Let's look at what page 131 of the GAO report says about Table 8 (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf).
First of all, these are loans, not bailouts.
Second, for at least half of the amount (the PDFC loans), the number is highly inflated: "For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30 days."
A December 2010 paper, "Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations", takes a similar approach.
The article was published in ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, PDF version.
The paper details a gap in the security of VBR compressed encrypted VoIP streams. The authors had earlier found that it is possible to determine the language that is spoken on such a VoIP call, based on packet lengths. Now they have expanded their research and show that itâ(TM)s possible to detect entire spoken phrases during a VoIP call. On average, their method achieved recall of 50% and precision of 51% for a wide variety of phrases spoken by a diverse collection of speakers (some phrases are easier to detect than others; the recall various from 0% to 98%, depending on length of the phrase and the speaker).
In other words: they can detect fairly well if a certain phrase is being used in a conversation, even though the VoIP conversation is encrypted.
Re:Waiting for a capable PostgreSQL front-end
on
PostgreSQL 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You know that you can point your MS Access client to any supported back-end right? Just create an ODBC connection on your Windows machine to your PostgreSQL server and you can use Access with pretty much all the features that work for the Microsoft JetEngine (PostgreSQL has ODBC drivers here; http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/)
Earlier this year we converted a huge Access application from MSSQL to PostgreSQL and the technical conversion, using ODBC to PostgreSQL instead of connecting to MSSQL, was a piece of cake.
While "free" or "liberal" is a translation of the Dutch word "Vrije", the officially used name in English of this university is "VU University", not "Free University".
See the website:
http://www.vu.nl/en/index.asp
A example of a small, but useful open source project that started as an internal project:
JavaConfig. It allows easy and type-safe access to configuration properties, for Java based applications.
My previous employer, Chess in Haarlem, the Netherlands, agreed to make it Open Source (under a BSD license) after me and a few other colleagues had been working on it for a while. Proves that it's a cool company;)
Isn't it a bit early to judge this thing? The Register didn't even hear Microsoft's response yet.
From the Register's article:
"Can Microsoft really be attempting to take a phonetic-sounding domain name? Well, Mike is reassuringly candid and although we have not seen Microsoft's letter and the company has yet to confirm or deny its threats are real, it seems to hang together. Unless Mike is a first-rate hoaxer, it would appear that Microsoft really has lost the plot and is trying to extend the already flawed domain dispute rules into hitherto unexplored territory". [emphasis mine]
True; it sounds real enough but it could also be a smart hoax.
It'd be nice if there was a Netbeans module that would read the struts-config.xml and present it in a form, like the TLD module.
I think that exactly the point KDan was making: IDE support for the struts-config and validation.xml files.
I don't know about Netbeans, but there are a couple of them for Eclipse (Alpha Struts Editor, Easy Struts). The latter one already supports Struts 1.1.
I'm a reasonably experienced Java developer (4 years). We're mostly creating J2EE applications at my work.
Recently I had to work in PHP as well; a friend of mine wanted a small website. It was quite a change!
I know Java has its drawbacks, but the tooling is becoming really good: Eclipse, code beautifiers, Javadoc, Junit, StrutsTestCases, Hibernate... they all make developing a lot easier.
Tooling for PHP is another matter. There are editors, there are Eclipse plugins, but nowhere near the level of Java (or, of course, Visual Studio for that matter). It seems like all the tools are just a bit less mature (perhaps with the exception of database-access layers, there are quite good ones available). A point where PHP beats Java is of course deployment: simply change the source file, reload the page, and your application is deployed. That takes a bit longer in Java;)
However, tooling isn't the most important thing for a good system: the design is what really matters. This is not made easier by the lack of decent OO functionality of PHP. My approach was to stick with the 'Struts-way' as much as possible.
There's a reasonable Struts-replacement (Phrame), which works pretty neat with the template engine Smarty.
The project worked well -- but I'm happy to be back at Java. Somehow programming in PHP felt a bit 'ugly'. Although the code is quite readable, and the application works nicely, I don't have the same proud feeling I (sometimes:)) have when writing Java code.
Don't know if it's an option, but I saw quite decently priced Java hosting: http://www.4java.ca/ (no personal experience with them though).
Reference: Here we read that Mainstream support for windows 2000 servers will end 31 March 2005 That's only 2 years and 4 months from now. I don't remember seeing a 'use before' date on any linux servers. Do you?
Readers might wish to balance this article with the rest of the story, found here.
Or, when you're talking about files this small, it's even an option to just print the source and retype it when you need it;)
Reminds me of the good-old days when we used to have a ROM-only computer, don't know the brand but it didn't have a diskdrive or harddisk... Everytime we wanted to play a game we had to type it from a booklet.
Obviously KDE and Gnome are not just tools, or frameworks. They are quite complicated programs that are still constantly evolving. However, they can use Gnu make, gnu c, all kind of open source scripting languages "from the shelf". Gnome or KDE are examples for (currently) there is still a lot of work for developers, possibly 'closed source' (ie: MS Windows)...
My point is that there is no need to re-invent the wheel for well-understood programs . I didn't mean to say all open source software falls into this category.
I agree with you; I think Jerry Plouffe is not right. One of the things that I consider a big advantage of Open Source is the fact that there is less need to re-invent the wheel all the time.
In many software-companies software is created just for the purpose of this company (think about frameworks, scripting, tools) where this is not necessary at all. It is only done because creating it yourself is cheaper than buying it. However, using open-source variants of these tools, frameworks etc money will be saved. I believe this saving is good: it allows the developer to focus on their main product.
This way there will be a change in focus for developers: less on the tools, more on the business logic they're implemented for their customer. Productivity will rise (good for the employer), and the job will be more interesting too I believe. Jerry will not have to be afraid for his job but should embrace Open Source where possible and enjoy his work more, and be more efficient for the same money spent.
In Modern Compiler Design the advantages of compiling your compiler in the language (system) you are developing are summarized as this:
first, basic sanity check because it shows you're compiler and language are at least able to do work together
second, an extended sanity check because typically a compiler is a BIG program. This means not only small test-programs will be compilable, but also a real-world, large-scale application.
They mention as a possible disadvantage that there might be a danger that the language will be a bit biased towards creating a compiler. However, in case of C# (where the language is already defined) this is not the case of course.
Say I had two programs, one done in all C++ and one done in all Java
Now, if these numbers are right, then the C++ program is up to TWICE as fast as the Java one... I think I know which one I'll be using.
As it reads on the website:
Important: As stated on page 33 of the report; when the report uses the phrase X is 30% slower than Y, then this means that X uses 30% more time than Y to perform the same computation. This is the same as saying that X is 1.3 times slower than Y. So if X is 50% slower than Y, this does not mean X is half the speed of Y.
This means that a Java version would take 1.2 to 1.5 times as much time as a C++ one, NOT 2 times as much.
Slashdot Mirror
This is already reality. So called "red pills" allow malware to find out if its are running in an emulator or virtual machine.
Here's a paper that describes automatically generating such red pills:
"A fistful of red-pills: how to automatically generate procedures to detect cpu emulators" by R. Paleari, L. Martignoni, G. F. Roglia, and D. Bruschi
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot09/tech/full_papers/paleari.pdf
The authors found more than 23k red-pills to detect QEMU and/or BOCHS.
Let's look at what page 131 of the GAO report says about Table 8 (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf).
First of all, these are loans, not bailouts.
Second, for at least half of the amount (the PDFC loans), the number is highly inflated: "For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30 days."
A December 2010 paper, "Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations", takes a similar approach.
The article was published in ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, PDF version.
The paper details a gap in the security of VBR compressed encrypted VoIP streams. The authors had earlier found that it is possible to determine the language that is spoken on such a VoIP call, based on packet lengths. Now they have expanded their research and show that itâ(TM)s possible to detect entire spoken phrases during a VoIP call. On average, their method achieved recall of 50% and precision of 51% for a wide variety of phrases spoken by a diverse collection of speakers (some phrases are easier to detect than others; the recall various from 0% to 98%, depending on length of the phrase and the speaker). In other words: they can detect fairly well if a certain phrase is being used in a conversation, even though the VoIP conversation is encrypted.
You know that you can point your MS Access client to any supported back-end right? Just create an ODBC connection on your Windows machine to your PostgreSQL server and you can use Access with pretty much all the features that work for the Microsoft JetEngine (PostgreSQL has ODBC drivers here; http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/)
Earlier this year we converted a huge Access application from MSSQL to PostgreSQL and the technical conversion, using ODBC to PostgreSQL instead of connecting to MSSQL, was a piece of cake.
While "free" or "liberal" is a translation of the Dutch word "Vrije", the officially used name in English of this university is "VU University", not "Free University". See the website: http://www.vu.nl/en/index.asp
A example of a small, but useful open source project that started as an internal project:
;)
JavaConfig. It allows easy and type-safe access to configuration properties, for Java based applications.
My previous employer, Chess in Haarlem, the Netherlands, agreed to make it Open Source (under a BSD license) after me and a few other colleagues had been working on it for a while. Proves that it's a cool company
Actually, the Dutch boy succeeded!
Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates.
Isn't it a bit early to judge this thing? The Register didn't even hear Microsoft's response yet.
From the Register's article:
"Can Microsoft really be attempting to take a phonetic-sounding domain name? Well, Mike is reassuringly candid and although we have not seen Microsoft's letter and the company has yet to confirm or deny its threats are real, it seems to hang together. Unless Mike is a first-rate hoaxer, it would appear that Microsoft really has lost the plot and is trying to extend the already flawed domain dispute rules into hitherto unexplored territory". [emphasis mine]
True; it sounds real enough but it could also be a smart hoax.
Wonderful :)
Do moderators actually follow these links before given modpoints?
It'd be nice if there was a Netbeans module that would read the struts-config.xml and present it in a form, like the TLD module.
I think that exactly the point KDan was making: IDE support for the struts-config and validation.xml files.
