BTW, Drosophila genes are an excellent scheme for hostnames. I talked my advisor into naming the first server for our comp bio group 'wingless'. Now I need to get him to buy 'hedgehog' and 'engrailed'...
Fie upon Windows BBS's -- back in the day (1990-92), I ran Maximus and BinkleyTerm (the Fidonet mailer) in a DOS session under Desqview so I could get work done in another window. I remember receiving a message (in Texas) from a Fido node in Australia; I printed out that message and saved it because it was so amazing that it took *only* twelve hours to reach me. I also recall the day somebody connected to my board with a 300 bps modem (ridiculous even in those days).
Oddly enough, I still have the 386 I used to run the board, because it's so obsolete now that even charities won't take it. I've still got the same modem (a USR Courier) as well, except that it's since been repeatedly flashed from USR's proprietary 16.8kbps protocol all the way up to v90. It now sits in my closet as a backup in case my DSL ever goes out.
Actually, I just figured that the fellow who blocked sci.archaeology as "occult" had seen too many Indiana Jones movies. Or possibly watched "Poltergeist: the Legacy". Amazing what passes for literacy these days...
It appears that the Sci-Fi version is guilty only of using the "received" pronunciations from the Herbert estate. I've heard some selections from the Harper-Collins audiobook version of Dune in which Frank Herbert pronounces the words as in the miniseries.
This doesn't make the pronunciations any less wrong -- for example, "kwisatz haderach" should almost certainly be accented on "DErach" (= path, way), not the definite article "ha", and "fedaykin", a plural, should be accented on the last syllable, as with the Arabic "chamsin" or "mujaheddin". Of course, the stresses might have shifted in 10000+ years.
Disclaimer: damn it, Jim, I'm a computer scientist, not a linguist!
Well yes... hence the usage in Denmark and Scandinavia. A large chunk of England was ruled by the Danes for several hundred years, so it's not surprising that English common law would share some the of the same concepts.
Before we all play "jump on Microsoft", have a look at CERT CA-2000-21, posted on Thursday. This is a great DoS attack for anyone who controls a bunch of slave machines: fully open many TCP connections on the victim's box, then leave them stuck in the ESTABLISHED or FIN WAIT-1 states. This requires minimal traffic and no memory on the attacker's side once the sockets are in the right state. I doubt syncookie-like strategies will take care of the problem, and the TCP keepalive mechanism probably uses intervals too large to do much good against a concerted attack.
Many systems are vulnerable to this attack. Right now, Linux, the BSD's, and a number of other UNIX flavors appear vulnerable; see the statements from IBM, Compaq, and FreeBSD in the advisory.
Interestingly, MS says that Win2K is resistant to these attacks by design, though NT 4 has been patched. I wonder how they defend against an attack from multiple machines without refusing new connections or RST'ing the wrong ones? Similar recovery problems have already proven somewhat difficult in the context of handling local memory exhaustion attacks on Linux systems.
Well, according to the old law codes in England, Denmark, etc, I believe this is exactly how the law worked. If you killed someone, even if it was ruled justifiable (ie he called you a wanker and you killed him in a fair duel), his family could still force you to pay his wergild (lit. "man-price"), which was supposed to compensate them for the income the deceased would have provided them.
I believe there's an analogous concept today in English common law.
I don't think you need network connectivity to MS to do periodic licensing. When I pay for a one-year license to use Word 37, Microsoft sends me a cryptographically signed certificate that says "This certificate good for one concurrent Word 37 user until January 1, 2003." When the user starts Word 37, it checks a file somewhere to determine that 1. the certificate has a valid signature, 2. the use period has not yet expired, and 3. the license isn't being used.
For a single user with a Windows PC, the certificate would be stored locally, while for a multiuser workgroup, there would be a central license manager service which hands out floating licenses. To making duplicating licenses inconvenient, they could be "branded" with specific characteristics of the client machines, so that a license purchased for machine X cannot be copied to machine Y. Yes, this would be annoying, but it's already being done with OEM versions of Windows.
Of course, this scheme is vulnerable to various attacks, including removing the license checking code or replacing MS's public key with your own in the signature check. However, such schemes to circumvent the license agreement require more work than simply typing the same CD key for multiple installations. Moreover, most of these schemes are obvious "wilful violations" of the license agreeement rather than simple carlessness (think DMCA and triple damages). Most users, especially those big enough to fear an audit from the BSA, would probably comply.
Eeewwww... having pondered such things, I feel an urgent need for a shower with lots of soap.
Could you use instant slime deployment to detect subs? My intuition is that a propeller which was whisper-quiet at a given speed in ordinary water would cavitate in a much more viscous gel, creating noise which would give away the sub's position. Want to know if someone's hiding in your prop-wash? Fire a "slime torpedo" from your aft tubes. Or, use a static emplacement to create a "wall-o-slime" across the mouth of a harbor to detect incoming subs.
Of course, I'm a computer scientist, not a fluid dynamicist (Damnit, Jim!), so I may in fact be completely wrong about this.
You know, I heard Ivan Sutherland from Sun talk about async logic today, and after an hour I still had no clue what it's all about. All I got was that it doesn't radiate quite so much at a single clock frequency. Would you care to give a quick explanation for the non-specialist (I do computational biology)?
How about 1. buy a set of false ID documents (birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, etc), 2. open an account under the false ID, 3. hack the bank and transfer small amounts of cash (say, $50 from 100 accounts per week) into your own account, picking those accounts with the highest transaction rates and balances so the cash won't be missed, 4. move the money to the Cayman Islands/Vanuatu/Belgium/somewhere else with strong banking secrecy laws.
Of course, you'd want to perform the fraud over the course of a single month to finish the job before 400 irate people call the bank about an error in their monthly statements.
This scheme seems dangerous and somewhat expensive for a single person to do multiple times, so it may be better suited to organized crime, which could easily run multiple scams at once, get the false ID's at cost, and launder the profits through high-volume commercial accounts.
> Each device has a unique serial number. You can
> see this number spit out with the perl decoder
> available on the net.
Fortunately, the CueCat servers don't care if you force the scanner ID to all 0's when sending your request, just as they don't care if you set your activation code to the literal string "ACTIVATIONCODE". Perhaps this is another fact that Digital Convergence doesn't want you to discover through reverse engineering?
After all these years, I was beginning to wonder whether I had only imagined watching "Heartbeeps." I was about to conclude that the movie never existed, since even USA and WTBS (truly the bottom feeders of the cinematic aquarium) seem to have shunned it. OK, so it wasn't "Soylent Green,", but surely it was no more ridiculous than, say, "Earth Girls are Easy"?
Hey, Sci Fi Channel! How about a double feature of "Heartbeeps" and "Electric Dreams"?
Why build an environmentally correct solar power system, then use racks of great big batteries filled with corrosive chemicals and toxic heavy metals to store the energy?
Do we have commercially competitive flywheel energy storage systems yet?
> thats a rather unique comma notation you've got there, buddy.
I'm just reproducing what I've seen in print. It's sensible if you're counting in lakh and crore: 1,23,45,678 would be 1 crore + 23 lakh + 45 thousand + 678.
> moon-orbiter for Rs 350 crore (a crore is > 100,000, so 350,000,000 rupees ~= $11 million),
I thought a lakh was 10^5, while a crore was 10^7. So wouldn't Rs 350 crore be Rs 350,00,00,000, which is Rs 3.5 x 10^9 ~= $78.4 million as of today's market close?
I believe the search engine will be funded by "virtual dollars".
If you compare the cost of maintaining this web site to the amount that the government spends every year, it's some really really really small fraction -- so small, in fact, that dollar amounts that size spontaneously circulate, are spent, and are annihilated as taxes all the time without existing long enough to affect the annual balance sheet. Such quantum fluctuations in the economy are a side-effect of the Budgetary Uncertainty Principle (towhit: you cannot simultaneously know precisely how much of your income goes to the government and just what they're spending it on). Apparently, the Clinton administration has found a way to harness these transient virtual dollars to generate real money with which to fund the new web site.
How, you ask, is it possible to buy real services with virtual money? After all, every dollar created in this way surely creates an "anti-dollar" as well and soon annihilates with it; to do otherwise would be a violation of the Conservation of Cash (the so-called GRH, or Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, Principle). However, fans of Stephen Hawking know that when a quantum fluctuation occurs near a really strong gravity well like a black hole, one member of the virtual particle-antiparticle pair can be sucked inside the event horizon, so that the other virtual particle becomes real and appears as radiation from the hole. Analogously, you can convert virtual dollar-antidollar pairs into real dollars only in the neighborhood of an object so unprofitable that no sum, however small, can ever escape it.
Now you know the frightening true purpose behind the recent appearance of all these dot.com startups.
That list looks awfully out-of-date. For instance, I'm pretty sure that your modutils must be >= 2.3.11 these days. You'd be more likely to find an up-to-date requirement list in the kernel source tree itself, in the file Documentation/Changes (at least, that's where it is in 2.2.x).
