The current associated with keeping a voltage constant is just leakage current, and it's much lower than that needed for constant refreshes. The reason DRAM needs to be refreshed is because every capacitor leaks current constantly, at a much higher rate than transistor leakage.
If each memory cell was a bucket and electric current was water DRAM would be a bunch of buckets with holes in them, with someone constantly running past them, checking whether they're above the half way mark, and refilling them if they are.
Perhaps that book is out of date, I'm not sure, but it's a well known fact that SRAM uses less power.
It would be a very good teaching aid. Even those people in my Hardware Fundamentals course who just "didn't get it" would be able to see clearly what's going on.
Hmm you might want to read up about SRAM and DRAM, because "SRAM is MUCH more power hungry than DRAM" is wrong. DRAM needs power constantly to refresh its capacitor, SRAM only needs a voltage to be maintained and doesn't require any current flow while idle.
Pretty slim, the NSA has loads of mathematics PhDs but no physicists.
Also if it was so easy to do the NSA would be concerned about American info being snooped on. Surely they would rather that nothing can be snooped on than a free for all where everything can be snooped on.
To those wondering why it would be good to have DRAM as fast as SRAM: SRAM doesn't need to be "refreshed" constantly, and is faster, but takes up many more transistors and is therefore much less dense and more expensive for the same amount of memory.
However with DRAM it takes quite a bit of power just to keep data in memory (because of the constant "refreshes"), which isn't the case with SRAM. So this discovery wouldn't take SRAM out of production for applications which require its low power usage.
Read "How Brains Think" by William H. Calvin; he's a neurologist and the book goes into lots of detail about how brains think (dur), how they evolved, and the possibility of AI.
He's an expert in the field and you can feel his bitter dislike of "quantum consciousness" proponents through his writing. He writes that it's just saying "we don't know how X works, and we don't know how Y works, but if we say that Y depends upon X then we have one problem instead of two".
Consciousness is built on the interactions of neurons. We understand how neurons work at interact at a low level (from studying the ~50 neuron brains of snails etc), and we understand on a large level which regions of the brain do what, but we don't understand the "middle ground".
It's as if we understand the transistor, and logic gates, and we can recognize which part of a chip is the ALU and which is the cache, but we can't recognize an adder circuit or microinstruction translator for what it is.
Quantum physics is certainly involved in the action of transistors but it doesn't explain how they combine to process data.
(On a similar note some I saw, in a documentary, one crackpot explain away "spontaneous human combustion" with an unknown quantum particle.)
With all the watermelons in this field, and all the political and monetary pressure to come up with a "man-made global warming" result, why should we trust the thousands of climatologists?
Good point; research grants are such a gold mine that they are worth a conspiracy amongst thousands of scientists (and those who have peer reviewed their works too, presumably).
I've been wondering why I'm always bumping into filthy rich climatologists these days, always throwing around research grant money and driving around in their gas guzzling sports cars.
It would also explain why there are so many "climatology for dummies" books cropping up, all selling themselves with the rich lifestyles climatologists have.
Now that I think about it.. Didn't the WTC contain a research lab that was due to release a report on alleged "IPCC inconsistencies" on 9/12? O_O It's all a conspiracy! These people have access to satellite data too! Put on your tin foil hats!
Also it's still based on the SHA-1 algorithm that was "broken".
For practical purposes even SHA-1 is still reasonably safe, but it'd be best to learn from the cryptanalysis and research of almost two decades if we're going to make everyone change their hashing algorithm anyway.
You're not suggesting Apple isn't the single innovative force in the software industry.. are you? We all know "Spaces" could never have been conceived without Jobs' flawless guidance.
Not taking this theory into account and then saying there is a 90% certainty that humans have caused global warming is not scientific.
I haven't read the draft of the latest report, but I did read the 2001 one.
There's a graph showing the effect they think various potential influences had, listed along with our scientific understanding of them. Solar influence was at the far right of the scale of our scientific understanding (at the lowest level), and was listed as having a comparatively small heating effect. Greenhouse gases were listed to the far left, and had a comparatively very high heating effect.
You can read this as "we're not sure what effect solar radiation has, but we're damn sure greenhouse gases have a large heating effect".
If they haven't taken it into account to the same degree as other influences it's because they don't fully understand it and don't have much to report, not because there's some conspiracy.
Just because we don't understand dark matter doesn't mean we don't know the direction a ball will fall in when we release it; solar radiation may or may not be having a impact, but what we do know is that the Earth is warming and humans are having a huge warming influence.
Does the editor of New Scientist might have a clue what he's talking about? Have you read New Scientist recently? Every time I see a copy in a waiting room I learn that there may be black holes everywhere, or how some scientist has come up with a theory of everything, or how the entire field of physics has just been turned on its head.
Most of the time it's just sensationalist rubbish to get sales. "A 1000 year old problem solved?" "Is N-theory the successor to M-theory?" "Are there millions of galaxies within every atom?" "Has time travel been achieved?". Then, in the list of extras "Are you more like Einstein or Newton? Take our test", etc, etc.
With all the recent reports of oil companies paying people to discredit the IPCC should we trust the editor of a magazine? Or a report compiled based on the cumulative efforts of thousands of climatologists?
"Mother Nature" taking care of the Earth, stopping us wretched creatures from destroying it. Ahh, what a nice picture.
But "Mother Nature" is ruthlessly indifferent. It has shaped us with billions of years of shifting climates and tectonic plates, meteors and droughts, pitting animal against animal in arms races.
Yeah, but that's just the thing. Microsoft isn't pleased when vendors start selling machines without Windows (or worse, with Linux). Dell and IBM get away with this on a limited basis, but even then it's tricky.
It's tricky to sell machines without an OS because MS have some kind of conspiracy going, not because consumers generally just want the machine to come with the current Windows OS?
All of these "BitLocker" vulnerabilities aren't actually BitLocker vulnerabilities, they're full-disk-encryption vulnerabilities. They apply just as much to my FreeBSD GBDE protected partition as they do to BitLocker, there's nothing new or even interesting in this article. (The summary "No Real Threat To Decryption" is misleading, because there is nothing about decryption in there.)
The article says that if the user was using a USB key to unlock the drive, or was in a corporate environment, investigators would be able to get access by taking the USB key or co-operating with the business owners.
It says that if the computer was on they could get access to the disk. That's only if the computer isn't locked of course, and if you were under investigation you would think the criminal would quickly press [Windows key]+L as the police burst in.
Clearly The Register has been doing lots of research to produce this article; they should try and get it published in a crypto journal.
Most importantly they seem to have completely missed the point of drive encryption; it's to protect against theft, not "investigators". Would Microsoft have built the technology into Vista in the hope that more criminals under investigation would buy Vista?
If you're being investigated no drive encryption is going to help; if they want access to your system they can just as easily use hardware keyloggers. They'll have the evidence they want long before they let you know you're being investigated.
If you want a good reason to bash BitLocker how about; it's expensive, and there are free alternatives that are just as good for guarding your data against theft.
Agreed, at one point my online strategy game was in the top 200 most active on sourceforge.net, well above many of the others listed in this thread. Activity ratings are the default way that searches are ordered, and they vary so much it's difficult to tell the truly active, popular projects from the others.
As someone taking a CS degree I can attest to this. We learn some interesting stuff (and lots of boring stuff), but no practical stuff. All the employment I've got has utilized knowledge and experience gained in my spare time.
I go to uni and learn about Karnaugh maps, the way Linux 2.2 booted, how to write mind-numbingly simple Java programs, and red-black trees, etc, etc.
In my spare time I learn how to make websites, design and implement large programs with objects, use.NET, administer servers, use SQL, etc, etc.
I'm just glad I'm doing physics at the same time, or I'd probably have lost heart.
Okay first off Myspace should then talk about protecting their admins from harm, not their users (one of which they are harming).
Second, how long would it take to clean this up? Let's be conservative; 30 mins to find the problem, 30 mins to write a quick patch to the filter system that stops the worm spreading, 20 mins to write a query to remove the script from everyone's profile. You then have to enhance the filter system to ensure this doesn't happen again, but you would have to have done that anyway.
This really isn't a huge deal, the whole thing could have been resolved without any fuss or downtime.
We are pleased with the verdict and will continue to pursue criminal action against people who try to harm our members in any way.
Protect your members from the horrors of a harmless prank by helping get one of your members three years of probation, three months of community service, pay restitution to MySpace, banned using the Internet for personal uses, and having a tarnished CV.
I'd like to think that if someone managed to release a script onto/. that added everyone as their friend the admins would brush it off and take it as a joke. I don't think such a script would "harm" me. (I use FF's NoScript anyway, but that's besides the point..)
Worms + Quake III = Soldat. Fast paced, strategic, looks great (a game doesn't have to be 3D to look good *gasp*), always loads of players online, doesn't need the latest computer, runs quite well in WINE, and free.
Slashdot Mirror
The current associated with keeping a voltage constant is just leakage current, and it's much lower than that needed for constant refreshes. The reason DRAM needs to be refreshed is because every capacitor leaks current constantly, at a much higher rate than transistor leakage.
If each memory cell was a bucket and electric current was water DRAM would be a bunch of buckets with holes in them, with someone constantly running past them, checking whether they're above the half way mark, and refilling them if they are.
Perhaps that book is out of date, I'm not sure, but it's a well known fact that SRAM uses less power.
No, Pythagoras didn't have a seismometer capable of detecting 10 millihertz..
I'm in Australia, so it'll be for the winter, but the problem is that the winter holidays aren't as long as the summer ones at my uni. :(
It would be a very good teaching aid. Even those people in my Hardware Fundamentals course who just "didn't get it" would be able to see clearly what's going on.
Hmm you might want to read up about SRAM and DRAM, because "SRAM is MUCH more power hungry than DRAM" is wrong. DRAM needs power constantly to refresh its capacitor, SRAM only needs a voltage to be maintained and doesn't require any current flow while idle.
Pretty slim, the NSA has loads of mathematics PhDs but no physicists.
Also if it was so easy to do the NSA would be concerned about American info being snooped on. Surely they would rather that nothing can be snooped on than a free for all where everything can be snooped on.
Speed isn't the important thing in a particle accelerator. They're not racing the electrons, they're smashing particles.
To those wondering why it would be good to have DRAM as fast as SRAM: SRAM doesn't need to be "refreshed" constantly, and is faster, but takes up many more transistors and is therefore much less dense and more expensive for the same amount of memory.
However with DRAM it takes quite a bit of power just to keep data in memory (because of the constant "refreshes"), which isn't the case with SRAM. So this discovery wouldn't take SRAM out of production for applications which require its low power usage.
Read "How Brains Think" by William H. Calvin; he's a neurologist and the book goes into lots of detail about how brains think (dur), how they evolved, and the possibility of AI.
He's an expert in the field and you can feel his bitter dislike of "quantum consciousness" proponents through his writing. He writes that it's just saying "we don't know how X works, and we don't know how Y works, but if we say that Y depends upon X then we have one problem instead of two".
Consciousness is built on the interactions of neurons. We understand how neurons work at interact at a low level (from studying the ~50 neuron brains of snails etc), and we understand on a large level which regions of the brain do what, but we don't understand the "middle ground".
It's as if we understand the transistor, and logic gates, and we can recognize which part of a chip is the ALU and which is the cache, but we can't recognize an adder circuit or microinstruction translator for what it is.
Quantum physics is certainly involved in the action of transistors but it doesn't explain how they combine to process data.
(On a similar note some I saw, in a documentary, one crackpot explain away "spontaneous human combustion" with an unknown quantum particle.)
I've been wondering why I'm always bumping into filthy rich climatologists these days, always throwing around research grant money and driving around in their gas guzzling sports cars.
It would also explain why there are so many "climatology for dummies" books cropping up, all selling themselves with the rich lifestyles climatologists have.
Now that I think about it.. Didn't the WTC contain a research lab that was due to release a report on alleged "IPCC inconsistencies" on 9/12? O_O It's all a conspiracy! These people have access to satellite data too! Put on your tin foil hats!
Also it's still based on the SHA-1 algorithm that was "broken".
For practical purposes even SHA-1 is still reasonably safe, but it'd be best to learn from the cryptanalysis and research of almost two decades if we're going to make everyone change their hashing algorithm anyway.
You're not suggesting Apple isn't the single innovative force in the software industry.. are you? We all know "Spaces" could never have been conceived without Jobs' flawless guidance.
There's a graph showing the effect they think various potential influences had, listed along with our scientific understanding of them. Solar influence was at the far right of the scale of our scientific understanding (at the lowest level), and was listed as having a comparatively small heating effect. Greenhouse gases were listed to the far left, and had a comparatively very high heating effect.
You can read this as "we're not sure what effect solar radiation has, but we're damn sure greenhouse gases have a large heating effect".
If they haven't taken it into account to the same degree as other influences it's because they don't fully understand it and don't have much to report, not because there's some conspiracy.
