I am not the one saying how you should spend your vacation, you are the one saying how others should spend their vacations.
I merely offer my advice, as a reknowned expert on such matters. You are free to ignore it. Slashdot postings impose no binding obligations; just because you read my words does not mean that you are required or even expected to agree.
If you really know of a good French jazz station, please post its frequency (and URL).
So, why doesn't someone ressurect it? Using a layer like VMware (or your favorite substitute shim layer) is a way to hide the details of the drivers from the kernel.
You're assuming that by something more productive, I mean something having to do with computers. It could be anything. There are a lot of ways you can spend your time that are more productive than writing a virus.
It turns out that of the top 10, six are netsky variants. Makes you wonder whether they're counting the number of new viruses, or the number of variations (or bit patterns). It's hard to believe that there were really 959 new viruses in one month. Actually almost all of these viruses seem to be rehashes of the same old ideas, just a few new bells and whistles. Not that much innovation from what I can see.
(not that I want there to be -- I'd be happy if all these sociopathic virus writers found something more productive to do, or just f****d off and died.)
No, I mean unbreakable in the sense that you can't even make a copy of the encrypted message. You can't see the encrypted bits unless you already have the decryption key. Therefore you can't take the encrypted message and use it as input to any super-powerful decoder and then just wait for a long time. You can't even do trial and error.
This is fascinating -- I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a scholar of software history, but I did witness the whole visicalc revolution and this is the first time I've ever heard that Dan Bricklin had co-authors! I'd always heard that he hacked the whole thing together himself and the only help he had was figuring out how to package and sell the thing.
I wonder what other software myths will fade or be debunked in the next twenty years.
Aren't at least some of the widely used security algorithms proven to be likewise unbreakable without changing the laws of, mmmm, mathematics?
None, except for one-time pads (which have other problems). For example, many schemes depend on the fact that it's impractical to factor large numbers. The truth is that nobody knows how to factor large numbers today, but it's also true that nobody knows how hard this problem really is. Perhaps someone clever will figure out how to do it tomorrow... and in the meanwhile, someone already has figured out how to factor large numbers using quantum computing. Nobody has built a quantum computer large enough to run the algorithm, but once they do, you can kiss all these schemes goodbye.
I think it's a bit weird that people are building linux-based calculators. Doesn't that seem like a bit of overkill? The memory required to boot linux is at least 1,000 times the memory of my trusty old HP.
Everyone in the Slashdot community seems so worried about the Microsoft monoculture, and yet here we are pushing linux into every possible niche. It can't be optimal to have the same OS running on both our calculators and our supercomputers.
They've automatically, like all people who patent cryptography, made their entire idea completly unprofitable and made sure that no-one ever implements it.
Yes, just like RSA, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, SHA-1... C'mon. You use patented stuff all the time.
there's no market pressure to adopt this stuff.. we already have secure communication.
Oh, where to begin... we don't have secure communications, what we have are communications that nobody knows how to break yet. Quantum cryptography is a different ballgame. It can't be broken without changing the laws of physics.
... and then the student gets a hefty bill for drilling holes in the wall so his neighbors can run cable to their machines.
But the real drawback of this solution is that it ties you to one spot. If you want to wander to the library (or live in a different dorm the next year) you'll have to pay the cost again. It probably works out the same as just buying fibre interface. Yuck.
To check the weather forecast...
radio
the tides...
paper, radio. Or just ask your neighbor with the boat.
to figure out what that sandpiper-ish bird with a hooked bill is..
It's a sandpiper. If you need more detail than that, go get a book about birds.
to order new books from Amazon
You're on vacation! Go to the book store! It's fun and you don't have to wait for delivery.
to view pr0n when you can't get anywhere with the girls on the beach...
Never a problem for me. My wife and I always bring home two girls, one for each of us. (Of course, it's the same two girls we brought to the beach, but that just makes it even better.)
to get a recipe for tom yam gai when you left your cookbooks at home...
Go to the book store. Call a friend. Recreate the recipe from memory.
I guess different people have different ideas of what they like to do when they're on vacation. For me, it means getting away from the normal routine and not being such a geek for a few days. To each his own.
Who rents a beach house so that they can use the computer? When my family rents a beach house, spending time in front of a computer is the last thing on my mind.
From your point of view, putting a computer in a beach house could be a headache anyway, for physical reasons. Everything in a rental property takes a beating. I'd just get a wireless router, hide it in
a locked closet, and maybe put a few ethernet jacks where your guests can find them. Let them bring their laptops if they're geeky enough.
You might also make them sign something saying that they're responsible for whatever gets downloaded during the time they're in the house. That way, if you have a guest who downloads something that attracts the wrong sort of attention, maybe they'll get in trouble instead of you.
