500 GB is about a fortieth of the Library of Congress, according to Wikipedia.
Compression would bring this down, and with good compression you could bring it down to maybe a 5th of the Library of Congress considering English has, according to Shannon's estimates, between 0.6 and 1.2 (probably closer to 1.2) bits of entropy per chararcter.
\begin{wishful thinking} Just wait until holographic technology hits the mass market, then we can get it onto one CD-sized disk! \end{wishful thinking} \end{slashdot post}
Deuterium fusion doesn't produce neutrons. Fusion of deuterium and tritium produces prodigious amounts of neutrons, hence the neutron bomb. And any fusion produces lots of gamma rays from the high-energy nuclear reactions.
opening the page in Chimera gave me bloated font size. Doesn't happen on any other pages. Is this a strange bug in Chimera? Slashcode? Anyone else have this problem?
I don't like your company, because I block popups for a reason: they piss me off. Therefore, if you would be so kind as to go out of business, I'm sure everyone would be happy.
Disclaimer: I am biased because I have a college account. Of the past 547 emails I have received, none of them have been spam. Before that I had a Hotmail account (mike_hamburg at hotmail dot com), which is still open (although I don't check it often), but it receives only about 2 spams a week. Please restrain yourselves from selling me to a list out of spite.
The article is wrong. Spam is a big problem, but it will not "end email as we know it." There are plenty of ways to curb the problem that have not been implemented yet.
The best suggestion that I have seen to curb spam, although it would be hard to implement and people would bitch about it, would be to have a payment based system. Everyone has a contact list of people who can send them mail for free. If you're not on that list, you have to pay a penny to send a message. Since the profit margin on spam is less than a penny per message, no more spam, or at least not much. Hard to implement, but it would work.
Other than that, there's Hash Cash, which could be combined with the above system, to increase the computational load of spamming. Easier to implement, and to get people to switch to, could reduce spam, not a cure-all.
Encryption and digital signatures would be a useful technique too. Require all mail in your inbox to be encrypted with a Diffie key would help, as Diffie encryption is much harder than decryption. This would also increase privacy, although changing the protocol to prevent traffic analysis would be a bitch to get off the ground (although you can get something like this already at Hushmail).
Bayesian spam filtering or other advanced techniques might also help to curb the problem, but they are a bit like a band-aid on a bullet wound. The article is at least right in that spam filters are not the solution.
Actually, I meant IE for Mac, not for Windows (Note that I said IE Mac is better than IE Windows). Remember that in choosing a browser, I mainly care about features that I actually use.
Although it's nice, I don't care too much about popup blocking, I usually can close them before they go under or start spawning. Of course, it may help that I don't spend my days at porno sites, where this could be a bigger issue. Tabbed browsing is also cool, but only marginally more efficient than lots of stacked windows. Standards support is not much of an issue, as most pages are written and tested for MSIE's faulty implementation of the standards anyway. On Mac, IE has much better plugin support than Mozilla, and more importantly, integrates better with Aqua so as to perform faster (for stuff like window resizes) and looks better. Furthermore, if you want to talk standards compilance, IE conforms better to Apple's interface guidelines than Mozilla by quite a bit.
Then there's Chimera, which is sort of the Mac equivalent of Phoenix. The main advantages of Chimera (over Mozilla) are that it loads faster and runs faster/with less memory, and that the features of Mozilla that it preserves happen to coincide with the ones I use (tabbed browsing and popup blocking). Its interface is a bit nicer. Furthermore, it is a Cocoa app, which means better system intergration and that I can use Cocoa gestures. I am writing this post from Chimera. But it still runs slow, violates various interface guidelines (eg keeping related interface elements in the same font, size, style), crashes more often than explorer, and lacks many of the features that I do use (selection-completion, for example). It also has poor plugin support. Chimera is only version 0.6, so we can expect this to improve later, and it is already the second-best Mac browser I've tried.
I've only tried Opera briefly, but the free version seems no better than Chimera. It doesnt block banners, just replaces them with its own. It runs slower than Chimera, is buggy, and is a Carbon app (not Cocoa). It seems to have lots of features, but I started by turning most of them off anyway. And it's adware, which is annoying.
Overall, although there are several features I'd like to see in Explorer, but it is the best that is available for what I do on the web. After that, Chimera is the best, and should get better.
Clearly, the code and descriptions for the bug are Windows-only. The question is, does a similar bug (vulnerability to cross-channel scripting attacks) exist in the Mac version? No mention of this on the forums. I would guess not, but I'm using Chimera until the bug is fixed just in case.
PS. To all those people who think MS are evil and that I should be stoned for using Internet Explorer at all: remember that although it lacks tabbed browsing and popup-blocking, Explorer is in most ways superior to Mo and especially to Chimera. The most important difference is that IE runs faster, considering that I'm seeing typing lag as I write this post in Chimera. It's only a couple tenths of a second, but still quite annoying and totally unexcusable on a 700MHz machine. Also remember that IE mac is much better than IE windows for some reason (I've heard Office X is also much better than Office XP, but never tried either).
That's covered by "(-1) Flamebait"
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
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· Score: 1
Could anyone here help me win a lawsuit against a German city?
--Mike Hamburg
(Aside: yes, the name comes from that city; my ancesters were "Hamburger"s and wisely decided to change their names to avoid a lawsuit by MacDonald's. Or maybe just to avoid being made fun of.)
Are these the same employees that worked on DR-DOS compatability [eatthestate.org]?
Well, no, probably not, seeing as that was over 10 years ago. Plus, just because they did something evil once (ok, many times) doesn't mean they are incapable of all good.
Actually not really. Maybe if your packets are really small this could be an issue, but for stuff that requires lots of bandwidth (say, file downloads), you have lots of data to transmit anyway, so block size is not the issue. However, with many asymmetric keys, you have intrinsic data expansion: everything you put into ElGamal (whether over elliptic curves or finite fields) or McEliece comes out twice the size. RSA doesn't have this problem, and is probably the best asymmetric algo currently out there for encrypting a link unless you're willing to put up with the problems in McEliece (knapsacks would be the best, but they were broken almost 25 years ago). RSA, however, is still too slow, requiring a substantial fraction of a second per block on most systems. And by the way, elliptic keys are usually around 200 bits, which is smaller than say a Blowfish key, which can be up to 448 bits (though this is much bigger than a block, and it is really block size that matters, and elliptic encryption also doubles data size). The only symmetric block cipher that I've heard of with a huge block size is Crab at 1KB, and it's probably not secure anyway.
Erm... well actually any block cipher requires plaintext to be a multiple of block size, so you really can't send less than that at a time (unless you're using it in OFB streaming mode, but then it's really a stream cipher anyway). A standard stream cipher, probably implemented with shift registers or the like, is the best for a wired data line; then you can send one bit at a time if you really want to. With a wireless datalink, there's lots of overhead anyway, so 16 bytes from say AES or (pick your favorite block cipher) isn't much. This is why Blowfish is used in ssh.
The bigger problem with public-key algorithms is speed: RSA is much slower than most symmetric ciphers. ElGamal is no good because it is slow, has large data expansion (2x), and requires a lot of strong pseudorandom numbers. If you were going to use public-key encryption over a link, the best algo would probably the little-known McEliece system because it is very fast and has built-in error correction. However, it requires a good PRNG and a very careful implementation to avoid being cracked, and some cryptographers are still skeptical, especially for pipelines with lots of data. Not to mention that its minimum secure key length is about 64K.
The best use for public-key crypto is definitely to exchange symmetric keys. That way you only have to use the code once per session, don't stress your PRNG, get more speed and avoid too much data expansion.
if I sniff long enough, I can crack your encryption...
how about instead of trying to play spy, the WIFI owners make it secure? Nahhh, makes too much sense.
You answered your own question. Hard to make it secure if they can crack your encryption, say with AirSnort. The protocol needs better encryption on it, simple as that.
The 10.2.2 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall...
The firewall was in there before. There's just bugfixes for it now.
Not really. IMHO you should go with forests (hybrid) plus maybe one borehole per base, then you don't pollute. If you don't want to be green (it ain't easy) then you have to balance boreholes, superfarm+condenser, superfarm+solar, superfarm+echelon to produce and not pollute too much: when you have enough population to make it worthwhile, it is usually best to diversify resource collection (unless youre going green), you get more that way. Effective but hard.
