Is there a chance that what you call "the expanding universe" is not the universe itself but a bunch of galaxies that happen to be closer to each other, and the universe is in fact much larger but we just can't see it?
I vote for an infinite universe in which your theory is crap. Who else is with me?
hey, a community database with scripts for various sites would be useful. Whenever scripts are available for a certain link, you could get a drop-down near your address bar to choose the way you like that page displayed
though I hate the number the security issues this raises
I'm not so much concerned about air pollution. A trip by car will produce more CO2 than the computer running for the whole year. I do care though for my laptop battery, not to mention I hate the sound produced by the cooler.
Anyone into silent computing?
I underclocked my t-bred athlon to 1GHz and undervolted it to about 1.12V and it runs without a cooler. I estimate the power consumption at 10-15W under full stress, although I'm not sure I should call 1GHz full stress.
Don't agree to the entropy stuff. Just because we've never seen it decreasing doesn't mean it never decreases.
I'm no expert physicist, but I think black holes violate the entropy rule. As there is no energy escaping a black hole it would be supposed that it should have absolute zero temperature, but that is not likely the case considering the amount of energy it absorbed.
I totally subscribe to that, and then the first self-aware machine we create will kill all the creationists because they refuse to believe it has a conscience, then all the other people because it ran out of creationists, but by that time it won't really matter because all of us geeks will already be in digital form in order to enjoy virtual sex.
not really, I think it's the X server, Except for the direct rendering, which finally repaired some problems the entire concept sux. Any function call to X that must return a result requires two task switches.
This can be overcome by implementing xlib directly over the driver, skipping the client-server communication. I think athene/snap does this and they claim to have some improvement. I tried something but it didn't have real drivers for the videocard.
Maybe they are this good because they don't stuff ads down your throat. I'm sure they could have increased their profit by drowning you in commercials. But instead they make a statement: showing respect to our users is more important than making the highest profit. It's also ensures that people won't start hating them as they hate Microsoft.
for MD5 some people managed obtaining pairs of documents with same hash. This is why the algorithm is no longer considered secure. Doing this however requires a lot of computing power for each generated pair. For SHA nobody can do it so far and nobody won't be able in the forseeable future. There is no need to use two hashes. Just use a longer hash.
They might be able to break the hash of one particular network (eDonkey or something) but their claim that they cracked all of them is absurd.
Not really, actually AC is more dangerous.
AC is used because transformers don't work on DC. It's true, with the technology available now, you don't even use the old kind of transformers, but you generate a higher frequency AC (that's what a switching power supply does) in order to increase efficiency and also use a smaller transformer. (If you were curious to open up a PSU you would see some small round ferromagnetic things with two or more wires around them).
Even with better conductors very high currents will might generate magnetic fields that you might not like. Besides, it is unlikely that you will start changing all your electronic devices to fit the new 12V power outlet.
best experience I had was with polarized light systems, but I don't really have access to those. Shutter glasses aren't great, they really kill the 3d effect, I don't know why. What anyone can afford is red-blue glasses, that is if you don't mind looking at the stuff in "black-and-white" (your brain really gets used to it and the color's dont matter so much). In the old times I made a really simple DOS game using this. You also used to have driver support for that and I remember playing quake, but I remember they didn't get it all right. Also the real angle of view doesn't match what it is displayed on your screen (I think by default in quake the hfov is 90degrees, while the real one is about half as that, which makes people that are not used to it sick at first)
ok, from the cryptographic point of view, this is all very nice. I congratulate the guys who did it, but from the practical point of view it has a few flaws: For example, if you crack the protection of your player but don't release the keys to the public, instead starting to convert protected HDDVDs to unencrypted ones, either alone or with group of "friends". People would keep exchanging pirated copies over the internet, so the problem is not really solved.
In addition if you will be able to play a HDDVD in a computer (which I assume you will, but I may be mistaken) thare are tons of hacks you can apply. You can just recapture your video output and store it in a file. You won't have much quality loss, except that due to recompression. Actually this applies to all devices from which you can grab output, but if you can grab the output in digital format it prevents losing quality.
Also I think DVD market will be going down in favor of Internet distribution. This has the advantage that you can give different watermarked copies to your clients, so when there is a leak, you will know where it originated. This will raise some privacy issues of course, but it seems that so far this was not enough to stop anyone. After all you are given a choice, give up privacy or just go back to tape recording.
Oh, as far as I know you guys in cryptography are also working on some fine ways of protecting privacy, including something like: give me something from that database but you don't really know what you're giving me. (although I think this is computationally expensive and it cannot be applied to movies yet.)
