Slashback: Moon Footage, KillerNic, ZFS Leopard

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories including: some direct answers to Slashdot questions on the KillerNIC, recap in stolen laptop identity theft problems, a victory for one PayPal user, missing moon footage surfaces, Dell laptops unwelcome on Quantas flights, and more ZFS news from the Leopard front Read on for details.

Direct answers to Slashdot KillerNIC questions. Emptynest writes "A bit over a week ago, Slashdot linked a story on GDHardware.com and it was filled with a bunch of 'hard questions from the Slashdot Community" regarding Bigfoot Network's pending 'killer' Network card that promises to reduce in-game lag. It looks as if Bigfoot isn't backing down and has hand-picked several of the questions from the Slashdot Community and answered them in a new article."

Recap of stolen laptop identity theft. Kn10 writes to tell us Technibble has a brief recap of some of the major laptop thefts resulting in personal information being leaked from major organizations. From the article: "According to the FBI, laptop theft is the second most common computer crime and less than 2 percent of those stolen laptops are ever recovered. Four in five (81%) of US firms have had at least one laptop stolen containing sensitive information according to a recent study."

A victory for on PayPal user. Not-So-Anonymous Coward writes "According to his site, 'silic0nsilence', who was featured in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600, has won his long battle with PayPal Fraud. On August 15th, 2006 in Small Claims court, he was awarded $671.12 after almost a year-long war with PayPal and a user. He also successfully won a small claims suit against PayPal to commence in his case with the user."

Missing moon footage surfaces. denis-The-menace writes "Film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film. He had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimeter film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue"

Dell laptops unwelcome on Quatas flights. Thomas Henden writes "The Australian airline company Quantas, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, banned the in-flight use of Dell laptops on battery power. The security personnel even went so far as taping over the contacts in the batteries according to an agreement between Dell and Qantas. However the security is now somewhat relaxed — all you need to do now, is to get in touch with the personal aboard, and tell you want to use your Dell laptop, and then you will be 'advised individually.'"

More ZFS new from the Leopard front. nezmar writes "From the AppleInsider forum comes an interesting discovery about Sun's ZFS and Apple. A user who has the Leopard developer preview searched the system with Spotlight and found a mention of ZFS. He says: 'There is no file system bundle for it, nor is there a mount utility or any other one (no fsck, now newfs, etc.). There is, however, a changed vnode.h.' Looks like the story back in May might have some truth after all."

Comments

PayPal article

[ackthpt]

You have to go to here and click on the link. Otherwise you get a WMD parody.

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

You have to go to here and click on the link.Otherwise you get a WMD parody.

Oh, hey, cool. Thanks for the heads up on that one. I would have missed it otherwise.

KFG

Re:PayPal article

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Or you can just go here. There's an extra / at the end of the posted URL.

And the WMD thing is from an old meme.

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

And the WMD thing is from an old meme

It's easy to tell jokes to kids, they don't even know why birds fly south.

KFG

Re:PayPal article

[Nefarious Wheel]

It's easy to tell jokes to kids, they don't even know why birds fly south

From here, they fly North for the winter. And it's because they have magnets in their heads (this was proven before P.E.T.A found out).

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

From here, they fly North for the winter.

I didn't say anything about winter.

. . . it's because they have magnets in their heads. . .

The magnet is the earth. Not all birds have the iron to make use of it for navigation; apparently relying on good ole VFR. Navigation methods do not address the metaissue of why they fly south.

KFG

Re:PayPal article

[bcrowell]

Well, I'm kind of baffled. Silic0nsilence has the money in his bank account. The scammer has the laptop. PayPal is out $600, but has obviously decided that they don't have any cost-effective way of getting their money back from the scammer. So isn't it PayPal that's been screwed? Doesn't seem like that much of a tragedy for silic0nsilence. Is he worried about getting his credit rating hurt? Is he terribly offended that he won't be able to use this PayPal account anymore?

Re:PayPal article

[operagost]

My war with PayPal began in early September 2005. I sold a laptop on eBay for $615. To protect the buyer's identity, I will refer to him as RH.

"RH" stole his laptop, yet he suggests that PayPal is the real villan here and wants to protect "RH"! They surely committed some serious acts of negligence, but why not tell everyone about "RH", too? After all, this larceny wouldn't have happened without "RH". Why would he do this?

Re:PayPal article

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm told that chickens fly south to get to the other side.

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

I'm told that chickens fly south to get to the other side.

Because that's about as far as they can make it.

KFG

Re:PayPal article

[Fred_A]

Flabby, pasty looking people in shorts and colourful shirts with a Nikon round they neck also fly south every now and then for no apparent reason and they also don't have any iron in their head.

I guess we'll just have to accept that nature still has its mysteries. :)

Re:PayPal article

[kfg]

. . .they also don't have any iron in their head.

Coulda fooled me.

KFG

Re:PayPal article

[Lumpy]

and he did not win. He got a small claims suit against the person that frauded him. he did not win against paypal in any way.

He does not have the money, his chances of actually getting the money are slim to none... small claims awards = nothing unless you have the means to enforce it, they are not going to garnish the scammers wages.

Paypal has done nothing to help this victim except try to harass, threaten and intimidate him. they will not do anything for him nor do they give a rats ass.

as long as paypal is not a bank you are able to be screwed by them at any moment. remember that.

Quantas?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's QANTAS fellas....stands for Queansland And Northern Territory Air Service.

Re:Quantas?

[LokiTD]

The person spelled it three different ways in the blurb. Including the correct way once...

Re:Quantas?

[CaptainCarrot]

If they want it spelled right, they should stop pronouncing it as if there was a "u" in there. It should be "q" as in "Qatar".

Re:Quantas?

[Devoir]

Say that out loud. In the office. I dare you.

Re:Quantas?

[ozbird]

If they want it spelled right, they should stop pronouncing it as if there was a "u" in there. It should be "q" as in "Qatar".

"Qatar" is the English transliteration of the Arabic, so is pronounced "k".
Australia's national language is English, so the "Q" of QANTAS - with its implied "u" - is pronounced "kw".

Re:Quantas?

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

And even then the correct way was a cut and paste quote.

Re:Quantas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q as in catarrh?

Re:Quantas?

[CaptainCarrot]

There is no implied u following a q in English. It's always explicit. There are a few words in use in English where q is not followed by a u, but the overwhelming majority are foreign loanwords. In no case is it pronounced "kw". (Except for "qwerty", but the "w" comes from the "w" and not an implied "u".)

Re:Quantas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just pretend it's American English then (see: yo, color, etc).

Re:Quantas?

[CaptainCarrot]

"Yo" doesn't mean "you", it's a call across a distance like "yoo-hoo" or "haloo". It's not polite usage, and in the context you probably have in mind it's actually very rude, and Blair was being a wimp by taking it so meekly. And the "u" in "colour" is an affectation without warrant. (Although I wouldn't go as far as this guy in spelling reform. The extreme reforms obscure meaning.) This is one case where the Americans have preserved the older usage.

Re:Quantas?

[ozbird]

There is no implied u following a q in English. It's always explicit.

Explicit in words - not acronyms.

KillerNIC responds

[User 956]

So from their response, It's clear that not only does their marketing department design and develop their products, but they also perform most traditional functions, such as put together fluff non-answers for web "interviews".

Re:KillerNIC responds

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the only one who thought it was bullshit? Thank god.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[Anonymous Coward]

To me it seems that even if it does work, it is yet another where those with money just need somewhere else to spend it.

Could donate to a worth cause instead. Like college students who eat ramen and get two hours sleep. (Yeah... I could use it... Could also use 'KillerPEN' to make me write better and 'KillerBRAIN' to understand theoretical quantum physics...but I digress)

Anyway. Technically speaking, it sounds like MAYBE it could give you a few...miliseconds....but I think raw skills in a game would more than compensate. Just my opinion.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[222]

Uhh, TCP Offload Engines are actually a real feature in server NICS, and quite worthwhile imho.
While you may no see the need for such a product in a PC gaming system, to dismiss the technology described as "fluff" is innacurrate at best.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[ivan256]

*cough*

Describing the benefits of a TCP offload engine as the answer to a question about how they can claim reduced UDP latency is fluff. It's like the magician getting you to look at his assistant's chest while he moves a hidden card to the top of the deck.

Besides, TCP offload is a technology to increase throughput, not to reduce latency.

We are agreed that TCP is not UDP, right?

Re:KillerNIC responds

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."

Re:KillerNIC responds

[snowgirl]

While worms/viruses/etc are always a concern, Killer uses Linux built-in permission and security systems to help protect against this. In addition, users have complete control to choose which FNApps run on their card.

Linux is not immune to worms, it all depends on the apps that are running in the background. If *their* code is crappy, then it can break down the Linux permissions, and voila, worm. And while users may have complete control to choose which FNApps run on their card... um... they already have that option on real PCs, yet things get run without them knowing. Spyware and Adware are things that work around issues such as "you choose what to run".

This is also neglecting the idea of a root kit, such that an app could hide itself from the user.

This can yield multi-millisecond benefits, even on the fastest of today's computers.

Ok, now granted this is a Mac to a Linux box, but:

23 packets transmitted, 23 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.169/0.230/0.416/0.074 ms

This is between two computers on a gigabit network through a switch. Now, please, explain to me how I'm supposed to be expecting these multi-millisecond benefits from bypassing the UDP stack? I mean, if he seriously would like to tax me on this, I suppose I could write a UDP ping program and prove that my network gets that sort of a response regularly even over UDP.

And as the perfect finale, their question number 1 was from me:

1) Seriously, who else but a marketing department would think that it's a good idea to trademark a name describing everything "new" that your product does? And the page is so full of TLAs (three letter acronyms) that you need a glossary to read it.

Bigfoot: Virtually all technology companies trademark their features, including Intel, AMD, nVidia, Razer, and us! But we understand you want to understand the technology, so check out Killer's new product page at our website. You will find that it is much more detail driven in terms of how the technology works. Also, you'll find plenty of meat in our FAQ here.

I'd like to point out that my issue was that they're trademarking EVERYTHING, not just NetBurst, or SSE, or AltiVec, etc, or any other of the individual names that companies have thrown out to describe their new products. But when I look at an ad for a product and there literally is nothing describing the card or product that doesn't have a little (tm) next to it, I get suspicious.

When you have to go to such great lengths to make something sound so totally rad, that's usually the biggest indication that something is wrong with it.

As a personal rule of thumb: the slimier the salesman, the more seriously you need to consider what he's trying to offer you.

If they feel that they have to trademark a word "MaxFPS(tm)" that provides absolutely no information about what it does, rather than just say "Network Process Offloading" be warry.

Oh, and then the creativity of all their new trademarks. I mean, they're just words squished together. It's not like you're getting a cool name like "NetBurst" or "AltiVec" or something new, no, you get "PingThrottle", and "GameFirst", or "UltimatePing". Who did they have working as the creative director on these names? Nim Chimpsky? They are so uninteresting, and bland, that it just smacks of "We didn't want to even try to be cool, because we didn't care."

Personally, I for one welcome our new NetworkOverlords(tm), with their NiftyTrademarks(tm), with their SuperCreativity(tm).

Tell you what Bigfoot, send me a KillerNIC to review, and we'll start talking about if any of your lame lame lame marketing is worth anything at all. Until then, I'll slam it anytime I can. With my patent pending HyperDis(tm) technology.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[Jekler]

After reading their responses, even if I'm not completely satisfied with their pitch, I'm willing to consider the possibility that they have a valid product. I'll need to see independent benchmarks. If there is a network card that's going to improve my gaming experience, even if it costs $280, I'd buy it. Heck, I'd buy anything to improve my gaming experience, but I need solid evidence first.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[0xygen]

*cough*

You will actually find that TOE frequently refers to TCP/IP Offload Engine, which includes the IP packet checksum. If this is quick enough, it would indeed also improve the latency, as less (slower) code has to be run in the OS IP stack (although I certainly agree with you that this would most likely not be noticable in a gaming environment).

TCP is indeed not UDP, however the IP checksum falls under TCP/IP.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[schon]

TCP Offload Engines are actually a real feature in server NICS, and quite worthwhile imho.

Yes, and they're not real features in client NICS, for good reason - specifically that clients (especially gaming clients) don't suffer the network load to make effective use of them.

Re:KillerNIC responds

[anticypher]

Their responses left me with even more doubts about this scam, I was willing to believe they were on to something if they had some on-the-ball technical answers.

I support a number of gaming server companies, and online gaming is one of the biggest nightmares in the ISP/carrier world. The problem is all the short UDP packets really pound hard on the CPUs of all the big routers. I moved one large game hosting company from one client to another recently, and watched the network problems migrate from one to the other. Web traffic is mostly large TCP packets, high bandwidth but low Packets Per Second. Game traffic is low bandwidth and high PPS. PPS, especially UDP and ICMP traffic tends to touch the CPU more often, and if you look at all the big router companies they rate their boxes with PPS as more important than total bandwidth or throughput.

If KillerNIC really wanted to make a hot gaming product, they would optimise this for gaming servers, they already disclaim that it wont work on any multi-game server with many clients. Offloading all the unimportant traffic responses, such as ICMP echo/reply packets, would allow gaming servers to dedicate all their CPU power to updating game state, and would allow game hosting companies to spec much lesser hardware (i.e. save $$$ per box). Maybe make it part of a matched pair, that would allow gaming companies to advertise their use of ping acceleration technology.

They should really push the CPU offload feature, if it really works, for the hardcore gamers who play on GigEthernet LANs. It's there where offloading the CPU would help, and latency is a non-issue. Shaving a millisecond or two over broadband isn't going to make much difference to players who win because of skill and talent. Although I always see messages along the lines of "dtag players are complaining in the forums that ping times have gone up 3 mSec from 34mSec to 37mSec, can you fix that?", due to their lack of skill getting them fragged and they have to blame something.

I was joking around recently about creating a line of "Monster" Cat6 cables using gold plated solid silver wires with mu-metal shielding for game-o-philes. Something to go between their 3 euro realtek NIC and their 29 euro no-name chinese DSL modem with ping acceleration on their wanadoo/orange connection. There is probably a fortune to be made taking gameophool's money.

the AC

and a UDP accelerator cow magnet, a framerate cleanser, a joystick base resonance-reflecting granite stone slab for faster reflexes...

Re:KillerNIC responds

[ivan256]

You are correct that it would improve improve latency, but it does so only slightly, and it exists primarily to prevent the checksum calculation from traversing the CPU bus/interconnect, thus reducing CPU load and increasing throughput. It was introduced because CPUs couldn't push gigabit ethernet to it's full potential. If all the data is being processed by the CPU anyway (all dynamic content, like in a game) the benefit would be negligible, or there could even be a performance hit...

The code that runs in the OS IP stack isn't any slower... It's probably faster because the system processor is faster. It's the bus utilisation and the cache clobbering that are the real reasons for TCP offload.

(Disclaimer: I have written ethernet drivers for a chip with TCP offload.... and SSL offload for that matter.)

Re:KillerNIC responds

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

If they feel that they have to trademark a word "MaxFPS(tm)" that provides absolutely no information about what it does, rather than just say "Network Process Offloading" be warry.

Indeed. The fact that it's a trademark means that it provides no information about what it does. It's like Microsoft's PlaysForSure(TM). If you sue them complaining that it does not, in fact, play for sure, they will just turn around and say "We never claimed it does; That's just our trademark".

bigfoot networks

[larry bagina]

I can't be the only who thinks of goatse when I see the bigfoots network logo...

Pedant

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things.

1) It's "Qantas" - no "u".

2) "...all but forgotten..." - Why do people insist on using this awfully stupid phrase? To all BUT forget something means you have done everything, *anything* except forget it! All BUT!

Re:Pedant

[jkeegan]

In this case, I'm guessing they used it because otherwise someone would have posted something like "but if he forgot it, then he shouldn't know he has it now, because he forgot!".

Re:Pedant

[geekoid]

"2) "...all but forgotten..." - Why do people insist on using this awfully stupid phrase? To all BUT forget something means you have done everything, *anything* except forget it! All BUT!"

why is it people who don't understand a saying scream about it not making sense?

Re:Pedant

[Chirs]

Where X is an adjective the phrase "all but X" implies "almost completely X". You can think of it as "just about ALL the way to being X, BUT not quite".

On the other hand, "anything but X" has the opposite meaning--it is not even close to X.

Gotta love English...

[Anonymous Coward]

Missing moon footage surfaces?

Are you talking about the surface of the footage from the moon, which is missing? The footage, that is. Not the moon. Or the surface. :|

D.

Re:Gotta love English...

[SEWilco]

Obviously they're referring to the Moon footage where Neil placed his foot on the surface.
Maybe someone with a broom tidied up Tranquility Base.

you think that's bad?

[User 956]

You should see the logo for Westnet Broadband in Australia.

Re:you think that's bad?

[gEvil (beta)]

Oh man. That's just too funny! :-D

Re:you think that's bad?

[theskipper]

Copyright (c) 2006, Irving M. Goatse.

Re:you think that's bad?

[TheSpoom]

Westnet Broadband: Huge pipes ready for you to fill.

Re:you think that's bad?

[ArsenneLupin]

You should see the logo for Westnet Broadband in Australia.

Careful there. This is an ASP site, and soon enough, the GLGA may make sure that there is a real goatse on there...

Re:you think that's bad?

[MarkGriz]

Here's the perfect gift for all you goatse fans

You are wrong

[A nonymous Coward]

The sense of the saying is that it is only an infinitesimal point away from being forgotten, similar to saying a contract is all but signed, that only the very last step in forgetting something actually remains.

Re:You are wrong

[kfg]

He knows what it means. He's talking about what it means. I mean, at least I think that's the mean of it. Don't be mean.

KFG

Re:You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

That is another possibly correct interpretation of the literal meaning of the words. However, the OP is correct in saying that it's a stupid phrase to use - because the guy DID forget about the reels. They were not "all but forgotten" in any possible sense, yet that is the usage of the phrase that persists, and it is incorrect!

WTF

[Phantom100]

The airline said that although passengers would be allowed to carry their Dells either as checked or cabin baggage, they could only use them on battery power or through the aircraft power supply available in some first and business class cabins once they have first removed the batteries from the unit.

How does someone run on battery power with the battery removed?

Re:WTF

[Shadow Wrought]

The airline said that although passengers would be allowed to carry their Dells either as checked or cabin baggage, they could only use them on battery power or through the aircraft power supply available in some first and business class cabins once they have first removed the batteries from the unit.

You can use the battery, or use the cord, but you can't use both.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

That handcrank on the $100 PC doesn't look so funny now huh?

Re:WTF

[Pinky3]

The word you didn't read was OR.

You may use it with a battery in it. OR you may use it with a power cord and no battery in it.

You may not use it with a power cord and a battery in it, i.e. no charging.

Re:WTF

[Svartalf]

External Battery supply such as what's provided by Valence- a Saphion battery pack.

Re:WTF

[blincoln]

The word you didn't read was OR.

My understanding is that in common English, "or" is the inclusive variety. That's why the logical operation for inclusive OR isn't called something like "IOR."

If they mean XOR, they should append "but not both" or clarify it in some equivalent way.

Re:WTF

[hob42]

Or prepend "either" like they did earlier in the sentance, "either as checked or cabin baggage..."

Re:WTF

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

My understanding is that in common English, "or" is the inclusive variety. That's why the logical operation for inclusive OR isn't called something like "IOR."

In a lot of contexts, "or" is exclusive, and "and/or" is inclusive. In other contexts, you would be correct.

English is a mess.

Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[khasim]

In TCP/IP world, CPU utilization has been known to be dramatically reduced by offload technologies, but the biggest benefits of Killer come from its unique 'hardware network stack'. This literally bypasses the Windows network stack and uses hardware interrupts to get data directly to the game, skipping tons of queuing, and 'software interrupts' that are common with the operating system's network stack.

Yes, that is your claim.

But the "network stack" is a bit more complex than you seem to be implying. I'm sure that most people here are familiar with the old OSI model:

Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical

Now, explain how those "hardware interrupts" substitute for the processing that needs to happen.

I'm not saying that the Windows TCP/IP stack could not stand some optimization. I'm sure that it could.

I just don't see how claiming "hardware interrupts" are the solution is an answer if you don't explain how those "hardware interrupts" handle the processing and where/when they are called.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[A nonymous Coward]

I think all they've done is replace a general purpose PC network stack with a dedicated one on the NIC. They get to optimize the stack, they get to avoid general OS interruptions, they avoid PCI latency, but not much else. Good for a millisecond or two, maybe.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[lnjasdpppun]

I really like how the question being answered specifically related to UDP nothing about TCP. Games generally don't use TCP anyway, so there isn't much point in optimising it for better gaming performance...

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Trogre]

You forgot the top layer in the OSI stack:

8: Operator

So many network problems I've had to troubleshoot have been tracked to layer 8.

Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[batkiwi]

It's a joke. You've all been trolled.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[GreyKnight]

Now, explain how those "hardware interrupts" substitute for the processing that needs to happen.

The problem here, is that they aren't actually attempting to answer the questions, just produce the appearance of answering the questions, for the benefit of their target demographic (who likely don't understand either side of the exchange).

They also managed to get another link posted from slashdot in the process. *Cough*.

From the "answers":

This can yield multi-millisecond benefits, even on the fastest of today's computers.

The ping time to my firewall, (a Pentium classic, underclocked to 75 MHz), is ~0.45 ms. Pretty hard to make a multi-millisecond improvement on that.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found a hammer or a large screwdriver to do the trick (also works for PEBKAC/PIBCAKS and eye-dee-ten-tee errors. If that doesn't work, then hey: just order some large screwdrivers and get hammered.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[FSWKU]

Good for a millisecond or two, maybe.

Which is good enough to have plenty of "hardcore gamers" lining up to buy this snake-oil. You know the type. The ones that shell out several thousands of dollars on a high end machine, spend hours hand-picking watercooling components to get another 5 MHz out of their overpriced CPU, fork over $100+ for a 36gb HDD because it's 10,000rpm... all in an effort to shave a quarter of a second off their load times and gain a few FPS in what usually ends up being Quake 3 or CS. And after all that, they still get mauled by someone running a 1200mhz Athlon with half a gig of RAM and a GeForce 4...

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[schon]

I really like how the question being answered specifically related to UDP nothing about TCP.

Actually, my favouite part was that he ignored the fact that clients and servers have vastly different requirements - namely that servers process much more network data.

"Oh, it's useful on a server, therefore it must be useful on a client!"

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[operagost]

You joke, but that Athlon sounds almost exactly like my rig.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Svartalf]

You don't avoid PCI latency- you STILL have to cross the bus.
You don't avoid hardware interrupts- HOW do you let the OS know that you've sent the data or got it?
Optimizing the stack- optimizing WHAT? It's allegedly speeding up UDP traffic; there's little to "optimize" there.

I'd buy TCP Offload maybe needing to be done- for 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware. I should know;
I work with that sort of hardware for a client. UDP's not needing diddly at any lower speeds than that-
the offloads that make sense and work are scatter-gather DMA of the packet instead of needing an assembly
buffer and checksum calculation. Most modern cards worth their salt do this already.

They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the
problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're
allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be
but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[complete loony]

So, how many games use TCP??? How exactly is this going to improve performance??
I've got an nForce4 motherboard with on board NIC, it comes with drivers for windows that offload some of the processing. I assume there is a higher level interface in the driver model that you can replace.

However it's only with a recent driver revision that I've been able to ftp files without corruption. Any TCP based protocol that didn't have another layer of checksum's would result in errors.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[NateTech]

8. Religion
9. Politics

No system runs without them.

e.g. "We're an all Cisco shop..."

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[KagatoLNX]

Actually, TCP/IP predates OSI by a fair margin. It only has five layers if I recall correctly.

Could this just be low level packet prioritization? Maybe utilizing some tweaked out optimizations for checksum offloading or perhaps some clever optimization of TCP windows?

Still, sounds like snake oil to me (just like some video card specs).

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[hayden]

The top two layers of the OSI stack are:

9: Political
8: Financial

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[ThePhilips]

Games suffer from latencies. Servers are Ok with latencies - they are made so and pipelining (used to improve overall performance) is the cause of the latencies.

Another point, nobody payed attention to, is that KillerNIC "literally bypasses the Windows network stack and uses hardware interrupts to get data directly to the game". That might sound find (in fact I was personally doing something similar with Intel's e1000 adapters) but with one major problem: the network traffic reaches the game directly, bypassing all the security, firewalls, anti-virii software you might happen to have. In other words, before attackers were needed to find a hole in Windows, now they would start looking into holes in games. With advent of MMO games, how many millions of people would be exposed to the risks??

To conclude. No miracles, KillerNIC traded security for performance. Well, nothing new really. Moving on.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[evilviper]

Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.

Not at all. Like any other flaky component, you swap it out with a known-good one for testing, and if you determine the original was defective, you dispose of it.

Note to self: Buy more heavy-duty trash bags.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[WWWWolf]

9: Political
8: Financial

And 10: The supernatural. (As evidenced by this recent debate...)

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[anticypher]

Those two are an essential part of BGP/MPLS routing policy. You forgot the highest layer of the protocol stack

10: Religious

Yes, financial obligations of the organisation may dictate where traffic flows, and political considerations of various suppliers may override that, but it's the religious views of the most technical person on the network that ultimately prevails. By religious, I mean along the lines of SBCATT sucks, Juniper vs. Cisco, linux vs. openbsd, vi vs. emacs, and other *ahem* non-trivial viewpoints.

the AC

The non-answers on the GDHardware site make me even more suspicious that this is a snake-oil product aimed at game-o-philes who think that gold plated cat5e cables increase their framerate by a noticable amount

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the claim, anyway. Coming from a company that claims that ping doesn't use your network stack (how do you think it gets on the network, then? Telepathy?) I can't give it much weight. All they've done with their replies is cement their snake-oil status.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Seraphim_72]

They might be offering something- I won't call it as totally bogus until I see proof either way. But the problem REALLY is that the thing bypasses ALL of the system security. In this case, they're allegedly using Linux to provide the core of the network stack, so it's less problematic than it could be but what kinds of exploits are present in the interface between the Killer and the Windows OS.

[tinfoil]Like accumulating and sending back aggregate web data. For the marketeers these people seem to be , I have to admit it would be a great ploy. Watch these things come out at some rediculously cheap price point.[/tinfoil]

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pinging your firewall requires very little from your system.

Besides... they were refering to improving in-game ping time. In-game "ping" is not the traditional ICMP ping that we have all come to know and love. In-game "ping" is refering to the round-trip time from a regular UDP packet. While your playing a first person shooter like Counter-Strike it's common for a system to be sending and receiving hundreds of thousands of UDP packets within a few seconds.

The four packets that your workstation sends to your firewall just doesn't accurately simulate a gaming network situation.

As far as the stack... they aren't refering to the OSI model, folks.

Re:Still not buying the KillerNIC story.

[Em Adespoton]

From what I can gather, they're offloading the CPU crunching done in the network stack to their card, freeing up the CPU to deal with other game-related processes. As far as the network stack goes, quick handling of TCP means that UDP packets (also handled by the stack) are also processed in a more timely fashion.

Basicly, you won't really see a difference in theoretical simulations; the only time this should make any sort of a noticeable difference is when your computer is already being brought to its knees by running UltimateShakyGround II Online at 240fps, 3200x2400dpi. Believe me... I've been in situations where computers exchanging UDP packets ran into real trouble because some unrelated process kicked in on one of them.

All that being said, it'd be just as easy to lower your screen resolution and turn off the eye candy to reduce CPU load. I have a feeling that's what all the really skilled gamers do.

Not much of a victory, and nought to do with paypa

[A nonymous Coward]

Near as I can tell, his victory is a small claims court win against the buyer who claimed a fraudulent chargeback. Not only is paypal not a direct part of that victory, it's a pretty small victory, since he still has to collect payment, and that is much harder than merely showing up in small claims court with your opponent missing. He still intends to pay off NCO and paypal, so they won't lose much at all from his "victory".

It's spelled "Qantas"

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize I'm picking nits, but... it's not "Quantas", and it's not "Quatas".

Qantas is an acronym (or possibly more accurately, an initialism, since it's pronounced as a word and not spelled out letter-by-letter when spoken) for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service".

Qantas flights and Dell

[wonk]

I took a Qantas flight yesterday and can confirm they are not allowing Dell computers to be used on their planes. They didn't actually ask people indidivually if they had a Dell, but part of the pre-takeoff announcement was "Dell laptop computers must not be used at any time on this aircraft".

ZFS Port

[joe_bruin]

ZFS is an amazing file system. However, despite both Solaris and OSX having POSIX semantics and BSD heritage, porting ZFS to OSX is not a simple matter as, for example, porting UFS or EXT2 would be*. ZFS consumes the block driver, the volume manager, and the RAID layer into one giant entity. It further adds things like FS snapshots, compression, and dynamically resizable partitions that OSX may not be prepared to handle. If this is happening, it will take time. Lots of time. But hopefully, they'll do it. ZFS addresses shortcomings present in most (not-so-)modern file systems.

* example only, I imagine these exist already.

Re:ZFS Port

[ArbitraryConstant]

"ZFS consumes the block driver, the volume manager, and the RAID layer into one giant entity."

It does all three better than what Apple currently has. I agree about the complexity, but coming up with a good filesystem isn't as easy as it used to be.

Re:ZFS Port

[VValdo]

porting ZFS to OSX is not a simple matter as, for example, porting UFS or EXT2 would be*

Actually, early released versions of OS X (10.0 for sure) ran on either HFS+ *or* UFS. UFS wasn't used so much and I think had some issues (case sensitivity & classic OS 9 support), and I believe at some point (10.2?) UFS-based installation was dropped.

W

Re:ZFS Port

[PygmySurfer]

Dtrace has already been integrated into Leopard, which I thought was pretty impressive. I imagine its not as complex as ZFS, but, I still think its quite the accomplishment.

That said, I hope ZFS makes it to Leopard. And FreeBSD.

Re:ZFS Port

[arloguthrie]

Warning: Flat-Out Conjecture:

From this comment:

I would love for the FS to do snapshot saves with incrementals and checkpoints and rollback, instead of having each application do it. This provides unlimited undos potential with actual stored versions... a true 'history' of the file, available for review.

Which had me thinking (and you folks probably know more about this than I do) — could ZFS power elements of Time Machine? I mean, probably for 10.6 (Ocelot?), but still... If Time Machine was not only backup software but a way for the OS to automatically handle version control, holy crap. Please, tell me if I have no idea what I'm talking about. Entirely possible.

Re:ZFS Port

[m874t232]

If Time Machine was not only backup software but a way for the OS to automatically handle version control, holy crap.

You don't need ZFS for that--any file system will do.

Furthermore, lots of operating systems have these capabilities already, but they are not popular and are generally not enabled. It may be that it's the right thing for Apple's consumer OS to do, but in most other settings, universal version control and automatic restore simply aren't desirable features.

Re:ZFS Port

[zdzichu]

It took 10 days for FreeBSD hacker to port ZFS to FBSD. The result is available here.

Re:ZFS Port

[Anonymous Coward]

Dtrace has already been integrated into Leopard, which I thought was pretty impressive. I imagine its not as complex as ZFS, but, I still think its quite the accomplishment

ZFS might be more lines of code (I don't know), but ZFS interfaces with the system mostly at a point where the system has been set up to handle "more" (the vnode layer), and in some "all new" spots (zpool and such). Dtrace touches the system in all sorts of places (think "trace points for pretty much everything"). Dtrace is likely harder to "port to" a new system. ZFS should be pretty easy, at least until you decide you need to support things like exchangedata and resource forks, then you start having to do more work, but just supporting it as well as UFS is already supported isn't likely to be hard.

Re:ZFS Port

[PygmySurfer]

All the more impressive that they were able to implement Dtrace already then :) Hopefully that bodes well for ZFS support.

QUANTAS QUATAS??? WTF?!?!?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

ITS QANTAS FFS!
It's a damn acronym Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service.
And still the safest airline in the world!

No 'U' in Quantas

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no 'U' in QANTAS. It is an acronym - Queensland & Northern Territory Aerial Services. not a word.

Re:No 'U' in Quantas

[kfg]

It is an acronym . . . not a word.

Laser, radar, scuba. . .

KFG

Re:No 'U' in Quantas

[mjwx]

QANTAS,

Its written on the side of the damn plane

http://www.qantas.com.au/

Offloads the network stack?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Good idea, except your new network stack interface has to be a driver. So this won't help any Linux or Mac gaming....oh. Never mind then.

(Yes, this was posted with Safari. I don't have as much as Solitaire on here.)

DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA can now join the legion of other corps/organisations that have had their content rescued solely because an untrusted third party just happened to have a non DRM-locked copy lying around (The BBC is famous for this). It would be very interesting to see what sort of licencing regime Peter Clifton will require in order to return the footage NASA. Alternatively this could be a case of DRM 'do as I say not do as I do' and NASA will just be given the unencumbered media to copy and distribute.

As an aside - is this footage in the public domain? If it isn't, this would be a unique opportunity to have the footage placed there. Original licencing agreements with NASA last century really don't matter anymore if you have to only copy of the footage. (This from a very pragmatic perspective, not a legal one).

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA can now join the legion of other corps/organisations that have had their content rescued solely because an untrusted third party just happened to have a non DRM-locked copy lying around (The BBC is famous for this).

How is he an "untrusted" third-party if he specifically ordered the footage? He licensed it and therefore didn't need the DRM.

What a silly but completely unsurprising Slashdot argument. DRM is not bad, and you can't point to any instance where it's been evil. DRM like that in iTunes is the most liberal around. You don't even notice it's there.

Re:DRM

[TooMuchToDo]

With regards to your question about the footage being in the public domain, please refer to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#United_ States_law

"Works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation. Examples include military journalism, federal court opinions (but not necessarily state court opinions), congressional committee reports, and census data. However, works commissioned by the government but created by a contractor are still subject to copyright, and even in the case of public domain documents, availability of such documents may be limited by laws limiting the spread of classified information.

Before 1978, unpublished works were not covered by the federal copyright act. This does not mean that the works were in the public domain. Rather, it means that they were covered under (perpetual) state copyright law. The claim that "pre-1923 works are safe" is only correct for published works; unpublished works are under federal copyright for at least the life of the author plus seventy years. If they were created before 1978 but first published before 2002, the works have federal copyright protection until 2047."

So, while the moon landing film/video was created before 1978 (and thereby, before the federal copyright act), it is most likely still in the public domain (due to the astronauts being government employees).

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

'Untrusted' because he is not a NASA employee.
'Untrusted' because the footage has at some point been out of NASA's control.
'Untrusted' because technically we don't know what he's edited out of the footage he may return.

Additionally, if DRM was in use the following scenario could well happen:

NASA: Have you really got a copy of xxx in stock?
Peter: I believe so - my access key expired several years ago, but the outside of the case confirms it's what you're after.

Tech 1: Damn - I can't read this, who's got the key?
Tech 2: Damn - I'm afraid that we lost that too.

If you think that it's unlikely that NASA would lose a private key, may I remind you that they've already lost all copies of the footage in question.

Re:DRM

[fossa]

DRM may not be bad in and of itself, but DRM backed by the DMCA certainly is bad as it allows copyright owners to circumvent copyright law, so carefully balanced (HA!) to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by completely dictating what can and cannot be done and with no apparent mechanism to revert to the public domain.

Re:DRM

[westlake]

an untrusted third party

Tell me how a movie producer who licenses/purchases the use of stock footage from the Smithsonian becomes an "untrusted third party."

Re:DRM

[RexRhino]

While it is true that DRM makes life difficult... I don't think it is critical when you are talking about preserving old and historically significant media. Most people agree that it is very difficult or impossible to make DRM that isn't easily cracked. The difficult thing is that cracking DRM, or distributing the method of cracking DRM, is a crime and you can end up in prison.

The real problem isn't the DRM (which is simply an annoyance), but the special legal status that DRM is given. If DRM encourages an organization to distribute digital copies of historically significant media, that they wouldn't otherwise distribute without DRM, then that is fantastic! The more copies that exist, the less likely something is to be lost. Lets just make sure that we are able to crack the DRM legally.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

You do when you have to reburn and rerip every single bit of DRM'd music you have in order to get it to play on non-Apple software.

Queansland?

[Peter Simpson]

That'd be Queensland, mate.

Dark Side of the Moon

[Rob T Firefly]

Film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film.

Strangely enough, it turns out that the moon landing footage syncs up perfectly with "The Wizard of Oz."

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[Nefarious Wheel]

Strangely enough, it turns out that the moon landing footage syncs up perfectly with "The Wizard of Oz

What are the sync points? Curious from a multimedia production pov.

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, one of them is that when Neal first sets foot on the moon, he says, "I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[tepples]

Nefarious Wheel asked for the sync points between The Wizard of Oz and something else. Here they are.

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[Leibel]

The article doesn't mention that anything has been found. Rather a copy could lead to further clues. FTA:

"It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist."

Re:Dark Side of the Moon

[sjs132]

Mr Clifton's business partner and catalogue manager Drew Thompson said their 16-millimetre film version of the Apollo 11 landing contains images never released to the public.

Yep... Images never released to the poublic, like Armstrong toking on a fatty just before stepping out to get that ultra zero-G buz Feeling... or was that "Buzz' Aldrin who thought about how cool it'd be to get toked on the dark side... ;)

Bigfoot nonanswers

[gEvil (beta)]

I love how the Bigfoot thing is billed as "answering the tough questions," yet it's simply filled with more nonsense marketing bullshit. In one answer they talk about completely bypassing the Windows network stack, yet in another answer they say they don't offload the full stack. Which is it?

No so fast

[plutonium83]

From what I remember, wasn't an entire COLLECTION of apollo footage missing? I'm glad they found at least one reel, but what about the others?

Re:No so fast

[unity]

Not so fast? If you had taken the time to RTFA and not posted so fast perhaps you would have come across this quote:

"It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist."

Re:No so fast

[rholland356]

As the others have pointed out, Clifton's film was not part of the items NASA lost.

My observation is that Clifton found a reel of 16mm filmstock.

The items NASA lost were reels of magnetic tape that can play through ONLY ONE MACHINE ON EARTH, which is about to be decommissioned.

Wouldn't it be nice for NASA to begin uploading digitized footage to Google Video? Yes, that would be nice.

Say, are there any professors out there who have calculated the rates at which filmed footage is being digitized and the rates at which it is decaying/lost/destroyed?

I think it would open your eyes to discover just how much information is captured and lost in a short period of time.

So the guy won a case in small claims court...

[lostraven]

I wonder if this guy know how much of a pain in the ass it is to collect money from a small claims case where the defendant doesn't bother to show up? Granted, there are a number of options at his disposal, but most require knowing a lot of details about the defendant. Garnish his wages? Where does he work and how do you find out? Put a lien on the defendant's property? You have to find out more info on the assets of the defendant. My personal experience was that you had to be (or hire a) private detective to even collect on a dead beat defendant. This guy sounds tenacious though. We'll see how long it takes for him to actually collect the money. -ShawnD

Re:So the guy won a case in small claims court...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this guy know how much of a pain in the ass it is to collect money from a small claims case where the defendant doesn't bother to show up?

Damned right. Some years back, some rich asshole (owned his own electronics outfit, lived in Marin County, CA, "self insured", etc.) ran my BIL up onto the curb trying to cut across a lane to go into a gas station. BIL's front end royally xcrewed up, leaing to going through a set of tires , waiing for payment. My sister nearly became a legal secretary trying to track down the bastard's assets. In the end, my BIL had to repair the damage and replace tires himself because nothing that came out of the small claims court judgement meant shit.

Oh, yeah,one of the things she called about was called an "order of examination". When she called the guy's place of business to get info, they thought she was someone's legal secretary because she'd learned so much legal jargon along the way.

Re:So the guy won a case in small claims court...

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is a BIL? Brother in law?

Re:So the guy won a case in small claims court...

[Tekzel]

You know, oddball acronyms that you made up, and are difficult to infer from the context, are a bad, bad idea. That is, if you want people to actually read what you are saying and not spend all their time trying to figure out what the fuck you mean by BIL. Of course by the end I realized you meant brother in law, but damn. Just... damn.

KillNIC??

[Monoman]

So I read some of the KillerNIC stuff because it was news to me. I wound up on http://www.endlagnow.org/ELN/TakeAction_TopTips.as px and found it hilarious. Let's see some of their first two tips for reducing lag.

1. CONNECT DIRECTLY TO THE NET
2. TURN OFF YOUR ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

Yeah I'm gonna get right on that.

Re:KillNIC??

[Tim Browse]

I also liked their amazingly intuitive suggestion that was doubtless the fruit of much in-depth research:

6. CHOOSE THE SERVER WITH THE LOWEST PING

No kidding, professor!

Re:KillNIC??

[evilviper]

Nice find, but you skipped the best ones... Let's see:

Plug the internet straight into your computer,

You mean those AOL disks? They're the internet, right?

More latency could potentially mean more Lag.

**shudder**

Not here, I only have the kind of latency that doesn't affect lag. You know, "Good Latency(tm)".

Re:KillNIC??

[mxs]

And they both DO help to reduce "lag".

Not in the realm that /any/ human would notice, but heck, you're talking to people who can "feel" the difference between 80 and 120 fps, who have the l33t sk1llz required to react to something they see within less than 0.5ms, and generally will believe anything a cool rendered babe tells them about the latest r4d graphics card.

"The faster your ISP service is, the lower your latency will be. The lower your latency is, the less Lag youll experience."

Certainly. Get a satellite uplink. It's faster.

"If there are applications or background tasks running, its a sure bet that your machine is going to devote some CPU to it. Dont let it happen!!!!"

Correct. Please kill explorer.exe, all svchost.exe, winlogon.exe, and anything that does not look like cstrike.exe. Your gaming experience will be much improved !

"Nothing can slow down a machine like a good dose of Spyware. Dont let those murderous bastards who write Spyware ruin your game."

Like the ones you got when you disabled your AntiVirus and Firewall.
(For many people, they are one and the same)

"When you decide between playing on a server with a ping of 36, or a server with a ping of 150... choose the 36!!! Seriously, if you connect to the server with a high ping you will not only expose yourself to potential Lag, but you will expose everybody else as well. Everybody loses when somebody with a terrible Ping signs onto the server."

Pure and utter bullcrap on the last part.

I love sites like that. I love it even more when a l33t pr0-g4m3r w/sk1llz tries to educate me based on that stuff. It's fun, every time.

Oh the Irony

[geekoid]

of "Captain Carrot" giving spelling corrections.

What next, Nobby giving advice on hygiene? Rincewind talking about the virtues of a famous last stand?

Re:Oh the Irony

[CaptainCarrot]

Im nawt korrexting the sppeling. Im korrrecting the pronunnseeashen.

Its 'QANTAS' - not 'Quantas'

[MrCreosote]

It stands for 'Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services' so there is no 'u' after the 'Q'

Re:Its 'QANTAS' - not 'Quantas'

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry i thought aussies always added the extra "u" in all their words....

Re:Its 'QANTAS' - not 'Quantas'

[Alioth]

I thought it stood for "Quite a Nice Trip, Any Survivors?"

Re:Its 'QANTAS' - not 'Quantas'

[bratwiz]

It's always about "U" isn't it?

ZFS on FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

porting ZFS to OSX is not a simple matter as, for example, porting UFS or EXT2 would be

The start of a port to FreeBSD has been started, and after ten days there has been demonstratable progress:

I can already mount ZFS-created file systems (with 'zfs create'
comman), create files/directories, change permissions/owner/etc., list
directories content, and perform few other minor operation.

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/ 2006-August/004609.html

Of course you're generally correct: ZFS goes into 'layers' that have been treated as separate parts, but given the resources Apple has, it's very possible it won't be too difficult, as it's a port and not actually creating it from scratch.

UFS doesn't support resource forks

[anagram]

The reason why UFS died for Mac OS X was due largely to it's lack of support for resource forks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork

Re:UFS doesn't support resource forks

[Anonymous Coward]

It has Extended Attributes EAs instead,

DOWN WITH DELL!

[Anonymous Coward]

No Dells on planes? Now I have the final proof I need.

DELL = TERRORISM

Meet Detective Bookman of the NASA Library

[craXORjack]

CLIFTON: Oh, I'm glad you're here, so we can get this all straightened out. Would you like a cup of tea?

BOOKMAN: You got any orange drink?

CLIFTON: Orange drink?

BOOKMAN: Yeah. Orange drink.

CLIFTON: No, I don't drink orange drink.

BOOKMAN: Yeah, you don't drink orange drink? How about instant orange drink?

CLIFTON: No, I don't...

BOOKMAN: You don't have any instant Tang?

CLIFTON: Well, I don't normally--

BOOKMAN: Who doesn't have instant Tang?

CLIFTON: I don't.

BOOKMAN: You buy a jar of Tang, you put it in the cupboard, you forget about it. Then later on when you need it, it's there. It lasts forever. It's freeze-dried. Freeze-dried orange drink.

CLIFTON: Really? I'll have to remember that.

BOOKMAN: You took the moon landing movie out in 1979.

CLIFTON: Yes, and I returned it in 1979.

BOOKMAN: Yeah, '79. That was my first year on the job. Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, the Betamax decision letting everybody steal movies. I don't judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the NASA Film Library, fella.

CLIFTON: Look, Mr. Bookman. I--I returned that movie. I remember it very specifically.

BOOKMAN: You're a Rock cinematographer, you entertain people, make them have fun.

CLIFTON: I try.

BOOKMAN: You think this is all big fun, don't you?

CLIFTON: No, I don't.

BOOKMAN: I saw your name in the credits once; I remembered your name--from my list. I looked it up. Sure enough, it checked out. You think because you're a celebrity that somehow the law doesn't apply to you, that you're above the law?

CLIFTON: Certainly not.

BOOKMAN: Well, let me tell you something, music fun boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "NASA Film Library"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about old moon movies for? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid renting a movie, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding X rated porn taped over the middle of The Dark Crystal and Finding Nemo? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing movies, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to borrow a movie without getting his mind warped! Or: maybe that turns you on, Clifton; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies. Well I got a flash for ya, joy-boy: Party time is over. Y'got seven days, Clifton. That is one week!

Re:Meet Detective Bookman of the NASA Library

[dr_turgeon]

Bravo! The Tang was tasty, but porn over Dark Crystal? -- that's the gravy.

Note to self: remember to purchase some refreshing ORANGE-DRINK on my way out of the gymnasium.

Re:Meet Detective Bookman of the NASA Library

[St.Anne]

OMG! This was my Dad giving me the "Smoking The Pot" speech 20 years ago !!!

Was all Apollo footage lost or just Apollo 11?

[HappyEngineer]

Was all Apollo footage lost or just the Apollo 11 footage? If high quality footage exists of the other moon landings, can someone point me to it?

Re:Was all Apollo footage lost or just Apollo 11?

[Scutter]

I don't know about *high quality*, but you can access a WEALTH of moon landing information, including radio transmission transcripts, astronaut commentary, mission logs, photos, and tons of video from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

Re:Was all Apollo footage lost or just Apollo 11?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the good footage was censored so that the public wouldn't know about the moon bases or extra-terrestrials observing human progress. Or that the secret underground government has had a handle on reverse engineered alien technology and had far superior space travel technology to the moon and beyond since before the Apollo missions.
</aluminum foil deflector beanie>

QUeensland?

[tepples]

It stands for 'Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services' so there is no 'u' after the 'Q'

You're correct, but I can see how someone might think *"QUANTAS" by starting with QUeensland.

Re:QUeensland?

[umm qasr]

You're correct, but I can see how someone might think *"QUANTAS" by starting with QUeensland.

Not really, it is an acronym.

Re:QUeensland?

[1u3hr]

You're correct, but I can see how someone might think ...

The submitter and editors are supposed to RTFA, not just guess. It's the first word of the story.

Re:QUeensland?

[dbIII]

No problem - they gave us three spellings of qantas to choose from! Even all that choice didn't make the spelling nazi's happy - someone was bound to complain that the correct spelling does not contain a U and that usage of Q shall bring on the apocalypse.

Re:QUeensland?

[1u3hr]

Even all that choice didn't make the spelling nazi's happy - someone was bound to complain that the correct spelling does not contain a U and that usage of Q shall bring on the apocalypse.

Those Austrians are just trying to confuse you.

Anyway, no one was talking about apocalypses. Just unprofessionalism and carelessness.

NASA and copyright.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

NASA imagery is normally copyright-free, as government documents produced at government expense.

Some matierials produced by NASA may have copyrights. (For instance: movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere).

More a NASA web site.

Re:NASA and copyright.

[evilviper]

movies with copyrighted music in the background which was licensed for NASA's use and needs an additional license if it gets cloned elsewhere

I never did like that Guns 'n Roses soundtrack NASA put in the moon landing footage... Seemed out of place somehow.

corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

That comment is so quintessentially Slashdot.

Re:corrections

[kfg]

That comment is so quintessentially Slashdot.

Thank you, I tried. :)

KFG

This is Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything's possible here - Slashdot is served off the computer in the high-energy-magic building.

PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own words

[taustin]

First:

Since I transferred the funds to my bank account, my PayPal account was empty,

Then:

On March 23, 2006 I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau against PayPal. I told them I was down $600 and that PayPal made no effort to get my laptop back.

and:

My PayPal account is frozen with a -$615 balance

So they didn't ding his bank account for the $615.

In other words, he deliberately lied in the complaint to the BBB. And he wonders why PayPal locked the account. He's lucky they don't sue his ass for libel, if he's giving an accurate account.

WTF am I missing here?

It's QANTAS without the U

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans never get that right.

Re:It's QANTAS without the U

[quantaman]

I'm actually Canadian :)

Re:Not much of a victory, and nought to do with pa

[TubeSteak]

he still has to collect payment

Now that he has a default judgement, he would can sick a collection agency (N.C.O. Financial Systems?) on the wanker who started this whole mess.

Something to note: He didn't actually tell us the terms of his settlement with PayPal, so who knows... maybe PayPal threw some money his way to avoid being dragged into a lawsuit.

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[LearnToSpell]

That they sent a credit agency after him for the money?

The REAL killer app for KillerNIC

[illumin8]

Ok, I'm in total agreement with everyone that the KillerNIC is smoke and mirrors. From my linux host, pinging my default gateway, I'm getting times of roughly 0.135ms... that's 135 micro-seconds. How in the hell is there any way to improve that? My Windows gaming box reports 1ms, but that's probably because it doesn't get any more granular than that. Even if they could reduce that latency to zero (impossible, because electricity/light doesn't travel that fast), no human can respond that fast anyway, so what's the use?

I especially like this part of one of their answers:

Simply running the 'ping' program is not sufficient, because it does not use your Network stack which can introduce tons of added latency.

WTF? The ping program does use the network stack; how else would it talk with the network? ICMP is still a protocol that needs to be encapsulated with a header and traverse down through your stack to the wire...

The only people that will be using this card are losers that have more money than brains, and cheaters. Yes, that's right, once again, cheating is the REAL killer app for the KillerNIC. You see, after playing a lot of PvP on Guild Wars I realized one thing about lag: Game designers intentionally account for player lag and compensate for it in interesting ways. Guild Wars PvP becomes a very serious game about skill interruption. An enemy spell caster could be casting a spell that will take 1 second to cast and obliterate you when it lands. You have a skill that will interrupt their spell if you click the button fast enough, during that 1 second time period. Well, the server has to accomodate dialup users and those users that are on laggy connections, so there are times when I've casted a spell, had the progress bar go all the way to completion, and then half a second later, the spell is interrupted (after it was done casting on my end). This is because the person on the other end actually interrupted the spell in time according to their game client, but because of network lag (they're on a slow connection), the interrupt didn't get to the server for a while. The server still honored their interrupt, and eventually my spell failed. By increasing their lag, the server has to give them "extra time", which means their reaction time doesn't need to be as good to win. People will write custom FNapps or whatever they're called to do this.

I can foresee cheaters intentionally increasing in game lag just to trigger this kind of a cheating mechanism. If you could add 100-200 ms of latency to your line, you could actually gain an advantage in games like this. I'm thinking WoW PvP is probably the same, although I'm not sure if skill interruption is a big part of that or not. If I remember correctly, WoW has a lot of insta-cast spells.

Re:The REAL killer app for KillerNIC

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets easier then that.... AimBot on the card....

Most anti-cheating mesures ensure that the client is legit... the network card is powerful enough to do the cheating and is not able to be verified by the game.

Re:The REAL killer app for KillerNIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, but you could achieve all of that using a second machine anyway. Doesn't matter if that second machine is a hideously overpriced network card, or just a cheapo Linux box made out of obsolete parts. So even for cheats, KillerNIC doesn't do anything new..

Haha. Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't notice that article you linked was bollocks? I guess it's understandable, I got suckered in too initially. But when the author starts calling for radical simplification thn it becums obvius tht hi iz pullin owr legz.

So a rebuttal of the article is a bit pointless. But I can certainly rebut your post - "This is one case where the Americans have preserved the older usage." That claim is demonstrably false - in the first instance, because there is no "preservation" here. English spelled "-our" with the "u"; the only preservation possible is if you KEPT that usage. Reverting to a previous usage is not preservation, by definition. And even if you disagree on that technicality the fact remains that Webster wrote his American English dictionary with NO intent to "restore older usage", only to simplify the spelling of a complicated language.

Secondly, "older usage" does not ever mean "more correct usage". English is derived largely from Latin and Germanic roots, but we do not speak either Latin or German! :)

Re:Haha. Nope.

[CaptainCarrot]

You haven't really rebutted anything at all; you just made a counter-assertion. I suggest you consult your OED. "Colour" may date from the 14th century, but "color" came into use in the 15th. It's not an American innovation, and is certainly not Webster's. The spellings of "labor" and "favor" were never consistent from the 14th century.

These words are of French origin which itself only settled on the "u" consistently in recent centuries. But who cares about that? If we speak neither Latin nor German, then neither do we speak French.

In words like "analyze", the "z" is generally the older form.

Of course older doesn't mean more correct. Neither does newer.

Re:Haha. Nope.

[KarMann]

Secondly, "older usage" does not ever mean "more correct usage". English is derived largely from Latin and Germanic roots, but we do not speak either Latin or German! :)

Beg to differ, yes I do. Both.

ZFS Commands

[allenw]

It isn't too surprising that there aren't zfs-specific commands for mount, newfs, fsck, etc., given that all that work is done by the zfs, zpool, and other commands under Solaris.

Re:Pedant es "thupid"...

[IBitOBear]

"all but", as in "all but forgotten", is not a mathematical expression. The domain is implicitly limited by the subject-object agreement. So in the case of "this guy all but drown", the guy didn't fully drown but he was clearly under watter and unable to extracate himself etc. There is no implication that the guy was beaten nor given the Nobel. So it doesn't mean "*anything* except" by any reasonable expectation, in the same way that if someone says they love icecream, we don't expect "well why don't you marry it" as a reasonable response.

In short, "all" is universally inclusive, but only within the included domain of its use.

Further, it _wasn't_ forgotten, it is rememberd, and disparaged, and ignored and god knows what else, but again, no Nobel etc... 8-)

The phrasing is fine. There is a difference between being pedantic and deliberatly ignoring the obvious. Try looking up "pedant" and "obtuse" and "deliberatly contradictory"... 8-)

This wasn't missing

[jgoemat]

This was not a loaner or misplaced, Clifton paid for the movie reel. Since they couldn't find the footage, Clifton came forward with his own personal copy. Now they need to find other film makeres that may have purchased reels of Apollo footage to make up the rest :). They actually hope that the documentation he received with his purchase will show where he got it from and possibly lead to the original footage. It seems to me that over the years, they've forgotten which facility they stored the footage in. Reminds me of the ending of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"...

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[Buran]

The credit agency stopped going after him after he sent proof to Paypal that he does not owe them any money and that he delivered the laptop as promised and the buyer accepted it and was happy with it. In other words, Paypal is (for whatever reason) attempting to scam him for money he doesn't owe, and owes him a cancellation of the whole thing. They are the ones committing fraud.

unproven

[m874t232]

ZFS is putting lots of functionality into one big package, and doing that is generally bad software design. In the case of Linux, there are separate packages for partition management, volume management, RAID, core file system, and high-level file system functionality like encryption, versioning, and distribution, that users can mix and match as needed. Furthermore, that functionality isn't going to become redundant, at least for Apple: no matter how much they might like the world to move to ZFS, they'll still have to deal with Windows, Linux, and Mac partitions and file systems for decades.

What OS X really needs much more than ZFS is built-in ext3 support and something like FUSE.

Re:unproven

[jimicus]

Granted, but a lot of that is down to how the software is architected.

IBM, for example, have had all RAID, block-level and partitioning integrated into their LVM under AIX for years. IIRC, you can't have any disk which isn't ultimately handled by the AIX LVM system in some way - even the root "partition" is held as a logical volume.

Re:unproven

[m874t232]

IIRC, you can't have any disk which isn't ultimately handled by the AIX LVM system in some way - even the root "partition" is held as a logical volume.

I believe you could; LVM just took physical devices and presented another set of virtual block devices. It was up to you if you wanted to make your file systems on the physical device or the logical device.

The fact that LVM was a module that stayed within the standard UNIX framework of devices, rather than an all-encompassing replacement of everything, meant that it was easy to port to Linux and that Linux users ended up having a choice whether to use it or not. As it turns out, the functionality is probably not all that useful and it is pretty universally not used. And that's a good thing. Once you adopt ZFS, you're stuck with the whole thing, even if it turns out that parts of it are useless or harmful.

Re:unproven

[jimicus]

As it turns out, the functionality is probably not all that useful and it is pretty universally not used

If we're talking about LVM in general, Fedora Core uses that by default for everything apart from a small /boot partition. And I use LVM on a number of servers.

Re:unproven

[thogard]

Its the new way to build stuff.
And by new, I mean its the way every failed software project in the history of software has been built.
Ever look at how complex the core OS functions are in an early BSD unix? Its simple. read(2) fits on a single page of a printout as do most other system calls and their underlying structures.
The only reason these new mega-complex projects don't fall apart is that debuggers are getting much better. Increases in working software complexity has never been about computer languages but its been about the debuggers.

I figure I'l wait a few years before I start using zfs. I don't need its features now and I know extra complexity will bite me. The real question about zfs is "is it less complex that what its replacing?" From a ground up development, it looks like it will be less complex but when you start hacking in alongside an existing system, that looks nasty.

Re:unproven

[m874t232]

You're saying that Fedora actually uses volume groups? Other Linux distributions ship with the kernel module, but they use physical devices by default.

In my experience, logical volumes are a really lousy idea in so many ways that I think any Linux distribution that enables them by default is simply broken.

Re:unproven

[jimicus]

That's exactly what I'm saying.

If you've been using LVM snapshots - my experience concurs. They suck. However, LVM gives you a lot of other things which do tend to work OK:

• An easy means of resizing the block device underlying the filesystem - you don't have to worry about finding out you need to defragment your partitions because you don't have the space where you need it.
  
• Non-destructive extending of LVs beyond the boundaries of a single disk.
  
• Moving LVs between physical disks live - you don't have to umount them.
  

It may help that my first exposure to the idea of LVM was in AIX, where you don't have much choice in the matter <g>.

Missing moon footage copy in germany too

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of days ago I saw a documentary on a local tv station here in Bochum, Germany, where this guy from the local observatory
said how amazed he was when he learned that the original viedeos where lost, and how he instantly started searching in the observatorys archive.

He showed a pile of large tape cases and said that they (probably like many other observatories around the world) recorded all the original transmissions
from the apollo moon mission in Bochum, and that they still have the tapes in good conditions. I dont remeber him saying that about the machinery to replay them though.

On behalf of the conspiracy theories, he said something like: "I can assure you one hundred percent that, at the time, something was flying to the moon sending the transmissions we taped."! He also said, he did not at all believe the conspiracy theorists.

Re:Not much of a victory, and nought to do with pa

[jimicus]

What I didn't understand was apparently the collection company accepted the package he sent them explaining the situation, and closed the demand to set the dogs on him.

AFAICT, PayPal's only course of action after that is to take him to court - surely he could just sit back and say "Fine. Take me to court"?

Okay, lets listen to an educated Australian...

[grrowl]

QANTAS is a acronym, for the Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Service. This means the actual proper pronunciation should be "Kew Ay En Tee Ay Ess", I suppose, but us Australian folk are all kinds of lazy so we say "Kwantas" ("Q" as a "Kw"). P.S. Get a hobby, for god's sake.

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[jimicus]

Right, but what difference does it make if his account is cancelled or if he just ignores it and leaves it to rot?

Imagine the Late Fees!

[Anonymous Coward]

This poor guy is returning the video footage 27 years after he borrowed it? I bet those late fees really add up! I hope he at least remembered to rewind.

Re:Imagine the Late Fees!

[bratwiz]

The late fees would be out of this world.... (ducking)

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[1u3hr]

Right, but what difference does it make if his account is cancelled or if he just ignores it and leaves it to rot?

It'll probably get on his credit record and be something he has to explain every time he wants to borrow money, get a credit card, etc.

Moon footage

[Midnight Thunder]

It would cool if they transfered the orginal moon footage to DVD ( needs to be region free of course :D ), when they find it, and made it available for purchase. I would certainly be tempted if they kept the price below $25 USD.

It would be even better if they indicated that you had permission to use the content for non-commercial use. I wonder whether you could apply a creative commons license to the contents of a commercial DVD?

Re:Moon footage

[yuriismaster]

As explained above, NASA content (and all government-paid content) is pretty much copyright-free. You can use it for whatever purposes you want to. Same thing happened with Ted Steven's Senate rant on Tubes. A few people made very funny remixes/mashups, and the government couldn't do anything about it.

Re:Moon footage

[Xcruciate]

See http://www.spacecraftfilms.com/

You want peak broadband internet speed, do this...

[IBitOBear]

Get a linux box, configure it as a firewall.

Add the following rules to the end of your firewall script.

NOTE: The Lameness filter sucks so get text here instead of just reading the script:http://whiterc.com.nyud.net:8080/just_shapi ng.txt
The whole firewall script is here: http://whiterc.com.nyud.net:8080/rc.firewall.txt

The most important elements are the 1:10 rules that make sure that your TCP acknowledgements have the highest classification; and the udp rules that will let your VoIP and games (and Bittorrent 8-) have precidence.

Now, use the script below to set up your simple 6-tier traffic shapping output. MAKE SURE to set INTERFACE_SPEED= value to your _ACTUAL_ _UPLINK_ rate in kbps. I have fast cable, so I have 768. Default comcast rate is 384 in my area if you don't pay the $10 a month. If you have [A]DSL set the speed the link is _supposed_ to be. Don't hedge, the hedging is already in the math. [Tweak the weight array if you want to change the reservation ratios.]

NOTE: The Lameness filter sucks so get text here instead of just reading the script:http://whiterc.com.nyud.net:8080/rc.shaper. txt

What is the magic? TCP/IP speeds up additively but slows down exponentally. So to get fast _downstream_ data flow, you have to make sure that your _upstream_ packet acknowledgement events get through. It is really easy to overrun the buffers built into your cable modem (etc) while receiving a large/fast stream.

Speed tests from reasonably local speed testing website regularly give me between 90% and 98% of my purchased download speed in actual single-stream performance. I can also game while my roomates browse the internet without incurring nasty lag.

Note that I have tweaked the math to a nonce for my link, but if you want to play with fine tuning then look at tweaking the numerators in the declare statements for CEILING and BURST_CELING. That's why the "* 98 / 100" and "* 100 / 100" parts are there... 8-)

Really, the above makes _ALL_ the difference in my effective internet speed.

A play in one act...

[Lijemo]

NASA: Houston, we have a problem. We seem to have, um, lost the moon landing footage...

Media: you lost the WHAT?

NASA: You know the "one small step for man" bit? Yeah. Well, it's gotta be around here somewhere...

Tinfoil Hat Guy: Ha! See! See! it WAS faked! "Lost" the footage. Mmmm hmm, how convenient.

Media: How could you loos the footage of the FIRST MOON LANDING?!?!

NASA: We could have sworn it was right here! It's gota be here somewhere---( *rustle* *rustle* damn.).

Peter Clifton: (now waita second, I couldn't possibly have.... *rustle* *rustle*) Oh whoops, HERE it is! I completely forgot you lent it to me when I was working on the Dark Side of the Moon Film! Silly me, I guess I forgot to return some of the most significant film in history for over 30 years. Whoops. Theres not a late fine on that, is there?

Tinfoil Hat Guy: Umm hmm... interesting that a film-producer is the one that came up with it, isn't it?

.oO~~~~fin~~~Oo.

They could mess with his bad credit rating

[A nonymous Coward]

All they have to do is give him a bad credit report as a deadbeat.

Missing moon footage NOT found

[Dan East]

According to the article, the missing footage has not been found:
"It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist."

They are going to use his copy to follow a paperwork trail, hopefully ending at the missing tapes.

Dan East

Re:Missing moon footage NOT found

[Lijemo]

That makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Re:Quantas? Queansland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?
You probably meant Queansland and Nortern Tearratory Aeirie Searvice !

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[Buran]

I think it's the principle of the matter from the sound of it. That, and he doesn't want a black mark on his credit record for being the victim of fraud. Since when was it acceptable to blame the victim? (since paypal thought so, apparently).

This is why the highest-dollar item I've ever sold on eBay was a camera, once, and I made sure to cover my ass with documentation that it had been sent and was as described. Never had trouble but I never will sell anything like a laptop.

Ours stay here all winter

[leonbrooks]

They don't need to escape this place for any season.

Well... y'know... that's just Australian weather for you. (-: Hello from Perth :-)

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[taustin]

No. They sent a collection agency after him. Who, according to his own account, accepted his account that he owed PayPal no money.

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[taustin]

At which point he can challenge it with the credit reporting agency. If they don't remove it, he has a legitimate case against them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

The bottom line is, according to his account, he sued PayPal and the guy who bought the laptop for money he already had.

I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the defendant had showed up and pointed that out to the judge.

Pedantic spelling Nazi response

[Anonymous Coward]

"watter" is "water"
"extracate" is "extricate"
"icecream" is "ice cream"
"deliberatly" is "deliberately" (twice)

I'm sure I missed a couple.

(Evil cackle!)

Dark Side of the Moon Movie?

[bigredradio]

Forget the moon landing. I want to see the Dark Side of the Moon movie. (I wonder if Dorothy is in it?)

When is the collectors editin DVD coming out?

[kimvette]

I want to hear the director and special effects crew commentary!

(I kid, I kid. Obviously.)

Re:Not much of a victory, and nought to do with pa

[fm6]

Something to note: He didn't actually tell us the terms of his settlement with PayPal...

And in fact, I find his whole story pretty hard to understand. He seems to feel screwed over, even though nobody was trying to collect money from him. Sure, his Paypal account had a negative balance, but he just wanted to close it, so what's the diff?

Most complaints against PayPal seem to assume that they have an obligation to protect you from fraud. They're just a financial middleman. When people refuse to pay for credit card transactions, it's the merchant that gets stuck, not the bank. Why should it be any different for an individual who sells something using Paypal instead of the bank?

I'm afraid those NASA tapes are history!

[rholland356]

Yes, indeed. For librarians have discovered their error and hold little hope for recovery.

The reason? In a clerical error of no small consequence, the tapes originally requested by one Oliver Stone--for a movie project--were instead sent to one Oliver North. Signature on the delivery slip shows that one Fawn Hall acknowledged receipt for Mr. North's office.

Re:PayPal fraud? Er, not according to his own word

[jimicus]

Which brings back a point I raised elsewhere in this thread: Wouldn't it make more sense to wait until PayPal sue him and then explain the situation in front of a judge? The only reason I can think of for not doing that is that PayPal figured (after he successfully got rid of the collection agency) that it would be cheaper to just write it off and (optionally) screw up this guy's credit rating.

Therefore, the only possible reason for him to sue is to ensure the "screw up his credit rating" bit doesn't happen. Seeing as how he originally sued PayPal (which would have been the end of it), but settled out of court before suing the purcahser, the only possible reason I can think of is that PayPal's lawyers explained that the contract essentially meant it was his problem, however they would overlook the "screwing up the credit rating" part on condition he sued the original purchaser and gave any winnings to them.

Oh

[Anonymous Coward]

I just thought he was using british spelling.

The links work if you can use coral cache at all.

[IBitOBear]

The links "Work For Me". I used the coral cache service because my little box couldn't possibly withstand a slashdotting. Sometimes coral cache is hit or miss sometimes, especially if your ISP has funky DNS service settings or if you are using Windows and you have spyware/malware that messesses up your DNS.

Sometimes you just have to keep hitting "try again" the cache network catches you up the bomb... 8-)

Will ZFS be there for Linux?

[johansalk]

Someone on usenet said ZFS is a BSD thing only so it'll work on the BSDs such as solaris and osx, but the linux kernel is incomparible. Is this true? Thanks.

Re:The links work if you can use coral cache at al

[cr0sh]

Hmm - seems you're right - I was trying this at work, I just tried it now at home (cox.net) and it worked find - saved the info, might look at it sometime in the future when I have more time. Thanks for the "heads up"...