What's wrong with having Debian be the technology proving ground while Ubuntu builds stable desktop operating systems for average people?
What are the odds that all those Debian developers will wake up one day and decide to work for Ubuntu instead? Clearly, many of them are bitter that Ubuntu is stealing their thunder. It's doubtful that Debian developers will abandon ship anytime soon for Ubuntu. It's also doubtful that Ubuntu will get the huge numbers of developers needed to compete with RedHat anytime soon. For at least the near future, Ubuntu requires Debian to thrive.
As for me, I trust Debian's open style of development to never be corrupted by any single person. It's amazing growth and activity is a tribute to the spirit of the open-source community. Sure, there's no all-powerful leader who can make things happen quickly. But then again, that can be a good thing. It's kind of like the US vs European Union.
Crypto is scary stuff
on
Crypto Snake Oil
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, for example, with a post like this, will somebody in a dark suit and glasses show up at my door tomorrow?
Blasphemy #1: I've heard from a claimed friend of one of the inventors of RSA that it was cracked it years ago. Yet, it continues to get worldwide use. Sure my friend was probably full of it... but who am I suppose to trust here? The government?
Blasphemy #2: One of my close friend's mother had to switch fields from Numerics after she published some papers considered too sensitive. It had something to do with factoring.
Blasphemy #3: Anybody else notice that quantum computers have been proven to be capable of factoring really well, but no one has shown that they can solve any NP-hard algorithms? Come on... factoring isn't NP hard.
Then, there's just some silly stuff I've noticed about crypto. Why do we always seem to use encryption just a generation or so ahead of what is needed to crack it? SHA-1 for example... And, why do we encrypt one small block at a time. Each encrypted file usually gives many independent chances to crack the key, and in many cases, some of those blocks have known data. Also, public key is great, but secret key can be easily shown NP-hard to crack (in terms of secret key length) with semi-reasonable assumptions, while public key has no such simple proof. I personally have been trying to prove that no public key system can be NP-hard, but what the heck... I'm not that good. However, I do believe it's probably true.
It seems any time you start talking about crypto, you get assailed by experts telling you just how full of it you are. Consider something simple, like generation of random numbers. Just claiming you can do a good job brings nay-sayers out of the woodwork. See:
for how to do it well. Any child could do it (well at least my geeky 6-year-old).
Everything about crypto is scary... Are we being manipulated into using weak encryption? Is there some invisible line, which if crossed, bad things can happen? The scary part is the unknown.
--
Just because your paranoid doesn't mean the world isn't out to get you.
I'm not going to say it's as good as DreamWeaver, but for free Nvu is awesome. Installs with 'sudo apt-get install nvu' in Ubuntu and Debian. I personally download free DreamWeaver templates, and use Nvu from there.
I no longer dual-boot myself. I'm 100% Linux. However, I do miss those rock'in games.
You're wrong. We don't need AI or awesome speech recognition technology. What we have is enough.
I blew out the ulnar nerves in my elbows... not as bad as carpal tunnel syndrome, but enough to force me to write code by voice for three years instead of typing. For example, the initial version of HDL Analyst in Synplify was written almost entirely by voice. By the end I'd written over 1,600 emacs macros that I could speak to help me do my job.
So, I'm not completely unfamiliar with voice interfaces to computers.
What we do need is a new suite of operating systems and applications that are written from scratch to use a combination of voice and pointer devices. Text entry should be by voice. Menus, selection, scrolling, button pushing, etc should all be done with a selection device (mouse, pen, finger.... whatever). It's really that simple.
Sorry... just can't help putting in the stupid Linux is great plug...
In Linux, I'd forget the logs, download the source, and run the darned tool in the debugger. Of course, then I'd fail to fix it (because I'm not THAT good), and even if I did the author would never integrate my patch. Even if he did, the 100 guys who I might have to support would each have to recompile their kernels to get the fix.
Look, I've dealt with big stupid government contractors. This video sounds par for the course. Hopefully, this YouTube video will kick somebody into action.
And the real problem... who will take action? It's not anybody's job to fix fvck-ups.