This network is very expensive for the students to use. Their cheapest option for someone with an existing PC is $188.11 (NetGear GA621), which won't work on their home DSL/Broadband/whatever network when they're on break. The option for laptops (a better option for students, IMHO) is to get the adapter gizmo for $216.50 (NetGear GC102). Given that very decent desktops are $600 and laptops $1000, this means that they're increasing the price of these computers by >20%. Ouch.
To add to the problem, most commodity PCs can't handle gigabit anyway. The garden-variety PCI implementation tops out at about 50 MB/s, so you aren't even getting everything you're paying for unless you pay for a system with PCI-X or better.
OK, last week we all learned that Brown is ignorant and his book is, at best, FUD. Then we got to learn it again, when Andy Tanenbaum spoke up, and we got some comments for Linus too. Now we get to learn it again from RMS.
I don't care if the Pope speaks out about this book -- we've beaten this dead horse enough.
This seems too ridiculous to be true. Note that "Sun declined to comment for this story." The best the reporter could do was "sources familiar with the product." It was also conveniently posted on Memorial Day (in the US) with means that it's unlikely that there will be any official comment from Sun today, leaving this to simmer for a whole day. If Sun says something different tomorrow, it'll look like they're backpedaling. Coincidence, or a FUD tactic?
It doesn't mention that they're using anything special to do the wireless, but IIRC 60M of ice (or water) will defeat a fairly powerful radio signal. Anyone know if (a) I'm simply wrong, or (b) they're using something special? If the latter, how is it done and how well would it penetrate say 60M of rock?
Because Apple makes really great hardware, but I don't use software that doesn't come with source code and the freedom to improve it.
Gee, that must make it hard to use computers at all. The firmware in your disk drives, network controller, are graphics card are almost certainly closed source. (Even your BIOS is likely to be, although there are alternatives.) Not to mention all the switches, bridges, and routers your packets go through on the way to slashdot...
However, if you had enough money, I'm sure you could convince all those vendors to sell you a copy of their source. But I have a feeling that what you want isn't just the source code -- you want the code to be free.
... but I think that BlueSmoke describes what's coming out of their web server right now.
Small drives like this (though maybe not quite so petite) have been around for at least a year but they haven't apparently caught on. My guess is that the dollars/gigabyte ratio isn't down to the point where these things become worthwhile. For a few megs (or hundreds of megs) a keychain USB "drive" (really flash memory) is fine. For large amounts of data, portable drives (ala LaCie) are OK; it's no big deal to carry around something a bit larger than a 3.5" drive. Is there a market for anything in between? Probably not, unless it's pretty cheap.
Why is "&&" different from "and"? Ditto for "||" and "or", etc.
What I meant to write was "why are they the same? I'm still trying to figure out how to read this table. First I thought precedence went in one direction, then another, and now I doubt it's
represented in the table. So never mind.
At my school a student was kicked out for cheating. The parents came to complain to the headmaster. "How could you do this, after $X of our money?" they argued with him. He responded by nothing that since most of his tuition had actually been paid from the endowment, the school had actually paid $X+Y of their own money, and were also sad to see it go to waste -- but not as sad as they were that they couldn't have given his spot in the class to an honest student. The parents backed down.
I can't decide whether I'm more surprised that NEC would do something this transparently stupid, or that it took so long for people to notice! It seems like school budgets are gone over with a fine-tooth comb around here; lots of people want to keep costs down because higher school budgets -> more taxes.
Maybe this snuck through because it was done in a separate program funded a different way, but it still amazes me that they thought they wouldn't get caught.
Of course, TV dinners don't scream out the way ramen does for improvement and improvisation.
The operative word here is scream. I've known people who lived for months on ramen noodles but I still haven't figured out how they didn't get rickets or scurvy or something similar. There isn't much in the way of nutrition in those things.
Slashdot Mirror
I merely offer my advice, as a reknowned expert on such matters. You are free to ignore it. Slashdot postings impose no binding obligations; just because you read my words does not mean that you are required or even expected to agree.
If you really know of a good French jazz station, please post its frequency (and URL).
So, why doesn't someone ressurect it? Using a layer like VMware (or your favorite substitute shim layer) is a way to hide the details of the drivers from the kernel.
Some people enjoy this kind of thing. Let them have their fun. I'm sure there's something equally dorky that you enjoy.
Personally, I get a kick out of programming an 8-bit processor with a whopping 256-byte address space. It's a thrill to get anything working.
You're assuming that by something more productive, I mean something having to do with computers. It could be anything. There are a lot of ways you can spend your time that are more productive than writing a virus.
(not that I want there to be -- I'd be happy if all these sociopathic virus writers found something more productive to do, or just f****d off and died.)
No, I mean unbreakable in the sense that you can't even make a copy of the encrypted message. You can't see the encrypted bits unless you already have the decryption key. Therefore you can't take the encrypted message and use it as input to any super-powerful decoder and then just wait for a long time. You can't even do trial and error.