I don't know about Netbeans, but there are a couple of them for Eclipse (Alpha Struts Editor, Easy Struts). The latter one already supports Struts 1.1.
I'm a reasonably experienced Java developer (4 years). We're mostly creating J2EE applications at my work.
... they all make developing a lot easier.
;)
:)) have when writing Java code.
Recently I had to work in PHP as well; a friend of mine wanted a small website. It was quite a change!
I know Java has its drawbacks, but the tooling is becoming really good: Eclipse, code beautifiers, Javadoc, Junit, StrutsTestCases, Hibernate
Tooling for PHP is another matter. There are editors, there are Eclipse plugins, but nowhere near the level of Java (or, of course, Visual Studio for that matter). It seems like all the tools are just a bit less mature (perhaps with the exception of database-access layers, there are quite good ones available). A point where PHP beats Java is of course deployment: simply change the source file, reload the page, and your application is deployed. That takes a bit longer in Java
However, tooling isn't the most important thing for a good system: the design is what really matters. This is not made easier by the lack of decent OO functionality of PHP. My approach was to stick with the 'Struts-way' as much as possible.
There's a reasonable Struts-replacement (Phrame), which works pretty neat with the template engine Smarty.
The project worked well -- but I'm happy to be back at Java. Somehow programming in PHP felt a bit 'ugly'. Although the code is quite readable, and the application works nicely, I don't have the same proud feeling I (sometimes
Don't know if it's an option, but I saw quite decently priced Java hosting: http://www.4java.ca/ (no personal experience with them though).
April 1st again?
4 9&tid=111 (dupe 1)
0 6&mode=nested&tid=111&tid=95 (dupe 2)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/19/17362
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/12/14422
Again a story that has been posted a little while ago. I won't rant about reading your own website or getting decent editors... not this time.
:)
But I wouldn't be surprised if one of the factors for the attention BBC gives to this project is the fact that is has been on Slashdot.
Nice circle
From the comments under the article ('BSD user'):
Reference: Here we read that Mainstream support for windows 2000 servers will end 31 March 2005 That's only 2 years and 4 months from now. I don't remember seeing a 'use before' date on any linux servers. Do you?
Readers might wish to balance this article with the rest of the story, found here.
They sometimes do redirect links in the search results; I've seen it happen a couple of times.
There is also a 'Unhappy with your result?' link that appears every now and then through which you can sent a message to an operator or sth.
And it's not like it was half year ago; I mean come on.
Get a decent editor; somebody that checks this kind of stuff,
Or, when you're talking about files this small, it's even an option to just print the source and retype it when you need it ;)
Reminds me of the good-old days when we used to have a ROM-only computer, don't know the brand but it didn't have a diskdrive or harddisk... Everytime we wanted to play a game we had to type it from a booklet.
...or to use the "X" that is also a popular character in geek-land.
All spam advertises is the usual porn/get rich quick/dodgey viagra crap. You forgot to mention the free university titles. :)
Definately cool -- congratulations to the guy.
Obviously KDE and Gnome are not just tools, or frameworks. They are quite complicated programs that are still constantly evolving. However, they can use Gnu make, gnu c, all kind of open source scripting languages "from the shelf". Gnome or KDE are examples for (currently) there is still a lot of work for developers, possibly 'closed source' (ie: MS Windows)...
My point is that there is no need to re-invent the wheel for well-understood programs . I didn't mean to say all open source software falls into this category.
I agree with you; I think Jerry Plouffe is not right. One of the things that I consider a big advantage of Open Source is the fact that there is less need to re-invent the wheel all the time.
In many software-companies software is created just for the purpose of this company (think about frameworks, scripting, tools) where this is not necessary at all. It is only done because creating it yourself is cheaper than buying it. However, using open-source variants of these tools, frameworks etc money will be saved. I believe this saving is good: it allows the developer to focus on their main product.
This way there will be a change in focus for developers: less on the tools, more on the business logic they're implemented for their customer. Productivity will rise (good for the employer), and the job will be more interesting too I believe. Jerry will not have to be afraid for his job but should embrace Open Source where possible and enjoy his work more, and be more efficient for the same money spent.
In Modern Compiler Design the advantages of compiling your compiler in the language (system) you are developing are summarized as this:
first, basic sanity check because it shows you're compiler and language are at least able to do work together
second, an extended sanity check because typically a compiler is a BIG program. This means not only small test-programs will be compilable, but also a real-world, large-scale application.
They mention as a possible disadvantage that there might be a danger that the language will be a bit biased towards creating a compiler. However, in case of C# (where the language is already defined) this is not the case of course.
Seems they have managed to take yet another step since this slashdot article.
Important: As stated on page 33 of the report; when the report uses the phrase X is 30% slower than Y, then this means that X uses 30% more time than Y to perform the same computation. This is the same as saying that X is 1.3 times slower than Y. So if X is 50% slower than Y, this does not mean X is half the speed of Y.
This means that a Java version would take 1.2 to 1.5 times as much time as a C++ one, NOT 2 times as much.