There are tons of outstanding engineers and managers who really care at Lockheed and the other companies involved. This project probably didn't get many of them.
Here's my own personal similar story. Remember the BFV (Bradley Fighting Vehicle... which eventually became a good unit, I think). One of my first jobs was building the analog circuit to integrate the signal from gas gyros in a 'pistol' control. The tank commander would in theory pull the pistol and shoot it at an enemy. The result would be the gun turning automatically and sighting in on the target. The probem was that the gas-gyros drifted... a LOT. By the time you made a system semi-useful, it was only good for a few seconds out of the 'holster' at a time. The electronics took up a cubic foot INSIDE the BFV, and generated a LOT of heat. There was no way that system was going to be reliable.
I recommended that they give the tank commander a joy-stick instead (reliable, low heat, low volume, darned cheap). Guess how far that went:-)
That's what I thought, too, but then I read the full article. The first thing they say is they've refuted river-water as a source of the problem, and acknowledge the dead-zone in the Gulf. The guy who posted about "upwelling" sounds like he's got a potential answer from Google.
I'm sorry, but ESR is simply wrong. There's no window that will close in 2008. Linux is unstoppable.
- It's growing exponentially - The applications are becoming compelling - It's growth is down-turn immune - Can't be stopped with money
Linux is growing exponentially, not just the user base, but applications. As the market has proven many times, it's the applications that count in the end (which is why Linux should embrace non-free binaries). Check out Debian package growth:
Fedora isn't doing too badly either, with over 6,000 packages available (in extras, mostly).
With Fedora or Ubuntu, I can now install with a few mouse clicks 10X more applications than can be found in all the software stores in the world, and many of these freebies rock. It's crazy, unstoppable growth.
The standard killers that cool technologies face in trying to overturn an entrenched dominate player don't apply to Linux. Microsoft can't buy Linux out. They can't sue Linux to death. They can't under-cut prices and force Linux into bankruptcy.
But, ESR has a good point about wooing the proprietary software and content developers.
Dell tech support... the best example I know of where stupid US based management fired a highly experienced and skilled team and replaced them with a bunch of cheaper morons from abroad. I'm all in favor of H1-Bs, and understand that some jobs are leaving, but not my skilled support!
I'm the CTO of a very small company, but this is the third company I've encouraged to standardize on Dell. I know Dell makes lots on it's warranties, since their machines rarely go bad (not many actually explode), but I can't buy them any more. Neither my company, nor any I can influence will buy Dell machines with extended warranties in the future. The support is just too useless. It's now simply better to throw the machine away, rather than make that first support call.
There are other reasons for wanting to go for more primaries. You eye does not have uniform colour sensitivity: it will detect colours differently in the centre and in the periphery. The brain tries to remove this variation, as it is part of the eye not part of the image. You do not see this variation directly, but you can get to see it if you look at a large white patch on a screen where the left and right halves have different spectra.
I've got a common color sensing defect in my red cones, which shifts their sensitivity towards green. However, I've noticed that many reds look black in my peripheral vision, but show up as red when I look right at it. The circuitry in my brain that tries to correct for color differences gives up, and instead red objects are somehow flagged as unimportant. To me, red is the invisibility color. Every car accident I've ever been in (I've been hit several times) has been by a red car.
The red, green, and blue light coming from my computer screen are chosen to give a broad range of colors for a normal human eye. Unfortunately, these colors suck for us color-blind dudes. A significant benefit of this technology may be improved color rendering for color-blind folks like me.
In my own eyes, the cones sensitive to red have a slight defect that shifts their sensitivity towards green. In the real world, some reds look black to me, since they don't fire the cones. Others (closer to green) show up nice and bright as red to me. However, TV screens and computer monitors always use a very deep spectrum red. If they did not, they would not be able to display that color, since higher frequency reds also fire some green cones in a normal human eye.
So, even though my world has red in it, my TV and computer never display any. This new technology could fix that, which would be very cool.
They made $273M last year, out of which $230M was subscription revenue (Redhat Enterprise licenses). Clearly, free Fedora subscriptions compete with their main product.
* The Fedora Project, as many of you know, is a partnership between Red Hat and the OSS community. * Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization.
