Assuming I counted correctly, there have only been 5 successful landers/rovers (Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit) and 1 partial success (Mars 6). Check the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars. There were a lot more missions to Mars than I realized, most of them failures. Going to Mars is hard, which makes the success of Opportunity and Spirit even more amazing. It would be a mistake for us to get cocky and think we've got this mastered, just because our couple missions went really well.
There are a lots of people here bashing the Tolkien works that were released after J.R.R death. Have any of you actually looked any of these books? Given that most of these books are very dense and very scholarly works, it's highly doubtful that Christopher Tolkien edited them just to make a quick buck. The intended audience for these books was just too small for that.
When J.R.R died, he left literally thousands of pages of unpublished pages, many that he had been working on for decades. It would have been a real shame for this stuff to vanish forever. And Christopher Tolkien's contribution is usually just editing. He is generally very careful to separate his father's words from his commentary (usually with a different font).
Not quite. The recent Dune books (prequels and sequels) were written by Brian Herbert (son of Frank Herbert) using notes left by this father. They do not claim to be written by Frank Herbert. Although I have not read them, my understanding is that the Dune books written by Brian Herbert received decent reviews.
It's a little heavy on the mathematician side, but all of these are heavy hitters who had interesting lives and careers. I've read biographies on most of them.
Kurt Godel
Gregor Mendel
Paul Erdos
Stanislaw Ulam
Alan Turing
John von Neumann
George Dantzig
Evariste Galois
OMG. You mean Gilligan might get voted off the island? That would be sacrilege. But then maybe he can tell us why the Professor can build a cold fusion plant with coconuts, but can't build a damn boat. I've always wondered about that.
For those that actually read the article, it is completely wrong. It does a terrible job of explaining FairUCE. Read the material at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/fairuce. They are not advocating sending spam back to the spammers, but instead are using a combination challenge/response and DNS lookups to associate a reputation to the IP that is sending the email message. I figured IBM was smarter than the original article was implying.
I'll really glad such a magnanimous and unbiased group of companies were nice enough to let me know to stay away from Linux. I might have made a bad mistake and started using Linux. I guess I'll just have to stick with FreeBSD.
I think this is just an example of the school being lazy. It's also one of those "fashionable feel good" measures that doesn't really add any security or protection for the students. That's just the lame argument the school uses to defend the measure.
Given that there has been a few violent episodes at various schools in the last several years, I can understand the desire for security. I've got young kids myself. But they need to make sure that the measures that are enacted really add security. I would much rather see the schools add metal detectors or search school bags rather than have everyone wear RFID chips. I know that sounds totalitarian, and if I were a student at the school I would hate it too. But at least these are real measures and not fashionable nonsense.
There is a lot of speculation here that Microsoft put in this encryption bug on purpose. That's giving them too much credit on this one. I just read the paper about the weakness. They are essentially reusing the same keystream more than once. That's an amateur level bug that is discussed in any crypto book that talks about stream ciphers. Look in the book Applied Crytography by Bruce Schneier in the section on cryptographic modes. He talks about this directly. This is not a minor threat. It's a gaping hole since a simple XOR of two versions of the document gives you a lot of information.
The bigger question is why Microsoft used a stream cipher for this. As Zimmerman mentions, they are more difficult to use correctly. Although some weakness in RC4 have been found, it is still possible to use it in a strong manner. You just have to be careful. It would have been better to use a good block cipher (AES, Triple DES, blowfish, etc) and a simple mode like CBC. It's easy to code and still plenty strong if you reuse the same initialization vector. Even better would have been a newer mode like CCM.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that just because all the previous DRM schemes were broken, that any new scheme will suffer the same fate. The crypto necessary to build good DRM exists. It's just that in the past, engineers ignored the advice of crypto experts and developed their own methods. All of which were broken. But I think they are learning from their mistakes.
Of course, this means that there will need to be a single digital-analog-digital iteration to remove the DRM. As someone said, if I can play it, I can record it. I just may not be able to record the original digital data
It's interesting that the article mentions that many spam messages are simple text messages with nothing but hyperlinks. This is exactly what Paul Graham predicted in his first essay on Bayesian filtering for spam. This definitely demonstrates that Bayesian techniques are having an effect on the behavior of spammers.
