If you're methodically iterating through every combination of every printable character in the ASCII table, sure.
But my understanding is that crackers take advantage of simplisitc, dictionary-based passwords by first trying out obvious dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words first, which is much much faster even though this will result in longer passwords (as there are fewer combinations to try).
You could move to Solaris and run AutoCAD for Solaris; otherwise This article about running the Windows version under Linux looks useful.
The CAD applications I'm familiar with are all related to electronic engineering... Cadence, Mentor, OrCAD, EAGLE, etc. Some of these have Solaris versions without a Linux option, some have both. I'm sure there are good generic CAD programs out there for Linux, but I haven't used any.
I usually hate open source because it is anti-capitalist,
Unlike the self-protected multi-national mega-corp pseudo-monopolies? Hah!
Personally, I find Open Source is ideologically as capitalist as it gets. Freedom, free trade, equal opportunities. Let the best product win.
I don't want to be forced to pay pezzo to the mafia just so I can do business.
Commercial software companies have the potential to be much better technology leaders than open source hippies. However, once things become main-stream commodoty items (such as operating system, web servers, programming environments, portals, databases, browsers..), it goes open source - just because of the shear nature of the thing: the market finds equilibrium like this. Forcefully restricting open source would upset that balance and unfairly disadvantage people and deny them opportunity.
And no, I'm not an RMS wannabe. Personally, I spend thousands on commercial software, for things that just wouldn't work as Free (as in Libre) Open Source because the apps I need are rather specialised by comparison (PCB CAD software, FPGA synthesis software (although I'm playing with confluence, a FLOSS project;-), and VMWare).
A Debian GNU/Linux user that actually pays money for closed-source commercial software. And I don't believe I'm alone.
Your lack of understanding about the world stage and the UAE's role is astounding.
That you actually believe what you said is incredibly depressing.
Try and do some research before painting every arab nation with the same brush.
Trying to do business with the UAE invoked some shred of respect for Bush with me, even if it was hilarious that his "war on terror" campaign backfired on him with reactions like yours.
I'm not from the US, but I thought there was something about unreasonable searches.
Anyway, the point of privacy is that you don't trust the government.
You don't trust the government because you don't want to become a victim, either from the government looking for trouble ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy ) or they're incompetent (assuming irrelevant or falsified facts are as good as evidence for some random accusation).
It's not quite as clear-cut as you make it out to be. The people purchasing this stuff aren't retards, they've bought fighter jets before - they know how complicated it can be to get at "trade secrets", especially military ones.
The details are murky, but the impression I get is that they expected access to software to begin with but were later denied when it actually came to needing it futher down the track.
There are a number of lessons to be learnt from the experience of industry involvement in the F/A-18 program...
... A further significant hangover from the F/A-18A program was caused by the unsatisfactory handling of technology transfer and of intellectual property. Australia had expectations that, as a consequence of our large capital outlay, significant technology relating to manufacture and support of the aircraft would be transferred to Australia and access would be granted to software source code. Australia's expectations were not met, although when considered against our ability to usefully exploit the software code they may have been unrealistically high. Perhaps the core of the software issue was our lack of access to the source code needed for a full understanding of the aircraft radar, and an inability to reprogram the electronic warfare system in accordance with Australian requirements.
Countries generally want to be self-sufficient, or at least don't want to be trapped into being dependant on others.
Also important is that instead of the government allowing native defense contractors to take on upgrade projects, we are forced into using (expensive) US ones. So that expense goes into a black-hole, it doesn't stimulate our own economy or develop our own aviation industry.
This is not comparable to desktop software at all.
It is inconceivable that a country would buy combat aircraft and expect to use its stock-standard factory installed avionics, weapons systems, sensors, etc. unmodified for 25 years.
Australia has been burnt badly in the past cost-wise with the F-111 and F/A-18 hornets with respect to the USA failing to even think about the transfer of necessary intellectual property that would allow our own contractors to take on upgrade projects.