Can it really be a partnership when one partner retains full legal control?
IMO, this is the number one reason Ubuntu leads Fedora. Ubuntu is funded and guided by people who only want to make money from services. Thus making Ubuntu as good as possible is in-line with their financial goals. RedHat makes money selling an OS that competes with Fedora. Making Fedora good is in opposition to their financial goals.
* Fedora is the best of what works today. RHEL is the best of what will work for the next seven years.
Ubuntu's Dapper Drake will be supported for five years. Obviously, Ubuntu does not see the same conflict between cutting edge and stability as RedHat.
I think this is a sign that Debian developers are getting pissed that Ubuntu is stealing all their glory. What's so great about Ubuntu? It installs easily! And, it generally works on your machine without much fuss. I see this comming rift between Debian developers and Ubuntu as the biggest threat to the worlds best hope for a Windows replacement (Ubuntu).
If time slows down in gravity, it might speed-up in anti-gravity (the stuff that globs anti-matter together, yet repels regular matter). So here's a wild idea:
Maybe all the anti-matter didn't go away. Maybe it clumped together into large masses, spread out between galaxies. If so, it would help explain the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. If time for anti-matter were accelerated, perhaps all the antimatter stars burned out already, and went dark.
I remember finding your circuit on-line! I actually built yours first, but my inverters made oscillators, rather than amplifiers. Also, the parallel interface was slower than the ISA bus.
However, my main improvement was using a 40-mhz 8-bit A/D converter. The samples are highly correlated, but who cares? By only taking the MSB (the least random), the old circuit loses most of the available noise. The 40-Mhz samples get highly random LSBs (less than 10% correlation).
Thanks for the circuit, especially the initial noise source stage, which I duplicated exactly (first two transistors, resistor, coupling cap)! It's a great noise source, good for probably 1MByte/sec with proper sampling. My biggest remaining concern for the circuit is just how much the first two transistors vary as a noise source, as the beta is fairly uncontrolled, as is the noisiness of the emitter-base breakdown.
I put together a simple random number generator in the late '90s using avalanche noise from the reverse break-down of a cheap transistor's emitter/base junction. I amplified it with a simple supply noise insensitive 4-transistor amplifier, and pushed it through an 8-bit 40 megabit/sec Analog Devices A/D converter. I xor-ed 80 samples together, while rotating bits in between samples. I used a $3 Lattice PLD to interface the board to an old PCs ISA bus.
I generated a CD full of random data, which anyone is willing to have if they want it. I've tested it against the "Die Hard" tests, and almost all the 10-meg files pass. There is one test that failed now and then, so I contacted the statistics professor who wrote it. I showed him that his own random number generator, thought to be nearly foolproof, failed the same test with the same probability. It seems I found a bug in his program!
Total cost for components is $10. Anyone who is interested can have schematics for free. Contact me at bill@billrocks.org.
The theory behind it is simple... who cares if the bits from the source are completely random? It turns out you just need a LITTLE true randomness from the source. By xoring bits together that have some randomness, you quickly approach truly random. By my estimate, only God would ever know the difference for the data I generated from perfectly random data, since the board could generate data for billions of years before accumulating even one bit of non-random data in it's output.
Mathematical proof:
Two semi-random bits b1 and b2 each contain small amounts of non-random noise which we can call d1 and d2. Note that d1 and d2 can be correlated, and usually are. The notation P(expression) means the probability that the expression will be 1.
I define P(b1) and P(b2) as:
P(b1) = 0.5 + d1 P(b2) = 0.5 + d2
Both d1 and d2 have a range of -0.5 to 0.5. Xoring b1 and b2 together gives:
Squaring a small number makes it very small indeed. If d1 and d2 are already 0.01, then xoring b1 and b2 together results in a random bit noise level 0.0002. This leads to the following equation for the amount of non-random noise defined as n(bits) given the number of bits in the xor sum:
Here's how you can use this equation. Lets say you believe you have non-random noise levels of no more than d. You want the noise level to be less than N. We want to compute the number of bits needed, i:
N = n(i) =.5*(2*d)^i 2*N = (2*d)^i log(2*N) = i*log(2*d) i = log(2*N)/log(2*d)
So, for example, if you feel your non-randomness per bit is less than 10%, but you need less than 1 part per billion, we compute the number of bits needed in the xor-sum:
i = log(2*10^-9)/log(2*.1) = 12.5
In other words, just xor together at least 13 bits.
