The Amazon datacenter the article discusses is located in Ashburn, VA, about 20 miles WNW of Washington DC and about 100 miles from the nearest Atlantic coastline. We get rain from hurricanes that come ashore down in NC as they drive their way NNE up the coastline, but nothing worse. And since Amazon chose that location because it's one of the major Internet peering points (i.e., MAE East), there won't be any way to get anywhere on the Internet when it gets blown away:-)
The only problem with Apple's App Store is that Apple makes it impossible to have other app stores on your iPhone or iPad. In the physical world, we don't allow that kind of monopolistic behavior (at least in the USA). Want to have a brush guard with a killer winch on the front of your Jeep? You can buy them from lots of places, even though the manufacturer won't sell you one and (most) dealers won't install one. You can even pay someone else to install it for you, without Jeep's permission or approval.
This sounds like almost every Clifford D. Simak story, plus a few other writers. I wish I could remember which one of them ran into the problem of trans-substantiation being mistaken for cannibalism:-)
About 25 years ago, TCP/IP experimenters on BITNET were sending IP packets as RSCS messages, which were limited to the same scale of data as SMS messages. It was slow as hell, but just like the SMS network, the RSCS network prioritized these short messages above other traffic.
This is the same network facility that inspired the IBM Reseach folks who moved to AOL to create the buddy list and everything that arose from there.
Funny how things come around over and over in the computing world - it's like nobody studies any prior work.
Yeah, this is why I love Opera. Firefox may have lots of add-ons, but Opera always does everything I need it to, right out of the box, and its defaults are extremely sensible.
And that's why a request for a waiver isn't just a formality, dispensed with in a few minutes. The FCC needs to determine that there isn't a risk to the public or to other established users of the frequencies in the specific case requested by the requestor. Lots of waiver requests are for experimental uses (the Amateur Radio community does so from time to time), but those typically designate small groups of stations and locations. As this is a portable commercial product, I suspect it was a lot harder to decide on.
TFA says "the circuitry combines the echoes at different frequencies", but I suspect "circuitry" is a layman's term and that this is truly done in software. Various DSP chips would be excellent platforms with which to do so. If so, then the starting point is a "RADAR camera", which gets turned into a motion detector through image processing. In which case those plants will be quite visible, along with anything else that has edges. The stolen Van Gogh on the wall, however, will be indistinguishable from Dogs Playing Poker.
Look at what he says: "I am developing an application for PDA and require a light-weight browser for it..."
ie. his boss has told him to find something they can steal.
Nope, he's coming from iiitb.ac.in - the Indian Institue of Information Technology's graduate school in Bangalore. He's trying to avoid doing his own thesis work.
The problem isn't BITS. The problem is the idea that BITS is "trusted". Should you trust every FTP server your computer connects to? Every HTTP server? Of course not. Then why BITS?
The Windows firewall model of "trust this program" is inherently incorrect, and that's the real source of this issue. I really hate to say it, but Internet Explorer gets this right - programs aren't trusted, places you can connect to are trusted.
No, but perhaps you should think about that next time you submit a story about your own website. It's a great idea, and LiteratePrograms is already doing a fine job at it.
Hey, there's no law that says you have to make your application look like MS Office. But since most applications on Windows (and many FS/OSS applications as well) try to do so, it's nice to know how, and to know that the only folks who could try to stop you from doing it won't. Cut Microsoft a break here - they deserve it in this case.
On the other hand, the strong implication in this is that Microsoft has defensible intellectual property underlying the Office 2007 UI. It wouldn't surprise me to find that there are a bunch of patents involved. So... if you're against software patents, you should consider what approach to take. Personally, I'd avoid replicating their interface anyway.
You're absolutely correct. And worse than that, the "patched GPL" is incompatible with the GPL. That's exactly the reason why the FSF controls the copyright on the GPL and forbids changes to it.
I think your crystal ball is a little cloudy. Mainframes will be with us for a very long time to come, but that "legacy" code is exactly the reason. If we learned anything from Y2K (besides the fact that a concerted effort can head off a disaster), it should be that we're not going to re-write and replace those old programs and systems unless we absolutely have to. So, the next time your job goes to India and all you get is that lousy t-shirt, start looking at mainframe shops and go convince the managers that you've got a lot of skills and just need some training. They expect to have to train people, so they're always looking for folks who can learn and become productive.
An InfoWorld article from May 4th quoted Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef as saying:
Among other things, Reshef said that pharmamaster claimed to have a contact at UUNET who would do his bidding. Rather than launch a denial of service attack against BlueSecurity.com, the spammer instructed the contact to alter the routing tables so that traffic from outside Israel would not reach the company's servers.
Since Blue Security is now referring to "tier-1 ISP name withheld", that means one of several things:
This isn't the first time a small player in the OS market tried to use dual-boot technology as a springboard to greater market share. It never works. It didn't work for OS/2, and it hasn't worked yet for desktop Linux. Nothing has changed in the market or the technology, so there's no reason to believe it will work for whatever Apple is calling its OS this week.
Even better, the creators of Snort are the founders of SourceFire. They own the copyright on the Snort source code, and can do anything they like with it. They can even sell binaries to $SecretAgency and withhold the source.
It goes both ways. There are significant restrictions on activities of the US Federal government that don't apply to private entities, so there's a long history of "outsourcing" such actions to the private sector.
Maybe you weren't aware, but corps only have the power that the government lets them have. The government is vastly more powerful than any coporate entity and has essentially unlimited resources. If you make a list of organzations to be wary of the government is _always_ at the top of the list.
You're kidding, right? A corporation generally has the same rights as a person (hence the term "corporation" - "embodiment"). And people (and corporations) have all the rights and powers except those explicitly denied to them by law. Sure, the US Federal government is huge and should not be trusted, but that doesn't change the foregoing.
If he *really* had some common sense, he would've said, in essence, "there's no legal basis for requiring Google to hand out *any* data if there's not a criminal investigation going on, so go away, n00bs".
You forgot the obvious "but IANAL". There is lots of legal basis for requiring Google to hand out data when there's no criminal investigation going on. In fact, there's an entire section of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that deals with obtaining information during a civil suit from someone who isn't a party to the suit. It happens all the time, and it's supposed to be possible.
You can argue until the cows come home whether or not the DoJ needed the specific information they asked for, but the fact is that there is a legal basis for the decision, and under the FRCP, Judge Ware seems to have made a reasonable decision.
I have no idea why hprof gives up the ghost, and lacking source code I never investigated it. As to AOP, I think it's a bad idea. I don't want to recompile my code to profile it, I want to profile the code I've compiled. Not often, and not on a predictable basis.
That's why I like the bytecode-injection-at-load-time idea - it works with normal code. If I think the code is too slow under the profiler, I can run the same class files without the profiler and see if it's the application or the profiler that's slow. If the former, I've got a problem. If the latter, well, that's how profiling works.
There's still the problem of getting a javaagent mechanism working with a complex system, but that's probably just a case of coding the class-recognizer well. The overhead of having it examine and ignore 75% of the classes that are loaded shouldn't be too high.
For the record, I think Aspect Oriented Programming is a train wreck looking for a place to happen. The only legitimate use for it is exactly this kind of problem, and then only in non-production environments. Harbison said of Object Oriented Programming something that I think bears on AOP in spades:
"... the ability to define your own operator functions
[in C++] means that a simple statement such as x = a +
b; in an inner loop might involve the sending of e-mail
to Afghanistan."
And in AOP, you'll never know that it happens from reading the source code.
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The Amazon datacenter the article discusses is located in Ashburn, VA, about 20 miles WNW of Washington DC and about 100 miles from the nearest Atlantic coastline. We get rain from hurricanes that come ashore down in NC as they drive their way NNE up the coastline, but nothing worse. And since Amazon chose that location because it's one of the major Internet peering points (i.e., MAE East), there won't be any way to get anywhere on the Internet when it gets blown away :-)
w00T! Can't wait for mine to arrive!
On a more serious note, the Trebuchette project got funded to double its goal. Cool.
The only problem with Apple's App Store is that Apple makes it impossible to have other app stores on your iPhone or iPad. In the physical world, we don't allow that kind of monopolistic behavior (at least in the USA). Want to have a brush guard with a killer winch on the front of your Jeep? You can buy them from lots of places, even though the manufacturer won't sell you one and (most) dealers won't install one. You can even pay someone else to install it for you, without Jeep's permission or approval.
Lord Acton was right about absolute power.
This sounds like almost every Clifford D. Simak story, plus a few other writers. I wish I could remember which one of them ran into the problem of trans-substantiation being mistaken for cannibalism :-)
Sounds like Clarke and Baxter's "Light of Other Days". Societal impacts in the book were huge.
About 25 years ago, TCP/IP experimenters on BITNET were sending IP packets as RSCS messages, which were limited to the same scale of data as SMS messages. It was slow as hell, but just like the SMS network, the RSCS network prioritized these short messages above other traffic.
This is the same network facility that inspired the IBM Reseach folks who moved to AOL to create the buddy list and everything that arose from there.
Funny how things come around over and over in the computing world - it's like nobody studies any prior work.
It isn't often that you see an article where the British and US usages of "scheme" are BOTH correct.
This is REALLY old news. 66 years ago, it was known as the DELPHI method, and it's been studied to death in the interim.
Yeah, this is why I love Opera. Firefox may have lots of add-ons, but Opera always does everything I need it to, right out of the box, and its defaults are extremely sensible.
And that's why a request for a waiver isn't just a formality, dispensed with in a few minutes. The FCC needs to determine that there isn't a risk to the public or to other established users of the frequencies in the specific case requested by the requestor. Lots of waiver requests are for experimental uses (the Amateur Radio community does so from time to time), but those typically designate small groups of stations and locations. As this is a portable commercial product, I suspect it was a lot harder to decide on.
TFA says "the circuitry combines the echoes at different frequencies", but I suspect "circuitry" is a layman's term and that this is truly done in software. Various DSP chips would be excellent platforms with which to do so. If so, then the starting point is a "RADAR camera", which gets turned into a motion detector through image processing. In which case those plants will be quite visible, along with anything else that has edges. The stolen Van Gogh on the wall, however, will be indistinguishable from Dogs Playing Poker.