The article neglects to mention that PCR is covered by several patents. For instance, here's the fine print from an advertisement for Clontech's AdvanTaq DNA polymerase:
"Purchase of Advantage PCR reagents is accompanied by a limited license to use them in the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) process for research in conjunction with with a thermal cycler whose use in the automated performance of the PCR process is covered by the up-front license fee, either by payment to Perkin-Elmer or as purchased, i.e., an authorized thermal cycler."
Roche holds most of the relevant patents on PCR, though they recently lost one of them as a result of a long, ugly lawsuit against Promega. For details, see this page at about.com. Perkin-Elmer holds a bunch of patents on machines for performing the thermal cycling step.
Fiddling with PCR in your own home is arguably an "experimental use" (i.e. you just want to see if it works) and therefore permitted under patent law, but don't make any commercial plans to Make DNA Fast.
Many years ago, I remember having a set of Lego Technics which included a bunch of gears. I had a good time building gear trains, but only up to a certain size -- ultimately, it became too hard to move the gear train.
What's considered a practical limit on the length of gear trains used for watches, mechanical computers, etc? At some point, the amount of force needed to overcome the static friction of the shafts would break the teeth off the gears first. Even before that, the force required to keep everything turning might be too high for a spring/watch battery/other power source to produce for any useful length of time.
If trains of four, five, six, etc gears are mechanically practical, the computational problem of choosing their ratios still seems interesting.
It's pretty clear that any "top X" algorithms list strongly reflects the bias of the people compiling it, so here's another extremely biased list (in no particular order):
* Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm * BLAST search algorithm (Altschul et al) * Ukkonen's suffix tree construction * expectation maximization * inference algorithm(s) for Bayes nets * Davis-Putnam procedure for SAT
Bonus points to those who can guess what I do for a living (without checking my home page)...
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to, um, compile your own version of A. thaliana, see
/
ftp://warthog.mips.biochem.mpg.de/pub/cress/MAR
BTW, Drosophila genes are an excellent scheme for hostnames. I talked my advisor into naming the first server for our comp bio group 'wingless'. Now I need to get him to buy 'hedgehog' and 'engrailed'...
Fie upon Windows BBS's -- back in the day (1990-92), I ran Maximus and BinkleyTerm (the Fidonet mailer) in a DOS session under Desqview so I could get work done in another window. I remember receiving a message (in Texas) from a Fido node in Australia; I printed out that message and saved it because it was so amazing that it took *only* twelve hours to reach me. I also recall the day somebody connected to my board with a 300 bps modem (ridiculous even in those days).
Oddly enough, I still have the 386 I used to run the board, because it's so obsolete now that even charities won't take it. I've still got the same modem (a USR Courier) as well, except that it's since been repeatedly flashed from USR's proprietary 16.8kbps protocol all the way up to v90. It now sits in my closet as a backup in case my DSL ever goes out.
Sigh -- *major* nostalgia attack. Oh Bell's Theorem BBS, we hardly knew ye...
Actually, I just figured that the fellow who blocked sci.archaeology as "occult" had seen too many Indiana Jones movies. Or possibly watched "Poltergeist: the Legacy". Amazing what passes for literacy these days...
It appears that the Sci-Fi version is guilty only of using the "received" pronunciations from the Herbert estate. I've heard some selections from the Harper-Collins audiobook version of Dune in which Frank Herbert pronounces the words as in the miniseries.
This doesn't make the pronunciations any less wrong -- for example, "kwisatz haderach" should almost certainly be accented on "DErach" (= path, way), not the definite article "ha", and "fedaykin", a plural, should be accented on the last syllable, as with the Arabic "chamsin" or "mujaheddin". Of course, the stresses might have shifted in 10000+ years.
Disclaimer: damn it, Jim, I'm a computer scientist, not a linguist!
Well yes... hence the usage in Denmark and Scandinavia. A large chunk of England was ruled by the Danes for several hundred years, so it's not surprising that English common law would share some the of the same concepts.
Before we all play "jump on Microsoft", have a look at CERT CA-2000-21, posted on Thursday. This is a great DoS attack for anyone who controls a bunch of slave machines: fully open many TCP connections on the victim's box, then leave them stuck in the ESTABLISHED or FIN WAIT-1 states. This requires minimal traffic and no memory on the attacker's side once the sockets are in the right state. I doubt syncookie-like strategies will take care of the problem, and the TCP keepalive mechanism probably uses intervals too large to do much good against a concerted attack.