Could it be that the terrorists are timing an attack perfectly to help Republicans maintain control in the US?
The terrorist ranks have never swelled so fast, nor their cash influx been so strong... In a sense, the right-wing Republicans controlling the US and the extremist Muslims need each other. Without an enemy to fight, both lose power and importance.
Basically, hydrogen sounds like it wont work, not in the near-term. On the other hand, new battery technologies are hopefully close at hand, like the ultra capacitors from EEStor. If we get this working, it could mostly eliminate our oil imports, and clean up the air. I posted a blog entry at:
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with having Debian be the technology proving ground while Ubuntu builds stable desktop operating systems for average people?
What are the odds that all those Debian developers will wake up one day and decide to work for Ubuntu instead? Clearly, many of them are bitter that Ubuntu is stealing their thunder. It's doubtful that Debian developers will abandon ship anytime soon for Ubuntu. It's also doubtful that Ubuntu will get the huge numbers of developers needed to compete with RedHat anytime soon. For at least the near future, Ubuntu requires Debian to thrive.
As for me, I trust Debian's open style of development to never be corrupted by any single person. It's amazing growth and activity is a tribute to the spirit of the open-source community. Sure, there's no all-powerful leader who can make things happen quickly. But then again, that can be a good thing. It's kind of like the US vs European Union.
So, for example, with a post like this, will somebody in a dark suit and glasses show up at my door tomorrow?
c id=15899118
Blasphemy #1: I've heard from a claimed friend of one of the inventors of RSA that it was cracked it years ago. Yet, it continues to get worldwide use. Sure my friend was probably full of it... but who am I suppose to trust here? The government?
Blasphemy #2: One of my close friend's mother had to switch fields from Numerics after she published some papers considered too sensitive. It had something to do with factoring.
Blasphemy #3: Anybody else notice that quantum computers have been proven to be capable of factoring really well, but no one has shown that they can solve any NP-hard algorithms? Come on... factoring isn't NP hard.
Then, there's just some silly stuff I've noticed about crypto. Why do we always seem to use encryption just a generation or so ahead of what is needed to crack it? SHA-1 for example... And, why do we encrypt one small block at a time. Each encrypted file usually gives many independent chances to crack the key, and in many cases, some of those blocks have known data. Also, public key is great, but secret key can be easily shown NP-hard to crack (in terms of secret key length) with semi-reasonable assumptions, while public key has no such simple proof. I personally have been trying to prove that no public key system can be NP-hard, but what the heck... I'm not that good. However, I do believe it's probably true.
It seems any time you start talking about crypto, you get assailed by experts telling you just how full of it you are. Consider something simple, like generation of random numbers. Just claiming you can do a good job brings nay-sayers out of the woodwork. See:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193904&
http://www.billrocks.org/rng
for how to do it well. Any child could do it (well at least my geeky 6-year-old).
Everything about crypto is scary... Are we being manipulated into using weak encryption? Is there some invisible line, which if crossed, bad things can happen? The scary part is the unknown.
--
Just because your paranoid doesn't mean the world isn't out to get you.
I'm not going to say it's as good as DreamWeaver, but for free Nvu is awesome. Installs with 'sudo apt-get install nvu' in Ubuntu and Debian. I personally download free DreamWeaver templates, and use Nvu from there.
I no longer dual-boot myself. I'm 100% Linux. However, I do miss those rock'in games.
You're wrong. We don't need AI or awesome speech recognition technology. What we have is enough.
I blew out the ulnar nerves in my elbows... not as bad as carpal tunnel syndrome, but enough to force me to write code by voice for three years instead of typing. For example, the initial version of HDL Analyst in Synplify was written almost entirely by voice. By the end I'd written over 1,600 emacs macros that I could speak to help me do my job.
So, I'm not completely unfamiliar with voice interfaces to computers.
What we do need is a new suite of operating systems and applications that are written from scratch to use a combination of voice and pointer devices. Text entry should be by voice. Menus, selection, scrolling, button pushing, etc should all be done with a selection device (mouse, pen, finger.... whatever). It's really that simple.
Sorry... just can't help putting in the stupid Linux is great plug...
In Linux, I'd forget the logs, download the source, and run the darned tool in the debugger. Of course, then I'd fail to fix it (because I'm not THAT good), and even if I did the author would never integrate my patch. Even if he did, the 100 guys who I might have to support would each have to recompile their kernels to get the fix.
Gotta love it!
True, but he would have lost the drama and emotion. It would have been far less believable.
:-)
If I were a true moderator points whore, I'd transcribe the video, and post a text version
Look, I've dealt with big stupid government contractors. This video sounds par for the course. Hopefully, this YouTube video will kick somebody into action.
:-)
And the real problem... who will take action? It's not anybody's job to fix fvck-ups.
There are tons of outstanding engineers and managers who really care at Lockheed and the other companies involved. This project probably didn't get many of them.
Here's my own personal similar story. Remember the BFV (Bradley Fighting Vehicle... which eventually became a good unit, I think). One of my first jobs was building the analog circuit to integrate the signal from gas gyros in a 'pistol' control. The tank commander would in theory pull the pistol and shoot it at an enemy. The result would be the gun turning automatically and sighting in on the target. The probem was that the gas-gyros drifted... a LOT. By the time you made a system semi-useful, it was only good for a few seconds out of the 'holster' at a time. The electronics took up a cubic foot INSIDE the BFV, and generated a LOT of heat. There was no way that system was going to be reliable.
I recommended that they give the tank commander a joy-stick instead (reliable, low heat, low volume, darned cheap). Guess how far that went
And my favorite light-bulb joke (putting on flame-retardant suit)...
;-p
How many women does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: One! But... it takes a man to tell her which way to turn it
That's what I thought, too, but then I read the full article. The first thing they say is they've refuted river-water as a source of the problem, and acknowledge the dead-zone in the Gulf. The guy who posted about "upwelling" sounds like he's got a potential answer from Google.
I'm sorry, but ESR is simply wrong. There's no window that will close in 2008. Linux is unstoppable.
i lity-list/2004-March/000277.html
- It's growing exponentially
- The applications are becoming compelling
- It's growth is down-turn immune
- Can't be stopped with money
Linux is growing exponentially, not just the user base, but applications. As the market has proven many times, it's the applications that count in the end (which is why Linux should embrace non-free binaries). Check out Debian package growth:
http://telemetrybox.org/tokyo/
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/deb-usab
2000 - 2000
2002 - 9000
2004 - 12000
2006 - 19000 (in Ubuntu)
Fedora isn't doing too badly either, with over 6,000 packages available (in extras, mostly).
With Fedora or Ubuntu, I can now install with a few mouse clicks 10X more applications than can be found in all the software stores in the world, and many of these freebies rock. It's crazy, unstoppable growth.
The standard killers that cool technologies face in trying to overturn an entrenched dominate player don't apply to Linux. Microsoft can't buy Linux out. They can't sue Linux to death. They can't under-cut prices and force Linux into bankruptcy.
But, ESR has a good point about wooing the proprietary software and content developers.
Dell tech support... the best example I know of where stupid US based management fired a highly experienced and skilled team and replaced them with a bunch of cheaper morons from abroad. I'm all in favor of H1-Bs, and understand that some jobs are leaving, but not my skilled support!
I'm the CTO of a very small company, but this is the third company I've encouraged to standardize on Dell. I know Dell makes lots on it's warranties, since their machines rarely go bad (not many actually explode), but I can't buy them any more. Neither my company, nor any I can influence will buy Dell machines with extended warranties in the future. The support is just too useless. It's now simply better to throw the machine away, rather than make that first support call.
AMD is apparently already making 65nm parts for Dell, supposedly available next month! See:
http://www.fabtech.org/content/view/1757/2/
There are other reasons for wanting to go for more primaries. You eye does not have uniform colour sensitivity: it will detect colours differently in the centre and in the periphery. The brain tries to remove this variation, as it is part of the eye not part of the image. You do not see this variation directly, but you can get to see it if you look at a large white patch on a screen where the left and right halves have different spectra.
I've got a common color sensing defect in my red cones, which shifts their sensitivity towards green. However, I've noticed that many reds look black in my peripheral vision, but show up as red when I look right at it. The circuitry in my brain that tries to correct for color differences gives up, and instead red objects are somehow flagged as unimportant. To me, red is the invisibility color. Every car accident I've ever been in (I've been hit several times) has been by a red car.
The red, green, and blue light coming from my computer screen are chosen to give a broad range of colors for a normal human eye. Unfortunately, these colors suck for us color-blind dudes. A significant benefit of this technology may be improved color rendering for color-blind folks like me.
In my own eyes, the cones sensitive to red have a slight defect that shifts their sensitivity towards green. In the real world, some reds look black to me, since they don't fire the cones. Others (closer to green) show up nice and bright as red to me. However, TV screens and computer monitors always use a very deep spectrum red. If they did not, they would not be able to display that color, since higher frequency reds also fire some green cones in a normal human eye.
So, even though my world has red in it, my TV and computer never display any. This new technology could fix that, which would be very cool.
Just check their latest financials:
/ 67156/RHAT2006AR.pdf
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/67
They made $273M last year, out of which $230M was subscription revenue (Redhat Enterprise licenses). Clearly, free Fedora subscriptions compete with their main product.
* The Fedora Project, as many of you know, is a partnership between Red Hat and the OSS community.
* Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization.
Can it really be a partnership when one partner retains full legal control?
IMO, this is the number one reason Ubuntu leads Fedora. Ubuntu is funded and guided by people who only want to make money from services. Thus making Ubuntu as good as possible is in-line with their financial goals. RedHat makes money selling an OS that competes with Fedora. Making Fedora good is in opposition to their financial goals.
* Fedora is the best of what works today. RHEL is the best of what will work for the next seven years.
Ubuntu's Dapper Drake will be supported for five years. Obviously, Ubuntu does not see the same conflict between cutting edge and stability as RedHat.
I think this is a sign that Debian developers are getting pissed that Ubuntu is stealing all their glory. What's so great about Ubuntu? It installs easily! And, it generally works on your machine without much fuss. I see this comming rift between Debian developers and Ubuntu as the biggest threat to the worlds best hope for a Windows replacement (Ubuntu).
As long as we're speculating about the discovery, let's not hold back! There's still debate as to whether anti-matter falls up or down. See:
r oject_Physics/Archive4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiP
If time slows down in gravity, it might speed-up in anti-gravity (the stuff that globs anti-matter together, yet repels regular matter). So here's a wild idea:
Maybe all the anti-matter didn't go away. Maybe it clumped together into large masses, spread out between galaxies. If so, it would help explain the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. If time for anti-matter were accelerated, perhaps all the antimatter stars burned out already, and went dark.
For anyone interested, I'm developing a web-site to document my old RNG at http://www.billrocks.org/rng. Enjoy!
LOL!!!
It compresses really well! In fact, to one byte: 42
I remember finding your circuit on-line! I actually built yours first, but my inverters made oscillators, rather than amplifiers. Also, the parallel interface was slower than the ISA bus.
However, my main improvement was using a 40-mhz 8-bit A/D converter. The samples are highly correlated, but who cares? By only taking the MSB (the least random), the old circuit loses most of the available noise. The 40-Mhz samples get highly random LSBs (less than 10% correlation).
Thanks for the circuit, especially the initial noise source stage, which I duplicated exactly (first two transistors, resistor, coupling cap)! It's a great noise source, good for probably 1MByte/sec with proper sampling. My biggest remaining concern for the circuit is just how much the first two transistors vary as a noise source, as the beta is fairly uncontrolled, as is the noisiness of the emitter-base breakdown.
