Our goal was to not use cookies. Using the apache log is just a start, our goal is to drop this and use a packet sniffer - idea being you can run the program on your web server, but if you are in an environment where you don't want your webserver tied up stuffing things into mysql and running some nasty queries you could have another machine on the same hub as the server do the job. Cookies might get around your particular proxy becuase maybe you and your colleges are nice enough to allow cookies, but increasing amount of people are turning them off (atleast in a limited capacity). You're right, our technique won't destinguish between you behind your firewall, but if you all had distinct IPs and had cookies blocked our way would get you and cookies wouldn't.
Here's another way we looked at it. You have 10 people sharing the proxy, suppose 2 or 3 hit my site at the same time, you would be lumped together into a single session. Fine, then sessions do not mean a specific user hit the site, just a specific IP - that's all we really want. We know that IP could mean 10 people seeing things at a presentation, 10 behind a proxy, 10 who dial in, click, hang up, someone else dials into same IP, click, hang up... We know there's going to overlap and error, but in the grand scheme of things I'd think it'd all work out in the wash.
We just wanted a simple and as non-invasive as possible means to gather information. We see cookies as invase (not that I have a problem with them, but since some do then we have to treat them as such) and relying on the user to be as honest as possible.
This "problem" of proxies and such is actually eliminated entirely under the conditions the "Ask/." submitter described - "authenticated-user" which I presume to be some sort of login that can be linked to the session transactions. If you login to a site and I tie that login to my database updates then my UserSession table would have IP/ID/StartDate/StartTime/EndTime AND LoginID. Now you and your buddies using the same IP would (presumably) be using different logins. The people who use the dial in only to access the site, hang up, and have someone quickly jump on and hit the same site using the same IP - again, I presume would authenticate themselves.
I just completed a semester project for a database class where we parse the apache log from a web server into a database and then wrote some embeded SQL things in some C code to spit out statistics. One of our key things was to define a "session" for a user rather than just track "hits" on specific pages. By creating a session we can then look at the relation of pages on the site occuring in session. In other words we can ask, out of all sessions what percentage contained pages x and y (obviously expandable to x, y, z, etc... or x and z but not y, but you get the point). We implemented the session like this:
Read a line in.
Look up the IP address and time in the session information.
IF that IP does not exist, make a new session.
IF that IP does exist:
Is the time we just read within (you define) minutes of the current end time in the database for the last session?
Yes: Set end time of this session to the time just read in.
No: create a new session (same IP, but session ID is just one greater than the last)
For example, someone loads just one page from your site, then they would have an row in the session information table with their IP and a session ID of 0 and their start and end time would be the same. If they load a page again (then there would be another line in the apache log for this) within the time you set then the end time of that session is just set to the time of the most recent load of a page in that session. We have another table called PageSession where we list the IP, session ID, and page ID for all pages accessed in the session. Note: we distinguished between html, htm, txt, php, etc... content and other (jpg, gif, mpg, etc...) into different tables so we can query just html info or just picture info.
Other than IP we don't "authenticate" the user. We put in place the means to try to weed out dial-up users vs. static IP users, but this is by no means a well implemented as of now thing since it relies on knowing the domain names of dial-up ISPs or looking for keywords like "dial" in the hostname of a page from a known ISP that has several types of connection. With that asside, I don't know what means you have your authentication, but I don't see why your authentication couldn't be tied into (or inplace of) our use of IP to denote a specfic user.
Our initial goal of the project was just to look at date and time info about the sessions with the extension of page x, y, and not z (hehe, "not z") reports available from our design. Part of the problem with looking for a corelation between pages visited on your site during a session (and referal URL stuff, too) is simple data mining algorithms usually have a threshold in there to look for "interesting" relationships. You would supply an expected percentage for the number of sessions involving certain items. For example, if your main page links only to a sub page then you'd expect a high degree of relationship between those, but if a page burried deep down links to no pages it might be interesting to see how a person got to it. A tricky thing this threshold is, but the info you get about unexpected things is amazing.
I recall an anecdote about supermarkets looking for unexpected item sales and they found out that there was a higher than expected percentage of people buying beer and diapers on a Friday. It is suspected that men were doing the shopping at this time and had to get some things for the family and they had their own priorities... Supermarkets have it easy since people tend to buy all of their items in one transaction, the web is a gimmey-now-one-at-a-time type thing so defining a session is also an art, and I'd suspect would vary greatly depending on your site's content, target audience, bandwidth, etc...