Instead, we had to use expensive US defense contractors (Boeing? Honeywell? Raytheon? I forget).
AFAICT the F-111 turned out to be a nice plane, but keeping it and the hornets up-to-date could have been MUCH cheaper if the USA weren't arseholes about it all.
You are spot on with your observations with patents. It's crazy. The US side wanted something in return for thinking about letting us do "free" trade with them (but it's still a bit weird - e.g., IIRC the beef import tarriffs would be applied if we export more than a certain quota because of a provision that won't allow the US beef industry to see a reduction in size).
are there any large Aus-based software companies - Anyone, anyone?
Mincom is probably the biggest. Of Australia's home-grown companies, it has the highest CMM rating and I think it's only level 2 or 3.
There are of course Motorola, IBM Global Services, Accenture, etc. operations here, but Mincom is probably the biggest Australian-owned company we have.
Bottleneck? How is a multi-gigahertz CPU with tens of gigabits of I/O to the chipset and gobs of gigaBYTES of memory I/O going to be a bottleneck?
I have experience developing real-time image processing that involved an FPGA running on a USB port with Windows XP.
The real trouble is that general-purpose desktop/server operating systems are terrible at giving consistent performance to the critical paths in your code. You really do need a dedicated RTOS for this type of stuff.
USB is annoying because it requires a lot of attention from the CPU to keep maintaining it. If your computer is already busy and your virus-scanner on friday night kicks in with fastfind and a whole slew of applications phoning home for their auto-update features, it can happen that your thread goes for dozens of miliseconds without being serviced.
But, you already knew that.
Even if IOS is running on a MIPS CPU, they've written the IOS around networking, rather than thrown a networking app onto a random host OS with all the background noise and 2nd-hand software interrupt schemes propagating through API layers via IPC...
What am I getting at... well, you are right that "bandwidth" isn't the bottleneck here - and your original point is interesting, but the real problem with PC architecture + generic OS vs custom hardware + specialised OS is the real-time, latency-related issues:)
I was under the impression Telcos can check that the CID being reported is actually allocated to that line or at least within the range of numbers that belong to that trunk (say, on an ISDN PRI).
I thought that here in Australia (with Telstra at least), a badly configured CID would not get passed onto the called party...
Because children are taught from day one to leech off their parents.
I still don't see what this has to do with the issue at hand.
25 years old and living with his parents.
Actually, the very first sentence says
In the six hours between crashing into bed and rolling out of it, the 21-year-old hacker...
Yeah, he should really be thinking about moving out by now. But I don't think living with his parents is the huge problem you're making it out to be. That said, I essentially agree with everything you say about living with your parents for too long.
Did I say anything to the contrary? No. All I'm saying is that it's too easy for well-off folks to write off people like this without really appreciating the environment they've grown up in that has probably caused their apathetic disposition.
If this kid had grown up in a different town, things might have been different. Does that make him a blameless victim? Of course not.
What I was getting at is that the problem is much bigger than just this kid living at home with his parents. It's bigger than just this kid. You can choose to simplify it if you want, but that's also "ignorant".
You're just shooting messenger here.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think I used overly agressive "shooting" language, and if you can arbitrarily lable yourself as a "messenger" then what is stopping me from doing the same?
Re:What's so great aobut the location
on
Space Tourism from UAE
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you're over-estimating the "importance" of this space-port. They are unbelievably wealthy: $300 million or whatever it is costing is bugger-all to them.
It's not like they're hinging their future success on this space-port, the Emirates have invested in countless schemes which have failed miserably in the past - this one is not special, and it's not going to hurt them if it fails as well.
I'm sure they already have a very diverse portfolio as it is.
I'm not an expert on UAE culture, I just have relatives that lived over there for a few years.
It seems they like taking risks and would prefer to do interesting things with their money rather than horde it all.
And the Emirates already do have a lot of overseas investment in the countries you have mentioned, and then some.
But from what I can gather, they want to develop their own country and create sustainable industries for their people within their own borders that doesn't depend on oil.
But in the future, when the Gulf has less income, due to less oil, won't their economies die? I have a hard time seeing them sustaining anything once the lifeblood of their economy is exhausted.
Exactly.
The royal families in the UAE know that their oil won't last forever.
Although they have a habit of blowing their billions on outrageously trivial endeavours and decadence in general, they are also investing their wealth into as many non-oil enterprises as possible so that they have a future beyond fossil fuels.
I don't know how the American Military is going to feel about a potential space borne weapon being located in the Middle East, even without explosives the kinetic energy from 100km is more than enough to cause a lot of damage in a populated area.
It may interest you to know that the UAE is quite friendly towards western nations, and still has the respect of more hostile middle eastern countries.
I know that Australia has significant diplomatic and strategic interests there (as long as the UAE wants them around), I'm pretty sure the USA already does as well.
The guy is still living with his parents and he buys a new laptop? Hasn't the guy heard of priorities?
What are you getting at? That he should move out of home? That's your priority, but why do you think it has to be everybody's? We don't know this character or his circumstances. Who says he isn't paying his parents rent/board? What's wrong with that?
He's also a high school dropout (read: shot himself in the foot in terms of getting a -real- job).
This is true. But we all make mistakes. What's your point?
Two minutes? Ever heard the saying 'idle hands are the works of the devil?'
He spends his time creating new viruses, finding new exploits for himself and his friends, covering his tracks, seeking out new zombie PCs or at least creating the tools to do so. I highly doubt this work is also completed in his daily 2 minute routine.
No fucking wonder he can't get a decent job.
So, it's that simple is it? You have all the answers?
You think if he just buckled up and tried harder at school he'd get something better than a meaningless dead-end job in his home-town (forget about even landing a job that paid the same!)?
Life isn't that fair. Granted, people of real inspiration can work their way up from nothing with honesty and integrity. They make good books and movies.
For the rest of these mediocre people living in small towns with few opportunities, the apathy is infectious.
Sounds like he's painted as someone in an economically depressed area with few opportunities, using his skills to make a lot of money for himself.
Which would be the same as with a lot of criminal activities, it seems.
By the end of TFA he's wondering why he hasn't been caught yet, waiting for his little game to blow up in his face. Then talking about joining the Army so he can get into college and make a sustainable future for himself.
Sorry, I don't hate Americans like you, I don't even hate the ones who voted Bush in the second time - it's not necessarily their fault elections are run the way they are, that the propaganda system is so effective, or that the competition to Bush was hopeless, or whatever it was that made things turn out the way it did.
I do, in fact, try to give anonymous individuals I have never met the benefit of the doubt.
"Every nation has the government it deserves" - google search says Joseph de Maitre said that, hmm. Anyway, I cannot pretend that my own or really any other country is perfect, there is always lies and deception. Overall, I find politics hopelessly depressing, I like to stick to solving smaller problems within my reach:/
That's not the computer. That's your LISP programming language that you use to program the computer.
Ah, no my friend - firstly there is no computer involved at all, just an FPGA chip. I could wire up the contents of the FPGA chip to mimic a CPU and a full System on a Chip, complete with ethernet and audio and VGA sub-systems if I like..
Confluence was but one HDL (Hardware Description Language) I experimented with to write EPXRESSIVE code. There was only sequentiality because I wired the clocks up that way.
It's truly WYSIWYG: "That's your LISP programming language", yes it is - it also translates directly, every statement, into dedicated hardware. There is no assembly language, no smaller instructions it gets broken down into, no OP codes, no nothing - it just gets hard-wired into dedicated logic that way.
Your FPGAs are still algorithmic, they do things sequentially, one thing per clock cycle.
FPGAs are a bit of a specialty field, but you do not understand them.
There is no "central" anything on an FPGA. None at all. They certainly don't do just one thing per clock cycle: for starters, they can have thousands of clock circuits all running at once. Secondly, if it's only doing one thing per clock cycle, then that's only because you've wired it up that way - and you're probably not using the FPGA efficiently.
