...for a mollusk.

Shouldn't it be EITHER fraud OR obstruction of justice?

Will cause me to stop reading slashdot. Too much white space for the sake of some intellectual's notion of what good design is. Leave design to apple and please let me keep the site I like.

you are having too much fun dabbling and playing

Who cares, it's not real programming anyway. To teach someone programming, you have to convey both the concepts - ok they get that - and the ability to grok structures made of text. No structures made of text grokking, no programmer.

This is retarded. 10 x .999 = 9.99... it does not equal 9.999... that example proof in the slashdot post is total bull$h1t!

Many years ago I was a network admin at a state agency which was converting from all 3270 (IBM mainframe terminal) wiring, which of course is coax - to IBM TokenRing, which started with expensive STP (shielded twisted pair) wiring but was transitioning to UTP. There was a cool little device which would run the token ring over coax; it required two coax wires. Worked great.

Thing is, coax is great wiring - the shielding makes the signal run across the inner wire very clean. This is why it is used for cable tv. Cat5, I believe, is widely used not because it is better than coax but because it is cheaper.

Still, as said by others, Ethernet over Cat5 goes as far as depending upon certain of the wires being twisted along with certain others. Anyone who has crimped a rj45 knows that you can't even mix the pairs, let alone hook up to coax.

Here's a good one:

Whitehead, British math professor and author of the Principia, was visiting Harvard as a guest lecturer. He was lecturing on logic, and every time he talked about P(a), the American students would burst out laughing. The stodgy professor was quite confused, as this had never happened in England. He asked for advice from a Harvard professor whom he knew, when he bumped into him in the hallway.

The professor explained that the American students were not as genteel or demure as those in England, and were reacting to a double entendre when Whitehead talked about "the p-ness of a". Whitehead blushed, thanked the professor for explaining, and returned to the lecture hall the next day, determined to avoid further outbursts. He picked up where he had left off, now discussing A(p).

(Not sure if he made up the joke, but I heard this from Professor David McCarty many years ago.)

After getting some great analyses from the community, I reloaded ten contiguous days of the firewall logs, re-visualized, and produced this next video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K4QmpTCtDc I think the stripes across all countries have to be some sort of backscatter/ISP network phenomenon that is a secondary effect of the botnet activity, as was suggested by several people. So I filtered out those stripes by eliminating any countries with fewer than 200 total inbound packets over the ten days. This leaves what is really interesting: botnets becoming active and going dormant, and portscans - one clearly visible from Sweden; shown in this new video.

All you have to do is click once on the green cube at the origin and you have the description of the axes... but as that is not enough, I am going to add a feature with better axis descriptions. Optional of course. :)

These are all inbound packets; it may be that one or more machines outside this firewall but inside the next firewall up are compromised and spoofing. These are all denied when they hit this firewall.

The spoofing makes sense; really good point. The scary thing is it kind of looks like something on the inside of this network may be participating in the botnet, I suppose...

I looked at the traffic by destination port and hour, and it looks like botnet activity: all of the traffic producing those stripes is aimed at either port 137 (windows networking) or no port (icmp). Thanks for your comment; this is the type of informed response I was hoping to get with my post.

Only change of perspective makes something 3D; this is the point of using a virtual world, so that the user can fly around building a spatial awareness.

I do not want to produce a one-time "plot". I want to show data for what it is. If it doesn't look as nice as Tufte would have made it look, I don't care. The point is not to look nice... it's to provide the ability for people to see what is in databases, without bias. And I still don't think Tufte's paradigms work with as much data as these 3d ones do.

Everyone always wants me to have labels on the graphs. I don't put them there unless you roll over the data, because I want you to see the patterns in the data without bias first.

I should not have called this graph "crazy looking". It is actually pretty simple and makes it quite clear what is going on, as you can see from the comments submitted by people talking about botnets.

Finally, I am not interested in producing graphs which show you everything "at a glance". Use a pie chart for that. I am making graphs which facilitate a deeper understanding of larger amounts of data than Tufte dreamed of showing using his 2D paradigms.