Maybe not with a kernel made for generic cpus, but I'm sure there are plenty of processing tasks which would benefit from a GPU: raytracing, fractals, various AI applications, image processing. Those are probably the more obvious ones. Once common usage was underway, I'm sure developers would find other uses too... It is essentially a co-processor (tied to the graphics system), so why not use it as one?
That is because it was in some previous story. I'd probably have to search slashdot's archives for an hour to find it though. Basicly what I understand it to say was: Microsoft's new security enhancements would either make it difficult or impossible for 3rd party security vendors to create software for Vista. Apparently it locks everyone else out of doing lower level things with the kernel.
WTF is up with the troll mod here? This just proves the mods are working for Microsoft. This guy wasn't even saying anything negative about MS, just pointing out that Linux has lots of software to download from the internet too, therefore it has a similar risk for trojans.
IANAL, but that is not enough. There are plenty of stories which show you can be DMCAed or sued even if you don't share their files. Just having a file called christina_stripped.mpg on your website could cause problems for you (their bots seem to have a wide swath). Even if it had nothing to do with any pop star named christina or a song named stripped.
And in many places it is against copyright laws to knowingly receive the files too, so only downloading doesn't magicly protect you. Though it would be more difficult to get a judgment against you, as they may be required to prove you "knowingly" accepted copyright violating files...
What? I thought selling a CD (a lawful copy) was protected by the "right of first sale"? It was last time I looked it up a few years ago. Has this changed? I thought copyright was intended to give authors the same rights as those who sold material goods, not more...
Ah yes, I see. I don't know the details to the POSIX spec, so I didn't realize disabling seek was not compliant. I figured they had just made it so you could stream the entire iso image onto the disk, which would make things quite easy. Perhaps a character device could be made to do that?
One thought I had a few weeks ago was to create a filesystem driver which would allow updating of rewritable CDs. The system would cache the updates in RAM and burn all the new files when the disk was unmounted or the computer was nearly out of memory. I think it should be possible--especially with todays large amounts of memory, but I haven't explored enough of the kernel's insides to know the size of the job. That is partly why I was so inclined to believe / wanted to believe your post.:-D
I haven't switched to 2.6 yet. I have it downloaded, I just need to compile and install it. So I haven't tried the/dev/hd? way with cdrecord. I don't think it would make things more confusing, since that is the way I specify the drive everywhere else...should be less confusing. Then again I've never had any real SCSI devices, so...
Are you talking about MS Windows or Linux here? The ubuntuforums sounds like a Linux name, but the rest sounds like a Microsoft situation.
If I have trouble getting something to work in Linux or see if it works, I just do a google search. If it says it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it has instructions how to get it to work, I'm good to go. If it says nothing, I assume no one has tried it and choose accordingly.
It's stupid to assume something will work on every computer no matter what. There may be an incompatibility with the motherboard or the like. What kind of idiot doesn't check to see if it will work before he buys it? It is no different than the 80s where manufacturers would only build parts which worked with specific computers--many times they had to because of physical constraints. Something made for an Amiga generally wouldn't work with an Atari 130XE. Only stupid lusers believe everything will automaticly work with their computer. With more standarization of hardware (such as pci and usb) it is more drivers which are the issue, however hardware compatibilty problems still show up.
I've been doing a lot of shopping on TigerDirect lately, and I've seen plenty of MS Windows users complain that they have trouble getting something to work and gave up. The problems aren't all on Linux.
Linux is already superior, not "second best." Becoming #1 will follow from that.
No it won't. There are countless systems which were superior to MS products, but they not only never became #1, they completely disappeared. Luckily Linux is open source, so it probably won't disappear, but MS could make it undesireable or unuseable by "encouraging" half of the internet or more to create files and sites which Linux and other OSs can't read. They could also "encourage" many manufacturers to create computers which refuse to boot Linux. This is exactly why they want to push DRM.
See MS didn't become #1 by creating a great product. Not even by creating a decent product. The only time I would call something made by MS "decent" would be when they were really being pushed by some competitor.
MS became #1 by being assholes. They lie, harrass, indoctrinate the naive, and do anything they can to squash any competition. Their product is shoddy as hell, but none of the common lusers seems to understand that or even try to. That is how they won, and that is how everyone else lost.
Obviously, the real issue isn't why Linux can't be #1, but why don't we have a much wider and better choice of operating systems? For a free market to work, competition needs to exist. Without it, you may as well have the government do it--at least they will have some interest in producing something decent and not going completely against the public, even if it would be costly and inefficient. Microsoft certainly isn't doing better.