The key to getting the maximum work out of an FPGA is parallelism... creating logic that will process as much as possible per clock cycle, but with keeping the complexity down so that the clock speed itself doesn't slow down so much so as to work against you...
You are saying nothing "ever" happens all at once when talking about throwing sets of numbers at something: but I say, with FPGA and HDLs like Confluence, you can actually write functional code that translates - line by line - into physical hardware that will evaluate everything in parallel, all at once.
Handel-C, for instance (although not functional) will translate every line of code into physical hardware. Doing i++;? It will create adder logic, wire up registers for input from the previous statement and output onto the next (it's a bad example that implies FPGAs have a concept of "execution" like a CPU that you're clinging to, I just wanted to talk about the dedicated-hardware-for-every-statement thing).
On an FPGA, it's all happening at once. There is no such thing as a CPU unless you create one. There are no bottle-necks unless you create one.
That's why when one of my projects in image processing, my FPGA whose master clock ran at 65MHz (other speeds were derived from this clock to drive complex logic down to speeds of about 4MHz) out-performed a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 by a factor of 10. Because where as the P4 was too general, my FPGA design could do in just one clock cycle something that took the P4 1000s of cycles because my FPGA logic was dedicated to the task.
DSP and Control Systems theory also requires a good understanding of higher mathematics, although now we're entering the realm of EE which is my background... functional programming certainly is extremely useful in FPGA design if you have a problem that can be expressed functionally, which is often the case in electronics.
And think about it: designing FPGA logic is much like building larger "macro" circuits with off-the-shelf chips. Each small part serves a specific "black-box" function. Unlike specs in software, specs in electronic engineering often are mathematical, where signals require some sort of transformation - somtimes in the time domain, sometimes in frequency domain, sometimes complex-S...
I'm not disagreeing with your overall argument, just saying that you need to open your mind a bit - "never" is a very strong word:-)
As a non-USian, I'm sure I speak the sentiments many others have by saying it wouldn't be nearly as frustating, nearly as fucking annoying if only the USA would stop prancing about with all its self-congratulating double-speak and admit it's just greedy/doesn't care just like everybody else, PICK A SIN AND RUN WITH IT ALREADY.
As if the phrase "Opeartion Iraqi Freedom" (yes, Iraqis gained some freedoms, but at the expense of others) wasn't bad enough, they actually had the nerve to go and mock real people's blood and guts with it.
It does one thing, then another. No computer has ever worked functionally, and no computer ever will.
That's a bit short-sighted, speaking as someone converting imperative ISO-C code into FPGA logic.
I was working with Confluence (write [functional!] Scheme-ish code, out pops massive RTL netlists for your FPGA to re-wire its logic with), but it seems the project has taken a sharp turn towards Ocaml...
FPGAs are fascinating things... and yes, if you express a function that evaluates (at "compile" time) as recursing 15-deep, it can replicate that function 15 times so that it all happens in one clock cycle (or to save chip space you can rig it up to take 15 cycles on just one instance of the logic, with an accumulator/FIFO idea).
I wish I could get a permenant job working with them.
Well, back to hacking x86 assembly on a 15 year old 16-bit MS-DOS app:-(
"Midicholorion" is based on the real cellular biology term "Mitochondrion", but you probably already knew that.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midichlorian The word "midi-chlorian" appears to be a blend of "mitochondrion" and "chloroplast", two organelles found in real cells and thought to have evolved from bacteria as endosymbionts inside other cells, as purported in the endosymbiotic theory. Lucas has indeed stated that the midi-chlorians are based on the endosymbiotic theory, and it appears that in the story of Anakin Skywalker, he wanted to create a more modern "virgin birth" in the Star Wars saga that was as much based in science as in philosophy and religion, with the mythic "givers of life" being microscopic lifeforms, rather than gods.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're methodically iterating through every combination of every printable character in the ASCII table, sure.