Let's imagine a system: you have a database of movies. I make a query: give me f(database), which f is a little larger than the size of the movie. Only I know the inverse of f, so you don't really know what movie I asked for (so this works to protect my privacy), You can charge me on a per gigabit basis (there may be separate databases for movies having different price/length ratios). In addition you can provide a stream that can only be playes in my player, and the each user sees a different version of the database with all movies watermarked with his ID.
There are watermarks which hold to recompression and even image filtering. A problem if I get two versions of a movie with different watermarks and I manage to find and remove the watermark by comparing them.
Anyway, I think this could be real PhD work for someone.
If what you say it's true about oxygen, (although I didn't check), it should be easy. You just bring one ton of hydrogen and you've got yourself 9 tons of water. (although it might not be so easy transporitg it, maybe scooping it in Earth's upper atmosphere would be a solution)
Nuclear fission is out of the question. You've got to put a lot of energy into some atoms to make them split to hydrogen. If you manage to get hydrogen as a byproduct by fissioning larger atoms it will you will have a very low mass percentage. It's not worth fissioning 200 tons of uranium to get 1 ton of hydrogen even if it were possible.
Also I don't think there's gonna be much industry on the moon, and maybe you'll be able to go by without much water. How much water have you got on the space station anyway?
Also think of this: If you are in the processor business, when you are designing a new CPU that will be on the market in 18 months, you just have to make it twice as powerful as the processors are now. Nobody would even conceive of doing anything less because they know they will be out of business. So from my point of view, this helps me get a better computer each year, but I guess you're not so much a fan of good hardware.
I wonder if conference mode actually works to distribute the same data to more people. A shame with p2p networks is that you have to do as much upload as download, and for people with little bandwidth this is a problem.
Maybe this would be a solution but if it is it will put serious load on the skype servers. Normal calls do not pass through the server, I don't know about conferences. If they don't then this is of no use.
On the other hand what about p2p through email? You can log in into your free email acount and send 10megabytes in attachments to 50 people. You are only doing traffic once.
Although I feel it would be a shame abusing a service that is offered to you for free. The result might be that targeted providers will set limits on the type/total size of attachments. And I think the same will happan to skype when people start flooding them with music streams.
If publishers won't shift toward Internet distribution willingly, maybe the increasing rate of piracy will convince them.
By the way, how much would you pay to download a movie? If they do it like with the music and ask you for the full price of the dvd they can just forget about it.
Those guys don't understand that I'd rather download a movie than get out of the house and go rent it? What's the difference to them?
the point was: loose the private keys every few months, and by loose I don't mean misplace them, i mean make sure they are gone for good. This way nobody will ever be able to fake an older record (unless the crypto algorithm is flawed). As for the records that are only a few months old, you can keep copies on paper if you like.
Not so, what about optical storage. I've heard a few years ago about some guys making optical disks of glass instead of plastic, and even without a metal layer inside (just with air bubbles or something like that) - i think they were called eon, or aeon but a search revealed nothing.
I think glass holds for 100k years+, which is a little more than paper
imagine you sign some documents and then you make sure you loose the private key for good, the documents can still be checked using the public key, but nobody will be able to duplicate the signature on another document. Keys can be changed each few months.
I don't trust paper more than algorithms. Although you never know when they manage to break rsa. But that would be a global disaster and maybe patents will be the least concern.
Also note that you can store disks in a secure area, and also make radioactive marks on them so as to determine their age. Solutions can always be found, and maybe someone is getting some funding exactly for that.
No, but please explain then, if it is old and obsolete, why are 85% computers using it?
(When I said NTFS I was not refering to NT4, and the next filesystem from Microsoft is yet to come, and I'm not really convinced it will be better)
As it is, I don't like fragmentation status on the computer I'm working on (w2k), and I don't have Admin privileges to defragment it, so it can be really frustrating.
Also file caching is crappy, try copying a large file between two partitions and see your harddisk doing seek each few kilobytes, try accessing the CD with two programs at the same time and see how both work at 1/10 speed.
Virtual memory management is primitive: if you really use two memory intensive programs and Windows is forced to throw some of the data on disk, when you finally realise your mistake and close one of them, the other one will take a few minutes to recover and get it's few megabytes back from disk.
What about only allowing certain IP addreses on a network to connect to my file shares. Or maybe it's possible and I don't know it. But I would replace windows file shareing with the Linux Samba version anytime (actually I would prefer sftp), but I could find neither on windows (actually there is sftp but not for free, and I don't feel like installing cygwin)
On the other hand Linux is just the reverse. You have a good base to build on, but aplications are awfull, even freeware is better on Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a chance that what you call "the expanding universe" is not the universe itself but a bunch of galaxies that happen to be closer to each other, and the universe is in fact much larger but we just can't see it?
