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  What are some lesser known but useful Unix commands?

A few that come to mind, some less known, some more: xargs or parallel: run things in parallel, with lots of options sed and awk: more well-known but still super useful for processing text files, and faster than Python or Ruby m4: simple macro processor screen: powerful terminal multiplexing and session persistence yes: print a string a lot cal: nice calendar env: run a command (useful in scripts) look: find English words (or lines in a file) beginning with a string cut and paste and join: data...

   Linux,Unix,Command,Less used     2011-12-27 09:27:49

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  Some famous article aggregators

Blogs are still very important places for people sharing their thoughts about something although some social media platforms have replaced some of these capabilities. As a blog writer, how can you let others know what you are thinking about? Besides your friends and social media platforms, there are some article aggregators around us which can help us promote our articles. Other than some aggregators like Google News, readers can submit articles to these sites themselves What are some famous art...

   News aggregator,Reddit,Digg,Hacker News     2013-08-12 03:34:37

  Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chai...

   VMWare,Founder,Mark Lucovsky,Microsoft,Google,Cloud Foundry     2011-11-25 03:00:39

  SSH Security and You - /bin/false is *not* security

Backstory While at RIT around 2004 or 2005, I discovered that a few important machines at the datacenter allowed all students, faculty, and staff to authenticate against them via ssh. Everyone's shells appear to be set to /bin/false (or some derivative) on said machines, so the only thing you'll see after you authenticate is the login banner and your connection will close. I thought to myself, "Fine, no shell for me. I wonder if port forwarding works?" ...

   Linux,Security,/bin/false,SSH     2012-02-06 07:46:29

  Open source code libraries suffer from vulnerabilities

A study of how 31 popular open source code libraries were downloaded over the past 12 months found that more than a third of the 1,261 versions of these libraries had a known vulnerability and about a quarter of the downloads were tainted. The study was undertaken by Aspect Security, which evaluates software for vulnerabilities, with Sonatype, a firm that provides a central repository housing more than 300,000 libraries for downloading open source components and gets 4 billion requests pe...

   Open source,Security,Vulnerability     2012-03-28 06:10:19

  Fun With Numbers

Yesterday the NPD Group issued a report on U.S. tablet sales in the U.S., from January through October of 2011. Worth noting up front is that the numbers in this report are about sales — actual tablets sold to actual customers — not “shipments” from the factory to stores and warehouses.Much-reported on is that second-place went to HP, after its fire sale on the discontinued TouchPad. What hasn’t gotten much commentary is the extraordinarily contort...

   Tablet,iPad,TouchPad,HP,Market share,2011     2011-11-24 09:12:58

  Will Artificial Intelligences Find Humans Enjoyable?

Will AIs find humans interesting, enjoyable, and worthy of companionship? My guess: the smarter and more autonomous they become the more the answer will become NO. There are practical reasons for AIs to want to understand humans: The AIs will want to protect themselves from all threats, including human threads. The AIs will also want to get more resources (e.g. energy, raw materials for fabrication of additional computing power). The extent that humans control access to resources AIs will...

   AI,People,Cooperation,Enjoyable     2012-02-19 06:13:47

  Arrays.equals() vs MessageDigest.isEqual()

Both Arrays.equals() and MessageDigest.isEqual() are used to compare the equality of two arrays. They can be interchangeably in many cases. However, they do have some differences which lead to different use cases in real applications. One difference is that the arrays passed to MessageDigest.isEqual() cannot be null while it's ok for Arrays.equals(). The one major difference between these two methods is that Arrays.equals() is not time-constant while MessageDigest.isEqual() is time-constant. Thi...

   Arrays.equal(),MessageDigest.isEqual(),Java,Security     2015-05-14 22:03:29

  Good ways to build communities around a web product

If a product wants to be successful, there are must be a group of loyal users of the product. Though their influence, more and more people get to know and product and start to use the product and again promote the product. The most difficult thing to promote a product after building an excellent product is to find the first bunch of users. For web products, same conditions apply, but the ways to promote the product may be more abundant. Besides the advertisement, there are other ways a web produ...

   Web product,Community,Promotion     2014-03-12 07:37:05