Well, I guess I should end my rambling as tomorrow evening I have to give a presentation on this project and end my semester (finals are next week). Hope there is some nugget of info in there that helps!
I caught on the local 11 O'Clock news that some local highschool students were in Fla. to see the launch because they were sending some Soy Beans up for an experiement. I just looked all over the website of said news site and I couldn't find an applicable reference. But this shows that the students aren't just working on the satelite of this mission.
I volunteer to go up into space and conduct a scientific experiment to determine whether a 2 week vacation in space increases or decreases the productivity of an opensource programmer upon return to earth.
To make that more towards the realm of science, you'd need a control person or group. Depending on what you're testing, lack of human interaction, some sort of weightlessness impacting code openness, typing speed, who knows... you'd want your control group to experience something similar only without that which you are testing. So, if you're going of the weighlessness impacts coding, you'd need to lock some people up in a small place, limit their diet to things rehydrated, limit their interaction with outsiders.... oh wait, that sounds like most coders lives I know... drat.
A) I'm not the one who is doing this, so
B) I don't know if they are running some variant on NT.
C) Presume worst case and it's infact 9x allowing students to circumvent the login process and just get to a desktop and run apps, does that not prevent SMS from running and intern preventing the underlying "bad" apps to run?
I consider myself moderately unique in that my shirt size is an extra medium. I don't know many other people who take an extra medium, but if the shirt companies make 'em then I can't be fully unique.
Either something is unique or it's not, by crikey! Soon we'll have things described as "marginally special"
Well, at the local food store the manager often has things that are getting old on special... oh, you were talking about marginally...
or "slightly dead."
Ever see the Princess Bride? Wesley was not all dead when they took him to Miracle Max's....
Do you have linkage to info about that tale? If I were to reference it conversation saying a CNN article told me so sounds way better than a/. poster told me so. However, I think tabloid TV (read: eXtrak, ET, etc...) probably ranks some where below/.
First off, I'm not a windows person, I'm Unix, so maybe my question seems dumb, but does SMS allow for setting times that the apps can and can not run? I gather from the poster that email is ok, just so long as it's not during the designated class times. If you had a database of the schedules you could just query all students who are in classes that are not study halls (oh, and plant an Easter egg that they can email during gym, why not?) and set those apps to not be able to run from like 1 minute before class bell to 1 minute after. But does SMS support these timed things? It's kinda my understanding SMS needs an SQL database just to run so I guess the existnace of the needed schedule dbase would be there, it's just the time that gets me.
The equation editor program thing in star office allows you to type in equations, and you can type into your paper an equation and then highlight it and click to insert an equation, thus tranforming your text into the equation. Consider this string that makes the obvious pretty G(z):
G(z) =
{sum from {n>=0} left( 4^n + 6 right) z^n + 10z + 13 } over {left( 1 - p_1 z right) left( 1 - p_2 z right)}
~=~
{ left( 4^0 + 6 right) z^0 + left(4 + 6 right) z + sum from {n>=2} left( 4^n + 6 right) z^n + 10z + 13 } over {left( 1 - p_1 z right) left( 1 - p_2 z right)}
Put that into star office equation editor thing-e and enjoy...
Woz probably had the biggest impact on the computer industry via hacking. Err phreaking... But anyway, a history of Apple cannot leave out Woz and his blue box. Dont know of any book about apple but thats the most major "hacking" event in computer science I know if.
Bright people do bright things. How did Woz getting free phone calls alter computer science? Did he work on the apple hardware to further his blue boxing? As I recall, No. I'll grant you a history of Apple cannot leave out Woz and his blue box and maybe a history of hacking should discuss such a notable person, but how did his phreaking alone alter computer science?
Like Ratbert42, I'm assuming that you mean you want references for the security aspects of hacking. Hacking is a wide open term, but as for hacking security, the above give an excellent overview (except the wretched Takedown, which is a very sensationalized account).
