Furthermore, x86 represents a worst case in the areas where it differs significantly from RISC-style processors…
Paul Barham, et al., Xen and the art of virtualization, SOSP 2003. Emphasis original, deliberately taken out of context.
If the Internet has taught us anything, it is that you can always get people to do what they already want to do.
Lawrence Lessig, NYTimes
I type my 17-character password very fast. It’s a strictly automatic process, all muscle-memory.
The timing is very critical and synchronization problems happen a lot. There’s lots of hand-alternation; sometimes one hand is a decisecond early or late and I type a letter out of order. Sometimes I hit J instead of H because the “down” muscles are faster than the “left” muscles.
All these errors are compounded because I don’t actually know my password consciously. I’m not typing a word, I’m just activating a motor program. I don’t think “H”, I just put my finger “where it’s supposed to go next”. So all the error-correction in the cerebellum and motor cortex that I’ve built up from a decade of typing never has a chance to help.
Amusingly, I can type my ordinary and root passwords just fine under the influence of alcohol. So a complex password isn’t an IID for a computer.
On a darkly humorous note, many years from now, this may be an excellent stroke diagnostic. If I can’t type my password without concentrating, it’s time to call the paramedics.
Rushi is reading a PDF textbook on his computer.
“Joe, do you have a physical copy of this?”
I glance at page on the screen, reach over to the heap of junk piled on top of the coffee table, carefully rummage around for a moment, and pull out the book in question. He doesn’t need to tell me what book he’s reading: it haunts my dreams still
Of course, last quarter when I was in the undergrad algorithms course, I borrowed his copy of the Kleinberg, Tardos book
(BSG is sweet)
There is a professor at UCSD (Angela Yu, Cognitive Science department) who graduated from MIT with a 5.0 GPA on a 5.0 scale.
This is impressive.
She majored in theoretical math, brain & cognitive sciences, and computer science. Yes, that’s three degrees.
This is dumbfounding.
She did it in four years.
This can’t be possible.
It looks like CAPE found the original proof. Now where’s that million-dollar prize?
MacWorld deconstructs the anti-phishing features in Safari 3.2.
Bottom line for security & web developers: It’s Google’s database, they’ve been doing this for 3 years, only hashes go over the network, locally cached. It’s good stuff.
Bottom line for privacy-interested people: If you hit a suspicious hash prefix, you ask Google’s servers for the full hash. In theory this is enough for Google to do some analytics. Certainly it doesn’t directly reveal what URLs you are really visiting. Apple’s privacy policy does not discuss any sending of data to anyone but the site you visit (i.e. it is mute on this sort of feature). It further does not bind Google from misuse of anything they could collect. Mozilla’s privacy policy covers these bases.
Bottom line for anyone who has better things to worry about: It’s fine, leave the checkbox on, and if it ever warns you that you may be visiting a malicious website, stop and listen to it. You are probably not where you intend to be. Scott can explain.
I get a lot of spam comments on the blog here. You don’t see them, because I mark them as spam, a few hundred every week. They’re roughly uniformly distributed across all my posts. If fewer posts are open, I get fewer comments. So I want to minimize the number of comments I have to deal with.
I’m trying to use Mark Kenny’s Extended Comment Options plugin to automatically close comments on old posts. I used this plugin a long time ago, and it was great. But now, in WP 2.6, it seems to do exactly the inverse of what it says on the box: it closes my most recent posts and opens the oldest ones.
I don’t understand. Isn’t this just
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed' WHERE `ID` IN (SELECT `ID` FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_status` = 'publish' AND `post_type` = 'post' ORDER BY `post_date_gmt` DESC) LIMIT 0,10
(Okay, it’s not quite that simple, because MySQL doesn’t do ORDER BY or LIMIT in subqueries… But it’s close! Temporary table?)
Has anybody got a good solution to this, better than a cron job to run that query?
Meanwhile, apologies to everyone who wanted to comment but couldn’t.
I wasn’t sure of the exact phrasing of Einstein’s old chestnut about difficulty in mathematics. So I googled it. I haven’t found a really authoritative source, but there are definitely plenty of variations. So I picked one that sounded right.
As far as I can tell, it’s not even in Bartlett’s, which is a bit troubling. In fact, I can’t find any reputable source or citation. Is this an apocryphal quote?