But to be honest if Microsoft didn't give away the money, people would be crying and moaning about that.
Giving away the money? What money? Microsoft is giving away copies of their software which cost them exactly $0 and serves to maintain their monopoly. There are practically no lost sales (non-profit organizations wouldn't be able to afford to pay for Microsoft's software anyway) and the monopoly effect (specifically, Microsoft's incompatible protocols and file formats) actually generates more sales out of the people who need to communicate with those non-profit organizations! Also, they may be able to get a huge tax writeoff by claiming the full retail cost of the giveaway software as business expense. (Any accountants on/. ? Please confirm.) So where is the philantropy?
This is really no different than the "punishment" Microsoft proposed to settle their antitrust suit: give away $1 billion worth of Microsoft's software to schools. Apple was very unimpressed with this proposition and said so to the judge. That was one of the reasons the deal fell through.
Since the EULA is a legally binding document that the user is entering into willfully, an OS restriction could easily be a part of that.
EULAs are on a shaky legal ground precisely because in most cases the users are not entering into the agreement willfully. You cannot view the agreement until you buy the software, open the box and start installing it -- but once you open the shrinkwrap, you implicitly agree to the terms hidden inside the box and you can no longer return the software. In effect, EULA is an attempt to impose hidden restrictions on you post-sale.
Secondly, even if we assume that EULAs are not intrinsically illegal, that doesn't mean that every clause the vendor puts in the EULA is enforcible. A vendor cannot demand, for instance, that you give them all your possessions after your death. Such a clause would simply be thrown out if the matter ever went to court.
An interesting anecdote I heard illustrates very well what I'm saying. One company decided to put this insane EULA in their product. One of their lawyers protested, but was overruled, so he committed a clever sabotage: he added a clause to the EULA that stated, roughly, "the User shall surrender to the Company their first-born child". The product was shipped with this clause in the EULA. Eventually, this was noticed and the lawyer was fired, but do you seriously believe that those people who bought the early version of the product are required to give their first-born to the company?
Consider a software vendor who has released a product specifically for a certain class of operating systems. It would be entirely reasonable for them to restrict the use of that application (via the EULA) to avoid deployment on other OS's, due to the unpredictable issues that will pop up.
False. They can say "this product is designed to be used on system X; we will not support it if you use it on system Y". However, nothing gives them the right to demand that you use the product on system X, just like GM cannot demand that you have your car serviced only at Goodwrench. That is an abuse of monopoly, plain and simple.
Really? And how would you feel if you got a nice piece of documentation, and it included a scathing critique of the Iraq war as an "Invariant Section"?
On this particular subject I would add that Rumsfeld and the rest of the white house 'hawks' should be tried for treason for providing chemical and biological weapons to Iraq in the first place and helping the Ba'ath party (headed by Saddam) to gain power.
But I see your point: the invariant section may be open to abuse. However, if someone tried to pull that off, this would obviously not go over well with the community, so the author would face a lot of pressure to remove the offending section.
that the invariant sections can simply be a short history of the document or the like. For example, you might want to include a section that says "this document was written by so-and-so with the help of so-and-so; it went through revisions x, y, z; if you like this document, send pizza to this address, etc.". The invariant section cannot deal with the actual subject of the document (i.e. you cannot mark a chapter as invariant). This doesn't sound that bad to me.
Before the US military even finished bombing Iraq, the contracts for rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure have already been awarded to US corporations. Among those corporations is Haliburton, where vice president Dick Cheney served as CEO. He is still on Haliburton's payroll and still owns 8 million of Haliburton's stock options.
The more damage US military does to Iraq's infrastructure, the more money will US corporations make on rebuilding. US government is planning to use Iraqi oil to pay for this enterprise.
Acording to SIPRI (http://www.sipri.se/) the number one arms supply for Iraq from 1973 to 1990 has been the Soviet Union for $25 billion worth of arms, followed by France and China at $5 billion each.
OK, I'll clue you in, just in case you've been living under a rock for the past year. We are not talking about conventional weapons (guns, tanks, helicopters, etc.). The whole disarmament thing was about chemical and biological weapons, which is what US happily supplied Iraq with.
