Proxies, Adblock plus, deleting cookies and such in fact do very little.
It is easy to match you up to your profile by considering only your browser version, operating system, browsing habits (do you use google.com, google.somethingelse, the Google search in the default Firefox homepage, or the Firefox google search bar? Do you click on "search" or press enter? Do you block googleanalytics via Adblock plus? Which IP addresses do you browse/proxy from? How did you set the web page localization preferences?). Remember, it only takes 33 yes-no bits of information to uniquely identify you among all human beings. How many are you already handing over to dear Google?
Dude, just slap together some random figures like the number of occupied inodes in your hard disk -- they are executives after all, what do you expect them to understand about technical stuff? Getting "mean web-page loading time" is already a big step.
I suppose your work/university/school wireless network doesn't run TTLS/EAP PAP, then. Nokia smartphones have been missing support for that authentication protocol (very common in university networks) for at least three years.
IF you have health problem, or a weak immunitary system, then you are likely to have had flu shots in the past, AND you are likely to catch swine flu now that a shot for it does not exist yet. So nothing particularly stunning here.
Another interesting possibility would be using titles instead of numbers to identify laws, i.e., "border controls" instead of "law 7441". This would also add the possibility to include wiki-style links in the texts. All of this would greatly simplify the interface for the casual user.
In the Maths department I am working in, all the computers in the labs run Ubuntu. I was told that there are a couple of Windows machines in a hidden room, but I have never seen them. So, the right question for us would be "Is Windows supported in your department?"
I have this great and innovative idea. Take your browser-based e-mail client and word processor, rewrite them in native machine code and run them alongside the browser, as a separate app, instead of inside it. For even more speedup, the data could be stored on the hard drive instead of downloaded from a remote web-site.
Never seen before!
Call me a paranoid, but I don't trust sending my entire home directory somewhere over the network with a dubious encryption protocol. I use unison with my usb stick as the root of a "star" sync topology, and if I need versioning for some project I create a git repo inside the unison'd directory. Works fine for me.
And that makes me think: why isn't "encrypted" the standard for/all/ network protocols, unless explicitly requested by the servers? For most uses, the processor isn't the bottleneck anyway, and those who run heavy-duty servers that need to run unencrypted for performance reasons probably already know how to turn it off. (and, even for those, hardware encryption chips would be extremely cheap if mass-produced).
Given the current processor speeds, 99% of the network traffic should be encrypted and digitally signed. At least, all human-produced content (like e-mail, or this comment) should.
Citation needed.
Even if not phython, what does Fortran have over modern compiled languages, for example?
0) A lot of legacy code people still have to work with is written in FORTRAN. Sad but true.
1) Many very optimized libraries available. Check if your language du jour has an implementation of a routine for solving a linear system using BLAS. That provides a huge improvement.
2) Many libraries are in fact only available for FORTRAN. For calculating the eigenvalues of a sparse matrix, there is only ARPACK (for Fortran), Arpack++ (a kludgy C++ interface to the very same FORTRAN library), and Matlab's "eigs" (a Visual Basic-style interface to the very same FORTRAN library).
3) Very expressive. For instance, you can reverse the entries of a vector of complex numbers in a single compiler instruction. This is a toy example, but for more complicate stuff this expressiveness pays: the compiler has an easier job in understanding what code can be safely optimized and what cannot. More complicate stuff involving e.g. C++ method calls suffers in terms of pointer aliasing problems and similar stuff. Of course you may write the very same thing in C or machine code, but for 99% of the computations you would use the "standard" interface to vectors/arrays of your languages and forget about this sort of micro-optimizations. A good commercial FORTRAN compiler (forget about gfortran, sorry GNU but sadly it's true) does this automatically.
4) FORTRAN 95 is not a punch-card language anymore, it has most of the fancy modern stuff if you wish to use it. While "bad programmers can write FORTRAN in every language", good programmers can write well-factored and perfectly readable FORTRAN code.
Nevertheless, I do matrix computations, and still I try to avoid it as much as I can. Most people in our field use MATLAB (which is essentially a Visual Basic-style interface to most of the awesome number-crunching FORTRAN libraries) even though for tight "for" loops its performance sucks. If performance is mission-critical, you may write FORTRAN subroutines and call them from MATLAB, and that's very convenient. Python still lacks many of Matlab's features, its only advantage is being Free Software.
BTW, a very ill-advised design choice of Python:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0211/
Ask any numerical analyst to know why it is a terrible idea to solve a linear system with inv(A)*b. But make sure you have at least half an hour free.
Slashdot Mirror
It would take more energy to break a current day 256bit symmetric key than there is usable energy in our galaxy.
With the known algorithms. On a traditional (non-quantum) computer. Don't feel so safe.
I claim prior art!
Nah. Clearly photoshopped.
Proxies, Adblock plus, deleting cookies and such in fact do very little. It is easy to match you up to your profile by considering only your browser version, operating system, browsing habits (do you use google.com, google.somethingelse, the Google search in the default Firefox homepage, or the Firefox google search bar? Do you click on "search" or press enter? Do you block googleanalytics via Adblock plus? Which IP addresses do you browse/proxy from? How did you set the web page localization preferences?). Remember, it only takes 33 yes-no bits of information to uniquely identify you among all human beings. How many are you already handing over to dear Google?
Duh. Sounds like they discovered caching. Definitely not a new idea.
Hey, we're talking about Mars here, not Io
Want that. Is that a released add-on or did you just patch and recompile the source?
qkd2f
You know, I am desperately trying to forget about FORTRAN too.
Dude, just slap together some random figures like the number of occupied inodes in your hard disk -- they are executives after all, what do you expect them to understand about technical stuff? Getting "mean web-page loading time" is already a big step.
ahem... Gtkmm uses Glib::ustring, not std::string (though there are default constructors and conversion methods in both directions).
I suppose your work/university/school wireless network doesn't run TTLS/EAP PAP, then. Nokia smartphones have been missing support for that authentication protocol (very common in university networks) for at least three years.
Their website is going to host 4GB update files for this gizmo. I can imagine them crawling under bandwidth costs shortly. Why not use bittorrent?
Bah. I already use EXT3 (and I am planning to migrate to EXT4). What could this EXTJS have more?
IF you have health problem, or a weak immunitary system, then you are likely to have had flu shots in the past, AND you are likely to catch swine flu now that a shot for it does not exist yet. So nothing particularly stunning here.
Another interesting possibility would be using titles instead of numbers to identify laws, i.e., "border controls" instead of "law 7441". This would also add the possibility to include wiki-style links in the texts. All of this would greatly simplify the interface for the casual user.
In the Maths department I am working in, all the computers in the labs run Ubuntu. I was told that there are a couple of Windows machines in a hidden room, but I have never seen them. So, the right question for us would be "Is Windows supported in your department?"
nethack
No encryption/digital signature = fail
alternative: www.jango.com works fine (at least from Italy)
I have this great and innovative idea. Take your browser-based e-mail client and word processor, rewrite them in native machine code and run them alongside the browser, as a separate app, instead of inside it. For even more speedup, the data could be stored on the hard drive instead of downloaded from a remote web-site. Never seen before!
Call me a paranoid, but I don't trust sending my entire home directory somewhere over the network with a dubious encryption protocol. I use unison with my usb stick as the root of a "star" sync topology, and if I need versioning for some project I create a git repo inside the unison'd directory. Works fine for me.
And that makes me think: why isn't "encrypted" the standard for /all/ network protocols, unless explicitly requested by the servers? For most uses, the processor isn't the bottleneck anyway, and those who run heavy-duty servers that need to run unencrypted for performance reasons probably already know how to turn it off. (and, even for those, hardware encryption chips would be extremely cheap if mass-produced).
Given the current processor speeds, 99% of the network traffic should be encrypted and digitally signed. At least, all human-produced content (like e-mail, or this comment) should.
So, all primes greater than two are odd, but only one of them is Odd's!
0) A lot of legacy code people still have to work with is written in FORTRAN. Sad but true.
1) Many very optimized libraries available. Check if your language du jour has an implementation of a routine for solving a linear system using BLAS. That provides a huge improvement.
2) Many libraries are in fact only available for FORTRAN. For calculating the eigenvalues of a sparse matrix, there is only ARPACK (for Fortran), Arpack++ (a kludgy C++ interface to the very same FORTRAN library), and Matlab's "eigs" (a Visual Basic-style interface to the very same FORTRAN library).
3) Very expressive. For instance, you can reverse the entries of a vector of complex numbers in a single compiler instruction. This is a toy example, but for more complicate stuff this expressiveness pays: the compiler has an easier job in understanding what code can be safely optimized and what cannot. More complicate stuff involving e.g. C++ method calls suffers in terms of pointer aliasing problems and similar stuff. Of course you may write the very same thing in C or machine code, but for 99% of the computations you would use the "standard" interface to vectors/arrays of your languages and forget about this sort of micro-optimizations. A good commercial FORTRAN compiler (forget about gfortran, sorry GNU but sadly it's true) does this automatically.
4) FORTRAN 95 is not a punch-card language anymore, it has most of the fancy modern stuff if you wish to use it. While "bad programmers can write FORTRAN in every language", good programmers can write well-factored and perfectly readable FORTRAN code.
Nevertheless, I do matrix computations, and still I try to avoid it as much as I can. Most people in our field use MATLAB (which is essentially a Visual Basic-style interface to most of the awesome number-crunching FORTRAN libraries) even though for tight "for" loops its performance sucks. If performance is mission-critical, you may write FORTRAN subroutines and call them from MATLAB, and that's very convenient. Python still lacks many of Matlab's features, its only advantage is being Free Software.
BTW, a very ill-advised design choice of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0211/ Ask any numerical analyst to know why it is a terrible idea to solve a linear system with inv(A)*b. But make sure you have at least half an hour free.