Deviant Abstraction

“I hate it when my ideas are the best in the room. That just means I didn’t make the room big enough.”

Chris Anderson

After the bug of year 2K, here is a more serious problem: most computer system are based on Unix. Ie: Linux, Solaris, and so on. Most of their time is the number of seconds after 1.1.1970. This function returns a 32 bits variable which is stored for instance to get the creation date of a file.

32 bits is 2^32 possible values so around 136 years. But the variable seems to be signed, hence 2^31 and only 68 years (= 136 / 2). Hence in 2038 we are going to have a big problems since most current systems are coded with Unix.

More information here.

An interesting link on main enterprise open source solution vs closed source one.

Link (Via Julien The Blogging Star)

This is the last part on my presentation on large scale distributed file system. Here is the report (in French) synthetizing all we have said on the subject.

This presentation was made for a CNAM class and I wish to thank all the professors and the other students for their support and help.

Link

A shellcode is a piece of code designed to take control of another machine. It is executed usually through buffer overflow. This article explains how they work.

A fascinating read.

Link