So it's for sale is it? I seem to recall at the time that their hopes hinged on making it a jurisdiction for legal gambling and other commerce that was heavily regulated in other jurisdictions. So now they want to try their hand at web hosting, do they? Interesting...
And we talked about warning labels at one point because some of the ones on his products are so silly. For example, "Do not rest top of ladder against power line(s)."
He was telling me that within a few years, nobody will be manufacturing ladders in the United States anymore, and it will become impossible to buy a ladder. The reason? There are so many frivolous lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors and retailers of ladders that the cost of defending them and/or insurance against claims will make it a money losing proposition.
Once you get beyond the overhead of 100-200 lines of code shared by all COBOL programs (ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, etc.), some single lines of COBOL can perform some powerhouse tasks. It's not all "ADD SUBTOTAL AND TAXES GIVING TOTAL" type stuff.
Now, as to speed: remember that COBOL compilers have become pretty damned efficient over 40+ years. I have seen 1,000 line COBOL programs compile into 24K executables (that's K not M), all of it optimized native machine language. And since COBOL programs are by nature procedural, not too much dead code escapes notice and stays in. I have seen COBOL programs running on a 25 year old 8-bit processor (IBM S/38) rip through a million row table in less time than a modern server would take using Java code hooked up to PostgreSQL (with all its abstraction layers, etc.) - COBOL, done properly, is anything but slow.
a lot like the terrain on Baffin Island, another arctic island which underwent intense glaciation in the last ice age - and emerged from it due to slightly milder climate. This picture of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island is likely quite representative of what would be under Greenland's ice. Minus, of course, the moss/lichen/pioneer plants.
I live in a farmhouse in rural Ontario Canada. Gas heating is not an option, and oil delivery is likely not possible to an area this remote. To give you an idea, my only acceptable Internet service option is a Tachyon dish setup.
Heating the house with electricity adds $400/month to the electricity bill in the winter. But... I can buy a full cord of firewood here for $30 (or chop it myself for free on my land). Burning one cord of wood per month in a high efficiency wood stove cuts the power bill by about $225/month.
Compared to heating, all other electricity costs are minimal. Which is a good thing probably - 11 computers, 3 always on.
I have a dozen dedicated servers including a couple of nifty Xeon duals in three colocation data centres across North America and bandwidth to burn. Does this qualify as infrastructure?
Let's make this open source and see what's there. If there's a half decent engine behind it, then nothing's to stop one of us with the time, resources, or the inclination, from forking it and having something worthwhile pop out the other end.
Bully tactics involving a dispute over this or that piece of Internet real estate are nothing new - but historically the item in dispute has usually been a domain name rather than something like a search engine ranking.
I am reminded of the WIPO decision a few years back where they declined to transfer "armani.com" to the trademark holder Georgio Armani, deciding instead to leave it with A.R. Mani, a Vancouver small businessman who had used it for years. Ultimately, I am certain he decided sell it to Georgio Armani for a healthy sum, but it is nice to know that these things do not always come down on the side of the big corporation (the bully in this case).
It is very tough to find good COBOL people now...
on
100 Years of Grace Hopper
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The university I went to stopped teaching it about 20 years ago, and most programmers of COBOL with much in the way of practical real world development experience retired long ago. In fact, a lot of them came out of retirement for a few months or a year prior to Y2K because the money offered was so good.
Today, there are still COBOL jobs advertised, and they largely go unfilled. It could have something to do with the fact that there are so few people remaining with the skills, and something to do with the fact that many of them are with banks who are notoriously cheap on IT salaries. The few remaining good COBOL people on the market go into contract positions that usually begin at about $70/hour. I kid you not.
It's a lot of typing, writing COBOL, and the code is at times boringly simple, but if someone is out of work and seriously looking for an IT position, learning it would not hurt. I predict there will still be some call for it 20 years from now.
Considering how tough it was to prove the neutrino's existence - yet we still managed to do that decades ago. This one must have been like trying to find a flea's egg on a black cat... in the dark... without knowing the location of the cat... using an orbital telescope.
The parent to this is correct: CBC is subsidized to an incredible sum by the Federal government. I am not sure of the figure now, but just a few years ago it was over $1 billion. Out of this amount, they manage to do such things as make sure there is a French TV signal available in every part of the country (even where there are no French speakers to speak of), produce arts programming that is so far into left field I suspect they draw an audience in the low thousands, and broadcast news which is so completely biased towards the left and socialism that there is no semblance of balanced coverage. Oh - and provide union jobs for a crew of 30 where all they need is an announcer and a person with a video camera.
So they want us to pay for more CBC do they? Well, I hope it's better than the last white elephant they forced into the basic cable bundles - "The French Parliamentary Channel". I just wish we could one day get a government with the guts to cut off most of their subsidy and let them sink or swim based on the value of their programming. And if they sink, well, let them go back to what they stated with (and still do very well): make sure that there is one Canadian radio station available in any settled part of the country.
I am using metric because this is a question of physics and the wavelength of light. Physics uses metric exclusively. Also, outside of the United States, the world overwhelmingly uses metric measure - and I am not in the United States.
DPI or dpmm, the basic facts have not been altered, nor has the conclusion: a scanner using visible light can't pick up objects this small. Work this out yourself, using your treasured "imperial" measure if you would like - but if you are going to measure the speed of light in "furlongs per fortnight", try to be accurate.:P
Which is what this would have to do - scan markings on the paper that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Why do you think the max an optical microscope can magnify is 2,000x, and beyond that you need electron microscopes?
Okay, let's look at some math. First, calculate the number of bits that must be stored to reliably archive 256GB:
256*1024*1024*1024*8*(10/8) = 2.749 * 10^12 [allowing for 25% extra - error detection/correction]
Now, the area of a sheet of paper in mm^2:
210 mm * 297 mm = 6.237 * 10^4
Let's make an assumption: it would be tough for a scanner to correctly identify more than 256 colors (blues especially are problematic). So, going by a pixel based method, we can store 8 bits per pixel, so the number of pixels needed is:
2.749 * 10^12 / 8 = 3.436 * 10^11
Pixels per mm^2 will therefore be:
3.436 * 10^11 / 6.237 * 10^4 = 5.509 * 10^6
Taking the square root of this figure and inverting will give us the size of one side of a pixel in mm, so:
This is smaller than the wavelengths of some frequencies of visible light, therefore a large portion of the spectrum is gone in terms of colors that can be used. Eliminate these colors and you increase density yet again, requiring you eliminate more colours. By the time you get to monochromatic (black white), which you will, the size is smaller than the wavelength of ANY visible light.
So, for this storage density, either you are scanning in ultraviolet light (and printing using an appropriate ink) to get a small enough wavelength, or you have thrown out light all together and you are using an electron microscope as your scanner. (Note - ever see electron microscope images in color? Can't exist unless colorized).
Fairly clever hoax though - if they had stuck with, say, 16GB then it would not have edged into the impossible.
Considering that most organized spam campaigns originate in Russia these days, and are run by Russian organized crime, then I would suggest that simply getting your day in court to plead guilty would be your best possible outcome. More likely, I suspect, is that beating up a spammer is likely to get you very dead very fast. Especially if it turns out to be one of their key technical people.
Unless I miss my guess, Google will continue towards its stated objective of making all the world's information searchable and retrievable. Want something archived, Google will take care of it. And if Google fails, my suspicion is the entity that takes their place will take it on.
Considering the incredible gains OSS has made over the past few years, and the fact that it's taking a bite out of the M$ Internet development and deployment platforms, I'd expect nothing less from the guy. Perhaps he genuinely believes that he can force a majority of Linux users out there to deploy a M$ sanctioned and supported Linux distro.
