The average consumer doesnt understand the concept of unlocking.
Don't you believe it. The average consumer here in the UK certainly does understand the concept of unlocking, normally done down a local market for about £5. What they don't understand the concept of is paying £270 for a phone - phones here are things that come free with your contract, paying even £50 would be considered unusual. There are exceptions, such as the N95, but that's at the very top end of the market only and is still considered to be unusual.
'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.'
No, they aren't. The early episodes, as with the middle episodes and the late episodes and indeed with every episode ever filmed, were intended for children. Yes there were some nods here and there to the adults, but the episodes are intended for children.
I despise smoking - really can't stand it. That said, I've made absolutely no attempt to show non-smoking only films to my kids. I seem to remember Ghostbusters for example, has Ray dropping a cigarette out of his mouth at the sight of a ghost and our kids love Ghostbusters.
I love the standards at work - apparently lying is fine. Just not smoking a comedy pipe.
Funnily enough was looking at this earlier today - I have one and am likely to get another.
The 'switch' is a beam, not sure what kind, which controls on/off and and brightness for a lamp. You don't flick anything, you just move your hand across and the lamp switches on.
Irritatingly the Mathmos website is arranged such that you can't directly link to a product, but here's a video of the lamp in action on another site. I know the tech isn't the highest in the world, but who cares? It looks fantastic.
Thanks - yours is exactly the sort of viewpoint I was hoping to hear from - real life tool users, not armchair zealots.
No problem - hope you've got email notification on because I switched the machine of after making that post and missed your reply.
So in your opinion an up-to-date JDK is what you require, and could live without OS hooks, native-GUI, etc.?
Yes - that's exactly it. There will be some need for customisation, specifically the menu bar code on client-side, but that's already done and works very well. Keeping the look'n'feel together can be a job for the porters on the OpenJDK if required - I'm sure there'd be enough interest that a decent job would be done, but it's not a prime concern either of myself nor any of the other Mac-using Java coders I deal with.
Do you think the special Java bindings, native-GUI, etc. are worth the effort on Apple's part, or do you believe those would continue to be under-utilized?
I believe they'd be under-utilised. I appreciate the native look'n'feel and the ability to sort out the menu bar as per a normal Mac app, but beyond that I wouldn't use anything Mac-specific anyway. That's just for my client code too, which isn't all that much compared to the server-side. Quite a lot of my client code these days is written in SWT as well which isn't affected by Apple's code.
Essentially you've hit it though - an up-to-date JDK is what I'm after, rather than the bells and whistles of OS integration.
So does Apple perceive Java as moving into the also-ran category? Something that isn't gonna pay off development & support effort as a major player on the desktop? What makes it inappropriate for the iPhone?
I believe that's their perception, yes. I believe it's wrong too.
Are there any Java-on-Mac developers willing to share their insights? Folks who actually use it, pay attention to it on an ongoing basis, etc.?
Sort of - allow me to pontificate for a moment please.
I develop a lot of Java code, but it typically gets deployed on other platforms other than the Mac. It's a mix of desktop and server-side, and it's for internal apps only.
I would like to develop this using my Mac - it's not that I will unleash a mass of Mac Java apps on the world (though I have unleashed one), it's more that it allows me to pick the Mac as my daily working tool. I believe Apple have underestimated the demand for Macs amongst the more technical crowd, and I am hopeful of an OpenJDK port to OS X to take this worry away.
To summarise: perhaps Apple are right about desktop apps in Java on their platform. I still believe they're wrong in the general case though, and that they should still either keep up with the JDK or just help with the port to the OpenJDK and let others keep up for them.
There is not one recorded/public example of someone breaking out of the isolation of a virtual environment! I dare someone to demonstrate otherwise, and I will eat my words.
What is the buffer capacity of the server's NIC?...
How long does it take to empty it?...
What was the guy just before you doing? Did he fill it?
Sorry, but do you really think people don't do that level of analysis as well as trying to improve the network speed?
My point is that if you're looking at spending money for a 1 millisecond gain, you've already lost sight of the goal.
The goal in this kind of app is low latency - every millisecond counts. There are other goals of course, throughput, guaranteed maximums as well as low minimums...but in this case we were specifically discussing latency.
And that's not even counting a router or everything that can slow down your Internet connection
Internet connection? Who's talking about an internet connection? Dedicated leased lines direct to the exchange, internal transfer between machines...this kind of stuff isn't One Man And His PC sitting at home trying to day-trade. Yes there's variability, but even so engineering it out as much as possible is certainly an aim.
All the levels of analysis you describe, from the algorithm right through to the NIC, are already being done. At some point they will be done better, because of a change in available tools. This appears to be one of those tools.
So looking to shave a micro-second/milli-second off of a packet isn't that important or realistic. Humans do NOT make decisions that fast. You'd do better improving the speed of your code or throwing faster hardware at it.
Humans make decisions at a minimum of around 200ms I think - that's from memory, so I expect someone to be along and give the real figure soon. But I'm not speaking about humans, I'm speaking about algorithmic trading in a competitive environment. It truly is that significant to remove certainly a millisecond, and why stop there. Think about clustered pricing engines and similar, all trying to price as fast as possible to both a) capture business and b) avoid arbitrage. There definitely is a market for this level of network analysis. I'm on the code-side myself, so I agree that getting your code right is the most important. Throwing faster hardware at it helps however, depending on design, and in some circumstances you take all the speed you can get no matter which source it comes from.
Not every financial system needs this level of performance, but there are a significant number that do.
Cheers,
Ian
Now I can get those random stock tips in my email in less milliseconds! I will be rich one day, I will!
Milliseconds count. Maybe not to your stock tips, but trust me as someone who has spent about a decade in this kind of environment now - sub-millisecond latencies certainly count in automated trading between investment banks/hedge funds/whatever. To the point where people are prepared to pay fortunes to have their machines located physically closer to an exchange.
For fun, check out arbitrage, and then ponder again why reducing latency might be important in a competitive environment. Think about highly liquid markets, such as spot foreign exchange.
People who have used SPDIF fiber optic audio will all agree that analog audio is obsolete.
I use SPDIF - used it when I had PCs a few years ago (switched to Shuttles about the time SPDIF was becoming common), and I use it now on my Macs. I still disagree with you on this point however - how can I plug my headphones into SPDIF? And the ubiquity isn't there either - if I want to use my laptop to play music somewhere that isn't my own carefully set-up room, I'm still better off having analogue available.
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports....
Yep, nodding along...
.... analog audio output ports....
Awake now. Analogue audio output ports are far from legacy - almost every non-computer speaker system on earth uses analogue. Headphones too. I can agree with your other points*, but it's far too soon to get rid of analogue audio.
Cheers,
Ian
(*well I would do - I'm on a Mac here which has none of those anyway)
Throughout the article they allude to it, but never say what's happening. Could someone who knows please tell me what's going on between Amiga and Hyperion?
Fortunately, each user has their own account, so i can easily check which user owns any malicious processes or files that appear on the system.
May want to be careful about that assumption. A lot of these things go out under the apache user and the mails via the www-data@somehost.invalid account.
Look for tell-tale things like apache processes running when you're an apache2-only site (they're disguised processes that are really something else, obviously). Do an ls -al in all the home directories, look for directories whose name is just a space character, check/tmp isn't mounted executable...that kind of thing.
I've noticed a large increase in attempts to crack my co-lo Linux servers recently, and it must be said that two got through (shared site, some customers running old content management apps and the kits hit). When we watched the behaviour of the cracked box, it was connecting back to...I think undernet.org or similar?...and sending controls via IRC. Plus doing a spot of spamming of its own bat.
