Don't forget bundled with P2P applications like kazza you are installing software like WhenU.
This is NOT NORMAL WEB ADVERTISING in a lot of cases. This is software that normal users install unaware that it is modifying windows and hooking into IE to pop up adverts all the time even when the P2P client is not open, made legal by dodgy clickwrap agreements on the P2P software that no-one reads whilst installing kazza.
So before everyone says that P2P software companies have the right to earn advertising revenue, remember this is often not normal web advertising it's normally thiefware/spyware applications doing the advertising. It's just that most advertisers don't care, they bulk buy their mediaspace through agencies that can buy space on WhenU etc, very cheaply. And now companies like whenU are getting into bed with the spyware removal companies it's going to get even harder to remove all the pop-ups from your friends PCs.
MSNBot over the last year or so has started pulling content at a rate so fast many webmasters on PAYG bandwidth have had to block the crawler.
Also when I complained to the research guys I got a reply back dead quick about how my virtual hosts were misconfigured and one domain wasn't configured with a robot.txt. This is compared to the normal response from a microsoft monkey after 2 weeks saying "please try to reboot" that you normally get.
My guess is that Microsoft are throwing money at the new MSN search and have a good research team on it. Assuming that the archiving/indexing is working well MSNBot is now indexing much faster than Googlebot and will catchup or overtake Google if it continues like this. Perhaps it is a key part of the Longhorn-search integration?
Talk to your ISP with your boss about what their process is for dealing with DDOS attacks.
Then after that meeting suggest to your boss that he could investigate taking out an insurance policy to cover business losses while your ISP filters traffic.
That's not quite understanding the scale of the problem.
A DDOS will also cause most loadbalancers and firewalls to fall over even if you have the machines numbers to deal with it. But all this is irrelevant as your line will be saturated.
If you are hosted at a small ISP they may also be totally saturated to their upstream provider and they will need to contact them.
If your on a tier 1 backbone your uplink will saturate quickly particularly if you are only on a 100MB/s burstable line and probably the network section that you are on will also be saturated. This will mean that the tier 1 ISP will probably be desperately trying to filter the incoming traffic at it's borders.
Your best bet may be to pay for an expensive ISP package by a company designed to protect against against DDOS attacks, possibly you could hide behind an edge serving network though both these solutions are not guaranteed - and they can be very expensive. Even Akamai has been taken down by DDOS attacks on their DNS system.
Matt.
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 1
Whilst it's obviously true that good developers produce better applications I think that development methodology/tools and team style makes a massive difference.
Having worked in the same agile team for several years it's a world of difference using modern development tools like eclipse, focusing on OO design, automated unit testing, automated deployment and functional testing. The guarantee that the baseline never contains compile time errors, tests always pass in HEAD and there is automated functional testing togethor means development and refactoring can be done in chunks of a few hours and that the commercial team can see the changes live within a couple of days. In the other company i worked for it took two days just to get hold of the main database person and discuss the required schema changes and then discover breakages in code other people looked after.
Of course if your project is using release cycles in months then you can hide up the cost of maintaining a relational database. But in commercial terms it's increasingly hard to be competitive if you are working with release cycles of months or years - atleast for a lot industries.
Having said that a lot can be done to automate schema migration, database recreation and functional testing - but's even with this it still feels like you are fighting the system to get a good development system in place rather than the database helping. It feels more like a required hinderance than an aid to development.
I'm sure other peoples experiences differ.
Matt.
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 1
The difference is not large setting the thing up in the first place but it's a world of difference when it comes to modifying the house functionality later. Sometimes you modify a room or a person or the interface to house, but it's rare that you will ever need to modify and understand how the whole system works, seperate parts can be considered a black box. Whereas, any changes or new queries required in SQL will require re-understanding the relationships between all those tables.
SQL fitted better with procedural languages where you weren't losing much anyway as all the code was horribly inter-related and refactoring was a nightmare, these days refactoring OO code particularly with unit tests in place can be relatively easy - unless there is an OO-SQL-DB layer that needs to be kept up-to-date.
Using stored procedures may have performance advantages but it also breaks the OO encapsulation/cohesion even more so than you've already done introducing the relational database in the first place. Taking stored procedures and relational databases to the extreme and you have most business logic in complex queries that only a few people understand and you have lost most of the benefit of OO.
Good object databases / object caching solutions that are ACID compliant are rare and often have migration/scalability issues, but one day i hope they will replace the relational database altogethor. Or perhaps it will work the other way round and databases like postgres or Oracle will enter from the J2EE side to better support objects.
Matt.
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 1
I have worked for a place where the database was the application and for another place where the OO model is the application.
Developing, refactoring and testing changes to an OO model is much easier than one with a relational database back end. The OO model is also much easier to conceptualise - especially once the logic and data get's beyond a certain level of complexity. It's generally easier to get better performance in the OO system for a lower hardware/development cost if the model fully fits in memory - especially if business requirements change rapidly.
Example: In OO you can ask a house object how many people are in the livingroom and if you can't you can neatly add a method the house object for other people to use in the future.
In SQL you need to join the house to the livingroom and then to the people via the location table and then it takes too long so you need to use a query planner only to discover that maybe you are going to need to store a cached denormalised people-location table because you have already created the best indexes. Then next week there is a schema change and it breaks half the queries in the system. It takes on average about 10 mins to understand each query written by someone else and rewrite it.
My point?
You get some stuff free from a good database - persistance, transactions, roll-back, generic querying, etc, So if I have to put a small system togethor quickly a database is ok, but for bigger systems with fast changing requirements they aren't so great.
Maybe it's not a security vulnerability but it's probably not a good idea to allow the modification of browser-application functionality on a per website basis.
I'm not sure they stopped caring, I reckon they just need some killer feature like integrating the operating system and the web better to allow people to create decent apps delivered over the web.
You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.
Hmm, clearly someone needs to integrate RAID into a virtual web mail server that uses hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc, underneath. So when microsoft goes bust it can rebuild your missing emails onto gmail using the parity data stored at yahoo mail.
Wow you're never going to get ahead with views like that.
If theres anything I've learnt from watching the news recently it's that it's clearly wrong to torture people, plus it's also illegal here in the UK. But that is just a technicality.
Fortunately our Home Secretary David Blunkett has explained this neat little trick for getting round the moral dilemma. You can out-source the actual torturing to americans thus gaining the benefit from torturing people whilst still holding the moral high ground.
Correct. Sorry I wasn't clear - I am aware that it is not currently the case with credit card companies.
Having said that, very price competitive companies are now starting to sur-charge credit card users. Particular the low cost airlines.
Of course Microsoft wants their cost hidden to end users so that it appears to be "free" but in microsofts case the way they achieve this is quite anti-competitive.
Unfortunately there are some similarities to a tax due to Microsofts coercive OEM Contracts.
For an OEM to get good discounts for the Windows licenses they have to agree not to install any operating system besides Microsoft Windows.
Therefore you can go to a small supplier which charges higher prices but it's usually cheaper to get a machine with windows pre-installed from say "Dell" and then format over windows and install Linux.
So if you want to buy a cheap PC atleast in the UK you probably pay like 80% to Dell 17.5% VAT and 2.5% Microsoft. (These numbers are just examples)
Maybe companies should be forced to display the cost of the OS similar to the way till receipts tell you that 2% of the bill is going to a credit card processing company. Then they should be forced to offer the product cheaper without the OS.
Let's be realistic what most people install at home is a router providing NAT and not a firewall.
The reality is that this DOES effectively filter a lot of traffic because the router is rarely configured by default to forward ports directly to a machine on the LAN.
If we switch to IP6 and don't use NAT this will mean installing firewalls becomes more important. Though in reality i can't see this happening - as everyone will just use software firewalls.
Given the incredibly misleading nature of this slashdot submission leads me to wonder why we can't moderate the main story.
Win 2k has extended support for security hot fixes till 2010 and the enhancements that won't be including are things like firewalls and popup blockers. Which is what everyone expected anyway.
It's sensible in a 'spin' interview like this to focus on persuading people that windows is better than what's currently out there.
I'm sure they also have an anti-OSS strategy internally but this is likely to be very sensitive information. Probably their anti-OSS strategy includes creating new standards for the Web via Avalon/Indigo that become reliant on having the windows.NET API, Office/music/video DRM, putting increasing resources into the.NET versus Java battle, dropping the price of windows to emerging markets and encouraging the use of non-standard MS technologies by bundling new API's and apps into windows at every opportunity.
These are the kind of strategies that are neccessary to discourage linux adoption. Every change to windows that makes it less easy to migrate to linux must be hidden as either eye-candy, ease-of-use or a DRM "feature".
Application startup times are quite poor though. I run Fedora Core 2 and Win 2K on the same 512Meg 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 machine.
After some use in both systems IE, Dos and Word appear to snap open in windows. In FC2 Firefox, gnome-shell and OpenOffice are much slower starting up.
In fact after disk caching it takes longer to open Gedit on FC2 than it does to open Office on Win2k. That can't be good! Open Office in contrast is just taking the piss. The only window that opens in a similar time frame to windows apps is the nautilus viewer (without the left hand side browser).
I'm trying to help an organisation that ships recycled machines abroad to charities and schools (mainly in africa). Trying to get a linux distro that is as useable as windows is very difficult. Standard machine specs are Pentium II or above with 64meg ram. This spec machine will run windows and MS Office ALOT better than I can configure a linux box to run KDE/GNOME and Openoffce. And yes I do need to install openoffice for compatibility reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget bundled with P2P applications like kazza you are installing software like WhenU.
This is NOT NORMAL WEB ADVERTISING in a lot of cases. This is software that normal users install unaware that it is modifying windows and hooking into IE to pop up adverts all the time even when the P2P client is not open, made legal by dodgy clickwrap agreements on the P2P software that no-one reads whilst installing kazza.
So before everyone says that P2P software companies have the right to earn advertising revenue, remember this is often not normal web advertising it's normally thiefware/spyware applications doing the advertising. It's just that most advertisers don't care, they bulk buy their mediaspace through agencies that can buy space on WhenU etc, very cheaply. And now companies like whenU are getting into bed with the spyware removal companies it's going to get even harder to remove all the pop-ups from your friends PCs.
MSNBot over the last year or so has started pulling content at a rate so fast many webmasters on PAYG bandwidth have had to block the crawler.
Also when I complained to the research guys I got a reply back dead quick about how my virtual hosts were misconfigured and one domain wasn't configured with a robot.txt. This is compared to the normal response from a microsoft monkey after 2 weeks saying "please try to reboot" that you normally get.
My guess is that Microsoft are throwing money at the new MSN search and have a good research team on it. Assuming that the archiving/indexing is working well MSNBot is now indexing much faster than Googlebot and will catchup or overtake Google if it continues like this. Perhaps it is a key part of the Longhorn-search integration?
I wonder if I put this kind of personal use disclaimer on my website would that make it illegal for google to scrape it?
Seems to me like google are in a weak position given that no one granted them permission to scrape the stuff in the first place.
Do you think the lawyers working for IBM are better people than the onces working for SCO?
I suspect they just work for the highest bidder.
Western Union transfer maybe?
:)
The DDOS blackmailers usually request money transfers using this method or "we dstroy your DNS" as they so elequently put it
Talk to your ISP with your boss about what their process is for dealing with DDOS attacks.
Then after that meeting suggest to your boss that he could investigate taking out an insurance policy to cover business losses while your ISP filters traffic.
Matt.
That's not quite understanding the scale of the problem.
A DDOS will also cause most loadbalancers and firewalls to fall over even if you have the machines numbers to deal with it. But all this is irrelevant as your line will be saturated.
If you are hosted at a small ISP they may also be totally saturated to their upstream provider and they will need to contact them.
If your on a tier 1 backbone your uplink will saturate quickly particularly if you are only on a 100MB/s burstable line and probably the network section that you are on will also be saturated. This will mean that the tier 1 ISP will probably be desperately trying to filter the incoming traffic at it's borders.
Your best bet may be to pay for an expensive ISP package by a company designed to protect against against DDOS attacks, possibly you could hide behind an edge serving network though both these solutions are not guaranteed - and they can be very expensive. Even Akamai has been taken down by DDOS attacks on their DNS system.
Matt.
Whilst it's obviously true that good developers produce better applications I think that development methodology/tools and team style makes a massive difference.
Having worked in the same agile team for several years it's a world of difference using modern development tools like eclipse, focusing on OO design, automated unit testing, automated deployment and functional testing. The guarantee that the baseline never contains compile time errors, tests always pass in HEAD and there is automated functional testing togethor means development and refactoring can be done in chunks of a few hours and that the commercial team can see the changes live within a couple of days. In the other company i worked for it took two days just to get hold of the main database person and discuss the required schema changes and then discover breakages in code other people looked after.
Of course if your project is using release cycles in months then you can hide up the cost of maintaining a relational database. But in commercial terms it's increasingly hard to be competitive if you are working with release cycles of months or years - atleast for a lot industries.
Having said that a lot can be done to automate schema migration, database recreation and functional testing - but's even with this it still feels like you are fighting the system to get a good development system in place rather than the database helping. It feels more like a required hinderance than an aid to development.
I'm sure other peoples experiences differ.
Matt.
The difference is not large setting the thing up in the first place but it's a world of difference when it comes to modifying the house functionality later. Sometimes you modify a room or a person or the interface to house, but it's rare that you will ever need to modify and understand how the whole system works, seperate parts can be considered a black box. Whereas, any changes or new queries required in SQL will require re-understanding the relationships between all those tables.
SQL fitted better with procedural languages where you weren't losing much anyway as all the code was horribly inter-related and refactoring was a nightmare, these days refactoring OO code particularly with unit tests in place can be relatively easy - unless there is an OO-SQL-DB layer that needs to be kept up-to-date.
Using stored procedures may have performance advantages but it also breaks the OO encapsulation/cohesion even more so than you've already done introducing the relational database in the first place. Taking stored procedures and relational databases to the extreme and you have most business logic in complex queries that only a few people understand and you have lost most of the benefit of OO.
Good object databases / object caching solutions that are ACID compliant are rare and often have migration/scalability issues, but one day i hope they will replace the relational database altogethor. Or perhaps it will work the other way round and databases like postgres or Oracle will enter from the J2EE side to better support objects.
Matt.
I have worked for a place where the database was the application and for another place where the OO model is the application.
Developing, refactoring and testing changes to an OO model is much easier than one with a relational database back end.
The OO model is also much easier to conceptualise - especially once the logic and data get's beyond a certain level of complexity.
It's generally easier to get better performance in the OO system for a lower hardware/development cost if the model fully fits in memory - especially if business requirements change rapidly.
Example:
In OO you can ask a house object how many people are in the livingroom and if you can't you can neatly add a method the house object for other people to use in the future.
In SQL you need to join the house to the livingroom and then to the people via the location table and then it takes too long so you need to use a query planner only to discover that maybe you are going to need to store a cached denormalised people-location table because you have already created the best indexes. Then next week there is a schema change and it breaks half the queries in the system. It takes on average about 10 mins to understand each query written by someone else and rewrite it.
My point?
You get some stuff free from a good database - persistance, transactions, roll-back, generic querying, etc, So if I have to put a small system togethor quickly a database is ok, but for bigger systems with fast changing requirements they aren't so great.
Matt.
PayPal will shut you down if they don't like your politics.
:)
Actually so will banks. Barclays shut down the British Nationalist Party bank account fairly recently.
Maybe swiss banks don't care
*then* is it not prudent to perhaps look at cutting CO2 emitions?
:)
No, because current world leaders are normally only in power for a few years
Maybe it's not a security vulnerability but it's probably not a good idea to allow the modification of browser-application functionality on a per website basis.
I'm not sure they stopped caring, I reckon they just need some killer feature like integrating the operating system and the web better to allow people to create decent apps delivered over the web.
Isn't that what Avalon is suppose to be about?
It does look a bit weird when you upgrade office, you get the feeling that you are actually installing a part of the next version of windows.
But then it's better than IE, where you ARE installing part of the next version of windows!
You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.
Hmm, clearly someone needs to integrate RAID into a virtual web mail server that uses hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc, underneath. So when microsoft goes bust it can rebuild your missing emails onto gmail using the parity data stored at yahoo mail.
Matt.
Wow you're never going to get ahead with views like that.
If theres anything I've learnt from watching the news recently it's that it's clearly wrong to torture people, plus it's also illegal here in the UK. But that is just a technicality.
Fortunately our Home Secretary David Blunkett has explained this neat little trick for getting round the moral dilemma. You can out-source the actual torturing to americans thus gaining the benefit from torturing people whilst still holding the moral high ground.
I think it's called "the third way".
Correct. Sorry I wasn't clear - I am aware that it is not currently the case with credit card companies.
Having said that, very price competitive companies are now starting to sur-charge credit card users. Particular the low cost airlines.
Of course Microsoft wants their cost hidden to end users so that it appears to be "free" but in microsofts case the way they achieve this is quite anti-competitive.
Unfortunately there are some similarities to a tax due to Microsofts coercive OEM Contracts.
For an OEM to get good discounts for the Windows licenses they have to agree not to install any operating system besides Microsoft Windows.
Therefore you can go to a small supplier which charges higher prices but it's usually cheaper to get a machine with windows pre-installed from say "Dell" and then format over windows and install Linux.
So if you want to buy a cheap PC atleast in the UK you probably pay like 80% to Dell 17.5% VAT and 2.5% Microsoft. (These numbers are just examples)
Maybe companies should be forced to display the cost of the OS similar to the way till receipts tell you that 2% of the bill is going to a credit card processing company. Then they should be forced to offer the product cheaper without the OS.
Let's be realistic what most people install at home is a router providing NAT and not a firewall.
The reality is that this DOES effectively filter a lot of traffic because the router is rarely configured by default to forward ports directly to a machine on the LAN.
If we switch to IP6 and don't use NAT this will mean installing firewalls becomes more important. Though in reality i can't see this happening - as everyone will just use software firewalls.
Given the incredibly misleading nature of this slashdot submission leads me to wonder why we can't moderate the main story.
Win 2k has extended support for security hot fixes till 2010 and the enhancements that won't be including are things like firewalls and popup blockers. Which is what everyone expected anyway.
Hmmm that's why fred#3079-beta1 would never answer any of my questions.
and explain why I am broke.
Hmmm. Depressing isn't it.
It's sensible in a 'spin' interview like this to focus on persuading people that windows is better than what's currently out there.
.NET API, Office/music/video DRM, putting increasing resources into the .NET versus Java battle, dropping the price of windows to emerging markets and encouraging the use of non-standard MS technologies by bundling new API's and apps into windows at every opportunity.
I'm sure they also have an anti-OSS strategy internally but this is likely to be very sensitive information. Probably their anti-OSS strategy includes creating new standards for the Web via Avalon/Indigo that become reliant on having the windows
These are the kind of strategies that are neccessary to discourage linux adoption. Every change to windows that makes it less easy to migrate to linux must be hidden as either eye-candy, ease-of-use or a DRM "feature".
Matt
Application startup times are quite poor though. I run Fedora Core 2 and Win 2K on the same 512Meg 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 machine.
After some use in both systems IE, Dos and Word appear to snap open in windows. In FC2 Firefox, gnome-shell and OpenOffice are much slower starting up.
In fact after disk caching it takes longer to open Gedit on FC2 than it does to open Office on Win2k. That can't be good! Open Office in contrast is just taking the piss. The only window that opens in a similar time frame to windows apps is the nautilus viewer (without the left hand side browser).
I'm trying to help an organisation that ships recycled machines abroad to charities and schools (mainly in africa). Trying to get a linux distro that is as useable as windows is very difficult. Standard machine specs are Pentium II or above with 64meg ram. This spec machine will run windows and MS Office ALOT better than I can configure a linux box to run KDE/GNOME and Openoffce. And yes I do need to install openoffice for compatibility reasons.
Matt.