I put together a simple random number generator in the late '90s using avalanche noise from the reverse break-down of a cheap transistor's emitter/base junction. I amplified it with a simple supply noise insensitive 4-transistor amplifier, and pushed it through an 8-bit 40 megabit/sec Analog Devices A/D converter. I xor-ed 80 samples together, while rotating bits in between samples. I used a $3 Lattice PLD to interface the board to an old PCs ISA bus.
... .5*2^i*d^i = .5*(2*d)^i
.5*(2*d)^i
I generated a CD full of random data, which anyone is willing to have if they want it. I've tested it against the "Die Hard" tests, and almost all the 10-meg files pass. There is one test that failed now and then, so I contacted the statistics professor who wrote it. I showed him that his own random number generator, thought to be nearly foolproof, failed the same test with the same probability. It seems I found a bug in his program!
Total cost for components is $10. Anyone who is interested can have schematics for free. Contact me at bill@billrocks.org.
The theory behind it is simple... who cares if the bits from the source are completely random? It turns out you just need a LITTLE true randomness from the source. By xoring bits together that have some randomness, you quickly approach truly random. By my estimate, only God would ever know the difference for the data I generated from perfectly random data, since the board could generate data for billions of years before accumulating even one bit of non-random data in it's output.
Mathematical proof:
Two semi-random bits b1 and b2 each contain small amounts of
non-random noise which we can call d1 and d2. Note that d1 and d2 can
be correlated, and usually are. The notation P(expression) means the
probability that the expression will be 1.
I define P(b1) and P(b2) as:
P(b1) = 0.5 + d1
P(b2) = 0.5 + d2
Both d1 and d2 have a range of -0.5 to 0.5. Xoring b1 and b2 together gives:
P(b1 ^ b2) = P(b1 & !b2) + P(!b1 & b2) = P(b1)*P(!b2) + P(!b1)*P(b2)
= (0.5 + d1)*(0.5 - d2) + (0.5 - d1)*(0.5 + d2)
= 0.25 - 0.5*d2 + 0.5*d1 - d1*d2 + 0.25 + 0.5*d2 - 0.5*d1 - d1*d2
= 0.5 - 2*d1*d2
Squaring a small number makes it very small indeed. If d1 and d2 are
already 0.01, then xoring b1 and b2 together results in a random bit
noise level 0.0002. This leads to the following equation for the
amount of non-random noise defined as n(bits) given the number of bits
in the xor sum:
n(1) = d
n(2) = 2*n(1)^2 = 2*d^2
n(4) = 2*n(2)^2 = 2*(2*d^2)^2 = 2^3*d^4
n(8) = 2*n(4)^2 = 2*(2^3*d^4)^2 = 2^7*d^8
n(i) = 2^(i-1)*d^i =
Here's how you can use this equation. Lets say you believe you have
non-random noise levels of no more than d. You want the noise level
to be less than N. We want to compute the number of bits needed, i:
N = n(i) =
2*N = (2*d)^i
log(2*N) = i*log(2*d)
i = log(2*N)/log(2*d)
So, for example, if you feel your non-randomness per bit is less than 10%,
but you need less than 1 part per billion, we compute the number of bits
needed in the xor-sum:
i = log(2*10^-9)/log(2*.1) = 12.5
In other words, just xor together at least 13 bits.
Could it be that the terrorists are timing an attack perfectly to help Republicans maintain control in the US?
The terrorist ranks have never swelled so fast, nor their cash influx been so strong... In a sense, the right-wing Republicans controlling the US and the extremist Muslims need each other. Without an enemy to fight, both lose power and importance.
If Fedora Core is too good, it steals away paying RedHat customers. If it's too bad, Ubuntu steals away Fedora Core users.
What makes you optimistic that a significant space will continue to exist for Fedora?
There's a great white-paper on Tesla Motor's site:
s .php?js_enabled=1
s /15-Saving-the-World-with-Electric-Cars.html
http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/white_paper
Basically, hydrogen sounds like it wont work, not in the near-term. On the other hand, new battery technologies are hopefully close at hand, like the ultra capacitors from EEStor. If we get this working, it could mostly eliminate our oil imports, and clean up the air. I posted a blog entry at:
http://www.billrocks.org/ideas/index.php?/archive