Actually rain prediction doesn't work like it sounds at all. 70% chance of rain really means that it will rain on 70% of the described area.
"Actually" that's not right. It means there's a 70% chance of rain falling somewhere in the area of interest during the 24 hours in question.
There are many possible different interpretations, I actually got curious enough to look it up a few weeks ago. Sorry I'm not motivated enough to find a link for you...;-)
The impossibility of snooping on a quantum-encrypted communications channel without the receiving party knowing about it.
To be fair, the correct expression is "quantum transmitted" not "quantum encrypted". You can send the message in cleartext if you're sure (on a bit-by-bit basis) that nothing has been intercepted.
Oh, you mean the ones that use human couriers to relay messages? The ones that live in caves with no access to computers?
No, this technology is not going to be used on terrorists. It is going to be used on a combination of normal people suspected of criminal activity (ie anyone who bothers to encrypt their communications) and actual hightech criminals.
This technology will be effectively useless at stopping the terrorists we are worried about.
First of all, plenty of terrorists have access to technology and are no doubt interested in encryption. However, from what I just read at Wikipedia, it will take at least 1e12 entangled qubits to decrypt info encrypted with a 1000 bit key - much less 2048 bits. So even RSA encryption with decent key sizes seems quite safe.
Any serious (read: military) crypto user will likely be using one time pads generated using a true random data source. That form of crypto has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, if the pad isn't compromised (the pads should be distributed during a face-to-face meeting and securely guarded afterwords). Quantum doesn't help in decrypting one time pad encrypted data.
Unfortunately, for e-commerce and such one time pads don't work since there is currently no secure way to distribute the pads. Untappable quantum comm channels could help with that problem...
Well having done a little research I find that the following is wrong:
In order to do anything practical, all the qubits in a quantum computer must be entangled - which is apparently the hard part. So, in order to break information encoded with a 2048 bit key, 2048 entangled qubits will have to be available. Anyone have any insight as to when that might happen? Is there anything intrinsically harder about entangling more qubits, or is the leap from say eight to 2048 straightforward?
Instead, it's (courtesy of Wikipedia):
For a 1000 bit number, this implies a need for 1e12 to 1e18 qubits. Fabrication and control of this large number of qubits is non-trivial for any of the proposed designs.
So, I'd say that our (large keysize) encrypted data is safe for now...;-)
Relax dude, there's already the ultimate encryption scheme out there and it doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics. It's called steganography, and it works. Expect it to become more popular in the coming years as creating, processing, transmitting and storing huge quantities of data becomes easier and easier.
Steganography is the process of hiding (possibly encrypted) data in the low-order areas of other files, often multimedia files like pictures and music. This information is (often readily) detectable, and once detected is no more secure than any other information. In other words, right now most people would use PGP or the equivalent to encrypt the information they're hiding steganographically - which could be broken by quantum computers.
In order to do anything practical, all the qubits in a quantum computer must be entangled - which is apparently the hard part. So, in order to break information encoded with a 2048 bit key, 2048 entangled qubits will have to be available. Anyone have any insight as to when that might happen? Is there anything intrinsically harder about entangling more qubits, or is the leap from say eight to 2048 straightforward?
Quantum computers will, if they work as advertised, break all RSA type public key encryption. Does anyone know if ECC is also vulnerable?
OK, that's enough questions for now...;-) TIA for any answers.
Ummmm...from what source did you get this information.
Toms Hardware says otherwise.
Yeah, the charts are quite a bit old. But the price drops from both companies since then seem to be very comparable.
Well, I'll begin by stating that since I consider accelerated OpenGL drivers for Linux to be an important part of "bang" that pretty well kills the ATI lineup right off the bat.;-)
However, looking at these results with the 9600XT at around $138 and the 5900 XT at around $173 (current prices), the 5900 comes out well ahead on FPS/$. The 9800 Pros are somewhat more expensive (~$200) but offer a slight performance edge - I'd say about even on bang-per-buck - using Windows that is. Under Linux, no comparison.
With the new cards in the GeForce series you have expensive requirements like massive power supplies extra slots, high-end cooling, and you need to not mind the dustbuster sound coming from your machine.
As has been pointed out, this critique is flat-out wrong for the 6800 GT. One bonus you get with the 6800 cards is excellent accelerated OpenGL drivers, under Linux as well!
and their middle end cards just simply suck.
This is also simply wrong, the 5900XT is the best bang-for-the-buck on the market.
In short, your post should be modded back down to +1 or 0.
We put two rovers on Mars for less than a hundred million; people on Mars would cost tens of billions.
The research and engineering to get to Mars might cost billions - of course there would doubtless be the usual useful spinoffs and breakthroughs that'd make billions.
