Currently the best theories we got suggests there's a lower entropy limit of kT*ln 2 (the Von Neumann-Landauer limit) per operation, which is on the order of 10^-23 joule. The energy of the sun via E=mc^2 is on the order of 10^47 joule. So at most you can do is 10^70 operations but 2^256 = ~10^77. In other words you can't get through the keyspace before you run out of energy, even taking ideal assumptions.
Well, if your strategy is guess and check, sure, OK. Wouldn't this plan be a hell of a lot cheaper:
Estimate the total number of operations a genius level human brain can accomplish per second. I will be wildly optimistic and give it 10^3. Lets assume all thought is directed toward crypto and no daydreaming about the young lady working in accounting, or arguing about which was better, Kirk or Picard.
Estimate the age of the NSA. Wikipedia claims formed in 1952 but theres plenty of cloak and dagger stuff going on before, so we'll round it to 10^3 years
Estimate the total number of geniuses the NSA has hired over the years. The holy font of all wisdom, wikipedia, claims the number of employees is classified. However, they claim there's 18000 parking spaces at HQ. What the hell they do with 18K people is a mystery to me. My guess is theres 17990 supervisors, managers, directors, HR personnel, diversity directors, marketing personnel, and other executives and about 10 guys with pocket protectors doing all the work, in between their slashdot breaks. But lets say on a very long term average they have 10^5 geniuses working at any given instant.
Lets further assume they never eat, sleep, have sex (duh, they're math majors). That gives us 31 million seconds per year. Well, we'll round that down for time to watch star trek reruns, eat pizza rolls, and read slashdot, so call it 10^7 seconds per year.
So, you need to do about 10^3 * 10^3 * 10*5 * 10^7 = about 10^18 crypto related thought operations over the total lifetime of the NSA.
In conclusion, you need to run WELL under 10^18 thought operations to figure out the back door they put into your encryption algorithm and/or reverse engineer their top secret decryption technology. A wee bit less than your 10^70 operations required to brute force one message. Plus, when you crack the entire algorithm, you've cracked all messages ever sent with it, not just one message.
Wait, I'm assuming we're talking a 256 character long password. Because I'd sure love to see someone memorise a string of 1 and 0 that is 256 digits long.
Three hours later and no one noticed his post was 155 characters long (at least wc -l claims that). You can look at that as about 8 bits per byte of raw very non random data, giving 1240 bits of nonrandom data and he only needs 256 bits. Pessimistically you might pull 2 bits of randomness out per byte, yielding a whopping 310 bits of randomness. Anyway, thats more than enough to feed a hash function to get a nice even 256 bits. I pushed his post thru sha256sum and got the following 256 bit hash:
Can the OP memorize that hash? Probably not. Can he memorize his post, including his misspelled "memorize" word? Most likely. Everyone works with some clown who memorized every star trek and star wars script, so memorizing one slashdot post is not exactly a heroic achievement.
Even if you only pull one bit of stinky randomness out per byte, his post would still be 155 bits strong, frankly not bad. Add a couple bits of salt (not too many) and it'll do, it'll do.
Just another feel good appointment of an academic to a position where they can't really do anything.
Bruce Schneier newly appointed as Secretary of the US department of Homeland (in)Security? That would be change I could believe in. Maybe in the second term, if he somehow gets 51% of the votes.
he should fire Geithner and replace him with Elizabeth Warren. But no, he won't do that.
Warren? Well, anyone would be an improvement. Wouldn't Ron Paul be better? As treasury secretary, his peculiar opinions about abortion would be about as important as Tom Cruise's insights about foreign policy, i.e. quaintly irrelevant to the task at hand. Would be a nice last job for a smart old man (I mean RP not Cruise)
And of course, (just like the app-store) if you are wearing just a bikini... the doors just won't open.
Yeah I know what you're trying to say, but technically, you can already purchase, for several years now, "door keycard" technology in a form factor the shape and size of a very small pen cap, for about twice the cost of a traditional credit card shaped keycard. I believe you're supposed to put it on a keychain, but there are other possibilities. Luckily there are no sharp edges. So, the bikini ladies can theoretically carry two door fobs, and the guys can carry one. This also has the benefit that people are not going to ask to borrow your keycard. If the bikini ladies are wearing a bikini top of sufficient volume, they could theoretically carry at least another two keycards, adding up to a total of four unlockable door systems, most people probably only need three or so.
Several companies already have solutions in the market, but they haven't caught on yet because the technology isn't quite ready yet and not quite cheap enough.
"isn't quite ready" ? "not cheap enough" ? You need to research that a little bit more. For at least a decade I've never worked at a place without those electric door "key card" locks. Every my kids daycare used them. Both my jobs, my wifes job, daycare, all use the same type of card.
