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Other viruses

Obligatory Usenet Oracle

Whitespace and brainfuck are too damn elegant.Give me a properly obfuscated language like Intercal.

http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/intercal.html

Oh no, the Imperial seems to be winning! Let's see can Metric match that, I very much doubt it.

A: "10 gram bullet travelling 1km/s has same momentum as 100kg man travelling 0.1m/s".

http://ofb.net/~jlm/oracle/oracle.365.10

Sorry :-)

Interestingly, he could have used the "Magic 8-Ball" to increase the strength of his encryption. I'm not sure how, but it would be funny.

I was looking through some raid articles and found this.
http://www.ofb.net/~jheiss/raid10/
It explains how 1+0 is better than 0+1 either way..ROACHES HATE RAID!!
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... sorry, had to throw in the corny bug joke.

There seem to be a lot of comments claiming you will need lots of batteries. I've found while travelling that two sets of rechargable batteries (whatever was in my camera and one fully charged spare) was always more than enough. I'm assuming the village you'll be in has electricity -- that's usually the first available utility in Chinese villages. You might consider picking up some kind of voltage regulator from a bigger city before you get there. They aren't that great, but they're better than nothing for electronics.

Software

I've used GRASS, while trying to construct a map of the touristy "ancient city" here in Xianggelila, Yunnan, China. It does reasonably well and, though it tends to crash a lot with large sets of data, it's ok for doing transformations on your data. The time consuming part (which I haven't done for my map yet as you can tell) is to take a bunch of points of interest and convert them into vectors for the left and right side of each road. That's a process that needs to be done manually and probably will involve a lot of fudging. I haven't found anything exactly suitable yet, so I might eventually end up using some vector drawing program to do that.

Accuracy

If you get a consumer grade GPS, it's not going to be that accurate. Probably around 10m. It's good enough to do larger scale maps, but if you're trying to map out a small village, you should probably take your readings all in the same day. That way, at least the points will be pretty accurate with respect to each other, even if they're all 10m east of where they should be. If you take readings on separate days, the changes in the atmosphere will give you different errors each day.

It's viruses.

Viruses

Lot's of software isn't sold in the first place.

Quite a lot of people play games that are >12 months old. Breaking them isn't an option: they simply won't apply any more security updates from that point forward.

Welcome to the real world. I've already dealt with several in various test Linux migrations. One of them was written by a company that doesn't appear on Google and is apparently bust anyway. Actually this app was a Windows 3.1 program, from even earlier.

Linux is pretty much a textbook case of how not to maintain backwards compatibility. It's a serious problem. Some vendors are telling the LSB they won't start porting their apps to Linux until it becomes more stable (C++ in particular is an issue).

Due to the projects I'm involved with, I deal with the lack of stability on Linux all the time, and I can tell you it's one seriously fucked platform from that perspective. I've seen more than one open source developer get up and walk away (back to Windows) because the stuff they wrote simply didn't keep working.

It's easy to talk about source code escrow now. Too late, it's already happened. On a large scale. Deal with it.

That's why you don't work for Microsoft, and therefore have no say in the matter. You don't sell many operating systems by telling your customers that they're screwed but it's OK because "that's business, it's harsh". People will just tell you to fuck off, and they will give their money to people who care about their software investments (like Microsoft).

Here's a clear and concise explanation, with pictures.

With a striped pair of mirrors, a total failure happens only if both drives in one of the mirrors fail; there are two ways this can happen.

With a mirrored pair of stripes, a total failure happens whenever any two drives in different stripes fail; there are four ways this can happen.

In both cases, there are (4 2) = 6 pairs of drives that can fail. Given that two drives have failed, there's a 2/6 = 33% chance that the RAID 1+0 will fail, but a 4/6 = 67% chance that the RAID 0+1 will fail.

Ok, I know this is nitpicking but I have to say this: The plural of "virus" is "viruses" not "virii". If you don't believe me, check your Oxford English Dictionary.
Also, you can find more information from this webpage that has an analysis of those ignorant minds who use a words like "virii": Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing, but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

Well, I was half right. "Viruses" is in fact good English. You are correct that "virii" is not good Latin, and I thank you for calling my attention to it. A quick Google search discovered the following comprehensive discussion on the subject:

What's the Plural of Virus?"

I'm not sure if the 8 ball is trying to tell you to avoid Iraq or stop using Microsoft Outlook. Either is sound advice in my opinion. ;)

now, IANAL, but I think that this Dissection of a magic 8-ball may be a violation of the DMCA. The information within has clearly been used to illegally modify the magic 8-ball to serve a new sinister purpose, which is a clear violation of the Patriot Act (they may be used to carry hidden subversive messages for terrorists). Please turn yourself in to the relevant authorities at once.

Have a nice day

now, IANAL, but I think that this Dissection of a magic 8-ball may be a violation of the DMCA. The information within has clearly been used to illegally modify the magic 8-ball to serve a new sinister purpose, which is a clear violation of the Patriot Act (they may be used to carry hidden subversive messages for terrorists). Please turn yourself in to the relevant authorities at once.

Have a nice day

Well there goes the Patent Offices' investment in 3000 Magic 8-Balls...

(Check out this cool little ROT13 program written in INTERCAL)

Perhaps you would be more comfortable with Intercal or Brainf*ck?

1. Food prepared at central plant, loaded on robot-driven trucks.
2. Trucks drive to special robot truck loading dock, robot vendomat forklift takes cargo, goes to back of vendomat on specialized tracks, and sorts cargo into cubicles
3. People pay in front of vendomat and eat food like they do now

The thing is, robots can only automate so much. Even with the "human-style brain" there will have to be some system of self-repair on par with a human. Think about it, if you are at work, and you cut your finger, you go "ow," slap on a band-aid, and go on with your work. A robot has to be pretty sophisticated to do that. They lose a wire, anything could happen. Sure, they got have a team of robots fixing robots, but the cost involved would seriously outweight a human doing the same job.

I also see a lot of Union complications if we end up in an android-like situtaion. It may not be preventable from immigrants "taking all the jobs" (I won't go there, but being an American who was not born here, I am very pro-immigrant), but preventable created robot "people" would certainly be stopped. You'd have to think about the arguments that would be created:

1. Is it REALLY cheaper to create a robot mass working force?
2. Why create it if a human can do the same job?
3. When enough people are out of work, who will buy the goods the robots create?

As par of a long term strategy, "robots run everything" will be scrutinized by lawmakers.

An SMTP replacement that verified - at least - that the domain of the sender was correct - would cut down on spam tremendously. Virually all spam I get has forged headers and invalid reply addresses.

It's already been done: RFC 3207. It's an extentsion to SMTP: STARTTLS allows the use of SSL certificates to encrypt email and authenticate SMTP servers/clients.

It's backwards compatible, and many sites already use it (my company).

Sendmail supports it, as do many other SMTP servers with a simple compile-time option. Highly recommended.

From the site itself...

by Joshua Schachter, joshua-geourl@burri.to.
inspired by Dan Egnor's Geocoder.

as in "Daniel Egnor - Project title: Geographic Search" from the link you provided to Google...

It should indeed look like the idea from the Google contest. Here's the last line on Google's cached version of GeoURL:

inspired by Dan Egnor's Geocoder.

But this is probably Adaptec's fault, since they label RAID 1+0 and RAID 0+1 opposite from standard convention.

I connect different power supply lines to each of the mirrors' halves, so that one half of each mirror is powered by one line, and the other half is supplied by another line.

If a power supply fails only partially, it usually does so on one of the peripheral power lines. With the right power supply wiring, and the 2400A set up in RAID 1+0 mode, a power supply failure will not usually result in any lost data, since it will be isolated to one half of each mirror.

Power supplies have been failing on me more often than drives have lately, even when they are used well within their rated limits.

Don't power both drives of a mirror with the same peripheral power cable!!! On many power suppplies, those separate peripheral power connector lines are on separate circuits, which means one may fail while the other doesn't. It's best to spread the chances of failure out as evenly as possible across the RAID.

Two-channel IDE RAID cannot support RAID 1+0, only RAID 0+1. Four IDE channels are necessary for RAID 1+0 to be effective, because if one drive fails in a two-channel configuration, the other drive sharing the same channel can stop working too, especially if the failing drive was the master.

Adaptec also offers open-source drivers for the 2400A, while the article neglects to mention that, and in doing so implies that only 3ware and HighPoint do.

Also, the article's table has read/write speeds of the Promise FastTrak shown backwards (133 vs 100).

Nonethless, the article's comments about the 2400A's slow rebuild time are accurate. It takes around 8 hours to rebuild my 120 GB 1+0 RAID (four 60 GB 7200 RPM drives).

And keep in mind that the 2400A is a SCSI RAID solution retrofitted onto an IDE interface -- some of the 2400A's firmware is shared with Adaptec's SCSI RAID firmware. So the 2400A is not really built or optimized for IDE from the ground up.

But if you need RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 data protection, and you have 4 inexpensive IDE drives to use, the 2400A is nice. It's twice saved me from losing any data. Don't expect blazing-fast performance, though -- just consistently good performance, very low CPU usage, and very strong reliability.

Danger! Danger! RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 is different, and the MTBF is drastically worse for 10 (the standard version included on the controllers) due to the way it's handled... think about it for a few moments:

RAID 1+0 (or 10) (mirroring plus striping) gives you a chance that if one drive dies, you still have a fully functioning side of the mirror on the other disk.
RAID 0+1 (striping plus mirroring) gives you a chance that if one drive dies, half of the mirror dies immediately.

Thus, if you lose a drive in the other half for 10, your stripe set continues with one (non-mirrored) disk on each side. But if you lose a drive in the other half for 0+1, your mirror set fails completely since both sides are missing half of the stripes... bang! you're dead.

Check out a more detailed writeup that we consulted when debating this for a client...

PBD has the potential to make computers easier to use by allowing any user to automate repetitive tasks simply by demonstrating the task on concrete examples.

(hi tessa!) nick

Here is a article on TechTV's site concerning Google's programming contest winner. Hey look I found the /. thread concerning the contest. I can't find the original thread, but I am sure someone out there started one.

I would imagine that if they awarded this guy $10,000 plus expenses for his trip out to visit them, that they would have serious thoughts about adding this feature to their website.

I wonder why Mr. Dan Egnor decided to release all his source code for this project under the GNU liscene when google is paying him all this money to essentially act as a consultant for them.

I wonder how long it takes for the other search engines to integrate this source code into their engines. Is this Teoma Google's closest competitor? They have the Teoma search bar and their site seems to be reasonably fast.

I certainly see no reason to switch.

Oh and by the way the Google Toolbar has been updated apparently since (6/7/02) if you haven't downloaded it since then you might want to check it out again. I think they added some new buttons.

"The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee ."
"My code is available to the public under the terms of the GNU Public License."

No wonder he got fired!

They tend to be the epitome of quality software.

I guess you haven't read Egnor's resume, especially the Excel notes. From his experiences, it sounds like the times Microsoft does make well-designed software, it has difficulty getting released, while the buggy crap tends to make it out the door.

They tend to be the epitome of quality software.

I guess you haven't read Egnor's resume, especially the Excel notes. From his experiences, it sounds like the times Microsoft does make well-designed software, it has difficulty getting released, while the buggy crap tends to make it out the door.

For more details about how Daniel's entry works, you can view the README, or even just read the source for yourself.

For more details about how Daniel's entry works, you can view the README, or even just read the source for yourself.

I've met Dan Egnor, and this isn't the only cool thing he's done. He's the author of Iocaine powder, the world champion rock-paper-scissors program. He's also the proprieter of sweetcode a web log devoted to innovative open source projects (i.e. projects that don't just clone or tweak existing software.) But his best hack (not described on line, as far as I know) is a version of Pac Man that runs on a PDA and uses a GPS for a user interface -- if you run around an open field carrying the GPS+PDA, the pacman correspondingly runs around the maze chasing Blinky, Stinky and Dinky (or whatever their names are.)

In a weird coincidence, I just spent a half-hour last night lecturing about Daniel Egnor's Iocaine Powder , winner of the First International RoShamBo Programming Competition. Credit this guy with two award-winning pieces of extreme programming cleverness!

What was failed to mention from his resume:
Miscellaneous Projects

1995 - ongoing: Free Software

I wrote and maintain Gale30, an open source instant messaging system. Other free software projects of mine include Airhook, Liboop, and some XML processing tools.

2001 - ongoing: Sweetcode

I am the sole proprietor of Sweetcode, a web site that reports interesting free software. Sweetcode receives thousands of visitors daily; media reports include NTK, memepool, the Linux Weekly News, and others.

2000 - ongoing: SeattleWireless

I maintain the Node Map, a simple XML-based GIS which uses public mapping engines to display the location of community 802.11b wireless nodes in Seattle.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

There was a Slashdot article some time ago (which I couldn't find) that referred to a Magic 8-Ball disection.

The Magic 8-Ball technology is similar to "electronic paper" - the ball is filled with an oily blue/black fluid, and contains a plastic icosahedron (polyhedron with 20 triangular sides.) The message appears when the plastic icosahedron floats to the top and a side (usually) presses against the "window" to reveal the message.

In "electronic paper", an electric charge controls the display instead of gravity; I suspect gravity may cause the image to fade over time as it pulls the microcapsules back to the inky depths.

Why hasn't anyone else picked up on this? The thumbnail versions of the diagrams explaining anti-aliasing were created using subsampling, and as a result look absolutely horrible. This is really bad design under any circumstances, and absolutely inexcusable in this context!

In case you missed it, the bad-looking thumbnail images are here and here.

I have put properly anti-aliased versions of the same images here and here. (Isn't that much, much better?) These were created with 'pnmscale', a free (speech, beer, and everything else) tool that has been around for a decade now.

Why hasn't anyone else picked up on this? The thumbnail versions of the diagrams explaining anti-aliasing were created using subsampling, and as a result look absolutely horrible. This is really bad design under any circumstances, and absolutely inexcusable in this context!

In case you missed it, the bad-looking thumbnail images are here and here.

I have put properly anti-aliased versions of the same images here and here. (Isn't that much, much better?) These were created with 'pnmscale', a free (speech, beer, and everything else) tool that has been around for a decade now.

Having such a limited background in math, it's just this sort of walkthrough that hosers like myself need. The kicker, as is always the case, is that it's so fucking simple once you see what is being implemented and how successful it is.

Thanks for the information, egnor!
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com

My submission, Iocaine Powder, won last year's competition. Follow the link to see a complete description of how it works. The competition results from last year describe some of the other strategies that did well (and some that did not-so-well).

This competition is more complex than it seems; not only are there deliberate "dumb robots", but many of the real entries are quite predictable. A random player wouldn't have made it close to winning, and stalemates were rare.

What does this year hold in store? We'll just have to see!