It doesn't matter who you vote for. The two parties have all the votes in the electorial college, and that is what counts - regardless of who wins the popular vote.
I am just going to vote in local elections and record this dark age for future generations - if any - so they know what really went down.
The problem with your idea is we couldn't be too lenient, otherwise we would lose it.
The reason people can read the scrambled words is many many hours of reading correct words and building an expectation (pattern) of what a word should look like. Without this ingrained pattern recognition, this would not work, and written language would lose its meaning slowly, over time, as native readers died off, and new readers had to 'learn' the patternless mess (which would not work).
Re:The oldest story to ever hit slashdot.
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
There is no 'intuition' involved. Its pattern recognition.
Its how your brain is able to see only part of something hidden behind another object, and determine what the hidden object is based on prior experience with said object - a particularly useful survival tool - if the object is a bear, for example, hidden behind a tree.
Now, if you had no experience or understanding of bears, then you could hardly be called a moron if you didn't recogize the foot of a bear sticking out from behind the tree, and consequently became, for want of a better word, dinner.
Similarly, someone without experience with cognitive science could hardly be called a moron for not recognizing the pattern matching capabilities of the human brain.
Everyone is a moron at something; spend enough time with someone, and you will find out what that is.
What you say is true - except the part about M$ losing.
There are enough open source options out there now (and as DRM kicks in I anticipate a backlash of even more to come).
The only way to 'win' this game is to destroy the internet; I don't see the majority of people who have built the network and grown accustomed to free interchange of ideas, entertainment and applications just rolling over and playing dead.
I, for one, will not have DRM in my home. I would urge anyone who loves freedom to do the same. While we may not be playing the hippest Xbox game, or watching on-demand WB programs - we will be enjoying our Muds, Tux Racer, and our encrypted p2p meta-networks on our own terms.
Viva la Revolution! Vote with your wallet, and don't buy the Redmond propaganda. They want every dollar in your wallet to flow into their bank accounts - and they will not have it!
I think people will be using encrypted P2P 'trust' networks with people they know and trust. Unfortunately, this will have the effect of further segmenting the internet. However, the '3 degrees of seperation' effect could ameliorate that to a certain extent.
These 'meta-networks' are the wave of the future - unless they become outlawed, at which point the internet as we know it is dead, given that this would also kill VPNs - the staple of many businesses.
A P2P wireless network of networks based on the MIT Roofnet or similar technology would be the next logical step. That could be banned, as well.
On the face of it the situation looks more and more like Soviet Russia - without the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman, being banned, of course!
"When networks are outlawed, only outlaws will have networks"
Re:Just out of curiosity....
on
Grid Processing
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· Score: 1
If the parallelism is at the microcode level, which is what this article is addressing, then the 'type' of application is irrelevant - you will still gain speed benefits.
Think of a computer system as virtual boxes within boxes. At the lowest level you have the physical logic gates that make up the processor. Above that level you have the microcode which is a very simple application that forms the underlying structure of a virtual von neuman machine, and associated extensions - accessible via an assembler. Above that we have applications - the operating system, and user applications - that are a 3rd tier of virtualization (the assemblers, interpreters and compilers, which essentially provide another layer of abstraction above the assembler in the form of human readable programming languages, are all application level).
Now if we parallelize our microcode, providing, in essence multiple virtual CPUs, each with a portion of the instruction queue, that can work on seperate instructions we can potentially increase the speed at which the queues stream through the processor. The only tricky part will be building the microcode to keep all of the queues in syncronization - since one queue could potentially need the results of another queue, or visa-versa. However, we already have experience with the issues surrounding this, in high performance cpus in the form of prefetch queues and branching algorithms applied to a pipeline; UT is taking this concept to another level, having the compiler build a 'tree' of dependencies - instead of a traditional pipeline - and assigning blocks of code to adjacent (dependent) grid processors.
This gets around the problem of busy waiting because the adjacent instruction queues are optimized to either read and write on internal cache, or communicate with adjacent cpus in the grid as much as possible, making at most 1 additional clock cycle to pass information to useful 'next step' instructions in adjacent cpus.
