Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.
From The Seattle Times::
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — The Washington Post said today that a former FBI official, W. Mark Felt, was the confidential source known as “Deep Throat” who provided the newspaper information that led to President Nixon’s impeachment investigation and eventual resignation.
VERY interesting. It will be interesting to see if this passes the tests of blogging.
From Slashdot:
Kozmik writes “Looks like the first of likely many video plugins for Skype has arrived. Dialcom claims the plugin which works with Skype, will provided end to end encrypted video that will work behind NATs, proxies and firewalls. Currently only supports Windows.“
I’ve downloaded the program and installed it. My webcam is setup and working. Now all I need is for someone to Skype me.
Saw this on my Slashdot RSS feed, downloaded it and I’ve already saved 6.5 seconds….and I’m on my colleges connection. Interesting.
Lukey Boy writes “Google has released a free web accelerator product for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. According to their information page the software uses Google servers as a proxy for web content, delivering the pages to your system more rapidly and compressing them beforehand.”
I think the most unique aspect of this is that it’s geared towards DSL users and not dial-up users. I also wonder if this will help me view pages that have been Farked or Slashdotted.
Here’s the direct link to Google’s Web Accelerator.
I guess Quinn likes quizing us (by us, I mean people he knows). Here’s one he just sent out:
Box #1 is guaranteed to contain $1000 no matter what. Box #2 either contains one million dollars, or it contains nothing. You can either 1) take both boxes, or 2) take only Box #2.
Seems simple enough right now, but there’s a story behind Box #2. A brilliant alien psychologist has been studying your every behavior since birth. This hypothetical alien knows you better than you know yourself, and can predict your actions as accurately as possible. This alien is in charge of deciding whether to put the million in Box #2 or not. If the alien predicts you will chose both boxes, he will have put nothing in Box #2. If the alien predicts that you chose ONLY Box #2, he will have put a million dollars in it.
If you really want the answer, check out the Wikipedia article => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox
From http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=38445
PC vs. Mac Revisited: Adobe Says PCs are Faster
The debate between PC and Macintosh partisans over which platform performs better reached an interesting impasse this week when longtime Apple Computer partner Adobe Systems published a document on its Web site that supports claims that the PC is indeed faster. This development is interesting for two reasons. First, Apple has always used specially written Adobe applications to demonstrate the Mac’s performance claims, so it’s a bit problematic when the creator of those applications basically refutes the information. Second, Apple has actually responded to the claims.
Adobe’s Web site (see the URL below) republished information that first appeared in July 2002–a performance comparison of a then top-of-the line 2.53GHz Dell Precision Workstation versus an equally decked-out dual-processor Power Mac G4 running at 1GHz. The single-processor Dell Precision crushed the Mac in every test; Adobe noted, "While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid. The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate." Today, the fastest PCs feature clock speeds faster than 3GHz, whereas G4-powered Macs have jumped to 1.42GHz.
For years, Apple has been fighting what it calls "The Megahertz Myth." On the company’s Web site, Apple describes its high-end 1.42GHz Power Mac as "32 percent faster than the fastest PC on the market with a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor [when] using nine commonly used actions and filters that stress overall system performance–including processor, memory, system bus, and hard drive–in [Adobe] Photoshop." And this week, Apple responded to the Adobe site specifically. "Apple stands by our claims that our latest Power Mac systems perform equal to or better than competing PC systems," the company wrote in a statement. "The reported tests on Adobe’s Web site showing slower performance of After Effects on a Mac than a PC is more an application test than a platform test and is not indicative of all Pro [nonconsumer] application performance on the Mac." Apple’s claim, apparently, is that the Photoshop tests it touts are somehow more indicative of the performance of all Pro applications than are the After Effects tests that the Adobe site describes.
My experience with both platforms refutes that assumption. After long-term tests with several desktop and notebook Macs, the only area in which I’ve found any Mac to outperform any comparable PC was notebook battery life, and the Centrino chipset, which powers new Wintel-compatible notebooks, recently overcame that advantage. I’m not saying that Macs perform unacceptably for everyday tasks; even my low-end iBook works fine for such tasks as Web browsing, email, DVD playback, and light word processing. But for resource-intensive tasks (e.g., video editing, graphics work), PCs running Windows have long dominated the Mac.