Tftp implements its own timeout and retransmission on top of UDP. In essence, it recreates a mini version of TCP. I read in one of the Steven's books that the reason they do this is because tftp was designed with embedded applications in mind. This allows them to use special stacks that only support UDP. I doubt this is necessary these days, but was probably useful 15 years ago.
As to the original question, since TCP is the standard method of creating a reliable stream between two points, it makes sense to use that as the standard for the point to point land speed record. There is a great deal of research about optimizing TCP over such networks, which I think is the whole point of the exercise.
Don't feel bad about not understanding the details of this. I have a masters degree in math (and know a good deal about topology and analysis) and this stuff is still mostly jibberish to me. This is very deep stuff. But the way it interconnects math and physics is very interesting.
I believe it is naive to think that the dynamics of this situation only apply to the US. The beauracratic thought processes of different governments are more alike than different. These issues are now arising in the US only because the Internet has been here longer. You will get your turn.
These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.
The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.
But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.
My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.
Why can't they figure out these names are all dumb and poor for brand recognition.
Actually, I think the Mozilla project has done much better PR than most of the other large, open source projects. The project always comes across as much better organized than most of the other projects I follow. I think the name change was a smart move.
Hubble's replacement is scheduled for 2012 and it sees in infrared. Hubble uses visible light spectrum. There is no scheduled replacement for hubble.
I don't know the details of the spectrum that the Webb telescope will be able to view. But viewing only infrared is not as odd as it seems. Visible light and infrared astronomy overlap a great deal. The really deep objects are so greatly red-shifted, they are in the infrared when the light gets to us. And since the Webb telescope is primarily for viewing such objects, this makes sense. But you are right in that it will not be a direct replacement for the Hubble, although it is close.
And I agree that shutting down Hubble makes no sense. It is doing great astronomy and could continue doing so for many years. I also think it's a mistake to put the Webb telescope at the L2 point rather than in Earth orbit. Hubble has shown that the ability to do repair missions is invaluable.
Look. I'm not saying this guy is a Saint or anything. Usually someone doesn't become a billionaire by being a nice guy. He may be a real jerk for all I know. But it's hard to deny the guy's impact on the world (for better or worse). He's definitely had more impact than most of the actors and entertainers that have been knighted.
Remember that not only is Bill Gates the self-made, richest man in the world, but he is also one of the top philanthropist of all times due to the charitable gifts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has already given away billions. So, it's not too surprising that he is knighted. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
I'm definitely not a Microsoft fan (I'm a Unix admin). But give the guy some slack. I think some people take this anti-Microsoft thing too personally.
The CAN-SPAM act has only been in effect a couple weeks. Did you expect miracles? I don't know what the ultimate effectiveness of this law will be. It may never work. But if the FTC starts really cracking down, the lives of hard core spammers could get very interesting. But I suspect the FTC will wait some time before they do anything. That way, anyone still not in compliance will have no excuse.
Although the spam problem looks pretty ugly today, I think with a few simple changes it can be brought under control. I believe a combination of CAN-SPAM, deployment of SPF, and wide spread use of tools like spamassassin (or similar) will take a real bite out of the spam problem. It won't be any one thing, it will be a combination of small things.
Well, just making it free was not enough. It was important that it was both free AND simple. It's yet another example of the dynamic "good enough is best" that occurs over and over. Making something too complicated in the beginning will kill its acceptance. But after its accepted, all the other features will be added on as users demand it. Now that the web is firmly entrenched, I wouldn't be surprised to see additional features from research projects like Xanadu being added to the web.
Everyone should read the classic paper from Richard Gabriel that discusses this "good enough is best" in the context of lisp and unix. Although it's a little old now, it's still a good read even for those with no interest in lisp.
The end of year CPU review on THG (posted on slashdot a couple days ago) recommended the Athalon 2600 (I think that was the model number) as the best cpu for the dollar. Maybe there is an Intel bias at THG, but this article made AMD look pretty good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Either you are the customer, or you are the product.
