I think you're making a flawed assumption about Linux, once you start charging more for a Linux version the sales drops drastically. After all the software is already written and the Windows sales covered the development cost, then surely the Linux sales can cover the small porting cost. Not saying that's necessarily a correct assumption, but many think that way. And as some of the Linux porting companies have found out, often people feel they've paid for this software and is then entitled to use it on any platform it's available.
The other thing is support and binary compatibility. You can say you only support Linux distro X, but rest assured that you'll have a million requests/demands/complaints that you support every little distro out there, as well as people clogging up the forums with hacks and workarounds to do it anyway. Every sort of library/upgrade/version issue will land on your table, which may be once every six months. In short, Windows and OS X is built to ship binaries, there's long lasting binary interfaces to everything and old interfaces are kept around for many years until they're slowly deprecated and phased out. Linux is constantly changing and backwards compatibility is spotty at best.
Oh yes and you might not realize it, but Microsoft does a whole lot both on the hardware and software side to make life easier for developers. Driver models like WDDM, NDIS etc and software toolkits like DirectX. There's a reason Windows has one video acceleration standard (DXVA) and Linux has three (XvBA, VA API and VDPAU). It's Microsoft saying here's the standard, build your driver to comply with this and the DirectX code will do the rest. Nobody really takes the same responsibility to write the code above the vendor specific layer, very often it falls to AMD and nVidia and Intel to write what Microsoft would have done on Windows. That puts even more of the cost of supporting Linux on them.
The music industry is just one part of it. Pretty much all that work in the IP industry is looking at some form of "First they came for the music industry..." scenario. The RIAA. The MPAA. TV networks. The porn industry. The BSA. E-books. Put together there are a lot stronger forces at work to defend copyright, because they all realize it's not going to stop there. It would come to a showdown of who controls the creative output of all of them, they or the public. Sure, there's a little bit of infighting right now but don't pretend any of them has really changed sides, this is just corporate interests interfering.
Apple is hardly in the "anti-IP" camp. They have a ton of software patents on their products, they subscribe to the idea "we designed it, we OWN that idea". They're just opposed to anything that gets in the way of their profit margins. That's the way with most these companies, they're playing both sides of the fence. Google almost closed one helluva book deal where they'd use copyright to give themselves exclusive rights to the scans. Amazon makes good money on shipping CDs, DVDs, BluRays, computer games and so on - is it in their best interest to stir the pot here? And Microsoft is of course a heavy copyright defender.
So what are they going to say to the music industry? "You're being to obsessive-compulsive about control, ease up!" is the pot calling the kettle black - at least the music industry doesn't have mandatory online activation yet. Both the video and software industry is full of DRM that music doesn't have anymore. They just want to tug at this a little to make them back down, not unravel the whole rug. They certainly don't want the public to take any of this as any kind of endorsement or support for weakening corporate control, that's for sure. In the end I think that's why they reached an agreement, they have more to lose than to gain by bringing it to a showdown in court.
Well right now they'd be wise to lower expectations quite a bit. The previous rovers performed off the charts, this one might just perform to spec or worse. I'm guessing that as usually there's a long, long list of "never been done before" and you can only go so far in simulation. It's not really tested until it's tried.
I'm not talking about everybody else who buys later after it's a proven success, I talk about all the early adopters and developers. Why are they willing to develop for and buy a system that as of then doesn't have many users or applications? Obviously Apple has a pretty good history of making successes, but usually everything is approached with a lot of caution that this might be their flop. Obviously Apple does a lot of other things rights too, but when it comes down to "Why can Apple kickstart a market while other companies end up in a catch 22?" then I'd say it's Jobs. Not the stage performance as such, but that he's worked on the design and user experience and built up a team around him that think the Jobs way. People believe that under his direction Apple won't make any crappy products that misjudge their market, which means people commit with irrationally little caution. I don't mean to say Jobs is the reason why the iPhone 4 is a success, that's pretty much due to the iPhone 1, 2 and 3. But when it comes to launching new products like the iPad then I would say he personally is essential to that.
So true. That's one stroke of genius by President Obama. By selecting Biden for VP he made sure even the KKK pray for the health of the President every night.
Well, if it's a tactic it's a bipartisan one. If McCain had won you could swear every democrat would pray for his health too, or there'd be President Palin...
Well, there's also D - make solutions that lets other traffic be on their way. For example a roundabout that's clogged with north-south traffic will also block east-west traffic. Of course there's limits to all solutions, but often making some kind of pass-through road that doesn't need to run through 10 intersections downtown will help a lot.
As for solution A, it also takes a certain willingness to use public transportation. It won't go to your driveway, you probably will have to walk 5 or 10 minutes to the nearest bus, tram or subway stop at both ends. It might rain, it might - at least up north - snow, it might be windy. If the tiniest bit of effort is too much, then people will drive anyway. At least some Americans I've run into have a mentality where public transportation has no hope to win.
Which is why every other company is envious ot Steve Jobs. He simply declares the iPad to be the next big thing, and there's suddenly an army of developers and users who believe it - instant critical mass. Of course it's nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, conjured out of thin air but it's not something everyone could do. Ballmer or Ellison could get up there and everyone would go "lol yeah right". Jobs gets up there and because people believe it will happen it does happen. That's a power that's not just a RDF because it does become reality.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are three separate career paths needing lifetime commitment?
Absolutely not. I was saying you can probably make a lifelong career of it, if you want. That companies will rise and fall but they'll still need someone to do that job, you don't need to be a jack-of-all-trades to stay employed. Maybe you need to pick up a new programming language, but software development is a plenty wide field in itself. You don't need to know auto repair too.
You think? Of these, network administration has a good chance of not existing in a decade-- it's going to become an off-the-shelf commodity, "order a network, push the button, deploy" except at the highest level.
Throw in firewall management and it's never going away, you'll always need people to manage who talks to what systems. That you actually have the redundancy and capacity and monitoring you need to have. There's no way your random guy of the street will be able to set up a DMZ and put the right servers in the right place properly, no matter how neat the tools get.
The boys and girls at the MITs and Stanford and Berkeleys are learning the real stuff
Oh, you're that kind where only the cutting edge of science is "real stuff". That's not what most real work is, real work is usually drab implementation of known concepts. Just like the plumber isn't doing anything revolutionary to my building, but it still needs plumbing. There's a helluva lot more plumbers around the world than there are people researching how to make better plumbing. Moderately skilled people for moderately skilled work is the bread and butter of work life, not MIT and Stanford and Berkeley. If you have an application, and the boss says "we need a text field here that's stored in the customer database and goes on that report" you need someone to edit the GUI, modify the database, update the report. It won't be rocket science but it's work that needs doing by someone who's at least a little bit skilled at what he's doing. IT plumbing if you will, I suppose you can end up in a whip and buggy industry but for the most part you can spend a lifetime working the same field, even today.
We're not quitting space exploration, last I checked there was plenty probes and rovers and telescopes on the drawing board that'd go into space or observe space. The question is the cost/benefit of sending humans out there to do the exploring. To make an analogy, does submarines bring us any closer to building underwater cities? Or are we just really travelling around in a big tin can burning resources to make the submerged life like surface life? In the same way I don't think we'll get any closer to a Mars colony just doing more loops in a shuttle. Obviously a manned mission to Mars can do more than the rovers we have there today, but for the cost we could probably send a hundred more with various instruments.
Most the hard tech challenges are the same for improving robot exploration.as they are for manned exploration, we want better instruments, better communication, better solar panels, reliable rockets, lighter spacecraft, better propulsion and so on. The challenges of adding a crew section with low g-force launch/entry, radiation shielding, breathable air composition and pressure, livable temperature, food and water is not fundamentally different from the Apollo days and won't change in the foreseeable future. What we will miss is the technology that'll eventually result in a colonization of space, but there we lack a lot of earth-based research. We need to learn how to make an ecosystem in a can, a small self-sustained system that'll function over time.
Once we have that, once we can say "if only we had the technology to place this on the Martian surface, we'd have an extraterrestrial colony" then we should pick up that thread again. Right now my impression is not that the humans would enhance the robots, but rather that pretty much the whole mission would exist to sustain the humans. I guess there's a point to doing it to prove that we can, but we've sort of already proved that. If the conditions on the inside are right, it doesn't matter if it's on a submarine or a research base in the Antarctic or on the Moon, people will survive and so they will on Mars too. It's just a matter of how strong the shielding must be.
Quite frankly in my opinion the most interesting part of space exploration happening right now is something we haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of exploring with current technology, manned or not. By finding exoplanets we're really mapping unexplored territory, getting closer and closer to finding planets like Earth. The only thing that'd come close in this solar system is if we found traces of life (extinct or otherwise) on Mars. Don't get me wrong, the rovers are really cool but the planet is still just a big barren, lifeless rock until proven otherwise. Or until we learn terraforming, but that's a long ways off.
Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?
9. Linux
Better find a distro with delta packages then, most Linux distros are happy to give you another 20MB download if there's been a 1kB fix. I don't care but if you're highly bandwidth limited, most distros are bandwidth slobs.
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s.
Changing jobs and changing job categories are two completely different things. And even the latter doesn't really mean you changed careers, I've just put my skills to use in a different industry. If you want to develop you can be a software engineer all your life. If you know how to manage a database you can be a DBA, if you know how to setup networks you can do that. They'll always need people for that, no matter how often the company logo changes.
It's not really all that tricky. Instead of a hash, let's just say we assign it a date like April 3rd. You know some peers by birthday, and each peer pays extra attention to people with a birthday like their own. So you just ask the closest you know, they'll know someone closer and so your search is passed until it finds people in the right month, week and finally day. You could easily simulate this by placing people in a big circle by birthday, each get a few long connections and many short connections. That way everyone knows how to route the message without a central node. It's a little bit more complicated than that but not much really.
Re:it already is almost dead due to ISP's
on
BitTorrent Turns 10
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· Score: 2
Here in Norway the average is now 7.4 Mbps and the mean 5.3 Mbps. About 80% of all households have broadband, yet we are less densely populated than the US (12 vs 31 people/km^2) and the average Norwegian lives in a town of less than 20,000 people. Yet we're still envious of Sweden and Denmark. Last figure is 14% of the population on fiber, but 20-25 Mbps lines are generally available on both cable and DSL. Most new installations are fiber though, which usually means symmetric speed... P2P when everyone is on 25/25 Mbit is way different than 25/5 Mbit.
Well duh, if the alternatives are job or internship take the job. If the alternatives are internship and unemployment, well that's a bit tougher because that is worse. At least with internship you're still used to work life, delivering 8 hours a day and you might have gotten at least a little more out of it than sitting at home playing xbox all day. Of course, if you take the internship you'll have less time looking for a real job. But with youth unemployment anywhere from 20 to 45%, you are caught between a rock and a hard place anyway.
I think the legal balance is just as important. The fact that "BitTorrent" isn't one service or one network but that each site offer their files individually and the Ubuntu torrent has nothing to do with those on The Pirate Bay. That detached the technology and those building the tools from the shadier uses of it. Oh, they've rattled their sables a bit but never really had an legal grounds to shut BitTorrent itself down, unlike Napster, Grokster, Limewire and so many others.
And despite the best efforts to shut down torrent sites, many of them still operate very much in the open. The fact that The Pirate Bay has been all over the media and is in the top 100 most popular sites on the web means they've walked a very fine line and come down on the right side - at least for now. You didn't have to look that very hard in the past either to find it, but it was not that obvious to everyone and their dog.
I think something like TPB model is there to stay, if necessary they'll just move it to be a TOR onion site, still centralized but anonymous. Not the content itself as that'd be sloooow, just the site itself. For the moment that is simply not necessary, but there's now other ways should the public torrent sites lose while still keeping the things that made it a success.
I doubt it, the overall trend of leaving IE is pretty strong but it might stabilize IE while accelerating Firefox' decline. Up until last month Chrome has grown almost only at the cost of IE, that may change now.
Wikipedia doesn't have June numbers yet. W3C has seen it rise from 16.8% to 18.7% in the last month. That's a 1.9% increase, statcounter has 1.29%, hitslink only 0.59% and Wikimedia still isn't ready yet, but it's likely the WP average will go up from 16.2% to 17.3-17.4% for June. Either way there's no denying Chrome is climbing fast.
I tried it now using a fresh install of IE9 (since I don't ever use it for anything) and first time I went to google I got a top bar asking if I'd like to change my home page to google, same size as their menu line with "Web Images Videos etc." and a small box in the upper right corner below the menu line "for faster video browsing, install Google Chrome". I answered no to the homepage question, X'd out the Chrome box, closed down IE. Opened up IE again, and now it looks exactly like Google in Chrome. So yes it bugs you, but it only bugs you once. If you're seeing it all the time, it's probably due to some non-default settings so Google doesn't realize you've already said no.
