After 3-5 years of non-payment, the credit card company will forgive the debt owed to them by their delinquent customer. The customer at this point usually thinks that they are off the hook, scott free.
BUT, an unpaid loan turns into *tada* INCOME! This income becomes TAXABLE! So, once the debt is forgiven, the credit card company turns in their customer to the IRS, and the customer suddenly finds themselves with a tiger on their tail. A much bigger tiger than a credit card company.
The woman who got the $70,000 forgiven now owes about half that amount to the IRS, plus late penalties, fees, and interest.
I'm really surprised that the article didn't mention that, but maybe not too many people know about it.
First stage engine cutoff occurred at 147,000 feet. Thrust increased from 7,648,000 pounds at sea level to approximately 9,160,000 pounds at cutoff. When rockets burn in dense air, they are not nearly as efficient as burning in thin air or a vacuum. That's one big reason for launching from 35,000 feet on an airplane.
Thin air also means less drag. 69 seconds into flight the Saturn V experienced maximum aerodynamic pressure, which was 460,000 pounds of drag force. The first stage engines burned for 135.5 seconds.
OK, I was unable to determine how fast the rocket is moving at MECO. But, it says that the first stage separates at an altitude of 205,000 feet, and it coasts upwards to an altitude of 366,000 feet before it falls back into the ocean. It doesn't burn up, but it actually impacts the ocean 350 miles downrange.
So, how fast would something have to go if it were to coast up for 161,000 feet?
Well, 161000 feet is 49072.8 meters. The relevant formula is v^2=2*9.8m/s*h. Solving the equation shows that the first stage was moving at the vertical speed of 981 meters per second. This is the same as 2194 miles per hour, or about 3 times the speed of sound at sea level. This says nothing of the horizontal speed, which would mean that the rocket would have been moving even faster than I calculated. Air resistance is ignored for these equations.
It looks like the Saturn V could have gotten a 33% boost if it was launched from an airplane at 600 MPH just from the speed of the plane.
Another 15% or so would have come from the increase in rocket efficiency in thinner air.
Another point is that we really have no interest in such mundane business details such as trademarks. The sole reason that Linus owns the Linux trademark is because someone in Boston got the Linux trademark and was trying to force money out of people selling Linux distributions.
Now that we have the trademark, the worst thing that happens is that it gets diluted, and a judge says that we failed to protect the trademark, so everyone can use it.
This is OK, because if everyone can use it, nobody can threaten to take us to court over the name. And I don't think that Linux the operating system would be harmed in any way by Linux brand dog treats. In that example, even a dog could tell the two apart, so humans would be unlikely to be confused.
This is really great news, because it's a demonstration that the current theory might be on the right track.
If the researchers had been unable to get their images, then they would have had to rethink the basics again.
Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.
A question: How complicated is the vision system compared to the signals on the spinal cord? Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
Now that Slashdot has helped you out, do you suppose you could talk to Electronic Arts and get them to release Janes' Fighter's Anthology and Janes' Israeli Air Force for Linux?
Someday when I run for president, I'll have to make up a fake name.
Seriously, in a few years it will be a routine thing to search for politician's postings on Deja.com. That will be a crazy situation, because a lot of them got onto the internet in college. I don't know about everyone else, but I am a far different person now at 30 that I was at 18. If someone were to look up posts that I made back in the 1980's, they would look pretty silly. I don't think it's fair to hold a candidate to higher standards. Words uttered at 18 in the middle of a flame war don't have any real correlation to the actual physical person, maybe two decades later. A lot of people might get tarnished unfairly.
>Oh dear. "He" was aiming for a rather different >tone than "strident." Gonna have to work on >that.
Crap! Did I miss something? I think I did indeed miss the sarchasm. Well, it *has* been a long time since we've knocked heads.
>It might be interesting to try to find an >example of "him" arguing in favor of >circumcision -- in any case you appear to be >drawing rather sweeping conclusions from rather >meager data.
Well this is entirely off topic for this forum, so this will drop.
>>He doesn't see the usenet as a valid medium for >>radical political organization.
>And here I never knew that. The things you learn >on/.
A couple of times you were ranting about how all the wackos discussing various topics were sending us all to Usenet hell, figuratively speaking of course. It's not your *primary* complaint by any means. The way I see it, as long as it's on topic for the group, even sort of marginally, then no problem. My memory may be bad, but I recall a lot of complaining about the tactics of a particular side in the very heated debate. I figure that as long as it's not spam, why worry? Smart people can sort that stuff out themselves.