Look at what he says: "I am developing an application for PDA and require a light-weight browser for it..."
ie. his boss has told him to find something they can steal.
Nope, he's coming from iiitb.ac.in - the Indian Institue of Information Technology's graduate school in Bangalore. He's trying to avoid doing his own thesis work.
Well, it worked for BitTorrent (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorre nt.html)!
The problem isn't BITS. The problem is the idea that BITS is "trusted". Should you trust every FTP server your computer connects to? Every HTTP server? Of course not. Then why BITS?
The Windows firewall model of "trust this program" is inherently incorrect, and that's the real source of this issue. I really hate to say it, but Internet Explorer gets this right - programs aren't trusted, places you can connect to are trusted.
No, but perhaps you should think about that next time you submit a story about your own website. It's a great idea, and LiteratePrograms is already doing a fine job at it.
Hey, there's no law that says you have to make your application look like MS Office. But since most applications on Windows (and many FS/OSS applications as well) try to do so, it's nice to know how, and to know that the only folks who could try to stop you from doing it won't. Cut Microsoft a break here - they deserve it in this case.
... if you're against software patents, you should consider what approach to take. Personally, I'd avoid replicating their interface anyway.
On the other hand, the strong implication in this is that Microsoft has defensible intellectual property underlying the Office 2007 UI. It wouldn't surprise me to find that there are a bunch of patents involved. So
You're absolutely correct. And worse than that, the "patched GPL" is incompatible with the GPL. That's exactly the reason why the FSF controls the copyright on the GPL and forbids changes to it.
I think your crystal ball is a little cloudy. Mainframes will be with us for a very long time to come, but that "legacy" code is exactly the reason. If we learned anything from Y2K (besides the fact that a concerted effort can head off a disaster), it should be that we're not going to re-write and replace those old programs and systems unless we absolutely have to. So, the next time your job goes to India and all you get is that lousy t-shirt, start looking at mainframe shops and go convince the managers that you've got a lot of skills and just need some training. They expect to have to train people, so they're always looking for folks who can learn and become productive.
An InfoWorld article from May 4th quoted Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef as saying:
Since Blue Security is now referring to "tier-1 ISP name withheld", that means one of several things:This isn't the first time a small player in the OS market tried to use dual-boot technology as a springboard to greater market share. It never works. It didn't work for OS/2, and it hasn't worked yet for desktop Linux. Nothing has changed in the market or the technology, so there's no reason to believe it will work for whatever Apple is calling its OS this week.
Even better, the creators of Snort are the founders of SourceFire. They own the copyright on the Snort source code, and can do anything they like with it. They can even sell binaries to $SecretAgency and withhold the source.
It goes both ways. There are significant restrictions on activities of the US Federal government that don't apply to private entities, so there's a long history of "outsourcing" such actions to the private sector.
Maybe you weren't aware, but corps only have the power that the government lets them have. The government is vastly more powerful than any coporate entity and has essentially unlimited resources. If you make a list of organzations to be wary of the government is _always_ at the top of the list.
You're kidding, right? A corporation generally has the same rights as a person (hence the term "corporation" - "embodiment"). And people (and corporations) have all the rights and powers except those explicitly denied to them by law. Sure, the US Federal government is huge and should not be trusted, but that doesn't change the foregoing.
If he *really* had some common sense, he would've said, in essence, "there's no legal basis for requiring Google to hand out *any* data if there's not a criminal investigation going on, so go away, n00bs".
You forgot the obvious "but IANAL". There is lots of legal basis for requiring Google to hand out data when there's no criminal investigation going on. In fact, there's an entire section of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that deals with obtaining information during a civil suit from someone who isn't a party to the suit. It happens all the time, and it's supposed to be possible.
You can argue until the cows come home whether or not the DoJ needed the specific information they asked for, but the fact is that there is a legal basis for the decision, and under the FRCP, Judge Ware seems to have made a reasonable decision.
I have no idea why hprof gives up the ghost, and lacking source code I never investigated it. As to AOP, I think it's a bad idea. I don't want to recompile my code to profile it, I want to profile the code I've compiled. Not often, and not on a predictable basis.
That's why I like the bytecode-injection-at-load-time idea - it works with normal code. If I think the code is too slow under the profiler, I can run the same class files without the profiler and see if it's the application or the profiler that's slow. If the former, I've got a problem. If the latter, well, that's how profiling works.
There's still the problem of getting a javaagent mechanism working with a complex system, but that's probably just a case of coding the class-recognizer well. The overhead of having it examine and ignore 75% of the classes that are loaded shouldn't be too high.
For the record, I think Aspect Oriented Programming is a train wreck looking for a place to happen. The only legitimate use for it is exactly this kind of problem, and then only in non-production environments. Harbison said of Object Oriented Programming something that I think bears on AOP in spades:
"... the ability to define your own operator functions
[in C++] means that a simple statement such as x = a +
b; in an inner loop might involve the sending of e-mail
to Afghanistan."
And in AOP, you'll never know that it happens from reading the source code.