"Even Cray-acres don't help against a one time pad that is used correctly."
Most terrorists probably do not have the resources to make proper one-time pads. Truly random one-time pads are _extremely_ difficult to make, due to the difficulty of finding truly random sources. Again, if you have any kind of flaw in your crypto, the boys and girls at NSA will break it. They're not super-human geniuses, but they've had the brightest minds in the field hitting these problems for 50 years, and they've got practically unlimited resources to throw at them, too.
One-time pads are also painful to use, and in an operations planning setting, I don't think they're a feasible communications medium. So, yes, one-time pads could render wiretaps worthless, but it's unlikely they'll be used.
People are often like "hey, those are totally different". If only. Once you get out of undergraduate economics, CS algorithms get used for economics problems _all the time_ (dynamic programming, for instance), and economics has a surprising amount of relevance when trying to write efficient AI code.
"people did not understand/were confused by the auction process"
Those people have no business playing in the market, then. Auction theory is in second semester economics here at UMD@CP, including the exact variant that Google is using.
Anyone who gets in at $85 is going to get burned once rational valuation kicks in. We should be thankful it went lower. I've read that most institutional investors are staying far, far away from this one - that's pretty telling, in my eyes.
Actually, that's probably not an anecdote, so forgive me... revised the post a couple times before hitting the submit button.
Additionally, I'd also like to point out that European/.'ers would do well to stay away from all of this, in particular. Even if Kerry wins, the citizens of the US of A are not going to be in the "caring to reconcile mood" if there's wide-spread perception that Europe spent lots of time playing inane games with our politics. Don't make a bad situation worse, even if you think the US is responsible in the first place.
The fact that it's illegal, immature, and not at all conducive to proper political discussion is why people don't understand why anyone would think this is a good idea. Of course, the very fact that you used the word "regime" indicates to me that you are probably too far divorced from fairness and thinking for yourself to understand this.
Here's an anecdote: this is roughly akin to nailing two-by-fours across every door and window in my house so that you can prevent me from coming out and using my freedom of speech because you don't like the views I espouse. If you disagree with what I say, the appropriate response is to write, speak, and make your views known. It is not to simply silence the opposition by preventing them from being heard.
The US doesn't have a big problem with pro-neo-Nazi sentiment in our population. Why? It's not because we ban them from speaking or promoting their views, like in Germany. It's because every time they do speak, they get so thoroughly discredited by the opposition that everyone simply ignores them.
I would urge all people who do not agree with the White House to _write_ them, whether it's by email or snail mail. Call them, even! But I would urge everyone, both in America and elsewhere, to NOT participate in a childish act like DDOS'ing the RNC's website. The politics in this country are awful enough without resorting to a new low.
"Looks too much like a press release for my taste"
That because it's probably taken straight from the media kit for the product.
I'm doing tech support in a teaching theater for a PR class this summer. They barely ever require my help, so I sometimes listen in on what's going on.
One of the most fascinating things they talked about was how important "ready-made" materials that could be presented as a "story" were. Basically, reporters are generally lazy. If you send them stuff they can mostly cut and paste that's informative and doesn't look _exactly_ like an ad, they'll use it almost verbatim.
To be honest, I almost got the impression that the "reviewer" had not used the product at all.
I got the impression from the article that this thing was relatively light. Any manned expedition, hell, unmanned expedition, to Mars is going to be a LOT heavier. It's unlikely that the Sun would give you a noticable speed boost for about a million years in that situation.
"It just has a DVR(which, again, people who are going to have a DVR already do)."
This is the major flaw I see in most/. reasoning on the convergence topic. Market saturation is a temporary effect, since new consumers are always entering the market.
IOW, the market will eventually become less saturated once the DVR becomes less of a hot item (or more of a hot item, I suppose).
Steve Gibson must be feeling pretty damn good right now, seeing as his whole "raw sockets are the end of the world" issue seems to actually have been fixed in SP2.
Guess the doomsayers really are right once in a while...
Going a touch OT here, but "unlike putting the money in a bank" is simply not true.
For all the faults our country has, our banking system is wonderfully reliable, regulated pretty intelligently, and is one of the few things that should be that way.
Yet banks _do fail_. That's why they have to be insured by the FDIC. However, you're probably saying "but wait! I've never heard of them failing in the US".
