I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
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Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#12> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight).
What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#13For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
> For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today?
They would wonder why the student went through all that trouble instead of getting time on our HPC cluster.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#14For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
> For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? They would wonder why the student went through all that trouble instead of getting time on our HPC cluster.
Not even that. You can reach those kinds of levels with a GPU these days (and GPU programming is sufficiently obscure that most people won't even attempt to go that route).
Though... with the whole GPU shortage going on right now, maybe it'd be easier to steal computer time from someone else's lab right now!!
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#15I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
When I was in college, we would set the process name of the MUD client to whatever WordPerfect used on the VAX so we wouldn't get busted for playing games during non-gaming hours. Of course the sysadmins saw right through the charade, but it was fun to feel like you were getting away with something for half a minute.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#16For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
Some universities provide distributed computing resources.
Example: https://www.psc.edu/resources/allocations/
A primary mission of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is to train students, including undergraduates, in high performance computing. To this end, PSC offers Coursework allocations which are grants of free supercomputing time to supplement other teaching tools.
Typically, Coursework allocations have been used in heavily quantitative subjects, such as numerical methods, computational fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry. But we encourage all fields, including the social sciences and humanities, to take advantage of Coursework allocations.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#17I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
We had this StudeNT Vista thing and yeah it was so much fun finding exploits.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#18> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight). What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?
Or on a single modern smartphone?
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#19I'd like to clarify that my code was running only on machines that were otherwise idle. Not many people were in the lab late in the evenings. MPQS processing nodes could be added and removed dynamically, so if somebody needed a computer that was part of my cluster, they could just quit my program and everything would go back to normal.
Also, once the number theory professor learned of what I had implemented, he worked out an agreement with the lab manager to give me legitimate access to the machines. :)
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#20Apart from using hacking to overcome imposed limitations such as these, I am amazed by the number of times I had to use my chops to overcome what was simply a bug. Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it.
I was very... surprised when I managed to productively use "javascript:(some code)" in the URL bar of the browser of my phone once when I was stuck in the airport probably like 10 years ago and needed to do something that just wasn't working normally. Now that we're used to smart phones it probably sounds quite basic but it was absolutely weird back then.