There are uncrackable codes; they are called one-time pads. Of course, they require a perfect random number generator, not a pseudo RNG like this one.
Ciphertext encrypted with a real OTP can never be bruteforced. The problem becomes keeping the key a secret. Key distribution problems were the reason that asymmetric encryption methods like RSA were invented. These encryption schemes are merely "hard" rather than "impossible".
TFA does indeed make this exact point. Bruce is confused as to why the NSA would push so strongly for the adoption of an RNG algorithm that is both slow AND crap, because random number generators are about the most interchangeable part of any cryptosystem. Or possibly he's just being polite.
No one in their right mind would use the slowest RNG in the standard anyway, unless it conveyed some special advantage like being more random than the others. Or of course, unless the guv'ment mandated that they pick that one to win their contract. And why not.. after all it's a standard, right?
A bill that would basically allow any minister to change any law without parliamentary debate or oversight. This was allegedly intended to "allow the cutting of red tape". Alas, regardless of how well-intentioned it was, it doesn't protect the UK against misuse by present or future administrations.
Happily, the British are a little more politically aware than their transatlantic cousins, and managed to kick up a stink about it. Our second house of parliament also thoughtfully shot most of the provisions down, although they can be overruled by the first house.
The current North American administration would probably try it too, but I think it might be a bit much even for their main voting body (the media barons, obviously) to swallow. They pretty much have the equivalent already, as long as they don't draw too much attention to it - they can just filibuster anything they want into law. e.g. "The provide lots of money for orphans and nuke undesirable ethnic groupings bill"
Until they rank OSS databases on TPC-C alongside Oracle, DB2, MSSQL and Sybase, it isn't a valid comparison. But of course, many of the commercial RDBMS vendors have a clause in their license agreement forbidding you to publish benchmarks, so it makes sense that their chosen publicists (the TPPC) don't publish price/performance data for OSS servers ; when the bulk of the cost of your server is the per-CPU DB license, it can really make your price / performance ration look inadequate going up against free software.
This phone has a flashlight, a single bright white LED in the top of the casing.
It's the epitomy of minimalism, but it's the only phone I've seen with this sensible feature. Not a xenon tube that needs a battery guzzling capacitor to charge for each shot, either.
I really like quiet. To me, a car that wastes as little as possible energy, yet still kicks ass in performance, is much more exciting than some roaring dinosaur.
I mean, that's why KITT was cool. Not because of the talking dashboard ornament. Because it didn't go "rooooar". It went "mmmwhoooaw" .
Precisely the point I made in the BBC feedback box.
In fact, with a decent fibre network and a sufficient number of collaborators (enough to possess a large enough tuners and disk cache to cover the last week, for all channels, with 2-4x redundancy) in your local node, you could provide a much better service, for free, if it wasn't illegal.
In addition, knives penetrate ballistic armour more easily than bullets.
A bullet has a fixed kinetic energy, once it's dissipated, that's the end of it. A knife has an active arm behind it, applies pressure to a much smaller cross section which cuts armour fibres easily, and has a progressive effect - once it's cut a small way, it can cut some more.
They also don't run out of ammunition, aim more easily (as you point out), and because they are used at melee range, choosing your target for maximum damage is also much easier.
It's a fair point, but the extra productivity is not benefiting those out-of-work shovellers.
The engineer side of me loves improved productivity and efficiency. The basic human side of me knows that improved productivity means fewer jobs, and that means a buyers market for labour with all that entails ; lower employment, lower wages, lower standard of living.
"Retrain! Adapt!" you say... for this to work, the market must grow ; what if it's already supplying everything that could conceivably be consumed? What if there is so much automation now that new growth cannot possibly absorb the influx of job seekers? What if new growth is impossible because there are no longer enough people earning a disposable income?
I've been hunting for a nice patch of farmland for some time. Subsistence agriculture might not be glamorous or luxurious, but at least you get to keep the fruits of any gains in productivity you make.