The simple answer is, when your bank goes bankrupt (or is on the way), instead of having the FDIC bail them out, the failing bank's assets are simply sold to another bank, where they (presumably) will be managed better. You, the bank customer, never hear about this except for a notice in the mail talking about how your bank was bought by some other bank, or "merging" with them. The industry knows that FDIC bail-outs look ugly in the paper, and that this is an excellent way to pick up some assets on the cheap.
But, the FDIC _could_ be forced to bail them out - at which point all your funds above $100,000 will be lost. So banks do, in fact, entail a little bit of risk.
However, I just wanted to correct the impression that "putting your money in the bank is totally safe". It's not true, especially if you've got more than hundred grand in there.
But that's a nitpick, and the parent is right in the sense that "a sure thing" is like 99% going to happen, and a gamble is something that's less than some percentage (based on your risk aversion).
I'm getting so damn tired of this "having reservations" excuse whenever Kerry voted for something that went flat-out against what he's campaigning with now.
I'd feel better about him if he just had a voting record I disagreed with, and actually tried to justify it to me. This "I'm anti-war today, better make up an excuse about voting for war" thing is just the biggest turn-off ever. He did this just the other day with the Yucca nuclear reserve, in fact. Take responsibility for your actions. I can't vote for a guy in good conscience who says one thing when he's done another so often.
People ask why I'm writing in McCain/Lieberman on my ballot: it's because I'd prefer honest, intelligent, honorable men who I sometimes disagree with, but have the country's best interests in mind. I honestly believe those two do, even if they each have stands that I would disagree with (Lieberman's videogame policy coming to mind).
I mean, let's face it... no one's going to be using SCO any more. This isn't more than a PR stunt by Newsforge.
Still, I appreciate it. With all the whines about SCO the litigator running about, it was interesting to read what SCO the software company was producing.
When your hobby becomes your job, your hobby becomes a lot less fun. After slamming out the upmteenth million CS project of the semester, I'm just not in the mood for major coding projects on the MUD.
This is exactly what happened this semester. Took Linear Algebra - and I was pumping out code like there was no tomorrow. But now I'm doing 400-level algorithms, and frankly, I'd rather just let my mind rot.
And it mirrors what's going on here at University of Maryland at College Park.
The enrollment in the CS program has been dropping like a stone (we're like 400 down, to 1800, since the bubble popped, IIRC). Curiously, engineering has been mostly untouched, which is why I found the talk about "engineering" to be a non-sequitur.
I don't really see this as "greedy students are gone!" so much as "less incentive to do the work with lesser pay". I mean, you can always hack on computers while doing something else entirely. Why not feed yourself with a steady job and do what you love in your spare time? Seems reasonable to me.
I also predict a steady flood of/.'ers claiming college is worthless for learning computer science.
The problem is that I could buy a Happy Hacking Lite2 USB and a good optical mouse for the same price as this thing. Yes, I have to take my hands off the keyboard to use my mouse, but then again, I don't have to learn a new typing method, either. The HH keyboard and mouse take more room, too, but then again, if they fit in a laptop case, that's enough for me.
The AlphaGrip seemed appealing for about 10 seconds, until reality kicked in. I can't think of a situation where I'd want the AlphaGrip instead of the keyboard+mouse. The mini-joystick is cute, but I doubt it'll make for an enjoyable mouse.
The USB hub at the top is next to useless, too. Don't they realize that having a memory stick is going to unbalance the thing, and that a cable is going to just get in the way?
I hate to get all down on them, because this was a pretty smart plan in theory: leverage joypad familiarity into a mouse/keyboard solution. But the execution seems to be lacking. Honestly, I have no idea how I would improve on the concept.
What's weird is that nVidia already _does_ have a $200 variant of Geforce6 - the Geforce 6800LE. It's essentially a lower-clocked (GPU and RAM) 6800 with only 8 pipes (so, half of what the 6800GT/U has). One of the hardware sites did a review of it (t-break?), and it performed pretty nicely - almost always beat the 5950. It's supposedly only for OEMs, but that's never stopped the online vendors from selling a card.
If they are indeed talking about a 6600, it's going to need to go under $170 to have any sales value whatsoever. SLI is nice and everything, but most people simply don't have PCIe mobos to take advantage of it, so it's going to be a non-issue for the next year and a half.
Still, it'll be nice to see nVidia actually try to deliver a better price/performance ratio than ATI for once.
I was reading a textbook about this very issue just a couple days ago at work (I was bored, and there it was in lost and found pile). Don't recall the name, but it was basically about biometrics for security purposes.
