Well, with "nearby", I mean "in the same country, or at least the same continent as where I live". Anything else just means horrible things (expensive shipping, customs, problems with returns / warranty repairs).
"[7200 rpm disks] are generally too costly, or a bit overkill, for mundane office applications such as word processing or sending emails"
I'm having enough trouble just finding 5400 rpm disks. The performance (speed-wise) is more than enough for me, and I'd rather go with cool and quiet. The cost difference between 5400 and 7200 drives is marginal (a few bucks).
The thing is, there aren't many 5400 rpm disks around anymore and only sizes up to 80 GB. I'd rather have one big disk than two or three small ones (both heat and noise adds up), but I can't find any 5400 rpm disks at, say, 120GB or so, while 7200 rpm disks are available up to 200GB or so. And as long as the 7200 rpm drives are as hot and noisy as they are, I would rather have 5400 rpm disks.
Perhaps there are larger 5400 rpm disks, but I have yet to see them at any reseller nearby.
Couldn't they have placed that day sometime else? Right now, 90% of the people working here are on vacation. Just the sysadmin is at work, as usual. (Actually, I went on vacation before everybody else, so now when I'm back, it's more or less a couple of weeks of vacation-at-work.)
But the biggie is the hyperdrive. SW ships routinely cross the galaxy in very short periods of time...
[snip]
A journey like that for a Federation ship would take generations
Well, SW _is_ set in a galaxy far far away. Might be a galaxy that is just a bit smaller? In AotC, I think they mention stuff about "thousands of worlds" here and there. Not millions. Which could mean there aren't millions of worlds.
So if you want to find out if you are being wiretaped, simply do a couple of traceroutes and see if you hit verisigns switches?
Well, since the service is about tapping ordinary voice phone calls, you might have a hard time doing a traceroute.
Has anyone ever heard someone being able to modulate the TTL of their voice?;)
If Verisign were to tap IP traffic as well, they would surely not alter it in any such way. They'd just copy the packet (at some intercept point), send it on its merry way, and have the copy sent to them.
There's also this thing called "playback". You just _pretend_ you're singing, and the music system plays the original singers voice instead. It's also much cheaper than a karaoke system, you only need an ordinary home stereo setup. You don't need a real microphone, just use something that looks similar (bottles, pencils, Philips No. 2 screwdrivers). You can also use ordinary CD:s, no need for those expensive karaoke discs. In total, this is much cheaper, and sounds more like the original artist than any of those fancy tune-correcting voice-blending thingies.
> There a big ambiguity that I couldn't really sort out while reading these web pages : Is this an Open standard or a Commercial standard ?
It's a US government standard, meaning that all government-related (whatever that means) should use it (or something like that). It's just another algorithm instead of DES/3DES to be used as The Official US Government Encryption Standard.
Some pieces-o'-software, both free and commercial, use Rijndael, but it's not a standard (ISO or ANSI or whatever).
> Will I have to pay royalties if I intend to write AES-compliant programs then sell related services ?
Probably not. There are plenty of free implementations of the Rijndael algorithm, and from what I can figure out, there doesn't seem do be any restrictions to it. From the authour's page: Rijndael is available for free. You can use it for whatever purposes you want, irrespective of whether it is accepted as AES or not.
Even if the US government puts some kind of export restriction on software using it, it's still very available (in several free (of some kind) implementations) outside US. NIST too, provide their own reference implementation.
> I actually read in the facts page that the "public" helped building the algorithm and specs but in which way is that AES thing public ?
The algorithm was invented by "the public" (two guys in Belgium), not by NIST or the US government. NIST just selected the one algorithm they considered the most appropriate from the whole lot of available encryption algorithms out there.
I wonder how it's possible to write a "Linux Emulation Layer" without using the Linux source in a way that violates the GPL.
It has to have some stuff behave exactly the same, or just wouldn't work. And how do you figure this out without looking at the original source?
"...implementing open source software throughout the federal government could result in savings of 250 million marks (US$116 million)."
I'm a bit curious as to how they're going to save all that money. If they just stop using whatever software they already have paid for, will they get a refund? Or do they spend huge amounts of money each year on licenses, and that figure represents the savings over several years?
The money they'll _spend_ in the process will probably be mainly domestic, and that's pretty good (for the country). But I still don't see how they will _save_ all that money.
