One big difference is a new aria he wrote for Princess Turandot. It attempts to tackle the opera's main difficulty: how can the cold-hearted ice princess Turandot fall suddenly and deeply in love with her suitor, Calaf? The new aria aims to give psychological depth to Turandot's transformation while staying faithful to Puccini's original music.
"We wanted to respect Puccini's style and finish the work in the same way. We didn't want my contribution to be completely Chinese or completely modern or completely different from Puccini," Hao says.
I would like to see Turandot. Unfortunately, the most recent performance in Atlanta I found reference to was in fall of 2007. :-(
So today while speaking with one of my house-mates who mentioned that polar bears are becoming at risk of extinction, she made a plea that they were so cute.
While I agree, the polar bears we see in commercials are actually cute - real polar bears will eat your face.... much like the ones seen here in the golden compass. (Note: the above bears are alive only because of the coke bottle in their paws)
Why didn't they eat the little girl? I don't know but how fucking awesome was that? Mother fucking bears! At first I thought the movie was going to suck but this scene is worth it. They should have just renamed the movie "Mother Fucking Bears." Why you might ask - because MOTHER FUCKING BEARS, thats why!
Back to my point. Stephen Colbert has it right to be afraid of bears. Bears will eat you. They are not nice and cuddly which tells me that my house-mate would be eaten in the wilderness.
It isn't as though they are that dumb either. May I present exhibit Wojtek (Polish for Soldier Bear). Wojtek would carry heavy artillery shells for the Polish during WWII. That is not the coolest part. The coolest part is the soldiers considered him part of the team and would sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink beer with him.
What kind of jackass play fights with a bear? Wojtek liked water so much he would drain the water supply if they didn't keep the shower locked. Imagine if the Polish had no soldiers and only bears.... it wouldn't matter how much technology the Germans had because no one fights an army of bears. Especially, beer drinking cigarette smoking bears.
In conclusion: If bears had opposable thumbs, we'd be the ones going extinct.
Study Finds 'Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion' | Negative Approach - CNET Blogs
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:26 pm EDT, Apr 21, 2008
Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA
If the $60 billion is true (and I would assume based on Standish's five years of research it is) then we have been dramatically underestimating the impact open source is having on the traditional vendors. We've known there is a effect, and now we finally have some numbers (and $60 billion is a whopper.)
It's a great time to be an open source company.
Even if 60 billion is correct, don't think of this as open source taking money out of the pocket of the software market without giving back. While OSS has reduced some markets (databases are a good example, web servers is another), it has enabled other markets to exist. Think about all the network/security appliances out there that are built on Linux/(Free|Open|Net)BSD that would not be economically viable without a free operating system.
Automatic Patch-Based Exploit Generation is Possible: Techniques and Implications
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:40 pm EDT, Apr 18, 2008
In the automatic patch-based exploit generation problem, we are given two versions of the same program P and P' where P' fixes an unknown vulnerability in P. The goal is to generate an exploit for P for the vulnerability fixed in P'. More formally, we are given a safety policy F, and the programs P and P'. The purpose of F is to encode what constitutes an exploit. Our goal is to generate an input x such that F(P(x)) = unsafe, but F(P′(x)) = safe.
... ... !!!
There is something humbling about seeing hours work (reading the Microsoft security bulletin, using IDA and BinDiff, discovering the security changes, performing the needed "magic" like unicode evasion, no null's etc) reduced to a math equation.
My RAID 5 array died 2 days ago. And my heart just about stopped.
Actually only a single drive died, but in the process of failing the drive in mdadm and adding a new one, somehow ext3 freaked out. Superblocks gone. filesystem, unmountable. Testdisk couldn't find any superblocks and insisted that the 320GB array I was pointing it contained a 13TB HFS+ partition.
Holy Shit!
Every document I wrote Every piece of code I wrote Documents and code I was legally required to destroy years ago Every digital picture I had taken Every email I had sent All my music and videos
Essentially the record of my life, both digital and non, since 1996 was gone.
Holy Shit!
Sure I had backups, but they were spotty at best, and some of these are on CDs of dubious quality that I had burned literally 11 years ago.
Holy Shit!
I was almost beyond hope and was about to call SE2600 friend Scott Moulton when I saw a passing reference to debugfs on a forum post. I fire it up, point it a /dev/md0 and at the prompt do an ls.
...
...
and I can see my directories!
... ok ok [breathes] ... [checks man debugfs] ...
debugfs: rdump publications /tmp/ debugfs:
Could it be?
acidus@hatter:~$ cd /tmp/publications
HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Ode to joy and all that lot, I can recover my data!
[HR inappropriate victory dance]
Theodore Ts'o, I love, and if I ever meet you, I just might make sweet sweet love to you down by the fire. Serious. I crave my obsolete and poorly written C code that badly.
PS: The only thing I couldn't recover with debugfs were some 4+ GB files that were flat text files and MySQL dumps. debugfs coredumps. Luckily the code which crawled the in-tar-web to assemble this data was still around and working, and so the data is reproduceable.
