The only application I can think of is to build a drop down with Fibonacci numbers in it. Of course, recursion has efficiency on the order of 2^N, which means 100 fibonacci numbers would take 10^30 operations to generate.
How to make your webpages load slower: use recursion in XSL.
Are you running this application in production now? How is the performance? What kind of performance do you need?
The answer is: it depends. I've seen off the shelf apps that don't use a single stored procedure and have one user for pass-thru authentication, they are always IO bound, never CPU bound. I've seen custom apps that have a billion stored procedures, replication, etc that are really CPU intensive and IO intensive.
Ask yourself:
-Are you using replication?
-Are you using the SQL Server security model?
-Are you using stored procedures?
-Is this a federated database?
-How many tables does it have?
-How many rows in the largest table?
-What kind of transaction volume does it have?
-To what degree does data change?
-What kind of reporting are you doing?
That's the kind of information you need to ask before you size the server. More stored procedures, more CPU intensive. More users whose access rights are checked against schema objects, more CPU intensive. Replication, duh. If you're loading a million rows a day and truncing a bunch of tables, you'll have more CPU overhead to maintain indexes and optimizer statistics. If you're letting users run Crystal Reports against your live database, you're raping the system but good.
Make sure you use RAID 1 or RAID 10, not RAID5. Parity overhead is the death of an RDBMS. Also, you have an assload of ram, but don't just let SQL Server use it, make sure you actually tune the database. You'd be floored at the kind of transaction volume we get our of at a moderately sized, well tuned (and well chosen) SQL Server, but alot depends on the app too. Shitty app, shitty performance.
Off the cuff, my personal opinion is that the threading in SQL Server isn't good enough to make quality use of 4 CPUs -- I'd get the two fast ones. Just remember: opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. You need to make the decision for yourself.
that way, if something had gone wrong, Janie Porche could have showed up and saved it.
Was Gianni Jackone on hand to manage them all, or are track suits illegal in Amsterdam?
Track suits are, afterall, the official uniform of the state of New Jersey.
Re:Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
·
· Score: 2
I'm a consultant, and I was told when I started in the 80's that we were expected to dress one level above the client. I think this is a good rule for everyone not just consultants (though, of course, if everyone adhered to it there would be a clothing arms race).
I give Oracle big points for this: all their sales people have to wear suits. There is nothing I hate more than sales people coming in in wrinkled khakis and polos trying to sell me $1 Million+ in goods and/or services.
My understanding is that FLAIM has depricated BTRIEVE for low-level storage in Netware. FLAIM is used to store all the records in NDS, though technotes about Novell's license service make reference to a choice between FLAIM or BTRIEVE for that.
Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not like I'm old school, I'm in my mid-twenties, but who wears anything but a suit to the first day of work?
Probably someone who doesn't wear a suit to an interview.
I remember when I was younger, I would bitch whenever I had to wear a tie. The fact is that people judge you by how you look, and if you're starting a real job (or even an internship), you're an adult -- dress the part. That doesn't mean you have to wear a tux to work every day (well, if you were a real penguin...), but you don't want to be the frumpiest looking person on the block.
Our office is business casual M-Th, so the guys wear slacks and button down shirts, and used to always wear ties. About a year ago we had a new manager start who is very "new school/dot com", and always wears polo shirts. To rebel, we all started dressing up more. He's supposed to be our boss, and he's always less presentable than the worst of us.
I'm sure it's a regional thing -- since I work in DC I'm around more people who *have* to wear suits every day (thousands of lawyers and political-types). I'm sure it's similar on Madison Ave, and probably not like that at all in Berkley.
My personal rule of thumb though is when it doubt, dress up, especially where work is concerned. Nobody wants to go to a luncheon in a tux and have people think they work there, but what's worse is when you go to work and people think you're a delivery guy.
We replaced our financial system this year with the shinest new version of Lawson, so this one has been around for a while. They have something like eight front ends, but the terminal based front end -- The Lawson Insight Desktop, or LID -- happens to be the fastest, and has been around the longest. Each form you load has a default action (Inquire/Add/Chage/etc), but sometimes you run into this:
In an Action Mode of 'No Action' You Must Select an Action to Perform.
At most companies (at least all the ones I've worked for: for profit, not for profit, government, etc) Email is the property on the company. That means that a company executive has every right to go and read/change/delete a person's email.
