My Science Comp Answers

are stored encrypted in this text file: http://up.cw.siteoz.info/encryptedsciencecomp.txt (I've been told I'm good at science)

Now here's an introduction to the fine science of cryptography.

The encryption is given by the formula:

Where:

E is the encrypted text

P is the plain text

n is the position in the text

K is the key



E_n = P_n + (n + K)^2



By simple algebraric moving stuff around, you can find the formula for P_n. In the case of these answers, the key I used is between 0 and 5, so it's easy to brute force.

Science Comp etc.

The UNSW Science Competition was today, and for the benefit of anyone that hasn't done it, I will post some answers using my very own Quadratic Caesar algorithm shortly. Also, my CityRail ticket collection has officially piled up to the height of the length of one cable tie!

Silverlight continued...

Now, I said that I would validate Silverlight's homepage's HTML when W3C's validator went back up, to find out how much Microsoft meaures up to their "supposed" new stance of "not-not-giving-a-fuck-anymore" about W3C standards.



Evidently, they have decided to maintain their old stance on W3C standards for now... If you don't believe my screenshot, why not run the test yourself? http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fsilverlight%2Fwhy-flexible.aspx



So not only is Silverlight a rip off piece of shit, they're also hypocratic.

War on Silverlight

Now, if you've been keeping up with IT news (or if you haven't), you've probably heard of Microsoft Silverlight, the pathetic inferior alternative to Adobe Flash Player. Everyone knows that soon, Google will come up with something like gPlayer that will own both of them, but thats beside the point for now. What isn't beside the point is how Microsft spammed the words "cross-platform" all over their website. Just take a look at this bullshit that's just their front page:



And "cross-platform" is already used twice on the front page. But the front page is just skin deep. Let's delve a bit deeper:



As you can see on the first dot point, even Microsoft themselves are admitting that Silverlight is based on a shithouse rip-off of Java. And they don't really expect me to believe that Microsoft changed their "don't-give-a-fuck" stance towards W3C standards. Not far after that they pull the classic Microsoft stunt of trying to sound cool with buzz words and then using the words "cross-platform" again.

So I decided to take it upon myself to find out how much Microsoft really does care about W3C standards by running a CSS validation on their Silverlight website: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fsilverlight%2Fwhy-flexible.aspx&warning=1&profile=css21&usermedium=all.



Evidently not much... When W3C HTML validator goes back up, I will do a HTML validation on their site too.



Now, I don't know if anyone other than anyone at Microsoft would consider supporting just Windows and Mac OS X as cross-platform. What about those other users that use GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD or Solaris or OS/2, etc. I wish to congratulate Microsoft on their excellent support of 2 platforms. It's quite an achievement for them, since they usually only support half (ie. broken support of just Windows).



The final verdict: Just another piece of bullshit with a cool looking logo.