Re:I'm for the war... but..
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The US uses their WMD as defense only
And how exactly does one use WMD for "defense only"? A weapon of mass destruction has only one purpose. It is interesting how the propaganda parrots do not hesitate to condemn Iraq's use of chemical weapons but always find a justification for US's use of nuclear weapons -- on a civilian population, mind you!
On the other hand, Sadam is a mad man and he has killed many of his own ppl.
With your support! Who the fuck do you think provided the chemical and biological weapons to Iraq? Why, it was the good old US of A! You give WMD to a madmen and what do you expect him to do with them?
Did US protest when Saddam used chemical weapons -- back in the 80's mind you? Did it issue a condemnation? Nope. For propaganda parrots to come out now -- almost 20 years since Saddam used the chemical weapons -- and codemn him is hypocritical beyond belief.
You see, back in the 80's Iraq was US's ally. At the time Iran's dictator -- whom CIA had installed back in 1953 -- had just been overthrown, so US needed someone to bitchslap Iran. Iraq was a convenient ally.Of course US military contractors did not hesitate to profit from the war by selling weapons to both sides...
Oh, and speaking of dictators, I wonder if the new democratic government of Iraq will be of the same sort of democracy that you brought to Iran (or Guatemala, or Chile, or...)
This post is a lot like the "BSD is dying" troll that's just not going away. Every once in a while some idiot posts it, and a few other idiots moderate it up. Anyway, on to debunking.
The MacOS running WebStar and other webservers as has never been exploited or defaced, and are are unbreakable based on historical evidence.
Really? Is that because it crashed every time someone tried to access it? Considering that MacOS does not even have preemptive multitasking or proper memory protection, it's not that hard to imagine. MacOS has a really nice GUI, but in terms of technology it is behind even Windows 95.
In fact in the entire SecurityFocus (BugTraq) database history there has never been a Mac exploited over the internet remotely.
Hmmm, there are no exploits for DOS either. Are we to conclude that DOS is the most secure OS ever?
No command shell...
BFD! If you gain control of a process (through buffer overflow, for example) and manage to execute your own code, you still have complete control of the system. Heck, the current bug in IIS has nothing to do with exploiting shell.
No Root user.
The troll is only getting better. Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to our attention that the competitors' cars have malfunctioning seatbelts and thus cause injuries to passengers in a collision. Our MacCar has no seatbelts, therefore it is not vulnerable to collisions.
You know, IIS also runs as root (or rather LocalSystem in NT terms). By always running as root there is no false sense of security and programming is done carefully. Doesn't seem to help though...
Pascal strings.... As you know Pascal strings (length prefixed) are faster than C...but the side effect is less buffer exploits
...and they are limited to 255 bytes in length. (For those who did not program in pascal, the first character in the char array represents the length of the string. Since unsigned char's maximum value is 255, that's the maximum length of the string). Anyway, a buffer overflow occurs when you try to write more data than you can fit in the buffer. The only way a compiler could prevent that is if it inserts length checks before every write, and either truncates the string or terminates the program. It's been a loooong time since I touched pascal, so I don't remember how it handles that, but in any case it's irrelevant: is WebStar written in Pascal? In fact, besides some legacy code in MacOS, is anything at all written in Pascal these days?
Macs running Webstar have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed" (not mere file name extension).
Unix running Apache have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed" (not mere file name extension). (You can't run some random data).
Macs never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing!
Unix never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing! (You need to set executable permission first).
but the best part is that mac web programs and server tools do not create files with resource forks usually. TOTAL security.
Yeah, and when I leave the house I put my keys under the rug usually. TOTAL security. I mean who would possibly figure out how to create "resource forks" and such?
Stack return address positioned in safer location than some intel Osses.
That is the property of the hardware, not OS. Do you undestand the distinction?
7> There are less macs, though there are huge cash prizes for cracking into a MacOS based WebStar server (typically over $10,000 US). Less macs means less hacker interest
What happened to 5> and 6>? Were those argument too stupid even by your standards?