Had the recording industry had to deal with the rise in value and the fall in revenue that technology companies have lived with, we would be buying whole libraries of music for use any way we would like to use it for a dollar and a quarter. (...) Content just HAS to price its product to compete with reality, and the reality is that it doesn't cost as much to produce content, package content, and distribute content. It costs orders of magnitude less (how many, I don't know) to make their product and sell their product. Yet we haven't seen orders of magnitude cut from the price of content.
By that logic, books should be the price of paper and ink. That somebody spent a few years writing that book doesn't matter. That somebody took the risk and fronted the cost so the author got published and carried the cost of the flops doesn't matter. If you want libraries of music for a dollar and a quarter, what does that leave the artists? Fractions of fractions of a cent, a guitarist couldn't even afford strings. True, a few things have gotten cheaper but the total cost of releasing an album is still nowhere near free, most artists need to recover some money from sales or it just isn't feasible. Or at least it'll be really obviously a garage band recording in the garage.
For a fun fact, this shoe advertisement (NSFW) was found illegal, not for being visible to children despite being a 24m^2 poster at the mall but because they found it to be objectifying women. That said we do have a fairly strict barrier between nudity and sex, the sex magazines are by law on the top shelf and covered so you can't see much from below. Of course, that doesn't stop the Internet but that's a different story...
It had two things going for it, because it also involves dramatically less CPU overhead.
For the price difference you could buy a faster CPU which makes the point entirely moot. I guess it was nice if you were working a lot against an external disk, but really work should be against an internal disk and just stored externally (unless you've got at least eSATA connectors, but those didn't exist at the time)
Funny, I haven't. Maybe/., like the rest of the corporate web, uses IP geolocation to ensure everybody doesn't see the same web. (Yeah, I'm a bit bitter, and true, obviously localized ads aren't the same issue as localized content.)
What's to be bitter about? Without localized ads they'd only make sense to huge chains and corporations with shops/product all over the world. Now I'm not fond of ads in general, but an offer I can't even use is a complete waste of both my time and their money. Well except hosting and such I can buy anywhere in the world, but that's a tiny exception. And if I wanted to there's plenty ways to proxy the connection...
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're making a flawed assumption about Linux, once you start charging more for a Linux version the sales drops drastically. After all the software is already written and the Windows sales covered the development cost, then surely the Linux sales can cover the small porting cost. Not saying that's necessarily a correct assumption, but many think that way. And as some of the Linux porting companies have found out, often people feel they've paid for this software and is then entitled to use it on any platform it's available.
The other thing is support and binary compatibility. You can say you only support Linux distro X, but rest assured that you'll have a million requests/demands/complaints that you support every little distro out there, as well as people clogging up the forums with hacks and workarounds to do it anyway. Every sort of library/upgrade/version issue will land on your table, which may be once every six months. In short, Windows and OS X is built to ship binaries, there's long lasting binary interfaces to everything and old interfaces are kept around for many years until they're slowly deprecated and phased out. Linux is constantly changing and backwards compatibility is spotty at best.
Oh yes and you might not realize it, but Microsoft does a whole lot both on the hardware and software side to make life easier for developers. Driver models like WDDM, NDIS etc and software toolkits like DirectX. There's a reason Windows has one video acceleration standard (DXVA) and Linux has three (XvBA, VA API and VDPAU). It's Microsoft saying here's the standard, build your driver to comply with this and the DirectX code will do the rest. Nobody really takes the same responsibility to write the code above the vendor specific layer, very often it falls to AMD and nVidia and Intel to write what Microsoft would have done on Windows. That puts even more of the cost of supporting Linux on them.
Who's going to reach for the knife first?
Probably more of a Crocodile Dundee moment. "You call that a knife? This is a knife."
In the end I think that's why they reached an agreement, they have more to lose than to gain by bringing it to a showdown in court.
Sigh, where's my edit button... I meant to say they should have reached an agreement. Obviously, they didn't.
The music industry is just one part of it. Pretty much all that work in the IP industry is looking at some form of "First they came for the music industry..." scenario. The RIAA. The MPAA. TV networks. The porn industry. The BSA. E-books. Put together there are a lot stronger forces at work to defend copyright, because they all realize it's not going to stop there. It would come to a showdown of who controls the creative output of all of them, they or the public. Sure, there's a little bit of infighting right now but don't pretend any of them has really changed sides, this is just corporate interests interfering.
Apple is hardly in the "anti-IP" camp. They have a ton of software patents on their products, they subscribe to the idea "we designed it, we OWN that idea". They're just opposed to anything that gets in the way of their profit margins. That's the way with most these companies, they're playing both sides of the fence. Google almost closed one helluva book deal where they'd use copyright to give themselves exclusive rights to the scans. Amazon makes good money on shipping CDs, DVDs, BluRays, computer games and so on - is it in their best interest to stir the pot here? And Microsoft is of course a heavy copyright defender.
So what are they going to say to the music industry? "You're being to obsessive-compulsive about control, ease up!" is the pot calling the kettle black - at least the music industry doesn't have mandatory online activation yet. Both the video and software industry is full of DRM that music doesn't have anymore. They just want to tug at this a little to make them back down, not unravel the whole rug. They certainly don't want the public to take any of this as any kind of endorsement or support for weakening corporate control, that's for sure. In the end I think that's why they reached an agreement, they have more to lose than to gain by bringing it to a showdown in court.
Well right now they'd be wise to lower expectations quite a bit. The previous rovers performed off the charts, this one might just perform to spec or worse. I'm guessing that as usually there's a long, long list of "never been done before" and you can only go so far in simulation. It's not really tested until it's tried.
I'm not talking about everybody else who buys later after it's a proven success, I talk about all the early adopters and developers. Why are they willing to develop for and buy a system that as of then doesn't have many users or applications? Obviously Apple has a pretty good history of making successes, but usually everything is approached with a lot of caution that this might be their flop. Obviously Apple does a lot of other things rights too, but when it comes down to "Why can Apple kickstart a market while other companies end up in a catch 22?" then I'd say it's Jobs. Not the stage performance as such, but that he's worked on the design and user experience and built up a team around him that think the Jobs way. People believe that under his direction Apple won't make any crappy products that misjudge their market, which means people commit with irrationally little caution. I don't mean to say Jobs is the reason why the iPhone 4 is a success, that's pretty much due to the iPhone 1, 2 and 3. But when it comes to launching new products like the iPad then I would say he personally is essential to that.
So true. That's one stroke of genius by President Obama. By selecting Biden for VP he made sure even the KKK pray for the health of the President every night.
Well, if it's a tactic it's a bipartisan one. If McCain had won you could swear every democrat would pray for his health too, or there'd be President Palin...
Well, there's also D - make solutions that lets other traffic be on their way. For example a roundabout that's clogged with north-south traffic will also block east-west traffic. Of course there's limits to all solutions, but often making some kind of pass-through road that doesn't need to run through 10 intersections downtown will help a lot.
As for solution A, it also takes a certain willingness to use public transportation. It won't go to your driveway, you probably will have to walk 5 or 10 minutes to the nearest bus, tram or subway stop at both ends. It might rain, it might - at least up north - snow, it might be windy. If the tiniest bit of effort is too much, then people will drive anyway. At least some Americans I've run into have a mentality where public transportation has no hope to win.
Which is why every other company is envious ot Steve Jobs. He simply declares the iPad to be the next big thing, and there's suddenly an army of developers and users who believe it - instant critical mass. Of course it's nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, conjured out of thin air but it's not something everyone could do. Ballmer or Ellison could get up there and everyone would go "lol yeah right". Jobs gets up there and because people believe it will happen it does happen. That's a power that's not just a RDF because it does become reality.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are three separate career paths needing lifetime commitment?
Absolutely not. I was saying you can probably make a lifelong career of it, if you want. That companies will rise and fall but they'll still need someone to do that job, you don't need to be a jack-of-all-trades to stay employed. Maybe you need to pick up a new programming language, but software development is a plenty wide field in itself. You don't need to know auto repair too.
You think? Of these, network administration has a good chance of not existing in a decade-- it's going to become an off-the-shelf commodity, "order a network, push the button, deploy" except at the highest level.
Throw in firewall management and it's never going away, you'll always need people to manage who talks to what systems. That you actually have the redundancy and capacity and monitoring you need to have. There's no way your random guy of the street will be able to set up a DMZ and put the right servers in the right place properly, no matter how neat the tools get.
The boys and girls at the MITs and Stanford and Berkeleys are learning the real stuff
Oh, you're that kind where only the cutting edge of science is "real stuff". That's not what most real work is, real work is usually drab implementation of known concepts. Just like the plumber isn't doing anything revolutionary to my building, but it still needs plumbing. There's a helluva lot more plumbers around the world than there are people researching how to make better plumbing. Moderately skilled people for moderately skilled work is the bread and butter of work life, not MIT and Stanford and Berkeley. If you have an application, and the boss says "we need a text field here that's stored in the customer database and goes on that report" you need someone to edit the GUI, modify the database, update the report. It won't be rocket science but it's work that needs doing by someone who's at least a little bit skilled at what he's doing. IT plumbing if you will, I suppose you can end up in a whip and buggy industry but for the most part you can spend a lifetime working the same field, even today.
We're not quitting space exploration, last I checked there was plenty probes and rovers and telescopes on the drawing board that'd go into space or observe space. The question is the cost/benefit of sending humans out there to do the exploring. To make an analogy, does submarines bring us any closer to building underwater cities? Or are we just really travelling around in a big tin can burning resources to make the submerged life like surface life? In the same way I don't think we'll get any closer to a Mars colony just doing more loops in a shuttle. Obviously a manned mission to Mars can do more than the rovers we have there today, but for the cost we could probably send a hundred more with various instruments.
Most the hard tech challenges are the same for improving robot exploration.as they are for manned exploration, we want better instruments, better communication, better solar panels, reliable rockets, lighter spacecraft, better propulsion and so on. The challenges of adding a crew section with low g-force launch/entry, radiation shielding, breathable air composition and pressure, livable temperature, food and water is not fundamentally different from the Apollo days and won't change in the foreseeable future. What we will miss is the technology that'll eventually result in a colonization of space, but there we lack a lot of earth-based research. We need to learn how to make an ecosystem in a can, a small self-sustained system that'll function over time.
Once we have that, once we can say "if only we had the technology to place this on the Martian surface, we'd have an extraterrestrial colony" then we should pick up that thread again. Right now my impression is not that the humans would enhance the robots, but rather that pretty much the whole mission would exist to sustain the humans. I guess there's a point to doing it to prove that we can, but we've sort of already proved that. If the conditions on the inside are right, it doesn't matter if it's on a submarine or a research base in the Antarctic or on the Moon, people will survive and so they will on Mars too. It's just a matter of how strong the shielding must be.
Quite frankly in my opinion the most interesting part of space exploration happening right now is something we haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of exploring with current technology, manned or not. By finding exoplanets we're really mapping unexplored territory, getting closer and closer to finding planets like Earth. The only thing that'd come close in this solar system is if we found traces of life (extinct or otherwise) on Mars. Don't get me wrong, the rovers are really cool but the planet is still just a big barren, lifeless rock until proven otherwise. Or until we learn terraforming, but that's a long ways off.
Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?
9. Linux
Better find a distro with delta packages then, most Linux distros are happy to give you another 20MB download if there's been a 1kB fix. I don't care but if you're highly bandwidth limited, most distros are bandwidth slobs.
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s.
Changing jobs and changing job categories are two completely different things. And even the latter doesn't really mean you changed careers, I've just put my skills to use in a different industry. If you want to develop you can be a software engineer all your life. If you know how to manage a database you can be a DBA, if you know how to setup networks you can do that. They'll always need people for that, no matter how often the company logo changes.
It's not really all that tricky. Instead of a hash, let's just say we assign it a date like April 3rd. You know some peers by birthday, and each peer pays extra attention to people with a birthday like their own. So you just ask the closest you know, they'll know someone closer and so your search is passed until it finds people in the right month, week and finally day. You could easily simulate this by placing people in a big circle by birthday, each get a few long connections and many short connections. That way everyone knows how to route the message without a central node. It's a little bit more complicated than that but not much really.
Here in Norway the average is now 7.4 Mbps and the mean 5.3 Mbps. About 80% of all households have broadband, yet we are less densely populated than the US (12 vs 31 people/km^2) and the average Norwegian lives in a town of less than 20,000 people. Yet we're still envious of Sweden and Denmark. Last figure is 14% of the population on fiber, but 20-25 Mbps lines are generally available on both cable and DSL. Most new installations are fiber though, which usually means symmetric speed... P2P when everyone is on 25/25 Mbit is way different than 25/5 Mbit.
Well duh, if the alternatives are job or internship take the job. If the alternatives are internship and unemployment, well that's a bit tougher because that is worse. At least with internship you're still used to work life, delivering 8 hours a day and you might have gotten at least a little more out of it than sitting at home playing xbox all day. Of course, if you take the internship you'll have less time looking for a real job. But with youth unemployment anywhere from 20 to 45%, you are caught between a rock and a hard place anyway.
I think the legal balance is just as important. The fact that "BitTorrent" isn't one service or one network but that each site offer their files individually and the Ubuntu torrent has nothing to do with those on The Pirate Bay. That detached the technology and those building the tools from the shadier uses of it. Oh, they've rattled their sables a bit but never really had an legal grounds to shut BitTorrent itself down, unlike Napster, Grokster, Limewire and so many others.
And despite the best efforts to shut down torrent sites, many of them still operate very much in the open. The fact that The Pirate Bay has been all over the media and is in the top 100 most popular sites on the web means they've walked a very fine line and come down on the right side - at least for now. You didn't have to look that very hard in the past either to find it, but it was not that obvious to everyone and their dog.
I think something like TPB model is there to stay, if necessary they'll just move it to be a TOR onion site, still centralized but anonymous. Not the content itself as that'd be sloooow, just the site itself. For the moment that is simply not necessary, but there's now other ways should the public torrent sites lose while still keeping the things that made it a success.
I doubt it, the overall trend of leaving IE is pretty strong but it might stabilize IE while accelerating Firefox' decline. Up until last month Chrome has grown almost only at the cost of IE, that may change now.
Wikipedia doesn't have June numbers yet. W3C has seen it rise from 16.8% to 18.7% in the last month. That's a 1.9% increase, statcounter has 1.29%, hitslink only 0.59% and Wikimedia still isn't ready yet, but it's likely the WP average will go up from 16.2% to 17.3-17.4% for June. Either way there's no denying Chrome is climbing fast.
"for faster video browsing, install Google Chrome"
"for faster web browsing", of course.. mental typo
I tried it now using a fresh install of IE9 (since I don't ever use it for anything) and first time I went to google I got a top bar asking if I'd like to change my home page to google, same size as their menu line with "Web Images Videos etc." and a small box in the upper right corner below the menu line "for faster video browsing, install Google Chrome". I answered no to the homepage question, X'd out the Chrome box, closed down IE. Opened up IE again, and now it looks exactly like Google in Chrome. So yes it bugs you, but it only bugs you once. If you're seeing it all the time, it's probably due to some non-default settings so Google doesn't realize you've already said no.
Had the recording industry had to deal with the rise in value and the fall in revenue that technology companies have lived with, we would be buying whole libraries of music for use any way we would like to use it for a dollar and a quarter. (...) Content just HAS to price its product to compete with reality, and the reality is that it doesn't cost as much to produce content, package content, and distribute content. It costs orders of magnitude less (how many, I don't know) to make their product and sell their product. Yet we haven't seen orders of magnitude cut from the price of content.
By that logic, books should be the price of paper and ink. That somebody spent a few years writing that book doesn't matter. That somebody took the risk and fronted the cost so the author got published and carried the cost of the flops doesn't matter. If you want libraries of music for a dollar and a quarter, what does that leave the artists? Fractions of fractions of a cent, a guitarist couldn't even afford strings. True, a few things have gotten cheaper but the total cost of releasing an album is still nowhere near free, most artists need to recover some money from sales or it just isn't feasible. Or at least it'll be really obviously a garage band recording in the garage.
For a fun fact, this shoe advertisement (NSFW) was found illegal, not for being visible to children despite being a 24m^2 poster at the mall but because they found it to be objectifying women. That said we do have a fairly strict barrier between nudity and sex, the sex magazines are by law on the top shelf and covered so you can't see much from below. Of course, that doesn't stop the Internet but that's a different story...
It had two things going for it, because it also involves dramatically less CPU overhead.
For the price difference you could buy a faster CPU which makes the point entirely moot. I guess it was nice if you were working a lot against an external disk, but really work should be against an internal disk and just stored externally (unless you've got at least eSATA connectors, but those didn't exist at the time)
Funny, I haven't. Maybe /., like the rest of the corporate web, uses IP geolocation to ensure everybody doesn't see the same web. (Yeah, I'm a bit bitter, and true, obviously localized ads aren't the same issue as localized content.)
What's to be bitter about? Without localized ads they'd only make sense to huge chains and corporations with shops/product all over the world. Now I'm not fond of ads in general, but an offer I can't even use is a complete waste of both my time and their money. Well except hosting and such I can buy anywhere in the world, but that's a tiny exception. And if I wanted to there's plenty ways to proxy the connection...