Sanjeev Singh

Gary McKinnon, "most wanted hacker" on how he hacked the pentagon, NASA, etc, and what he found out. (1) He never had to "hack" these machines, they had blank Administrator passwords. (2) There were a ton of other (presumably unauthorized) hackers on these machines (3) NASA regularly airbrushes UFOs out of pictures. (4) He saw an excel spreadsheet of 20-30 "non-terrestrial officers" but it's not clear what that term means. - Sanjeev Singh

omg omg we're doomed! :) - AJ Batac

I will express my thoughts about the video, since no one else will. :) It seems difficult to dismiss the objects here as naturally occurring phenomena or as human artifacts. I am intensely curious about this video (and many others like it coming from Mexico and other nations). I want to know more. We don't know that these objects are ET vehicles, but they might be -- I don't automatically dismiss the possibility. I agree with the former defense ministers of Britain and Canada: this subject deserves intense investigation and scrutiny. - Sean McBride

1.2B reads / sec from a hash map in a single JVM on a machine with several hundred CPUs. That aggregate throughput is probably a record for any hash table running anywhere on any hardware. - Sanjeev Singh

In case you want the slides, you can find them here http://developers.sun.com/learnin... - Shakeel Mahate

I watched this talk when it was first released and by fall last year wondered why Cliff Click's data structure hadn't seen inclusion to the jdk or at least wider adoption. I asked jjb during one of our weekly concurrency meetings and learned that some unexpected problems had crept up in the meantime. - Mustafa K. Isik

I watched this talk twice by video and once live at JavaOne. I still didn't understand one component until speaking with Cliff at the conclusion of his live talk. I'm not surprised it's not yet part of the JDK; I suspect it requires a significant acceptance prior to its inclusion, given that it's so new. Of course, I don't claim to understand JCP, nor have I followed updates to this hash map since J1 '07. - Robert Konigsberg

"Modern single- and multi-core processors can provide developers and performance engineers with valuable information via performance counters embedded within the processor. These counters can provide insight into the interactions between processor and code. CodeSleuth is an Eclipse plug-in that allows developers to access these performance counters and relate them back to Java source. This tool enables you to track counter information from raw address locations, through the machine code emitted by Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), and back to the Java source. Once you identify the location of performance issues in the Java source, you can modify the code to improve application performance. Best of all, CodeSleuth works on all x86 platforms, not just AMD systems. " - Sanjeev Singh

Pity it's windows only. - Sanjeev Singh

"Why does Blizzard succeed where others don't?" asks Jay Wilson, a lead game designer with a shock of spiked hair and a wry disposition. "It isn't a magic trick. We work at it, and if a product isn't good enough, we cancel it." - Sanjeev Singh

Yes with $600m/yr in profit and only 250 employees, they can afford to focus on quality. - Sanjeev Singh

Someone named Mike Higgins claims to have hiked the island in 1995 and restrung the flagpole http://www.kayaker.net/sfbay.... I wonder if it's the same flagpole that was raised in the 1850s by Selim Woodworth. I also wonder who owns it now. Articles from May 2008 list it as being on sale for $22M but the realtor handling it no longer lists it. - Sanjeev Singh

"Hone compares his test to stretching a piece of plastic wrap over the top of a coffee cup, and measuring the force that it takes to puncture it with a pencil. If he could get a large enough piece of the material to lay over the top of a coffee cup, he says, graphene would be strong enough to support the weight of a car balanced atop the pencil." - Sanjeev Singh

I also disagree with the hand-wavy "If we could scale it to large size". Most materials are strong when they're very small, and get dramatically weaker as they get larger. This tells us nothing about how much stronger it is than, say, steel. - Alex Power

"We're very pleased that we actually got a search engine launched" - Sanjeev Singh

Other than saying they didn't see any technical problems before launch there's not much detail about what actually went wrong (some of which are still being worked on). - Sanjeev Singh

Mostly, they claim they didn't anticipate all the attention and they were hoping for a quiet little launch. - ⓞnor

"they claim they didn't anticipate all the attention and they were hoping for a quiet little launch" TechCrunch writes that Cuil "pre-briefed every blogger and tech journalist on the planet" about their engine (quote from http://www.techcrunch.com/2008...). This led to, for instance, this preview at Techcrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... . Not sure who exactly they send their press release to, though. - Philipp Lenssen

I'm surprised to see that "Windows Powershell" supports more paradigms than Common Lisp :). Oz seems to be the Michael Phelps of programming languages, supporting 8 paradigms out of the box. - Sanjeev Singh

Perhaps we can call visual programming a "paradigm group". Mostly I would call it as the family of paradigms where programs are *not* expressed as a prose-like stream of text tokens. - ⓞnor

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Sanjeev Singh

Super useful for dealing with machines that appear to be dead. - Sanjeev Singh

Do we have that enabled? - Paul Buchheit

yes, it's enabled in the stock kernels. - Sanjeev Singh

this book is hilarious, and also, all true. "Rejection of management objectives is undesirable when you are wrong and unforgivable when you are right." If you're an aspiring Tech Manager you need this under your pillow. - Sanjeev Singh

cool cool cool! have to get my hands on this one. - Hayk

"We at Sun have given this problem a lot of thought, both during the original development of NIO and in the time since. We have yet to come up with a way to implement an unmap() method that's safe, efficient, and plausibly portable across operating systems. We've explored several other alternatives aside from the two described above, but all of them were even more problematic. We'd be thrilled if someone could come up with a workable solution, so we'll leave this bug open in the hope that it will attract attention from someone more clever than we are." - Sanjeev Singh

I take it back. It is possible, using NewDirectByteBuffer (I misread the definition of this call when I first looked at the JNI documentation). That should be sufficient to implement an unsafe unmmap for Java code. http://java.sun.com/j2se... - Larry Greenfield

"Active Share" measures how much a fund manager deviates from a benchmark index (not just tracking error). Interestingly, those who deviate more do better, and the performance persists over time. The margins of outperformance may not beat passive indexing for taxable investors but could still be useful for managing 401(k)s and 529s. - Sanjeev Singh

Re-shared from my brother. Choice snippets: "The mite's digestive system is so efficient and results in so little waste that there is no excretory orifice"..... "Older people are much more likely to carry the mites; estimates range as high as an 96-98% infestation rate in aged people"....."It is quite easy to look for one's own demodex mites, by carefully removing an eyelash or eyebrow hair and placing it under a microscope" - Sanjeev Singh

Sanjeev, there's something a little disturbing about starting a discussion on parasites with 'Re-shared from my brother'. :-) - Dan Liebke

Old news, but I only learned recently that SUN was serious about transactional memory. - Sanjeev Singh

Looks like a gopher. Maybe it's just a bad pic. - Sanjeev Singh

Looks a little like a panda. Maybe these are the ones that are made in China :) - Ana

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a panda. - Casey Muller

A short essay on specific problems with Software Patents. The most shocking defect: you can patent things that are so obvious they would be unpublishable in a trade magazine or journal. Something worse than Bubblesort, anyone? - Sanjeev Singh

According to the article, our photoreceptors respond to four different wavelengths, but our lenses block the lower wavelengths (the shaded portions in the picture). Surgical replacement of biological lenses with more transparent ones might allow us to see into the UV A range. - Sanjeev Singh

The reason you can't "see" UV directly might be due to the processing circuitry, not the cones themselves. - Sanjeev Singh

A good example of how to make simple code complicated. The simple if-then-else becomes so busy you now need a diagram (scroll down) to show you what is going on. - Sanjeev Singh

Sanjeev - sad thing is, the Ant guys knew that when they started and purposely avoided offering true control constructs. The problem is that while they built a great set of APIs and java class utilities, they tried to stick to an XML language which just wouldn't scale beyond basic build layouts. What someone should do is take all the Ant goodies they've built up and just roll it up in something like Groovy or BeanShell... perhaps http://www.gradle.org/ is it? - Patrick Lightbody

don't write ant scripts that require if/then/else - simple - Dave Hodson

classic case of, "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" - Karim

He also appears to look more like kittens than a horse :) - Sanjeev Singh

"A theory often put forward to explain some of the most spectacular UFO sightings is that they might be prototype aircraft or UAVs. Of course, at any time we will be test flying various things that you won't see at the Farnborough airshow for several years, but the bottom line is that we test fly such things in certain areas so at least within government we can differentiate between black projects and UFOs. In view of the controversy about Aurora (an alleged hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird) we did, in the case of the March 1993 UFO sightings, raise the issue with the US authorities, through the British Embassy in Washington. Was it possible that something had gone wrong with the normal processes for overflight of another country and could our UFO sightings be attributable to some US prototype? The answer I got back was extraordinary." - Sanjeev Singh

Does anyone here find the testimony on UFOs in this video to be NOT reliable or credible? If so, why? UFO Alien Disclosure Project pt 1 http://tinyurl.com/6d9jfk - Sean McBride

"Scraping action produced piles of scrapings at the bottom of a trench on Monday, but did not get the material into its scoop, information returned from Mars on Monday night confirmed. The piles of scrapings produced were smaller than previous piles dug by Phoenix, which made it difficult to collect the material into the Robotic Arm scoop......It's like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but without a broom". Maybe they should have packed a broom? :) - Sanjeev Singh

yeah its surprising that they are having so much trouble with this - this seems like the sort of thing you could test pretty easily on earth, digging... - bob

Sounds like Diane got pushed out mainly because she didn't get along with Joe Tucci. I wonder if it will be weird for Mendel Rosenblum to work with Maritz (assuming he's still active at VMware). - Sanjeev Singh

"The solitary medusa of this species can revert to its polyp stage after becoming sexually mature (Bavestrello et al., 1992; Piraino et al., 1996). In the laboratory, 100% of these medusae regularly undergo this change. Thus, it is possible that organismic death does not occur in this species!" - Sanjeev Singh

Two thumbs up. Reshared from pts. An interesting discussion of how weird our financial system is and possible ways to fix it (no, gold isn't the answer). - Sanjeev Singh

My best guess, since it looks like it runs for a little while before showing the error page. Also, the same query with one less zero works fine. - Sanjeev Singh

I've seen this error before, I was searching for "Powered by phpbb" (for good reasons though ;) ) - Hassan Ibraheem

numactl is a useful little utility for NUMA opteron servers. "Writing memory on the SUMA configuration in the 8 concurrent memhammer case demonstrated latencies on order of 156ns but dropped 38% to 97ns by switching to NUMA and using the Linux 2.6 NUMA API" - Sanjeev Singh

Mitch Kapor claims no computer will pass the turing test by 2029. Ray Kurzweil disagrees. (and other interesting bets) Each bet includes reasons for and against. I have my money on Kurzweil. - Sanjeev Singh

That's too clever... - Danielle Fong

Interesting visualization of live blog data. - Sanjeev Singh

One of the coolest visualizations I've ever seen... Fun to play with the feeling filters too. - Ross Miller

creative indeed.. Sep Kamavar and Johnathan Harris did a few like these... more can be found here http://www.number27.org/ - Krishna Gade

A full charge only costs $4 and takes you almost 100 miles. - Sanjeev Singh

They should give it regenerative breaking so that you can find a good thermal or something and use that to recharge the battery in-flight. - Paul Buchheit