unpublished paper reveals unspecified hole
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 3, Funny
At least they gave the algorithm. If their synopsis is indicative of the paper, they illustrate that SHA-1 has collisions, and collisions can be discovered through the awesomely sophisticated technique of brute force. Pardon me while I dust off my bomb shelter.
Let's wait for the actual paper. If it takes more CPU power to force a collision within a year than the whole of what IBM sells in that year, I think that the hash is doing its job...
> Just so that we're not exclusively on Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a decent job at this too.
Most certainly. And unlike JMS, Joss Whedon can write characters. In fact, he does characters well, and doesn't do so hot with story arcs, but B5's story arc was really, well, lame. B5 got a free pass because it was sci-fi, but the acting for the most part was truly awful, verging on Xena/Hercules quality.
As for G'Kar, he represented a successful bit of character evolution. The interplay between him and Londo really made the show for me. Wooden lifeless characters like Morden and Ivonava never did it for me. Delenn and Sheridan could have been all right, except I could never get over the mimbari baby talk ("the religious caste", "the shadows"), nor her harsh hissing accent.
Someone needs to create some sci-fi Frankenproducer with the best qualities of Chris Carter, JMS, and Joss Whedon. Maybe even some Berman. There's got to be something redeeming about Berman.
Re:The funniest part of this technology
on
Havok Team Profiled
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, but the lag til you get to respawn is terrible -- no one's actually managed to even do it. There's rumours of some players who did, but they were in god mode.
> Ah, forgot to add---selling software isn't the only way for software developers to make a living
No, but it is one, and I'll be damned to hear some sanctimonious self-appointed philosopher king tell me I should stop because he doesn't approve of it. I supply the service, they're okay with the conditions I place on it.
I don't need advice on how to make a living from some has-been who already hit his motherlode with a macarthur grant and now tells everyone they can just work at wal-mart if they're not willing to serve the community over themselves.
I like open source. I write open source. But I won't have it shoved down my throat.
To the defense of... well, everyone but DJB, he doesn't exactly make people want to listen to him. Given his manner and his licenses, the conclusion of even cold rational business-oriented security folks is that if they borrow djb's ideas elsewhere, he'll turn around and sue them for IP violations simply out of spite.
At any rate, his proposal for IDNC3 simply seems to be "just switch to UTF8, let everything break, and when it goes live, disallow any characters that are 'risky'". This is what we in the industry call a handwave. I'm not a fan of punycode either, but it addresses a problem that raw UTF8 precisely doesn't. There's simply nothing to his proposal at all.
FYI: The spreadingsantorum link in your sig is only going to work on humans. Google spiders slashdot without a login and thus never even sees sigs. Try logging out, you'll see.
The OP was talking about VAs heuristic behavior, where (for example) if you call Foo.Bar() a whole lot, the method Bar will be moved upward in the autocomplete list.
Emacs has a pretty simple yet effective heuristic for its dabbrev expansion: it goes backward from the point for the most recent expansion candidate. Thus what you expanded most recently will be what's expanded first. It's pretty simple-minded, but it's actually quite useful. What's great about it is that it expands anything at all without having to create abbrev tables. Thus, if I'm typing out a paper and type out "existentialism" once, I just type "ex", hit alt-space (it's normally bound to alt-/) and presto, it expands it. It even looks in other buffers.
It's no substitute for a good autocomplete, but it would make a great supplemental feature. I sometimes find myself wishing for this feature in other editors when typing out cumbersome names (of people, like "Suresh Ramasubramanian") in comments.
> As I HATE upgrading Linux boxes for fear of messing them up, and ive laready gotten the 2.6 kernal on my RHEL 3 machine, what benefit does this have?
Speaking as someone forced to admin RHEL 3 without provisioning credits (it's politics and bureacracy, not money), what did you have to do to get kernel 2.6 on it, did you have any problems with it, and could I bum the RPMs off of you? I have a SuSE 9 box right next to it on identical hardware, and it's blowing the doors off the RH box (some of it has to do with them installing ext3 on the RH box instead of xfs, but that's not the whole story).
