The social authoritarians only need to show that they care for the kids; having practical proposals doesn't even get into their equations, it's all about the votes.
Do what I do in a plane: stay in your seat and eat something, talk with the sensible people around you. In the plane I am sometimes joking with the stewardesses while everybody is trying to get off the plane like madmen. Before that I am normally just trying to read my book. Oh, wait, you said NASCAR, never mind...
Seems to me that the more important ones are all for firefox. FF beats IE on access, control flow, crypto and strings. IE beats FF on 3D, bitops, date and regexp. They are about even on math.
Now bitops could be important for a browser, but I would not see too many pages doing things with 3D. Date and regexp are important, but they are hardly things you do in a loop on a regular basis. Access, control flow, crypto and strings seem more important to me.
Just adding up the benchmark results was pretty weird imho. Just putting them in 9 separate screens would be better, especially if the author had the decency to at least look up the contents of the tests. Ah well, presentation over content I suppose.
Currently all the flash interfaces are the default interfaces for hard drives: PATA, SATA and even USB. Now one of the advantages of flash is the extremely low latency (seek times) compared with hard drives. Now I know that flash memory will still lag significantly compared with DRAM, but a question springs to mind: should PATA/SATA really be the interface for flash drives? Won't these interfaces slow down seek times?
You would probably use this memory module in products as logical replacement as a hard drive only. There is no need for smaller flash drives if you use a standard drive bay. So why is having a PATA/SATA connection so important? Why not go for maximum performance and functionality instead? Why not make a flash SSD interface that more closely matches flash drive functionality?
The reason I ask is because I have already read reviews in which the SATA interface was much slower than the PATA interface for 'seek' times. And that was talking about a 5-10 x difference (!). Ok, this might sound a bit like ask slashdot, but does anyone know about the best interface to use (direct PCI-e?) and if a change of interface would really help?
Doesn't matter if I/O doesn't matter for CPU utilization. The problem is that all of my programs are limited by I/O rather than CPU. In this regard, I've high hopes of flash solid state drives and I've got the feeling that they will make more of a difference for everyday computing than any multi-threaded CPU I can put on my motherboard.
I'm just reading C'T (the Dutch version of computer and technology, a German magazine), and they do a test with 32 threads on a single hard disk. Throughput? 1.0 to 1.1 MB/s, depending if NCQ (native command queuing) is enabled. Use an SSD and you should get *much* higher numbers. 1 MB/s would mean that a single logging method would much more slow down your PC than any other multi-threading issue except for total starvation or dead lock.
Of course there are applications that just rely on the CPU, but I tend not to have to wait for it even for heavy encoding methods. If I do anything slightly with drive I/O and I have to test for performance, I'll use a RAM disk and switch of the feakin company installed McAfee bug-ware. On a similar note, which Windows/Linux application can I use that makes reliable copies and access files *in sequence*?
Well, yes, before that it was explorer for everything. Remember the way Windows 3.1 used to start up applications? That's what the parenthesis were for.
Huge windows and no curtains? What's wrong with that? You think that is done to monitor the street? Gods, I would hate it if they had small windows and curtains closed all the time. If you want to do something in private, you would not do it in the middle of the street now, won't you? And in the few places where religion still is in control, that's where you'll see closed curtains, otherwise the neighbors will see what you are up to.
"Doe normaal" is indeed preserved for people that act crazy. But the many times I hear it is when someone is annoying people and is not acting socially. E.g. I shouted "doe normaal" when somebody played music loudly in the train (damn phones). Depending on where you are, acting not normally is quite accepted in the Netherlands. Many things that are thought of as being shocking in other countries won't shock somebody from the Netherlands.
Of course, it depends a bit where you are. I'm living near Amsterdam. Just last year I walked down the street when a leather clad, half naked gay ran right out of a bar in broad daylight. The reaction of the crowd was all telling. There was none. There will be a slightly different reaction on the country side (people will tend to know you and might avoid you after an episode like that).
Oh, and afaik shops and restaurants are obliged to notify you of camera's over here. At least you know what they are present.
