jmdjmd - Slashdot User

Comment Old hat (Score 1) 867

by jmdjmd on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @06:58PM (#41470775) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order?

Red Hat (before it became Fedora) -> SUSE -> Gentoo (happy with it)

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final 145

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @11:34AM from the onwards-and-upwards dept.

CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."

Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express Numbers 482

Posted by kdawson on Monday July 14, 2008 @08:08AM from the how-many-fingers dept.

In 2004 we discussed the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon, when a study appeared characterizing their language as a "one, two, many" language. Now reader mu22le informs us of a new study of the Piraha pointing to the possibility that they use no number words at all. Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4. The language has about 300 native speakers. "The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."

Comment Re:Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem... (Score 1) 205

by jmdjmd on Thursday July 29, 2004 @02:26PM (#9834519) Attached to: NIST Proposes Abandoning DES

Elliptic curve systems are way slower than AES (or DES). Also, the two are very different animals. AES and DES are symmetric ciphers, which means that the sender and receiver each need the same, secret key. On the other hand, elliptic curve systems (like RSA) are asymmetric (or public key) ciphers, which means that only the receiver's (private) key needs to be kept secret. The sender's key can be made public, hence the name ;-). The big disadvantage of public key ciphers are their relative slowness.

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