What mature, socially responsible individual could not agree with you? But again, the problem is getting somebody to act. Modern democracies are pretty good about being proactive on many issues, but they only got that way from broad social pressure. The majority of the public does not even understand this issue, and remains blissfully unaware of the full dimension of the problem. The situation on the internet these days is a crises waiting to happen, but nobody reacts. Granted, there are futile attempts along the lines that you suggest. For example, when a white hat security researcher takes his discovery to the FBI in the USA, the FBI has been known to act to shut down a botnet herder within its jurisdiction from time to time. Unfortunately, these efforts are woefully under-maned and underfunded. It is probably a similar situation in other countries you mention. We have seen some wonderfully coordinated actions on the international level (Interpol) to shut down child porn rings. If only we could give these same people a broader mandate and funding at the level the military enjoys. However, there is no evidence that is going to happen any time soon. Not until we are seeing daily headlines in the popular press and nightly news casts about the situation will anyone act. The general public does not have the vocabulary or knowledge to even begin to understand the issue. The newscasters don't understand the issues. How can they even begin to alert the public? We get action against child porn rings because everybody can understand that and are rightfully horrified when they learn what is going on. The problem with the botnets, however, is beyond their understanding. The truth that the vast majority doesn't understand is that the world exists in a state of perpetual warfare. Look at the world from a long ways away, from another planet perhaps, and what do you see? Beneath the surface on that third planet from the sun is a chess board, with move and counter move as diverse forces battle for power. People in modern democracies remain isolated by their own ignorance from the bulk of the drama. The entire earth is a forest or coal field where fires burn underground, breaking out to the surface here and there all over the globe. If you happen to live in one of these hot spots, then you are rudely confronted by reality, though may not be aware of the bigger picture. If you happen live in a modern, civilized country, you go blindly about your personal affairs blissfully unaware of the fire that burns beneath the soil. No government is going to react until a fire breaks out and the internet burns down.
I thought that was quite elegantly stated, or at a minimum, sufficient to back your thesis. The problem is, this has been going on for a long time, and nobody is doing anything about it. In such a void, vigilantism may at least focus attention onto the problem and in the end bring about a more refined solution.
Personally, to me vigilantism is very appealing on a gut level. There is a war going on for control of the net, and we carry on with our mundane daily affairs as if the internet is always going to be there for us. But I ask you, what happens when some rogue state suddenly buys up and corners the market on all the botnets at once, and that tremendous power becomes concentrated onto one focused terrible purpose? I won't paint you scenarios. I am sure you can imagine potential villains and their nefarious goals as well as I. Even if such a thing does not come about, just think of the potential all this crime has of corrupting the world. These criminal enterprises are growing at an exponential rate. While we debate solutions the darkness spreads. It is hard enough to reach consensus on a national level. Imagine how long it would take to reach a consensus on the ideas you propose? How long does it take the average RFC to work its way through the standards process? I believe that figure is ten years. In such a space of time, the crime and corruption grows a thousand time stronger. I say - sound the call to arms. Its time to take back the net!
Dangling pointers arise when an object is deleted or deallocated, without modifying the value of the pointer, so that the pointer still points to the memory location of the deallocated memory. As the system may reallocate the previously freed memory to another process, if the original program then dereferences the (now) dangling pointer, unpredictable behavior may result, as the memory may now contain completely different data. This is especially the case if the program writes data to memory pointed by a dangling pointer, as silent corruption of unrelated data may result, leading to subtle bugs that can be extremely difficult to find, or cause segmentation faults (*NIX) or general protection faults (Windows). If the overwritten data is bookkeeping data used by the system's memory allocator, the corruption can cause system instabilities.
However, although I and others suggest doing magic things with certain areas of memory without stating how one is supposed to do that, you require not only magic ("if you can change one object by modifying fields through the other pointer"), but also combining the original flaw with a buffer overflow. In the end, I don't think any of us are even close. We just don't have enough information. Perhaps if we experimented with the application, in time we could figure it out....but would it be worth the effort?
Now, however, they can change the value of the dangling pointer and when IIS does the jump this time, it executes their exploit code instead.
They are not saying they "change the value of the dangling pointer".
From the FA: "The problem before was, you had to override the exact location that the pointer was pointing to. It was considered impossible. But we discovered a way... The long and short of it is, if you can determine the value of the pointer, it's game over."
