I'm certainly not arguing that. As far as I know, work on gPulp/gnutellaNG (the "Next Generation" protocol) is still ongoing. But for the time being, people who want to use Gnutella are stuck with the existing protocol, and really should be using a client that respects it.
Forgot this the first time around. Here are some tips to improve Gnutella's performance for yourself and for everyone.
1. Never connect to more than 5 hosts at a time. There's no need for it and you'll only hurt yourself by doing so. I used to spend a lot of time in the gnutella.wego.com discussion area, and then the GnutellaNews boards, helping out new users. Time after time someone would come in and say, "Gnutella is shit! I type in a search and I don't get results for 10 minutes!" Me: "How many connections do you have open?" Them: "50, and if I try with 100, it goes even slower!!"
The more active connections you have, the slower your Gnutella experience will be... And by being a congested node, you're adding latency to the network for everyone else. Set your max connections to 5. That gives me, on average, an overhead of 6-10K/sec in background chatter, not counting uploads/downloads.
If you're on dialup, max your connections out at 2 and (it hurts to say this) don't share files or you won't be able to do anything else online. If you really want to share - and that's a good thing - cap your uploads at 1. Leave routing up to the people with the fatter pipes.
2. Go for diversity in your connections. If you load up your client and see that you're connected to 5 RoadRunner nodes, dump a few of them and try to connect to other networks. Peer-to-peer file sharing relies a lot on peering, after all. Connecting across ISPs, networks, and even across countries is a good thing.
3. Don't share junk files. Please. Every time I search for Pink Floyd and get a ton of under-1MB MP3s in the results, I want to kill someone. Know which directories, if any, you're sharing... And clean them out from time to time. All those incomplete downloads you made are being sent out as search results, but nobody is going to download them from you. Those are a lot of wasted bytes coming through your query hits.
4. Perhaps most importantly, use a good client. See the parent for details.
...and will continue to improve if only folks would move to newer, more robust, and more compliant clients. If you're still running gnutella 0.53, or even Gn0tella, check out BearShare at http://www.bearshare.com/. You'll be surprised at how far Gnutella has come - that only hints at how far it may go in the future.
Critics said man would never set foot on the moon. Now critics are saying Gnutella is doomed. Funny, they've been saying that since March of last year and I'm still happily downloading MP3s. Ignore the critics and keep the faith.
>Just as an aside, I'm pretty sure that it's completely illegal
>to ship firecrackers or other dangerous materials (explosives? hello!)
>using the USPS, and I'm pretty sure the other transport companies
>won't go near the place either.
Well, it's illegal to grow pot, too, but there's no shortage of seedbanks out there who will be glad to mail anywhere in the world:) I've actually received several mailorder catalogs from a company called Glory Fireworks. I never ordered anything - I buy all my shit at the county line - but they were doing mailorder regardless.
I just did a search and found a fireworks company who was willing to ship via USPS to anywhere except "AZ,CA,CT,DE,GA,MA,ME,MN,NJ,NY,PA,RI,VT." Apparently there's no federal (e.g. USPS) regulations on shipping fireworks... Must be up to each state to decide.
All those roadkill pictures at steakandcheese have got to go. Quick, somebody get me the number for the FBI! That flattened squirrel is a clear sign of drivers' disregard for animals, and the perpetrators must be prosecuted at once. We don't take Interstate Trafficking of Dead Animal Pictures lightly 'round these parts.
>Would it really have hurt them to put a "this is a parody"
>disclaimer at the bottom of the site?
Hindsight is always 20/20. They'll think twice about that next time - or maybe not. There's no notice up there yet, and I assume they still have control of the site.
>If I had a "how to kill your neighbours" site and posted (faked)
>pictures, do you think I should get investigated?
Of course not. Have you done a websearch for the Anarchist's Cookbook lately? "How to make a pipe bomb" and "How to burn through asphalt with iron filings and a match" are mirrored about a jillion times. Should they be investigated?
>Were do you draw the line?
See above. For every copy of "How to make a pipe bomb" there's probably five websites selling fireworks, willing to ship to any address in the US. And for every pyrotechnics company on the web, there are probably ten times as many knife dealers. Just because something could be dangerous doesn't mean it is - yet, unfortunately, we're getting to a point where people *expect* the government to step in "just in case."