If you aren't giving them any money, it's obviously which is true.
Assuming I counted correctly, there have only been 5 successful landers/rovers (Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit) and 1 partial success (Mars 6). Check the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars. There were a lot more missions to Mars than I realized, most of them failures. Going to Mars is hard, which makes the success of Opportunity and Spirit even more amazing. It would be a mistake for us to get cocky and think we've got this mastered, just because our couple missions went really well.
There are a lots of people here bashing the Tolkien works that were released after J.R.R death. Have any of you actually looked any of these books? Given that most of these books are very dense and very scholarly works, it's highly doubtful that Christopher Tolkien edited them just to make a quick buck. The intended audience for these books was just too small for that.
When J.R.R died, he left literally thousands of pages of unpublished pages, many that he had been working on for decades. It would have been a real shame for this stuff to vanish forever. And Christopher Tolkien's contribution is usually just editing. He is generally very careful to separate his father's words from his commentary (usually with a different font).
Not quite. The recent Dune books (prequels and sequels) were written by Brian Herbert (son of Frank Herbert) using notes left by this father. They do not claim to be written by Frank Herbert. Although I have not read them, my understanding is that the Dune books written by Brian Herbert received decent reviews.
It's a little heavy on the mathematician side, but all of these are heavy hitters who had interesting lives and careers. I've read biographies on most of them.
Kurt Godel
Gregor Mendel
Paul Erdos
Stanislaw Ulam
Alan Turing
John von Neumann
George Dantzig
Evariste Galois
OMG. You mean Gilligan might get voted off the island? That would be sacrilege. But then maybe he can tell us why the Professor can build a cold fusion plant with coconuts, but can't build a damn boat. I've always wondered about that.
One problem with the Fields medal is that it is only awarded every 4 years. Unlike the Nobel and Turing awards which are given yearly.
For those that actually read the article, it is completely wrong. It does a terrible job of explaining FairUCE. Read the material at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/fairuce. They are not advocating sending spam back to the spammers, but instead are using a combination challenge/response and DNS lookups to associate a reputation to the IP that is sending the email message. I figured IBM was smarter than the original article was implying.
I'll really glad such a magnanimous and unbiased group of companies were nice enough to let me know to stay away from Linux. I might have made a bad mistake and started using Linux. I guess I'll just have to stick with FreeBSD.
I think this is just an example of the school being lazy. It's also one of those "fashionable feel good" measures that doesn't really add any security or protection for the students. That's just the lame argument the school uses to defend the measure.
Given that there has been a few violent episodes at various schools in the last several years, I can understand the desire for security. I've got young kids myself. But they need to make sure that the measures that are enacted really add security. I would much rather see the schools add metal detectors or search school bags rather than have everyone wear RFID chips. I know that sounds totalitarian, and if I were a student at the school I would hate it too. But at least these are real measures and not fashionable nonsense.
There is a lot of speculation here that Microsoft put in this encryption bug on purpose. That's giving them too much credit on this one. I just read the paper about the weakness. They are essentially reusing the same keystream more than once. That's an amateur level bug that is discussed in any crypto book that talks about stream ciphers. Look in the book Applied Crytography by Bruce Schneier in the section on cryptographic modes. He talks about this directly. This is not a minor threat. It's a gaping hole since a simple XOR of two versions of the document gives you a lot of information.
The bigger question is why Microsoft used a stream cipher for this. As Zimmerman mentions, they are more difficult to use correctly. Although some weakness in RC4 have been found, it is still possible to use it in a strong manner. You just have to be careful. It would have been better to use a good block cipher (AES, Triple DES, blowfish, etc) and a simple mode like CBC. It's easy to code and still plenty strong if you reuse the same initialization vector. Even better would have been a newer mode like CCM.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that just because all the previous DRM schemes were broken, that any new scheme will suffer the same fate. The crypto necessary to build good DRM exists. It's just that in the past, engineers ignored the advice of crypto experts and developed their own methods. All of which were broken. But I think they are learning from their mistakes.