Why don't we have standards for software APIs and such as we do for hardware? We do have standards--Posix, OpenGL, etc--however the OS run by over 90% of the desktop market doesn't follow those standards, so in a way, they aren't standards at all.
I had good luck with tigerdirect.com. I read some reviews saying they had problems with rebates, so I avoid them, though I saw a few that mentioned they never had problems. Maybe I'm just being paraniod. But I've ordered several things from them, and everything came promptly. They have good deals.
I've never put such a machine together, but I'd probably go with: Asus P5V800-MX Socket 775 Barebone Kit ($300 after rebate--again, I never tried their rebates and this one ends very soon--risky), ATI HDTV Wonder ($80 after rebate.
Never tried any hdtv cards, but this looks good--check for linux compatibility though), I bought a Geforce 6200 and was satisfied. You may want/need a different card, since you probably won't be focused on 3D graphics. I don't know which work well with mpeg decoding (I thought I saw one which supported encoding too while I was shopping for my 6200, can't remember what it was though...)
That doesn't leave much for a monitor, but I've seen some cheap CRTs...however you could just use the TV out on your video card, I suppose. (My 6200 has one)
Shop around. I'm sure you'll find what you are looking for.
You don't have very much imagination. A monitor is better than a TV, and I'm sure it would fit just fine in your entertainment center. If you don't like the size, buy a bigger one. Unless you don't have the money, then you're shit out of luck. However, think about this: for the price of your TV, you could've bought a bigger monitor. Yeah, if you want to watch old fashoned television, you'll have to buy a tuner card--they're $50(us)--actually I just found this Mercury one for $20.
I did that for a long time. My computer was also my TV.
There are a lot of reasons not to use Amazon's Unibox, but having to view movies on your monitor should not be one of them.
Ha! I fell for it. Though I wouldn't call it an "intelligence" test, but a fact checking test, and the moderators failed--if they're going to moderate something informative, they should at least have an idea if something is true before they do it.
I was going to upgrade to 2.6 because I thought the dd thing was real. (I should upgrade anyway.) Damn. Why don't they make it work that way? If they can't get it working for particular drives, then they should printk a message and make the device read-only as usual. Mine shows up as "generic scsi" in cdrecord, I'm sure many others do. So many drives should do this. WTF? What is the problem?
It would be trivial for the government to issue age verification cards. Difficult for just about anyone else. They could issue them at driver's license offices, tax offices, and such. And to make it somewhat private and resonably secure, they could do something as simple as hashing a name and birth year together and putting it on a card. Then websites could just collect a name, birth year and the hash, send them to a government server, and get a result back real or fake, and the site would know whether or not it is legal to allow them to post, view pr0n, buy kitten juice or whatever.
Yeah, children might get an adult's card and use it. Yeah, some government workers might decide they don't like someone and modify the server so it will reject their hash, denying them access to many websites, just like the no fly list. Not perfect, but it would be better than the stupid credit card/identity fraud assistance ideas.
The problem with this is the people enacting these laws and enforcing them don't really care about what they say. The usually want to force people to follow
their religion, politics or such. It is the taliban pure and simple. They want to ban pr0n, alcohol, gambling, or just keep people from communicating on the internet. It has nothing to do with "protecting the children" or "public safety." They probably rape and eat baby heads for dinner.
I remember this one city I was living, they used 9/11 as an excuse to shut down most of the bars and dance clubs (not that there were many left after all the things they did anyway). They passed a law requiring many public places to have metal detectors and all sorts of things--convienently, schools and churches were left out. Made it very expensive to run any sort of social gathering place (except a church or school-- which was essentialy run by the local clergy anyway) The few who managed to comply were harassed out of business anyway. I think the only place which managed to survive was a bar, and they probably did because they were used to that kind of harassment. There was already a law in place where alcohol could only be served in "private clubs" and undercover police would constantly go in without a membership and try and buy something. (by their crazy law was illegal) The reason these laws were created had nothing to do with protecting anyone. They made them to take away all social access from anyone who didn't go to their church.
Later they also created some "parking" laws to basicly kick out everyone who was over 25 and single, because one of their clergy had declared these people a "menace to society."
That is a good question. I hope they released the sourcecode somewhere. I don't have an Xbox, but I would like to have that program--I have had two strokes.
Maybe it works on Linux in general, and they wanted to make it more widespread? The glove appears to work on PCs to. No Mac drivers apparently, but according to this page, they eventually made linux ones.
