I was at a Microsoft Christmas party in about 1990 (+/- a year). Bill Gates and Paul Allen were there talking to each other. Their body language was that they were old friends, not mortal enemies. This would have been seven years or so after the date mentioned in the cnet article. So, even if the article was true, which I doubt, then they had patched up their differences by then.
If I buy a rack of kitchen knives, I can't take it home on the subway? What about knitting needles? I sometimes carry a pen knife. Scissors? Will the play-doh for the kids look like plastic explosives?
I'm no security expert, but allowing HTML mail to arbitrarily download embedded graphics in a mail client is just dumb. From my reading of the articles, doing that doesn't disable the problem, but keeps the information from escaping back to the malicious parties. This is a mail client problem triggering PGP to decrypt, then allowing the information to escape through embedded graphics, not a fundamental problem in PGP itself. Turning off HTML mail support at the client and just taking the text representation of the message looks like it completely defeats the hack. Tell me if I'm wrong.
The Windows Phone was really well done. (We'll ignore Windows Phone 6 and before as if they never existed!) Much more coherent interface than either the iPhone or Android. And the battery life was way better. The problem with it was timing and apps. If it had come out before the iPhone, they would have ruled the market, and Apple would probably be suffering. But coming out after the iPhone and Android, they were continually playing catch up. They never got the app base, and without that it was chicken and egg...nobody bought it because it didn't have apps and no apps because nobody bought it.
There is just other people's computers. What this does is make it easier to move your data between your computers and the other people's computers. Seems like a good move by Microsoft.
There is only other people's computers. If you move to relying on "the cloud", all you are doing is delegating your security to someone else. Now you have two points of vulnerability: Your local Linux machine, and the "cloud" server, either of which could be infected with malware. You have not fixed the problem, and you have actually doubled your exposure.
I took a Software Engineering class where we covered formal specifications. For even a simple piece of code, the formal specifications were longer than the code to cover all of the boundary conditions. It was faster and simpler just to write code. Using code snippets in not new. We call those libraries. I've used those all my life. My code specifies which libraries to use and how to tie those together. Also, random code written by other people are frequently crap. Who is going to vet the quality of the code? I am not scared by this at all.
Windows 8 with Classic Shell is just as usable as Windows 7. Windows 8 without Classic Shell has a terrible interface for grouping the programs you have installed. If Microsoft had issued Windows 8 with the equivalent of the Classic Shell start button, then acceptance of Windows 8 would have been a no-brainer, and all the complaints about it would have been almost non-existent. Windows 8.1 was the right place to recover from the mistake, but instead they just gave a *different* button in place of the start button that essentially did nothing useful.
Don't be afraid to use Windows 8, but get Classic Shell to go with it. It's free.
Survivor benefits are paid to the children, not the surviving parent. The parent only get the money as the custodian of the children, and is supposed to use it for the benefit of the child. The parent doesn't report the benefits on his or her tax return. If the child makes enough money during the year to file a tax return, the child does. So the IRS is going after the party to which the money was given. But of course, it really makes no sense...the child did not actually receive the money. The child has no records of receiving the money, or of any overpayment and can't contest it. It's unlikely even the parent has the records. And it is implied that the IRS can try to collect money from whomever they can get it from, not just the child of record.
FXCop (now incorporated as Code Analysis) is not a security tool. It looks for bad coding practices not malicious software. This might catch some stuff in the process, but it is not the main purpose.
On the other hand, Red Gate's Reflector decompiles the code into C#, VB.NET, F#, IL, or MC++. You can then look for malicious code. I mainly look for code accessing classes in the System.IO namespace, System.Web, System.Net, or similar namespaces, because these are the ones that are likely to either mess with existing files or connect to the Internet.
You can use the ILDASM (Intermediate Language Dis-assembler) program that comes with the.NET Framework, but it only decompiles into intermediate language (IL). This is enough to find the calls, but most people are not adept at reading IL.
Reflector is worth every penny. Besides looking for security problems, I use it all the time to figure out what the Framework is really doing, fix bugs in other people's libraries, sign code that wasn't signed originally, translate VB.NET code to C#, etc. (To translate code, compile it in one language and decompile it with Reflector into the other.)
Excel does not treat 1900 as a leap year. Excel's epoch, though, is December 30th, 1899 instead of the 31st to be compatible with 1-2-3 for all dates from March 1st, 1900 onward, allowing for 1-2-3's bug. Excel and Word, and all other Microsoft products that use VBA as a macro language, use the OLE Automation date format that works just fine on all dates from January 1, year 100 to December 31st 9999. Dates are treated as a double with the integer part being days and fractions being the fraction of a day. Negative numbers give the dates before the epoch. The only weird thing is the date of the epoch, which causes things such the Time function to return the time on December 30th 1899, if you retrieve the date portion.
This was a failure in marketing, not technology. When this came out, it took me a while to differentiate the products because of the first word in the name being the same. I finally figured out to just drop the word "Expression" and concentrate on the second word. I think it was a huge mistake trying to use the term to group a disparate set of products. They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc. and then packaged them as "Microsoft Designer Suite".
Blend is actually pretty cool.
What if through some (magical) combination of hardware and software, after say two months, if you didn't log in, the contents became completely irretrievable? Then if you were arrested, you only had to hold out for two months before they would have to release you. Contempt of court means that they can only hold you while you can possibly give them what they need. If it is impossible for you to comply, which would be true after two months, they have to charge you with something else (obstruction of justice?) or release you.
Only a completely de-normalized flat-file database would need anything like that number of columns. That would mean many duplicate pieces of information, and a complete maintenance nightmare. The only purpose I can see is to have views of existing normalized data for fast searching, but that would be read-only data.
This is a feature in need of an application and I can see very few applications.
The monolith can be any size, but the proportions are 1:4:9. It's actually infinitely dimensional, so the next three are 16,25,36. Notice the pattern?
The monolith is found on the moon in the crater Tycho. Tycho is the one with all the streaks coming from it on any picture of a full moon; like arrows pointing at the crater saying "find monolith here".
When the sun hits the monolith for the first time in the 4 million years since the apes were impregnated with the idea of the use of tools, it sends a message to the rebroadcast station near Jupiter (Saturn in the book) saying this planet has sufficiently advanced to be able to reach their moon, check them out!
The primary problem with foldit is that it can't be just a game. Since it is trying to simulate science, the game designers can't simplify features to increase playability. So when player frustration sets in due to the complexity, there is no simpler version or cheat mode. You are competing against nature, and nature is a bitch.
This causes many people to give up on foldit after a short while, because it takes time to learn what gains points. What is cool about the game is that many of the best players know relatively little about biology. It's a game that anyone can play, it's just hard to do well at it. If you like logic puzzles, crosswords, soduku, chess, or Go, you will probably like foldit.
In 1994, Bill Gates gave an interview to Playboy. He stated then that he was going to give away his money. In it he says:
PLAYBOY: Does your net worth of multi-billions, despite the fact that it's mostly in stock and the value varies daily, boggle your mind?
GATES: It's a ridiculous number. But remember, 95 percent of it I'm just going to give away. [Smiles] Don't tell people to write me letters. I'm saving that for when I'm in my 50s. It's a lot to give away and it's going to take time.
PLAYBOY: Where will you donate it?
GATES: To charitable things, scientific things. I don't believe in burdening any children I might have with that. They'll have enough. They'll be comfortable.
I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter, he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.
Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hardproblem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.
All CC numbers have a particular pattern, and there is even a check digit. Why doesn't Google provide a global filter in their search index so that any keyword that matches a credit card number is not indexed? And pages with CC numbers not cached, or blanked in the cache?
Sites such as bulletin boards frequently get somebody being stupid and posting their credit card number. The mods fix it, but the Google spider gets there first.
This is because on typewriters (yes, I know most of you haven't ever seen one), they frequently didn't have a zero or one key. You had to use lowercase "l" for one and capital "O" for zero.
As for old laws that were typed on a typewriter, getting them changed requires legislation, which is very expensive and time consuming, unless they can pass some sort of "meta-legislation" that changes all lowercase "l" to one throughout the law where appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at a Microsoft Christmas party in about 1990 (+/- a year). Bill Gates and Paul Allen were there talking to each other. Their body language was that they were old friends, not mortal enemies. This would have been seven years or so after the date mentioned in the cnet article. So, even if the article was true, which I doubt, then they had patched up their differences by then.
If I buy a rack of kitchen knives, I can't take it home on the subway? What about knitting needles? I sometimes carry a pen knife. Scissors? Will the play-doh for the kids look like plastic explosives?
I'm no security expert, but allowing HTML mail to arbitrarily download embedded graphics in a mail client is just dumb. From my reading of the articles, doing that doesn't disable the problem, but keeps the information from escaping back to the malicious parties. This is a mail client problem triggering PGP to decrypt, then allowing the information to escape through embedded graphics, not a fundamental problem in PGP itself. Turning off HTML mail support at the client and just taking the text representation of the message looks like it completely defeats the hack. Tell me if I'm wrong.
The Windows Phone was really well done. (We'll ignore Windows Phone 6 and before as if they never existed!) Much more coherent interface than either the iPhone or Android. And the battery life was way better. The problem with it was timing and apps. If it had come out before the iPhone, they would have ruled the market, and Apple would probably be suffering. But coming out after the iPhone and Android, they were continually playing catch up. They never got the app base, and without that it was chicken and egg...nobody bought it because it didn't have apps and no apps because nobody bought it.
There is just other people's computers. What this does is make it easier to move your data between your computers and the other people's computers. Seems like a good move by Microsoft.
http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4426/...
There is only other people's computers. If you move to relying on "the cloud", all you are doing is delegating your security to someone else. Now you have two points of vulnerability: Your local Linux machine, and the "cloud" server, either of which could be infected with malware. You have not fixed the problem, and you have actually doubled your exposure.
We'll lose money with every sale, but we'll make it up in volume.
I took a Software Engineering class where we covered formal specifications. For even a simple piece of code, the formal specifications were longer than the code to cover all of the boundary conditions. It was faster and simpler just to write code. Using code snippets in not new. We call those libraries. I've used those all my life. My code specifies which libraries to use and how to tie those together. Also, random code written by other people are frequently crap. Who is going to vet the quality of the code? I am not scared by this at all.
They are going to be Hurding Catz for a long time to come.
Windows 8 with Classic Shell is just as usable as Windows 7. Windows 8 without Classic Shell has a terrible interface for grouping the programs you have installed. If Microsoft had issued Windows 8 with the equivalent of the Classic Shell start button, then acceptance of Windows 8 would have been a no-brainer, and all the complaints about it would have been almost non-existent. Windows 8.1 was the right place to recover from the mistake, but instead they just gave a *different* button in place of the start button that essentially did nothing useful. Don't be afraid to use Windows 8, but get Classic Shell to go with it. It's free.
Survivor benefits are paid to the children, not the surviving parent. The parent only get the money as the custodian of the children, and is supposed to use it for the benefit of the child. The parent doesn't report the benefits on his or her tax return. If the child makes enough money during the year to file a tax return, the child does. So the IRS is going after the party to which the money was given. But of course, it really makes no sense...the child did not actually receive the money. The child has no records of receiving the money, or of any overpayment and can't contest it. It's unlikely even the parent has the records. And it is implied that the IRS can try to collect money from whomever they can get it from, not just the child of record.
On the other hand, Red Gate's Reflector decompiles the code into C#, VB.NET, F#, IL, or MC++. You can then look for malicious code. I mainly look for code accessing classes in the System.IO namespace, System.Web, System.Net, or similar namespaces, because these are the ones that are likely to either mess with existing files or connect to the Internet.
You can use the ILDASM (Intermediate Language Dis-assembler) program that comes with the .NET Framework, but it only decompiles into intermediate language (IL). This is enough to find the calls, but most people are not adept at reading IL.
Reflector is worth every penny. Besides looking for security problems, I use it all the time to figure out what the Framework is really doing, fix bugs in other people's libraries, sign code that wasn't signed originally, translate VB.NET code to C#, etc. (To translate code, compile it in one language and decompile it with Reflector into the other.)
Excel does not treat 1900 as a leap year. Excel's epoch, though, is December 30th, 1899 instead of the 31st to be compatible with 1-2-3 for all dates from March 1st, 1900 onward, allowing for 1-2-3's bug. Excel and Word, and all other Microsoft products that use VBA as a macro language, use the OLE Automation date format that works just fine on all dates from January 1, year 100 to December 31st 9999. Dates are treated as a double with the integer part being days and fractions being the fraction of a day. Negative numbers give the dates before the epoch. The only weird thing is the date of the epoch, which causes things such the Time function to return the time on December 30th 1899, if you retrieve the date portion.
This was a failure in marketing, not technology. When this came out, it took me a while to differentiate the products because of the first word in the name being the same. I finally figured out to just drop the word "Expression" and concentrate on the second word. I think it was a huge mistake trying to use the term to group a disparate set of products. They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc. and then packaged them as "Microsoft Designer Suite". Blend is actually pretty cool.
What if through some (magical) combination of hardware and software, after say two months, if you didn't log in, the contents became completely irretrievable? Then if you were arrested, you only had to hold out for two months before they would have to release you. Contempt of court means that they can only hold you while you can possibly give them what they need. If it is impossible for you to comply, which would be true after two months, they have to charge you with something else (obstruction of justice?) or release you.
This is a feature in need of an application and I can see very few applications.
Does that give me a an Erdos number?
The primary problem with foldit is that it can't be just a game. Since it is trying to simulate science, the game designers can't simplify features to increase playability. So when player frustration sets in due to the complexity, there is no simpler version or cheat mode. You are competing against nature, and nature is a bitch.
This causes many people to give up on foldit after a short while, because it takes time to learn what gains points. What is cool about the game is that many of the best players know relatively little about biology. It's a game that anyone can play, it's just hard to do well at it. If you like logic puzzles, crosswords, soduku, chess, or Go, you will probably like foldit.
In 1994, Bill Gates gave an interview to Playboy. He stated then that he was going to give away his money. In it he says:
PLAYBOY: Does your net worth of multi-billions, despite the fact that it's mostly in stock and the value varies daily, boggle your mind?
GATES: It's a ridiculous number. But remember, 95 percent of it I'm just going to give away. [Smiles] Don't tell people to write me letters. I'm saving that for when I'm in my 50s. It's a lot to give away and it's going to take time.
PLAYBOY: Where will you donate it?
GATES: To charitable things, scientific things. I don't believe in burdening any children I might have with that. They'll have enough. They'll be comfortable.
http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesint5.htm
I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter , he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.
Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hard problem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.
The best way to describe Lost is in the words of one of its main actors, Terry O'Quinn. He called it The Mysterious Gilligan's Island of Dr. Moreau. (An allusion to The Mysterious Island, Gilligan's Island, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.) Flashbacks and flashforwards in story telling is not new. The Mahabharata and Arabian Nights used it.
Sites such as bulletin boards frequently get somebody being stupid and posting their credit card number. The mods fix it, but the Google spider gets there first.
This is because on typewriters (yes, I know most of you haven't ever seen one), they frequently didn't have a zero or one key. You had to use lowercase "l" for one and capital "O" for zero.
As for old laws that were typed on a typewriter, getting them changed requires legislation, which is very expensive and time consuming, unless they can pass some sort of "meta-legislation" that changes all lowercase "l" to one throughout the law where appropriate.