... some people tend to get tunnel vision and concentrate wholely on the bb theory,... This does usually lead to problems and errors in the code.
Not only errors: black box routines can be expensive on performance too. Take database programming as an example: black box programming teaches us that we must break the problem down into its smallest (easily) solveable (and reusable) parts, create a routine for each one and then work our way up. In a program that does disk reads to solve the problem this could mean many, many more reads from disk than what is necessary, if you're not careful.
IMHO part of what makes a good programmer an even better programmer, is to know which routines to black box, taking into consideration performance and resource availability, and which ones not to.
High level languages are no less than a library of black box routines. And there are often parts of a program that are best written at the lowest level, for efficiency's sake.
A good programmer will constanly be weighing up the pros and cons of his or her methodology in order to provide a system that is sufficiently practical for the underlying architechture while taking into consideration all the other constraints of the project such as budget and deadline.
As a South African I am extremely grateful to the USA, and other nations who can afford it, for their continued exploration of space, near and far.
I cannot help but believe that there will no alternative but to find alternative accommodation for a large portion of the human race within the next few generations. Without exploration that will never be possible.
The article says: The big question that NASA never talks about is: what are we doing dinking about with humans--instead of teleoperated robots--in near earth orbit anyway? What can people do in near-earth orbit that is worth doing that unmanned remote-controlled craft cannot? It never talks about it because it is a question that has no answer.
If NASA has no answer (which is hard to believe) then how about this: there is still a LOT we have to learn about how the human body has to adapt to make life in space possible. Surely each mission outside earth's atmosphere completes another tiny piece of the puzzle?
I salute the astronauts who are prepared to risk their lives to ensure the long term survival and growth of the human race. Thanks, guys.
In South Africa where vehicle theft and vehicle hijackings are at record breaking levels, there have been vehicle tracking systems for private vehicle owners and also fleet operators for a number of years.
Visit #1 Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue Patient drank gin and water till late last night Prescribe aspirin and fluids.
Visit #2 Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue Patient drank whiskey and water till late last night Prescribe aspirin and fluids.
Visit #3 Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue Patient drank rum and water till late last night Final diagnosis Patient is allergic to water.
Difference between American Football and Soccer
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1
Soccer playing nations invite other nations to compete against when they organise a world championship:)
I don't even get decent reception at home! Which network covers the Andes??
Who's gonna tell Amazon about the /. list?
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
This is such a brilliant question!
I have nothing to add at this late stage, except....how about forwarding the completed, audited and metamoderated list to Amazon and negotiating a discount for/.ers?
The ISOC global conference is starting on 18th June. It will be interesting to see what they say about this.
The South African chapter in their submission to the parliamentary portfolio committtee support the bill, but they also point out some massive shortcomings, including that Appointment of ALL board members by the Minister is a gross violation of democracy. All in all they make some excellent suggestions. The question is whether they will be listened to. (No, they won't.)
I think it suffices to say the government representatives tasked with formulating this bill are not very sophisticated individuals (I mean in as far as their knowledge of technology goes of course;) ). That alone should be reason enough for them to stay the hell out of its management.
or.... follow the geese [slashdot.org]. With the signal a flock of geese is going to generate there's bound to always be an empty road or two below them.
Technology really is amazing. No more phoney decoys; no more phoney animal sound immitations. Just take your cell phone with you on the hunt, dial 08000-GOOSE and listen for the ring... aim.... FIRE!!!!
MS is so far removed from Open Source that it would be futile to expect them to jump the great divide in one single step.
A first baby step in the right direction would be for MS to stop its spiteful nature of wanting to control the entire IT industry, even in areas where they have no intention of offering solutions (just in case, I guess). This nature of MS is as old as the PC itself.
An archaic example that comes to is how MS used an undocumented DOS call to implement the Terminate and Stay Resident behaviour of its print spooler for DOS. MS's excuse for not documenting the function was because they could not guarantee that it would be supported in future releases of the operating system. It didn't take long for the guys at Borland to pull the print spooler apart and to figure out how to use it effectively. The result was Sidekick, a TSR notepad and calculator with a few other goodies that could be called up at any time with the push of a couple of buttons. Programmers found the notepad very useful as a source code editor, while being able to run another program simultaneously. Soon after, thousands of TSR applications saw the light; the TSR call, however, remained undocumented but appeared identically in all future releases of DOS. Notably, none of the offerings came from MS as far as I know.
This is in my mind purely spiteful behaviour and not to the benefit of the IT industry or its consumers.
If I had the chance to change MS's attitude, it would be to simply try and convince them that insead of wilfully trying to make it as difficult as possible for competitors to produce useful solutions, even though MS has no interest in, or intention of trading in the same market, they should rather consider what would be most beneficial to the industry and consumers, while maintaining their competitive edge. If that were their attitude, open source would soon rear its head in their planning, at least for some components of their software.
I think Bill would rather poke himself in the eye with a sharp stick, but hey, here's to hoping...
It could be the Shakespeare of the future though. In fact it would be downright nasty if I had to read some dead guy's waffling, written while he was stoned, and my kids don't get to suffer the same torture. (Remember SW was made in the 70s)
Nice thing in their case will be, if they find out after an exam that their answers were wrong they could pay someone at LucasFilm to change the original.
I thought the article quite clearly stated that it weighs (a combination of) 3 things:
increased volume
1:1 setup to breakdown ratio
worm signatures
Of the above 1 and 2 can very possibly be due to legitimate transactions; 3 too, if you just happen to be very, very unlucky.
A spike would still be 1:1, whereas DDoS would be off that.
If I ping a server at 2 sec intervals, the 1:1 ration is maintained. If I and 5000 zombies ping a server at 2 sec intervals, the 1:1 ration is still maintained. But now it is a DOS attack that can bring down a slow connection. And the header doesn't have to have been altered, incidentally.
A combination of all 3 factors have to be taken into account to decide whether it is a DOS attack or not. The question of whether their algorithm is clever enough to do that and not impair legitimate traffic remains.
I accept that a tool such as this can successfully detect and stop DOS attacks, but is it clever enough to allow for legitimate spikes? If anything, I think that the real challenge is in sorting the binary wheat from the chaff and while the article does make mention of this factor, it doesn't say that normal traffic spikes were ignored and allowed to complete their transactions during an attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only errors: black box routines can be expensive on performance too. Take database programming as an example: black box programming teaches us that we must break the problem down into its smallest (easily) solveable (and reusable) parts, create a routine for each one and then work our way up. In a program that does disk reads to solve the problem this could mean many, many more reads from disk than what is necessary, if you're not careful.
IMHO part of what makes a good programmer an even better programmer, is to know which routines to black box, taking into consideration performance and resource availability, and which ones not to.
High level languages are no less than a library of black box routines. And there are often parts of a program that are best written at the lowest level, for efficiency's sake.
A good programmer will constanly be weighing up the pros and cons of his or her methodology in order to provide a system that is sufficiently practical for the underlying architechture while taking into consideration all the other constraints of the project such as budget and deadline.
As a South African I am extremely grateful to the USA, and other nations who can afford it, for their continued exploration of space, near and far.
I cannot help but believe that there will no alternative but to find alternative accommodation for a large portion of the human race within the next few generations. Without exploration that will never be possible.
The article says:
The big question that NASA never talks about is: what are we doing dinking about with humans--instead of teleoperated robots--in near earth orbit anyway? What can people do in near-earth orbit that is worth doing that unmanned remote-controlled craft cannot? It never talks about it because it is a question that has no answer.
If NASA has no answer (which is hard to believe) then how about this: there is still a LOT we have to learn about how the human body has to adapt to make life in space possible. Surely each mission outside earth's atmosphere completes another tiny piece of the puzzle?
I salute the astronauts who are prepared to risk their lives to ensure the long term survival and growth of the human race. Thanks, guys.
In South Africa where vehicle theft and vehicle hijackings are at record breaking levels, there have been vehicle tracking systems for private vehicle owners and also fleet operators for a number of years.
Look at www.netstar.co.za and www.tracker.co.za.
Both of these companies have a good track record. No excuse for the pun.
Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue
Patient drank gin and water till late last night
Prescribe aspirin and fluids.
Visit #2
Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue
Patient drank whiskey and water till late last night
Prescribe aspirin and fluids.
Visit #3
Symptoms : Headache, blurred vision, nausea, furry tongue
Patient drank rum and water till late last night
Final diagnosis
Patient is allergic to water.
I don't even get decent reception at home! Which network covers the Andes??
I have nothing to add at this late stage, except ....how about forwarding the completed, audited and metamoderated list to Amazon and negotiating a discount for /.ers?
Why hasnt the SA govt participated in the namespace meetings seeing as they had been invited to do so from day one?
The South African chapter in their submission to the parliamentary portfolio committtee support the bill, but they also point out some massive shortcomings, including that Appointment of ALL board members by the Minister is a gross violation of democracy. All in all they make some excellent suggestions. The question is whether they will be listened to. (No, they won't.)
I think it suffices to say the government representatives tasked with formulating this bill are not very sophisticated individuals (I mean in as far as their knowledge of technology goes of course ;) ). That alone should be reason enough for them to stay the hell out of its management.
Yebo gogo to my fellow ZAnians :)
Silly me.
I'm going to bed now.
PS: All those fscking calculations for nothing.
~125,000,000,000 bytes
~122,070,312 kilobytes
~119,209 megabytes
~116 gigabytes
Why didn't they just say so?
Last time I checked the smallest new hard disk I could get was 20Gb, i.e. 25 hard disks = 500 gigabytes.
Oh wait, now I see why they didn't just say so... 25 times sounds so much more impressive than almost 6 times ...
A first baby step in the right direction would be for MS to stop its spiteful nature of wanting to control the entire IT industry, even in areas where they have no intention of offering solutions (just in case, I guess). This nature of MS is as old as the PC itself.
An archaic example that comes to is how MS used an undocumented DOS call to implement the Terminate and Stay Resident behaviour of its print spooler for DOS. MS's excuse for not documenting the function was because they could not guarantee that it would be supported in future releases of the operating system. It didn't take long for the guys at Borland to pull the print spooler apart and to figure out how to use it effectively. The result was Sidekick, a TSR notepad and calculator with a few other goodies that could be called up at any time with the push of a couple of buttons. Programmers found the notepad very useful as a source code editor, while being able to run another program simultaneously. Soon after, thousands of TSR applications saw the light; the TSR call, however, remained undocumented but appeared identically in all future releases of DOS. Notably, none of the offerings came from MS as far as I know.
This is in my mind purely spiteful behaviour and not to the benefit of the IT industry or its consumers.
If I had the chance to change MS's attitude, it would be to simply try and convince them that insead of wilfully trying to make it as difficult as possible for competitors to produce useful solutions, even though MS has no interest in, or intention of trading in the same market, they should rather consider what would be most beneficial to the industry and consumers, while maintaining their competitive edge. If that were their attitude, open source would soon rear its head in their planning, at least for some components of their software.
I think Bill would rather poke himself in the eye with a sharp stick, but hey, here's to hoping ...
It could be the Shakespeare of the future though. In fact it would be downright nasty if I had to read some dead guy's waffling, written while he was stoned, and my kids don't get to suffer the same torture. (Remember SW was made in the 70s)
Nice thing in their case will be, if they find out after an exam that their answers were wrong they could pay someone at LucasFilm to change the original.
- increased volume
- 1:1 setup to breakdown ratio
- worm signatures
Of the above 1 and 2 can very possibly be due to legitimate transactions; 3 too, if you just happen to be very, very unlucky.A spike would still be 1:1, whereas DDoS would be off that.
If I ping a server at 2 sec intervals, the 1:1 ration is maintained. If I and 5000 zombies ping a server at 2 sec intervals, the 1:1 ration is still maintained. But now it is a DOS attack that can bring down a slow connection. And the header doesn't have to have been altered, incidentally.
A combination of all 3 factors have to be taken into account to decide whether it is a DOS attack or not. The question of whether their algorithm is clever enough to do that and not impair legitimate traffic remains.
I accept that a tool such as this can successfully detect and stop DOS attacks, but is it clever enough to allow for legitimate spikes? If anything, I think that the real challenge is in sorting the binary wheat from the chaff and while the article does make mention of this factor, it doesn't say that normal traffic spikes were ignored and allowed to complete their transactions during an attack.
Screw them. Down all DNS servers and revert back to IP. In hex. I can see the headlines now: Geeks take back the Internet.