Did You Know 3.0

Some interesting stats

Hexspeak

This is pretty funny if you ask me. Found this gem on wikipedia:

Hexspeak, like leetspeak, is a novelty form of variant English spelling.

Hexspeak was created by programmers who wanted a magic number, a clear and unique identifier with which to mark memory or data. Using hexadecimal notation, which includes the digits 0123456789ABCDEF, it is possible to create small words with the digit "0" representing the letter "O", "1" representing the letter "I", and "5" representing "S".

0xABADBABE ("a bad babe") is used by Apple as the "Boot Zero Block" magic number.

0xBAADF00D ("bad food") is used by Microsoft's LocalAlloc(LMEM_FIXED) to indicate uninitialised allocated heap memory.

0xBADDCAFE ("bad cafe") is used by 'watchmalloc' in OpenSolaris to mark allocated but uninitialized memory.

0xCAFEBABE ("cafe babe") is used by both Mach-O ("Fat binary" in both 68k and PowerPC) to identify object files and the Java programming language to identify Java bytecode class files[1]

0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS, running on Alpha processes DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T.[2]

0xDEFEC8ED ("defecated") is the magic number for OpenSolaris core dumps [3].

0xFACEFEED ("face feed") is used by Alpha servers running Windows NT. The Alpha Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) generates this error when it encounters a hardware failure.[4]

0xFEE1DEAD ("feel dead") is used as magic number in Linux reboot system call.

0xBADCAB1E ("bad cable") Error Code returned to the Microsoft eVC debugger when connection is severed to the debugger.

0xFEEDFACE ("feed face") is used as a header for Mach-O binaries, and as an invalid pointer value for 'watchmalloc' in OpenSolaris.

0xD15EA5E\0 ("disease") opens a game disc partition on the Wii video game console. (\0 is used to mark the end of a string. Also of note, it was 0xDEADBEEF on the Nintendo GameCube.)

0xDEADDEAD ("dead dead") is the STOP code when invoking a Blue Screen of Death by using a special keystroke on a Windows NT based OS.

0xBEADFACE ("bead face, or face bead") Is the pattern that fills all unused memory locations in the Motorola 68HCS12DP256 micro-controller simulator, SimHC12.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak#Notable_magic_numbers


So guess what this will return if you run it in SQL Server
SELECT CONVERT(VARBINARY,'ÞþÈí')

Microwaving M&Ms??

Microwaving M&Ms?? Who comes up with such a thing.

I was listening to the This Week In Twit and Gina Trapani (from lifehacker fame)said to microwave M&Ms on high for 30 seconds. This will make the inside nice and warm but the outside is still crunchy. This means that they still melt in your mouth and not in your hand :-)

So I tied it myself and it is quite good, think of it like very small chocolate souffles

Bonuses for people with incomes over $250,000 would be taxed at a 90% rate for companies receiveing TARP money

The House just passed a Wall Street bonus tax

The measure would tax individuals on any bonuses received in 2009 from companies getting $5 billion or more in money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Bonuses for people with incomes over $250,000 would be taxed at a 90% rate.

Let's do some quick math shall we?

1) You get a million, you get taxed 90% and keep 100K


2) You return 750K, keep 250K, get taxed 35% and you keep 162.5K


For option 2 it looks like you did a good thing because you returned 750K. But in reality you did it because that way you can keep a lot more of the money

Please Tell Me That You Know The Answer To These 3 Questions

So I was listening to the This Week In Science podcast. A poll was conducted and three questions were asked. Amazingly only 21% of the people knew the answer to all three of these questions. These questions seem very simple to me so I don't really know how you can mess it up. Here are the questions

1) How long does it take for the earth to orbit around the sun once?
2) Did dinosaurs and humans coexist?
3) What percentage of Earth's surface is covered by water?

So there you have it? Do you know the answer to all three?

Mix 09 Day 1 Keynote

A lot of things announced today at Mix 09
ASP.NET MVC 1.0
Silverlight 3 Beta
Expression Blend 3 Preview

Watch The Keynote

Big Blue To Buy The Dot In .COM

Remember the we are the dot in .com ads? Of course later it became we are the dot in the .com crash :-)

So IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc for 6.5 billion dollars. Sun is up 3.42 or 68.81% in pre market trading today. A while back it was noted that Sun's stock was basically worth 0 dollars because their market cap was the same as what they had in cash.

This acquisition probably makes sense to IBM because it will take out another Unix vendor and IBM also has a heavy investment in Java with a variety of products.

Sun bought MySQL not too long ago and butchered it, MySQL 5.1 was released with crashing bugs and Monty Widenius left Sun. This is going to be interesting since IBM already has a database product DB2

The Sun acquisition could also be because of the announcement that Cisco Systems Inc would be selling their own servers and stepping on IBM's turf.

This is going to be very interesting, after this downturn/recession/depression is over I think we are going to have a lot less tech companies. I am wondering if Oracle, HP, Microsoft or Google will make any major acquisition s in the coming months.