There are theoretically two ways to exploit a dangling pointer - change the address that it points to (which they don't do), or discover the address it is pointing to, and put some code there (considered impossible). Most likely, it is pointing to memory space within the program that once held valid executable code. They say this "was considered impossible, but we discovered a way". So I suspect they just stuck a jump instruction at the location the pointer was pointing to instead of trying to cram executable code into an unknown sized space. The jump would of course be to some space they allocated, with a known size, big enough to hold their exploit. Determining the value of the dangling pointer would be easy enough - you would get a message when it crashed that the app tried to access invalid memory at addr: 0x????????. Just stick a jump at that location - then get a big warm hug from Microsoft when you show them how you did it.
this has got to one of the most pointless slashdot stories ever
I don't agree at all. I find it very educational. In spite of being a programmer for over a decade, it is only within the last few years I have been learning about the network side of things, as the majority of software I developed didn't require such knowledge. Today, for example, thanks to a post, I learned there is an update to Ethereal called WireShark that I have just installed, along with an update to WinPcap. I imagine there are many Slashdot readers that have as much knowledge on the network side as I have on the programming side, and I for one am very grateful they share their knowledge with the rest of us.
I have never gambled at a casino. They scare me. Once someone invited me to go along, and I went, since I needed to get out of the house. I stayed at the bar, reading a book until my companion had had enough, and refused to go near a machine, even when offered some free tokens by a casino employee. The power of the psychology employed is a frightening concept. At this point there have been decades of research into sales and marketing and how to arrange shelf space to maximize profits, and as another here pointed out, even universities in Los Vegas that specialize in the psychology of gambling. Manipulation of the environment with lighting and air "conditioning" adds another dimension. Imagine the potential to take this to a whole new level with cutting edge technology such as face recognition and detection of emotions. Imagine a person is looking bored, or anxiously looking at his watch, and starts walking toward the door. Suddenly the machines all around him are triggered to win, lights flashing, coins raining down. I doubt there would be any laws against increasing the payout at will - ie: giving away money, only against decreasing it below some regulated amount. There was mention of strategically placed machines that pay out more than normal in highly visible locations. Imagine that instead of each machine having its own microprocessor, its software is hosted on a virtual platform on cluster somewhere. Then its payout could be manipulated instantly to suit the moment - to attract attention when required. Computers with face/emotion recognition could have vast neural networks that would learn how to maximize profits from each individual, as well as the group as a whole. It would recognize regulars and first timers. The software would grow so sophisticated with time that it would be beyond the ability of any individual to comprehend. The computers would also help to motivate employees and have them smiling encouragement or handing out free drinks at the precise moment required or doing whatever it is that keeps the money flowing to the casino's coffers. It would experiment with lighting levels, sounds, music, temperature, air movement, every detail of the environment, constantly fine tunning and instantly adapting to ever changing realities. Each casino would have its "control centre" and its software would be a closely guarded secret. It would be a trap from who's clutches you would never escape - Hotel California.
I think casinos should required to foot the bill for social problems caused by gambling and gambling addiction....and if this was a requirement, would owning a casino still be profitable?
I have often thought they could use some compressed gas to blow the dust off the solar panels. It may be useful for other things as well, such as blowing the dust off a rock under study. When looking at images you can see that where they have ground down a surface with the RAT tool, there is often a lot of dust on them, left over from the operation. They could have an efficient little compressor that runs as a background task filling up the reservoir. Even water under pressure could be useful for some interesting experiments. Rocks look different when wet, and their wetted colour can provide clues about their composition. They could water a spot on the ground to see if some plant starts to grow. A desert on earth that hasn't received rain in a hundred years will suddenly blossom with plant life nearly overnight after a rain. Who knows if maybe the same thing could happen on mars? Well - except for the water evaporating immediately and the toxic soil, that is...
You may find using a genetic algorithm to solve tic tac toe an interesting approach. You can download the player and choose to play against the genetic algorithm, which you will never beat, or against a neural network which you may beat. Then you can give your four year old a chance to play against the random number generator.
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
For me, quite the coincidence to run across you comment. Just in the past few days I have taken to resizing my browser to half the width of the screen - like folding a newspaper - because I realized that my eyes tire when reading lines of text running the entire 1280 pixel width of my monitor. It seems to work out great - I am even reading Slashdot this way now. If only I could figure out how to change the background colour without copying and pasting into a word processor. No option for this in Firefox? Perhaps there should be.
Rod Cope of OpenLogic explains what this is all about in a nice video at JavaOne 2007 where he really seems to be a nice guy who perhaps deserves our support as they have been involved in Open Source and promoting it for a long time. Its just this thing about their Indemnification offer that has touched off a raw nerve here. I hereby invite Rod Cope to contact me and I will ask him about this, do a little interview with him, and report back.
Supplemental to what I just said above, I think they are really hoping you will send them a list of all the files on your computer, so they can do their little free 'analysis' for you. Who knows what they want to do with that list after? I can only speculate...
Who would be stupid enough to send them such a list? Who is this company, anyway, and who is behind them? Is this some kind of sting operation - by - who knows? Conspiracy theories, anyone?