But my understanding is that crackers take advantage of simplisitc, dictionary-based passwords by first trying out obvious dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words first, which is much much faster even though this will result in longer passwords (as there are fewer combinations to try).
You could move to Solaris and run AutoCAD for Solaris; otherwise This article about running the Windows version under Linux looks useful.
The CAD applications I'm familiar with are all related to electronic engineering... Cadence, Mentor, OrCAD, EAGLE, etc. Some of these have Solaris versions without a Linux option, some have both. I'm sure there are good generic CAD programs out there for Linux, but I haven't used any.
This link looks useful.
Most high-end CAD products that matter run on Solaris. It hasn't been until the last few years that they mostly have a Linux option, which is nice.
I usually hate open source because it is anti-capitalist,
;-), and VMWare).
Unlike the self-protected multi-national mega-corp pseudo-monopolies? Hah!
Personally, I find Open Source is ideologically as capitalist as it gets. Freedom, free trade, equal opportunities. Let the best product win.
I don't want to be forced to pay pezzo to the mafia just so I can do business.
Commercial software companies have the potential to be much better technology leaders than open source hippies. However, once things become main-stream commodoty items (such as operating system, web servers, programming environments, portals, databases, browsers..), it goes open source - just because of the shear nature of the thing: the market finds equilibrium like this. Forcefully restricting open source would upset that balance and unfairly disadvantage people and deny them opportunity.
And no, I'm not an RMS wannabe. Personally, I spend thousands on commercial software, for things that just wouldn't work as Free (as in Libre) Open Source because the apps I need are rather specialised by comparison (PCB CAD software, FPGA synthesis software (although I'm playing with confluence, a FLOSS project
A Debian GNU/Linux user that actually pays money for closed-source commercial software. And I don't believe I'm alone.
being sold to nations with ties to terrorism: OK.
Your lack of understanding about the world stage and the UAE's role is astounding.
That you actually believe what you said is incredibly depressing.
Try and do some research before painting every arab nation with the same brush.
Trying to do business with the UAE invoked some shred of respect for Bush with me, even if it was hilarious that his "war on terror" campaign backfired on him with reactions like yours.
I'm not from the US, but I thought there was something about unreasonable searches.
Anyway, the point of privacy is that you don't trust the government.
You don't trust the government because you don't want to become a victim, either from the government looking for trouble ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy ) or they're incompetent (assuming irrelevant or falsified facts are as good as evidence for some random accusation).
"Trust us" doesn't work for me.
It's not quite as clear-cut as you make it out to be. The people purchasing this stuff aren't retards, they've bought fighter jets before - they know how complicated it can be to get at "trade secrets", especially military ones.
The details are murky, but the impression I get is that they expected access to software to begin with but were later denied when it actually came to needing it futher down the track.
Can't find a good article right now, see There are a number of lessons to be learnt from the experience of industry involvement in the F/A-18 program.
Wrong, Australia was burnt with both the F/A-18 Hornet and F-111.
A Big Deal: Australia's air combat capability:
Countries generally want to be self-sufficient, or at least don't want to be trapped into being dependant on others.
Also important is that instead of the government allowing native defense contractors to take on upgrade projects, we are forced into using (expensive) US ones. So that expense goes into a black-hole, it doesn't stimulate our own economy or develop our own aviation industry.
This is not comparable to desktop software at all.
Aircraft have lifespans measured in decades.
It is inconceivable that a country would buy combat aircraft and expect to use its stock-standard factory installed avionics, weapons systems, sensors, etc. unmodified for 25 years.
Australia has been burnt badly in the past cost-wise with the F-111 and F/A-18 hornets with respect to the USA failing to even think about the transfer of necessary intellectual property that would allow our own contractors to take on upgrade projects.
Instead, we had to use expensive US defense contractors (Boeing? Honeywell? Raytheon? I forget).