I don't see how this couldn't be useful to speed up processing of any application, threaded or traditional 'flat' applications, since the compiler will be optimizing the code for the processor, automatically taking into account for, and building the optimized tree regardless of the type of application (which is essentially what the article states the research team anticipates). Recognizing that parallel processors will need to share data, this research focuses on optimizing that process to ameliorate inefficiencies due to the very same limitations of traditional multiprocessors that you mention - instead of assuming the traditional single pipeline is the only way.
This is taking the processor itself from a traditional serial device, into a multiplexed realm - complicated - but, very interesting and useful indeed! (and about time!)
If the patent holder decides to pursue this against open source/free software - then we will just have to do things the old fashioned way: kick off a separate application to run the widget in. No skin off my teeth (this means my life as a sysadmin just got 50% easier with regard to configuration management - I would no longer have to maintain plugins, and stand-alone patches).
If the patent holder does this, they won't make any money from it other than getting damages from deep pockets, like M$, and will kill the technology in the bargain.
This would be a canonical example of the Wrong Thing
There also were technology issues that were not developed, and the added impetus of the President's focus spurred the accomplishment of the seemingly impossible.
I think it is good to have a vision of where we want our space travel and exploration milestones to be. Without goals to stretch us outside of our day to day normality, we have a tendency to maintain the status quo. Insurmountable goals almost always have a way of being accomplished - to the suprise of people who never thought they could function at such a high level.
Per the initial write-up: "...all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux..." (my emphasis)
The key word here is 'verifiable'. It is much easier to detect and validate that someone has hacked a Linux box, than a Windows box. We don't know the following that would lead more credence to any claims:
1. What is the ratio of M$ to Linux boxes that were attacked that we don't know about? (undetected and still infected - I would argue this number is much larger on the M$ side) 2. How were the percentages arrived at? If there are more Linux servers on the network than Windows servers, then we can not quantify 'percentage of total servers' and have it mean anything useful in terms of total numbers of attacks because, statistically, Linux attacks will outnumber Windows attacks given a standard distribution; since most script kiddie tools run on, and target Winblows machines, a 21% of total attacks on a few windows machines is more significant than a 67% of total attacks on a much larger group of Linux machines.
Social science numbers have no intrinsic value, except to the uninformed.
"Figures never lie, but liers tend to figure." - Longfellow
In the case of the $25,000 - that is about 4 months of my salary; they are going to try to convince me that it will take 4 man months to fix the security issue with their proxy settings? Give me a break!
If they are spending that much money to fix a proxy issue, then I am in the wrong line of work...
Earn $$$ verifying Unix code! Don't know what Unix is, or where the restroom is for that matter? No problem! We will pay for your honorary 'MIT' mathematics degree, to lend you that aire of authenticity! Call 555-1111...
'Intellectual Property' is big business - and businesses are now seeing how much they have to loose if they keep letting everyone share.
Unfortunatley, the genie is out of the bottle, and people are used to sharing, which will make it hard to go back to 'oldfashioned' distribution methods. Of course, nothing a little heavy-handed litigation, political lobbying, and scare tactics can't solve...or so they would think.
What is your measure of 'productivity' vis-a-vis software development?
If its the number of lines of code a programmer produces, that is an irrelevant measurement if the code doesn't do anything interesting or useful.
On the other hand, if we measure productivity based on production of useful modules and applications - then a person who creates less code than our 'productive' programmer, yet produces less buggy and more useful modules is more productive in my book.
I thought Apollo 1 was the last pure Oxygen ship?
on
The Return of Apollo?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The structure of the capsule would be modified so it could handle the 105 kilopascal (15 psi) air pressure used in the ISS today, rather than the 34 kPa (5 psi) pure oxygen environment that Apollo used. - The Space Review
Hmmm - I thought they went to a Nitrogen/Oxygen mix after the Apollo 1 fire?
More SCO obfuscation. Reading the 'break down' it is plain that SCO is twisting Bruce Peren's words for their own benefit. They just 'happened' to leave out the part about the code in question being old, uncompilable, and legal to be used according to the AT&T decision back in the '70s.
The tenor of SCO's accusations is going higher - a clear sign that they are grabbing at straws.
Col. David H. Hackworth entered the service at that age. From his web site:
"Biography
Hack's military career as a sailor, soldier and a military correspondent has spanned nearly a dozen wars and conflicts, from the end of World War II to the recent meltdown in the ex-Yugoslavia.
