I wouldn't want Red Hat or Suse or Gentoo on a production server, but I'd be happy with FreeBSD or Debian.
But I'd also be happy to run Solaris though. It has features that Linux and the BSDs don't have. Doesn't make it better for everything, but it's certainly worth looking at.
Compression works by converting long and simple strings of bits into short and complex strings. With formats like AAC and MP3 that are already highly compressed (already complex), the overhead of compression will often make a file even bigger than it was before. Then, it will require more CPU and memory to play, and perform worse when playing (require more power, increased lag when switching tracks, difficulty seeking inside a track, etc).
If you want, iTunes will transcode files into AAC, which performs a bit better than MP3 and is easier on the battery. At 128 kbps, it's about the same quality as MP3 except instruments like cymbals aren't distorted so much, which is a significant improvement. You might want to keep your collection as high bitrate files but transcode them to AAC for use on your iPod.
It's a small computer with a lot of storage and a screen. And you can restore the Apple firmware any time you want. And it's fun.
I wouldn't do use it... but I understand the urge to.
Why are you getting so worked up over people doing what they like with hardware they own? It's not like iPods are religious objects of worship. Not for anyone that's sane, anyway.
The Cell is not a magic talisman to make all your computing woes go away. It's designed to be very good at some jobs, and okay-ish at other jobs.
It'll play games better than anything else, and you can bet that Pixar will be buying them, but for stuff like dynamic web content or compiling it'll be slower than other CPUs we use today. Indeed, it'll be worse at most of the jobs that desktop computers do today, and it'll be harder to program for.
"Since then, the USA's encyrption policy has been undermined from so-called allies such as Canada and Mexico such that these technologies are in the public domain and commonly used in communicating things that threaten our national security."
The US's encryption policy has been undermined because it's stupid. Canada and Mexico are only two of the dozens of countries that agree with my assessment.
Even if the USA were the only source of strong crypto (Not the case. Rijndael aka AES comes from Belgium.) or every other country agreed with the American position (ha!), it only takes one leak for the bad guys to get the good cyphers.
One leak. When every computer has a binary implementation that can be reverse engineered. When open source software has the source code available for all to see. Even if nobody sold/distributed the good versions outside of the US, it would still be trivial to get a good version out.
"Once you do that, then why not just go to a brand new algorithm? That's actually what's being done -- whether it's sha256, or tiger."
SHA1-256 is not a new algorithm. It's essentially the same algorithm with twice the bits. I'm pretty sure it's also vulnerable (it just has more bits so an attack is harder).
It's an acceptable solution for the time being, as an attack on SHA1-160 is just barely this side of practical even now.
As for why they don't just hop on new algorithms... SHA-1 was designed very carefully by the best of the best, and it's been in the wild for a very long time for a crypto algorithm. And it's just now that it's been broken.
Nobody wants to commit to a new standard only to have it turn out to be flawed as well.
The next few years are going to be a time for math grad students to become men, I'll tell you that much.
Thanks! That was very helpful, this has been annoying me lately.
Another thing I like to do is block the worst ad servers at my firewall. For example, any server that sends me ads that make noise goes on the list immediately and permanently.
In this case I think the OP's post is accurate for first little while. As more and more SHA-1 breaking machines can be built on each chip, the size of the order will decrease. It'll decrease until the size of the order is too small for anyone to bother with (so it'll never reach $2500).
"Does the protocol even have to be unbreakable in the middle?"
"The QoS would be rediculously reduced."
As I said: "A protocol doesn't have to be invulnerable, it just has to be strong enough that stopping it would cripple the economy.":)
Re:Bittorrent?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well... TFA says that collisions occur in SHA-1 160 with a probability of 1 in 2^69, but that's for any collision, not whatever message you want. Now, there's a lot of torrents and a lot of digests out there, so if all they want to do is attack any torrent that's out there it might be practical if they had a large cluster of dedicated hardware... but that seems unlikely. Lawyers are cheaper.
A move to bigger SHA-1 functions or not-currently-broken algorithms might be in order for future revisions though. Things seem to be eroding pretty quickly these days for SHA-1.
A protocol doesn't have to be invulnerable, it just has to be strong enough that stopping it would cripple the economy.
As an example of a circumvention technique, consider if BitTorrent were to be extended to allow trackers to use encrypted connections to the clients, and to mediate keys between the various clients. Torrent files could be extended to contain the public key of the tracker. Then, regular SSL connections to the torrent websites would work.
I can think of a few other things off the top of my head... The client-to-client connections could be made to look like SSH connections. Can't stop those without crippling the economy and people actually pay attention to the keys there so you can't proxy it either. Or, you could start putting keys in the DNS records like Yahoo! domainkeys. UDP messages would be a pretty big PITA to classify and firewall.
The people behind most of the p2p protocols are way smarter than me and I could do any of those.
"And iMovie, and iDVD and iTunes and Photoshop and Poser and Bryce and Vue D'Esprit and... wait... why do I want to do this again?"
You don't care about any of those apps? Or you care about apps that haven't been ported to MacOS? Linux always gets all the best open source software first.
"In IT dying means that you're not leading - companies not leading or competing for the lead in their respective fields (processors/memory/OS/cases/etc) are as good as dead. It just they way it is with IT."
Apple held on when their OS was obsolete, and again when their processors fell behind. They survived both. I think Microsoft can survive their current troubles, no matter how much we wish that weren't so. Hell, IBM has survived and look how bad they screwed up.
The moral of the story is that you can survive to come back if you have a big enough wad of cash. Microsoft can survive years on their cash alone, and a lot longer than that if they start getting rid of assets.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've actually _tried_ all those distributions on a Sun 20z, and while Gentoo and SuSE both worked fine,"
From experience, I don't really put too much stock in the Suse or Gentoo definition of "working fine".
"FreeBSD and Debian aren't even ready for x86_64. Red Hat was notably unworkable, sadly. Maybe we only sacrificed enough goats for two distritubions."
Unless you specifically need 64 bits, you can run the 32-bit x86 port until the 64-bit port matures.
All the 64-bit ports are a bit young at the moment.
I agree.
I wouldn't want Red Hat or Suse or Gentoo on a production server, but I'd be happy with FreeBSD or Debian.
But I'd also be happy to run Solaris though. It has features that Linux and the BSDs don't have. Doesn't make it better for everything, but it's certainly worth looking at.
Do what I do; make criticisms mild and undisputable, and mix them with praise.
You think that's bad? Try being critical of Gentoo Linux. You can get modded troll with specifics like version numbers and dates.
Yeah, but it's still a good idea to wait for an update.
Compression works by converting long and simple strings of bits into short and complex strings. With formats like AAC and MP3 that are already highly compressed (already complex), the overhead of compression will often make a file even bigger than it was before. Then, it will require more CPU and memory to play, and perform worse when playing (require more power, increased lag when switching tracks, difficulty seeking inside a track, etc).
If you want, iTunes will transcode files into AAC, which performs a bit better than MP3 and is easier on the battery. At 128 kbps, it's about the same quality as MP3 except instruments like cymbals aren't distorted so much, which is a significant improvement. You might want to keep your collection as high bitrate files but transcode them to AAC for use on your iPod.
"My guess is that this is just an intermediate step towards some greater functionality. Like video or broader PDA functionality."
That would be pretty cool. Like a cellphone camera, but with enough storage for many hours (days?) of video.
It's a small computer with a lot of storage and a screen. And you can restore the Apple firmware any time you want. And it's fun.
I wouldn't do use it... but I understand the urge to.
Why are you getting so worked up over people doing what they like with hardware they own? It's not like iPods are religious objects of worship. Not for anyone that's sane, anyway.
IIRC, they won't throttle automatically. I think they just shut off. But that's enough to prevent damage.
The Cell is not a magic talisman to make all your computing woes go away. It's designed to be very good at some jobs, and okay-ish at other jobs.
It'll play games better than anything else, and you can bet that Pixar will be buying them, but for stuff like dynamic web content or compiling it'll be slower than other CPUs we use today. Indeed, it'll be worse at most of the jobs that desktop computers do today, and it'll be harder to program for.
"Since then, the USA's encyrption policy has been undermined from so-called allies such as Canada and Mexico such that these technologies are in the public domain and commonly used in communicating things that threaten our national security."
The US's encryption policy has been undermined because it's stupid. Canada and Mexico are only two of the dozens of countries that agree with my assessment.
Even if the USA were the only source of strong crypto (Not the case. Rijndael aka AES comes from Belgium.) or every other country agreed with the American position (ha!), it only takes one leak for the bad guys to get the good cyphers.
One leak. When every computer has a binary implementation that can be reverse engineered. When open source software has the source code available for all to see. Even if nobody sold/distributed the good versions outside of the US, it would still be trivial to get a good version out.
"Once you do that, then why not just go to a brand new algorithm? That's actually what's being done -- whether it's sha256, or tiger."
SHA1-256 is not a new algorithm. It's essentially the same algorithm with twice the bits. I'm pretty sure it's also vulnerable (it just has more bits so an attack is harder).
It's an acceptable solution for the time being, as an attack on SHA1-160 is just barely this side of practical even now.
As for why they don't just hop on new algorithms... SHA-1 was designed very carefully by the best of the best, and it's been in the wild for a very long time for a crypto algorithm. And it's just now that it's been broken.
Nobody wants to commit to a new standard only to have it turn out to be flawed as well.
The next few years are going to be a time for math grad students to become men, I'll tell you that much.
Thanks! That was very helpful, this has been annoying me lately.
Another thing I like to do is block the worst ad servers at my firewall. For example, any server that sends me ads that make noise goes on the list immediately and permanently.
In this case I think the OP's post is accurate for first little while. As more and more SHA-1 breaking machines can be built on each chip, the size of the order will decrease. It'll decrease until the size of the order is too small for anyone to bother with (so it'll never reach $2500).
"Does the protocol even have to be unbreakable in the middle?"
:)
"The QoS would be rediculously reduced."
As I said: "A protocol doesn't have to be invulnerable, it just has to be strong enough that stopping it would cripple the economy."
Well... TFA says that collisions occur in SHA-1 160 with a probability of 1 in 2^69, but that's for any collision, not whatever message you want. Now, there's a lot of torrents and a lot of digests out there, so if all they want to do is attack any torrent that's out there it might be practical if they had a large cluster of dedicated hardware... but that seems unlikely. Lawyers are cheaper.
A move to bigger SHA-1 functions or not-currently-broken algorithms might be in order for future revisions though. Things seem to be eroding pretty quickly these days for SHA-1.
You're already taxed for driving on private dirt roads because the gas tax goes towards road maintenance.
Thanks... I think?
A protocol doesn't have to be invulnerable, it just has to be strong enough that stopping it would cripple the economy.
As an example of a circumvention technique, consider if BitTorrent were to be extended to allow trackers to use encrypted connections to the clients, and to mediate keys between the various clients. Torrent files could be extended to contain the public key of the tracker. Then, regular SSL connections to the torrent websites would work.
I can think of a few other things off the top of my head... The client-to-client connections could be made to look like SSH connections. Can't stop those without crippling the economy and people actually pay attention to the keys there so you can't proxy it either. Or, you could start putting keys in the DNS records like Yahoo! domainkeys. UDP messages would be a pretty big PITA to classify and firewall.
The people behind most of the p2p protocols are way smarter than me and I could do any of those.
"This would require massive amounts of computational power"
I don't know about massive, but certainly significant. It's doable, particularly with dedicated hardware.
"And Comcast has as much pull with congress as the MPAA."
I don't think that's the case.
"And iMovie, and iDVD and iTunes and Photoshop and Poser and Bryce and Vue D'Esprit and... wait... why do I want to do this again?"
You don't care about any of those apps? Or you care about apps that haven't been ported to MacOS? Linux always gets all the best open source software first.
I had a dying NIC that did pretty much the same thing with XP...
I don't use that NIC or Windows anymore, but credit where credit is due.
"In IT dying means that you're not leading - companies not leading or competing for the lead in their respective fields (processors/memory/OS/cases/etc) are as good as dead. It just they way it is with IT."
Apple held on when their OS was obsolete, and again when their processors fell behind. They survived both. I think Microsoft can survive their current troubles, no matter how much we wish that weren't so. Hell, IBM has survived and look how bad they screwed up.
The moral of the story is that you can survive to come back if you have a big enough wad of cash. Microsoft can survive years on their cash alone, and a lot longer than that if they start getting rid of assets.
Cross compiling won't help unless you can run it too, and you're not going to be able to run it without hardware or emulation.
I'd be shocked if your uni didn't have an x86 machine that you can SSH to. Easiest to just use that.
It'll be a flag day when they move, so they're probably putting it off as long as possible.