Exactly. And what's more, there ARE people who run standalone systems that are not web servers or database servers or something else. And if you are sensible enough not to click on random exe's and stuff like that, Win98 is actually pretty ideal for a home computer.
Any Win* that came later was definitely slower than Win98. And none of them, imho, provide radically easier ways of doing things.
How does this AAC or WMA format keep you from getting at the music? I mean, it might be protected by some key or something, but it finally has to be decrypted on your computer, so I don't see how you can't do it yourself.
Yes, I do remember not being able to play some WMA files some time but I don't have any idea how they do it. Anyone know the details?
How do these three services ensure copyright protection? I mean, what technology? Just because they encrypt stuff doesnt mean that it's safe - someone has to decrypt it somewhere before sending it to the sound card, and what's more, this is your computer, so you can figure out where that's done. So how do they ensure you don't pick out the audio data and then use it as you like?
Or is it simply protection by obfuscation? No one knows how the code goes and so no one tries to break it? So we all have to wait for some midnight hacker to come along and destroy all these services...
I had this idea that without special hardware support, there was no way anyone could keep some content that was ultimately on my machine safe from me. This thing seems to go against that belief. Or am I missing something straight in front of me?
You got it. But there's more, the book has an epilogue kinda thing where Forsyth takes the pulpit and talks about how the powers-in-charge thought electronic surveillance was enough humint couldn't be done without.
ya! a real tragedy!
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It is especially tragic because of the nature of spy work - all those technical guys who could innovate while working under defense departments and who could not tell anybody about what they had done. Especially considering the acclaim that they would have earned in conventional academic circles.
Off topic, but there's this debate about whether human intelligence is better or whether tech surveillance like listening to radio traffic or say flying reconnaisance flights, is more useful. The latest war in Iraq is, in my opinion, a fine example. No one had an accurate picture of what it was like inside Iraq. Frederick Forsyth ends his The Fist of God with the hypothesis that humint can never outdo tehnical intelligence. any views on this?
The number of bits in the key is not the issue. In fact, most secure protocols like SSL use a decent size so that brute forcing is not worthwhile.
The point actually is that any theoretical construct like a cryptographic scheme or a TCP protocol needs practical implementation in code. And this is where the bugs creep in. And with things like Microsoft, those bugs are as common as snow in Greenland. And so all these hackers/crackers out there working their fingers on their keyboards and peering into bright screens into the fading night can 'hack' Palladium.
Microsoft has taken on itself to make errors wherever possible and remain as human as any one of us. Trust them to repeat their humanity and come up with enough holes in their Palladium implementation to let most hacks through.
That Java is interpreted is bad enough compared to compiled languages like C. Just imagine the situation within a loop - suppose there is an access of a class' data member. The interpreter / JVM reads in this instruction, parses it and executes it within its own space. Imagine on the other hand what compiled code would do - the class.value thing would be traslated directly to a memory address. And loading code is done by the processor. Everything is some orders of magnitude faster. And this whole thing is in a loop that might run a zillion times. I know most people around know this, but I was trying to describe it in its full glory so that the optimisations that all these posts are discussing look powerless.
So optimisation for Java will, most probably, not do much. But still, it makes sense to make it as fast as it can get. In this context, it has to be pointed out that the development of faster and faster C compilers was spurred on by a lot of academic research. That was the time when those things were still new and hot. Now, I doubt if that magnitude of research goes into JVM & javac optimisation.
The question that they have to answer is not that of reliability, imho. What they have to say is why non-living chemical substrates do not develop in an ordered way. In fact, it is pretty logical that non-living stuff develop in simple patterns because they are ultimately the product of certain simple reactions at heart. Something like these fractal stuff - simple reactions composed to form a large structure should be pretty patterned and easily compressible. Life forms, on the other hand are formed by centuries of evolution (ok these are pretty basic life forms but still centuries of evolution must've been involved) and you would naturally expect some deviation from pattern.
Just because someone puts a 'This is pretty intuitive' post at the top shouldnt mean this issue isn't debated. It is most definitely not logical / intuitive.
What he says about quantum computing sounds reasonable. Though there exists a known algorithm to factorise primes in polynomial time, which would certainly make almost all cryptographic systems obsolete (of course there are others which will still work but...), there's almost no decent working quantum computer that can approach the number of bits that a practical application of this sort will involve.