The book stated near the very beginning that, basically, passwords are useless because the really secure ones are hard to remember, and that little problem causes people to do other things that mostly destroy the security of a "secure" password anyways (such as the infamous post-it note on the monitor).
The book's solution was fairly common-sense: implement different layers of security. That is to say, a password on its own is bad, but a token+password (say, USB memory stick with accesss code) can actually be a lot better.
The best stated was "bio+token+password". Seems reasonable to me, at least.
Bulls-eye. The economy is bad in some places, but it's great in others. My fiance is fresh outta school with an MS in Mechanical Engineering, and she's gotten so many job offers it's mind-blowing. This is in the DC metropolitan area. I'm sure some small midwest towns have bigger troubles in this area.
Frankly, after seeing the kind of robbery that IT professionals did on venture capitalists back in 1997-1999, I could really care less that they're seeing a market correction. We all love to point to corporate misdoings as the root of all our problems, but let's not forget the kind of greed that IT had back in.com boom.
That is your conjecture, and it's not at all supported by the article. The article talks about how Miguel lectured Microsoft about FOSS at his interview. If Miguel was working at Microsoft, it would seem to me that he'd only be doing it because he could write Free software.
"now he's reimplimenting their reimplimentation of Java"
You know, it's not like FOSS programmers just allot time to whatever the masses care about. They program to scratch their itches - and Java is obviously not Miguel's itch.
Don't view Mono as time taken away from kaffe/gcj/Parrot, because chances are, the time put into Mono wouldn't have gone into any of those.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even Cray-acres don't help against a one time pad that is used correctly."
Most terrorists probably do not have the resources to make proper one-time pads. Truly random one-time pads are _extremely_ difficult to make, due to the difficulty of finding truly random sources. Again, if you have any kind of flaw in your crypto, the boys and girls at NSA will break it. They're not super-human geniuses, but they've had the brightest minds in the field hitting these problems for 50 years, and they've got practically unlimited resources to throw at them, too.
One-time pads are also painful to use, and in an operations planning setting, I don't think they're a feasible communications medium. So, yes, one-time pads could render wiretaps worthless, but it's unlikely they'll be used.
-Erwos
"Only for linux on x86. Why does everyone assume that's the only place you'll ever find linux?"
Why does everyone forget about Linux for Alpha, Sparc, and MIPS? The world does not completely revolve around PPC and x86.
-Erwos
"I would think that they would use something like the PGP Phone"
/.'ers believe that PGP/GPG is perfectly and utterly unreadable. Phil's a smart guy, but my money's on Fort Meade, every time.
Which would stop NSA for, what, 10 seconds?
I enjoy reading how
-Erwos
I'm actually double majoring CS and economics.
People are often like "hey, those are totally different". If only. Once you get out of undergraduate economics, CS algorithms get used for economics problems _all the time_ (dynamic programming, for instance), and economics has a surprising amount of relevance when trying to write efficient AI code.
-Erwos
"people did not understand/were confused by the auction process"
Those people have no business playing in the market, then. Auction theory is in second semester economics here at UMD@CP, including the exact variant that Google is using.
Anyone who gets in at $85 is going to get burned once rational valuation kicks in. We should be thankful it went lower. I've read that most institutional investors are staying far, far away from this one - that's pretty telling, in my eyes.
Geek cred != market cred.
-Erwos
Yes, because there's no way the crackers could have altered the ISO to contain a virus. Nope, no way.
-Erwos
Huh?
Apple's using KHTML, pal. Nothing to do with Moz.
Linux+Moz, maybe.
-Erwos
Actually, that's probably not an anecdote, so forgive me... revised the post a couple times before hitting the submit button.
/.'ers would do well to stay away from all of this, in particular. Even if Kerry wins, the citizens of the US of A are not going to be in the "caring to reconcile mood" if there's wide-spread perception that Europe spent lots of time playing inane games with our politics. Don't make a bad situation worse, even if you think the US is responsible in the first place.
Additionally, I'd also like to point out that European
-Erwos
The fact that it's illegal, immature, and not at all conducive to proper political discussion is why people don't understand why anyone would think this is a good idea. Of course, the very fact that you used the word "regime" indicates to me that you are probably too far divorced from fairness and thinking for yourself to understand this.
