At least you don't have to be alone! I also noticed the beautifully correct apostrophe usage, and it's made my day just a little bit better. Data geek that I am, language is very important to me.
Instant messaging doesn't have to pop up. You can ask it to stay in the background, and similarly train people not to consider instant messaging to be 'instant'. This has worked for me, although new people that I talk to don't always catch on very quickly. (by the way, I do this with 'gaim' - keep one conversation window for all conversations (tabbed), and don't let it steal focus.)
[soapbox] I'm developing an interesting application that will help mitigate the interruption affect by changing the way your interface works. Related information to whatever you are doing will always be available but discrete (optionally hidden beneath a single mouseclick). Temporal (important 'now', like scheduled tasks or urgent messages, or the notification that it's time to eat again) information will be optionally hidden but preferably visible and discrete - taking up a small amount of screen resources.
The interface also works to minimize distractions in other ways by removing pieces of applications that you rarely use, like the menu buttons, and putting them away "underneath" the screen. It is possible to do this to all the applications that you use, by using unconventional programming practices (specifically, code insertion and replacement, as used by viruses but for a non-malignant cause).
Oh yeah, it only runs on linux, but should run on any linux, with any graphical linux program. [/soapbox]
Apparently they've been working on it since 1998. A similar discussion may have been had at the Toyota PR section 7 years ago, but at least they committed to it.
Anyway if they're all about making money, and they found a way to make money AND do something good for the environment, good for them! (and us)
It has recently come to Our notice that iDownload(hereafter referred to as the 'Bastard') has been sending unsolicited notices to Our Unnamed Constituents(hereafter referred to as the 'heavenly spirit') containing prayers of 'cease and desist'.
These notices will be ignored by the Heavenly Spirit, who advises the Bastard to cease and desist the machiavellian intimidation techniques currently utilized in both legal and viral implementations. Failure to cease and desist in these actions (including unsolicited advertisement, installation, noncompliant software, and "Bullying") may result in legal action on the part of the Heavenly Spirit.
California is outsourcing their research to Oregon in order to increase their taxes. Too funny. Also, in Oregon you're not allowed to pump your own gas (it's against the law) - this increases the cost of gas slightly, for the express and single purpose of increasing the taxes slightly and quietly.
I work in Professional Services for my Chinese-managed company... they're strict about certain things, but I can still get away with stuff.
Basically it seems like no matter where you are, if you have a little downtime and you devote it to a project that will help the company, they'll pretty much give you leave to do whatever you like. It's not like management is going to say "No, you can't do that project that is going to make our product more valuable." - unless there's some good reason, like you're giving away company secrets (oops).
This is definitely easily available for enterprises in the form of disk arrays and SANs, but when you start looking at the overhead implied by the controllers and connectivity to a separate storage unit, price increases dramatically. None of the major enterprise storage vendors (IBM, EMC, STK, Hitachi) seem to be aiming at the consumer market for these things yet, and for good reason.
Joebob don't care.
That said, the solutions are available, they're just going to run you into the tens of thousands of USD.
Allow me to toot my own SAN horn. Before you think I'm a kook, realize that the top two lawfirms in the world use these solutions (along with many many others in the know):
FalconStor designs an appliance which will allow you to do many many things with your data in terms of reliability, speed, and disaster recovery. One of the best features available is -instantaneous- backup and recovery. That's right. Instant. In the blink of an eye your entire SAN drive can be backed up or restored using Timemarks.
In addition, using a Time'view', we can open up a transparent window to any timemark (timemarks are usually taken on some schedule - one every five minutes, for instance; they only take about 64k of overhead), and allow you to look at your data as it was an hour, six hours, or two minutes ago. This lets you easily mount up a drive and recover a file you accidentally deleted - or an email.
Our solutions tie into Exchange, SQL server, Oracle, Sybase, and more, to provide instant backup and recovery. We provide an inband solution (that means we get between your disks and your servers) - because of this, we can provide extreme services such as bare metal recovery (mirror your local drive to the SAN, then if your drive fails, just boot off the SAN! Either via IP or FC!)
We also provide solutions for disaster recovery (replicating your data to a remote location, then restoring it), redundancy (our applications have no single point of failure; on top of that, we use a redundant pair of applications so that if one fails, the other takes over), data migration (move your data from that fast EMC disk onto some slower JBOD disks, or take your local drive and put it on a fast SAN instead).
We've been doing this for a while! It's nothing new, but everyone is paying attention, especially to our Virtual Tape Library solutions, which allow you to backup your systems to disk, then export those backups to tape - still using your familiar NetBackup/etc infrastructure.