One thing that he'll never be able to change, though. It generally takes considerably more technical skill to create a web application and implement it with the M$ combo of ASP/MS SQL - whereas a weekend hacker can put somthing together in PHP/mySQL. As a result of this, the amount of OSS available, from blogs to full CMS and portal systems, in LAMP vs. M$ is about 8:1. Just check SourceForge or HotScripts. OSS is driving the past few years' explosion of dynamic content websites. Of course he thinks M$ is threatened. He should realize though that when you examine the history of the Internet (back to about 1982 or so), bullying has generally been counterproductive. Exhibit A: PirateBay.org (try a tracert - it's funny).
I have a phone number that sounds like two bars of a B-side Britney Spears track. Guess I had better let my stepson know not to phone me ever again from a bar - wouldn't want him to serve 14 years for asking for a ride home.
Guess this means the RIAA will compare a database of all phone numbers to a database of all existing music (perhaps in MIDI form) and have the $8,000 licensing fees added to the phone bill when a match is found.
I have used some and/or all of these in combination to good effect:
Scramble field names, so the INPUT named "comments" is actually for the email address, etc.
Multiple type="submit" buttons, all but the real one hidden using CSS, all in a random order on each page load
Non-intuitive action= names such as b41gzL924.php which are further generated by Javascript in the client browser from an obfuscated string
REFERRER games
Of these, singly, I have found obfuscating the name of the submit script for the FORM the most effective. The Javascript code is left as an exercise for the reader.
Only $378,000 each? C'mon, when the dust settles on this type of stuff, we know that $378,000 per lawyer won't even be close to the actual legal fees. Try adding at least one "0" to that figure. "We must prevent the proceeds of this lawsuit from being frittered away on the Plaintiffs."
I know more than a bit about electronics and electrical engineering, having spent part of my early career designing various gadgets. I have to wonder why all this fiasco with these electronic voting machines when it would be so very easy to simply build a small printer which uses a roll of paper (think cash register) inside to create a paper polling record.
It would not add substantially to the cost, and the small rolls of paper that resulted would be perfect in cases where a recount was demanded or required. Why the resistance? Make it too difficult to steal an election?
Slashdot Mirror
So it's for sale is it? I seem to recall at the time that their hopes hinged on making it a jurisdiction for legal gambling and other commerce that was heavily regulated in other jurisdictions. So now they want to try their hand at web hosting, do they? Interesting...
And we talked about warning labels at one point because some of the ones on his products are so silly. For example, "Do not rest top of ladder against power line(s)."
He was telling me that within a few years, nobody will be manufacturing ladders in the United States anymore, and it will become impossible to buy a ladder. The reason? There are so many frivolous lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors and retailers of ladders that the cost of defending them and/or insurance against claims will make it a money losing proposition.
Once you get beyond the overhead of 100-200 lines of code shared by all COBOL programs (ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, etc.), some single lines of COBOL can perform some powerhouse tasks. It's not all "ADD SUBTOTAL AND TAXES GIVING TOTAL" type stuff.
Now, as to speed: remember that COBOL compilers have become pretty damned efficient over 40+ years. I have seen 1,000 line COBOL programs compile into 24K executables (that's K not M), all of it optimized native machine language. And since COBOL programs are by nature procedural, not too much dead code escapes notice and stays in. I have seen COBOL programs running on a 25 year old 8-bit processor (IBM S/38) rip through a million row table in less time than a modern server would take using Java code hooked up to PostgreSQL (with all its abstraction layers, etc.) - COBOL, done properly, is anything but slow.
a lot like the terrain on Baffin Island, another arctic island which underwent intense glaciation in the last ice age - and emerged from it due to slightly milder climate. This picture of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island is likely quite representative of what would be under Greenland's ice. Minus, of course, the moss/lichen/pioneer plants.
I live in a farmhouse in rural Ontario Canada. Gas heating is not an option, and oil delivery is likely not possible to an area this remote. To give you an idea, my only acceptable Internet service option is a Tachyon dish setup.
Heating the house with electricity adds $400/month to the electricity bill in the winter. But... I can buy a full cord of firewood here for $30 (or chop it myself for free on my land). Burning one cord of wood per month in a high efficiency wood stove cuts the power bill by about $225/month.
Compared to heating, all other electricity costs are minimal. Which is a good thing probably - 11 computers, 3 always on.
I have a dozen dedicated servers including a couple of nifty Xeon duals in three colocation data centres across North America and bandwidth to burn. Does this qualify as infrastructure?
Let's make this open source and see what's there. If there's a half decent engine behind it, then nothing's to stop one of us with the time, resources, or the inclination, from forking it and having something worthwhile pop out the other end.
as is the case on many machines out there.
I wonder if a properly crafted email could launch this one simply by clicking "Reply". Insights, anyone?
PHP has security issues??!!!!
I'm not an explosives expert, but wouldn't just a tiny amount of RDX (Cyclonite) cause major mayhem?
Bully tactics involving a dispute over this or that piece of Internet real estate are nothing new - but historically the item in dispute has usually been a domain name rather than something like a search engine ranking.
I am reminded of the WIPO decision a few years back where they declined to transfer "armani.com" to the trademark holder Georgio Armani, deciding instead to leave it with A.R. Mani, a Vancouver small businessman who had used it for years. Ultimately, I am certain he decided sell it to Georgio Armani for a healthy sum, but it is nice to know that these things do not always come down on the side of the big corporation (the bully in this case).
The university I went to stopped teaching it about 20 years ago, and most programmers of COBOL with much in the way of practical real world development experience retired long ago. In fact, a lot of them came out of retirement for a few months or a year prior to Y2K because the money offered was so good.
Today, there are still COBOL jobs advertised, and they largely go unfilled. It could have something to do with the fact that there are so few people remaining with the skills, and something to do with the fact that many of them are with banks who are notoriously cheap on IT salaries. The few remaining good COBOL people on the market go into contract positions that usually begin at about $70/hour. I kid you not.
It's a lot of typing, writing COBOL, and the code is at times boringly simple, but if someone is out of work and seriously looking for an IT position, learning it would not hurt. I predict there will still be some call for it 20 years from now.
Considering how tough it was to prove the neutrino's existence - yet we still managed to do that decades ago. This one must have been like trying to find a flea's egg on a black cat... in the dark... without knowing the location of the cat... using an orbital telescope.
The parent to this is correct: CBC is subsidized to an incredible sum by the Federal government. I am not sure of the figure now, but just a few years ago it was over $1 billion. Out of this amount, they manage to do such things as make sure there is a French TV signal available in every part of the country (even where there are no French speakers to speak of), produce arts programming that is so far into left field I suspect they draw an audience in the low thousands, and broadcast news which is so completely biased towards the left and socialism that there is no semblance of balanced coverage. Oh - and provide union jobs for a crew of 30 where all they need is an announcer and a person with a video camera.
So they want us to pay for more CBC do they? Well, I hope it's better than the last white elephant they forced into the basic cable bundles - "The French Parliamentary Channel". I just wish we could one day get a government with the guts to cut off most of their subsidy and let them sink or swim based on the value of their programming. And if they sink, well, let them go back to what they stated with (and still do very well): make sure that there is one Canadian radio station available in any settled part of the country.
I am using metric because this is a question of physics and the wavelength of light. Physics uses metric exclusively. Also, outside of the United States, the world overwhelmingly uses metric measure - and I am not in the United States.
:P
DPI or dpmm, the basic facts have not been altered, nor has the conclusion: a scanner using visible light can't pick up objects this small. Work this out yourself, using your treasured "imperial" measure if you would like - but if you are going to measure the speed of light in "furlongs per fortnight", try to be accurate.
Which is what this would have to do - scan markings on the paper that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Why do you think the max an optical microscope can magnify is 2,000x, and beyond that you need electron microscopes?
Okay, let's look at some math. First, calculate the number of bits that must be stored to reliably archive 256GB:
.426 micro meters = 426 nm
256*1024*1024*1024*8*(10/8) = 2.749 * 10^12 [allowing for 25% extra - error detection/correction]
Now, the area of a sheet of paper in mm^2:
210 mm * 297 mm = 6.237 * 10^4
Let's make an assumption: it would be tough for a scanner to correctly identify more than 256 colors (blues especially are problematic). So, going by a pixel based method, we can store 8 bits per pixel, so the number of pixels needed is:
2.749 * 10^12 / 8 = 3.436 * 10^11
Pixels per mm^2 will therefore be:
3.436 * 10^11 / 6.237 * 10^4 = 5.509 * 10^6
Taking the square root of this figure and inverting will give us the size of one side of a pixel in mm, so:
1 / (5.509 * 10^6)^.5 = 4.260 * 10^-4 mm =
This is smaller than the wavelengths of some frequencies of visible light, therefore a large portion of the spectrum is gone in terms of colors that can be used. Eliminate these colors and you increase density yet again, requiring you eliminate more colours. By the time you get to monochromatic (black white), which you will, the size is smaller than the wavelength of ANY visible light.
So, for this storage density, either you are scanning in ultraviolet light (and printing using an appropriate ink) to get a small enough wavelength, or you have thrown out light all together and you are using an electron microscope as your scanner. (Note - ever see electron microscope images in color? Can't exist unless colorized).
Fairly clever hoax though - if they had stuck with, say, 16GB then it would not have edged into the impossible.
Considering that most organized spam campaigns originate in Russia these days, and are run by Russian organized crime, then I would suggest that simply getting your day in court to plead guilty would be your best possible outcome. More likely, I suspect, is that beating up a spammer is likely to get you very dead very fast. Especially if it turns out to be one of their key technical people.
Unless I miss my guess, Google will continue towards its stated objective of making all the world's information searchable and retrievable. Want something archived, Google will take care of it. And if Google fails, my suspicion is the entity that takes their place will take it on.
Considering the incredible gains OSS has made over the past few years, and the fact that it's taking a bite out of the M$ Internet development and deployment platforms, I'd expect nothing less from the guy. Perhaps he genuinely believes that he can force a majority of Linux users out there to deploy a M$ sanctioned and supported Linux distro.
One thing that he'll never be able to change, though. It generally takes considerably more technical skill to create a web application and implement it with the M$ combo of ASP/MS SQL - whereas a weekend hacker can put somthing together in PHP/mySQL. As a result of this, the amount of OSS available, from blogs to full CMS and portal systems, in LAMP vs. M$ is about 8:1. Just check SourceForge or HotScripts. OSS is driving the past few years' explosion of dynamic content websites. Of course he thinks M$ is threatened. He should realize though that when you examine the history of the Internet (back to about 1982 or so), bullying has generally been counterproductive. Exhibit A: PirateBay.org (try a tracert - it's funny).
Did you happen to notice the date on this news item?
I have a phone number that sounds like two bars of a B-side Britney Spears track. Guess I had better let my stepson know not to phone me ever again from a bar - wouldn't want him to serve 14 years for asking for a ride home.
Guess this means the RIAA will compare a database of all phone numbers to a database of all existing music (perhaps in MIDI form) and have the $8,000 licensing fees added to the phone bill when a match is found.
- Scramble field names, so the INPUT named "comments" is actually for the email address, etc.
- Multiple type="submit" buttons, all but the real one hidden using CSS, all in a random order on each page load
- Non-intuitive action= names such as b41gzL924.php which are further generated by Javascript in the client browser from an obfuscated string
- REFERRER games
Of these, singly, I have found obfuscating the name of the submit script for the FORM the most effective. The Javascript code is left as an exercise for the reader.Only $378,000 each? C'mon, when the dust settles on this type of stuff, we know that $378,000 per lawyer won't even be close to the actual legal fees. Try adding at least one "0" to that figure. "We must prevent the proceeds of this lawsuit from being frittered away on the Plaintiffs."
I know more than a bit about electronics and electrical engineering, having spent part of my early career designing various gadgets. I have to wonder why all this fiasco with these electronic voting machines when it would be so very easy to simply build a small printer which uses a roll of paper (think cash register) inside to create a paper polling record.
It would not add substantially to the cost, and the small rolls of paper that resulted would be perfect in cases where a recount was demanded or required. Why the resistance? Make it too difficult to steal an election?