parallel processing human network that did it..
I disagree; humans don't process in parallel. Or rather, we do process in parallel, but we process in such a way that we repeat who is processing what. This is different from a computer, in which what is being processed is only processed once.
It would be interesting to play this differently by selecting different people for different jobs. "Joe, you be in charge of strategy and help move us in a specific direction. Jeff, you analyze all the positions that can follow from PK4. Jane, you analyze the positions that follow from PQ4. Jack, you analyze...." We could have redundancy to check to see if the analysis is correct, and have a variety of jobs for people to take.
The problem I see with this is that with it we would be moving the direction of the Borg, which is something that I think we would all rather avoid.
I would warrant a guess that the majority of people who play chess are average players. And almost everybody is a worse player than Kasparov (there might be some undiscovered talent out there). So, the grand majority get to choose moves that will ultimately lose, while the few genius moves will be out-voted.
I am inclined to disagree. The problem with an average chess player is not that he makes average moves, but that he makes brilliant moves less often. So the only way a group of average people will will make average moves is if they all make average moves at the same time.
The idea behind the analogy is that a two-edged sword, while it has the ability to cut on the way in and on the way out, it can cut both the enemy and the guy holding the sword. That's exactly what open source is like -- yes, security through obscurity is a bad idea in that it keeps holes secret from the good guys, but open source makes holes easier for the bad guys to find.
The solution is to use open-source code, and write using an environment that keeps exploits to a minimum. The trade-off here is that bounds checking and stripping bad characters takes processing power, and so you need a bigger machine. But who really cares if it takes.001 seconds or.00011 seconds to process a file?
Core wars is about writing programs in redcode that attack each other. This is different from a virus which straps onto another program and replicates, often killing the host in the process, much like a virus that would attack a human. Okay, perhaps there is a fine line between these two, but here are some major differences between redcode programs and real programs:
1) redcode isn't a real machine language (or at least I don't know of any chips that understand redcode), so a virus-like program in redcode can't damage anything.
2) most real computers don't have 10000 or so bytes of circular memory.
3) if a redcode program could be ported to a real computer, it would simply crash the machine or be halted by the OS for violating memory protection.
4) most modern computers don't have instruction sets that include "mov 0 1" and the like -- making it difficult to port even the simplest of recode programs, the imp.
I've never really thought it would be that hard to do - articially create a bacteria, but it does make for an interesting debate of whether life was made/created or not.
This discovery/plan doesn't really have much to do with whether life was created at all. The primary argument for the creation of life is that evolution without some sort of intelligence guiding the process is impossible. Unless these bacteria are created in such a way so the bacteria develop systematically without human intervention, the creationist's argument still stands.
If, however, humans could create a life form more complex than ourselves, that would be a systematic process, and we would have an argument for evolution through slightly different processes, and one that would even explain the missing links! Basically, if we created such a life form, there would be a sort of "evolution" into that life form. Then it is trivial, given enough time, for that life form to create anything below itself, probably for the purpose of maintaining a stable ecosystem. I don't think that such a creation would ever be possible, though.
Someone mentioned an experiement in which basic amino acids were put together in just such conditions. But from what I understand of that experiment, the chemical chains that did result were not proven to be life, by any definition. To put it in a higher-level example, if man were to create a DNA strand by a process, not based on existing DNA, then it's probably not life; even though it contains all the right chemicals, the probability that the chemicals are in the right order are infinitessimally small.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a vending machine at Sam's today for $1700. Not a bad price, considering it was feature-rich. I don't recall seeing a contract on it, either.
It's not free (as in speech), obviously.
And it's not (free as in beer), otherwise we'd all be drinking beer for free, just for watching the Super Bowl?
So what kind of free is it?
There's been some discussion during the past week on our local newsgroup, clem.hubcap, regarding dialpad.com and napster. The fulltext of the most informative of the posts is at deja.com at this URL.
If your box is crashing every ten minutes, then there is something wrong with your box, not your browser.
I've been running Linux almost non-stop for a month now (as opposed to switching back and forth between OSes as I did before). From that, I think I've gathered a number of possibilities for why Netscape crashes:
1) Netscape is badly written junk (oh, sorry, I have a knack for being redundant).
2) More seriously, Netscape on Linux needs 64 megs of memory. If Linux can't swap Netscape in and out fast enough, Netscape gets impatient and dies.
3) Netscape seems to have a HUGE memory leak that causes it to eat up memory, especially on pages with lots of images (ahem!).
