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Classic Games (Games)

23-Year-Old Chess Grandmaster Whips Bill Gates In 71 Seconds 449

MojoKid writes "There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind. Sure, he dropped out of Harvard College, but he got accepted into the elite institution of higher learning in the first place. Leading into his college career, Gates scored 1,590 out of 1,600 on the SAT. The rest is history — he went on to co-found Microsoft, built a net worth that's in the billions ($76.8 billion at last count), and now spends his time on his philanthropic efforts. Regardless, it took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster" Chess player since the age of 13 and new world Chess champion, just 71 seconds to defeat Gates in a friendly game of Chess on a Norwegian television show. It takes longer to heat up a cup of water in the microwave."
Communications

Spoiled Onions: Exposing Malicious Tor Exit Relays 65

An anonymous reader points out this recently published study (PDF) on detecting malicious (or at least suspicious) Tor exit relays. From their conclusions: "After developing a scanner, we closely monitored all ~1000 exit relays over a period of four months. Wed discovered 25 relays which were either outright malicious or simply misconfigured. Interestingly, the majority of the attacks were coordinated instead of being isolated actions of independent individuals. Our results further suggest that the attackers made an active effort to remain under the radar and delay detection." One of the authors, Philipp Winter, wrote a followup blog post to help clarify what the paper's findings mean for Tor users, including this clarification: "First, it's important to understand that 25 relays in four months isn't a lot. It is ultimately a very small fraction of the Tor network. Also, it doesn't mean that 25 out of 1,000 relays are malicious or misconfigured (we weren't very clear on that in the paper). We have yet to calculate the churn rate of exit relays which is the rate at which relays join and leave the network. 1,000 is really just the approximate number of exit relays at any given point in time. So the actual number of exit relays we ended up testing in four months is certainly higher than that. As a user, that means that you will not see many malicious relays 'in the wild."
Desktops (Apple)

Schiller Says Apple Is the Last PC Maker From the Mac Era, Forgets About HP 474

An anonymous reader writes "Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, recently claimed that Apple is the only computer company left from the early days of the Mac. Unfortunately for him, HP still exists. "Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone," Schiller told Macworld in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus. 'We're the only one left.' I'm sorry Apple, but when exactly did HP declare bankruptcy? We contacted an HP spokesperson for a statement on Apple's ridiculous claim and were pointed to its timeline history page."

Comment Computing, Really? (Score 1) 420

I bank on every smart phone increasing the demand for a larger and more capable cloud, but the iPhone did not create cloud computing, the web did.

Being a computing professional for nigh on 30 years, I cringe when "computing" and "computer" are used interchangeably. It also bugs me when I hear claims that Computer Science is some lofty discipline that shadows over computer engineering and professional programming or someone corrects my pronunciation of GIF, or [/.pretence]

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

Comment a black car followed by a white car (Score 1) 79

TFA: The Exchange of Features, Textures and Faces - The binding problem is a fundamental issue in neuroscience. The term refers to the fact that the brain processes color, motion, and other visual features separately and in parallel, yet our perception is of a unified world, populated by coherent objects.

I've long marvelled that as I'm speeding down the freeway, a black car followed by a white car in the oncoming lane looks like a police car: a black car with a white door.

Comment map your data (Score 1) 124

Most OS's and programming languages will let you map your memory data structure to a contiguous disk file so your disk IO is performed at paging speeds. The file system is only touched when the file is mapped (opened). Your system can then be configured to chose to what degree your data is in memory vs. disk.

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