I think common sense ought to dictate where to draw the line, but clearly that's not what's happening (e.g. Starcraft clan busted, 6 year old with chicken finger arrested). When you make a practice of investigating everything, you'll never get anywhere... But I guess that's our government in a nutshell these days.
Disclaimer: that poor sap is not an FBI agent (that I know of). I found him on that "Am I a total raving dork, or not? Why don't I put my ugly mug in front of thousands of people!" site, glass bottle courtesy essentialsupplies.com. There, now I can't be sued.
>Obviously you need to learn something about User
>Interface and appreciation.
You say this after flaunting your preference for antialiased fonts, as if to imply that anyone who doesn't use antialiasing in their design is a moron. The first rule of UI, whether graphical or not, is "give the user the choice." You prefer antialiased fonts. I don't, cause they give me a headache, plus I don't need fonts when I'm looking at porn.
This is definitely a step forward. It just needs to be made into a preference which the user can configure to his taste.
I don't think it's a PayPal deal, but AIMPhone may be on-target. The "AIM Pay" icon is a service icon - the kind that shows up next to your buddy, indicating what service they're using (AOL, AIM, ICQ, etc). So it would seem that "AIM Pay" is meant to be a distinct kind of service, not just a client feature. It seems reasonable that people who sign up for AIMPhone might be considered "AIM Pay" users, but I dunno. I still wouldn't put it past AOL to start charging a monthly fee to keep your AIM name active.
For what it's worth, the "AIM Pay" cicn resources have been present since the 3.0 generation of Mac AIM clients. But if they don't plan on charging for AIM, you'd think they'd have removed the icons.
BTW, if you think PayPal rocks, check out ProPay. They let you bill anyone, not just other (paypal|propay) users. Their fee is 3.5% + 35 cents/transaction. Not bad.
I have two AOL accounts, which equates to 14 screen names, plus another 30 or so AIM names. Probably 50 AOL/AIM names in all. Not that I use them all every day, but I know I'm not the only one with a big stockpile. Only certain people know certain names - so I can control my privacy level by using a particular name, without having to alter my "block these users" prefs every hour.
What's the matter with you people?? You have censor not only the site name (fuckedcompany.com) AND the goddamn URL??? (http://ww.f---edcompany.com) You have GOT to be kidding me.
f---edcompany.com is a valid domain, and takes you to the right place. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses (and educational institutions, and libraries, and...) won't allow people to access pages with that oh-so-nasty F word. Masking it out makes Slashdot accessible to a broader audience.
There would have been a lot of unlucky fucks who couldn't access the Slashdot main page if they'd left the word intact.
If you want to buy banner ads on a particular site and you're worried that their demographic info is inflated, here are some things to try.
Have them pull the banner from your server, not theirs - never ever let them put your ad banner on their server. Do a test ad run with them, then analyze your own server logs. You'll be able to see if your banner was really pulled, say, 10K times or if they quit showing it after far fewer impressions. I've caught several places shorting me. You can expect some discrepancies due to caching and other issues, but if you're supposed to get 10K impressions and the image only gets served 2K times, consider it a lesson learned and advertise somewhere else.
If you want proof of their traffic claims, ask them to embed a 1x1 GIF from your server (or one of those little FastCounters set to 1x1 size) on their page. Check your own logs, or view the FastCounter in full size, to see if they're really getting the traffic they say they are. Most one-man websites will be happy to do this when faced with the chance to gain you as an advertising customer; but don't expect Excite et al to bend over for you like this.
Whenever possible, purchase ads by click-through, not CPM. Click-throughs will cost you more, but I'd rather get 1K guaranteed clicks than 10K ignored impressions.
Shaun
Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep
on
Typosquatting
·
· Score: 1
I have a feeling that if I went out on the street, put up a green sign with silver arches, and called it MacDonalds and started selling chicken sandwiches, that the company that has sold Billions and Billions would have proper recourse to land on me with a ton of lawyers.
Sure they would, because you were obviously capitalizing off McDonalds' name, logo, etc. while selling similar products. I forget the lawyerspeak for that, but it's something along the lines of "intent to mislead."
However, if you were to set up mcdonalsd.com and fill the site with porn banners or something, McDonald's wouldn't have a leg to stand on. There would be no confusing your porn-banner website with McDonalds' real site.
Why not? It says news for nerds, not news for linux enthusiasts, something a lot of people seem to forget. I'm a nerd, quite proud, and I grew up on Macs. There's nothing wrong with seeing them grace these pages:)
I feel so bad even talking about vandalizing *nix with such sacralige...
Apple isn't vandalizing unix by using a BSD core, they're improving the MacOS.
I was remote Macintosh support at a large online service (heh) for 5 years. The most common complaint was "My Mac always crashes." With OSX, you can say goodbye to that.
Yeah, bit of an odd comparison, but that's where it's headed. Open your copy of TV Guide or your local paper's channel listings, and you'll probably see those inane VCR+plus codes attached to every listing. Right?
But do you actually know anyone who owns (or ever owned) a VRC+plus? Me either.
Those codes are there because the VCR+plus people made a big stink (and probably paid a bit) to have support for their product included in your TV listings. The CueCat's going down the same road. Five years from now, everyone will be printing barcodes in magazines to let CueCat users visit their site. But you won't know anyone who actually uses a CueCat.
If you go here, you can inform DC about products they haven't found yet. Tack a bogus UPC/ISBN onto the end of the URL and you're set. Not that I'd ever suggest looping this process infinitely, or anything...
If this surprises you at all, just browse the rest of the AG's website and you'll get a feel for who's behind this stuff. Quoting from the bottom of website (http://167.240.254.37/),
Web sessions using "crawlers" or "spiders" are blocked on this site because they negatively effect the site performance for other users. If you are denied access it may be because a prior user of the temporary IP number assigned to your session by your Internet Service Provider had a crawler or spider running.
Give me a break. What kind of server are they running that they're severely impacted when Altavista stops by? And their robots.txt file is fucked up, so they aren't blocking crawlers or spiders to begin with.
I believe "this stuff" was a reference to "stories that just came over the wire ten minutes ago with next to no details," not a reference to "stories about credit cards."
>Second, how will AMEX ensure that you will pay your bill?
>Will they require that you have an alternate AMEX card,
>and bill THAT one monthly?
My guess is that charges you make with disposable numbers will appear on your regular Amex statement. They aren't issuing disposable cards, just disposable numbers. They'll be attached to your primary account, I'm sure.
>if the numbers are instantly available online, you might
>buy a $900 computer system on a whim, and not have the
>cash to cover it.
Peoples' credit card numbers are already instantly available in their wallets. Overextended credit already happens all the time (and making purchases you can't afford is what keeps credit card companies in business, after all). Disposable numbers aren't going to make this any more of a problem. People who overspend, especially people who do it out of compulsion, don't need new numbers. They already have credit cards.
Slashdot Mirror
>Don't design around the problem, fix it.
I'm certainly not arguing that. As far as I know, work on gPulp/gnutellaNG (the "Next Generation" protocol) is still ongoing. But for the time being, people who want to use Gnutella are stuck with the existing protocol, and really should be using a client that respects it.
Shaun
Forgot this the first time around. Here are some tips to improve Gnutella's performance for yourself and for everyone.
1. Never connect to more than 5 hosts at a time. There's no need for it and you'll only hurt yourself by doing so. I used to spend a lot of time in the gnutella.wego.com discussion area, and then the GnutellaNews boards, helping out new users. Time after time someone would come in and say, "Gnutella is shit! I type in a search and I don't get results for 10 minutes!" Me: "How many connections do you have open?" Them: "50, and if I try with 100, it goes even slower!!"
The more active connections you have, the slower your Gnutella experience will be... And by being a congested node, you're adding latency to the network for everyone else. Set your max connections to 5. That gives me, on average, an overhead of 6-10K/sec in background chatter, not counting uploads/downloads.
If you're on dialup, max your connections out at 2 and (it hurts to say this) don't share files or you won't be able to do anything else online. If you really want to share - and that's a good thing - cap your uploads at 1. Leave routing up to the people with the fatter pipes.
2. Go for diversity in your connections. If you load up your client and see that you're connected to 5 RoadRunner nodes, dump a few of them and try to connect to other networks. Peer-to-peer file sharing relies a lot on peering, after all. Connecting across ISPs, networks, and even across countries is a good thing.
