I was writing an article on how to use HTTP to view web banner information. My first choice was to use the big G, Google.com. However, when I used the command nc google.com 80 and used OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1, Google generated this error message.
It is also interesting to observe how Google generates its logo using the color codes.
UPDATE:Â I believe either Vint Cerf himself or more likely a Google India representative posted a comment with some updated stats. I double checked the stats and indeed found them out to be right as shown in the presentation. I am updating the post to reflect the correct stats.Â
So, I finally make my way into the Google Speaker series where the guest speaker was Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr.Vinton Cerf who is also the current Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The whole show was extremely well organized. Dr. Cerf promptly showed up at the assigned time at 5:30 pm IST. There was a formal introduction of Dr.Cerf, his contributions, his various achievements by the Google India representatives before handing the stage over to him.
He starts of by introducing himself and then praising the cofounder of TCP/IP Bob Kahn and then talks briefly about SETI and the role which collective computing is playing these days in crunching the world’s problems. About SETI he jokes ” Maybe the reason we are searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is that we didn’t find any here on Earth”
His formal presentation began with him talking about some stats. He tells us that there are almost 500-600 million servers on this planet and that the number of Internet users has jumped from 50 million in 1997 to over a Billion in 2006 where Asia with 56% of the world’s total population brings in almost 389.4 Million Internet users with a total penetration of 16.6%. He then talks with dismay about how there are a Billion people in Africa and yet there are only 32.8 Million users in the entire continent.
Mobile Devices: Then he talks about mobile devices where he lets us know that there are almost 2.5 Billion mobile users which far exceed the number of laptops or desktops or servers out there. He then talks about the benefits of a mobile phone which is smaller, has a smaller keyboard and a smaller screen size all of which present their own unique challenges in delivering content and applications to such a mobile platform.
Current technology shaping the Internet — BroadBand
Vint Cerf then makes an interesting observation where he says that we are not sending as much as we are downloading which the basis of today’s internet. He lets us know that he a very strong proponent of symmetric broadband.
“Half of the traffic is Bit Torrent, and a lot of that may be video. It’s symmetric. As a user downloads a piece of a file, that piece is made available to others. The effect is that a user is pushing as much traffic as they pull. This does a funny thing to companies that offer ‘broadband service.’ Cable modems are asymmetric. DSL is the same. Symmetric service is competing with higher priced DS-3 and T-1 service. There’s a built in disincentive to create symmetric services, but as fiber capacities reach residential users, we will all want to push as much information as we pull. I’m not talking about people doing anything illegal. There’s a pressure from the edge for symmetry in the internet.”
Current Research problems being faced by Google
He then talks about the problems being faced by Google and the opportunities for everyone out there to come up with a solution by including the following as their dissertation topics…
a. Internet is not secure
b. Internet “Erlang” formulas
c. QOS debates(smart routers?) — debating whether the cost of charging for services and examining traffic would be more expensive than simply building more bandwidth.
d. Mobility, persistence(processes, convertions)
e. Multi homing — Multi-homing can be very effective for ensuring continuous connectivity — eliminating the ISP as a single point of failure — and it can be cost effective as well. However, your multi-homing strategy must be carefully planned to ensure that you actually improve connectivity for your company
f. Multipath routing — the concept of providing multipath routing at the naming level and supporting replicated sites. Also getting people thinking about multi-path routing algorithms should provide a good “safety valve”, just in case there should ever be valid military reasons for separating the Internet.
Vint Cerf adds in the comments
“Multipath routing actually is intended to increase the capacity between a pair of endpoints on the Internet,if there are in fact independent paths that could concurrently carry traffic between them”
g. Broadcast utilization
h. Mesh and Sensor networks
i. Scaling(of events) – IPVL — On scaling, IPv6 is intended to deal with increasing number of endpoints on the internet, not so much scaling of events
For all the geeks out there, do you know someone who tried to teach themselves how to read Barcode? Here is a list of Geek quotes, sayings and phrases. Some of them are from Boardofwisdom who put together a nice compilation themselves.