Ultimate production is a Gaian base with alternating fungus and boreholes around it, and enough tech to make the fungus produce 3/3/3. This makes total production 42/78/78 plus your recycling tanks and whatever else is in your base. Of course, you have to either have built the Voice of Planet or planted fungus many squares thick else you drown in mindworms. The best approximation to this earlier on is surrounding with forests when you have a hybrid (60/40/40).
Compare surrounding with tidals and kelp farms at 60/0/40. Water bases suck for most of the game anyway.
Don't like mindworms? What about "Planetpearls retrieved from husks! Energy reserves increased by 30 credits!" Or the (mostly Gaian) strategy of capturing all the mindworms you can and sending them rampaging through people's bases? I think they're kind of cute actually...
Tidal harness: increases energy production of this square by +2. Built by sea formers (*-1-4), 8 turns.
The thermal borehole is the one I'd really like to see in action, though. 6 energy and 6 minerals is a lot, and could really cut down on our dependency on oil.
... but there are some places where it sucks. For example, resize the browser window this text is in. Resize a finder window. On my computer (700 MHz eMac, crappy rendering card), you get a lag of half a second to initiate the resize, and then only about 5 frames per second updating. This problem is not completely system-wide, but it happens in many other apps (especially Carbon apps, but Chimera has the same problem).
File searches: locate takes half a second, Finder's find command takes half a minute. This might be excusable with searches for contents, but not for "files named lshort.pdf."
App launches: about average. It launches photoshop faster a PC of the same speed launches it, or launches GIMP for that matter. It doesn't launch simple apps as fast as Linux or Windows, but the half-second delay won't kill you.
Text stuff: TeXshop is slow, as are a few other apps that do weird things with text, to the point where you get typing lag. But the bundled apps run fast, so I would assume this is app-specific.
Other stuff seems about up to par. Boot speed is pretty good, unless you're launching Classic at launch as well. Even emulated Classic apps run pretty fast. Warcraft III runs slow, but this is my rendering card's fault, not the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
500 GB is about a fortieth of the Library of Congress, according to Wikipedia.
Compression would bring this down, and with good compression you could bring it down to maybe a 5th of the Library of Congress considering English has, according to Shannon's estimates, between 0.6 and 1.2 (probably closer to 1.2) bits of entropy per chararcter.
\begin{wishful thinking}
Just wait until holographic technology hits the mass market, then we can get it onto one CD-sized disk!
\end{wishful thinking}
\end{slashdot post}
Not to mention that your comment is redundant (mine too, in fact). We could win the award of redundancy award.
Deuterium fusion doesn't produce neutrons. Fusion of deuterium and tritium produces prodigious amounts of neutrons, hence the neutron bomb. And any fusion produces lots of gamma rays from the high-energy nuclear reactions.
opening the page in Chimera gave me bloated font size. Doesn't happen on any other pages. Is this a strange bug in Chimera? Slashcode? Anyone else have this problem?
Translation of the above letter:
I don't like your company, because I block popups for a reason: they piss me off. Therefore, if you would be so kind as to go out of business, I'm sure everyone would be happy.
I've never seen a total of 28
Did you see The Post?
On the other hand, without Windows, Apple would probably far better off indeed, as would Linux. See the article for details.
Disclaimer: I am biased because I have a college account. Of the past 547 emails I have received, none of them have been spam. Before that I had a Hotmail account (mike_hamburg at hotmail dot com), which is still open (although I don't check it often), but it receives only about 2 spams a week. Please restrain yourselves from selling me to a list out of spite.
The article is wrong. Spam is a big problem, but it will not "end email as we know it." There are plenty of ways to curb the problem that have not been implemented yet.
The best suggestion that I have seen to curb spam, although it would be hard to implement and people would bitch about it, would be to have a payment based system. Everyone has a contact list of people who can send them mail for free. If you're not on that list, you have to pay a penny to send a message. Since the profit margin on spam is less than a penny per message, no more spam, or at least not much. Hard to implement, but it would work.
Other than that, there's Hash Cash, which could be combined with the above system, to increase the computational load of spamming. Easier to implement, and to get people to switch to, could reduce spam, not a cure-all.
Encryption and digital signatures would be a useful technique too. Require all mail in your inbox to be encrypted with a Diffie key would help, as Diffie encryption is much harder than decryption. This would also increase privacy, although changing the protocol to prevent traffic analysis would be a bitch to get off the ground (although you can get something like this already at Hushmail).
Bayesian spam filtering or other advanced techniques might also help to curb the problem, but they are a bit like a band-aid on a bullet wound. The article is at least right in that spam filters are not the solution.
Actually, I meant IE for Mac, not for Windows (Note that I said IE Mac is better than IE Windows). Remember that in choosing a browser, I mainly care about features that I actually use.
Although it's nice, I don't care too much about popup blocking, I usually can close them before they go under or start spawning. Of course, it may help that I don't spend my days at porno sites, where this could be a bigger issue. Tabbed browsing is also cool, but only marginally more efficient than lots of stacked windows. Standards support is not much of an issue, as most pages are written and tested for MSIE's faulty implementation of the standards anyway. On Mac, IE has much better plugin support than Mozilla, and more importantly, integrates better with Aqua so as to perform faster (for stuff like window resizes) and looks better. Furthermore, if you want to talk standards compilance, IE conforms better to Apple's interface guidelines than Mozilla by quite a bit.
Then there's Chimera, which is sort of the Mac equivalent of Phoenix. The main advantages of Chimera (over Mozilla) are that it loads faster and runs faster/with less memory, and that the features of Mozilla that it preserves happen to coincide with the ones I use (tabbed browsing and popup blocking). Its interface is a bit nicer. Furthermore, it is a Cocoa app, which means better system intergration and that I can use Cocoa gestures. I am writing this post from Chimera. But it still runs slow, violates various interface guidelines (eg keeping related interface elements in the same font, size, style), crashes more often than explorer, and lacks many of the features that I do use (selection-completion, for example). It also has poor plugin support. Chimera is only version 0.6, so we can expect this to improve later, and it is already the second-best Mac browser I've tried.
I've only tried Opera briefly, but the free version seems no better than Chimera. It doesnt block banners, just replaces them with its own. It runs slower than Chimera, is buggy, and is a Carbon app (not Cocoa). It seems to have lots of features, but I started by turning most of them off anyway. And it's adware, which is annoying.
Overall, although there are several features I'd like to see in Explorer, but it is the best that is available for what I do on the web. After that, Chimera is the best, and should get better.
Sort of reminds me of "Sarge almost dodged Visor's rocket."
Clearly, the code and descriptions for the bug are Windows-only. The question is, does a similar bug (vulnerability to cross-channel scripting attacks) exist in the Mac version? No mention of this on the forums. I would guess not, but I'm using Chimera until the bug is fixed just in case.
PS. To all those people who think MS are evil and that I should be stoned for using Internet Explorer at all: remember that although it lacks tabbed browsing and popup-blocking, Explorer is in most ways superior to Mo and especially to Chimera. The most important difference is that IE runs faster, considering that I'm seeing typing lag as I write this post in Chimera. It's only a couple tenths of a second, but still quite annoying and totally unexcusable on a 700MHz machine. Also remember that IE mac is much better than IE windows for some reason (I've heard Office X is also much better than Office XP, but never tried either).
It's called "political correctness".
:-)
Not anymore. The term "politically correct" is no longer poltically correct. The correct term is "socially sensitive."
Could anyone here help me win a lawsuit against a German city?
--Mike Hamburg
(Aside: yes, the name comes from that city; my ancesters were "Hamburger"s and wisely decided to change their names to avoid a lawsuit by MacDonald's. Or maybe just to avoid being made fun of.)
Are these the same employees that worked on DR-DOS compatability [eatthestate.org]?
Well, no, probably not, seeing as that was over 10 years ago. Plus, just because they did something evil once (ok, many times) doesn't mean they are incapable of all good.
Actually not really. Maybe if your packets are really small this could be an issue, but for stuff that requires lots of bandwidth (say, file downloads), you have lots of data to transmit anyway, so block size is not the issue. However, with many asymmetric keys, you have intrinsic data expansion: everything you put into ElGamal (whether over elliptic curves or finite fields) or McEliece comes out twice the size. RSA doesn't have this problem, and is probably the best asymmetric algo currently out there for encrypting a link unless you're willing to put up with the problems in McEliece (knapsacks would be the best, but they were broken almost 25 years ago). RSA, however, is still too slow, requiring a substantial fraction of a second per block on most systems. And by the way, elliptic keys are usually around 200 bits, which is smaller than say a Blowfish key, which can be up to 448 bits (though this is much bigger than a block, and it is really block size that matters, and elliptic encryption also doubles data size). The only symmetric block cipher that I've heard of with a huge block size is Crab at 1KB, and it's probably not secure anyway.
