This video may only be funny to StarCraft players… so for those, without further ado, check this epic SCV-rush.
For those who really don’t understand what is going on here: When the game starts you get “workers”. This player has selected ‘terran’ as race so his workers are called SCVs. The workers need to mine minerals and when you’ve got enough minerals you can create more workers but also buildings. The buildings can create other stuff for instance marines, tanks etc.
So that is how you are supposed to create an army. The workers can construct but also destruct so can be used as ‘soldiers’. Instead of building an army this player decides to recruit its workers and send them out to attack the enemy. The enemy… totally stupified by this unexpected attack doesn’t know how to defend its base against this surprise attack.
I actually tried this once -out of stupidity, didn’t know what to do- with one SCV. I attacked an enemy base of another player who also was a n00b at that time. However my worker got killed.
Oops, if this is true this may be a killing blow to all of you MicroSoft fanboys out there. According to Computer World a tech-worker on the oilrig crashing windows systems may be part of the problem that eventually let to the spilling of oil. And we’re not talking a little Dr.Watson, an occasional “general exception”… we’re talking about a full-blown BSOD (blue screen of death). Well maybe we learn a little lesson here. Never use a computer system for critical mission computing that can’t even keep itself alive for longer than half an hour… If this doesn’t teach us then maybe this will… one day…
A very happy birthday to PacMan… the friendly yellow gobbler. I love PacMan. Today –to commemorate the 30th birthday of PacMan– Google put a playable PacMan logo/game online. Sooo cool…. You can play it on the google website. Here’s a screenshot. When you leave PacMan in the shown position the ghost will never catch him… small bug?
I already mentioned the upcoming birthday of PacMan before. Click on the screenshot below to play Google PacMan.
Whahahaha.. brilliant. Rop Gonggrijp is at it again. Together with some researchers he like totally p0wnez Indian voting machines. Rop already demonstrated that dutch voting machines are inherently unsafe. Check the site “Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet” (English). That is the reason why we (again) vote with red pencil and paper in the Netherlands. Now in India they will probably do the same thing. Looking for a career change? How about manufacturing red pencils… India will need a couple anytime soon. Here’s a cool video that can also be found on Rop’s site.
Oh this is good news for those who embrace web standards: the usage of Internet Explorer is on its decline. Sure the current marketshare –at just below 60%– is still way too large but at least it is on its decline. Surprisingly (at least to me) is that Google’s Chrome is the big winner and not Mozilla’s Firefox. Anyway… less IE means better future for web developers who are getting really fed up with the lack of conformity in IE. Maybe the decline will force for Microsoft to actually support standards instead of setting their own standards?
Whahahaha… it had to happen one day. A problem with an anti-virus update marks a false positive and puts the file in quarantine. The OS can’t load the file anymore and… oops… reboots… and…. reboots…. and… reboots… This is actually a great feature. Rebooting windows is like 80% of normal usage and it is now fully automated.
Fixing it can be a bit hard… since the computer is rebooting all the time. McAfee could create a bootable windows CD that restores the missing file from the system but.. hey wait.. no they can’t do that. You can’t distribute a proprietary OS like windows for free… Maybe they can create a Linux boot CD to restore the windows file… Something to contemplate: using Linux to revive a windows machine.
Oh whow.. now here’s a very nice report of a recent successful XSS-attack on apache.org. No don’t worry it isn’t a huge hole in the Apache webserver… just a very clever attack. Well.. they did obtain SVN credentials so maybe the attackers could have changed the sources and inject a backdoor…
The attackers were able to penetrate at system level due to usual end-user fuck-ups like using the same account & credentials on the web applications as well as shell access to production systems. One-time passwords did prevent the attackers to gain full access to the entire infrastructure. It’s a nice read.
Oh wow.. many people I’ve spoken about the Oracle/Sun merger didn’t like the idea but also at former Sun not everyone seems to be happy about it. As always with mergers like these the most gifted and talented people are the first ones to leave. Those who actually matter don’t have to put up with management crap. Just pack up your ol’ bags and throw ‘m down at some other company who is delighted with your arrival.
So the latest rumours are now confirmed: James Gosling (father of the programming language Java) is bailing ship… who will be next? Who will stay behind? What will the impact be on Sun’s former assets like Java, Solaris and MySQL?
