Do you know why AES-256 is apparently more vulnerable than AES-128? Reading the article, attacks on AES-256 have apparently reduced the search time far more (to 2^119) than they have for AES-128 (which still stands at 2^128). Shouldn't a longer key make the attack more difficult as well because it increases the search space?
I mean... really? I don't even have a lame/wildly inaccurate car analogy to throw at this one, I'm just in awe of how dumb this is.
"If you put petrol in your car, do you expect it to last forever? So why would you expect the music in your Zune to last forever? Just as you need to fill up your car to keep it running, so do you need to fill up your mp3-player to keep listening to music."
I'd wager in 20 years there will be a booming business in wind turbine demolition as it becomes painfully clear, even to many wind power advocates, that their efficiency is lousy and the ongoing maintenance, especially as the turbines age, far larger than inticipated; many will be glad to see the eyesores turn down.
I live in the Netherlands, and I can tell you that windfarms can be turned into a thriving tourist business after a couple of centuries.
So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
That's only 15km from my house! It's quite easy to reach!
Anyway, I notice a rather strong focus on English-speaking countries. Why only five sites in Germany? Why is the Boerhave Museum in Leiden (in the Netherlands) missing (with its fascinating exhibit of the first-ever helium liquification system)?
And why is the Atomium in Brussels there? Talk about a crummy museum...
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it!
The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
True. Of course, there was the small matter of the 120 or so people incinerated in the Nedelin disaster, but they were on the ground.
When I visited the Kennedy Space Center a couple of years ago, they explained that NASA was extremely proud to never have lost an astronaut in space. Apparently, astronauts lost while on their way to space, or coming back from space, or just rehearsing going to space, don't really count...
For the good of this country, we need to concentrate on making sure our best students get the best education. This should be a higher priority than trying to make scientists out of juvenile criminals and bullies. Society doesn't need, and will never get 100% genius-status for all students, anyway. Attempts to make this happen will likely drag us all down.
Whereas society definitely does need smart people. Trying to drag them down by putting them in the same class as the stupid kids only results in endless frustration for them. Worse, as their school days will likely be filled with frustration and bullying, you risk them dropping out of school (or at least, never reaching their potential) as well.
But do you have a plan for those juvenile criminals and bullies? Or are you just going to let them grow into adult criminals and get stacked into the already-overpopulated prisons?
Yes, we can preventively stick them in already-overpopulated prisons before they ever reach adulthood.
Hah, you hadn't thought of -that- now had you?
For all I care Belgium can disintegrate. If wallonia wants to join France, so be it. If Eupen want to join Germany, so be it. If both want to stay independent, so be it. I don't care.
But Flanders will become an independent republic. It would never join the Netherlands. You would have to pry Brussel from our cold dead hands, before we would let it join Wallonia. Or it could go to the EU as the DC capital of europe, which is also fine. Fighting over Brussel costs too much money, and we are a peaceful people anyway. But sending billions of euros to wallonia, while they spit on our culture and threaten our territorial integrity, has to stop.
Bonus point if you guess which side I am from.
Oh, come on! The Netherlands really isn't that bad. We love our southern neighbours, their chocolate, their beer, their friendly demeanor... And you might enjoy our liberal drug-policies and cheap, fast internet. When you join, we will (as a bonus) finally get around to fixing the access to the Antwerp harbor, as well as the railway to Germany that you have been craving for such a long time.
On the other hand, we wouldn't want to share a border with France, so I'm in favor of keeping at least something of a buffer zone...
You make a good point, but it is totally unrealistic. Let me demonstrate where it will fail:
A more realistic approach is to get the best requirements you can, and build enough time into the project to handle 1.5-2 years worth of scope creep because that's what's going to happen with any huge system.
If you overbid by 1.5-2 years, you are sure to be outbid by a competitor who will stick to the "rigid requirements" method. So you will never receive a contract in the first place.
If you try to hardline your users by forcing them into a corner with rigid up front requirements that they cannot possibly help you formulate, they'll simply go outside the company and work with someone who knows how to run a project better and you'll get laid off.
Yes, but if you let the schedule slip those very same users will suddenly remember that you have a contract and force you into a corner with rigid contract stipulations about deadlines. If you want to avoid that, you'd better act first.
Don't forget, "the users" is not a single homogenous group, they are a collection of individuals, each with their own ideas and agenda, about half of which will hate your guts on principle (you mess with their computer, their routine, and their certainty about the future for no good reason they can think of). If you listen to them, they will tug you into a hundred different directions, roughly half of which are on the wrong side of a tall cliff.
I've been doing this for 20 years and I've seen the approach you are talking about fail over and over even with PM's that have 30 years experience. They knew better but corporate policy forced them to operate this way.