Anyway, in this paragraph you are contridicting yourself: on the one hand you are claiming that macs are safer because there is less
What Corel did, and I really find this unforgivable, was they got the brainiac idea to "sync" the two versions of the code base (X and window) by using wine!
No, what Corel did, back in 95 or so was simply drop WP on all platforms but Windows and started to compete with Microsoft head to head on Microsoft's own platform. We all know how well that turned out. When Linux became a buzzword and Corel was looking for a new bandwagon to jump on, they simply couldn't produce a native version of WP in a reasonable timeframe, so they just hacked it until it ran under WINE without crashing too much. When I downloaded a trial version of WP8 for Linux, my first reaction was "are they actually trying to sell this thing?". I had the same impression about their distribution: a good start, but far, far from a finished product.
Had they kept the Unix ports going, they would have been able to provide a high-quality office suite for Linux. The last version of WP I used was WP8 (for Windows), and I certainly would have paid for a Linux version. But no, I am not interested in half-assed wine hacks.
Anyway, the story of Corel is truly sad. They were an awesome graphics company back in early 90s, but they kept making one boneheaded decision after another. This is a perfect example of how *not* to run a company.
Occidental cultures are all European countries and their descendant cultures that are ruled by people who have European origins -- a notable exception being Slavs
Actually Slavs are also Europeans. Their origin is believed to be the modern-day Ukraine. From there they spread west and north, but basically, Slavs always occupied eastern Europe.
You might be thinking of Hungarians -- they were the fierce nomads who came to Europe around 15th century.
Good support for more than 4 gigs of ram on x86 architecture.
You can't have more than 4 gigs on x86 architecture. It's 32 bit, so it's limited to 4 gigs. I know, I know, Intel has some kind of 36-bit addressing hack, but it's just that -- a hack, like the XMS/EMS memory of the olde DOS days. It's either that or AMD's x86-64 which isn't out yet, but Linux is running quite nicely on the pre-release models. A few months ago, AMD even demoed x86-64 version of SuSE.
... that's as long as I've been using it. I don't know the actual time frame when 64-bit support appeared in Linux kernel, but I have read that Linux was the first OS to run on UltraSPARC in 64 bit mode, putting Sun to shame.
Without Windows for x86-64, AMD is dead. No, Linux will not save it. However, the moment Microsoft releases Windows for x86-64, Itanic is history. The market will overwhelmingly favour x86-64 because of the much lower price (I expect at least 3-4 times lower, cosidering that the Itanic CPU alone sells for over $3000), and perfect backwards compatibility. Itanic's ia32 support is so pathetically slow that it may as well not exist, so a move to Itanic requires you to replace _all_ your software, which ain't cheap, while x86-64 allows you to do incremental upgrades. So, taking simple economics into account, Itanic will go the way of that ship and AMD will emerge the winner... provided there is a version of Windows for x86-64. Without that there is no point of talking about "64 bit desktop" market because it just won't exist. So what is Microsoft doing?
Tcl is a complete hack of a language. Imagine a Bourne shell, but with a totally ugly syntax. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of large application (and I have had an exteme misfortune of writing a farily large project in Tcl/Tk). What's wrong with Tcl? Let's see...
It's a scripting language, interpreted on the fly. That means only the parts of the code that are actually being executed are parsed. You may have a syntax error in another part of the code, but you will not notice it unless you run that code. Even Perl parses the entire file before running it, but Tcl, just like shell, essentially treats the file as a stream of commands.
It's weakly typed. This is actually the bane of all scripting languages that makes them unsuitable for large projects. You can assign an integer / float / string / file handle / whatever to the same variable without the interpreter even twitching.
Here is a biggie: it does not force explicit declaration of variables.A variable simply comes to life when it's first used. Good luck trying to debug misspelled variable names.
And these are just my biggest objectsions. The Tk widget set is not bad. It is quite ugly and limited, but good enough for a small GUI app. The underlying language though is absolute crap.