This may be true, in the loosest of senses, but don't underestimate the buying power of a customer that literally represents the population of an entire country. An organisation representing 80M people can cut a pretty sweet deal, relatively speaking, with Big Pharma.
Yes, I would be glad to see a great deal of the red tape evaporate. But the thought of being seriously ill in America would fill me with dread, because unless you are loaded, it's a one-way ticket to poverty.
America spends more per capita on it's healthcare than any other nation, yet doesn't even have coverage for everyone. Something tells me that you are getting a much heavier "ass-raping" than other nations.
You need the qualifier ; DRM is not necessary when no-one is an asshole. In an ideal world, people would be free to download all games, and pay the developer the price they thought was appropriate for them after playing, and the developer would make handsome sums that enabled it to produce it's next masterpiece in comfort. We all know this is not the case.
I submit that the DRM is necessary in this case, because without it, people would just exploit the fact that you can make a perfect copy of the game and give it to someone else for nothing but the cost of bandwidth, DVD blanks, whatever, and run the developer into the ground.
The DRM here is rather less onerous than you are making out. DRM on music and movies restricts your freedom to enjoy them as and when you like, on your preferred devices, and your freedom to transcode them into the format of your choice.
Steam DRM only restricts you to using a valid account (once) and not reselling (although I'm sure you could get away with passing your whole account to someone). It's less offensive than most disc-distributed DRM (except where it's forced onto Steam games like BioShock). Most of the SecuRom protected games I've bought recently don't like my optical drive and whinge about having an original disk, even after they are patched. This never happens with Steam.
Since you are so furious about anti-copying measures, I can't for the life of me see why you are restricting your rant to Steam. Surely you should be aiming for all leisure software DRM?
Or are you just upset that Steam works better than disc-based protections?
I bought a PalmOS upgrade pack (about 6 years ago, I think). I'm reasonably sure this produced an upgrade to v 4.0 or 4.1; I remember thinking that I was fortunate to escape Graffiti 2 (which came in 4.1.2). I also remember a very scary flashing process that utilised screen memory, producing the same kind of snow dump as loading large 8-bit games.
After a quick shufty at Wikipedia, I'm now sure - the bitmap drawing program Notepad was first released on PalmOS 4.0 and I definitely have that now.
Palm.com KB points out that they no longer sell it (probably due to one of their legal wrangles - maybe even because this was the last time they shipped Graffiti 1 before Xerox sued them.)
I've not noticed any problems. There are various improvements in usability, and overall the applications feel slicker and more useful than the older ones - things like a merged display of the todo list with the calendar. Some of the OS improvements are a little pointless on a Palm III, particularly the ones regarding networking because the only way to use them on an unexpanded device is to park it in the cradle. And colour support, obviously. And some things are just daft on a device with only 2MB of storage.
I confess that I don't use it often anymore because my job changed from being highly mobile and roaming around hospitals, for which I needed a good task list and phonebook application, to sitting behind a desk with a PIM application open on the second monitor all the time. I'm starting to feel the need for it again though, just to manage my at-home life. Maybe I'll hunt out a good belt holster for it.
It still functions properly after multiple drops to hard surfaces, and it's nearly 10 years old. The low power consumption and use of AAA batteries is a design combination I'd love to see in a modern PDA device. The Palm III is a classic to me ; sure, it's a bit chunky in todays world, but it's a wonderful example of form fitting function - it doesn't have any more resources than it needs to be a decent PIM, and the OS is trim and lean enough to provide for that, quirks aside. Robust case, hard top flip cover as standard, instant on, weeks of useful battery life from standard cells. For a while I considered writing a bunch of software for doctors to run on wi-fi enabled variants that the likes of Symbol cranked out.
At the time it was an expensive purchase ; the present entry level Z22 is a much more powerful machine, and costs less than a third of what I paid for it, but it lacks many of the desirable features, Graffiti 1 being one of them. There are various articles on backgrading the Graffiti 1 library from older machines, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to shell out and risk it not working.