I vote for an infinite universe in which your theory is crap. Who else is with me?
hey, a community database with scripts for various sites would be useful. Whenever scripts are available for a certain link, you could get a drop-down near your address bar to choose the way you like that page displayed though I hate the number the security issues this raises
by the way, anyone has some grease for slashdot?
I can't wait to write my code that disables your code that disables Greasemonkey.
Happy greasing!
I'm not so much concerned about air pollution. A trip by car will produce more CO2 than the computer running for the whole year. I do care though for my laptop battery, not to mention I hate the sound produced by the cooler.
Anyone into silent computing?
I underclocked my t-bred athlon to 1GHz and undervolted it to about 1.12V and it runs without a cooler. I estimate the power consumption at 10-15W under full stress, although I'm not sure I should call 1GHz full stress.
well, that should work until one of them gets cancer from the radio transmitter
Don't agree to the entropy stuff. Just because we've never seen it decreasing doesn't mean it never decreases.
I'm no expert physicist, but I think black holes violate the entropy rule. As there is no energy escaping a black hole it would be supposed that it should have absolute zero temperature, but that is not likely the case considering the amount of energy it absorbed.
Is there someone who could explain this paradox?
I totally subscribe to that, and then the first self-aware machine we create will kill all the creationists because they refuse to believe it has a conscience, then all the other people because it ran out of creationists, but by that time it won't really matter because all of us geeks will already be in digital form in order to enjoy virtual sex.
not really, I think it's the X server, Except for the direct rendering, which finally repaired some problems the entire concept sux. Any function call to X that must return a result requires two task switches.
This can be overcome by implementing xlib directly over the driver, skipping the client-server communication. I think athene/snap does this and they claim to have some improvement. I tried something but it didn't have real drivers for the videocard.
try XP+Office 2000 on 64MB, 233MHz Pentium MMX after you've done trimming services themes and skins, you can still play an mp3 in background. really
Maybe they are this good because they don't stuff ads down your throat. I'm sure they could have increased their profit by drowning you in commercials. But instead they make a statement: showing respect to our users is more important than making the highest profit. It's also ensures that people won't start hating them as they hate Microsoft.
for MD5 some people managed obtaining pairs of documents with same hash. This is why the algorithm is no longer considered secure. Doing this however requires a lot of computing power for each generated pair. For SHA nobody can do it so far and nobody won't be able in the forseeable future. There is no need to use two hashes. Just use a longer hash.
They might be able to break the hash of one particular network (eDonkey or something) but their claim that they cracked all of them is absurd.
Not really, actually AC is more dangerous. AC is used because transformers don't work on DC. It's true, with the technology available now, you don't even use the old kind of transformers, but you generate a higher frequency AC (that's what a switching power supply does) in order to increase efficiency and also use a smaller transformer. (If you were curious to open up a PSU you would see some small round ferromagnetic things with two or more wires around them). Even with better conductors very high currents will might generate magnetic fields that you might not like. Besides, it is unlikely that you will start changing all your electronic devices to fit the new 12V power outlet.
best experience I had was with polarized light systems, but I don't really have access to those. Shutter glasses aren't great, they really kill the 3d effect, I don't know why. What anyone can afford is red-blue glasses, that is if you don't mind looking at the stuff in "black-and-white" (your brain really gets used to it and the color's dont matter so much). In the old times I made a really simple DOS game using this. You also used to have driver support for that and I remember playing quake, but I remember they didn't get it all right. Also the real angle of view doesn't match what it is displayed on your screen (I think by default in quake the hfov is 90degrees, while the real one is about half as that, which makes people that are not used to it sick at first)
ok, from the cryptographic point of view, this is all very nice. I congratulate the guys who did it, but from the practical point of view it has a few flaws: For example, if you crack the protection of your player but don't release the keys to the public, instead starting to convert protected HDDVDs to unencrypted ones, either alone or with group of "friends". People would keep exchanging pirated copies over the internet, so the problem is not really solved.
In addition if you will be able to play a HDDVD in a computer (which I assume you will, but I may be mistaken) thare are tons of hacks you can apply. You can just recapture your video output and store it in a file. You won't have much quality loss, except that due to recompression. Actually this applies to all devices from which you can grab output, but if you can grab the output in digital format it prevents losing quality.
Also I think DVD market will be going down in favor of Internet distribution. This has the advantage that you can give different watermarked copies to your clients, so when there is a leak, you will know where it originated. This will raise some privacy issues of course, but it seems that so far this was not enough to stop anyone. After all you are given a choice, give up privacy or just go back to tape recording.
Oh, as far as I know you guys in cryptography are also working on some fine ways of protecting privacy, including something like: give me something from that database but you don't really know what you're giving me. (although I think this is computationally expensive and it cannot be applied to movies yet.)