He enlisted in the merchant marine at age 14 and the U.S. Army at 15. In almost 26 years in the Army he spent over seven years in combat theaters, winning a battlefield commission in Korea to become that war's youngest Army captain...."
That is probably the most well-known instance that I am aware of.
I realize he is 15 - but come on...it should be water off a duck's back.
Many kids his age lied about their age, and were fighting in WWII - I don't buy the 'pain and suffering' he is experiencing from this. The litigation sounds like greed to me.
That being said, I think he should be in the movie, or at least give him a tour of the set. He is an internet icon now - his fans will enjoy seeing him on the big screen.
Okay guys and gals, I am going to share the methodology I use to create pseudo random passwords:
1. Make up a phrase that you will remember - make it fairly long - at least 12 words, e.g:
night of the living dead zombies eat flesh for fun and kicks
2. Pick out key letters. A simple key is to use is just the first letters of each word - you can get more complex by alternating the first and the last letters or some number of letters, like alternating 1st and 3rd letters (on words smaller than 3 letters just use the last letter) etc. We will just use the simple method:
night of the living dead zombies eat flesh for fun and kicks
so we end up with:
notldzefffak
3. Make it even more difficult to break by inserting numbers and special characters in the password. Many password systems are set up to require numbers within passwords - so you may not have a choice in the matter; also, some systems will not let you use special characters - adjust as needed for your local conditions:
notl96dzefff%ak
And there you have it, a password that a normal dicationary lookup will not break - and yet one you can easily remember by recalling the original phrase, and applying your letter picking rule. No need to keep stickies on your computer, or in your desk drawer, or under your desk, or in a book, or in your wallet etc... (you would be amazed where you can find people's passwords just by examining their work area...lol).
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter who you vote for. The two parties have all the votes in the electorial college, and that is what counts - regardless of who wins the popular vote.
I am just going to vote in local elections and record this dark age for future generations - if any - so they know what really went down.
Resist temptation. Get a PS2, or better yet, run Linux and play Tux Racer on your workstation - FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Why the heck would you run Gtk on a Windoze box, when a proper Linux box will do the trick?
:p
Learn from M$ - build-in incompatibilities so that users are forced to change OS...
SCO sucks. End of story.
There you go.
The problem with your idea is we couldn't be too lenient, otherwise we would lose it.
The reason people can read the scrambled words is many many hours of reading correct words and building an expectation (pattern) of what a word should look like. Without this ingrained pattern recognition, this would not work, and written language would lose its meaning slowly, over time, as native readers died off, and new readers had to 'learn' the patternless mess (which would not work).
There is no 'intuition' involved. Its pattern recognition.
Its how your brain is able to see only part of something hidden behind another object, and determine what the hidden object is based on prior experience with said object - a particularly useful survival tool - if the object is a bear, for example, hidden behind a tree.
Now, if you had no experience or understanding of bears, then you could hardly be called a moron if you didn't recogize the foot of a bear sticking out from behind the tree, and consequently became, for want of a better word, dinner.
Similarly, someone without experience with cognitive science could hardly be called a moron for not recognizing the pattern matching capabilities of the human brain.
Everyone is a moron at something; spend enough time with someone, and you will find out what that is.
What you say is true - except the part about M$ losing.
There are enough open source options out there now (and as DRM kicks in I anticipate a backlash of even more to come).
The only way to 'win' this game is to destroy the internet; I don't see the majority of people who have built the network and grown accustomed to free interchange of ideas, entertainment and applications just rolling over and playing dead.
I, for one, will not have DRM in my home. I would urge anyone who loves freedom to do the same. While we may not be playing the hippest Xbox game, or watching on-demand WB programs - we will be enjoying our Muds, Tux Racer, and our encrypted p2p meta-networks on our own terms.
Viva la Revolution! Vote with your wallet, and don't buy the Redmond propaganda. They want every dollar in your wallet to flow into their bank accounts - and they will not have it!
Who, me?
sleep (60);
press (submit);
I think people will be using encrypted P2P 'trust' networks with people they know and trust. Unfortunately, this will have the effect of further segmenting the internet. However, the '3 degrees of seperation' effect could ameliorate that to a certain extent.
These 'meta-networks' are the wave of the future - unless they become outlawed, at which point the internet as we know it is dead, given that this would also kill VPNs - the staple of many businesses.
A P2P wireless network of networks based on the MIT Roofnet or similar technology would be the next logical step. That could be banned, as well.
On the face of it the situation looks more and more like Soviet Russia - without the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman, being banned, of course!
"When networks are outlawed, only outlaws will have networks"
If the parallelism is at the microcode level, which is what this article is addressing, then the 'type' of application is irrelevant - you will still gain speed benefits.
Think of a computer system as virtual boxes within boxes. At the lowest level you have the physical logic gates that make up the processor. Above that level you have the microcode which is a very simple application that forms the underlying structure of a virtual von neuman machine, and associated extensions - accessible via an assembler. Above that we have applications - the operating system, and user applications - that are a 3rd tier of virtualization (the assemblers, interpreters and compilers, which essentially provide another layer of abstraction above the assembler in the form of human readable programming languages, are all application level).
Now if we parallelize our microcode, providing, in essence multiple virtual CPUs, each with a portion of the instruction queue, that can work on seperate instructions we can potentially increase the speed at which the queues stream through the processor. The only tricky part will be building the microcode to keep all of the queues in syncronization - since one queue could potentially need the results of another queue, or visa-versa. However, we already have experience with the issues surrounding this, in high performance cpus in the form of prefetch queues and branching algorithms applied to a pipeline; UT is taking this concept to another level, having the compiler build a 'tree' of dependencies - instead of a traditional pipeline - and assigning blocks of code to adjacent (dependent) grid processors.
This gets around the problem of busy waiting because the adjacent instruction queues are optimized to either read and write on internal cache, or communicate with adjacent cpus in the grid as much as possible, making at most 1 additional clock cycle to pass information to useful 'next step' instructions in adjacent cpus.
I don't see how this couldn't be useful to speed up processing of any application, threaded or traditional 'flat' applications, since the compiler will be optimizing the code for the processor, automatically taking into account for, and building the optimized tree regardless of the type of application (which is essentially what the article states the research team anticipates). Recognizing that parallel processors will need to share data, this research focuses on optimizing that process to ameliorate inefficiencies due to the very same limitations of traditional multiprocessors that you mention - instead of assuming the traditional single pipeline is the only way.
This is taking the processor itself from a traditional serial device, into a multiplexed realm - complicated - but, very interesting and useful indeed! (and about time!)
If the patent holder decides to pursue this against open source/free software - then we will just have to do things the old fashioned way: kick off a separate application to run the widget in. No skin off my teeth (this means my life as a sysadmin just got 50% easier with regard to configuration management - I would no longer have to maintain plugins, and stand-alone patches).
If the patent holder does this, they won't make any money from it other than getting damages from deep pockets, like M$, and will kill the technology in the bargain.
This would be a canonical example of the Wrong Thing
Instead of WAR, lets put some money toward projects that will show the best of the human spirit.
There also were technology issues that were not developed, and the added impetus of the President's focus spurred the accomplishment of the seemingly impossible.
I think it is good to have a vision of where we want our space travel and exploration milestones to be. Without goals to stretch us outside of our day to day normality, we have a tendency to maintain the status quo. Insurmountable goals almost always have a way of being accomplished - to the suprise of people who never thought they could function at such a high level.
Bravo!
Per the initial write-up: "...all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux..." (my emphasis)
The key word here is 'verifiable'. It is much easier to detect and validate that someone has hacked a Linux box, than a Windows box. We don't know the following that would lead more credence to any claims:
1. What is the ratio of M$ to Linux boxes that were attacked that we don't know about? (undetected and still infected - I would argue this number is much larger on the M$ side)
2. How were the percentages arrived at? If there are more Linux servers on the network than Windows servers, then we can not quantify 'percentage of total servers' and have it mean anything useful in terms of total numbers of attacks because, statistically, Linux attacks will outnumber Windows attacks given a standard distribution; since most script kiddie tools run on, and target Winblows machines, a 21% of total attacks on a few windows machines is more significant than a 67% of total attacks on a much larger group of Linux machines.
Social science numbers have no intrinsic value, except to the uninformed.
"Figures never lie, but liers tend to figure." - Longfellow
In the case of the $25,000 - that is about 4 months of my salary; they are going to try to convince me that it will take 4 man months to fix the security issue with their proxy settings? Give me a break!
If they are spending that much money to fix a proxy issue, then I am in the wrong line of work...
Milton's Institute of Tricology does...
Sign seen at Utah bars:
Earn $$$ verifying Unix code! Don't know what Unix is, or where the restroom is for that matter? No problem! We will pay for your honorary 'MIT' mathematics degree, to lend you that aire of authenticity! Call 555-1111...
'Intellectual Property' is big business - and businesses are now seeing how much they have to loose if they keep letting everyone share.
Unfortunatley, the genie is out of the bottle, and people are used to sharing, which will make it hard to go back to 'oldfashioned' distribution methods. Of course, nothing a little heavy-handed litigation, political lobbying, and scare tactics can't solve...or so they would think.
Here is cheap development under Linux (or Windows for that matter):
Load Zope on your Linux server.
Learn Python, if you don't know it already.
Build web based apps quickly and easily via any web browser that supports frames from any location that can route to the server.
Zope has built-in functionality for http server, ftp server, Berkley DB, and allows you to access external SQL databases as needed.
Using simple templates and python programs you can build sophisticated applications quickly.
What is your measure of 'productivity' vis-a-vis software development?
If its the number of lines of code a programmer produces, that is an irrelevant measurement if the code doesn't do anything interesting or useful.
On the other hand, if we measure productivity based on production of useful modules and applications - then a person who creates less code than our 'productive' programmer, yet produces less buggy and more useful modules is more productive in my book.
The structure of the capsule would be modified so it could handle the 105 kilopascal (15 psi) air pressure used in the ISS today, rather than the 34 kPa (5 psi) pure oxygen environment that Apollo used. - The Space Review
Hmmm - I thought they went to a Nitrogen/Oxygen mix after the Apollo 1 fire?
More SCO obfuscation. Reading the 'break down' it is plain that SCO is twisting Bruce Peren's words for their own benefit. They just 'happened' to leave out the part about the code in question being old, uncompilable, and legal to be used according to the AT&T decision back in the '70s.
The tenor of SCO's accusations is going higher - a clear sign that they are grabbing at straws.
Col. David H. Hackworth entered the service at that age. From his web site:
..."
"Biography
Hack's military career as a sailor, soldier and a military correspondent has spanned nearly a dozen wars and conflicts, from the end of World War II to the recent meltdown in the ex-Yugoslavia.
He enlisted in the merchant marine at age 14 and the U.S. Army at 15. In almost 26 years in the Army he spent over seven years in combat theaters, winning a battlefield commission in Korea to become that war's youngest Army captain.
That is probably the most well-known instance that I am aware of.
I realize he is 15 - but come on...it should be water off a duck's back.
Many kids his age lied about their age, and were fighting in WWII - I don't buy the 'pain and suffering' he is experiencing from this. The litigation sounds like greed to me.
That being said, I think he should be in the movie, or at least give him a tour of the set. He is an internet icon now - his fans will enjoy seeing him on the big screen.
Okay guys and gals, I am going to share the methodology I use to create pseudo random passwords:
1. Make up a phrase that you will remember - make it fairly long - at least 12 words, e.g:
night of the living dead zombies eat flesh for fun and kicks
2. Pick out key letters. A simple key is to use is just the first letters of each word - you can get more complex by alternating the first and the last letters or some number of letters, like alternating 1st and 3rd letters (on words smaller than 3 letters just use the last letter) etc. We will just use the simple method:
night of the living dead zombies eat flesh for fun and kicks
so we end up with:
notldzefffak
3. Make it even more difficult to break by inserting numbers and special characters in the password. Many password systems are set up to require numbers within passwords - so you may not have a choice in the matter; also, some systems will not let you use special characters - adjust as needed for your local conditions:
notl96dzefff%ak
And there you have it, a password that a normal dicationary lookup will not break - and yet one you can easily remember by recalling the original phrase, and applying your letter picking rule. No need to keep stickies on your computer, or in your desk drawer, or under your desk, or in a book, or in your wallet etc... (you would be amazed where you can find people's passwords just by examining their work area...lol).
Now, get out there and change your passwords!
Good luck!