Given that most of mainland Europe is nicer than the UK. (Better eather, better food, better beer, politer people, lower cost of living etc. etc.). It could only be an improvement.
Plus most of mainland European govenments managed to stay out of Iraq.
Writing as someone who has been stuck writing large technical documents in Word I couldn't agree more.
Why most managers in most shops think a tool designed for secretaries writing memos is suitable for creating technical documents I will never know.
Worst -- we have standards for word documents. We must use yukky fonts, we must use headings that indent three tabs at each level leaving you with four inches of blank space and one inch of text.
Even worse -- we are supposed to colaberate with other departments who have a diffenrent version of word. I have struggled for hours to get a document looking sensible with the text next to the correct image, no tables/list spilt on page breaks. No chapter heading at the bottom of a page etc. Then some **** goes and changes the default font and complains about the appearance.
You are not "supposed to hate word", thats up to you, but I certainly do.
Google actually made significant adavances in the way free text (wanted to say "unstructured data" but I will get told off!) data is indexed and searched.
The evolution goes roughly:
Yahoo --- Guys browse the WEB and put intersting links into the search engine.
HotBot --- Script browses the web and puts anything it finds into an index.
Google -- Programs browse the web and attempt to classify data based on links to and from the web page and a meta-database of "similar" data.
Teoma -- Similar to google but without the hype and much more accurate.
Off-topic, but the product is doomed to failure because it appears to be MicroSoft SQLserver only. Any business which trusts serious data to SQLserver is doomed to failure, so, reapeat business will not be good.
What an incredibly patronising, stupid, and, just plain wrong thing to say.
Walmart, Tescos, Carrefour (pick your local mega retailer) are incredibly sophisticated in thier use of technoligy. They all have first class inventory managment, ordering and distribution systems. With the advent of customer loyalty cards they drove data warehousing technoligy to new heights. In addition the "old" retailers have significant market share in e-commerce.
And this guy thinks they will have problems implementing what is effectively and upgrade to thier barcode system. Whats more he thinks they would be dumb enough to store the price information only on the RFID tag?
You could go around the supermarket going over barcodes with a felt tip pen, but, nobody ever bothered. Why do this just cause its digital?
And what exactly is the privicy issue? Do you refuse to drive VWs because they record fuel consumtion etc. on thier service chip. Do you file the serial numbers off your engine block? Its just product id!
In a world where people are starving, and, the only remaining superpower is led by a low I.Q. president there are other things to worry about.
Recent hardware only works with the latest solaris. The Solaris 8 upgrade in particular had a number of features related to large file system support which broke a lot of software. Particularly the "ftok" call (which has been used since time immemorial to get unique soket and semiphore ids) was almost guarenteed to produce a duplicate number.
As the call was working according to POSIX spec Sun didn't fix it.
So new hardware forces OS upgrade forces software upgrade -- YUK!
What I find really scary is the feeble " we bought cheap systems, we can't secure it " excuses the systems admins are giving.
If they had used free software it would have been pretty secure out of the box (or whatever the eqivalent is for downloading).
Most of the places I have worked recently are using the famously secure and "trusted" software from "honest" Bill Gates, and, they have reasonably secure networks, it just takes a some actual admin from the sysadmins.
What software are they using that stores passwords in plain text? In the 21st century ? This is just plain neglegent, I think the students involved should pursue the college through the data protection act. In the UK anyone holding somebody elses personal information on thier computer system has a duty to secure that data and prevent access from unauthorised users. Clearly asking the student body to "please obey the rules and not look" falls short of "reasonable measures to protect ".
An inprovement of 1000 times might not be that sectacular, it depends what the system was replacing.
Most likely it would be some unix hardware circa 1997. (say 4 x 200 Mhz Solaris, 512MB, with SCSII II disks, or, perhaps even a VAX complete with snails pace IO would be typical for that period in that environment). So a 2 x 3 gHz, 2 GB, with fibre channel ought to be faster. Plus it looks like they rewrote the whole system to take advantage of Oracle 10 features.
What is perhaps more interesting for slashdot readers is that for most people working at the trading end of finacial services this is very much a non news story. The last two sites I worked at had implemented or were implementing Linux cluster server based systems, and, these were both for volume performance critical systems.
I agree with this. The article was very uncritical and did not place the software in any context.
IBM mainframe users have had this type of stuff since the early '80s. (The trace facilities SMF etc. were much earlier but the cool tools for analysing the output weren't really there util then).
Also there are similar tracing facilities available on AIX, although the user interface is classic IBM (obscure and picky) syntax.
This could be viewed as case of Sun playing catchup with its competitors, and, hyping up any new product to obscure the fact that it hasn't any new hardware to sell.
I don't think its about protection just practicality. Google offers a SPAM filter the littel pratt tested it and found it wanting.
I think its more of a problem for Google than the end users. The whole Gmail "get a gigiabyte of memeory free" business model is predicated on most people using only a small fraction of that Gigibayte but felling good about the capacity being there. If I open up a gmail account, get p*ss*d of with the spam and go elsewhere without closing the account the 1G will fill up with spam in a couple of months, Google will end up storing terabytes of spam for cutomers who no longer use the service.
SPEC.ORG doesnt have any recent PowerPC benchmarks, but looking at historical bechmarks (Specint95 on 500Mhz processors) PowerPC has about a 20% higher score than a pentium of the same Mhz.
I would guess this advantage has increased as PowerPC pipelining and paralellism have improved dramatically since then.
So a 2.5 GHz PowerPC should be able to crunch numbers better than a 3 GHz Intel.
The chip also has the advantage of not being constained by the 8080 architecture.
The system was switched to use a smat card/calculator/pin code combo because of an ingenious attack on the old system.
A virus (piggy backed on a web based e-mail) went through your browser cache looking for chached pages from the banking application. When it found a nice static page like a menu or anouncement page it replaced the contents with html which contained a pop-up page from an Eastern European web site.
The faked web site then asked the user to re-authneticate themselves - with user id, password and the next number form the scratchlist, and closed the page, leaving the user to carry on as normal.
However the other web site has gathered enough information to log in and use your account, only one time , but he could still clean out the account.
But surely one of the major fuctions of a phone is that people can wring you.
How is anyone going to find my phone with a roaming v/ip setup?
Are all those little 400 mz processors with no disks going to implement a CDMA/GSM type roaming protocol? (Phone contacts local base station, via several hops contacts your CDMA/GSM provider and tells it, plus the FBI CIA etc., where your phone is so your calls can be routed to the right base station).
Given the recent US history of treating any country that doesnt 100% agree with its current policy as an enemy.
The history of abusing international trade agreements for the benefit of US based corperations.
And the general unwillingness to agree with any other goverment about anything. I would say that depending on a US government controlled system would be pretty dumb.
China does indeed have its own "Red Flag" linux distibution. Its a pretty standard distro apart from the fact that the support for chinese ideograms is standardised and most of the desktop apps use ideograms by default.
The descision to standardise on a homegrown Linux platform was as much to do with flakey and inconsistent chinese langauge support on other platforms as it was about saving money.
Say it costs 1 billion schekels to define a new standard and ramp up production, or, 5 schekels per phone in patent fees to use an old standard.
For a small country with a market for 5 million phones it makes no sense to define a new standard, you just for out 25 million schekels in patent fees.
For a potential market of more than 200 million it is cheaper to develop your own technoligy rather then fork 1 billion plus in patent fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what is better organized in the UK?
The trains?
The mail?
The tax system?
The schools?
The banks (Well the UK banks are better at extracting money from customers - but you guys still use checks!)
Whats wrong with being run from Brussels?
Given that most of mainland Europe is nicer than the UK. (Better eather, better food, better beer, politer people, lower cost of living etc. etc.). It could only be an improvement.
Plus most of mainland European govenments managed to stay out of Iraq.
Writing as someone who has been stuck writing large technical documents in Word I couldn't agree more.
Why most managers in most shops think a tool designed for secretaries writing memos is suitable for creating technical documents I will never know.
Worst -- we have standards for word documents. We must use yukky fonts, we must use headings that indent three tabs at each level leaving you with four inches of blank space and one inch of text.