Let's imagine a system: you have a database of movies. I make a query: give me f(database), which f is a little larger than the size of the movie. Only I know the inverse of f, so you don't really know what movie I asked for (so this works to protect my privacy), You can charge me on a per gigabit basis (there may be separate databases for movies having different price/length ratios). In addition you can provide a stream that can only be playes in my player, and the each user sees a different version of the database with all movies watermarked with his ID.
There are watermarks which hold to recompression and even image filtering. A problem if I get two versions of a movie with different watermarks and I manage to find and remove the watermark by comparing them.
Anyway, I think this could be real PhD work for someone.
If what you say it's true about oxygen, (although I didn't check), it should be easy. You just bring one ton of hydrogen and you've got yourself 9 tons of water. (although it might not be so easy transporitg it, maybe scooping it in Earth's upper atmosphere would be a solution) Nuclear fission is out of the question. You've got to put a lot of energy into some atoms to make them split to hydrogen. If you manage to get hydrogen as a byproduct by fissioning larger atoms it will you will have a very low mass percentage. It's not worth fissioning 200 tons of uranium to get 1 ton of hydrogen even if it were possible. Also I don't think there's gonna be much industry on the moon, and maybe you'll be able to go by without much water. How much water have you got on the space station anyway?
Well, how does Murphy's Conjecture sound?
Also think of this: If you are in the processor business, when you are designing a new CPU that will be on the market in 18 months, you just have to make it twice as powerful as the processors are now. Nobody would even conceive of doing anything less because they know they will be out of business. So from my point of view, this helps me get a better computer each year, but I guess you're not so much a fan of good hardware.
I wonder if conference mode actually works to distribute the same data to more people. A shame with p2p networks is that you have to do as much upload as download, and for people with little bandwidth this is a problem.
Maybe this would be a solution but if it is it will put serious load on the skype servers. Normal calls do not pass through the server, I don't know about conferences. If they don't then this is of no use.
On the other hand what about p2p through email? You can log in into your free email acount and send 10megabytes in attachments to 50 people. You are only doing traffic once.
Although I feel it would be a shame abusing a service that is offered to you for free. The result might be that targeted providers will set limits on the type/total size of attachments. And I think the same will happan to skype when people start flooding them with music streams.
what happaned to BSD, and "it's a gift to mankind" concept?
If publishers won't shift toward Internet distribution willingly, maybe the increasing rate of piracy will convince them.
By the way, how much would you pay to download a movie? If they do it like with the music and ask you for the full price of the dvd they can just forget about it.
Those guys don't understand that I'd rather download a movie than get out of the house and go rent it? What's the difference to them?
the point was: loose the private keys every few months, and by loose I don't mean misplace them, i mean make sure they are gone for good. This way nobody will ever be able to fake an older record (unless the crypto algorithm is flawed). As for the records that are only a few months old, you can keep copies on paper if you like.
Not so, what about optical storage. I've heard a few years ago about some guys making optical disks of glass instead of plastic, and even without a metal layer inside (just with air bubbles or something like that) - i think they were called eon, or aeon but a search revealed nothing. I think glass holds for 100k years+, which is a little more than paper
public key signature works at least as good
imagine you sign some documents and then you make sure you loose the private key for good, the documents can still be checked using the public key, but nobody will be able to duplicate the signature on another document. Keys can be changed each few months.
I don't trust paper more than algorithms. Although you never know when they manage to break rsa. But that would be a global disaster and maybe patents will be the least concern.
Also note that you can store disks in a secure area, and also make radioactive marks on them so as to determine their age. Solutions can always be found, and maybe someone is getting some funding exactly for that.
No, but please explain then, if it is old and obsolete, why are 85% computers using it?
(When I said NTFS I was not refering to NT4, and the next filesystem from Microsoft is yet to come, and I'm not really convinced it will be better)
As it is, I don't like fragmentation status on the computer I'm working on (w2k), and I don't have Admin privileges to defragment it, so it can be really frustrating.
Also file caching is crappy, try copying a large file between two partitions and see your harddisk doing seek each few kilobytes, try accessing the CD with two programs at the same time and see how both work at 1/10 speed.
Virtual memory management is primitive: if you really use two memory intensive programs and Windows is forced to throw some of the data on disk, when you finally realise your mistake and close one of them, the other one will take a few minutes to recover and get it's few megabytes back from disk.
What about only allowing certain IP addreses on a network to connect to my file shares. Or maybe it's possible and I don't know it. But I would replace windows file shareing with the Linux Samba version anytime (actually I would prefer sftp), but I could find neither on windows (actually there is sftp but not for free, and I don't feel like installing cygwin)
On the other hand Linux is just the reverse. You have a good base to build on, but aplications are awfull, even freeware is better on Windows.
Sorry, are you saying NTFS is better?