Comment Re:close, but no cigar.. (Score 1) 210
They do try to make it look like Windows 95 though...
Comment Re:Ha! BIOS, gotcha! (Score 3, Insightful) 210
It's like using a condom... it won't protect you 100% but that's still safer than doing nothing!
Comment Re:RAM (Score 2) 210
I don't see how this is any different than any other live CD though.
I don't think it really is any different. It's just now an approved solution for DOD personnel.
Comment Re:video (Score 3, Informative) 119
Is there more in the video that's not in the article? Because your comment is a way off:
Aunque las acciones llevadas a cabo en la red pudieran "parecer trastadas", considera Vázquez, constituyen un auténtico "peligro". No en vano, "la OTAN considera estos 'ciberataques' una verdadera amenaza junto con Al Qaeda", recuerda el comisario de la BIT.
Google Translated:
Although the actions undertaken in the network would " seem pranks "believes Vazquez, are a real "danger" . Not surprisingly, "NATO considers this 'cyber' a real threat along with Al Qaeda," says the curator of the BIT.
Basically it says NATO considers cyber attacks to be a real threat, just like Al Qaeda is a real threat. I don't see the Spanish Police saying anything that equates these hackers to AQ.
Comment Re:Sounds like they're got inside access (Score 2) 353
Not to crush your Robin Hood hero imagery, but it looks like these guys really are just thugs.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20068939-245/exclusive-ceo-says-hackers-tried-to-extort-data-money
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20068939-245/exclusive-ceo-says-hackers-tried-to-extort-data-money
Comment Re:hey editor guy! (Score 4, Informative) 767
Actual Transcript:
"GIBSON: Let's start, because we are near Russia, let's start with Russia and Georgia.
The administration has said we've got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.That's why we have to keep an eye on Russia.
And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
The leading question to her response was actually asking how her close proximity of Alaska gave her insight into Russia. On careful read she mangled the response to how being close to Alaska gives her insight, she could have talked about cultural and trade ties between Alaska and Russia. But its also not a response that she came up with to legitimize her foreign policy knowledge. Once again you are talking about a misinterpretation of the real interview based on the SNL representation.
And let me state this again, I am not a Palin fan, and think she is clumsy in press engagements. However I think the majority of people in this country falsely attribute the Tina Fey parody to the politician.
"GIBSON: Let's start, because we are near Russia, let's start with Russia and Georgia.
The administration has said we've got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.That's why we have to keep an eye on Russia.
And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
The leading question to her response was actually asking how her close proximity of Alaska gave her insight into Russia. On careful read she mangled the response to how being close to Alaska gives her insight, she could have talked about cultural and trade ties between Alaska and Russia. But its also not a response that she came up with to legitimize her foreign policy knowledge. Once again you are talking about a misinterpretation of the real interview based on the SNL representation.
And let me state this again, I am not a Palin fan, and think she is clumsy in press engagements. However I think the majority of people in this country falsely attribute the Tina Fey parody to the politician.
Comment Re:hey editor guy! (Score 2, Insightful) 767
You also know that Palin never said she could see Russia from her house right? It was just an SNL Skit.
Actual quote from Palin: "They're our next door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska."
I'm no fan of Palin but please try to separate her real gaffes from the ones the media made up.
Actual quote from Palin: "They're our next door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska."
I'm no fan of Palin but please try to separate her real gaffes from the ones the media made up.
Comment Re:What stops the MPAA from changing the DVD TOS? (Score 1) 112
Putting Terms of Service on a DVD doesn't really make sense to me. Terms of Service apply to an actual service provided, such as an online subscription or an communications contract. A violation of Terms of Service will revoke your privilege to use the service. Owning a DVD is not a receiving a service. What would they do if you violated the TOS, revoke your privilege to watch the DVD's you own?
Comment Re:2 questions for the TSA (Score 2) 570
Yes but we could have paid a lot less for a sticker that says we have an alarm system, than installing an alarm system that doesn't work.
Comment Re:Osama Bin Laden (Score 1) 570
This is true, but it's not OBL's victory. We did this to ourselves.
Submission + - Harrison Schmitt's Plan to Solve the Energy Proble (yahoo.com)
MarkWhittington writes: "Harrison Schmitt, Apollo Moonwalker, geologist, and former United States Senator, recently presented a plan to solve the world’s long term energy problems by developing fusion power fueled with helium-3 mined from the Moon. He presented this plan at a speech at Williston Basin Petroleum Conference,"
Submission + - Signs of Dark Matter from Minnesota Mine (sciencenews.org)
thomst writes: "Ron Cowen of Science News reports that on May 2nd, at the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, CA, Juan Collar, team leader of COGENT, an experimental effort to detect WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), presented a paper detailing 15 months of data collected via a pure germanium detector located deep in a Minnesota mine which seems to confirm similar results reported by a European effort called DAMA/LIBRA. The results are particularly intriguing, because they appear to show a seasonal variation in the density of WIMPs that accords with models that predict that Earth should encounter more WIMPs in Summer (when its path around the Sun moves in the same direction as the Milky Way revolves) than in Winter (when it goes the opposite direction). The most interesting thing about the COGENT experiment is that the mass of the WIMP candidates it records is significantly less than most particle physicists had predicted, according to popular models. If the interactions recorded by COGENT are eventually confirmed as WIMP encounters, wholesale revisions to the so-called "Standard Model" may be required. (Cowen wrote an earlier article about COGENT last year that goes into a lot more detail about how COGENT works, what its team expects it to find, and why."