4) Netscape can bring the entire system down if a) your CPU overheats or b) your video card overheats.
5) Netscape can also bring the entire system down if by some random chance it happens to eat memory just as another process (syslog, etc.) tries to grab it, but for some reason Netscape wins the race. In this case, I've seen INIT panic and Ctrl-Alt-Del get disabled.
With a good OS, a bad application cannot and will not bring down your whole system.
A good OS should not allow any application to bring it down. This does NOT mean that it will not let an application do this. Even good programmers have bugs from time to time. And even good programmers are no match for buggy engineering (i.e. F00F).
I was thinking of the implications that this would have, and it SCARES me. Okay, I make a virtual clone of my brain. Now I'm inside the computer, right? No, I'm still inside my head -- the copy is in the computer.
I'd prefer to be the one inside the computer, I suppose. But there's really no guarantee that that's the one I would be. I might be the one outside, and the one inside is the other me. But really they are both me, so I can't avoid being the one outside. No matter how I cut it, one of me still has to experience death.
But that brings up another interesting idea. What happens if we scan the brain just before death? Would we get a glimpse of what death is like? Could we proceed to put the images of what the person saw onto a screen for all to see?
And what of all the sensations that would be lost? Maybe that's a good thing. I'll never have to sneeze again. But then I'll never have that "ahhh" feeling after I've sneezed.
Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with what the MPAA is doing. But I think it's important to see this from both sides.
My counter arguement to the "every pirating dvd's" arguement is the VCR. How many people do you know make bootleg copies of VCR tapes? Maybe 1, if that? Heck, how many people do you know that borrow cd's and burn a copy of it onto another cd? It doesn't happen as often as the MPAA wants you to think.
Actually, I know many people who make bootleg copies of VCR tapes. Additionally, there was a big news coverage of the bootleg movie copies in NYC a few months back. A few people I know picked up a copy of South Park just to see if it was for real -- and it was. I do grant that most of these are copies of the movie and not the tape.
Additionally, just because the VCR is capable of allowing copies isn't a good reason for keeping things the same way with DVD. DVD is supposed to be an up and coming format, something to lead us into the next great revolution in this area. If we aren't allowed to innovate and add new features, then what's the point? (Yes, I believe that copy protection is a feature).
The cost of writable DVD media makes piracy more expensive than actually purchasing DVDs.
I don't know how long this will actually be true. It was very expensive to copy CD's just a few years ago. Now it's commonplace! From what I've read, the folks who hacked the format were trying to build an OS player. Of course, it is possible to make use of the information gained for nefarious purposes, but I fail to see how anyone is harmed by my gaining the ability to play The Matrix on my *nix box. (Not that I have a DVD player yet.)
Like I said, I think this is the real reason why this is such a big issue. We (the open source community) want open source software to thrive. And if we can't have the same features (DVD playing being one of these) as commercial software, then we lose out.
Part of their business model is that they want to sell the same content to a single consumer multiple times. Why else would there be an interest in metered viewing and rentals?
Perhaps, just perhaps, for the same reasons Blockbuster or Hollywood Video have for renting VHS tapes. Many people don't want to pay full price for a movie they will only watch once or twice; in this situation, renting the movie makes sense. And being able to watch the movie a second time without going out again to rent it does make sense (though streaming seems to be the final solution, many years from now).
I'm a little afraid that the Linux-x86 community would sell out and accept a DVD-player binary and leave the rest of the minority platforms to rot.
Somehow my ideas didn't make their way entirely to the keyboard. What I'm envisioning is a hardware-based decoding scheme, which would have a documented interface, so open source software could play, but not copy, the DVD.
As for the backup issue, I agree that this is a valid concern. But DVD's are much less likely, in my opinion, to get damanged as VHS tapes or floppy discs. While this doesn't eliminate the problem, I think backups are much less of an issue than we are making them out to be.
punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.
I think Mork and Mindy reruns would be pleasurable, not painful.
In the last few months, there seems to be a lot of animosity on Slashdot against the MPAA. But is this animosity really deserved?
The MPAA is trying to protect their industry. An open-source DVD player means that a player that *copies* DVD's is trivial. This is what the MPAA doesn't want. I don't think any of us really want that, because if everyone goes and gets pirated DVD's, the movie industry takes a serious blow.
