If you need 1kW just for a 200kg craft it means that the power requirements for a manned 30 tonne mission will be pretty high. Where do you get all that power? Solar panels are heavy and not very efficient.
I guess this calls for unpopular power sources such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
It's quite likely that the reason for the selection has nothing to do with cryptography or any other technically relevent reason.
Hitachi has a patent which all finalists but Rijndael appear to infringe. Given the fact that Twofish, Serpent and Rijndael are all very secure, efficient to implement on all relevant platforms and are more or less the same on all other technical issues the determining factor is probably the patent issue.
Quite depressing, actually.
(BTW, it's not just me saying that all three would have made a great AES- many of the contenstants themselves have said so).
LunaCorp is planning to send a robotic vehicle to the moon for a Grand Apollo Tour of historic landing sites.
This is a commercial venture and the money will supposedly come from letting people be telepresent at the location in real time (minus lightspeed lag) and even drive the rover by remote control.
I wonder if declaring them a national monument will have any legal effect on LunaCorp's plans.
Look at the bottom right corner of this screenshot for a nice solution to the problem of tray icon overpopulation: only the ones you use appear and the others are accessible through the "" icon. I know many windows users that have so many tray icons there is virtually no room left on the task bar. They keep downloading and installing "cool" stuff from the net and a lot of it ends up as new tray icons.
When I think of it, screen real estate is not their real problem. Windows machines with so much stuff loaded in memory are even more unstable. The first thing I do when they come screaming for help is get rid of all this junk.
Netscape is doing the same, and it's not exactly new either: this feature is there since version 4.0 (1998?). The default bookmarks in the Personal Toolbar Folder redirect through Netscape's site.
The redirection URL is http://home.netscape.com/bookmark/(version)/(bookm arkname).html
When the U.S. astronauts visited Mir, they brought their Fisher Space Pens. Those were no doubt the most reliable pieces of equipment on the space station.
When NASA realized that a regular pen doesn't work in zero G they set on a big expensive project to develop a special pen.
The russians use pencils.
The aging space shuttle is not more reliable than Mir, it's just that it can run back to mommmy earth at the slightest hint of trouble and get the several month long overhaul it needs before each flight.
The russians tough it out and solve their problems. You gotta respect that. Which of these approaches results in more useful experience for future habitation in space?
The state of Mir is more a matter of public perception than actual fact.
You may have signed over your rights to the patent, but you have every right to participate in the patent issuing process.
If you send a letter to the patent examiner (or better, request an oral hearing - $130) there is a good chance that he will take it into consideration, especially if it's clear that you are not trying to cause harm to your ex-employer and that you are doing this from your conscience and understanding of the underlying art.
After millions of dollars spent on research over the last decade no correlation has been proven yet between cellular phone usage and any damage to the health of the user. If such correlation does exist, though, one thing is sure: it's so low that it is difficult to spot against the background noise of normal health problems.
Compare this to the damage of air pollution that is very easy to spot statistically.
I am not saying that there is no risk in cellular phones, it's just a matter of proportion. We take risks every day: the risk of living in a polluted city, the risk of being hit in a car accident, the risk of being mugged etc.
I would like to have better information about the amount of risk I am taking when I use my cellular phone, but it's pretty certain that it's much lower than other risks I take every day with barely a second thought.
Storing partially encrypted data in the database and keeping the decryption key on a separate, secure machine definitely sounds like a good idea - but has anyone here actually seen this done in practice?
Can you point me to any references I can quote for management?
Current active matrix displays use amorphous silicon thin film transistors as pixel drivers. This means that the backlight has to pass through both the silicon film and the liquid crystal itself. The combined attenuation is quite high and a very bright backlight is required.
If this polymer semiconductor is more transparent than amorphous silicon this could result in significant power savings on the backlight to achieve the same brightness.
You might remember this article and the slashdot discussion about it claiming that the Transmeta processor improve battry life help that much because the display is the real power hog. Any improvement in display power consumption will be very much welcomed.
Let's see how well Hotmail functions now. Not a flame, I'm just curious to see some real world comparisons between FreeBSD and Win2K.
Does this case really compare between the OSes? There are lots of other implementation issues that could affect the result.