OT but...
Erm... well actually any block cipher requires plaintext to be a multiple of block size, so you really can't send less than that at a time (unless you're using it in OFB streaming mode, but then it's really a stream cipher anyway). A standard stream cipher, probably implemented with shift registers or the like, is the best for a wired data line; then you can send one bit at a time if you really want to. With a wireless datalink, there's lots of overhead anyway, so 16 bytes from say AES or (pick your favorite block cipher) isn't much. This is why Blowfish is used in ssh.
The bigger problem with public-key algorithms is speed: RSA is much slower than most symmetric ciphers. ElGamal is no good because it is slow, has large data expansion (2x), and requires a lot of strong pseudorandom numbers. If you were going to use public-key encryption over a link, the best algo would probably the little-known McEliece system because it is very fast and has built-in error correction. However, it requires a good PRNG and a very careful implementation to avoid being cracked, and some cryptographers are still skeptical, especially for pipelines with lots of data. Not to mention that its minimum secure key length is about 64K.
The best use for public-key crypto is definitely to exchange symmetric keys. That way you only have to use the code once per session, don't stress your PRNG, get more speed and avoid too much data expansion.
if I sniff long enough, I can crack your encryption...
how about instead of trying to play spy, the WIFI owners make it secure? Nahhh, makes too much sense.
You answered your own question. Hard to make it secure if they can crack your encryption, say with AirSnort. The protocol needs better encryption on it, simple as that.
... but I'll bite anyway.
I work for Apple's East division, there is no such thing as 10.2.2.
That's funny... I just installed it...
When did we release 10.2.1 ?
09/18/02, according to Apple.
Read more carefully next time:
The 10.2.2 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall...
The firewall was in there before. There's just bugfixes for it now.
Not really. IMHO you should go with forests (hybrid) plus maybe one borehole per base, then you don't pollute. If you don't want to be green (it ain't easy) then you have to balance boreholes, superfarm+condenser, superfarm+solar, superfarm+echelon to produce and not pollute too much: when you have enough population to make it worthwhile, it is usually best to diversify resource collection (unless youre going green), you get more that way. Effective but hard.
Ultimate production is a Gaian base with alternating fungus and boreholes around it, and enough tech to make the fungus produce 3/3/3. This makes total production 42/78/78 plus your recycling tanks and whatever else is in your base. Of course, you have to either have built the Voice of Planet or planted fungus many squares thick else you drown in mindworms. The best approximation to this earlier on is surrounding with forests when you have a hybrid (60/40/40).
Compare surrounding with tidals and kelp farms at 60/0/40. Water bases suck for most of the game anyway.
... "All your database are belong to us"
Don't like mindworms? What about "Planetpearls retrieved from husks! Energy reserves increased by 30 credits!" Or the (mostly Gaian) strategy of capturing all the mindworms you can and sending them rampaging through people's bases? I think they're kind of cute actually...
Tidal harness: increases energy production of this square by +2. Built by sea formers (*-1-4), 8 turns.
The thermal borehole is the one I'd really like to see in action, though. 6 energy and 6 minerals is a lot, and could really cut down on our dependency on oil.
Err, yeah...
... but there are some places where it sucks. For example, resize the browser window this text is in. Resize a finder window. On my computer (700 MHz eMac, crappy rendering card), you get a lag of half a second to initiate the resize, and then only about 5 frames per second updating. This problem is not completely system-wide, but it happens in many other apps (especially Carbon apps, but Chimera has the same problem).
File searches: locate takes half a second, Finder's find command takes half a minute. This might be excusable with searches for contents, but not for "files named lshort.pdf."
App launches: about average. It launches photoshop faster a PC of the same speed launches it, or launches GIMP for that matter. It doesn't launch simple apps as fast as Linux or Windows, but the half-second delay won't kill you.
Text stuff: TeXshop is slow, as are a few other apps that do weird things with text, to the point where you get typing lag. But the bundled apps run fast, so I would assume this is app-specific.
Other stuff seems about up to par. Boot speed is pretty good, unless you're launching Classic at launch as well. Even emulated Classic apps run pretty fast. Warcraft III runs slow, but this is my rendering card's fault, not the OS.