Actually I think Dell is in the perfect position to offer at least one or two flavors of Linux/BSD because of their control of the hardware just as Apple has. Controlling both the hardware and software that goes into their machines is Apple's secret to having a stable OS and application suite. For that matter, Dell could even offer it's own distro customized for Dell's standard hardware configurations. If they did that, I might even be tempted to buy a Dell myself instead of putting a machine together from scratch and wrestling with Linux over device drivers, screen resolution and refresh rate, etc. Maybe I could even *finally* have a version of Linux/BSD that lets me use the sidebuttons on my Logitech mice as I can under Windblows.:-)
It can take several seconds to program an FPGA bit serially via a JTAG port, but if it had a parallel I/F it could probably be reprogrammed much faster. In any case the reconfiguration time is inconsequential to the potential benefit.
Suppose I could implement my own custom instruction that would compute a complex function such as something used in cryptography, matrix inversion, or whatever I choose that is built-in to the very fabric of the CPU and has access to its internal registers? The instruction could be started and then proceed without interfering with normal CPU instruction execution and then interrupt the processor when that custom instruction is finished much like PCI boards containing math co-processors do, except that if a language like Verilog or even the CPU's own microcode (not the macro instruction machine code the OS executes) were used, I for one would welcome such an architecture with open arms because I recently learned Verilog and adding instructions to the CPU instruction set sounds like great fun. Any suggestions for additional machine language instructions you would like to see?:-)
the value of copper has gone up significantly since 1998
You have it backwards just as almost all so called "news reporters" do (including even financial reporters). The value of copper, gold, nickle, etc., hasn't changed at all. The reason copper and all other items cost more than they used to is because the value of the US Dollar has declined. One ounce of pure gold still buys a good quality men's suit just as it always has.
I used to work for a company that regularly and intentionally made schedules too short to complete on time so that they could *require* salaried employees to work evenings and weekends for free.
I have had similar discussions with people about the plausibility of creating a "liquid bomb". When I tell them how impractical it is and what would be required to do so, I usually get blank stares
Then you obviously haven't read Chapter 5 on Nitric Esters in Tenny L. Davis' book The Chemistry of Powder & Explosives. Manufacturing something like nitroglycerin in an aircraft bathroom safely would be impossible, but if a terrorist is planning on dying in the explosion there is no need for any safety precautions at all.
This is pretty funny. I selected "Applied cryptography" by Bruce Schneier as a book in my library and the UnSuggester selected "The Devil Wears Prada" as the book I'm least likely to own. Ironically enough, I happen to be downloading the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" with Bittorrent at this very moment, LOL!
Note: To deal with Slashdot, we've degraded the search capability, to titles only, and search for the beginning of the title, not the middle.
UnSuggestions for Applied cryptography : protocols, algorithms, and source code in C by Bruce Schneier
224 members (2,975 more popular); 2 reviews; average rating 4.2 stars. Members with the book have have a total of 123,804 books in their libraries (see good suggestions).
1. The devil wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger (expected 20.1, found 1; unsuggestions)
Since my retirement I've taught myself the Verilog programming language (yes, Verilog is a programming language regardless of what hardware designers will tell you) and designed FPGA hardware implementations of the following:
1. Lenstra's Elliptic Curve Method (ECM) of integer factorization. 2. Fermat's method of integer factorization.
It turns out that the ECM design was far too large to fit into any existing FPGA, so I now have two different FPGA development boards running Fermat's factorization method on RSA-704 and RSA-768 respectively. Yes, I know the Sun will engulf the earth before either FPGA development board comes up with an answer, but they both display a lot of pretty colored blinking lights while doing the calculations so they make a great conversation piece - Har.:-) Besides, I did this primarily as a learning exercise for myself in lieu of spending my time watching brain-dead TV programs, etc.
"The very moment that the Chinese central bank HINTED that they were planning on diversifying their hard currency holdings, the US dollar would bottom-out."
Earlier this month, the People's Bank of China said it is looking to diversify its $1 trillion reserves across currencies and asset classes. And just last week, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Goldman Sachs chairman, enlisted Bernanke to join an unusual delegation of cabinet members to China next month showing increased concern over China's economic policies.
Now what were you saying about leverage? Incidentally, the US Dollar has only just begun the bottoming out process against other world currencies and has a long way down to go.
the total US population is only about 300 million people whereas the population of China is almost twice that.
