What do the recording agencies do? Record, remaster, produce, manufacture and market musicians.
Nearly as I can tell computers and the Internet have pretty much taken over those roles.
Computers and the p2p internet are being use to download for free the music that was recorded, remastered, produced, manufacturered (ripped from CD) and marked by the record labels, nearly as I can tell...
.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a small part of internet downloading is authorized by independant musicians, but the vast majority of music swapped on Kazaa and similar networks is the big name acts from the big labels.
At least in the US, you have that right to rip/mix/burn as long as you paid for the CDs legitimately. It's called "fair use". No additional levy on blank media or recording devices is necessary to obtain the "fair use" right to rip/mix/burn.
... and assuming each person wasted 15 seconds recognizing it as spam
Now-a-days, a good portion of all users have spam filters. Some are highly effective (spamassassin) but even the lesser filters still remove a large portion of the spam.
So a lot of modern spam gets automaitcally deleted by filters.
First, the bug being in CVS has nothing to do with changing the source code on a hacked machine.
Now if I were a malicious hacker/cracker, hell-bent on obtaining unauthorized access to as many machines as possible, and I happened to have a 0-day exploit to CVS, which happens to be used to maintain the sources to many of the most popular server applications....
hmmm, what might I do with that exploit ??
Yeah, I know, I'd go root lots of boxen and deface home pages on any machines also running web servers and use the rest to launch DDOS attacks. Yeah, that'd be the thing to do. All that writable source code wouldn't even be on my mind at all, would it??
I was wondering how much that really is. Wandering over to XE.COM, one US Dollar is equal to 8.9 South Africa Rand.
The article's writing style seems a bit odd to me, but maybe that's how reporting is done in South Africa. Quoting....
The move should save at least R3bn a year, says agency chief information officer Mojalefa Moseki.
Now I'm wondering if "R3bn" is (roughly) equivilant to 337 million US dollars. Suppose the average PC gets $600(usd) installed on it, in windows, office, and a couple other apps. I just pulled that $600 out of a hat, but it seems a reasonably conservative (high) estimate of the amount of proprietary software you'd purchase per machine, on average.
That'd put their annual software purchasing at (approx) 561600 PCs per year, or 1.12 million PCs in use on a 2-year Microsoft "software assurance" upgrade cycle.
Is that reasonable, or did I add something up wrong?
...but I'm not expecting some of these governments to actually contribute anything back to OSS.
Time and time again, people have tried this and failed again and again. When the primary goal is to simply have a good program to USE (not resell to others), it just doesn't work not contributing back. Many have tried this and regretted it.
What inevitably happens is the "official" project improves, both fixing bugs and including new features. The private code diverges from the public version, even if only in minor ways, it becomes a headache when a patch doesn't apply cleanly. Whomever "maintains" the private code needs to reimplement the improvements that are deemed critical from the public code, and as time goes on this becomes more and more hassle.
Often the private changes are contributed back into the public version, simply because that is the only viable way to "maintain" the application over time. Sometimes, the private version stagnates or diverges too far. Either way, the lesson learned by an organization who's primary purpose is simply using the software is that it's in their own self interest to merge their improvements back into the public project, where they will be maintained and tested together with all future improvements contributed by others.
Maybe, just maybe, someday everybody will be able to remember or at least find out where they saved their files when they later attempt to open them with a different program that starts the file open dialog in a different directory ???
Pretty much any server can serve hundreds, or even thousands of pages per second (I benchmark a basic PC IIS 5 server serving 17,000+ pages per second),
Have you ever tried a test where the clients kept their connections open for a reasonable length of time??
In the real world, virtually all clients are connected via links ranging from slow dialup to 1.5 Mbit/sec. They hold connections open and tie up server memory resources for a lot longer than a fast-as-possible benchmark running on the same machine or over fast ethernet.
Any server running on a single box is probably going to have trouble with 17000+ pages per seconds to modem users, who require many seconds to transfer the page. If the average connection open time is 2 seconds, that's 34000 open connections. Even if the server used only 32k of RAM per connection (barely enough to buffer a few packets and allocate "window" inside the TCP layer in the OS, and maintain OS-level info and buffering for the open file), that'd be over 1 gigabyte of memory. I suspect a combination of Windows (TCP/IP & file I/O), IIS, and ASP.NET uses a lot more than 32k per connection.
Yes, mod_gzip is great and I use it on my own server, but for any "normal" website the main advantage is an interactive speed-up for dialup users. It really doesn't save huge amounts of bandwidth (in this case, enough to matter for withstanding the slashdot effect).
As an example, the page slashdot linked to is 22443 bytes of compressable html, and approx 84287 bytes of images (not including the ads and two images that didn't load because they're not handling the slashdot effect so well as they thing they can). At -9, the slowest and best compression (remember, this is a dynamic JSP site, not static content you can compress ahead of time), the html compresses to 5758 bytes, thereby reducing the total content from 106730 bytes to 90045.
That's only a 15.6% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, a typical HTTP response header, which can't be compressed, is about 300 bytes (not including TCP/IP packet overhead, which we'll ignore hoping that HTTP/1.1 keepalives are putting it all in one connection...). There were 18 images (actually 20, but junkbuster filtered 2 out for me). That's 19 HTTP headers, at 300 bytes each, all uncompressable. Adding in HTTP overhead we're at (approx) 112430 without compression and 95745 with mod_gzip. So the uncompressability of the headers reduces the bandwidth savings to 14.8%.
The big advantage that makes mod_gzip really worthwhile for a site like that is the a dialup user can get all the html in about 2 seconds, rather than 5-6 (assuming the modem's compression is on). Then they can start reading, while the remaining 82k of images slowly appear over the next 20-30 seconds.
Now in some cases, like slashdot's comments pages, mod_gzip makes a massive difference. But for most sites, the majority of the bandwidth is images that are already compressed. That 10% to 20% reduction in bandwidth from simply installing mod_gzip is pretty small compared to a bit of effort redesigning pages to trim the fatty images.
To point out the obvious, it looks like they're slashdotted.
Reloading their page a couple times (2nd page of the article, not the one slashdot linked to), I'm getting occasional 503 errors, and the rest are taking a very long time to load. Usually the page comes up with some "broken" images that didn't load.
At the bottom of each page, there's a number that seems to indicate the time they believe their server spent serving the page. Usually is says something like "2 ms" or "3 ms"... That may be how long their code spent creating the html, but the real world performance I see (via a 1.5 Mbit/sec DSL line) is many seconds for the html and many more for the images, some of which never show up, and sometimes a 503 error instead of anything useful at all.
