And not liable for the content they transmit. They are however liable for content they host on their servers, but only once they are notified and given a reasonable amount of time to remove it.
The powers the FBI has been granted to boss around ISPs does not apply to content providers (like web sites).
I suspect what the FBI tried to do was demand logs and other information from Declan's, perhaps even demanding they look through his web space. Either they refused, had nothing useful, or maybe he handles his own hosting, the last one which may be grounds for the FBI to call him an ISP (which is probably enough to get a judge to grant the power, but not enough to stand up in court).
This is my best guess as to what happened, and I don't know anything about his situation and IANAL.
Two TECHNICIANS lead Jack to the BURNT-OUT SHELL of a WRECKED AUTOMOBILE. Jack sets down his briefcase, opens it and starts to make notes on a CLIPBOARDED FORM.
JACK (V.O.) I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. It's a story problem.
TECHNICIAN #1 Here's where the infant went through the windshield. Three points.
JACK (V.O.) A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up.
TECHNICIAN #2 The teenager's braces around the backseat ashtray would make a good "anti-smoking" ad.
JACK (V.O.) The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall?
TECHNICIAN #1 The father must've been huge. See how the fat burnt into the driver's seat with his polyester shirt? Very "modern art."
JACK (V.O.) Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...
CUT TO:
INT. AIRPLANE CABIN - MOVING DOWN RUNWAY
Jack is speaking to the BUSINESSWOMAN next to him.
JACK If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
BUSISNESS WOMAN Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
JACK Oh, you wouldn't believe.
BUSINESS WOMAN ... Which... car company do you work for?
JACK A major one.
Turgid silence. Jack turns to the window. He sees a PELICAN get SUCKED into the TURBINE.
And about this new windows box: All I'll say is there's a nasty exploit that can get me a SYSTEM priv shell remotely. And it's worked on every box that I've tried it upon.
Hello? Full disclosure anybody?
Are all of the Windows admins here supposed to just freak out? What program does it exploit?
We did provide people with tools like Java to build more safe and reliable services on the network. But Java has been underappreciated because, once again, it was a solution to a problem people had heard about but had not felt viscerally
What's he talking about "underappreciated"? Sun refused to let a standards group take it over. Sun refused (and may still refuse, I haven't checked) to even open source it.
And it's not until I'm sitting in front of a 2,4GHz workstation that Java applets load and run reasonably.
Way to go about changing the world. What he really means is that they weren't able to take Microsoft's place as monopolist.
For everyone who whines and blames Microsoft for their failures, you can point to a company that was competing with a shittier product or a greedier mentality.
How do companies get away with this kind of fraud? Is SCOs behavior totally invisible to the financial regulatory bodies? Or are they all being bought?
Unless you have a lot of money or addressing your situation will result in great press, the government is completely and totally uninterested in your problems.
Cases in point:
You're a middle class couple with one child. Some kids are regularly harassing your child after school. The schools take no responsibility since it happens after school. You call the police who think you're overprotective parents who can't take a little boys will be boys. Following your kids around all day is affecting your work. Best solution? Transfer your child to another school or move to a different town.
Suppose you're a single male living in an apartment building. One of the tenants in the apartment building is insane and hates you. One day she starts dialing 911 out of nowhere and tells the police that you attacked her. She keeps doing this. No matter how many times the police have shown up, each time they become angrier and don't want to believe your side of the story, and they may arrest you based on how experienced the police officer is (you're fucked if it's a new recruit). The landlord cannot evict her, because since she has no money or job a housing court judge refuses to evict her. Best option? Move. If you're the landlord? Pray to god that she leaves of her own free will, pay her off, or have her killed.
You're a small but successful dot com and one of your competitors launches denial of service attacks against your site. You call the police and find that they're completely uninterested in investigating. They don't even return your calls.
Repeat until it sinks in: THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU
The government does listen to IBM, however. My question is, what are they waiting for?
If you ever worked at an ISP that hosted both Windows ASP/Front Page sites and UNIX PHP/CGI/DreamWeaver sites you know first hand how much of a royal pain in the ass managing the Windows sites is. Windows accounted for only 10% or so of our hosted sites but consumed about 65% of our support budget. It's simply too hard or even outright impossible to automate administrative tasks.
I've heard from several sources that Windows 2003 makes this *much* easier, so it's very possible that the major hosting companies that have to deal with all of these ASP/Front Page sites that once moved as many sites as possible to a Linux platform to cut their costs have moved back now that they have Windows 2003.
And it only took Microsoft 6 years to start addressing this market, and of all of the people who said Windows 2003 was way better, they still have a lot of complaints.
Sometime in the next 10 years, something really really bad will happen and it will be blamed on Microsoft if they're still the dominant force. With every member of the public affected, and angry, Microsoft as an independent entity will cease and it will become controlled by the U.S. government.
Spammers are going to discover that just like if you tell a billion people to send you ten dollars, at least 1% of 1% of them will listen to you and you'll make $10,000,000, if you annoy a billion people sufficiently enough, at least 1% of 1% of them will also kill you without thinking twice. The only reason the spammers are still alive is because the people who would kill them if they saw them on the street don't know that they're spammers. That will change. Spammers will start being killed. Spamming will become a very dirty business and it will be abandoned by all. And that's when the mob will get into spamming.
God help us all.
Re:Has he....?
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
[has Stephenson learned to write] a sex scene that doesn't make one cringe
Doesn't it make you cringe when you see a lion chase and tackle and dismantle an errant zebra who couldn't escape with the rest of his herd? How about watching a snake envelope a rabbit and slowly suffocate it, then unhinge its jaw and begin swallowing it whole?
That's what makes a Stephenson sex scene so great. It's described for what it is, a guttural, instinctive, animal act.
Sure he could have sugar coated it with this talk of romance and love, but it's so much more funny to portray it for what it is: people shooting DNA at one another.
And you know why? Because most people would still buy Windows machines and as a result it would not be profitable to diversify the range of pre-installed operating systems.
All I asked Dell for was a laptop with no OS installed. They refused to offer it. How does that require a significant non-profitable investment? They can allow the buyer to slash $50-$150 off the retail price (which Dell makes no money on anyway).
Sure Microsoft has made exclusive deals with the hardware manufacturers: if the OEM wants serious bulk discounts on the Windows, they must sell only Windows computers. But that's business!
They sure have. So exclusive that the FTC has forced Microsoft to add a refund clause to the Windows EULA (see first paragraph).
So exclusive that Dell refuses to honor the refund clause, despite all force of law requiring them to comply.
I'm doing my part as a participant of capitalism by taking them to court for non-compliance.
Always trying to one-up the *BSD people by making something "more free", but never living up to the hype.
Yeah, it's about as ridiculous as how the *BSD people resent their dependence on GPL'd code and duplicate effort making sure they clone GNU tools and release them under a "less viral" license and they can declare their system even more BSD licensed.
Shouldn't the kernel be wiping pages when it hands them to new processes?
Hmmm... possibly not. This is a topic of some debate, apparently.
There's no debate at all.
A process cannot see another process's memory without kernel intervention. By default memory that is handed to a process is zeroed out (unless it is from a file mapping).
This is done on demand of course. If you malloc() 100MB of memory the kernel won't take 100MB of pages and set them all to zero, only the ones you touch for the first time.
It kind of does. Seems that fatal() calls fatal_cleanup() [cf fatal.c], which runs thru a list of callback procedures before exiting. Somewhere in those callbacks the function buffer_free() [cf buffer.c] might be called on the offending buffer. That function does a memset(buffer->buf, 0, buffer->alloc), and there's your overrun.
That seems harmless (it would be reallyhard to do useful damage by overflowing a buffer with zeroes), but it's also pointless. _exit() will free all of that memory. Why are they bothering with proper cleanup? This is FATAL CONDITION! ABANDON SHIP!
Someone's fired -- even though this probably isn't the source of the exploit.
This could potentially cause another part of the program to run past the actual end of the buffer.
But if the allocation fails, even though it has recorded an incorrect buffer size, the program immediately calls fatal().
How is this exploitable? Does the program somehow magically use the buffer in the background between the time that it's determined the allocation has failed and it has called exit?
Is fatal misnamed? Does it keep doing more stuff even though something really bad just happened? That would be reallystupid
I suspect OpenSSH developers are freaking out, have no proof that the exploit even exists, and are just pushing all of the planned bugfixes off their desks just in case.
Ensure that your benevolent dictator's ego isn't writing checks that you can't cash.
Re:What's with all of the bellyaching about speed?
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 1
So how come so many applications run slow as shit on anything but the latest and most expensive hardware?
Because they're either poorly designed or targetted at high end hardware.
The best way to end up with an application that runs like dogshit is for the developers to have one project meeting to discuss making the application fast that ends up being centered on rating the "speed" of each programming language. They'll probably even reference articles like the one in this story to do so.
Applications written in machine assembly can be slower than applications written in Java based on the algorithms used.
In the end the overall design is more important for performance than the development environment used.
What's with all of the bellyaching about speed?
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
OK lets get a few things settled.
Given: two identical applications; A, written in low level language like machine assembly, C, or C++; B, written in high level language like Java, Python, VB, hgluahalguha.
If the application is high in CPU burn (lets call it X), like oh, for (i = 0; i
If the application is copying a very large file using basic read/write system calls and large enough buffers (lets call this Y), A and B will have very similar performance.
If the application is printing hello world, they will have similar performance, although the startup costs for B may be higher, and A will probably finish executing faster.
MOST applications written today are written to solve for Y. The code that most programmers write today is NOT the CPU intensive portion. Usually the CPU intensive portion is in the library called by the programmer: rendering a box, moving things around on a storage device, making something appear on a network.
In these cases, a high or low level language makes no freaking difference on execution speed. However, your choice WILL make a huge difference on time to develop, maintainability, resultant bugginess, SECURITY, etc.
OF COURSE THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. Maybe you're writing a routine that needs to draw lines fast, or move bytes through a network filter at 100MB/sec, or you're compressing a file, whatever. In these cases you tend to write the performance critical code in a more low level language so you have greater control over the physical machine. Sometimes you write the entire application in the low level language.
Many high level languages provide mechanisms for calling low-level code when it's necessary for performance. It's often pretty easy.
The performance argument is a red herring.
Re:We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1
I didn't say it was a drop in replacement, simply to try it.;)
I suspect also that most people who know that they need fast execution speed know that they can take advantage of writing performance critical code in a lower-level language and easily link it from the python environment (it's super duper easy, possibly easier than doing it in any other language).
As for small? A "typical" Python environment is smaller than a typical Java environment for the same application, and they run at approximately the same speed (this may be due to simple JVM suckiness).
/JRE
That's not saying much about how Python compares to C/C++, but it says a lot about Python vs. Java.
Re:We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I recommend Python.
Open source, expressive (very short code can achieve a lot), readable (very short expressive code is easily groked -- fewer bugs), no direct pointer manipulation (safe -- fewer bugs), integrates nicely with other languages, runs on a variety of platforms, very easy to learn.
ACID problems? Well, getting transaction support on one machine was enough of a hassle. It was just a bitch and constant swearing session. It could be done, but in the end the performance wasn't where it should be - adding servers to the cluster didn't scale it up as fast as it should have, IMO.
It was pretty easy to achieve simply from reading the MySQL documentation on InnoDB. About my only gripe with MySQL is that you need to stop all traffic to the server in order to start off replication (unless your environment facilitates ibbackup) for the first time.
There are a lot of great OSS products out there, it's just that none of them are enterprise class database engines. Watch 404 messages from websites for telling clues - mysql always fails before apache.
I have a business of 20 employees, 40 vendors, and about 275,000 customers depending on MySQL in high load environments. It may fail before Apache, but it's only like 100x more complicated than Apache is. And with fairly reasonable hardware (an under $10k investment) we can keep MySQL uptime above 99.9% a year.
I suspect most of the businesses demanding "enterprise reliability" with Oracle don't actually receive anything close to that kind of uptime anyway -- be it due to Oracle's inherent crappiness or some other completely unrelated source. ie, a blackout, a worm disables your clients, a worm makes your web site unreachable due to routers overloading, or your sys admin by mistake set the wrong DNS entries and it'll be 48 hours before all of your client's resolvers flush their caches.
You have no clue what you are talking about. The lawyer invests signifigant time into filing and preparing for a lawsuit. If the lawyer didn't honestly think that the client had a valid claim, that time could be spent working for a client that did. And the lawyer IS held accountable. It's called "Rule 11" [epistolary.org] and it's there to sanction lawyers that file frivilous law suits.
My parents have just been sued by a tenant who claimed to have suffered $10 million in pain and suffering by falling down the stairs in their apartment building, oh, and that my father pushed her.
She did however neglect to mention that she was drunk off her ass, forced her way into another tenants apartment, assaulted them, and fell down under her own power (or rather, lack of stability), and much of this is on video. Also, she fell down two carpetted steps to land on a carpetted landing, and was SO pained by the fall that she refused to let the EMTs take her to the hospital until the police arrested my father (which they eventually didn't).
Now I ask, what kind of scumbag of a lawyer does she have that would file a $10 million suit against us on her behalf? The insurance company took our statements and saw the video and the case in their opinion is so frivilous that they're not even willing to settle with her for any amount and will actually take it to court.
I'm going to incorporate some company, claim to have acquired copyright to Windows XP, and start sending notices to all of Microsoft's customers demanding to be paid $500 per cpu. Oh, and I'll also sue Microsoft, IBM for $100 billion in damages.
It will be months before it's determined that lawsuit is baseless, but in the meantime the media will play up the story and even if 1/10,000th of Microsoft's customers pay up, that's still a sizable chunk of money, for doing absolutely nothing!
If facial recognition technology is used alone to try to catch criminals, of course it will fail. However, when used in conjunction with other systems, even a low success rate can be helpful.
I have no idea how the system works, but my guess is that it was spitting out "definitely yes" or "definitely no" when it should instead be offering an estimate. "73% chance that this guy is the same person as this felon who is on the lam".
It's not the kind of thing that stands up in court, but it is the kind of thing that can raise an eyebrow, and in those cases, that's often enough.
Slashdot Mirror
And not liable for the content they transmit. They are however liable for content they host on their servers, but only once they are notified and given a reasonable amount of time to remove it.
The powers the FBI has been granted to boss around ISPs does not apply to content providers (like web sites).
I suspect what the FBI tried to do was demand logs and other information from Declan's, perhaps even demanding they look through his web space. Either they refused, had nothing useful, or maybe he handles his own hosting, the last one which may be grounds for the FBI to call him an ISP (which is probably enough to get a judge to grant the power, but not enough to stand up in court).
This is my best guess as to what happened, and I don't know anything about his situation and IANAL.
Two TECHNICIANS lead Jack to the BURNT-OUT SHELL of a
... Which... car company do you work
WRECKED AUTOMOBILE. Jack sets down his briefcase, opens it
and starts to make notes on a CLIPBOARDED FORM.
JACK (V.O.)
I'm a recall coordinator. My job is
to apply the formula. It's a story
problem.
TECHNICIAN #1
Here's where the infant went through
the windshield. Three points.
JACK (V.O.)
A new car built by my company leaves
somewhere traveling at 60 miles per
hour. The rear differential locks up.
TECHNICIAN #2
The teenager's braces around the
backseat ashtray would make a good
"anti-smoking" ad.
JACK (V.O.)
The car crashes and burns with
everyone trapped inside. Now: do we
initiate a recall?
TECHNICIAN #1
The father must've been huge. See
how the fat burnt into the driver's
seat with his polyester shirt? Very
"modern art."
JACK (V.O.)
Take the number of vehicles in the
field, (A), and multiply it by the
probable rate of failure, (B), then
multiply the result by the average
out-of-court settlement, (C). A
times B times C equals X...
CUT TO:
INT. AIRPLANE CABIN - MOVING DOWN RUNWAY
Jack is speaking to the BUSINESSWOMAN next to him.
JACK
If X is less than the cost of a
recall, we don't do one.
BUSISNESS WOMAN
Are there a lot of these kinds of
accidents?
JACK
Oh, you wouldn't believe.
BUSINESS WOMAN
for?
JACK
A major one.
Turgid silence. Jack turns to the window. He sees a
PELICAN get SUCKED into the TURBINE.
Sounds like fun.
And about this new windows box: All I'll say is there's a nasty exploit that can get me a SYSTEM priv shell remotely. And it's worked on every box that I've tried it upon.
Hello? Full disclosure anybody?
Are all of the Windows admins here supposed to just freak out? What program does it exploit?
The easy solution to spam is to make the identity of the spammer known to all.
Do their neighbors know that they live next door to a spammer?
When a customer walks into your store, do you know if they are a spammer?
When someone hits on you at a bar, do you know if it's a spammer who is hitting on you?
When you're on highway patrol and catch someone speeding, do you know if is the spammer that is speeding?
When you walk down the sidewalk and pass by a car parked on the street, do you know if it is the spammer's car?
When your kids go to school, do they know the spammer's kids?
When you are delivering (paper) mail, do you know if it is the spammer's mail?
When you are serving food to someone, do you know if you're serving food to a spammer?
When you receive a call to 911/poison control, do you know if this is a spammer calling 911/poison control?
Spam is a community problem, and the community is the one best able to deal with it.
All the community needs is information.
The problem will solve itself.
We did provide people with tools like Java to build more safe and reliable services on the network. But Java has been underappreciated because, once again, it was a solution to a problem people had heard about but had not felt viscerally
What's he talking about "underappreciated"? Sun refused to let a standards group take it over. Sun refused (and may still refuse, I haven't checked) to even open source it.
And it's not until I'm sitting in front of a 2,4GHz workstation that Java applets load and run reasonably.
Way to go about changing the world. What he really means is that they weren't able to take Microsoft's place as monopolist.
For everyone who whines and blames Microsoft for their failures, you can point to a company that was competing with a shittier product or a greedier mentality.
Since when was a massive omni-mega corp ever cool?
Sony's a cool, cold, heartless, omni-mega corporation.
How do companies get away with this kind of fraud? Is SCOs behavior totally invisible to the financial regulatory bodies? Or are they all being bought?
Unless you have a lot of money or addressing your situation will result in great press, the government is completely and totally uninterested in your problems.
Cases in point:
You're a middle class couple with one child. Some kids are regularly harassing your child after school. The schools take no responsibility since it happens after school. You call the police who think you're overprotective parents who can't take a little boys will be boys. Following your kids around all day is affecting your work. Best solution? Transfer your child to another school or move to a different town.
Suppose you're a single male living in an apartment building. One of the tenants in the apartment building is insane and hates you. One day she starts dialing 911 out of nowhere and tells the police that you attacked her. She keeps doing this. No matter how many times the police have shown up, each time they become angrier and don't want to believe your side of the story, and they may arrest you based on how experienced the police officer is (you're fucked if it's a new recruit). The landlord cannot evict her, because since she has no money or job a housing court judge refuses to evict her. Best option? Move. If you're the landlord? Pray to god that she leaves of her own free will, pay her off, or have her killed.
You're a small but successful dot com and one of your competitors launches denial of service attacks against your site. You call the police and find that they're completely uninterested in investigating. They don't even return your calls.
Repeat until it sinks in: THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU
The government does listen to IBM, however. My question is, what are they waiting for?
If you ever worked at an ISP that hosted both Windows ASP/Front Page sites and UNIX PHP/CGI/DreamWeaver sites you know first hand how much of a royal pain in the ass managing the Windows sites is. Windows accounted for only 10% or so of our hosted sites but consumed about 65% of our support budget. It's simply too hard or even outright impossible to automate administrative tasks.
I've heard from several sources that Windows 2003 makes this *much* easier, so it's very possible that the major hosting companies that have to deal with all of these ASP/Front Page sites that once moved as many sites as possible to a Linux platform to cut their costs have moved back now that they have Windows 2003.
And it only took Microsoft 6 years to start addressing this market, and of all of the people who said Windows 2003 was way better, they still have a lot of complaints.
I predict that by 2013, two things will happen.
Spammers are going to discover that just like if you tell a billion people to send you ten dollars, at least 1% of 1% of them will listen to you and you'll make $10,000,000, if you annoy a billion people sufficiently enough, at least 1% of 1% of them will also kill you without thinking twice. The only reason the spammers are still alive is because the people who would kill them if they saw them on the street don't know that they're spammers. That will change. Spammers will start being killed. Spamming will become a very dirty business and it will be abandoned by all. And that's when the mob will get into spamming.
God help us all.
[has Stephenson learned to write] a sex scene that doesn't make one cringe
Doesn't it make you cringe when you see a lion chase and tackle and dismantle an errant zebra who couldn't escape with the rest of his herd? How about watching a snake envelope a rabbit and slowly suffocate it, then unhinge its jaw and begin swallowing it whole?
That's what makes a Stephenson sex scene so great. It's described for what it is, a guttural, instinctive, animal act.
Sure he could have sugar coated it with this talk of romance and love, but it's so much more funny to portray it for what it is: people shooting DNA at one another.
And you know why? Because most people would still buy Windows machines and as a result it would not be profitable to diversify the range of pre-installed operating systems.
All I asked Dell for was a laptop with no OS installed. They refused to offer it. How does that require a significant non-profitable investment? They can allow the buyer to slash $50-$150 off the retail price (which Dell makes no money on anyway).
Sure Microsoft has made exclusive deals with the hardware manufacturers: if the OEM wants serious bulk discounts on the Windows, they must sell only Windows computers. But that's business!
They sure have. So exclusive that the FTC has forced Microsoft to add a refund clause to the Windows EULA (see first paragraph).
So exclusive that Dell refuses to honor the refund clause, despite all force of law requiring them to comply.
I'm doing my part as a participant of capitalism by taking them to court for non-compliance.
Always trying to one-up the *BSD people by making something "more free", but never living up to the hype.
Yeah, it's about as ridiculous as how the *BSD people resent their dependence on GPL'd code and duplicate effort making sure they clone GNU tools and release them under a "less viral" license and they can declare their system even more BSD licensed.
I wonder where they are on replacing gcc.
Shouldn't the kernel be wiping pages when it hands them to new processes?
Hmmm... possibly not. This is a topic of some debate, apparently.
There's no debate at all.
A process cannot see another process's memory without kernel intervention. By default memory that is handed to a process is zeroed out (unless it is from a file mapping).
This is done on demand of course. If you malloc() 100MB of memory the kernel won't take 100MB of pages and set them all to zero, only the ones you touch for the first time.
It kind of does. Seems that fatal() calls fatal_cleanup() [cf fatal.c], which runs thru a list of callback procedures before exiting. Somewhere in those callbacks the function buffer_free() [cf buffer.c] might be called on the offending buffer. That function does a memset(buffer->buf, 0, buffer->alloc), and there's your overrun.
That seems harmless (it would be really hard to do useful damage by overflowing a buffer with zeroes), but it's also pointless. _exit() will free all of that memory. Why are they bothering with proper cleanup? This is FATAL CONDITION! ABANDON SHIP!
Someone's fired -- even though this probably isn't the source of the exploit.
This could potentially cause another part of the program to run past the actual end of the buffer.
But if the allocation fails, even though it has recorded an incorrect buffer size, the program immediately calls fatal().
How is this exploitable? Does the program somehow magically use the buffer in the background between the time that it's determined the allocation has failed and it has called exit?
Is fatal misnamed? Does it keep doing more stuff even though something really bad just happened? That would be really stupid
I suspect OpenSSH developers are freaking out, have no proof that the exploit even exists, and are just pushing all of the planned bugfixes off their desks just in case.
Ensure that your benevolent dictator's ego isn't writing checks that you can't cash.
So how come so many applications run slow as shit on anything but the latest and most expensive hardware?
Because they're either poorly designed or targetted at high end hardware.
The best way to end up with an application that runs like dogshit is for the developers to have one project meeting to discuss making the application fast that ends up being centered on rating the "speed" of each programming language. They'll probably even reference articles like the one in this story to do so.
Applications written in machine assembly can be slower than applications written in Java based on the algorithms used.
In the end the overall design is more important for performance than the development environment used.
OK lets get a few things settled.
Given: two identical applications; A, written in low level language like machine assembly, C, or C++; B, written in high level language like Java, Python, VB, hgluahalguha.
If the application is high in CPU burn (lets call it X), like oh, for (i = 0; i
If the application is copying a very large file using basic read/write system calls and large enough buffers (lets call this Y), A and B will have very similar performance.
If the application is printing hello world, they will have similar performance, although the startup costs for B may be higher, and A will probably finish executing faster.
MOST applications written today are written to solve for Y. The code that most programmers write today is NOT the CPU intensive portion. Usually the CPU intensive portion is in the library called by the programmer: rendering a box, moving things around on a storage device, making something appear on a network.
In these cases, a high or low level language makes no freaking difference on execution speed. However, your choice WILL make a huge difference on time to develop, maintainability, resultant bugginess, SECURITY, etc.
OF COURSE THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. Maybe you're writing a routine that needs to draw lines fast, or move bytes through a network filter at 100MB/sec, or you're compressing a file, whatever. In these cases you tend to write the performance critical code in a more low level language so you have greater control over the physical machine. Sometimes you write the entire application in the low level language.
Many high level languages provide mechanisms for calling low-level code when it's necessary for performance. It's often pretty easy.
The performance argument is a red herring.
I didn't say it was a drop in replacement, simply to try it. ;)
I suspect also that most people who know that they need fast execution speed know that they can take advantage of writing performance critical code in a lower-level language and easily link it from the python environment (it's super duper easy, possibly easier than doing it in any other language).
As for small? A "typical" Python environment is smaller than a typical Java environment for the same application, and they run at approximately the same speed (this may be due to simple JVM suckiness).
That's not saying much about how Python compares to C/C++, but it says a lot about Python vs. Java.
I recommend Python.
Open source, expressive (very short code can achieve a lot), readable (very short expressive code is easily groked -- fewer bugs), no direct pointer manipulation (safe -- fewer bugs), integrates nicely with other languages, runs on a variety of platforms, very easy to learn.
ACID problems? Well, getting transaction support on one machine was enough of a hassle. It was just a bitch and constant swearing session. It could be done, but in the end the performance wasn't where it should be - adding servers to the cluster didn't scale it up as fast as it should have, IMO.
It was pretty easy to achieve simply from reading the MySQL documentation on InnoDB. About my only gripe with MySQL is that you need to stop all traffic to the server in order to start off replication (unless your environment facilitates ibbackup) for the first time.
There are a lot of great OSS products out there, it's just that none of them are enterprise class database engines. Watch 404 messages from websites for telling clues - mysql always fails before apache.
I have a business of 20 employees, 40 vendors, and about 275,000 customers depending on MySQL in high load environments. It may fail before Apache, but it's only like 100x more complicated than Apache is. And with fairly reasonable hardware (an under $10k investment) we can keep MySQL uptime above 99.9% a year.
I suspect most of the businesses demanding "enterprise reliability" with Oracle don't actually receive anything close to that kind of uptime anyway -- be it due to Oracle's inherent crappiness or some other completely unrelated source. ie, a blackout, a worm disables your clients, a worm makes your web site unreachable due to routers overloading, or your sys admin by mistake set the wrong DNS entries and it'll be 48 hours before all of your client's resolvers flush their caches.
You have no clue what you are talking about. The lawyer invests signifigant time into filing and preparing for a lawsuit. If the lawyer didn't honestly think that the client had a valid claim, that time could be spent working for a client that did. And the lawyer IS held accountable. It's called "Rule 11" [epistolary.org] and it's there to sanction lawyers that file frivilous law suits.
My parents have just been sued by a tenant who claimed to have suffered $10 million in pain and suffering by falling down the stairs in their apartment building, oh, and that my father pushed her.
She did however neglect to mention that she was drunk off her ass, forced her way into another tenants apartment, assaulted them, and fell down under her own power (or rather, lack of stability), and much of this is on video. Also, she fell down two carpetted steps to land on a carpetted landing, and was SO pained by the fall that she refused to let the EMTs take her to the hospital until the police arrested my father (which they eventually didn't).
Now I ask, what kind of scumbag of a lawyer does she have that would file a $10 million suit against us on her behalf? The insurance company took our statements and saw the video and the case in their opinion is so frivilous that they're not even willing to settle with her for any amount and will actually take it to court.
Why would her lawyer get involved in this?
I'm going to incorporate some company, claim to have acquired copyright to Windows XP, and start sending notices to all of Microsoft's customers demanding to be paid $500 per cpu. Oh, and I'll also sue Microsoft, IBM for $100 billion in damages.
It will be months before it's determined that lawsuit is baseless, but in the meantime the media will play up the story and even if 1/10,000th of Microsoft's customers pay up, that's still a sizable chunk of money, for doing absolutely nothing!
If facial recognition technology is used alone to try to catch criminals, of course it will fail. However, when used in conjunction with other systems, even a low success rate can be helpful.
I have no idea how the system works, but my guess is that it was spitting out "definitely yes" or "definitely no" when it should instead be offering an estimate. "73% chance that this guy is the same person as this felon who is on the lam".
It's not the kind of thing that stands up in court, but it is the kind of thing that can raise an eyebrow, and in those cases, that's often enough.