Not at all, all 4 were running anyway, whilst they were in there for redundancy, we used them for speed as well. 2 nics meant a lot faster connection to the stock market, and speed is always good!
So they weren't allowed to use a kernel still under development at the time? Thats not old software. Imagine if MS had ran an NT kernel that was in beta and it out performed a Linux install. You'd be complaining then that MS had an unfair advantage running beta software.
Actually I have. On a banking environment I had a machine that connected to the German stockmarket on 2 nics (in case one died), and the other 2 nices were to bridge up to our mainframe, again in case 1 died.
Not a common situation I'll admit, but it happens, so don't make such sweeping statements. On all my web servers, no matter what OS I have 2 nics, a big raid, 2 power supplies and so on. It's good practice.
This is an aside, but did you know about bus noise on USB? I went and bought one of those spiffy Intellieye mice (hey I hate having to clean mice balls) and the damn thing creates quite a bit of noise. It's recommended (unoffically) that you don't put it on a hub, as it may interfere with other devices).
Interesting you bring up keyboards. I'm going off topic here, but if you have Win98 with a password on it, the USB devices used to get initialised after the password was entered, so if you had a USB keyboard, you couldn't type the password in, as it hadn't started yet.
Seriously? Do you want to date someone like yourself? I'm not being insulting here, I've done it, but what is there to build on? Having dated both "geek" and "non-geek" women, in my opinion, a relationship with a "non-geek" women has more scope for growth.
Lets take my current relationship, which was setup by a colleague at work. She's a sales support lass, so she can cope with email and SMS messages. She knows what the web is, and she kind of understands what I do. When I leave work to meet her, I don't have to continue thinking about computers, I can relax. We go to the cinema, eat out, concerts, and I don't look at a PC once. It broadens your horizons.
Compare this with my last geek relationship, I could talk about work, twiddle with my PC, discuss web techniques and so on. But it was just an extension of work, albeit with added sex.
It doesn't matter how you meet women, but if you meet them on-line you'll have to meet them in real life sooner or later. So why not start in real life?
Look outside your normal boundaries. Approach people you like. Talk to them. Don't view them as partners (well don't be obvious about it). And don't limit yourself to geek partners. There's a whole other world out there.
(Having said that, my girlfriend did understand enough to leave me to play for an evening when I bought my news graphics accelerator and SB-Live, so some understanding of boys/girls with toys is helpful!)
Re:Anybody picked up on the Serial port stuff ?
on
E-commerce and Linux
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· Score: 1
Actually at a guess I'd say the problem is Access. I see this all on the time when taking over web sites, where someone has used Access in an environment with 20+ users. It barfs, and it barfs badly.
Now this will be off topic I know, but in my estimation about 70-85% of web site problems is the artitecture, look at some of EBay's problems, this boiled down to having only 1 database server, and when it died, the whole site went down.
A lot of people, myself included I'll admit, are getting very lazy these days when designing software, we don't think about the hardware architecture we'll need. I've finally broken this lack of foresight over the last 9 months, and it was hard! However I was damned proud of the latest banking system I did, which continued after the death of 3 servers.
Anyway back onto topic, don't just blame software, look at everything, that serial port cable is just nasty!
Interesting, thats how MSN.CO.UK sort of does it. A lot of the information, for example news articles are held in a big SQL feed, and every 15 minutes a job kicks off which generates the ASP which just copes with the personalisation.
As for implementing ASP on every page for personalisation, depends how you do it I suppose, I have a exhibition site running at the moment, still quite small only say about 10000 hits per hour, but it personalises using ASP and doesn't die. The only problems I do get has been with DNS updates which didn't reflect round the net and some people were hitting the old static site and getting confused.
It all comes down to implementation, for static sites use HTML, for small interactivity use ASP, Perl or your favourite scripting language, for large interactivity compile your code.
I don't think you can specifically blame MS for wanting every page to be interactive, I put the blame squarely at the feet of marketing people, and programmers that don't tell them when they're wrong.
AS far as I know, it's not really CE based. What you can do however is have CE embedded on the games CE, which will be loaded when the games starts. You can choose to stick wuith the Dreamcast's base OS if you want.
Of course it's a damned good idea that, as the dreamcast CE has some DirectX built in, so porting PC games is easier.
OK I'm getting pissed answering the same FUD each time someone posts it. So here's a summary
What does it do? It's a central repository for your billing, shipping and credit card information. Each of these sets of information is optional.
How does it work? A web site can choose to add Passport support onto their site. When your browse the site and go to pay, you will see a login to Passport button. If you choose this, then the shopping site can request the shipping & billing information stored on the Passport servers. This is send back to the shopping site via HTTP and SSL via the "post" method.
