... /: / ___ / .' `. | . | `.___.'
Mars is large multinational which produces various foods, pet products, and electronics.
Some of their most famous products are: Mars, Snickers, M&M, Milky Way, Sheba, and Uncle Ben's.
Frank C. Mars and his wife started with the production of snackfood in Tacoma, Washington in 1911. In 1932 Forrest E. Mars expanded the business to the United Kingdom, and started investing in pet products.
In 1940 they founded M&M limited in Newark, New Jersey. In the 1970's Mars Electronics created the first coin recognition systems.
A block cipher and AES candidate brought to you by IBM, based in part on the legacy of DES.
A movement from Gustav Holst's orchestral Planets Suite, subtitled Bringer of War. It features a lot of brass and it kicks butt. This is a favorite for large brass group arrangements.
Also, MARS is the virtual computer system that runs Redcode in the classic game Corewars.
Oh, and let's not forget the pulp fiction novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
If you speak to people from Marseille, they will proclaim that they are not French, but Marseillais.
At aphelion Mars is at a distance of 249,200,000 km from the sun. Perihelion is at 206,600,000 km. This is a much more eccentric (0.09) orbit than that of Earth which has a nearly perfect circular orbit (only 0.01 eccentricity - 0.00 is a perfect circle). The length of a Martin day is 24.622962 hours, a Martian year is 686.98 earth days or 667.76 Martian days.
The effect of this eccentricity is that the seasons are very uneven in length. Northern spring lasts 371 Martian days (more than half the Martian year), and summer solstice (separating spring from summer) occurs significantly later than halfway between spring and fall. The result of this is that the southern summer is short and warm while the northern summer is long and cool. This also creates differences in the composition of the polar caps. The southern cap is formed in the southern winter which is long and cold and is thought to be mostly dry ice. The northern polar cap is formed in the northern winter which is much warmer and thus would be made of water ice.
At an mean distance of 1.52 AU from the sun, this means that the planet gets much less sunlight. Earth receives 1370 watts/m2 while Mars receives only 445 watts/m2. This is known as the solar constant. This combined with the elliptical orbit results in large temperature fluctuations. The lowest temperature recorded was in northern hemisphere winter -124 C. The highest recorded temperature was -31 C. It is believed that temperatures may get as high as 20 C at the equator and -140 C at the poles.
The atmosphere of Mars has a mean pressure of 7 millibars (atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth is 1 about bar or 1000 millibars) and is primarily composed of CO2 (95.3%), N2 (2.7%), Ar (1.6%), and trace O2 (0.15%) and H2O (0.03%). At the deepest basin this goes up to 9 millibars, while the top of Olympus Mons is only 1 millibar. This atmosphere provides very little greenhouse effect and only raises the surface temperature about 7 degrees.
The total land surface area of Mars is about the same as that the land surface area of Earth. Of notable interest
Mars was first successfuly visited in 1965 by the Mariner 4 spacecraft. Mars 2 was the first spacecraft to land on Mars, which was followed by the Viking landers in 1976. Twenty years later, Mars Pathfinder landed on July 4, 1997.
All missions are American unless otherwise mentioned.
There is evidence that at one time, Mars had running water on the surface. This would have required a much thicker atmosphere. Some even theorize that life could have evolved on Mars first because it cooled off earlier due to its small size. This life would then have been ejected into space on a meteorite that could have fallen on Earth.
©Mahogany Pictures, 1996
Runtime 87 minutes.
Blurb Information:
Powerhouse action hero OLIVER GRUNNER (who's building a list of video hits that includes SAVAGE and NEMESIS) stars in the new sci-fi thriller MARS
Grunner plays an Inter-Galactic Cop who is drawn into a web of corruption on the lawless Mars colony, when he arrives to investigate a distress call received from his brother. In the tradition of TOTAL RECALL, MARS is an action-packed story set in the not too distant future.
I bet you're glad you asked...
Mars n.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10-compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
Mars was the son Jupiter (Zeus) and Juno (Hera). Both of them supposedly hated their son. His sister is Eris (Discord), and his nephew is Strife. He walks with Bellona (Enyo), the goddess of war. She brings with her Terror, Trembling, and Panic. Where ever they walk, groans are heard, and blood streams arise.
Romans liked the god Mars more than the Greeks liked Ares, his Greek counter-part. There are many differences between the Greek god of war and the Roman god of war. In Greek, Ares is a whining and uncaring deity, but in Roman mythology, Mars is a brave and wonderful warrior. There were however, no special cities where mars was worshipped and he was vaguely said to come from Thrace.
There is a story where Mars had an affair with Venus (Aphrodite), but was shamed and brought to justice by her husband, Vulcan (Hephaestus). His animal is a vulture, and the other animal is a dog. This lead to the saying, "Let loose the dogs of war."
MARS is a pretty interesting block cipher designed by a team at IBM, and submitted to the AES contest. It made it to the final group of 5 (out of the original 15), and, in the final vote, ended up taking 4th (just ahead of RC6). Like the other AES candidates, MARS encrypts a 128-bit block under the control of a 128, 192, or 256 bit key. For whatever reason, MARS has far more designers than any of the other AES submissions - 11 people! Included among these is Don Coppersmith, who has been around for ages, and worked on (among other things), the original DES design. And, by the way, no, I don't know why the name is all capital letters, as it is not an acronym as far as I can tell. But the original papers and design specs all use all-caps, so who am I to argue?
MARS uses a lot of different tricks - large(ish) random S-boxes, data dependent rotations, and multiplication, along with the more usual stuff (addition, subtraction, XOR, and fixed rotations). It also has a very interesting structural design, which is to split the cipher into three layers - first an unkeyed mixing layer, then the 'cryptographic core', and then another mixing layer. Whitening is used immediately before the first mixing and after the final mixing, so the operations can't just be stripped off by the cryptanalyst. The idea being that before someone could even look at attacking the inner core, they would have to break the mixing layers - and then they are still stuck trying to attack the inner core, which is by all accounts quite strong.
The disadvantage to MARS comes from the extra complexity of this multi-layered design. MARS is a serious hog in hardware, because its random S-boxes are basically impossible to implement in gates. Thus, one would have to use ROM, with all the extra complexity that involves. In addition, 32-bit multiplications and 32-bit general rotations take up a lot of resources. Now, in the end, we're not talking about much regardless - a few tens of thousands of extra gates is not going to mean much in cost, size, or heat. But since AES will be used in (pretty much) everything, including very low-end stuff, for the next 15-25 years, the smaller and cheaper in hardware, the better off everyone is.
And it is not that much fun in software, either. In particular, the cryptographic core likes to multiply some of it's inputs with key words. To prevent the use of 'bad' key words, which will interact poorly with the multiplication (values like 0, 1, powers of two, etc), MARS defines a special test for each key word, and this test is really tricky to do. You have to create a 'mask', where the bits of the mask are 1 iff the corresponding bit of the key word is part of a run of 0s or 1s that is 11 bits long or longer. Sorry, I know that's hard to parse, but that is as simple as I know how to phrase it. You have to have some serious bit bashing skillz to be able to see how to do it. And of course a 32-bit multiply is not easy on an 8-bit smartcard (this also worked against RC6).
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun (Earth is the third), and is well-known as a setting for science-fiction stories.
Space missions to Mars have so far all been automated due to the difficulties of sending humans to the red planet. The Viking landers of 1976 and 1980 were among the first to search for life, and the Pathfinder mission of 1997 began the use of remote-controlled rovers, currently embodied in the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, who landed in 2004 and continue their explorations today. One of the main themes of their current mission has been the search for evidence of past or present flowing water on Mars, and this search has been boosted by images from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express missions.
The geography of Mars (sometimes known as areography) includes the spectacular highlights of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, and the Valles Marineris, a network of canyons which dwarves the Grand Canyon on Earth. The Hellas Planitia impact basin dominates the topography of Mars' southern hemisphere, and prominent ice-caps are visible at both north and south poles. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos.
The depiction of Mars in mythology and popular culture has led to its name being borrowed frequently, notably in the confectionery bar and company of the same name. Here is a selection of E2 nodes related to Mars in one way or another:
Mars (?), n. [L. Mars, gen. Martis, archaic Mavors, gen. Mavortis.]
1. Rom. Myth.
The god of war and husbandry.
2. Astron.
One of the planets of the solar system, the fourth in order from the sun, or the next beyond the earth, having a diameter of about 4,200 miles, a period of 687 days, and a mean distance of 141,000,000 miles. It is conspicuous for the redness of its light.
3. Alchemy
The metallic element iron, the symbol of which ♂ was the same as that of the planet Mars.
Chaucer.
Mars brown, a bright, somewhat yellowish, brown.
© Webster 1913.
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