The idiots *printed out* all the emails they received, and then *scanned in the print-outs*.
That's how they're able to misspell a name from an email.
That's theory one. But ironically enough, my comment (yes, i finally found it, they misspelled my last name) reads *correctly* on the comment page, even though it is misspelled in the index. Which indicates that they *paid someone to manually type in all the names to generate the index*. Even the names from the emails.
I guess it's hard to change a bureaucracy. And the opinion that resulted is probably not that surprising by an agency so technically inept.
I actually mailed in *two* comments: one a signature on someone else's letter (just to be safe), and then just under the deadline I sent in my thoughtful self-written letter. *Neither* is on the site, as far as I can tell.
There seem to be more than one of us. Is this grounds for a legal complaint of some sort? They are *required by law* to post *all* of their responses.
Some newer versions of the gnome2 libs are in http://sinfor.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian/debs, but as another reply mentioned, you'll probably have to wait a little longer for the non-library parts. If anyone wants to do the porting (probably shouldn't be very hard) I'm willing to host the debs at the address above.
You can get a gnome2 version of gnumeric from my archive, since that's what I'm working on.
Yeah, I've looked at the code gcc produces for StrongARM, and it ain't that great. Pretty awful, actually. But the StrongARM is a very quirky architecture, too. Perhaps one day someone will put decent predicated-execution hooks in gcc's backend and someone else will spend the time to tune for ARM and things will be different.
Not only that --- the article doesn't even say which compiler flags they used with the two compilers. For all we know, they could have been testing against gcc *with all the optimizations turned off*!
Without more detailed information on how the compiler was invoked, such comparisons are meaningless.
Also, they're still getting slightly less performance on linux, which --- since their benchmarks are completely OS-independent number-crunchers --- probably means that their methodology was faulty. Did they disable background tasks, for instance? Did they log in single-user?
SIMULA --- the first object-oriented language --- was specifically *designed* for engineering tasks: but the tasks in question were process *simulation*. And, indeed, any iterative difference-based approach to physics modeling fits right into modern object-oriented languages. You create an instance of the object Car, say, for each physical car in the system, then call Car.update(time) to have the car compute its physics to move itself to the proper location for the given time. This way the physics of each part is sensibly contained within the instance of the object representing the part. This also works is you have instances of Boiler, WaterPipe, or OxygenAtom, WaterMolecule, or UraniumAtom and Neutron.
I think the "answer" to your question is that, yes, your examples are too simple. When you're doing some simulation where the "finite difference solutions to non-linear equations" all interact with each other, and with computed fluid dynamics and heat transfer, etc, you'll immediately see the benefit of separating all these concerns into encapsulating object types.
Luc Frechette's publications page
has links to a number of papers with more technical details on his work (including the reasons why hydrogen was chosen, the current status of the turbine, what happens when one of these rotors "crashes" (i.e. not the death of the researcher), and other details ignorantly speculated upon by slashdot readers. Start with the overview paper; you can access his PhD thesis and more details on many of the component parts of the turbine from his publications page.
The speed of sound is dependent on pressure and medium. Saying "the speed of sound is about 350 m/s" means *nothing*. You probably meant "the speed of sound in air at room temperature", neither of which is strictly true for the turbine.
Nonetheless, the turbine tip speeds *are* "high subsonic or low supersonic" according to Frechette's papers. The turbine housing can reasonably be expected to damp external noise quite a bit.
They are using hydrogen because it burns cooler than hydrocarbons. No other reason. Frechette's overview paper lays this out quite plainly. Hydrocarbon burning won't really be feasible until SiC manufacturing technology is improved.
Um, no. If you wave the LED around, then its brightness goes down. Think of it this way: it's only turned "on" for the amount of time that it is actually at the spot you're looking at. The rest of the time it's busy pointing somewhere else. Persistence of vision isn't some magical cure for this. The apparent brightness of a scanning LED will be a tiny fraction of the brightness of the
steady LED.
If you want to work on these issues and are in
the vicinity of Boston, drop me a line at cananian@mit.edu. I'm the organizer of the Boston "Free Sklyarov" actions
(seven weeks running until disrupted by the WTC bombings) and I'll be pulling together other
activist groups now as well. Drop me a line, tell me your interests, and I'll do my best to put you together with other folk who want to work on the same sorts of things.
Protests are planned in Boston,
Pittsburgh, and
St. Louis in addition to the San Jose protest detailed in the EFF's press release. More details at freesklyarov.org (of course!).
"There wasn't, in any of the documents we had, a true security hole," Microsoft's Murchie said, adding there was a vulnerability in 7.0 if no security procedures were employed on-site.
In other words, what the Russians said ("also had a critical security flaw that would allow easy access to the sensitive nuclear database by hackers or unauthorized personnel.") was entirely correct. Any hacker or unauthorized personnel which had (physical?) access to *ANY ONE OF* the accounting terminals, it seems, could make changes to the database at will. As well, users who ordinarily have permissions to change only small portions of the database in limited ways (and who therefore have physical access to the system by definition) can exceed their permissions at will.
I agree with the Russians: this *is* a big security hole!!
See http://freesklyarov.org/boston for more info. Many other groups will still be protesting on Monday, as well. It's rather irresponsible of Slashdot to infer that the game's over!
The Boston protest will happen at high noon, downtown Boston. We're still working on the exact place. There's a mailing list set up for all those interested: send mail to dmitry-boston-subscribe@lm.lcs.mit.edu with the word "subscribe" in the subject or body to join. Archives are at http://lm.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian/hypermail/dmitry-b oston/. See http://freesklyarov.org/boston for latest news.
You're confusing public-key and private-key technologies. No one uses 512-bit private keys; distributed.net is currently working on a 64-bit private key. A 512-bit *public* key is *very* crackable, and no, you don't have to test all the
possible 512-bit numbers.
Granted, a 128-bit private key (which is a reasonable size, and one which Microsoft might be likely to use) is still *completely* out of range of any distributed.net-type effort, and 1024-bit public keys (also reasonable and likely) are similarly intractable. But protocols are hardly ever broken by brute force: usually you just wait for the other guy to make a design, implementation, or protocol error, and pounce there. Or use human factors.
Actually, this is the equivalent of having *many* (transmitting) radar stations and a *single* receiving station. The bet is that *one* of the transmitters will be in the right place to reflect signals to your receiver.
This is effective for scattering-style stealth technologies; it isn't as effective for absorbing-style stealth tech. The F-117 is an example of the first (ugly angular thing) and (I believe) the B-2 uses the second.
Another idea (of my own): use the network of earth-side transmitters in conjunction with a satellite-based receiver to work against even absorbing stealth aircraft. Basically, look for the big hole where there should be a radio signal but is not. This would be considerably more tricky to pull off.
This was really a pretty sloppy writeup. The "performance note" from linus was linked a page too early, there were no convenient navigation links, and far too little effort was spent to identify the sources of the performance improvements identified. In addition, "capabilities" are blamed for what was really the result of a debugging-printk excess, and in at least one point "kernel 2.1.92" was blamed (a convenient culprit) when looking at the graph it is obvious that kernel 2.1.*32* was the outlier.
NTK's summary at http://www.ntk.net/ is by far the best Mundie retort I've read so far. Quoting:
You can't stick a postfix next to a variable these days
without causing the imminent collapse of society. The day
after US assistant attorney Daniel Alter told a New York court
that DeCSS was like "software programs that shut down
navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in
hotels" (you know, *those* programs), Microsoft's CRAIG MUNDIE
was across town, declaiming that the GPL was a virus that
would shut down intellectual property inside people's heads.