However, the stuff about quantum cryptography is too pessimistic, imho. Quite recently scientists have achieved quantum entanglement over decently usable distances - this (http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20030126213558da ta_trunc_sys.shtml ) is a link for starters). And because quantum entanglement allows u to transfer bits across in total secrecy (at least u definitely know if somebody eavesdrops), quantum cryptography involving just a few bits is also important.
Anyway, it's one hot field for theoretical research right now, so that probably implies that practical applications are years away.;-)
India and America are more than five years apart, I guess. anyway, it's a simple matter of how the US dollar shapes against the India rupee and according to all existing indications, it is only going to rocket. And so, it is *always* going to remain profitable for US companies to outsource;-)
In what way is this different from a company that thinks Indian companies charge much cheaper rates and outsources most of its work (that it earlier did in-house) to them? For those who think outsourcing is not that significant, here in India, outsourced jobs from US companies form a really significant part of companies' revenue. There even exist companies that do purely this work.
Anyway, I dont understand why a company can be taken to court for having a policy like that. I might be a total maverick for all I care and I might run a company and I may like only blonde-haired sharp-nosed thick-lipped people, how does that come in the way of justice?
For people like me in India, this is good news, though;-)
Re:Sorry... I fail to see where the issue is.
on
The Taste of Pain
·
· Score: 1
I think if u just say 'conscious choice' you are missing a whole mountain of hardwired circuitry in your brain that participates in this. In the sense that if you analyse your decisions there are a lot of axiomatic things that you use to 'decide'. (In fact if you discover all these axioms, you are *God*). And all this discussion is about whether these axioms are genetic or environmental, i.e. did u have them right at birth or were they imprinted on u while u grew up and didnt know urself.
And like someone already said, the distinction is crucial because the next time u think - i have to get over this laziness or something like that - and some scientists somewhere find a gene that when expressed makes ppl lazy, then u r in a situation where nature is against u. simple. and u can't really do much. but environment can be overcome by some conditioning and thinking.
ok i think i have rehashed the whole nature vs nurture argument while replying to this... lemme guess.. this'll probably be modded redundant by someone.
This by itself wouldnt have been that great if it were not for the fact that there's an enormous amount of parallelism possible with this kinda stuff. I mean, all these neurons also fire according to some rules, cells too are in some sense programmed by rules to do something and we could use them for computing in that sense. Computers are eveywhere. But what is crucial is whether it can be used practically to achieve something. At least, DNA have been used to solve the Hamiltonian problem (which, is in computer science lingo, an NP-Hard problem, meaning, quite roughly, that it inherently takes exponential computational steps) by L Adleman. This was the thing that actually boosted all such dna and cellular and molecular and any-other-teeny-weeny-thing computing to such (overrated, imo) importance. This link - http://www2.hmc.edu/~belgin/dnacomp.html - could be a starter for someone interested.
>> This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
This thing is nowhere that close to reality yet, so we gotta stick to sliced bread;-)
That's exactly how AMD hopes to make it big with its Hammer line. An x86 compatible 64 bit machine.
But i guess it's a good thing for computing that Intel decided to shift away from that x86 instruction set. The x86 instruction set was really bad design and not at all suited for all the pipelining that came rushing in after it. I am pretty sure the guys at Intel had to break their heads over pipelining with the x86 instruction set. The one fundamental principle of pipelining is a clean instruction set. Even all those textbook examples use instructions of as fixed a size as possible. And the x86 instruction set has tiny 1-byte instruction to 17 - byte monsters. Makes for real bad pipelining.
And so because a lot of people sell Intel chips and because a lot of the world is going to run on them, it is better they are really neat and fast instead of trying to prop up a century-old architecture.
Best of luck to the guys at AMD, though. a 64 bit x86 compatible chip. If they really manage it quick enough, they might lap up a significant market share, especially because there's really little software for the IA64 line as yet. At least M$ hasnt put in its Win series of hi-performance OSs;-) (which probably need such enormous computing power for survival) on them yet.
I think such a strategy would make a mess of the file system. The idea is that a file system is supposed to concentrate more on stuff like not allowing major fragmentation (ext2fs does that and that's why u dont have to defrag ur file sys in linux every now and then) and also things like fast, reliable access. i guess undeleting would be at the bottom of the 'desired features list' for a file system. Doing something like what u r proposing would prob'ly send all these things for a toss. anyway, do u think those guys in the linux kernel dev wouldn't have thought of this?
The kind of phillosophy linux's built on, users r supposed to know what they do. if they really want an undelete, they should use something like the KDE Trash Can or some such 'dumb' stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. And what's more, there ARE people who run standalone systems that are not web servers or database servers or something else. And if you are sensible enough not to click on random exe's and stuff like that, Win98 is actually pretty ideal for a home computer.
Any Win* that came later was definitely slower than Win98. And none of them, imho, provide radically easier ways of doing things.
How does this AAC or WMA format keep you from getting at the music? I mean, it might be protected by some key or something, but it finally has to be decrypted on your computer, so I don't see how you can't do it yourself.
Yes, I do remember not being able to play some WMA files some time but I don't have any idea how they do it. Anyone know the details?
How do these three services ensure copyright protection? I mean, what technology? Just because they encrypt stuff doesnt mean that it's safe - someone has to decrypt it somewhere before sending it to the sound card, and what's more, this is your computer, so you can figure out where that's done. So how do they ensure you don't pick out the audio data and then use it as you like?
...
Or is it simply protection by obfuscation? No one knows how the code goes and so no one tries to break it? So we all have to wait for some midnight hacker to come along and destroy all these services
I had this idea that without special hardware support, there was no way anyone could keep some content that was ultimately on my machine safe from me. This thing seems to go against that belief. Or am I missing something straight in front of me?
$ host irc.niggerjewfagsandthemidgetsthatlovethem.como st not found.
H
Still, the same thing. But yes, my browser defaults to Verisign's page. But why doesnt host too return a valid IP?
$ host www.werwearwer.com
Host not found.
$ host www.slshdt.org
Host not found.
I thought i should get verizon's ip? Anybody explain this? Or is there some way to get around this thing.
You got it. But there's more, the book has an epilogue kinda thing where Forsyth takes the pulpit and talks about how the powers-in-charge thought electronic surveillance was enough humint couldn't be done without.
It is especially tragic because of the nature of spy work - all those technical guys who could innovate while working under defense departments and who could not tell anybody about what they had done. Especially considering the acclaim that they would have earned in conventional academic circles.
Off topic, but there's this debate about whether human intelligence is better or whether tech surveillance like listening to radio traffic or say flying reconnaisance flights, is more useful. The latest war in Iraq is, in my opinion, a fine example. No one had an accurate picture of what it was like inside Iraq. Frederick Forsyth ends his The Fist of God with the hypothesis that humint can never outdo tehnical intelligence. any views on this?
In an update to our earlier article - X hogs network resources, we now present - "TransluXent hogs local *and* network resources."
The number of bits in the key is not the issue. In fact, most secure protocols like SSL use a decent size so that brute forcing is not worthwhile.
The point actually is that any theoretical construct like a cryptographic scheme or a TCP protocol needs practical implementation in code. And this is where the bugs creep in. And with things like Microsoft, those bugs are as common as snow in Greenland. And so all these hackers/crackers out there working their fingers on their keyboards and peering into bright screens into the fading night can 'hack' Palladium.
Microsoft has taken on itself to make errors wherever possible and remain as human as any one of us. Trust them to repeat their humanity and come up with enough holes in their Palladium implementation to let most hacks through.
That Java is interpreted is bad enough compared to compiled languages like C. Just imagine the situation within a loop - suppose there is an access of a class' data member. The interpreter / JVM reads in this instruction, parses it and executes it within its own space. Imagine on the other hand what compiled code would do - the class.value thing would be traslated directly to a memory address. And loading code is done by the processor. Everything is some orders of magnitude faster. And this whole thing is in a loop that might run a zillion times. I know most people around know this, but I was trying to describe it in its full glory so that the optimisations that all these posts are discussing look powerless.
So optimisation for Java will, most probably, not do much. But still, it makes sense to make it as fast as it can get. In this context, it has to be pointed out that the development of faster and faster C compilers was spurred on by a lot of academic research. That was the time when those things were still new and hot. Now, I doubt if that magnitude of research goes into JVM & javac optimisation.
The question that they have to answer is not that of reliability, imho. What they have to say is why non-living chemical substrates do not develop in an ordered way. In fact, it is pretty logical that non-living stuff develop in simple patterns because they are ultimately the product of certain simple reactions at heart. Something like these fractal stuff - simple reactions composed to form a large structure should be pretty patterned and easily compressible. Life forms, on the other hand are formed by centuries of evolution (ok these are pretty basic life forms but still centuries of evolution must've been involved) and you would naturally expect some deviation from pattern.
Just because someone puts a 'This is pretty intuitive' post at the top shouldnt mean this issue isn't debated. It is most definitely not logical / intuitive.