The task bar should not have been part of explorer in the first place. This is a remnant of the (internet) explorer for everything game played by Microsoft. I mean, showing which main windows are open? Is that part of the functionality of explorer? The start menu, with its weird drag and drop capabilities? The time?
Now we are stuck with an OS in which you can only switch tasks using the keyboard (which most people don't even use) if explorer has a hick-up (and boy, does it hick up, especially when using network resources). The only way to get into the task manager from there is to press ctrl-alt-delete, for Pete's sake.
"What a lot of people fail to realise is that encryption can be made unbreakable even by brute force by simply choosing a large enough encryption key. What people also fail to realise is that 256 bit encryption doesn't take twice as long to crack as 128 bit encryption. It in fact takes 2^128 times as long to crack."
It does not always work that way. This doubling of complexity of brute force attacks per bit is true for most symmetric ciphers (in which case 128 bit AES encryption is plenty strong for 99% of cases). For RSA/DSA ciphers you will need bigger and bigger keys. Check out keylength.com if you don't believe me. This is one reason why Elliptic curve ciphers are so interesting. Pretty strong RSA encryption is 2048 bits, very strong is 16384 bits. EC starts around 160 bits but scales proportionally with symmetric ciphers: no need to go higher than 521 bits (that's not a typo, the highest order Elliptic Curve parameters defined by FIPS are 521 bits).
In conclusion, just saying that each bit doubles the search space, regardless of the cryptographic algorithm, is simplifying matters a tad too much.
"If it's standard procedure for this guy to carry unencrypted data around in his car, it's the guy setting policy/procedure that should be made responsible."
Yes, although I would also argue that if your job is keeping the data safe, you'll have some responsibility to notify bad procedures to the one creating them. Of course if the organization makes this impossible or ignores your notification, then they are screwed. In that case, make sure you're not the one that's going to receive the blame if shit hits the fan. Hey, maybe the guy did already report this and was made the scape goat. Who knows.
"Honestly I don't care if a convicted rapist gets murdered by mistake (If a database like this prevents even one instance like the one described above)"
Well, the guy is going to live in *someones* neighborhood. So how is this thing going to prevent "even one instance like the one described above"? And if every parent locked his kid up he might just go somewhere *not* in the neighborhood. The only reasons that these laws are passed (quickly) is that they will get you the vote of people that tend to listen to populist BS.
Anyway, how is this "being murdered by mistake"? The murderer seemed to know precisely what he was doing. And said he was never going to change. Right, this guy should really be locked up for a long period, unless he changes his views on that in the mean time.
This is a Windows software product really offers the same benefits as most other Windows products, so the following things should be noted: - "32-bit Operating Systems ONLY" - "Though this is a simple procedure, it is recommended that you backup any/all critical data before continuing." (this software *contains* the backup utility) - Doesn't make clear which operating systems are included on the tools page, you'll have to read the product specs per product. - All in one package, so don't use with without a high speed internet connection (~100 MB). Manual available after download, so any questions will be answered after you download the thing. - No version information in the filename. I must admit, it is not called "setup.exe" so they are making progress here. Then again, the Mac version has the same filename and ends with.zip. - It's an agent. Hello rather unhelpful, additional icon next to my clock. Hello increased startup time. If we're lucky, we'll spend several seconds staring at a logo as well.
Except that I don't have an ethernet connection handy where-ever I go. Many company network don't allow you (either through procedure or technically) to just plug in a network device, and for good reason. Also there are still a lot of cable modems with a single connection at homes (because of idiot cable providers). So if there is a single PC at a home, they tend to use their only ethernet connection to connect to the cable modem. And network connections are a pain to setup.
So a NAS is nice, but I would only use it at home. Or buy one with an ethernet/firewire/e-sata and an USB connection. Now I come to think of it, for my a single computer (backup solution) I would prefer a sata connection. It's fast (latency) and it gets seen as a local drive, so I don't have all this trouble with copying inaccessible files and NTFS meta-data over the SMB protocol. [rant] The one that came up with the "Documents and Settings" scheme on Windows should be shot on sight, and so should the one that made the Exploder copy/move process stop when a single file cannot be copied [/rant].
