I'm a parent. When we manage to get a baby-sitter and go out to a movie, we have our cell phones with us, and they are set on "vibrate". The most likely emergency call we're going to get would be from our sitter, saying that something happened to our daughter. If some non-emergency call comes in, we look at the number and let it go to voicemail. There's no ring, no noise, no problem. How is a cell-phone jamming device going to allow that emergency call through? Answer: it won't, and therefore we wouldn't patronize any establishment that installs one.
Before cell phones, the usual parental practice was to give the sitter the phone number of the theater. But these days, theaters don't give that out; the advertised number just gets you a voicemail somewhere with show times.
HP bet on the wrong horse: the Itanic. They were planning to dump their old HP-RISC architecture in favor of Itanium but it's a dog that no one wants to buy. They are dumping not just Gnome on HP-UX, but pretty much any new work on HP-UX. It's an OS on the way out, with no reason to exist.
Fedora is not "community driven". It's basically beta for subsequent versions of the expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL is not just servers, it's also for workstations, and Gnome is the main GUI for the workstations.
Novell has bought both SUSE and Ximian, and they aren't planning to throw that work away.
Slackware is an oddity as a one-man distro; one guy can't support everything in the world, so he might have to drop something, or "outsource" it to the Dropline guys. But before people start tossing out the phrase "distributions like Slackware", they should be able to point to at least one other distro that made the same decision that Slackware did. Hint: there aren't any.
Gnome and KDE are going to co-exist for some time. Get used to it. Gnome apps run under a KDE desktop and vice versa, and the glitches are being worked out so that this integration continues to improve.
The US was not asked to sign the international treaty protecting the use of place names on wine, because it was during Prohibition. It really seems kind of funny that the US ignores naming rights in this way, though, considering how tough the laws are otherwise about trademarks.
See, "Champagne" should really be thought of as a trademark belonging to the wine-growers of the Champagne region of France, and almost everyone but the US sees it that way. It's kind of like letting a foreign company making knock-off jeans and calling them "Levi's".
One of the Bell Labs Unix pioneers, I forget if it was Dennis Ritchie or someone else, when asked what he would do differently if he redid Unix, said "I'd spell creat() with an e at the end."
They don't need your finger, just your fingerprint, from any surface. Then they make a fake finger from your fingerprint, as described in this article.
For the purpose of the X-prize, "reaching space" is defined as reaching 100 km altitude. That's way short of reaching orbit. SpaceShipOne is not even close to being a vehicle that can go into orbit and return from orbit, and until it reaches that point, it hasn't caught up with what the US and USSR space programs could do in the early 60s.
By increasing the power, something like SpaceShipOne could reach orbit, but that's the easy part. Returning without burning up is the hard part, and it's a problem on a whole different scale. When SpaceShipOne reached the top of its arc, its speed was zero; the problem is just to control the acceleration on the descent. A craft in orbit is going at 18000 mph, and all that kinetic energy has to be dumped. You can use atmospheric friction (as the space shuttle does, but then you generate enormous heat if you do it right, and if you enter at the wrong angle you either burn up or bounce off the atmosphere like a skipping stone. I don't think other approaches (like using onboard rockets to get rid of most of the kinetic energy) are feasible.
That's not to say that these problems can't be solved. But acting like we're going to have space tourism tomorrow because some guys won the X-prize is mistakenly optimistic.
I think, though, that private companies offering satellite launching services with non-reusable vehicles is a much easier objective to achieve. For that, you don't have to worry about the problem of re-entry.
The risk of traveling by plane is lower than by car even if you compute it per mile travelled. It's not lower because you fly by plane less often. You are a lot less likely to die on a 400-mile plane trip than you are to die on a 400-mile car trip.
Yeah, right. None of the commuters who live in Washington state and commute to work or do their shopping bother with use tax, and Washington state has no way of enforcing it.
There isn't a clear line between "real news" and editorials in any case. Editorials sometimes break news, news is often opinionated. The most careful attempts at "balance" introduce their own bias; by presenting two "sides", the author strongly implies that the truth is somewhere in between, when both "sides" might be biased in the same direction and truth happens to be elsewhere.
We generally run Linux in my house, but my six year old daughter has a couple of computer games, and one of our machines is dual-boot; pretty much all that that copy of Windows is used for is her games. Guess what? The games only work if I make my six year old an administrator. The reason is that the games were written in the Windows 95 era; they want to do direct access to everything, and that takes privileges that a non-admin Windows XP user does not have.
This kind of thing is common, and it forces a lot of people to run with elevated privilege. This is the price of legacy. Of course, Microsoft could have provided some mechanism to run the older programs without privilege (say, with some kind of virtual machine setup), but they probably figured that if they didn't do the work, it would be easier to sell new XP versions of all the apps.
The DoD retained the trademark for Ada, and you have to pass the test suite to call your implementation Ada. The GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) passes just fine.
It looks like he's built a vehicle that has a good shot at winning the X-prize. But it's not like you could tweak the design a bit and make something that could go into orbit and then return to earth. It's strictly a suborbital vehicle and it needs gravity to re-enter.
But he will get to see black sky during daytime. So maybe he can die happy.
The complainers can't read. I'm a member of the GCC steering committee, and I'm very happy with Scott's work (sorry, dude, I'm not going to call you "ChaoticCoyote"). It's not perfect, but it has helped to improve GCC.
That issue was already settled in the early 1990s, when the previous owners of Unix tried to block the University of California, Berkeley from releasing BSD as open source. The BSD developers had access to the Unix source code throughout its development; Linus Torvalds did not. So that should have been a much stronger case.
However, the case was settled, with BSD remaining as free software (after the elimination and replacement of a couple of disputed source files).
But if Real reverse-engineers Apple, and Apple reverse-engineers Real, it would be cheaper for both sides to just exchange specs.
It's contract law, not trademark law
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
The fight is going to be about whether Apple Computer broke the contract it signed with Apple Corp, the one they signed to settle the previous trademark dispute.
You should be able to use apt or yum to upgrade from the test release to the final release, and the Fedora team should be testing to assure that this flow works.
If this continuing sloppiness starts costing Slashdot money, maybe they will clean it up.
Factoring is not known to be NP-complete
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Because factoring is not known to be NP-complete, there might turn out to be a polynomial-time algorithm for factoring, but no polynomial-time algorithm for NP-complete problems. If this were true, RSA might be broken, but other public-key algorithms might still be strong enough.
Surely you remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, the guy with a British passport and a nice white-guy name? A Wall Street Journal reporter managed to get hold of a computer in Afghanistan that had a number of al Qaeda files on it, and many referred to Mr. Reid, and very specifically to experiments to see what a guy with a nice European Union passport could get away with.
This is not to defend the current extremely stupid no-fly list, but it seems that some people think that it would work to just harrass obvious Arabs and Muslims and let everyone else through. The bad guys would simply pick someone who does not fit the profile.
Slashdot Mirror
Before cell phones, the usual parental practice was to give the sitter the phone number of the theater. But these days, theaters don't give that out; the advertised number just gets you a voicemail somewhere with show times.
HP bet on the wrong horse: the Itanic. They were planning to dump their old HP-RISC architecture in favor of Itanium but it's a dog that no one wants to buy. They are dumping not just Gnome on HP-UX, but pretty much any new work on HP-UX. It's an OS on the way out, with no reason to exist.
Fedora is not "community driven". It's basically beta for subsequent versions of the expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL is not just servers, it's also for workstations, and Gnome is the main GUI for the workstations.
Novell has bought both SUSE and Ximian, and they aren't planning to throw that work away.
Slackware is an oddity as a one-man distro; one guy can't support everything in the world, so he might have to drop something, or "outsource" it to the Dropline guys. But before people start tossing out the phrase "distributions like Slackware", they should be able to point to at least one other distro that made the same decision that Slackware did. Hint: there aren't any.
Gnome and KDE are going to co-exist for some time. Get used to it. Gnome apps run under a KDE desktop and vice versa, and the glitches are being worked out so that this integration continues to improve.
See, "Champagne" should really be thought of as a trademark belonging to the wine-growers of the Champagne region of France, and almost everyone but the US sees it that way. It's kind of like letting a foreign company making knock-off jeans and calling them "Levi's".
One of the Bell Labs Unix pioneers, I forget if it was Dennis Ritchie or someone else, when asked what he would do differently if he redid Unix, said "I'd spell creat() with an e at the end."
They don't need your finger, just your fingerprint, from any surface. Then they make a fake finger from your fingerprint, as described in this article.
By increasing the power, something like SpaceShipOne could reach orbit, but that's the easy part. Returning without burning up is the hard part, and it's a problem on a whole different scale. When SpaceShipOne reached the top of its arc, its speed was zero; the problem is just to control the acceleration on the descent. A craft in orbit is going at 18000 mph, and all that kinetic energy has to be dumped. You can use atmospheric friction (as the space shuttle does, but then you generate enormous heat if you do it right, and if you enter at the wrong angle you either burn up or bounce off the atmosphere like a skipping stone. I don't think other approaches (like using onboard rockets to get rid of most of the kinetic energy) are feasible.
That's not to say that these problems can't be solved. But acting like we're going to have space tourism tomorrow because some guys won the X-prize is mistakenly optimistic.
I think, though, that private companies offering satellite launching services with non-reusable vehicles is a much easier objective to achieve. For that, you don't have to worry about the problem of re-entry.
The risk of traveling by plane is lower than by car even if you compute it per mile travelled. It's not lower because you fly by plane less often. You are a lot less likely to die on a 400-mile plane trip than you are to die on a 400-mile car trip.
Yeah, right. None of the commuters who live in Washington state and commute to work or do their shopping bother with use tax, and Washington state has no way of enforcing it.
There isn't a clear line between "real news" and editorials in any case. Editorials sometimes break news, news is often opinionated. The most careful attempts at "balance" introduce their own bias; by presenting two "sides", the author strongly implies that the truth is somewhere in between, when both "sides" might be biased in the same direction and truth happens to be elsewhere.
We generally run Linux in my house, but my six year old daughter has a couple of computer games, and one of our machines is dual-boot; pretty much all that that copy of Windows is used for is her games. Guess what? The games only work if I make my six year old an administrator. The reason is that the games were written in the Windows 95 era; they want to do direct access to everything, and that takes privileges that a non-admin Windows XP user does not have.
This kind of thing is common, and it forces a lot of people to run with elevated privilege. This is the price of legacy. Of course, Microsoft could have provided some mechanism to run the older programs without privilege (say, with some kind of virtual machine setup), but they probably figured that if they didn't do the work, it would be easier to sell new XP versions of all the apps.
The DoD retained the trademark for Ada, and you have to pass the test suite to call your implementation Ada. The GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) passes just fine.
What I mean is that there are no retro-rockets or braking mechanism, it just relies on gravity to come back down.
But he will get to see black sky during daytime. So maybe he can die happy.
The complainers can't read. I'm a member of the GCC steering committee, and I'm very happy with Scott's work (sorry, dude, I'm not going to call you "ChaoticCoyote"). It's not perfect, but it has helped to improve GCC.
That issue was already settled in the early 1990s, when the previous owners of Unix tried to block the University of California, Berkeley from releasing BSD as open source. The BSD developers had access to the Unix source code throughout its development; Linus Torvalds did not. So that should have been a much stronger case.
However, the case was settled, with BSD remaining as free software (after the elimination and replacement of a couple of disputed source files).
But if Real reverse-engineers Apple, and Apple reverse-engineers Real, it would be cheaper for both sides to just exchange specs.
The fight is going to be about whether Apple Computer broke the contract it signed with Apple Corp, the one they signed to settle the previous trademark dispute.
You should be able to use apt or yum to upgrade from the test release to the final release, and the Fedora team should be testing to assure that this flow works.
If this continuing sloppiness starts costing Slashdot money, maybe they will clean it up.
Because factoring is not known to be NP-complete, there might turn out to be a polynomial-time algorithm for factoring, but no polynomial-time algorithm for NP-complete problems. If this were true, RSA might be broken, but other public-key algorithms might still be strong enough.
Those Quebec people at Unibroue do a fine job, but what they are doing a fine job of is cloning Belgian beer.
Unfortunately, the owners of Stella Artois are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to ruin the reputation of Belgium. Just say no to Stella!
The provision of the BSD license requiring disclosure is widely violated (mostly because of ignorance of the requirement).
Surely you remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, the guy with a British passport and a nice white-guy name? A Wall Street Journal reporter managed to get hold of a computer in Afghanistan that had a number of al Qaeda files on it, and many referred to Mr. Reid, and very specifically to experiments to see what a guy with a nice European Union passport could get away with.
This is not to defend the current extremely stupid no-fly list, but it seems that some people think that it would work to just harrass obvious Arabs and Muslims and let everyone else through. The bad guys would simply pick someone who does not fit the profile.
But then how will he ever get tenure?