Thanks for the tips. What I'm seeing on the literary side are works of specific incidents. While helpful greatly for this talk I'm concerned that there isn't a work on just say the hacks of the 1980s. Pickup a HS history book and there are chapters for decades and centuries and there are many books on the specific incidents in the students' library. Obviously a person reading the generalized book might get insprired to read deeper into particular subjects and that's where the topical books come in handy, but for the subject of hacking I can't name a title that does the job of "over view without being silly." Certainly there will be issues of "why was this left out?" and conversely "why was that put in?" for any historical work but wouldn't a book that spans differing flavors in a general sense and gets the facts straight be beneficial to a class discussing computer security, social sciences, or even just plain history of technology?
If you want a look from the "other side", you can purcahce all 17 years of back issues of 2600 Magazine for $300. I would also seriously suggest walking down to your local 2600 meeting. It's *very* touch and go as to whether or not you'll meet anyone decent, but I've heard that the New York City meeting is generally very nice. emmanuel, the editor of 2600, is very approachable, and makes for a very literate interview, and hate him or love him, he was there for many of the key points of security hacker history.
As for 2600 meetings they are anything but within walking distance and plans are afoot to start a local one, thanks for thinking about it however. I have met Emmanuel and I have seen the spark behind the eyes that you have hinted at, "as I spoke to him I got the impression there is definately something there with that man" and he has been very helpful to me already on this and other projects. But he is just like a specific book - he knows a great deal about this or that and can put things into his own spin, he is however more approaching the general knowledge base that I think I feel the world is lacking. Unfortunitly Emmanuel doesn't come in paper back form and doesn't have an ISBN number or card catalog entry for all those in the globe to "read."
Check out Steve Jackson (of the publishing company Steve Jackson Games) for an interesting perspective of what happens when a "hacker crackdown" goes wrong. It's all detailed in the book "Hacker Crackdown", but I've always found that going to the source can elicit some interesting quotes... and the ability to say in a presentation "as I spoke to him, I got the impression".
I haven't dealt with Mr. Jackson, but I have poked at the website and I saw the feedback page - do you have a more direct email address to suggest?
I take it that you haven't yet come across this [linkage to movie "Hackers"] documentary on the subject.
A) I do have the DVD but I use it to show others how even with input from Emmanuel Goldstein (editor of 2600) people can still get it WAY wrong.
B) A few decent TV shows have appeared on PBS and TLC. Frontline had an episode (taped, appearing again this Thursday, and I have linkage) so did Nova about Bletchley Park (taped and I have linkage) and I think there was a TLC show called "Hackers: Computer Outlaws" of which I only have linkage, not the show.
This reminds me of the the Architects Sketch by John Cleese and Graham Chapman from "Monty Python's Flying Circus", 20 October 1970 (script) where these architects are showing off their design for a rather unusual building... it starts off:
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....
I have a DVD-RAM drive, and although it's great for my needs (storing mpegs from a survelance camera) the media is locked in what are basically fat 5.25" floppy disk like jackets - read: won't go well in your PS2, etc... Drive works great and the media prices sure have come down, but I don't think this product's feature set intersects your needs.
If the site has a problem serving up content (and I sure see that it does) why not link to the Google Cache instead? Ok, so maybe the links on the cache don't like back to the cache, but you don't have to work too hard to get the links added to the URL.
I recently took a Java class and the prof complained and complained about the lack of "good" java texts and how he might just have to resort to writing his own. The course had used Deitel and Dietel the semester before I took it, but was stopped due to the overwhelming number of errata in the text. When I took it we used Kalin's Object Oriented Programming in Java however the two or three times I used the text I saw errors on a few pages.
If you are looking for only a discussion of OOP topics and not bound to a particular language...
I kinda think that's the topic the person was really looking for, but I'm not sure since he does list the few languages taught. Maybe the person hasn't decided what track they wish to take (OO SE or coding), but I can throw in my $0.02 on this subject. I've taken several OO design and SE classes. This one has changed since I took it, it now uses the Booch book referenced in an earlier post as well as a UML book. Back in my day (man I'm feeling old here) we had a really bad small talk book, but it did drive home selecting a good hirarchy of classes. This other one has also changed since I took it, it now uses a UML book as well. When I had the second class we used Schach's Classical and Object-Oriented Software Engineering (I later used that text in some silly MSIS Grad class I took for giggles). There are a few editions I beleive of that book, we used the one with Java and UML and included a CD with Popkin's System Architech 2001. The Schrach book is an OK book from the SE standpoint, but I think the ordering is a little out of order.
Maybe they'd like to toss all of this out and teach formal software design techniques and include methodologies for proving source code meets the design and things like DFD-SPECS and SPECS-C++, nah, maybe you're right, they probably just want to teach Java's objects to the kids who know C structs.
Unless you make like a specific system backup point where the system is in a completely safe state you know you can return to, wouldn't you still have to be concerned with cascading roll backs?
Hmmm, as soon as you talked about rolling back "trashed" files I immediately began thinking about some sort of optimistic validation protocol where transactions would attempt to write to the same file and one would roll back (like based on time stamp) but then I caught you just want a restore point for users and I'm wondering why the overhead? Why not just a backup like to external tape, or, as you suggest, added internal HD locations for backup?
Ok, so maybe having a file system handle the restoration rather than you might seem easy, but how hard is backup software?
Seriously, I think it would only be useful if you could couple it with a RAID-like (I know it wouldn't be true RAID) system so if the power for whatever reason (Power outage, UPS goes bad, battery dies) you info wuold still be there, maybe a RAM-drive that does nightly/hourly back ups...
Why not just make a 40GB HD with 40GB cache? When an access is made on the same data already accessed it would just be found in the cache on the device, and (depending on your write-through, etc.. technique) this should be the same as a platter based divice in "RAID" with a RAM based device. You would have the same lag at initial load as the platter based device but your load time from that point on should only decrease. The data on the HD cache should be able to remained cached following the system soft-reboot, and possibly with a switch on the side, remain during a hard-reboot (useful for if you want to change the sound card and don't mind the pennies worth of electricity used) or turned OFF for when you go on vacation and there is no need...
Heck, I'm sure you could get a nice cache hit ratio with only 10GB of cache on the 40GB HD. Those of you with 40 gigers, think about how much of that data is just mp3s and iso's and how much is OS, browser, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Our goal was to not use cookies. Using the apache log is just a start, our goal is to drop this and use a packet sniffer - idea being you can run the program on your web server, but if you are in an environment where you don't want your webserver tied up stuffing things into mysql and running some nasty queries you could have another machine on the same hub as the server do the job. Cookies might get around your particular proxy becuase maybe you and your colleges are nice enough to allow cookies, but increasing amount of people are turning them off (atleast in a limited capacity). You're right, our technique won't destinguish between you behind your firewall, but if you all had distinct IPs and had cookies blocked our way would get you and cookies wouldn't.
/." submitter described - "authenticated-user" which I presume to be some sort of login that can be linked to the session transactions. If you login to a site and I tie that login to my database updates then my UserSession table would have IP/ID/StartDate/StartTime/EndTime AND LoginID. Now you and your buddies using the same IP would (presumably) be using different logins. The people who use the dial in only to access the site, hang up, and have someone quickly jump on and hit the same site using the same IP - again, I presume would authenticate themselves.
Here's another way we looked at it. You have 10 people sharing the proxy, suppose 2 or 3 hit my site at the same time, you would be lumped together into a single session. Fine, then sessions do not mean a specific user hit the site, just a specific IP - that's all we really want. We know that IP could mean 10 people seeing things at a presentation, 10 behind a proxy, 10 who dial in, click, hang up, someone else dials into same IP, click, hang up... We know there's going to overlap and error, but in the grand scheme of things I'd think it'd all work out in the wash.
We just wanted a simple and as non-invasive as possible means to gather information. We see cookies as invase (not that I have a problem with them, but since some do then we have to treat them as such) and relying on the user to be as honest as possible.
This "problem" of proxies and such is actually eliminated entirely under the conditions the "Ask
The aluminum pyramid hat helps keep them away when I...
For those who would like this garb, but are too afraid to ask how to make one, just check here. (I just love step 7)
I just completed a semester project for a database class where we parse the apache log from a web server into a database and then wrote some embeded SQL things in some C code to spit out statistics. One of our key things was to define a "session" for a user rather than just track "hits" on specific pages. By creating a session we can then look at the relation of pages on the site occuring in session. In other words we can ask, out of all sessions what percentage contained pages x and y (obviously expandable to x, y, z, etc... or x and z but not y, but you get the point). We implemented the session like this:
Read a line in.
Look up the IP address and time in the session information.
IF that IP does not exist, make a new session.