These things have really high write speeds and are non-volatile. So they will be used at places where write access should be really fast, and the need for reliability and persistence will be high. Because of size considerations (we are talking about multiple Mb per chip here, not Gb) I cannot see them replace flash soon. What I can see is the use in devices that don't need too much memory, but do need speed.
Are there any plans to use this memory as a cache for (solid state) disks? It seems to me that it might be a perfect *companion* chip for flash drives. You can write a few MB to the flash drive really fast, and then it gets copied to the real flash memory, all while maintaining non-volatility. You might also use it to alleviate the (performance) problems with wear leveling in flash drives (place most used sectors of the drive on MRAM, or use the MRAM while swapping much written and less written data during wear leveling).
As always on Slashdot you see many comments on technology replacing other technology. Unless some kind of technology beats older technology on *all* fronts, the older technology will maintain its usefulness, (maybe only in niche markets). In those cases it makes more sense to see if there is synergy between the different kind of technologies than to look for ways of "beating" the other (older) technology.
... (SIDE: I cant stand the mathematicians. I am a physicist. We score more e.g. Schrodinger, Einstein, Feynman... were all pimps. Newton died a virgin. Turing was gay. Godel was emaciated and his wife just had to be cheating on him.)... maybe all the technological progress is so short-sighted because we just are not capable of being civilized. And I agree, at least for physicists:)
At my work I have two bash scripts that do the same. Unfortunately some invalid characters mess up the script. Now it does something useful (it actually prints: "something useful" if I remember correctly), or it crashes. This is because you still have to put some arbitrary data at the end of the script. Some command to make the interpreter stop would probably fix that, but since it was only proof of concept for me, I didn't go that far.
As the article mentions, this could be really bad for third party signing (e.g. MS Authenticode). Since I've seen that they sign practically anything that comes from a "trusted email address" that means practically squat. Of course, it is not fun to test if such an attack is somewhere in a text or binary file. The companies would be better off not using MD5 for such purposes.
Leave MD5 in legacy applications that are not vulnerable. Try and avoid SHA-1 as well. Everybody should upgrade to SHA-256 or SHA-512 for new applications or protocols that can be upgraded. The article is a good read-up for people that have not yet understood the problems with MD5, nothing more, nothing less.
Seems to me that most criminals cost more money in prison than without. No need to make everybody's life miserable. Furthermore, the possibility for someone to return to society in any meaningful way is hampered as well. As for the death penalty, it has been proven again and again that judges and juries can be wrong. The whole problem with the death penalty is its definiteness. And keeping someone 5 years in prison before killing the person is not the right way either.
One thing: someone who is repeating the same mistake again should be locked up for longer and longer times. There is no reason to keep someone outside of prison if you know the person is going to mess it up again right after he/she is out of prison. Nowadays you will get the same punishment over and over again, since all punishments have upper bounds. That's just ridiculous.
Anyway, the punishment for rape is imprisonment not exceeding 15 years or a fine. OK, not the toughest sentence you can get, but it ain't a slap on the wrist either.
"Let's face it, typing is quicker than mousing - you've got 110 keys at your disposal instead of just 2"
Don't be daft. Are you telling me that you are using the keyboard to browse the internet? Or are you using the mouse to copy letter to letter from an on screen alphabet?
Of course not; the input device must be linked to use. And I can imagine multi-touch screens have their use without too many problems. You could use them for keyboard simulation if you would wanted to (since you seem to display some keyboard fetish;).
Slashdot Mirror
This one is better, in my opinion, it displays the stone clac^H^H^H^Hsemaphore tower and the wooden part on top structure to relay the messages.
The social authoritarians only need to show that they care for the kids; having practical proposals doesn't even get into their equations, it's all about the votes.
Chuck Norris is unbeatable; he even takes a suit into a fight.
Do what I do in a plane: stay in your seat and eat something, talk with the sensible people around you. In the plane I am sometimes joking with the stewardesses while everybody is trying to get off the plane like madmen. Before that I am normally just trying to read my book. Oh, wait, you said NASCAR, never mind...
Seems to me that the more important ones are all for firefox. FF beats IE on access, control flow, crypto and strings. IE beats FF on 3D, bitops, date and regexp. They are about even on math.
Now bitops could be important for a browser, but I would not see too many pages doing things with 3D. Date and regexp are important, but they are hardly things you do in a loop on a regular basis. Access, control flow, crypto and strings seem more important to me.
Just adding up the benchmark results was pretty weird imho. Just putting them in 9 separate screens would be better, especially if the author had the decency to at least look up the contents of the tests. Ah well, presentation over content I suppose.
Currently all the flash interfaces are the default interfaces for hard drives: PATA, SATA and even USB. Now one of the advantages of flash is the extremely low latency (seek times) compared with hard drives. Now I know that flash memory will still lag significantly compared with DRAM, but a question springs to mind: should PATA/SATA really be the interface for flash drives? Won't these interfaces slow down seek times?
You would probably use this memory module in products as logical replacement as a hard drive only. There is no need for smaller flash drives if you use a standard drive bay. So why is having a PATA/SATA connection so important? Why not go for maximum performance and functionality instead? Why not make a flash SSD interface that more closely matches flash drive functionality?
The reason I ask is because I have already read reviews in which the SATA interface was much slower than the PATA interface for 'seek' times. And that was talking about a 5-10 x difference (!). Ok, this might sound a bit like ask slashdot, but does anyone know about the best interface to use (direct PCI-e?) and if a change of interface would really help?
What do you mean, *compared* to flash? This *is* flash. Maybe you mean compared to Secure Digital, or USB pen drives? Which one?
Doesn't matter if I/O doesn't matter for CPU utilization. The problem is that all of my programs are limited by I/O rather than CPU. In this regard, I've high hopes of flash solid state drives and I've got the feeling that they will make more of a difference for everyday computing than any multi-threaded CPU I can put on my motherboard.
I'm just reading C'T (the Dutch version of computer and technology, a German magazine), and they do a test with 32 threads on a single hard disk. Throughput? 1.0 to 1.1 MB/s, depending if NCQ (native command queuing) is enabled. Use an SSD and you should get *much* higher numbers. 1 MB/s would mean that a single logging method would much more slow down your PC than any other multi-threading issue except for total starvation or dead lock.
Of course there are applications that just rely on the CPU, but I tend not to have to wait for it even for heavy encoding methods. If I do anything slightly with drive I/O and I have to test for performance, I'll use a RAM disk and switch of the feakin company installed McAfee bug-ware. On a similar note, which Windows/Linux application can I use that makes reliable copies and access files *in sequence*?
Well, yes, before that it was explorer for everything. Remember the way Windows 3.1 used to start up applications? That's what the parenthesis were for.
Huge windows and no curtains? What's wrong with that? You think that is done to monitor the street? Gods, I would hate it if they had small windows and curtains closed all the time. If you want to do something in private, you would not do it in the middle of the street now, won't you? And in the few places where religion still is in control, that's where you'll see closed curtains, otherwise the neighbors will see what you are up to.
"Doe normaal" is indeed preserved for people that act crazy. But the many times I hear it is when someone is annoying people and is not acting socially. E.g. I shouted "doe normaal" when somebody played music loudly in the train (damn phones). Depending on where you are, acting not normally is quite accepted in the Netherlands. Many things that are thought of as being shocking in other countries won't shock somebody from the Netherlands.
Of course, it depends a bit where you are. I'm living near Amsterdam. Just last year I walked down the street when a leather clad, half naked gay ran right out of a bar in broad daylight. The reaction of the crowd was all telling. There was none. There will be a slightly different reaction on the country side (people will tend to know you and might avoid you after an episode like that).
Oh, and afaik shops and restaurants are obliged to notify you of camera's over here. At least you know what they are present.