Of course, this means that there will need to be a single digital-analog-digital iteration to remove the DRM. As someone said, if I can play it, I can record it. I just may not be able to record the original digital data
It's interesting that the article mentions that many spam messages are simple text messages with nothing but hyperlinks. This is exactly what Paul Graham predicted in his first essay on Bayesian filtering for spam. This definitely demonstrates that Bayesian techniques are having an effect on the behavior of spammers.
Tftp implements its own timeout and retransmission on top of UDP. In essence, it recreates a mini version of TCP. I read in one of the Steven's books that the reason they do this is because tftp was designed with embedded applications in mind. This allows them to use special stacks that only support UDP. I doubt this is necessary these days, but was probably useful 15 years ago.
As to the original question, since TCP is the standard method of creating a reliable stream between two points, it makes sense to use that as the standard for the point to point land speed record. There is a great deal of research about optimizing TCP over such networks, which I think is the whole point of the exercise.
Don't feel bad about not understanding the details of this. I have a masters degree in math (and know a good deal about topology and analysis) and this stuff is still mostly jibberish to me. This is very deep stuff. But the way it interconnects math and physics is very interesting.
I believe it is naive to think that the dynamics of this situation only apply to the US. The beauracratic thought processes of different governments are more alike than different. These issues are now arising in the US only because the Internet has been here longer. You will get your turn.
These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.
The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.
But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.
My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.
Why can't they figure out these names are all dumb and poor for brand recognition.
Actually, I think the Mozilla project has done much better PR than most of the other large, open source projects. The project always comes across as much better organized than most of the other projects I follow. I think the name change was a smart move.
Hubble's replacement is scheduled for 2012 and it sees in infrared. Hubble uses visible light spectrum. There is no scheduled replacement for hubble.
I don't know the details of the spectrum that the Webb telescope will be able to view. But viewing only infrared is not as odd as it seems. Visible light and infrared astronomy overlap a great deal. The really deep objects are so greatly red-shifted, they are in the infrared when the light gets to us. And since the Webb telescope is primarily for viewing such objects, this makes sense. But you are right in that it will not be a direct replacement for the Hubble, although it is close.
And I agree that shutting down Hubble makes no sense. It is doing great astronomy and could continue doing so for many years. I also think it's a mistake to put the Webb telescope at the L2 point rather than in Earth orbit. Hubble has shown that the ability to do repair missions is invaluable.
I hit submit too early. Let me finish my thought.
Look. I'm not saying this guy is a Saint or anything. Usually someone doesn't become a billionaire by being a nice guy. He may be a real jerk for all I know. But it's hard to deny the guy's impact on the world (for better or worse). He's definitely had more impact than most of the actors and entertainers that have been knighted.
According to the webiste for the Gates Foundation they have an endowment of 26 billion dollars donated personally by Bill Gates and his wife.
Remember that not only is Bill Gates the self-made, richest man in the world, but he is also one of the top philanthropist of all times due to the charitable gifts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has already given away billions. So, it's not too surprising that he is knighted. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
I'm definitely not a Microsoft fan (I'm a Unix admin). But give the guy some slack. I think some people take this anti-Microsoft thing too personally.
The CAN-SPAM act has only been in effect a couple weeks. Did you expect miracles? I don't know what the ultimate effectiveness of this law will be. It may never work. But if the FTC starts really cracking down, the lives of hard core spammers could get very interesting. But I suspect the FTC will wait some time before they do anything. That way, anyone still not in compliance will have no excuse.
Although the spam problem looks pretty ugly today, I think with a few simple changes it can be brought under control. I believe a combination of CAN-SPAM, deployment of SPF, and wide spread use of tools like spamassassin (or similar) will take a real bite out of the spam problem. It won't be any one thing, it will be a combination of small things.
Everyone should read the classic paper from Richard Gabriel that discusses this "good enough is best" in the context of lisp and unix. Although it's a little old now, it's still a good read even for those with no interest in lisp.
The end of year CPU review on THG (posted on slashdot a couple days ago) recommended the Athalon 2600 (I think that was the model number) as the best cpu for the dollar. Maybe there is an Intel bias at THG, but this article made AMD look pretty good to me.