Deliberately designed to crash. Very few people realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME (all closely related to each other) were designed to crash. Windows 95 was originally designed with a 64 kilobyte limitation on some resources that would have caused it to crash sooner than it does. Protests by knowledgeable people caused Microsoft to increase that artificial limit to 128 kilobytes. At that time, memory was very expensive. When memory became cheaper, and it became common that people would run more than one big program at the same time, crashing became extremely common. However, Microsoft did nothing to solve the problem. Therefore, it must be said that the crashing was deliberate.
"What you in for?" "Killed a guy. Why, what you in for?" "Drew a circle on the sidewalk, and some foreign phone company didn't like it" "Tough break!" "Tell me about it!"
Describing writing on the floor as theft is as inaccurate as describing people who copy programs as pirates. Both `theft` and `piracy` are old, well established words, so using them to describe different acts is counter-productive. I wonder if the industry would have had more success in preventing `software copying` (to give it it's correct term) if they had used more sensible terms?
"The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred over a year ago"
Whats so significant about a terrorist attack? Are they worse than actions sanctioned by (admittedly rather ignorant) voters?
An estimated 80,000,000 people have starved to death since last September, and people have the gall to sit around talking about Osama Bin Laden, Saddam etc. America made those people rich and powerful in the first place. Why were the warnings ignored? Gee - I really can't figure that one out. You`ll have to help me. Something about...making it easier to take control of their natural resources? Yeah, something like that.
"followed by a Holy War against Islam"
Thats not it. The religion is irrelevant.
"and now Israel and the Palestinians as well as India and Pakistan are teetering on the brink of their own war"
The India/Pakistan thing has quietened down. Israel has been at war with the Palestinians for ages, nothing significant is happening there right now. In fact, that situation is pretty quiet at the moment, and it is given plenty of attention in the UN. But yeah, you could try and get the US government to stop sending the bullies all those tanks and planes, that`d be nice.
"Argentina is in the midst of a financial crisis"
Fuck `em.
"America is considering launching attacks against Somalia and Iraq"
Somalia? Where did you hear that? I had heard about the planned attacks on Iraq, however - its been in one or two papers, if you look hard enough.
"and you people have the gall to be discussing the season premier of Enterprise???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!"
You mean your priorities? What have you done to obtain world peace? If you`re not doing anything, then you may as well watch/discuss star trek, for all the difference you`re making!
Yes, it was in 1984 when he first told the world that a film version was coming soon, and he was justing finishing off the script! It was on the front page of a (now long defunct) computer magazine.
Perhaps you aren't a very good coder either. I seem to remember taking a version of Llamatron which only worked on a 1 meg machine, and made it work on a half-meg machine. Took me 10 mins. He was obviously incapable of doing it. I put it to you that you are talking out of your arse.
I`m not sure why you think OTPs are so a) expensive and b) clumsy to use. The actual program to do the en/decryption can be written in VB in a few minutes - it's trivial.
A company wanting to use crack-proof encryption to convey 'a product design worth 100's of millions of dollars ' can surely afford to buy a PC to sit in a room, filling a hard disk with random data, and occasionally burning that data onto CDs in pairs. Check the disks are identical once burned (another cheesy VB program that'll take a few mins to write), physically take one of those disks to the location you`ll be emailing with encrypted data and you`re set!
"Does someone really want to dedicate a several million dollar machine for several years to break a 2^64 strength-cipher you used?"
Who knows? I don't know if someone is onto my (fictitious!) company with its valuable product designs. No-one knows except the people snooping around, and they aren't talking. Given that the cost of implementing a 100% uncrackable OTP are in the order of 0.000001% the cost of the product designs, who wants to get it wrong so they can find out?
"It's larger organizations like banks, companies, and governments that are exchanging large volumes of information that make the fattest, juiciest targets for analysis and they can't deploy OTP's for all of their needs, there's just too much data to do so."
Possibly. Then again, they have secure vans for collecting cash - surely its not beyond the realms of possibility to create a disk for each branch in a region each day/week, ship them around in the vans and use them.
It boils down to - do you really need to have the data 100% secure. If you don't, then of course don't do it. But if you even think you might do, then surely it makes sense to have the ability to do it in place, so you can use it if you need to.
"Mario Sunshine is a blast but not really that original"
Yeah...there are enough old bits of kit out there that you can get hold of for next to nothing - to say nothing of all the Mame/etc emulators - that I see no point in chasing after the latest consoles and their expensive software. First it was polygon count, now its how many more times the frame can be redrawn than the actual display can physically display those frames (180 frames per second! thats handy.).
What are the best 10 games, in terms of gameplay, which have been released in the last year or 2. When you`ve done that, perform a similar comparison with those of 10 years ago.
Of course, allowing Minter to spew his poorly coded nonsense on the Jaguar invoked the Curse of Minter, and assured an early grave for what was a promising console. I`ve looked through Minters code (68k assembly) and it's really not very good. I remember the very first instruction of his Robotron for the Amiga being wrong, (he wrote into $96(a0) but a0 was zero - I think he was after the DMA, but neglected to lea $dff000,a0).
It's showing how outdated faith in non-existant entities can retard businesses ability to make money, and how a government which tries to be all things to all people can be caught in the middle. I`d have thought that were obvious.
>separate secure mechanism by which to agree upon >the pad.
Meeting a friend in person. If you meet up with friends regularly, then this is not a problem.
> 1) truly random Lavarand. Webcam pointing out of your window mixed with lavarand mixed with the data taken from rips from each cd you play in your pc mixed with other `random` numbers from noddy programs mixed with bits and pieces from your swapfile mixed with digitized input from a PCI radio/tv tuner tuned into inter-station noise mixed with data from Numbers Stations. You could also use traditional encryption to encrypt this random noise... Really, its very easy to get random numbers.
Remember, if you`re XORing this stuff together, it doesn't matter if any given element is not random, as it will not make the resulting number less random.
2) only used one time No problemo.
3) as long as the data to be encrypted. See 1. You can leave that running and generate a few megs a day...you can burn as many CDs of it as you like.
"If you can already securely courier the data of the pads, in most cases it makes sense to just courier the data itself."
True in certain situations, but mostly you`ll want to communicate when you are not together physically. A few CDs of random numbers should last you a fair old while if you compress messages before encryption. Each message may only be a few k, so even 1 cd should last you months, if not years.
> storage of the pad itself
Could be anywhere. If its a CD then you could put the data as a bonus track on an audio CD. There are many storage devices available today, remember. USB non-volatile RAM, floppies, CDs, magnetic stripes on cards, files on PCs...
"Anybody who thinks highly critical data gets shuttled around on the public Internet has a lot to learn."
It is you who has a lot to learn. Unless you have a different definition of `highly critical data`. How do you think government departments all over the world communicate with each other? Online ordering (with credit card details)? Affairs behind partners backs? Credit card transactions over TCPIP?
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly I`d rather have a Simpsons movie.
Those aren't my eyeballs, buddy - back off!
IBM can do all the work related to getting the chip designed, fabbed, tested and at the right price, on schedule etc.
Apple can work out precisely which shade of blue the chip's plastic housing should be.
Deliberately designed to crash. Very few people realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME (all closely related to each other) were designed to crash. Windows 95 was originally designed with a 64 kilobyte limitation on some resources that would have caused it to crash sooner than it does. Protests by knowledgeable people caused Microsoft to increase that artificial limit to 128 kilobytes. At that time, memory was very expensive. When memory became cheaper, and it became common that people would run more than one big program at the same time, crashing became extremely common. However, Microsoft did nothing to solve the problem. Therefore, it must be said that the crashing was deliberate.
"What you in for?"
"Killed a guy. Why, what you in for?"
"Drew a circle on the sidewalk, and some foreign phone company didn't like it"
"Tough break!"
"Tell me about it!"
Describing writing on the floor as theft is as inaccurate as describing people who copy programs as pirates. Both `theft` and `piracy` are old, well established words, so using them to describe different acts is counter-productive. I wonder if the industry would have had more success in preventing `software copying` (to give it it's correct term) if they had used more sensible terms?
"The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred over a year ago"
Whats so significant about a terrorist attack? Are they worse than actions sanctioned by (admittedly rather ignorant) voters?
An estimated 80,000,000 people have starved to death since last September, and people have the gall to sit around talking about Osama Bin Laden, Saddam etc. America made those people rich and powerful in the first place. Why were the warnings ignored? Gee - I really can't figure that one out. You`ll have to help me. Something about...making it easier to take control of their natural resources? Yeah, something like that.
"followed by a Holy War against Islam"
Thats not it. The religion is irrelevant.
"and now Israel and the Palestinians as well as India and Pakistan are teetering on the brink of their own war"
The India/Pakistan thing has quietened down. Israel has been at war with the Palestinians for ages, nothing significant is happening there right now. In fact, that situation is pretty quiet at the moment, and it is given plenty of attention in the UN. But yeah, you could try and get the US government to stop sending the bullies all those tanks and planes, that`d be nice.
"Argentina is in the midst of a financial crisis"
Fuck `em.
"America is considering launching attacks against Somalia and Iraq"
Somalia? Where did you hear that? I had heard about the planned attacks on Iraq, however - its been in one or two papers, if you look hard enough.
"and you people have the gall to be discussing the season premier of Enterprise???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!"
You mean your priorities? What have you done to obtain world peace? If you`re not doing anything, then you may as well watch/discuss star trek, for all the difference you`re making!
"The parent is a quote from the book"
Really? Otherwise....why would we have posted it, given that its wednesday today?
"I'm sure he knows it's tuesday and not thursday."
Then why would he have put `thursday` and not either tuesday or wednesday?
"Besides, thursday is way funnier anyway."
yeah, thats why Adams is famous the world over, and the original poster is just some twat on Slashdot.
"I heard him talk about it once."
Yes, it was in 1984 when he first told the world that a film version was coming soon, and he was justing finishing off the script! It was on the front page of a (now long defunct) computer magazine.