One question I have: I tried Essential Reality's site, and there is another company listed there. Did they get bought out or go out of business? Is the glove still being made?
After looking at all this, I want one of these. This would be a kick-ass input device even for regular computing. You could probably use it as a mouse and keyboard (one handed--no pr0n jokes please;-)...and more!
This first part is more to the grandparent poster: I don't see these games as a high risk for causing seizures as they don't seem to have many flashing lights. Maybe the butterfly one may be a problem, depends upon how fluttery it is on screen. The pokemon incident was caused because the video flashed the screen repetedly at just the right frequency. I had two strokes, and flashing lights or sudden changes in light cause me to be disoriented. (They don't seem to cause seizures. I think I had a few seizures shortly after the strokes, however I don't think they were caused by any outword simulii...)
Plus it doesn't have to be updated with security patches, virus scanners, etc, so it's more stable than a common desktop computer.
What? Any computer which isn't connected to a network and won't be running untrusted programs (or in the case of autorun CD, won't have untrusted CDs) doesn't need to worry about patches or virus scanners at all. The Xbox is a computer, just a restricted one.
It's also cheaper than most computers, coming in around $100-$125 these days.
Err...is it really cheaper when you think about all the issues? First off, how do you know this program will even work much longer. Microsoft will undoubtedly release a patch to (try to) fix the hole they're using to run linux. Secondly, you can buy a real computer that does a lot more than an Xbox for $150, not much cheaper. Thirdly, you can buy used computers for much less. (I've seen them for $50 sometimes. In fact, the computer I'm using to type this message was found for free in a dumpster--well the case and motherboard.) Fourth, computers are so expensive because nobody seems to want to manufacture or sell cheap ones. Sony was selling their playstation 1 for $50. That system has more than enough processing ability for the vast majority of home users.
Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"
Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.
You're kidding, right? I've seen plenty of print books which have those problems, and not just crap fiction either. Textbooks and manuals. I remember one programming manual for the Atari ST had examples in both C and Assembly Language. All the Assembly examples were fucked up in some way--I don't think they even tested them, and I didn't know C or have a C compiler! I paid for that book and another from a different company, which had similar problems. It was total crap.
I've been in classes where nobody read the textbook and just looked at the equations and figures because it was so poorly written as to be useless. Also, almost every textbook where the answers to problems were in the back, quite a few were wrong. The instructor would have to tell everyone which ones were right. Sometimes even professionals aren't up to basic standards. Why should you expect a volunteer site written for free to be any better?
And the minor grammar problems? Who cares. Most people read Wikipedia for information, not to look for grammar problems. As long as you can understand what is being said, it is good enough. As for the major problems making the article unreadable, well it happens. For all you know, the person writing is an expert in the field, and had a stroke or came down with some sort of neurological disease and has problems with grammar. (or maybe they just never learned proper grammar.) The articles are more or less intended to give a person a general idea about the subject.
If you want something which is 100% accurate with perfect grammar, then you'll have to pay a lot of money to buy expensive books or hire a bunch of people to write them. You probably still won't get your perfect material anyway...
Well, since you can easily squeeze about 6 bits for readable gibberish (meaning up/lowercase letters numbers and a few punctuation marks), I calculate you should only need 27 characters (160 bits/6). However that is only an estimate. You may need more because the inbetween bits may affect the result. If you were willing to go with unreadable characters, then 20 bytes should be enough.
Either way, I don't see why you'd need more than one line, so this attack may not be as noticable as one may think. I suppose if you were trying to use a set of real words forming realistic sentances, you'd need a much larger set, however I imagine you'd probably have a greater chance of it not being noticed...
Why not just create an algorithm with more rounds? I'm sure it would have more benefits than just slapping two algorithms together. In fact MD5 and SHA came from the same algorithm anyway (MD4), so I don't see much of a benefit... You may even need less processing time to calculate the hash than just doing both.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not with a kernel made for generic cpus, but I'm sure there are plenty of processing tasks which would benefit from a GPU: raytracing, fractals, various AI applications, image processing. Those are probably the more obvious ones. Once common usage was underway, I'm sure developers would find other uses too... It is essentially a co-processor (tied to the graphics system), so why not use it as one?
That is because it was in some previous story. I'd probably have to search slashdot's archives for an hour to find it though. Basicly what I understand it to say was: Microsoft's new security enhancements would either make it difficult or impossible for 3rd party security vendors to create software for Vista. Apparently it locks everyone else out of doing lower level things with the kernel.
WTF is up with the troll mod here? This just proves the mods are working for Microsoft. This guy wasn't even saying anything negative about MS, just pointing out that Linux has lots of software to download from the internet too, therefore it has a similar risk for trojans.
IANAL, but that is not enough. There are plenty of stories which show you can be DMCAed or sued even if you don't share their files. Just having a file called christina_stripped.mpg on your website could cause problems for you (their bots seem to have a wide swath). Even if it had nothing to do with any pop star named christina or a song named stripped.
And in many places it is against copyright laws to knowingly receive the files too, so only downloading doesn't magicly protect you. Though it would be more difficult to get a judgment against you, as they may be required to prove you "knowingly" accepted copyright violating files...
What? I thought selling a CD (a lawful copy) was protected by the "right of first sale"? It was last time I looked it up a few years ago. Has this changed? I thought copyright was intended to give authors the same rights as those who sold material goods, not more...
The moderators now work for microsoft. Anything which may be interpeted as negative about MS results in automatic troll mods. Have a nice day. :-)
Ah yes, I see. I don't know the details to the POSIX spec, so I didn't realize disabling seek was not compliant. I figured they had just made it so you could stream the entire iso image onto the disk, which would make things quite easy. Perhaps a character device could be made to do that?
One thought I had a few weeks ago was to create a filesystem driver which would allow updating of rewritable CDs. The system would cache the updates in RAM and burn all the new files when the disk was unmounted or the computer was nearly out of memory. I think it should be possible--especially with todays large amounts of memory, but I haven't explored enough of the kernel's insides to know the size of the job. That is partly why I was so inclined to believe / wanted to believe your post. :-D
I haven't switched to 2.6 yet. I have it downloaded, I just need to compile and install it. So I haven't tried the /dev/hd? way with cdrecord. I don't think it would make things more confusing, since that is the way I specify the drive everywhere else...should be less confusing. Then again I've never had any real SCSI devices, so...
Are you talking about MS Windows or Linux here? The ubuntuforums sounds like a Linux name, but the rest sounds like a Microsoft situation.
If I have trouble getting something to work in Linux or see if it works, I just do a google search. If it says it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it has instructions how to get it to work, I'm good to go. If it says nothing, I assume no one has tried it and choose accordingly.
It's stupid to assume something will work on every computer no matter what. There may be an incompatibility with the motherboard or the like. What kind of idiot doesn't check to see if it will work before he buys it? It is no different than the 80s where manufacturers would only build parts which worked with specific computers--many times they had to because of physical constraints. Something made for an Amiga generally wouldn't work with an Atari 130XE. Only stupid lusers believe everything will automaticly work with their computer. With more standarization of hardware (such as pci and usb) it is more drivers which are the issue, however hardware compatibilty problems still show up.
I've been doing a lot of shopping on TigerDirect lately, and I've seen plenty of MS Windows users complain that they have trouble getting something to work and gave up. The problems aren't all on Linux.
No it won't. There are countless systems which were superior to MS products, but they not only never became #1, they completely disappeared. Luckily Linux is open source, so it probably won't disappear, but MS could make it undesireable or unuseable by "encouraging" half of the internet or more to create files and sites which Linux and other OSs can't read. They could also "encourage" many manufacturers to create computers which refuse to boot Linux. This is exactly why they want to push DRM.
See MS didn't become #1 by creating a great product. Not even by creating a decent product. The only time I would call something made by MS "decent" would be when they were really being pushed by some competitor.
MS became #1 by being assholes. They lie, harrass, indoctrinate the naive, and do anything they can to squash any competition. Their product is shoddy as hell, but none of the common lusers seems to understand that or even try to. That is how they won, and that is how everyone else lost.
Obviously, the real issue isn't why Linux can't be #1, but why don't we have a much wider and better choice of operating systems? For a free market to work, competition needs to exist. Without it, you may as well have the government do it--at least they will have some interest in producing something decent and not going completely against the public, even if it would be costly and inefficient. Microsoft certainly isn't doing better.
Why don't we have standards for software APIs and such as we do for hardware? We do have standards--Posix, OpenGL, etc--however the OS run by over 90% of the desktop market doesn't follow those standards, so in a way, they aren't standards at all.
I had good luck with tigerdirect.com. I read some reviews saying they had problems with rebates, so I avoid them, though I saw a few that mentioned they never had problems. Maybe I'm just being paraniod. But I've ordered several things from them, and everything came promptly. They have good deals.