So, Brian, if you're reading this comment (which will probably be worthy of "redundant" moderation by the time I hit the Submit button)... it ain't workin' as well as you think. Maybe the next article will be an explaination of what went wrong this time, and you can try again???
...it only makes sense for the states to be able to tax us for the upkeep and maintainence of this valuable service [the internet]
You have misunderstood the meaning of "internet tax". It is a sales tax, taxing sales of goods and services.
The money collected will NOT be used to support the internet infrastructure. It will add directly to state's budgets, which primarily pay for things like public schools and roads.
The internet's infrastructure will be supported the same way it always has (since it was weaned from public funding), by connectivity (bandwidth) charges from the backbone providers, that filter down to ISPs and ultimately non-ISP business and ordinary people.
The problem with Micropayment futurism (aside from the ugly truth that they're unworkable) is that the utopia they predict is based upon authors, publishers, and tranaction processors forgoing potential profits.
Utopian micropayment predictions always seem to ignore the basic desire to maximize profits. They predict a utopia where vast amounts of content are available with automatic payments so tiny that nobody will be bothered. But why would any author/provider leave all that money on the table? Why would they not increase prices to what the market will bear?
Today there is a lot of "content" available for free, or for "free registration". That would change. Virtually anything worthwhile that exists today for free would almost certainly go to micropayments. Lots of worthless content would also go to micropayments, because even a small amount of money from occasional readers would be better than nothing. Shopping sites and some purely non-commercial sites would likely be the only places left that cared more about getting lots of viewer (paying nothing) than a smaller number of viewers (paying "micro" amounts).
But would also truely high quality content appear? Maybe, but micropayments would have to be a pretty successful business opportunity before substantial new investments get made (other than re-purposing content authored for other media). Even then, the drive to maximize profits would be the primary driver. One way to maximize profits might be to produce something truely great and hope that a lot of people find it. Another might be to produce LOTS of mediocre content (as cheaply as possible) and make small returns on each piece. Another might be to put a large portion of the resources into "marketing" the content (getting paid hits) as opposed to the development of the content itself.
Luckily, micropayments appear to be unworkable for the forseeable future (people love flat fees and hate metered services, financial transactions cost too much to process, and financial institutions are also driven to maximize profits and burden the transaction as much as the market will bear). If all these problems ever get worked out, I believe we'll all be looking back on the glory days of the World Wide Web, when one could easily surf around and find lots of info about almost anything.
The article is talking about reusing a connection that is left half open by the client. It should be the second connection that would exhibit the behavior.
It talks about this approach working because IIS (supposedly) doesn't close connections fully (it actually did in my tests). But it claims MSIE sends this speculatively, hoping that a server might accept the request.
In any case, I had some time to kill tonight, and didn't feel like doing anything productive, so I repeated the test and annotated the packet log... which was quite a bit more work because MSIE opens many connections concurrently when verifing cached content (and it already knows the server IP numbers from the cache).
Still, you will see 4 connections opened, all in the normal way (well, one is aborted before fully opened, but still legal behavior though non-optimal). You'll also see two connections fully closed (FIN in each direction), so the part about connections being left half open is also not reproducible.
ok, why not. I've got a bit of time tonight (girlfriend left for a business trip with early monday morning meetings).
This time, I tried www.intel.com (which is an IIS server). It is a bit more complicated because content comes from multiple servers. You'll see that on the second access, where all the content is caches and IE already knows a list of IP numbers it wants to contact to check if the cached copy is up to date.
Cutting to the chase: we see 1 connection opened in the first group of packets (I didn't include enough to see the later connections for the content from other servers) and 4 connections opened in the second group of packets when reloading the page 4 minutes later. All connections are opened in an RFC compliant manner, with no requests sent before the connection is properly opened as the article claims.
MSIE asks IP address of www.intel.com
22:56:51.812091 192.168.194.211.1026 > 192.168.194.1.domain: 7+ A? www.intel.com. (31)
MSIE starts connection with normal SYN
22:56:51.931109 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: S 3669105715:3669105715(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Intel responds with SYN/ACK
22:56:51.982576 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: S 1792107795:1792107795(0) ack 3669105716 win 8192 <mss 1460>
MSIE responds with ACK to finish opening the connection
22:56:51.982969 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
Many hundred more packets occur, with connections established to other servers (opened the normal RFC compliant) way.
.
And here is view the same page about 4 minutes later
.
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 198.175.96.33 (connection #1)
23:00:26.798508 192.168.194.211.1062 > 198.175.96.33.http: S 3723498008:3723498008(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 216.203.32.78 (connection #2)
23:00:26.802485 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: S 3723557647:3723557647(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 64.154.80.51 (connection #3)
23:00:26.826112 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: S 3723624012:3723624012(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Notice the absence of any packet related to an already-open connection, as the article claimed. Below MSIE opens a 4th connection to another server, again using the RFC compliant SYN-SYN/ACK-ACK sequence before and data exchange takes place.
Intel respond with its SYN/ACK to open the connection (#1)
23:00:26.853681 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1062: S 626928500:626928500(0) ack 3723498009 win 8192 <mss 1460>
MSIE (for some reason) sends a RST and terminates connection #1. Perhaps it abandoned the connection after calling connect (or whatever MSIE calls if it's not using the normal sockets API), maybe because it didn't really need to check if the file cached from this server is up to date. Better programmers might have simply avoided attempting to open the connection in the first place, but it's certainly allowed to abandon an open like this and sending a RST packet to abort opening the connection is legal TCP behavior.
23:00:26.855874 192.168.194.211.1062 > 198.175.96.33.http: R 3723498009:3723498009(0) win 0
(#3) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #3
23:00:26.900586 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: S 2830569043:2830569043(0) ack 3723624013 win 33580 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
(#2) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #2
23:00:26.909440 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: S 3187959102:3187959102(0) ack 3723557648 win 8760 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
MSIE transmits HTTP request (331 bytes) on connection #3
23:00:26.917184 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: P 1:332(331) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE transmits HTTP request (267 bytes) on connection #2
23:00:26.919711 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: P 1:268(267) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
connection #3 reponds with ACK to the request
23:00:27.009910 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: . ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
connection #3 reponds with FIN (close connection) - delivered out of order by the internet!!!
23:00:27.010734 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: F 517:517(0) ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
MSIE responds with ACK at byte 1 (saying it hasn't received the data yet)
23:00:27.013719 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 1 win 17520 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {517:518} > (DF)
connection #3's data finally arrives (presumably server send this before the FIN
but it was delivered out-of-order)
23:00:27.017008 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: P 1:517(516) ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
MSIE responds with an ACK that is received all 517 bytes. Obviously HTTP/1.1 is
in use here and the response with something like a 304 telling MSIE that the
copy it has in its cache is up to date.
23:00:27.019072 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 518 win 17004 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {517:518} > (DF)
MSIE transmits FIN to close connection #3
23:00:27.022234 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: F 332:332(0) ack 518 win 17004 (DF)
MSIE decides to open a 4th connection, and again uses a standard SYN packet
23:00:27.026125 192.168.194.211.1065 > 64.154.80.51.http: S 3723719998:3723719998(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
connection #2 ACKs the request, but does not send any data yet
23:00:27.035684 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: . ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
connection #2 sends FIN (connection close) at 441st byte (delivered out of order)
23:00:27.081678 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: F 441:441(0) ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
MSIE sends ACK at byte 1 (didn't receive the 440 bytes) to connection #2
23:00:27.083705 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: . ack 1 win 17520 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {441:442} > (DF)
connection #2's 440 bytes of data arrive
23:00:27.087099 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: P 1:441(440) ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
MSIE sends ACK for all 440 bytes (again, probably a HTTP 304 response)
23:00:27.089153 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: . ack 442 win 17080 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {441:442} > (DF)
MSIE sends FIN to close connection #2
23:00:27.092288 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: F 268:268(0) ack 442 win 17080 (DF)
connection #3 sends another ACK (I'm not exactly sure why)
23:00:27.096392 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: . ack 333 win 33580 (DF)
(#4) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #4
23:00:27.100604 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1065: S 1240818516:1240818516(0) ack 3723719999 win 33580 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
MSIE sends HTTP request (333 bytes) on connection #4
23:00:27.112355 192.168.194.211.1065 > 64.154.80.51.http: P 1:334(333) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
.
So, there you have it... a test viewing the same page twice (though the article mentions MSIE tries this speculatively) and done with an IIS-based website (though the article claims MSIE tries this with all sites and it slows down with non-IIS and speeds up with IIS).
All the connections are opened here in an RFC compliant manner.
Actually, it wasn't that hard. But I shoulda been more careful with my spelling in the subject line.
But alas, Yahoo isn't using IIS so its all a moot point.
No, it is valid. You should read the article more carefully.
The article claims the MSIE sends a request first before the normal SYN to establish the connection, before it knows what server is being used. The claim it waits for a RST packet (the standard behavior) from non-IIS servers, or a response from IIS.
Quoting from the article:
In other words, instead of sending a SYN packet like every other TCP/IP application in the world, IE would send out the request packet first of all. Just to check. Just in case the HTTP server was, oh, say, a Microsoft IIS server.
I just fired up a vmware session with windows 98 and
did a test with MSIE 5.00.2614.3500 (the one that
came installed with win98 second edition, no patches
or updates). Watching the ethernet with tcpdump, I
did not see the behaviour specified.
I then fired up Windows XP Pro. XP sends lots of
netbios stuff at startup and periodically. Very
interesting. But again, nothing nearly as interesting
as this article suggests. MSIE 6.0.2600.0000...
also did not reproduce this non-RFC behavior.
Here is the packet log from tcpdump, with some comments. 192.168.194.211 is the Windows XP client. 192.168.194.1 is the nameserver, and 66.218.71.83 is the web server (www.yahoo.com).
First, XP asks the nameserver for the IP number of www.yahoo.com
15:19:50.426473 192.168.194.211.1026 > 192.168.194.1.domain: 2+ A? www.yahoo.com. (31)
XP/MSIE sends a normal SYN packet. There is no non-RFC packet transmitted before this standard SYN packet,
corresponding to an already-open connection before this as the article claims.
15:19:50.734980 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: S 3861657940:3861657940(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Yahoo responds with a normal SYN
15:19:50.797377 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: S 3674114276:3674114276(0) ack 3861657941 win 65535 <mss 1460> (DF)
XP/MSIE sends a normal ACK to finish the connection setup
15:19:50.802506 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
XP/MSIE sends the HTTP request (196 bytes)
15:19:50.809064 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: P 1:197(196) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
Yahoo responds with the first 1460 bytes of data
15:19:50.907564 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 1:1461(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
Yahoo responds with two more packets
15:19:50.999791 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 4381:5841(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
15:19:51.007961 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 5841:7301(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
XP/MSIE acks that it has received up to 7301. Notice how Microsoft is
properly delaying the ack until a second packet is received.
15:19:51.013652 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 7301 win 17520 (DF)
So there are two tests, with the MSIE shipped (unpatched) with Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Pro. It looks like there just isn't a story here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but at that rate, won't the 2048-bit key only take about 5 * 2^(2048 - 64), or a little over 2^1986 years to compute?
With RSA, the key is a multiplication of other numbers and the goal is to factor the key into primes (or numbers that are "likely" primes). The vast majority of cases don't need to be considered (eq, all even numbers, all multiples of 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on).
That is why public key lengths are so long. They're fundamentally different that "symetric" keys, where you must try every single number (assuming the algorithm doesn't have known "weak" numbers that are intentionally avoided and all 2^N values are equally likely)
the funny thing about free speech is that governments are free to chose how they express them selfs, is America free as in speech, yes but so is China, China chose to keep thier speech tightly controlled and thats thier right. In fact I think it would be a violation of human rights to force China to allow its people to freely express their own opinions of the goverment.
.... that a free software product *might* gain market share. What market? It's free, so there's no market, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. What are the bean counters counting? Some people sound like they are just itching to sell out.
No matter how badly you want to see Microsoft Windows remain the only desktop OS on PCs, you can at least admit to understanding what is meant by the term "market share" rather than playing silly word games (to somehow "prove" your point?)
By this logic, Opera would have nearly 100% of the web browser "market share", because Microsoft gives IE away for free, and AOL/Netscape gives away Netscape and Mozilla for free. But it is a well recognized fact that today, Microsoft's IE enjoys about 90-95% of the browser "market", despite the fact that Microsoft gives it away for free.
Likewise, Apache is well recognized to have 61% of the web server "market", even though it is a free program. If there were "no market" for Apache simply because it is free, then you could conclude that all websites are hosted on Microsoft IIS and a few other servers. But the facts are clear (actually, Apache is commonly deployed to vitual host many sites, so it has a smaller but still very respectable portion of the "market" if you count by number of physical servers instead of number of served websites).
Wether kde/gnome/linux will ever get a larger portion of the "desktop market share" is a good question. But playing silly word games to say it will never have any "market share" because it is a free program is definately not the answer to that question. A pile of factual errors (as other have pointed out) is also not a good answer.