The only good thing about Tcl is that it provides a (relatively) easy way of interfacing with C code: you can expose C functions as Tcl commands (e.g. you could map Tcl command foobar to C function MyFooBar()). This is, in fact, what Tool Control Language was designed for: exposing C functions to a high-level script to facilitate easy automated testing. However, trying to write a real application in Tcl is an excercise in futility. There are much better alternatives available. But, if all you have is a hammer, everyting looks like a nail -- that is why Tcl is the "past and future king".
Why isn't a list of known primes to make things much easier in the search for the private key?
Unfortunately, this doesn't work simply because N is too large. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that there are 2^300 primes between 1 and 2^1024 (*). To make the lookup table you suggest we would need to store all of them. That is 2^300 numbers that are 1024 bits (= 128 bytes) each. That's 2.37 * 10^80 terabytes. There is not enough storage capacity in the world to accomodate that.
Some day we will have large enough hard drives to store that much data. But when that day comes, we'll need to break much larger keys.
(*) In general, there is an infinite amount of primes in the set of all integers (between 1 and infinity).
You pick two large primes, p and q; multiply them together to get N. Then, arbitrarily pick an encryption key e (1 < e < N) and calculate the corresponding decryption key d (1 < d < N, d != e). Make the set {e, N} public but keep d private.
Now, to encrypt a message M you calculate cyphertext C as follows: C = M ^ e (mod N)
To decrypt, you calculate M' = C ^ d (mod N). The claim is, of course, that M' == M. (Notice that M' = (M ^ e) ^ d (mod N) = (M ^ d) ^ e (mod N), so it's really irrelevant which of {e,d} you make public.)
Anyway, from the public key, you know N and e and you want to figure out d. To do that you need to factor N into p and q (see above), then you can make an easy calculation to get d. Since p and q are primes, those are the only factors of N (other than 1 and N). Further, since we are talking about 2048 bit encryption (N >= 2^2048), the factors p and q can be up to 1024 bits long (2^1024). To brute-force the private key you need to go through 2^1024 (*) possible factors of N until you find one that works.
Now, suppose we have a computer that can check the divisibility of N 1000 times per second. It will need 10 ^ 298 years to go through all possible combinations (though of course it can get lucky and pick the right factor early on). If we have 1,000,000 of these computers, we'll still need 10 ^ 292 years, so don't hold your breath...
(*) It's actually less than 2^2048 because you only need to consider prime numbers, but it's still staggeringly large. Also, given a number x, it's not so easy to tell if it's prime (unless it's even). You need to use an algorithm to determine that, which takes time.
It outdates the browser by quite a bit, and has worked hard to built a reputable brand for itself
Phoenix *BIOS* has nothing to do with Phoenix *browser*. The two names do not create confusion, so Mozilla folks can use the name. A tradamark applies to one specific area. This is wy we have Macintosh apples and Macintosh computers, or, more recently, Windows XP and Athlon XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving away the money? What money? Microsoft is giving away copies of their software which cost them exactly $0 and serves to maintain their monopoly. There are practically no lost sales (non-profit organizations wouldn't be able to afford to pay for Microsoft's software anyway) and the monopoly effect (specifically, Microsoft's incompatible protocols and file formats) actually generates more sales out of the people who need to communicate with those non-profit organizations! Also, they may be able to get a huge tax writeoff by claiming the full retail cost of the giveaway software as business expense. (Any accountants on /. ? Please confirm.) So where is the philantropy?
This is really no different than the "punishment" Microsoft proposed to settle their antitrust suit: give away $1 billion worth of Microsoft's software to schools. Apple was very unimpressed with this proposition and said so to the judge. That was one of the reasons the deal fell through.
EULAs are on a shaky legal ground precisely because in most cases the users are not entering into the agreement willfully. You cannot view the agreement until you buy the software, open the box and start installing it -- but once you open the shrinkwrap, you implicitly agree to the terms hidden inside the box and you can no longer return the software. In effect, EULA is an attempt to impose hidden restrictions on you post-sale.
