Replying to my own post, because I found something useful: rpiquepa is his Slashdot account. You will notice two things: first, he seems to have stopped portraying Primidi (his site) as the major post. Second, in a nice karmic balance, people are ripping off his original work from Primidi.:-)
Doesn't matter anymore. The links in his article are to real sites. The only link to his blog is in his name - and all submitters do that. The controversy a while back is when the main link in his submission was to his blog (which seemed only to copy-and-paste or provide only slightly more information than the actual news report.)
Screen popups mean that you don't have to wait for the recipient to check their email/vmail but it also means that you just interrupted what they were doing. I don't know how many times I was trying to solve a problem and I got IMed by multiple people asking if I had solved the problem.
What software are you using? On AIM, you just put an away message saying "I'm working on the problem", and check the little box to hide windows and disable sounds. Then, when you're able to respond, you see if people had sent you messages.
Out of curiosity, where's the documentation that describes this? I was thinking of writing a WMF that pops up a window saying "Warning, you haven't patched the WMF vulnerability. I was able to open this window on your computer by simply loading a picture. Imagine if this had been a virus too. Click here to download the fix - and here's why you should trust that guy."
Try using email, you can even use filters to pick your freinds messages out of the background noise, like inter-departmental mail.
Ah, you mean e-mail that has attachments and embedded HTML pictures, as opposed to IM, which (on a reasonable network) is text-only until you give permission?
And I trust downloading a DLL that injects into gdi32...why? I'll just do what I always do to avoid viewing pictures that I don't need (goatse, web beacons, etc.).
Who is this guy and why should I trust him? Or better yet, is the code open-source, or is the exact method publicly available so I can write my own hook?
That's exactly why I use IM instead of the phone. And two other things. The first is kinda related to your "atomic", but you can't hold multiple converations over the phone. I regularly hold two or three IM converstations at the same time.
The other is presence. If I call someone, half the time I get an answering machine. If they regularly use IM but they're offline (or better yet, away with a clear message), I assume they're not there and I don't have to leave a message. If they're online, well...might as well IM them instead of calling them.
I use e-mail for two things nowadays: for slightly more formal communications, and for leaving a message if the other person isn't on IM now and I won't be on IM later.
When I say $100k, most people understand that kilo means 1000, even though dollars are not SI units (and the k is in the wrong place, for the pedantic).
What do you say for a hundred million dollars? $100M. A hundred billion? $100B. And that's where the prefixes break down. No one will understand $100G. Besides, no one would ever honestly refer to a kilodollar (or even a kUSD, the "correct" unit). SI prefixes don't demand respect in non-SI units. When they are used, it's out of convenience.
And what about sig figs? Does a company that reported $100M profits get to make anywhere from $95M to $105M? Do we have to say $100.0M?
As for the indexing service... it would be a useful consumer feature, IF it came with a user interface.
What exactly is the indexing service? I was under the impression that Start|Find invoked it, or do I have my terminology confused? So what's the interface to it then?
You know, wake-on-LAN would actually be useful if there were a (reasonably secure) way to send it by IP address across the Internet, not by MAC address across a local subnet. Then I could not leave my home computer on all the time.
Here's my suggestion: computers with wake-on-Internet (since it's not LAN anymore) are off except for the network card, or the appropriate motherboard section. They run a port-knocking implementation. The router above it is informed that the computer has gone into WOI mode; if there's a packet outside a specific small range, it does what it would do if the computer was off (stealth it, report no route, whatever.) If the packet is within the range, it's forwarded to the NIC, which checks if that packet, and the next few, is in the right order for port-knocking. If it isn't, it just ignores it. If it is, it powers up the CPU and RAM into a special OS (loaded off flash in the NIC) that provides an HTTPS login screen, and reports to the router that it's on like normal. If the login fails, it goes back to WOI mode; if it's successful, it boots the regular OS (or wakes from hibernate or whatever.)
My wife picks up 4 of my kid's friends and drives 10 miles to the soccer field.
Indeed. Fault the SUV and Hummer owners, but don't fault the soccer moms when you don't carpool yourself. The mile-man-per-gallon (à la man-month) of soccer mom's vehicles is often higher than the average Prius's.
According to Wikipedia, it was only detected in January, named according to that year's scheme, and then later proven that it must have reached naming-strength in December (which means it should've been named Irene).
Yes, since a byte is an inherently binary unit.:-) Besides, how many people would really use it in combination with SI units, and say, "Oh, 1 kilobyte per millisecond must be the same thing as one megabyte per second"?
And joule, watt, and hertz are all SI derived units, but byte isn't SI-related. So it's allowed to steal SI prefixes without stealing their meaning.
You're missing the point. Nothing I email my mom about is worthy of encryption. But like you just said, an encrypted message amongst plain text stands out like a beacon. If I encrypt everything I send none of email mail is more or less interesting than any other bit. Rather than concentrating resources on the one encrypted messages, a hypothetical eavesdropper now has to make choices about where to focus resources. Is it a magic bullet? By no means. It's simply a small but important part of a well layered security scheme.
That works if you use encryption on occasion. But nothing I e-mail anyone is worthy of encryption. So there's no need to draw attention to myself by using encryption even once.
No, I'm not a cypherphobe. I recognize the value of public access to encryption. But I don't need it right now. So why take the effort, especially when it'll probably increase surveillance of anything I do in plaintext? (And yes, there's stuff I have to do in plaintext. Such as use a landline phone.)
Yes. There are countless times where the US government has cracked an encryption and not told anyone for years, even decades, because otherwise cracking it would be useless. They can't even publicize information encrypted with that method, because then people will figure it out. Assume that any encryption that has been here for over a couple of years has been cracked by the NSA.
By the way, at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, remember that this is the same mistake made by the Germans during World War II - and they had scores of brilliant minds who thought the US/UK/Poland/(whoever, I don't feel like fighting that flamewar) couldn't crack their encryption. A common user using a common encrpytion stands no chance.
Do we have quantum technology yet?
Quantum only helps in dramatically speeding computational time. And as far as computational time...how much total processing power do you think the government has? Or has access to?
Slashdot Mirror
What about Chewbacca living on [a moon of] Endor? Last I heard, THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!
Replying to my own post, because I found something useful: rpiquepa is his Slashdot account. You will notice two things: first, he seems to have stopped portraying Primidi (his site) as the major post. Second, in a nice karmic balance, people are ripping off his original work from Primidi. :-)
Doesn't matter anymore. The links in his article are to real sites. The only link to his blog is in his name - and all submitters do that. The controversy a while back is when the main link in his submission was to his blog (which seemed only to copy-and-paste or provide only slightly more information than the actual news report.)
Thanks Roland.
Cue response which points out you shouldn't judge blogs by just browsing them at random
Before anyone criticizes the general concept of blogs, please remember that Slashdot is a blog.
You might as well just criticize Apache.
Screen popups mean that you don't have to wait for the recipient to check their email/vmail but it also means that you just interrupted what they were doing. I don't know how many times I was trying to solve a problem and I got IMed by multiple people asking if I had solved the problem.
What software are you using? On AIM, you just put an away message saying "I'm working on the problem", and check the little box to hide windows and disable sounds. Then, when you're able to respond, you see if people had sent you messages.
Out of curiosity, where's the documentation that describes this? I was thinking of writing a WMF that pops up a window saying "Warning, you haven't patched the WMF vulnerability. I was able to open this window on your computer by simply loading a picture. Imagine if this had been a virus too. Click here to download the fix - and here's why you should trust that guy."
Try using email, you can even use filters to pick your freinds messages out of the background noise, like inter-departmental mail.
Ah, you mean e-mail that has attachments and embedded HTML pictures, as opposed to IM, which (on a reasonable network) is text-only until you give permission?
Ok, ignore my other message, I trust him.
And I trust downloading a DLL that injects into gdi32...why? I'll just do what I always do to avoid viewing pictures that I don't need (goatse, web beacons, etc.).
Who is this guy and why should I trust him? Or better yet, is the code open-source, or is the exact method publicly available so I can write my own hook?
That's exactly why I use IM instead of the phone. And two other things. The first is kinda related to your "atomic", but you can't hold multiple converations over the phone. I regularly hold two or three IM converstations at the same time.
The other is presence. If I call someone, half the time I get an answering machine. If they regularly use IM but they're offline (or better yet, away with a clear message), I assume they're not there and I don't have to leave a message. If they're online, well...might as well IM them instead of calling them.
I use e-mail for two things nowadays: for slightly more formal communications, and for leaving a message if the other person isn't on IM now and I won't be on IM later.
I haven't seen a single piece of DTP software on linux that is useful
What about LaTeX?
When I say $100k, most people understand that kilo means 1000, even though dollars are not SI units (and the k is in the wrong place, for the pedantic).
What do you say for a hundred million dollars? $100M. A hundred billion? $100B. And that's where the prefixes break down. No one will understand $100G. Besides, no one would ever honestly refer to a kilodollar (or even a kUSD, the "correct" unit). SI prefixes don't demand respect in non-SI units. When they are used, it's out of convenience.