What I would LOVE to see would be a port of PalmOS for the DS, or even just a Palm emulator. Shouldn't be too hard - DS is ARM, PalmOS 5 is ARM, and it includes a Dragonball emulator that runs faster than the original native processor on modern ARM hardware. There is DS organizer software, but it just isn't nearly as slick as Palm. And think of the possibilities for that second screen.
A DS is a little bulky, but no more so than a paper organiser, and just imagine the kudos gained from whipping out a slick, piano-black organizer and proceeding to note your next business meeting before playing Zelda.
Heck, I'm sold. I'm off to hunt out some homebrew kit.
Agreed. Graffiti 1 was good, I can tell Graffiti 2 would annoy me immensely just by looking at the glyph chart.
I still have my old Palm III, upgraded to PalmOS 4, for this very reason. Although I have been quite impressed by the Fitaly keyboard, which is freeware for Palm devices. Since you can get it for other devices, it might be a good input device to learn.
The new Battlestar Galactica did well for being off screen for several decades.
The series is overwhelmingly about the people involved, and not the technology. This is the key to all good science fiction, all good stories.
My wife is an excellent barometer of good sci-fi. Anything she even bothers watching is good. Everything she bothers watching has the same key characteristic - it's about people, not technology. The technology just serves as a way of putting people in a situation that you wouldn't find credible in traditional fiction. You use it as a "what-if?" enabler.
Firefly got this right. The technology is just a backdrop. The characters do not innovate their way out of tight corners. The most interesting conflicts are between the principal characters.
Voyager increasingly got this wrong. Many stories were overwhelmingly about pulling a technological rabbit out of a hat, solving problems with technology. We're geeks ; we're already sold on the idea that you can solve problems with technology. It doesn't make for challenging viewing without a personal angle.
e.g.
Voyager is in a mess. Lt. Torres reverses the polarity of the deflector dish and saves the day. vs Voyager is in a mess. Lt. Torres chooses to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish, even though she knows that it will destroy a fluffy kitten. She laments the Klingon side of her personality that finds fluffy kittens deeply offensive, because she secretly enjoyed pushing the button. She starts to have dreams about putting kittens in a blender and drinking the result.
Mailing lists are not spam. Maybe they are archaic, but the key difference is that to get on a properly administered mailing list, you have to ask. Equally, if you ask to be removed, you are.
The problem here is idiots who signed up to a mailing list and then decided they didn't like it ; instead of using the unsubscribe mechanism, they blip the "Spam" button to dump it, which causes it's spam rating to rise until it's automatically canned and then the list server gets blacklisted.
Your point about modern technologies is taken, but there are still advantages to lists ; you can download the mails, and peruse them later, and even compose replies in network downtime, which is still common enough. Composing replies into a text file for later pasting into the browser just doesn't have the same measure of convenience. I suppose what you really want is a unified discussion system that supports mail gateways, RSS feeds, Web BB, etc. I do get frustrated with lists, particularly when I have to subscribe to a list just to post my single question. (I'd much rather have a web interface that forced you to search the list archive for an answer first). But lumping them in with spam is just silly.
It kinda makes you want the desktop to have its own "workspace" file like a modern IDE does, detailing the application windows you had open and which workspace files *they* had open, so they can load their previous state and get back to the position in the files you had open.
I quite like the Firefox "restore session" feature, it would be nice if every application had this, including the actual desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
There are uncrackable codes; they are called one-time pads. Of course, they require a perfect random number generator, not a pseudo RNG like this one.
Ciphertext encrypted with a real OTP can never be bruteforced. The problem becomes keeping the key a secret. Key distribution problems were the reason that asymmetric encryption methods like RSA were invented. These encryption schemes are merely "hard" rather than "impossible".