Secondly, even if we assume that EULAs are not intrinsically illegal, that doesn't mean that every clause the vendor puts in the EULA is enforcible. A vendor cannot demand, for instance, that you give them all your possessions after your death. Such a clause would simply be thrown out if the matter ever went to court.
An interesting anecdote I heard illustrates very well what I'm saying. One company decided to put this insane EULA in their product. One of their lawyers protested, but was overruled, so he committed a clever sabotage: he added a clause to the EULA that stated, roughly, "the User shall surrender to the Company their first-born child". The product was shipped with this clause in the EULA. Eventually, this was noticed and the lawyer was fired, but do you seriously believe that those people who bought the early version of the product are required to give their first-born to the company?
False. They can say "this product is designed to be used on system X; we will not support it if you use it on system Y". However, nothing gives them the right to demand that you use the product on system X, just like GM cannot demand that you have your car serviced only at Goodwrench. That is an abuse of monopoly, plain and simple.
Now that seems to be true...
On this particular subject I would add that Rumsfeld and the rest of the white house 'hawks' should be tried for treason for providing chemical and biological weapons to Iraq in the first place and helping the Ba'ath party (headed by Saddam) to gain power.
But I see your point: the invariant section may be open to abuse. However, if someone tried to pull that off, this would obviously not go over well with the community, so the author would face a lot of pressure to remove the offending section.
that the invariant sections can simply be a short history of the document or the like. For example, you might want to include a section that says "this document was written by so-and-so with the help of so-and-so; it went through revisions x, y, z; if you like this document, send pizza to this address, etc.". The invariant section cannot deal with the actual subject of the document (i.e. you cannot mark a chapter as invariant). This doesn't sound that bad to me.
The more damage US military does to Iraq's infrastructure, the more money will US corporations make on rebuilding. US government is planning to use Iraqi oil to pay for this enterprise.
Care to give any proof of that statement?
link
link
Acording to SIPRI (http://www.sipri.se/) the number one arms supply for Iraq from 1973 to 1990 has been the Soviet Union for $25 billion worth of arms, followed by France and China at $5 billion each.
OK, I'll clue you in, just in case you've been living under a rock for the past year. We are not talking about conventional weapons (guns, tanks, helicopters, etc.). The whole disarmament thing was about chemical and biological weapons, which is what US happily supplied Iraq with.
And how exactly does one use WMD for "defense only"? A weapon of mass destruction has only one purpose. It is interesting how the propaganda parrots do not hesitate to condemn Iraq's use of chemical weapons but always find a justification for US's use of nuclear weapons -- on a civilian population, mind you!
On the other hand, Sadam is a mad man and he has killed many of his own ppl.
With your support! Who the fuck do you think provided the chemical and biological weapons to Iraq? Why, it was the good old US of A! You give WMD to a madmen and what do you expect him to do with them?
Did US protest when Saddam used chemical weapons -- back in the 80's mind you? Did it issue a condemnation? Nope. For propaganda parrots to come out now -- almost 20 years since Saddam used the chemical weapons -- and codemn him is hypocritical beyond belief.
You see, back in the 80's Iraq was US's ally. At the time Iran's dictator -- whom CIA had installed back in 1953 -- had just been overthrown, so US needed someone to bitchslap Iran. Iraq was a convenient ally.Of course US military contractors did not hesitate to profit from the war by selling weapons to both sides...
Oh, and speaking of dictators, I wonder if the new democratic government of Iraq will be of the same sort of democracy that you brought to Iran (or Guatemala, or Chile, or...)
This post is a lot like the "BSD is dying" troll that's just not going away. Every once in a while some idiot posts it, and a few other idiots moderate it up. Anyway, on to debunking.
The MacOS running WebStar and other webservers as has never been exploited or defaced, and are are unbreakable based on historical evidence.
Really? Is that because it crashed every time someone tried to access it? Considering that MacOS does not even have preemptive multitasking or proper memory protection, it's not that hard to imagine. MacOS has a really nice GUI, but in terms of technology it is behind even Windows 95.
In fact in the entire SecurityFocus (BugTraq) database history there has never been a Mac exploited over the internet remotely.