I tried it, but at first, not on the drive where Firefox and Thunderbird are installed. Since it says it identifies individual open source files as well as installs, I tried it on a drive where I have collected thousands of files of all sorts over the years, including Open Source installs and code. The result was very strange. While I think it did find a lot of OS files, it didn't specifically identify them. It highlighted folder names in bold at the top of the tree, but I could not verify that the actual OS files were somewhere within that particular tree - there were too many files. Perhaps I just didn't understand the UI. It showed me a folder view on the left pane, and a files view on the right.
I don't understand this. There is an option on the file menu to save the results of the scan, but it just prints out this big list of files in XML, and there doesn't seem to be any way to determine which of them may be open source. I think you have to send it to them. Besides that, it offers you three different views of all your files, Biggest, Oldest, or Newest. Seems to be a nice little piece of software as far as that goes if you don't happen to have anything else to give you such a listing.
Hold on a minute - I'm now scanning my C: drive...
Well - this time I got a list of open source "projects" installed or partially installed. It identified 7-Zip, and Ethereal as incomplete, even telling me that WinPcap was not installed. The thing is, I do not have "projects" installed - only the applications. Beyond that, there was no mention of either Firefox or Thunderbird, and all Microsoft products such as the DxSDK and many others were listed (MSVC, Platform SDK, etc, etc)
Very well spoken. It's a pity the moderators haven't noticed (yet).
So to have hope to understand such a changing system logically and reasonably, we first have to understand our self.
When contemplating self, who is it that is doing the contemplating? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watcher?) When contemplating self, we see ourselves reflected in an infinite hall of mirrors. Thus we arrive at paradox.
It was once proposed that if we attempt to travel in a straight line through this universe for a long enough time, eventually we will come back to where we started. Later, when it was learned that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating pace, I suppose that we would never reach the 'other end of the universe'. I see a parallel in what I have just said with trying to fathom what lies beyond the event horizon. Whether that paradox is resolved or not, there will always be another awaiting us beyond the next bend, and we will never arrive to comprehend the universe. It will forever remain 'mystery'. Science relies on reduction to illuminate a part of the whole, but by its very nature, can never explain the whole. In the end, it's every man for himself to create some meaning in his life as best he can. By choosing to measure the state of one of a pair of entangled photons, you have effected the state of the other. The choices you make in life have a profound effect on your ultimate destiny, and ultimately an impact on the entire universe. Since science is an inadequate tool for holistic comprehension, we are left in the end with nothing better to rely on than philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Don't try to make sense out of this, because what I am speaking of cannot be made 'sense' of. It can only be expressed in poetry or music. All truth is reflected in the form of a lotus blossom. Now I'm speaking gibberish... or poetry, to be more kind to myself. I'm sorry, I am not too sure what I wanted to say, or if I really want to plunge into this right now after all. The parent spoke so eloquently, but I have come up short. If you found a grain of something useful in what I just said that is all that matters.
I found this idea about microscopic black holes much more interesting. They are talking about the idea that these things could be rattling around inside the sun, or inside Jupiter and causing it to heat up, or even inside the earth. It was also suggested that the new Large Hadron Collider might be capable of creating microscopic black holes through the collision of particles at relativistic velocities.
I once read a scifi story decades ago about this tiny black hole that revolved around a planet close to the surface, leaving a hole behind whenever it passed through a mountain or whatever. I never forgot that story and was fascinated by the concept.
I had rebooted - but perhaps the state of my computer was 'confused' at that time. I was in the middle of something and had a lot of applications open. It's working great now - at least - it displays my new site, which is the whole reason I wanted to try out Safari.
I was grateful for that tip, since I am running a non-English version of WinXP Pro, but it didn't make any difference. I was using Safari to test my own web site, which meets W3C compliance for HTML 4. Most pages rendered horribly, often with missing text.
There was another problem - when I went to the W3C verification site with Safari to double check a page, as soon as I tried to fill in the URL field Safari crashes every time. So I guess that's the end of my experimenting with at least this version of Safari. Anyhow - I wish them luck, and hope they take some market away from IE (but please not FF!).
Ah... The bright square at the end of the room is not a window - rather, it is the photographer's light box he is using to illuminate the scene. Then I was right - the photographer himself is kneeling to the left of it. I just sent an email to the author of the article, asking about the scene reflected in the silicon sphere. Let us see if he replies with some information
The picture shows a beautiful shot of the perfect silicon sphere. Out of curiosity, I looked very closly at the scene reflected by it's surface, thinking perhaps I might get a glimpse of the photographer. However, he was nowhere to be seen.
Then I got to thinking - it should be easy to reconstruct the scene that is portrayed in the reflection from the surface of the sphere. All that is needed is to cut out the image of the silicon sphere and paste onto the surface of a three dimensional sphere. Then we could rotate it this way and that and look around the scientist's lab. So I did this - using a software simulation. I cut out the silicon sphere from the article's photo, and used it as a texture on a spherical 3D mesh, and added a little code to rotate it back and forth so that I could look around the scientist's lab. Guess what - there is no sign of the photographer! What we see is a very messy lab, with a closed door on the right. There are florescent fixtures on the ceiling that are currently turned off. There is a large window at the end of the room. I do believe that the ceiling, though it meets the left wall at the usual 90 degree angle, curves down to the wall at the right - a very unusual space, as if it was crammed into to an attic. At the extreme right of the room I believe we see a curtain hastily thrown over whatever would have been on the right side of the view. If the photographer is in the room, as he must be, I think he must be kneeling to the left of the window about three-quarters of the way back, and using a telephoto lens.
I have made available the exe that I created on my web site so that you may take a look for yourself. The code is a hasty adaptation of Microsoft's DX3D mesh tutorial "Tut_06Meshes" from the DxSDK 9.0, which is also included. You can get the zip package here. Perhaps you could modify the code to produce an even better view, but unfortunately, the resolution of the original image is really too low to get much out of it. It was a lot of fun doing this, and if you come up with a better result than me I would like to hear from you.
Click Control Panel - Indexing - Uncheck the locations it searches.
People keep saying how simple this is - in fact - it is this simple on XP at least. I keep it turned off on my computer, because I can't allow a process to wake up and start accessing the HD unexpectedly when I am testing software I develop. However, how many of you have checked if it is the same thing on Vista? Perhaps it's different. How many responding in a similar manner are actually running Vista, anyhow? I would imagine that only a minority of the Slashdot crowd have actually upgraded to Vista. Furthermore, as usual, we are not getting all the facts. Google must have some reason to say what they are saying. I can't believe that all their brilliant engineers don't know how to turn of the search service. There must be more to this than we have been informed. It is hardly the moment to suddenly call Google evil and defend Micro$soft based on the minimal information we have on this.
You could have provided us with the link while you were at it, but thanks for the tip. The entire article is there! I am going to enjoy reading this: A Simpler Origin for Life by Robert Shapiro.
They make this so easy with the examples of the various classifications that image recognition software could probably do the job just as well. Imagine feeding neural networked based pattern recognition software a few thousand samples of each terrain type, and you'll probably get as good as you would from the general public.
One more thing - I got an all black image from the half-dozen or so I tried. It was explained that these will occur on the edge of a frame. It would be so simple to filter those out - rather than waste bandwidth showing them to people. At a minimum thousands of featureless images could similarly be filtered out. Just these two measures alone would increase efficiency considerably. Beyond that perhaps you could just use human input to verify and fine tune the pattern recognition software. The job could be done in a fraction of the time. Are you listening, NASA? I'll set it up for you if you like.
Why - that's brilliant. Then - we can't really trust anything we read on Slashdot anymore - because it might be planted by Microsoft. In fact - what a devious way for Microsoft to divide our community!
Wait a minute... Why are you saying this, anyhow? You are spreading paranoia and mistrust on Slashdot! Could it be that you were paid by Microsoft to say these things?
Just kidding:) - really - you make a good point - and it is kinda scary when you think about it.
I just got off the phone with Michael J. Laine, President of the LiftPort Group. In a previous comment, I had noted that there was some direct feedback from Mr. Laine, but his comments came out at 0 because he logged on as AC. Since I felt no one had noticed his comments, I offered to interview him on behalf of Slashdot, and he contacted me and accepted my offer. I was able to authenticate that indeed I was in touch with the real Michael J. Laine. I must say it was very interesting conversation. In the end it was agreed that I will prepare a list of questions for Michael, mostly based on Slashdot comments posted here, giving him a chance to respond to each in his own words. If you wish to add to the that list, pose your question here and now. I hope to be able to submit the completed interview within 24 hours, and then it will be up to Slashdot editors if and when to post it.
I don't know if anybody noticed, but we seem to have some feedback from Michael Laine of LiftPort himself. Since he logged on as Anonymous Coward, his remarks are coming out at 0, below the radar of most readers. It seems no moderator has considered elevating his comments, or is not convinced that the writer is indeed Michael Laine of LiftPort.
Mr. Laine - if that is really you, I would suggest that you log on, so that your comments will at least start out at 1 and thereby become visible. If you wish, drop me a note, and I will interview you (via email or Skype) on behalf of Slashdot. (Click the contact-me link on my web page). Of course you can expect to be properly authenticated in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
What mature, socially responsible individual could not agree with you? But again, the problem is getting somebody to act. Modern democracies are pretty good about being proactive on many issues, but they only got that way from broad social pressure. The majority of the public does not even understand this issue, and remains blissfully unaware of the full dimension of the problem. The situation on the internet these days is a crises waiting to happen, but nobody reacts. Granted, there are futile attempts along the lines that you suggest. For example, when a white hat security researcher takes his discovery to the FBI in the USA, the FBI has been known to act to shut down a botnet herder within its jurisdiction from time to time. Unfortunately, these efforts are woefully under-maned and underfunded. It is probably a similar situation in other countries you mention. We have seen some wonderfully coordinated actions on the international level (Interpol) to shut down child porn rings. If only we could give these same people a broader mandate and funding at the level the military enjoys. However, there is no evidence that is going to happen any time soon. Not until we are seeing daily headlines in the popular press and nightly news casts about the situation will anyone act. The general public does not have the vocabulary or knowledge to even begin to understand the issue. The newscasters don't understand the issues. How can they even begin to alert the public? We get action against child porn rings because everybody can understand that and are rightfully horrified when they learn what is going on. The problem with the botnets, however, is beyond their understanding. The truth that the vast majority doesn't understand is that the world exists in a state of perpetual warfare. Look at the world from a long ways away, from another planet perhaps, and what do you see? Beneath the surface on that third planet from the sun is a chess board, with move and counter move as diverse forces battle for power. People in modern democracies remain isolated by their own ignorance from the bulk of the drama. The entire earth is a forest or coal field where fires burn underground, breaking out to the surface here and there all over the globe. If you happen to live in one of these hot spots, then you are rudely confronted by reality, though may not be aware of the bigger picture. If you happen live in a modern, civilized country, you go blindly about your personal affairs blissfully unaware of the fire that burns beneath the soil. No government is going to react until a fire breaks out and the internet burns down.
The internet is broken.
I thought that was quite elegantly stated, or at a minimum, sufficient to back your thesis. The problem is, this has been going on for a long time, and nobody is doing anything about it. In such a void, vigilantism may at least focus attention onto the problem and in the end bring about a more refined solution.
Personally, to me vigilantism is very appealing on a gut level. There is a war going on for control of the net, and we carry on with our mundane daily affairs as if the internet is always going to be there for us. But I ask you, what happens when some rogue state suddenly buys up and corners the market on all the botnets at once, and that tremendous power becomes concentrated onto one focused terrible purpose? I won't paint you scenarios. I am sure you can imagine potential villains and their nefarious goals as well as I. Even if such a thing does not come about, just think of the potential all this crime has of corrupting the world. These criminal enterprises are growing at an exponential rate. While we debate solutions the darkness spreads. It is hard enough to reach consensus on a national level. Imagine how long it would take to reach a consensus on the ideas you propose? How long does it take the average RFC to work its way through the standards process? I believe that figure is ten years. In such a space of time, the crime and corruption grows a thousand time stronger. I say - sound the call to arms. Its time to take back the net!
Well, no - a dangling pointer implies two different pointers referencing the same memory area.
Well, not according to Wikipedia, who says...
Dangling pointers arise when an object is deleted or deallocated, without modifying the value of the pointer, so that the pointer still points to the memory location of the deallocated memory. As the system may reallocate the previously freed memory to another process, if the original program then dereferences the (now) dangling pointer, unpredictable behavior may result, as the memory may now contain completely different data. This is especially the case if the program writes data to memory pointed by a dangling pointer, as silent corruption of unrelated data may result, leading to subtle bugs that can be extremely difficult to find, or cause segmentation faults (*NIX) or general protection faults (Windows). If the overwritten data is bookkeeping data used by the system's memory allocator, the corruption can cause system instabilities.
However, although I and others suggest doing magic things with certain areas of memory without stating how one is supposed to do that, you require not only magic ("if you can change one object by modifying fields through the other pointer"), but also combining the original flaw with a buffer overflow. In the end, I don't think any of us are even close. We just don't have enough information. Perhaps if we experimented with the application, in time we could figure it out. ...but would it be worth the effort?
Now, however, they can change the value of the dangling pointer and when IIS does the jump this time, it executes their exploit code instead.
They are not saying they "change the value of the dangling pointer".
From the FA: "The problem before was, you had to override the exact location that the pointer was pointing to. It was considered impossible. But we discovered a way... The long and short of it is, if you can determine the value of the pointer, it's game over."
There are theoretically two ways to exploit a dangling pointer - change the address that it points to (which they don't do), or discover the address it is pointing to, and put some code there (considered impossible). Most likely, it is pointing to memory space within the program that once held valid executable code. They say this "was considered impossible, but we discovered a way". So I suspect they just stuck a jump instruction at the location the pointer was pointing to instead of trying to cram executable code into an unknown sized space. The jump would of course be to some space they allocated, with a known size, big enough to hold their exploit. Determining the value of the dangling pointer would be easy enough - you would get a message when it crashed that the app tried to access invalid memory at addr: 0x????????. Just stick a jump at that location - then get a big warm hug from Microsoft when you show them how you did it.
this has got to one of the most pointless slashdot stories ever
I don't agree at all. I find it very educational. In spite of being a programmer for over a decade, it is only within the last few years I have been learning about the network side of things, as the majority of software I developed didn't require such knowledge. Today, for example, thanks to a post, I learned there is an update to Ethereal called WireShark that I have just installed, along with an update to WinPcap. I imagine there are many Slashdot readers that have as much knowledge on the network side as I have on the programming side, and I for one am very grateful they share their knowledge with the rest of us.
