painterly - Slashdot User

Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 4, Informative) 407

by blacksmith on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @10:16AM (#44165195) Attached to: NSA Backdoors In Open Source and Open Standards: What Are the Odds?

I believe the s-boxes were provided by the NSA without much comment about them.

You're probably thinking of DES rather than AES with regards NSA provided s-boxes. IIRC said s-boxes in DES were changed by the NSA with no real explanation. Some years later when differential cryptanalysis was discovered in the non-secret world it turned out that the change actually hardened DES against such an attack - so in this case the NSA created a stronger algorithm. See wikipedia.

Comment Re:broadcom soc (Score 2) 181

by blacksmith on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @10:20AM (#38953185) Attached to: First Run of Raspberry Pi Boards To Be Completed Feb 20th

There's a fair amount that's been removed from this datasheet from the full BCM2835 one - all the parts that aren't accessible from the ARM have been taken out. It wasn't that these bits were secret per se, but that it took effort to produce the edited version.

Submission + - Why the Raspberry Pi won't ship in kit form (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:23PM

An anonymous reader writes: The guys at Broadcom have released an image containing the Raspberry Pi SoC and memory chip to help explain why the tiny PC won't ship in kit form. Clearly the chips are so small and the solder blobs required so tiny, 99% of the time you would mess up doing it by hand. Add to that the fact one chip as to sit on top of the other, and if you're a millimeter out your chips are fried.

Video Raspberry Pi $25 Linux Computer Now In Production (Video) 196

Posted by Roblimo on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @08:38AM from the cheap-computing-at-its-finest dept.

Timothy Lord caught up with Raspberry Pi product leader Eben Upton at CES. The long-awaited $25 Linux single-board computers are finally being shipped from the Chinese factory where they're being assembled and will be available for sale in just a few weeks. Eben talks not only about the Raspberry Pi boards and the add-on Gertboard, but about the eBay auction that helped finance Raspberry Pi. Timothy says he considers Eben Upton one of his "personal tech-world heroes." After watching this video, maybe he'll be one of yours, too. Read on below to watch.

Comment Re:12 atoms? Go smaller! (Score 1) 135

by blacksmith on Friday January 13, 2012 @05:52AM (#38683826) Attached to: IBM Shrinks Bit Size To 12 Atoms

I think the word you're looking for is "symbol" rather than "bit". A bit by definition is either 0 or 1.

Comment Re:Real Ale! (Score 1) 840

by blacksmith on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @08:16AM (#36595226) Attached to: With regards to beer, I prefer it to be:

> Pity King & Barnes exist in name only now.

WJ King are run by the same family as the King from King & Barnes. The newish brewer there was at Harvey's until a few months ago.

Comment Re:If you give up the inch, they'll take the mile (Score 1) 901

by blacksmith on Wednesday June 24, 2009 @12:14PM (#28453801) Attached to: NASA Sticking To Imperial Units For Shuttle Replacement

Spirits haven't been sold in fractions of a gill for some time now. They're sold in multiples of some number of ml, although that number varies between bars - 25ml, 35ml and 40ml all seem to get used.

Comment Re:Not much carbon in hops (Score 1) 468

by blacksmith on Thursday April 02, 2009 @07:08AM (#27428153) Attached to: Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet?

Largely right, in that the hops provide hardly any sugars for fermentation. I'd like to correct one point though. The hop flowers are removed after the boil, before the yeast is even added. Spent hops are generally sent to agriculture, so the carbon cycle is continued that way.

Comment Re:Accurate? (Score 1) 373

by blacksmith on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @08:10AM (#17627078) Attached to: The Trouble with Physics

You can't? Why not?

Because the metre is defined in terms of the distance light travels in some fraction of a second. As such, the speed of light in SI units is always going to be fixed.

Comment Change SSN as my license/id number to a random no (Score 1) 976

by painterly on Thursday January 10, 2002 @01:40PM (#2817477) Attached to: Driver's Licenses to Become National ID Cards

In Mass., and apparantly in many other states, the ID no. on the license is ones SS no. In Mass., at least, one has the opportunity to not have their SS no as their drivers licnese no. and instead have a random, state assigned number.

If your a Mass resident go here for more info:
http://www.state.ma.us/rmv/faq/index.htm#license

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