Posts by MJB7 586 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2013
"Surely the only people who switch to Linux are those that actually want to?"
Or are switched by their children. I am seriously considering switching my mother (94) over to a Linux distro. She needs Chrome, and access to Whatsapp - and that's probably all. It needs a very, very, Windows-like UI. Different system calls are entirely irrelevant.
"Most people on the planet live in the wilds "
The UN says 55% of the population live in urban areas, and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. OTOH, it is true to say "Quite a lot of people live in the wilds".
(I'm actually surprised it's as low as that - I would have guessed 75% urban now.)
I never did get round to writing my "Project Manager's Guide to Using VSS as an Excuse For Why Your Project is Late". Step 1 was going to be "don't have sufficient disk space", and Step 2 was "don't have backups". (There were several more rules. I have forgotten them now.)
Unfortunately, our IT department had procedures in place to make both Steps 1 and 2 unnecessarily difficult.
Err, when DARPA write "incompressible CFD" that means the easy stuff - with fluids like water whose compressibility can be ignored.
The fluid in a nuclear fusion reactor is very, very, compressible which makes the fluid dynamics much harder. Not only that, it is a plasma, so the particles are all charged, and if you have moving charged particles you need to consider magnetism. There are people who try and model magneto-hydro-dynamics, but it's ... not easy.
Of course, that doesn't nullify your conclusion "quantum computers won't solve nuclear fusion" - if they can't do the easy stuff, what hope have they got with the really messy stuff?
It adds another layer to get through, and while you may think it doesn't happen the law in the UK says that auction houses have to do due diligence on purchasers who spend more than €10,000 (and that currency symbol is not a typo). See (for example) https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/anti-money-laundering-legislation.
The EU has the same rules, and I am pretty sure so does America too.
The boring answer is almost certainly electron beams. Cutting very fine details with an electron beam has been possible for ages (I think that's how existing masks are made). The problem for chip lithography is that electron beam is _slow_ (you only cut one bit at a time). An optical mask can cover the whole chip in one go.
> I'd think even a half-competent government can probably build their own data centers and go fully open source for about the same price.
Do you mean "a government which is half-way along the list of governments sorted by competency"? Looking at the number of government-based IT disasters, I really doubt it.
Or do you mean "a government which is half-way to being fully competent" ? I'm not sure there are any of those.
> Can someone explain to me how a hyper-velocity impact with a satellite fails, enough to break chunks off, does not result is a significant effect on the orbit?
Not sure what the actual numbers are here, but:
1 tonne (1 Mg) stage in orbit.
10g "thing" smacks into the stage at 10,000 m/s relative to the orbiting stage. That's quite a bang, and could easily crack something off, but it changes the momentum by 100,000 gm/s - which is a change in velocity of 10cm/second. Typical LEO orbital velocities are about 8,000 m/s (which is why I chose 10,000).
Net result: The orbit changed (of course), but not significantly. A 10kg bullet would make more of a difference - but it would still be pretty small.
> Passwords salted and hashed, miscreants aren't going to be able to do much with that
Depends _how_ it is hashed. If it PBKDF2 with 1000 iterations of SHA1, it'll take longer to download the data than to find if the password is one of the top 1000 passwords.
If they are following OWASP recommendations and using Argon2id with a minimum configuration of 19 MiB of memory, an iteration count of 2, and 1 degree of parallelism then I agree. However "following OWASP" probably isn't the way to bet in this case.
... but I do agree that they deserve plaudits for being upfront about the situation.
I wonder if I see a different UI (connecting to amazon.de). The last couple of times I have signed up for a free 3-months Prime trial, I have found it really quite straightforward to cancel my Prime membership.
I also like the fact that I can sign up, place the order, and then cancel it - but it still lasts until my three months is up.
Err.
1. SMS is the _least_ secure MFA option (by a substantial margin). Use a TOTP generator instead.
2. There are certainly a substantial number of people in my office who won't install a a custom app to act as a MFA token on their own phones. I don't _know_ whether they would accept texts - but I wouldn't want to bet on it!
Minor nit: I _think_ even Alabama now insists on children being at least 14 before marrying.
A 13yo legally married to an adult in one of the United States is probably legally married in the UK. They just can't have sex in the UK (and the adult is at risk of being prosecuted for having sex in America).
The worst bug I ever came across was a memory corruption bug that only occurred if the username had an odd number of characters. The programmer who kept encountering the bug did. The programmer who was trying to debug it had an even number of characters in their user name. That was _days_ of fun!
(This was before valgrind.)
Standard practise in Germany. Don't forget, everything is on a series of 16A radials, rather than ring circuits (and neither appliances, nor lights, have fuses).
The safety and cost trade-offs between the UK and European systems are complex - but neither is per-se dangerous.
It is perfectly possible to write secure systems with RSA. What's wrong with it, is that it is slower to sign/encrypt than a corresponding EC algorithm, and it is _much_ slower to generate a new key. That last point matters if each participant generates a new keypair for each message (as they should), and only uses the persistent key pair for authenticity.
There _is_ a theoretical point that because quantum computers break asymmetric cryptography in a completely different way to classical computers, a quantum computer that can break RSA-3076 will need about 12 times as many qbits as one that can break NIST-P256. If quantum computers develop at something like Moore's Law (a _big_ if), that gives RSA-3076 about a decade advantage over P256.
The Cambridge Maths Tripos Part III is a fourth year of university which prepares students for a career in mathematical research. The questions on the exam paper are often of the form "Prove or counter-example the following proposition". Legend has it that the exam setters don't always know the answer.
You are referring to Zaha Hadid. Coincidentally I was in her fire-station this morning. It was a fire station for a big factory - run by Vitra, which makes designer furniture and is famous for having a factory site with examples of amazing architecture. The fire station is a fabulous bit of a sculpture, but is indeed useless as a fire station.
I don't think that is what the problem was.
They should have dispatched the engineer _straight away_, in case the on-site engineer was needed. Then they should have diagnosed and fixed the problem remotely (and then told the engineer to come back).
The alternative is wait an extra half an hour while they diagnose the problem and realize they need an on-site engineer. That's half an hour wasted.
Security is difficult, but the one thing you _don't_ need in your list is "an understanding of the maths of cryptograph" (let alone a deep understanding). What you _do_ need, is to understand what promises a cryptographic primitive makes and what promises it _doesn't_ make.
As an example, I know almost nothing about AES or 3DES beyond "stick a secret and a key in here, magic happens, and ciphertext appears out here". However I _do_ know that these only promise that an attacker cannot determine the secret given the ciphertext. What they don't promise is that the attacker can't modify the ciphertext in a way which modifies the secret. For that, you need an AEAD scheme like AES-GCM or AES-CBC + HMAC.
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