Anyway, it's still A Good Thing. Almost no matter what the cost. It takes somebody big and reliable (governments are supposed to be that) to encourage everyone else.
It's probably necessary to limit the contest to a specific language, but it would be cool to see a competition with other languages as well. Perhaps a limited set of "reasonable" languages (or everything will be written in esoteric (weird) languages (did anyone say Malbolge?).
I'd really like to see obfuscated/weird code in a language less "obfuscatable" than C (maybe Java or somethingorother?).
In that way, "obfuscation" can be more a matter of weird program flow and such, instead of confusing (but not very "interesting") a?b:c-statements (whatever they're called, I've forgotten it) and other C specialties.
Obfuscation is more of a challenge if you don't have as many weird operators and such do go with, and you have to fool people some other way.
Perhaps an Obfuscated Pseudo Code Contest?
I wonder if and when Apple's mice will have more than one button.
I had to get a 2-button mouse to avoid going nuts when browsing (trying to right-click by clicking the same button but with the middle finger just won't help), and X-windows (there are actually several decent PPC Linux diststibutions nowadays) is a bit lame with just one button.
Just these reasons should be enough to have Apple considering an extra button or two (and perhaps a wheel, too). It shouldn't be less "easy-to-use", because you don't *need* to use the extra buttons if you don't want to.
But if even their own OS supports more buttons, they really should have the hardware for it, too.
I wonder how the Apple Pro Mouse (the-entire-mouse-is-just-a-big-button-mouse) could have two buttons...
That's just *so* wrong. I mean, that the company that makes the OS more or less decides what should be in the hardware.
MS said that they won't support USB 2.0 (they also said something like that they would, sort of, but never mind that for now, thank you) because there is no available hardware to test it on. And noone wants (dares) to make any hardware for it, because the major OS for their hardware maybe won't support it.
The OS should just support the hardware that's aviailable. Linux seems like that (to me at least), it does what it can on whatever hardware people might have out there.
I wonder if there's some kind of similar situation over at Apple, hardware dudes saying "let's have this Cool Gizmo", and the OS guys go "naah, we don't want to support it, because we don't care, and you guys smell bad", and everyone gets mad at each other.
Probably takes someone like Apple to be the first to make boxes with USB 2.0 and 1394b. Hopefully, PCs will have them too, in a not-too-distant future.
From what I remember (from the distant 20th century), Apple where first with "regular" USB too. Some PC:s had it (I had an old pentium MB with a USB bracket (sold separately)), but noone where able to use it (no drivers or hardware).
Think it was the same with FireWire too.
Why is this? Are Apple more daring and adventureous than all PC manufacturers? Or is it because noone wants to spend money on a technology that might not be "wanted" (meaning: Windows won't support it)?
Can't wait for someone to code an MC Escher-style renderer.
Why even bother with right angles or Euclidean space, for that matter?
Nothing wrong with WAP, really.
on
WAP Bashing
·
· Score: 1
There is really nothing badly wrong with WAP. The protocol itself is quite good, it just needs to "mature" a little bit.
The problem itself is in the WAP browsers (being "non-standardized"), the phones (too small displays) and the cellphone nets (just too darn slow and expensive).
The phones (getting more "PDA:ish") will get bigger displays, and the connection speeds will improve, eventually. But until then, it doesn't seem that useful. I'd really like a good WAP email service (which could be used with what's available today), but I've yet to see one.
I think most geeks/nerds (or similar people) think that a PC box running this-or-that OS with dual NIC's is the best router/firewall setup. But for most people (the rest of the world), it's not that simple.
Even though there are "router-on-a-floppy" distributions available, it is still not as simple to set up as a dedicated router "thing".
A dedicated computer box is a bit messier to set up, takes up a lot more space, makes more noise, generates more heat, and so on. Plus, you probably won't need a separate hub either.
Most people don't need all the spiffy features you can get from the router PC. NAT, DHCP and some basic firewalling is enough. And those dedicated thingys can do just that, and really well too. If I didn't use my router/firewall PC setup as a server for a few things, I would have changed it for one of those, easily.
But I still don't have a clue as to which one is the best. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, with "nearby", I mean "in the same country, or at least the same continent as where I live". Anything else just means horrible things (expensive shipping, customs, problems with returns / warranty repairs).