While you may not think it's ethical, it's usually spelled out in the company handbook of some kind. Ours states that computer, email, and phones are property of the company and should be used only for business use. While no one is going to fire me for checking out CNN, we were able to fire some people a few years back for trading some pretty nasty porn through company email.
Two additional points: our current corporate email system (GroupWise) allows a user to retract an email they've sent as long as the recipient has not read it. That gets the admin and his morals off the hook.
The other is that big boss is lucky he doesn't work is a different industry. A certain government-type place I worked at once upon a time has an obligation to keep all correspondance for a very long time, so there is a system that all email goes through -- be it inbound, outbound, or inter-postoffice -- that stores the message in a database for full text searches. If someone were to nuke that, they're next assignment would be turning big rocks into little rocks.
My suggestion, if you're hell bent on a web application, it to consider perhaps a Java Applet. At least with an applet you can use Swing and AWT widgets for designing your app, and Applets provide some modicum of security. You would also be able to maintain a stateful connection, meaning people could still run this with just a browser, but also have most of the benifits of a C/S paradigm.
As for design, my thought is that standard GUI design rules (for the most part) apply. Consistant look and feel across screens (so the "add record" button isn't in a different place on every screen), clean asthetics (color, fonts, separation), meaningful labels (book title capitalization), no Peoplesoft-esque nested scroll bars, logical grouping of similar items, etc. Without knowing what your designing it's hard to say for sure, but if you've ever designed a GUI that didn't make users have seizures or get motion sick, most of those same rules apply.
I had LASIK done in May 2000, and aside from some dryness for a few months after it couldn't have gone better.
I was -1.25 diopters in both eyes, astigmatic, I'm 20/15 in both eyes now, even after two years.
My ex-gf had it done at the same time, she was -3.25 in both eyes and corrected to 20/20. Her vision is still "perfect".
I had mine done in Canada, because (1) it was cheaper at the time, and (2) they were using a scanning spot laster which the FDA hadn't approved. It makes a much larger incision, and has less haloing (mine went away within 6 weeks). Make sure if you have large pupils that the laser they are using will make a large enough incision to lower haloing.
Expect the procedure to take a few minutes, mine took 10. They position your head, the laser makes an incision, a cup comes down and sucks the flap up, a laser makes the correction, then the doctor uses a brush with special glue to put your cornea back in place. No hands are going to touch your eyes, no scapals will get near you. It sounds worse than it is. Don't worry about sneazing, the laser will stop. Don't worry about fucking up your eye exam, they do a bunch. I paid a whole lot of attention during those eye exams.
My only problem is that the muscles in my right eye are noticably weaker than the ones in my left. Glasses corrected for this, so my eyes didn't get as tired as they do now, but in effect it's because I look at the computer screen for too long.
One big note: make sure you use natural tears and not something like Visine. Don't ask why, just pay more.
The Goo Goo Dolls last CD did a similar thing. You needed to buy the CD to access the "Member's Only" section of the website. Once there, you got special videos and song downloads, and the passwords to preorder tickets from Ticketbastard for their concert.
I admit, I bought the CD when I did to preorder tickets (great seats), but I would have bought it eventually.
As much as I still love Computer Shopper...
on
Ziff Davis Teeters
·
· Score: 2
I hope this means that windbag Jessie Burst is getting canned!
ZD owns some really good properties, and they're aren't as biased as some other publications, but I'm sure the problem is the high cost of print publishing and the move toward internet sales. Something like Price Watch must be killing Computer Shopper.
Still, I suspect people are going to want to read computer magazines for a while. Like most businesses right now, they might just need to merge their way out of this mess. Don't you just love the business cycle?
Chances are good that the vendor never updated the BIOS. Some of us remember the glory days when harddrive size had a BIOS limitation.
You have two options:
1) Buy a replacement BIOS ROM from someone like Mr. BIOS (yes, I said "Mr. BIOS")
2) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). A DDO is a piece of software that is, in effect, a bootstrap virus. It loads code in the bootblock that builds a new drive map at boot time. While BIOS only seens four or five hundred megs, a DDO will get you to the next physical barrier (which, if I'm not mistaken is either 2GB or 4GB).
DDOs were used successfully for a very long time, though I remember avoiding them at the time. They're creepy. Most HD vendors use to offer then for free (WD, Maxtor), you should be able to dig one up on an abandonware site.
What is going on with the FreeBSD team recently? I used to be an avid FreeBSD user, but the last year or so have not been the best.
There was some serious hostility that the latest FreeBSD release was announced too early. In this community that kind of thing happens all the time. Not ideal, but not much you can do about it either.
There was a contest for a new logo, and after over 100 people participated they decided that "none of them were what we were looking for".
FreeBSD 5.0 is supposed to have some great features, but it seems to get more distant with each passing day.
There have been some issues with the last couple releases (though I haven't tried 4.6 yet) with how it's packaged. I've heard grumbling about this outside the Linux/BSD community as well.
The port collection in FreeBSD, well frankly I think it stinks. I'm always running into broken ports that should have never made it in in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I think that the work the FreeBSD team has done is outstanding, but their behavior has been really whacky for quite a while. Maybe a new core team will do them some good.
I Pledge Allegiance to the Judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and to the Decision for which this stands One Nation in Agreement that the Separation of Church and State is ABSOLUTE.
In my experience, the problem most beginning CS students have is understanding "computer think", or how to solve a problem.
Very early in my first CS class (like the second or third class after we got the obligatory lesson in history and basic terminology) our instructor brought in a loaf of bread, a knife, peanut butter, and jelly. She asked people to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a piece of paper.
After about 20 minutes she called on one person and followed their instructions, smashing bread into the jar and using the knife to stab the bread. It took a visual exercise like this to make people understand how each instruction is very important, and to be attentive to details.
Later when we did Towers of Hanoi she brought in three of those Fisher Price ring-stack toys. She showed us with those how to get the disks from peg one to peg two in a way we could understand.
One other thing that was helpful was being shown that we weren't just "learning C++" or "learning Java", that we were learning skills that are portible to other languages. After our first looping program we got a small booklet from our teacher that showed the same problem solved in several different languages.
As for actual problems we had to solve, I hated most of them, but I'm thankful for having done them. Most were intentionally difficult (reading and writing data in bizarre file formats) that made me a much better programmer.
I'm an OpenBSD user, and a Perl advocate. I love Perl, but not everyone does. Not everyone needs it, just like not everyone needs Python or tcl/tk.
OpenBSD is the closest thing I've seen to an operating system in a long time. When I install an OS, I want to chose what to turn on, not hope I turned off everything I didn't need. I want to know dozens of eyes have done their best to be sure the OS is secure.
The ports collection is far better than any package management tool I've used (Sun pkgadd, Linux RPM). Not only is it good, but OpenBSD's is the best of any BSD I've used (Free and Net) because it's clean. There is only a tiny chance a port you try and build won't work (::leering at FreeBSD::) and it's so easy that I don't mind doing a make;make install to get Perl.
All that said, Theo's recent rant about r* utils makes perfect sense. Get rid of it!
And while we're at it, toss telnet out with the bathwater. Anyone who isn't using ssh to connect to a remote machine is *begging* to get owned. The only way some people are going to use secure tools is if we force them to. I know at work until I turn telnet off people will use that over ssh because it's familiar, because they don't want to upgrade the 100 year old version of QVTTerm they have.
As for FTP - don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. I've been using scp for so long I get physically ill when I see this:
ftp>
Yeah it works, but it's a gaping hole. If people want it, fine, but build the daemon you want from the ports collection. The idea of inetd housing all these "critical" services is just an invite to get owned.
I'm not a huge security nut (my boss won't use a grocery store card because his "marketing data is worth more than what they give me"), but in the battle for securie systems, we are losing! Servers here at work are breeding like rabbits, and everyone is not as savy as you and I. We need to do whatever we can to nudge them in the right direction, not just for their own sake, but for everyones sake.
You still need the exp. date, the cardholder's name, possibly address, and sometimes even the three digit number found on the signature panel. the only thing that the luhn algorithm is good for is validating that the card *might* be a valid card number, not a valid card.
Depends on what you're using the card number for. Not every company that accepts credit cards check those things throughly. For example, some smaller computer places just take the number and the expiration date and run the card manually.
I'm aware of a couple websites that offer services (not goods) that you can buy with a credit card that just do a LUHN check. If the number passes your service is provided. Billing is done by hand later. Credit card processors that can validate in real time (Verisign for example) are pretty expensive, much more so than printing out an email and keying it into a POS terminal.
Most of these retail type places buy a turn key solution (::COUGH::::COUGH:: IBM::COUGH::). I don't expect my mechanic to know how to fix my car, and I don't expect a store manager to understand wireless encryption. A store doesn't have its own IT people, corporate does. Maybe (if they're lucky) corporate even had a helpdesk they can call.
Someone sold them this wireless gear, they should be the onces concerned about the security.
You know, just because Ziff Davis became the media giant it is because of the PC doesn't mean the world revoles around PCs.
Yes IBM does well with the Thinkpad division, and yes I'm sure there are sour grapes over OS/2, but do you think anyone is crying that they're not selling PCs at a profit of 6 cents per machine? They own Lexmark! They own Lotus! They make a fortune selling AS/400s and RS/6000s and Z/90s (if that's what they're called this week).
There is a small tug of war over Java, no denying that, but why would IBM buy Sun other than for their customers? They are two completely different companies in mindset and direction. You think HP and Compaq will be a difficult merger?
There are also Sun's partners to consider. Larry Ellison is not going to like it if Sun buys IBM, since Oracle ties itself so closely to Java these days, and IBM just bought Informix. I would rather see Oracle and Sun merge and split the software division.
Interesting conjecture on the part of the author, but I think it's pretty unlikely.
Maybe you should ask your Project Manager or Government Contract Manager. They are required to understand what you can and can't use, particularly when the project is classified.
Unless things have changes a lot in the past couple years, I suspect you won't be able to use any open source software. Even if you can, you should check with your Project Manager and your Government Contract Manager before you make that decision for yourself - it could cost you more than your job.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example of: "Not how did they do it, but why?"
r y/ x-xslrecur/
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/libra
The only application I can think of is to build a drop down with Fibonacci numbers in it. Of course, recursion has efficiency on the order of 2^N, which means 100 fibonacci numbers would take 10^30 operations to generate.
How to make your webpages load slower: use recursion in XSL.
What do you think this is, a Sun? How many Intel servers have you seen cook a CPU in an SMP system and keep running without crashing the machine?
Sure, the machine can run with an odd number of processors, but they still die. At least with our Suns you can hot plug the CPU board in and out.
Are you running this application in production now? How is the performance? What kind of performance do you need?
The answer is: it depends. I've seen off the shelf apps that don't use a single stored procedure and have one user for pass-thru authentication, they are always IO bound, never CPU bound. I've seen custom apps that have a billion stored procedures, replication, etc that are really CPU intensive and IO intensive.
Ask yourself:
-Are you using replication?
-Are you using the SQL Server security model?
-Are you using stored procedures?
-Is this a federated database?
-How many tables does it have?
-How many rows in the largest table?
-What kind of transaction volume does it have?
-To what degree does data change?
-What kind of reporting are you doing?
That's the kind of information you need to ask before you size the server. More stored procedures, more CPU intensive. More users whose access rights are checked against schema objects, more CPU intensive. Replication, duh. If you're loading a million rows a day and truncing a bunch of tables, you'll have more CPU overhead to maintain indexes and optimizer statistics. If you're letting users run Crystal Reports against your live database, you're raping the system but good.
Make sure you use RAID 1 or RAID 10, not RAID5. Parity overhead is the death of an RDBMS. Also, you have an assload of ram, but don't just let SQL Server use it, make sure you actually tune the database. You'd be floored at the kind of transaction volume we get our of at a moderately sized, well tuned (and well chosen) SQL Server, but alot depends on the app too. Shitty app, shitty performance.
Off the cuff, my personal opinion is that the threading in SQL Server isn't good enough to make quality use of 4 CPUs -- I'd get the two fast ones. Just remember: opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. You need to make the decision for yourself.
that way, if something had gone wrong, Janie Porche could have showed up and saved it.
Was Gianni Jackone on hand to manage them all, or are track suits illegal in Amsterdam?
Track suits are, afterall, the official uniform of the state of New Jersey.
I'm a consultant, and I was told when I started in the 80's that we were expected to dress one level above the client. I think this is a good rule for everyone not just consultants (though, of course, if everyone adhered to it there would be a clothing arms race).
