Arsen Ivanov

Be advised: the video is, for lack of better word, mad (in a good way). h/t: NewScientistTech

Please read full thing @ NewScientistTech:

“The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU - less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card - Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days.”

It turns out that Windows actually does have versions of its core! Read more about this at Ars Technica:

Why “Windows 7″? The number is based on Microsoft’s internal operating system numbers: the first version of Windows NT, 3.1, was given the same number as the “Classic” Windows when it was released in 1992. Since then there has been NT 4, Windows 2000 (NT 5), Windows XP (NT 5.1), and Windows Vista (NT 6). You can check these numbers by typing “ver” at a command prompt on any of these operating systems.

Click to see here. Look around too - this guy has some crazy and interesting projects, such as Da Vinci Clock, designed to let you stay awake 21 hours a day.

“Avatar Machine /

The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”

Well, the future of robotic war-machines, and their malfunctioning is here. To put in this perspective, it is necessary to say that this sort of thing is, unfortunately, is inevitable. Ever since some human ancestor, picked up a long stick and fashioned it into the spear, war because inseparable from science. In fact, lion’s share of most important scientific discoveries and experiments were done for purely military purpose. Galileio Galilei first tackled problem of falling objects (the famous experiment with droping object from falling tower of Pisa) at the request of Doj of Pisa, to fix the horrendous accuracy of Pisan artillery.

What difference does it make, whether people settle their scores with sticks crudely shaped into spears or with nuclear weapons? Problem is not the weapon itself, but the reason why it can potentially be put to use. In the end, this whole episode will result in more focus in high-quality programming and technology. Nobody wants to have software for their robotic UAV bombe-aircraft to be buggy. Can you imagine what would software crash mean for such a vehicle, while it is flying armed for a combat mission? Cutting corners and saving costs will not do anymore, no more outsourcing, not in that business.

In general, computer science will in general be more and more motivated on bug-free programming methodologies, or more bug-safe programming languages. This development will be interesting to see.

Science is the realm of sceptics, and righlty so. The scientific process on based on proof, not on belief. But herein lies the greates problem of modern science - paralysis by scepticism. Why were previous centuries so enthralling in their wealth of fundamental discovery, while our time is so poor? Where are Netwon, Leibniz, and Lenoardo Da Vinci of our time? Where are Fermat, Euler and Gauss of today? Sure, our generation has great discoveries to claim - DNA for instance, - but that is more an exception rather than the rule. Most importantly from engineering perspective, the latest fundamental knowledge we use modern technology dates back to early 19th Century. Sure, people come up with new ways to use old principles, is that enough to say that our science works? I, as an electronic engineer, think there must be much more to signal processing than combination of statistics, probability, and Fourier Theorem, all of which were developed long time ago. Something is amiss.

The problem is scepticism. We do not believe we can do great discoveries. We preach to ourselves that science is difficult and hard, and that it is not up to us to be any good at it. I have a disturbing feeling that in the end, the reason why Newton, Leibniz, Gauss and Euler were able to flip the world upside down with their intellect was that they had, pardon my language, balls to believe they can do it and act on it. When I became part of Spectral Analysis Lab, Dr. Jian Li (the director of the lab and my boss) made is read a speech by Richard Hamming to new graduates of Stanford Engineering (if I am not mistaken) in which he advised them to find the most important problems in their field and attack them, instead of focusing on small and easy stuff nobody cares about. It seems like such a simple suggestion - why is it necessary to have Hamming tell you so in the first place? Because you are afraid to think of it on your own. Because you are intimidated by science like a rabbit by a snake. “I can’t possibly understand it, I can’t possibly be any good at it.” There is the our Greatest Enemy - fear!

I am not trying to say that once you “believe” you will make great discoveries. It is as absurd as saying that once you “believe” you are the fastest runner you will be a champion. All I am saying is that this lack of believe robs our generation of more than half our potential. How fast would you run if you believed you were slow? My final example would be to cite Muhammad Ali - remember how he would intimidate everyone and inspire himself? Remember “I am the greatest”? Maybe he was right to do so? Maybe that was a necessary ingredient inunlocking his boxing talent? Maybe the same will work for our generation?

Conclusion: scepticism is science’s greatest tool, but greatest threat to the scientist. In this business, you must not let yourself be intimidated, otherwise, you will not get anywhere. Believe you can achieve, believe it is easier than it seems, and maybe, just maybe, it will be so. I am not saying science is not hard - it is. It is a lot of hard work, but being intimidated with it makes it just plain impossible.

Let us say you have a table or times when people arrive at work. One column identifies a person by his or her name and second column records time when person arrived. How would “ask” MySQL for information on how often does each individual person come to work?

This is easily done with “SELECT … GROUP BY”.

Let’s assume that table is set up like so (pseudo-code, this is not actual MySQL code):

VARCHAR(20) name, TIMESTAMP time

So, to select all individuals and count how many times they arrived, do this:

SELECT name, COUNT(*) FROM tbl_your_table_here GROUP BY name;

So, we group rows by name, then count for each individual name! Voila! This is a bit counter-intuitive, but it works! You can also sort ascending or descending like this:

SELECT name, COUNT(*) FROM tbl_your_table_here GROUP BY name ORDER BY name DESC;

Obviously, it is very important to have a grip on disk usage on any computer syste. However, it is hard to do in Linux without the click-drag-drop interface of Windows. That is where “df” command comes in:

“df /mount/point -h” , where /mount/point can be either the actual mount point, or the physical /dev/disk file, “-h” option is for human readable.

Synopsis from the “info df” output (”info” is the new equivalent of the “man” command):

df displays the amount of disk space available on the file system containing each file name argument. If no file name is given, the space available on all currently mounted file systems is shown.

Here is sample input output, for a USB disk appropriately named “disk”, mounted under “media” directory on my system (that is the default setup for Ubuntu, it might be different in your case):

root@arsen-laptop-ubuntu:~# df /media/disk -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sdb1              76G   44G   29G  61% /media/disk