"[7200 rpm disks] are generally too costly, or a bit overkill, for mundane office applications such as word processing or sending emails"
I'm having enough trouble just finding 5400 rpm disks. The performance (speed-wise) is more than enough for me, and I'd rather go with cool and quiet. The cost difference between 5400 and 7200 drives is marginal (a few bucks).
The thing is, there aren't many 5400 rpm disks around anymore and only sizes up to 80 GB. I'd rather have one big disk than two or three small ones (both heat and noise adds up), but I can't find any 5400 rpm disks at, say, 120GB or so, while 7200 rpm disks are available up to 200GB or so. And as long as the 7200 rpm drives are as hot and noisy as they are, I would rather have 5400 rpm disks.
Perhaps there are larger 5400 rpm disks, but I have yet to see them at any reseller nearby.
If, as in my case, there is more room left over in my PC case than on the desk, this mod is actually _useful_.
Couldn't they have placed that day sometime else? Right now, 90% of the people working here are on vacation. Just the sysadmin is at work, as usual. (Actually, I went on vacation before everybody else, so now when I'm back, it's more or less a couple of weeks of vacation-at-work.)
But the biggie is the hyperdrive. SW ships routinely cross the galaxy in very short periods of time...
[snip]
A journey like that for a Federation ship would take generations
Well, SW _is_ set in a galaxy far far away. Might be a galaxy that is just a bit smaller? In AotC, I think they mention stuff about "thousands of worlds" here and there. Not millions. Which could mean there aren't millions of worlds.
So if you want to find out if you are being wiretaped, simply do a couple of traceroutes and see if you hit verisigns switches?
;)
Well, since the service is about tapping ordinary voice phone calls, you might have a hard time doing a traceroute.
Has anyone ever heard someone being able to modulate the TTL of their voice?
If Verisign were to tap IP traffic as well, they would surely not alter it in any such way. They'd just copy the packet (at some intercept point), send it on its merry way, and have the copy sent to them.
No it doesn't. You just have to use the .ssl TLD.
"Modern comics are sorely underrepresented, unfortunately."
I guess elements stopped being cool&hip some time ago, it just doesn't appeal to the kids (and other people who read comic strips) of today...
"Although the $A357 million train..."
Is that "A" a typo, or are the numbers in hexadecimal to make it look cheaper?
There's also this thing called "playback". You just _pretend_ you're singing, and the music system plays the original singers voice instead. It's also much cheaper than a karaoke system, you only need an ordinary home stereo setup. You don't need a real microphone, just use something that looks similar (bottles, pencils, Philips No. 2 screwdrivers). You can also use ordinary CD:s, no need for those expensive karaoke discs.
In total, this is much cheaper, and sounds more like the original artist than any of those fancy tune-correcting voice-blending thingies.
> There a big ambiguity that I couldn't really sort out while reading these web pages : Is this an Open standard or a Commercial standard ?
It's a US government standard, meaning that all government-related (whatever that means) should use it (or something like that). It's just another algorithm instead of DES/3DES to be used as The Official US Government Encryption Standard.
Some pieces-o'-software, both free and commercial, use Rijndael, but it's not a standard (ISO or ANSI or whatever).
> Will I have to pay royalties if I intend to write AES-compliant programs then sell related services ?
Probably not. There are plenty of free implementations of the Rijndael algorithm, and from what I can figure out, there doesn't seem do be any restrictions to it. From the authour's page:
Rijndael is available for free. You can use it for whatever purposes you want, irrespective of whether it is accepted as AES or not.
Even if the US government puts some kind of export restriction on software using it, it's still very available (in several free (of some kind) implementations) outside US.
NIST too, provide their own reference implementation.
> I actually read in the facts page that the "public" helped building the algorithm and specs but in which way is that AES thing public ?
The algorithm was invented by "the public" (two guys in Belgium), not by NIST or the US government. NIST just selected the one algorithm they considered the most appropriate from the whole lot of available encryption algorithms out there.
...instead of wasting all that CPU-time on Quake and Counterstrike.
When will there be Beowulf Parties?
I wonder how it's possible to write a "Linux Emulation Layer" without using the Linux source in a way that violates the GPL.
It has to have some stuff behave exactly the same, or just wouldn't work. And how do you figure this out without looking at the original source?
"...implementing open source software throughout the federal government could result in savings of 250 million marks (US$116 million)."
I'm a bit curious as to how they're going to save all that money. If they just stop using whatever software they already have paid for, will they get a refund? Or do they spend huge amounts of money each year on licenses, and that figure represents the savings over several years? The money they'll _spend_ in the process will probably be mainly domestic, and that's pretty good (for the country). But I still don't see how they will _save_ all that money. Anyway, it's still A Good Thing. Almost no matter what the cost. It takes somebody big and reliable (governments are supposed to be that) to encourage everyone else.
It's probably necessary to limit the contest to a specific language, but it would be cool to see a competition with other languages as well. Perhaps a limited set of "reasonable" languages (or everything will be written in esoteric (weird) languages (did anyone say Malbolge?).
I'd really like to see obfuscated/weird code in a language less "obfuscatable" than C (maybe Java or somethingorother?).
In that way, "obfuscation" can be more a matter of weird program flow and such, instead of confusing (but not very "interesting") a?b:c-statements (whatever they're called, I've forgotten it) and other C specialties.
Obfuscation is more of a challenge if you don't have as many weird operators and such do go with, and you have to fool people some other way.
Perhaps an Obfuscated Pseudo Code Contest?
That site just links to the page at Apple, which links to the (slashdotted, needless to say, but I'll say it anyway) download site.
I wonder if and when Apple's mice will have more than one button.
I had to get a 2-button mouse to avoid going nuts when browsing (trying to right-click by clicking the same button but with the middle finger just won't help), and X-windows (there are actually several decent PPC Linux diststibutions nowadays) is a bit lame with just one button.
Just these reasons should be enough to have Apple considering an extra button or two (and perhaps a wheel, too). It shouldn't be less "easy-to-use", because you don't *need* to use the extra buttons if you don't want to.
But if even their own OS supports more buttons, they really should have the hardware for it, too.
I wonder how the Apple Pro Mouse (the-entire-mouse-is-just-a-big-button-mouse) could have two buttons...
That's just *so* wrong. I mean, that the company that makes the OS more or less decides what should be in the hardware.
MS said that they won't support USB 2.0 (they also said something like that they would, sort of, but never mind that for now, thank you) because there is no available hardware to test it on. And noone wants (dares) to make any hardware for it, because the major OS for their hardware maybe won't support it.
The OS should just support the hardware that's aviailable. Linux seems like that (to me at least), it does what it can on whatever hardware people might have out there.
I wonder if there's some kind of similar situation over at Apple, hardware dudes saying "let's have this Cool Gizmo", and the OS guys go "naah, we don't want to support it, because we don't care, and you guys smell bad", and everyone gets mad at each other.
Probably takes someone like Apple to be the first to make boxes with USB 2.0 and 1394b. Hopefully, PCs will have them too, in a not-too-distant future.
From what I remember (from the distant 20th century), Apple where first with "regular" USB too. Some PC:s had it (I had an old pentium MB with a USB bracket (sold separately)), but noone where able to use it (no drivers or hardware).
Think it was the same with FireWire too.
Why is this? Are Apple more daring and adventureous than all PC manufacturers? Or is it because noone wants to spend money on a technology that might not be "wanted" (meaning: Windows won't support it)?
Can't wait for someone to code an MC Escher-style renderer.
Why even bother with right angles or Euclidean space, for that matter?
There is really nothing badly wrong with WAP. The protocol itself is quite good, it just needs to "mature" a little bit.
The problem itself is in the WAP browsers (being "non-standardized"), the phones (too small displays) and the cellphone nets (just too darn slow and expensive).
The phones (getting more "PDA:ish") will get bigger displays, and the connection speeds will improve, eventually. But until then, it doesn't seem that useful. I'd really like a good WAP email service (which could be used with what's available today), but I've yet to see one.
Well, what do you know. A bug that actually saved lives.
I think most geeks/nerds (or similar people) think that a PC box running this-or-that OS with dual NIC's is the best router/firewall setup. But for most people (the rest of the world), it's not that simple.
Even though there are "router-on-a-floppy" distributions available, it is still not as simple to set up as a dedicated router "thing".
A dedicated computer box is a bit messier to set up, takes up a lot more space, makes more noise, generates more heat, and so on. Plus, you probably won't need a separate hub either.
Most people don't need all the spiffy features you can get from the router PC. NAT, DHCP and some basic firewalling is enough. And those dedicated thingys can do just that, and really well too. If I didn't use my router/firewall PC setup as a server for a few things, I would have changed it for one of those, easily.
But I still don't have a clue as to which one is the best. Sorry.