We provide NAS solutions, too, and much more than I could ever fit in one comment. FalconStor is widely recognized in the storage world as the leader of SAN management and disaster recovery. So don't tell me disk isn't going anywhere. There ARE still customer needs, from backup to virtualization. Take a look if your SAN needs an upgrade - www.falconstor.com. Oh yeah. And it's FAST TOO, with technologies like Hotzone, which will identify the most-used portions of your disk and cache reads and writes to a solid-state disk.
I wanted to change a domain name (one a friend of mine legitimately owns, and had asked me to change). I started calling around... I first called names4ever. They went through the process of looking up the actual registrar, which was "In Just a Minute." I then called up IJM and they redirected me to their DNS services guy. I got ahold of the guy (name protected) on the phone and asked him to change the authorized zoneholder... he did it immediately, without asking for any kind of information.
In fact at no time during this process did I ever tell anyone my name or the name of their original client. All I ever said was the domain name (also protected, you evil blackhats).
So... it's not too hard to steal a domain anyway...
Let's write a completely nonpolitic letter to Microsoft and see if they respond.
Hello? The way to change things is to convince MS that their policies are incorrect, not blaspheme and curse at them. They'll just ignore such letters as hatemail, the same way you or I would.
The amygdala is used for not just fear, but also pleasure. It's linked to autism, PTSD, and narcolepsy/depression. It's also the primary center used for classical conditioning. There is no research indicating that a 'larger' amygdala is more active.
Want to educate yourself? Go read a wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala
Th ere are a lot of pitfalls to avoid when reading psychology papers, because a lot of it is just nonsense. One is directed research: investigating a narrow part of a large phenomenon in order to prove a specific point, even if the rest of the information makes it invalid. While it is interesting that the amygdala is larger in democrats, it doesn't prove any stereotypes.
However: Duh, certain traits and functionalities are linked in the brain, so you can line up certain stereotypes that will prove generally true. It's probably also true that certain traits are generally true of certain races, and stereotypes can be "proven" that way as well - it's just rather frightening research to do, and perhaps immoral as well.
Has the "No massive particle can travel at or faster than c" been proven, or accepted reasonably? I thought the rule was that massive particles became infinitely massive at the speed of light, because of some strange properties of the relativistic equations.
Nothing is a given, except that 'Light travels at c' (and maybe photons are quantized light)... in fact c is not defined as the speed of light in a vacuum; light speeds up a little in a true vacuum.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to migrate storage? Hotmail is adding a boatload of terabytes to their servers; in order to promise every hotmail user 250 megs, assuming their published 30 million number is right... let's assume 1/10th of their users use the full storage; 3 million. Now some quick math brings that up to 750 000 000 megabytes, or 750 terabytes. That's a lot of arrays to put into an environment; they probably have to set up a new room just to store the new servers to handle the load. A month! Oh my. I'd be surprised if the purchase order got finished in three weeks. Cabling up that many servers? Gonna take another week at least. Bringing them all online, served up to the hotmail servers (remember, they're using a decent backend, not windows) shouldn't take TOO long, but is still going to take another two weeks to work the bugs out.
Finish in a month? I'll be amazed. Maybe if they started last month they'll be finished in a month. And, to think of it, they probably did.
It is slop. It's old slop. *L* I guess you can't see the timestamp, but that code is probably four years old. It's not even part of the program anymore. Anyway, sloppy code may have made this program appear "alive" to the players, who're swearing it has a soul. Course, they -are- a little crazy.
For you, the problem is clear. However, since you want more detail:
argument = one_argument(argument, username);
This function takes 'argument' and cuts one word off - a bunch of letters followed by a space. Or nothing, if there's no word waiting. Then it returns the remainder - still using the original string space, not copying or anything.
Now, assuming 'argument' is 300 characters. The first word is say 6 characters. After one_argument, 'username' is six characters long, and 'argument' is 293. (The missing character is the space between the words.)
So now 'password' can only be a maximum of 293 letters. Let's say it is. 'argument' is now the string "". When you cat these values back together, you still end up with 300 letters. Unfortunately there's a superfluous 8 letter character sitting in there too. So there's technically a hole here, if the user knew about the code, knew what MIL was (you could test, of course, and... already... had... full access to this program. However, nobody has that access except me and two other people, and they all already have shell access.
LMAO good call;) Fortunately for me, 'argument' is secured from the input end to a maximum length of MIL, and is also limited to pure ASCII. MSL is about 4*MIL. And the commands you see are trusted high-level operator commands anyway. The content itself could screw the code up with a lot less effort than a buffer overflow would take.
Did you really go looking through all my pictures for that? *LMAO*
BTW those are Max String Length and Max Input Length.
It seems to be that people who make security tools don't open source them on the normal channels because they don't want 5cr1p7 k1dd135 stealing them. For instance, I'm currently working on an SNMP scanner to analyze a fibre channel network - no way am I open sourcing it; it shows entirely too many holes. *shrugs*
*black hat on* Besides, if the holes you find become fixed due to public notice, how are you going to exploit them in the future? *black hat off*
The workspace you suggest is good, but the workspace I work in is better.
It's a rectangular arrangement with desks facing the wall. There is no "boss" in the room, and the culture is good, so there's no tension about backs away from the wall. In the center of the room is a table. We often confer around the table - sometimes joking or playing around with the toys in the room, and sometimes exploring various physics principles, and sometimes considering the software we work on. The door is around the hallway, so even if someone opens it, we have time to scatter our toys and return to work.
It is VERY important that we have our toys, and our privacy! If we didn't, we'd burn out faster than a lightbulb. We all have lots of wall space, whiteboards, multiple computers, space for laptops, multiple monitors, and all of the various storage equipment we need (I work for a backup software company).
However. This doesn't work as well for the programmers! See, I'm actually a storage architect. I do programming, but I also go on the road frequently. The programmers all work in similar configurations (except they're in high-wall cubeland), but they never take advantage of the ability to talk to each other. It might be a chinese culture thing for them. But I think they'd all do a lot better with full privacy, backs against the wall, huddled in the dark, maybe intravenously fed from a centralized location yogurt and rice.
Slashdot Mirror
At least you don't have to be alone! I also noticed the beautifully correct apostrophe usage, and it's made my day just a little bit better. Data geek that I am, language is very important to me.
Instant messaging doesn't have to pop up. You can ask it to stay in the background, and similarly train people not to consider instant messaging to be 'instant'. This has worked for me, although new people that I talk to don't always catch on very quickly. (by the way, I do this with 'gaim' - keep one conversation window for all conversations (tabbed), and don't let it steal focus.)
[soapbox]
I'm developing an interesting application that will help mitigate the interruption affect by changing the way your interface works. Related information to whatever you are doing will always be available but discrete (optionally hidden beneath a single mouseclick). Temporal (important 'now', like scheduled tasks or urgent messages, or the notification that it's time to eat again) information will be optionally hidden but preferably visible and discrete - taking up a small amount of screen resources.
The interface also works to minimize distractions in other ways by removing pieces of applications that you rarely use, like the menu buttons, and putting them away "underneath" the screen. It is possible to do this to all the applications that you use, by using unconventional programming practices (specifically, code insertion and replacement, as used by viruses but for a non-malignant cause).
Oh yeah, it only runs on linux, but should run on any linux, with any graphical linux program.
[/soapbox]
Apparently they've been working on it since 1998. A similar discussion may have been had at the Toyota PR section 7 years ago, but at least they committed to it.
Anyway if they're all about making money, and they found a way to make money AND do something good for the environment, good for them! (and us)
AND you managed to promote an alternate site that actually has a decent moderation system! Neat! Thank you!
To whom it may concern,
It has recently come to Our notice that iDownload(hereafter referred to as the 'Bastard') has been sending unsolicited notices to Our Unnamed Constituents(hereafter referred to as the 'heavenly spirit') containing prayers of 'cease and desist'.
These notices will be ignored by the Heavenly Spirit, who advises the Bastard to cease and desist the machiavellian intimidation techniques currently utilized in both legal and viral implementations. Failure to cease and desist in these actions (including unsolicited advertisement, installation, noncompliant software, and "Bullying") may result in legal action on the part of the Heavenly Spirit.
Sincerely,
Us.
California is outsourcing their research to Oregon in order to increase their taxes. Too funny. Also, in Oregon you're not allowed to pump your own gas (it's against the law) - this increases the cost of gas slightly, for the express and single purpose of increasing the taxes slightly and quietly.
I wonder if we can crash the eggs by thinking about them real hard... :-D
I work in Professional Services for my Chinese-managed company... they're strict about certain things, but I can still get away with stuff.
Basically it seems like no matter where you are, if you have a little downtime and you devote it to a project that will help the company, they'll pretty much give you leave to do whatever you like. It's not like management is going to say "No, you can't do that project that is going to make our product more valuable." - unless there's some good reason, like you're giving away company secrets (oops).
This is definitely easily available for enterprises in the form of disk arrays and SANs, but when you start looking at the overhead implied by the controllers and connectivity to a separate storage unit, price increases dramatically. None of the major enterprise storage vendors (IBM, EMC, STK, Hitachi) seem to be aiming at the consumer market for these things yet, and for good reason.
Joebob don't care.
That said, the solutions are available, they're just going to run you into the tens of thousands of USD.
Allow me to toot my own SAN horn. Before you think I'm a kook, realize that the top two lawfirms in the world use these solutions (along with many many others in the know):
FalconStor designs an appliance which will allow you to do many many things with your data in terms of reliability, speed, and disaster recovery. One of the best features available is -instantaneous- backup and recovery. That's right. Instant. In the blink of an eye your entire SAN drive can be backed up or restored using Timemarks.
In addition, using a Time'view', we can open up a transparent window to any timemark (timemarks are usually taken on some schedule - one every five minutes, for instance; they only take about 64k of overhead), and allow you to look at your data as it was an hour, six hours, or two minutes ago. This lets you easily mount up a drive and recover a file you accidentally deleted - or an email.
Our solutions tie into Exchange, SQL server, Oracle, Sybase, and more, to provide instant backup and recovery. We provide an inband solution (that means we get between your disks and your servers) - because of this, we can provide extreme services such as bare metal recovery (mirror your local drive to the SAN, then if your drive fails, just boot off the SAN! Either via IP or FC!)
We also provide solutions for disaster recovery (replicating your data to a remote location, then restoring it), redundancy (our applications have no single point of failure; on top of that, we use a redundant pair of applications so that if one fails, the other takes over), data migration (move your data from that fast EMC disk onto some slower JBOD disks, or take your local drive and put it on a fast SAN instead).
We've been doing this for a while! It's nothing new, but everyone is paying attention, especially to our Virtual Tape Library solutions, which allow you to backup your systems to disk, then export those backups to tape - still using your familiar NetBackup/etc infrastructure.
We provide NAS solutions, too, and much more than I could ever fit in one comment. FalconStor is widely recognized in the storage world as the leader of SAN management and disaster recovery. So don't tell me disk isn't going anywhere. There ARE still customer needs, from backup to virtualization. Take a look if your SAN needs an upgrade - www.falconstor.com. Oh yeah. And it's FAST TOO, with technologies like Hotzone, which will identify the most-used portions of your disk and cache reads and writes to a solid-state disk.
Ironically, it's this very same logic we use when saying Linux is more secure!
Windows is more of a target and thus gets hacked more. So Linux is safer, but hardly more secure.
This time I'll admit it.
I wanted to change a domain name (one a friend of mine legitimately owns, and had asked me to change). I started calling around... I first called names4ever. They went through the process of looking up the actual registrar, which was "In Just a Minute." I then called up IJM and they redirected me to their DNS services guy. I got ahold of the guy (name protected) on the phone and asked him to change the authorized zoneholder... he did it immediately, without asking for any kind of information.
In fact at no time during this process did I ever tell anyone my name or the name of their original client. All I ever said was the domain name (also protected, you evil blackhats).
So... it's not too hard to steal a domain anyway...
Lame as it may be, this is -definitely- going in the archive for witty sayings. ;) "Your speech compression algorithm is a bit lossy, sir."
What a totally worthless thing to do.
Let's write a completely nonpolitic letter to Microsoft and see if they respond.
Hello? The way to change things is to convince MS that their policies are incorrect, not blaspheme and curse at them. They'll just ignore such letters as hatemail, the same way you or I would.
The amygdala is used for not just fear, but also pleasure. It's linked to autism, PTSD, and narcolepsy/depression. It's also the primary center used for classical conditioning. There is no research indicating that a 'larger' amygdala is more active.
Want to educate yourself? Go read a wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala
Th ere are a lot of pitfalls to avoid when reading psychology papers, because a lot of it is just nonsense. One is directed research: investigating a narrow part of a large phenomenon in order to prove a specific point, even if the rest of the information makes it invalid. While it is interesting that the amygdala is larger in democrats, it doesn't prove any stereotypes.
However: Duh, certain traits and functionalities are linked in the brain, so you can line up certain stereotypes that will prove generally true. It's probably also true that certain traits are generally true of certain races, and stereotypes can be "proven" that way as well - it's just rather frightening research to do, and perhaps immoral as well.
Has the "No massive particle can travel at or faster than c" been proven, or accepted reasonably? I thought the rule was that massive particles became infinitely massive at the speed of light, because of some strange properties of the relativistic equations.
Nothing is a given, except that 'Light travels at c' (and maybe photons are quantized light)... in fact c is not defined as the speed of light in a vacuum; light speeds up a little in a true vacuum.
Feel free to explain the error of my thoughts.
Disclaimer: I'm not a microsoft proponent.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to migrate storage? Hotmail is adding a boatload of terabytes to their servers; in order to promise every hotmail user 250 megs, assuming their published 30 million number is right... let's assume 1/10th of their users use the full storage; 3 million. Now some quick math brings that up to 750 000 000 megabytes, or 750 terabytes. That's a lot of arrays to put into an environment; they probably have to set up a new room just to store the new servers to handle the load. A month! Oh my. I'd be surprised if the purchase order got finished in three weeks. Cabling up that many servers? Gonna take another week at least. Bringing them all online, served up to the hotmail servers (remember, they're using a decent backend, not windows) shouldn't take TOO long, but is still going to take another two weeks to work the bugs out.
Finish in a month? I'll be amazed. Maybe if they started last month they'll be finished in a month. And, to think of it, they probably did.
There is only one devil.
Google for World President!
It's old hat. My { are different now - I finally buckled.
while( descil.age < 20 ) {
descil.correct++;
world.astonished++;
}
while( descil.age >= 20 ) {
descil.stubborn--;
world.amused++;
}
mm. Indeed.
C indentation colors? It's keyword hilighting. My tastes have since changed away from the garish. Definitely makes the code stand out tho P:
It is slop. It's old slop. *L* I guess you can't see the timestamp, but that code is probably four years old. It's not even part of the program anymore. Anyway, sloppy code may have made this program appear "alive" to the players, who're swearing it has a soul. Course, they -are- a little crazy.
Are you done being anonymous yet?
For you, the problem is clear. However, since you want more detail:
argument = one_argument(argument, username);
This function takes 'argument' and cuts one word off - a bunch of letters followed by a space. Or nothing, if there's no word waiting. Then it returns the remainder - still using the original string space, not copying or anything.
Now, assuming 'argument' is 300 characters. The first word is say 6 characters. After one_argument, 'username' is six characters long, and 'argument' is 293. (The missing character is the space between the words.)
So now 'password' can only be a maximum of 293 letters. Let's say it is. 'argument' is now the string "". When you cat these values back together, you still end up with 300 letters. Unfortunately there's a superfluous 8 letter character sitting in there too. So there's technically a hole here, if the user knew about the code, knew what MIL was (you could test, of course, and... already... had... full access to this program. However, nobody has that access except me and two other people, and they all already have shell access.
LMAO good call ;) Fortunately for me, 'argument' is secured from the input end to a maximum length of MIL, and is also limited to pure ASCII. MSL is about 4*MIL. And the commands you see are trusted high-level operator commands anyway. The content itself could screw the code up with a lot less effort than a buffer overflow would take.
Did you really go looking through all my pictures for that? *LMAO*
BTW those are Max String Length and Max Input Length.
It seems to be that people who make security tools don't open source them on the normal channels because they don't want 5cr1p7 k1dd135 stealing them. For instance, I'm currently working on an SNMP scanner to analyze a fibre channel network - no way am I open sourcing it; it shows entirely too many holes. *shrugs*
*black hat on*
Besides, if the holes you find become fixed due to public notice, how are you going to exploit them in the future?
*black hat off*
The workspace you suggest is good, but the workspace I work in is better.
It's a rectangular arrangement with desks facing the wall. There is no "boss" in the room, and the culture is good, so there's no tension about backs away from the wall. In the center of the room is a table. We often confer around the table - sometimes joking or playing around with the toys in the room, and sometimes exploring various physics principles, and sometimes considering the software we work on. The door is around the hallway, so even if someone opens it, we have time to scatter our toys and return to work.
It is VERY important that we have our toys, and our privacy! If we didn't, we'd burn out faster than a lightbulb. We all have lots of wall space, whiteboards, multiple computers, space for laptops, multiple monitors, and all of the various storage equipment we need (I work for a backup software company).
However. This doesn't work as well for the programmers! See, I'm actually a storage architect. I do programming, but I also go on the road frequently. The programmers all work in similar configurations (except they're in high-wall cubeland), but they never take advantage of the ability to talk to each other. It might be a chinese culture thing for them. But I think they'd all do a lot better with full privacy, backs against the wall, huddled in the dark, maybe intravenously fed from a centralized location yogurt and rice.