Submission + - Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor (nytimes.com)
lee1 writes: "Intel has found a way to keep on the Moore's Law track by making smaller, faster and lower-power computer chips by building 3D transistors. They are already manufacturing microprocessors using this new design, called a FINFET (for fin field-effect transistor), which incorporates a small pillar, or fin, of silicon that sticks up above the surface of the chip. Intel said that it expected to be able to make chips that run as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and use as much as 50 percent less power. Products based on the new technology may appear some time later this year."
Submission + - How to monitor your Internet data transfer amounts 1
Vrtigo1 writes: With many ISPs either already using bandwidth caps or talking about them, I was wondering how other Slashdot readers are keeping tabs on how much data is being transferred through their home Internet connections. None of the consumer routers I've used seem to make this information easily accessible. I'd like some way to see exactly how much data has been sent and received by the WAN port facing my ISP's modem so I can compare the numbers I get with the numbers they give me. I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic, so I'd like to see how the two numbers line up.
Submission + - Book Review: Apache JMeter
MassDosage writes: "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache’s open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to wet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn’t already included in JMeter’s own user manual.
I am one of those (fairly) rare software developers with a genuine interest in testing and first tried using JMeter many years ago after its initial release as a tool primarily focused on testing the Apache Tomcat web/application server. It was a bit rough around the edges and poorly documented in those days so I was looking forward to a book that would re-familiarise me with JMeter in its current form. This book clearly targets itself at the testing community and doesn’t require any programming (or even much testing) knowledge.
Apache JMeter starts off with a not particularly convincing overview of why one would want to automate testing and goes off on a tangent trying to prove the monetary savings this leads too. Any testing will depend very much on the type of software being tested, the skills of the tester, technology stack in use etc. so trying to come up with a general formula proving that testing will save money is probably impossible and pointless. It would have been far more useful to include some practical examples where testing saved time, effort, caught bugs early etc. A very brief history of JMeter is provided as well as an overview of its GUI and the the various elements available. For those who haven’t used it before — JMeter acts as a client which sends requests to the application being tested and can then act on the responses returned. Overall this isn’t the smoothest of introductions with lots of grammatical errors, fragmented text and repeated concepts, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.
Installing and setting up JMeter is covered next and this is straightforward and simple. A good overview of what a JMeter test plan consists of is provided and this covers controlling how many simultaneous users a test will use, what logic and timing will be used to issue requests, the type of requests (e.g. HTTP for web sites, FTP for file retrieval etc.), various configuration options, how to assert the contents of responses and so on. The book is a bit dated and the version of JMeter I was using didn’t always match up with the text and diagrams but most of the differences were self explanatory so this wasn’t really an issue.
The chapter on load and performance testing is the best on offer and provides sensible guidelines on this type of testing. These include tips such as ensuring network bandwidth between the machines under test, running the tests on physically separate machines from the software being tested, running tests for long periods of time and what to monitor. This is mainly common sense but it’s good to see them summarised and the book would have benefited from more sections that appear to be informed by the author’s practical experiences as a tester. The example given in the book is the load testing of a web site over HTTP and it’s left up to the reader to translate the various types of request being made to an example website of their own. The screen shots of setting the various GUI values are clear and useful. Remote testing (i.e. not using a single JMeter GUI but multiple command-line instances of JMeter) is mentioned but sadly not covered which is a shame as any serious load or stress testing usually requires this. Using JMeter as a proxy to quickly generate a test plan by recording HTTP requests from a browser is both neat and useful and explained well.
JMeter is not just limited to load testing but can also be used to do simple functional tests as it can inspect the values returned by requests and perform assertions on these responses (e.g. checking that the returned HTML contains some text). Unfortunately functional testing is covered very poorly with far too little detail and no explanation of how to run the examples yourself. The author should have stuck to one simple use case (ideally that the reader could follow along with) which would show how to add one’s own custom values to requests and to assert the results returned. In the end I could figure it out for myself, but I’d expect a book to guide me through this.
Advanced features are up next and the reader is pointed towards the sample code included with the book (a .rar file inside a .zip file, why?) but absolutely no explanation is given as to what one should actually do with the bunch of PHP and SQL files included in it. Using regular expressions and configuring JMeter to run tests using loops is covered but this doesn’t make much sense as there is no context for the example used in setting this all up. Fortunately the sections on using JMeter to test a database and an FTP server are introduced with clear setup steps that are easy to follow. I wouldn’t classify most of this material as advanced, it just gives the reader the knowledge that JMeter can be used to test more than just HTTP sites and provides a few very simple examples which they can build on.
Finally the book wraps up by stressing once again that it’s just an introduction to JMeter and a concluding table clearly showing that more is not covered than actually covered. The appendices consist of definitions of nearly every JMeter element that can be accessed in the GUI (a good quick reference), some pointers to material for readers interested in learning more, and a glossary of testing terms, the vast majority of which are never used in the book itself. Unfortunately the latter is yet more evidence of the biggest weakness of this book — the appalling editing that doesn’t even remove sentences which are completely incorrect. “You can too contribute.” (the closing sentence of Chapter 1) is just one of many examples of poor writing that somehow survived into print.
On the whole the book does give one an overview of how to get started with JMeter and the section on load testing a website is a useful introduction to various JMeter concepts. This is the only printed book on the topic out there so if you learn best reading from print then you don’t have many options. This is a shame as a niche topic like this could do with an interesting, well-informed and authoritative guide. For everyone else I would suggest reading the User Manual on the JMeter website as it covers all the material here (and much more) and is far more readable.
Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion."
I am one of those (fairly) rare software developers with a genuine interest in testing and first tried using JMeter many years ago after its initial release as a tool primarily focused on testing the Apache Tomcat web/application server. It was a bit rough around the edges and poorly documented in those days so I was looking forward to a book that would re-familiarise me with JMeter in its current form. This book clearly targets itself at the testing community and doesn’t require any programming (or even much testing) knowledge.
Apache JMeter starts off with a not particularly convincing overview of why one would want to automate testing and goes off on a tangent trying to prove the monetary savings this leads too. Any testing will depend very much on the type of software being tested, the skills of the tester, technology stack in use etc. so trying to come up with a general formula proving that testing will save money is probably impossible and pointless. It would have been far more useful to include some practical examples where testing saved time, effort, caught bugs early etc. A very brief history of JMeter is provided as well as an overview of its GUI and the the various elements available. For those who haven’t used it before — JMeter acts as a client which sends requests to the application being tested and can then act on the responses returned. Overall this isn’t the smoothest of introductions with lots of grammatical errors, fragmented text and repeated concepts, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.
Installing and setting up JMeter is covered next and this is straightforward and simple. A good overview of what a JMeter test plan consists of is provided and this covers controlling how many simultaneous users a test will use, what logic and timing will be used to issue requests, the type of requests (e.g. HTTP for web sites, FTP for file retrieval etc.), various configuration options, how to assert the contents of responses and so on. The book is a bit dated and the version of JMeter I was using didn’t always match up with the text and diagrams but most of the differences were self explanatory so this wasn’t really an issue.
The chapter on load and performance testing is the best on offer and provides sensible guidelines on this type of testing. These include tips such as ensuring network bandwidth between the machines under test, running the tests on physically separate machines from the software being tested, running tests for long periods of time and what to monitor. This is mainly common sense but it’s good to see them summarised and the book would have benefited from more sections that appear to be informed by the author’s practical experiences as a tester. The example given in the book is the load testing of a web site over HTTP and it’s left up to the reader to translate the various types of request being made to an example website of their own. The screen shots of setting the various GUI values are clear and useful. Remote testing (i.e. not using a single JMeter GUI but multiple command-line instances of JMeter) is mentioned but sadly not covered which is a shame as any serious load or stress testing usually requires this. Using JMeter as a proxy to quickly generate a test plan by recording HTTP requests from a browser is both neat and useful and explained well.
JMeter is not just limited to load testing but can also be used to do simple functional tests as it can inspect the values returned by requests and perform assertions on these responses (e.g. checking that the returned HTML contains some text). Unfortunately functional testing is covered very poorly with far too little detail and no explanation of how to run the examples yourself. The author should have stuck to one simple use case (ideally that the reader could follow along with) which would show how to add one’s own custom values to requests and to assert the results returned. In the end I could figure it out for myself, but I’d expect a book to guide me through this.
Advanced features are up next and the reader is pointed towards the sample code included with the book (a
Finally the book wraps up by stressing once again that it’s just an introduction to JMeter and a concluding table clearly showing that more is not covered than actually covered. The appendices consist of definitions of nearly every JMeter element that can be accessed in the GUI (a good quick reference), some pointers to material for readers interested in learning more, and a glossary of testing terms, the vast majority of which are never used in the book itself. Unfortunately the latter is yet more evidence of the biggest weakness of this book — the appalling editing that doesn’t even remove sentences which are completely incorrect. “You can too contribute.” (the closing sentence of Chapter 1) is just one of many examples of poor writing that somehow survived into print.
On the whole the book does give one an overview of how to get started with JMeter and the section on load testing a website is a useful introduction to various JMeter concepts. This is the only printed book on the topic out there so if you learn best reading from print then you don’t have many options. This is a shame as a niche topic like this could do with an interesting, well-informed and authoritative guide. For everyone else I would suggest reading the User Manual on the JMeter website as it covers all the material here (and much more) and is far more readable.
Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion."
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"I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel
