The problem with "cripple account after 3 failed attempts " is that it makes for a great denial of service oppertunity.
Worse if you cripple a couple of hundred passwords at a site, you can just phone up the helpdesk and ask for the new password on a known account. The chances are they will be so flooded with calls they will give you the new password without any attempt to establish identitiy.
British nuclear expertise produced dungeness B a nuclear reactor so flawed and inefficient it cannot generate enough energy to cover its running costs.
Only the very early 1950s reactors ever generated electricity profitably, which is somewhat ironic as they were specificaly designed to produce weapons grade plutonium and the electicity generation was an add on to soak up surplus energy and produce a good cover story for public consumption.
IBM has publicly expressed its disapproval of software patents, citing, among other things the cost of litigation. IBM is the owner of a vast number of patents which provide substantial revenue for the company, however, the vast majosrity of these are hardware patents, and, even here IBM has been reluctant to get involved in litigation except fot the most blatent violations.
I am getting a bit fed up with this patches mantra everyone keeps shouting.
OK so I do keep my home system reasonably up to date with patches.
But at work if I apply a patch to an OS I must retest every single application that uses the OS, on every type of hardware where the OS is deployed to ensure they still function correctly before I can start applying the patch generally. As this can take about two months applying security patches twice a week is just not feasable.
We do have a fast track for security patches, but, there have been several cases where the patches have broken applications or caused problems with older hardware.
Constantly applying patches is just not consistant with good software engineering.
There is a UK Coast Guard service. But this is a comparativlely small organisation which monitors radios traffic for distress calls, does traffic management on busy shipping routes and coordinates search and rescue operations.
The actual rescue is usually done by the RNLI which has boats manned by volenterr crews and is funded as a charity, or, if anything airborne is required it is supplied by the airforce, (additionally police, fire brigade etc. may be called in).
The actual effect of the outage doesn't seem to severe as computers are not extensively used. Radio and telephone being perfectly adequate to coordinate this sort of stuff.
It looks better than java, its faster than java, is is easier to deploy than java, they really thought about the security issues (as opposed to java's sandbox which stops you doing anything).
It's so much better than CORBA its not worth comparing.
Ironicaly however, I believe.NET will be microsoft's downfall. I think 'mono' (or someone) can produce a better '.NET' in the same way than Compaq produced a better 'IBM PC'and left IBM in the dust as a PC manufacturer. Being '.NET' compatable will be more important than being Microsoft.
The wierdness of there case:- IBM wote JFS for its own UNIX system therefore its UNIX and we own it would set a precedent which could lead to even more bizzare cases.
e.g. FreeBSD Your operating system uses an amended version of our TCP/IP stack therefore we own it, -, all you Windows users belong us
Depends how you measure it but 70% is about right.
When you consider that your bank statement, electricty bill, tax bill and airline ticket almost certainly came from an IBM mainframe you get an idea of how pervasive these systems are.
Find a sofware company specialising in Medical Systems (Medical Records, Diagnostic Aids, Drug Trial analysis etc. etc.). Get a job on the Medical side then having established yourself you can slide over to the CS side.
Niche software companies always need people who are qualified in thier target field.
The entire computer industry is a product of government funding!
Alan Turing's Betchly code buster was paid for by the British government.
The various early US computers (ENIAC et all) were paid for by the US DoD.
Modern large computer architecures were an offshoot of various government funded University projects (Notably the University of Manchesters various machines from the Marconi MARK 1 & UMIST machines).
The original DARPA internet was funded by the US DoD.
The WEB was invented at CERN... an international project funded by various goverments.
Just because governments are sometimes dumb it doesn't mean they are always dumb. And anyway capitalists are so much better at wasting money c.f. Enron et all
They probably really are counting only those with computer related degrees!
Since the '70s an IT qualfication was seen as a ticket to a well paying job in the west, and, the Indian universities expanded the number of courses to meet the demand so there is now a considerable production line.
Experience tells me that there is no direct correlation between programming/design skills and qualifications, but, the mix of geniuses, plodders and deadbeats is about the same as in most western computer shops. But when they are good they are very good!
I suspect most of the derogatory comments on there skills are chauvanistic or plain racist in origon.
Re:you know -- the current generation still rule
on
End In Sight For Alpha
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If alphas were so nice how come nobody bought them!
Reason one. Loosey IO bandwith on alpha hardware. This made them useless for standard commercial processing or database work and confined them in the scientific number crunching niche at a time when research money was tight.
Reason two. Loosey operating systems. ULTRIX was immature and buggy, VMS was VMS (some people love it, not sure why), and NT......
Reason three. It was a memory hog. With a "int" set to 64 bits as standard and each machine instruction taking up a lot of room (256 bits I think) you needed tons of real memory to run "Hello World", remember memory was expensive then.
As its been some twenty years since someone came up with a new sort algorithm, and, about fifteen years since someone came up with a really new key hashing algorithm, you will find that 98% of the early volumes relevent.
Most of the irrelevent 2% involves tweeking algorithms to save memory so it might still be relevent if you are working on an embedded system.
As someone who works in very large corperations I would say two things are generally true about MS software.
It is widly deployed in 99% of large corperations.
It is not used for "betting thier entire business" applications in 99% of large corperations.
MS software is used for word processing, mail clients, non critical web servers, spread sheets, non critical databases and (probably its most important functions) terminal and X windows emulation.
Applications like warehousing, billing, accounts, order processing, important web servers are run on (in orderof usage) OS/390, Sun Solaris, AS/400, AIX, OpenVMS, HP/UX, etc.etc.
This is all besed on personal observation but I am sure most IT professionals working in Fortune 500 companies would agree with these observations.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with "cripple account after 3 failed attempts " is that it makes for a great denial of service oppertunity.
Worse if you cripple a couple of hundred passwords at a site, you can just phone up the helpdesk and ask for the new password on a known account. The chances are they will be so flooded with calls they will give you the new password without any attempt to establish identitiy.
What nuclear expertise ??
British nuclear expertise produced dungeness B a nuclear reactor so flawed and inefficient it cannot generate enough energy to cover its running costs.
Only the very early 1950s reactors ever generated electricity profitably, which is somewhat ironic as they were specificaly designed to produce weapons grade plutonium and the electicity generation was an add on to soak up surplus energy and produce a good cover story for public consumption.
Which was cobbled together form the CP/M operating system and rebranded by an up and coming business guy.
He also admits to reading the assembly listings from for DEC Basic before writing his own completely original Basic interpreter.
I do wish this "institute" was based in France where it is illegal to falsify history.
IBM has publicly expressed its disapproval of software patents, citing, among other things the cost of litigation.
IBM is the owner of a vast number of patents which provide substantial revenue for the company, however, the vast majosrity of these are hardware patents, and, even here IBM has been reluctant to get involved in litigation except fot the most blatent violations.
I have moved forward since then. I recently got catigated for writing C in Java.
I'll catch up with the youngsters one day.
We need interoprability with everything else to keep LINUX viable.
I am getting a bit fed up with this patches mantra everyone keeps shouting.
OK so I do keep my home system reasonably up to date with patches.
But at work if I apply a patch to an OS I must retest every single application that uses the OS, on every type of hardware where the OS is deployed to ensure they still function correctly before I can start applying the patch generally. As this can take about two months applying security patches twice a week is just not feasable.
We do have a fast track for security patches, but, there have been several cases where the patches have broken applications or caused problems with older hardware.
Constantly applying patches is just not consistant with good software engineering.
Not quit correct?
There is a UK Coast Guard service. But this is a comparativlely small organisation which monitors radios traffic for distress calls, does traffic management on busy shipping routes and coordinates search and rescue operations.
The actual rescue is usually done by the RNLI which has boats manned by volenterr crews and is funded as a charity, or, if anything airborne is required it is supplied by the airforce, (additionally police, fire brigade etc. may be called in).
The actual effect of the outage doesn't seem to severe as computers are not extensively used. Radio and telephone being perfectly adequate to coordinate this sort of stuff.
.NET will succeed because it is better.
It looks better than java, its faster than java, is is easier to deploy than java, they really thought about the security issues (as opposed to java's sandbox which stops you doing anything).
It's so much better than CORBA its not worth comparing.
Ironicaly however, I believe
What would happen if SCO won?
The wierdness of there case:-
IBM wote JFS for its own UNIX system therefore its UNIX and we own it would set a precedent which could lead to even more bizzare cases.
e.g. FreeBSD Your operating system uses an amended version of our TCP/IP stack therefore we own it, -, all you Windows users belong us
Depends how you measure it but 70% is about right.
/ TopTenWinners.asp>
When you consider that your bank statement, electricty bill, tax bill and airline ticket almost certainly came from an IBM mainframe you get an idea of how pervasive these systems are.
Also if you look at a survey of the largest databases IBM mainframes do float to the top
http://www.wintercorp.com/vldb/2003_TopTen_Survey
All depends how you look at it.
Its the de-facto scripting language on the paltform that hosts two thirds of the fortune 500s data.
Find a sofware company specialising in Medical Systems (Medical Records, Diagnostic Aids, Drug Trial analysis etc. etc.). Get a job on the Medical side then having established yourself you can slide over to the CS side.
Niche software companies always need people who are qualified in thier target field.
W@tergate ??
The French have a much simpler low tech answer to the problem.
Everybody leaves there parking brake off, then, the car parking nudges the already parked cars along to make a big enough space.
Anyone foolish enough to actually engage the parking brake gets dented both ends.
Another sad brainwashed libertarian.
The entire computer industry is a product of government funding!
Alan Turing's Betchly code buster was paid for by the British government.
The various early US computers (ENIAC et all) were paid for by the US DoD.
Modern large computer architecures were an offshoot of various government funded University projects (Notably the University of Manchesters various machines from the Marconi MARK 1 & UMIST machines).
The original DARPA internet was funded by the US DoD.
The WEB was invented at CERN
Just because governments are sometimes dumb it doesn't mean they are always dumb. And anyway capitalists are so much better at wasting money c.f. Enron et all
They probably really are counting only those with computer related degrees!
Since the '70s an IT qualfication was seen as a ticket to a well paying job in the west, and, the Indian universities expanded the number of courses to meet the demand so there is now a considerable production line.
Experience tells me that there is no direct correlation between programming/design skills and qualifications, but, the mix of geniuses, plodders and deadbeats is about the same as in most western computer shops. But when they are good they are very good!
I suspect most of the derogatory comments on there skills are chauvanistic or plain racist in origon.
Damn we been sussed!
Well they managed to grab "bookshelf" as their own for a while.
The one million bit key.
Can't wait till my bank upgrades thier ATMs.
If alphas were so nice how come nobody bought them!
Reason one. Loosey IO bandwith on alpha hardware. This made them useless for standard commercial processing or database work and confined them in the scientific number crunching niche at a time when research money was tight.
Reason two. Loosey operating systems. ULTRIX was immature and buggy, VMS was VMS (some people love it, not sure why), and NT ......
Reason three. It was a memory hog. With a "int" set to 64 bits as standard and each machine instruction taking up a lot of room (256 bits I think) you needed tons of real memory to run "Hello World", remember memory was expensive then.
As its been some twenty years since someone came up with a new sort algorithm, and, about fifteen years since someone came up with a really new key hashing algorithm, you will find that 98% of the early volumes relevent.
Most of the irrelevent 2% involves tweeking algorithms to save memory so it might still be relevent if you are working on an embedded system.
As someone who works in very large corperations I would say two things are generally true about MS software.
It is widly deployed in 99% of large corperations.
It is not used for "betting thier entire business" applications in 99% of large corperations.
MS software is used for word processing, mail clients, non critical web servers, spread sheets, non critical databases and (probably its most important functions) terminal and X windows emulation.
Applications like warehousing, billing, accounts, order processing, important web servers are run on (in orderof usage) OS/390, Sun Solaris, AS/400, AIX, OpenVMS, HP/UX, etc.etc.
This is all besed on personal observation but I am sure most IT professionals working in Fortune 500 companies would agree with these observations.
Richard Stallman and the many others who have been involved in the GNU project over the years have:---
Porposed the idea of a free UNIX clone.
Written a first class set of compilers, linkers etc.
Written a first class development environment for the compiler linker etc.
Created tools to support the entire POSIX standard.
Created the legal and political framework for free software.
Linus:
Used all of the above to write the free Linux kernel.