They just know that rigid requirements don't work. But do they have an actual alternative? You've apparently chosen to work on failing projects for the last 20 years, that tells me something about how difficult it is to find a project that's managed differently.
Inevitably the requirements were hopelessly incomplete and the users were pissed off when they had to sign off the project as complete because of what they agreed to, and in the end, the product did not meet their needs. The whole idea is to give the users the product they need. So even if you succeed in beating them on paper, and they are forced to sign off complete, you've failed.
Actually, the whole idea is to make money building something to specification. That is (apparently) what you were hired to do. If you don't like it, set up your own company, make your own rules, and fail to get _any_ customers because you are consequently overbidding and customers cannot tell the difference between you and the huge number of penny-pinching nitwits that define the rest of the industry.
Know what happens when you do this to your users? They hire contractors, who will be more flexible and give them what they want, and fire you.
Contractors will either work on a fixed budget, in which case they will either demand fixed requirements or stop working once the budget has run out, or they will work on time and materials basis, in which case they will be happy sitting on your premises and drinking coffee (and the occasional bit of programming) until the sun goes out.
You are better off with a "Look this is a big system and it's going to take a while to get it right. Lets figure out what you think you need now, we'll build it, and use that as a starting point to flesh out your system."
And you really claim to have 20 years of experience? First of all, a lowly peon will never get to sit down with the people who make the decisions and have this sort of talk with them. If you somehow managed to do it anyway, they will smile and say that they cannot budget for an open-ended development project (which is what you are proposing), so they are just going to go with a fixed set of requirements and the associated fixed budget.
XP for the win for corporate development, Waterfall = FAIL. Waterfall can only succeed if you are a software company building a boxed static product produced by someone that knows what they want.
XP = lack of organisation = lack of milestones = lack of deadlines = lack of ability to budget = fail.
At the end of the day a large corporate software project will take 10x longer than you think it will. I've never seen one that didn't. I've seen plenty that failed. Plan accordingly.
You essentially propose to do software development on a time and materials basis. Good luck finding any customers that will write you a blank cheque like that...
Give em the newest rpg(or jrpg grinder if you like). Make the story and game so it updates their world with earth's servers on par with the delays and there you go.
Next thing you know they wouldn't want to leave the ship.
Or if rts is their fancy
RTS?
Look, I need to explain something to you. Colonies have this way of becoming independent, in the end, and we should _not_ be training to think of conquest as their most important hobby for when that time comes.
They can have a copy of Animal Crossing if they want.
Just because we're used to greater graphics now doesn't mean the gameplay is shit and only great gameplay is in 2D ASCII games we're you have to have good imagination to go with things.
Yeah, I *totally* said that... (rolls eyes)
To avoid troll-mods, next time try responding to what I actually said.
In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.
I'd argue that there are still innovative games around, but most are derivate crap. In that sense nothing has changed from the good ol' days of 8- and 16-bit. What has changed, however, is that games are now more locked into specific presentation formats: everything has to be 3D, and abstract graphics have just about died out. In some ways, this limits what can be done (some gameplay mechanics depend on 2D or fake-3D presentation). We've lost some of the richness of the early game landscape because of that, I think.
Because it was just a first person shooter! It was advertized as so much more... In SS2 you have freedom of movement (Bioshock is on rails), you get to make some real choices about how to approach the game (and it matters greatly for gameplay), and it has some fantastic storytelling (of which Bioshock is a pale ripoff).
I've not played System Shock 2
Well, that's your problem right there. Shame it is so hard to find, it is well worth playing, even today.
Bioshock was not that good of a game. It removed the best parts of System Shock, consolised the gameplay and removed any challenge to the player.
Bioshock had no replay value as both choices you could have made led to exactly the same ending. There was no need to ever alter your style of play as you could carry every weapon and every power in the game at once and there were two or three over powered attacks which made it pointless to use anything else, not that it mattered as you simply just couldn't die no matter what you did. 2K completely removed any RPG elements and dumbed down the FPS elements in order to make the game accessable to consoles. If Bioshock 1 is any indication on how Bioshock 2 will turn out I'm not holding my breath for it.
I have to agree with that. Choices in a game can be meaningful if they impact the game, somehow. But ending movies? Do they really think I'm going to play through the entire game again just to see a different 30 seconds of badly rendered movie?
Meaningful choices could include keeping one weapon and dropping another, but as you say, you can carry everything with you all the time. Replay value could also have been increased by experimenting with different powers, but again, you can already do that on your first playthrough so why bother?
Ultimately Bioshock was not a bad game, but it was not a successor to System Shock in any way. Instead it was a highly polished, very pretty Doom-clone. And since I've had enough of those by now, I won't be shelling out for part 2.
So, what's going on here? Are the file formats used to store this data *that* bloated?
<genome species="human">...
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton
