CurtMonash - Slashdot User

Submission + - How should a non-techie learn programming? (dbms2.com) 2

Submitted by CurtMonash on Friday July 30, 2010 @09:36AM

CurtMonash writes: Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? I started a thread with the question on DBMS2, and some consistent themes emerged, including:

* Learn HTML + CSS early on.
* Learn a bit of SQL, but you needn't make that your focus.
* Have your first real programming language be one of the modern ones, such as PHP or Python.
* MySQL is a good vehicle to learn SQL.
* It's a great idea to start with a project you actually want to accomplish, and that can be done by modifying a starter set of sample code. (E.g., a WordPress blog.)
* Microsoft's technology stack is an interesting alternative to some of the other technology ideas.

A variety of books and websites were suggested, most notably MIT's Scratch. But, frankly, it would really help to get more suggestions for sites and books that help one get started with HTML/CSS, or with MySQL, or with PHP. And so, techie studs and studdettes, I ask you — how should a non-techie go about learning some basic technological skills?

Submission + - Hospital turns away ambulances after EHRs go down (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Thursday June 04, 2009 @03:07AM

CurtMonash writes: "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable.

If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?

Maybe the latter is OK, since there obviously were other, more smoothly running hospitals to send the patient to. Still, the whole story should be held up as a cautionary tale for hospitals and IT suppliers everywhere."

Submission + - Web analytics databases get every larger (dbms2.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Thursday April 30, 2009 @06:47AM

CurtMonash writes: "Web analytics databases are getting every larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2/12 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff."

Submission + - Twitter gets slammed by the StalkDaily XSS worm (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Sunday April 12, 2009 @01:25AM

CurtMonash writes: "(This is a better version of what I just submitted, based on a more careful reading of the comment thread to my first blog post. Sorry for the dupe.)

Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims' accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers.

Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. Most of the details can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole."

Submission + - The EHR privacy debate heats up (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Monday January 19, 2009 @06:26AM

CurtMonash writes: "The New York Times reports on President-Elect Obama's continued commitment to electronic health records (EHRs), which on the whole are a great idea. The article goes on to cite a number of legistlative initiatives to deal with the privacy risks of EHRs. That's where things start to go astray.

The proposals seem to focus on simply controlling the flow of information, but from a defense-in-depth standpoint, that's not enough. Medical care is full of information waivers, much like EULAs, only with your health at stake. What's more, any information control regime has to have exceptions for medical emergencies — but where legitimate emergencies are routine, socially-engineered fake emergencies can blast security to smithereens.

So medical information privacy will never be adequate unless there are strong usage-control rules as well, in areas such as discrimination, marketing, or tabloid-press publication. In my usual helpful manner, I've provided some ideas as to how and why that could work well."

Submission + - Solving Obama's Blackberry dilemma (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Monday January 12, 2009 @08:29PM

CurtMonash writes: "Much is being made of the deliberations as to whether President Obama will be able to keep using his beloved Blackberry. As the New York Times reports, there are two major sets of objections:

Infosecurity
Legal/records retention

Deven Coldeway of CrunchGear does a good job of showing that the technological infosecurity problems can be solved. And as I noted for Network World, the "Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner" issue is absurd. Presidents are surrounded by attendants, Secret Service and otherwise. Somebody just has to add the job of keeping track of the president's personal communication device. As for the legal question of whether the president afford to put things in writing that will likely be exposed by courts and archivists later — the answer to that surely depends on the subject matter or recipient. Email to his Chicago friends — why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter."

Submission + - The technology behind the magic yellow line (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Thursday January 08, 2009 @01:15PM

CurtMonash writes: "Fandome offers a fascinating video explaining how the first-down line on football broadcasts actually works. Evidently, theres a lot of processing both to calculate the exact location being photographed on the field — including optical sensors and two steps of encoding — and to draw a line in exactly the right place onscreen. For those who don't want to watch the whole video, highlights are here."

Submission + - Should the United States' new CTO really be a CIO? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Friday November 07, 2008 @04:18PM

CurtMonash writes: "Barack Obama promised to appoint the United States' first Chief Technology Officer. Naturally, the blogosphere is full of discussion as to who that should be. I favor American Management Systems founder and former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti. Richard Koman thinks it should be one of the better state CTOs. John Doerr, going in a different direction, thinks it should be his partner Bill Joy.

We can bandy names back and forth all month, but first a more fundamental question needs to be answered: What do we need most — a get-things-done CIO (Chief Information Officer), or a more visionary true CTO? I think it's a CIO, and based on his campaign statements it appears Obama agrees. Management of government IT is a huge, generally unsolved problem, and we need somebody deeply experienced to have even a fighting chance. Of course, that doesn't preclude recruiting a visionary CTO in addition, but the highest priority is a CIO.

Do Slashdot readers agree? [With Slashdot pages timing out, it's hard to know if a submission got in. I apologize if I wind up submitting multiple times!]"

Submission + - eBay makes huge gains in parallel efficiency (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Friday October 17, 2008 @11:49AM

CurtMonash writes: "Parallel Efficiency (PE) is a simple metric that divides the actual work your parallel CPUs do by the sum of their total capacity. If you can get your parallel efficiency up, it's like getting free servers, free floor space, and some free power as well. eBay reports that it amazed even itself by increasing overall parallel efficiency from 80% in about 6 months — across 10s of 1000s of servers. The secret sauce was data warehouse-based analytics. I.e., eBay instrumented its own network to do minute-by-minute status checks, then crunched the resulting data to find where bottlenecks that needed removing. Obviously, savings are in the many millions of dollars. eBay has been offering some glimpses into its analytic efforts this year, and the PE savings are one of the most concrete examples they're offering to validate all this analytic cleverness."

Submission + - Enterprise software sales dried up in September (barrons.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Monday October 06, 2008 @05:49PM

CurtMonash writes: "As I predicted a week ago, it looks as if the third quarter was ugly for software vendors, due to the economic crisis. SAP said "The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter." My old acquaintance John Treadway — who used to work in Sybase's financial services vertical unit — reports that things are even worse than that in the financial services industry, Wall street and retail banks alike.

So now what? Well, IT is a huge part of capital spending, and at enterprises that have to cut back capital spending, IT is going to get hurt. On the other hand, high-growth companies — web businesses, analytic services providers, etc. — may try to power through the downturn. And the more directly an IT project affects near-term profits, the more likely it is to survive. Data mining to increase customer retention 5%? Data center consolidation to rapidly cut costs? Those are likely to keep being funded. Enterprise-wide balanced-scorecard dashboard to get everybody aligned with the CEO's strategic vision? Hmm, maybe we can defer that one for a while."

Submission + - MapReduce goes commercial, integrated with SQL (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Tuesday August 26, 2008 @04:20AM

CurtMonash writes: "MapReduce sits at the heart of Google's data processing — and Yahoo's, Facebook's and LinkedIn's as well. But it's been highly controversial, due to an apparent conflict with standard data warehousing common sense. Now two data warehouse DBMS vendors — Greenplum and Aster Data — have announced the integration of MapReduce into their SQL database managers. As I explained at length over on DBMS2, I think MapReduce could give a major boost to high-end analytics, specifically to applications in three areas:

Text tokenization, indexing, and search
Creation of other kinds of data structures (e.g., graphs)
Data mining and machine learning

(Data transformation may belong on that list as well.)

All these areas could yield better results if there were better performance, and MapReduce offers the possibiity of major processing speed-ups."

Submission + - The 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Monday August 25, 2008 @05:40AM

CurtMonash writes: "I had been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it is 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we are about to see data warehouses — running on commercial database management systems — that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. For example, Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too. And by the way, Yahoo already has a petabyte+ database running on a home-grown system.

Meanwhile, the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat. Besides the vendors already mentioned above, others with 100+ terabyte databases deployed include Netezza, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and even SAS."

Submission + - How to fight a new kind of online scam? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Monday July 07, 2008 @01:31AM

CurtMonash writes: "I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of the JLove dating service. It turns out these scamsters generate web pages for lots of (FirstName, LastName) combos, each claiming that the named individual is a member of their service. I posted about this, and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member, and so on. I've since followed up with lessons learned, a big one being that everybody should have a visible web presence. But frankly, the ideas I've come up with for fighting this kind of reputation scam seem fairly weak. Do Slashdotters have any better ideas?"

Submission + - Russian chatbot passes Turing Test (news.com)

Submitted by

CurtMonash

on Sunday December 09, 2007 @05:00AM

CurtMonash writes: "According to Ina Fried, a chatbot is making the rounds that successfully emulates an easily-laid woman. As such, it dupes lonely Russian males into divulging personal and financial details at a rate of one every three minutes. All jokes aside — and a lot of them come quickly to mind — that sure sounds like the Turing Test to me. Of course, there are caveats. Reports of scary internet security threats are commonly overblown. There are some pretty obvious ways the chatbot could be designed to lessen its AI challenge by seeking to direct the conversation. And finally, while we are told the bot has fooled a few victims, we don't know its overall success rate at fooling the involuntary Turing "judges.""

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