There are a lot of things you can do just from opening mail... because usually you can launch a javascript. From Javascript you can sometimes get to cookies (which store passwords) or worse. I'm not sure how this exploit works, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case.
Dangers from just reading email are still mostly a hoax, but it's not a totally safe activity anymore.
I currently have a setup with 3 21" monitors hooked up to the same computer. One is more than enough for my eye to focus on, trying to look at more space than that I have to turn my head. I think a 50" monitor would be a waste for desktop purposes, especially since the resolution is so low.
It would be nice to put one your ceiling and be able to surf or watch TV while laying in bed. But for that kind of money I think a projector would work just as well.
Code first, optimize later. Time = money. Big O notation doesn't matter for a huge number of problems. Optimization is an art, but knowing when to optimize is also just as important. A good consultant will save you money by *not* optimizing things that don't matter. It's the ones that have to get everything perfect you need to watch out for.
I agree. One other thing, the majority of people reading slashdot are in the USA. Currently the US controls the internet.. many countries are locating their servers here because it's cheaper and on a faster route to the rest of the net. This creates more jobs in here. But this is surely not going to last very long. As voice over data networks becomes more prevelant these same countries will be forced to upgrade their interconnecting infastructure... making the US less of a central hub for the world.
Try to get a job in China or India making 1/4th of what you can make in the US. Even the Germany with it's vibrant economy can't offer salaries near silicon valley levels.
Certainly not all software jobs are tied to networking. But many of areas of programming have been taken over by general purpose solutions. Just as programs can make other jobs obsolete, so too can they make many programmers obsolete. Need a database? Few people write their own anymore, and GUIs are making setup and configuration easier and easier. System Administrators could easily be replaced by thin-clients and a central phone-company-like administration. Kids growing up today make their own web pages for fun... what's going to happen to "web designers" when everyone knows how to do it?
I think there will always be a good market for good programmers, just as there is still a market for good areospace engineers. But some people getting into the field because it looks like easy money could run into trouble in a few years.
In the game industry there is already a glut of entry-level programmers. The average starting salary is less than $30k there.
MBNA is not a fly-by-night operation. I've been using them as my primary credit card for about 8 years. From what I can tell they handle all of the business aspects in a unified fashion. Getting a linux credit card is no different from getting a Star Trek credit card or University of Texas credit card except that it has a penguin logo on it.
I believe MBNA pays for marketing and new sign-ups through a small cut (very small probably) of what they make (~1.5%) MBNA probably doesn't even know what linux is. It's definitely a gimmick, but for those of us without debt one credit card is the same as another.
But to answer your question on if other people are getting a free ride off of linux... yes, but why should that matter? There is the saying : any press is good press.. and these people are publicizing linux by attempting to make money off of it. Linux is still not mainstream and needs a lot of work before you can stop a random person on the street and ask them what Linux is.
I'm not much of a physics person myself, but a friend of mine was doing his thesis on the subject of qauntum effects involved in the simulation and probablistic rendering of molecules. If you are interested, I could try to dig it up.
I agree, but if there is a change to SMTP headers to add the support you mentioned, how do you know the other end has the extension?
Also data on disk can be recovered unless it is erased in a cryptographically secure manner. I know a certain person who had a laptop at a certain company, when he got fired for doing bad stuff he formatted the harddrive and gave it back. The company took it to a lab, recovered the data and sued his ass.
I've gotten to where I will use the phone if I'm not comfortable having my words around forever.
Mom's new mantra should be: "If you can't email anything nice, don't email anything at all."
Well, for the sake of argument, I'd say the theory of gravity has been better understood and more accurate over the years. Then again, no one has detected the presence of a graviton have they? Without a grand unified theory we are forced to admit the current theories governing the basic forces in the universe are approximations at best - which is what I meant by saying it is not fully understood. The fact that theoretical physics research continues is evidence of that.
Does this matter to computer graphics? Not really... because computation power, not lack of an accurate model, is the limiting factor for all but the simplest simulations.
I was a video game person as well (crack.com), but that is a different camp than theoretical computer graphics. Most young people are into real-time graphics (i.e games) aren't interested in what happens to light waves if they travel through all points in space at the same time. Plus you need something close to a ph.d in physics or computer graphics to be near the cutting edge. So... it's unlikely that someone under 22 could break ground in this field.
I'm still not there myself, but Glassner's 2 volume series "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis" has a good intro to the subject of light and energy transport.
I used to run the procedural texture mailing list a few years ago and we had Ken and Ebert on there. Ebert is still working on this stuff, he usually has something at siggraph, but Ken has moved on to other areas of interest. I just had a sweet offer to work on a real-time procedural texturing system for an upcoming game console, so I'm thinking about getting back into that.
Don't bother reading the article. It contains no real information and it's obvious the reporter is dancing around the subject.
I don't know exactly what is being refereed to here, but many alternatives to polygon rendering have been around for ages. Simulation of the light reflection/refraction at the molecular level has been an ongoing area of research in the graphics community. The problem is as you get closer to real-life, exponentially more processing power is required. We can only hope for better and better approximation methods. Further, the fundamental laws of physics governing lights at the quantum level are not fully understood.
I'm highly skeptical that a 22 year is doing any work in this area. This work had very little application in the real-time graphics community, why should Nintendo be interested?
Perhaps they are referring to voxel rendering, which can be done in realtime and a more likely project for a 22 year old to undertake (who hasn't?) A large problem with voxels is the amount of memory required, so either the shapes must be generated on the fly procedurally or it must be compressed using curves/wavelets or a combination of both. The article mentions "parabolas and ellipses," so this might be what is being talked about? Voxels are in no way a representation of something "on a molecular level."
I'm impressed the reporter managed to write such a long article without saying anything.
I thought I read that MAC addresses are centrally dispatched (by who?) in large blocks to card producers. So they only thing you could probably do is determine what company makes the ethernet card at the other end. There is no way the card companies could trace a particular card to you unless you bought it directly from them.
However, since you can't really modify MACs, it could be as evidence in court to show who you are. With IPs this is a little harder to do because of the dial-up banks and ISPs are not required by law to keep logs (right?) The use of proxies shouldn't be any different from v4 to v6 because the proxy is not going to reveal your MAC, only it's.
The problem there is you don't know their IP address unless it's clear from the logs who they are. To solve this problem here is a neat trick. Most people uses a mail reader that supports HTML encoding. You can embed an small one pixel image or perhaps a business card in your email. It should be embedded as an external image with no actual data in the mail.
Assuming they are using a mail reader that will fetch the image (Outlook will), you will have your IP address as soon as they read their mail. Outlook uses IE to fetch such images, so even if they are going through a proxy you'll know the right IP. This is also a useful trick to learn the exact time someone has read your mail... it can also be used to learn where someone lives, by using a traceroute to their IP address. hehe.
If they are using a web-based mail account this won't work of course, but most businesses don't.
No, I'm quite sure that google does not respect cache-control. There is no way they could keep up with the "internet refresh rate" if that were the case.
Well, to create their index they have to create a cache (compressed) of the internet. I think they thought - hey, we have this data.. why not let other people access it. (Which is how many people feel about their MP3 collections!)
I don't think this feature is very useful for the average user and they will probably drop it when threatened by numerous lawsuits. The one time it comes in handy is when a search result returns a page that no longer contains the content you were looking for - because the server is down, or the page is frequently updated.
(setq howareyoulst '((how are you) (hows it going) (hows it going eh) (how\'s it going) (how\'s it going eh) (how goes it) (whats up) (whats new) (what\'s up) (what\'s new) (howre you) (how\'re you) (how\'s everything) (how is everything) (how do you do) (how\'s it hanging) (que pasa) (how are you doing) (what do you say))) (setq qlist '((what do you think \?) (i\'ll ask the questions\, if you don\'t mind!) (i could ask the same thing myself \.) (($ please) allow me to do the questioning \.) (i have asked myself that question many times \.) (($ please) try to answer that question yourself \.)))
(setq foullst '((($ please) watch your tongue!) (($ please) avoid such unwholesome thoughts \.) (($ please) get your mind out of the gutter \.) (such lewdness is not appreciated \.)))
(setq deathlst '((this is not a healthy way of thinking \.) (($ bother) you\, too\, may die someday \?) (i am worried by your obsession with this topic!) (did you watch a lot of crime and violence on television as a child \?)) )
(setq sexlst '((($ areyou) ($ afraidof) sex \?) (($ describe)($ something) about your sexual history \.) (($ please)($ describe) your sex life \.\.\.) (($ describe) your ($ feelings-about) your sexual partner \.) (($ describe) your most ($ random-adjective) sexual experience \.) (($ areyou) satisfied with (// lover) \.\.\. \?)))
(setq stallmanlst '( (($ describe) your ($ feelings-about) him \.) (($ areyou) a friend of Stallman \?) (($ bother) Stallman is ($ random-adjective) \?) (($ ibelieve) you are ($ afraidof) him \.)))
If you'd like to plan for high availability what is the best way to go as far as SSL certficates? If you have a central re-director machine, each of the clients needs to have their own SSL certficate right? What do people typically do here, use a transparent redirection mechanism, or buy more certficates? Any info would be greatly appreachiated.
I wouldn't say we can scale. At least not in the way a computer can. Our nueral processing capabilities are pretty much fixed. Also, humans don't share information very efficiently so it's difficult to solve a hard problem by solving more humans at it.
It's interesting that we are so self-centric that we cannot solve many global problems (polution, population, welfare, etc). A computer "person" has the potential to be a single distributed being, so death would be very difficult and then all problems become global in nature.
I guess one of the biggest limitations right now is sleep.
It's been argued convincingly that much of the brain organization occurs during sleep. Without sleep, it's doubtful that we would be able to think at all.
I would say our biggest limitation is death and decay of the body. All the information gained during a lifetime is lost and has to be relearned by later generations. There are big limits to what you can learn in 60 or so years - especially when you spend most of your time on survival.
One of my favorite books is Win95 System Programming Secrets by Matt Pietrik. It is a good example of reverse engineering put to constructive use (rather than copy protection removal). Matt provides psuedo code for many of the system calls and a good understanding of what is going on under the hood. There are mountains of useful information in this book about reverse engineering, check it out...
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of things you can do just from opening mail... because usually you can launch a javascript. From Javascript you can sometimes get to cookies (which store passwords) or worse. I'm not sure how this exploit works, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case.
Dangers from just reading email are still mostly a hoax, but it's not a totally safe activity anymore.
Thanks, I was serching for Ge Force and nothing was turing up. Here is a link to the complete listing at pricewatch.
Prices at Pricewatch
Where is the cheapest place to buy one of these things? (including shipping)
I currently have a setup with 3 21" monitors hooked up to the same computer. One is more than enough for my eye to focus on, trying to look at more space than that I have to turn my head. I think a 50" monitor would be a waste for desktop purposes, especially since the resolution is so low.
It would be nice to put one your ceiling and be able to surf or watch TV while laying in bed. But for that kind of money I think a projector would work just as well.
What are your theories on what makes a game "fun" (multi-player vs single player)?
Code first, optimize later. Time = money. Big O notation doesn't matter for a huge number of problems. Optimization is an art, but knowing when to optimize is also just as important. A good consultant will save you money by *not* optimizing things that don't matter. It's the ones that have to get everything perfect you need to watch out for.
I agree. One other thing, the majority of people reading slashdot are in the USA. Currently the US controls the internet.. many countries are locating their servers here because it's cheaper and on a faster route to the rest of the net. This creates more jobs in here. But this is surely not going to last very long. As voice over data networks becomes more prevelant these same countries will be forced to upgrade their interconnecting infastructure... making the US less of a central hub for the world.
Try to get a job in China or India making 1/4th of what you can make in the US. Even the Germany with it's vibrant economy can't offer salaries near silicon valley levels.
Certainly not all software jobs are tied to networking. But many of areas of programming have been taken over by general purpose solutions. Just as programs can make other jobs obsolete, so too can they make many programmers obsolete. Need a database? Few people write their own anymore, and GUIs are making setup and configuration easier and easier. System Administrators could easily be replaced by thin-clients and a central phone-company-like administration. Kids growing up today make their own web pages for fun... what's going to happen to "web designers" when everyone knows how to do it?
I think there will always be a good market for good programmers, just as there is still a market for good areospace engineers. But some people getting into the field because it looks like easy money could run into trouble in a few years.
In the game industry there is already a glut of entry-level programmers. The average starting salary is less than $30k there.
MBNA is not a fly-by-night operation. I've been using them as my primary credit card for about 8 years. From what I can tell they handle all of the business aspects in a unified fashion. Getting a linux credit card is no different from getting a Star Trek credit card or University of Texas credit card except that it has a penguin logo on it.
I believe MBNA pays for marketing and new sign-ups through a small cut (very small probably) of what they make (~1.5%) MBNA probably doesn't even know what linux is. It's definitely a gimmick, but for those of us without debt one credit card is the same as another.
But to answer your question on if other people are getting a free ride off of linux... yes, but why should that matter? There is the saying : any press is good press.. and these people are publicizing linux by attempting to make money off of it. Linux is still not mainstream and needs a lot of work before you can stop a random person on the street and ask them what Linux is.
I'm not much of a physics person myself, but a friend of mine was doing his thesis on the subject of qauntum effects involved in the simulation and probablistic rendering of molecules. If you are interested, I could try to dig it up.
I agree, but if there is a change to SMTP headers to add the support you mentioned, how do you know the other end has the extension?
Also data on disk can be recovered unless it is erased in a cryptographically secure manner. I know a certain person who had a laptop at a certain company, when he got fired for doing bad stuff he formatted the harddrive and gave it back. The company took it to a lab, recovered the data and sued his ass.
I've gotten to where I will use the phone if I'm not comfortable having my words around forever.
Mom's new mantra should be:
"If you can't email anything nice, don't email anything at all."
Well, for the sake of argument, I'd say the theory of gravity has been better understood and more accurate over the years. Then again, no one has detected the presence of a graviton have they? Without a grand unified theory we are forced to admit the current theories governing the basic forces in the universe are approximations at best - which is what I meant by saying it is not fully understood. The fact that theoretical physics research continues is evidence of that.
Does this matter to computer graphics? Not really... because computation power, not lack of an accurate model, is the limiting factor for all but the simplest simulations.
Ah.... the classic Mars demo! that was cool sh*t back then. Hard to believe it was so small.
I was a video game person as well (crack.com), but that is a different camp than theoretical computer graphics. Most young people are into real-time graphics (i.e games) aren't interested in what happens to light waves if they travel through all points in space at the same time. Plus you need something close to a ph.d in physics or computer graphics to be near the cutting edge. So... it's unlikely that someone under 22 could break ground in this field.
I'm still not there myself, but Glassner's 2 volume series "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis" has a good intro to the subject of light and energy transport.
I used to run the procedural texture mailing list a few years ago and we had Ken and Ebert on there. Ebert is still working on this stuff, he usually has something at siggraph, but Ken has moved on to other areas of interest. I just had a sweet offer to work on a real-time procedural texturing system for an upcoming game console, so I'm thinking about getting back into that.
Don't bother reading the article. It contains no real information and it's obvious the reporter is dancing around the subject.
I don't know exactly what is being refereed to here, but many alternatives to polygon rendering have been around for ages. Simulation of the light reflection/refraction at the molecular level has been an ongoing area of research in the graphics community. The problem is as you get closer to real-life, exponentially more processing power is required. We can only hope for better and better approximation methods. Further, the fundamental laws of physics governing lights at the quantum level are not fully understood.
I'm highly skeptical that a 22 year is doing any work in this area. This work had very little application in the real-time graphics community, why should Nintendo be interested?
Perhaps they are referring to voxel rendering, which can be done in realtime and a more likely project for a 22 year old to undertake (who hasn't?) A large problem with voxels is the amount of memory required, so either the shapes must be generated on the fly procedurally or it must be compressed using curves/wavelets or a combination of both. The article mentions "parabolas and ellipses," so this might be what is being talked about? Voxels are in no way a representation of something "on a molecular level."
I'm impressed the reporter managed to write such a long article without saying anything.
I thought I read that MAC addresses are centrally dispatched (by who?) in large blocks to card producers. So they only thing you could probably do is determine what company makes the ethernet card at the other end. There is no way the card companies could trace a particular card to you unless you bought it directly from them.
However, since you can't really modify MACs, it could be as evidence in court to show who you are. With IPs this is a little harder to do because of the dial-up banks and ISPs are not required by law to keep logs (right?) The use of proxies shouldn't be any different from v4 to v6 because the proxy is not going to reveal your MAC, only it's.
Do you mind my asking why they were pestering you? Trademark infringement?
I said most businesses, not most people.
The problem there is you don't know their IP address unless it's clear from the logs who they are. To solve this problem here is a neat trick. Most people uses a mail reader that supports HTML encoding. You can embed an small one pixel image or perhaps a business card in your email. It should be embedded as an external image with no actual data in the mail.
Assuming they are using a mail reader that will fetch the image (Outlook will), you will have your IP address as soon as they read their mail. Outlook uses IE to fetch such images, so even if they are going through a proxy you'll know the right IP. This is also a useful trick to learn the exact time someone has read your mail... it can also be used to learn where someone lives, by using a traceroute to their IP address. hehe.
If they are using a web-based mail account this won't work of course, but most businesses don't.
No, I'm quite sure that google does not respect cache-control. There is no way they could keep up with the "internet refresh rate" if that were the case.
Well, to create their index they have to create a cache (compressed) of the internet. I think they thought - hey, we have this data.. why not let other people access it. (Which is how many people feel about their MP3 collections!)
I don't think this feature is very useful for the average user and they will probably drop it when threatened by numerous lawsuits. The one time it comes in handy is when a search result returns a page that no longer contains the content you were looking for - because the server is down, or the page is frequently updated.
(setq howareyoulst '((how are you) (hows it going) (hows it going eh)
(how\'s it going) (how\'s it going eh) (how goes it)
(whats up) (whats new) (what\'s up) (what\'s new)
(howre you) (how\'re you) (how\'s everything)
(how is everything) (how do you do)
(how\'s it hanging) (que pasa)
(how are you doing) (what do you say)))
(setq qlist
'((what do you think \?)
(i\'ll ask the questions\, if you don\'t mind!)
(i could ask the same thing myself \.)
(($ please) allow me to do the questioning \.)
(i have asked myself that question many times \.)
(($ please) try to answer that question yourself \.)))
(setq foullst
'((($ please) watch your tongue!)
(($ please) avoid such unwholesome thoughts \.)
(($ please) get your mind out of the gutter \.)
(such lewdness is not appreciated \.)))
(setq deathlst
'((this is not a healthy way of thinking \.)
(($ bother) you\, too\, may die someday \?)
(i am worried by your obsession with this topic!)
(did you watch a lot of crime and violence on television as a child \?))
)
(setq sexlst
'((($ areyou) ($ afraidof) sex \?)
(($ describe)($ something) about your sexual history \.)
(($ please)($ describe) your sex life \.\.\.)
(($ describe) your ($ feelings-about) your sexual partner \.)
(($ describe) your most ($ random-adjective) sexual experience \.)
(($ areyou) satisfied with (// lover) \.\.\. \?)))
(setq stallmanlst '(
(($ describe) your ($ feelings-about) him \.)
(($ areyou) a friend of Stallman \?)
(($ bother) Stallman is ($ random-adjective) \?)
(($ ibelieve) you are ($ afraidof) him \.)))
Slashdot is one big pro-Linux, anti-Microsoft FUD machine. Redhat has very visible links to /. on it's main page in the "News & Views sections".
If you'd like to plan for high availability what is the best way to go as far as SSL certficates? If you have a central re-director machine, each of the clients needs to have their own SSL certficate right? What do people typically do here, use a transparent redirection mechanism, or buy more certficates? Any info would be greatly appreachiated.
Just how much can we scale?
I wouldn't say we can scale. At least not in the way a computer can. Our nueral processing capabilities are pretty much fixed. Also, humans don't share information very efficiently so it's difficult to solve a hard problem by solving more humans at it.
It's interesting that we are so self-centric that we cannot solve many global problems (polution, population, welfare, etc). A computer "person" has the potential to be a single distributed being, so death would be very difficult and then all problems become global in nature.
I guess one of the biggest limitations right now is sleep.
It's been argued convincingly that much of the brain organization occurs during sleep. Without sleep, it's doubtful that we would be able to think at all.
I would say our biggest limitation is death and decay of the body. All the information gained during a lifetime is lost and has to be relearned by later generations. There are big limits to what you can learn in 60 or so years - especially when you spend most of your time on survival.
One of my favorite books is Win95 System Programming Secrets by Matt Pietrik. It is a good example of reverse engineering put to constructive use (rather than copy protection removal). Matt provides psuedo code for many of the system calls and a good understanding of what is going on under the hood. There are mountains of useful information in this book about reverse engineering, check it out...