The task bar should not have been part of explorer in the first place. This is a remnant of the (internet) explorer for everything game played by Microsoft. I mean, showing which main windows are open? Is that part of the functionality of explorer? The start menu, with its weird drag and drop capabilities? The time?
Now we are stuck with an OS in which you can only switch tasks using the keyboard (which most people don't even use) if explorer has a hick-up (and boy, does it hick up, especially when using network resources). The only way to get into the task manager from there is to press ctrl-alt-delete, for Pete's sake.
"What a lot of people fail to realise is that encryption can be made unbreakable even by brute force by simply choosing a large enough encryption key. What people also fail to realise is that 256 bit encryption doesn't take twice as long to crack as 128 bit encryption. It in fact takes 2^128 times as long to crack."
It does not always work that way. This doubling of complexity of brute force attacks per bit is true for most symmetric ciphers (in which case 128 bit AES encryption is plenty strong for 99% of cases). For RSA/DSA ciphers you will need bigger and bigger keys. Check out keylength.com if you don't believe me. This is one reason why Elliptic curve ciphers are so interesting. Pretty strong RSA encryption is 2048 bits, very strong is 16384 bits. EC starts around 160 bits but scales proportionally with symmetric ciphers: no need to go higher than 521 bits (that's not a typo, the highest order Elliptic Curve parameters defined by FIPS are 521 bits).
In conclusion, just saying that each bit doubles the search space, regardless of the cryptographic algorithm, is simplifying matters a tad too much.
"If it's standard procedure for this guy to carry unencrypted data around in his car, it's the guy setting policy/procedure that should be made responsible."
Yes, although I would also argue that if your job is keeping the data safe, you'll have some responsibility to notify bad procedures to the one creating them. Of course if the organization makes this impossible or ignores your notification, then they are screwed. In that case, make sure you're not the one that's going to receive the blame if shit hits the fan. Hey, maybe the guy did already report this and was made the scape goat. Who knows.
"Honestly I don't care if a convicted rapist gets murdered by mistake (If a database like this prevents even one instance like the one described above)"
Well, the guy is going to live in *someones* neighborhood. So how is this thing going to prevent "even one instance like the one described above"? And if every parent locked his kid up he might just go somewhere *not* in the neighborhood. The only reasons that these laws are passed (quickly) is that they will get you the vote of people that tend to listen to populist BS.
Anyway, how is this "being murdered by mistake"? The murderer seemed to know precisely what he was doing. And said he was never going to change. Right, this guy should really be locked up for a long period, unless he changes his views on that in the mean time.
This is a Windows software product really offers the same benefits as most other Windows products, so the following things should be noted: .zip.
- "32-bit Operating Systems ONLY"
- "Though this is a simple procedure, it is recommended that you backup any/all critical data before continuing." (this software *contains* the backup utility)
- Doesn't make clear which operating systems are included on the tools page, you'll have to read the product specs per product.
- All in one package, so don't use with without a high speed internet connection (~100 MB). Manual available after download, so any questions will be answered after you download the thing.
- No version information in the filename. I must admit, it is not called "setup.exe" so they are making progress here. Then again, the Mac version has the same filename and ends with
- It's an agent. Hello rather unhelpful, additional icon next to my clock. Hello increased startup time. If we're lucky, we'll spend several seconds staring at a logo as well.
And this is before trying the actual product.
Except that I don't have an ethernet connection handy where-ever I go. Many company network don't allow you (either through procedure or technically) to just plug in a network device, and for good reason. Also there are still a lot of cable modems with a single connection at homes (because of idiot cable providers). So if there is a single PC at a home, they tend to use their only ethernet connection to connect to the cable modem. And network connections are a pain to setup.
So a NAS is nice, but I would only use it at home. Or buy one with an ethernet/firewire/e-sata and an USB connection. Now I come to think of it, for my a single computer (backup solution) I would prefer a sata connection. It's fast (latency) and it gets seen as a local drive, so I don't have all this trouble with copying inaccessible files and NTFS meta-data over the SMB protocol. [rant] The one that came up with the "Documents and Settings" scheme on Windows should be shot on sight, and so should the one that made the Exploder copy/move process stop when a single file cannot be copied [/rant].