The cards are about $4 and the little pencil-eraser keychain fobs cost a whopping $8. Now this is from a reseller like smarthome.com. Wholesale in bulk they are probably about half that. Most businesses charge like $50 for a lost card, not because it costs $50 but to scare and intimidate the employees (some bosses love that) and also to make up for the labor cost of issuing another card. They are cheap enough to put in a house, and I've been seriously considering it.
I integrated mine with my ipod by purchasing a silicone stretchy case and placing the credit card sized doorcard behind the ipod in the stretchy. It was actually quite inconvenient and I was worried I'd drop the ipod so I stopped doing that. It was more convenient to have them separate.
I think they are hurrying up, because the provider has long sold a little pencil eraser shaped fob, and I know people whom have made bracelets out of them. A wee bit smaller and they could be mounted in a ring. That would be quite convenient, since my had is usually near the door when I'm opening the door.
Yeah, which means you're essentially forced to carry a set of regular keys for your car, house, etc. anyway.
No, you bury your spare house key in the flower bed at a precise coordinate in a vacuum packed plastic bag. When I was a kid my parents had a combination lock on a lock box bolted to the concrete in the garage, with about 100 different keys inside only one of which worked, essentially a poor mans safe.
As for the car key, you can buy flat credit card sized keys from most locksmiths that fit in your wallet for a very small cost. In 12 years I've used mine 3 times, once by locking the keys in the car, once because I forgot my keys, and once because the battery was dead and I needed to get inside to open the hood to charge the battery. If I lock my keys AND my wallet in the car, then I'm screwed.
But to hear the typical slashdotter speak (well, write), it's not the least bit uncommon for non-trained hunt-and-peck geeks to plow through 100-120 words per minute.
wpm in what domain specific language?
I would like my typing test to be five minutes of:
cd.. ls -al cd pr0n:wq ctrl-x ctrl-c rm -Rf df free uptime use DBI; if ($debugmode == 1 ) {/etc/init.d/bind9 reload apt-get dist-upgrade
On the other hand, I suppose the windows admins would prefer text like: see spot see spot run run spot run (just kidding guys you know I love you all, or at least I feel sorry for you having to admin windows)
Under my working conditions with my kind of text, yes, I could hunt-n-peck sustained for an entire test at about 200 wpm on pure muscle memory. I agree with you, that given a page of random legal text, assuming you aren't otherwise a typist at a law firm, most hunt-n-peck slashdot-typists could barely achieve 20 wpm, on a good day.
I actually read the article, it reads like one of those hack academics in 1995 trying to sound hip (and/or pompous) by writing long tedious screeds using technical words they don't understand, to discuss a culture they have no experience with. About 1/3 of the article is about how great the guy used to be and how important and relevant his every utterance is. However, I'm not buying it.
I think its an elaborate hoax, like a modern "Sokal affair", and most of you fell for it.
'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source.
Yes, access to information without the mediation of the academics and priesthood, and control by multinational corporations is a big problem, for them. Not so much for everyone else. I think we'll survive despite their best FUD.
The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast -- especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload.
Sorry teacher I couldn't read chapter 3 last night because chapters 4, 5, 6,7 all exist so I was too intimidated to read chapter 3. I can't read my slashdot firefox tab because I have other tabs open. WTF is this guy talking about?
But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate,
I strongly suggest each user operate their own mouse, as opposed to operating each others mices. My kids figured this out around K or first grade, although their previous failure to follow that rule was probably more sibling rivalry and/or comic relief rather than actual ignorance.
and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information -- his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts.
Translation: Google docs, gmail, and google calendar is really cool. Facebook too. Thanks for letting us know, academic dude, without you guys we'd never have known!
To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis
Cool idea dude, like a log file, but on the web. I'm sure no one would ever think of putting a log file on a web. Actually the log file could be human generated prose and comments instead of the insights from my/var/log/syslog. Why, we could call it a web log. Or even a 'blog.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
Stagnant pool... thats kuro5hin, right? information-in-motion, thats like the front page of slashdot.
Come on Alan Sokal, admit it, you're the one behind this hoax, aren't you?
I ask because I've worked with people who claim to type ~90-100 wpm before, but in reality it's usually closer to 50-60.
They can only type as fast as they can think / author / read / BS / debug. Some folks are surprisingly slow.
Given a fairly stereotypical, low content, yet long, business letter in a typing test, folks might be able to squirt out 100 wpm. In the pre-xerox, pre-wordprocessor era, that was even a marketable skill. Not so much now.
Relatively few people can productively concentrate faster than they can type, at certainly on average, and probably also at peak.
Why would you want to believe the marketing droids? Their job is to create demand, and they always have an agenda.
Well, I'm an old timer. You can tell by my slashdot id number. But, I was already an oldtimer when I got that number...
In school in the early 80s, we were told that to compete in the high tech marketplace of the future, we need to take "touch typing" classes and learn "bank street writer" and "visicalc" or else we'd end up digging ditches or flipping burgers for the rest of our lives. Touch typing is no picnic, most folks didn't bother trying, even fewer succeed, almost no one is fast. I turned out OK anyway, I guess.
I'm seeing the marketing droids swimming in my/our aquarium, trying to fit in to talk to us, rather than them trying to change stuff. We don't touch type, we're not gonna touch type, you're not going to make us touch type, and you're gonna sell us products and lifestyles that don't require touch typing. Or, I suppose, you can go broke trying. So, we're living in the result of a couple decades of that, not their goal.
If you believe the marketing folks, touch typing has never been less important now, than in the entire history of computing.
Everything is going to touch screen non-tactile smartphones, tablets, etc. Touch typing doesn't help much on ipods/iphones.
The idea of typing anything other than "english prose" using a keyboard is dead. All "commands" are given via mice and menus/ribbons. The concept of a "command line" is dead to 99% of the population.
Even worse, "leet txt sms speak" is the wave of the future. If it doesn't fit in 160 characters or whatever it is, then it is literally unthinkable.
Also the tools are dying. I can type pretty well on a clicky Model-M keyboard. Not so well on a mushboard.
Its a circular argument. So few people are willing to actually pay for "fill in the blank" channel, that its not offered ala carte, yet people won't buy ala carte because "fill in the blank" channel is not offered.
Yogi berra had a great quote about ala carte TV, something like "its so crowded that no one goes there anymore"
their smallest dishes are a meter across.
Yes that's a stereotypical American problem if I've ever seen one. I see plenty of TVs at best buy that are large enough that you could mount an old fashioned C-band dish behind it and no one could see it from the front... A TV the size and cost of a new car is always "a great investment", but hiding a small dish behind tasteful landscaping is supposedly impossibly expensive...
People will be unhappy about paying $25/month for one channel and a competitor will come along that only charges $12 for that channel, and people might pick that one up instead. It's called competition. Similarly, if you say only 3 channels cost $25, then all those other channels will be pretty cheap, won't they? So why do you suddenly say I'll only have 3 channels if all the others have to go down to pennies a channel in order for me to pick them up?
Oh my. I'm not seeing any way in which ala carte would benefit the consumers.
1st) Here, cable is a regulated monopoly based on contracts with individual municipalities. There is only one cable company in the area. There will be no competition. Its like saying police brutality isn't a problem because a competing police station will set up shop and put the bad one out of business, uh no thats not possible. In a way its good, ala carte would cost a lot to bill, and all that cost can be passed along by the local monopoly onto the customers. On average they'll just end up paying more, for more complicated billing / more support calls to add/remove channels.
2) The "individual channel cost" is currently a pretty arbitrary marketing number. The channel costs are made up, so as to achieve a total corporate income of $X, our rigged non-free market price of 300 channels is $X. So, you'll simply have the ala carte market manipulated by the very small number of sellers into, the cost of your 3 channels also happens to be $X. After all, you were willing to pay $X for the 3 channels you watch out of the 300 available before, and you're not going to disconnect because something you have no interest in is unavailable. There is no free market, there are only a small number of suppliers and there is only one ESPN. I'm mystified by people whom think the big media corporations would accept less money, apparently out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, just because their local cableco changed their billing system. One way or another, a small cartel of non-commodity suppliers will maintain a constant (or increasing) income.
3) A free market only works if its free. Err, wait, cable is a regulated monopoly, not a free market. How will the regulatory groups handle free channel market pricing, they can barely handle annual increases? Cableco can't sell ESPN for $20/month for a year at a time if that's the wrong price in that market. Think of other confuse-opolies of endless mysterious little added charges like cellphones. Is there any confuse-opoly out there that benefits the consumer? No. They all result in MORE money being sent to the big corps. So, how does setting up ala carte, aka a big confuse-opoly, benefit the end users?
4) Also, to be honest, whom really wants to wait on hold for two hours to "subscribe" to the history channel to watch one program and then another two hours on hold to try and "unsubscribe"? I'm seeing it as an unholy annoyance no one will like.
I will concede that, for the 1% of tv watchers whom only watch EWTN 24x7, they will have somewhat reduced bills. But, overall, looking at a metro area, ala carte could only result in more money being extracted in total from that area.
Can evidence of even primitive life in galaxies so far away that they may not even exist now disprove all geocentric religions?
Probably about as well as the existence of native americans wiped out Christianity in 1492. Err, that's not quite how it turned out.
Considering how televangelists and shortwave broadcasters like to spend money, to blast people whom aren't interested with religious indoctrination, I'd suggest buying stock in companies that manufacture large satellite dishes and high power transmitters. Also expect at attempt at missionary activity (and by missionary activity, I'm not talking about the position).
Of course there is a bad side, the aliens will probably think we're idiots. On the other hand, if they've been watching TV, they already know that.
I'd say it's a small Slashdot-style minority clamoring for A La Carte programming.