Just because we don't understand dark matter doesn't mean we don't know the direction a ball will fall in when we release it; solar radiation may or may not be having a impact, but what we do know is that the Earth is warming and humans are having a huge warming influence.
Does the editor of New Scientist might have a clue what he's talking about? Have you read New Scientist recently? Every time I see a copy in a waiting room I learn that there may be black holes everywhere, or how some scientist has come up with a theory of everything, or how the entire field of physics has just been turned on its head.
Most of the time it's just sensationalist rubbish to get sales. "A 1000 year old problem solved?" "Is N-theory the successor to M-theory?" "Are there millions of galaxies within every atom?" "Has time travel been achieved?". Then, in the list of extras "Are you more like Einstein or Newton? Take our test", etc, etc.
With all the recent reports of oil companies paying people to discredit the IPCC should we trust the editor of a magazine? Or a report compiled based on the cumulative efforts of thousands of climatologists?
I hope the benchmarks don't take get advantage out of using 64-bit arithmetic.
"Mother Nature" taking care of the Earth, stopping us wretched creatures from destroying it. Ahh, what a nice picture.
e _Temperature_Rev_png
But "Mother Nature" is ruthlessly indifferent. It has shaped us with billions of years of shifting climates and tectonic plates, meteors and droughts, pitting animal against animal in arms races.
Human civilization began around 8,000 years ago. A practically unheard of stability in the climate began around 10,000 years ago.
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Ice_Ag
It's rather a sobering thought.
If a modified algae would be so successful that it could soak up all the CO2 in the atmosphere, why hasn't Darwin done it for us?
... gets slashdotted, what an irony.
All of these "BitLocker" vulnerabilities aren't actually BitLocker vulnerabilities, they're full-disk-encryption vulnerabilities. They apply just as much to my FreeBSD GBDE protected partition as they do to BitLocker, there's nothing new or even interesting in this article. (The summary "No Real Threat To Decryption" is misleading, because there is nothing about decryption in there.)
The article says that if the user was using a USB key to unlock the drive, or was in a corporate environment, investigators would be able to get access by taking the USB key or co-operating with the business owners.
It says that if the computer was on they could get access to the disk. That's only if the computer isn't locked of course, and if you were under investigation you would think the criminal would quickly press [Windows key]+L as the police burst in.
Clearly The Register has been doing lots of research to produce this article; they should try and get it published in a crypto journal.
Most importantly they seem to have completely missed the point of drive encryption; it's to protect against theft, not "investigators". Would Microsoft have built the technology into Vista in the hope that more criminals under investigation would buy Vista?
If you're being investigated no drive encryption is going to help; if they want access to your system they can just as easily use hardware keyloggers. They'll have the evidence they want long before they let you know you're being investigated.
If you want a good reason to bash BitLocker how about; it's expensive, and there are free alternatives that are just as good for guarding your data against theft.
Agreed, at one point my online strategy game was in the top 200 most active on sourceforge.net, well above many of the others listed in this thread. Activity ratings are the default way that searches are ordered, and they vary so much it's difficult to tell the truly active, popular projects from the others.
As someone taking a CS degree I can attest to this. We learn some interesting stuff (and lots of boring stuff), but no practical stuff. All the employment I've got has utilized knowledge and experience gained in my spare time.
.NET, administer servers, use SQL, etc, etc.
I go to uni and learn about Karnaugh maps, the way Linux 2.2 booted, how to write mind-numbingly simple Java programs, and red-black trees, etc, etc.
In my spare time I learn how to make websites, design and implement large programs with objects, use
I'm just glad I'm doing physics at the same time, or I'd probably have lost heart.
Nope, it is completely broken and will break your kernel if you try. -- Your neighbor
Okay first off Myspace should then talk about protecting their admins from harm, not their users (one of which they are harming).
Second, how long would it take to clean this up? Let's be conservative; 30 mins to find the problem, 30 mins to write a quick patch to the filter system that stops the worm spreading, 20 mins to write a query to remove the script from everyone's profile. You then have to enhance the filter system to ensure this doesn't happen again, but you would have to have done that anyway.
This really isn't a huge deal, the whole thing could have been resolved without any fuss or downtime.
I'd like to think that if someone managed to release a script onto
Worms + Quake III = Soldat. Fast paced, strategic, looks great (a game doesn't have to be 3D to look good *gasp*), always loads of players online, doesn't need the latest computer, runs quite well in WINE, and free.