Hey! buy the Jakarta Commons Cookbook
on
Apache Jakarta Commons
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
:-)
I wrote a book on the Jakarta Commons - The Jakarta Commons Cookbook, and, from what I hear people like it. Really, you should read it, I tried to stay as far away from reference as possible and pack it full of useful recipes.
Choicepoint selling data to criminals, Bank of America exposing customer data. Windows XP on my ATM. I can't even get Windows XP to work correctly on a Dell specifically designed for it. Don't worry, be happy.
I hate to say it, but FOSS isn't going to get traction in the world by going to the World Social Forum. Instead, we need to send people to the World Economic Forum. Instead of challenging capitalism, we need to convince people lilke George Soros that open source just makes good economic sense and is a net positive for the world economy.
Worked for a now defunct company that had a team of four and no source control. Actually, I lied, they all thought they were using "source control", but it was simply a shared filesystem. So, in other words, everyone worked on the same set of files all day, while some just took a day every month or so to manually copy files from the shared frive to a local drive. It was complete madness.
The organization then decided to adopt source control in the form of "Visual Sourcesafe". Anyone who has used Visual Sourcesafe on a large project will tell you two things:
1. Lock-modify-unlock destroys productivity 2. A shared filesystem is preferable to the ever-corruptable Visual Sourcesafe.
Lock-modify-unlock mean that specific developers would declare ownership of a particular directory and lock it indefinitely not bothering to update the repository with changes until they were good and ready.
The best source control systems are CVS and Subversion. Copy-modify-merge is the only way to go, and don't let anyone tell you that they need to lock files or directories.
Ugh, I just witnessed an organization purchase a copy of Rational Rose XDE only to just watch it sit on the shelf for a few months. This was the second time this has happened to me. Rational products are over-priced for what they deliver, and the rational unified process is a consultant magnet.
An open source security program would be exceptionally easy to bypass, I'd think, since you'd have direct access to any encryption mechanism used.
Awesome, finally someone smart comes along! Hey, since you know how to factor large numbers, could I get a hand with this http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenge s/fact oring/numbers.html, I figure it should be easy......right?
Java needs a new I/O subsystem because it doesn't effectively support file copying and renaming. Why can't this guy start working on a FileUtils package in Jakarta or Tigris? Why does Sun have to be the originator of all Java functionality.
Read the ruling, and you notice about three pages of California marketing.
"Because Pavlovich know that California is commonly known as the center of the movie industry, and knew that Silicon Valley in California is one of the top three technology "hot spots" in the country, he knew, or should have known, that the DVD republishing and distribution activities he was illegally doing and allowing to be done through the use of his Web site, while benefiting him, were injuriously affecting the motion picture and computer industries in California." p.10 of th 15 page ruling.
What?!?!!? That reads like a "Virginia is for lovers" marketing brochure. The most frightening phrase in that paragraph above in "or should have known". Are our courts set up to decide what a person should or shouldn't know?
Alright, think about this, how come no one in the article talks about how this will affect the Shark in any way. A shark gets pulled from the ocean, and some alien beings ( us ) can implant a satelitte beacon in a tail fin. Then we dump him/her back in the frothy sea. Just like magic, we've made the sea safe! Thanks guys. Why? Anyone think this may be a little invasive?
Oh and wait, the cost of 2000 pounds is being put up by corporate sponsors. ALRIGHT ENOUGH, is this a hoax, five fatal shark attacks in Australia LET US IMPLANT SENSORS IN THE SHARKS. Why not just STOP PLAYING ON THE DANGEROUS BEACHES? Seriously, this article doesn't talk about curious scientists wanting to learn the migratory habits of the shark, it talks about corporate sponsors tracking the sea killers to make beaches safer.
Why not spend money on real problems instead of manufacturing cybersharks? ( Oh, sorry, it's cool, let's do it because it's cool. )
Interesting, hadn't given this one much thought, but it makes sense. Throw P4's out of the mix here for a moment ( since early reports suggest that P4 is a marketing tool, time will tell ). Check out this Intel document about managing increasing CPU power. It is interesting, if my boss gives me too much work, I'm going to shout "STOPCLOCK".
Instead of just factoring in performance when deciding whether to go with a 1.0 GHz PIII or a 1.3 GHz PIII, maybe we should starting looking at power consumption variations over the frequency range of a single architecture. Take the pIII for example: I wonder if the relationship between powerconsumption and frequency over the pIII line is linear ( probably not )? Anybody know?
I guess the robot heart is a great thing for people who would otherwise die without it. Go robot heart!
Assume we were giving sufferers of Lung cancer a robot lung. You know the mainstream media would follow a story like that with another story detailing the numerous evils of smoking. How come CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, all other corporate news, never follow a story about the artificial heart with a discussion about how you can avoid ever having to experience an artificial heart. Is it because they know that Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, would stop buying expensive advertising time.
Not trying to stomp out every fire of excitment, just trying to provide some balance here. We should be worried that we have so many people with heart disease. The goal is to live in such a way that only the rarest cases would ever need an artificial anything?
Am I right? or am I full of bogus and smelly cheese?
Well, one nitpick, it is generally cheaper in terms of hardware cost, but this option is more expensive in terms of operational costs. Also, the rent associated with rack space at a commercial provider can start to be prohibitive.
So, three things start to add up here:
Operational Costs - People who can manage machines are expensive.
Rent - Renting space to house more smaller boxes may be prohibitive.
Network Traffic - More boxes means higher bandwidth requirements between these boxes.
For some tasks, say a very large database with millions of transactions, it makes sense to pay the premium for even an extra iota of horsepower. For other task, such as web servers, it sometimes makes more sense to have many smaller machines. Also, if someone wants to start using this approach it usually pays to be able to autmatically configure a machine; otherwise, maintaining machines start to become unrealistic.
The single-signon mechanism is housed on a central MS server. So someone like IBM would have to send a redirect to the browser with the URL of the Passport login page. From my understanding of the article, all of the communication between Passport and IBM would happen through the client. The client is the medium of communication between Passport and the vendor. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Or to be more specific Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 is the only valid communication mechanism between the vendor and Microsoft. Microsoft worldwide empire is going to be built on redirects and cookies?!??! Dear God, please deliver us from this insanity.
Why not say to each vendor, here's drop this Box in your network, use it as your authentication, will setup some sort of super encrypted VPN between your network and ours and we'll provide real-time authenitcation. Why not? Because it is too easy, and it doesn't TRAP THE CONSUMER INTO OUR INCREDIBLY INVASIVE SOFTWARE.
What about browsers that don't accept redirects? I know, I know, it's 2001, people should be using modern browsers, but what about people with old computers. I mean, maybe I'm just wrong, but if you are say Barnes and Noble or Ford ( whatever? ), why would you hand over your security concerns to Microsoft?!? After such high profile security explosions such as CodeRed, and now the CodeRed II which is MUCH MUCH WORSE because now everybody who has read Slashdot today has root privileges on every box that has been compromised. ( Be good, people. Be good. )
The same CNN that was holding a CodeRed vigil this week, predicting the impending doom of the internet as we know it is once again missing the boat.
No story on CNN about what is probably one of the most embarrassing days for Microsoft EVER: Millions of people have access to a root trojan on millions of consumer boxes. AND THIS IS A COMPANY THAT WANTS TO INTRODUCE PASSPORT!! WTF!
Note to corporate manager: Take your head out of your *ss. If your "IT" guy missed the first CodeRed and now your dealing with this. It's time to find a new "IT" guy. Preferably one with a reasonably big large against Micro$oft products.
Also, if anyone is interested in a surprisingly GOOD article about Microsoft's arrogance read this month's IEEE Spectrum.
And, chances are that the clock speed on the TI chip be it a DSP chip or a general microprocessor is something on the order or 100 - 200 MHz.
How come people don't go around bragging about Clock Speed for a cell phone. Probably because it doesn't matter? so take that a little bit farther, how come someone like Yahoo doesn't go around bragging about the 450 MHz ultraspace chip they have running the website.... because it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
Hey, isn't it cool that I have a 50 MHz coffee maker?
Here's the formula for computing a metric that allows you to compare two different chips regardless of architecture when running a specific program:
Effective Speed( Program p ) =
Instructions in p *
Avg # of cycles to complete 1 instruction *
seconds per cycle
In other words seconds per cycle is the inverse of clock speed.
What can be gained from this equation:
Chip A is not "faster" than Chip B. The speed of a chip depends on the program being executed. The equation above can be made more general by focusing on instruction types and not complete programs, but since the average user uses "programs" the above equation is more relevant.
Clock Speed is irrelevant when not discussed in the context of the chip architecture. Is there parallel execution? What is the architecture of the chip including: the pipeline, any caches, etc.
Focus on the program, and how different programs run differently on different architectures. It is more than possible that when changing architectures some programs may run faster and some programs may run slower depending.
Stop drooling about clock speeds, it is nearly meaningless, and is only a marketing tool. If users thought feature size was cool, we'd be having this argument about how "0.18 micron feature size" is meaningless when trumpeted out of context.
Start getting interested in SPECint and SPECfp metrics. Why don't chip makers start focusing on those metrics?
When Moore's law starts failing, someday, we'll see far more innovation in chip designs that don't relate to feature size or clock speed. There's a whole unrealized sea of optimization that could happen to speed up current designs right now. We all beat up Microsoft for being a monopoly, how about Intel:-).
Wait! who mod'd this reply to Offtopic. It isn't offtopic at all, the user was trying to provide a correction to the previous post in saying that you don't need to use Outlook if you are running Exchange server.
The Slashdot moderator system is becoming the censorship of the masses and is dumbing down the content.
Not only a single brain, instead of viewing a mission as one vehicle that gets thrown into space at a very high velocity and ends up spending a few weeks mucking around taking pictures. You would have a series of orbiting brains that could be replaced and upgraded as time goes on, and a series of smaller exploratory drones that would gather data.
This way, every thing you launch towards Mars is very light and you reduce the risk by splitting the mission into micro missions. I've always wondered why we haven't had a mission yet where we release very small insect sized probes into the martian environment. Every insect sized probe knows how to communicate with an orbiting intelligence, thereby reducing the cost of the drone.
I don't maybe NASA isn't think about this kind of thing these days, they are just trying to hold on to the little funding they have left.
The professor involved in Mentat looks to have either left UVA or is no longer focusing on Mentat as a viable tool. I believe that Mentat morphed into Legion, and that there is now a project called Centurion which is a proving ground for Legion.
The real question that would be interesting to answer is this: how has the emerging interest in peer to peer technology changed the approaches to massively parallel computation? or has it changed the approach at all?
When I tried to use Mentat initially in 1997 it was a forced fit. There was a piece of legacy Fortran 90 code about 100,000 lines long and Mentat was used purely as a way to spawn simulations in parallel over a net of 30 computers, it was a horrifying thing to learn to use, and I was always wondering why we didn't just rewrite the thing in C++ and use something more standard like PVM. I'm not saying that Mentat/Legion is a bad idea, it is just that for the application it didn't fit at all.
The pages for Legion look very out of date, has the Legion project hit a funding problem? Is Legion dead? or has it morphed into something entirely different?
Interesting, I agree with this statement not only for vehicles on ground and in the air, but for any computational resources that are involved in the functioning of any space mission. Anything that is going to be more than a few light minutes away needs to be shipped with "brains".
One thing, I'd like to see is the development of intelligent "brains" orbiting a planet, and a relatively dumb surface unit taking controls from an orbiting satelittle.
This way, the "brains" don't need to be engineered to survive entry into a martian environment, and the mission could be expanded by launching more "slave" units to the planet's surface.
In other words, as long as a new vehicle sent to the surface of Mars, works with the protocol of the master satelitte, the mission could be extended. This opens up the possibility for creating some sort of XML ( eXtensible Mission Language ):-).......
In other words, you could have vehicles on the ground on Mars, and vehicles orbiting Mars and these vehicles could all communicate with one another. The arctic is a proving grounds for any future mission in space.
If it can call for help, isn't the next logical step to make an autonomous repair vehicle that can respond to queries for assistance.
I think this brings us one step closer to having a large cloud of intelligent sensing devices distributed throughout near space all collaborating towards a common goal. Sort of an autonomous "carrier group" of associated space vehicles.
Hey let's get some design firm to draw us a pretty picture of what we think a computer will look like in ten years and then write some filler so we can kill more trees with our bloated magazine.
Slashdot Mirror
:-)
I wrote a book on the Jakarta Commons - The Jakarta Commons Cookbook, and, from what I hear people like it. Really, you should read it, I tried to stay as far away from reference as possible and pack it full of useful recipes.
Choicepoint selling data to criminals, Bank of America exposing customer data. Windows XP on my ATM. I can't even get Windows XP to work correctly on a Dell specifically designed for it. Don't worry, be happy.
I hate to say it, but FOSS isn't going to get traction in the world by going to the World Social Forum. Instead, we need to send people to the World Economic Forum. Instead of challenging capitalism, we need to convince people lilke George Soros that open source just makes good economic sense and is a net positive for the world economy.
Worked for a now defunct company that had a team of four and no source control. Actually, I lied, they all thought they were using "source control", but it was simply a shared filesystem. So, in other words, everyone worked on the same set of files all day, while some just took a day every month or so to manually copy files from the shared frive to a local drive. It was complete madness.
The organization then decided to adopt source control in the form of "Visual Sourcesafe". Anyone who has used Visual Sourcesafe on a large project will tell you two things:
1. Lock-modify-unlock destroys productivity
2. A shared filesystem is preferable to the ever-corruptable Visual Sourcesafe.
Lock-modify-unlock mean that specific developers would declare ownership of a particular directory and lock it indefinitely not bothering to update the repository with changes until they were good and ready.
The best source control systems are CVS and Subversion. Copy-modify-merge is the only way to go, and don't let anyone tell you that they need to lock files or directories.
Ugh, I just witnessed an organization purchase a copy of Rational Rose XDE only to just watch it sit on the shelf for a few months. This was the second time this has happened to me. Rational products are over-priced for what they deliver, and the rational unified process is a consultant magnet.
An open source security program would be exceptionally easy to bypass, I'd think, since you'd have direct access to any encryption mechanism used.
Awesome, finally someone smart comes
along! Hey, since you know how to factor
large numbers, could I get a hand with this
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challeng
Agreed,
Java needs a new I/O subsystem because it doesn't effectively support file copying and renaming. Why can't this guy start working on a FileUtils package in Jakarta or Tigris? Why does Sun have to be the originator of all Java functionality.
Arse, arse, arse.
Read the ruling, and you notice about three pages of California marketing.
"Because Pavlovich know that California is commonly known as the center of the movie industry, and knew that Silicon Valley in California is one of the top three technology "hot spots" in the country, he knew, or should have known, that the DVD republishing and distribution activities he was illegally doing and allowing to be done through the use of his Web site, while benefiting him, were injuriously affecting the motion picture and computer industries in California." p.10 of th 15 page ruling.
What?!?!!? That reads like a "Virginia is for lovers" marketing brochure. The most frightening phrase in that paragraph above in "or should have known". Are our courts set up to decide what a person should or shouldn't know?
what's the next story in "science", MAN HARNESSES LIGHTNING CREATES ULTRASAFE RAIN-FREE OCEAN.
GO HUMANS!
timothy, you've got this thirst for stories about man's ability to conquer nature of late huh? So what do we have lately:
Alright, think about this, how come no one in the article talks about how this will affect the Shark in any way. A shark gets pulled from the ocean, and some alien beings ( us ) can implant a satelitte beacon in a tail fin. Then we dump him/her back in the frothy sea. Just like magic, we've made the sea safe! Thanks guys. Why? Anyone think this may be a little invasive?
Oh and wait, the cost of 2000 pounds is being put up by corporate sponsors. ALRIGHT ENOUGH, is this a hoax, five fatal shark attacks in Australia LET US IMPLANT SENSORS IN THE SHARKS. Why not just STOP PLAYING ON THE DANGEROUS BEACHES? Seriously, this article doesn't talk about curious scientists wanting to learn the migratory habits of the shark, it talks about corporate sponsors tracking the sea killers to make beaches safer.