Skyvision is a well known and reputable satellite provider of ala carte channels. Their subscriber numbers are basically a rounding error compared to the big providers. As for my relationship with skyvision, and providing ala carte channels, there is a guy on the NANOG mailing list with a well known humorous quote something like "I strongly encourage my competitors to deploy this bad idea".
Here's some corrections to some factual errors/omissions. I am not even remotely speaking in an official capacity and I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but I do have more insight on the topic that the original poster.
1) Some channels cost, some are free/almost free, some pay. The problem is, you can see the total net cost used to be vaguely low/zero because it sort of balances out, kind of. But that's an unstable situation. A 10% increase on one channel, could result in a total net cost change of like 20%. So the claws really come out in the battle. In an internet era, how well do you think television shopping channels are doing? Hence some inbalance leading to chaos. Essentially pay TV is collapsing such that the only successful channels (sports and news) happen to be channels that historically were expensive.
2) Everything you see on commercial/mainstream media TV comes from about a half dozen corps. You can play games with percentage cutoffs vs number of providers, but "most TV comes from about 6 major corporations" is more or less correct. So there is no financial reason to have more or less than about a half dozen bundles. Bundle size/design is a purely marketing driven confuse-opoly situation, like the cellphone business or whatever. A bundle sends a certain bucket of cash to the Disney empire, and the cableco really doesn't care what fraction of that bucket disney earmarks for ABC vs disney channel vs whatever.
3) Its a zero sum game, to some extent. The providers already know that most subscribers only watch about 3 channels and budget their charges accordingly. On average this works pretty well, since almost everything on TV comes from only a couple multinational corps. So, you can pay the big media corps $75 for 300 channels of which you only watch 3, or you can pay $25/each to only get the three channels you watch. Either way the big media corp total revenue will be unchanged. You're better off with 297 channels available that you MIGHT watch in the future, plus people whom watch more than 3 channels would be really screwed with ala carte.
4) This ties in with #3. If a cableco caves into espn or abc, the problem is not that they've lost ONE battle with one channel. It means they've got to fight perhaps 50 smaller channels to make up the money somewhere else. Hence the claws come out. From the cableco perspective, the job isn't to win a battle with one channel, but not to start a war with numerous little channels. Worst case scenario, since some cablecos are owned partially or in part by content providers, is alliance type activity creating a TV WWI scenario where everyone sues everyone and no one wins or survives but the lawyers. Its a lot easier to fight one big channel to the death, than fifty little channels.
they have to provide content people want to watch
5) Ha Ha very funny dude. Actually, they have to sell eyeballs to advertisers. If all they had to do was provide highly desired content, we'd have about 500 channels of pr0n. But in psuedo-christian america, advertisers would get boycotted for advertising on pr0n. Hence, other than ppv, theres not much pr0n on tv. No one boycotts advertisers on violent shows, hence we're supersaturated with violent TV.
6) Some of it is a pure marketing PR stunt. As a rounded down percentage of the total country population, no one thinks of or watches ABC. But at least today, they got some PR. And theres no such thing as bad PR. Cableco costs go up because of the price of gas, insurance, etc, just like any other business, but this is a very public way of showing an attempt at limiting cost increases, even if its not the real cause of rate increases. Therefore, "Kabuki Theatre" time, and once enough PR interest is generated, we can go back to business as usual. I'd give it a couple days.
Even the highest-performance RAID controllers today cannot support the IOPS of just three of the fastest SSDs.
In the old days, raid controllers were faster than doing it in software.
Now a days, aren't software controllers faster than hardware? So, just do software raid? In my very unscientific tests of SSDs I have not been able to max out the server CPU when running bonnie++ so I guess software can handle it better?
Even worse, it seems difficult to purchase "real hardware raid" cards since marketing departments have flooded the market with essentially multiport win-SATA cards that require weird drivers because they're non-standard?
You have to keep rotating onto newer media, and newer media technologies. This sounds horrible, "oh no! I'm generating ten full drives per year". But realize in a couple years, all those drives will fit on a USB 4.0 stick, or on a card in your cellphone.
If you haven't read it (and recopied it) in a couple years, its probably gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently the best theories we got suggests there's a lower entropy limit of kT*ln 2 (the Von Neumann-Landauer limit) per operation, which is on the order of 10^-23 joule. The energy of the sun via E=mc^2 is on the order of 10^47 joule. So at most you can do is 10^70 operations but 2^256 = ~10^77. In other words you can't get through the keyspace before you run out of energy, even taking ideal assumptions.
Well, if your strategy is guess and check, sure, OK. Wouldn't this plan be a hell of a lot cheaper:
Estimate the total number of operations a genius level human brain can accomplish per second. I will be wildly optimistic and give it 10^3. Lets assume all thought is directed toward crypto and no daydreaming about the young lady working in accounting, or arguing about which was better, Kirk or Picard.
Estimate the age of the NSA. Wikipedia claims formed in 1952 but theres plenty of cloak and dagger stuff going on before, so we'll round it to 10^3 years
Estimate the total number of geniuses the NSA has hired over the years. The holy font of all wisdom, wikipedia, claims the number of employees is classified. However, they claim there's 18000 parking spaces at HQ. What the hell they do with 18K people is a mystery to me. My guess is theres 17990 supervisors, managers, directors, HR personnel, diversity directors, marketing personnel, and other executives and about 10 guys with pocket protectors doing all the work, in between their slashdot breaks. But lets say on a very long term average they have 10^5 geniuses working at any given instant.
Lets further assume they never eat, sleep, have sex (duh, they're math majors). That gives us 31 million seconds per year. Well, we'll round that down for time to watch star trek reruns, eat pizza rolls, and read slashdot, so call it 10^7 seconds per year.
So, you need to do about 10^3 * 10^3 * 10*5 * 10^7 = about 10^18 crypto related thought operations over the total lifetime of the NSA.
In conclusion, you need to run WELL under 10^18 thought operations to figure out the back door they put into your encryption algorithm and/or reverse engineer their top secret decryption technology. A wee bit less than your 10^70 operations required to brute force one message. Plus, when you crack the entire algorithm, you've cracked all messages ever sent with it, not just one message.
Wait, I'm assuming we're talking a 256 character long password. Because I'd sure love to see someone memorise a string of 1 and 0 that is 256 digits long.
Three hours later and no one noticed his post was 155 characters long (at least wc -l claims that). You can look at that as about 8 bits per byte of raw very non random data, giving 1240 bits of nonrandom data and he only needs 256 bits. Pessimistically you might pull 2 bits of randomness out per byte, yielding a whopping 310 bits of randomness. Anyway, thats more than enough to feed a hash function to get a nice even 256 bits. I pushed his post thru sha256sum and got the following 256 bit hash:
d254ed3793668c774d24c55b8553036becb1a9bf1b11401cde27b4bf7bc02f89
Can the OP memorize that hash? Probably not. Can he memorize his post, including his misspelled "memorize" word? Most likely. Everyone works with some clown who memorized every star trek and star wars script, so memorizing one slashdot post is not exactly a heroic achievement.
Even if you only pull one bit of stinky randomness out per byte, his post would still be 155 bits strong, frankly not bad. Add a couple bits of salt (not too many) and it'll do, it'll do.
Let's trade some curry and hookahs for blue jeans, and call off the war, k?
Hmm.... Our military industrial complex vs our dead textile industry. I wonder which will set policy.
What I don't get is, why doesn't Kenya and all these other 3rd world countries build a real sewer system?
Corruption.
You're assuming they didn't outsource engineering, QA, security, and testing.
You have the olden days idea, that China only manufactures.
I would not be surprised to learn Energizer-USA in 2010 is no more than an overpriced CEO and some marketing folks.
Just another feel good appointment of an academic to a position where they can't really do anything.
Bruce Schneier newly appointed as Secretary of the US department of Homeland (in)Security? That would be change I could believe in. Maybe in the second term, if he somehow gets 51% of the votes.
just take one of the most famous graphs from his book, and reproduce it:
relabel the ....
That's not scary. Try retitling it from "Napoleons invasion of Russia" to "Bushes invasion of Iraq". That sounds possible enough to be terrifying.
he should fire Geithner and replace him with Elizabeth Warren. But no, he won't do that.
Warren? Well, anyone would be an improvement. Wouldn't Ron Paul be better? As treasury secretary, his peculiar opinions about abortion would be about as important as Tom Cruise's insights about foreign policy, i.e. quaintly irrelevant to the task at hand. Would be a nice last job for a smart old man (I mean RP not Cruise)
And of course, (just like the app-store) if you are wearing just a bikini ... the doors just won't open.
Yeah I know what you're trying to say, but technically, you can already purchase, for several years now, "door keycard" technology in a form factor the shape and size of a very small pen cap, for about twice the cost of a traditional credit card shaped keycard. I believe you're supposed to put it on a keychain, but there are other possibilities. Luckily there are no sharp edges. So, the bikini ladies can theoretically carry two door fobs, and the guys can carry one. This also has the benefit that people are not going to ask to borrow your keycard. If the bikini ladies are wearing a bikini top of sufficient volume, they could theoretically carry at least another two keycards, adding up to a total of four unlockable door systems, most people probably only need three or so.
Several companies already have solutions in the market, but they haven't caught on yet because the technology isn't quite ready yet and not quite cheap enough.
"isn't quite ready" ? "not cheap enough" ? You need to research that a little bit more. For at least a decade I've never worked at a place without those electric door "key card" locks. Every my kids daycare used them. Both my jobs, my wifes job, daycare, all use the same type of card.