It is actually possible to build reliable and scalable systems based on Windows 2000. Barnes and Noble is a pure MS shop (web servers, database, everything) and they seem to be doing quite well. I prefer *nix because I like the *nix way of doing things and command line power. But it's mostly a cultural difference, not one platform that is inherently better than the other.
According to the description of the device they use ultrasound in the millimeter wavelengths, this is in the hundreds of kilohertz. So your dog will not go insane, fido can't hear over 35kHz. These high frequencies are also attenuated rather rapidly in air.
The coupling of these frequencies from the air to your body is also extremely poor. Compare this to a medical ultrasound that uses very high levels and is in direct contact with your body with gel to improve the impedance match.
This definitely requires further study, but I wouldn't be too concerned about safety.
I use google almost exclusively, but AltaVista is still useful sometimes. And when I do use it I prefer text mode (originally created for text-based browsers like Lynx)
One of the primary reasons for the lower power consumption claimed by Transmeta is that the chip area is much smaller - Pentium compatibility is achieved in software instead of transistors.
Wait a second... doesn't a smaller chip area mean that it's supposed to be significantly cheaper, too?
I guess it could have been much cheaper than a Pentium, but they have a huge investment to cover so they are going for a high-margin market by targeting manufacturers that desperately need something other than price - lower power consumption.
So what do you do if the CPU isn't the only power hog around?
there are lot's of fraudulent and dead keys in there and they are signed by someone who was trusted enough to sign the kernel key
This sentence is meaningless. Trust goes only one way. It doesn't mean anything if someone you don't know has signed a key.
I only added signers of keys to until the database was 4000 keys or so.
You're going the wrong way. You should trace the web of trust by looking for keys that are SIGNED BY that key, not keys that SIGN IT. Yes, I know, it's a little more difficult to find all the keys signed by a particular key. You need to download the entire database for that.
The only solution to this is a certified key authority.
According to your logic I could discredit the certificate authority by creating a bogus key and signing the CA's key with it...
The actual transceiver design may have been borrowed from FireWire, but what really makes a standard is the support infrastructure around it such as the device framework and drivers, not the low-level electronics.
Intel has supported USB on its chipsets for a long time before Microsoft had any kind of software support for it in Windows 95 OSR/2. It took more than a year until they released Windows 98 with halfway decent USB support and ironed out most of the remaining bugs in hot plug'n'play and other parts of the system with Windows 98 Second Edition. Overall it took more than 3 years.
Do you want to wait this long until Microsoft gets it right with 1394?
USB 2.0 will leverage this miserable experience and make sure that we don't have to go through this again. It will just replace the low level host controller driver and use all the upper layers without modification.
Personally, I don't care much for Windows, but the peripherals will not be on the shelves for us Linux geeks until they are supported by Windows.
Nice to see this "confession" from someone in the know. It's still not enough, though. He says that the increase is not as big as the article claims when in fact there *cannot* be any increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques like QAM.
The implementation of VMSK/2, however, is significantly simpler. VMSK/2 can be implemented with an extremely low gate count without quadrature A/D converters, complex digital signal processing and equalization. So if its performance is not too suboptimal it might still be interesting. It would have been much more interesting 10 years ago, though. Today you can put half a million transistors on a chip without blinking.
Slashdot Mirror
If you need 1kW just for a 200kg craft it means that the power requirements for a manned 30 tonne mission will be pretty high. Where do you get all that power? Solar panels are heavy and not very efficient.
I guess this calls for unpopular power sources such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
----
It's quite likely that the reason for the selection has nothing to do with cryptography or any other technically relevent reason.
Hitachi has a patent which all finalists but Rijndael appear to infringe. Given the fact that Twofish, Serpent and Rijndael are all very secure, efficient to implement on all relevant platforms and are more or less the same on all other technical issues the determining factor is probably the patent issue.
Quite depressing, actually.
(BTW, it's not just me saying that all three would have made a great AES- many of the contenstants themselves have said so).
----
An algorithm ID is already defined for AES in OpenPGP (RFC2440).
It might be nice publicity stunt to release a special version of GnuPG (1.0.4?) with AES support within seconds of the official announcement.