The actual mission might be quite affordable if the right breakthroughs happen along the way. For instance, what is the total flight time if a.01 G continuous thrust engine is available? Check out:
http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/documents.html
(Hint: my back of the envelope calculation shows that one month in each direction is about right for a reasonable geometry - quite a bit better than a ballistic trajectory. Perhaps the ship could even be robust enough to include decent radiation shielding.)
Yes, it looks like Apple is trying to purposefully confuse people by prepending "Open" to this product, but maybe this will prove once and for all that any term like this can be hijacked, just like the Open Source people believe that the term Free Software is easily misunderstood.
Note that "Open" doesn't imply "Open Source". I'd say it would be a reasonable name if the "OpenTalk" protocols are published and freely available to third parties (I have no idea if Apple is planning this or not).
If so, that certainly fits one definition of "Open".
SCO will probably lawyer themselves out of existence, but what is stopping some other greedy little twerp from pulling the same stunt with copyright claim or perhaps a software patent?
The burning memory of SCO "lawyering themselves out of existence". This is the first, best chance to screw Linux for SCO/Microsoft (let's not forget MS involvement in this). If it doesn't work this time, chances go WAY down that it ever will. It's going to be very hard to get investment backing of similar shenanigans in the future - that is presuming that Microsoft doesn't find another way to backdoor money to some hapless entity.
When the government can use reasons like this to avoid releasing the data in the first place.
The mind boggles...
By the way, isn't this type of thing the raison d'etre for Freenet - how many Freenet nodes are up these days? Any DHS visits to Freenet node operators/sites?
The last thing I need is for Linux to become a tech-slave to Microsoft's Win32NG department and its users to start acting like a bunch of *ssholes.
Exactly.
There are already several free/commercial JVMs on Linux. Sun, despite a lot of handwaving to the contrary, has been quite friendly to the free software community. C#/CLR is not much more than a slightly warmed over version of Java, without an unencumbered cross-platform GUI library. Java has two major contenders (Swing and SWT).
Mono was a bad idea and only furthers Microsoft's market dominance.
Dynamic language usually means "dynamically typed".
The definition I've always used is "a dynamic language permits a program to dynamically change it's behavior at runtime". Here is the best reference I could find. Dynamic typing is a separate (but related) issue.
Note that Objective-C and Dylan both have efficiency as a major priority, including native compilation. Also Scheme (Bigloo is one example) has several implementations that generate native code.
Java is dynamic (despite what the above link claims at the bottom;) and uses a static (strong) type system.
Which of the Fedora package managers does the best job of building from SRPMs, if any? I like the idea of being able to build my own binaries using my own compile flags for certain packages... What are the issues with using different package managers after the initial install? Will urpmi
Alternatively, is there a distribution point for AMD (32 and 64 bit) optimized RPMs?
I know we are all about open source here, but honestly.. this has very little to do with Microsoft launching Visual Studio Express. Maybe you should mention how you can code C# in Eclipse. And also mention sharpdevelop or monodevelop. NetBeans, isn't really useful for.Net development as far I know...
Sure it has a lot to do with VS Express. I'd hate to see people get needlessly locked into Windows development with VS, when they could target Windows along with (essentially) everything else using either IDE I mentioned and Java.
Outside Windows, C#/CLI/CLR aren't mature, robust, or unencumbered - hence they are best avoided altogether, IMNSHO. YMMV.;-) This may change in the future, but I'm betting not.
This is absolutely incorrect, Eclipse supports several languages and does so by design. A brief search revealed support for Java (of course), C++, C#, COBOL, Haskell, Perl, and Python. NetBeans is Java-centric.
and some of the best plugins for Eclipse are not free.
The release version of VS Express won't be either. Regardless, no one ever said that everything is or ought to be free-as-in-beer.;-)
Interesting that you should bring up Eclipse though, a classic case of an OS IDE desperately trying to emulate the standards of a commercial offering, IDEA Intellj.
Eclipse has quite a lineage of it's own, since it inherited a large commercial code base from IBM. Eclipse has had a nice revitalizing effect on the Java world, and SWT is an interesting addition as well.
I went looking for power consumption info on Pentium M, but couldn't easily find any. I'm pretty sure it's even less than 25 W. However, I'd personally rather have an Athlon 64 notebook, since I hear you can get three hours of real-world use out of the E-machines 6805 and it should spank any of the Pentium Ms on performance. That is my current first choice, along with the 6809.
A Canadian company (the name escapes me at the moment) is supposedly making A64 notebooks with the ATI 9700M GPU, but their prices looked quite steep.
BTW, I couldn't agree with you more regarding the HP A64 notebooks - what a stupid decision on the graphics subsystems! I've not been impressed with HP for quite a while - how do you like your notebook other than the graphics? Is battery life good? How is the general engineering and fit/finish?
I sure hope E-machines doesn't axe it's A64 notebooks now that Gateway bought it - they seem to be some of the best around! I wish they'd go to 4-8 GB of RAM though...;-)
AMD is not any better. It took them nearly a year to get their SOI process stable enough to launch the Athlon 64. This is just part of the business. It's just unfortunate for Intel that this happened on some of the first wafer lots out of the fab and that they didn't catch the problem from class probe and WAT data before they shipped some wafers out.
There is a QC issue if Intel didn't catch it in time to prevent a multi-million dollar screwup.
Note that AMD didn't ship anything until it's process was working right.
Slashdot Mirror
"Actually" that's not right. It means there's a 70% chance of rain falling somewhere in the area of interest during the 24 hours in question.
There are many possible different interpretations, I actually got curious enough to look it up a few weeks ago. Sorry I'm not motivated enough to find a link for you... ;-)
To be fair, the correct expression is "quantum transmitted" not "quantum encrypted". You can send the message in cleartext if you're sure (on a bit-by-bit basis) that nothing has been intercepted.
No, this technology is not going to be used on terrorists. It is going to be used on a combination of normal people suspected of criminal activity (ie anyone who bothers to encrypt their communications) and actual hightech criminals.
This technology will be effectively useless at stopping the terrorists we are worried about.
First of all, plenty of terrorists have access to technology and are no doubt interested in encryption. However, from what I just read at Wikipedia, it will take at least 1e12 entangled qubits to decrypt info encrypted with a 1000 bit key - much less 2048 bits. So even RSA encryption with decent key sizes seems quite safe.
Any serious (read: military) crypto user will likely be using one time pads generated using a true random data source. That form of crypto has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, if the pad isn't compromised (the pads should be distributed during a face-to-face meeting and securely guarded afterwords). Quantum doesn't help in decrypting one time pad encrypted data.
Unfortunately, for e-commerce and such one time pads don't work since there is currently no secure way to distribute the pads. Untappable quantum comm channels could help with that problem...
In order to do anything practical, all the qubits in a quantum computer must be entangled - which is apparently the hard part. So, in order to break information encoded with a 2048 bit key, 2048 entangled qubits will have to be available. Anyone have any insight as to when that might happen? Is there anything intrinsically harder about entangling more qubits, or is the leap from say eight to 2048 straightforward?
Instead, it's (courtesy of Wikipedia):
So, I'd say that our (large keysize) encrypted data is safe for now... ;-)
Steganography is the process of hiding (possibly encrypted) data in the low-order areas of other files, often multimedia files like pictures and music. This information is (often readily) detectable, and once detected is no more secure than any other information. In other words, right now most people would use PGP or the equivalent to encrypt the information they're hiding steganographically - which could be broken by quantum computers.
For more information, check out this, or for the more technically inclined read the steganography and steganalysis section here. Good stuff.
In order to do anything practical, all the qubits in a quantum computer must be entangled - which is apparently the hard part. So, in order to break information encoded with a 2048 bit key, 2048 entangled qubits will have to be available. Anyone have any insight as to when that might happen? Is there anything intrinsically harder about entangling more qubits, or is the leap from say eight to 2048 straightforward?
Quantum computers will, if they work as advertised, break all RSA type public key encryption. Does anyone know if ECC is also vulnerable?
OK, that's enough questions for now... ;-) TIA for any answers.
Toms Hardware says otherwise.
Yeah, the charts are quite a bit old. But the price drops from both companies since then seem to be very comparable.
Well, I'll begin by stating that since I consider accelerated OpenGL drivers for Linux to be an important part of "bang" that pretty well kills the ATI lineup right off the bat. ;-)
However, looking at these results with the 9600XT at around $138 and the 5900 XT at around $173 (current prices), the 5900 comes out well ahead on FPS/$. The 9800 Pros are somewhat more expensive (~$200) but offer a slight performance edge - I'd say about even on bang-per-buck - using Windows that is. Under Linux, no comparison.
As has been pointed out, this critique is flat-out wrong for the 6800 GT. One bonus you get with the 6800 cards is excellent accelerated OpenGL drivers, under Linux as well!
and their middle end cards just simply suck.
This is also simply wrong, the 5900XT is the best bang-for-the-buck on the market.
In short, your post should be modded back down to +1 or 0.
The research and engineering to get to Mars might cost billions - of course there would doubtless be the usual useful spinoffs and breakthroughs that'd make billions.
The actual mission might be quite affordable if the right breakthroughs happen along the way. For instance, what is the total flight time if a .01 G continuous thrust engine is available? Check out:
http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/documents.html
(Hint: my back of the envelope calculation shows that one month in each direction is about right for a reasonable geometry - quite a bit better than a ballistic trajectory. Perhaps the ship could even be robust enough to include decent radiation shielding.)
Note that "Open" doesn't imply "Open Source". I'd say it would be a reasonable name if the "OpenTalk" protocols are published and freely available to third parties (I have no idea if Apple is planning this or not).
If so, that certainly fits one definition of "Open".
I think so.
SCO will probably lawyer themselves out of existence, but what is stopping some other greedy little twerp from pulling the same stunt with copyright claim or perhaps a software patent?
The burning memory of SCO "lawyering themselves out of existence". This is the first, best chance to screw Linux for SCO/Microsoft (let's not forget MS involvement in this). If it doesn't work this time, chances go WAY down that it ever will. It's going to be very hard to get investment backing of similar shenanigans in the future - that is presuming that Microsoft doesn't find another way to backdoor money to some hapless entity.
[sarcasm]That can't possibly be true - it's a client Java app![/sarcasm]
The mind boggles...
By the way, isn't this type of thing the raison d'etre for Freenet - how many Freenet nodes are up these days? Any DHS visits to Freenet node operators/sites?
With, as you point out, over 150 member companies the Liberty Alliance is scarcely just "Sun".
Exactly.
There are already several free/commercial JVMs on Linux. Sun, despite a lot of handwaving to the contrary, has been quite friendly to the free software community. C#/CLR is not much more than a slightly warmed over version of Java, without an unencumbered cross-platform GUI library. Java has two major contenders (Swing and SWT).
Mono was a bad idea and only furthers Microsoft's market dominance.
The definition I've always used is "a dynamic language permits a program to dynamically change it's behavior at runtime". Here is the best reference I could find. Dynamic typing is a separate (but related) issue.
Note that Objective-C and Dylan both have efficiency as a major priority, including native compilation. Also Scheme (Bigloo is one example) has several implementations that generate native code.
Java is dynamic (despite what the above link claims at the bottom;) and uses a static (strong) type system.
It should be pointed out that a lot of "those guys" work for RedHat (since it bought out Cygnus) and...actually get paid!
What a concept! :-P
Alternatively, is there a distribution point for AMD (32 and 64 bit) optimized RPMs?
TIA...
S. 2560
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
Sure it has a lot to do with VS Express. I'd hate to see people get needlessly locked into Windows development with VS, when they could target Windows along with (essentially) everything else using either IDE I mentioned and Java.
Outside Windows, C#/CLI/CLR aren't mature, robust, or unencumbered - hence they are best avoided altogether, IMNSHO. YMMV. ;-) This may change in the future, but I'm betting not.
This is absolutely incorrect, Eclipse supports several languages and does so by design. A brief search revealed support for Java (of course), C++, C#, COBOL, Haskell, Perl, and Python. NetBeans is Java-centric.
and some of the best plugins for Eclipse are not free.
The release version of VS Express won't be either. Regardless, no one ever said that everything is or ought to be free-as-in-beer. ;-)
Interesting that you should bring up Eclipse though, a classic case of an OS IDE desperately trying to emulate the standards of a commercial offering, IDEA Intellj.
Eclipse has quite a lineage of it's own, since it inherited a large commercial code base from IBM. Eclipse has had a nice revitalizing effect on the Java world, and SWT is an interesting addition as well.
As an added bonus, both are cross-platform. ;-)
I went looking for power consumption info on Pentium M, but couldn't easily find any. I'm pretty sure it's even less than 25 W. However, I'd personally rather have an Athlon 64 notebook, since I hear you can get three hours of real-world use out of the E-machines 6805 and it should spank any of the Pentium Ms on performance. That is my current first choice, along with the 6809.
A Canadian company (the name escapes me at the moment) is supposedly making A64 notebooks with the ATI 9700M GPU, but their prices looked quite steep.
BTW, I couldn't agree with you more regarding the HP A64 notebooks - what a stupid decision on the graphics subsystems! I've not been impressed with HP for quite a while - how do you like your notebook other than the graphics? Is battery life good? How is the general engineering and fit/finish?
I sure hope E-machines doesn't axe it's A64 notebooks now that Gateway bought it - they seem to be some of the best around! I wish they'd go to 4-8 GB of RAM though... ;-)
There is a QC issue if Intel didn't catch it in time to prevent a multi-million dollar screwup.
Note that AMD didn't ship anything until it's process was working right.
Yes, but a) this has caused no known problems and b) there will be a BIOS fix soon.
Interestingly, this isn't listed on AMD's errata page, which appears to be two years out of date.
I was able to find the Opteron/Athlon 64 Revision Guide from a post on one of AMD's online forums. It looks like the forums are pretty responsive, from what I saw.