What about the new ECML standard? Well thats not really a wallet standard, more like a form naming convention. But Passport works with it, like it works with any form.
Whats the benefits? Well for lazy people it means they only have to enter their details once, then use a common login over all Passport supporting sites.
But why should I give MS my details? If you don't like it, don't. The wallet licence isn't exclusive, sites are not forced to force you to use wallet. Of course some stupid web master somewhere may consider that a good idea, if so, avoid them.
Why is it good? Well every Hotmail user has a passport account by default, thats an awful lot of people. It allows flexible branding of the wallet, so it won't have to look like an MS product. And it offers an easy way to support impluse buying, something stores like.
What does it support? For the Wallet anything, for the common login (see below) IIS & NT now, Unix is about 85% done for Sun and Netscape servers, Apache version about 75% done. Give it a month and a half.
What else is it planned for? Well a common login type thing. When you login to Slashdot and customise thats kinda nifty. But try using the same login on another site, and someone else may have taken it. Passport will evebtually allow a common login across all sites implmenting it, wether it be for shopping or just personalisation purposes.
Costs? Mindshare so far, after March 2000 fees will be implemented.
Who bills? You do. Look I keep reading that the vendor bills MS, then MS bills you. Utter crap. For a start that would be problematic for those countries outside the US (yes we do exist you know). What good would it be if a London company had to bill MS in pounds, then MS bill my British Visa in dollars? Passport will transmit your credit card details to the shopping site, if you have entered them. If you haven't it will just send shipping information, if you've entered it.
Problems? Security, lets face it MS is a big target. But quite frankly if anyone says "We're going to store credit card information for the world" on this server, lots of people are going to attack it.
I'm peeved at you lot, I've seen a lot of FUD here this morning, and I'm more dissapointed than normal.
Now I've implemented 3 client side wallet systems, and 1 passport test system. And from a server side, Passport is sweet.
Ok it doesn't work this way round folks. Now pay attention.
You create a passport account. You enter your name and addresses, and if you wish your credit card number. If you leave the CC out, you will be able to fill it in manually.
You go to a passport enabled site.
You click to purchase, the vendors web server then sends a message to MS saying "Can I have details for user x"
Passport posts the information back to the server.
At no time does passport ever get your shopping list, all they get is the store you're shopping at. Thats less than your credit card people know about you.
And if you don't have a passport account then MS will see *nothing* about you.
Do you really think that signing up to passport has a clause saying "You must give us all your customer details, don't tell your customers though." Grow Up
There have been though. I've been evaluating quite a few wallet technologies here, and of course all of them use different standards, and none of them were that good. The best one I saw was the MS Wallet implimentation in IE4/NS4. Even then, becase it involves a *lot* of work on the server side to interface, hardly anyone ever implemented it.
I have summary here (which I can't post, it's copyrighted, and paid for) that came to the conclusion wallet technology is nowhere near ready yet.
One thing I will say in favour of the MS system, be it Wallet or Passport, it's not US based (I found a lot of client side wallets were), and it allows any payment technology, so you aren't tied in to using a specific clearing house (which were, again, all US based)
Hmm I doubt it, I'll look more this week at this. Emails in ascii won't have the embedded macros, nore will HTML formatted mail. Word formatted mail isn't a complete word document, so it will strip all macros out.
Whats more silly perhaps is that MS allow people to set HTML email to be in the "trusted zone". This means all javascript will be ran. Of course you can't get really nasty with javascript, but it's possible to do DOS attacks and to do the popping up porno window.
Well the first thing I thought when I saw money was oh Children in Need is around that publication date, and in the unlikely event of any of my flu addled ravings making it, I want my money to go to there.
For those of you that don't know what it is, it's an annual UK charity event, taking up a whole evening on BBC1, and raises an awful lot of money for children in the UK and in the 3rd world. So please think about donating there.
I wonder if we could get Janes to double the cash donated...
A relatively unskilled cyberterrorist can crash a computer server that is responsible for anything from publishing content to the WWW to monitoring transactions on a bank network
Publishing content to the web is not exactly a crtical system, but I'd love to see your sources for the estimates on bank attacks. Having worked with banking infrastructure before I'd like to see some evidence here. I'm not saying you're a liar, but personally, I find that estimate highly doubtful.
Slashdot Mirror
OK so install a kernel patch, which is what an NT service pack boils down to ... and do you have to reboot? Of course you do.
Now if you want to point out the frequency of service packs to kernel patches and why they're released, well thats another matter!
OK I have an NT license in front of me. Point out that paragraph please
Not at all, all 4 were running anyway, whilst they were in there for redundancy, we used them for speed as well. 2 nics meant a lot faster connection to the stock market, and speed is always good!
Actually I'm in the UK, all I'm trying to do is see if I can stop the damaging kneejerk reactions that go on after every benchmark *grin*
So they weren't allowed to use a kernel still under development at the time? Thats not old software. Imagine if MS had ran an NT kernel that was in beta and it out performed a Linux install. You'd be complaining then that MS had an unfair advantage running beta software.
Actually I have. On a banking environment I had a machine that connected to the German stockmarket on 2 nics (in case one died), and the other 2 nices were to bridge up to our mainframe, again in case 1 died.
Not a common situation I'll admit, but it happens, so don't make such sweeping statements. On all my web servers, no matter what OS I have 2 nics, a big raid, 2 power supplies and so on. It's good practice.
Yea it was the original Win98 and certain BIOSes I think
This is an aside, but did you know about bus noise on USB? I went and bought one of those spiffy Intellieye mice (hey I hate having to clean mice balls) and the damn thing creates quite a bit of noise. It's recommended (unoffically) that you don't put it on a hub, as it may interfere with other devices).
My little Sony Vaio has a firewire port, and the damn thing is so small it's probably on the motherboard.
Interesting you bring up keyboards. I'm going off topic here, but if you have Win98 with a password on it, the USB devices used to get initialised after the password was entered, so if you had a USB keyboard, you couldn't type the password in, as it hadn't started yet.
You're serious? Wow! As for USB dos drivers, I'd doubt it, although I'd be pleased to someone prove me wrong.
Seriously? Do you want to date someone like yourself? I'm not being insulting here, I've done it, but what is there to build on? Having dated both "geek" and "non-geek" women, in my opinion, a relationship with a "non-geek" women has more scope for growth.
Lets take my current relationship, which was setup by a colleague at work. She's a sales support lass, so she can cope with email and SMS messages. She knows what the web is, and she kind of understands what I do. When I leave work to meet her, I don't have to continue thinking about computers, I can relax. We go to the cinema, eat out, concerts, and I don't look at a PC once. It broadens your horizons.
Compare this with my last geek relationship, I could talk about work, twiddle with my PC, discuss web techniques and so on. But it was just an extension of work, albeit with added sex.
It doesn't matter how you meet women, but if you meet them on-line you'll have to meet them in real life sooner or later. So why not start in real life?
Look outside your normal boundaries. Approach people you like. Talk to them. Don't view them as partners (well don't be obvious about it). And don't limit yourself to geek partners. There's a whole other world out there.
(Having said that, my girlfriend did understand enough to leave me to play for an evening when I bought my news graphics accelerator and SB-Live, so some understanding of boys/girls with toys is helpful!)
Actually at a guess I'd say the problem is Access. I see this all on the time when taking over web sites, where someone has used Access in an environment with 20+ users. It barfs, and it barfs badly.
Now this will be off topic I know, but in my estimation about 70-85% of web site problems is the artitecture, look at some of EBay's problems, this boiled down to having only 1 database server, and when it died, the whole site went down.
A lot of people, myself included I'll admit, are getting very lazy these days when designing software, we don't think about the hardware architecture we'll need. I've finally broken this lack of foresight over the last 9 months, and it was hard! However I was damned proud of the latest banking system I did, which continued after the death of 3 servers.
Anyway back onto topic, don't just blame software, look at everything, that serial port cable is just nasty!
Well certinaly PCN/GSM in Europe doesn't get over 9600, but as I tend to use it just for email that doesn't matter too much.
Barry
Interesting, thats how MSN.CO.UK sort of does it. A lot of the information, for example news articles are held in a big SQL feed, and every 15 minutes a job kicks off which generates the ASP which just copes with the personalisation.
As for implementing ASP on every page for personalisation, depends how you do it I suppose, I have a exhibition site running at the moment, still quite small only say about 10000 hits per hour, but it personalises using ASP and doesn't die. The only problems I do get has been with DNS updates which didn't reflect round the net and some people were hitting the old static site and getting confused.
It all comes down to implementation, for static sites use HTML, for small interactivity use ASP, Perl or your favourite scripting language, for large interactivity compile your code.
I don't think you can specifically blame MS for wanting every page to be interactive, I put the blame squarely at the feet of marketing people, and programmers that don't tell them when they're wrong.
Barry
I agree with the flow, except for 2 things.
Televisions, because PAL is more widespread than NTSC
Mobile Phones, because again the US went their own frequency route.
Makes a wonderful change :)
AS far as I know, it's not really CE based. What you can do however is have CE embedded on the games CE, which will be loaded when the games starts. You can choose to stick wuith the Dreamcast's base OS if you want.
Of course it's a damned good idea that, as the dreamcast CE has some DirectX built in, so porting PC games is easier.
Not just English regionalisations to consider, German differs between Germany and Austria, Spanish between Spain and America.
OK I'm getting pissed answering the same FUD each time someone posts it. So here's a summary
What does it do? It's a central repository for your billing, shipping and credit card information. Each of these sets of information is optional.
How does it work? A web site can choose to add Passport support onto their site. When your browse the site and go to pay, you will see a login to Passport button. If you choose this, then the shopping site can request the shipping & billing information stored on the Passport servers. This is send back to the shopping site via HTTP and SSL via the "post" method.
What about the new ECML standard? Well thats not really a wallet standard, more like a form naming convention. But Passport works with it, like it works with any form.
Whats the benefits? Well for lazy people it means they only have to enter their details once, then use a common login over all Passport supporting sites.
But why should I give MS my details? If you don't like it, don't. The wallet licence isn't exclusive, sites are not forced to force you to use wallet. Of course some stupid web master somewhere may consider that a good idea, if so, avoid them.
Why is it good? Well every Hotmail user has a passport account by default, thats an awful lot of people. It allows flexible branding of the wallet, so it won't have to look like an MS product. And it offers an easy way to support impluse buying, something stores like.
What does it support? For the Wallet anything, for the common login (see below) IIS & NT now, Unix is about 85% done for Sun and Netscape servers, Apache version about 75% done. Give it a month and a half.
What else is it planned for? Well a common login type thing. When you login to Slashdot and customise thats kinda nifty. But try using the same login on another site, and someone else may have taken it. Passport will evebtually allow a common login across all sites implmenting it, wether it be for shopping or just personalisation purposes.
Costs? Mindshare so far, after March 2000 fees will be implemented.
Who bills? You do. Look I keep reading that the vendor bills MS, then MS bills you. Utter crap. For a start that would be problematic for those countries outside the US (yes we do exist you know). What good would it be if a London company had to bill MS in pounds, then MS bill my British Visa in dollars? Passport will transmit your credit card details to the shopping site, if you have entered them. If you haven't it will just send shipping information, if you've entered it.
Problems? Security, lets face it MS is a big target. But quite frankly if anyone says "We're going to store credit card information for the world" on this server, lots of people are going to attack it.
I'm peeved at you lot, I've seen a lot of FUD here this morning, and I'm more dissapointed than normal.
Now I've implemented 3 client side wallet systems, and 1 passport test system. And from a server side, Passport is sweet.
Anyway, no-one's forcing you to use it are they?
Barry
Oh lord.
Ok it doesn't work this way round folks. Now pay attention.
You create a passport account. You enter your name and addresses, and if you wish your credit card number. If you leave the CC out, you will be able to fill it in manually.
You go to a passport enabled site.
You click to purchase, the vendors web server then sends a message to MS saying "Can I have details for user x"
Passport posts the information back to the server.
At no time does passport ever get your shopping list, all they get is the store you're shopping at. Thats less than your credit card people know about you.
And if you don't have a passport account then MS will see *nothing* about you.
Do you really think that signing up to passport has a clause saying "You must give us all your customer details, don't tell your customers though." Grow Up
You will be able to lave the CC number out, so it will just fill in delivery addresses.
:)
There have been though. I've been evaluating quite a few wallet technologies here, and of course all of them use different standards, and none of them were that good. The best one I saw was the MS Wallet implimentation in IE4/NS4. Even then, becase it involves a *lot* of work on the server side to interface, hardly anyone ever implemented it.
I have summary here (which I can't post, it's copyrighted, and paid for) that came to the conclusion wallet technology is nowhere near ready yet.
One thing I will say in favour of the MS system, be it Wallet or Passport, it's not US based (I found a lot of client side wallets were), and it allows any payment technology, so you aren't tied in to using a specific clearing house (which were, again, all US based)
Hmm I doubt it, I'll look more this week at this. Emails in ascii won't have the embedded macros, nore will HTML formatted mail. Word formatted mail isn't a complete word document, so it will strip all macros out.
Whats more silly perhaps is that MS allow people to set HTML email to be in the "trusted zone". This means all javascript will be ran. Of course you can't get really nasty with javascript, but it's possible to do DOS attacks and to do the popping up porno window.
Barry
Well the first thing I thought when I saw money was oh Children in Need is around that publication date, and in the unlikely event of any of my flu addled ravings making it, I want my money to go to there.
For those of you that don't know what it is, it's an annual UK charity event, taking up a whole evening on BBC1, and raises an awful lot of money for children in the UK and in the 3rd world. So please think about donating there.
I wonder if we could get Janes to double the cash donated ...
Publishing content to the web is not exactly a crtical system, but I'd love to see your sources for the estimates on bank attacks. Having worked with banking infrastructure before I'd like to see some evidence here. I'm not saying you're a liar, but personally, I find that estimate highly doubtful.