Here's an anecdote: this is roughly akin to nailing two-by-fours across every door and window in my house so that you can prevent me from coming out and using my freedom of speech because you don't like the views I espouse. If you disagree with what I say, the appropriate response is to write, speak, and make your views known. It is not to simply silence the opposition by preventing them from being heard.
The US doesn't have a big problem with pro-neo-Nazi sentiment in our population. Why? It's not because we ban them from speaking or promoting their views, like in Germany. It's because every time they do speak, they get so thoroughly discredited by the opposition that everyone simply ignores them.
I would urge all people who do not agree with the White House to _write_ them, whether it's by email or snail mail. Call them, even! But I would urge everyone, both in America and elsewhere, to NOT participate in a childish act like DDOS'ing the RNC's website. The politics in this country are awful enough without resorting to a new low.
-Erwos
"Looks too much like a press release for my taste"
That because it's probably taken straight from the media kit for the product.
I'm doing tech support in a teaching theater for a PR class this summer. They barely ever require my help, so I sometimes listen in on what's going on.
One of the most fascinating things they talked about was how important "ready-made" materials that could be presented as a "story" were. Basically, reporters are generally lazy. If you send them stuff they can mostly cut and paste that's informative and doesn't look _exactly_ like an ad, they'll use it almost verbatim.
To be honest, I almost got the impression that the "reviewer" had not used the product at all.
-Erwos
I got the impression from the article that this thing was relatively light. Any manned expedition, hell, unmanned expedition, to Mars is going to be a LOT heavier. It's unlikely that the Sun would give you a noticable speed boost for about a million years in that situation.
-Erwos
"It just has a DVR(which, again, people who are going to have a DVR already do)."
/. reasoning on the convergence topic. Market saturation is a temporary effect, since new consumers are always entering the market.
This is the major flaw I see in most
IOW, the market will eventually become less saturated once the DVR becomes less of a hot item (or more of a hot item, I suppose).
-Erwos
Steve Gibson must be feeling pretty damn good right now, seeing as his whole "raw sockets are the end of the world" issue seems to actually have been fixed in SP2.
Guess the doomsayers really are right once in a while...
-Erwos
Going a touch OT here, but "unlike putting the money in a bank" is simply not true.
For all the faults our country has, our banking system is wonderfully reliable, regulated pretty intelligently, and is one of the few things that should be that way.
Yet banks _do fail_. That's why they have to be insured by the FDIC. However, you're probably saying "but wait! I've never heard of them failing in the US".
The simple answer is, when your bank goes bankrupt (or is on the way), instead of having the FDIC bail them out, the failing bank's assets are simply sold to another bank, where they (presumably) will be managed better. You, the bank customer, never hear about this except for a notice in the mail talking about how your bank was bought by some other bank, or "merging" with them. The industry knows that FDIC bail-outs look ugly in the paper, and that this is an excellent way to pick up some assets on the cheap.
But, the FDIC _could_ be forced to bail them out - at which point all your funds above $100,000 will be lost. So banks do, in fact, entail a little bit of risk.
However, I just wanted to correct the impression that "putting your money in the bank is totally safe". It's not true, especially if you've got more than hundred grand in there.
But that's a nitpick, and the parent is right in the sense that "a sure thing" is like 99% going to happen, and a gamble is something that's less than some percentage (based on your risk aversion).
-Erwos
"That's true - but that was with provisios."
I'm getting so damn tired of this "having reservations" excuse whenever Kerry voted for something that went flat-out against what he's campaigning with now.
I'd feel better about him if he just had a voting record I disagreed with, and actually tried to justify it to me. This "I'm anti-war today, better make up an excuse about voting for war" thing is just the biggest turn-off ever. He did this just the other day with the Yucca nuclear reserve, in fact. Take responsibility for your actions. I can't vote for a guy in good conscience who says one thing when he's done another so often.
People ask why I'm writing in McCain/Lieberman on my ballot: it's because I'd prefer honest, intelligent, honorable men who I sometimes disagree with, but have the country's best interests in mind. I honestly believe those two do, even if they each have stands that I would disagree with (Lieberman's videogame policy coming to mind).
-Erwos
I mean, let's face it... no one's going to be using SCO any more. This isn't more than a PR stunt by Newsforge.
Still, I appreciate it. With all the whines about SCO the litigator running about, it was interesting to read what SCO the software company was producing.
-Erwos
Because familiarity breeds contempt.
When your hobby becomes your job, your hobby becomes a lot less fun. After slamming out the upmteenth million CS project of the semester, I'm just not in the mood for major coding projects on the MUD.
This is exactly what happened this semester. Took Linear Algebra - and I was pumping out code like there was no tomorrow. But now I'm doing 400-level algorithms, and frankly, I'd rather just let my mind rot.
-Erwos
And it mirrors what's going on here at University of Maryland at College Park.
/.'ers claiming college is worthless for learning computer science.
The enrollment in the CS program has been dropping like a stone (we're like 400 down, to 1800, since the bubble popped, IIRC). Curiously, engineering has been mostly untouched, which is why I found the talk about "engineering" to be a non-sequitur.
I don't really see this as "greedy students are gone!" so much as "less incentive to do the work with lesser pay". I mean, you can always hack on computers while doing something else entirely. Why not feed yourself with a steady job and do what you love in your spare time? Seems reasonable to me.
I also predict a steady flood of
-Erwos
Tablet owner's perspective:
The problem is that I could buy a Happy Hacking Lite2 USB and a good optical mouse for the same price as this thing. Yes, I have to take my hands off the keyboard to use my mouse, but then again, I don't have to learn a new typing method, either. The HH keyboard and mouse take more room, too, but then again, if they fit in a laptop case, that's enough for me.
The AlphaGrip seemed appealing for about 10 seconds, until reality kicked in. I can't think of a situation where I'd want the AlphaGrip instead of the keyboard+mouse. The mini-joystick is cute, but I doubt it'll make for an enjoyable mouse.
The USB hub at the top is next to useless, too. Don't they realize that having a memory stick is going to unbalance the thing, and that a cable is going to just get in the way?
I hate to get all down on them, because this was a pretty smart plan in theory: leverage joypad familiarity into a mouse/keyboard solution. But the execution seems to be lacking. Honestly, I have no idea how I would improve on the concept.
-Erwos
I guess I'm lame, but I always turn it back on. Is there some better way to pass variables through a link?
-Erwos
What's weird is that nVidia already _does_ have a $200 variant of Geforce6 - the Geforce 6800LE. It's essentially a lower-clocked (GPU and RAM) 6800 with only 8 pipes (so, half of what the 6800GT/U has). One of the hardware sites did a review of it (t-break?), and it performed pretty nicely - almost always beat the 5950. It's supposedly only for OEMs, but that's never stopped the online vendors from selling a card.
If they are indeed talking about a 6600, it's going to need to go under $170 to have any sales value whatsoever. SLI is nice and everything, but most people simply don't have PCIe mobos to take advantage of it, so it's going to be a non-issue for the next year and a half.
Still, it'll be nice to see nVidia actually try to deliver a better price/performance ratio than ATI for once.
-Erwos
I was reading a textbook about this very issue just a couple days ago at work (I was bored, and there it was in lost and found pile). Don't recall the name, but it was basically about biometrics for security purposes.
The book stated near the very beginning that, basically, passwords are useless because the really secure ones are hard to remember, and that little problem causes people to do other things that mostly destroy the security of a "secure" password anyways (such as the infamous post-it note on the monitor).
The book's solution was fairly common-sense: implement different layers of security. That is to say, a password on its own is bad, but a token+password (say, USB memory stick with accesss code) can actually be a lot better.
The best stated was "bio+token+password". Seems reasonable to me, at least.
-Erwos
Bulls-eye. The economy is bad in some places, but it's great in others. My fiance is fresh outta school with an MS in Mechanical Engineering, and she's gotten so many job offers it's mind-blowing. This is in the DC metropolitan area. I'm sure some small midwest towns have bigger troubles in this area.
.com boom.
Frankly, after seeing the kind of robbery that IT professionals did on venture capitalists back in 1997-1999, I could really care less that they're seeing a market correction. We all love to point to corporate misdoings as the root of all our problems, but let's not forget the kind of greed that IT had back in
-Erwos
"If Microsoft hired him he'd be working there."
That is your conjecture, and it's not at all supported by the article. The article talks about how Miguel lectured Microsoft about FOSS at his interview. If Miguel was working at Microsoft, it would seem to me that he'd only be doing it because he could write Free software.
-Erwos
"now he's reimplimenting their reimplimentation of Java"
You know, it's not like FOSS programmers just allot time to whatever the masses care about. They program to scratch their itches - and Java is obviously not Miguel's itch.
Don't view Mono as time taken away from kaffe/gcj/Parrot, because chances are, the time put into Mono wouldn't have gone into any of those.
-Erwos