And what about sig figs? Does a company that reported $100M profits get to make anywhere from $95M to $105M? Do we have to say $100.0M?
32% of all Slashdot stories are duplicates
Shouldn't that be 64%?
And I'm correcting someone someone correcting
You missed a "correcting". Hah. First Grammar Nazi of 2006. What do I win?
As for the indexing service ... it would be a useful consumer feature, IF it came with a user interface.
What exactly is the indexing service? I was under the impression that Start|Find invoked it, or do I have my terminology confused? So what's the interface to it then?
You know, wake-on-LAN would actually be useful if there were a (reasonably secure) way to send it by IP address across the Internet, not by MAC address across a local subnet. Then I could not leave my home computer on all the time.
Here's my suggestion: computers with wake-on-Internet (since it's not LAN anymore) are off except for the network card, or the appropriate motherboard section. They run a port-knocking implementation. The router above it is informed that the computer has gone into WOI mode; if there's a packet outside a specific small range, it does what it would do if the computer was off (stealth it, report no route, whatever.) If the packet is within the range, it's forwarded to the NIC, which checks if that packet, and the next few, is in the right order for port-knocking. If it isn't, it just ignores it. If it is, it powers up the CPU and RAM into a special OS (loaded off flash in the NIC) that provides an HTTPS login screen, and reports to the router that it's on like normal. If the login fails, it goes back to WOI mode; if it's successful, it boots the regular OS (or wakes from hibernate or whatever.)
Shouldn't that work?
DHMO doesn't drown anyone. They were just addicted to oxygen.
My wife picks up 4 of my kid's friends and drives 10 miles to the soccer field.
Indeed. Fault the SUV and Hummer owners, but don't fault the soccer moms when you don't carpool yourself. The mile-man-per-gallon (à la man-month) of soccer mom's vehicles is often higher than the average Prius's.
According to Wikipedia, it was only detected in January, named according to that year's scheme, and then later proven that it must have reached naming-strength in December (which means it should've been named Irene).
Yes, since a byte is an inherently binary unit. :-) Besides, how many people would really use it in combination with SI units, and say, "Oh, 1 kilobyte per millisecond must be the same thing as one megabyte per second"?
And joule, watt, and hertz are all SI derived units, but byte isn't SI-related. So it's allowed to steal SI prefixes without stealing their meaning.
I tried watercooling my XBOX 360. I ended up with a bunch of steam.
Steam? Don't you mean Xbox Live?
And then, you will be itting, like John Gilmore, on a no-fly list
I'm fairly sure that not even a dictatorship can keep its capitalism afloat if they put half the passengers on a no-fly list.
What is wrong with mebibyte? If you don't like how it sounds then why didn't you suggest something better during the years it was being standardized?
Suggestion:
1 048 576 bytes = 1 megabyte.
1 000 000 bytes = 1 million bytes.
And if you need the floppy-makers' bastardization:
1 024 000 bytes = 1 thousand kilobytes.
You're missing the point. Nothing I email my mom about is worthy of encryption. But like you just said, an encrypted message amongst plain text stands out like a beacon. If I encrypt everything I send none of email mail is more or less interesting than any other bit. Rather than concentrating resources on the one encrypted messages, a hypothetical eavesdropper now has to make choices about where to focus resources. Is it a magic bullet? By no means. It's simply a small but important part of a well layered security scheme.
That works if you use encryption on occasion. But nothing I e-mail anyone is worthy of encryption. So there's no need to draw attention to myself by using encryption even once.
No, I'm not a cypherphobe. I recognize the value of public access to encryption. But I don't need it right now. So why take the effort, especially when it'll probably increase surveillance of anything I do in plaintext? (And yes, there's stuff I have to do in plaintext. Such as use a landline phone.)
Can the NSA crack RSA?
Yes. There are countless times where the US government has cracked an encryption and not told anyone for years, even decades, because otherwise cracking it would be useless. They can't even publicize information encrypted with that method, because then people will figure it out. Assume that any encryption that has been here for over a couple of years has been cracked by the NSA.
By the way, at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, remember that this is the same mistake made by the Germans during World War II - and they had scores of brilliant minds who thought the US/UK/Poland/(whoever, I don't feel like fighting that flamewar) couldn't crack their encryption. A common user using a common encrpytion stands no chance.
Do we have quantum technology yet?
Quantum only helps in dramatically speeding computational time. And as far as computational time...how much total processing power do you think the government has? Or has access to?