Even worse -- we are supposed to colaberate with other departments who have a diffenrent version of word. I have struggled for hours to get a document looking sensible with the text next to the correct image, no tables/list spilt on page breaks. No chapter heading at the bottom of a page etc. Then some **** goes and changes the default font and complains about the appearance.
You are not " supposed to hate word", thats up to you, but I certainly do.
Google actually made significant adavances in the way free text (wanted to say "unstructured data" but I will get told off!) data is indexed and searched.
The evolution goes roughly:
Yahoo --- Guys browse the WEB and put intersting links into the search engine.
HotBot --- Script browses the web and puts anything it finds into an index.
Google -- Programs browse the web and attempt to classify data based on links to and from the web page and a meta-database of "similar" data.
Teoma -- Similar to google but without the hype and much more accurate.
Off-topic, but the product is doomed to failure because it appears to be MicroSoft SQLserver only. Any business which trusts serious data to SQLserver is doomed to failure, so, reapeat business will not be good.
What an incredibly patronising, stupid, and, just plain wrong thing to say.
Walmart, Tescos, Carrefour (pick your local mega retailer) are incredibly sophisticated in thier use of technoligy. They all have first class inventory managment, ordering and distribution systems. With the advent of customer loyalty cards they drove data warehousing technoligy to new heights. In addition the "old" retailers have significant market share in e-commerce.
And this guy thinks they will have problems implementing what is effectively and upgrade to thier barcode system. Whats more he thinks they would be dumb enough to store the price information only on the RFID tag?
You could go around the supermarket going over barcodes with a felt tip pen, but, nobody ever bothered. Why do this just cause its digital?
And what exactly is the privicy issue? Do you refuse to drive VWs because they record fuel consumtion etc. on thier service chip. Do you file the serial numbers off your engine block? Its just product id!
In a world where people are starving, and, the only remaining superpower is led by a low I.Q. president there are other things to worry about.
Totally agree !
But they were probably forced into this by Sun.
Recent hardware only works with the latest solaris. The Solaris 8 upgrade in particular had a number of features related to large file system support which broke a lot of software. Particularly the "ftok" call (which has been used since time immemorial to get unique soket and semiphore ids) was almost guarenteed to produce a duplicate number.
As the call was working according to POSIX spec Sun didn't fix it.
So new hardware forces OS upgrade forces software upgrade -- YUK!
What I find really scary is the feeble " we bought cheap systems, we can't secure it " excuses the systems admins are giving.
If they had used free software it would have been pretty secure out of the box (or whatever the eqivalent is for downloading).
Most of the places I have worked recently are using the famously secure and "trusted" software from "honest" Bill Gates, and, they have reasonably secure networks, it just takes a some actual admin from the sysadmins.
What software are they using that stores passwords in plain text? In the 21st century ? This is just plain neglegent, I think the students involved should pursue the college through the data protection act. In the UK anyone holding somebody elses personal information on thier computer system has a duty to secure that data and prevent access from unauthorised users. Clearly asking the student body to "please obey the rules and not look" falls short of "reasonable measures to protect ".
Buy from "Honest" Bill.
Nearly original operating systems loved by hackers everywhere at LOW LOW prices!
Trust Bill! The "Gates Guarentee" will ensure your OS against absolutly nothing for NO EXTRA COST!
"Fair Play" Bill also GIVING AWAY a range of pre-hacked browsers at low lwo prices.
An inprovement of 1000 times might not be that sectacular, it depends what the system was replacing.
Most likely it would be some unix hardware circa 1997. (say 4 x 200 Mhz Solaris, 512MB, with SCSII II disks, or, perhaps even a VAX complete with snails pace IO would be typical for that period in that environment). So a 2 x 3 gHz, 2 GB, with fibre channel ought to be faster. Plus it looks like they rewrote the whole system to take advantage of Oracle 10 features.
What is perhaps more interesting for slashdot readers is that for most people working at the trading end of finacial services this is very much a non news story. The last two sites I worked at had implemented or were implementing Linux cluster server based systems, and, these were both for volume performance critical systems.
I agree with this. The article was very uncritical and did not place the software in any context.
IBM mainframe users have had this type of stuff since the early '80s. (The trace facilities SMF etc. were much earlier but the cool tools for analysing the output weren't really there util then).
Also there are similar tracing facilities available on AIX, although the user interface is classic IBM (obscure and picky) syntax.
This could be viewed as case of Sun playing catchup with its competitors, and, hyping up any new product to obscure the fact that it hasn't any new hardware to sell.
Most os the OSes I work with are written is assembler or vanila C.
C++ is not a good language to write an OS in (or anything else for that matter :-)
I don't think its about protection just practicality. Google offers a SPAM filter the littel pratt tested it and found it wanting.
I think its more of a problem for Google than the end users. The whole Gmail "get a gigiabyte of memeory free" business model is predicated on most people using only a small fraction of that Gigibayte but felling good about the capacity being there. If I open up a gmail account, get p*ss*d of with the spam and go elsewhere without closing the account the 1G will fill up with spam in a couple of months, Google will end up storing terabytes of spam for cutomers who no longer use the service.
Netcraft queries uptime on servers periodicaly and uses fingerprinting to identify the OS.
SPEC.ORG doesnt have any recent PowerPC benchmarks, but looking at historical bechmarks (Specint95 on 500Mhz processors) PowerPC has about a 20% higher score than a pentium of the same Mhz.
I would guess this advantage has increased as PowerPC pipelining and paralellism have improved dramatically since then.
So a 2.5 GHz PowerPC should be able to crunch numbers better than a 3 GHz Intel.
The chip also has the advantage of not being constained by the 8080 architecture.
(Netscapre 7.2)
Jovial
:-)
It was/is definitly a defense industry language. The dollar is not a statement delimiter, its information for the billing system
.. was actualy upgraded recently but they are still using the same old software.
article
The system was switched to use a smat card/calculator/pin code combo because of an ingenious attack on the old system.
A virus (piggy backed on a web based e-mail) went through your browser cache looking for chached pages from the banking application. When it found a nice static page like a menu or anouncement page it replaced the contents with html which contained a pop-up page from an Eastern European web site.
The faked web site then asked the user to re-authneticate themselves - with user id, password and the next number form the scratchlist,
and closed the page, leaving the user to carry on as normal.
However the other web site has gathered enough information to log in and use your account, only one time , but he could still clean out the account.
Whoever was sitting a
But surely one of the major fuctions of a phone is that people can wring you.
How is anyone going to find my phone with a roaming v/ip setup?
Are all those little 400 mz processors with no disks going to implement a CDMA/GSM type roaming protocol? (Phone contacts local base station, via several hops contacts your CDMA/GSM provider and tells it, plus the FBI CIA etc., where your phone is so your calls can be routed to the right base station).
Foreign keys are un-American
No they arent, they are just not British
Given the recent US history of treating any country that doesnt 100% agree with its current policy as an enemy.
The history of abusing international trade agreements for the benefit of US based corperations.
And the general unwillingness to agree with any other goverment about anything. I would say that depending on a US government controlled system would be pretty dumb.
China does indeed have its own "Red Flag" linux distibution. Its a pretty standard distro apart from the fact that the support for chinese ideograms is standardised and most of the desktop apps use ideograms by default.
The descision to standardise on a homegrown Linux platform was as much to do with flakey and inconsistent chinese langauge support on other platforms as it was about saving money.
Its about the economics and numbers.
Say it costs 1 billion schekels to define a new standard and ramp up production, or, 5 schekels per phone in patent fees to use an old standard.
For a small country with a market for 5 million phones it makes no sense to define a new standard, you just for out 25 million schekels in patent fees.
For a potential market of more than 200 million it is cheaper to develop your own technoligy rather then fork 1 billion plus in patent fees.
It really makes sense.
It doesn't seem to bother the USA my standard GSM phone does only ever worked in New Orleans.
I think China is quite right to reject patent encumbered standards.
I thought MS SQLServer was origonally SYBASE.
MS forked off at about SYSBASE v6.