Where is a mod point when I need one? Yes!

No, I just noticed that on my own. Apparently just the sites I tried to get information off of were closed down. http://www.census.gov/ http://www.fs.fed.us/ http://www.nps.gov/ Those were the ones that I tried to use.

Has anyone found a answer to why https://www.healthcare.gov/ is the only US federal government web page that is not shut down?

If we're making a list of things that were innovative about the iPhone that led to its success, why not include these?

d) Industrial design, such as only one prominent button and the iconic white earbuds
e) Marketing, also known as the "reality distortion field"
f) Desktop integration. From a technical standpoint, I just want a media player that acts as a dumb disk so I can drag-and-drop music files. But I continually meet new people who want iTunes as their "media gateway." It started long before the iPhone was released but it was part of the vertical that Apple still dominates.

Um, you should check your facts again.

Gates owns 461,409,025 insider shares.

Total shares at that time: 5,830,212,610.

Couldn't agree more on a lot of what you said there.

That is why the majority no one gives a shit about Microsoft & their products anymore.

Oh, lots of businesses have no other choice. Apple isn't trying to replace Microsoft, though it looks like they're being backed into that corner a little at a time.

Google does some things fair enough, like GMail, but Docs/Drive/whatever it is today has not taken out Office. The fact that LibreOffice is growing so fast means there is a business opportunity to displace Microsoft Office. Not saying that will be easy but LibreOffice is doing it.

Another entire area where Microsoft isn't going away is Accounting (not Finance, those HFT guys are all on Linux).

Somebody stick a fork in it already. Start a business that disrupts it! (Too busy laying fiber to do it myself.)

Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:

• - Listen to users before releasing Win8, not wait until Win8.1 to start "listening"
• - Listen to users when market testing the first run of Surface ads, not wait until reviewers have panned the ads, the product, and the OS, and then start making decent ads
• - Listen to users before forcing UEFI Secure Boot (without an unlock), not wait until there is an uproar to say oops, change the Win8 logo requirements (desktop PCs escape armageddon... for now)
• - Listen to users before forcing always-on connected DRM with the new Xbox, not wait until there is an uproar then take some more things away from their platform
• - News flash! Listen to your shareholders! and get rid of Ballmer (ok, clearly there has not been a full scale shareholder revolt. yet.)
• - Listen to users who are jumping ship for Google and Apple, to see if a more humble Microsoft could win some of them back

Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.

Unfortunately, though Microsoft will toss all that hardware as rubbish, we're stuck with UEFI and there are no market indications it is failing.

Kiss your general purpose PC goodbye. "Post PC World" indeed.

No.

I'll pick RSA 1024-bit public/private key crypto as my example. A 1024-bit key only takes 128 bytes.

Wikipedia says that 1E18 Joules is an absolute minimum for brute-forcing a single AES-128 key. (Unless you can invent an entirely different kind of computer - see quantum computers.) I'll be nice and let you do it at that cost, even though generally that would be considered impossible.

If you can brute-force 128 bits for 1E18 Joules, you only need to repeat that effort twice for each additional bit. (1024-128)*log(2)/log(10)+18 = 287.723. If my calculations are correct, that's 1E287 Joules required to brute force a 1024-bit key. Even if there's a way to speed that up 100 times, 1E285 Joules is more than a googol squared (1E100*1E100) times the total mass-energy of the observable universe.

After you've surrounded the entire universe in some kind of collector and annihilated all matter inside it to power your key-cracker, you'll have cracked just 297 bits!

Now I've hand-waved away a lot of multipliers that would actually affect your choice of implementation but the fact stands: no, the encryption cannot be brute-forced with "enough hardware and time."

Evi has been my closest contact at CU over the years. She was always a good friend and administered the scholarship I set up there. I am very sad but hoping to hear good news from my NZ friends. Evi was a very important person when it comes to Unix and Internet routing.

If you're serious about finding work, try moving to a state that's (mostly) the opposite political persuasion. It's never black and white, so you'll quickly find you have natural allies against the common enemy.

Oh, and quit reading slashdot cold turkey. That's part of your problem.

Re; "article must be a joke" ...

You must be new here.

Now to say something more helpful: good luck getting the vendor to agree to anything. The equipment has been sold, signed, and delivered. Whatever contract was put in place by the CEO over golf, that's what you get to try and work with.

But is it worth turning into a BOFH just to screw the manufacturing guys?

If the problem is really as bad as it sounds, maybe it's time to start looking for another job.

It's good to hear some real-world experiences.

I honestly thought we'd end up focusing on what a "Tat" is, and how big a "Google's Tit" is, this being slashdot and all.

Time to think about college choices...

Maybe we should only buy machines listed on coreboot.org