I have never gambled at a casino. They scare me. Once someone invited me to go along, and I went, since I needed to get out of the house. I stayed at the bar, reading a book until my companion had had enough, and refused to go near a machine, even when offered some free tokens by a casino employee. The power of the psychology employed is a frightening concept. At this point there have been decades of research into sales and marketing and how to arrange shelf space to maximize profits, and as another here pointed out, even universities in Los Vegas that specialize in the psychology of gambling. Manipulation of the environment with lighting and air "conditioning" adds another dimension. Imagine the potential to take this to a whole new level with cutting edge technology such as face recognition and detection of emotions. Imagine a person is looking bored, or anxiously looking at his watch, and starts walking toward the door. Suddenly the machines all around him are triggered to win, lights flashing, coins raining down. I doubt there would be any laws against increasing the payout at will - ie: giving away money, only against decreasing it below some regulated amount. There was mention of strategically placed machines that pay out more than normal in highly visible locations. Imagine that instead of each machine having its own microprocessor, its software is hosted on a virtual platform on cluster somewhere. Then its payout could be manipulated instantly to suit the moment - to attract attention when required. Computers with face/emotion recognition could have vast neural networks that would learn how to maximize profits from each individual, as well as the group as a whole. It would recognize regulars and first timers. The software would grow so sophisticated with time that it would be beyond the ability of any individual to comprehend. The computers would also help to motivate employees and have them smiling encouragement or handing out free drinks at the precise moment required or doing whatever it is that keeps the money flowing to the casino's coffers. It would experiment with lighting levels, sounds, music, temperature, air movement, every detail of the environment, constantly fine tunning and instantly adapting to ever changing realities. Each casino would have its "control centre" and its software would be a closely guarded secret. It would be a trap from who's clutches you would never escape - Hotel California.
I think casinos should required to foot the bill for social problems caused by gambling and gambling addiction. ...and if this was a requirement, would owning a casino still be profitable?
I have often thought they could use some compressed gas to blow the dust off the solar panels. It may be useful for other things as well, such as blowing the dust off a rock under study. When looking at images you can see that where they have ground down a surface with the RAT tool, there is often a lot of dust on them, left over from the operation. They could have an efficient little compressor that runs as a background task filling up the reservoir. Even water under pressure could be useful for some interesting experiments. Rocks look different when wet, and their wetted colour can provide clues about their composition. They could water a spot on the ground to see if some plant starts to grow. A desert on earth that hasn't received rain in a hundred years will suddenly blossom with plant life nearly overnight after a rain. Who knows if maybe the same thing could happen on mars? Well - except for the water evaporating immediately and the toxic soil, that is...
You may find using a genetic algorithm to solve tic tac toe an interesting approach. You can download the player and choose to play against the genetic algorithm, which you will never beat, or against a neural network which you may beat. Then you can give your four year old a chance to play against the random number generator.
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
For me, quite the coincidence to run across you comment. Just in the past few days I have taken to resizing my browser to half the width of the screen - like folding a newspaper - because I realized that my eyes tire when reading lines of text running the entire 1280 pixel width of my monitor. It seems to work out great - I am even reading Slashdot this way now. If only I could figure out how to change the background colour without copying and pasting into a word processor. No option for this in Firefox? Perhaps there should be.
In reply to myself above, to satisfy my own curiosity, I just spent an hour researching this company. Seems they began as EJB Solutions in 1998 with one Rod Cope as co-founder. 2003 finds them headquartered in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They were specialized in Java, J2EE, XML, and web service technologies, and without doubt the "EJB" in their name refers to Enterprise Java Beans which were all the rage back then. EJB Solutions changed their name to Open Logic sometime around June 21, 2004. They released the BlueGlue 3.2 Open Source Stack July 13, 2005. They launched Indemnification for their Certified Library of Open Source Products on October 17, 2006, but at least one blogger was not too impressed with that
Rod Cope of OpenLogic explains what this is all about in a nice video at JavaOne 2007 where he really seems to be a nice guy who perhaps deserves our support as they have been involved in Open Source and promoting it for a long time. Its just this thing about their Indemnification offer that has touched off a raw nerve here. I hereby invite Rod Cope to contact me and I will ask him about this, do a little interview with him, and report back.
Supplemental to what I just said above, I think they are really hoping you will send them a list of all the files on your computer, so they can do their little free 'analysis' for you. Who knows what they want to do with that list after? I can only speculate...
Who would be stupid enough to send them such a list? Who is this company, anyway, and who is behind them? Is this some kind of sting operation - by - who knows? Conspiracy theories, anyone?
I tried it, but at first, not on the drive where Firefox and Thunderbird are installed. Since it says it identifies individual open source files as well as installs, I tried it on a drive where I have collected thousands of files of all sorts over the years, including Open Source installs and code. The result was very strange. While I think it did find a lot of OS files, it didn't specifically identify them. It highlighted folder names in bold at the top of the tree, but I could not verify that the actual OS files were somewhere within that particular tree - there were too many files. Perhaps I just didn't understand the UI. It showed me a folder view on the left pane, and a files view on the right.
I don't understand this. There is an option on the file menu to save the results of the scan, but it just prints out this big list of files in XML, and there doesn't seem to be any way to determine which of them may be open source. I think you have to send it to them. Besides that, it offers you three different views of all your files, Biggest, Oldest, or Newest. Seems to be a nice little piece of software as far as that goes if you don't happen to have anything else to give you such a listing.
Hold on a minute - I'm now scanning my C: drive...
Well - this time I got a list of open source "projects" installed or partially installed. It identified 7-Zip, and Ethereal as incomplete, even telling me that WinPcap was not installed. The thing is, I do not have "projects" installed - only the applications. Beyond that, there was no mention of either Firefox or Thunderbird, and all Microsoft products such as the DxSDK and many others were listed (MSVC, Platform SDK, etc, etc)
.I must confess, I really don't understand this!
Very well spoken. It's a pity the moderators haven't noticed (yet).
So to have hope to understand such a changing system logically and reasonably, we first have to understand our self.
When contemplating self, who is it that is doing the contemplating? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watcher?) When contemplating self, we see ourselves reflected in an infinite hall of mirrors. Thus we arrive at paradox.
It was once proposed that if we attempt to travel in a straight line through this universe for a long enough time, eventually we will come back to where we started. Later, when it was learned that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating pace, I suppose that we would never reach the 'other end of the universe'. I see a parallel in what I have just said with trying to fathom what lies beyond the event horizon. Whether that paradox is resolved or not, there will always be another awaiting us beyond the next bend, and we will never arrive to comprehend the universe. It will forever remain 'mystery'. Science relies on reduction to illuminate a part of the whole, but by its very nature, can never explain the whole. In the end, it's every man for himself to create some meaning in his life as best he can. By choosing to measure the state of one of a pair of entangled photons, you have effected the state of the other. The choices you make in life have a profound effect on your ultimate destiny, and ultimately an impact on the entire universe. Since science is an inadequate tool for holistic comprehension, we are left in the end with nothing better to rely on than philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Don't try to make sense out of this, because what I am speaking of cannot be made 'sense' of. It can only be expressed in poetry or music. All truth is reflected in the form of a lotus blossom. Now I'm speaking gibberish... or poetry, to be more kind to myself. I'm sorry, I am not too sure what I wanted to say, or if I really want to plunge into this right now after all. The parent spoke so eloquently, but I have come up short. If you found a grain of something useful in what I just said that is all that matters.
I found this idea about microscopic black holes much more interesting. They are talking about the idea that these things could be rattling around inside the sun, or inside Jupiter and causing it to heat up, or even inside the earth. It was also suggested that the new Large Hadron Collider might be capable of creating microscopic black holes through the collision of particles at relativistic velocities.
I once read a scifi story decades ago about this tiny black hole that revolved around a planet close to the surface, leaving a hole behind whenever it passed through a mountain or whatever. I never forgot that story and was fascinated by the concept.
I had rebooted - but perhaps the state of my computer was 'confused' at that time. I was in the middle of something and had a lot of applications open. It's working great now - at least - it displays my new site, which is the whole reason I wanted to try out Safari.
Wow! What a difference that made on my LCD monitor. So much more readable. Thanks for the tip.
I was grateful for that tip, since I am running a non-English version of WinXP Pro, but it didn't make any difference. I was using Safari to test my own web site, which meets W3C compliance for HTML 4. Most pages rendered horribly, often with missing text.
There was another problem - when I went to the W3C verification site with Safari to double check a page, as soon as I tried to fill in the URL field Safari crashes every time. So I guess that's the end of my experimenting with at least this version of Safari. Anyhow - I wish them luck, and hope they take some market away from IE (but please not FF!).
Ah... The bright square at the end of the room is not a window - rather, it is the photographer's light box he is using to illuminate the scene. Then I was right - the photographer himself is kneeling to the left of it. I just sent an email to the author of the article, asking about the scene reflected in the silicon sphere. Let us see if he replies with some information
The picture shows a beautiful shot of the perfect silicon sphere. Out of curiosity, I looked very closly at the scene reflected by it's surface, thinking perhaps I might get a glimpse of the photographer. However, he was nowhere to be seen.