The cards are about $4 and the little pencil-eraser keychain fobs cost a whopping $8. Now this is from a reseller like smarthome.com. Wholesale in bulk they are probably about half that. Most businesses charge like $50 for a lost card, not because it costs $50 but to scare and intimidate the employees (some bosses love that) and also to make up for the labor cost of issuing another card. They are cheap enough to put in a house, and I've been seriously considering it.
I integrated mine with my ipod by purchasing a silicone stretchy case and placing the credit card sized doorcard behind the ipod in the stretchy. It was actually quite inconvenient and I was worried I'd drop the ipod so I stopped doing that. It was more convenient to have them separate.
I think they are hurrying up, because the provider has long sold a little pencil eraser shaped fob, and I know people whom have made bracelets out of them. A wee bit smaller and they could be mounted in a ring. That would be quite convenient, since my had is usually near the door when I'm opening the door.
Yeah, which means you're essentially forced to carry a set of regular keys for your car, house, etc. anyway.
No, you bury your spare house key in the flower bed at a precise coordinate in a vacuum packed plastic bag. When I was a kid my parents had a combination lock on a lock box bolted to the concrete in the garage, with about 100 different keys inside only one of which worked, essentially a poor mans safe.
As for the car key, you can buy flat credit card sized keys from most locksmiths that fit in your wallet for a very small cost. In 12 years I've used mine 3 times, once by locking the keys in the car, once because I forgot my keys, and once because the battery was dead and I needed to get inside to open the hood to charge the battery. If I lock my keys AND my wallet in the car, then I'm screwed.
But to hear the typical slashdotter speak (well, write), it's not the least bit uncommon for non-trained hunt-and-peck geeks to plow through 100-120 words per minute.
wpm in what domain specific language?
I would like my typing test to be five minutes of:
cd .. :wq /etc/init.d/bind9 reload
ls -al
cd pr0n
ctrl-x ctrl-c
rm -Rf
df
free
uptime
use DBI;
if ($debugmode == 1 ) {
apt-get dist-upgrade
On the other hand, I suppose the windows admins would prefer text like:
see spot
see spot run
run spot run
(just kidding guys you know I love you all, or at least I feel sorry for you having to admin windows)
Under my working conditions with my kind of text, yes, I could hunt-n-peck sustained for an entire test at about 200 wpm on pure muscle memory. I agree with you, that given a page of random legal text, assuming you aren't otherwise a typist at a law firm, most hunt-n-peck slashdot-typists could barely achieve 20 wpm, on a good day.
I actually read the article, it reads like one of those hack academics in 1995 trying to sound hip (and/or pompous) by writing long tedious screeds using technical words they don't understand, to discuss a culture they have no experience with. About 1/3 of the article is about how great the guy used to be and how important and relevant his every utterance is. However, I'm not buying it.
I think its an elaborate hoax, like a modern "Sokal affair", and most of you fell for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source.
Yes, access to information without the mediation of the academics and priesthood, and control by multinational corporations is a big problem, for them. Not so much for everyone else. I think we'll survive despite their best FUD.
The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast -- especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload.
Sorry teacher I couldn't read chapter 3 last night because chapters 4, 5, 6 ,7 all exist so I was too intimidated to read chapter 3. I can't read my slashdot firefox tab because I have other tabs open. WTF is this guy talking about?
But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate,
I strongly suggest each user operate their own mouse, as opposed to operating each others mices. My kids figured this out around K or first grade, although their previous failure to follow that rule was probably more sibling rivalry and/or comic relief rather than actual ignorance.
and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information -- his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts.
Translation: Google docs, gmail, and google calendar is really cool. Facebook too. Thanks for letting us know, academic dude, without you guys we'd never have known!
To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis
Cool idea dude, like a log file, but on the web. I'm sure no one would ever think of putting a log file on a web. Actually the log file could be human generated prose and comments instead of the insights from my /var/log/syslog. Why, we could call it a web log. Or even a 'blog.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
Stagnant pool... thats kuro5hin, right? information-in-motion, thats like the front page of slashdot.
Come on Alan Sokal, admit it, you're the one behind this hoax, aren't you?
I ask because I've worked with people who claim to type ~90-100 wpm before, but in reality it's usually closer to 50-60.
They can only type as fast as they can think / author / read / BS / debug. Some folks are surprisingly slow.
Given a fairly stereotypical, low content, yet long, business letter in a typing test, folks might be able to squirt out 100 wpm. In the pre-xerox, pre-wordprocessor era, that was even a marketable skill. Not so much now.
Relatively few people can productively concentrate faster than they can type, at certainly on average, and probably also at peak.
Why would you want to believe the marketing droids? Their job is to create demand, and they always have an agenda.
Well, I'm an old timer. You can tell by my slashdot id number. But, I was already an oldtimer when I got that number...
In school in the early 80s, we were told that to compete in the high tech marketplace of the future, we need to take "touch typing" classes and learn "bank street writer" and "visicalc" or else we'd end up digging ditches or flipping burgers for the rest of our lives. Touch typing is no picnic, most folks didn't bother trying, even fewer succeed, almost no one is fast. I turned out OK anyway, I guess.