AFAICT the F-111 turned out to be a nice plane, but keeping it and the hornets up-to-date could have been MUCH cheaper if the USA weren't arseholes about it all.
You are spot on with your observations with patents. It's crazy. The US side wanted something in return for thinking about letting us do "free" trade with them (but it's still a bit weird - e.g., IIRC the beef import tarriffs would be applied if we export more than a certain quota because of a provision that won't allow the US beef industry to see a reduction in size).
are there any large Aus-based software companies - Anyone, anyone?
Mincom is probably the biggest. Of Australia's home-grown companies, it has the highest CMM rating and I think it's only level 2 or 3.
There are of course Motorola, IBM Global Services, Accenture, etc. operations here, but Mincom is probably the biggest Australian-owned company we have.
Bottleneck? How is a multi-gigahertz CPU with tens of gigabits of I/O to the chipset and gobs of gigaBYTES of memory I/O going to be a bottleneck?
:)
I have experience developing real-time image processing that involved an FPGA running on a USB port with Windows XP.
The real trouble is that general-purpose desktop/server operating systems are terrible at giving consistent performance to the critical paths in your code. You really do need a dedicated RTOS for this type of stuff.
USB is annoying because it requires a lot of attention from the CPU to keep maintaining it. If your computer is already busy and your virus-scanner on friday night kicks in with fastfind and a whole slew of applications phoning home for their auto-update features, it can happen that your thread goes for dozens of miliseconds without being serviced.
But, you already knew that.
Even if IOS is running on a MIPS CPU, they've written the IOS around networking, rather than thrown a networking app onto a random host OS with all the background noise and 2nd-hand software interrupt schemes propagating through API layers via IPC...
What am I getting at... well, you are right that "bandwidth" isn't the bottleneck here - and your original point is interesting, but the real problem with PC architecture + generic OS vs custom hardware + specialised OS is the real-time, latency-related issues
I was under the impression Telcos can check that the CID being reported is actually allocated to that line or at least within the range of numbers that belong to that trunk (say, on an ISDN PRI).
I thought that here in Australia (with Telstra at least), a badly configured CID would not get passed onto the called party...
amusing link in your sig btw :-)
I still don't see what this has to do with the issue at hand.
25 years old and living with his parents.
Actually, the very first sentence says
Yeah, he should really be thinking about moving out by now. But I don't think living with his parents is the huge problem you're making it out to be. That said, I essentially agree with everything you say about living with your parents for too long.
Employers don't want uneducated, unmotivated, unproven kids.
Did I say anything to the contrary? No. All I'm saying is that it's too easy for well-off folks to write off people like this without really appreciating the environment they've grown up in that has probably caused their apathetic disposition.
If this kid had grown up in a different town, things might have been different. Does that make him a blameless victim? Of course not.
What I was getting at is that the problem is much bigger than just this kid living at home with his parents. It's bigger than just this kid. You can choose to simplify it if you want, but that's also "ignorant".
You're just shooting messenger here.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think I used overly agressive "shooting" language, and if you can arbitrarily lable yourself as a "messenger" then what is stopping me from doing the same?
I think you're over-estimating the "importance" of this space-port. They are unbelievably wealthy: $300 million or whatever it is costing is bugger-all to them.
It's not like they're hinging their future success on this space-port, the Emirates have invested in countless schemes which have failed miserably in the past - this one is not special, and it's not going to hurt them if it fails as well.
I'm sure they already have a very diverse portfolio as it is.
I'm not an expert on UAE culture, I just have relatives that lived over there for a few years.
It seems they like taking risks and would prefer to do interesting things with their money rather than horde it all.
And the Emirates already do have a lot of overseas investment in the countries you have mentioned, and then some.
But from what I can gather, they want to develop their own country and create sustainable industries for their people within their own borders that doesn't depend on oil.
But in the future, when the Gulf has less income, due to less oil, won't their economies die? I have a hard time seeing them sustaining anything once the lifeblood of their economy is exhausted.
Exactly.