I wonder what other software myths will fade or be debunked in the next twenty years.
Diffie-Hellman -- US patent 4200770
The SHA-1 algorithm is not patented, but many uses of the algorithm are.
Do your reading.
None, except for one-time pads (which have other problems). For example, many schemes depend on the fact that it's impractical to factor large numbers. The truth is that nobody knows how to factor large numbers today, but it's also true that nobody knows how hard this problem really is. Perhaps someone clever will figure out how to do it tomorrow... and in the meanwhile, someone already has figured out how to factor large numbers using quantum computing. Nobody has built a quantum computer large enough to run the algorithm, but once they do, you can kiss all these schemes goodbye.
Everyone in the Slashdot community seems so worried about the Microsoft monoculture, and yet here we are pushing linux into every possible niche. It can't be optimal to have the same OS running on both our calculators and our supercomputers.
Yes, just like RSA, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange, SHA-1... C'mon. You use patented stuff all the time.
there's no market pressure to adopt this stuff.. we already have secure communication.
Oh, where to begin... we don't have secure communications, what we have are communications that nobody knows how to break yet. Quantum cryptography is a different ballgame. It can't be broken without changing the laws of physics.
But the real drawback of this solution is that it ties you to one spot. If you want to wander to the library (or live in a different dorm the next year) you'll have to pay the cost again. It probably works out the same as just buying fibre interface. Yuck.
I guess different people have different ideas of what they like to do when they're on vacation. For me, it means getting away from the normal routine and not being such a geek for a few days. To each his own.From your point of view, putting a computer in a beach house could be a headache anyway, for physical reasons. Everything in a rental property takes a beating. I'd just get a wireless router, hide it in a locked closet, and maybe put a few ethernet jacks where your guests can find them. Let them bring their laptops if they're geeky enough.
You might also make them sign something saying that they're responsible for whatever gets downloaded during the time they're in the house. That way, if you have a guest who downloads something that attracts the wrong sort of attention, maybe they'll get in trouble instead of you.
To add to the problem, most commodity PCs can't handle gigabit anyway. The garden-variety PCI implementation tops out at about 50 MB/s, so you aren't even getting everything you're paying for unless you pay for a system with PCI-X or better.
I don't care if the Pope speaks out about this book -- we've beaten this dead horse enough.
This seems too ridiculous to be true. Note that "Sun declined to comment for this story." The best the reporter could do was "sources familiar with the product." It was also conveniently posted on Memorial Day (in the US) with means that it's unlikely that there will be any official comment from Sun today, leaving this to simmer for a whole day. If Sun says something different tomorrow, it'll look like they're backpedaling. Coincidence, or a FUD tactic?
It doesn't mention that they're using anything special to do the wireless, but IIRC 60M of ice (or water) will defeat a fairly powerful radio signal. Anyone know if (a) I'm simply wrong, or (b) they're using something special? If the latter, how is it done and how well would it penetrate say 60M of rock?
Gee, that must make it hard to use computers at all. The firmware in your disk drives, network controller, are graphics card are almost certainly closed source. (Even your BIOS is likely to be, although there are alternatives.) Not to mention all the switches, bridges, and routers your packets go through on the way to slashdot...
However, if you had enough money, I'm sure you could convince all those vendors to sell you a copy of their source. But I have a feeling that what you want isn't just the source code -- you want the code to be free.
Small drives like this (though maybe not quite so petite) have been around for at least a year but they haven't apparently caught on. My guess is that the dollars/gigabyte ratio isn't down to the point where these things become worthwhile. For a few megs (or hundreds of megs) a keychain USB "drive" (really flash memory) is fine. For large amounts of data, portable drives (ala LaCie) are OK; it's no big deal to carry around something a bit larger than a 3.5" drive. Is there a market for anything in between? Probably not, unless it's pretty cheap.
What I meant to write was "why are they the same? I'm still trying to figure out how to read this table. First I thought precedence went in one direction, then another, and now I doubt it's represented in the table. So never mind.
At my school a student was kicked out for cheating. The parents came to complain to the headmaster. "How could you do this, after $X of our money?" they argued with him. He responded by nothing that since most of his tuition had actually been paid from the endowment, the school had actually paid $X+Y of their own money, and were also sad to see it go to waste -- but not as sad as they were that they couldn't have given his spot in the class to an honest student. The parents backed down.
And just to be pedantic, shouldn't all the "op=" operators be described as molecules formed from "op" and "="?
Maybe this snuck through because it was done in a separate program funded a different way, but it still amazes me that they thought they wouldn't get caught.
The operative word here is scream. I've known people who lived for months on ramen noodles but I still haven't figured out how they didn't get rickets or scurvy or something similar. There isn't much in the way of nutrition in those things.