3. Don't share junk files. Please. Every time I search for Pink Floyd and get a ton of under-1MB MP3s in the results, I want to kill someone. Know which directories, if any, you're sharing... And clean them out from time to time. All those incomplete downloads you made are being sent out as search results, but nobody is going to download them from you. Those are a lot of wasted bytes coming through your query hits.
4. Perhaps most importantly, use a good client. See the parent for details.
Shaun
...and will continue to improve if only folks would move to newer, more robust, and more compliant clients. If you're still running gnutella 0.53, or even Gn0tella, check out BearShare at http://www.bearshare.com/. You'll be surprised at how far Gnutella has come - that only hints at how far it may go in the future.
Critics said man would never set foot on the moon. Now critics are saying Gnutella is doomed. Funny, they've been saying that since March of last year and I'm still happily downloading MP3s. Ignore the critics and keep the faith.
Shaun
>Just as an aside, I'm pretty sure that it's completely illegal
:) I've actually received several mailorder catalogs from a company called Glory Fireworks. I never ordered anything - I buy all my shit at the county line - but they were doing mailorder regardless.
>to ship firecrackers or other dangerous materials (explosives? hello!)
>using the USPS, and I'm pretty sure the other transport companies
>won't go near the place either.
Well, it's illegal to grow pot, too, but there's no shortage of seedbanks out there who will be glad to mail anywhere in the world
I just did a search and found a fireworks company who was willing to ship via USPS to anywhere except "AZ,CA,CT,DE,GA,MA,ME,MN,NJ,NY,PA,RI,VT." Apparently there's no federal (e.g. USPS) regulations on shipping fireworks... Must be up to each state to decide.
Shaun
All those roadkill pictures at steakandcheese have got to go. Quick, somebody get me the number for the FBI! That flattened squirrel is a clear sign of drivers' disregard for animals, and the perpetrators must be prosecuted at once. We don't take Interstate Trafficking of Dead Animal Pictures lightly 'round these parts.
Shaun
>Would it really have hurt them to put a "this is a parody"
>disclaimer at the bottom of the site?
Hindsight is always 20/20. They'll think twice about that next time - or maybe not. There's no notice up there yet, and I assume they still have control of the site.
>If I had a "how to kill your neighbours" site and posted (faked)
>pictures, do you think I should get investigated?
Of course not. Have you done a websearch for the Anarchist's Cookbook lately? "How to make a pipe bomb" and "How to burn through asphalt with iron filings and a match" are mirrored about a jillion times. Should they be investigated?
>Were do you draw the line?
See above. For every copy of "How to make a pipe bomb" there's probably five websites selling fireworks, willing to ship to any address in the US. And for every pyrotechnics company on the web, there are probably ten times as many knife dealers. Just because something could be dangerous doesn't mean it is - yet, unfortunately, we're getting to a point where people *expect* the government to step in "just in case."
I think common sense ought to dictate where to draw the line, but clearly that's not what's happening (e.g. Starcraft clan busted, 6 year old with chicken finger arrested). When you make a practice of investigating everything, you'll never get anywhere... But I guess that's our government in a nutshell these days.
Shaun
http://shat.net/bonsaifbi.jpg
Disclaimer: that poor sap is not an FBI agent (that I know of). I found him on that "Am I a total raving dork, or not? Why don't I put my ugly mug in front of thousands of people!" site, glass bottle courtesy essentialsupplies.com. There, now I can't be sued.
Shaun
>Obviously you need to learn something about User
>Interface and appreciation.
You say this after flaunting your preference for antialiased fonts, as if to imply that anyone who doesn't use antialiasing in their design is a moron. The first rule of UI, whether graphical or not, is "give the user the choice." You prefer antialiased fonts. I don't, cause they give me a headache, plus I don't need fonts when I'm looking at porn.
This is definitely a step forward. It just needs to be made into a preference which the user can configure to his taste.
Shaun
Here you go.
cryptome.org/flannery-cp.htm
Shaun
Shaun
I don't think it's a PayPal deal, but AIMPhone may be on-target. The "AIM Pay" icon is a service icon - the kind that shows up next to your buddy, indicating what service they're using (AOL, AIM, ICQ, etc). So it would seem that "AIM Pay" is meant to be a distinct kind of service, not just a client feature. It seems reasonable that people who sign up for AIMPhone might be considered "AIM Pay" users, but I dunno. I still wouldn't put it past AOL to start charging a monthly fee to keep your AIM name active.