IF that IP does exist:
Is the time we just read within (you define) minutes of the current end time in the database for the last session?
Yes: Set end time of this session to the time just read in.
No: create a new session (same IP, but session ID is just one greater than the last)
For example, someone loads just one page from your site, then they would have an row in the session information table with their IP and a session ID of 0 and their start and end time would be the same. If they load a page again (then there would be another line in the apache log for this) within the time you set then the end time of that session is just set to the time of the most recent load of a page in that session. We have another table called PageSession where we list the IP, session ID, and page ID for all pages accessed in the session. Note: we distinguished between html, htm, txt, php, etc... content and other (jpg, gif, mpg, etc...) into different tables so we can query just html info or just picture info.
Other than IP we don't "authenticate" the user. We put in place the means to try to weed out dial-up users vs. static IP users, but this is by no means a well implemented as of now thing since it relies on knowing the domain names of dial-up ISPs or looking for keywords like "dial" in the hostname of a page from a known ISP that has several types of connection. With that asside, I don't know what means you have your authentication, but I don't see why your authentication couldn't be tied into (or inplace of) our use of IP to denote a specfic user.
Our initial goal of the project was just to look at date and time info about the sessions with the extension of page x, y, and not z (hehe, "not z") reports available from our design. Part of the problem with looking for a corelation between pages visited on your site during a session (and referal URL stuff, too) is simple data mining algorithms usually have a threshold in there to look for "interesting" relationships. You would supply an expected percentage for the number of sessions involving certain items. For example, if your main page links only to a sub page then you'd expect a high degree of relationship between those, but if a page burried deep down links to no pages it might be interesting to see how a person got to it. A tricky thing this threshold is, but the info you get about unexpected things is amazing.
I recall an anecdote about supermarkets looking for unexpected item sales and they found out that there was a higher than expected percentage of people buying beer and diapers on a Friday. It is suspected that men were doing the shopping at this time and had to get some things for the family and they had their own priorities... Supermarkets have it easy since people tend to buy all of their items in one transaction, the web is a gimmey-now-one-at-a-time type thing so defining a session is also an art, and I'd suspect would vary greatly depending on your site's content, target audience, bandwidth, etc...
Well, I guess I should end my rambling as tomorrow evening I have to give a presentation on this project and end my semester (finals are next week). Hope there is some nugget of info in there that helps!
I caught on the local 11 O'Clock news that some local highschool students were in Fla. to see the launch because they were sending some Soy Beans up for an experiement. I just looked all over the website of said news site and I couldn't find an applicable reference. But this shows that the students aren't just working on the satelite of this mission.
I volunteer to go up into space and conduct a scientific experiment to determine whether a 2 week vacation in space increases or decreases the productivity of an opensource programmer upon return to earth.
To make that more towards the realm of science, you'd need a control person or group. Depending on what you're testing, lack of human interaction, some sort of weightlessness impacting code openness, typing speed, who knows... you'd want your control group to experience something similar only without that which you are testing. So, if you're going of the weighlessness impacts coding, you'd need to lock some people up in a small place, limit their diet to things rehydrated, limit their interaction with outsiders.... oh wait, that sounds like most coders lives I know... drat.
I think its pretty reasonable for someone to be patriotic, don't you?
patriot - one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests.
Last time I checked, Africa was not a country, it was more of a continent on which several contries have set up shop.
A) I'm not the one who is doing this, so
B) I don't know if they are running some variant on NT.
C) Presume worst case and it's infact 9x allowing students to circumvent the login process and just get to a desktop and run apps, does that not prevent SMS from running and intern preventing the underlying "bad" apps to run?
WTF does "moderately unique" mean?
I consider myself moderately unique in that my shirt size is an extra medium. I don't know many other people who take an extra medium, but if the shirt companies make 'em then I can't be fully unique.
Either something is unique or it's not, by crikey! Soon we'll have things described as "marginally special"
Well, at the local food store the manager often has things that are getting old on special... oh, you were talking about marginally...
or "slightly dead."
Ever see the Princess Bride? Wesley was not all dead when they took him to Miracle Max's....
Saltine or Ritz?
What kinds of topings did you have in mind? The cheese variety or maybe something along the lines of Seafood Sald?
Oh wait, maybe I need to askin h4x0r speek:
541+in3 0r R1+2?