Then I got to thinking - it should be easy to reconstruct the scene that is portrayed in the reflection from the surface of the sphere. All that is needed is to cut out the image of the silicon sphere and paste onto the surface of a three dimensional sphere. Then we could rotate it this way and that and look around the scientist's lab. So I did this - using a software simulation. I cut out the silicon sphere from the article's photo, and used it as a texture on a spherical 3D mesh, and added a little code to rotate it back and forth so that I could look around the scientist's lab. Guess what - there is no sign of the photographer! What we see is a very messy lab, with a closed door on the right. There are florescent fixtures on the ceiling that are currently turned off. There is a large window at the end of the room. I do believe that the ceiling, though it meets the left wall at the usual 90 degree angle, curves down to the wall at the right - a very unusual space, as if it was crammed into to an attic. At the extreme right of the room I believe we see a curtain hastily thrown over whatever would have been on the right side of the view. If the photographer is in the room, as he must be, I think he must be kneeling to the left of the window about three-quarters of the way back, and using a telephoto lens.
I have made available the exe that I created on my web site so that you may take a look for yourself. The code is a hasty adaptation of Microsoft's DX3D mesh tutorial "Tut_06Meshes" from the DxSDK 9.0, which is also included. You can get the zip package here. Perhaps you could modify the code to produce an even better view, but unfortunately, the resolution of the original image is really too low to get much out of it. It was a lot of fun doing this, and if you come up with a better result than me I would like to hear from you.
Click Control Panel - Indexing - Uncheck the locations it searches.
People keep saying how simple this is - in fact - it is this simple on XP at least. I keep it turned off on my computer, because I can't allow a process to wake up and start accessing the HD unexpectedly when I am testing software I develop. However, how many of you have checked if it is the same thing on Vista? Perhaps it's different. How many responding in a similar manner are actually running Vista, anyhow? I would imagine that only a minority of the Slashdot crowd have actually upgraded to Vista. Furthermore, as usual, we are not getting all the facts. Google must have some reason to say what they are saying. I can't believe that all their brilliant engineers don't know how to turn of the search service. There must be more to this than we have been informed. It is hardly the moment to suddenly call Google evil and defend Micro$soft based on the minimal information we have on this.
You could have provided us with the link while you were at it, but thanks for the tip. The entire article is there! I am going to enjoy reading this: A Simpler Origin for Life by Robert Shapiro.
They make this so easy with the examples of the various classifications that image recognition software could probably do the job just as well. Imagine feeding neural networked based pattern recognition software a few thousand samples of each terrain type, and you'll probably get as good as you would from the general public.
One more thing - I got an all black image from the half-dozen or so I tried. It was explained that these will occur on the edge of a frame. It would be so simple to filter those out - rather than waste bandwidth showing them to people. At a minimum thousands of featureless images could similarly be filtered out. Just these two measures alone would increase efficiency considerably. Beyond that perhaps you could just use human input to verify and fine tune the pattern recognition software. The job could be done in a fraction of the time. Are you listening, NASA? I'll set it up for you if you like.
Why - that's brilliant. Then - we can't really trust anything we read on Slashdot anymore - because it might be planted by Microsoft. In fact - what a devious way for Microsoft to divide our community!
Wait a minute... Why are you saying this, anyhow? You are spreading paranoia and mistrust on Slashdot! Could it be that you were paid by Microsoft to say these things?
Just kidding :) - really - you make a good point - and it is kinda scary when you think about it.
I just got off the phone with Michael J. Laine, President of the LiftPort Group. In a previous comment, I had noted that there was some direct feedback from Mr. Laine, but his comments came out at 0 because he logged on as AC. Since I felt no one had noticed his comments, I offered to interview him on behalf of Slashdot, and he contacted me and accepted my offer. I was able to authenticate that indeed I was in touch with the real Michael J. Laine. I must say it was very interesting conversation. In the end it was agreed that I will prepare a list of questions for Michael, mostly based on Slashdot comments posted here, giving him a chance to respond to each in his own words. If you wish to add to the that list, pose your question here and now. I hope to be able to submit the completed interview within 24 hours, and then it will be up to Slashdot editors if and when to post it.
TropicalCoder
I don't know if anybody noticed, but we seem to have some feedback from Michael Laine of LiftPort himself. Since he logged on as Anonymous Coward, his remarks are coming out at 0, below the radar of most readers. It seems no moderator has considered elevating his comments, or is not convinced that the writer is indeed Michael Laine of LiftPort.
Mr. Laine - if that is really you, I would suggest that you log on, so that your comments will at least start out at 1 and thereby become visible. If you wish, drop me a note, and I will interview you (via email or Skype) on behalf of Slashdot. (Click the contact-me link on my web page). Of course you can expect to be properly authenticated in the process.