For what it's worth, the "AIM Pay" cicn resources have been present since the 3.0 generation of Mac AIM clients. But if they don't plan on charging for AIM, you'd think they'd have removed the icons.
BTW, if you think PayPal rocks, check out ProPay. They let you bill anyone, not just other (paypal|propay) users. Their fee is 3.5% + 35 cents/transaction. Not bad.
Shaun
I have two AOL accounts, which equates to 14 screen names, plus another 30 or so AIM names. Probably 50 AOL/AIM names in all. Not that I use them all every day, but I know I'm not the only one with a big stockpile. Only certain people know certain names - so I can control my privacy level by using a particular name, without having to alter my "block these users" prefs every hour.
Shaun
At least, so say the icons built into the latest Macintosh AIM client. There's a service icon for "AIM Pay" and "AIM Pay (Unused)."
Shaun
There would have been a lot of unlucky fucks who couldn't access the Slashdot main page if they'd left the word intact.
Shaun
- Have them pull the banner from your server, not theirs - never ever let them put your ad banner on their server. Do a test ad run with them, then analyze your own server logs. You'll be able to see if your banner was really pulled, say, 10K times or if they quit showing it after far fewer impressions. I've caught several places shorting me. You can expect some discrepancies due to caching and other issues, but if you're supposed to get 10K impressions and the image only gets served 2K times, consider it a lesson learned and advertise somewhere else.
- If you want proof of their traffic claims, ask them to embed a 1x1 GIF from your server (or one of those little FastCounters set to 1x1 size) on their page. Check your own logs, or view the FastCounter in full size, to see if they're really getting the traffic they say they are. Most one-man websites will be happy to do this when faced with the chance to gain you as an advertising customer; but don't expect Excite et al to bend over for you like this.
- Whenever possible, purchase ads by click-through, not CPM. Click-throughs will cost you more, but I'd rather get 1K guaranteed clicks than 10K ignored impressions.
ShaunHowever, if you were to set up mcdonalsd.com and fill the site with porn banners or something, McDonald's wouldn't have a leg to stand on. There would be no confusing your porn-banner website with McDonalds' real site.
Shaun
Shaun
I was remote Macintosh support at a large online service (heh) for 5 years. The most common complaint was "My Mac always crashes." With OSX, you can say goodbye to that.
Shaun
Yeah, bit of an odd comparison, but that's where it's headed. Open your copy of TV Guide or your local paper's channel listings, and you'll probably see those inane VCR+plus codes attached to every listing. Right?
But do you actually know anyone who owns (or ever owned) a VRC+plus? Me either.
Those codes are there because the VCR+plus people made a big stink (and probably paid a bit) to have support for their product included in your TV listings. The CueCat's going down the same road. Five years from now, everyone will be printing barcodes in magazines to let CueCat users visit their site. But you won't know anyone who actually uses a CueCat.
Shaun
If you go here, you can inform DC about products they haven't found yet. Tack a bogus UPC/ISBN onto the end of the URL and you're set. Not that I'd ever suggest looping this process infinitely, or anything...
Shaun
Shaun
Someone mail these people a clue.
Shaun
>...for the universities to cash in on their captive audience.
:)
Where I come from, that's called "tuition" and they've been doing it forever
Shaun
I believe "this stuff" was a reference to "stories that just came over the wire ten minutes ago with next to no details," not a reference to "stories about credit cards."
Shaun
>Second, how will AMEX ensure that you will pay your bill?
>Will they require that you have an alternate AMEX card,
>and bill THAT one monthly?
My guess is that charges you make with disposable numbers will appear on your regular Amex statement. They aren't issuing disposable cards, just disposable numbers. They'll be attached to your primary account, I'm sure.
>if the numbers are instantly available online, you might
>buy a $900 computer system on a whim, and not have the
>cash to cover it.
Peoples' credit card numbers are already instantly available in their wallets. Overextended credit already happens all the time (and making purchases you can't afford is what keeps credit card companies in business, after all). Disposable numbers aren't going to make this any more of a problem. People who overspend, especially people who do it out of compulsion, don't need new numbers. They already have credit cards.
Shaun