Oops, I should have double checked. According to the CIA Factbook the population of China is 1,313,973,713 so that would make China's population about 4.4 times the size of the population of the USA.
What do you suppose would happen if China were to start dumping all those trade deficit US Dollars it's accumulated? China has quite a lot of leverage over the USA because of our fiscal problems.
Does that include the 550 million Chinese people who are available for military service as well? Although I don't know the size of the total armed forces (including reserves and National Guard) of the USA, the total US population is only about 300 million people whereas the population of China is almost twice that. Their standing army is about 3.5 million strong.
Source: CIA Factbook
Chinese Manpower fit for military service:
males age 18-49: 281,240,272
females age 18-49: 269,025,517 (2005 est.)
"God help us if medical imaging ever advances to the point they could follow Mr. Happy inside for his little trip through the flesh tunnel."
There was a BBC video on Google for a short while that featured this very thing in fact. It used very tiny cameras with their own light source. It has apparently been pulled (as expected) but was the subject of a Digg story a few weeks ago. I think the Google video was an excerpt from "A Girls Guide To 21st Century Sex."
I keep the ring tone of my Palm Treo turned off so that I'm never disturbed by incoming calls, and run a program called "Butler" that makes the green LED blink rapidly when someone leaves a message (just like an answering machine). That way, I have the option of calling back or not as I choose.
Exactly what I was thinking. In order to make any successful long term stock market predictions (days or months rather than minutes or hours), a model would have to incorporate worldwide Socio-political and economic modeling. Not likely to happen anytime soon methinks.
It would be neat if the public, or at least those with Internet connections, be allowed to "vote" on bills before the House and Senate as shown on CSPAN, and to display the results on a large screen in the House and Senate so our representatives/senators can see what the Internet voting public think. A simple "one vote per Bill per IP address" should be enough to eliminate most cheating. If someone wants to go to the trouble of using anonymous proxies to vote multiple times, who really cares since the Internet vote wouldn't have any official standing (unless of course a means of authentication could be used).
P.S.
Lest my prior post be marked "Offtopic", I would like to point out that the ability to easily create and delete email addresses completely obviates the problem of having your email address harvested in the first place.
For example, the email address I use at the moment for Usenet postings is "news5@spamex.com" (soon to be news6, new7, or something entirely different;-), and if for example I wanted to send an email to cmdrTaco, I might create an email address like: cmdrTaco@spamex.com, which by the way is a perfectly valid email address (but will be disabled/deleted the first time I get a smart aleck message sent to it, ha.;-)
This is going to sound like a pitch for Spamex.com and I guess it is, but I am in no way affiliated with Spamex other than as a happy customer.
Spamex.com lets me create a new and unique valid email address for every single correspondent I have. It also lets me enable, disable, and delete those email addresses. The first time I get a Spam email from one of the email addresses I've assigned, I either disable or delete that email address, so Spam is very rare for me.
Spamex's forum has been silent for several months and I fear they may be going out of business. There is no good replacement for them that I know of, so I encourage everyone to check them out, maybe try a free account, and then sign up for a premium account to help keep them going.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrrrggghhhh! I hate it when that happens (I'm a fellow grammar Nazi ;-).
Actually I think Dell is in the perfect position to offer at least one or two flavors of Linux/BSD because of their control of the hardware just as Apple has. Controlling both the hardware and software that goes into their machines is Apple's secret to having a stable OS and application suite. For that matter, Dell could even offer it's own distro customized for Dell's standard hardware configurations. If they did that, I might even be tempted to buy a Dell myself instead of putting a machine together from scratch and wrestling with Linux over device drivers, screen resolution and refresh rate, etc. Maybe I could even *finally* have a version of Linux/BSD that lets me use the sidebuttons on my Logitech mice as I can under Windblows. :-)
It can take several seconds to program an FPGA bit serially via a JTAG port, but if it had a parallel I/F it could probably be reprogrammed much faster. In any case the reconfiguration time is inconsequential to the potential benefit.
:-)
Suppose I could implement my own custom instruction that would compute a complex function such as something used in cryptography, matrix inversion, or whatever I choose that is built-in to the very fabric of the CPU and has access to its internal registers? The instruction could be started and then proceed without interfering with normal CPU instruction execution and then interrupt the processor when that custom instruction is finished much like PCI boards containing math co-processors do, except that if a language like Verilog or even the CPU's own microcode (not the macro instruction machine code the OS executes) were used, I for one would welcome such an architecture with open arms because I recently learned Verilog and adding instructions to the CPU instruction set sounds like great fun. Any suggestions for additional machine language instructions you would like to see?
I used to work for a company that regularly and intentionally made schedules too short to complete on time so that they could *require* salaried employees to work evenings and weekends for free.
"why hasn't the planet died out from such a runaway loop?"
You mean like Venus?
No problem, that's leaves 3.7 gigabytes of my 4 gigabytes of RAM free. :-)
Since my retirement I've taught myself the Verilog programming language (yes, Verilog is a programming language regardless of what hardware designers will tell you) and designed FPGA hardware implementations of the following:
:-) Besides, I did this primarily as a learning exercise for myself in lieu of spending my time watching brain-dead TV programs, etc.
1. Lenstra's Elliptic Curve Method (ECM) of integer factorization.
2. Fermat's method of integer factorization.
It turns out that the ECM design was far too large to fit into any existing FPGA, so I now have two different FPGA development boards running Fermat's factorization method on RSA-704 and RSA-768 respectively. Yes, I know the Sun will engulf the earth before either FPGA development board comes up with an answer, but they both display a lot of pretty colored blinking lights while doing the calculations so they make a great conversation piece - Har.
Please see: U.S. Economic Slowdown Will Not Curb China's Growth, By Jon A. Nones, 26 Nov 2006 at 10:58 PM EST Now what were you saying about leverage? Incidentally, the US Dollar has only just begun the bottoming out process against other world currencies and has a long way down to go.
What do you suppose would happen if China were to start dumping all those trade deficit US Dollars it's accumulated? China has quite a lot of leverage over the USA because of our fiscal problems.
Source: CIA Factbook
I keep the ring tone of my Palm Treo turned off so that I'm never disturbed by incoming calls, and run a program called "Butler" that makes the green LED blink rapidly when someone leaves a message (just like an answering machine). That way, I have the option of calling back or not as I choose.
Exactly what I was thinking. In order to make any successful long term stock market predictions (days or months rather than minutes or hours), a model would have to incorporate worldwide Socio-political and economic modeling. Not likely to happen anytime soon methinks.
And eventually all those millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere return to earth in the form of sulfuric acid rain and kills all the crops.
It would be neat if the public, or at least those with Internet connections, be allowed to "vote" on bills before the House and Senate as shown on CSPAN, and to display the results on a large screen in the House and Senate so our representatives/senators can see what the Internet voting public think. A simple "one vote per Bill per IP address" should be enough to eliminate most cheating. If someone wants to go to the trouble of using anonymous proxies to vote multiple times, who really cares since the Internet vote wouldn't have any official standing (unless of course a means of authentication could be used).
Nah, I think the DRM in Vista is because of Microsoft's "War against piracy" at least as much as as it's due to Hollywood.
Yes, it's a l33t inside Slashdot joke that originated with an article long ago about remote controlled sharks. For an explanation, see here .
P.S. Lest my prior post be marked "Offtopic", I would like to point out that the ability to easily create and delete email addresses completely obviates the problem of having your email address harvested in the first place. For example, the email address I use at the moment for Usenet postings is "news5@spamex.com" (soon to be news6, new7, or something entirely different ;-), and if for example I wanted to send an email to cmdrTaco, I might create an email address like: cmdrTaco@spamex.com, which by the way is a perfectly valid email address (but will be disabled/deleted the first time I get a smart aleck message sent to it, ha. ;-)
This is going to sound like a pitch for Spamex.com and I guess it is, but I am in no way affiliated with Spamex other than as a happy customer.
Spamex.com lets me create a new and unique valid email address for every single correspondent I have. It also lets me enable, disable, and delete those email addresses. The first time I get a Spam email from one of the email addresses I've assigned, I either disable or delete that email address, so Spam is very rare for me.
Spamex's forum has been silent for several months and I fear they may be going out of business. There is no good replacement for them that I know of, so I encourage everyone to check them out, maybe try a free account, and then sign up for a premium account to help keep them going.