The royal families in the UAE know that their oil won't last forever.
Although they have a habit of blowing their billions on outrageously trivial endeavours and decadence in general, they are also investing their wealth into as many non-oil enterprises as possible so that they have a future beyond fossil fuels.
This is what you're seeing here.
I don't know how the American Military is going to feel about a potential space borne weapon being located in the Middle East, even without explosives the kinetic energy from 100km is more than enough to cause a lot of damage in a populated area.
It may interest you to know that the UAE is quite friendly towards western nations, and still has the respect of more hostile middle eastern countries.
I know that Australia has significant diplomatic and strategic interests there (as long as the UAE wants them around), I'm pretty sure the USA already does as well.
The guy is still living with his parents and he buys a new laptop? Hasn't the guy heard of priorities?
What are you getting at? That he should move out of home? That's your priority, but why do you think it has to be everybody's? We don't know this character or his circumstances. Who says he isn't paying his parents rent/board? What's wrong with that?
He's also a high school dropout (read: shot himself in the foot in terms of getting a -real- job).
This is true. But we all make mistakes. What's your point?
Two minutes? Ever heard the saying 'idle hands are the works of the devil?'
He spends his time creating new viruses, finding new exploits for himself and his friends, covering his tracks, seeking out new zombie PCs or at least creating the tools to do so. I highly doubt this work is also completed in his daily 2 minute routine.
No fucking wonder he can't get a decent job.
So, it's that simple is it? You have all the answers?
You think if he just buckled up and tried harder at school he'd get something better than a meaningless dead-end job in his home-town (forget about even landing a job that paid the same!)?
Life isn't that fair. Granted, people of real inspiration can work their way up from nothing with honesty and integrity. They make good books and movies.
For the rest of these mediocre people living in small towns with few opportunities, the apathy is infectious.
Sounds like he's painted as someone in an economically depressed area with few opportunities, using his skills to make a lot of money for himself.
Which would be the same as with a lot of criminal activities, it seems.
By the end of TFA he's wondering why he hasn't been caught yet, waiting for his little game to blow up in his face. Then talking about joining the Army so he can get into college and make a sustainable future for himself.
Interesting perspective. Not a bad article.
Speaking as someone living in Brisbane, I just bought a pack of 3 compact fluro bulbs for $12.
Try KMart.
Sorry, I don't hate Americans like you, I don't even hate the ones who voted Bush in the second time - it's not necessarily their fault elections are run the way they are, that the propaganda system is so effective, or that the competition to Bush was hopeless, or whatever it was that made things turn out the way it did.
:/
I do, in fact, try to give anonymous individuals I have never met the benefit of the doubt.
"Every nation has the government it deserves" - google search says Joseph de Maitre said that, hmm. Anyway, I cannot pretend that my own or really any other country is perfect, there is always lies and deception. Overall, I find politics hopelessly depressing, I like to stick to solving smaller problems within my reach
That's not the computer. That's your LISP programming language that you use to program the computer.
:-)
Ah, no my friend - firstly there is no computer involved at all, just an FPGA chip. I could wire up the contents of the FPGA chip to mimic a CPU and a full System on a Chip, complete with ethernet and audio and VGA sub-systems if I like..
Confluence was but one HDL (Hardware Description Language) I experimented with to write EPXRESSIVE code. There was only sequentiality because I wired the clocks up that way.
It's truly WYSIWYG: "That's your LISP programming language", yes it is - it also translates directly, every statement, into dedicated hardware. There is no assembly language, no smaller instructions it gets broken down into, no OP codes, no nothing - it just gets hard-wired into dedicated logic that way.
Your FPGAs are still algorithmic, they do things sequentially, one thing per clock cycle.
FPGAs are a bit of a specialty field, but you do not understand them.
There is no "central" anything on an FPGA. None at all. They certainly don't do just one thing per clock cycle: for starters, they can have thousands of clock circuits all running at once. Secondly, if it's only doing one thing per clock cycle, then that's only because you've wired it up that way - and you're probably not using the FPGA efficiently.
The key to getting the maximum work out of an FPGA is parallelism... creating logic that will process as much as possible per clock cycle, but with keeping the complexity down so that the clock speed itself doesn't slow down so much so as to work against you...
You are saying nothing "ever" happens all at once when talking about throwing sets of numbers at something: but I say, with FPGA and HDLs like Confluence, you can actually write functional code that translates - line by line - into physical hardware that will evaluate everything in parallel, all at once.
Handel-C, for instance (although not functional) will translate every line of code into physical hardware. Doing i++;? It will create adder logic, wire up registers for input from the previous statement and output onto the next (it's a bad example that implies FPGAs have a concept of "execution" like a CPU that you're clinging to, I just wanted to talk about the dedicated-hardware-for-every-statement thing).
On an FPGA, it's all happening at once. There is no such thing as a CPU unless you create one. There are no bottle-necks unless you create one.
That's why when one of my projects in image processing, my FPGA whose master clock ran at 65MHz (other speeds were derived from this clock to drive complex logic down to speeds of about 4MHz) out-performed a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 by a factor of 10. Because where as the P4 was too general, my FPGA design could do in just one clock cycle something that took the P4 1000s of cycles because my FPGA logic was dedicated to the task.
DSP and Control Systems theory also requires a good understanding of higher mathematics, although now we're entering the realm of EE which is my background... functional programming certainly is extremely useful in FPGA design if you have a problem that can be expressed functionally, which is often the case in electronics.
And think about it: designing FPGA logic is much like building larger "macro" circuits with off-the-shelf chips. Each small part serves a specific "black-box" function. Unlike specs in software, specs in electronic engineering often are mathematical, where signals require some sort of transformation - somtimes in the time domain, sometimes in frequency domain, sometimes complex-S...
I'm not disagreeing with your overall argument, just saying that you need to open your mind a bit - "never" is a very strong word
As a non-USian, I'm sure I speak the sentiments many others have by saying it wouldn't be nearly as frustating, nearly as fucking annoying if only the USA would stop prancing about with all its self-congratulating double-speak and admit it's just greedy/doesn't care just like everybody else, PICK A SIN AND RUN WITH IT ALREADY.
As if the phrase "Opeartion Iraqi Freedom" (yes, Iraqis gained some freedoms, but at the expense of others) wasn't bad enough, they actually had the nerve to go and mock real people's blood and guts with it.
It does one thing, then another. No computer has ever worked functionally, and no computer ever will.
:-(
That's a bit short-sighted, speaking as someone converting imperative ISO-C code into FPGA logic.
I was working with Confluence (write [functional!] Scheme-ish code, out pops massive RTL netlists for your FPGA to re-wire its logic with), but it seems the project has taken a sharp turn towards Ocaml...
FPGAs are fascinating things... and yes, if you express a function that evaluates (at "compile" time) as recursing 15-deep, it can replicate that function 15 times so that it all happens in one clock cycle (or to save chip space you can rig it up to take 15 cycles on just one instance of the logic, with an accumulator/FIFO idea).
I wish I could get a permenant job working with them.
Well, back to hacking x86 assembly on a 15 year old 16-bit MS-DOS app
"Midicholorion" is based on the real cellular biology term "Mitochondrion", but you probably already knew that.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midichlorian
The word "midi-chlorian" appears to be a blend of "mitochondrion" and "chloroplast", two organelles found in real cells and thought to have evolved from bacteria as endosymbionts inside other cells, as purported in the endosymbiotic theory. Lucas has indeed stated that the midi-chlorians are based on the endosymbiotic theory, and it appears that in the story of Anakin Skywalker, he wanted to create a more modern "virgin birth" in the Star Wars saga that was as much based in science as in philosophy and religion, with the mythic "givers of life" being microscopic lifeforms, rather than gods.
More at BBSpot: Lucas Confirms Midichlorian Inquiry