Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
Inside a DOS attack
First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a
period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our
tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the
server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability.
That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking
experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.
Second, and here’s where the chain of events come into focus, although
not the motive. We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking
server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to
non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing
to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN
packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And
that torrential cascade of “Hi”s brought down our network.
Grodsky admits that his computers sent those SYN packets to Revision3,
but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every
three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second.
The singularity
Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin
and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn’t have time to
organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes
them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he
carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week
at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The
reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the
singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this
century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a
heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad
for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck,
like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments
before the armistice was proclaimed.
Technology Trends
The earliest audio recording – discovered!
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville has certainly been obscure, at least until now. Researchers say that in April 1860, the Parisian tinkerer used a device called a phonautograph to make visual recordings of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” That was 17 years before Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph, and 28 years before his technology was used to capture and play back a piece of a section of a Handel oratorio.
Explaining Religion
It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have
blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the
Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University’s School of
Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson’s disease.
This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called
dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr
McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson’s had lower levels of
religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to
correlate with the disease’s severity. He therefore suspects a link
with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some
patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are
not.
Why Old Technologies are still kicking
“The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to
thrive because customers didn’t care about the underlying technology,”
said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of
the mainframe in the early 1990s and is now a visiting professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and I.B.M. made the investments to make that happen.”
Big Brother is watching….
Scary Stuff – now it seems there is way to know if you’re a dog on the internet
Top 3 trends in IT
In IT
- SOA
- Green computing
- Web 2.0
The "old" economy finally catches with up the "new" one
Silicon valley is seeing movement of staff from start-ups to old established companies. People are seeing an imminent recession and moving to safer grounds – WSJ article has an article here
Mr. Kher grew concerned, especially when several colleagues fled for nearby Cisco and other large Silicon Valley companies. A self-professed “Wall Street junkie,” Mr. Kher trades his own portfolio of tech stocks, and his fears heightened after he watched reports on CNBC about the stock market’s volatility and a possible recession. “The economy will go down eventually,” he recalls thinking.
In December, he posted his résumé on several Internet job sites. His wife, also a software engineer, encouraged him to pursue a variety of options. But “I wanted to go back to a big company,” he says. “Start-ups throw money at you, but after two quarters, they can disappear.” He adds that he and his wife have discussed buying a house this year, despite the area’s high home prices. In January, the median price of a single-family home in Santa Clara County was $750,000, according to the California Association of Realtors.
MSFT and Online Services
MSFT is launching on-line services – looks like SaaS but the devil is in the details. Looks like the Portal (Sharepoint) is the front end of the hosted mail/calendar etc. As the article on ZDNet says, it looks like the same strategy of Windows = DOS 5 + GUI. Time will tell….
Microsoft opens Pandora’s box on online services, betting convenience is the killer app by ZDNet’s Dana Gardner — And what Microsoft must do, in addition to making the true cost-benefits analysis murky, is to absolutely win on packaging and convenience. And this is where Google is vulnerable. Google has still to show, aside from costs, how businesses of all sorts can adopt their services and approach in an easy to manage way, that packages things up neatly for the IT folks, and that make a transition from the hairball easy, convenient, and well-understood.