Oracle has already taken another approach with many of the assets they got from Sun. Former Sun Solaris, now called Oracle Solaris, used to be free (as in free beer) but Oracle Solaris has a 90-day trail period. After the trail period you’ll have to obtain a license from Oracle. Sure, you can still use OpenSolaris but unfortunately all (or most) future development to Oracle Solaris is closed source so these features and fixes will not end up in Open Solaris.
Yup once again the adoption of open standards by the EU has come under attack according to this article on Slashdot. They accuse Kroes of trying to get the open standards and open source off the agenda. Kind of weird isn’t it? She has been European Commissioner for Competition… go figure.
Now take a look at this: Mike Davey built a Turing Machine. And what a beauty it is… What? Don’t know what a Turing machine is? And you don’t know who Alan Turing is? Well no one special: he just happened to kickstart automated computing by formalizing algorithms , computability and programmable machines as we know it today. That’s all. Jeez what’s wrong with you?
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Here are some more videos of different programs the Turing Machine is executing.
Well as many developers already know: security is a concept, not a product! You can’t just throw “some security” at a piece of software. Security considerations must be part of the original design and development of software. The Pwn2Own hacking contest shows –once again– that there is too little security awareness in current software design. Look at these embarrassing results: all major browsers took a fall: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Most browser are compromised by popular plugins like acrobat reader
These OS’s took a fall: Windows 7, Windows XP, Mac OS X snow leopard. The only OS that is still standing is Linux. Because Linux is indefinitely more secure? Well maybe but there’s also something else: Linux is an open source OS where highly skilled developers are coding. Changes are reviewed by others before they are merged into the main kernel tree. In other words: security is part of Linux. Another thing is that people who run linux are people who are aware of abuse. These are –in general– not the people who would click on the ‘cute-kitten-movie.exe‘ attachment. So Linux is just not that interesting to Black Hat Hackers. True: Mac OS X is build on an open source OS as well: FreeBSD but the presentation layer and Safari is proprietary code from Apple (except for the WebKit on which it is build).
Microsoft currently runs the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) model. This should make security an integral part of the development lifecycle. Well to be honest when budgets are getting tight and deadlines are running out: documentation and code quality are the first areas that take the fall. So really I don’t expect much from SDL. Especially since MS is trying to develop a ‘catch all’ (silver bullet) security measure inside the kernel… I’m not saying these measures aren’t worthwhile, they are (Linux has them for ages now), it’s just not enough.
The phrase ‘security is a concept, not a product‘ proves its point when you look at the measures current OS’s are implementing to prevent ‘arbitrary code execution’. Windows XP, Windows Vista (still in use?) and Windows 7 has DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization). Both ‘techniques’ should prevent (or make it harder) to execute arbitrary code… but they don’t. Dutch security researcher Peter Vreugdenhil showed an impressive circumvention of DEP and ASLR in windows 7. See: security is not a product…
The good thing is that the hackers are not just updating the vendors on the leaks they found. Instead they tell the vendors how to find the leaks themselves in an attempt to raise awareness.
An article in the Washington Times reports on US cybersecurity experts who claim that the chinese cyberattack last year was targeted at stealing corporate secrets. One of the targeted firms was Google. They discovered the attack and claimed they could trace it back to the Chinese government. This is one of the reasons why Google is moving its business from China to Hong Kong. It’s a good read and I hope more details will follow.
Recently Google launched a new service called Buzz. It’s like a twitter thingy and integrates seamlessly with gmail. When you start a buzz you can select if this is a public Buzz or a restricted –only visible to people you grant access– Buzz. People can leave comments on your Buzz and start a conversation or discussion. The nice thing is that all your Buzzes and comments are stored in your gmail box. When people comment on your Buzz the mail in your mailbox is updated. I use an external email client to read my gmail (iMail on a Mac) and even there I can see the mail that corresponds to the Buzz is updated… IMAP rules
Besides these twitter-like buzzes you can also integrate picasa photo albums, blogs (rss feeds in general), twitter and other stuff. Really nice. Try it out.
I will hang on to my twitter account since I can post to it using simple SMS messages and publish them on my blog automatically… but when I can buzz using my mobile phone I might switch.
Oh my goodness, take a look at this. You like to play the old fashioned boardgames like Settlers of Catan? Yet you don’t want to appear as the oldtimer that you actually are? Maybe you should go OLED like some researchers of the Queens University did. Digital game pieces rock the world. Check the article on cnet and watch this great video. They use projection in the video but you’ll get the idea
This will make a lot of games more exciting… well except for solving a puzzle since you can just throw the pieces on the table and let the oleds display the image correctly.