I've never put such a machine together, but I'd probably go with: Asus P5V800-MX Socket 775 Barebone Kit ($300 after rebate--again, I never tried their rebates and this one ends very soon--risky), ATI HDTV Wonder ($80 after rebate.
Never tried any hdtv cards, but this looks good--check for linux compatibility though), I bought a Geforce 6200 and was satisfied. You may want/need a different card, since you probably won't be focused on 3D graphics. I don't know which work well with mpeg decoding (I thought I saw one which supported encoding too while I was shopping for my 6200, can't remember what it was though...)
That doesn't leave much for a monitor, but I've seen some cheap CRTs...however you could just use the TV out on your video card, I suppose. (My 6200 has one)
Shop around. I'm sure you'll find what you are looking for.
Whatever. I think you have been living in your parent's basement too long. Otherwise you would know TVs are expensive.
You don't have very much imagination. A monitor is better than a TV, and I'm sure it would fit just fine in your entertainment center. If you don't like the size, buy a bigger one. Unless you don't have the money, then you're shit out of luck. However, think about this: for the price of your TV, you could've bought a bigger monitor. Yeah, if you want to watch old fashoned television, you'll have to buy a tuner card--they're $50(us)--actually I just found this Mercury one for $20.
I did that for a long time. My computer was also my TV.
There are a lot of reasons not to use Amazon's Unibox, but having to view movies on your monitor should not be one of them.
Ha! I fell for it. Though I wouldn't call it an "intelligence" test, but a fact checking test, and the moderators failed--if they're going to moderate something informative, they should at least have an idea if something is true before they do it.
I was going to upgrade to 2.6 because I thought the dd thing was real. (I should upgrade anyway.) Damn. Why don't they make it work that way? If they can't get it working for particular drives, then they should printk a message and make the device read-only as usual. Mine shows up as "generic scsi" in cdrecord, I'm sure many others do. So many drives should do this. WTF? What is the problem?
It would be trivial for the government to issue age verification cards. Difficult for just about anyone else. They could issue them at driver's license offices, tax offices, and such. And to make it somewhat private and resonably secure, they could do something as simple as hashing a name and birth year together and putting it on a card. Then websites could just collect a name, birth year and the hash, send them to a government server, and get a result back real or fake, and the site would know whether or not it is legal to allow them to post, view pr0n, buy kitten juice or whatever.
Yeah, children might get an adult's card and use it. Yeah, some government workers might decide they don't like someone and modify the server so it will reject their hash, denying them access to many websites, just like the no fly list. Not perfect, but it would be better than the stupid credit card/identity fraud assistance ideas.
The problem with this is the people enacting these laws and enforcing them don't really care about what they say. The usually want to force people to follow their religion, politics or such. It is the taliban pure and simple. They want to ban pr0n, alcohol, gambling, or just keep people from communicating on the internet. It has nothing to do with "protecting the children" or "public safety." They probably rape and eat baby heads for dinner.
I remember this one city I was living, they used 9/11 as an excuse to shut down most of the bars and dance clubs (not that there were many left after all the things they did anyway). They passed a law requiring many public places to have metal detectors and all sorts of things--convienently, schools and churches were left out. Made it very expensive to run any sort of social gathering place (except a church or school-- which was essentialy run by the local clergy anyway) The few who managed to comply were harassed out of business anyway. I think the only place which managed to survive was a bar, and they probably did because they were used to that kind of harassment. There was already a law in place where alcohol could only be served in "private clubs" and undercover police would constantly go in without a membership and try and buy something. (by their crazy law was illegal) The reason these laws were created had nothing to do with protecting anyone. They made them to take away all social access from anyone who didn't go to their church.
Later they also created some "parking" laws to basicly kick out everyone who was over 25 and single, because one of their clergy had declared these people a "menace to society."
Well, that's what people get for using proprietary hardware.
That is a good question. I hope they released the sourcecode somewhere. I don't have an Xbox, but I would like to have that program--I have had two strokes.
Maybe it works on Linux in general, and they wanted to make it more widespread? The glove appears to work on PCs to. No Mac drivers apparently, but according to this page, they eventually made linux ones.
Here are some interesting links for the glove: Linux patch to blacklist the P5 from HID (apparently it reports itself as HID device, but does not comply with standard.) Library to use the P5 in Linux geocities page with lots of links to P5 info Page with lots of technical details about the glove
One question I have: I tried Essential Reality's site, and there is another company listed there. Did they get bought out or go out of business? Is the glove still being made?