So what is the MPAA to do? Are they to just stand back and watch as their domain gets trampled on by the likes of us? No, they are doing the only logical thing at the moment -- they are standing up for themselves. Okay, granted, they don't have much of a case here. But that isn't the point. The point is that they can make their stand on the issue clear, that they will not stand for piracy. I think almost anyone would do the same thing in their position.
Of course, the real solution is to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better DVD, one that is more difficult to crack, this time. Then provide Linux/FreeBSD software so the Linux community won't be reduced to having to figure it out for themselves. Would any of this really be much of an issue if it weren't for that?
Yes, 1 is not prime. However, 11:59:59 19/11/1999 contains four distinct primes:
11
19
59
1999
which makes it a prime timestamp. I think we are using two different standards here. For odd/even timestamps, we look at the individual digits. For prime timestamps, we look at the numbers between the separators.
I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that the products Microsoft has developed have hurt consumers; in fact, Windows 9x, Microsoft Office, and other products have actually been influential in bringing the market to where it is today.
HOWEVER, the business tactics that Microsoft has used in marketing these products has hurt consumers. It is because Microsoft has used unfair business practices that there never were any serious contenders to Microsofts' products. A list of all of these is beyond the scope of this post, but a few include: purposely creating bugs in software in order to make competitors' products unstable and increase development time of competitors' products, undocumented Microsoft API calls that only Microsoft knows about and is allowed to use (remember Stacker?), and bundling other products with their own in order to increase market share of their products (not just IE, remember MS-DOS 5 and 6?).
Additionally, it is because competitors' products were so quickly extinguished that we have had to live with UAE's, BSOD's, GPF's, and annoying paper clips that won't go away. If it were not for the misuse of Microsoft's size and position, the market might be much further along than it is today.
I've been waiting for a court case like this for years, and I'm glad the public is finally starting to realize what's truly going on.
If the courts are the best place to decide, I wonder where they get their power of decision from? They can't just make up laws; they can only re-interpret what the legislative branch gives them. So the only way to deal with this IS by making a law. Now whether this is the right bill or not is a question.
...Jam Echelon Day did do something? I doubt it would bring their computers to a halt, but it might give their human analysts a bit too much to work with.
And let's say this did happen. And this other really-bad-oraganization knew it would happen, and took advantage of it. The article mentions that we might possibly find out what effect Jam Echelon Day had, say 10 years from now. What if 10 years from now, as a result of Jam Echelon Day, the world as we now know it is no more, all because we couldn't differentiate between a real message and all these fake messages.
It's not a question of whether we would regret what was done, it's a question of how much.
Yes, this is very true. DC may have a lot of people with internet connections, but these are 28k and 56k modem connections. Much of the area isn't set up for DSL or cable modems, and ISDN is around $300 a month (I know, I looked into it). On the other hand, it isn't surprising that people have modem connections, since those run $10 a month from Erols.
Claiming that an area which has a lot of people with modems doesn't make it any more "wired" than a place where everyone owns a telephone.
Tchaikovsky is great. Especially the 1812 Overture and Swan Lake. Can be distracting though, it's that good. Orbital and other ambient music can be soothing, drowns out those pesky little noises outside, and really gets me in the mood. I think those are the characteristics that any good coding music should have.
...but it never takes Linux down with it. Actually, X just crashed on me just 10 minutes ago, but I was still able to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a virtual terminal. The issue is not whether the operating system comes down with X; rather, the issue is whether X should come down in the first place. If we use statements like "when the X server falls over" instead of "if the X server falls over" we are admitting that there is an integral piece of the system that is not functioning properly, perhaps as poorly as *cough cough* Windows.
Okay, someone go right ahead and correct me if I simply misunderstand what is being said in the article.
But if I do understand, it seems to me as if there is still some basis for measuring time. The author mentions that the universe is simply the transition from one state to another, and history is the record in the present state of what has happened.
But we still have time -- I can look at my watch, and find how long it takes for me to get from point A to point B. Could it be that under this theory we are simply measuring time as a number of state changes? That is, an event that takes twice as many state changes takes twice as long to occur.
If so, what's the difference between this and current theories? If not, I fail to understand how the author can explain stopwatches.
gopher.citadel.edu
gopher.micro.umn.edu (Mother Gopher)
spinaltap.micro.umn.edu
gopher.nd.edu
scitsc.wlv.ac.uk
gopher.nara.gov
renoir.vill.edu
gopher.uoregon.edu
gopher.vt.edu
marvel.loc.gov
tvnews.vanderbilt.edu
twinbrook.cis.uab.edu
And for some good Veronica servers (gopher search engines):
liberty.uc.wlu.edu:70/11/gophers/veronica
AND THE BEST GOPHER SERVER OF ALL!
wiretap.spies.com
Do you mean Mozilla?
Netscape 5 never really had a chance. People have lost hope in Netscape. It has so many outstanding bugs, and if they are actually addressed in Netscape 5, I'm sure the Netscape programmers could find some other little nuance to annoy users.
/., of course).
In fact, I really think that's what the browser war is over. It's who can come up with the most annoying little nuances. What's with IE's "ftp server returned extended information?" And what's with that desktop integration? It's a ploy to make 486's obsolete, that's what it is.
My response to this? Until someone comes along and fixes this situation, I'm going back to gopher (except for reading
I read somewhere that the QWERTY keyboard is designed the way it is because typewriter salesmen could type the word "typewriter" using only the letters on the first row of the keyboard. Is there any truth to this?
It's not giant Beawulf clusters that did it, it was a giant parallel processing human network that did it..
I disagree; humans don't process in parallel. Or rather, we do process in parallel, but we process in such a way that we repeat who is processing what. This is different from a computer, in which what is being processed is only processed once.
It would be interesting to play this differently by selecting different people for different jobs. "Joe, you be in charge of strategy and help move us in a specific direction. Jeff, you analyze all the positions that can follow from PK4. Jane, you analyze the positions that follow from PQ4. Jack, you analyze...." We could have redundancy to check to see if the analysis is correct, and have a variety of jobs for people to take.
The problem I see with this is that with it we would be moving the direction of the Borg, which is something that I think we would all rather avoid.
I would warrant a guess that the majority of people who play chess are average players. And almost everybody is a worse player than Kasparov (there might be some undiscovered talent out there). So, the grand majority get to choose moves that will ultimately lose, while the few genius moves will be out-voted.
I am inclined to disagree. The problem with an average chess player is not that he makes average moves, but that he makes brilliant moves less often. So the only way a group of average people will will make average moves is if they all make average moves at the same time.
The idea behind the analogy is that a two-edged sword, while it has the ability to cut on the way in and on the way out, it can cut both the enemy and the guy holding the sword. That's exactly what open source is like -- yes, security through obscurity is a bad idea in that it keeps holes secret from the good guys, but open source makes holes easier for the bad guys to find.
.001 seconds or .00011 seconds to process a file?
The solution is to use open-source code, and write using an environment that keeps exploits to a minimum. The trade-off here is that bounds checking and stripping bad characters takes processing power, and so you need a bigger machine. But who really cares if it takes
Core wars is about writing programs in redcode that attack each other. This is different from a virus which straps onto another program and replicates, often killing the host in the process, much like a virus that would attack a human. Okay, perhaps there is a fine line between these two, but here are some major differences between redcode programs and real programs:
1) redcode isn't a real machine language (or at least I don't know of any chips that understand redcode), so a virus-like program in redcode can't damage anything.
2) most real computers don't have 10000 or so bytes of circular memory.
3) if a redcode program could be ported to a real computer, it would simply crash the machine or be halted by the OS for violating memory protection.
4) most modern computers don't have instruction sets that include "mov 0 1" and the like -- making it difficult to port even the simplest of recode programs, the imp.
I've never really thought it would be that hard to do - articially create a bacteria, but it does make for an interesting debate of whether life was made/created or not.
This discovery/plan doesn't really have much to do with whether life was created at all. The primary argument for the creation of life is that evolution without some sort of intelligence guiding the process is impossible. Unless these bacteria are created in such a way so the bacteria develop systematically without human intervention, the creationist's argument still stands.
If, however, humans could create a life form more complex than ourselves, that would be a systematic process, and we would have an argument for evolution through slightly different processes, and one that would even explain the missing links! Basically, if we created such a life form, there would be a sort of "evolution" into that life form. Then it is trivial, given enough time, for that life form to create anything below itself, probably for the purpose of maintaining a stable ecosystem. I don't think that such a creation would ever be possible, though.
Someone mentioned an experiement in which basic amino acids were put together in just such conditions. But from what I understand of that experiment, the chemical chains that did result were not proven to be life, by any definition. To put it in a higher-level example, if man were to create a DNA strand by a process, not based on existing DNA, then it's probably not life; even though it contains all the right chemicals, the probability that the chemicals are in the right order are infinitessimally small.