>DCS does not suffer fools gladly, and has been
And that's why I included the phrase "not a nutbag by any means." It's an acknowlegement of that.
Mostly I was responding to the other guy who doubted your existence. Since I have some evidence, I thought I'd contribute it. I think I was nice to you though. Check out my flamage of Brett Glass a couple days ago for my mean side.
D.C. Sessions is well known on the Usenet for a number of things, but I've dealt with him in two areas. He's not a total nutbag by any means, but he is extremely strident (a term applicable to myself as well!) in his views.
1) He's active in the area of spam control on the Usenet. In this regard, I agree with him because spammers are evil, and they have destroyed some of the usefulness of the Usenet. He goes way overboard in my opinion, because he's a monitor of what the *appropriate use* of the internet is. In other words, he's not just against spammers, he's against those who use the internet to further their political goals. And that's where I ran into him when I was arguing a particular topic.
2) And that topic was circumcision. There's a lot of people who are opposed to it, and they argue on the usenet about it. I think he'd just like to shut that idea down entirely, because, well, he's in favor of performing surgery on infants without a medical diagnosis. He doesn't see the usenet as a valid medium for radical political organization. No matter what a person thinks on an issue, I think the usenet is there for everyone to argue all day long if that's what they want to do, and to organize grassroots political support if they can.
That sounds like the borg! Making silicon and organics work together.
Anyway, the notion of disposable screens sounds wasteful to me. Don't we already generate too much trash? Rather than see cheap screens go to waste (literally) on the sides of milk cartons, I'd like to see cheap screens be used for things like wallpaper. Should Bill Gates be the only one who can change his wallpaper by running 'xv -root -random -wait 900 *.png' on his Linux box? NO! I'd love to have a cheap wall hanging display too, on every wall of my house. Outside too.
Instead, we all know what will happen. These little screens will be used like miniature billboards, and soon they will be everywhere, with little sealed chips running a fixed and unchangeable program. They will be about as useful to a geek as an AOL CD-ROM. The best we can hope for is for these cheap little advertizing screens to be given out for free, and in such a way that we can link them together into a much larger screen. That would be more like the AOL floppy disk where you could erase it and use it for your own programs.
Yes, you're right, I did miss that one. I also noticed that you and others mis-interpreted what I said about Brett being a MORON.
It wasn't strictly name calling, though I'm sure that there are others who would agree that he fits the dictionary definition. I was referring to his use of Microsoft tools that make their users look like Morons. The feature in question is the Microsoft Smart Quote, which turns a regular quote into a smart quote. MS Word and other programs write that smart quote into an undefined character, and on non-Windows systems the quote appears as a question mark. There is a program called the DeMoronizer that will fix these documents up.
I realize that my original article could be taken as a troll, but it's not entirely a troll. My point is that Brett Glass is well known for arguing against open source and free software on other forums, and for using goofy logic to justify himself. Falling victim to the MS Smart Quotes is just another indication that he's no techie.
I was going to add this last one, but I thought it would be too mean.
So, I posted my original message, and re-listed the comments page. And there it was, plain as day, the followup to a critical comment, made by B.G. posting as an A.C. !
8) B.G. can't let a good flame go. He'll have to followup to each and every one of them, making this topic a 500+ followup by Monday noon.
OK, I'm going to be mean and this might cost me some karma points, but I've just got to say this:
1) Brett Glass pointed out *his own* article. That has to be some indicator of cluelessness and/or hubris.
2) He's a MORON. He obviously didn't use the DeMoronizer to fix up the Microsoft Stupid Quotes.
3) What's with the^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^I Love the Hair!
4) If you read what this guy posts on Infoworld.com, you'll see that he's generally clueless compared to everyone else there. He is a critic of open source, but not a very good one. I seem to remember him claiming that Red Hat didn't sell Linux because Linux was free. Red Hat sold bandwidth, because they could mail a CD to you for an effective data rate of 670 Megs per 24 hours for FedEx. Ummmm. Sure.
5) He described BO2K as a trojan horse program. Would he describe PC Anywhere the same way? How about an admin tool released from Microsoft? These are all the same kind of program, and can be used or misused in a wide variety of ways.
