Notes: Do not use SonicStage while logged on to a domain user account under Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition.
SonicStage should be installed while logged on to an account with administrator privileges.
It's not easy to show that much technical incompetence in such few words.
By shunting the price of the hardware into the software, Sun is pulling a quick marketing trick to make you think that the hardware is becoming cheap.
I think it's more than just a marketing trick. If all the money is made with software, hardware-only vendors (such as Intel) will be in serious trouble. This would be good for Sun as they are currently getting hammered by x86/Linux in the server market.
They claim that every computation step requires at minimum energy of ln 2 k_B T (k_B is Boltzmann's constant, T is the temperature of the system). This is only true for irreversible operations such as setting or erasing a bit.
But computation doesn't have to be irreversible. There are various proposals on how to build reversible computers that don't consume this minimum energy per operation. More information about reversible computing can be found in this introduction.
The alternative seems to be no driver, and the kernel becomes a useless lump of code.
Wrong. The alternative is not to buy a device lacking of a free driver. Always, and I really mean always, buy your hardware according to the software you are going to run. Many of those who didn't respect that have experienced serious trouble.
If the message is intercepted and then re-transmitted, the message has now been sent through the attenuation cycle twice. This means that instead of the signal being modified by the original attenuation function, it's modified by the attenuation function squared, which is easy to distinguish.
The signal dampening function is an exponential function of the channel length. If Eve knows the distance to Alice and Bob, she can easily impersonate both by sending "noisy" photons to the other.
According to their poster the project uses a pre-shared secret. This has the disadvantage of introducing a DoS attack in which Eve intercepts the communication based on the shared secret. Since the pre-shared secret has been used up, there is no way for Alice and Bob to set up the secure quantum channel.
I never understood how quantum cryptography is not vulnerable to normal man in the middle attacks.
It is vulnerable, or at least present protocols are. True, once the secure channel is set up, a MITM can be detected, but the problem lies with the initial key exchange. It is impossible to be sure that the transmitted quantum key belongs to the person it claims to come from.
There have been proposals to circumvent this problem (e.g. using a trusted center), but the problem always remains the same. If the channel between Alice and Bob cannot be trusted, the channel between Alice or Bob and the center may be insecure as well.
According to "Der rote Orbit" by Harro Zimmer, a book on the Soviet space program based on data released in the 1990s: There is about 940 kg of highly enriched uranium and more than 15 tons of radioactive material. The sattelites will stay about 600 years in orbit before coming down. Argon-39, mentioned in the article, will still be around then.
One exception is Kosmos 1900. On this RORSAT mission the core ejection was done later than usual due to a technical problem. Since the orbit was already very low then, the core was shot to an altitude of about 750 km, where it will only last about 100 years.
Will this be a major event to the earth, or will the upper atmosphere just shrug and eat it up?
This is unclear. There were two incidents in the RORSAT history where the reactor core re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Kosmos 1402 did not leave a radioactive trace while the infamous Kosmos 954 spacecraft certainly did.
Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server.
Issuing legal threats against a usenet provider is ridiculous. By the time the complaint arrives, the article has already been download by all interested users. If it's a post to a binary group, it probably expired already from the server. So this will have little effect on usenet as a whole. And if this should result in AOL stopping to provide usenet access to its users, I won't shed a tear.
All it is is on extra bit in the pagetable that check whether the memory region is W^X (write or execute). This kind of thing usually requires a bit of operating system magic to make it work.
I don't think it's that easy. For example, the RET instruction on x86s that is usually called at the and of a function reads the address of the next instruction directly from the stack. If this address has been overwritten by a buffer overflow, an attacker can jump to an arbitrary address in the memory where the really nasty code is located.
Even if the memory regions that the attacker can modify are marked as non-executable, it is still possible to call a function inside the C library. A system() call will lead to arbritrary code execution as well.
I don't think it matters if this is a proprietary driver, just yet. With big people like Intel and IBM showing an interest in Linux, its bound to encourage others to do the same. Then with time, open source drivers might just happen?
That will take much longer if non-free drivers are available. Intel said somewhere that they won't release the driver as free software because they fear that this would reveal too much information about the hardware itself. So when Intel is out, the driver has to come from a third party. And clearly, the urge to develop a free driver is much lower when there is already a proprietary one available.
I read something very interesting on gravity in deep space. A scientist who revised the rules of gravity so that the model worked without all this invisible stuff around. The amazing thing is that while this guy does exactly the same as dark matter believers - filling in blank spots until the model fits reality - he's not taken seriously at all.
MOND theories are taken seriously, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The problem is that these theories are only descriptive and do not lead to a universal principle. Of course that doesn't mean that there is no such principle. For example, the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom could already be calculated precisely in the 19th century. But Niels Bohr was the first to actually give an explanation for that.
What if I want to setup a domain name criticizing my private school? They censor the newspapers so the internet is the only medium in which that would be possible to do anonymously.
Well, you still can. You just can't get a DNS domain name for that, and I can't see why this is necessary to operate a website. If you want to remain anonymous, a fake whois record won't protect you. You still need to pay for it somehow, and this information can be traced back to you.
But false or misleading WHOIS data is a huge problem when you have trouble coming from a specific host or network. Fortunately, IP addresses are much harder to get than domain names.
While it is good to see that the issue gets some attention in the media, the article fails to address the central point:
If a company pays for a study, it may set the terms under which the study is carried out. If these terms are biased, even if the study is carried out as independently as possible, the outcome may be wrong.
The mentioned studies don't only compare Linux and Windows. They compare Oracle and MS SQL Server, Mainframes and x86 servers, etc. A scientific approach would be to use the same applications on the same hardware with different operating systems.
Hah! Mine was Nightfall. Must have been late 1997 or so. I remember decoding it with an audio program that was unable to do it in real time. Took about 15 minutes on a P90.
True, but this was the first time doing it with Josephson junction qubits, i.e. using superconductors. These are regarded as being more scalable than techniques using NMR or ion traps.
Which way will finally end in building a useful quantum computer (if any) is still a difficult question, but it is good to see that there are are variety of possibilities.
At least home users of Linux can take solace in knowing that they don't have to pay up yet.
If you take SCO's view seriously, this is completely wrong. Home users may not use Linux at all because they can't get a valid license. Maybe I'm just too paranoid here, but when dubious organizations sue individuals for millions of dollars, you just can't be sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Notes:
Do not use SonicStage while logged on to a domain user account under Windows 2000
Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition.
SonicStage should be installed while logged on to an account with administrator privileges.
It's not easy to show that much technical incompetence in such few words.
By shunting the price of the hardware into the software, Sun is pulling a quick marketing trick to make you think that the hardware is becoming cheap.
I think it's more than just a marketing trick. If all the money is made with software, hardware-only vendors (such as Intel) will be in serious trouble. This would be good for Sun as they are currently getting hammered by x86/Linux in the server market.
Here's an interesting one, this is guarenteed to piss off any math student that doesn't get it.
The best "proof" I've ever seen is this one:
\int 1/x dx = \int 1 * 1/x dx
Partial integration:
\int 1 * 1/x dx = x/x - \int x * (-1)/x^2 dx
= 1 + \int 1/x dx
=> \int 1/x dx = 1 + \int 1/x dx
<=> 0 = 1
They claim that every computation step requires at minimum energy of ln 2 k_B T (k_B is Boltzmann's constant, T is the temperature of the system). This is only true for irreversible operations such as setting or erasing a bit.
But computation doesn't have to be irreversible. There are various proposals on how to build reversible computers that don't consume this minimum energy per operation. More information about reversible computing can be found in this introduction.
The alternative seems to be no driver, and the kernel becomes a useless lump of code.
Wrong. The alternative is not to buy a device lacking of a free driver. Always, and I really mean always, buy your hardware according to the software you are going to run. Many of those who didn't respect that have experienced serious trouble.
If the message is intercepted and then re-transmitted, the message has now been sent through the attenuation cycle twice. This means that instead of the signal being modified by the original attenuation function, it's modified by the attenuation function squared, which is easy to distinguish.
The signal dampening function is an exponential function of the channel length. If Eve knows the distance to Alice and Bob, she can easily impersonate both by sending "noisy" photons to the other.
According to their poster the project uses a pre-shared secret. This has the disadvantage of introducing a DoS attack in which Eve intercepts the communication based on the shared secret. Since the pre-shared secret has been used up, there is no way for Alice and Bob to set up the secure quantum channel.
I never understood how quantum cryptography is not vulnerable to normal man in the middle attacks.
It is vulnerable, or at least present protocols are. True, once the secure channel is set up, a MITM can be detected, but the problem lies with the initial key exchange. It is impossible to be sure that the transmitted quantum key belongs to the person it claims to come from.
There have been proposals to circumvent this problem (e.g. using a trusted center), but the problem always remains the same. If the channel between Alice and Bob cannot be trusted, the channel between Alice or Bob and the center may be insecure as well.
31 kg of 90% U235.
This is the amount of uranium used in the reactor core of a single satellite. There are still 31 of them out there in Earth's orbit.
How much material are we talking?
According to "Der rote Orbit" by Harro Zimmer, a book on the Soviet space program based on data released in the 1990s: There is about 940 kg of highly enriched uranium and more than 15 tons of radioactive material. The sattelites will stay about 600 years in orbit before coming down. Argon-39, mentioned in the article, will still be around then.
One exception is Kosmos 1900. On this RORSAT mission the core ejection was done later than usual due to a technical problem. Since the orbit was already very low then, the core was shot to an altitude of about 750 km, where it will only last about 100 years.
Will this be a major event to the earth, or will the upper atmosphere just shrug and eat it up?
This is unclear. There were two incidents in the RORSAT history where the reactor core re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Kosmos 1402 did not leave a radioactive trace while the infamous Kosmos 954 spacecraft certainly did.
Harlan thinks of some turkey posts his book on USENET, he should then be able to attack all the zillions of people running a USENET server.
Issuing legal threats against a usenet provider is ridiculous. By the time the complaint arrives, the article has already been download by all interested users. If it's a post to a binary group, it probably expired already from the server. So this will have little effect on usenet as a whole. And if this should result in AOL stopping to provide usenet access to its users, I won't shed a tear.
All it is is on extra bit in the pagetable that check whether the memory region is W^X (write or execute). This kind of thing usually requires a bit of operating system magic to make it work.
I don't think it's that easy. For example, the RET instruction on x86s that is usually called at the and of a function reads the address of the next instruction directly from the stack. If this address has been overwritten by a buffer overflow, an attacker can jump to an arbitrary address in the memory where the really nasty code is located.
Even if the memory regions that the attacker can modify are marked as non-executable, it is still possible to call a function inside the C library. A system() call will lead to arbritrary code execution as well.
I don't think it matters if this is a proprietary driver, just yet. With big people like Intel and IBM showing an interest in Linux, its bound to encourage others to do the same. Then with time, open source drivers might just happen?
That will take much longer if non-free drivers are available. Intel said somewhere that they won't release the driver as free software because they fear that this would reveal too much information about the hardware itself. So when Intel is out, the driver has to come from a third party. And clearly, the urge to develop a free driver is much lower when there is already a proprietary one available.
I read something very interesting on gravity in deep space. A scientist who revised the rules of gravity so that the model worked without all this invisible stuff around. The amazing thing is that while this guy does exactly the same as dark matter believers - filling in blank spots until the model fits reality - he's not taken seriously at all.
MOND theories are taken seriously, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The problem is that these theories are only descriptive and do not lead to a universal principle. Of course that doesn't mean that there is no such principle. For example, the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom could already be calculated precisely in the 19th century. But Niels Bohr was the first to actually give an explanation for that.
Another task is to explain that some galaxies contain less dark matter than expected.
What if I want to setup a domain name criticizing my private school? They censor the newspapers so the internet is the only medium in which that would be possible to do anonymously.
Well, you still can. You just can't get a DNS domain name for that, and I can't see why this is necessary to operate a website. If you want to remain anonymous, a fake whois record won't protect you. You still need to pay for it somehow, and this information can be traced back to you.
But false or misleading WHOIS data is a huge problem when you have trouble coming from a specific host or network. Fortunately, IP addresses are much harder to get than domain names.
While it is good to see that the issue gets some attention in the media, the article fails to address the central point:
If a company pays for a study, it may set the terms under which the study is carried out. If these terms are biased, even if the study is carried out as independently as possible, the outcome may be wrong.
The mentioned studies don't only compare Linux and Windows. They compare Oracle and MS SQL Server, Mainframes and x86 servers, etc. A scientific approach would be to use the same applications on the same hardware with different operating systems.
Blind Guardian - Into The Storm.mp3 RAWR!
Hah! Mine was Nightfall. Must have been late 1997 or so. I remember decoding it with an audio program that was unable to do it in real time. Took about 15 minutes on a P90.
Does anyone know of a website where you can get access to comp sci and comp eng papers and stuff?
Try looking at arxiv.org and CiteSeer.
CNOT has been done before
True, but this was the first time doing it with Josephson junction qubits, i.e. using superconductors. These are regarded as being more scalable than techniques using NMR or ion traps.
Which way will finally end in building a useful quantum computer (if any) is still a difficult question, but it is good to see that there are are variety of possibilities.If you take SCO's view seriously, this is completely wrong. Home users may not use Linux at all because they can't get a valid license. Maybe I'm just too paranoid here, but when dubious organizations sue individuals for millions of dollars, you just can't be sure.