Just to let you know, I feel that comments like this are very inappropriate to say to anyone, either on-line or off-line. This is a very nasty personal insult; I have been to schools where this kind of language would not be allowed (it is "fighting language"; language which angers someone enough to start a fight in the real world).
As a result, I have placed you on my foes list. If you wish to be taken off of my foes list, please apologize to the person you have personally insulted, and mail me proof that you have done so.
You are free to continue using this kind of language, of course, but people will respect you less and your karma will undoubtably suffer.
I think the big change is that Slashdot used to be essentially a 100% Linux site; the moderation system and attracting the crowd of media pirates during the Napster era came later. The big flame war when I got my Slashdot UID was whether Free QT's not-quite-open-source license was OK for a Linux desktop or not.
Yeah, competition really sucks, duddn't it? Now the Linux Community will have to develop a competing prodcut that's better. Bummer.
I think his object, and my objection too, is that Microsoft designs things so that, even when there is an equivalent Linux solution, you have to use Microsoft to access a given piece of content.
Let me give you one example: MSN had an interview with Depeche Mode back in 2001. They deliberately designed the page with this interview so that, unless you had "MSIE" in your user-agent tag, you would not be able to access the interview.
Another example: Last time I tried to sign up for a Hotmail account with Mozilla, it didn't work.
Another example: Microsoft deliberately makes it difficult to save a file as an rtf (or other open-standard) document in Word.
Microsoft, instead of trying to develop something that is truly better, is designing their software with a "roach motel" mindset; forcing people to use Microsft software even when there is an equivalent Linux solution.
Thanks for the apology, and I apologize myself for being a little harsh there, saying "you are incapable of understanding why some people might not be as obsessive about structure as you are".
I think the OP is someone who "plays it by ear" with their classes a lot more than a really structured person would like. I know some teachers are loath to outright grade on a curve; however, if a number of students are doing poorly, they will help them by fudging things a bit. Also, teachers may need to speed up the lesson plan for a classroom of good students, or slow down the class presentation for students struggling with the material.
Be careful with your argument style here; there is no need to have personal insults like "you don't know how to do a progress report" in your Slashdot postings. I have a habit of putting people who engage in personal insults on my foes list. This time, I won't put you on my foes list, since this was something said in the heat of a flame war caused by two people who have fundamentally different views of the world.
However, please watch the personal insults; these kinds of insults indicate that you are incapable of understanding why some people might not be as obsessive about structure as you are.
All I had to do was install some MP3 encoding software since RH stupidly ripped all of theirs out of the distibution
RedHat has a very legitimate reason for removing MP3 support from their distribution. I really wish that people would look a little farther than their own "gimme" instinct; I guess America's overly consumerist society encourages that kind of selfishness.
I feel it is very inappropriate to respond to someone with a different viewpoint than yours with a line like "it will take a severe lack of judgement on your manager's part for you to get promoted above a coding monkey". This is a personal attack against the original poster; if you feel that 100% office compatibility is important, please explain why instead of insulting strangers.
Until you post an apologoly here, or email me proof that you have apologized to the original poster, I will have you on my foes list. I only place people who engage in personal insults (or put me on their foes list) on my foes list; the only way to get off of my foes list is to apologize to the person who has been insulted.
I know this is Slashdot; however I hope that basic human decency still exists, even here.
I'm noticed that bzip2 compresses better (and sometimes, much better) for most tarballs of software and other data. However, in the case of a list of prime numbers, gzip actually compresses better than bzip2.
Dangit, Slashdot, mirror things this important; don't just link to some poor low-traffic Linux kernel archive which can not handle Slashdot-level traffic. I normally don't mind sites being Slashdotted, but a critical security fix being slashdotted is not a good thing.
One project these developers can do is finish up and polish xconq, which is a GPL multi-platform real-time strategy wargame which has been in a perpetual state of being incomplete for 17 years now. The game has only two part-time developers and one of them is becoming blind; this game has a lot of promise and I would love to see it get the kind of professional polish that a team of eight programmers working on it for a year can give it.
I much prefer an open-source game; it allows me
to make tweaks and implement house rules; something a proprietary game does not allow.
I used it for a while back in 1996, back when Caldera's office suite was the only office suite for Linux, and one had to buy the "Caldera Network Desktop" to get the office suite. Actually, it wasn't Caldera per se; it was a re-branded RedHat 2.0 with some proprietary software added.