Only on slashdot can one call social interaction social engineering :)
/. - it came from someplace else.
You should read the 2600 magazine a little more often - it's not just a term used on
Do you have linkage to info about that tale? If I were to reference it conversation saying a CNN article told me so sounds way better than a /. poster told me so. However, I think tabloid TV (read: eXtrak, ET, etc...) probably ranks some where below /.
First off, I'm not a windows person, I'm Unix, so maybe my question seems dumb, but does SMS allow for setting times that the apps can and can not run? I gather from the poster that email is ok, just so long as it's not during the designated class times. If you had a database of the schedules you could just query all students who are in classes that are not study halls (oh, and plant an Easter egg that they can email during gym, why not?) and set those apps to not be able to run from like 1 minute before class bell to 1 minute after. But does SMS support these timed things? It's kinda my understanding SMS needs an SQL database just to run so I guess the existnace of the needed schedule dbase would be there, it's just the time that gets me.
Put that into star office equation editor thing-e and enjoy...
Woz probably had the biggest impact on the computer industry via hacking. Err phreaking... But anyway, a history of Apple cannot leave out Woz and his blue box. Dont know of any book about apple but thats the most major "hacking" event in computer science I know if.
Bright people do bright things. How did Woz getting free phone calls alter computer science? Did he work on the apple hardware to further his blue boxing? As I recall, No. I'll grant you a history of Apple cannot leave out Woz and his blue box and maybe a history of hacking should discuss such a notable person, but how did his phreaking alone alter computer science?
Like Ratbert42, I'm assuming that you mean you want references for the security aspects of hacking. Hacking is a wide open term, but as for hacking security, the above give an excellent overview (except the wretched Takedown, which is a very sensationalized account).
Thanks for the tips. What I'm seeing on the literary side are works of specific incidents. While helpful greatly for this talk I'm concerned that there isn't a work on just say the hacks of the 1980s. Pickup a HS history book and there are chapters for decades and centuries and there are many books on the specific incidents in the students' library. Obviously a person reading the generalized book might get insprired to read deeper into particular subjects and that's where the topical books come in handy, but for the subject of hacking I can't name a title that does the job of "over view without being silly." Certainly there will be issues of "why was this left out?" and conversely "why was that put in?" for any historical work but wouldn't a book that spans differing flavors in a general sense and gets the facts straight be beneficial to a class discussing computer security, social sciences, or even just plain history of technology?
If you want a look from the "other side", you can purcahce all 17 years of back issues of 2600 Magazine for $300. I would also seriously suggest walking down to your local 2600 meeting. It's *very* touch and go as to whether or not you'll meet anyone decent, but I've heard that the New York City meeting is generally very nice. emmanuel, the editor of 2600, is very approachable, and makes for a very literate interview, and hate him or love him, he was there for many of the key points of security hacker history.
As for 2600 meetings they are anything but within walking distance and plans are afoot to start a local one, thanks for thinking about it however. I have met Emmanuel and I have seen the spark behind the eyes that you have hinted at, "as I spoke to him I got the impression there is definately something there with that man" and he has been very helpful to me already on this and other projects. But he is just like a specific book - he knows a great deal about this or that and can put things into his own spin, he is however more approaching the general knowledge base that I think I feel the world is lacking. Unfortunitly Emmanuel doesn't come in paper back form and doesn't have an ISBN number or card catalog entry for all those in the globe to "read."
Check out Steve Jackson (of the publishing company Steve Jackson Games) for an interesting perspective of what happens when a "hacker crackdown" goes wrong. It's all detailed in the book "Hacker Crackdown", but I've always found that going to the source can elicit some interesting quotes... and the ability to say in a presentation "as I spoke to him, I got the impression".
I haven't dealt with Mr. Jackson, but I have poked at the website and I saw the feedback page - do you have a more direct email address to suggest?
Thanks again for the info...
I take it that you haven't yet come across this [linkage to movie "Hackers"] documentary on the subject.
A) I do have the DVD but I use it to show others how even with input from Emmanuel Goldstein (editor of 2600) people can still get it WAY wrong.
B) A few decent TV shows have appeared on PBS and TLC. Frontline had an episode (taped, appearing again this Thursday, and I have linkage) so did Nova about Bletchley Park (taped and I have linkage) and I think there was a TLC show called "Hackers: Computer Outlaws" of which I only have linkage, not the show.
This reminds me of the the Architects Sketch by John Cleese and Graham Chapman from "Monty Python's Flying Circus", 20 October 1970 (script) where these architects are showing off their design for a rather unusual building... it starts off:
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....
I have a DVD-RAM drive, and although it's great for my needs (storing mpegs from a survelance camera) the media is locked in what are basically fat 5.25" floppy disk like jackets - read: won't go well in your PS2, etc... Drive works great and the media prices sure have come down, but I don't think this product's feature set intersects your needs.
who DOESNT have a spare holocaust cloak?
Ever stop over at Miracle Max's? He said he gave his to this really big fellow - apparently he was on the brute squad.
Nah, Jerry Lewis... Fraun-Leavan!
Those pesky fat zero's are what's clogging up the communications, compared to those sleek 1's that just fit down the wires so easily.
If you are worried about zero saturation, do check out this site.
If the site has a problem serving up content (and I sure see that it does) why not link to the Google Cache instead? Ok, so maybe the links on the cache don't like back to the cache, but you don't have to work too hard to get the links added to the URL.
Deitel and Dietel's Java texts are also popular.
I recently took a Java class and the prof complained and complained about the lack of "good" java texts and how he might just have to resort to writing his own. The course had used Deitel and Dietel the semester before I took it, but was stopped due to the overwhelming number of errata in the text. When I took it we used Kalin's Object Oriented Programming in Java however the two or three times I used the text I saw errors on a few pages.
If you are looking for only a discussion of OOP topics and not bound to a particular language...
I kinda think that's the topic the person was really looking for, but I'm not sure since he does list the few languages taught. Maybe the person hasn't decided what track they wish to take (OO SE or coding), but I can throw in my $0.02 on this subject. I've taken several OO design and SE classes. This one has changed since I took it, it now uses the Booch book referenced in an earlier post as well as a UML book. Back in my day (man I'm feeling old here) we had a really bad small talk book, but it did drive home selecting a good hirarchy of classes. This other one has also changed since I took it, it now uses a UML book as well. When I had the second class we used Schach's Classical and Object-Oriented Software Engineering (I later used that text in some silly MSIS Grad class I took for giggles). There are a few editions I beleive of that book, we used the one with Java and UML and included a CD with Popkin's System Architech 2001. The Schrach book is an OK book from the SE standpoint, but I think the ordering is a little out of order.
Maybe they'd like to toss all of this out and teach formal software design techniques and include methodologies for proving source code meets the design and things like DFD-SPECS and SPECS-C++, nah, maybe you're right, they probably just want to teach Java's objects to the kids who know C structs.
Unless you make like a specific system backup point where the system is in a completely safe state you know you can return to, wouldn't you still have to be concerned with cascading roll backs?
Hmmm, as soon as you talked about rolling back "trashed" files I immediately began thinking about some sort of optimistic validation protocol where transactions would attempt to write to the same file and one would roll back (like based on time stamp) but then I caught you just want a restore point for users and I'm wondering why the overhead? Why not just a backup like to external tape, or, as you suggest, added internal HD locations for backup?
Ok, so maybe having a file system handle the restoration rather than you might seem easy, but how hard is backup software?
Seriously, I think it would only be useful if you could couple it with a RAID-like (I know it wouldn't be true RAID) system so if the power for whatever reason (Power outage, UPS goes bad, battery dies) you info wuold still be there, maybe a RAM-drive that does nightly/hourly back ups...
Why not just make a 40GB HD with 40GB cache? When an access is made on the same data already accessed it would just be found in the cache on the device, and (depending on your write-through, etc.. technique) this should be the same as a platter based divice in "RAID" with a RAM based device. You would have the same lag at initial load as the platter based device but your load time from that point on should only decrease. The data on the HD cache should be able to remained cached following the system soft-reboot, and possibly with a switch on the side, remain during a hard-reboot (useful for if you want to change the sound card and don't mind the pennies worth of electricity used) or turned OFF for when you go on vacation and there is no need...
Heck, I'm sure you could get a nice cache hit ratio with only 10GB of cache on the 40GB HD. Those of you with 40 gigers, think about how much of that data is just mp3s and iso's and how much is OS, browser, etc...