I give Oracle big points for this: all their sales people have to wear suits. There is nothing I hate more than sales people coming in in wrinkled khakis and polos trying to sell me $1 Million+ in goods and/or services.
My understanding is that FLAIM has depricated BTRIEVE for low-level storage in Netware. FLAIM is used to store all the records in NDS, though technotes about Novell's license service make reference to a choice between FLAIM or BTRIEVE for that.
It's not like I'm old school, I'm in my mid-twenties, but who wears anything but a suit to the first day of work?
Probably someone who doesn't wear a suit to an interview.
I remember when I was younger, I would bitch whenever I had to wear a tie. The fact is that people judge you by how you look, and if you're starting a real job (or even an internship), you're an adult -- dress the part. That doesn't mean you have to wear a tux to work every day (well, if you were a real penguin...), but you don't want to be the frumpiest looking person on the block.
Our office is business casual M-Th, so the guys wear slacks and button down shirts, and used to always wear ties. About a year ago we had a new manager start who is very "new school/dot com", and always wears polo shirts. To rebel, we all started dressing up more. He's supposed to be our boss, and he's always less presentable than the worst of us.
I'm sure it's a regional thing -- since I work in DC I'm around more people who *have* to wear suits every day (thousands of lawyers and political-types). I'm sure it's similar on Madison Ave, and probably not like that at all in Berkley.
My personal rule of thumb though is when it doubt, dress up, especially where work is concerned. Nobody wants to go to a luncheon in a tux and have people think they work there, but what's worse is when you go to work and people think you're a delivery guy.
We replaced our financial system this year with the shinest new version of Lawson, so this one has been around for a while. They have something like eight front ends, but the terminal based front end -- The Lawson Insight Desktop, or LID -- happens to be the fastest, and has been around the longest. Each form you load has a default action (Inquire/Add/Chage/etc), but sometimes you run into this:
In an Action Mode of 'No Action' You Must Select an Action to Perform.
At most companies (at least all the ones I've worked for: for profit, not for profit, government, etc) Email is the property on the company. That means that a company executive has every right to go and read/change/delete a person's email.
While you may not think it's ethical, it's usually spelled out in the company handbook of some kind. Ours states that computer, email, and phones are property of the company and should be used only for business use. While no one is going to fire me for checking out CNN, we were able to fire some people a few years back for trading some pretty nasty porn through company email.
Two additional points: our current corporate email system (GroupWise) allows a user to retract an email they've sent as long as the recipient has not read it. That gets the admin and his morals off the hook.
The other is that big boss is lucky he doesn't work is a different industry. A certain government-type place I worked at once upon a time has an obligation to keep all correspondance for a very long time, so there is a system that all email goes through -- be it inbound, outbound, or inter-postoffice -- that stores the message in a database for full text searches. If someone were to nuke that, they're next assignment would be turning big rocks into little rocks.
My suggestion, if you're hell bent on a web application, it to consider perhaps a Java Applet. At least with an applet you can use Swing and AWT widgets for designing your app, and Applets provide some modicum of security. You would also be able to maintain a stateful connection, meaning people could still run this with just a browser, but also have most of the benifits of a C/S paradigm.
As for design, my thought is that standard GUI design rules (for the most part) apply. Consistant look and feel across screens (so the "add record" button isn't in a different place on every screen), clean asthetics (color, fonts, separation), meaningful labels (book title capitalization), no Peoplesoft-esque nested scroll bars, logical grouping of similar items, etc. Without knowing what your designing it's hard to say for sure, but if you've ever designed a GUI that didn't make users have seizures or get motion sick, most of those same rules apply.
I had LASIK done in May 2000, and aside from some dryness for a few months after it couldn't have gone better.
I was -1.25 diopters in both eyes, astigmatic, I'm 20/15 in both eyes now, even after two years.
My ex-gf had it done at the same time, she was -3.25 in both eyes and corrected to 20/20. Her vision is still "perfect".
I had mine done in Canada, because (1) it was cheaper at the time, and (2) they were using a scanning spot laster which the FDA hadn't approved. It makes a much larger incision, and has less haloing (mine went away within 6 weeks). Make sure if you have large pupils that the laser they are using will make a large enough incision to lower haloing.
Expect the procedure to take a few minutes, mine took 10. They position your head, the laser makes an incision, a cup comes down and sucks the flap up, a laser makes the correction, then the doctor uses a brush with special glue to put your cornea back in place. No hands are going to touch your eyes, no scapals will get near you. It sounds worse than it is. Don't worry about sneazing, the laser will stop. Don't worry about fucking up your eye exam, they do a bunch. I paid a whole lot of attention during those eye exams.
My only problem is that the muscles in my right eye are noticably weaker than the ones in my left. Glasses corrected for this, so my eyes didn't get as tired as they do now, but in effect it's because I look at the computer screen for too long.
One big note: make sure you use natural tears and not something like Visine. Don't ask why, just pay more.
Get out you wallet, you won't be sorry. Good luck
HFS Classic has a 2GB Size Limit, which is worse than FAT16 (4GB).
Speaking of, the poster made an error. FAT32 does not have a 4GB partition limit - FAT16 does.
The Goo Goo Dolls last CD did a similar thing. You needed to buy the CD to access the "Member's Only" section of the website. Once there, you got special videos and song downloads, and the passwords to preorder tickets from Ticketbastard for their concert.
I admit, I bought the CD when I did to preorder tickets (great seats), but I would have bought it eventually.
I hope this means that windbag Jessie Burst is getting canned!
ZD owns some really good properties, and they're aren't as biased as some other publications, but I'm sure the problem is the high cost of print publishing and the move toward internet sales. Something like Price Watch must be killing Computer Shopper.
Still, I suspect people are going to want to read computer magazines for a while. Like most businesses right now, they might just need to merge their way out of this mess. Don't you just love the business cycle?
Chances are good that the vendor never updated the BIOS. Some of us remember the glory days when harddrive size had a BIOS limitation.
You have two options:
1) Buy a replacement BIOS ROM from someone like Mr. BIOS (yes, I said "Mr. BIOS")
2) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). A DDO is a piece of software that is, in effect, a bootstrap virus. It loads code in the bootblock that builds a new drive map at boot time. While BIOS only seens four or five hundred megs, a DDO will get you to the next physical barrier (which, if I'm not mistaken is either 2GB or 4GB).
DDOs were used successfully for a very long time, though I remember avoiding them at the time. They're creepy. Most HD vendors use to offer then for free (WD, Maxtor), you should be able to dig one up on an abandonware site.
But I say "good".
What is going on with the FreeBSD team recently? I used to be an avid FreeBSD user, but the last year or so have not been the best.
There was some serious hostility that the latest FreeBSD release was announced too early. In this community that kind of thing happens all the time. Not ideal, but not much you can do about it either.
There was a contest for a new logo, and after over 100 people participated they decided that "none of them were what we were looking for".
FreeBSD 5.0 is supposed to have some great features, but it seems to get more distant with each passing day.
There have been some issues with the last couple releases (though I haven't tried 4.6 yet) with how it's packaged. I've heard grumbling about this outside the Linux/BSD community as well.
The port collection in FreeBSD, well frankly I think it stinks. I'm always running into broken ports that should have never made it in in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I think that the work the FreeBSD team has done is outstanding, but their behavior has been really whacky for quite a while. Maybe a new core team will do them some good.
I Pledge Allegiance
to the Judges
of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
and to the Decision
for which this stands
One Nation
in Agreement
that the Separation
of Church and State
is ABSOLUTE.
In my experience, the problem most beginning CS students have is understanding "computer think", or how to solve a problem.
Very early in my first CS class (like the second or third class after we got the obligatory lesson in history and basic terminology) our instructor brought in a loaf of bread, a knife, peanut butter, and jelly. She asked people to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a piece of paper.
After about 20 minutes she called on one person and followed their instructions, smashing bread into the jar and using the knife to stab the bread. It took a visual exercise like this to make people understand how each instruction is very important, and to be attentive to details.
Later when we did Towers of Hanoi she brought in three of those Fisher Price ring-stack toys. She showed us with those how to get the disks from peg one to peg two in a way we could understand.
One other thing that was helpful was being shown that we weren't just "learning C++" or "learning Java", that we were learning skills that are portible to other languages. After our first looping program we got a small booklet from our teacher that showed the same problem solved in several different languages.
As for actual problems we had to solve, I hated most of them, but I'm thankful for having done them. Most were intentionally difficult (reading and writing data in bizarre file formats) that made me a much better programmer.
It's about time.
I'm an OpenBSD user, and a Perl advocate. I love Perl, but not everyone does. Not everyone needs it, just like not everyone needs Python or tcl/tk.
OpenBSD is the closest thing I've seen to an operating system in a long time. When I install an OS, I want to chose what to turn on, not hope I turned off everything I didn't need. I want to know dozens of eyes have done their best to be sure the OS is secure.
The ports collection is far better than any package management tool I've used (Sun pkgadd, Linux RPM). Not only is it good, but OpenBSD's is the best of any BSD I've used (Free and Net) because it's clean. There is only a tiny chance a port you try and build won't work (::leering at FreeBSD::) and it's so easy that I don't mind doing a make;make install to get Perl.
All that said, Theo's recent rant about r* utils makes perfect sense. Get rid of it!
And while we're at it, toss telnet out with the bathwater. Anyone who isn't using ssh to connect to a remote machine is *begging* to get owned. The only way some people are going to use secure tools is if we force them to. I know at work until I turn telnet off people will use that over ssh because it's familiar, because they don't want to upgrade the 100 year old version of QVTTerm they have.
As for FTP - don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. I've been using scp for so long I get physically ill when I see this:
ftp>
Yeah it works, but it's a gaping hole. If people want it, fine, but build the daemon you want from the ports collection. The idea of inetd housing all these "critical" services is just an invite to get owned.
I'm not a huge security nut (my boss won't use a grocery store card because his "marketing data is worth more than what they give me"), but in the battle for securie systems, we are losing! Servers here at work are breeding like rabbits, and everyone is not as savy as you and I. We need to do whatever we can to nudge them in the right direction, not just for their own sake, but for everyones sake.
You still need the exp. date, the cardholder's name, possibly address, and sometimes even the three digit number found on the signature panel. the only thing that the luhn algorithm is good for is validating that the card *might* be a valid card number, not a valid card.
Depends on what you're using the card number for. Not every company that accepts credit cards check those things throughly. For example, some smaller computer places just take the number and the expiration date and run the card manually.
I'm aware of a couple websites that offer services (not goods) that you can buy with a credit card that just do a LUHN check. If the number passes your service is provided. Billing is done by hand later. Credit card processors that can validate in real time (Verisign for example) are pretty expensive, much more so than printing out an email and keying it into a POS terminal.
Let's be fair here.
::COUGH:: IBM ::COUGH::). I don't expect my mechanic to know how to fix my car, and I don't expect a store manager to understand wireless encryption. A store doesn't have its own IT people, corporate does. Maybe (if they're lucky) corporate even had a helpdesk they can call.
Most of these retail type places buy a turn key solution (::COUGH::
Someone sold them this wireless gear, they should be the onces concerned about the security.
Actually, the easiest way to steal a credit card number is to generate a number for yourself.
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Or so I'm told
You know, just because Ziff Davis became the media giant it is because of the PC doesn't mean the world revoles around PCs.
Yes IBM does well with the Thinkpad division, and yes I'm sure there are sour grapes over OS/2, but do you think anyone is crying that they're not selling PCs at a profit of 6 cents per machine? They own Lexmark! They own Lotus! They make a fortune selling AS/400s and RS/6000s and Z/90s (if that's what they're called this week).
There is a small tug of war over Java, no denying that, but why would IBM buy Sun other than for their customers? They are two completely different companies in mindset and direction. You think HP and Compaq will be a difficult merger?
There are also Sun's partners to consider. Larry Ellison is not going to like it if Sun buys IBM, since Oracle ties itself so closely to Java these days, and IBM just bought Informix. I would rather see Oracle and Sun merge and split the software division.
Interesting conjecture on the part of the author, but I think it's pretty unlikely.
I'll let me .sig be my comment on this.
Maybe you should ask your Project Manager or Government Contract Manager. They are required to understand what you can and can't use, particularly when the project is classified.
Unless things have changes a lot in the past couple years, I suspect you won't be able to use any open source software. Even if you can, you should check with your Project Manager and your Government Contract Manager before you make that decision for yourself - it could cost you more than your job.