Also, the increasing performance gap between Macs and PCs comes at a tough time for Apple, which is reportedly examining a replacement for the Power PC platform. Apple once touted the RISC-based Power PC as the future of computing, but the Pentium line, in which Intel has incorporated various RISC-like technologies, long ago surpassed the Power PC in performance, blurring the line between CISC and RISC architectures and ending the debate over which is superior. Apple’s choices appear to come down to an IBM advance on the Power PC platform called the Power PC 970 or possibly moving to an Intel-based architecture. Whatever the company chooses, it needs to move quickly; Apple’s market share continues to erode. The company’s high-profile Switch campaign has proven ineffective, and changing platforms is always risky. However, the company pulled off a similar change when it moved to the Power PC platform years ago. You never know, Apple could do it again.
From the December ’99 Wired:
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
As the last days of 1999 tick off and the mother of all bug fixes is in its final hours, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), networking managers, and backbone operators are beginning another heroic netware upgrade: the switch to IPv6.
The Internet Protocol was born in the 1970s, as the Net began spreading beyond Darpa into academia and private-sector R&D labs, and has become standard for routing data. According to Vint Cerf, the Internet – or actually its predecessor, Arpanet – burned through the first three versions of IP back in the early days. Today, most packet headers start with a 4, signifying IPv4, our current standard. The 6 in the header pictured here will replace the 4 as IPv6 is established. (IPv5, now retired, was an experimental protocol.) In 1996 the IETF began testing an IPv6 prototype, called 6BONE, now running on roughly 450 sites in 42 countries. Apple, DEC, IBM, Novell, Sun, and others Yet some, such as Steve Deering, a lead IPv6 designer, believe that old standards die hard, and binary buttresses to IPv4 could keep the current protocol limping along for decades. In the meantime, the IETF has announced a contingency plan – an interim standard called Realm Specific Internet Protocol, which smooths out some of IPv4’s kinks. But RSIP is just a stopgap and has yet to be implemented. The most likely scenario will be a gradual move to IPv6 over the next 5 to 10 years, with both IPv4 and IPv6 (and possibly RSIP) functioning at the same time until machines running the earlier standard fizzle out. |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
Twenty years ago, the Internet’s forebears surely never imagined today’s fat streaming-media files, which is probably why the current protocol peppers real-time multimedia audio and video downloads with snaps, crackles, and pops. IPv6 not only enhances streaming but provides for crystal-clear voice-over-IP.
The traffic class, designated in the first two 0s, is where IPv6 ensures that when the network clogs, routers won’t chop up crucial bits of real-time streams into multiple packets. Instead of receiving the first half of the stream and losing the second half – something you’ve surely experienced when a RealAudio broadcast drops out midsentence – IPv6 gives you the whole stream at one-half quality. That sounds like a drawback, but if you’re using voice-over-IP, it means you can depend on the network to not cut off your phone call during heavy traffic. The remaining five digits represent the flow label, which tags all the packets that belong to a single stream of audio. As streaming data arrives at your PC, IPv6’s flow label and traffic class combine forces: The flow label links all the packets in a stream, and the traffic class tells routers to let the whole bunch pass through at the same time. |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
This is the payload length, which is the size of the packet. Theoretically, in both IPv4 and IPv6, this field allows packets to be as big as 64K. But in practice, most servers are configured to divide data into 1,500-byte chunks so that they can pass through the narrow pipes of Ethernets. There’s no difference between the way IPv4 and IPv6 use this data. |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
These numbers indicate the type of the next header. In IPv6, additional headers may appear between the header dissected here and the payload. These headers allow IPv6 to perform authentication and encryption at the packet level. Security can become ubiquitous – a property of the network, not merely a special mode. IPv6’s authentication will put an end to spoofing, in which hackers dupe secure servers into believing the intruder is someone with authorized access. To authenticate a message, the sending node computes a sum using a secret key. This sum then goes into IPv6’s authentication header. When the packet arrives, IPv6 calculates the sum, then compares the result to make sure it hasn’t been hacked en route.
Currently, encryption – when it’s done at all – happens at the application level: Two techies exchange PGP-encrypted email, for instance. But IPv6’s Encapsulating Security Payload protects personal email against packet sniffing, even for those who don’t use PGP. ESP leaves the header as plaintext and This superstrong security involves a lot of overhead in terms of number crunching. But it creates an almost impenetrable barrier, known as a steel pipe, securely linking corporate firewalls for a lot less money than a virtual private network. |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 2800001 |
Routing errors can bounce packets aimlessly around the Net. To prevent such situations from clogging the backbone, each router subtracts 1 from this number, called the hop limit, every time it handles a packet. If the hop limit reaches 0, the packet expires, and the user may get an error message. The highest hop limit for IPv6 is 255 – the same as for IPv4. Why 255? Each character is equivalent to 4 bits, and 255 is the largest number that, in binary, fits into 8 bits. Sometimes a packet makes a hop along a particularly narrow path. If a packet is too big, the data can still get through, but the whole thing can’t go at once. Just as an oversize supertanker approaching the Panama Canal must disgorge its load into several smaller ships to get everything through, a packet encountering a narrow path has to fragment its data into a number of smaller bundles. In IPv4, this fragmentation occurs whenever a packet reaches a bottleneck. The packet may get broken up several times as it encounters progressively narrower |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
This is the source address, which identifies the sending computer and underlies those familiar domain names, such as wired.com. It’s also where IPv6 has some of its greatest (and most hyped) advantages over the current protocol.
Every networked device has a four-part numerical code, or IP address – the Internet equivalent of a snail-mail address. Whenever you upload a GIF to a Web page or download an email, the binary road map stored in the header carefully guides the bits through cyberspace to their destination. The 32-bit addresses in IPv4 allow for more than 4 billion addresses. This may seem like a lot, but when the Network Information Center doled out addresses in the early 1980s and ’90s, organizations like AT&T and MIT received more than 16 million apiece. Now, as more and more devices hit the market online-ready, IP addresses are becoming scarce. Half the total Since the IETF confronted the problem in 1990, several band-aids (allocating addresses temporarily to computers that only dial into networks via modem, for instance) have fended off crisis. But as we slowly run out of available addresses, smaller networks could be cut off from the backbone abruptly. Home workers who dial in may not be able to get an IP address when they want to log on. The 128-bit header in IPv6 makes for a tremendously expanded range of addresses. If you could fit all the IPv4 addresses in a space the size of a BB, a sphere encompassing all the new IPv6 addresses would easily eclipse the moon. Another benefit is IPv6’s autoconfiguration, which lets computers assign themselves a permanent IP address. IPv4 forces IT managers to assign new IP addresses to every node on the network whenever a company switches ISPs. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) partially automates this task, and Network Address Translators (NAT) can redirect packets to nodes behind To use a telephone analogy, IPv6 eliminates extensions and gives every user their own direct line. However, this also potentially eliminates online anonymity by including in the address space the manufacturer of your PC’s network card and your 48-bit Ethernet address. Privacy groups, of course, are pressing the IETF to revamp the autoconfiguration architecture, as |
60000000 05A0591A 10800000 00000000 00080800 200C417A 00000000 00000000 00000000 12800001 |
The destination address starts with a lot of 0s. That’s because an IPv6 machine is sending this packet to an older computer that still uses the shorter IPv4 addresses.
IPv4 computers will stick around long after most of the world upgrades to the newer protocol, but machines on these networks will need Network Address Translators to talk to the rest of the Net. Otherwise, the older networks – dubbed IPv4 "clouds" – won’t be able to handle the long IPv6 addresses. Even with the help of NATs, IPv4 clouds won’t benefit from IPv6’s The new protocol also lets backbone designers create more expandable hierarchical addressing. Much like the US telephone system, in which three-digit area codes forward long distance calls to local exchanges, IPv6 backbone routers relay packets using a prefix embedded in the destination address, instead of having to revise and store information continually for every network |
1-5 by Andrew Ferguson, 6-30 by past Oredigger Editors
As seen in the March 2002 editition of WIRED
Statistics are based on the most current data availible from the following sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Danger Ahead, by Larry Laudan; Heritage Foundation; IQ comparison tables; Rodrigo de la Jara; National Safety Council US Statstical Abstract; True Odds, by James Walsh.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in; the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
How this works:
Not only does the brain look at the first and last letters of the word, it also looks at the curvature of the words. To see how this works, write out “Misspelled Words” on a piece of paper. Now draw a line above it that fits the contours of the letters. This creates peaks and valleys at specific points that the brain recognizes. Do the same for bottom of the word. If you write out “Mlespslied Wrods” and perform the same action, you will see that the lines are almost exactly the same.
From Wired – July 2004:
The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable – thee speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact,. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. – Adam Rogers
Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger.
Sources: Fire in the Mind: Scien, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institure for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale