It is really weird (for someone I really don't even know), but the news of his death hit me pretty hard. I think part of it was that he really wasn't very old, in fact he is wasn't much much older than one of my brothers.

A reminder that all of us have a finite amount of time here and we really should try and make the best of it.

RIP Steve.

He isn't leaving because he is going to die. He is leaving so he can go back to the island.

I'm curious, how does this contest work? You sign up for a 30 minute spot. Do they allow the security researcher to sit at the system to compromise and operate it or does the security researcher direct a user to visit some url with a potential exploit? Part of the contest is to exploit the browser so I am guessing that the browser needs someone operating it and fetching well crafted html etc. from some where.

The phone stuff looks interesting as they are looking for drive by exploits as well as browser exploits.

Prices from Newegg and CDW (Newegg doesn't carry the memory)

CPU(s) $3,446.30
Memory $6,708.00
MB $359.00
Disks $3,599.84
Disk controllers $1,058.00
OS $659.00
Case/Misc $500.00

Total $16,330.14

You don't need the source code to find holes to exploit! In fact some security researchers only care about having the released binaries. For more information read "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation". IIRC it has something to do with the fact that different; compilers, versions of same compiler, options to same compiler can all generate different binaries. So to truly exploit the code you need to know what instructions actually made it into the binary that people are using. That is why tools like IDA Pro are so useful.

Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence. --Dijkstra

How about?

NT 3.51
NT 4.0

Indeed, I use http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm to setup booting linux from windows.