>>> The Gamma rays would destroy the ozone on the unlucky side.
No, actually that's incorrect, and I'm amazed that such an innacuracy goes into a public article. Gamma rays will rather create a huge quantity of ozone on the exposed side of the earth. Note that gamma rays are ionizing radiations, due to the fact that their energy is high enough (in the order of MeV or more) to wipe out an electron out of its orbit due to either the Compton effect or the photoelectric effect.
That said, ozone is quite toxic so in the end you might end up with the same mass life extinction...
You have to detect the presence of a few general classes of thoughts: up/down. left-right. With only these two dimensions you can then do anything.
But this is still far from being real "thought reading".
>>> Naturally EDS has financial interests in saying such things. They're a company that makes millions off of companies by pushing proprietary software.
Financial interests? Hmmm...
http://www.eds.com/
About EDS EDS provides a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions to help its clients worldwide improve their business performance. EDS' core portfolio comprises information-technology, applications and business process services, as well as information-technology transformation services. EDS' A.T. Kearney subsidiary is one of the world's leading high-value management consultancies. With more than $20 billion in annual revenue, EDS is ranked 87th on the Fortune 500. The company's stock is traded on the New York (NYSE: EDS) and London stock exchanges. Learn more at eds.com.
>>> On a Windows box however it's not uncommon to see backup utilities running with higher priviledges than the "administrator" account because that's the only way to sidestep things like system file protection and other tricks Microsoft uses to protect the system from abuse.
That is not true.
All you need to read a file system in Windows is the backup privilege. You don't even need to be an adminstrator. So if you have this privilege enabled, you can use the BackupRead API to backup stuff.
so i happened to look over my finances this past weekend and i realized something: i'm broke. which is odd, because i had a bunch of liquid capital in my checking account last time i checked, and now all of a sudden i have nothing.
i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck (which i haven't received yet). finally, add in the fact that i had to put down two months rent as a deposit for my new lease, and i'm flat broke.
on the plus side, this first paycheck is going to be huge... (which unfortunately means i'll probably end up getting taxed huge on it. doh!)
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.
next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.
lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things acc
I am reading now an article in which James Gosling claims that.NET has a huge security hole. The problem seems to be that.NET allows execution of both safe and unsafe managed code in the same process:
[...], Gosling is concerned about "unsafe" code, which is produced by traditional languages like C and C++. Unsafe code is old code that does not strictly follow the rules of type safety that.NET defines, and this sort of code requires additional permissions to execute. According to Sterling, "you as a developer take it upon yourself" to utilise unsafe code in your.NET applications.
But what James Gosling fails to mention is that the Java runtime also allows the same type of unsafe code execution in every process running safe Java code. No, I'm not smoking crack. The technology is well established in the Java world and it is called JNI. Here is a quote:
The JNI allows Java code that runs within a Java Virtual Machine (VM) to operate with applications and libraries written in other languages, such as C, C++, and assembly. In addition, the Invocation API allows you to embed the Java Virtual Machine into your native applications.
Programmers use the JNI to write native methods to handle those situations when an application cannot be written entirely in the Java programming language. For example, you may need to use native methods and the JNI in the following situations:
The standard Java class library may not support the platform-dependent features needed by your application. You may already have a library or application written in another programming language and you wish to make it accessible to Java applications. You may want to implement a small portion of time-critical code in a lower-level programming language, such as assembly, and then have your Java application call these functions. Think of it a second - in fact, how does a small Java program interoperate with the underlying operating system? How does a "Hello world" Java program succeed to write anything to the console? After all, the Win32 API is not directly callable from Java, correct?
Therefore, by its own measure, Gosling only suceeded to demonstrate that Java also contains a huge security hole...:-)
P.S. And, please, don't tell me that JNI is not a security hole because writing JNI code is eventually harder and not done as often than using "unsafe" in C#... Face it - in Java, whenever you are writing to a file, communicating through a network interface or just handling GUI controls, there is always some unmanaged C++ code being executed in your process...
... I think that 5 megabit pixel will be the norm in five years... with some models including built-in software to automatically correct distorted images due to dirty lenses (remember that the "eye" of such a cell phone will be very exposed to potential physical damage, dirt, etc.
A while back, one of the main things I admired NASA for was the redundant design concept. You just have a backup path for everything.
But recently it looks like they kind of dropped this concept, at least partially. Probably as a cost-cutting measure. The success of the whole mission now depends on the reliability of several single components, like the sensor in discussion.
BTW, did you know that a Mars Rover has a single CPU that carries out all the computation? I found this puzzling. Today, you add redundance in every piece of equipment - even in web blades.
Let's be creative here... All this carbon-based energy production is a terribly innefficient way to generate electricity. In the future, probably eolian energy will be the best source of energy.
At that point, given enough energy, we can re-disolve the CO2 into magma - remember that there is a lot more CO2 (and other gases) dissolved in the liquid magma than all the power plants will ever produce.
>>> It would actually mean that Microsoft built the SP2 updates with a new compiler that basically eliminates any possibility of buffer overflows.
While the new compiler additions detect some buffer overruns/underruns, note that there is no way to get 100% buffer overrun detection with commercial C++ compilers. Usually, these overruns are detected by a variety of methods, like putting canary "values" at the beginning and/or at the end of each of the protected data buffers. These canary values are checked at certain moments of time, usually at the end of the buffer data lieftime - for example for stack-allocated blocks they are checked on routine exit; for heap allocated blocks when the blocks are freed.
The problem with canaries is that they won't detect memory writes that write directly in other "valid" data buffers. For example thread 1 writing overwriting the contents of some local variables in another stack, manipulated by thread 2.
There are other techniques, for example checksums for the user-mode data structures (like stack frames, C++ VTABLEs, heap data structures, constant data, etc). But these techniques have limited use too.
In addition, a malicious piece of code can always workaround the canary/checksum detection. The moment this malicious code has a chance to run in yoru process, all bets are off. It can eventually change the exception trap handlers, etc.
The only way to get 100% protection from buffer overruns would be to run Java/C#/VB.NET code (with certain restictions of course, for example avoiding unsafe code in C#). That said, you can also avoid buffer overruns to a certain degree in C++ too if you use proper class libraries like STL that perform things like automatic array bound checks, etc.
>>> One of the big problems with these kind of archives is that they aren't permanent the way that paper is. Washington could very easily end up the way that Stasi did in East Germany.
Paper is not really permanent either. If someone wants to get rid of paper documents, all he needs to do is burn them. Eventuially, in an "accidental fire".
It will look exactly as the normal matter. The interaction of antiparticles with photons would be exactly the same. Also, remember that the photon is its own antiparticle...
>>> Unless we find a way to make antimatter without having to make matter as well; then the reaction would be a net gain in usable energy (at the expense of matter in the universe, of course)
The main problem is that making antimatter consumes energy. You have to generate & capture enough positrons and anti-protons etc. until you get a sizeable lump of antimatter. This consumes way more energy than whatever will be released in the explosion.
This is why no human will be able to see antimatter in visible quantities.
Maybe some of them are still surprisingly stable. But you might never know since these atoms are created in extreme conditions (usually bombarding atoms of element X with atoms of element Y). This would cause quick destruction of the freshly creaed elements.
For example, a Uranium 238 is pretty stable (half-life in order of millions of years) but when a slow neutron hits it then it is pretty much gone.
>>> I spent an afternoon printing warnings on people's printers, with instructions on how to disable file & print sharing. Its quite an amazing thing to witness. About half of them are wide open, and don't require any password to mount the C drive or print documents. smbclient is a really fun utility.:)
Interesting. So I think there is a new market right there for "printed spam" ads...
Slashdot Mirror
Argh - yet another example when Microsoft is copying Apple with their Tablet PC.
Err...
From the original Microsoft link, you can see that the release date for this April 2003 study was 5 May 2004.
My guess is that the Slashdot editors confused this with 5 May 2005, which was yesterday.
>>> The Gamma rays would destroy the ozone on the unlucky side.
No, actually that's incorrect, and I'm amazed that such an innacuracy goes into a public article. Gamma rays will rather create a huge quantity of ozone on the exposed side of the earth. Note that gamma rays are ionizing radiations, due to the fact that their energy is high enough (in the order of MeV or more) to wipe out an electron out of its orbit due to either the Compton effect or the photoelectric effect.
That said, ozone is quite toxic so in the end you might end up with the same mass life extinction...
You have to detect the presence of a few general classes of thoughts: up/down. left-right. With only these two dimensions you can then do anything. But this is still far from being real "thought reading".
How interesting.
New archeological evidence seems to confirm the idea that our race was actually created by some ancient living things called "humans".
>>> Naturally EDS has financial interests in saying such things. They're a company that makes millions off of companies by pushing proprietary software.
Financial interests? Hmmm...
http://www.eds.com/
About EDS
EDS provides a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions to help its clients worldwide improve their business performance. EDS' core portfolio comprises information-technology, applications and business process services, as well as information-technology transformation services. EDS' A.T. Kearney subsidiary is one of the world's leading high-value management consultancies. With more than $20 billion in annual revenue, EDS is ranked 87th on the Fortune 500. The company's stock is traded on the New York (NYSE: EDS) and London stock exchanges. Learn more at eds.com.
>>> On a Windows box however it's not uncommon to see backup utilities running with higher priviledges than the "administrator" account because that's the only way to sidestep things like system file protection and other tricks Microsoft uses to protect the system from abuse.
That is not true.
All you need to read a file system in Windows is the backup privilege. You don't even need to be an adminstrator. So if you have this privilege enabled, you can use the BackupRead API to backup stuff.
Give me enough time, and I calculate for you the decimals of Pi to whatever precision you want. Ramanunjan algorithm works pretty nicely...
There is no point in memorizing things if you can come up to the same result with an algorithm.
The new blogs is missing the critical pieces. Fortunately, the contents of the previous blog are cached here.
Here are some relevant paragraphs:
January 24, 2005
uh oh, what happened to my bank account?
By markjen
so i happened to look over my finances this past weekend and i realized something: i'm broke. which is odd, because i had a bunch of liquid capital in my checking account last time i checked, and now all of a sudden i have nothing.
i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck (which i haven't received yet). finally, add in the fact that i had to put down two months rent as a deposit for my new lease, and i'm flat broke.
on the plus side, this first paycheck is going to be huge... (which unfortunately means i'll probably end up getting taxed huge on it. doh!)
which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.
then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.
next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.
lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things acc
And a similar blog entry here:
/ 07 /368226.aspx
.NET has a huge security hole. The problem seems to be that .NET allows execution of both safe and unsafe managed code in the same process:
.NET defines, and this sort of code requires additional permissions to execute. According to Sterling, "you as a developer take it upon yourself" to utilise unsafe code in your .NET applications.
:-)
http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/02
I am reading now an article in which James Gosling claims that
[...], Gosling is concerned about "unsafe" code, which is produced by traditional languages like C and C++. Unsafe code is old code that does not strictly follow the rules of type safety that
But what James Gosling fails to mention is that the Java runtime also allows the same type of unsafe code execution in every process running safe Java code. No, I'm not smoking crack. The technology is well established in the Java world and it is called JNI. Here is a quote:
The JNI allows Java code that runs within a Java Virtual Machine (VM) to operate with applications and libraries written in other languages, such as C, C++, and assembly. In addition, the Invocation API allows you to embed the Java Virtual Machine into your native applications.
Programmers use the JNI to write native methods to handle those situations when an application cannot be written entirely in the Java programming language. For example, you may need to use native methods and the JNI in the following situations:
The standard Java class library may not support the platform-dependent features needed by your application.
You may already have a library or application written in another programming language and you wish to make it accessible to Java applications.
You may want to implement a small portion of time-critical code in a lower-level programming language, such as assembly, and then have your Java application call these functions.
Think of it a second - in fact, how does a small Java program interoperate with the underlying operating system? How does a "Hello world" Java program succeed to write anything to the console? After all, the Win32 API is not directly callable from Java, correct?
Therefore, by its own measure, Gosling only suceeded to demonstrate that Java also contains a huge security hole...
P.S. And, please, don't tell me that JNI is not a security hole because writing JNI code is eventually harder and not done as often than using "unsafe" in C#... Face it - in Java, whenever you are writing to a file, communicating through a network interface or just handling GUI controls, there is always some unmanaged C++ code being executed in your process...
1) Sell your birthdate on eBay. ...
2)
3) Profit!
Or, alternatively, just go to http://www.shadowmite.com/
... I think that 5 megabit pixel will be the norm in five years... with some models including built-in software to automatically correct distorted images due to dirty lenses (remember that the "eye" of such a cell phone will be very exposed to potential physical damage, dirt, etc.
Hmmm... which one of these currents can use this as a proof?
BTW the equivalent recursive directory delete in Windows is "rm /s/q c:\" not "format c:"
A while back, one of the main things I admired NASA for was the redundant design concept. You just have a backup path for everything.
But recently it looks like they kind of dropped this concept, at least partially. Probably as a cost-cutting measure. The success of the whole mission now depends on the reliability of several single components, like the sensor in discussion.
BTW, did you know that a Mars Rover has a single CPU that carries out all the computation? I found this puzzling. Today, you add redundance in every piece of equipment - even in web blades.
Let's be creative here... All this carbon-based energy production is a terribly innefficient way to generate electricity. In the future, probably eolian energy will be the best source of energy.
At that point, given enough energy, we can re-disolve the CO2 into magma - remember that there is a lot more CO2 (and other gases) dissolved in the liquid magma than all the power plants will ever produce.
>>> It would actually mean that Microsoft built the SP2 updates with a new compiler that basically eliminates any possibility of buffer overflows.
While the new compiler additions detect some buffer overruns/underruns, note that there is no way to get 100% buffer overrun detection with commercial C++ compilers. Usually, these overruns are detected by a variety of methods, like putting canary "values" at the beginning and/or at the end of each of the protected data buffers. These canary values are checked at certain moments of time, usually at the end of the buffer data lieftime - for example for stack-allocated blocks they are checked on routine exit; for heap allocated blocks when the blocks are freed.
The problem with canaries is that they won't detect memory writes that write directly in other "valid" data buffers. For example thread 1 writing overwriting the contents of some local variables in another stack, manipulated by thread 2.
There are other techniques, for example checksums for the user-mode data structures (like stack frames, C++ VTABLEs, heap data structures, constant data, etc). But these techniques have limited use too.
In addition, a malicious piece of code can always workaround the canary/checksum detection. The moment this malicious code has a chance to run in yoru process, all bets are off. It can eventually change the exception trap handlers, etc.
The only way to get 100% protection from buffer overruns would be to run Java/C#/VB.NET code (with certain restictions of course, for example avoiding unsafe code in C#). That said, you can also avoid buffer overruns to a certain degree in C++ too if you use proper class libraries like STL that perform things like automatic array bound checks, etc.
>>> One of the big problems with these kind of archives is that they aren't permanent the way that paper is. Washington could very easily end up the way that Stasi did in East Germany.
Paper is not really permanent either. If someone wants to get rid of paper documents, all he needs to do is burn them. Eventuially, in an "accidental fire".
It will look exactly as the normal matter. The interaction of antiparticles with photons would be exactly the same. Also, remember that the photon is its own antiparticle...
>>> It's been said once, it's been said a million times: SpaceShipOne does not mean that NASA is a useless, wasteful government agency.
It might not be useless but it is certainly wasteful...
>>> Unless we find a way to make antimatter without having to make matter as well; then the reaction would be a net gain in usable energy (at the expense of matter in the universe, of course)
The main problem is that making antimatter consumes energy. You have to generate & capture enough positrons and anti-protons etc. until you get a sizeable lump of antimatter. This consumes way more energy than whatever will be released in the explosion.
This is why no human will be able to see antimatter in visible quantities.
Maybe some of them are still surprisingly stable. But you might never know since these atoms are created in extreme conditions (usually bombarding atoms of element X with atoms of element Y). This would cause quick destruction of the freshly creaed elements.
For example, a Uranium 238 is pretty stable (half-life in order of millions of years) but when a slow neutron hits it then it is pretty much gone.
An interesting article about the bomb is here:
c _i d=544276&msg_id=2403988&parent_id=2403988&tid=1186 5
http://www.icq.com/boards/view_replies.php?topi
>>> I spent an afternoon printing warnings on people's printers, with instructions on how to disable file & print sharing. Its quite an amazing thing to witness. About half of them are wide open, and don't require any password to mount the C drive or print documents. smbclient is a really fun utility. :)
Interesting. So I think there is a new market right there for "printed spam" ads...