Free Online IT Tutorials and Training
Updated the Client-Server Model tutorial–just one of over 800 Tutorials in the tutorials section of InetDaemon.Com. The updates clarify some of the common uses of the term including web thin clients, thick client applications and more.
UNIVAC in 1951
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), the first commercially successful computer performed a public demonstration in Philadelphia, PA. USA on this date in 1951. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly spent five years designing and building UNIVAC. Built from 5,600 vacuum tubes, 300 relays, 18,000 crystal diodes, miles of wire and a mercury acoustic delay loop for program storage, the system’s physical dimensions are 14.5 feet long by 7.5 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and required 120 kva to power it–basically a small electric power plant. It could store about 12,000 characters in main memory.
Compare those specifications to your Kindle, iPad or Android smartphone computing devices, which are thousands of times smaller and exponentially more powerful and run on mere milliwatts. Still, UNIVAC was able to successfully predict the result of the 1952 Presidential election which Walter Cronkite added to his election coverage for CBS.
UNIVAC was built on ones compliment logic and could process not just numeric data, but character data as well. However, ones compliment logic produces the possibility of minus zero (-0) as a result, something that had to be accounted for when writing programs for the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC also separated input, output and computational functions from each other which is industry standard practice today. Other firsts in this computer were the ten magnetic tape readers used for information storage and retrieval, buffer memory
UNIVAC was purchased by the U.S. Government Census Bureau to process demographic data at 120 facts per second. There were 46 UNIVAC computers built and delivered between 1951 to 1958.
The UNIVAC also has the distinction of being tied to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the Grande Dame of computing, creator of the first compiler, the COBOL language, both developed on the UNIVAC, and the term ‘debugging’.
Internet Explorer 9: Overview
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 with a new, slim, tabbed interface. Here’s a look at the new Microsoft Web browser.
Continue readingBlocking Russian and Chinese SPAM is actually fairly easy. Unless you communicate in Russian or Chinese, just delete any e-mail that contains any of the special characters either of those languages use. I’ll admit that Chinese is a bit harder, since there are over 3000 characters in their ‘alphabet’, but using the top 30 or 40 characters should block most of the SPAM.
RSA Security, maker of the SecureID two-factor authentication system used in many encryption systems and VPN/Remote Access products, was successfully attacked with an "Advanced Persistent Threat". The APT involved a small number of e-mails specifically targeted to the individuals contacted (spear phishing), a bit of social engineering in the e-mail and finally a malcode exel spreadsheet attachment that exploits a 0-day Adobe Flash vulnerability, that Adobe has since patched. Continue reading
Symantec estimates that 1/3 of all SPAM was stopped when Microsoft (with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals and a court order) took steps to shut down the Rustock botnet. Other botnets (Bagle, Festi, Cutwail, Lethic, Grum, Xarvester and others) are stepping into the void left by Rustock. Whether Rustock will remain 'dead', is unclear as the Rustock programmers and Rustock ringleaders are still unidentified and still at large. Continue reading