Many systems are vulnerable to this attack. Right now, Linux, the BSD's, and a number of other UNIX flavors appear vulnerable; see the statements from IBM, Compaq, and FreeBSD in the advisory.
Interestingly, MS says that Win2K is resistant to these attacks by design, though NT 4 has been patched. I wonder how they defend against an attack from multiple machines without refusing new connections or RST'ing the wrong ones? Similar recovery problems have already proven somewhat difficult in the context of handling local memory exhaustion attacks on Linux systems.
(Disclaimer: IANAL)
Well, according to the old law codes in England, Denmark, etc, I believe this is exactly how the law worked. If you killed someone, even if it was ruled justifiable (ie he called you a wanker and you killed him in a fair duel), his family could still force you to pay his wergild (lit. "man-price"), which was supposed to compensate them for the income the deceased would have provided them.
I believe there's an analogous concept today in English common law.
Cool, a multiprocessor on wheels. Now all it needs is a few servo motors, a grasping arm, and a video camera.
Oh, and a high-intensity particle beam. And *missles*!
I don't think you need network connectivity to MS to do periodic licensing. When I pay for a one-year license to use Word 37, Microsoft sends me a cryptographically signed certificate that says "This certificate good for one concurrent Word 37 user until January 1, 2003." When the user starts Word 37, it checks a file somewhere to determine that 1. the certificate has a valid signature, 2. the use period has not yet expired, and 3. the license isn't being used.
For a single user with a Windows PC, the certificate would be stored locally, while for a multiuser workgroup, there would be a central license manager service which hands out floating licenses. To making duplicating licenses inconvenient, they could be "branded" with specific characteristics of the client machines, so that a license purchased for machine X cannot be copied to machine Y. Yes, this would be annoying, but it's already being done with OEM versions of Windows.
Of course, this scheme is vulnerable to various attacks, including removing the license checking code or replacing MS's public key with your own in the signature check. However, such schemes to circumvent the license agreement require more work than simply typing the same CD key for multiple installations. Moreover, most of these schemes are obvious "wilful violations" of the license agreeement rather than simple carlessness (think DMCA and triple damages). Most users, especially those big enough to fear an audit from the BSA, would probably comply.
Eeewwww... having pondered such things, I feel an urgent need for a shower with lots of soap.
Could you use instant slime deployment to detect subs? My intuition is that a propeller which was whisper-quiet at a given speed in ordinary water would cavitate in a much more viscous gel, creating noise which would give away the sub's position. Want to know if someone's hiding in your prop-wash? Fire a "slime torpedo" from your aft tubes. Or, use a static emplacement to create a "wall-o-slime" across the mouth of a harbor to detect incoming subs.
Of course, I'm a computer scientist, not a fluid dynamicist (Damnit, Jim!), so I may in fact be completely wrong about this.
... and thanks to some extremely valuable last-minute input by our friends at NSA, the AES algorithm will be... ROT-13!
You know, I heard Ivan Sutherland from Sun talk about async logic today, and after an hour I still had no clue what it's all about. All I got was that it doesn't radiate quite so much at a single clock frequency. Would you care to give a quick explanation for the non-specialist (I do computational biology)?
Thanks in advance.
How about 1. buy a set of false ID documents (birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, etc), 2. open an account under the false ID, 3. hack the bank and transfer small amounts of cash (say, $50 from 100 accounts per week) into your own account, picking those accounts with the highest transaction rates and balances so the cash won't be missed, 4. move the money to the Cayman Islands/Vanuatu/Belgium/somewhere else with strong banking secrecy laws.
:-)).
Of course, you'd want to perform the fraud over the course of a single month to finish the job before 400 irate people call the bank about an error in their monthly statements.
This scheme seems dangerous and somewhat expensive for a single person to do multiple times, so it may be better suited to organized crime, which could easily run multiple scams at once, get the false ID's at cost, and launder the profits through high-volume commercial accounts.
ObDisclaimer: IANAM (I am not a mobster
> Each device has a unique serial number. You can
> see this number spit out with the perl decoder
> available on the net.
Fortunately, the CueCat servers don't care if you force the scanner ID to all 0's when sending your request, just as they don't care if you set your activation code to the literal string "ACTIVATIONCODE". Perhaps this is another fact that Digital Convergence doesn't want you to discover through reverse engineering?
After all these years, I was beginning to wonder whether I had only imagined watching "Heartbeeps." I was about to conclude that the movie never existed, since even USA and WTBS (truly the bottom feeders of the cinematic aquarium) seem to have shunned it. OK, so it wasn't "Soylent Green,", but surely it was no more ridiculous than, say, "Earth Girls are Easy"?