Hmmm, there are no exploits for DOS either. Are we to conclude that DOS is the most secure OS ever?
No command shell...
BFD! If you gain control of a process (through buffer overflow, for example) and manage to execute your own code, you still have complete control of the system. Heck, the current bug in IIS has nothing to do with exploiting shell.
No Root user.
The troll is only getting better. Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to our attention that the competitors' cars have malfunctioning seatbelts and thus cause injuries to passengers in a collision. Our MacCar has no seatbelts, therefore it is not vulnerable to collisions.
You know, IIS also runs as root (or rather LocalSystem in NT terms). By always running as root there is no false sense of security and programming is done carefully. Doesn't seem to help though...
Pascal strings.... As you know Pascal strings (length prefixed) are faster than C...but the side effect is less buffer exploits
...and they are limited to 255 bytes in length. (For those who did not program in pascal, the first character in the char array represents the length of the string. Since unsigned char's maximum value is 255, that's the maximum length of the string). Anyway, a buffer overflow occurs when you try to write more data than you can fit in the buffer. The only way a compiler could prevent that is if it inserts length checks before every write, and either truncates the string or terminates the program. It's been a loooong time since I touched pascal, so I don't remember how it handles that, but in any case it's irrelevant: is WebStar written in Pascal? In fact, besides some legacy code in MacOS, is anything at all written in Pascal these days?
Macs running Webstar have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed" (not mere file name extension).
Unix running Apache have ability to only run CGI placed in correct directory location and correctly file "typed" (not mere file name extension). (You can't run some random data).
Macs never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing!
Unix never run code ever merely based on how a file is named. ".exe" suffixes mean nothing! (You need to set executable permission first).
but the best part is that mac web programs and server tools do not create files with resource forks usually. TOTAL security.
Yeah, and when I leave the house I put my keys under the rug usually. TOTAL security. I mean who would possibly figure out how to create "resource forks" and such?
Stack return address positioned in safer location than some intel Osses.
That is the property of the hardware, not OS. Do you undestand the distinction?
7> There are less macs, though there are huge cash prizes for cracking into a MacOS based WebStar server (typically over $10,000 US). Less macs means less hacker interest
What happened to 5> and 6>? Were those argument too stupid even by your standards?
Anyway, in this paragraph you are contridicting yourself: on the one hand you are claiming that macs are safer because there is less
No, what Corel did, back in 95 or so was simply drop WP on all platforms but Windows and started to compete with Microsoft head to head on Microsoft's own platform. We all know how well that turned out. When Linux became a buzzword and Corel was looking for a new bandwagon to jump on, they simply couldn't produce a native version of WP in a reasonable timeframe, so they just hacked it until it ran under WINE without crashing too much. When I downloaded a trial version of WP8 for Linux, my first reaction was "are they actually trying to sell this thing?". I had the same impression about their distribution: a good start, but far, far from a finished product.
Had they kept the Unix ports going, they would have been able to provide a high-quality office suite for Linux. The last version of WP I used was WP8 (for Windows), and I certainly would have paid for a Linux version. But no, I am not interested in half-assed wine hacks.
Anyway, the story of Corel is truly sad. They were an awesome graphics company back in early 90s, but they kept making one boneheaded decision after another. This is a perfect example of how *not* to run a company.
...that *ESR* called someone "deeply stupid"...
Actually Slavs are also Europeans. Their origin is believed to be the modern-day Ukraine. From there they spread west and north, but basically, Slavs always occupied eastern Europe.
You might be thinking of Hungarians -- they were the fierce nomads who came to Europe around 15th century.
You can't have more than 4 gigs on x86 architecture. It's 32 bit, so it's limited to 4 gigs. I know, I know, Intel has some kind of 36-bit addressing hack, but it's just that -- a hack, like the XMS/EMS memory of the olde DOS days. It's either that or AMD's x86-64 which isn't out yet, but Linux is running quite nicely on the pre-release models. A few months ago, AMD even demoed x86-64 version of SuSE.
... that's as long as I've been using it. I don't know the actual time frame when 64-bit support appeared in Linux kernel, but I have read that Linux was the first OS to run on UltraSPARC in 64 bit mode, putting Sun to shame.
Without Windows for x86-64, AMD is dead. No, Linux will not save it. However, the moment Microsoft releases Windows for x86-64, Itanic is history. The market will overwhelmingly favour x86-64 because of the much lower price (I expect at least 3-4 times lower, cosidering that the Itanic CPU alone sells for over $3000), and perfect backwards compatibility. Itanic's ia32 support is so pathetically slow that it may as well not exist, so a move to Itanic requires you to replace _all_ your software, which ain't cheap, while x86-64 allows you to do incremental upgrades. So, taking simple economics into account, Itanic will go the way of that ship and AMD will emerge the winner... provided there is a version of Windows for x86-64. Without that there is no point of talking about "64 bit desktop" market because it just won't exist. So what is Microsoft doing?
So will she become RIAA's ass now? (About time too...)
Which TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG2 encoder are actually supported under Linux? That is a big showstopper as far as I can see...
And these are just my biggest objectsions. The Tk widget set is not bad. It is quite ugly and limited, but good enough for a small GUI app. The underlying language though is absolute crap.
The only good thing about Tcl is that it provides a (relatively) easy way of interfacing with C code: you can expose C functions as Tcl commands (e.g. you could map Tcl command foobar to C function MyFooBar()). This is, in fact, what Tool Control Language was designed for: exposing C functions to a high-level script to facilitate easy automated testing. However, trying to write a real application in Tcl is an excercise in futility. There are much better alternatives available. But, if all you have is a hammer, everyting looks like a nail -- that is why Tcl is the "past and future king".
I prefer to think of it as having no loose ends...
Unfortunately, this doesn't work simply because N is too large. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that there are 2^300 primes between 1 and 2^1024 (*). To make the lookup table you suggest we would need to store all of them. That is 2^300 numbers that are 1024 bits (= 128 bytes) each. That's 2.37 * 10^80 terabytes. There is not enough storage capacity in the world to accomodate that.
Some day we will have large enough hard drives to store that much data. But when that day comes, we'll need to break much larger keys.
(*) In general, there is an infinite amount of primes in the set of all integers (between 1 and infinity).
RSA encryption works like this:
You pick two large primes, p and q; multiply them together to get N.
Then, arbitrarily pick an encryption key e (1 < e < N) and calculate the corresponding decryption key d (1 < d < N, d != e).
Make the set {e, N} public but keep d private.
Now, to encrypt a message M you calculate cyphertext C as follows:
C = M ^ e (mod N)
To decrypt, you calculate M' = C ^ d (mod N). The claim is, of course, that M' == M. (Notice that M' = (M ^ e) ^ d (mod N) = (M ^ d) ^ e (mod N), so it's really irrelevant which of {e,d} you make public.)
Anyway, from the public key, you know N and e and you want to figure out d. To do that you need to factor N into p and q (see above), then you can make an easy calculation to get d. Since p and q are primes, those are the only factors of N (other than 1 and N). Further, since we are talking about 2048 bit encryption (N >= 2^2048), the factors p and q can be up to 1024 bits long (2^1024). To brute-force the private key you need to go through 2^1024 (*) possible factors of N until you find one that works.
Now, suppose we have a computer that can check the divisibility of N 1000 times per second. It will need 10 ^ 298 years to go through all possible combinations (though of course it can get lucky and pick the right factor early on). If we have 1,000,000 of these computers, we'll still need 10 ^ 292 years, so don't hold your breath...
(*) It's actually less than 2^2048 because you only need to consider prime numbers, but it's still staggeringly large. Also, given a number x, it's not so easy to tell if it's prime (unless it's even). You need to use an algorithm to determine that, which takes time.
Pricetag outside matters more than Intel inside.
see subject
Phoenix *BIOS* has nothing to do with Phoenix *browser*. The two names do not create confusion, so Mozilla folks can use the name. A tradamark applies to one specific area. This is wy we have Macintosh apples and Macintosh computers, or, more recently, Windows XP and Athlon XP.