TFA does indeed make this exact point. Bruce is confused as to why the NSA would push so strongly for the adoption of an RNG algorithm that is both slow AND crap, because random number generators are about the most interchangeable part of any cryptosystem. Or possibly he's just being polite.
.. after all it's a standard, right?
No one in their right mind would use the slowest RNG in the standard anyway, unless it conveyed some special advantage like being more random than the others. Or of course, unless the guv'ment mandated that they pick that one to win their contract. And why not
Britain, alas, already tried the "WDWTFWWAWWA".
http://www.saveparliament.org.uk/problem.php
A bill that would basically allow any minister to change any law without parliamentary debate or oversight. This was allegedly intended to "allow the cutting of red tape". Alas, regardless of how well-intentioned it was, it doesn't protect the UK against misuse by present or future administrations.
Happily, the British are a little more politically aware than their transatlantic cousins, and managed to kick up a stink about it. Our second house of parliament also thoughtfully shot most of the provisions down, although they can be overruled by the first house.
The current North American administration would probably try it too, but I think it might be a bit much even for their main voting body (the media barons, obviously) to swallow. They pretty much have the equivalent already, as long as they don't draw too much attention to it - they can just filibuster anything they want into law. e.g. "The provide lots of money for orphans and nuke undesirable ethnic groupings bill"
Until they rank OSS databases on TPC-C alongside Oracle, DB2, MSSQL and Sybase, it isn't a valid comparison. But of course, many of the commercial RDBMS vendors have a clause in their license agreement forbidding you to publish benchmarks, so it makes sense that their chosen publicists (the TPPC) don't publish price/performance data for OSS servers ; when the bulk of the cost of your server is the per-CPU DB license, it can really make your price / performance ration look inadequate going up against free software.
Yes, MSSQL is still a real database.
This phone has a flashlight, a single bright white LED in the top of the casing.
It's the epitomy of minimalism, but it's the only phone I've seen with this sensible feature. Not a xenon tube that needs a battery guzzling capacitor to charge for each shot, either.
I loved the good ending ; but I suspect that having a daughter gives you a different perspective. As well as making you more mushy inside.
I really like quiet. To me, a car that wastes as little as possible energy, yet still kicks ass in performance, is much more exciting than some roaring dinosaur.
I mean, that's why KITT was cool. Not because of the talking dashboard ornament. Because it didn't go "rooooar". It went "mmmwhoooaw" .
Precisely the point I made in the BBC feedback box.
In fact, with a decent fibre network and a sufficient number of collaborators (enough to possess a large enough tuners and disk cache to cover the last week, for all channels, with 2-4x redundancy) in your local node, you could provide a much better service, for free, if it wasn't illegal.
.. which is a good thing
Of course he is. He's a whiny girl-man.
The dude is a vampire. And he doesn't even BITE people.
In addition, knives penetrate ballistic armour more easily than bullets.
A bullet has a fixed kinetic energy, once it's dissipated, that's the end of it. A knife has an active arm behind it, applies pressure to a much smaller cross section which cuts armour fibres easily, and has a progressive effect - once it's cut a small way, it can cut some more.
They also don't run out of ammunition, aim more easily (as you point out), and because they are used at melee range, choosing your target for maximum damage is also much easier.
It's a fair point, but the extra productivity is not benefiting those out-of-work shovellers.
The engineer side of me loves improved productivity and efficiency. The basic human side of me knows that improved productivity means fewer jobs, and that means a buyers market for labour with all that entails ; lower employment, lower wages, lower standard of living.
"Retrain! Adapt!" you say... for this to work, the market must grow ; what if it's already supplying everything that could conceivably be consumed? What if there is so much automation now that new growth cannot possibly absorb the influx of job seekers? What if new growth is impossible because there are no longer enough people earning a disposable income?
I've been hunting for a nice patch of farmland for some time. Subsistence agriculture might not be glamorous or luxurious, but at least you get to keep the fruits of any gains in productivity you make.
"RAID is not a replacement for backup."