----
LunaCorp is planning to send a robotic vehicle to the moon for a Grand Apollo Tour of historic landing sites.
This is a commercial venture and the money will supposedly come from letting people be telepresent at the location in real time (minus lightspeed lag) and even drive the rover by remote control.
I wonder if declaring them a national monument will have any legal effect on LunaCorp's plans.
----
Timna is (was) an internal codename, not a marketing name. BTW, it's the name of a copper mine in israel, dating back to biblical times.
----
The CPU on this box is marginal for software-based decoding of MPEG video and, as you mentioned, there is no slot for a DVD drive.
This box, made by the same company has a DVD drive and a DVD decoder chipset. No need for DeCSS - the chipset already has a licensed CSS decoder.
----
Look at the bottom right corner of this screenshot for a nice solution to the problem of tray icon overpopulation: only the ones you use appear and the others are accessible through the "" icon. I know many windows users that have so many tray icons there is virtually no room left on the task bar. They keep downloading and installing "cool" stuff from the net and a lot of it ends up as new tray icons.
When I think of it, screen real estate is not their real problem. Windows machines with so much stuff loaded in memory are even more unstable. The first thing I do when they come screaming for help is get rid of all this junk.
----
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
----
"...Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven of them you can't say on television.
What a ratio that is. 399,993 - - - to 7.
They must really be bad.
They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large.
`All of you over here, you seven. Baad words!'
That's what they told us they were, remember? `That's a bad word!'
No bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And words... "
----
Netscape is doing the same, and it's not exactly new either: this feature is there since version 4.0 (1998?). The default bookmarks in the Personal Toolbar Folder redirect through Netscape's site.
m arkname).html
The redirection URL is http://home.netscape.com/bookmark/(version)/(book
Take a look at http://home.netscape.com/bookmark/ to see all supported versions.
----
When the U.S. astronauts visited Mir, they brought their Fisher Space Pens. Those were no doubt the most reliable pieces of equipment on the space station.
When NASA realized that a regular pen doesn't work in zero G they set on a big expensive project to develop a special pen.
The russians use pencils.
The aging space shuttle is not more reliable than Mir, it's just that it can run back to mommmy earth at the slightest hint of trouble and get the several month long overhaul it needs before each flight.
The russians tough it out and solve their problems. You gotta respect that. Which of these approaches results in more useful experience for future habitation in space?
The state of Mir is more a matter of public perception than actual fact.
----
You may have signed over your rights to the patent, but you have every right to participate in the patent issuing process.
If you send a letter to the patent examiner (or better, request an oral hearing - $130) there is a good chance that he will take it into consideration, especially if it's clear that you are not trying to cause harm to your ex-employer and that you are doing this from your conscience and understanding of the underlying art.
----
After millions of dollars spent on research over the last decade no correlation has been proven yet between cellular phone usage and any damage to the health of the user. If such correlation does exist, though, one thing is sure: it's so low that it is difficult to spot against the background noise of normal health problems.
Compare this to the damage of air pollution that is very easy to spot statistically.
I am not saying that there is no risk in cellular phones, it's just a matter of proportion. We take risks every day: the risk of living in a polluted city, the risk of being hit in a car accident, the risk of being mugged etc.
I would like to have better information about the amount of risk I am taking when I use my cellular phone, but it's pretty certain that it's much lower than other risks I take every day with barely a second thought.
----
Storing partially encrypted data in the database and keeping the decryption key on a separate, secure machine definitely sounds like a good idea - but has anyone here actually seen this done in practice?
Can you point me to any references I can quote for management?
----
Current active matrix displays use amorphous silicon thin film transistors as pixel drivers. This means that the backlight has to pass through both the silicon film and the liquid crystal itself. The combined attenuation is quite high and a very bright backlight is required.
If this polymer semiconductor is more transparent than amorphous silicon this could result in significant power savings on the backlight to achieve the same brightness.
You might remember this article and the slashdot discussion about it claiming that the Transmeta processor improve battry life help that much because the display is the real power hog. Any improvement in display power consumption will be very much welcomed.
----
Let's see how well Hotmail functions now. Not a flame, I'm just curious to see some real world comparisons between FreeBSD and Win2K.
Does this case really compare between the OSes? There are lots of other implementation issues that could affect the result.