Our set-up is that we have a host OS install doing nothing but running VMware Server and then any real stuff gets done in a VM, so this was easy for us to recover from quickly via VM snapshotting. But still, it's a trend that's noticeably on the increase.
Scorpion. That's the account I originally signed up with, and I've totally forgotten the login details and probably don't have access to the email address anymore. I try every so often to convince the admins to unlock it for me, but no joy.
Sorry but that's nonsense as well.
Advice: cut down the aggression.
Eclipse does indeed include its own JVM. Easily shown - go to the robocode sourceforge project and try running it with OS X's JVM. Fails on the vast majority of 10.4.10 Macs - AWT Exception, which is actually buried away in the Apple native code (plenty of example of this error scattered around the web, seems related to graphic driver as it doesn't occur on absolutely every machine). Now try running it under Eclipse - works.
OpenJDK doesn't provide Mac builds I know, but I can guarantee you there's work going on to port it to OS X. I know this because I'm one of the people having a crack at it. Very early days yet though.
When another project member checks out the projects, he just has to redefine this variable according to his file system location and everything will build as usual.
But that's exactly the point - it means your workspace isn't cross-platform and depends on external factors. When Eclipse themselves already have a mechanism for defining cross-platform variables (${project_loc:something etc.) introducing a second system for achieving the same results can' be considered a good thing.
I actually agree with you, and we have a very similar workaround in place. We've defined an ant task to create a user-specific user libraries file from a template, and the file which Eclipse imports is the result of that ant task. But it is, as you say, a workaround. The issue simply shouldn't exist.
1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.
Although I agree with your point, it's worth noting that Eclipse doesn't use the Apple JDK except for launching itself. Internally it has its own JVM, used for compiling and running your projects.
I have high hopes for the OpenJDK project addressing the long JDK release cycles for OS X.
The user libraries feature is useless for cross-platform development at present, and will stay so until this bug is addressed.
Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.
Except for user libraries.
Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a collection of pre-packaged anythings, eg. jars, shared libraries...whatever, all bundled up for easy inclusion in multiple projects) need to be hard-coded to a particular path. So forget about the example above, it's c:\workspaces\myProject\myUserLib on one platform, and it is on another too. This is a royal pain, means you can't use the same user libraries file on multiple platforms, or even on one platform but on different individual machines.
Marked as P3 at the moment, but without it cross-platform workspaces are just order of magnitude harder than they need to be.
Wouldn't the correct thing have been to have the next manual update show that Windows Update needed updating, and then proceed to show the newer patches only after the new Update was installed? Better still would be to show all, but grey some out saying "Requires Windows Update v1.2.3.4" next to the ones that aren't yet accessible.
Oh, and wild-speculation-with-no-evidence time: this seems awfully soon after the WGA failure debacle, I'll bet the changes are to do with preventing a rerun of that.
So they are still an anonymous player, they just have their anonymous works attributed to them as an anonymous individual
Not necessarily, no. Take my history here for example - there are comments I've made as an A.C.. If this can work out my structure, then it should be able to tie back with 95% accuracy that those A.C. comments are from the individual behind the mccalli account.
That's just here. I've always posted under my real name in most places (been using the net a lot longer than the spam problem has existed or Google started making twenty years of archives available, too late to retract everything now) but imagine those that post to Usenet under assumed names. They should be tieable to their web forum postings too and they may not feel the need for anonymity in some of those.
Slashdot Mirror
You just can't keep a good cat down. Or even a mediocre one.
Cheers,
Ian
The average consumer doesnt understand the concept of unlocking.
Don't you believe it. The average consumer here in the UK certainly does understand the concept of unlocking, normally done down a local market for about £5. What they don't understand the concept of is paying £270 for a phone - phones here are things that come free with your contract, paying even £50 would be considered unusual. There are exceptions, such as the N95, but that's at the very top end of the market only and is still considered to be unusual.
Cheers,
Ian
'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.'
No, they aren't. The early episodes, as with the middle episodes and the late episodes and indeed with every episode ever filmed, were intended for children. Yes there were some nods here and there to the adults, but the episodes are intended for children.
I despise smoking - really can't stand it. That said, I've made absolutely no attempt to show non-smoking only films to my kids. I seem to remember Ghostbusters for example, has Ray dropping a cigarette out of his mouth at the sight of a ghost and our kids love Ghostbusters.
I love the standards at work - apparently lying is fine. Just not smoking a comedy pipe.
Cheers,
Ian
Funnily enough was looking at this earlier today - I have one and am likely to get another.
The 'switch' is a beam, not sure what kind, which controls on/off and and brightness for a lamp. You don't flick anything, you just move your hand across and the lamp switches on.
Irritatingly the Mathmos website is arranged such that you can't directly link to a product, but here's a video of the lamp in action on another site. I know the tech isn't the highest in the world, but who cares? It looks fantastic.
Cheers,
Ian
Thanks - yours is exactly the sort of viewpoint I was hoping to hear from - real life tool users, not armchair zealots.
No problem - hope you've got email notification on because I switched the machine of after making that post and missed your reply.
So in your opinion an up-to-date JDK is what you require, and could live without OS hooks, native-GUI, etc.?
Yes - that's exactly it. There will be some need for customisation, specifically the menu bar code on client-side, but that's already done and works very well. Keeping the look'n'feel together can be a job for the porters on the OpenJDK if required - I'm sure there'd be enough interest that a decent job would be done, but it's not a prime concern either of myself nor any of the other Mac-using Java coders I deal with.
Do you think the special Java bindings, native-GUI, etc. are worth the effort on Apple's part, or do you believe those would continue to be under-utilized?
I believe they'd be under-utilised. I appreciate the native look'n'feel and the ability to sort out the menu bar as per a normal Mac app, but beyond that I wouldn't use anything Mac-specific anyway. That's just for my client code too, which isn't all that much compared to the server-side. Quite a lot of my client code these days is written in SWT as well which isn't affected by Apple's code.
Essentially you've hit it though - an up-to-date JDK is what I'm after, rather than the bells and whistles of OS integration.
Cheers,
Ian
So does Apple perceive Java as moving into the also-ran category? Something that isn't gonna pay off development & support effort as a major player on the desktop? What makes it inappropriate for the iPhone?
I believe that's their perception, yes. I believe it's wrong too.
Are there any Java-on-Mac developers willing to share their insights? Folks who actually use it, pay attention to it on an ongoing basis, etc.?
Sort of - allow me to pontificate for a moment please.
I develop a lot of Java code, but it typically gets deployed on other platforms other than the Mac. It's a mix of desktop and server-side, and it's for internal apps only.
I would like to develop this using my Mac - it's not that I will unleash a mass of Mac Java apps on the world (though I have unleashed one), it's more that it allows me to pick the Mac as my daily working tool. I believe Apple have underestimated the demand for Macs amongst the more technical crowd, and I am hopeful of an OpenJDK port to OS X to take this worry away.
To summarise: perhaps Apple are right about desktop apps in Java on their platform. I still believe they're wrong in the general case though, and that they should still either keep up with the JDK or just help with the port to the OpenJDK and let others keep up for them.
Cheers,
Ian
There is not one recorded/public example of someone breaking out of the isolation of a virtual environment! I dare someone to demonstrate otherwise, and I will eat my words.
VMware Tools seems to do it every day...
Cheers,
Ian
What is the buffer capacity of the server's NIC?... How long does it take to empty it?... What was the guy just before you doing? Did he fill it?
Sorry, but do you really think people don't do that level of analysis as well as trying to improve the network speed?
My point is that if you're looking at spending money for a 1 millisecond gain, you've already lost sight of the goal.
The goal in this kind of app is low latency - every millisecond counts. There are other goals of course, throughput, guaranteed maximums as well as low minimums...but in this case we were specifically discussing latency.
And that's not even counting a router or everything that can slow down your Internet connection
Internet connection? Who's talking about an internet connection? Dedicated leased lines direct to the exchange, internal transfer between machines...this kind of stuff isn't One Man And His PC sitting at home trying to day-trade. Yes there's variability, but even so engineering it out as much as possible is certainly an aim.
All the levels of analysis you describe, from the algorithm right through to the NIC, are already being done. At some point they will be done better, because of a change in available tools. This appears to be one of those tools.
Cheers,
Ian
So looking to shave a micro-second/milli-second off of a packet isn't that important or realistic. Humans do NOT make decisions that fast. You'd do better improving the speed of your code or throwing faster hardware at it.
Humans make decisions at a minimum of around 200ms I think - that's from memory, so I expect someone to be along and give the real figure soon. But I'm not speaking about humans, I'm speaking about algorithmic trading in a competitive environment. It truly is that significant to remove certainly a millisecond, and why stop there. Think about clustered pricing engines and similar, all trying to price as fast as possible to both a) capture business and b) avoid arbitrage. There definitely is a market for this level of network analysis. I'm on the code-side myself, so I agree that getting your code right is the most important. Throwing faster hardware at it helps however, depending on design, and in some circumstances you take all the speed you can get no matter which source it comes from.
Not every financial system needs this level of performance, but there are a significant number that do.
Cheers,
Ian
Now I can get those random stock tips in my email in less milliseconds! I will be rich one day, I will!
Milliseconds count. Maybe not to your stock tips, but trust me as someone who has spent about a decade in this kind of environment now - sub-millisecond latencies certainly count in automated trading between investment banks/hedge funds/whatever. To the point where people are prepared to pay fortunes to have their machines located physically closer to an exchange.
For fun, check out arbitrage, and then ponder again why reducing latency might be important in a competitive environment. Think about highly liquid markets, such as spot foreign exchange.
Cheers,
Ian
People who have used SPDIF fiber optic audio will all agree that analog audio is obsolete.
I use SPDIF - used it when I had PCs a few years ago (switched to Shuttles about the time SPDIF was becoming common), and I use it now on my Macs. I still disagree with you on this point however - how can I plug my headphones into SPDIF? And the ubiquity isn't there either - if I want to use my laptop to play music somewhere that isn't my own carefully set-up room, I'm still better off having analogue available.
Cheers,
Ian
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports....
.... analog audio output ports....
Yep, nodding along...
Awake now. Analogue audio output ports are far from legacy - almost every non-computer speaker system on earth uses analogue. Headphones too. I can agree with your other points*, but it's far too soon to get rid of analogue audio.
Cheers,
Ian
(*well I would do - I'm on a Mac here which has none of those anyway)
Belgium, man. Just Belgium.
Cheers,
Ian
Throughout the article they allude to it, but never say what's happening. Could someone who knows please tell me what's going on between Amiga and Hyperion?
Cheers,
Ian
Fortunately, each user has their own account, so i can easily check which user owns any malicious processes or files that appear on the system.
/tmp isn't mounted executable...that kind of thing.
May want to be careful about that assumption. A lot of these things go out under the apache user and the mails via the www-data@somehost.invalid account.
Look for tell-tale things like apache processes running when you're an apache2-only site (they're disguised processes that are really something else, obviously). Do an ls -al in all the home directories, look for directories whose name is just a space character, check
Cheers,
Ian
How are they trying? My logs show lots of attempts at phpbb, etc. vulnerabilities.
phpbb, Drupal and PHPNuke attempts mostly. Plus old sshd vulnerabilities, though we're up to date there and nothing got through.
Cheers,
Ian
(oh yeah, and first post! Only took a mere eight years or so...)
I've noticed a large increase in attempts to crack my co-lo Linux servers recently, and it must be said that two got through (shared site, some customers running old content management apps and the kits hit). When we watched the behaviour of the cracked box, it was connecting back to...I think undernet.org or similar?...and sending controls via IRC. Plus doing a spot of spamming of its own bat.
Our set-up is that we have a host OS install doing nothing but running VMware Server and then any real stuff gets done in a VM, so this was easy for us to recover from quickly via VM snapshotting. But still, it's a trend that's noticeably on the increase.
Cheers,
Ian
Scorpion. That's the account I originally signed up with, and I've totally forgotten the login details and probably don't have access to the email address anymore. I try every so often to convince the admins to unlock it for me, but no joy.
Ian
Sorry but that's nonsense as well.
Advice: cut down the aggression.
Eclipse does indeed include its own JVM. Easily shown - go to the robocode sourceforge project and try running it with OS X's JVM. Fails on the vast majority of 10.4.10 Macs - AWT Exception, which is actually buried away in the Apple native code (plenty of example of this error scattered around the web, seems related to graphic driver as it doesn't occur on absolutely every machine). Now try running it under Eclipse - works.
OpenJDK doesn't provide Mac builds I know, but I can guarantee you there's work going on to port it to OS X. I know this because I'm one of the people having a crack at it. Very early days yet though.
Cheers,
Ian
When another project member checks out the projects, he just has to redefine this variable according to his file system location and everything will build as usual.
But that's exactly the point - it means your workspace isn't cross-platform and depends on external factors. When Eclipse themselves already have a mechanism for defining cross-platform variables (${project_loc:something etc.) introducing a second system for achieving the same results can' be considered a good thing.
I actually agree with you, and we have a very similar workaround in place. We've defined an ant task to create a user-specific user libraries file from a template, and the file which Eclipse imports is the result of that ant task. But it is, as you say, a workaround. The issue simply shouldn't exist.
Cheers,
Ian
1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.
Although I agree with your point, it's worth noting that Eclipse doesn't use the Apple JDK except for launching itself. Internally it has its own JVM, used for compiling and running your projects.
I have high hopes for the OpenJDK project addressing the long JDK release cycles for OS X.
Cheers,
Ian
The user libraries feature is useless for cross-platform development at present, and will stay so until this bug is addressed.
Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.
Except for user libraries.
Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a collection of pre-packaged anythings, eg. jars, shared libraries...whatever, all bundled up for easy inclusion in multiple projects) need to be hard-coded to a particular path. So forget about the example above, it's c:\workspaces\myProject\myUserLib on one platform, and it is on another too. This is a royal pain, means you can't use the same user libraries file on multiple platforms, or even on one platform but on different individual machines.
Marked as P3 at the moment, but without it cross-platform workspaces are just order of magnitude harder than they need to be.
Cheers,
Ian
Wouldn't the correct thing have been to have the next manual update show that Windows Update needed updating, and then proceed to show the newer patches only after the new Update was installed? Better still would be to show all, but grey some out saying "Requires Windows Update v1.2.3.4" next to the ones that aren't yet accessible.
Oh, and wild-speculation-with-no-evidence time: this seems awfully soon after the WGA failure debacle, I'll bet the changes are to do with preventing a rerun of that.
Cheers,
Ian
Skool Daze, that is. Kids today with their new-fangled Bully thinking it's something new...pah!
Cheers,
Ian
So they are still an anonymous player, they just have their anonymous works attributed to them as an anonymous individual
Not necessarily, no. Take my history here for example - there are comments I've made as an A.C.. If this can work out my structure, then it should be able to tie back with 95% accuracy that those A.C. comments are from the individual behind the mccalli account.
That's just here. I've always posted under my real name in most places (been using the net a lot longer than the spam problem has existed or Google started making twenty years of archives available, too late to retract everything now) but imagine those that post to Usenet under assumed names. They should be tieable to their web forum postings too and they may not feel the need for anonymity in some of those.
Cheers,
Ian