Though these backbones are similar to those on the commercial Internet, only about three million users can access Internet2, versus several hundred million on the public Net.
Almost all the benefit (including the workability of QOS) comes from the fact that they have limited who has access to the network and thus have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. It's the internet culture of the late nineteen eighties, running on the hardware of the early two thousand naughts.
Personally, I'm glad that it sucks a little. If you look at the great eras of exploration, it generally sucked a lot. Stale water, six month old bread full of bugs, salt pork and scurvey. Or a hell of a lot of walking hoping to find water over the next ridge. Or trying to re-weave your grass boat at least as fast as the storm shreds it.
The big problem with our present age is that we are too worried about having to do without cleaning gel. We don't want to leave our home network, for fear of the roaming charges. We only want to go places that McDonalds has already collonized. We are afraid to have it suck even a little. And that sucks a lot.
Because when you are really exerting yourself, it often sucks. That's how adventure works. And we need to adventure, since there are a lot of places you can't get to by sitting in your living room, no matter how good your graphics card is.
We know where there are enough resources to make every single person on Earth as rich as Mr. Gates is at this moment, but most of us have gotten fat eating lotus leaves and we're afraid to go get it. I'm glad there are still a few nuts trying to launch themselves into space. And I'm glad there are people with more brains who actually manage to get into space, and go, even though it sucks a little.
My first reaction was, "didn't this happen years ago?"
I mean, when was the last time you got out a soldering iron and had at your PC? That used to be the norm, back when messing with micros meant S-100 and IEEE stuff. But with multi-layer boards (gack, I can't remember the last time I saw a single or layer two-sided board made by someone I didn't know) it's a lot harder, and likewise with the decreasing size and increasing complexity of ICs. But the main reason I stopped is that I no longer needed to work at that level to get the job done. The optimal level for configuration moved up, and I followed it.
This (if it happens, about which I have some reservations) will just trigger another migration: rather than hacking inside the box we'll just be hanging odd homebrew things on various I/O ports and treating the PC as a blackbox.
(set-mode Old-fart nil)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. A real old fart would tell us hardware hacking died when they went to these here new-fangled "chip" things. You can't pry them things open, or least wise 'tan't worth it.
I would be very interested in playing with an emulator for this, or failing that, and having specs writing one. I might even write an emulator for in in PIC assembly language to have an actual physical emulator (now instead of taking kilowats it'd probably take milliwats. It would be fun though.)
So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them.
Right off the bat, I'd like to state that I think whoever moded this down was clueless. ("flamebait"? As if the 604 User Group is going to respond in outrage? Get real.)
Second, in answer to your direct question, I don't have an documenation on it--at least, a quick search of my bookshelf didn't turn up anything older than the 1602--but I'll let you know if I come across anything.
Finally, you may be interested in a simulation of EDSAC, "the world first stored program computer to operate a regular service." I also enjoyed reading "The First Computers" (by Rojas & Hashagen, MIT press), which goes into a number of the claiments for "first" in the field.
And as much as I appreciate the freedom of innovation that people think they have creating new programming languages, just because they found another way to spell FOR doesn't mean they have the right to give birth to language.
Having lived through the little-language-dark-age (call it mid-eighties to early nineties), when it sometimes seemed like C and BASIC would drive out everyone but Chuck Moore, Ralph Griswold, and few Lisp hackers holed up on a farm in Montana, I am glad (no, strike that, I'm ecstatic) to see all the effort going into new (and sometimes not so new) languages. Carl, Larry, Guido, Peiter, and the thousands of others whose names don't spring to mind at this instant have my heartfelt gratitude. Personally, I'd much rather live in a chaotic world of plenty where, no matter how I want to spell "FOR", there's a language for me.
I can't tell if you did that intentionally and are one of those people who goes in for very obscure humour, or if it is just a one-in-a-million (exactly one-in-a-million) coincidence. Neither one seems particullarly plausible.
There is still this thing called the library, and they do still actually keep archives of periodicals.
Actually, Nicholson Baker has been raising a cry over this very issue; it seems that, in many cases, the libraries aren't keeping the hard copies. So the loss may be real.
For starters, the fact that "which encryption algorithm from among many I had chosen is known"... is still a bad thing. Makes the cryptanalysts job that much easier, yes?
Well, no. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help much against a dedicated attack; since this is the only type of attack you need to worry about when you're using reasonably strong crypto, there's no loss in admitting the type of encryption. With only a handful of popular algorithms (and those not equally likely), you'd only be gaining one or two bits worth of security were you hide the algorithm. It isn't worth the trouble.
But still, when I encrypt data with one of the symmetric ciphers (-s) and specifically selecting the algorithm (blowfish, serpent, aes, etc.) with the --cipher-algo switch it produces some encrypted file which when I decrypt... does NOT require me to specify the cipher algo, yet still knows when I put in the wrong password.