"RAID is not a replacement for backup"
RAID does not protect you against rm -rf / , or another idiotware/malware.
This may be true, in the loosest of senses, but don't underestimate the buying power of a customer that literally represents the population of an entire country. An organisation representing 80M people can cut a pretty sweet deal, relatively speaking, with Big Pharma.
Yes, I would be glad to see a great deal of the red tape evaporate. But the thought of being seriously ill in America would fill me with dread, because unless you are loaded, it's a one-way ticket to poverty.
America spends more per capita on it's healthcare than any other nation, yet doesn't even have coverage for everyone. Something tells me that you are getting a much heavier "ass-raping" than other nations.
You need the qualifier ; DRM is not necessary when no-one is an asshole. In an ideal world, people would be free to download all games, and pay the developer the price they thought was appropriate for them after playing, and the developer would make handsome sums that enabled it to produce it's next masterpiece in comfort. We all know this is not the case.
I submit that the DRM is necessary in this case, because without it, people would just exploit the fact that you can make a perfect copy of the game and give it to someone else for nothing but the cost of bandwidth, DVD blanks, whatever, and run the developer into the ground.
The DRM here is rather less onerous than you are making out. DRM on music and movies restricts your freedom to enjoy them as and when you like, on your preferred devices, and your freedom to transcode them into the format of your choice.
Steam DRM only restricts you to using a valid account (once) and not reselling (although I'm sure you could get away with passing your whole account to someone). It's less offensive than most disc-distributed DRM (except where it's forced onto Steam games like BioShock). Most of the SecuRom protected games I've bought recently don't like my optical drive and whinge about having an original disk, even after they are patched. This never happens with Steam.
Since you are so furious about anti-copying measures, I can't for the life of me see why you are restricting your rant to Steam. Surely you should be aiming for all leisure software DRM?
Or are you just upset that Steam works better than disc-based protections?
I bought a PalmOS upgrade pack (about 6 years ago, I think). I'm reasonably sure this produced an upgrade to v 4.0 or 4.1; I remember thinking that I was fortunate to escape Graffiti 2 (which came in 4.1.2). I also remember a very scary flashing process that utilised screen memory, producing the same kind of snow dump as loading large 8-bit games.
After a quick shufty at Wikipedia, I'm now sure - the bitmap drawing program Notepad was first released on PalmOS 4.0 and I definitely have that now.
ZDNET confirms it was once available
Palm.com KB points out that they no longer sell it (probably due to one of their legal wrangles - maybe even because this was the last time they shipped Graffiti 1 before Xerox sued them.)
I've not noticed any problems. There are various improvements in usability, and overall the applications feel slicker and more useful than the older ones - things like a merged display of the todo list with the calendar. Some of the OS improvements are a little pointless on a Palm III, particularly the ones regarding networking because the only way to use them on an unexpanded device is to park it in the cradle. And colour support, obviously. And some things are just daft on a device with only 2MB of storage.
I confess that I don't use it often anymore because my job changed from being highly mobile and roaming around hospitals, for which I needed a good task list and phonebook application, to sitting behind a desk with a PIM application open on the second monitor all the time. I'm starting to feel the need for it again though, just to manage my at-home life. Maybe I'll hunt out a good belt holster for it.
It still functions properly after multiple drops to hard surfaces, and it's nearly 10 years old. The low power consumption and use of AAA batteries is a design combination I'd love to see in a modern PDA device. The Palm III is a classic to me ; sure, it's a bit chunky in todays world, but it's a wonderful example of form fitting function - it doesn't have any more resources than it needs to be a decent PIM, and the OS is trim and lean enough to provide for that, quirks aside. Robust case, hard top flip cover as standard, instant on, weeks of useful battery life from standard cells. For a while I considered writing a bunch of software for doctors to run on wi-fi enabled variants that the likes of Symbol cranked out.
At the time it was an expensive purchase ; the present entry level Z22 is a much more powerful machine, and costs less than a third of what I paid for it, but it lacks many of the desirable features, Graffiti 1 being one of them. There are various articles on backgrading the Graffiti 1 library from older machines, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to shell out and risk it not working.
What I would LOVE to see would be a port of PalmOS for the DS, or even just a Palm emulator. Shouldn't be too hard - DS is ARM, PalmOS 5 is ARM, and it includes a Dragonball emulator that runs faster than the original native processor on modern ARM hardware. There is DS organizer software, but it just isn't nearly as slick as Palm. And think of the possibilities for that second screen.
A DS is a little bulky, but no more so than a paper organiser, and just imagine the kudos gained from whipping out a slick, piano-black organizer and proceeding to note your next business meeting before playing Zelda.
Heck, I'm sold. I'm off to hunt out some homebrew kit.
Couldn't resist...
Agreed. Graffiti 1 was good, I can tell Graffiti 2 would annoy me immensely just by looking at the glyph chart.
I still have my old Palm III, upgraded to PalmOS 4, for this very reason. Although I have been quite impressed by the Fitaly keyboard, which is freeware for Palm devices. Since you can get it for other devices, it might be a good input device to learn.
Fitaly Keyboard for Palm
www.cybertriallawyer.com - pr0n style...
Principally a programmers differencing tool, but also great for file copies, website deployment over FTP, all sorts of things.
The new Battlestar Galactica did well for being off screen for several decades.
The series is overwhelmingly about the people involved, and not the technology. This is the key to all good science fiction, all good stories.
My wife is an excellent barometer of good sci-fi. Anything she even bothers watching is good. Everything she bothers watching has the same key characteristic - it's about people, not technology. The technology just serves as a way of putting people in a situation that you wouldn't find credible in traditional fiction. You use it as a "what-if?" enabler.
Firefly got this right. The technology is just a backdrop. The characters do not innovate their way out of tight corners. The most interesting conflicts are between the principal characters.
Voyager increasingly got this wrong. Many stories were overwhelmingly about pulling a technological rabbit out of a hat, solving problems with technology. We're geeks ; we're already sold on the idea that you can solve problems with technology. It doesn't make for challenging viewing without a personal angle.
e.g.
Voyager is in a mess. Lt. Torres reverses the polarity of the deflector dish and saves the day.
vs
Voyager is in a mess. Lt. Torres chooses to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish, even though she knows that it will destroy a fluffy kitten. She laments the Klingon side of her personality that finds fluffy kittens deeply offensive, because she secretly enjoyed pushing the button. She starts to have dreams about putting kittens in a blender and drinking the result.
Mailing lists are not spam. Maybe they are archaic, but the key difference is that to get on a properly administered mailing list, you have to ask. Equally, if you ask to be removed, you are.
The problem here is idiots who signed up to a mailing list and then decided they didn't like it ; instead of using the unsubscribe mechanism, they blip the "Spam" button to dump it, which causes it's spam rating to rise until it's automatically canned and then the list server gets blacklisted.
Your point about modern technologies is taken, but there are still advantages to lists ; you can download the mails, and peruse them later, and even compose replies in network downtime, which is still common enough. Composing replies into a text file for later pasting into the browser just doesn't have the same measure of convenience. I suppose what you really want is a unified discussion system that supports mail gateways, RSS feeds, Web BB, etc. I do get frustrated with lists, particularly when I have to subscribe to a list just to post my single question. (I'd much rather have a web interface that forced you to search the list archive for an answer first). But lumping them in with spam is just silly.
It kinda makes you want the desktop to have its own "workspace" file like a modern IDE does, detailing the application windows you had open and which workspace files *they* had open, so they can load their previous state and get back to the position in the files you had open.
I quite like the Firefox "restore session" feature, it would be nice if every application had this, including the actual desktop.
MMMMmmmp ...meep!
BBC Computer 32K
BASIC
>
Well, true, but BioShock is loading around 16,000 times as much data.