6) Brett obviously has no idea what obfuscated code is. He claims that BO2K could have trojans hidden in obfuscated code. Heee hee haw haw.
7) Linux is just as insecure as Windows? Poorly designed and rife with security holes? That's a joke. For goodness sakes, MS Excel has a whole flight simulator hidden away inside of it. Where is the easter egg inside the Linux kernel?
It is true that C++ on Linux has had some handicaps, but in my experience it's Visual C++ which will be the biggest problem for the Perl Team.
I'm the coordinator of the Free Trek project, which is a space battle simulator intended to run at the very least on Linux and Windows computers. The project uses C++, compiled by G++ and Visual C++ 6.0. It has been tremendously difficult at times getting VC++ to work properly with the code, mostly due to the brain damaged Standard Template Library that ships with VC++.
The STL that comes with VC++ is based on the Hewlett Packard implementation which is old, and not thread safe. In my experience, VC++ will not even compile that old STL without a pile of errors which are nearly impossible to fix. I found an STL implementation called STLPort (http://www.stlport.org) that does the job, but it was also somewhat difficult to get working even with the latest Microsoft compiler and all the patches. The good part of that implementation is that it is a modern implementation based on the SGI code (which is in turn based on the HP code), and it is thread safe. The Free Trek distribution includes a configuration file for STLPort which can be dropped right into the STLPort distribution for VC++ compilation. It is not entirely obvious how to compile STLPort with VC++, and it certainly doesn't compile properly out of the box. With our config file, it will.
They are right in pointing out the G++ is pretty much standards compliant right now, and that they will have to limit their usage of the standard to what VC++ supports. If they use the STLPort library, then those problems will be minimized. One of the developers on the Free Trek project uses the Metrowerks compiler, and he seems to have a great deal fewer problems compiling the code.
So, based on my experience, I'd say that C++ on Linux is really excellent right now, and whatever kinks might exists should not exclude C++ from being chosen as a development language when it is appropriate for the project. Only if you are going to be maintaining a Windows port will you run into problems. I'd have to say that Free Trek has hit most of those problems already, so if anyone writing the Perl code gets stuck with something, please send me an e-mail. I might be able to help you out.
If you can get the sun in between the lens and the sidewalk, then I can believe that the pavement would indeed liquify. A millisecond later the pavement would vaporize. Just after that, the compounds would break apart into their constituent atoms. And then right after that, the hydrogens that used to be in the pavement would fuse into helium.
It would be much safer to put the fresnel lens in between the sun and the pavement, in my opinion.
I think my grandfather could have set his calendar by it too.
Wasn't it the 1939 world fair when these video phones were demonstrated for the first time? Or maybe it was 1960. Or maybe it was another year entirely.
In any case, the prospect of video phones being just around the corner has become almost an urban legend.
The latest Foundation trilogy was written by the "Three B's" or "Killer B's" or something like that.
Benford, Bear, and B..something. They were authorized by the Estate of Isaac Asimov (administered by Janet I think) to write the books.
There's 3 new robot novels too! They are really good reads. I personally hope that new stories set in Asimov worlds appear from time to time. (NOT every month - that would be horrible - one every other year would be great).
I've read nanotechnology articles that discussed making rocket engines out of solid, perfect, diamond. As we all know, with nanotech making a simple rectangular lattice structure with carbon atoms will be pretty easy to do. With these rocket engines made out of diamond, they could be operated at temperatures far higher than what steel engines operate at today, and higher temperatures means higher efficiency. I've read that a vehicle the size of a minivan would be able to reach orbit with passengers. Well, I don't know if that's entirely accurate, but rockets will get smaller and better with nanotech.
Yup. Slashdot seems to be slashdotted for me a lot of the time too! The hump is in the middle of the day, and by evening I can connect reliably.
Anyway, affordable air transportation is already available. Anyone can go out and buy a hang-glider type ultralight aircraft brand new for about $6000, which should be affordable for a lot of geeks with a job. The trouble is that these ultralights kill a lot of people when they crash! You don't need a license, so many people just buy them and try to fly them. Gravity is a teacher that only grudgingly gives make-up exams.
Maintenance is another problem. Pison engines need to have regular maintenance to be reliable, and some parts should be replaced not when they are broken, but when they have a certain number of hours on them. Sloppy maintenance will kill you too.