Perhaps you aren't a very good coder either. I seem to remember taking a version of Llamatron which only worked on a 1 meg machine, and made it work on a half-meg machine. Took me 10 mins. He was obviously incapable of doing it.
I put it to you that you are talking out of your arse.
"but his game design skills are what earns him the die hard fans"
He wrote mostly ports and conversions from other platforms though!
"Then again, the only Defender I really enjoyed was on the Atari 2600. :^) That and Atari 2600 Stargate. "
I had that! It was good, but not as good as Defender/Planetoid on the BBC Micro. And obviously that wasn't as good as the arcade one (or Mame!)
Never really got into Stargate.
I`m not sure why you think OTPs are so a) expensive and b) clumsy to use.
The actual program to do the en/decryption can be written in VB in a few minutes - it's trivial.
A company wanting to use crack-proof encryption to convey 'a product design worth 100's of millions of dollars ' can surely afford to buy a PC to sit in a room, filling a hard disk with random data, and occasionally burning that data onto CDs in pairs. Check the disks are identical once burned (another cheesy VB program that'll take a few mins to write), physically take one of those disks to the location you`ll be emailing with encrypted data and you`re set!
"Does someone really want to dedicate a several million dollar machine for several years to break a 2^64 strength-cipher you used?"
Who knows? I don't know if someone is onto my (fictitious!) company with its valuable product designs. No-one knows except the people snooping around, and they aren't talking. Given that the cost of implementing a 100% uncrackable OTP are in the order of 0.000001% the cost of the product designs, who wants to get it wrong so they can find out?
"It's larger organizations like banks, companies, and governments that are exchanging large volumes of information that make the fattest, juiciest targets for analysis and they can't deploy OTP's for all of their needs, there's just too much data to do so."
Possibly. Then again, they have secure vans for collecting cash - surely its not beyond the realms of possibility to create a disk for each branch in a region each day/week, ship them around in the vans and use them.
It boils down to - do you really need to have the data 100% secure. If you don't, then of course don't do it. But if you even think you might do, then surely it makes sense to have the ability to do it in place, so you can use it if you need to.
Fair enough.
I didn't try his Defender 2k. Did he remember to put a hyperspace feature in? He forgot to add it to the Amiga version!
"Mario Sunshine is a blast but not really that original"
Yeah...there are enough old bits of kit out there that you can get hold of for next to nothing - to say nothing of all the Mame/etc emulators - that I see no point in chasing after the latest consoles and their expensive software. First it was polygon count, now its how many more times the frame can be redrawn than the actual display can physically display those frames (180 frames per second! thats handy.).
What are the best 10 games, in terms of gameplay, which have been released in the last year or 2. When you`ve done that, perform a similar comparison with those of 10 years ago.
Of course, allowing Minter to spew his poorly coded nonsense on the Jaguar invoked the Curse of Minter, and assured an early grave for what was a promising console. I`ve looked through Minters code (68k assembly) and it's really not very good. I remember the very first instruction of his Robotron for the Amiga being wrong, (he wrote into $96(a0) but a0 was zero - I think he was after the DMA, but neglected to lea $dff000,a0).
It's definitely a girl, and not a volt-meter or something?
"This only works in countries that have legitimate elections though."
And where the population is intelligent enough to know how to punch a hole in a piece of paper with a hole punching machine.
It's showing how outdated faith in non-existant entities can retard businesses ability to make money, and how a government which tries to be all things to all people can be caught in the middle. I`d have thought that were obvious.
>separate secure mechanism by which to agree upon
>the pad.
Meeting a friend in person. If you meet up with friends regularly, then this is not a problem.
> 1) truly random
Lavarand. Webcam pointing out of your window mixed with lavarand mixed with the data taken from rips from each cd you play in your pc mixed with other `random` numbers from noddy programs mixed with bits and pieces from your swapfile mixed with digitized input from a PCI radio/tv tuner tuned into inter-station noise mixed with data from Numbers Stations. You could also use traditional encryption to encrypt this random noise... Really, its very easy to get random numbers.
Remember, if you`re XORing this stuff together, it doesn't matter if any given element is not random, as it will not make the resulting number less random.
2) only used one time
No problemo.
3) as long as the data to be encrypted.
See 1. You can leave that running and generate a few megs a day...you can burn as many CDs of it as you like.
"If you can already securely courier the data of the pads, in most cases it makes sense to just courier the data itself."
True in certain situations, but mostly you`ll want to communicate when you are not together physically. A few CDs of random numbers should last you a fair old while if you compress messages before encryption. Each message may only be a few k, so even 1 cd should last you months, if not years.
> storage of the pad itself
Could be anywhere. If its a CD then you could put the data as a bonus track on an audio CD. There are many storage devices available today, remember. USB non-volatile RAM, floppies, CDs, magnetic stripes on cards, files on PCs...
"Anybody who thinks highly critical data gets shuttled around on the public Internet has a lot to learn."
It is you who has a lot to learn. Unless you have a different definition of `highly critical data`. How do you think government departments all over the world communicate with each other? Online ordering (with credit card details)? Affairs behind partners backs? Credit card transactions over TCPIP?