I'm seeing the marketing droids swimming in my/our aquarium, trying to fit in to talk to us, rather than them trying to change stuff. We don't touch type, we're not gonna touch type, you're not going to make us touch type, and you're gonna sell us products and lifestyles that don't require touch typing. Or, I suppose, you can go broke trying. So, we're living in the result of a couple decades of that, not their goal.
If you believe the marketing folks, touch typing has never been less important now, than in the entire history of computing.
Everything is going to touch screen non-tactile smartphones, tablets, etc. Touch typing doesn't help much on ipods/iphones.
The idea of typing anything other than "english prose" using a keyboard is dead. All "commands" are given via mice and menus/ribbons. The concept of a "command line" is dead to 99% of the population.
Even worse, "leet txt sms speak" is the wave of the future. If it doesn't fit in 160 characters or whatever it is, then it is literally unthinkable.
Also the tools are dying. I can type pretty well on a clicky Model-M keyboard. Not so well on a mushboard.
Yes, because their channel selection is limited
Its a circular argument. So few people are willing to actually pay for "fill in the blank" channel, that its not offered ala carte, yet people won't buy ala carte because "fill in the blank" channel is not offered.
Yogi berra had a great quote about ala carte TV, something like "its so crowded that no one goes there anymore"
their smallest dishes are a meter across.
Yes that's a stereotypical American problem if I've ever seen one. I see plenty of TVs at best buy that are large enough that you could mount an old fashioned C-band dish behind it and no one could see it from the front... A TV the size and cost of a new car is always "a great investment", but hiding a small dish behind tasteful landscaping is supposedly impossibly expensive...
People will be unhappy about paying $25/month for one channel and a competitor will come along that only charges $12 for that channel, and people might pick that one up instead. It's called competition. Similarly, if you say only 3 channels cost $25, then all those other channels will be pretty cheap, won't they? So why do you suddenly say I'll only have 3 channels if all the others have to go down to pennies a channel in order for me to pick them up?
Oh my. I'm not seeing any way in which ala carte would benefit the consumers.
1st) Here, cable is a regulated monopoly based on contracts with individual municipalities. There is only one cable company in the area. There will be no competition. Its like saying police brutality isn't a problem because a competing police station will set up shop and put the bad one out of business, uh no thats not possible. In a way its good, ala carte would cost a lot to bill, and all that cost can be passed along by the local monopoly onto the customers. On average they'll just end up paying more, for more complicated billing / more support calls to add/remove channels.
2) The "individual channel cost" is currently a pretty arbitrary marketing number. The channel costs are made up, so as to achieve a total corporate income of $X, our rigged non-free market price of 300 channels is $X. So, you'll simply have the ala carte market manipulated by the very small number of sellers into, the cost of your 3 channels also happens to be $X. After all, you were willing to pay $X for the 3 channels you watch out of the 300 available before, and you're not going to disconnect because something you have no interest in is unavailable. There is no free market, there are only a small number of suppliers and there is only one ESPN. I'm mystified by people whom think the big media corporations would accept less money, apparently out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, just because their local cableco changed their billing system. One way or another, a small cartel of non-commodity suppliers will maintain a constant (or increasing) income.
3) A free market only works if its free. Err, wait, cable is a regulated monopoly, not a free market. How will the regulatory groups handle free channel market pricing, they can barely handle annual increases? Cableco can't sell ESPN for $20/month for a year at a time if that's the wrong price in that market. Think of other confuse-opolies of endless mysterious little added charges like cellphones. Is there any confuse-opoly out there that benefits the consumer? No. They all result in MORE money being sent to the big corps. So, how does setting up ala carte, aka a big confuse-opoly, benefit the end users?
4) Also, to be honest, whom really wants to wait on hold for two hours to "subscribe" to the history channel to watch one program and then another two hours on hold to try and "unsubscribe"? I'm seeing it as an unholy annoyance no one will like.
I will concede that, for the 1% of tv watchers whom only watch EWTN 24x7, they will have somewhat reduced bills. But, overall, looking at a metro area, ala carte could only result in more money being extracted in total from that area.
Can evidence of even primitive life in galaxies so far away that they may not even exist now disprove all geocentric religions?
Probably about as well as the existence of native americans wiped out Christianity in 1492. Err, that's not quite how it turned out.
Considering how televangelists and shortwave broadcasters like to spend money, to blast people whom aren't interested with religious indoctrination, I'd suggest buying stock in companies that manufacture large satellite dishes and high power transmitters. Also expect at attempt at missionary activity (and by missionary activity, I'm not talking about the position).
Of course there is a bad side, the aliens will probably think we're idiots. On the other hand, if they've been watching TV, they already know that.
I'd say it's a small Slashdot-style minority clamoring for A La Carte programming.
Skyvision is a well known and reputable satellite provider of ala carte channels. Their subscriber numbers are basically a rounding error compared to the big providers. As for my relationship with skyvision, and providing ala carte channels, there is a guy on the NANOG mailing list with a well known humorous quote something like "I strongly encourage my competitors to deploy this bad idea".
http://www.skyvision.com/programming/alacarte.html
ABC is going to have this coverage of the Oscars. Why do I have to pay for ABC crap content 24/7/365 to watch it?
Why do you have to pay ABC to watch the Oscars?
TV networks are becoming obsolete, just like RIAA/MPAA.
The death throes of the dinosaurs are violent and earth-shattering, for awhile, and then we move on with life, with a new business model.
Senator? Congresswoman? if you're listening, I'm holding YOU accountable.
You're "holding them accountable", they're sending the reelection campaign buckets of their customer's cash.
Here's some corrections to some factual errors/omissions. I am not even remotely speaking in an official capacity and I don't have a dog in this particular fight, but I do have more insight on the topic that the original poster.
1) Some channels cost, some are free/almost free, some pay. The problem is, you can see the total net cost used to be vaguely low/zero because it sort of balances out, kind of. But that's an unstable situation. A 10% increase on one channel, could result in a total net cost change of like 20%. So the claws really come out in the battle. In an internet era, how well do you think television shopping channels are doing? Hence some inbalance leading to chaos. Essentially pay TV is collapsing such that the only successful channels (sports and news) happen to be channels that historically were expensive.
2) Everything you see on commercial/mainstream media TV comes from about a half dozen corps. You can play games with percentage cutoffs vs number of providers, but "most TV comes from about 6 major corporations" is more or less correct. So there is no financial reason to have more or less than about a half dozen bundles. Bundle size/design is a purely marketing driven confuse-opoly situation, like the cellphone business or whatever. A bundle sends a certain bucket of cash to the Disney empire, and the cableco really doesn't care what fraction of that bucket disney earmarks for ABC vs disney channel vs whatever.
3) Its a zero sum game, to some extent. The providers already know that most subscribers only watch about 3 channels and budget their charges accordingly. On average this works pretty well, since almost everything on TV comes from only a couple multinational corps. So, you can pay the big media corps $75 for 300 channels of which you only watch 3, or you can pay $25/each to only get the three channels you watch. Either way the big media corp total revenue will be unchanged. You're better off with 297 channels available that you MIGHT watch in the future, plus people whom watch more than 3 channels would be really screwed with ala carte.
4) This ties in with #3. If a cableco caves into espn or abc, the problem is not that they've lost ONE battle with one channel. It means they've got to fight perhaps 50 smaller channels to make up the money somewhere else. Hence the claws come out. From the cableco perspective, the job isn't to win a battle with one channel, but not to start a war with numerous little channels. Worst case scenario, since some cablecos are owned partially or in part by content providers, is alliance type activity creating a TV WWI scenario where everyone sues everyone and no one wins or survives but the lawyers. Its a lot easier to fight one big channel to the death, than fifty little channels.
they have to provide content people want to watch
5) Ha Ha very funny dude. Actually, they have to sell eyeballs to advertisers. If all they had to do was provide highly desired content, we'd have about 500 channels of pr0n. But in psuedo-christian america, advertisers would get boycotted for advertising on pr0n. Hence, other than ppv, theres not much pr0n on tv. No one boycotts advertisers on violent shows, hence we're supersaturated with violent TV.
6) Some of it is a pure marketing PR stunt. As a rounded down percentage of the total country population, no one thinks of or watches ABC. But at least today, they got some PR. And theres no such thing as bad PR. Cableco costs go up because of the price of gas, insurance, etc, just like any other business, but this is a very public way of showing an attempt at limiting cost increases, even if its not the real cause of rate increases. Therefore, "Kabuki Theatre" time, and once enough PR interest is generated, we can go back to business as usual. I'd give it a couple days.
Even the highest-performance RAID controllers today cannot support the IOPS of just three of the fastest SSDs.
In the old days, raid controllers were faster than doing it in software.
Now a days, aren't software controllers faster than hardware? So, just do software raid? In my very unscientific tests of SSDs I have not been able to max out the server CPU when running bonnie++ so I guess software can handle it better?
Even worse, it seems difficult to purchase "real hardware raid" cards since marketing departments have flooded the market with essentially multiport win-SATA cards that require weird drivers because they're non-standard?
You have to keep rotating onto newer media, and newer media technologies. This sounds horrible, "oh no! I'm generating ten full drives per year". But realize in a couple years, all those drives will fit on a USB 4.0 stick, or on a card in your cellphone.
If you haven't read it (and recopied it) in a couple years, its probably gone.
OTOH, we're free to copy anything coming from North Korea as well. Not quite sure how much is worth copying.
Our govt is desperately copying their civil rights laws...
Some of our corporate-govt propaganda is about as bad as their govt propaganda...