Online
Degrees and Programs Information Guide
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Fast Online ecommerce degrees and programs
These days, millions of people with no formal business training at all
have entered the world of internet ecommerce marketing, selling,
affiliating, adsensing, SEO-ing, etc, etc. And many are making
loads of cash. (and many aren't). Others realize that by getting
the formal and very practical training offered through an online
e-commerce degree program, they can open doors both in terms of future
careers and their own business ideas. Companies are desperate
and will pay well for employers or contract workers who can help the
company be successful on the net. After all, the percentage of
sales happening online is growing exponentially, and those who don't
get on board quick will be left out.
As you search for the best on-line business degree program in
ecommerce, make sure you choose a respected school. Either a
traditional school with a proven track record that now offers onlnie
degrees in computer sciences, business and e-commerce, or a
distance education online college or university with a proven track
record. It's not enough to know it's an accredited e-commerce
program. Is it recognized by the state, and in the field? Once
you've done enough research to narrow down your search, be sure to ask
tough questions, get all the answers, so you know as well aspossible
what you are getting into. Then you can move foward confidently,
ready to spend some time and effort furthering your own knowledge, your
earning power and your career opportunities.
Funny Computer Programming Stories and jokes:
The first
great HACK in computer history:
A Classic Hack involving Zerox and Motorola.
Here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola
discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the
Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy,
it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a
portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which
memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large
value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and
could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the
file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other
interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official
`level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be
fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a
database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola
followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as
`Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation,
ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary
operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official
patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support
rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to
demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be
cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be
subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a
thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then
incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar
Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs'
(daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole to
subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep
an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator
(in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development
system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena.
These included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a
job. * Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would
attempt to walk across the floor. * The card-punch output device would
occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would
usually jam in the punch. * The console would print snide and insulting
messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The Xerox card
reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A,
stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which
case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches
installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver...
after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a
result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read,
leaving the operator to re collate them manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They
found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once
again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of
events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed,
and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few
milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them
simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter --- only to find that
the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out
that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the kernel
file, in UNIX terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs
that were to be started at boot time.
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the
system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled
the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this
problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management
about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It
is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against
either of them.
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