#1. Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF. All my base Are belong to you — someone on SlashDot
#2. There is no place like 127.0.0.1
#3. Girls are like Internet Domain names, the ones I like are already taken
#4. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning
#5. Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination. — Albert Einstein
#6. There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
#7. If at first you don’t succeed, call it version 1.0
#8. 1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41dÂ
    Leet is a phrase often used on the Internet, some being online games, message boards, and chat rooms. It comes from the word “elite”, meaning “above everyone else”. It’s most commonly written as “1337″ or “l33t”. It can also be written differently, the numbers 1, 3 and 7 standing for L, E and T respectively.
A Leet Speak Alphabet
* A—4,/-\,/_\
* B—8,|3 and very uncommonly 13
* C—<,{,[,(
* D---|>,|),|},|]
* E—3
* F—|=,ph
* G—[,-
* H---|-|,[-].{-},|=|,[=],{=}
* I—1,|
* J—usually the J is untouched
* K—|< ,1 <
* L—|_,|,1_
* M—|\/|,^^
* O—0,(),[],{}
* P—|o,p,|O
* Q—O, or 9
* R—|2,12
* S—5,$
* T—7,+
* U—|_|
* V—\/
* W—\/\/,(/\), \^/
* X—><,
* Y—j
* Z—Z
Numbers for letters
One of the qualities of leet speak is using numbers to replace letters. Many words have numbers leet speak.
* 1 — L, I (I is more often shown as |, and sometimes as ][)
* 2 — Z (not in common usage)
* 3 — E
* 4 — A
* 5 — S
* 6 — G (not in common usage)
* 7 — T (can also be L)
* 8 — B
* 9 — G
* 0 — O (Occasionally represented by “()”)
Below is a simple javascript I wrote to translate English into leet.
Many of us use the terms programmer and developer interchangebly. Hacknot has an excellent article describing the concept the the terms programmer and developer are indeed as unique as how they are made out to be.
The term programmer has historically referred to a menial, manual input task conducted by an unskilled worker. However since the age of EDIAC and EDVAC have passed on, the modern programmer loves writing code and usually see their sole function in an organization as being the production of code, and view any task that doesn’t involve having their hands on the keyboard as an unwanted distraction.
Developers like to code as well, but they see it as being only a part of their job function. They focus more on delivering value than delivering program text, and know that they can’t create value without having an awareness of the business context into which they will deploy their application, and the organizational factors that impact upon its success once delivered.
Some other differences between programmers and developers according to the article
Programmers like to stay as ignorant as possible of the business within which they work. They consider the problem domain to be the realm of the non-technical, and neither their problem or concern.Developers view the business domain as their “second job.” They work to develop a solid understanding of those aspects of it that impact upon their software, then use that knowledge to determine what the real business problems are.
Programmers crave new technologies the way children crave sweets. They are forever flitting from one programming language, framework, library or IDE to the next. Developers have a much more cautious approach to new technology. They know that a new technology is inevitably hyped through the roof by those with a vested interest in its success, but that the reality of the technology’s performance in the field often falls short of the spectacular claims made by proponents.
Programmers often focus so intently upon the technologies they use that they come to believe that technology is the dominant factor influencing the ultimate success or otherwise of their projects. For developers, the dominant factors influencing the quality of your application, and ultimately its success or otherwise, are the quality of the people doing the development and the work methods that they follow.
Programmers try to solve every problem through coding whereas Developers know that coding effort is best reserved for the application itself. Other differences include Developers seek repeatability, programmers like one-off heroics and Programmers like complexity, developers favor simplicity. Also, developers care about users whereas Programmers often view their user base with disdain or even outright contempt, as if they are the ignorant hordes to whose low technical literacy they must pander and finally
Read on more at hacknot for the rest of the article