It is actually possible to build reliable and scalable systems based on Windows 2000. Barnes and Noble is a pure MS shop (web servers, database, everything) and they seem to be doing quite well. I prefer *nix because I like the *nix way of doing things and command line power. But it's mostly a cultural difference, not one platform that is inherently better than the other.
----
About a month ago a Slashdot article reported that some Windows 2000 machines have been introduced into to the Hotmail load-balancing pool.
/var/tmp/hotmail
/var/tmp/hotmail | sort | uniq -c
One poster has used the following script to verify this:
#!/bin/bash
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt 100 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://www.hotmail.com/ >>
i=$((i+1))
done
grep Server
Results:
95 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
5 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
I have just run this script again and got only IIS. It looks like the assim^H^H^H^H^Hconversion of Hotmail to Windows 2000 is now complete.
----
How deep is the source ??? can anyone verify how much of this is true ?
What do you mean? It bashes Microsoft, it glorifies open source, it MUST be true !-)
----
According to the description of the device they use ultrasound in the millimeter wavelengths, this is in the hundreds of kilohertz. So your dog will not go insane, fido can't hear over 35kHz. These high frequencies are also attenuated rather rapidly in air.
The coupling of these frequencies from the air to your body is also extremely poor. Compare this to a medical ultrasound that uses very high levels and is in direct contact with your body with gel to improve the impedance match.
This definitely requires further study, but I wouldn't be too concerned about safety.
----
Compare with the hell that pours your modem whenever reloading av.com's index page.
Try av.com/?text
I use google almost exclusively, but AltaVista is still useful sometimes. And when I do use it I prefer text mode (originally created for text-based browsers like Lynx)
----
One of the primary reasons for the lower power consumption claimed by Transmeta is that the chip area is much smaller - Pentium compatibility is achieved in software instead of transistors.
Wait a second... doesn't a smaller chip area mean that it's supposed to be significantly cheaper, too?
I guess it could have been much cheaper than a Pentium, but they have a huge investment to cover so they are going for a high-margin market by targeting manufacturers that desperately need something other than price - lower power consumption.
So what do you do if the CPU isn't the only power hog around?
----
there are lot's of fraudulent and dead keys in there and they are signed by someone who was trusted enough to sign the kernel key
This sentence is meaningless. Trust goes only one way. It doesn't mean anything if someone you don't know has signed a key.
I only added signers of keys to until the database was 4000 keys or so.
You're going the wrong way. You should trace the web of trust by looking for keys that are SIGNED BY that key, not keys that SIGN IT. Yes, I know, it's a little more difficult to find all the keys signed by a particular key. You need to download the entire database for that.
The only solution to this is a certified key authority.
According to your logic I could discredit the certificate authority by creating a bogus key and signing the CA's key with it...
----
According to WHOIS it's been registered since May 2, 2000. If find this surprising because they've been selling the product for much longer than that.
----
The actual transceiver design may have been borrowed from FireWire, but what really makes a standard is the support infrastructure around it such as the device framework and drivers, not the low-level electronics.
Intel has supported USB on its chipsets for a long time before Microsoft had any kind of software support for it in Windows 95 OSR/2. It took more than a year until they released Windows 98 with halfway decent USB support and ironed out most of the remaining bugs in hot plug'n'play and other parts of the system with Windows 98 Second Edition. Overall it took more than 3 years.
Do you want to wait this long until Microsoft gets it right with 1394?
USB 2.0 will leverage this miserable experience and make sure that we don't have to go through this again. It will just replace the low level host controller driver and use all the upper layers without modification.
Personally, I don't care much for Windows, but the peripherals will not be on the shelves for us Linux geeks until they are supported by Windows.
----
Nice to see this "confession" from someone in the know. It's still not enough, though. He says that the increase is not as big as the article claims when in fact there *cannot* be any increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques like QAM.
The implementation of VMSK/2, however, is significantly simpler. VMSK/2 can be implemented with an extremely low gate count without quadrature A/D converters, complex digital signal processing and equalization. So if its performance is not too suboptimal it might still be interesting. It would have been much more interesting 10 years ago, though. Today you can put half a million transistors on a chip without blinking.
----