Hey, Sci Fi Channel! How about a double feature of "Heartbeeps" and "Electric Dreams"?
Why build an environmentally correct solar power system, then use racks of great big batteries filled with corrosive chemicals and toxic heavy metals to store the energy?
Do we have commercially competitive flywheel energy storage systems yet?
> thats a rather unique comma notation you've got there, buddy.
I'm just reproducing what I've seen in print. It's sensible if you're counting in lakh and crore: 1,23,45,678 would be 1 crore + 23 lakh + 45 thousand + 678.
> moon-orbiter for Rs 350 crore (a crore is
> 100,000, so 350,000,000 rupees ~= $11 million),
I thought a lakh was 10^5, while a crore was 10^7. So wouldn't Rs 350 crore be Rs 350,00,00,000, which is Rs 3.5 x 10^9 ~= $78.4 million as of today's market close?
I believe the search engine will be funded by "virtual dollars".
If you compare the cost of maintaining this web site to the amount that the government spends every year, it's some really really really small fraction -- so small, in fact, that dollar amounts that size spontaneously circulate, are spent, and are annihilated as taxes all the time without existing long enough to affect the annual balance sheet. Such quantum fluctuations in the economy are a side-effect of the Budgetary Uncertainty Principle (towhit: you cannot simultaneously know precisely how much of your income goes to the government and just what they're spending it on). Apparently, the Clinton administration has found a way to harness these transient virtual dollars to generate real money with which to fund the new web site.
How, you ask, is it possible to buy real services with virtual money? After all, every dollar created in this way surely creates an "anti-dollar" as well and soon annihilates with it; to do otherwise would be a violation of the Conservation of Cash (the so-called GRH, or Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, Principle). However, fans of Stephen Hawking know that when a quantum fluctuation occurs near a really strong gravity well like a black hole, one member of the virtual particle-antiparticle pair can be sucked inside the event horizon, so that the other virtual particle becomes real and appears as radiation from the hole. Analogously, you can convert virtual dollar-antidollar pairs into real dollars only in the neighborhood of an object so unprofitable that no sum, however small, can ever escape it.
Now you know the frightening true purpose behind the recent appearance of all these dot.com startups.
That list looks awfully out-of-date. For instance, I'm pretty sure that your modutils must be >= 2.3.11 these days. You'd be more likely to find an up-to-date requirement list in the kernel source tree itself, in the file Documentation/Changes (at least, that's where it is in 2.2.x).
The article neglects to mention that PCR is covered by several patents. For instance, here's the fine print from an advertisement for Clontech's AdvanTaq DNA polymerase:
"Purchase of Advantage PCR reagents is accompanied by a limited license to use them in the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) process for research in conjunction with with a thermal cycler whose use in the automated performance of the PCR process is covered by the up-front license fee, either by payment to Perkin-Elmer or as purchased, i.e., an authorized thermal cycler."
Roche holds most of the relevant patents on PCR, though they recently lost one of them as a result of a long, ugly lawsuit against Promega. For details, see this page at about.com. Perkin-Elmer holds a bunch of patents on machines for performing the thermal cycling step.
Fiddling with PCR in your own home is arguably an "experimental use" (i.e. you just want to see if it works) and therefore permitted under patent law, but don't make any commercial plans to Make DNA Fast.
Many years ago, I remember having a set of Lego Technics which included a bunch of gears. I had a good time building gear trains, but only up to a certain size -- ultimately, it became too hard to move the gear train.
What's considered a practical limit on the length of gear trains used for watches, mechanical computers, etc? At some point, the amount of force needed to overcome the static friction of the shafts would break the teeth off the gears first. Even before that, the force required to keep everything turning might be too high for a spring/watch battery/other power source to produce for any useful length of time.
If trains of four, five, six, etc gears are mechanically practical, the computational problem of choosing their ratios still seems interesting.
It's pretty clear that any "top X" algorithms list strongly reflects the bias of the people compiling it, so here's another extremely biased list (in no particular order):
* Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm
* BLAST search algorithm (Altschul et al)
* Ukkonen's suffix tree construction
* expectation maximization
* inference algorithm(s) for Bayes nets
* Davis-Putnam procedure for SAT
Bonus points to those who can guess what I do for a living (without checking my home page)...
With all this talk of special gravity-computing pipelines, does anyone know if the hardware design is a systolic array? If not, what is it?