I'm relying on openpkg to run non-core packages, but it's hardly a great solution.
Here's the deal: when your professor tells you that you're never ever ever ever... ever ever ever... ever ever (etc) supposed to do something, then as the poster who quoted Miss Manners mentioned, you've got a pretty good idea what the answer to the exam question is. Any professor who's been in the real world (usually people who retire into teaching) will tell you that there's exceptions to any rule.
Games, with their relentless demands for resource efficiency, will have you breaking lots of rules. Game saves are one of the first walls a junior game designer hits. They've written this fabulously interesting game, unpolished of course, but it's got real potential. But the saved games are two megs each, and take 15 seconds to write out. There goes your console version. You now have to start cutting all kinds of corners to get those save times and sizes down, and that may mean a sacrifice of architectural purity.
To wrap it up, you probably do not want to blindly serialize all your stateful objects into persistent storage and leave it at that. You can and probably should do that while developing the game (be sure to version your objects while you're at it), but when you need to get efficient, you need to start relentlessly trimming the "serialized" form, and seeing what you can build up, recreate, or even just leave out (e.g. a save game in a RTS probably doesn't need all the scorch marks saved). Then instead of serializing to a stream to persistent storage, you want them to simply notify a "state container" with a reference to themselves (the container can egregiously violate encapsulation -- use inner class adaptors or private inheritance if you're paranoid) and that container can index into a memory segment. Then you just write that segment out to disk. Version the damn thing, so if you patch the game, you're not completely hosed. Keep in mind that you're getting RAM 4K at a time, and writing it to disk in bigger chunks, so don't be too stingy.
This is almost certainly an intro course. He's not writing device drivers, he's going to be writing an implementation of dijkstra's algorithm or binsort or matrix arithmetic or something. I doubt he's going to have to analyze pipeline and branch prediction behavior either. So just throw it into an emulator, it'll be fine.
Your prof sincerely will NOT CARE that you used virtualPC or whatever, as long as you did the assignment. He WILL care if you're some whiny fanboy who can't stop moaning about how kludgy and crocky the x86 architecture is and how you sing love songs to your powerpc mac every night and how you had to condescend to use an emulator only IF this dinosaur of a professor who stoops so low to use this architecture might deign to look up to your lofty height and permit you to use an emulator blah blah. Just use the damn emulator and hand in the assignment. Chances are he won't notice, and if he does, then go buy a cheap old PC and get on with life.
> The Tomb Raider franchise has had more misses than the Prince of Persia franchise, but I can't tell how many PoP games there have been.
Five.
Prince of Persia 1: Old 2D DOS game. Wickedly frustrating timed-the-buttons-just-so puzzles. And the whole game was on a time limit. Time runs out, game over. Still quite fun for its day.
Prince of Persia 2: Basically a rehash of PoP1, but slightly more colorful.... many years pass...
Prince of Persia 3d: A buggy klunky disaster. Good 3d games were pretty rare at the time, most cards wouldn't have had the juice to do what was needed to pull this off. Camera controls were really bad.... several years pass...
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Stunningly good and game, smooth, pretty, good character and camera controls. The prince is a downright acrobat now, with the added gravity-defying kung-fu like ability of running along walls even from a dead stop. Well-written characters with good (though not outstanding) voice acting. Console and PC ports have control schemes that work very well on each platform.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Much darker and more combat-oriented than Sands of Time. Still has a number of "puzzles" (the platformer genre never has real puzzles like those in adventure games), but the focus is mainly on combat. Reasonably interesting premise, but the voice acting has sadly taken a dive, with the prince never being all that likeable, and the enemy (your standard vampish-chick-in-platemail-lingerie) not all that believable.
The holes in rexec have been acknowledged to the point where importing the module throws an error about its complete lack of actual security. Expect it to be removed entirely in some future version. Pickle is importing arbitrary code, which can do arbitrary things. There really isn't a sensible way to protect against this in a dynamic environment.
It's not like lua lacks file and system access primitives either, though those tend to be easier to hack out if necessary (which it usually isn't, since it's the game logic that's written in lua, not third party mode). The appeal of lua is the smaller footprint.
Dude, I hope you know Boilerplate was a hoax. He was created by Paul Guinan, a graphic artist from Portland. The Pancho Villa thing was what really put it over the top.
The "World's Fair" name was stuck onto the International Exposition (or just "Expo" as they're usually called), which is held every five years or so, in order to celebrate internationalism, the precursor to today's globalism. The name has since fallen out of favor, as the whole lookie-lookie novelty flavor "it's a small world after all" faddish style of internationalism that was the hallmark of the World's Fairs has since faded. It was never an official name.
They haven't been held in the USA for a while, since they've often been expensive organizational disasters. One could argue though that we have so many conventions that we're having a nonstop expo in our own fashion.
Look, friend, if you're going to rant about a site that offers no original content except verbatim pastes from an article in order to direct eyeballs to ad impressions, look no further than slashdot
Huh. I've used my $40 toaster every day for many years, and it's like the day I bought it. In fact, since it uses an IC timer instead of a thermostat, I expect it to last far longer than the old chrome monstrosities I used to have.
Never had a microwave that went wonky, except the one at work. I've seen turntables break in microwaves, and displays go out, but nothing else. Fridges are more reliable than ever. Can't remember the last time I had to change the belt on a dryer. Heating coil, yes, but thankfully they made the thing just plug right in, so it wasn't a major hassle (current dryer's gas, won't have that problem).
Coffee makers suck about as much now as they ever did then. I have some kind of vibration that breaks coffee makers on touch. I've gone through four in the last two years. Other than that, I can't think of a single appliance that isn't ten times more reliable than the ones I grew up with.
What about a program that enables you to automatically send fake responses to a 419-scam e-mail, using different FROM: addresses and variable contents, so they cannot be easily identified as such?
Different idea (not automated), but some people make it a hobby: http://419eater.com
> So, if people suggest that the Vietnam and the cold war were unfortunate events, and things shouldn't have progressed down that path, you'd say they're in need of chilling out?
Yes sir, there's a healthy sense of perspective. Why just yesterday, there was an anti-perl rally marching down the streets of my city, must have been 10,000 people.
> This is a show that had to come up with the transporter, because they didn't have the budget to do the shuttlecraft models yet!
I seriously doubt that a model would have cost more than the *set* they had to build for the transporter. Heck, rotoscoping the transporter visual effect probably took almost as long as making a model would have.
You want seriously cheezy transporter effect, check out the chalk outline effect of Blakes 7. Still managed to be a good show regardless.
Google might be able to wave a stack of patents at competitors, but they do not have the lock on distribution channels that Microsoft has. Possibly they could even strong-arm OEMs into including only google on the desktop, but unlike installing a new OS, going to another portal is just a URL away. Finally, unlike Microsoft's early competitors, Google's competitors like Yahoo and MSN aren't sitting on their hands either.
I have zero doubt that Google, as a publicly traded company, will become evil, despite their motto. However, I don't think they're in any position to corner a majority of online service markets. I suspect far more people read Yahoo news than Google news, for example...
Google: went to the site. Worked. Even used some kind of GeoIP to pre-fill a location in my city (10 market, san francisco).
map24: Cluttered site. Lengthy java detection, which failed to detect my installed JVM (and I'm even on windows). Long load time for applet. Search for a city in SF, makes me pick from a list of 10 matches (I wasn't aware there was more than one "10 Market St" in San Francisco, California). Draws the map at continent zoom anyway, but fails to draw the actual continent or even the city I searched for. Interface fails to respond while zoom animates. Eventually locks up my entire browser.
Yet Google is the only one stamping "beta" on the site. map24 might be nice tech, but a map site has to be a practical working thing for me, not a technology demo.
"like I could care less" was the way the phrase was spoken when I was growing up. Just that, by itself, sometimes preceded with "shyeah" (a contraction of "sure, yeah")
Shyeah, like I could care less.
But hey, I could care less about what some anal-retentive thinks about the grammatical correctness of slang.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they gave the algorithm. If their synopsis is indicative of the paper, they illustrate that SHA-1 has collisions, and collisions can be discovered through the awesomely sophisticated technique of brute force. Pardon me while I dust off my bomb shelter.
Let's wait for the actual paper. If it takes more CPU power to force a collision within a year than the whole of what IBM sells in that year, I think that the hash is doing its job...
> Just so that we're not exclusively on Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a decent job at this too.
Most certainly. And unlike JMS, Joss Whedon can write characters. In fact, he does characters well, and doesn't do so hot with story arcs, but B5's story arc was really, well, lame. B5 got a free pass because it was sci-fi, but the acting for the most part was truly awful, verging on Xena/Hercules quality.
As for G'Kar, he represented a successful bit of character evolution. The interplay between him and Londo really made the show for me. Wooden lifeless characters like Morden and Ivonava never did it for me. Delenn and Sheridan could have been all right, except I could never get over the mimbari baby talk ("the religious caste", "the shadows"), nor her harsh hissing accent.
Someone needs to create some sci-fi Frankenproducer with the best qualities of Chris Carter, JMS, and Joss Whedon. Maybe even some Berman. There's got to be something redeeming about Berman.
Yeah, but the lag til you get to respawn is terrible -- no one's actually managed to even do it. There's rumours of some players who did, but they were in god mode.
> Ah, forgot to add---selling software isn't the only way for software developers to make a living
No, but it is one, and I'll be damned to hear some sanctimonious self-appointed philosopher king tell me I should stop because he doesn't approve of it. I supply the service, they're okay with the conditions I place on it.
I don't need advice on how to make a living from some has-been who already hit his motherlode with a macarthur grant and now tells everyone they can just work at wal-mart if they're not willing to serve the community over themselves.
I like open source. I write open source. But I won't have it shoved down my throat.
> Looks like nobody listened to him though.
... well, everyone but DJB, he doesn't exactly make people want to listen to him. Given his manner and his licenses, the conclusion of even cold rational business-oriented security folks is that if they borrow djb's ideas elsewhere, he'll turn around and sue them for IP violations simply out of spite.
To the defense of
At any rate, his proposal for IDNC3 simply seems to be "just switch to UTF8, let everything break, and when it goes live, disallow any characters that are 'risky'". This is what we in the industry call a handwave. I'm not a fan of punycode either, but it addresses a problem that raw UTF8 precisely doesn't. There's simply nothing to his proposal at all.
FYI: The spreadingsantorum link in your sig is only going to work on humans. Google spiders slashdot without a login and thus never even sees sigs. Try logging out, you'll see.
The OP was talking about VAs heuristic behavior, where (for example) if you call Foo.Bar() a whole lot, the method Bar will be moved upward in the autocomplete list.
Emacs has a pretty simple yet effective heuristic for its dabbrev expansion: it goes backward from the point for the most recent expansion candidate. Thus what you expanded most recently will be what's expanded first. It's pretty simple-minded, but it's actually quite useful. What's great about it is that it expands anything at all without having to create abbrev tables. Thus, if I'm typing out a paper and type out "existentialism" once, I just type "ex", hit alt-space (it's normally bound to alt-/) and presto, it expands it. It even looks in other buffers.
It's no substitute for a good autocomplete, but it would make a great supplemental feature. I sometimes find myself wishing for this feature in other editors when typing out cumbersome names (of people, like "Suresh Ramasubramanian") in comments.
Wallpaper and slightly different icons. Same bluecurve theme. Am I missing something radically different here?
Most RHEL boxes look like this to their admins:
foo:/root#
> As I HATE upgrading Linux boxes for fear of messing them up, and ive laready gotten the 2.6 kernal on my RHEL 3 machine, what benefit does this have?
Speaking as someone forced to admin RHEL 3 without provisioning credits (it's politics and bureacracy, not money), what did you have to do to get kernel 2.6 on it, did you have any problems with it, and could I bum the RPMs off of you? I have a SuSE 9 box right next to it on identical hardware, and it's blowing the doors off the RH box (some of it has to do with them installing ext3 on the RH box instead of xfs, but that's not the whole story).
I'm relying on openpkg to run non-core packages, but it's hardly a great solution.
Here's the deal: when your professor tells you that you're never ever ever ever ... ever ever ever ... ever ever (etc) supposed to do something, then as the poster who quoted Miss Manners mentioned, you've got a pretty good idea what the answer to the exam question is. Any professor who's been in the real world (usually people who retire into teaching) will tell you that there's exceptions to any rule.
Games, with their relentless demands for resource efficiency, will have you breaking lots of rules. Game saves are one of the first walls a junior game designer hits. They've written this fabulously interesting game, unpolished of course, but it's got real potential. But the saved games are two megs each, and take 15 seconds to write out. There goes your console version. You now have to start cutting all kinds of corners to get those save times and sizes down, and that may mean a sacrifice of architectural purity.
To wrap it up, you probably do not want to blindly serialize all your stateful objects into persistent storage and leave it at that. You can and probably should do that while developing the game (be sure to version your objects while you're at it), but when you need to get efficient, you need to start relentlessly trimming the "serialized" form, and seeing what you can build up, recreate, or even just leave out (e.g. a save game in a RTS probably doesn't need all the scorch marks saved). Then instead of serializing to a stream to persistent storage, you want them to simply notify a "state container" with a reference to themselves (the container can egregiously violate encapsulation -- use inner class adaptors or private inheritance if you're paranoid) and that container can index into a memory segment. Then you just write that segment out to disk. Version the damn thing, so if you patch the game, you're not completely hosed. Keep in mind that you're getting RAM 4K at a time, and writing it to disk in bigger chunks, so don't be too stingy.
Now go do the rest of your homework yourself.
This is almost certainly an intro course. He's not writing device drivers, he's going to be writing an implementation of dijkstra's algorithm or binsort or matrix arithmetic or something. I doubt he's going to have to analyze pipeline and branch prediction behavior either. So just throw it into an emulator, it'll be fine.
Your prof sincerely will NOT CARE that you used virtualPC or whatever, as long as you did the assignment. He WILL care if you're some whiny fanboy who can't stop moaning about how kludgy and crocky the x86 architecture is and how you sing love songs to your powerpc mac every night and how you had to condescend to use an emulator only IF this dinosaur of a professor who stoops so low to use this architecture might deign to look up to your lofty height and permit you to use an emulator blah blah. Just use the damn emulator and hand in the assignment. Chances are he won't notice, and if he does, then go buy a cheap old PC and get on with life.
> The Tomb Raider franchise has had more misses than the Prince of Persia franchise, but I can't tell how many PoP games there have been.
... many years pass ...
... several years pass ...
Five.
Prince of Persia 1: Old 2D DOS game. Wickedly frustrating timed-the-buttons-just-so puzzles. And the whole game was on a time limit. Time runs out, game over. Still quite fun for its day.
Prince of Persia 2: Basically a rehash of PoP1, but slightly more colorful.
Prince of Persia 3d: A buggy klunky disaster. Good 3d games were pretty rare at the time, most cards wouldn't have had the juice to do what was needed to pull this off. Camera controls were really bad.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Stunningly good and game, smooth, pretty, good character and camera controls. The prince is a downright acrobat now, with the added gravity-defying kung-fu like ability of running along walls even from a dead stop. Well-written characters with good (though not outstanding) voice acting. Console and PC ports have control schemes that work very well on each platform.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Much darker and more combat-oriented than Sands of Time. Still has a number of "puzzles" (the platformer genre never has real puzzles like those in adventure games), but the focus is mainly on combat. Reasonably interesting premise, but the voice acting has sadly taken a dive, with the prince never being all that likeable, and the enemy (your standard vampish-chick-in-platemail-lingerie) not all that believable.
The holes in rexec have been acknowledged to the point where importing the module throws an error about its complete lack of actual security. Expect it to be removed entirely in some future version. Pickle is importing arbitrary code, which can do arbitrary things. There really isn't a sensible way to protect against this in a dynamic environment.
It's not like lua lacks file and system access primitives either, though those tend to be easier to hack out if necessary (which it usually isn't, since it's the game logic that's written in lua, not third party mode). The appeal of lua is the smaller footprint.
Dude, I hope you know Boilerplate was a hoax. He was created by Paul Guinan, a graphic artist from Portland. The Pancho Villa thing was what really put it over the top.
http://www.wouldthatitwere.com/tffopghh.htm
> How come there are no more World's Fairs?
The "World's Fair" name was stuck onto the International Exposition (or just "Expo" as they're usually called), which is held every five years or so, in order to celebrate internationalism, the precursor to today's globalism. The name has since fallen out of favor, as the whole lookie-lookie novelty flavor "it's a small world after all" faddish style of internationalism that was the hallmark of the World's Fairs has since faded. It was never an official name.
They haven't been held in the USA for a while, since they've often been expensive organizational disasters. One could argue though that we have so many conventions that we're having a nonstop expo in our own fashion.
Look, friend, if you're going to rant about a site that offers no original content except verbatim pastes from an article in order to direct eyeballs to ad impressions, look no further than slashdot
Huh. I've used my $40 toaster every day for many years, and it's like the day I bought it. In fact, since it uses an IC timer instead of a thermostat, I expect it to last far longer than the old chrome monstrosities I used to have.
Never had a microwave that went wonky, except the one at work. I've seen turntables break in microwaves, and displays go out, but nothing else. Fridges are more reliable than ever. Can't remember the last time I had to change the belt on a dryer. Heating coil, yes, but thankfully they made the thing just plug right in, so it wasn't a major hassle (current dryer's gas, won't have that problem).
Coffee makers suck about as much now as they ever did then. I have some kind of vibration that breaks coffee makers on touch. I've gone through four in the last two years. Other than that, I can't think of a single appliance that isn't ten times more reliable than the ones I grew up with.
Ooh, new sig idea. Thanks.
What about a program that enables you to automatically send fake responses to a 419-scam e-mail, using different FROM: addresses and variable contents, so they cannot be easily identified as such?
Different idea (not automated), but some people make it a hobby: http://419eater.com
It's really hilarious stuff.
> So, if people suggest that the Vietnam and the cold war were unfortunate events, and things shouldn't have progressed down that path, you'd say they're in need of chilling out?
Yes sir, there's a healthy sense of perspective. Why just yesterday, there was an anti-perl rally marching down the streets of my city, must have been 10,000 people.
> This is a show that had to come up with the transporter, because they didn't have the budget to do the shuttlecraft models yet!
I seriously doubt that a model would have cost more than the *set* they had to build for the transporter. Heck, rotoscoping the transporter visual effect probably took almost as long as making a model would have.
You want seriously cheezy transporter effect, check out the chalk outline effect of Blakes 7. Still managed to be a good show regardless.
Google might be able to wave a stack of patents at competitors, but they do not have the lock on distribution channels that Microsoft has. Possibly they could even strong-arm OEMs into including only google on the desktop, but unlike installing a new OS, going to another portal is just a URL away. Finally, unlike Microsoft's early competitors, Google's competitors like Yahoo and MSN aren't sitting on their hands either.
I have zero doubt that Google, as a publicly traded company, will become evil, despite their motto. However, I don't think they're in any position to corner a majority of online service markets. I suspect far more people read Yahoo news than Google news, for example...
Google: went to the site. Worked. Even used some kind of GeoIP to pre-fill a location in my city (10 market, san francisco).
map24: Cluttered site. Lengthy java detection, which failed to detect my installed JVM (and I'm even on windows). Long load time for applet. Search for a city in SF, makes me pick from a list of 10 matches (I wasn't aware there was more than one "10 Market St" in San Francisco, California). Draws the map at continent zoom anyway, but fails to draw the actual continent or even the city I searched for. Interface fails to respond while zoom animates. Eventually locks up my entire browser.
Yet Google is the only one stamping "beta" on the site. map24 might be nice tech, but a map site has to be a practical working thing for me, not a technology demo.
How much extra would it cost to fire Berman?
"like I could care less" was the way the phrase was spoken when I was growing up. Just that, by itself, sometimes preceded with "shyeah" (a contraction of "sure, yeah")
Shyeah, like I could care less.
But hey, I could care less about what some anal-retentive thinks about the grammatical correctness of slang.