Why not spend money on real problems instead of manufacturing cybersharks? ( Oh, sorry, it's cool, let's do it because it's cool. )
Did I mention, "DON'T MESS WITH RAIN"
Interesting, hadn't given this one much thought, but it makes sense. Throw P4's out of the mix here for a moment ( since early reports suggest that P4 is a marketing tool, time will tell ). Check out this Intel document about managing increasing CPU power. It is interesting, if my boss gives me too much work, I'm going to shout "STOPCLOCK".
Instead of just factoring in performance when deciding whether to go with a 1.0 GHz PIII or a 1.3 GHz PIII, maybe we should starting looking at power consumption variations over the frequency range of a single architecture. Take the pIII for example: I wonder if the relationship between powerconsumption and frequency over the pIII line is linear ( probably not )? Anybody know?
I guess the robot heart is a great thing for people who would otherwise die without it. Go robot heart!
Assume we were giving sufferers of Lung cancer a robot lung. You know the mainstream media would follow a story like that with another story detailing the numerous evils of smoking. How come CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, all other corporate news, never follow a story about the artificial heart with a discussion about how you can avoid ever having to experience an artificial heart. Is it because they know that Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, would stop buying expensive advertising time.
Not trying to stomp out every fire of excitment, just trying to provide some balance here. We should be worried that we have so many people with heart disease. The goal is to live in such a way that only the rarest cases would ever need an artificial anything?
Am I right? or am I full of bogus and smelly cheese?
I agree.
Well, one nitpick, it is generally cheaper in terms of hardware cost, but this option is more expensive in terms of operational costs. Also, the rent associated with rack space at a commercial provider can start to be prohibitive.
So, three things start to add up here:
For some tasks, say a very large database with millions of transactions, it makes sense to pay the premium for even an extra iota of horsepower. For other task, such as web servers, it sometimes makes more sense to have many smaller machines. Also, if someone wants to start using this approach it usually pays to be able to autmatically configure a machine; otherwise, maintaining machines start to become unrealistic.
The single-signon mechanism is housed on a central MS server. So someone like IBM would have to send a redirect to the browser with the URL of the Passport login page. From my understanding of the article, all of the communication between Passport and IBM would happen through the client. The client is the medium of communication between Passport and the vendor. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Or to be more specific Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 is the only valid communication mechanism between the vendor and Microsoft. Microsoft worldwide empire is going to be built on redirects and cookies?!??! Dear God, please deliver us from this insanity.
Why not say to each vendor, here's drop this Box in your network, use it as your authentication, will setup some sort of super encrypted VPN between your network and ours and we'll provide real-time authenitcation. Why not? Because it is too easy, and it doesn't TRAP THE CONSUMER INTO OUR INCREDIBLY INVASIVE SOFTWARE.
What about browsers that don't accept redirects? I know, I know, it's 2001, people should be using modern browsers, but what about people with old computers. I mean, maybe I'm just wrong, but if you are say Barnes and Noble or Ford ( whatever? ), why would you hand over your security concerns to Microsoft?!? After such high profile security explosions such as CodeRed, and now the CodeRed II which is MUCH MUCH WORSE because now everybody who has read Slashdot today has root privileges on every box that has been compromised. ( Be good, people. Be good. )
The same CNN that was holding a CodeRed vigil this week, predicting the impending doom of the internet as we know it is once again missing the boat.
No story on CNN about what is probably one of the most embarrassing days for Microsoft EVER: Millions of people have access to a root trojan on millions of consumer boxes. AND THIS IS A COMPANY THAT WANTS TO INTRODUCE PASSPORT!! WTF!
Note to corporate manager: Take your head out of your *ss. If your "IT" guy missed the first CodeRed and now your dealing with this. It's time to find a new "IT" guy. Preferably one with a reasonably big large against Micro$oft products.
Also, if anyone is interested in a surprisingly GOOD article about Microsoft's arrogance read this month's IEEE Spectrum.
I agree, and I believe that it is time to make: "Don't F**K with rain" a new motto.
What is next: "Scientists stop wind with new anti-wind device." STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.
you can take your #$(*@! ICE-9 and shove it.
And, chances are that the clock speed on the TI chip be it a DSP chip or a general microprocessor is something on the order or 100 - 200 MHz.
How come people don't go around bragging about Clock Speed for a cell phone. Probably because it doesn't matter? so take that a little bit farther, how come someone like Yahoo doesn't go around bragging about the 450 MHz ultraspace chip they have running the website.... because it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
Hey, isn't it cool that I have a 50 MHz coffee maker?
Here's the formula for computing a metric that allows you to compare two different chips regardless of architecture when running a specific program:
Effective Speed( Program p ) = Instructions in p * Avg # of cycles to complete 1 instruction * seconds per cycleIn other words seconds per cycle is the inverse of clock speed.
What can be gained from this equation:
Stop drooling about clock speeds, it is nearly meaningless, and is only a marketing tool. If users thought feature size was cool, we'd be having this argument about how "0.18 micron feature size" is meaningless when trumpeted out of context.
Start getting interested in SPECint and SPECfp metrics. Why don't chip makers start focusing on those metrics?
When Moore's law starts failing, someday, we'll see far more innovation in chip designs that don't relate to feature size or clock speed. There's a whole unrealized sea of optimization that could happen to speed up current designs right now. We all beat up Microsoft for being a monopoly, how about Intel :-).
Wait! who mod'd this reply to Offtopic. It isn't offtopic at all, the user was trying to provide a correction to the previous post in saying that you don't need to use Outlook if you are running Exchange server.
The Slashdot moderator system is becoming the censorship of the masses and is dumbing down the content.
Not only a single brain, instead of viewing a mission as one vehicle that gets thrown into space at a very high velocity and ends up spending a few weeks mucking around taking pictures. You would have a series of orbiting brains that could be replaced and upgraded as time goes on, and a series of smaller exploratory drones that would gather data.
This way, every thing you launch towards Mars is very light and you reduce the risk by splitting the mission into micro missions. I've always wondered why we haven't had a mission yet where we release very small insect sized probes into the martian environment. Every insect sized probe knows how to communicate with an orbiting intelligence, thereby reducing the cost of the drone.
I don't maybe NASA isn't think about this kind of thing these days, they are just trying to hold on to the little funding they have left.
The professor involved in Mentat looks to have either left UVA or is no longer focusing on Mentat as a viable tool. I believe that Mentat morphed into Legion, and that there is now a project called Centurion which is a proving ground for Legion.
The real question that would be interesting to answer is this: how has the emerging interest in peer to peer technology changed the approaches to massively parallel computation? or has it changed the approach at all?
When I tried to use Mentat initially in 1997 it was a forced fit. There was a piece of legacy Fortran 90 code about 100,000 lines long and Mentat was used purely as a way to spawn simulations in parallel over a net of 30 computers, it was a horrifying thing to learn to use, and I was always wondering why we didn't just rewrite the thing in C++ and use something more standard like PVM. I'm not saying that Mentat/Legion is a bad idea, it is just that for the application it didn't fit at all.
The pages for Legion look very out of date, has the Legion project hit a funding problem? Is Legion dead? or has it morphed into something entirely different?
Interesting, I agree with this statement not only for vehicles on ground and in the air, but for any computational resources that are involved in the functioning of any space mission. Anything that is going to be more than a few light minutes away needs to be shipped with "brains".
:-) .......
One thing, I'd like to see is the development of intelligent "brains" orbiting a planet, and a relatively dumb surface unit taking controls from an orbiting satelittle.
This way, the "brains" don't need to be engineered to survive entry into a martian environment, and the mission could be expanded by launching more "slave" units to the planet's surface.
In other words, as long as a new vehicle sent to the surface of Mars, works with the protocol of the master satelitte, the mission could be extended. This opens up the possibility for creating some sort of XML ( eXtensible Mission Language )
In other words, you could have vehicles on the ground on Mars, and vehicles orbiting Mars and these vehicles could all communicate with one another. The arctic is a proving grounds for any future mission in space.
If it can call for help, isn't the next logical step to make an autonomous repair vehicle that can respond to queries for assistance.
I think this brings us one step closer to having a large cloud of intelligent sensing devices distributed throughout near space all collaborating towards a common goal. Sort of an autonomous "carrier group" of associated space vehicles.
Hey let's get some design firm to draw us a pretty picture of what we think a computer will look like in ten years and then write some filler so we can kill more trees with our bloated magazine.