Get this: a new largest prime number had recently been "discovered".
Though I don't recommend you try to note it because it would take you three
weeks to jot down the 4,053,946 digits by hand. So do you want to know what
the number is? Do you have the bandwidth? In a text file it would weigh 32Mb.
So, here it is in zip format: 213,466,917 - 1.
The number was discovered by a guy at GIMPS
(Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search). One of 130,000 participants doing
the work of a single PC running for 130,000 years. Where in the world would
such a number be used?
I've just had the busiest two weeks for a long time. I've had
to make two websites for my sister, take five exams and play Freedom Force which
didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. If only they had used a control system
similar to Vampire, things would have been a lot better.
Also, the old Delta skins, Neo™ and Rust™, are back!
The layout is different, what with having a different site structure and all.
Otherwise, Neo™ hasn't changed much. Rust™ on the other hand received
a complete overhaul including a new, old Rusty™ logo!
DES or the Data Encryption Standard has been in use by banks
and private individuals for decads.
But in 1997, a new encryption system was sought and 15 parties
answered the call and were weeded down to just five in 1999.
And now, The US Secretary of Commerce announced
the release of AES or the Advanced
Encryption Standard as the solution for encrypting non-classified
material (Which means that someone, somewhere can crack it,
given time and some serious hardware).
The new system uses the Rijndael encryption formula developed
by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen and it supports a key of
up to 256 bits.
Of course, you would need permission-level access to Combine_Key_Parts
and for that, you need a banker. But considering that 82%
of all bank fraud is done by bankers, it shouldn't be all
that hard.
This didn't exactly happen yesterday, but I've got a few
nice web items that I don't want to waste and I'm kind of
lagging behind. Just a few more of these posts, then I'll
will be talking about things that happened yesterday, or failing
that, this year.
Anyway, here is something only a true geek could appreciate.
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC)
celebrated their 20th anniversary by hooking lamps behind
windows in an eight story building, in effect, creating a
huge 8x18 pixel display.
The display can even be controlled by cellphones. Maybe even
have a quick game of pong on the side of the building.
Kazaa
is the best P2P application to date. And for those of us who
live in the gulf, it is also inaccessible. For some reason,
port 1214 is being blocked and I doubt that they had Kazaa
on their minds when they did it.
So one thing to do is use an HTTP tunneler, like ... well
... HTTP-Tunnel.
The site has specific instructions on how to use it with Kazaa,
although they advise you to download a bogus version called
Kazaa Lite. But don't pay attention to that, it works just
as well with the official version.
The only problem is that if you don't register HTTP-Tunnel,
you only get about 1K/s of bandwidth. So don't expect to download
any DivX movies. Just stick with MP3s and you'll be fine.
The default Explorer scrollbar looks ugly next to the CarbonV
skin so I added a CSS scrollbar to it. I think I'll leave PlatinumV as is. Dunno
about Shore though... ahh ... it looks fine, forget it.
Some people have have been using the net for a while and they
don't have a clue about what is really is.
My sister wants my help to design this project site she's making
for school, and the links and headers she gave me read like a book.
I had to explain site maps and cascading categories to her and
spend two hours going through the DOC file she gave me, cutting and pasting
paragraphs and trying to turn unrelated articles into a coherent whole.
Of course, I'm just writing this here coz I realized that I haven't
updated the site for a few days!
I doubt I'll be drawing anything and since I can't record any
songs, the only thing I've got is my keyboard. I haven't even publicized the
site yet. And I won't until I have something to show for it.
The Launch of Windows XP marked the demise of MS-DOS. It
was put to sleep on Oct. 25 when Bill Gates typed "exit"
at the DOS prompt when WinXP was launched.
The good people of Byte
took it as their duty to write our lost friend's obituary,
since the magazine has been intimately involved with DOS throughout
it's growth.
This isn't exactly breaking news. The Nimda
worm has been out for a while now, wrecking
havoc with net bandwidth.
What makes this particular worm disturbing is that it can
infect a machine when the email it came with is viewed in
the preview pane of Outlook and Outlook Express. So even if
your smart enough not to run the file labeled Readme.exe (sheesh!)
you're still infected.
Naturally the best thing to do is just let Norton Antivirus
pre-scan all of your messages without bothering you. Ditto
auto update.