Of course, all of this ignores the fact that Redhat and others do SELL linux distributions. Even if they're not profitable or only just barely breaking even, product is being sold.
Slashdot's comments forums are a website centered on rewarding you for how much time you put into it. This is the core philisophy behind design of the website, since they display banner ads and make more money the longer you stick around. They care little for user complaints, and even less for suggestions and requests. They're in it to shove as many ads in front of your comsumer eyeballs as you're worth, and that's the first thing you have to know.
The second thing you have to know is that slashdot stops begin fun and informative. By that time, though, you are "addicted" to slashdot comments but you don't realize it. Comments become a source of frustration and anger instead of news for nerds, stuff that matters. It becomes a chore, a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consume with getting modded up, or seeing how many people you can get to respond with flames to you "troll" post, while so comsumed you begin to hate the website. Vehemently. It goes on forever, and one that you can never win.
After posting to slashdot for a while, you'll start conversing with other users, and you'll see the one thing all users have in common is they hate OSDN. (It should be noted that CmdrTaco and Hemon, the original developers, "sold out" to Andover and ownership changed hands again during the dot-com boom, so we will refer to them as OSDN for simplicity). This is baffling at first glance, because users view the banner ads every day and some even pay the volentary subscription service, and yet they despise them! Look a little deeper though, and you'll see that most people who dislike OSDN are the ones who no longer have fun posting to slashdot. They aren't getting what they want out of slashdot anymore, and they look to OSDN, being the source of all changes and improvements/breakdowns on the website, as the cause. Right or wrong, this is the state of addairs; the users hate the company providing they with the website they think has "stuff that matters".
Let's go back to the parts about OSDN not caring about their readership. Recently, they changed their moderation system such that, instead of a dedicated team of well know moderators to handle problems, ordinary users would temporarily be assigned moderator points roaming the various discussions infrequently.
----------
Ok, that's enough......
For the humor challenged, this feeble attempt at parody was intended to compare this whiny Everquest piece to the whining often heard about slashdot. There's plenty more in there... changes to the game causing loss of power analogous to changes that might impact someone's karma... the section about players determined to "win" and playing dirty analogous to trolling, karma whoring, gaming the site.... players harassing each others analogous to trolling and flame wars.... bugs and patch problems analogous to slashdot's regular not responding problems and Taco's inability to spell check.... the level of whining is just perfect.
It's hard to imagine how something this clue-challenged gets moded to +5.
They say Microsoft sucks but then they waste their time copying it.
"They" used to refer to the monolithic linux community, which has one uniform set of opinions and makes sure that all public commentary "they" present in a consistent and unified manner. And saying "they" to refer to linux users ("us" for win32 users) ignores the well established fact that a great number of installations are dual-boot with windows.
Why would someone want to "migrate" to something that looks the same and can't run most software?
Lower cost would probably be the most likely reason (obviously someone hasn't see the $200 wal-mart PC and hoards of governments and companies switching or considering switching to lower costs). And, most software that is commonly used is available for linux in some alternate form that's good enough for most (IE-Mozilla, Office-StarOffice, Outlook-Evolution, etc).
This time could have been used creating something better that would give Linux (and its users) an advantage. Instead, it was wasted making Linux look more and more like Windows.
Once more, the paradigm of a team consisting of a fixed number of salaried programmers is applied to free software. HELLO, wake up call. Obviously someone's slept through the revelation that free software is developed by a large number of only loosly associated programmers, and the number is very large and highly variable.
He's not getting paid to work on "something" and they squandering that paid time developing something that doesn't advance linux as a whole as much as something else. He's doing something he finds interesting. It's not wasted time. It's time well spent, from his perspective. That is what matters.
It's also possible that others will want to use it. I can see how it could be used to overcome much of the "learning curve" objections to switching for some people.
I've always been surprised and even disappointed at my friends' lack of curiosity about Linux.
Would you also be disappointed in my lack of curiousity in Microsoft Windows ?? It's come a long way since the bad-old-days of Windows 3.1. That's the time frame when I purchased my first PC and installed Slackware 1.1 (0.99pl14 kernel). Previously, I used a MacLC2 (dual boot, MacOS6 and MacOS7), and I logged into to various unix boxes for "real work". Before that, I had an Apple2, and again, I logged into BBSs and unix boxes for email, newsgroups, and chat.
I kept the Mac for many years and used it for word processing and graphics (bought one of the few monitors at the time which had two video inputs). MS Word 4.0, MacPaint 1.1, SuperPaint 3.0, Canvas 2.1 were getting pretty old, but they still worked great and did everything I needed. My old Mac has a 50 MHz speed-up card, and those old apps ran great. Likewise, I could do almost all unix-oriented tasks on the linux box, including email, usenet news, and later surfing the web. Linux (and related apps) has grown and grown, and the PC hardware has remained cheap (unlike trying to upgrade the mac). A couple years ago, I took the plunge and finally started using the GIMP, which replaced my last major hold-out on the Mac side.
Over the years, there's been 2 win32-only CAD apps I've needed. At times I had dual-boot, but eventually I purchased vmware and I really like the repeatable resume. I can finally not have to fiddle with windows.... I just set it up once and every time I start that virtual machine I get exactly the same working win32 system with my one CAD app installed.
I saw WinXP in the store not long ago. They've certainly made it pretty. It also looks like Win2k and WinXP are real operating systems with compatible apps and drivers (I was quite unimpressed with NT 3.51 and 4.0).
My linux setup works. I know how to use it. I have a set of apps that run great and do just about everything I need. I've got all my special apps in/usr/local and ~/bin, so backup and migrating to newer distros are easy.
I know there's LOTS of neat new apps for Windows that don't exist for Linux. I know the modern versions of Windows have become much better.
But I don't really care. What I have works, and until there's some really compelling reason to consider Microsoft again (that isn't easily solved by a repeatable-resume vmware virtual machine), I just want to leave well enough alone. It's certainly not broken, so why fix it ???
I can identify with your Windows-based friends who are quite happy with their computing paragigms and therefore aren't really curious about Linux. I can't see how yet-another-book is going to "help". If everything is working great and there's no need for anything new, then what is the "problem" that needs to be "solved" ?
I'm a proponent of all things open and Free, and I should support the GDF in this conflict else violate my principles.
Until Mike truely releases complete documentation on the protocol, in a manner that permits anyone to implement it, I can't see how supporting "gnutella2" is aligned with your principles.
The published interview is about as balanced as a Linux press-release issued by Microsoft.
I believe you missed this paragraph... the last of the introductory text before the actual interview begins:
Our goal with this article is not to take sides on this situation. Instead, we're publishing Shareaza's interview today, and in the following days we'll present the opposing viewpoint. Contribution to the opposition will include interviews with BearShare, LimeWire and XoloX.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly as I can tell computers and the Internet have pretty much taken over those roles.
Computers and the p2p internet are being use to download for free the music that was recorded, remastered, produced, manufacturered (ripped from CD) and marked by the record labels, nearly as I can tell...
.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a small part of internet downloading is authorized by independant musicians, but the vast majority of music swapped on Kazaa and similar networks is the big name acts from the big labels.
At least in the US, you have that right to rip/mix/burn as long as you paid for the CDs legitimately. It's called "fair use". No additional levy on blank media or recording devices is necessary to obtain the "fair use" right to rip/mix/burn.
Now-a-days, a good portion of all users have spam filters. Some are highly effective (spamassassin) but even the lesser filters still remove a large portion of the spam.
So a lot of modern spam gets automaitcally deleted by filters.
Now if I were a malicious hacker/cracker, hell-bent on obtaining unauthorized access to as many machines as possible, and I happened to have a 0-day exploit to CVS, which happens to be used to maintain the sources to many of the most popular server applications....
hmmm, what might I do with that exploit ??
Yeah, I know, I'd go root lots of boxen and deface home pages on any machines also running web servers and use the rest to launch DDOS attacks. Yeah, that'd be the thing to do. All that writable source code wouldn't even be on my mind at all, would it??
.
I was wondering how much that really is. Wandering over to XE.COM, one US Dollar is equal to 8.9 South Africa Rand. The article's writing style seems a bit odd to me, but maybe that's how reporting is done in South Africa. Quoting....
Now I'm wondering if "R3bn" is (roughly) equivilant to 337 million US dollars. Suppose the average PC gets $600(usd) installed on it, in windows, office, and a couple other apps. I just pulled that $600 out of a hat, but it seems a reasonably conservative (high) estimate of the amount of proprietary software you'd purchase per machine, on average.
That'd put their annual software purchasing at (approx) 561600 PCs per year, or 1.12 million PCs in use on a 2-year Microsoft "software assurance" upgrade cycle.
Is that reasonable, or did I add something up wrong?
Time and time again, people have tried this and failed again and again. When the primary goal is to simply have a good program to USE (not resell to others), it just doesn't work not contributing back. Many have tried this and regretted it.
What inevitably happens is the "official" project improves, both fixing bugs and including new features. The private code diverges from the public version, even if only in minor ways, it becomes a headache when a patch doesn't apply cleanly. Whomever "maintains" the private code needs to reimplement the improvements that are deemed critical from the public code, and as time goes on this becomes more and more hassle.
Often the private changes are contributed back into the public version, simply because that is the only viable way to "maintain" the application over time. Sometimes, the private version stagnates or diverges too far. Either way, the lesson learned by an organization who's primary purpose is simply using the software is that it's in their own self interest to merge their improvements back into the public project, where they will be maintained and tested together with all future improvements contributed by others.
Maybe, just maybe, someday everybody will be able to remember or at least find out where they saved their files when they later attempt to open them with a different program that starts the file open dialog in a different directory ???
Have you ever tried a test where the clients kept their connections open for a reasonable length of time??
In the real world, virtually all clients are connected via links ranging from slow dialup to 1.5 Mbit/sec. They hold connections open and tie up server memory resources for a lot longer than a fast-as-possible benchmark running on the same machine or over fast ethernet.
Any server running on a single box is probably going to have trouble with 17000+ pages per seconds to modem users, who require many seconds to transfer the page. If the average connection open time is 2 seconds, that's 34000 open connections. Even if the server used only 32k of RAM per connection (barely enough to buffer a few packets and allocate "window" inside the TCP layer in the OS, and maintain OS-level info and buffering for the open file), that'd be over 1 gigabyte of memory. I suspect a combination of Windows (TCP/IP & file I/O), IIS, and ASP.NET uses a lot more than 32k per connection.
Yes, mod_gzip is great and I use it on my own server, but for any "normal" website the main advantage is an interactive speed-up for dialup users. It really doesn't save huge amounts of bandwidth (in this case, enough to matter for withstanding the slashdot effect).
As an example, the page slashdot linked to is 22443 bytes of compressable html, and approx 84287 bytes of images (not including the ads and two images that didn't load because they're not handling the slashdot effect so well as they thing they can). At -9, the slowest and best compression (remember, this is a dynamic JSP site, not static content you can compress ahead of time), the html compresses to 5758 bytes, thereby reducing the total content from 106730 bytes to 90045.
That's only a 15.6% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, a typical HTTP response header, which can't be compressed, is about 300 bytes (not including TCP/IP packet overhead, which we'll ignore hoping that HTTP/1.1 keepalives are putting it all in one connection...). There were 18 images (actually 20, but junkbuster filtered 2 out for me). That's 19 HTTP headers, at 300 bytes each, all uncompressable. Adding in HTTP overhead we're at (approx) 112430 without compression and 95745 with mod_gzip. So the uncompressability of the headers reduces the bandwidth savings to 14.8%.
The big advantage that makes mod_gzip really worthwhile for a site like that is the a dialup user can get all the html in about 2 seconds, rather than 5-6 (assuming the modem's compression is on). Then they can start reading, while the remaining 82k of images slowly appear over the next 20-30 seconds.
Now in some cases, like slashdot's comments pages, mod_gzip makes a massive difference. But for most sites, the majority of the bandwidth is images that are already compressed. That 10% to 20% reduction in bandwidth from simply installing mod_gzip is pretty small compared to a bit of effort redesigning pages to trim the fatty images.
Reloading their page a couple times (2nd page of the article, not the one slashdot linked to), I'm getting occasional 503 errors, and the rest are taking a very long time to load. Usually the page comes up with some "broken" images that didn't load.
At the bottom of each page, there's a number that seems to indicate the time they believe their server spent serving the page. Usually is says something like "2 ms" or "3 ms"... That may be how long their code spent creating the html, but the real world performance I see (via a 1.5 Mbit/sec DSL line) is many seconds for the html and many more for the images, some of which never show up, and sometimes a 503 error instead of anything useful at all.
So, Brian, if you're reading this comment (which will probably be worthy of "redundant" moderation by the time I hit the Submit button)... it ain't workin' as well as you think. Maybe the next article will be an explaination of what went wrong this time, and you can try again???
You have misunderstood the meaning of "internet tax". It is a sales tax, taxing sales of goods and services.
The money collected will NOT be used to support the internet infrastructure. It will add directly to state's budgets, which primarily pay for things like public schools and roads.
The internet's infrastructure will be supported the same way it always has (since it was weaned from public funding), by connectivity (bandwidth) charges from the backbone providers, that filter down to ISPs and ultimately non-ISP business and ordinary people.
Utopian micropayment predictions always seem to ignore the basic desire to maximize profits. They predict a utopia where vast amounts of content are available with automatic payments so tiny that nobody will be bothered. But why would any author/provider leave all that money on the table? Why would they not increase prices to what the market will bear?
Today there is a lot of "content" available for free, or for "free registration". That would change. Virtually anything worthwhile that exists today for free would almost certainly go to micropayments. Lots of worthless content would also go to micropayments, because even a small amount of money from occasional readers would be better than nothing. Shopping sites and some purely non-commercial sites would likely be the only places left that cared more about getting lots of viewer (paying nothing) than a smaller number of viewers (paying "micro" amounts).
But would also truely high quality content appear? Maybe, but micropayments would have to be a pretty successful business opportunity before substantial new investments get made (other than re-purposing content authored for other media). Even then, the drive to maximize profits would be the primary driver. One way to maximize profits might be to produce something truely great and hope that a lot of people find it. Another might be to produce LOTS of mediocre content (as cheaply as possible) and make small returns on each piece. Another might be to put a large portion of the resources into "marketing" the content (getting paid hits) as opposed to the development of the content itself.
Luckily, micropayments appear to be unworkable for the forseeable future (people love flat fees and hate metered services, financial transactions cost too much to process, and financial institutions are also driven to maximize profits and burden the transaction as much as the market will bear). If all these problems ever get worked out, I believe we'll all be looking back on the glory days of the World Wide Web, when one could easily surf around and find lots of info about almost anything.
I did. here is the message.
The article is talking about reusing a connection that is left half open by the client. It should be the second connection that would exhibit the behavior.
It talks about this approach working because IIS (supposedly) doesn't close connections fully (it actually did in my tests). But it claims MSIE sends this speculatively, hoping that a server might accept the request.
In any case, I had some time to kill tonight, and didn't feel like doing anything productive, so I repeated the test and annotated the packet log... which was quite a bit more work because MSIE opens many connections concurrently when verifing cached content (and it already knows the server IP numbers from the cache).
Still, you will see 4 connections opened, all in the normal way (well, one is aborted before fully opened, but still legal behavior though non-optimal). You'll also see two connections fully closed (FIN in each direction), so the part about connections being left half open is also not reproducible.
This time, I tried www.intel.com (which is an IIS server). It is a bit more complicated because content comes from multiple servers. You'll see that on the second access, where all the content is caches and IE already knows a list of IP numbers it wants to contact to check if the cached copy is up to date.
Cutting to the chase: we see 1 connection opened in the first group of packets (I didn't include enough to see the later connections for the content from other servers) and 4 connections opened in the second group of packets when reloading the page 4 minutes later. All connections are opened in an RFC compliant manner, with no requests sent before the connection is properly opened as the article claims.
MSIE asks IP address of www.intel.com
22:56:51.812091 192.168.194.211.1026 > 192.168.194.1.domain: 7+ A? www.intel.com. (31)
Nameserver responds
22:56:51.924028 192.168.194.1.domain > 192.168.194.211.1026: 7 2/2/0 CNAME www.glb.intel.com., (105) (DF)
MSIE starts connection with normal SYN
22:56:51.931109 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: S 3669105715:3669105715(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Intel responds with SYN/ACK
22:56:51.982576 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: S 1792107795:1792107795(0) ack 3669105716 win 8192 <mss 1460>
MSIE responds with ACK to finish opening the connection
22:56:51.982969 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE sends HTTP request (249 bytes)
22:56:51.983879 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: P 1:250(249) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
Intel responds with ACK (but no data yet)
22:56:52.040913 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: . ack 250 win 8192
Intel responds with two packets, each carrying 1460 bytes of data
22:56:52.064191 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: . 1:1461(1460) ack 250 win 17271 (DF)
22:56:52.072302 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: . 1461:2921(1460) ack 250 win 17271 (DF)
MSIE acks both of them (delay ACK as per RFC)
22:56:52.072713 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: . ack 2921 win 17520 (DF)
Intel sends more data
22:56:52.141252 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1048: . 2921:4381(1460) ack 250 win 17271 (DF)
MSIE responds
22:56:52.141712 192.168.194.211.1048 > 198.175.96.33.http: . ack 4381 win 17520 (DF)
Many hundred more packets occur, with connections established to other servers (opened the normal RFC compliant) way.
.
.
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 198.175.96.33 (connection #1)
23:00:26.798508 192.168.194.211.1062 > 198.175.96.33.http: S 3723498008:3723498008(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 216.203.32.78 (connection #2)
23:00:26.802485 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: S 3723557647:3723557647(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
MSIE sends SYN to open connection to 64.154.80.51 (connection #3)
23:00:26.826112 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: S 3723624012:3723624012(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Notice the absence of any packet related to an already-open connection, as the article claimed. Below MSIE opens a 4th connection to another server, again using the RFC compliant SYN-SYN/ACK-ACK sequence before and data exchange takes place.
Intel respond with its SYN/ACK to open the connection (#1)
23:00:26.853681 198.175.96.33.http > 192.168.194.211.1062: S 626928500:626928500(0) ack 3723498009 win 8192 <mss 1460>
MSIE (for some reason) sends a RST and terminates connection #1. Perhaps it abandoned the connection after calling connect (or whatever MSIE calls if it's not using the normal sockets API), maybe because it didn't really need to check if the file cached from this server is up to date. Better programmers might have simply avoided attempting to open the connection in the first place, but it's certainly allowed to abandon an open like this and sending a RST packet to abort opening the connection is legal TCP behavior.
23:00:26.855874 192.168.194.211.1062 > 198.175.96.33.http: R 3723498009:3723498009(0) win 0
(#3) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #3
23:00:26.900586 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: S 2830569043:2830569043(0) ack 3723624013 win 33580 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
(#2) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #2
23:00:26.909440 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: S 3187959102:3187959102(0) ack 3723557648 win 8760 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
MSIE sends ACK to finish opening connection #3
23:00:26.912141 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE sends ACK to finish opening connection #2
23:00:26.914312 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE transmits HTTP request (331 bytes) on connection #3
23:00:26.917184 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: P 1:332(331) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE transmits HTTP request (267 bytes) on connection #2
23:00:26.919711 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: P 1:268(267) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
connection #3 reponds with ACK to the request
23:00:27.009910 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: . ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
connection #3 reponds with FIN (close connection) - delivered out of order by the internet!!!
23:00:27.010734 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: F 517:517(0) ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
MSIE responds with ACK at byte 1 (saying it hasn't received the data yet)
23:00:27.013719 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 1 win 17520 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {517:518} > (DF)
connection #3's data finally arrives (presumably server send this before the FIN but it was delivered out-of-order)
23:00:27.017008 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: P 1:517(516) ack 332 win 33580 (DF)
MSIE responds with an ACK that is received all 517 bytes. Obviously HTTP/1.1 is in use here and the response with something like a 304 telling MSIE that the copy it has in its cache is up to date.
23:00:27.019072 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 518 win 17004 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {517:518} > (DF)
MSIE transmits FIN to close connection #3
23:00:27.022234 192.168.194.211.1064 > 64.154.80.51.http: F 332:332(0) ack 518 win 17004 (DF)
MSIE decides to open a 4th connection, and again uses a standard SYN packet
23:00:27.026125 192.168.194.211.1065 > 64.154.80.51.http: S 3723719998:3723719998(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
connection #2 ACKs the request, but does not send any data yet
23:00:27.035684 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: . ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
connection #2 sends FIN (connection close) at 441st byte (delivered out of order)
23:00:27.081678 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: F 441:441(0) ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
MSIE sends ACK at byte 1 (didn't receive the 440 bytes) to connection #2
23:00:27.083705 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: . ack 1 win 17520 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {441:442} > (DF)
connection #2's 440 bytes of data arrive
23:00:27.087099 216.203.32.78.http > 192.168.194.211.1063: P 1:441(440) ack 268 win 8760 (DF)
MSIE sends ACK for all 440 bytes (again, probably a HTTP 304 response)
23:00:27.089153 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: . ack 442 win 17080 <nop,nop,sack sack 1 {441:442} > (DF)
MSIE sends FIN to close connection #2
23:00:27.092288 192.168.194.211.1063 > 216.203.32.78.http: F 268:268(0) ack 442 win 17080 (DF)
connection #3 sends another ACK (I'm not exactly sure why)
23:00:27.096392 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1064: . ack 333 win 33580 (DF)
(#4) responds with SYN/ACK to open connection #4
23:00:27.100604 64.154.80.51.http > 192.168.194.211.1065: S 1240818516:1240818516(0) ack 3723719999 win 33580 <nop,nop,sackOK,mss 1460> (DF)
MSIE sends ACK to finish opening connection #4
23:00:27.101961 192.168.194.211.1065 > 64.154.80.51.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
MSIE sends HTTP request (333 bytes) on connection #4
23:00:27.112355 192.168.194.211.1065 > 64.154.80.51.http: P 1:334(333) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
.
So, there you have it... a test viewing the same page twice (though the article mentions MSIE tries this speculatively) and done with an IIS-based website (though the article claims MSIE tries this with all sites and it slows down with non-IIS and speeds up with IIS).
All the connections are opened here in an RFC compliant manner.
Actually, it wasn't that hard. But I shoulda been more careful with my spelling in the subject line.
But alas, Yahoo isn't using IIS so its all a moot point.
No, it is valid. You should read the article more carefully.
The article claims the MSIE sends a request first before the normal SYN to establish the connection, before it knows what server is being used. The claim it waits for a RST packet (the standard behavior) from non-IIS servers, or a response from IIS.
Quoting from the article:
I then fired up Windows XP Pro. XP sends lots of netbios stuff at startup and periodically. Very interesting. But again, nothing nearly as interesting as this article suggests. MSIE 6.0.2600.0000... also did not reproduce this non-RFC behavior.
Here is the packet log from tcpdump, with some comments. 192.168.194.211 is the Windows XP client. 192.168.194.1 is the nameserver, and 66.218.71.83 is the web server (www.yahoo.com).
First, XP asks the nameserver for the IP number of www.yahoo.com
15:19:50.426473 192.168.194.211.1026 > 192.168.194.1.domain: 2+ A? www.yahoo.com. (31)
The nameserver responds
15:19:50.702603 192.168.194.1.domain > 192.168.194.211.1026: 2 10/11/0 CNAME[|domain] (DF)
XP/MSIE sends a normal SYN packet. There is no non-RFC packet transmitted before this standard SYN packet, corresponding to an already-open connection before this as the article claims.
15:19:50.734980 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: S 3861657940:3861657940(0) win 16384 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK> (DF)
Yahoo responds with a normal SYN
15:19:50.797377 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: S 3674114276:3674114276(0) ack 3861657941 win 65535 <mss 1460> (DF)
XP/MSIE sends a normal ACK to finish the connection setup
15:19:50.802506 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
XP/MSIE sends the HTTP request (196 bytes)
15:19:50.809064 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: P 1:197(196) ack 1 win 17520 (DF)
Yahoo responds with the first 1460 bytes of data
15:19:50.907564 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 1:1461(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
XP/MSIE acks it
15:19:50.919180 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 2921 win 17520 (DF)
Yahoo responds with another 1460 bytes
15:19:50.923751 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 2921:4381(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
XP/MSIE acks it
15:19:50.941174 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 4381 win 17520 (DF)
Yahoo responds with two more packets
15:19:50.999791 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 4381:5841(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
15:19:51.007961 66.218.71.83.http > 192.168.194.211.1032: . 5841:7301(1460) ack 197 win 65535 (DF)
XP/MSIE acks that it has received up to 7301. Notice how Microsoft is properly delaying the ack until a second packet is received.
15:19:51.013652 192.168.194.211.1032 > 66.218.71.83.http: . ack 7301 win 17520 (DF)
So there are two tests, with the MSIE shipped (unpatched) with Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Pro. It looks like there just isn't a story here.
With RSA, the key is a multiplication of other numbers and the goal is to factor the key into primes (or numbers that are "likely" primes). The vast majority of cases don't need to be considered (eq, all even numbers, all multiples of 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on).
That is why public key lengths are so long. They're fundamentally different that "symetric" keys, where you must try every single number (assuming the algorithm doesn't have known "weak" numbers that are intentionally avoided and all 2^N values are equally likely)
your spell's is sorry
No matter how badly you want to see Microsoft Windows remain the only desktop OS on PCs, you can at least admit to understanding what is meant by the term "market share" rather than playing silly word games (to somehow "prove" your point?)
By this logic, Opera would have nearly 100% of the web browser "market share", because Microsoft gives IE away for free, and AOL/Netscape gives away Netscape and Mozilla for free. But it is a well recognized fact that today, Microsoft's IE enjoys about 90-95% of the browser "market", despite the fact that Microsoft gives it away for free.
Likewise, Apache is well recognized to have 61% of the web server "market", even though it is a free program. If there were "no market" for Apache simply because it is free, then you could conclude that all websites are hosted on Microsoft IIS and a few other servers. But the facts are clear (actually, Apache is commonly deployed to vitual host many sites, so it has a smaller but still very respectable portion of the "market" if you count by number of physical servers instead of number of served websites).
Wether kde/gnome/linux will ever get a larger portion of the "desktop market share" is a good question. But playing silly word games to say it will never have any "market share" because it is a free program is definately not the answer to that question. A pile of factual errors (as other have pointed out) is also not a good answer.
Of course, all of this ignores the fact that Redhat and others do SELL linux distributions. Even if they're not profitable or only just barely breaking even, product is being sold.
The second thing you have to know is that slashdot stops begin fun and informative. By that time, though, you are "addicted" to slashdot comments but you don't realize it. Comments become a source of frustration and anger instead of news for nerds, stuff that matters. It becomes a chore, a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consume with getting modded up, or seeing how many people you can get to respond with flames to you "troll" post, while so comsumed you begin to hate the website. Vehemently. It goes on forever, and one that you can never win.
After posting to slashdot for a while, you'll start conversing with other users, and you'll see the one thing all users have in common is they hate OSDN. (It should be noted that CmdrTaco and Hemon, the original developers, "sold out" to Andover and ownership changed hands again during the dot-com boom, so we will refer to them as OSDN for simplicity). This is baffling at first glance, because users view the banner ads every day and some even pay the volentary subscription service, and yet they despise them! Look a little deeper though, and you'll see that most people who dislike OSDN are the ones who no longer have fun posting to slashdot. They aren't getting what they want out of slashdot anymore, and they look to OSDN, being the source of all changes and improvements/breakdowns on the website, as the cause. Right or wrong, this is the state of addairs; the users hate the company providing they with the website they think has "stuff that matters".
Let's go back to the parts about OSDN not caring about their readership. Recently, they changed their moderation system such that, instead of a dedicated team of well know moderators to handle problems, ordinary users would temporarily be assigned moderator points roaming the various discussions infrequently.
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Ok, that's enough......
For the humor challenged, this feeble attempt at parody was intended to compare this whiny Everquest piece to the whining often heard about slashdot. There's plenty more in there... changes to the game causing loss of power analogous to changes that might impact someone's karma... the section about players determined to "win" and playing dirty analogous to trolling, karma whoring, gaming the site.... players harassing each others analogous to trolling and flame wars.... bugs and patch problems analogous to slashdot's regular not responding problems and Taco's inability to spell check.... the level of whining is just perfect.
Anyone else want to continue this?
They say Microsoft sucks but then they waste their time copying it.
"They" used to refer to the monolithic linux community, which has one uniform set of opinions and makes sure that all public commentary "they" present in a consistent and unified manner. And saying "they" to refer to linux users ("us" for win32 users) ignores the well established fact that a great number of installations are dual-boot with windows.
Why would someone want to "migrate" to something that looks the same and can't run most software?
Lower cost would probably be the most likely reason (obviously someone hasn't see the $200 wal-mart PC and hoards of governments and companies switching or considering switching to lower costs). And, most software that is commonly used is available for linux in some alternate form that's good enough for most (IE-Mozilla, Office-StarOffice, Outlook-Evolution, etc).
This time could have been used creating something better that would give Linux (and its users) an advantage. Instead, it was wasted making Linux look more and more like Windows.
Once more, the paradigm of a team consisting of a fixed number of salaried programmers is applied to free software. HELLO, wake up call. Obviously someone's slept through the revelation that free software is developed by a large number of only loosly associated programmers, and the number is very large and highly variable.
He's not getting paid to work on "something" and they squandering that paid time developing something that doesn't advance linux as a whole as much as something else. He's doing something he finds interesting. It's not wasted time. It's time well spent, from his perspective. That is what matters.
It's also possible that others will want to use it. I can see how it could be used to overcome much of the "learning curve" objections to switching for some people.
The real question is what they will do if they want the least expensive PC that meets their needs. Or hundreds of such machines....
Would you also be disappointed in my lack of curiousity in Microsoft Windows ?? It's come a long way since the bad-old-days of Windows 3.1. That's the time frame when I purchased my first PC and installed Slackware 1.1 (0.99pl14 kernel). Previously, I used a MacLC2 (dual boot, MacOS6 and MacOS7), and I logged into to various unix boxes for "real work". Before that, I had an Apple2, and again, I logged into BBSs and unix boxes for email, newsgroups, and chat.
I kept the Mac for many years and used it for word processing and graphics (bought one of the few monitors at the time which had two video inputs). MS Word 4.0, MacPaint 1.1, SuperPaint 3.0, Canvas 2.1 were getting pretty old, but they still worked great and did everything I needed. My old Mac has a 50 MHz speed-up card, and those old apps ran great. Likewise, I could do almost all unix-oriented tasks on the linux box, including email, usenet news, and later surfing the web. Linux (and related apps) has grown and grown, and the PC hardware has remained cheap (unlike trying to upgrade the mac). A couple years ago, I took the plunge and finally started using the GIMP, which replaced my last major hold-out on the Mac side.
Over the years, there's been 2 win32-only CAD apps I've needed. At times I had dual-boot, but eventually I purchased vmware and I really like the repeatable resume. I can finally not have to fiddle with windows.... I just set it up once and every time I start that virtual machine I get exactly the same working win32 system with my one CAD app installed.
I saw WinXP in the store not long ago. They've certainly made it pretty. It also looks like Win2k and WinXP are real operating systems with compatible apps and drivers (I was quite unimpressed with NT 3.51 and 4.0).
My linux setup works. I know how to use it. I have a set of apps that run great and do just about everything I need. I've got all my special apps in /usr/local and ~/bin, so backup and migrating to newer distros are easy.
I know there's LOTS of neat new apps for Windows that don't exist for Linux. I know the modern versions of Windows have become much better.
But I don't really care. What I have works, and until there's some really compelling reason to consider Microsoft again (that isn't easily solved by a repeatable-resume vmware virtual machine), I just want to leave well enough alone. It's certainly not broken, so why fix it ???
I can identify with your Windows-based friends who are quite happy with their computing paragigms and therefore aren't really curious about Linux. I can't see how yet-another-book is going to "help". If everything is working great and there's no need for anything new, then what is the "problem" that needs to be "solved" ?
Until Mike truely releases complete documentation on the protocol, in a manner that permits anyone to implement it, I can't see how supporting "gnutella2" is aligned with your principles.
I believe you missed this paragraph... the last of the introductory text before the actual interview begins: