First let's start with ENIAC. ENIAC used valves, was electronic, was Turing Complete, and was designed to be Turing Complete. Which means that it could, theoretically, solve any problem currently solvable by today's machines (given enough time). Because it was Turing complete, it was obviously programmable.
The Z3 used mechanical relays instead. If I recall right, the Z3 could be Turing Complete with a little hack. In 1998, if I remember right, someone showed that conditional jumps could be implemented by quite literally forking the punched tape that was fed into it. So the Z3 was Turing complete, but wasn't quite designed to be. It was, however, quite programmable.
Collosus wasn't Turning Complete, but it was damn fast for what it did. It was programmable, and used valves like ENIAC later did.
Thus, the Z3 was the first Turing Complete (sort of) programmable computer ever made.
Collosus was the first fully electronic, programmable computer. It was also the first programmable computer used to break encryption.
ENIAC was the first computer designed to be Turing Complete.
Strongest contender to the title of the first "real" computer is, in my opinion, the Z3.
1) Most people in England still only have 486 computers 2) He's talking about deciphering stuff off a paper tape, something a modern PC can't do at any speed 3) An old guy bragging about life's accomplishments (which is okay).
Countless months of my life have been spent on just tracking library dependencies (whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of/usr/lib/* again), digging through cryptic incomplete outdated man pages, struggling with piss-poor user interfaces, etc.
I've been using Linux for about four years on various systems, and I've never had to 'recompile half of/usr/lib/*'. Even when I built a Linux From Scratch distribution, I didn't have to do such. Perhaps you're just making your job harder than it needs to be?
You know what? Windows is actually cheaper. Even if you add 80$ for a router, it's still cheaper. Because my time is more valuable than that.
For a router? What do you need Windows for on a router?
I built a linux dial-up router out of an old laptop with a failed screen. It didn't particularly take long, and I haven't touched the configuration since I set it up, three years ago. In fact, there has been considerably more troubles with the Linux router's replacement, a D-Link ADSL modem/router all-in-one package.
The router isn't particularly used anymore, but the power requirements are minimal. Linux fucks up, sometimes pretty badly, but if you set it up and then don't touch it, it just works. The Linux laptop router only shuts down at power failiures. It has never stopped working. I haven't logged in to it for over a year.
My experience with Windows has been quite different.
If that cool secure Linux box doesn't even run the programs I want to run, then it's far more broken than any version of Windows ever was. In fact, for what I need it's plain useless.
Of course, for a desktop machine this is an entirely practical and sensible approach. Fortunately, all the software I need runs under Linux. The few pieces of software I would like that I can't get, aren't worth the hassle of switching.
I prefer using Linux. Whenever I have to use an XP machine, I find I miss the relative efficiency of KDE's user interface, and find myself wishing the machine were running SuSE 9.1 instead:)
You are absolutely correct, after all, surveillance satellites have a very difficult time seeing over fences.
Two problems with this:
1. As marvelous as satellites are, they cannot really see into buildings, or anything with a roof.
2. Soldiers on the ground won't have direct access to military spy satellites. There isn't nearly enough of them to be able to respond to every query by a lowly marine. You might as well say; "Why do we need soldiers? We have nukes!".
As far as your "Red China" notion goes (it's spelt "China" by the way) all you have done is made yourself sound like a racist.
Because China's not a brutal, faux-communist, corrupt dictatorship? Oh, silly me! And here I thought organisations like Amnesty International were campaigning for human rights; turns out they're all racists.
As an aside, although the term "Red China" is a bit irritating, it's a reference to ideology, not race. People overuse the word "racist".
They (the Chinese) make your clothes, your household products, most of your steel, and nearly all the parts that make up your computer. So, you trust them with nearly every aspect of your life (after all, what would happen if all the things they supply you suddenly started to fail?) why do you imply we can't trust "them" with our technology, because when you actually look at it, we already do.
So, let me see if I understand you right; China makes many useful household products. Therefore, the US should have no worries about handing over all of its weapons technology over to them.
There may be a slight difference here. Technology isn't a linear scale. Just because a CD-ROM drive may be built in China, does not mean that the Chinese government automatically has access to, say, the US drone planes. Just because China manufactures US-designed trainers, doesn't magically grant the Chinese military US missile control tecnology.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, all ansynchronous encryption (that is, public/private key) are NP complete. The set of NP complete problems are interesting because they represent algorithms that to date, cannot be solved in polynomial time. Because NP complete problems take an exponencial amount of time to solve, encryptions keys that are of considerable length cannot feasibly be broken.
Unfortunately, it has been shown that if there is an algorithm that could consistantly solve one NP-Complete problem, then this algorithm can be applied to any NP complete problem.
In other words, if there is a mathematical method for cracking RSA, then it can equally be applied to DSA. Of course, many people doubt that NP-Complete problems can be solved in polynomial time, but as yet there has been no proof for this conjecture.
Quantum computers are interesting because they consist of qubits, rather than bits. A bit can be on or off: 0 or 1. A qubit is both 0 and 1 at the same time. Thus, in theory, if you have N qubits in your quantum computer, you can test 2^N combinations simultaneously.
Therefore, there are three ways the NSA could conceivably crack your 4096-bit public-key encryption:
1. Find a flaw in the implimentation of the encryption algorithm. 2. Find an algorithm which solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time. 3. Build a quantum computer.
Number 3 is probably quite a long way off (at least one with more than a handful of qubits). The NSA employs cryptographers, but there are a lot more mathematicians and cryptographers in the world than in the NSA that are working on number 2. Number 1 is a risk, but most established systems have been tested enough that this possibility is relatively small (though there was a fuss of El-Gamel keys in GnuPG a while ago).
Thus I'm pretty skeptical that the NSA can peep on high grade encryption schemes. However, as you say, quantum cryptography is useful.
True. I was hung up on the fact that the article was actually demonstrating nothing more than wave interference, then trying to prove the existance of parallel universes by means of extensive handwaving and reference to Deutsch's results.
I was completely wrong about the link though. I certainly should have double-checked it. That's probably one of my bad habits; not always checking sources.
So what are the differences between two-slit and four-slit on a macroscopic scale?
The/. article seems to say. "Look, two slits! Superposition! Now four slits! Different superposition!"
The whole bit about parallel Universes in the article isn't actually demonstrated. He just says, "If you could send one photon through, you'd get this result." All fine and good, but as far as I can see, all the experiments with the laser pen just demonstrate superposition, and don't test for parallel universes or any quantum effects.
Now, I may be wrong, and the four-slit laser experiment demonstrates some sort of quantum effect, but as far as I can see, the/. article doesn't actually test for any quantum effects whatsoever.
The Many Worlds thing I was almost certainly wrong about; should have googled it up more thoroughly. However, it still seems to me like the/. article doesn't show anything but wave interference and superposition.
Ignoring your rather unwarrented confrontational tone, you do have a rather good point. Why you felt the need to growl about it, I'll never know. Only on the internet, I guess.
However, this comment is very informative, and should be moderated as such.
I said "essencially". Could you perhaps explain why the interference pattern from four slits unexplained by standard superposition?
I was under the impression that it was only once you started limiting the experiment down to individual photons that you start to observe quantum effects. Are you saying that the interference pattern observed from four slits cannot be from a wave?
Firstly, as others have pointed out, this is essencially the double slit experiment. In this case, because he's just using laser light, this simply demonstrates the interference of waves.
More interesting results come from when you pass through single electrons or photons one at a time, and they show the same behaviour, but this experiment does not demonstrate this. Nor is the only explanation for this to assume parallel universes. The so-called "Many Worlds" theory.
In fact, according to this, the Many Worlds theory has been invalidated by a recent experiment.
So not only does this laser-pen experiment not prove the existence of parallel universes, but the Many Worlds explanation of the phenomenon has been potentially been already disproven.
You mean, like: 1. Click SuSE Yast Online Update icon in task bar. 2. Enter password. 3. Click next. 4. Click finish.
Or you could click the "Configure Fully Automatic Update..." button, then check the "Enable Automatic Update" checkbox, and have it upgrade automatically.
There's also a "Select patches manually" checkbox, which is what I have on, but I've never had to go with anything but the defaults.
So under Linux, you don't even have to take 30 seconds. It could be all done behind the scenes if you so wish.
I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun, and pretend like Java it's an Open/Free technology... it's not. Is it a good, elegant language? Yes.
Whoa! Slow down there. Java's "a good, elegant language"? Java? Are you sure you're not thinking about some other langauge instead?
I've read both, and I prefer Snow Crash, because...
1. More consistant pacing. Cryptonomicon meanders in places.
2. Cryptonomicon starts so, and ends so fast you'd miss it if you blinked. It's as if his editor told him to hurry the book up, and Stephenson crammed the ending into as short a space as possible. Diamond Age suffers from this even further, stuffing as much as possible into the ending chapter. An epilogue would be so appreciated. Snow Crash ends a lot better, and seems better planned out.
3. Can't figure out why you think Snow Crash is dull. Personally, I found Cryptonomicon to be dull in a few parts, whilst Snow Crash kept up its fast pacing most all the way through.
Personally, I far prefer Snow Crash over Cryptonomicon. It's also the only Neal Stephenson book I've read that doesn't seem to much suffer from a rushed ending.
There are still many things which software available for the Windows operating system does better than any present Unix-based system. Rather than admit that Windows is ahead in some areas, the tendency is to just ignore those particular areas.
Don't people usually complain projects like KDE copy too much from Windows, or claiming OpenOffice is just a clone of Microsoft Office? And what about Mono?
I really can't seen much of a problem with open source projects not using ideas from proprietry software. Quite a few people would argue that they do this too much!
Yes, RSA is potentially insecure, as there is no mathematical proof guarenteeing that there is no polynomial-time algorithm for solving NP-complete problems.
However, what makes you think that terrorists would use public key encryption? Presumably, these people meet in person, in secret, to discuss illegal activities. In such a scenario, they could give each other their passphrase by word of mouth. Public key encryption is only relevant when the medium for transmitting your keys is insecure.
If I remember rightly, there are other encryption schemes which are not public key, that have been mathematically proven to be secure.
As for quantum computing; I think you're giving the RSA a bit too much credit. Quantum computing is quite far off; all the current methods we know of can only handle a handle of qubits.
As someone else mentioned, the UK has the Data Protection Act (DPA).
The DPA basically states that I can ask any public or private institution for any information they have on me, and they have to give it. With exceptions, if I recall, relating to police investigation and national security.
The DPA also limits what people can do with that information. No passing it on to third parties without permission. No processing the information if I don't want them to. Interesting little things like that.
The UK does have a lot of cameras, but there are also a lot of safeguards. Even if the US had those safeguards, I'm not a US citizen, so I couldn't require them to do anything about it.
Secondly, if a tourist does a crime and leaves fingerprints then it can help track that down. Regarding fingerprinting, I remember getting fingerprinted when I was little at school, do all Americans get fingerprinted as routine? If so, then it kind of makes sense to treat visitors as we do ourselves.
If all US citizens are fingerprinted, photographed, and this information stored in a large, central database, then yes, I suppose so.
Personally, I tend be a little reluctant for a government to possess such a large and comprehensive database. There are many issues surrounding abuse of such a system.
Remember J. Edgar Hoover, and his misuse of the FBI? Seems to me that vast records of biometric information on innocent people could be considerably more dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
First let's start with ENIAC. ENIAC used valves, was electronic, was Turing Complete, and was designed to be Turing Complete. Which means that it could, theoretically, solve any problem currently solvable by today's machines (given enough time). Because it was Turing complete, it was obviously programmable.
The Z3 used mechanical relays instead. If I recall right, the Z3 could be Turing Complete with a little hack. In 1998, if I remember right, someone showed that conditional jumps could be implemented by quite literally forking the punched tape that was fed into it. So the Z3 was Turing complete, but wasn't quite designed to be. It was, however, quite programmable.
Collosus wasn't Turning Complete, but it was damn fast for what it did. It was programmable, and used valves like ENIAC later did.
Thus, the Z3 was the first Turing Complete (sort of) programmable computer ever made.
Collosus was the first fully electronic, programmable computer. It was also the first programmable computer used to break encryption.
ENIAC was the first computer designed to be Turing Complete.
Strongest contender to the title of the first "real" computer is, in my opinion, the Z3.
Hey, we succeeded in landing things on Mars too! Just not in all one piece :)
I really put that down to two things:
1) Most people in England still only have 486 computers
2) He's talking about deciphering stuff off a paper tape, something a modern PC can't do at any speed
3) An old guy bragging about life's accomplishments (which is okay).
At least we can count.
Countless months of my life have been spent on just tracking library dependencies (whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of /usr/lib/* again), digging through cryptic incomplete outdated man pages, struggling with piss-poor user interfaces, etc.
/usr/lib/*'. Even when I built a Linux From Scratch distribution, I didn't have to do such. Perhaps you're just making your job harder than it needs to be?
:)
I've been using Linux for about four years on various systems, and I've never had to 'recompile half of
You know what? Windows is actually cheaper. Even if you add 80$ for a router, it's still cheaper. Because my time is more valuable than that.
For a router? What do you need Windows for on a router?
I built a linux dial-up router out of an old laptop with a failed screen. It didn't particularly take long, and I haven't touched the configuration since I set it up, three years ago. In fact, there has been considerably more troubles with the Linux router's replacement, a D-Link ADSL modem/router all-in-one package.
The router isn't particularly used anymore, but the power requirements are minimal. Linux fucks up, sometimes pretty badly, but if you set it up and then don't touch it, it just works. The Linux laptop router only shuts down at power failiures. It has never stopped working. I haven't logged in to it for over a year.
My experience with Windows has been quite different.
If that cool secure Linux box doesn't even run the programs I want to run, then it's far more broken than any version of Windows ever was. In fact, for what I need it's plain useless.
Of course, for a desktop machine this is an entirely practical and sensible approach. Fortunately, all the software I need runs under Linux. The few pieces of software I would like that I can't get, aren't worth the hassle of switching.
I prefer using Linux. Whenever I have to use an XP machine, I find I miss the relative efficiency of KDE's user interface, and find myself wishing the machine were running SuSE 9.1 instead
You are absolutely correct, after all, surveillance satellites have a very difficult time seeing over fences.
Two problems with this:
1. As marvelous as satellites are, they cannot really see into buildings, or anything with a roof.
2. Soldiers on the ground won't have direct access to military spy satellites. There isn't nearly enough of them to be able to respond to every query by a lowly marine. You might as well say; "Why do we need soldiers? We have nukes!".
As far as your "Red China" notion goes (it's spelt "China" by the way) all you have done is made yourself sound like a racist.
Because China's not a brutal, faux-communist, corrupt dictatorship? Oh, silly me! And here I thought organisations like Amnesty International were campaigning for human rights; turns out they're all racists.
As an aside, although the term "Red China" is a bit irritating, it's a reference to ideology, not race. People overuse the word "racist".
They (the Chinese) make your clothes, your household products, most of your steel, and nearly all the parts that make up your computer. So, you trust them with nearly every aspect of your life (after all, what would happen if all the things they supply you suddenly started to fail?) why do you imply we can't trust "them" with our technology, because when you actually look at it, we already do.
So, let me see if I understand you right; China makes many useful household products. Therefore, the US should have no worries about handing over all of its weapons technology over to them.
There may be a slight difference here. Technology isn't a linear scale. Just because a CD-ROM drive may be built in China, does not mean that the Chinese government automatically has access to, say, the US drone planes. Just because China manufactures US-designed trainers, doesn't magically grant the Chinese military US missile control tecnology.
Down, down it goes.
What if legions of small, zombie bunnies attempt to take over the world?
Sometimes, there are more important and more likely things to be worried about.
Open the pod bay doors, Wendell.
I'm sorry, Fahr, I'm afraid I can't do that.
I'm not quite sure your point.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, all ansynchronous encryption (that is, public/private key) are NP complete. The set of NP complete problems are interesting because they represent algorithms that to date, cannot be solved in polynomial time. Because NP complete problems take an exponencial amount of time to solve, encryptions keys that are of considerable length cannot feasibly be broken.
Unfortunately, it has been shown that if there is an algorithm that could consistantly solve one NP-Complete problem, then this algorithm can be applied to any NP complete problem.
In other words, if there is a mathematical method for cracking RSA, then it can equally be applied to DSA. Of course, many people doubt that NP-Complete problems can be solved in polynomial time, but as yet there has been no proof for this conjecture.
Quantum computers are interesting because they consist of qubits, rather than bits. A bit can be on or off: 0 or 1. A qubit is both 0 and 1 at the same time. Thus, in theory, if you have N qubits in your quantum computer, you can test 2^N combinations simultaneously.
Therefore, there are three ways the NSA could conceivably crack your 4096-bit public-key encryption:
1. Find a flaw in the implimentation of the encryption algorithm.
2. Find an algorithm which solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
3. Build a quantum computer.
Number 3 is probably quite a long way off (at least one with more than a handful of qubits). The NSA employs cryptographers, but there are a lot more mathematicians and cryptographers in the world than in the NSA that are working on number 2. Number 1 is a risk, but most established systems have been tested enough that this possibility is relatively small (though there was a fuss of El-Gamel keys in GnuPG a while ago).
Thus I'm pretty skeptical that the NSA can peep on high grade encryption schemes. However, as you say, quantum cryptography is useful.
True. I was hung up on the fact that the article was actually demonstrating nothing more than wave interference, then trying to prove the existance of parallel universes by means of extensive handwaving and reference to Deutsch's results.
Okay. :)
I was completely wrong about the link though. I certainly should have double-checked it. That's probably one of my bad habits; not always checking sources.
So what are the differences between two-slit and four-slit on a macroscopic scale?
/. article seems to say. "Look, two slits! Superposition! Now four slits! Different superposition!"
/. article doesn't actually test for any quantum effects whatsoever.
/. article doesn't show anything but wave interference and superposition.
The
The whole bit about parallel Universes in the article isn't actually demonstrated. He just says, "If you could send one photon through, you'd get this result." All fine and good, but as far as I can see, all the experiments with the laser pen just demonstrate superposition, and don't test for parallel universes or any quantum effects.
Now, I may be wrong, and the four-slit laser experiment demonstrates some sort of quantum effect, but as far as I can see, the
The Many Worlds thing I was almost certainly wrong about; should have googled it up more thoroughly. However, it still seems to me like the
Ignoring your rather unwarrented confrontational tone, you do have a rather good point. Why you felt the need to growl about it, I'll never know. Only on the internet, I guess.
However, this comment is very informative, and should be moderated as such.
I said "essencially". Could you perhaps explain why the interference pattern from four slits unexplained by standard superposition?
I was under the impression that it was only once you started limiting the experiment down to individual photons that you start to observe quantum effects. Are you saying that the interference pattern observed from four slits cannot be from a wave?
Firstly, as others have pointed out, this is essencially the double slit experiment. In this case, because he's just using laser light, this simply demonstrates the interference of waves.
More interesting results come from when you pass through single electrons or photons one at a time, and they show the same behaviour, but this experiment does not demonstrate this. Nor is the only explanation for this to assume parallel universes. The so-called "Many Worlds" theory.
In fact, according to this, the Many Worlds theory has been invalidated by a recent experiment.
So not only does this laser-pen experiment not prove the existence of parallel universes, but the Many Worlds explanation of the phenomenon has been potentially been already disproven.
You mean, like:
1. Click SuSE Yast Online Update icon in task bar.
2. Enter password.
3. Click next.
4. Click finish.
Or you could click the "Configure Fully Automatic Update..." button, then check the "Enable Automatic Update" checkbox, and have it upgrade automatically.
There's also a "Select patches manually" checkbox, which is what I have on, but I've never had to go with anything but the defaults.
So under Linux, you don't even have to take 30 seconds. It could be all done behind the scenes if you so wish.
I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun, and pretend like Java it's an Open/Free technology... it's not. Is it a good, elegant language? Yes.
Whoa! Slow down there. Java's "a good, elegant language"? Java? Are you sure you're not thinking about some other langauge instead?
Close. Snow Crash was originally supposed to be a graphic novel.
pedantic (adj.)
Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules
I've read both, and I prefer Snow Crash, because...
1. More consistant pacing. Cryptonomicon meanders in places.
2. Cryptonomicon starts so, and ends so fast you'd miss it if you blinked. It's as if his editor told him to hurry the book up, and Stephenson crammed the ending into as short a space as possible. Diamond Age suffers from this even further, stuffing as much as possible into the ending chapter. An epilogue would be so appreciated. Snow Crash ends a lot better, and seems better planned out.
3. Can't figure out why you think Snow Crash is dull. Personally, I found Cryptonomicon to be dull in a few parts, whilst Snow Crash kept up its fast pacing most all the way through.
Personally, I far prefer Snow Crash over Cryptonomicon. It's also the only Neal Stephenson book I've read that doesn't seem to much suffer from a rushed ending.
There are still many things which software available for the Windows operating system does better than any present Unix-based system. Rather than admit that Windows is ahead in some areas, the tendency is to just ignore those particular areas.
Don't people usually complain projects like KDE copy too much from Windows, or claiming OpenOffice is just a clone of Microsoft Office? And what about Mono?
I really can't seen much of a problem with open source projects not using ideas from proprietry software. Quite a few people would argue that they do this too much!
Yes, RSA is potentially insecure, as there is no mathematical proof guarenteeing that there is no polynomial-time algorithm for solving NP-complete problems.
However, what makes you think that terrorists would use public key encryption? Presumably, these people meet in person, in secret, to discuss illegal activities. In such a scenario, they could give each other their passphrase by word of mouth. Public key encryption is only relevant when the medium for transmitting your keys is insecure.
If I remember rightly, there are other encryption schemes which are not public key, that have been mathematically proven to be secure.
As for quantum computing; I think you're giving the RSA a bit too much credit. Quantum computing is quite far off; all the current methods we know of can only handle a handle of qubits.
As someone else points out, ROX is Risc OS on X. So it's deliberate that they have the same approach as Risc ;)
As someone else mentioned, the UK has the Data Protection Act (DPA).
The DPA basically states that I can ask any public or private institution for any information they have on me, and they have to give it. With exceptions, if I recall, relating to police investigation and national security.
The DPA also limits what people can do with that information. No passing it on to third parties without permission. No processing the information if I don't want them to. Interesting little things like that.
The UK does have a lot of cameras, but there are also a lot of safeguards. Even if the US had those safeguards, I'm not a US citizen, so I couldn't require them to do anything about it.
Secondly, if a tourist does a crime and leaves fingerprints then it can help track that down. Regarding fingerprinting, I remember getting fingerprinted when I was little at school, do all Americans get fingerprinted as routine? If so, then it kind of makes sense to treat visitors as we do ourselves.
If all US citizens are fingerprinted, photographed, and this information stored in a large, central database, then yes, I suppose so.
Personally, I tend be a little reluctant for a government to possess such a large and comprehensive database. There are many issues surrounding abuse of such a system.
Remember J. Edgar Hoover, and his misuse of the FBI? Seems to me that vast records of biometric information on innocent people could be considerably more dangerous.