They did, but the testers kept getting shot when they started to do field testing.
These things have really high write speeds and are non-volatile. So they will be used at places where write access should be really fast, and the need for reliability and persistence will be high. Because of size considerations (we are talking about multiple Mb per chip here, not Gb) I cannot see them replace flash soon. What I can see is the use in devices that don't need too much memory, but do need speed.
Are there any plans to use this memory as a cache for (solid state) disks? It seems to me that it might be a perfect *companion* chip for flash drives. You can write a few MB to the flash drive really fast, and then it gets copied to the real flash memory, all while maintaining non-volatility. You might also use it to alleviate the (performance) problems with wear leveling in flash drives (place most used sectors of the drive on MRAM, or use the MRAM while swapping much written and less written data during wear leveling).
As always on Slashdot you see many comments on technology replacing other technology. Unless some kind of technology beats older technology on *all* fronts, the older technology will maintain its usefulness, (maybe only in niche markets). In those cases it makes more sense to see if there is synergy between the different kind of technologies than to look for ways of "beating" the other (older) technology.
... (SIDE: I cant stand the mathematicians. I am a physicist. We score more e.g. Schrodinger, Einstein, Feynman... were all pimps. Newton died a virgin. Turing was gay. Godel was emaciated and his wife just had to be cheating on him.)At my work I have two bash scripts that do the same. Unfortunately some invalid characters mess up the script. Now it does something useful (it actually prints: "something useful" if I remember correctly), or it crashes. This is because you still have to put some arbitrary data at the end of the script. Some command to make the interpreter stop would probably fix that, but since it was only proof of concept for me, I didn't go that far.
As the article mentions, this could be really bad for third party signing (e.g. MS Authenticode). Since I've seen that they sign practically anything that comes from a "trusted email address" that means practically squat. Of course, it is not fun to test if such an attack is somewhere in a text or binary file. The companies would be better off not using MD5 for such purposes.
Leave MD5 in legacy applications that are not vulnerable. Try and avoid SHA-1 as well. Everybody should upgrade to SHA-256 or SHA-512 for new applications or protocols that can be upgraded. The article is a good read-up for people that have not yet understood the problems with MD5, nothing more, nothing less.
Mod parent up. The person is only a A/C, but I cannot see how this is related to the birthday paradox.
Seems to me that most criminals cost more money in prison than without. No need to make everybody's life miserable. Furthermore, the possibility for someone to return to society in any meaningful way is hampered as well. As for the death penalty, it has been proven again and again that judges and juries can be wrong. The whole problem with the death penalty is its definiteness. And keeping someone 5 years in prison before killing the person is not the right way either.
One thing: someone who is repeating the same mistake again should be locked up for longer and longer times. There is no reason to keep someone outside of prison if you know the person is going to mess it up again right after he/she is out of prison. Nowadays you will get the same punishment over and over again, since all punishments have upper bounds. That's just ridiculous.
Anyway, the punishment for rape is imprisonment not exceeding 15 years or a fine. OK, not the toughest sentence you can get, but it ain't a slap on the wrist either.
Even if they cannot spell it :)
"Let's face it, typing is quicker than mousing - you've got 110 keys at your disposal instead of just 2"
;).
Don't be daft. Are you telling me that you are using the keyboard to browse the internet? Or are you using the mouse to copy letter to letter from an on screen alphabet?
Of course not; the input device must be linked to use. And I can imagine multi-touch screens have their use without too many problems. You could use them for keyboard simulation if you would wanted to (since you seem to display some keyboard fetish
Or a big fan and a truck full of water. Or dig up some silt and a stone and recreate it somewhere else, depending on which is easier.
And check if there are no hidden crevices, maybe the rocks contain robotic kites.
Darn, there I go again, both an interesting post and a funny one combined. Consider this two posts.