It ended up becoming RedHat 3.0.3 with Caldera's prorietary add-ons. Finally, in 1987, I ditched all of the Caldera-specific software and upgraded to RedHat 4.x, using Applix as my office suite.
I even have a screenshot of this old Caldera setup here.
I am very saddened to see Caldera fall from being a company that benefitted Linux greatly (they made the first professional-quality office suite for Linux ever available) to a company seeking to destroy Linux. May Caldera die a quick and clean death.
Even addresses encoded in javascript can be converted into regular addresses, because spammers know that the harder you try to hide your address, the more likely it is valid.
Currently, I have the following three protections on my email address:
The email address is on a special web page which takes 20 seconds to load
The email address is encoded with javascript
The email address is a slightly blurred image which is designed to be difficult for OCR software to read.
However, I still do not consider this ideal. What is ideal is to have a special email address which has the viewer's IP encoded in to it; I did this for years and got almost zero spam; every time a given IP got my email, I made the relevent apache logs public in news.admin.net-abuse.email and filtered the address in question.
From Dennis Ritchie's point of view, Linux is Unix.
Care to have a cite for this? I have a cite of DMR saying "As a product, [UNIX has] certainly lost any chance to take over the mass market.", which is most certaintly not true today if he considers Mac OS X "UNIX", and possibly not true if he considers Linux "UNIX".
There actually is an attempt to revive Blake's Seven which has been going on for several years now. It looks like nothing serious has come of it yet; it is designed to be post-Guada-Prime (after the end of the series) and will finally give Blake's Seven fans a "canonical" account of what happened after the famous last scene of the original series.
When I read that, I thought you were under the impression that the employees were making $60k a year and that is all the employer pays (since a techie for $60k a year is normal).
I was, as you pointed out wrong; my flame was misplaced. Please accept my apology.
Except for the hardware "interpreter" running those codes on your motherboard
Very good point. At one point, there was no such thing as mahcine language for computers. Computers were hardwired to do a given task; to change what a computer did meant rewiring the computer. It was Von Newmann who suggested wiring a computer to interpret numbers in memory (which were only previously used to store values when processing) as instructions to run. And thus machine language was born.
In fact, it is a good deal faster to run things by hard-wiring it than to run it in machine language. This is why FPGAs are faster than CPUs, and why ASICs are even fater. For example, there is a ASIC design which runs AES at "only" 200mhz, but is faster than a Pentium IV running AES at 3ghz because each "tick" encrypts an entire block.
- Sam
Re:Business Plan Math for the Startup
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Let's figure on 6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.): that's $360,000 in payroll.
These numbers are as dumb as you claim Talbot is. Clue 1: Employees have more overhead than just the money that goes to their pay check. Clue 2: Taxes.
If you are going to flame Talbot for being dumb, I think you should have the basic intelligence to come up with a real revised expense model.
- Sam (No, I will not miss Salon. I will miss Mandrake if they go, but not Salon)
A 64-bit machine can also handle 64-bit integers as a native data type. This is important for encryption
Depends on the algorithm one is using.
An encryption algorithm designed with 32-bit processors in mind does not benefit too much from a 64-bit design. For example, Rijndael (AES) will not be much faster on a 64-bit computer than on a 32-bit computer; it is designed to be reasonable to code on 8-bit processers and fast on 32-bit processers.
Then again, there are some crypto algorithms which do benefit from 64 bits. HPC (a failed AES candidate with arbitrary block size and the idea of a 'spice'), Tiger (a hash algorithm with a 192-bit digest), and Whirlpool (a Rijndael variant which is a hash algorithm with a 512-bit digest) were all designed with 64 bits in mind.
The problem is that one needs to be as conservative as possible when choosing a crypto algorithm; AES, while a standard, is still considered "risky" in some circles because it has only five years of experts cryptoanalyzing it. As a result, many people still use 3DES.
I seriously doubt that there will be a motion to make a new algorithm which is efficient on 64-bit processers in the near future; in the meantime, 32-bit (and, heck, 8-bit) machines can encrypt with AES just fine.
As for public key, I do not know as much, but those algorithms generally use numbers far bigger than 64-bit; I doubt that 64-bit is significantly faster when doing 4096-bit math.