Craig's speech is all about the nightmarish future of an open
source world, and is rather heavy on predictions. But then
Craig's job at Microsoft is to make gambles on the future of
technology. According Marlin Eller's account in "Barbarians
Led By Bill Gates", one of Mundie's first acts at Microsoft was
killing the company's 1993 low-bandwidth Net project in favour
of the *real* future - broadband interactive TV. That said,
once Gates caught on to this Interweb thing, Mundie was first
to catch on. "We'll tune it for all the platforms, then get
hardware companies to build accelerators for it", he
predicted, of the Net's most guaranteed success - VRML. Oh,
then he masterminded that whole WebTV deal, spending $425m MS
mad money on the sure-fire Internet/TV convergence. "We view
the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services",
he eerily prophesised in 1998. "PC this year, PC-TV's next
year", he again predicted - in 1997. Going further back,
Mundie features in "Soul of a New Machine" as the nameless guy
who loses the race to build a supercomputer. His own
supercomputer company went bust in 1992. Should anyone believe
his observations about the future of Open Source? As Mundie
himself once said "We persist. We're driven by some innate
belief about how these things are going to unfold." Even, it
seems, when they unfold in completely the opposite
direction.
Full details on the time/place of the meeting are
available at
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/pipermail/theloop/2001-May/ 000009.html.
The message is quoted below. It looks like the
room will be tiny, so show up outside the building
with signs in plenty of time to be seen!
An invitation from NYU CAT Co-Director Mike Uretsky:
Craig Mundie, Chief Strategist of Microsoft will visit the NYU Stern
School of Business this coming Thursday, May 3, from 12:00 - 1:30.
He is here as part of a trip to New York in which he will be talking
about Microsoft's move towards open source. That discussion will
take place in the Kaufman Management Center (KMEC), 44 West 4th
Street, Room 1-70 from 12-1:30. It is really a discussion and the
intent is to have a real and open dialogue.
Additional details are found below. Feel free to invite colleagues.
In light of the fact that the room has limited capacity and I am
providing food, I would appreciate it if you would take the RSVP
request seriously.
Thanks
Mike Uretsky
Co-Director
NYU Center for Advanced Technology
A Unique Invitation
May 3, 2001
12:00 1:30
(Lunch Provided)
A Discussion with Craig Mundie: SVP and Chief of Advanced Strategies
at Microsoft.
The Rapidly Changing Commercial Software Model A New Approach.
As the Internet evolves into the next phase, it becomes necessary to
re-examine and modify the commercial software model. These changes
take place within boundaries arising from the software development
community, source code licensing philosophies and a framework of
intellectual property rights. Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig
Mundie will present The Commercial Software Model how Microsoft is
positioning itself for success in this dynamically changing business
world.
Since there may be extensive press coverage, it is important that you RSVP.
Slashdot Mirror
That's theory one. But ironically enough, my comment (yes, i finally found it, they misspelled my last name) reads *correctly* on the comment page, even though it is misspelled in the index. Which indicates that they *paid someone to manually type in all the names to generate the index*. Even the names from the emails.
I guess it's hard to change a bureaucracy. And the opinion that resulted is probably not that surprising by an agency so technically inept.
There seem to be more than one of us. Is this grounds for a legal complaint of some sort? They are *required by law* to post *all* of their responses.
Some newer versions of the gnome2 libs are in
http://sinfor.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian/debs, but as another reply mentioned, you'll probably have to wait a little longer for the non-library parts. If anyone wants to do the porting (probably shouldn't be very hard) I'm willing to host the debs at the address above.
You can get a gnome2 version of gnumeric from my archive, since that's what I'm working on.
Yeah, I've looked at the code gcc produces for StrongARM, and it ain't that great. Pretty awful, actually. But the StrongARM is a very quirky architecture, too. Perhaps one day someone will put decent predicated-execution hooks in gcc's backend and someone else will spend the time to tune for ARM and things will be different.
Also, they're still getting slightly less performance on linux, which --- since their benchmarks are completely OS-independent number-crunchers --- probably means that their methodology was faulty. Did they disable background tasks, for instance? Did they log in single-user?
I don't trust these numbers at all.
I think the "answer" to your question is that, yes, your examples are too simple. When you're doing some simulation where the "finite difference solutions to non-linear equations" all interact with each other, and with computed fluid dynamics and heat transfer, etc, you'll immediately see the benefit of separating all these concerns into encapsulating object types.
Luc Frechette's publications page has links to a number of papers with more technical details on his work (including the reasons why hydrogen was chosen, the current status of the turbine, what happens when one of these rotors "crashes" (i.e. not the death of the researcher), and other details ignorantly speculated upon by slashdot readers. Start with the overview paper; you can access his PhD thesis and more details on many of the component parts of the turbine from his publications page.
Nonetheless, the turbine tip speeds *are* "high subsonic or low supersonic" according to Frechette's papers. The turbine housing can reasonably be expected to damp external noise quite a bit.
They are using hydrogen because it burns cooler than hydrocarbons. No other reason. Frechette's overview paper lays this out quite plainly. Hydrocarbon burning won't really be feasible until SiC manufacturing technology is improved.
Um, no. If you wave the LED around, then its brightness goes down. Think of it this way: it's only turned "on" for the amount of time that it is actually at the spot you're looking at. The rest of the time it's busy pointing somewhere else. Persistence of vision isn't some magical cure for this. The apparent brightness of a scanning LED will be a tiny fraction of the brightness of the
steady LED.
If you want to work on these issues and are in the vicinity of Boston, drop me a line at cananian@mit.edu. I'm the organizer of the Boston "Free Sklyarov" actions (seven weeks running until disrupted by the WTC bombings) and I'll be pulling together other activist groups now as well. Drop me a line, tell me your interests, and I'll do my best to put you together with other folk who want to work on the same sorts of things.
How about anti-dcma.org? The freesklyarov.org website (protests today btw, check it out) has a whole page of articles about the DMCA, including statements from Rep. Rick Boucher, and Brad Templeton (head of the EFF).
Protests are planned in Boston, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis in addition to the San Jose protest detailed in the EFF's press release. More details at freesklyarov.org (of course!).
Actually, http://boston.freesklyarov.org/mirror/freesklyarov .org is more up-to-date. Use that mirror instead.
Direct links to boston, LA, and seattle information are at boston.freesklyarov.org, la.freesklyarov.org, and seattle.freesklyarov.orb.
Protests are also scheduled in NY and LA. There's interest in the UK as well, see ntk.net for more details.
Boston write-up and pictures, Wired article on the protests, On-line petition, IDG story, CNN copy of the original Reuters story (better late than never!), ironic page on the AAP website (the AAP issued a press release defending Adobe and the DMCA).
I agree with the Russians: this *is* a big security hole!!
See http://freesklyarov.org/boston for more info. Many other groups will still be protesting on Monday, as well. It's rather irresponsible of Slashdot to infer that the game's over!
The Boston protest will happen at high noon, downtown Boston. We're still working on the exact place. There's a mailing list set up for all those interested: send mail to dmitry-boston-subscribe@lm.lcs.mit.edu with the word "subscribe" in the subject or body to join. Archives are at http://lm.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian/hypermail/dmitry-b oston/. See http://freesklyarov.org/boston for latest news.
Granted, a 128-bit private key (which is a reasonable size, and one which Microsoft might be likely to use) is still *completely* out of range of any distributed.net-type effort, and 1024-bit public keys (also reasonable and likely) are similarly intractable. But protocols are hardly ever broken by brute force: usually you just wait for the other guy to make a design, implementation, or protocol error, and pounce there. Or use human factors.
This is effective for scattering-style stealth technologies; it isn't as effective for absorbing-style stealth tech. The F-117 is an example of the first (ugly angular thing) and (I believe) the B-2 uses the second.
Another idea (of my own): use the network of earth-side transmitters in conjunction with a satellite-based receiver to work against even absorbing stealth aircraft. Basically, look for the big hole where there should be a radio signal but is not. This would be considerably more tricky to pull off.
I'm not impressed.
Oh, and here's a map.