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A customer asked me the other day how to choose the right No SQL Database? Unfortunately this is not an easy task. There are over 150 different offerings and there are significant differences between them. The best advice I can give is “Choose the database that matches best your problem”. Big data analytics show that NoSQL jokes scale well for large audiences.
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Here’s a quick brainteaser for you. Suppose you really want to find all the prime numbers in a certain range, and store them in a List<uint>. And also suppose that you want to parallelize that calculation to make it as quick as possible. You then need to synchronize access to the list so that it’s not corrupted by add operations performed in multiple threads. Would it be better to use a C# lock (CLR Monitor) or a Windows mutex to protect the list of primes? If you choose poorly, more processors actually make it slower.
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Neither, you'd choose a list implementation that used an internal Critical Section to protect overlapped appends and didn't resort to a Mutex until it really needed to. Even then memory allocation strategy might well trump locking cost depending on how many primes we're talking about.
That won't work across processes of course but then you don't need a lock at all as others have pointed out.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
modified 16-Jul-13 4:51am.
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I wouldn't be using a Mutex in this example for the simple fact that the thing works acrossed process boundries. If you have a couple of instances running, each process can interfere with the others.
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Poor implementation. No mutex or lock or critical section is needed. Simply have a separate list for each process that gets appended to a master list in the master process as each process completes.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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One of the first server-level compromises I had to deal with in my life was around 12 ago, and it was caused by a SSH brute force attack. A co-worker set up a test server and chose a very weak root password for it. A few days later, the box was owned running IRC bots and trying to compromise the rest of the network. That was just the first of many server-level compromises caused by SSH brute force attacks that I would end up responding to, and even after more than 10 years, quite a few of the server remediations that we do here at Sucuri are actually caused by the same thing. So let's set up a honeypot to see if we can catch some Heffalumps and Woozles.
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Imagine you have a 4.2GB CSV file. It has over 12 million records and 50 columns. All you need from this file is the sum of all values in one particular column. How would you do it? Writing a script in python/ruby/perl/whatever would probably take a few minutes and then even more time for the script to actually complete. A database and SQL would be fairly quick, but then you'd have load the data, which is kind of a pain. Thankfully, the Unix utilities exist and they're awesome. This sounds like a job for VB...
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There was a time when map assignments arrived from clients in a FedEx envelope, full of research, including Xerox’ed maps taped together and marked up with a highlighter. Back then, I could search online for photo references, but it certainly wasn’t the 3-D experience of flight that it is now. With Google Earth, I can get the lay of the land and see the heights of buildings and the way green spaces meet city blocks. These details give me a sense of place that fires my imagination. They say, that they have measur'd many a mile, To tread a measure with you on this glass.
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Graph Search seems like a great idea in theory. Facebook has collected billions, maybe trillions of pieces of data about its users over the last nine years, and making that data searchable is a natural move.... This feature can be useful: I searched for photos of my friends who visited Hawaii, because I just returned from a trip to Oahu and wanted to see their photos of the islands. But it also gives you the ability to search for incriminating photos of your ex, or for others to find terrible photos of you. Dislike. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by gamifying and monetizing data science.
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Bill Gates opened his talk at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit today by saying we’ve entered a “golden age of computing,” as connectivity, data and processing power open up new opportunities to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Which paves the way, of course, for the return of Microsoft Bob. OK, not really, but in response to one question, the Microsoft chairman did refer to the company’s ill-fated virtual Windows assistant, circa 1995, as an early example of a ”personal agent” helping lead us through our daily tasks. It looks like you're trying to stay relevant in the PC industry. Would you like help?
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The system that began this cycle, resuscitating the American video game industry and setting up the third-party game publisher system as we know it, was the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), launched in Japan on July 15, 1983 as the Family Computer (or Famicom). Today, in celebration of the original Famicom's 30th birthday, we'll be taking a look back at what the console accomplished, how it worked, and how people are (through means both legal and illegal) keeping its games alive today. From the Famicon to today's supercharged Generation NEX.
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You may be concerned that the NSA is reading your e-mail. Is there really anything you can do about it though? After all, you don’t really want to move off of GMail / Google Apps. And no place you would host is any better. Except, you know, hosting it yourself. The way that e-mail was originally designed to work. We’ve all just forgotten because, you know, webapps-n-stuff. It’s a lot of work, mkay, and I’m a lazy software developer. Today we kill your excuses. Because I’m going to show you exactly how to do it, it’s going to take about two hours to set up... Simple self-hosted email in 25... no 30... no, I stopped counting how many steps.
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It must work - they may just have knocked it out
500 - Internal Server Error
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up again.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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setting up your own mail server? that's it?
it's still not going to stop tunnels, keyloggers, screen grabbers/mirror drivers, and compromised random number generators.
red herring.
if you don't want it heard - don't say it. mostly on the internet.
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As a recovering TDD addict, I used to tell people, like many others do, that the issue with their TDD was that they didn’t do it right. If TDD is too hard, do more TDD! In other words, if it hurts, just bang that leg with that baseball bat a bit harder, eventually you will not hurt anymore. I will come straight out with it: this approach to unit, integration and tdd testing has, by far and large, failed. It’s over. It is time to move on. I have, and I now do VErtical Slice Testing. Is this a better approach, or yet another example of TDI (Testing Done Incorrectly)?
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Writing computer programs has always generally required using special-purpose languages like C++, Fortran, or Assembly language. In a pair of research papers, computer scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) investigated if it's possible to write programs using natural langage—that is, the sort of language we speak or write with on a daily basis. As it turns out, it might be—for some things, anyway. [Insert pedantic comment about programming requiring knowledge beyond language and syntax.]
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The Grand Negus must be feeling smug right now.
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OAuth is not a new concept, but a standardization and combined wisdom of many well established protocols. Also worth noting is that OAuth is not just limited to social-media applications, but provides a standardized way to share information securely between various kinds of applications that expose their APIs to other applications. OAuth 2.0 has a completely new prose and is not backwards compatible with its predecessor spec. You do not need to authenticate before reading this article. But you can afterward.
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If you write some code that executes conditionally, and that code can be eliminated by a compiler that understands how to exploit undefined behavior, then there’s a potential bug that you’d like to learn about. But how can we find this kind of code? One way would be to instrument the compiler optimization passes that eliminate code based on undefined behavior. This has some problems... A sufficiently advanced compiler is indistinguishable from an adversary.
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The legacy we’ve established in interface design is built upon physical affordances, an issue that has been brought into the harsh spotlight by Apple’s software designs.... The goal of skeuomorphic style was to leverage our pre-existing affordances and lend a healthy amount of familiarity and confidence to digital interfaces. Somewhere along the line, creativity took a back seat to Photoshopped mimicry, and designers began to notice. The skeuomorphic of today is the hieroglyphic of tomorrow.
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One of the other topics that Microsoft gets into with their memo is the need for a consistent user experience across all of the devices people use on a daily basis. Right now, it’s not uncommon for people to have a smartphone, tablet, laptop and/or desktop, a TV set-top box, and maybe even a gaming console or two – and depending on how you are set up, each of those might have a different OS and a different user interface. Some people might not mind switching between the various user interfaces, but this is definitely something that I’ve heard Apple users mention as a benefit... Is One Microsoft enough?
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Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.... Now a 91-year-old widower, the German-born Baer is the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. The Odyssey is predated in the games-on-screens space only by experiments like Willy Higinbotham's Tennis for Two and the coin-op dud Computer Space. But Baer also has a long and distinguished record as an engineer and inventor. Ralph H. Baer and Pong's proud papa: the Magnavox Odyssey.
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Fast forward 100 years to present day, and you will find amateur radio has grown past spark gap transmitters and morse code. Transceivers have grown from spark gap transmitters and receivers into software-defined radio, which uses digital signal processing instead of hardware audio filters. Morse code, or CW, is no longer the only mode of communicating. Voice and various digital modes now fill the airwaves. CQ CQ... Even ham radio is going online.
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Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000. But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.” First we get Moose and Squirrel, then conquer World.
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