Kahei: You're right, of course. The monolithic design of Linux means that Linux is as unstable as her most unstable driver; a microkernel design does not have this weakness. As shown by Linux's lack of popularity before KDE and Gnome were viable, the average user does not want to be doing things with ASCII pipes.
Personally, I hope that Open BeOS or Syllable become viable end-user operating systems.
Also: It is far easier to add a UNIX compatibility layer to some more-elegant-than-UNIX OS than it is to add a fast x86 compatibility layer to a non-x86 chip.
- Sam (so when are we going to have operations which can do core parts of AES quickly)
- Sam
Slashdot Mirror
Just to let you know, I feel that comments like this are very inappropriate to say to anyone, either on-line or off-line. This is a very nasty personal insult; I have been to schools where this kind of language would not be allowed (it is "fighting language"; language which angers someone enough to start a fight in the real world).
As a result, I have placed you on my foes list. If you wish to be taken off of my foes list, please apologize to the person you have personally insulted, and mail me proof that you have done so.
You are free to continue using this kind of language, of course, but people will respect you less and your karma will undoubtably suffer.
- Sam
- Sam
I think his object, and my objection too, is that Microsoft designs things so that, even when there is an equivalent Linux solution, you have to use Microsoft to access a given piece of content.
Let me give you one example: MSN had an interview with Depeche Mode back in 2001. They deliberately designed the page with this interview so that, unless you had "MSIE" in your user-agent tag, you would not be able to access the interview.
Another example: Last time I tried to sign up for a Hotmail account with Mozilla, it didn't work.
Another example: Microsoft deliberately makes it difficult to save a file as an rtf (or other open-standard) document in Word.
Microsoft, instead of trying to develop something that is truly better, is designing their software with a "roach motel" mindset; forcing people to use Microsft software even when there is an equivalent Linux solution.
- Sam
Who is the "Anonymous Coward" poster who keeps insulting me, and why can't I put him on my foes list?
I think the OP is someone who "plays it by ear" with their classes a lot more than a really structured person would like. I know some teachers are loath to outright grade on a curve; however, if a number of students are doing poorly, they will help them by fudging things a bit. Also, teachers may need to speed up the lesson plan for a classroom of good students, or slow down the class presentation for students struggling with the material.
Take care,
- Sam
Be careful with your argument style here; there is no need to have personal insults like "you don't know how to do a progress report" in your Slashdot postings. I have a habit of putting people who engage in personal insults on my foes list. This time, I won't put you on my foes list, since this was something said in the heat of a flame war caused by two people who have fundamentally different views of the world.
However, please watch the personal insults; these kinds of insults indicate that you are incapable of understanding why some people might not be as obsessive about structure as you are.
- Sam
RedHat has a very legitimate reason for removing MP3 support from their distribution. I really wish that people would look a little farther than their own "gimme" instinct; I guess America's overly consumerist society encourages that kind of selfishness.
- Sam
I feel it is very inappropriate to respond to someone with a different viewpoint than yours with a line like "it will take a severe lack of judgement on your manager's part for you to get promoted above a coding monkey". This is a personal attack against the original poster; if you feel that 100% office compatibility is important, please explain why instead of insulting strangers.
Until you post an apologoly here, or email me proof that you have apologized to the original poster, I will have you on my foes list. I only place people who engage in personal insults (or put me on their foes list) on my foes list; the only way to get off of my foes list is to apologize to the person who has been insulted.
I know this is Slashdot; however I hope that basic human decency still exists, even here.
Take care,
- Sam
I'm noticed that bzip2 compresses better (and sometimes, much better) for most tarballs of software and other data. However, in the case of a list of prime numbers, gzip actually compresses better than bzip2.
- Sam
Yep. I have posted the same thing myself, which did not go over well with the Slashdot crowd.
- Sam
This one seems to make a cleaner text patch than the last one I linked to.
- Sam (compiling the kernel as we speak)
Anyway, another copy of the patch.
- Sam
- Sam
I much prefer an open-source game; it allows me to make tweaks and implement house rules; something a proprietary game does not allow.
- Sam
One word: freeciv
- Sam (The AI is a little tough to fix, a bug which I have fixed)
Once, the ISP I used to work for got an email that said only this: "We lost the big bunny".
We still don't know if the kids were playing around with the email, or if the person was smoking something.
- Sam
I used it for a while back in 1996, back when Caldera's office suite was the only office suite for Linux, and one had to buy the "Caldera Network Desktop" to get the office suite. Actually, it wasn't Caldera per se; it was a re-branded RedHat 2.0 with some proprietary software added.
It ended up becoming RedHat 3.0.3 with Caldera's prorietary add-ons. Finally, in 1987, I ditched all of the Caldera-specific software and upgraded to RedHat 4.x, using Applix as my office suite.
I even have a screenshot of this old Caldera setup here.
I am very saddened to see Caldera fall from being a company that benefitted Linux greatly (they made the first professional-quality office suite for Linux ever available) to a company seeking to destroy Linux. May Caldera die a quick and clean death.
- Sam
Currently, I have the following three protections on my email address:
- The email address is on a special web page which takes 20 seconds to load
- The email address is encoded with javascript
- The email address is a slightly blurred image which is designed to be difficult for OCR software to read.
However, I still do not consider this ideal. What is ideal is to have a special email address which has the viewer's IP encoded in to it; I did this for years and got almost zero spam; every time a given IP got my email, I made the relevent apache logs public in news.admin.net-abuse.email and filtered the address in question.- Sam
From Dennis Ritchie's point of view, Linux is Unix.
Care to have a cite for this? I have a cite of DMR saying "As a product,
[UNIX has] certainly lost any chance to take over the mass market.", which is most certaintly not true today if he considers Mac OS X "UNIX", and possibly not true if he considers Linux "UNIX".
- Sam
There actually is an attempt to revive Blake's Seven which has been going on for several years now. It looks like nothing serious has come of it yet; it is designed to be post-Guada-Prime (after the end of the series) and will finally give Blake's Seven fans a "canonical" account of what happened after the famous last scene of the original series.
- Sam
I was, as you pointed out wrong; my flame was misplaced. Please accept my apology.
- Sam
Very good point. At one point, there was no such thing as mahcine language for computers. Computers were hardwired to do a given task; to change what a computer did meant rewiring the computer. It was Von Newmann who suggested wiring a computer to interpret numbers in memory (which were only previously used to store values when processing) as instructions to run. And thus machine language was born.
In fact, it is a good deal faster to run things by hard-wiring it than to run it in machine language. This is why FPGAs are faster than CPUs, and why ASICs are even fater. For example, there is a ASIC design which runs AES at "only" 200mhz, but is faster than a Pentium IV running AES at 3ghz because each "tick" encrypts an entire block.
- Sam
These numbers are as dumb as you claim Talbot is. Clue 1: Employees have more overhead than just the money that goes to their pay check. Clue 2: Taxes.
If you are going to flame Talbot for being dumb, I think you should have the basic intelligence to come up with a real revised expense model.
- Sam (No, I will not miss Salon. I will miss Mandrake if they go, but not Salon)
Depends on the algorithm one is using.
An encryption algorithm designed with 32-bit processors in mind does not benefit too much from a 64-bit design. For example, Rijndael (AES) will not be much faster on a 64-bit computer than on a 32-bit computer; it is designed to be reasonable to code on 8-bit processers and fast on 32-bit processers.
Then again, there are some crypto algorithms which do benefit from 64 bits. HPC (a failed AES candidate with arbitrary block size and the idea of a 'spice'), Tiger (a hash algorithm with a 192-bit digest), and Whirlpool (a Rijndael variant which is a hash algorithm with a 512-bit digest) were all designed with 64 bits in mind.
The problem is that one needs to be as conservative as possible when choosing a crypto algorithm; AES, while a standard, is still considered "risky" in some circles because it has only five years of experts cryptoanalyzing it. As a result, many people still use 3DES.
I seriously doubt that there will be a motion to make a new algorithm which is efficient on 64-bit processers in the near future; in the meantime, 32-bit (and, heck, 8-bit) machines can encrypt with AES just fine.
As for public key, I do not know as much, but those algorithms generally use numbers far bigger than 64-bit; I doubt that 64-bit is significantly faster when doing 4096-bit math.
- Sam
Personally, I hope that Open BeOS or Syllable become viable end-user operating systems.
Also: It is far easier to add a UNIX compatibility layer to some more-elegant-than-UNIX OS than it is to add a fast x86 compatibility layer to a non-x86 chip.
- Sam (so when are we going to have operations which can do core parts of AES quickly) - Sam