Still, I'm happy to see that people are still working on the problem. Sometime in my life I want to get my private pilot's license, and it would be nice to have a tiny personal aircraft that would be cheap to buy and cheap to keep. That means I need to keep it in my garage, not in a rental hangar at the airport.
"That's probably why Intel chose to implement standard, peer-reviewed algorithm:"
I have no quarrel with the algorithm they chose. It's the implementation that I don't trust. If I were to give you my very own implementation of RC4 that I wrote myself, would you use it? Why not? I might have screwed something up! Crypto algorithms are very tricky things to get right. Even if the algorithm is correct, there's all sorts of details involved with locking memory at the right times, erasing input buffers, avoiding buffer overruns, and key handling. The best way to try to crack something is to attack the implementation! It's very difficult for a single programmer or small group to get every last detail right, and if there's any gap at all you could lose all your security.
You don't believe me? How big a deal is a 1 byte buffer overrun? Who cares about that? 1 byte is sometimes is all that is necessary to crack a system wide open.
Peer review of the *implementation* is absolutely required. There's absolutely nothing at all wrong with the algorithms that Microsoft uses for security on their operating system. The problem is an implementation that is closed to peer review. Just like this device from Intel.
I can't trust *every* cracker out there who gets a copy of the source code, but I can trust *most* of them, including myself.
Let's say you've got one bad apple at RedHat who slips a trojan into an encryption driver. How long do you think it will be before it is discovered? Not long? You're right.
As soon as the code goes out the door people will start looking at it. I can do a diff against the same code acquired from different places. I can recompile the driver myself. I can inspect the code myself.
So you see, open source DOES solve these problems.
Encryption is all about trusting nobody. Once you trust someone, you've lost your security. It's an easy matter (for someone who can write a device driver!) to make a module that will encrypt and decrypt packets as they go in and out of the ethernet interface. Why would you want to build something like this into hardware, particularly when the user requirements aren't known ahead of time?
Some users might just be surfing, and they might decide that 64 bit encryption is good enough for them. They never buy anything on the web, but they might want to safeguard passwords and e-mail addresses against spammers or whatever. On the other hand, the U.S. Army might have a need for 1024 bit encryption because they don't want to take the slightest chance that their battle management network will be compromised. Would any hardware level encryption meet the needs of these different users?
And then, what if there's a bug in the encryption. That bug might affect the actual security of the protocol making the device completely worthless. Or it might just affect what devices you could connect to, making the product useful in a very limited way. AHA! you say the solution is to make the hardware upgradable by burning a new program into a flash RAM. Well, why can't a virus do the same thing, except strip out all encryption totally?
Finally, any algorithm implemented in silicon is unlikely to be peer-reviewed. If I will have security, I want it to be built into a software package distributed under a licence which requires source code to be available. I want everyone to check the code out, find the bugs, try to crack it. Once it stands up to all that, I'll use it. I can't just trust Intel to do my homework for me.
The conclusion that your declining is wrong in my opinion.
Why do you suppose people under 25 were making those discoveries? Well, you graduate from college at age 21 or 22, then if you do a Masters you'll be 23 to 24 years old after you complete that. So, by the time you're WELL into your Doctoral research you'll be 25 years old provided you don't slack too much.
Anyway, Doctoral students don't research in a vacuum. They are mentored by OLDER professors who often have long running research programs (that they GUESS WHAT started when they were Doctoral students themselves - heh heh). Anyway, these Older professors say to these Doctoral students "Why don't you take a look at this little gem..." meaning some line of inquiry which the old guy doesn't have time to track down because he's busy with his other work.
In short, the mentor feeds ideas to the young person who is cracking his ass 24 hours a day to get a Doctorate. The old guy is busy thinking a bit, drinking a bit, playing golf, driving kids around, vacationing, sabbaticalling, tenuring, politicking, etc.
If the old guy would put his nose to the grindstone like the young guy he'd make just as many important scientific studies. But it's hard work, and after you've got your tenure...the rest is human nature. Leave a few things for the younger students.
Slashdot Mirror
After 3-5 years of non-payment, the credit card company will forgive the debt owed to them by their delinquent customer. The customer at this point usually thinks that they are off the hook, scott free.
BUT, an unpaid loan turns into *tada* INCOME! This income becomes TAXABLE! So, once the debt is forgiven, the credit card company turns in their customer to the IRS, and the customer suddenly finds themselves with a tiger on their tail. A much bigger tiger than a credit card company.