This could still be accomplished by trying each of them and reporting failure if none of them worked. But in fact, the PGP file format simply stores the information. Blowfish, etc. are handled similarly.
What does any of THIS have to do with public/private key ciphers?
Nothing. In my first post I was just addressing your question about how it could "know" if you had a bad key, without weakening the encryption.
This is a grossly oversimplified explanation, but:
The public key is based on a number that is the product of two large primes. The private key is based on the primes.
When you attempt to decrypt the message you are in effect asserting "The public key was divisible by these two numbers." At that point it is easy to check, and say either "you are right, here's the plain text" or "nope, it isn't divisible by them." Thus GPG can tell when you put in the wrong key, since multiplying two numbers and comparing them to a third is easy. (Note again: this is a gross oversimplification to just nail down the point in question. There are a LOT of details beyond this.)
Notice that this does not mean that it is easy to "work out" the factors of the large number; the whole basis of this system is that it's easy to check an answer, but there are more potential answers than you could possible check (and a few other details, such as the fact that checking a subset does not provide any information about the unchecked values, etc.).
I agree. The only players I can see that ever had the means and motive were the little ISPs; if you had given them the same offer, many of them would have jumped at it--especially since the marginal increase in their market share could have been substantial. Sadly, they never had the opportunity.
This is basically the "last mile" problem; it is easy (or at least conceptually clean) to plan, negotiate, and build the long-haul segments. The dendritic / capillary part, which covers the last few miles gets much messier, and the benefit drops as the cost rise (How much do you expect to charge that farmer per month?).
If you take an analogy to the early phone system, the problem is that the consolidation of the little ISPs happened way too rapidly. The big guys should have waited for the locals to wire up all the neighborhoods and then bought them out.
Quitting because of a disagreement is just giving up. You want to get as many developers on a free project as you can, but they've got to be willing to stand up for themselves.
Not always. A few years back, I ran a project that comprised a handful of sharp people who "got it" and a larger group who just didn't. (e.g. rather than reading configuration files at run time, they would look up the value of interest at development time and hard code it in "for efficiency"). Management was clearly on the side of the later camp (now, there's a long story). After about a year of trying to work things out, I came to a realization: if I left and turned things over to my second-in-command, the project could be completed in time. It would be brittle and hell to maintain, but it would be done. If I stayed it would fail, since my efforts to proselytize The Right Way had made me the focus of the flame war and was attracting way too much "help" from upper management. So, I turned it over to him, and switched to another project where I could be effective. Both get finished, while if I had "stuck to my guns" I suspect neither would have.
Without any reference to the specifics of the Gnome situation, quitting a project can be the right thing to do.
When you work for an employeer, they pay you to write code (or whatever). When you do it, they own it, as a "work for hire."
A student, on the other hand, pays the university. The student is the employer and not the employee. Thus the student can clearly GPL anything they want to, since they own it.
And in the same sense that undergrads aren't employees, grad students aren't actually slaves (though the distinction gets blury sometimes).
-- MarkusQ
(One caviet though: the university might get snitty and decline to accept homework if it had been GPLed.)
OK, the subject of the hats has come up before on Slashdot. Would anyone care to shed a little light on the subject for those of us who have no clue what you're talking about?
Hats are a sort of head covering, often made of felt, cloth, or straw (though other materials are not unheard of). While they have some use as protection from rain or sun, they are more generally a social symbol. Many cultures place significance on their shape or ornamentation.
We now have the Unaccountable Company, bigger than the government of the nation in which it resides, beyond the reach of legislators, regulators, citizens, critics, victims, or more individualistic and entrepeneurial competitors.
Microsoft net worth: ~4 x 10^11 US$
US GNP / Year: ~ 1 x 10^13
Weeks for the US economy to generate wealth on the order of Microsoft's: ~2
National debt: ~7 x 10^12
Portion of the national debt Microsoft could pay off if liquidated for the purpose: ~6%
My point, of course, being that Microsoft may be large, but it's not (to quote John Lennon) "bigger than God."
-- MarkusQ
Off topic; In answer to a civil question
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 1
I gave it to myself (it helps if you got your domain name in the late eighties).
-- MarkusQ (aka MQR)
Take this to the logical limit
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 2
I think everyone is missing the true coolness here. Using software + generic hardware to simulate specialized hardware might sound like a bad tradeoff at first, but consider: the processor is just one more piece of specialized hardware, right?
So all we need to do is encourage this trend until we get to the point where someone figures out a way to simulate the processor with software and Presto! computers cost nothing to replicate, generate no heat, and can be shared over Napster.
-- MarkusQ
Next week: How to legally avoid paying taxes without having to earn any money.
This is just nuts. The math they use has been around since the 1700s. Artists have been using the process (cf Escher) for ages. I went head to head with them a few years back, pointed out these facts on behalf of a client (IANAL, I am a Programer with an Attitude) and they backed down. Didn't admit that we'd called their bluff, but dropped it cold.
They are bluffing. This is known art, and they know it. Call them on it.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Still annoyed by their audacity, if you can't tell.
First off, I agree with you. But you post such an interesting challenge I can't resist:
A better example would be the ampersand character (&). I can think of several ways to write that character, but I challenge anyone to come up with a sentence where changing one presentation form of the ampersand for another changes the meaning of the sentence.
How about:
"To delimit a path, *nix uses as slash, whereas MS* uses a backslash; if you get these confused it helps to remember that ampersand is a rounded "E" with a slash through it."
Contrived, I will admit, but I think it answers your challenge.
Interesting, but I am dubious. There are a lot of logic flaws and technical inconsistencies in the story. It could be that the reporter got the details wrong, or they fudged things to forestall imitators, or it could be...they made it all up. On the whole, my money is on "hoax."
Slashdot Mirror
Though these backbones are similar to those on the commercial Internet, only about three million users can access Internet2, versus several hundred million on the public Net.
Almost all the benefit (including the workability of QOS) comes from the fact that they have limited who has access to the network and thus have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. It's the internet culture of the late nineteen eighties, running on the hardware of the early two thousand naughts.
-- MarkusQ
Correct. That was the last answer under East Coast Hackish. The remaining answer, West Coast Hackish for 1000, is:
"This FLA is considered the appropriate response to 'DEI'."
-- MarkusQ
The big problem with our present age is that we are too worried about having to do without cleaning gel. We don't want to leave our home network, for fear of the roaming charges. We only want to go places that McDonalds has already collonized. We are afraid to have it suck even a little. And that sucks a lot.
Because when you are really exerting yourself, it often sucks. That's how adventure works. And we need to adventure, since there are a lot of places you can't get to by sitting in your living room, no matter how good your graphics card is.
We know where there are enough resources to make every single person on Earth as rich as Mr. Gates is at this moment, but most of us have gotten fat eating lotus leaves and we're afraid to go get it. I'm glad there are still a few nuts trying to launch themselves into space. And I'm glad there are people with more brains who actually manage to get into space, and go, even though it sucks a little.
-- MarkusQ
In parts of Maine "least wise 'tan't" seems to mean "so far as I know, it is not" (least wise it isn't/ain't).
I think on /. that would be written "afaik ~".
-- MarkusQ
My first reaction was, "didn't this happen years ago?"
I mean, when was the last time you got out a soldering iron and had at your PC? That used to be the norm, back when messing with micros meant S-100 and IEEE stuff. But with multi-layer boards (gack, I can't remember the last time I saw a single or layer two-sided board made by someone I didn't know) it's a lot harder, and likewise with the decreasing size and increasing complexity of ICs. But the main reason I stopped is that I no longer needed to work at that level to get the job done. The optimal level for configuration moved up, and I followed it.
This (if it happens, about which I have some reservations) will just trigger another migration: rather than hacking inside the box we'll just be hanging odd homebrew things on various I/O ports and treating the PC as a blackbox.
(set-mode Old-fart nil)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. A real old fart would tell us hardware hacking died when they went to these here new-fangled "chip" things. You can't pry them things open, or least wise 'tan't worth it.
So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them.
Right off the bat, I'd like to state that I think whoever moded this down was clueless. ("flamebait"? As if the 604 User Group is going to respond in outrage? Get real.)
Second, in answer to your direct question, I don't have an documenation on it--at least, a quick search of my bookshelf didn't turn up anything older than the 1602--but I'll let you know if I come across anything.
Finally, you may be interested in a simulation of EDSAC, "the world first stored program computer to operate a regular service." I also enjoyed reading "The First Computers" (by Rojas & Hashagen, MIT press), which goes into a number of the claiments for "first" in the field.
-- MarkusQ
Having lived through the little-language-dark-age (call it mid-eighties to early nineties), when it sometimes seemed like C and BASIC would drive out everyone but Chuck Moore, Ralph Griswold, and few Lisp hackers holed up on a farm in Montana, I am glad (no, strike that, I'm ecstatic) to see all the effort going into new (and sometimes not so new) languages. Carl, Larry, Guido, Peiter, and the thousands of others whose names don't spring to mind at this instant have my heartfelt gratitude. Personally, I'd much rather live in a chaotic world of plenty where, no matter how I want to spell "FOR", there's a language for me.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Actually, Nicholson Baker has been raising a cry over this very issue; it seems that, in many cases, the libraries aren't keeping the hard copies. So the loss may be real.
-- MarkusQ
Well, no. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help much against a dedicated attack; since this is the only type of attack you need to worry about when you're using reasonably strong crypto, there's no loss in admitting the type of encryption. With only a handful of popular algorithms (and those not equally likely), you'd only be gaining one or two bits worth of security were you hide the algorithm. It isn't worth the trouble.
But still, when I encrypt data with one of the symmetric ciphers (-s) and specifically selecting the algorithm (blowfish, serpent, aes, etc.) with the --cipher-algo switch it produces some encrypted file which when I decrypt... does NOT require me to specify the cipher algo, yet still knows when I put in the wrong password.
This could still be accomplished by trying each of them and reporting failure if none of them worked. But in fact, the PGP file format simply stores the information. Blowfish, etc. are handled similarly.
What does any of THIS have to do with public/private key ciphers?
Nothing. In my first post I was just addressing your question about how it could "know" if you had a bad key, without weakening the encryption.
-- MarkusQ
The public key is based on a number that is the product of two large primes. The private key is based on the primes.
When you attempt to decrypt the message you are in effect asserting "The public key was divisible by these two numbers." At that point it is easy to check, and say either "you are right, here's the plain text" or "nope, it isn't divisible by them." Thus GPG can tell when you put in the wrong key, since multiplying two numbers and comparing them to a third is easy. (Note again: this is a gross oversimplification to just nail down the point in question. There are a LOT of details beyond this.)
Notice that this does not mean that it is easy to "work out" the factors of the large number; the whole basis of this system is that it's easy to check an answer, but there are more potential answers than you could possible check (and a few other details, such as the fact that checking a subset does not provide any information about the unchecked values, etc.).
Hope that helps.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
If you take an analogy to the early phone system, the problem is that the consolidation of the little ISPs happened way too rapidly. The big guys should have waited for the locals to wire up all the neighborhoods and then bought them out.
--MarkusQ
Not always. A few years back, I ran a project that comprised a handful of sharp people who "got it" and a larger group who just didn't. (e.g. rather than reading configuration files at run time, they would look up the value of interest at development time and hard code it in "for efficiency"). Management was clearly on the side of the later camp (now, there's a long story). After about a year of trying to work things out, I came to a realization: if I left and turned things over to my second-in-command, the project could be completed in time. It would be brittle and hell to maintain, but it would be done. If I stayed it would fail, since my efforts to proselytize The Right Way had made me the focus of the flame war and was attracting way too much "help" from upper management. So, I turned it over to him, and switched to another project where I could be effective. Both get finished, while if I had "stuck to my guns" I suspect neither would have.
Without any reference to the specifics of the Gnome situation, quitting a project can be the right thing to do.
-- MarkusQ
Uh, its a pun, people.
When you work for an employeer, they pay you to write code (or whatever). When you do it, they own it, as a "work for hire."
A student, on the other hand, pays the university. The student is the employer and not the employee. Thus the student can clearly GPL anything they want to, since they own it.
And in the same sense that undergrads aren't employees, grad students aren't actually slaves (though the distinction gets blury sometimes).
-- MarkusQ
(One caviet though: the university might get snitty and decline to accept homework if it had been GPLed.)
Hats are a sort of head covering, often made of felt, cloth, or straw (though other materials are not unheard of). While they have some use as protection from rain or sun, they are more generally a social symbol. Many cultures place significance on their shape or ornamentation.
Sorry, I couldn't resist
--MarkusQ
Microsoft net worth: ~4 x 10^11 US$
US GNP / Year: ~ 1 x 10^13
Weeks for the US economy to generate wealth on the order of Microsoft's: ~2
National debt: ~7 x 10^12
Portion of the national debt Microsoft could pay off if liquidated for the purpose: ~6%
My point, of course, being that Microsoft may be large, but it's not (to quote John Lennon) "bigger than God."
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ (aka MQR)
So all we need to do is encourage this trend until we get to the point where someone figures out a way to simulate the processor with software and Presto! computers cost nothing to replicate, generate no heat, and can be shared over Napster.
-- MarkusQ
Next week: How to legally avoid paying taxes without having to earn any money.
They are bluffing. This is known art, and they know it. Call them on it.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Still annoyed by their audacity, if you can't tell.
A better example would be the ampersand character (&). I can think of several ways to write that character, but I challenge anyone to come up with a sentence where changing one presentation form of the ampersand for another changes the meaning of the sentence.
How about:
"To delimit a path, *nix uses as slash, whereas MS* uses a backslash; if you get these confused it helps to remember that ampersand is a rounded "E" with a slash through it."
Contrived, I will admit, but I think it answers your challenge.
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