After looking at all this, I want one of these. This would be a kick-ass input device even for regular computing. You could probably use it as a mouse and keyboard (one handed--no pr0n jokes please ;-)...and more!
This first part is more to the grandparent poster: I don't see these games as a high risk for causing seizures as they don't seem to have many flashing lights. Maybe the butterfly one may be a problem, depends upon how fluttery it is on screen. The pokemon incident was caused because the video flashed the screen repetedly at just the right frequency. I had two strokes, and flashing lights or sudden changes in light cause me to be disoriented. (They don't seem to cause seizures. I think I had a few seizures shortly after the strokes, however I don't think they were caused by any outword simulii...)
What? Any computer which isn't connected to a network and won't be running untrusted programs (or in the case of autorun CD, won't have untrusted CDs) doesn't need to worry about patches or virus scanners at all. The Xbox is a computer, just a restricted one.
Err...is it really cheaper when you think about all the issues? First off, how do you know this program will even work much longer. Microsoft will undoubtedly release a patch to (try to) fix the hole they're using to run linux. Secondly, you can buy a real computer that does a lot more than an Xbox for $150, not much cheaper. Thirdly, you can buy used computers for much less. (I've seen them for $50 sometimes. In fact, the computer I'm using to type this message was found for free in a dumpster--well the case and motherboard.) Fourth, computers are so expensive because nobody seems to want to manufacture or sell cheap ones. Sony was selling their playstation 1 for $50. That system has more than enough processing ability for the vast majority of home users.
Did anyone else see "wipe your butt with a paper trail" when they read this message?
Too many replies beneath your current threshold
Yeah, yeah. So they copied from Xerox PARC and Project Athena. Didn't everyone?
You're kidding, right? I've seen plenty of print books which have those problems, and not just crap fiction either. Textbooks and manuals. I remember one programming manual for the Atari ST had examples in both C and Assembly Language. All the Assembly examples were fucked up in some way--I don't think they even tested them, and I didn't know C or have a C compiler! I paid for that book and another from a different company, which had similar problems. It was total crap.
I've been in classes where nobody read the textbook and just looked at the equations and figures because it was so poorly written as to be useless. Also, almost every textbook where the answers to problems were in the back, quite a few were wrong. The instructor would have to tell everyone which ones were right. Sometimes even professionals aren't up to basic standards. Why should you expect a volunteer site written for free to be any better?
And the minor grammar problems? Who cares. Most people read Wikipedia for information, not to look for grammar problems. As long as you can understand what is being said, it is good enough. As for the major problems making the article unreadable, well it happens. For all you know, the person writing is an expert in the field, and had a stroke or came down with some sort of neurological disease and has problems with grammar. (or maybe they just never learned proper grammar.) The articles are more or less intended to give a person a general idea about the subject.
If you want something which is 100% accurate with perfect grammar, then you'll have to pay a lot of money to buy expensive books or hire a bunch of people to write them. You probably still won't get your perfect material anyway...
Yes, and you could also write your programs so they only work with a specific joystick and a specific soundcard only on computers made by IBM.
When you write a program, you should make sure it only works on the exact equipment you specify. Damn those stupid lusers for wanting anything else!
IANACE (I am not a crypto expert), but...
Well, since you can easily squeeze about 6 bits for readable gibberish (meaning up/lowercase letters numbers and a few punctuation marks), I calculate you should only need 27 characters (160 bits/6). However that is only an estimate. You may need more because the inbetween bits may affect the result. If you were willing to go with unreadable characters, then 20 bytes should be enough.
Either way, I don't see why you'd need more than one line, so this attack may not be as noticable as one may think. I suppose if you were trying to use a set of real words forming realistic sentances, you'd need a much larger set, however I imagine you'd probably have a greater chance of it not being noticed...
Why not just create an algorithm with more rounds? I'm sure it would have more benefits than just slapping two algorithms together. In fact MD5 and SHA came from the same algorithm anyway (MD4), so I don't see much of a benefit... You may even need less processing time to calculate the hash than just doing both.
So you think 5 months of prison + 5 months of home confinement + 2 years probation + $30k fine is worse than a 30 MILLION US Dollar judgement?
In case you don't understand our numerical system here, a million is equal to a thousand multiplied by a thousand.
You must make a huge shitload of money to think such a huge judgement is preferable to a few months in prison. Bill Gates, is that you?
The punishment for purjury is worse than a 30 millon dollar (200x$150k) judgement??? HOLY CRAP!