What he says about quantum computing sounds reasonable. Though there exists a known algorithm to factorise primes in polynomial time, which would certainly make almost all cryptographic systems obsolete (of course there are others which will still work but ...), there's almost no decent working quantum computer that can approach the number of bits that a practical application of this sort will involve.
a ta_trunc_sys.shtml ) is a link for starters). And because quantum entanglement allows u to transfer bits across in total secrecy (at least u definitely know if somebody eavesdrops), quantum cryptography involving just a few bits is also important.
;-)
However, the stuff about quantum cryptography is too pessimistic, imho. Quite recently scientists have achieved quantum entanglement over decently usable distances - this (http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20030126213558d
Anyway, it's one hot field for theoretical research right now, so that probably implies that practical applications are years away.
sorry for the plain text.
India and America are more than five years apart, I guess. anyway, it's a simple matter of how the US dollar shapes against the India rupee and according to all existing indications, it is only going to rocket. And so, it is *always* going to remain profitable for US companies to outsource ;-)
.... :-)
Our fun ride continues for ever then
In what way is this different from a company that thinks Indian companies charge much cheaper rates and outsources most of its work (that it earlier did in-house) to them? For those who think outsourcing is not that significant, here in India, outsourced jobs from US companies form a really significant part of companies' revenue. There even exist companies that do purely this work.
;-)
Anyway, I dont understand why a company can be taken to court for having a policy like that. I might be a total maverick for all I care and I might run a company and I may like only blonde-haired sharp-nosed thick-lipped people, how does that come in the way of justice?
For people like me in India, this is good news, though
I think if u just say 'conscious choice' you are missing a whole mountain of hardwired circuitry in your brain that participates in this. In the sense that if you analyse your decisions there are a lot of axiomatic things that you use to 'decide'. (In fact if you discover all these axioms, you are *God*). And all this discussion is about whether these axioms are genetic or environmental, i.e. did u have them right at birth or were they imprinted on u while u grew up and didnt know urself.
... lemme guess .. this'll probably be modded redundant by someone.
And like someone already said, the distinction is crucial because the next time u think - i have to get over this laziness or something like that - and some scientists somewhere find a gene that when expressed makes ppl lazy, then u r in a situation where nature is against u. simple. and u can't really do much. but environment can be overcome by some conditioning and thinking.
ok i think i have rehashed the whole nature vs nurture argument while replying to this
This by itself wouldnt have been that great if it were not for the fact that there's an enormous amount of parallelism possible with this kinda stuff. I mean, all these neurons also fire according to some rules, cells too are in some sense programmed by rules to do something and we could use them for computing in that sense. Computers are eveywhere. But what is crucial is whether it can be used practically to achieve something. At least, DNA have been used to solve the Hamiltonian problem (which, is in computer science lingo, an NP-Hard problem, meaning, quite roughly, that it inherently takes exponential computational steps) by L Adleman. This was the thing that actually boosted all such dna and cellular and molecular and any-other-teeny-weeny-thing computing to such (overrated, imo) importance. This link - http://www2.hmc.edu/~belgin/dnacomp.html - could be a starter for someone interested.
;-)
>> This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
This thing is nowhere that close to reality yet, so we gotta stick to sliced bread
That's exactly how AMD hopes to make it big with its Hammer line. An x86 compatible 64 bit machine.
;-) (which probably need such enormous computing power for survival) on them yet.
But i guess it's a good thing for computing that Intel decided to shift away from that x86 instruction set. The x86 instruction set was really bad design and not at all suited for all the pipelining that came rushing in after it. I am pretty sure the guys at Intel had to break their heads over pipelining with the x86 instruction set. The one fundamental principle of pipelining is a clean instruction set. Even all those textbook examples use instructions of as fixed a size as possible. And the x86 instruction set has tiny 1-byte instruction to 17 - byte monsters. Makes for real bad pipelining.
And so because a lot of people sell Intel chips and because a lot of the world is going to run on them, it is better they are really neat and fast instead of trying to prop up a century-old architecture.
Best of luck to the guys at AMD, though. a 64 bit x86 compatible chip. If they really manage it quick enough, they might lap up a significant market share, especially because there's really little software for the IA64 line as yet. At least M$ hasnt put in its Win series of hi-performance OSs
The kind of phillosophy linux's built on, users r supposed to know what they do. if they really want an undelete, they should use something like the KDE Trash Can or some such 'dumb' stuff.