The woman who got the $70,000 forgiven now owes about half that amount to the IRS, plus late penalties, fees, and interest.
I'm really surprised that the article didn't mention that, but maybe not too many people know about it.
www.apollosaturn.com
First stage engine cutoff occurred at 147,000 feet. Thrust increased from 7,648,000 pounds at sea level to approximately 9,160,000 pounds at cutoff. When rockets burn in dense air, they are not nearly as efficient as burning in thin air or a vacuum. That's one big reason for launching from 35,000 feet on an airplane.
Thin air also means less drag. 69 seconds into flight the Saturn V experienced maximum aerodynamic pressure, which was 460,000 pounds of drag force. The first stage engines burned for 135.5 seconds.
OK, I was unable to determine how fast the rocket is moving at MECO. But, it says that the first stage separates at an altitude of 205,000 feet, and it coasts upwards to an altitude of 366,000 feet before it falls back into the ocean. It doesn't burn up, but it actually impacts the ocean 350 miles downrange.
So, how fast would something have to go if it were to coast up for 161,000 feet?
Well, 161000 feet is 49072.8 meters. The relevant formula is v^2=2*9.8m/s*h. Solving the equation shows that the first stage was moving at the vertical speed of 981 meters per second. This is the same as 2194 miles per hour, or about 3 times the speed of sound at sea level. This says nothing of the horizontal speed, which would mean that the rocket would have been moving even faster than I calculated. Air resistance is ignored for these equations.
It looks like the Saturn V could have gotten a 33% boost if it was launched from an airplane at 600 MPH just from the speed of the plane.
Another 15% or so would have come from the increase in rocket efficiency in thinner air.
And *that* is why Pegasus is a good idea.
Another point is that we really have no interest in such mundane business details such as trademarks. The sole reason that Linus owns the Linux trademark is because someone in Boston got the Linux trademark and was trying to force money out of people selling Linux distributions.
Now that we have the trademark, the worst thing that happens is that it gets diluted, and a judge says that we failed to protect the trademark, so everyone can use it.
This is OK, because if everyone can use it, nobody can threaten to take us to court over the name. And I don't think that Linux the operating system would be harmed in any way by Linux brand dog treats. In that example, even a dog could tell the two apart, so humans would be unlikely to be confused.
This is really great news, because it's a demonstration that the current theory might be on the right track.
If the researchers had been unable to get their images, then they would have had to rethink the basics again.
Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.
A question: How complicated is the vision system compared to the signals on the spinal cord? Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
Dear Janes,
Now that Slashdot has helped you out, do you suppose you could talk to Electronic Arts and get them to release Janes' Fighter's Anthology and Janes' Israeli Air Force for Linux?
Sincerely,
Patrick Draper - a big fan
I always use my real name on the internet.
Someday when I run for president, I'll have to make up a fake name.
Seriously, in a few years it will be a routine thing to search for politician's postings on Deja.com. That will be a crazy situation, because a lot of them got onto the internet in college. I don't know about everyone else, but I am a far different person now at 30 that I was at 18. If someone were to look up posts that I made back in the 1980's, they would look pretty silly. I don't think it's fair to hold a candidate to higher standards. Words uttered at 18 in the middle of a flame war don't have any real correlation to the actual physical person, maybe two decades later. A lot of people might get tarnished unfairly.
>Oh dear. "He" was aiming for a rather different
/.
>tone than "strident." Gonna have to work on
>that.
Crap! Did I miss something? I think I did indeed miss the sarchasm. Well, it *has* been a long time since we've knocked heads.
>It might be interesting to try to find an
>example of "him" arguing in favor of
>circumcision -- in any case you appear to be
>drawing rather sweeping conclusions from rather
>meager data.
Well this is entirely off topic for this forum, so this will drop.
>>He doesn't see the usenet as a valid medium for
>>radical political organization.
>And here I never knew that. The things you learn
>on
A couple of times you were ranting about how all the wackos discussing various topics were sending us all to Usenet hell, figuratively speaking of course. It's not your *primary* complaint by any means. The way I see it, as long as it's on topic for the group, even sort of marginally, then no problem. My memory may be bad, but I recall a lot of complaining about the tactics of a particular side in the very heated debate. I figure that as long as it's not spam, why worry? Smart people can sort that stuff out themselves.
>DCS does not suffer fools gladly, and has been
And that's why I included the phrase "not a nutbag by any means." It's an acknowlegement of that.
