Slashdot Mirror

*ROFL*

Recently, there has been some interest in classic Slashdot posts, and that whole "specially hand-crafted packets" idea reminds me of this post.

It's sad to see the actual dumb marketing guys imitating the trolls, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Boucher said the kind of technology developed by MP3.com and made legal by
his bill would allow music buyers to listen to their stored-up songs in their car
once satellite Internet access is perfected, in their office or from a friend's
computer. The bill would only apply to music that is sent, or "streamed," not
music that is downloaded.

"Copyright owners lose nothing by virtue of the technology MP3.com is using,"
he said. "It frees the Internet user to obtain the music he already owns over the
Internet."

Sending non-standard packets to get information; sounds kinda familiar. Like nmap, or queso.

But I suppose when you want to sell something like this for a lot of money, the Marketspeak gets pretty thick. I think it's really funny that this is specifically a Windows hack^H^H^H^Hprobing tool, too.

Ah well, it's not as bad as "Digital DNA"; I spent a good afternoon trying to find out information on that until I realized that it meant nothing, stood for nothing, and is basically a stupid abbreviation for "Motorola Technology". They had PRESS RELEASES full of MARKETDROIDS saying things like "It's DNA of the digital variety". WTF??? Grow me a digital person, marketdroid!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

- Always change your default passwords (that is the easiest way to get hacked, as seen in The Cuckoo's Egg, a la Hagbard)

- Never store your passwords in plaintext. Preferably, just hash them.

- Never trust a good password to a website. I have a throw-away password I use for unencrypted web stuff; slashdot can have it, and I'm gonna keep it. If they hack my kuro5hin account, I'll survive.

- Hope for the best, expect the worst. If someone compromises your system, it doesn't matter how nice they are about it; make sure you check everything, regardless.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, maybe I'll give it another shot, but this used to suck. It was a CDE-looking add-on for fvwm, back in the day, and it was a pain to get it to compile.

However, I like the GNOME compliant stuff, and I don't think they wrote it with gtk widgets before, either, so maybe they totally rewrote the thing.

Also, the pictures are under "Snapshots"; please call them screenshots, people; when I see "Snapshots", I expect to see a tgz file with a date on it. :)
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MEEPT!!

When did you find your password?

Wow, I just went on a search for MEEPT!! posts, and I found a whole bunch of them, and now I get a *new* one! This is great!

And, so help me, if anyone mods this down for being "Offtopic" or anything else, I'll hunt you down, hack slashdot myself, change your user page to goatse.cx, and post even more comments.

MEEPT!! is back! The world must know! Let every slash poster rejoice, and make merry!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm not familiar with Microsoft's Transaction Server; isn't COM sort of like CORBA, except that it's a Microsoft Standard instead?

I'm sure Visual Studio lets you mock up a GUI quickly, but I'd be somewhat suspicious of everything else; besides, even Unix people can find GUI-builders if they want them.

Generally, I just don't like the direction that Microsoft takes with their products; I could go through a laundry list of design stuff I don't like with their products, and many other people can, and have.

I liked Borland's stuff, "back in the day", when Microsoft had more competition in the PC world. Of course, I really like Linux, and Unix in general, and from that perspective Microsoft has worked around a *lot* of design flaws to get to where they are.

But my opinion is that the center will not hold in the Microsoft world, and that eventually everything will have to be redesigned, and they'll end up entirely destroying backwards compatibility. That's happening with Windows 2000, so I hope they get it right this time. However, I won't be suffering through it to find out.

I might get a separate DOS machine though, so I can get sound working correctly on the Future Crew demo, and for stuff like that.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wait up, man...

Maybe some other sites running the Slash code would like five minutes or so to secure their sites before everyone else in the world knows about it?

Or rather, let's make sure everyone's got the fixes before we go passing around the exploits, ok?
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:) Thanks, that's funny as hell!

If that's what Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate means, keep me out! I can't stand Clippy!

Projected I.E. 8.0 Interface:
-----------------------------
Clippy:"You look like you're posting to slashdot; would you like some help?"
Me:"Yes."
Clippy:"Would you like your post to be:
- Informative
- Funny
- Insightful
- Troll"
Me:"Insightful"
Clippy:"What is the subject?"
Me:"Would You Pay $1000 For Windows?"
Clippy:"Contacting microsoft.com..."
Clippy:"Microsoft® Windows 2000® Advanced Server
What's New

Built on Windows * Windows 2000 Advanced Server
2000 Server contains all the features and
improvements of Windows 2000
Server, plus...
Enhanced SMP and * Deploy the latest server hardware
memory support with up to 8 processors and
support for up to 8 gigabytes of
Random Access Memory (RAM). Ideal
for running today's most demanding
applications.
Network Load * Quickly and easily scale-out Web,
Balancing VPN, and Terminal Services using
integrated TCP/IP load balancing
technology. NLB distributes
incoming requests across farms of
up to 32 servers, enabling rapid,
incremental scalability while
guarding against both planned and
unplanned server downtime.
Cluster Service * Two-node high-availabilty
clustering for applications such
as databases, messaging
applications, and file & print
services. Ideal for
business-critical applications and
services where data integrity and
availability are the key
requirements. Supports rolling
upgrades from Windows NT Server
4.0 clusters (w/ SP4 or higher).
$3,519.00"
Me:"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Also, there is an ext2 defragmenter, I've used it. I don't think it helps much, though. There's also ext2ed, which is the equivalent to 'Norton Utilities', and of course there's mc. ("Midnight Commander") :)

There are also linux programs for analyzing security holes; I'm not quite sure what Expert does, though. For voice stuff, there's mgetty, but I haven't tried to set it up.

I know that Microsoft licensed some stuff from Symantec and put it in DOS (around 6.0 or so?) and they finally have a defragmenter for Windows 2000. They've incorporated the functionality of a few of those utilities, but apparently not well enough to run Symantec out of business yet. Woo hoo!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

So tell them to post some News for...

what do you mean they fixed it?
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Precisely; my understanding is that there are some people and businesses that love their stuff, but they're pretty quiet about it. Lotus sold out, and the "IBM Marketing Machine" (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) quietly buried their reputation.

Of course, IBM never releases all the good stuff; I'm sure they have about 12 platforms worth of software that rules all marked "For IBM Internal Use Only" with great documentation that often says "This Page Intentionally Left Blank", all locked away in a dusty old room. They're their own government there; that's why *they* had a lawsuit filed against them by the DOJ back in the day...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh, yeah, someone else mentioned FrameMaker, of course you have Reader as well.

Acrobat Reader is actually an ok port; Photoshop 3.0 for Unix blew chunks on Solaris, at least. I hope future Adobe products work decently; we'll see if they can compete with the standard Unix stuff.

I think it's pretty sick that Adobe had to "embrace-and-extend" their own format, PostScript, to make more cash...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, that's why I mentioned InterLeaf; I'm sure there are other similar applications to Quark on Unix, but I haven't used them, 'cause I've never had to.

However, I figured if people can write whole books with TeX, it probably supports a lot of publishing stuff; remember, the first Unix app was roff. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

'cause I'm not going to annotate the whole stupid thing.

Incidentally, I'm viewing this in Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux x86. ;)

OF COURSE the breakup is going to change their pricing structure. Competition generally drives prices *lower*.

Please tell me what Microsoft's 'low price strategy' is. They sell Windows and Office separately now anyhow.

How could the Windows software environment *possibly* be less predictable?

Please give examples of any actual "Microsoft Innovation" that doesn't involve buying other companies.

No one would pay $800 for an OS when they can pay that for a computer now.

Prices dropped for Word Processors and Spreadsheets due to competition; everyone made them, and they came standard with a computer. Later, we get unfair competition: I never paid for MS-Works, back in the day; it was bundled. And a lot of companies went out of business, or disappeared.

Corel hasn't been solvent for a long time; it has nothing to do with their recent plans, which are quite good. They've just been leaking money.

You can already do everything low-level in Word BASIC. I move that it be considered part of the OS, and removed from Office, and preferably the Universe as well.

Ever hear of MySQL? It's free...

If AppCo becomes a competitor to OpCo... well, maybe they'll get broken up again. I was hoping for a 'Networking' division, too.

A game console really shouldn't have an OS, but that's completely separate from the hardware, since that stuff should be on the cartridge. Also, different gaming companies should be free to use it or not.

"Lower Quality Windows OS"? Bwahaha...

It genuinely scares me when paper-pushers think Microsoft==Computers==Innovation. Nothing could be further than the truth.

I give up. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

Since I don't consider this a serious debate, I haven't outlined all my points clearly, but if you wish to debate, pick a point and I will elaborate. I think this whole thing is incredibly pathetic, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"market leaders as Intuit, Symantec, Lotus, Adobe, or Quark"

Intuit:Quicken runs fine on Linux, a la Corel. (if Corel's Office Suite runs under Linux, so does Quicken, it's just not official...)

Symantec & Lotus: They already sold out, or have been crushed by Microsoft. Much more worrisome.

Adobe: They dropped all Unix support in Photoshop 3.x, even though the Windows version of Photoshop 3.0 runs just fine on Linux; see Intuit. Besides, we also have The Gimp.

Quark: Aren't you doing that on a Mac anyhow? Heck, if I had LinuxPPC, I might be able to get that working, too. There are alternatives, too, not that I'd ever want to use, say, Interleaf, but TeX is rather well known; people write books in it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, you're thinking of SGML.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I believe jwz is running a nightclub...

I doubt this is what usually happens, and it's probably more than offset by the number of bozos who just realized that their degree in Ancient Sumerian won't get them a job, but I doubt those bozos are necessarily highly qualified at first. (read: "Certification Programs")

However, it does happen.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Instead of a shortage, it's more of an inability to keep people; that's one reason why it's so easy to get temp work.

Read the paper and check out the ads sometime; they have totally unreasonable expectations of what skill-sets they expect people to have. Just going through college is not enough; you can graduate from mine with a degree in Computer Science, and never learn C if you're careful, just Java, assembler, and maybe a functional language and something else, like SQL.

But then you don't have seven years experience in web design, or five years experience in Java, or a working knowledge of RPG, or something else equally ludicrous.

Of course, these requirements are padded, as are most people's credentials; but I'd much rather people said what they meant and were honest about the job requirements and the work environment. Lying to prospective employees is not a good way to start anything.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A lot of people are saying that this is somehow new or different than the 3-D printing technology we've already heard about.

It's not.

I saw this years and years ago in Wired in the Fetish section, back when Wired was somewhat fun to read. Yes, it scanned, assembled, and built the parts, and colored them too.

The difference is, now it's cheaper. Well, so is the computer on my desktop; I could have gotten the same computing power back then, but it would have cost exponentially more.

But apparently both of these are news on slashdot: "Old tech cheaper now"=="Moore's Law Still Sorta Works", and whatnot...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, we could hold a constitutional convention, and *then* vote them off the island. But it shouldn't take longer than a day to reverse it, it'll just take longer than a day to get it all together.

Hey, everything I'm doing is legal. It's just all steganographically encoded in slashdot from about 8 accounts. That's needed, because the data loss is pretty high, but that's the price you pay for security these days.

I'm not afraid to mention that here because I'm not saying which 8 accounts, but they just post random gibberish-looking posts which have a tendency to get modded up for no reason. Oh, and some articles, too, but not that many people like the articles. Gotta get "post-Columbine" out of my wordlist before more people complain.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Real cloak-and-dagger style recon there, guys; cool!

Of course security professionals and people who have worked on these sorts of projects would be the best able to understand the issues involved. In this case, though, they're also the most likely ones to have conflicts of interest. I say, since this is a democracy and all, that we start voting them off the island and get a new group in there, pronto...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A little searching revealed these babies; they're U2, and it looks like they do AGP.
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Actually, that *is* a big deal. I'm pretty thankful for Mae West, and I don't mean the actress.

However, what I'd really want is faster international traffic, especially to Britain, Japan, Germany... well, anywhere slow, really. :)

However, it's probably better to look into massive distributed caching models for that first, considering how much that sort of bandwidth costs.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Indeed; piss off, peons. ;)
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I didn't want to see any more articles about the RIAA today!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I was wondering the same thing, since I never signed up for this either.

And looking at how their e-mail comes out from elm, well, if that's innovation, then I don't want any.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, maybe I should be more specific: until they unify AIM and ICQ, and release it for Linux without ads.

I know what they already have available, and I don't want it, because I don't want to run two clients.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

*ROFL*

I couldn't have said it better...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Random ugly microsoft spam:

From MSFin@microsoft.com Wed Sep 27 00:09:02 2000
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 21:04:03 -0700
Subject: A FINFLASH FROM THE FREEDOM TO INNOVATE NETWORK
Reply-To: MSFin@microsoft.com
X-Mailer: MT Mail ver. 1.22.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="PART.BOUNDARY.970028117"
X-UIDL: 1ea40d45cac410d3b081b3f1bc623b00
Status: ORU

> This is a message in 'MIME' format.
> If your mail reader does not support MIME
> you may not be able to read some parts of this message.

--PART.BOUNDARY.970028117
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

=20
A FINFLASH FROM THE FREEDOM TO INNOVATE NETWORK!
September 26, 2000

To cancel your subscription to this newsletter or stop all=20
newsletters from microsoft.com, read the directions at the=20
bottom of this message.

SUPREME COURT REJECTS DOJ REQUEST TO BYPASS DC APPEALS COURT =20

On Tuesday, September 26, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the=20
government's request to hear Microsoft=92s appeal in the Department=20
of Justice antitrust case against the company, and announced=20
its decision to send it instead directly to the U.S. Court of=20
Appeals.=20

The DC Court of Appeals previously announced that if the Supreme=20
Court sent the case to them, Microsoft=92s appeal would be heard =20
"en banc" -- which means by the entire panel of Appeals Court=20
judges (other than those who have recused themselves).

Microsoft is confident of its case on appeal, which will outline=20
a significant number of legal, factual and procedural errors=20
committed in the district court. Microsoft believes the district=20
court=92s ruling will be reversed, and that it is in the best=20
interests of the company, its customers and the entire industry=20
to put the issue behind us.
=20
The next step is for Microsoft to file its recommended briefing=20
schedule on Monday, October 2. The government will respond on=20
October 5, with Microsoft=92s reply due October 10.

If you would like to let your elected officials know what you think=20
about today=92s decision, or if you just want to stay up to date on=20
developments in the antitrust trial, visit the Freedom to Innovate=20
Network at http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate .

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Who marked that as overrated? I'm still snickering...

Unfortunately, I'm signed up for AIM and ICQ so I can talk to my friends outside of the Realm, so it'd be awfully cramped in there.

Can we check which client they're using before we stash them in the cave?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Not this time, AC! I post all my goatse.cx links at +2 so they're easy for you to find! :)

Hey, what's your ICQ number?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

...but until that happens, and they release a Linux version without ads, there's always Everybuddy.

In any case, I'll always be in favor of a universal, free client; I haven't tried Jabber lately.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Good call.

You can take our karma, but you can't break our spirit!

Signed,

The Slashdoterrati


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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The *only* good line from an unspeakable space movie had something to do with trusting your lives to billions of parts all made by the lowest bidder...

...sounds like the Mickey Mouse route to me, especially with what NASA's budget is these days.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Tell me if you get it working; I haven't tried QNX at all.

Sure, let's move to there...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You're completely right, my man.

Although I'll stick to "never trust anyone over 2^10, for obvious reasons"... :)

But talk about a stupid issue; since we were both around before we had UIDs, it doesn't matter at all. Although I'm glad I don't have to type in my contact info every time.

I remember when one new user thought that "BoredAtWork" was an Anonymous Coward-type account (i.e. a generic name assigned by the system if you don't give it a name) because he posted so #@*& much back then. But he's UID #36, so of course he doesn't post much now. His posts are still excellent, though.

And yes, it's the old users who get fed up with the system and turn to trolling, because the system encourages it. But don't even get me started on that one...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Apparently not...

Slashdot is just useless these days.

So what's up?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've heard the same complaints about them, but I haven't tried their product (for obvious reasons).

I also have a dualhead, but I haven't gotten to try it out yet. I guess I'll suffer through trying to do it with XFree, but I'm pretty sure that it's supported...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

*sigh*

Please read my post again, and smack yourself for me.

Especially the parts about "GNU", "RMS", and "common usage".

If you aren't unconscious by now, understand that in the common usage of the English language as regards this subject, everything in a "Linux distribution" will henceforth be referred to as "Linux" whether you like it or not. People will call Redhat 7, X, SuSE and ls "Linux". And they won't call Redhat 7 "Redhat 7.0", either. And no one will pronounce either "Linux" or "either" the same, either. Ha ha ha.

Okay? Are we done yet?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

dd *is* a Linux command; (c)1999, FSF.

Just because it was *also* one of those original Unix commands... well, Unix is used to namespace collisions. However, I'm sure any Unix purist would agree that the Linux command ls (GNU ls, that is) isn't Unix ls. Therefore, it's a Linux command.

(or, if you're RMS, a GNU/Linux command? Possibly a Linux GNU Userland Command? LGUC? Nah... just a Linux command; forget RMS, he doesn't understand about convenience and common usage in language at all. And if he rants one more time about it, I'm going to start calling him GNU/RMS, and start asking him for DNA samples so we can do research, and contribute the changes back...)

But you're right, that *is* confusing. Maybe we should start a dd FAQ, in the spirit of the Pong FAQ...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Disk Duplicator

Who woulda thunk it?

...if you don't like dd, you're probably just bitter about paying for GHOST... :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I have a Matrox G400 Max; I compiled UTAH-GLX for it, and run XFree86, and it's *fast*, and I'm happy.

Therefore, I have this to say to people who try to sell commercial X-servers for Linux for my card for $200 and up: Nyah nyah! And I have this to say to people who use it: I've got an X-server to sell you, cheap; it's really great, and widely used!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, in a sense. Generally, a coder has great skills in coding, not paper pushing. A manager should have great skills in paper pushing, not coding. And if they know anything about distributing tasks and delegation of authority, they will want to do the paper pushing, not the coding, because they can verify that it is done quickly and well, whereas the coder can't, necessarily. That's just common sense.

I'm a coder, and I'm taking a course in accounting; I understand the material, but I'm not great at it. I wouldn't want to do your taxes, and you wouldn't want me to, either. Got it?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Indeed; artists are not paper-pushers. All the good examples I've seen here of successful managers sound more like mentors, helping you find your way without getting bogged down in the system. Maybe that would be a better word to use.

I'd much rather see book suggestions for coding, though; I guess I should post it. For C, I'd definitely recommend the (now ANSI) C Book, of course, by K&R, because they are artists... But that's not as much fun as crossposting to comp.lang.* to find out what the "best" programming language is. Any volunteers? ;)

Have you read the book Holy Fire? If not, where did you hear the term used, because that's exactly the same concept. The book was okay overall, but the ideas are fascinating.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Just make sure you don't have much more than log(n) managers for n employees, in a well-organized structure; otherwise, it can become intractable. 20% is probably reasonable to help ensure this.

Also, make sure you understand statements like the above, still. You might want to read other people's code occasionally, so you can decide when to butt out from what they're doing, or become a full-time manager, or retire, or find another line of work...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh. Tell me when Apple releases it.

In a couple of years, I'll tell you that you didn't have a clue.

But if I'm wrong about this one, well, I'll be happy about it, at least! :)

The real stuff that matters is running everything under emulation when you can't run it natively. Or for that matter, adding 'hardware features' that the original didn't necessarily have. That's awesome!

I'm sorry an entire troop of Mac zealots had to reply to what was primarily a post about Emulation, but Emu doesn't seem to have a big place on slashdot, much like the Demoscene, which is a real shame.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now that's what I call an 'x86 virtual machine'!

Dude, that beats the hell out of a DOS box.

I need to try VMWare again, now that I have 128MB of RAM and a lot more HD space; if it supports my DVD drive, (as I've heard people say it might) I might get to reclaim 2GB of former Windows partitioning, and burn that worthless FAT. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I couldn't have said it better myself, although I've tried before.

I too believe in emulation and in eventually running whatever I want (resources permitting) on one computer. Right now, I could run the first computer I ever had (the Commodore 64) flawlessly, as well as the Apple II, the Amiga, the original Macintosh, the original PC, anything Nintendo ever made, thousands of arcade games...

Well, it's incredible what can be done, but of course you eventually run into some resource limitations. It sounds like this emulator might be sluggish on the new machine I just bought, (800Mhz Athlon, 128MB RAM) let alone an older one, so that's out of the question right now. Of course, I'd want a Linux port too, although it'd be *interesting* to try to run this on top of VMWare. (much like it was interesting to try to run Executor on top of Soft Windows back in the day: Executor was pretty speedy; Soft Windows is not....)

I was wondering if someone would try to run a PowerPC emulator on x86; I didn't think all the registers would map very well, but I guess a lot of them would end up cached or renamed or whatever, nowadays. I think the Merced would be a much better platform for this sort of emulation, but it's not really there yet, as noted, so that'll be years off at least.

And yes, Apple's history continually disgusts me. But what disgusts me more are the people who forget what they do and have always done, and keep going back, like battered software consumers. I never liked the tactics Apple used, and I'm not going to pay the "Apple Tax" just to try out their technology. If BeOS can run on my machine, so can MacOS X, and if they don't want to sell it to me, that's their loss.

It would be entirely to their benefit for a product like this to come to fruition, because then I might get to try their technology, and see what they have to offer. But it doesn't look like they care, and so many people have stopped coding for speed or size and are just trying to get products out the door that it's pitiful what ends up getting released. If the MacOS interface looked like the implementation looked like, no one would use it. I guess you could say the opposite about Unix, too. :)

I was amused by the whole Intel crisis; so many people are depending on them, and they're trying way too hard in the x86 war; they just need to calm down and get back to basics, and make a kick-ass next generation processor. But if someone takes that away from them (preferably some combination of IBM, Transmeta and AMD, in my dreams...) I wouldn't miss them at all.

Finally, thank you, Slashdot, for this article. For once I can be proud, and say "This is news for nerds! This is stuff that matters!" How often does that happen? Well, not nearly enough.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Some of these problems could be easily solved.

I think there needs to be a way to tell what the network load on an individual node is, and attempt to negotiate connections with machines of similar connection speeds or ping times up to a maximum load cut-off.

Of course, there will still be people with hacked clients that report a bandwidth of 0 and a load of 10, but suspiciously have low pings. Those leeches should be killed, or at least swamped with connections...

Also, it would be nice if the network could re-organize over time, as in, promote people in your segment who give you back successful searches, and cut off branches that don't yield search results. Then everyone who wants free books would eventually find each other, and be separate from everyone who wants free porn (the other 99%, it seems)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.