Mostly I was responding to the other guy who doubted your existence. Since I have some evidence, I thought I'd contribute it. I think I was nice to you though. Check out my flamage of Brett Glass a couple days ago for my mean side.
D.C. Sessions is well known on the Usenet for a number of things, but I've dealt with him in two areas. He's not a total nutbag by any means, but he is extremely strident (a term applicable to myself as well!) in his views.
1) He's active in the area of spam control on the Usenet. In this regard, I agree with him because spammers are evil, and they have destroyed some of the usefulness of the Usenet. He goes way overboard in my opinion, because he's a monitor of what the *appropriate use* of the internet is. In other words, he's not just against spammers, he's against those who use the internet to further their political goals. And that's where I ran into him when I was arguing a particular topic.
2) And that topic was circumcision. There's a lot of people who are opposed to it, and they argue on the usenet about it. I think he'd just like to shut that idea down entirely, because, well, he's in favor of performing surgery on infants without a medical diagnosis. He doesn't see the usenet as a valid medium for radical political organization. No matter what a person thinks on an issue, I think the usenet is there for everyone to argue all day long if that's what they want to do, and to organize grassroots political support if they can.
That sounds like the borg! Making silicon and organics work together.
Anyway, the notion of disposable screens sounds wasteful to me. Don't we already generate too much trash? Rather than see cheap screens go to waste (literally) on the sides of milk cartons, I'd like to see cheap screens be used for things like wallpaper. Should Bill Gates be the only one who can change his wallpaper by running 'xv -root -random -wait 900 *.png' on his Linux box? NO! I'd love to have a cheap wall hanging display too, on every wall of my house. Outside too.
Instead, we all know what will happen. These little screens will be used like miniature billboards, and soon they will be everywhere, with little sealed chips running a fixed and unchangeable program. They will be about as useful to a geek as an AOL CD-ROM. The best we can hope for is for these cheap little advertizing screens to be given out for free, and in such a way that we can link them together into a much larger screen. That would be more like the AOL floppy disk where you could erase it and use it for your own programs.
Yes, you're right, I did miss that one. I also noticed that you and others mis-interpreted what I said about Brett being a MORON.
It wasn't strictly name calling, though I'm sure that there are others who would agree that he fits the dictionary definition. I was referring to his use of Microsoft tools that make their users look like Morons. The feature in question is the Microsoft Smart Quote, which turns a regular quote into a smart quote. MS Word and other programs write that smart quote into an undefined character, and on non-Windows systems the quote appears as a question mark. There is a program called the DeMoronizer that will fix these documents up.
I realize that my original article could be taken as a troll, but it's not entirely a troll. My point is that Brett Glass is well known for arguing against open source and free software on other forums, and for using goofy logic to justify himself. Falling victim to the MS Smart Quotes is just another indication that he's no techie.
I was going to add this last one, but I thought it would be too mean.
So, I posted my original message, and re-listed the comments page. And there it was, plain as day, the followup to a critical comment, made by B.G. posting as an A.C. !
8) B.G. can't let a good flame go. He'll have to followup to each and every one of them, making this topic a 500+ followup by Monday noon.
OK, I'm going to be mean and this might cost me some karma points, but I've just got to say this:
1) Brett Glass pointed out *his own* article. That has to be some indicator of cluelessness and/or hubris.
2) He's a MORON. He obviously didn't use the DeMoronizer to fix up the Microsoft Stupid Quotes.
3) What's with the^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^I Love the Hair!
4) If you read what this guy posts on Infoworld.com, you'll see that he's generally clueless compared to everyone else there. He is a critic of open source, but not a very good one. I seem to remember him claiming that Red Hat didn't sell Linux because Linux was free. Red Hat sold bandwidth, because they could mail a CD to you for an effective data rate of 670 Megs per 24 hours for FedEx. Ummmm. Sure.
5) He described BO2K as a trojan horse program. Would he describe PC Anywhere the same way? How about an admin tool released from Microsoft? These are all the same kind of program, and can be used or misused in a wide variety of ways.
6) Brett obviously has no idea what obfuscated code is. He claims that BO2K could have trojans hidden in obfuscated code. Heee hee haw haw.
7) Linux is just as insecure as Windows? Poorly designed and rife with security holes? That's a joke. For goodness sakes, MS Excel has a whole flight simulator hidden away inside of it. Where is the easter egg inside the Linux kernel?
It is true that C++ on Linux has had some handicaps, but in my experience it's Visual C++ which will be the biggest problem for the Perl Team.
I'm the coordinator of the Free Trek project, which is a space battle simulator intended to run at the very least on Linux and Windows computers. The project uses C++, compiled by G++ and Visual C++ 6.0. It has been tremendously difficult at times getting VC++ to work properly with the code, mostly due to the brain damaged Standard Template Library that ships with VC++.
The STL that comes with VC++ is based on the Hewlett Packard implementation which is old, and not thread safe. In my experience, VC++ will not even compile that old STL without a pile of errors which are nearly impossible to fix. I found an STL implementation called STLPort (http://www.stlport.org) that does the job, but it was also somewhat difficult to get working even with the latest Microsoft compiler and all the patches. The good part of that implementation is that it is a modern implementation based on the SGI code (which is in turn based on the HP code), and it is thread safe. The Free Trek distribution includes a configuration file for STLPort which can be dropped right into the STLPort distribution for VC++ compilation. It is not entirely obvious how to compile STLPort with VC++, and it certainly doesn't compile properly out of the box. With our config file, it will.
They are right in pointing out the G++ is pretty much standards compliant right now, and that they will have to limit their usage of the standard to what VC++ supports. If they use the STLPort library, then those problems will be minimized. One of the developers on the Free Trek project uses the Metrowerks compiler, and he seems to have a great deal fewer problems compiling the code.
So, based on my experience, I'd say that C++ on Linux is really excellent right now, and whatever kinks might exists should not exclude C++ from being chosen as a development language when it is appropriate for the project. Only if you are going to be maintaining a Windows port will you run into problems. I'd have to say that Free Trek has hit most of those problems already, so if anyone writing the Perl code gets stuck with something, please send me an e-mail. I might be able to help you out.
A T1 does what, 1.6 Mbits/sec? The article said that the cut fiber could carry 80 GB/sec.
So that makes it the equivalent of 50,000 T1 lines.
Or 2.38 million 33.6K modems!
Actually, what you propose would actually work.
If you can get the sun in between the lens and the sidewalk, then I can believe that the pavement would indeed liquify. A millisecond later the pavement would vaporize. Just after that, the compounds would break apart into their constituent atoms. And then right after that, the hydrogens that used to be in the pavement would fuse into helium.
It would be much safer to put the fresnel lens in between the sun and the pavement, in my opinion.
I think my grandfather could have set his calendar by it too.
Wasn't it the 1939 world fair when these video phones were demonstrated for the first time? Or maybe it was 1960. Or maybe it was another year entirely.
In any case, the prospect of video phones being just around the corner has become almost an urban legend.
The latest Foundation trilogy was written by the "Three B's" or "Killer B's" or something like that.
Benford, Bear, and B..something. They were authorized by the Estate of Isaac Asimov (administered by Janet I think) to write the books.
There's 3 new robot novels too! They are really good reads. I personally hope that new stories set in Asimov worlds appear from time to time. (NOT every month - that would be horrible - one every other year would be great).
I've read nanotechnology articles that discussed making rocket engines out of solid, perfect, diamond. As we all know, with nanotech making a simple rectangular lattice structure with carbon atoms will be pretty easy to do. With these rocket engines made out of diamond, they could be operated at temperatures far higher than what steel engines operate at today, and higher temperatures means higher efficiency. I've read that a vehicle the size of a minivan would be able to reach orbit with passengers. Well, I don't know if that's entirely accurate, but rockets will get smaller and better with nanotech.
Would Performer be suitable for a game engine? I'm developing Free Trek (freetrek.linuxgames.com) using OpenGL.
Can someone comment on the similarities between Performer and OpenGL? How difficult would a conversion be? How are 3D accelerators supported? Thanks.
Yup. Slashdot seems to be slashdotted for me a lot of the time too! The hump is in the middle of the day, and by evening I can connect reliably.
Anyway, affordable air transportation is already available. Anyone can go out and buy a hang-glider type ultralight aircraft brand new for about $6000, which should be affordable for a lot of geeks with a job. The trouble is that these ultralights kill a lot of people when they crash! You don't need a license, so many people just buy them and try to fly them. Gravity is a teacher that only grudgingly gives make-up exams.
Maintenance is another problem. Pison engines need to have regular maintenance to be reliable, and some parts should be replaced not when they are broken, but when they have a certain number of hours on them. Sloppy maintenance will kill you too.
Still, I'm happy to see that people are still working on the problem. Sometime in my life I want to get my private pilot's license, and it would be nice to have a tiny personal aircraft that would be cheap to buy and cheap to keep. That means I need to keep it in my garage, not in a rental hangar at the airport.
"That's probably why Intel chose to implement standard, peer-reviewed algorithm:"
I have no quarrel with the algorithm they chose. It's the implementation that I don't trust. If I were to give you my very own implementation of RC4 that I wrote myself, would you use it? Why not? I might have screwed something up! Crypto algorithms are very tricky things to get right. Even if the algorithm is correct, there's all sorts of details involved with locking memory at the right times, erasing input buffers, avoiding buffer overruns, and key handling. The best way to try to crack something is to attack the implementation! It's very difficult for a single programmer or small group to get every last detail right, and if there's any gap at all you could lose all your security.
You don't believe me? How big a deal is a 1 byte buffer overrun? Who cares about that? 1 byte is sometimes is all that is necessary to crack a system wide open.
Peer review of the *implementation* is absolutely required. There's absolutely nothing at all wrong with the algorithms that Microsoft uses for security on their operating system. The problem is an implementation that is closed to peer review. Just like this device from Intel.
I can't trust *every* cracker out there who gets a copy of the source code, but I can trust *most* of them, including myself.
Let's say you've got one bad apple at RedHat who slips a trojan into an encryption driver. How long do you think it will be before it is discovered? Not long? You're right.
As soon as the code goes out the door people will start looking at it. I can do a diff against the same code acquired from different places. I can recompile the driver myself. I can inspect the code myself.
So you see, open source DOES solve these problems.
Encryption is all about trusting nobody. Once you trust someone, you've lost your security. It's an easy matter (for someone who can write a device driver!) to make a module that will encrypt and decrypt packets as they go in and out of the ethernet interface. Why would you want to build something like this into hardware, particularly when the user requirements aren't known ahead of time?
Some users might just be surfing, and they might decide that 64 bit encryption is good enough for them. They never buy anything on the web, but they might want to safeguard passwords and e-mail addresses against spammers or whatever. On the other hand, the U.S. Army might have a need for 1024 bit encryption because they don't want to take the slightest chance that their battle management network will be compromised. Would any hardware level encryption meet the needs of these different users?
And then, what if there's a bug in the encryption. That bug might affect the actual security of the protocol making the device completely worthless. Or it might just affect what devices you could connect to, making the product useful in a very limited way. AHA! you say the solution is to make the hardware upgradable by burning a new program into a flash RAM. Well, why can't a virus do the same thing, except strip out all encryption totally?
Finally, any algorithm implemented in silicon is unlikely to be peer-reviewed. If I will have security, I want it to be built into a software package distributed under a licence which requires source code to be available. I want everyone to check the code out, find the bugs, try to crack it. Once it stands up to all that, I'll use it. I can't just trust Intel to do my homework for me.
I'm 30 now. Would I want to live forever being 80 years old?
Only if Linus wants to live forever being 79 years old! (he's 29 now)
"Scientific discoveries by those under 25."
The conclusion that your declining is wrong in my opinion.
Why do you suppose people under 25 were making those discoveries? Well, you graduate from college at age 21 or 22, then if you do a Masters you'll be 23 to 24 years old after you complete that. So,
by the time you're WELL into your Doctoral research you'll be 25 years old provided you don't slack too much.
Anyway, Doctoral students don't research in a vacuum. They are mentored by OLDER professors who often have long running research programs (that they GUESS WHAT started when they were Doctoral students themselves - heh heh). Anyway, these Older professors say to these Doctoral students "Why don't you take a look at this little gem..." meaning some line of inquiry which the old guy doesn't have time to track down because he's busy with his other work.
In short, the mentor feeds ideas to the young person who is cracking his ass 24 hours a day to get a Doctorate. The old guy is busy thinking a bit, drinking a bit, playing golf, driving kids around, vacationing, sabbaticalling, tenuring, politicking, etc.
If the old guy would put his nose to the grindstone like the young guy he'd make just as many important scientific studies. But it's hard work, and after you've got your tenure...the rest is human nature. Leave a few things for the younger students.